‘If Man exists in the Metaxy, in the tension “between god and man” any construction of man as a world immanent entity will destroy the meaning of existence, because it deprives man of his specific humanity. The poles of the tension must not be hypostatized into objects independent of the tension in which they are experienced as its poles.”

Eric Voegelin Anamnesis (1978) p.104

To call our existence extraordinary is paradoxical because it is what is most commonplace. Nevertheless, why there is something rather than nothing is a mystery. The second mystery is why it has the order it does. The greatest mystery of all however is that we are conscious beings capable of reflecting on the fact of our existence and deciding how we shall live. The Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus claimed that reality is in a state of continual change, but it has underlying order which we can comprehend. This claim is foundational to Western civilization. In addition Christianity inspired the conviction that a state of perfection (although not in this life) is possible. We are an Imago Dei [= likeness of God] with the capacity to decide how we are going to live. Jesus supplied a new revelation: it is not enough to adhere to moral rules; to realise our potential we must have love in our heart. Jesus was executed but he demonstrated his divinity by conquering death. He told his followers that he will return one day and defeat Satan. A new kingdom of the spirit will be created in which justice shall reign. In the Modern Age, instead of waiting for the Parousia [= the return of Christ] it was believed that instead of submitting to God (who is a figment of our imagination) happiness we can become happy by re-making reality into something that suits our desires.

In my humanist philosophy I accept that God is a concept we create. We bring the kingdom of the spirit into existence. By this however I do not mean that God is an arbitrary creation; the divine is the highest level of being. What renders this level of existence possible is language. By this I do not mean that the life of the spirit is reducible to language, I am saying that language is a tool that enhances our ability to understand and discover meaning in what is the case. What we discover goes beyond what it is possible for language to describe. Reality is an object of continual discovery. The assumption that absolute knowledge is possible is a persistent temptation within Western philosophy, and this claim also applies to religion. We bring the highest level into existence, but we do so as fallible explorers. What the Christians describe as the Fall is a consequence of our desire to transcend our humanity and become divine. This aspiration is Satanic and is the root of all evil. It is a temptation that accompanies our realisation that we can know and create. An authentic existence requires us to accept that we are neither infallible nor are we a blank slate. We are an embodied and mortal consciousness who, augmented by symbolism, engages in continual discovery.

In my understanding Western civilization is a humanistic enterprise. It is inspired by the conviction that we can know and improve our lives by bringing a new reality into existence. This quest is augmented by our capacity for language. Ernst Cassirer declares that language supplies what he describes as an “Open Sesame” to a higher level of reality. We do not simply copy (Mimesis) what already exists, we make (Poiesis) a new reality. Ancient Greek philosophers claimed that what is real is guided by Logos. In the Modern era this became the claim that we impose an order on reality. Our experience is rendered meaningful as a consequence of the order which we impose upon it. This ignores that knowing is a process of discovery. A heuristic approach accepts that the quest for knowledge as an end in itself is what characterizes our nature as human beings. That we never arrive at absolute knowledge is not something that is shameful, it is the quest for truth, goodness, and beauty which gives our life meaning. This quest is only possible because we are situated. It is our finitude that creates the conditions for understanding. We are born into a reality that we did not create, and we endeavour to find meaning in it, and pass on what we have discovered onto new generations.

Cassirer views language as the most important of different symbol systems which render the human possible, another symbol system is mathematics. Without mathematics science is little more than story telling. Materialists assume that only that which can be reduced to the properties of matter is real. Everything else is an illusion. They acknowledge, or at least some of them do, that we are conscious, but they claim that what it is to be a conscious being is wholly determined by the properties of matter. In this vision we are wholly determined by powers beyond our control. Our fate is not determined by gods, but by the laws of physics. There are problems with this account; not the least of which is how is it possible for us to know? How is our understanding possible? Not only is it a mystery why the universe has the order it has, the properties that render what it is to be a human being possible, it is a mystery how it is that we are able to understand what is the case. If everything is wholly determined by the properties of matter how is science possible? Materialists solve this problem by ignoring it. They do not, and cannot live as if a reductionist account of the universe is true; they use it to undermine our belief in the existence of any higher reality. Every higher reality is reduced to the lower.

In their lives, materialists understand their existence as being a product of choices. If a materialist is awarded a Nobel Prize they do not make a speech thanking the properties of matter. They do not say that their discovery was wholly determined by the properties of matter, and that their contribution was zero. Idealists declare that thought is the ground of everything real. They claim that for something to exist it has to be thought. This of course raises the question of what is it that is doing the thinking? An Objective Idealist claims that what is doing the thinking is God. We are nothing more than thoughts in the mind of God. A Subjective Idealist claims that what exists is our creation. Like the materialists, Idealists do not live as if what they are saying is true. They say it because they want it to be true. The reason why they believe it is because it gives their life a meaning. The problem with Subjective Idealism is that reality does not do as it is told. We operate within the constraints supplied by the properties of matter. As for the claim that everything is a divine thought, how is thought possible without a body? The claim I am defending in this book is that humans exist in a state of inbetweenness. We are neither wholly material nor are we wholly spiritual. We are rendered possible by the properties of matter, but are not wholly determined by those properties. Our participation in higher levels occurs within the degrees of freedom that lower levels render possible.

In my view the highest level of reality are ideals, but ideals only become possible via a point of view. By this I do not mean a geometrical point, I mean that concepts such as truth and goodness and beauty only make sense as aspirations made by embodied conscious persons. An embodied conscious person explores higher levels of reality by using symbols as tools to reflect upon and make sense of their experience. A mind is a consciousness which makes use of abstract concepts to reflect upon its experience. Take away consciousness and there cannot be a mind, there are only material properties. In the absence of any consciousness there cannot be any meaning. In a humanist philosophy we create meanings. I reject the claim however that this implies that they are wholly subjective. We discover them. In this book I am offering an account of what it is to be a human being. It is the most important philosophical question. Our humanity is not something separate from physical properties, but nor is it in my view wholly reducible to those properties. In the account which I am defending, every attempt to supply a theory of everything is a delusion. It is a delusion to which those living in the Western tradition have frequently succumbed, but it is a temptation that should be resisted, because every attempt at absolute understanding ends up as an account in which the reality of what it is to be human ceases to exist.

The two primary duties of a humanities teacher is to direct their pupils to the greatest achievements of the human spirit, and to supply them with the background information that will help them make sense of them. Works of genius are not necessarily compatible with each other, because human achievements give us different ways of comprehending our lives. The two primary vices of a humanities teacher is to only talk about those achievements which are of interest to the educator, and to accompany that interest with the claim that what they are teaching is correct understanding. The focus of education ought to be on the process of discovery. I agree with those who claim that thinking returns us back to our experience, and enables us to know it for the first time. As the poet Goethe put it, the first and last thing which is required of genius is love of truth. Books should awaken thoughts, not replace them. We should follow where our experience takes us rather than parroting that what we are told is the truth. What is true is an object of continual inquiry. We start from where we are, relying upon the tools we have at our disposal, in the pursuit of understanding and meaning. Assuming that knowledge claims are settled as long as we follow the correct procedure is a fantasy that has dogged Western philosophy. It is a delusion. In its most pernicious form it becomes the claim that what cannot be described does not exist. In this way of understanding, what it is to know what has value is taken to be no more than an imposition of will.

The humanities are supplemented by the sciences. The contrast between those two different ways of making sense of our experience has long been noted, not least because they rely upon a different medium of understanding. The humanities assume that to be a human being is to know at least one human language, whereas excellence in the sciences is rendered possible by the exactitude supplied by mathematics. Since the discovery of mathematics there has been a continual temptation to reduce knowledge to that which mathematics is able to describe. That mathematics is a powerful tool nobody can deny. That it captures everything which is entitled to be called knowledge is a delusion that both degrades the humanities and undermines the importance of what it is to be a human being. It is not the case that the humanities are a branch of the sciences, the sciences are a branch of the humanities. The book of mathematics does not contain everything there is to know. We rely on mathematics as a tool for facilitating our ability to understand what is the case. We enrich the meaning of our experience by describing it. But descriptions do not wholly capture what is real, they fall short of that which is the case.

Jesus declared “My kingdom is not of this world” but in the Modern era the hopes for human salvation that these words inspired were transformed into the conviction that we ought to set ourselves the task of creating heaven on Earth. Marx saw technology as supplying us with tools of liberation which enable us to progress towards a society in which every human being is equal. At the end of history all class conflict shall cease. This claim, like the conviction that God will return at the end of days to judge the living and the dead, is a declaration of faith. Its Christian origins are obvious, but what motivates it is a feeling of outrage that we are required to submit to demands made upon us by something other than our own will. In Christianity it is our capacity to choose between good or evil which separates us from the rest of nature, but it is not the case that we determine what is right and wrong. To do this is to believe that we are God. With great confidence some in the Enlightenment era claimed that everything (consciousness included) can be reduced to the properties of matter. The belief that there is a higher level of reality that cannot be reduced to material properties was debunked, and replaced with nothing. This conclusion is not viewed with alarm because it is accompanied by the conviction that technology gives us the power to liberate ourselves from any demands higher than our own desires.

The Christian promise of the coming into being of a new kingdom was converted into the assumption that by relying upon science and technology we can create heaven on Earth. Knowledge will bring about happiness. To oppose any progress towards a society in which everybody is equal is evil; although if it is only material properties which are real how can there be such a thing as evil? Such are the contradictions generated by a materialist philosophy that relies on assumptions derived from Christianity. In the Romantic era some opposed science and technology, or at least rejected a materialist account of everything. In my view, rejecting science is not a good strategy. The quest to elevate science and technology into a substitute religion however is no less misguided, because it makes demands upon the sciences and technology which are more than they can deliver. Materialists claim that it is only the sciences which supply us with what counts as knowledge. This serves to create the contradictory attitudes I mentioned earlier. We are downgraded into an existence that is wholly determined by material properties, and elevated into beings who determine what is meaningful. I reject the claim that what is discovered within the sciences is our only source of knowledge.

A Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), and a Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) were the science and arts components of an elementary education in the Middle Ages in Western Europe. A lecturer was somebody who read out texts from a lectern. If you progressed from a school to a university your primary task was to master texts. It was assumed that it is theoretically possible for a library to contain all knowledge. A student at a university would begin their studies in the Arts faculty, and would then go on to specialize in either law, medicine, or theology. The framework for this knowledge was Christian theology. Universities identified and selected from those who could be useful as administrators. In the Renaissance era however, independent scholars opposed the philosophy being taught in the universities, to which they gave the pejorative name Scholasticism. In accordance with this critique the Columbia University humanities professor Jacques Barzun promoted the notion that an education system built on repetition, method, and specialisation impairs creativity, intuition, and the process of discovering meaning. It is no longer the case that universities require students to operate within the dogmas of Christianity. Materialists endeavour to replace this claim with the assumption that what it is to be educated is possessing knowledge of the sciences.

This elevation of science is sometimes accompanied by a rejection of philosophy. Philosophy is dominated by three key questions; what exists, how can we know it, and what is a good life? If the first question is handed over to the sciences, and the answers supplied to the last question are deemed to be wholly subjective, philosophers are left with the task of supplying correct rules for knowing. Philosophy becomes a quest to secure rules which will enable us to justify our knowledge claims. In order to prevent philosophy becoming an endless petītiō principiī [= begging the question] regress in our efforts to justify our claims, philosophers are forced to say: this is what I believe. In the absence of a foundation in Christian theology how can we justify this stopping point? For some the only foundation we need is the fact that we say it. It is clear that philosophy falls short of supplying us with answers upon which we can agree. What it excels at is creating bemusement. It is on those grounds that some concluded that philosophy is something to avoid, because all it succeeds in doing is creating a state of perplexity. If we are experiencing a crisis of meaning however this may be because we are relying on false assumptions. If this claim is true, and I believe to be true, should we not replace our assumptions with something better? Philosophy challenges us to make sense of our experience as a whole. In my view our biggest challenge is having an adequate account of what it is to be human.

I claim that there is a level of reality which transcends what the sciences can describe, and that it is our exploration of this reality which creates the human. To be a morally good person for example is an aspiration which it is not possible to understand in terms of the physical properties, nor it is possible to reduce it to biological systems. Nor can morality be wholly reduced to whatever happens to be our customs. A philosopher subjects customs to criticism. In a Positivistic account there is no knowledge other than that which is supplied by the sciences. It is claimed that everything can be reduced to the properties of matter, and these properties have no meaning. The only meanings are the meanings we impose. The American man of letters A.J.Nock claimed that ‘self-preservation is the first law of human conduct, exploitation the second…if one wished to split hairs, one might say that exploitation is the first law of conduct, since even in self-preservation one tends always to take the easiest way.’ In this vision of what it is to be a human being we spend our lives trying to satisfy our desires, and getting others to submit to our will. Saint Augustine claims that submission to God is not natural to us. What is natural to us is the desire to rule over everything. We want to become God. Contrary to the view advocated by materialists I endorse the claim that a spiritual level of existence is real, and that the process of bringing it into being is the civilizing process which creates the human, although I am in agreement with those who believe that we have a nature which places limits on what sort of society we can create.

Our existence as human beings is constrained by what lower level properties render possible. To refuse to acknowledge this is delusional. For the British-Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski piety is essentially a recognition of our finitude. It is not the case that we can become divine. Those who reject piety are motivated by the hubris of believing that with knowledge human beings can be anything we want. The first task of a utopian is to destroy that which exists, on the grounds that it can be replaced with perfection. Even if it is recognized that utopia is a nowhere place, destruction is justified as an act of will. An act of destruction is a protest against the meaninglessness of existence. Kolakowski claims that materialism offers two alternatives. It is, as the French poet Baudelaire put it, to be either a lover of prostitutes or a lover of clouds. Between dedicating yourself to the pleasures of the moment, or seeking to lose yourself in vain imaginings. Religion for Kolakowski is a vision of our existence orientated by the desire to add something more than satisfying material needs. Humanism takes religion to be a human creation, but in its spiritual version humanism acknowledges the existence of a higher level of reality than the material. I both endorse this assumption, and recognize that we are rendered possible by physical properties.

The attempt in Western philosophy to secure a foundation for knowledge ends up as the assumption that it is only what we can describe and justify that counts as knowledge. The claim that it is only the sciences which give us what counts as knowledge is a product of this assumption. I am claiming that the conviction that we can achieve absolute knowledge is a delusion. It assumes that we can leave our finitude behind and know absolutely, even if the conclusion we reach is that we can know nothing. In a humanist account we create meaning by pursuing ideals that we have formulated. It is our dedicated and fallible pursuit of the transcendent ideals of truth and goodness and beauty which is what creates our humanity. In this book I discuss three authors. They all defend the sciences, but they deny that it is only science which gives us knowledge. The three thinkers I discuss claim that what it is to be human is not something which is wholly reducible to the properties of matter. I suggest that they are best understood as heuristic philosophers. By this I mean that our journey towards meaning has a starting point, and we are able to explore a spiritual level of existence whose truths transcend our subjectivity.

1) Securing Truth

‘With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in something else.’

G.C.Lichtenberg Waste Books Translated R.J.Hollingdale (2000)

L 81

The most important fact about ourselves is that we are conscious. If it were not for our consciousness nothing would have any meaning for us. We would not even know that we exist. This awareness occurs in a specific place and at a particular time. We are rendered possible by constraints. We cannot do whatever we want. Our universe existed before we were born, and it will continue after we die. To live we need oxygen, water, and food. We are able to acquire and accumulate experiences and skills, and pass on what we have learned to new generations. Although it is our bodies which render our existence possible, we can augment them with tools. Our most powerful tool is language. Our ancestors could distinguish between a lion and a rock before they could speak. But language enables us to reflect upon and refine our distinctions. We also make use of numbers; which we use to describe and make discoveries about those aspects of our experience which can be quantified. These articulations do not replace our experience but they enhance our self-consciousness about how to interpret it. We make use of symbols to enrich the meaning of our experience, and they facilitate our ability to understand it. Words and numbers are tools which supply us with two different ways of knowing.

What unites the divide between the humanities and the sciences is that both rely upon our use of symbols. Symbols enhance our ability to make sense of our experience. We make use of them when interpreting our experience. This supplies us with three different paths. One path is an attempt to go beyond our experience and make claims about that which transcends it. Another denies that we can transcend the context which renders our consciousness possible. In this latter path all that we can know is our immediate experience. The third path assumes that because we are not separate from the reality that we are using symbols to evoke and describe we can have true beliefs about it. Our beliefs about what is the case however can be mistaken. We are in media res [“in the middle of things”] and are not all knowing, nor is there any path to absolute knowledge. To be a human being is to exist in a state of what Plato described as inbetweeness [μεταξύ - metaxy]. Because we have minds we seek to reflect on our experience. We are not detached from reality, but have no secure understanding of that which is the case. We try to make sense of our experience. Every attempt at understanding is reliant upon a context. Our birth supplies us with a beginning. We rely on our body, on our skills, and on our tools, and engage in a process of discovery, knowing that beliefs can be mistaken. There is no simple correspondence between that which we believe to be true and what is true.

You might assume that most philosophers in the Western tradition would follow this third path. But you would be wrong. The claim that we can know, but only fallibly, is a combination that most philosophers in the Western tradition have sought to avoid. Let us call the first path Rationalism, the second Scepticism, and the third path Personal Knowledge. For those who take the first path, anything less than absolute truth is unworthy of the name knowledge. Any inclusion of the personal is too subjective. The second path rejects Personal Knowledge on the opposite grounds. It claims that seeking to discover the truth about that which exists independently of our immediate experience, in other words any attempt to create a metaphysics, is delusional. None of our claims are certain enough to be called knowledge. The first two paths seem to be distinct, but they are actually the same path. It is only the direction of travel which is different. Scepticism assumes that we can secure knowledge, but reduces knowledge to the claim that we cannot know anything, and therefore every attempt to know what exists independently of our experience is a delusion. In one version of this we should seek to suspend all judgements about that which is true and that which is false.

Western philosophy has a history. This history can be divided into three lengthy eras. In the Classical era the aim was to deliver a science of everything. Reality is taken to have a necessary order and our task as thinking beings is to know it. Sceptics denied that such a science is possible. In the Medieval era philosophy was given the task of understanding Christianity. We are free to reject divine commandments, but via faith it is possible for us to reach a state of understanding. The universe has been so ordered that we are able to comprehend it. Any additional knowledge needed for our salvation is supplied by revelation. God created the universe and supplies the ground of all morality. In the Modern era philosophers set themselves the task of reconciling science with morality. Sceptics said that no such reconciliation is possible. Morality has no other ground than will. Our primary task is to create a world that is congenial to our desires. In Late Modernity this became the assumption that the only reality we can know is what we ourselves create. Modernity is an incoherent vision, in which on the grounds of an appeal to the authority of science it is claimed that value is something we impose on reality. Value has no other ground than what we want to be the case. The incoherence arises from the fact that in this vision our beliefs about what are true are wholly determined by the properties of matter.

On the grounds of an appeal to science values are seen as something we impose on reality, and this claim is secured by the truth of science. A scepticism about the objectivity of values is justified via an appeal to science, the truths of which that same scepticism undermines. These two claims are inconsistent. What is needed is a philosophy that abandons the delusion that an absolute understanding is possible, but which does not conclude that all our claims about what is the case are wholly subjective. What is needed is a philosophy which transcends the objective/subjective division and replaces it with a philosophy grounded in the concept of personal knowledge. What is needed is an approach that both acknowledges our finitude and accepts that we can discover truths that transcend our experience. By transcendence I mean that which transcends our finitude but is nevertheless knowable. Our humanity consists in the fact we are situated and pursue ideals that transcend our particularity. Our pursuit of these ideals distinguishes us from every other form of existence that is known to us. It is not a mission that is possible for us to ever wholly complete, and because of this our highest ideals are by their very nature transcendent. In the pursuit of these ideals however, as a consequence of our love for them, we transform ourselves and create the human.

Rationalism and Scepticism are both hostile to a humanistic account of knowing. In what can be described as the Critical Philosophy tradition Western Rationalists concede that our understanding falls short of a divine understanding, but they claim that reason can secure necessary truths about what is the case. The fact that we have a mind enables us to participate, albeit to a lesser degree, in a divine understanding. Reason enables us to identify the order of the universe, or at least engage in procedures which are rational. Scepticism seeks to undermine these knowledge claims. It is clear that Rationalism and Scepticism are not different paths, they are the same path. It is the approach which Polanyi (following the philosopher Kant) designates as Critical Philosophy. It assumes that if we follow the right method it is possible for us to secure knowledge of what is the case. The only dispute is how far it is possible to progress towards the truth. An extreme Rationalism claims that reason enables us to know everything. An extreme Scepticism claims that the only thing we can know is that we don’t know anything. Critical Philosophy is the dominant Western tradition. Broadly speaking Western philosophy is the history of advances and retreats as claims succumb to Scepticism. The act of doubting in this tradition is not a latecomer. It is a constant presence. Beliefs are secured as true by combating Scepticism. In Critical Philosophy doubting is always a virtue.

A Critical Philosophy path assumes that it is possible to know absolutely. Scepticism is a negative version of the same absolutism. It denies that any of our claims deserve to be called knowledge. The alternative to Critical Philosophy is common sense. Ancient Greek philosophers claimed that if you want to understand what it is that makes a good life you have to have a correct understanding of the order of the universe. On the grounds of this correct understanding you will make the right decisions about how to live. For Sceptics there is no ground for how we ought to live other than what we happen to desire. In the Modern era there was an attempt to secure moral claims without any reference to any demands other than the ones which we impose upon ourselves. Kant claimed that moral judgements are in accordance with the demands we impose upon ourselves as a consequence of seeking to live in accordance with the requirements of reason. We submit to reason because human beings are rational. He claims that to behave morally is to behave towards others as we would like them to behave towards us. This appeal to consistency is a formal demand, and therefore it lacks any content. It only tells us that a rational person ought to behave in such a way that their actions are consistent. An appeal to consistency however will not convince anybody to live their lives differently if they start from different assumptions. All rules are interpreted within a context. It is possible for us to be consistent and arrive at wholly conflicting conclusions. Even if we submit to the demands made upon us by an appeal to consistency it does not follow that we will arrive at the same conclusions.

Instead of grounding morality in intellectual consistency some Enlightenment thinkers appealed to the concept of utility. In this view morality is maximizing the achievement of the goals that we set for ourselves. To behave morally is to maximize the total amount of utility. In this account everybody counts as one, and no more than one. But why make this assumption? It is also far from obvious that this approach leads to judgements which everybody can accept are moral. On the basis of this analysis it would be morally justified to euthanise a healthy young person so that their organs can be given to people who have failing organs. This action is justified on the grounds that the needs of the many override what an individual wants to happen. An action is moral if it maximizes total utility. A Kantian and a Utilitarian account of morality deduce it from universal laws of reason. A Sceptic however denies that we can agree on how we ought to live. We pursue our own particular wants. These may be biological desires, they may be arbitrary whims, or they may be a consequence of acquiring the practices of a particular cultural tradition. There is no ground for moral claims other than what we desire. Why accept the claim that everybody counts as one, and no more than one. What I want is more important to me than what others want. There is no ground for morality other than whatever it is that I happen to want to happen.

Rationalists fall short of securing as many truths as they claim, but the conviction that we are able to comprehend reality has led to important discoveries. By situating knowledge claims within a context, Scepticism restrains those who claim that it is possible to understand everything. A Personal Knowledge approach is neither wholly Rationalist nor is it reducible to Scepticism. It combines the enhancement in our understanding that our use of descriptions can give us, with an acceptance that descriptions are rendered meaningful to us by our reliance upon our experience. It is a delusion to assume that we can escape from the context of our understanding, and secure our beliefs via an appeal to reason, but the fact that our judgements are situated does not prevent us from knowing. Our situatedness supplies us with a starting point. A good account of this starting point is provided by the Hungarian-British philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891-1976). He asserts that it is language which makes truth claims possible, but we cannot secure the truth of our claims. Articulation enables us to say more than we know. Polanyi reminds us that it is not only true to say that we say more than we can know, it is also the case that we can know more than we say. He rejects the claim that our beliefs about what is the case are arbitrary. Although our descriptions exceed what it is possible for us to know, the fact of our existence as an embodied consciousness situated in the world means that we are acquainted with what is the case even when we cannot wholly describe it.

Polanyi is advocating a Post-Critical philosophy. It is not possible for us to isolate ourselves from the context of our understanding, but it is possible to moderate our claims without abandoning the quest for knowledge. Polanyi endorses an axiological approach in which we succeed in making discoveries about what is true, and good, and beautiful. The fact that we make claims that go beyond what can be known with certainty does not undermine the fact of our achievements. I also examine the writings of the American philosopher Robert Pirsig (1928-2017), who supplies an account in which values are built upon the concept of Quality. Although Polanyi and Pirsig both emphasize the role which articulation plays in enhancing our ability to explore values, there is a tension between them, because Polanyi emphasises the creative agency of the person whereas Pirsig grounds values in the order of reality. The British philosopher and neurophysiologist Iain McGilchrist emphasizes the role which consciousness plays in our understanding, but he claims that we experience what is the case in two different ways; as a consequence of the fact that our brains have two hemispheres. In his view the ideal relationship between the right and left halves of our brain is when the left hemisphere accepts the primacy of the right hemisphere.

McGilchrist argues that the reason why our left hemisphere ought to acknowledge the primacy of our right hemisphere is not because the latter is infallible, on the contrary, it is because the right hemisphere is less dogmatic. It is less focused on achieving definite tasks. The attempt by the left hemisphere to secure all that can be known within systems of thought is evidence of our capacity for reflection. Human beings create tools which facilitate the imposition of our purposes on what is the case. We believe in the truth of our claims, and seek to persuade others of their truth. To secure the validity of their claims some assume that God has directed them to what is true. They claim that God has guided their understanding and enabled them to know that which is true. Scepticism responds that all such assumptions are delusions. It claims that if we were being honest about the conditions of our understanding we would recognize that our judgements go beyond what we can know. I deny however that it is not possible for us to know anything. These common sense defying extremes are generated by Critical Philosophy. The use of the word "Critical" in this context is meant to persuade others that what we are asserting as true ought to be accepted as correct because our conclusions are the product of a process of criticism. Polanyi claims that what is actually taking place is that we are substituting experience with dogma. He returns us back to the experiences Critical Philosophy ignores.

2) Critical Philosophy

“Excessive confidence in..reasoning, distrust and disdain for the intuitions which common sense supplies - these then are the causes which necessarily produce idealism and scepticism.”

Pierre Duhem German Science (1915) Translated by J.Lyons (1991) p.18.

Because we are conscious, we know that we exist, but Polanyi claims that there are two different types of awareness. A focal and a subsidiary awareness. In accordance with the conviction that only that which can be described qualifies as knowledge, Critical Philosophy aspires to make our awareness wholly explicit. This aspiration is the dominant philosophy in the Western tradition, especially in the Modern era. The Western tradition is so called because it is the cultural tradition that was built on the ruins of the Western Roman Empire. Western culture was in large part inspired by a collection of Greek and Hebrew texts which were translated into Latin. These texts were literary, scientific, and philosophical, and also included digests of Roman law. Surviving buildings and paintings and sculptures from the Ancient World inspired further achievements. A revival of mathematics was facilitated by the use of Arabic (actually Indian) notation, and a musical tradition evolved which relied upon a system of musical notation, but the spine of Western civilization was its literature. The invention in the Near East of the phonetic alphabet was an invention of decisive importance in the history of civilization, and it is the likely origin in the Western tradition of the assumption that in order for it to qualify as knowledge it has to be symbolically articulated.

The assumption that only that which can be symbolically articulated counts as knowledge encourages the conviction that mathematics is a royal road to truth, but if only that which can be symbolically articulated which counts as knowledge, where does that leave moral values? The assumption that nature does not have a moral order inspired modern science, but if the universe does not have a moral order, why be moral? The belief that what is the case is something we ought to have a theory about derives from the Ancient Greeks. On the grounds of the assumption that what is real has a necessary order, they sought to derive rightness from the order of the universe. It was claimed that the order of the universe punishes transgressions. Some Ancient Greeks claimed that the universe has an order but it is amoral, it is simply what is the case. In either version our actions are determined by a reality which transcends our subjectivity. The Jews rejected this approach and claimed that the ground of morality is adherence to supernatural commandments. Saint Paul claimed that the ground of a moral life is being born again in Christ. In order to save our souls we should live in accordance with the example set by Jesus, as it is recorded in the Gospels. In Late Antiquity Christianity replaced all the other religions of the Roman Empire. There was an attempt to reconcile Ancient Greek philosophy with the revelations about God that can be found in the texts of the Bible.

Materialists in Ancient Greece claimed that reality can be explained in terms of particles of matter which are moved around by forces. There is no directing mind. Nor is it the case that the universe has a moral order. Socrates rejected the assumption that the order we observe is a product of chance. He claims that if we seek to understand how we ought to live we need to understand the order of the universe. He assumes that knowing what is a good life, and then doing the opposite, makes no sense. In Christianity however it is the creator of the universe, who exists outside his creation, who tells us how we ought to live. This is the only important knowledge. Jesus asks how does it benefit us to obtain the power to rule over everything if the price we pay for this knowledge is loss of our soul? A righteous life for a human being is a life which is lived in accordance with divine commandments. This requires us to submit to what God demands of us. Our most important knowledge is knowledge of the will of God. We can only know what that creator has chosen to reveal to us, but that is all the knowledge we need. In Christianity a righteous life is a life which is lived in accordance with the teachings of Jesus, who is God incarnate. We are separate from the rest of nature as a special creation that transcends the natural order. We were created by God in his likeness, and as a consequence of this creation to be a human being is to be able to decide for ourselves how we shall live.

In the Western Middle Ages there were three major approaches to the relationship between Christianity and Greek philosophy. The first made the assumption that these traditions are in harmony. The universe operates in accordance with laws. Once you accept the truths contained in the Bible, our capacity for reason will enable us to understand them. Christians should find out what philosophers have discovered about the order of the universe, and pass that knowledge on to others. Scholastics set out to create a Christian philosophy that was systematic, inclusive, and in accordance with reason. The texts of the Bible say that God created the universe, and those who submit to his commandments shall be rewarded. Jesus asserted that a righteous life is a life which is transformed by love. His torture and death had the theological purpose of redeeming us of our sins. Jesus redeems our sins, and shows us how we should live. In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus declares "You have heard it said that... But I say unto you that” before going on to explain that rules cannot wholly capture what is morally right. In the good news of the New Covenant it is explained that God is love. It is a message for everybody, not just the chosen. Saint Paul asserts that it is love which is the fulfilment of the law. We sin, but are born again in Christ, and as a reward for changing ourselves this will lead after our death to the reward of eternal life in heaven.

In the second path Jerusalem has nothing to do with Athens. What God asks of us cannot be rationally justified. We are not in a position to know what God intends. He is God and we are not. Where were we when God created the universe? We should live in accordance with the teachings passed down to us in the Holy Scriptures. They were written down by scribes who were inspired by God, and reveal to us how to live a righteous life. Accepting that they supply us with truths requires an act of faith. The third path seeks to divide truths which it is possible for reason to justify, from truths whose validity are justified by faith. We should live in accordance with what reason tells us, but revelation gives us truths which go beyond what reason can justify. In the Modern era the first path became the claim that we ought to live our lives in accordance with reason. The second path became for some the assumption that our actions are justified by what we want to happen. Those who followed the third path set out to distinguish between the natural order, which is the object of the sciences, and the subjective meanings which we impose on an otherwise meaningless reality. In our efforts to apply our reason it is possible for us to devise new ways of satisfying whatever it is that we set for ourselves as our purposes. We create whatever order satisfies our desires.

In Critical Philosophy we should act in accordance with that which we can justify. Opposing the Rationalist approach it was pointed out that all criticism relies upon that which we take for granted. It relies upon an appeal to a set of beliefs. Philosophy in the Ancient world therefore reached an impasse. Whoever you select as your teacher others will dispute their assumptions. If your assumptions are justified by an appeal to your beliefs, and your beliefs are justified by an appeal to your assumptions, your justification relies upon what you are supposed to be proving. Any attempt to wholly describe the ground of your convictions ends up as the recognition that any attempt to justify your claims relies on the beliefs which are your starting point. If it is only that which has been described which counts as knowledge, and the beliefs you start with are not shared by those who you are seeking to persuade, philosophical disputes become irresolvable. Saint Augustine addresses this problem by declaring that Credo ut intelligam [= I believe in order that I understand]. In order to know you must first believe. We can know truths which exist in and are justified by the mind of God because in his grace he guides his special creation towards a state of understanding. On the basis of this account of what it is to know Augustine justified the persecution of heretics.

Polanyi denies that conflicts can be settled simply by affirming what we believe. The assumption that knowledge is justified by faith leads to what the English poet Matthew Arnold described as a clash of armies in the night. The armies rely on different beliefs. The person who told us what to believe may, as they claim, be guided by God, but it is also possible that they are deluded. Our claims about what is true are not secure. Our confidence in our beliefs relies upon what we take to be the case. Polanyi defends an account in which our knowledge claims are beliefs, but instead of guidance by God he claims that we are guided by our tacit knowledge. Our knowledge claims are grounded in our experience of reality. The process of making sense of our experience is enhanced by the reflection that our use of language renders possible. We ought to reflect critically on our customs. All criticism however is guided by our tacit awareness. In our debates with each other the ultimate ground of appeal is not to consistency but to our shared tacit knowledge. A Post-Critical approach to knowledge is acritical not uncritical. We rely upon that which is supplied to us by our tacit knowledge. The origins of this tacit knowledge is not simply supplied by tradition, it is rooted in our experience of that which is the case.

In short, you may seek to impose your opinions on the grounds of your assumption that you know what is true, and on the basis of this assumption seek to enforce this truth. Or you may rely upon force, on the grounds of your assumption that nobody is in possession of the truth and therefore nobody ought to tell you what to do because you should be able to do whatever you want. In either case that which is true ceases to be an object of discovery. You may seek to distinguish between how you want to live, which has no ground other than your particular preferences, and various value-neutral rules upon which everybody can agree, but this assumes that there is no connection between how you want to live and the rules you want imposed. But this is absurd. The rules you support will be the rules which accord with how you want to live. You are simply imposing what you believe on everybody else. Those who appeal to tradition claim that we should act in accordance with what is customary. Defenders of the Critical Philosophy tradition respond that we should seek to act only in accordance with that which reason can justify. However, to do this is to submit to rules supplied to you by those who believe they know how you should behave, on the grounds of assumptions you may not share

Knowing without a knower makes no sense. Knowing always takes place from somewhere. The fact that knowing is always situated does not however mean that knowing is a delusion. What is a delusion is the assumption that we have access to a point that exists nowhere in particular, and that arriving at that point can supply us with absolute knowledge. Although Polanyi rejects the reality of a view from nowhere, his conclusion does not have the consequence that we cannot know. Indeed the claim that we cannot know relies on the assumption that absolute knowledge is possible. It merely transforms it into the claim that we know we cannot know, which is contradictory; declaring that you cannot know is itself a knowledge claim. A Personal Knowledge account recognizes that what we believe is true may be false; but this does not follow that our beliefs are arbitrary. To be a knower is to be guided by our experience of what is the case. Our experience of what is the case is predominately tacit. We may arrive at false conclusions, but this does not invalidate the assumption that there is a ground for our judgements which goes beyond subjective preferences. What it means is that all of our knowledge claims are fallible; which is what you would expect to be the case unless you are claiming to have secured a source of absolute knowledge.

3) Personal Knowledge

‘Nobody understands what he does not feel.’

Aldous Huxley Point Counter Point (1928) Chapter 21 p.292.

Our use of symbols not only facilitates our ability to reflect upon our experience, and create new thoughts, they also help us to pass on our discoveries to new generations. In an Idealist account it is thoughts which create what is real. A Personal Knowledge account does not say that truth is whatever we want to be true, it is the claim that all explorations of what is the case are personal. Any description which replaces persons with laws does so on the assumption that they have discovered a theory of everything. They explain everything in terms of these laws but exclude themselves from those laws. For Marx it is power which determines what is right and wrong. There is no ground for right and wrong except the power to enforce your preferences. On the egalitarian assumption that nobody ought to tell you what to do he seeks to replace hierarchical arrangements with arrangements in which everybody is equal. Nobody is deemed to be better than anybody else. To bring this society about the right sort of people have to be in charge. The right sort of person is somebody who knows that there is no metaphysical ground for what is right and wrong except what we want to be true because it serves our purposes. Those with the most power make use of that power to impose their preferences on others.

Marx excluded himself from the claim that everybody is equal. He was justified in telling everybody what to do, because he knows the truth about reality. Everybody else is living in accordance with laws of history, but Marx, in some way that he does not explain, knows what is true. What is true is that everything is power, and the end of history is a society in which everybody is equal. Any action which brings this new society, however immoral, into existence is ipso facto justified. Any unequal society is a bad society, but on the basis of his knowledge Marx claims that the inevitable end of history is a society which acknowledges that nobody is better than anybody else. Marx knows this because he understands the laws of history. A Personal Knowledge account rejects the claims of those who believe that they possess a theory of everything. All knowing is a fallible process of inquiry. Contrary to nihilism Polanyi asserts that there are better and worse ways of living, and what is right and wrong is grounded in what is the case, but what is better and worse is a continual process of discovery. The best way for us to discover what is good and bad is not to live in a society which is centrally directed, it is to live in a society in which on the grounds of a belief in the reality of what is right and wrong those who seek to make discoveries about such matters have freedom to pursue their inquiries without them being told by those in charge of the State what it is that it is politically acceptable for them to believe.

In a Personal Knowledge account we make claims which go beyond what it is possible for us to know with certainty, but our claims are not arbitrary, we are guided by our tacit awareness. It is tacit because we cannot make it wholly explicit. The claim that what we know can be rendered wholly explicit is a delusion. Nor is there a method which can secure a path to truth. To illustrate the difference between a Rationalist, Sceptical, and a Personalist approach to knowing let us look at three different ways of understanding the orbit of our planets. In Ancient Greece, Rationalist philosophers claimed that the movement of the planets across the night sky is a demonstration of the fact of cosmic order. According to Plato, seven planets orbit in perfect circles around the Earth. The problem with this view is that it is not the case that the movement of the planets in the night sky is consistently in one direction. Sometimes they appear to move backwards relative to the stars. The Polish astronomer Copernicus (reviving the insight of the Ancient Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos) declared that the planets orbit the Sun. The German astronomer Kepler viewed this as consistent with the rationality of the universe. In his preface to the book in which Copernicus set out his theory, the German theologian Osiander claims that his theory is not supplying us with a description of the actual orbit of the planets; he is enabling us to predict their movement in the sky.

According to Osiander a theory is nothing more than a device for conveniently organising our experience, with a view to achieving our ends. In a Sceptical account the fact that a theory can successfully predict what is going to happen does not require us to accept the claim that it is a correct description. A theory is nothing more than an account which helps us to achieve our purposes. Theories are useful ways of organising our experience. In a materialist account everything can be wholly accounted for by reducing everything into the properties of matter. Everything else is fairy tales. Although everything that happens is wholly determined, the fact that it happens is accidental. There are no cosmic purposes, there are only only determined but meaningless events. Within this account the discovery that the Earth is not the centre of the universe was a humiliating demotion for humanity that transformed how we understand ourselves. The people who say this seem to be unaware that in the cosmology of the Middle Ages the universe was comprehended as a hierarchy, with the Earth at the lowest level. Materialists in Ancient Greece had claimed that there is no explanation for the perceived order of the universe other than chance. Aristophanes the comic playwright claimed that Socrates had at one time been a defender of this vision, but according to Plato this view is exactly what he opposed. He claims that the universe is ordered and grounds right and wrong.

In his book “Personal Knowledge; Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy” (1958) Polanyi begins by discussing the Copernican Revolution. In a Sceptical account, laws in the sciences are nothing more than a convenient way of organising our experience in the pursuit of our purposes. According to Polanyi what the Copernican Revolution actually demonstrates is the power of thought to transcend what is supplied by our senses. Despite the evidence of our senses the declaration that the Earth orbits the Sun is true. Both the claim that the planets have perfectly circular orbits, and the declaration that we cannot know what is true, are false. On the basis of the assumption that we ought not go beyond the evidence that is supplied to us by our senses, Empiricism asserts that if a theory conflicts with an observation the theory should be rejected. Relying on the power of thought, Copernicus relied upon his conviction that a heliocentric account is a more intellectually satisfying explanation of what we see in the night sky. By the power of thought those who agreed with him and defended this claim succeeded in transcending the evidence of our senses by arriving at a correct explanation. If the Earth is in motion why do we not fly off into space? Instead of abandoning the Copernican theory they solved this problem by creating a new physics.

The claim that the planets we observe in the night sky orbit the Earth is a false belief. This tells us that what we believe to be true may be false. Recognizing this however does not carry with it the implication that our beliefs are wholly subjective. Copernicus believed that viewing the Earth as a planet in orbit around the Sun makes more sense than claiming that the Sun is in orbit around the Earth. His belief turned out to be correct. Our beliefs about what is true can be mistaken, but Polanyi rejects the notion that we can secure claims in the sciences about what is the case simply by following rules. For example, a relationship seems to exist between 𝚷 and the length of mammalian pregnancies. What do we do with this information? It is ignored. Science is not an accumulation of correlations, it is about identifying patterns which help us to understand what is real. Guided by their intuition scientists endeavour to pursue fruitful lines of inquiry. They are seeking to understand what is true. In helping us achieve this task computers are a good servant, but they are a bad master. The questions which we ask, our commitment to finding a solution, and our sense of where to go and look for an answer, are guided by our tacit knowledge. This is what we bring with us when we make use of a computer to help us solve a problem.

Astronomers relied upon mathematics, they invented and used telescopes, and they succeeded in producing useful charts, but the desire to understand the movement of the planets in the night sky was not only motivated by practical ends. There was an intellectual desire to know and understand what is true. But Polanyi, unlike the approach taken by Rationalism and Scepticism, does not view philosophy as a process of securing truths. Knowing is a process in which by reflecting on our experience we arrive at judgments about what we believe to be true. All knowledge claims are beliefs, and as such they are fallible. The Rationalist quest to secure knowledge by excluding our participation in knowing is a delusion. It assumes that humans via reasoning are able to arrive at a place which transcends all perspectives. Scepticism inverts the conviction that it is possible for us to secure absolute knowledge into the declaration that it is absolutely the case that we cannot know. Instead of endlessly flipping between claiming that reason secures knowledge, which we then seek to impose on others, and the contrary claim that it is not possible for us to know anything, and on the grounds of this claim undermine claims to knowledge made by others, a Personal Knowledge approach transcends the objective-subjective distinction and grounds knowing in commitments.

Polanyi notes that probability statements cannot be contradicted by experience. This is not because probability statements are wholly subjective assertions. If they keep making wrong predictions we will begin to doubt their truth. The claim that an event has occurred randomly is a denial that it is the result of an ordering principle. When we look out of a train window and notice pebbles at a train station saying “Welcome to Wales'' we recognize the improbability of this pattern occurring by chance. But if the positions of the pebbles were the result of being scattered by the station master, the resulting arrangement would also be improbable; and yet we are happy to claim that this arrangement occurred by chance. This is because we are tacitly relying on the assumption that pebbles forming words have been ordered. To make a probability or order assessment is a personal judgement. Not because they are wholly subjective claims. They can be wholly subjective, but only when they are mistaken. Nor is it the case that discovering patterns leads to a state of absolute understanding. A new discovery may change how we understand a previous discovery. It may change our convictions; although if we are determined enough we can always come up with alternative explanations.

According to Polanyi our intellectual superiority over other animals derives almost entirely from our use of language. By language he means our general ability to understand, contrive, and extend the meaning of symbols. When we give symbols a meaning we rely upon those tacit powers of discrimination which existed prior to the development of symbols, but our use of symbols extends and enhances these powers. Just as making use of a hammer enhances the power of our hand, symbols enhance the power of our mind. But our articulations cannot wholly capture the reality they describe. They contain indeterminacies; although to varying degrees. It is possible to define what is meant by a claim in mathematics more precisely than we can define the meaning of a word, but to serve as a description of what is the case we must mean more than we say if our words are to mean anything at all. It is the price we pay for them having a bearing on reality. Polanyi seeks to halt any unending regress in our attempt to define the meaning of a word by noting that a word means nothing by itself, it is used by us to mean something. This does not imply that meanings only have a subjective significance. No more than it does in the examples which I cited about judgements about probability or order.

Relying upon our imagination we make claims about that which transcends our subjective awareness. We go beyond our immediate experience. Relying on the conviction that the universe has an order that we are capable of understanding, Copernicus set out to arrive at an explanation which made the most sense to him. His assumption that the universe has an order that we can comprehend was grounded in faith. But this was not an arbitrary assumption, it was guided by his tacit knowledge. Guided by our tacit knowledge we select from alternative explanations. We select the explanation which we find to be most convincing. Copernicus believed that the movements of the planets in the night sky are not random, they have a meaning. He believed that it is possible to render the motion of the planets in the night sky more comprehensible once we understand that our planets are in orbit around the Sun, not the Earth. We can comprehend the motions of the planets not because we impose an order upon them, but because they move in accordance with laws which our capacity for reflection enables us to discover. We can understand what we experience because reality has an order, and because we have a mind that can understand this order. Our attempts to make sense of our experience however are fallible. What we believe to be true may be false.

Defining truth as that which is true is an empty claim. Polanyi reminds us that affirming that something is true is to believe that it is true. We are only able to eliminate the infinite regress which takes place when we accompany the claim ‘p is true' with the claim ‘This sentence is also true’ and so on indefinitely, if we recognise that ‘p is true’ is an affirmation of what we believe to be the case. All claims that something is true are guided by our acritical reliance upon that which we already believe to be the case. Our claims about what we believe to be true rely on our tacit knowledge. We are embodied conscious beings who seek to make sense of our experience. We interpret our experience, and on the basis of these interpretations make claims which we believe to be true. If something is true it is true independently of our feelings. Truth is what is the case even if our preference is that it not be true. It is not the case that our beliefs are wholly independent of our feelings, but in our passionate attempt to find out what is true, what we discover may surprise us. What we find may not be what we had hoped to discover. But what is true is not reducible to that which we would prefer to be the case, it is that which is true. Our assertions do not become true simply because we want them to be true. Nor is it the case that truth is a fiction we impose on chaos.

4) Transcendent Ideals

‘Man is an intellectual animal and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the end of the universe.’

William Hazlitt Characteristics (1822) CLVIII

Truth is a transcendent ideal. To make a claim we believe to be true transcends the immediacy of our experience. To claim that something is true is to transcend our subjectivity in anticipation of an indeterminate number of future confirmations. Post-Critical philosophy denies that there is a method which enables us to secure the truth of our claims. Ancient Greek Rationalists believed that reason can secure necessary truths. It can demonstrate to us what is true. The Jewish prophets believed that God had chosen them to deliver his message. Truth in this sense is trusting what they are being told is correct. It is the claim that God is sharing his thoughts with those whom he has chosen to deliver his message. Both approaches assume that if we possess the right text, method, or state of mind we do not simply make claims we believe to be true, we are making claims which are true. Polanyi asserts that when we apply rules we rely on an interpretive framework of assumptions. Committing ourselves to a particular way of understanding our experience separates us from those who are committed to interpreting the same experience differently. To illustrate what he means Polanyi mentions Clever Hans, the horse in C19th Germany who could solve complex mathematical problems. It was discovered that Clever Hans did not give correct answers to questions whose answers were not already known to his interrogators. How Clever Hans responded was being influenced by the expectations of those who were asking him questions. Without realising it the people who were interrogating him were signalling to him the way in which they would like him to respond.

A Post-Critical philosophy factors in the realisation that every method for determining the correctness of a solution to a problem relies upon what the person who is using that method already believes to be the case. Every stage between discovery and validation relies upon what is already believed to be the case. These beliefs are not arbitrary; they are derived from our experience. All experience is interpreted. All claims about that experience rely on assumptions. In isolation from reality this creates a hermeneutic circle. Polanyi escapes from this circle by denying that what grounds are beliefs are other beliefs. What guides our beliefs is our experience of what is the case. This experience arises from the fact that we are already part of the world. We do not observe reality from a point outside reality. We are part of the reality we are describing. Because our awareness goes beyond what we can describe, Polanyi calls the awareness we rely upon our tacit knowledge. Our situatedness in what is the case brings us contact with reality, but this also means that the conclusions we make based on our experience may be incorrect. We go beyond what our experience can secure. What we believe to be true changes how we understand our experience. Our beliefs do not determine what we experience, but it does affect how we interpret it. Nor do we hold our beliefs dispassionately. Our efforts to discover what is true are driven by intellectual passions. To claim that something is true is to make a commitment.

Every factual claim has the structure of a commitment, but while appetites are guided by a private satisfaction, an intellectual passion attempts to satisfy a universal obligation. Our freedom to say what we want is overruled by the freedom to do as we must. Declaring something to be true imposes moral demands upon us. Our common sense tells us that what we believe to be true may be false. It is possible to accept the power and effectiveness of language, and at the same time acknowledge its limitations. We can make true claims, and at the same time acknowledge that what we believe to be true may be false. It is possible to become bewitched by a false account of what is the case. We can create fictions. When we claim that something is true we are claiming that it is true for everybody, because we are making a claim about what is the case. Polanyi calls this a “universal intent”. To say one thing and do another is hypocritical. A good faith claim is a claim about what you believe to be true. If you discover inconsistencies in what you are saying you will engage in an attempt to correct them. Descartes claimed that if you eliminate claims that could be false this will leave you with true claims. This ignores that all knowledge claims are fallible. They are fallible because we make them.

Polanyi asserts that it would be better if we accepted responsibility for our convictions instead of trying to bring the inquiry process to an end by claiming that we have discovered a path to absolute knowledge. Our claims are sustained by commitments, and although these commitments are grounded in our experience, it does not follow that they are infallible. Our claims are motivated by passionate commitments. It does not follow from this that the emotions we rely upon when interpreting our experience have a wholly subjective significance. The fear which we experience when we see a lion coming towards us is connecting us to the reality that the lion is intending to eat us. When Copernicus declared that the Earth is in orbit around the Sun he was being guided by his passionate belief that the universe is comprehensible. He endorsed an alternative theory on the basis of his commitment to the assumption that the universe has an order which we are capable of understanding. In our attempts to make sense of our experience we are guided by our feelings. These feelings may arise as a consequence of being brought up in a particular tradition of interpretation. Copernicus for example believed that God had created a rational universe. A universe whose order we can understand.

Our emotions may mislead us, but the assumption that knowing is a dispassionate exercise in applying rules is a fiction. We say what we believe to be true. A declaration that we believe that something is true carries with it obligations. It is not the case that truth is whatever we want it to be. The claim that something is true is subject to the constraints that something being true imposes on us. It operates as a moral commitment. The pursuit of truth as an end in itself rather than whatever serves our interests distinguishes us from animals. Animal behaviour is directed by feelings of pain and pleasure. An animal does what gives them pleasure and they seek to avoid that which gives them pain. We direct our emotions in accordance with a commitment to ideals which operate as ends that impose obligations on us that override our immediate desires. It is our use of language which enables us to exist at this higher level of being. We can pursue truth as an end in itself. The acritical fact of our existence does not prevent us from reflecting critically upon our claims. This reflection is facilitated by language. All reflection however is always situated with the context supplied by our experience of what is the case. Within this account all existence is particular. We can transcend this particularity by understanding what goes beyond ourselves, but every judgement is situated.

The fact that our beliefs about what is the case are fallible, and so may result in false claims, does not imply that what is true is unknowable. When our ancestors looked up and observed the movement of the Sun across the sky they believed the Sun was in orbit around the Earth. Yet, situated in a tradition which was motivated by a desire to discover what is true, Copernicus overturned this belief and replaced it with a heliocentric account. Polanyi accepts that it may be the case that only those with specialist knowledge may be able to judge the truth of a claim, but he also notes that a consensus among experts can, and indeed did, hinder discoveries. New thoughts may serve to create a new understanding. For thousands of years the consensus was that the Earth lies at the centre of the universe. The recognition however that it is possible for our beliefs to be mistaken does not carry with it the implication that all claims to truth are mistaken. All it means is that those who believe that they are in possession of the truth may be wrong. What we believe to be true may be revised. Pursuing truth is a moral commitment that has as its consequence making claims that we believe are true; but there is nothing contradictory in believing something to be true while at the same time acknowledging the possibility that our beliefs may be incorrect.

The notion that knowledge claims can and ought to be certain is so familiar to us that we overlook its extravagance. It reminds me of the claim that God is disembodied and all knowing, and the similarity is not accidental. What it amounts to is the claim that we are able to arrive at a divine understanding. For the Ancient Greeks reason is what enables us to arrive at certain knowledge, and for the Jews it is revelation. In his claim that understanding is possible through a process of illumination Saint Augustine combines both of these approaches. This is the assumption which Descartes relies upon when he claims that our clear and distinct ideas tell us about what is the case. Kant agrees with Descartes that what we claim to be true should be clear and distinct, but instead of telling us that our clear and distinct ideas tell us about the order of the universe he claimed that what they tell us about is the order we impose upon our experience in order to render it intelligible. Inspired by the claim that thought can deliver truths about the universe, minds were conceived as being separate from matter. Materialists have sought to render this claim consistent with materialism by viewing mind as a syntactic engine that is instantiated in matter. In this account, what it is to be a mind can be reduced to behaviour. Once this behaviour has been summarised in the form of rules it can be replicated by machines. A human being in this description can therefore be wholly replicated by a machine.

On the assumption that knowing takes place if you follow the right rules it is claimed that if a universal machine, which is to say a computer, is programmed with the right rules, it can know. But because a machine is a rule following device it does not follow that it has knowledge. Polanyi claims that knowing is a state of consciousness. What it is to be a consciousness takes place somewhere in particular, and has properties (such as intentionality and intensionality) which those who are seeking to reduce everything into physical properties cannot explain. In their devotion to materialism some try to solve this problem by declaring that consciousness is an illusion. They may accept that the fact that a machine follows rules does not render it conscious, but they respond to this statement by asserting that nothing is conscious, it is only the properties of matter which are real. Because it does not fit into a materialist account consciousness is eliminated as a causal agency. It is assumed that everything real can be reduced to material properties. For Polanyi a state of consciousness requires there to be a body, but this is not the same as viewing what it is to be conscious as wholly reducible to material properties.

Denying the reality of consciousness is absurd. It is an example of the lengths to which those who endorse a Critical Philosophy approach are prepared to go to defend their dogmas. In this case the dogma that materialism is able to supply us with a complete explanation of everything. On the grounds that materialism can account for everything, if it cannot explain the phenomenon of consciousness, instead of recognising the limitations of materialism as a theory of everything, materialists would rather deny the existence of consciousness. They are more devoted to their descriptions than they are to the reality which is supposed to be the object of their descriptions. What cannot be captured by their descriptions is rejected as unreal. The assumption that only that which has been described counts as knowledge is what motivates the hostility shown by advocates of Critical Philosophy towards the concept of tacit knowledge. A Post-Critical account returns us to our First-Person experience. It also rejects the assumption that all experience can be reduced into sense-data. Polanyi claims that what it is to be a particular is identified as such within the context which is supplied by a whole. What we identify as a whole changes our understanding of our experience, but the wholes we identify are not merely convenient ways of understanding our experience, they are an attempt to arrive at an adequatio intellectus et rem, which is to say a correct understanding is when what we say something that is a correct statement about what is the case. What grounds knowing is not a deduction from principles, but the attempt to make sense of our experience. To declare that if what is being asserted cannot be secured, either by a deduction from principles that have been identified by thought or by a reduction into what are claimed are atoms of experience which we are calling sense data, then what is being asserted should not be called knowledge, is a violation of our common sense.

Our ancestors hunted and gathered food. If they were unable to distinguish between different sorts of animals and plants they would not have survived. In a linguistic form these categories exist as universals. When making sense of our experience we rely on discriminative capacities which existed prior to the development of language. In the pursuit of food and the avoidance of predators we notice similarities and differences. Some philosophers are so keen to secure an absolute foundation for their knowledge claims that they invent a reality which only consists of universals; or inverting this assertion, they claim that universals are nothing more than arbitrary divisions. In this view it is claimed that we impose distinctions in accordance with our conventions, rather than admit that our descriptions become meaningful as a consequence of judgements that are guided by our acquaintance with reality. In our actual experience our encounters with reality are much more likely to be characterized by imprecision than they are by exactitude. With the exception of formal objects, whose reality consists of identity claims, descriptions will always fall short of the reality they describe. But the claim that in our attempts to make sense of our experience we cannot detect any general features is absurd. The patterns we detect are not wholly arbitrary.

Personal Knowledge transcends the debate between those who seek to defend the claim that universals are an order that can be read off reality, and those who view universals as fictions we impose on our experience. It returns us back to our fallible acquaintance with reality. Our attempts to explore and make sense of it are fallible because what we believe to be true may turn out to be false. But it is not on those grounds always the case that what we believe to be true is wholly subjective. We can discover and make sense of what transcends our experience. Only a Rationalist who is overawed by the effectiveness of mathematics would claim that reality can be wholly captured by mathematics. Only a Scepticism which seeks to reduce everything into the flux of our immediate experience would deny the possibility that we can discover general truths. That is not how we live our life. Only somebody who overreacts to the fact that we can supply more than one description of an experience would conclude from this that reality is whatever we want it to be. These claims are overclaims. Our ability to abstract general features does not imply that if philosophers follow the right method they can supply a complete description of reality. Instead of endorsing the pursuit of absolute knowledge, a Post-Critical approach returns us back to the way we live. Not as something imperfect to be replaced, but as the conditions of us knowing. A place where every claim is correct is a nowhere world.

Those who claim to have justified true beliefs reject those who deny their claims. Alternatively, Sceptics declare that those who claim to have justified true beliefs are misguided. Both of these approaches assume that they know what is true. Schools are set up in which teachers dispense correct thinking, and they test their pupils to see if they have mastered what it is they have been taught. The Critical Philosophy tradition encourages some to believe that there are people in the world, namely themselves, who are in possession of a method which enables them to secure truths. Those who reject their claims are dismissed and ignored. Critical Philosophy by its very nature is intolerant. It assumes that claims arrived at by a correct method qualify as knowledge. Scepticism inverts this, and declares that all such knowledge claims are unwarranted, and so we should give up trying to understand what is the case. The implications of this is that we should either accept the beliefs which have been handed down to us, or alternatively ignore everything we have been told on the grounds that it is only that which we want to be the case which matters to us. Philosophers in the Critical Philosophy tradition view themselves as securing or undermining knowledge claims. They do this by assuming a divine perspective. Rationalism will tell you what it is you should believe. Scepticism will tell you that there is nothing to know because all knowledge claims go beyond what it is possible for us to know. To make such a declaration however is to contradict yourself.

5) The Tacit Context

“[A] cherry between the teeth holds within it more mystery than the whole of idealist metaphysics.”

Jacques Maritain The Degrees of Knowledge (1932) Translated by G.B.Phelan (1959) p.335.

Polanyi reminds us that all attempts to describe our experience rely upon what has not been articulated. Saying that only that which can be described counts as knowledge supplies us with a distorted account of reality. Excluding what we rely upon creates what Polanyi calls “pseudo-substitutions”. An example of this is when it is claimed that the reason why scientists adopted a heliocentric account was because it was more convenient. This is not correct. Galileo and Kepler advocated heliocentrism because they believed it to be true. They believed it to be true because they were guided by their assumption that what is real is rational. To an Empiricist this is an unjustified metaphysics which should be ignored, or at least relegated to a context of discovery rather than a context of justification. Polanyi rejected this distinction. Justification relies upon assumptions that derive from what we believe to be true, and what we believe to be true goes beyond what we can describe. We rely on our common sense. A computer has no common sense, it only has the rules which are supplied to it by a programmer. It can only achieve tasks that can be precisely defined, and Polanyi claims knowing goes beyond what we can describe. Can we wholly define what we mean by the word beauty?

Mathematics is a universal symbol system which supplies precise and general descriptions of relations. Galileo claimed that “The Book of Nature” is written in the language of mathematics. Descartes defended a materialist account of the universe, and claimed that the workings of the physical world can be wholly described by mathematics. Contrary to his materialism Descartes claimed that consciousness is real, but he reduced it to thought. He believed that what takes place in thinking can be captured by a Mathesis Universalis which combines a limited number of signs in accordance with universal rules. In his system of Characteristica Universalis Leibnitz takes this approach one stage further by claiming that what is real is conceptual. This prepared the way for the German Idealist tradition. All that was needed was for Empiricists to supply the intermediary assumption that what it is to be a concept is nothing more than names. The Empiricists understood the meaning of names in psychological terms, but German Idealists returned the meaning of names back to thoughts. They are the thoughts we impose on our experience in order to render it meaningful. Rejecting this approach Polanyi grounds our understanding not in abstract concepts but in the tacit awareness supplied by our embodied consciousness as it engages with what is the case. It is our conscious awareness which is fundamental.

Polanyi claims that our consciousness exists in the form of two types of awareness. A focal and a subsidiary awareness. A focal awareness is a form of consciousness that is only possible because of our reliance upon a subsidiary awareness. The content of a focal awareness is not fixed, it changes according to what is being contemplated, but a focal awareness always relies on a subsidiary awareness. Our subsidiary awareness is what a focus of attention relies upon when generating a meaning. Polanyi is not claiming that our experience of what is the case can be reduced to something which Empiricists called sense-data. He claims that a part is identified as such within a context of a whole. What it is to be a face is not sense data. Various elements are integrated into a whole. Polanyi claims that to identify a whole [Gestalt] is to generate a meaning. This has an instrumental aspect. The process of rendering our experiences meaningful is bound up with our purposes. It is not possible to wholly describe everything that we rely upon when seeking to achieve a purpose. Nor is it possible to wholly describe the content of a transcendent ideal. If we have created a beautiful garden it does not follow from the fact that we have created it that we can define what makes it beautiful. We are being inspired by something we cannot wholly describe.

There is also a metaphysical dimension to tacit knowing. When a consciousness integrates its subsidiary awareness into a focal awareness, the coherences correspond to realities. This ability to identify different kinds of realities is essential to our survival. We need to be able to distinguish between different types of fungi if we are going to avoid being poisoned. We try to make sense of our experience. Knowing is a process of discovery that enriches the meaning of our existence. We are born into a universe we did not create, and nor is it the case that we are a blank slate, but it is the case that our reflections have the potential to add new purposes. We not only seek to understand what is already the case, we also create new realities. In the process of understanding what is the case, and creating new realities, we rely on our imagination. In any creative process we make choices about what we are going to do. Our choices are not wholly random. It is untrue to say that reality is anything we want it to be. What is real constrains our creations. It is not true to say we can be anything we want to be. This is delusional. We are rendered possible by constraints. Language extends our ability to create meanings, but it is not the case that the meanings we create are wholly arbitrary. Meanings arise from our attempts to make sense of our experience.

Polanyi illustrates how our subsidiary awareness operates in our tool use by using the example of a hammer. When we hit a nail with a hammer we attend to both the nail and the hammer; but in a different way. Our awareness of the hammer in our hand is subsidiary, whereas our awareness of the nail that we are hammering is focal. It is two different types of awareness. If we shift our focus from the nail to the hammer this may impair our ability to hit the nail. When we use a hammer as a tool it becomes an extension of our body. Polanyi calls the process of making a tool part of us “indwelling”. To indwell within a symbol system enables us to create meanings which would not otherwise be possible. Our use of language enables us to bring into existence a new level of reality. Symbols are tools which facilitate the process of evoking and elaborating the meanings we generate when integrating our subsidiary awareness into a focal awareness. When practising playing a piano we pay attention to how we use our fingers, but any knowledge that we obtain from this attention becomes subsidiary when we are playing a piano in front of an audience. If we are a soloist in a concert our focus is upon supplying a meaning to the music we are playing, and conveying that meaning to the audience in order to evoke an emotional response. For a meaning to come into existence there has to be a state of consciousness.

A computer is a machine which processes symbols in accordance with rules. Its actions are in accordance with its program. But meanings are not simply the product of following rules. If a computer is programmed to follow grammatical rules it can be used as a word processor, but it is not the computer which gives meaning to the symbols. We supply it with meanings. A computer is a machine that has no more awareness of the meaning of the symbols it is processing than an abacus knows that it is doing arithmetic. The claim that a computer knows the meaning of the words it is processing derives from the false assumption that what it is to know can be rendered wholly explicit. But a computer does not know if a grammatically correct sequence of words it is processing is a great work of poetry or a parody. A computer is a universal machine whose actions are in accordance with the rules supplied to it by a programmer. The claim that computers are engaging in a process of reflection is a false attribution. It is a claim which is derived from the assumption that what it is to be a consciousness is something that can be captured by a program. It is the claim that knowing can be reduced to the rules that enable a computer to give a correct response. But a machine can solve a mathematical problem without any awareness that it is doing mathematics.

Polanyi asserts that nothing which is said or written means anything by itself. It is a consciousness that recognizes and applies a symbol which means something by it. In the absence of any consciousness there cannot be any meaning. We use symbols as tools for deploying our tacit awareness. Polanyi defends the claim that it is our use of symbols which creates the distinctively human because when we use them they enhance our capacity for discrimination, and create new ways of understanding our experience. For symbols to become vehicles for meaning, and facilitate our ability to reflect upon that which they denote, the consciousness which makes use of them must be able to recognize, store, and rearrange them. Polanyi calls this the “Law of Poverty”. Language is a tool which enhances our ability to reflect, but how is the priority which he gives to our tacit knowledge consistent with the importance which Polanyi gives to our use of language? How is it possible to reconcile the priority which he gives to our tacit knowledge with his conviction that it is our use of language which creates the human? We can reconcile them once we accept that descriptions are always incomplete. The awareness that characterizes our consciousness goes beyond what languages can describe.

Mathematicians seek to enhance the precision and rigour of what they say by deriving their claims from axioms in accordance with rules of inference. Polanyi denies however that what we know can be wholly captured by a formal process. All knowledge claims rely upon our tacit knowledge. It is not the case that a process of validation exists in a state of isolation from that which we already believe to be true. Even in the formal sciences what we believe exceeds what it is possible to wholly reduce to rules. The participation of a knower does not render our knowledge claims wholly subjective; although it does undermine their certainty. He acknowledges the informal leaps of understanding which the American philosopher Charles Pierce recognized and called abductive reasoning. The fact that our claims about what is true go beyond what we can prove does not imply that our beliefs about what is true are arbitrary. Our claims about what we believe to be true are fallible, but that does not imply that our claims cannot be true. Why insist that our claims must be certain before we are allowed to call them knowledge? Why hold our claims to the same standard as trivial formal claims, such as something cannot be red and green all over? The assumption that to count as knowledge our beliefs have to be certain leads to the conclusion that we cannot know anything. This is not an accurate account of how we live. It would be better if in accordance with our common sense we acknowledged our fallibility.

Neither Rationalism or Scepticism is able to account for what happens in a discovery process. For Rationalists, knowledge arises as a consequence of deducing a claim from something which you already know to be the case. A Sceptic asserts that all claims fall short of anything entitled to be given the appellation knowledge, because other than trivial formal examples it is not possible to know if what we are claiming to be true is true. A discovery process cannot therefore be wholly Rationalist or Sceptical; because if you already know what it is that you are looking for then it is not a discovery, and if you do not know what you are looking for then how will you be able to find it. Polanyi recognises that a formal process of calculation is less personal than writing a symphony, but he claims that insofar as it is a creative process even mathematics cannot be wholly captured by a set of rules. Kurt Gödel in his Incompleteness Theorem formally demonstrates that even in mathematics a complete axiomization is impossible. Every formalization will always be incomplete. When a mathematician comes up with a creative solution to a mathematical problem it is not simply a case of making a deduction from that which has already been asserted. Nor is it the case that conclusions in mathematics are anything that we want them to be. It is not the case that the process of arriving at conclusions in mathematics is wholly arbitrary.

Some claim that mathematics consists of nothing more than the totality of theorems that can be derived from a consistent set of axioms. The implication is that its axioms are arbitrary. But only a tiny fraction of the propositions which can be derived from an arbitary set of axioms are of any interest to us. Polanyi claims that even the most precise and formal descriptions rely on tacit knowledge supplied by an interpreter. Of course it is a matter of degree. Mathematics is defined more precisely than language, notwithstanding the attempts of some philosophers to convert language into something as precise as mathematics. The Ancient Greek Megarian philosophers noted that it is not possible to say with precision how many grains of sand make a heap, or how many hairs on your head you have to lose before you become bald, or exactly how short a bench has to be before it can be described as a stool. Rationalists have been inspired by mathematical precision, but precision is not much help if the object which you are describing cannot be precisely described. The error is compounded when a precise description is substituted for the reality being described, on the grounds that if it cannot be described it ipso facto cannot exist. These are the absurdities which Critical Philosophy generates as a consequence of its desire to secure the certainty of its claims.

Maps enhance our ability to make sense of a territory, and a map of all human knowledge would be very useful. Polanyi reminds us however that even if it were possible to create such a map we would still have to interpret it. When interpreting it we rely on our tacit knowledge. By drawing attention to our tacit knowledge Polanyi is not simply pointing out that it is not always possible to specify what we know. What is important about tacit knowledge is not the fact that it is not always possible to specify what we know, what is important is the role that tacit knowledge plays in all knowing. All forms of knowing rely on our tacit knowledge. Indeed knowing is predominately tacit. Language enhances our reflection and helps us reach a new level of understanding, but in the absence of any consciousness there is no knowledge. We use articulation to convey our understanding, and our feelings, and what we are trying to achieve, but we do so by relying on our tacit knowledge. We are self-conscious beings who reflect upon our choices. In the absence of any ability to make choices there would be no morality, and in the absence of any emotions there would be no works of art. Polanyi claims that when we interpret symbols we engage more deeply with a great work of art than we do with even the greatest achievements in the sciences.

In order for us to appreciate a work of art, we need to make sense of its symbols. Polanyi accepts that the arts and sciences both explore that which transcends the subjective. It is also the case that both the arts and science rely on creativity. He claims however that we verify scientific assertions, but validate works of art. In his Diaries the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz remarks that we should not forget that a work of art does not simply describe, it brings into being new realities. Physics uses mathematics to describe those aspects of our experience that can be precisely described, but the purpose of a work of art is not exhausted by description. A work of art is not simply a description it is also a creation. Polanyi describes a work of art as a trans-natural integration. It creates a new order that serves the purpose of evoking and enriching our experience. As Viktor Schklovsky expressed it “What we call a work of art exists in order to give back the sensation of life: in order to make us feel.” In the Romantic period artists were inspired by the claim that what grounds our likeness to God is that we are creative agents. They claimed that our deepest access to reality is not through reason but through our feelings. In a Classical understanding however the individual emotions we experience in our encounters with reality are situated within a general order.

6) A Free Society

‘1) Wealth is knowledge 2) Growth is learning 3) Information is surprise…the great disabling error of the dominant schools of economic thought…is the belief that scarce material things are what constitute wealth. Under this materialist superstition, economics chiefly becomes the allocation of scarce material resources…politics becomes…allocations; and war…the pursuit of politics by other means.’

George Gilder Life After Capitalism (2023) pp.xi-1.

Polanyi does not defend a free society on the grounds that we ought to have the freedom to do whatever we want, he defends it on the grounds that a society which protects freedom of inquiry facilitates our pursuit of what is true, good, and beautiful. A society that takes values to be wholly subjective, and on that basis makes freedom an end in itself, has no ground to defend liberty against other ends, such as equality or fraternity. The French Revolution did not create a free society, it created a society in which everybody had to submit to the edicts of a central committee that imposed their judgements about what is best on everybody else. The Kantian claim that a moral action is in accordance with how we would want others to behave, tells us nothing about what it is to be a good life except that our behaviour ought to be consistent. The vision of a free society which Polanyi defends is not a society in which everyone can do as they please so long as they submit to laws justified on the grounds of an appeal to reason, it is a society which protects freedom on the grounds that free inquiry facilitates our pursuit of transcendent ideals. Because they are transcendent ideals they can never be fully realised, they serve as objects of continual discovery. Expressed differently, the reason why Polanyi defends a free society is that free inquiry is an essential part of human flourishing; on the grounds that what is good is an ideal we explore.

In Christianity humans are special because of our relationship with God. This is conceived in personal terms. To have faith is to have trust. Declaring that we are equal before God is not the claim that we are all equally good. It is the assumption that God judges us all equally. The judgement that God arrives is determined by the choices which we make. The choices made by Saint Francis of Assisi and the Marquis de Sade are not morally equivalent. In a materialist account all moral judgements are equally valid. Moral claims are nothing more than what somebody wants to be true. There is no truth, there is only power. At the end of history all power is equalized and therefore all conflict shall come to an end. Because free markets fail to generate equality, they will be replaced by a system that has equality as its purpose. This end will be achieved by central direction. Everybody will submit to the commands of those who have the purpose of everybody being equal. For Marx human history is nothing more than a history of the conflict between exploiters and the exploited. All knowledge claims are determined by your position in the class system. Are you oppressors or the oppressed? This conflict will come to an end when we live in a society in which the concept of rightness is abolished.

In this vision the end is equality of outcome, regardless of differences in contribution. There is no higher and lower, all hierarchies are abolished, because all that exists are the properties of matter. On a visit which Polanyi made to the USSR in 1935 the Soviet theoretician Nikolai Bukharin told him that science is not about the pursuit of truth, it is about solving the problems which are set by those in power. Polanyi rejects this claim and asserts that science is about truth. Truth is a transcendent ideal, it is not an appeal to that which works. A theory works if it is true, it is not true because it works. The planners in the USSR who were put in charge of scientific research denied that animals and plants can be improved by selective breeding. They rejected it on the grounds that it conflicts with egalitarianism. Biologists were told to follow Trofim Lysenko, who claimed that the development of an organism is wholly determined by its nurture. As a consequence of central planning famines were created that caused millions of people to starve to death. Central planning did not bring about the promised utopia. The Marxist claim that truth, justice, and beauty have no reality created a society in which lies, oppression, and ugliness were prominent. In a nihilistic society ideals are degraded into whatever is taken to serve the needs of the State.

Christians found solace in the conviction that God will one day bring about a world of peace and plenty. Marxists replaced God with the State. The reliance of Marx on upon Christian assumptions is evident, but the claim that it is we, not God, who will bring about heaven on Earth is no minor change. In the USSR churches were destroyed and priests executed. The notion that what is good is a reality which transcends what the State requires us to believe undermines Marxism. A reality that constrains what is possible undermines the claim that we are a blank slate. It is assumed that with sufficient power the State can create a new humanity. In a Christian conception humans exist in a fallen state, by which they mean that we aspire to live as if we are divine. We oppose God because we resent the existence of anything superior to ourselves. God is an opponent because we want to live however we like, in a society in which there is no higher or lower or right or wrong. Marx rejects the concept of right and wrong, there is only the freedom as we wish, and for this to be possible we have to have the power to bring such a society into existence. It is assumed that the creators of this society have the knowledge which justifies us the destruction of every existing way of life.

Among advocates of materialism the moral passions that Christianity inspired were transformed into a passionate defence of nihilism. Polanyi calls nihilism defended with moral passion a “moral inversion”. The Christian concept of original sin (which is an acknowledgement that humans are imperfect) had served as a restraint upon those who claimed that it is possible for us to create a perfect society. Liberated from any constraint other than those which are imposed on us by the properties of matter, the moral passion that converted the Ancient World to Christianity was channelled into utopianism. We ought to create societies in which everybody has the freedom to do as they like, subject only to the restraints that we impose on ourselves, in order that we may achieve the purpose of creating a society in which everybody is equal. We should live however we wish to live. There is no such thing as a morally better life, only the principle that on materialist grounds it can be shown that all appeals to spiritual ends are bogus. The concept of civilization imposes standards on us which create inequalities. With the creation of a new society the only standard will be equality. Those who reject the notion that everybody is the same are given the reply that what it is to be a human being can be moulded by the State into whatever is wanted.

The USSR (and all societies which have equality as their overriding purpose) justify their existence by claiming that they are serving the interests of the many. Those who promoted a centrally directed economy assume that central planners possess the knowledge they need in order to maximise happiness. The Anglo-Austrian economist Frederick Hayek however claimed that this knowledge is discovered via the “Spontaneous Order” that a free market price system generates. When free markets were abolished the greater efficiencies which those who advocated central planning predicted therefore failed to appear. Planners, on the grounds of what they perceived to be their entitlement, increased inequality by redistributing power (and resources) to themselves, and by promising equal reward for unequal effort they undermined the incentives which created the wealth that was being redistributed. It was assumed that there is a fixed amount of wealth, and that all that is needed is to eliminate the rich and redistribute their wealth equally. No thought was given to what creates wealth. It was assumed that technology would solve that problem. The wealth created by machines will enable us to live as we wish. In the morning we will hunt, in the afternoon we will fish, and after dinner we will criticise. Everybody will be able to become an Aristotle or a Goethe, if that is what we desire.

In Subjective Idealism the right sort of zauberworte (= word magic) will create any reality we desire. For Marx his defence of materialism was just a way of demolishing the notion that there are any higher standards than our own desires. What he actually believed is that matter is the material out of which we can create anything we want. In order for something to exist it is enough that it be thought into existence. In order for us to be equal all that is required is for us to believe it. Reality can be transformed into anything we desire. It is a humanism that claims that with sufficient power we can create any society we wish. Against humanism it declares that we are wholly determined by the properties of matter. Marxism in other words is an incoherent vision in which we are both divine and a slave of material properties. Every moral claim is ridiculed as nothing but disguised will to power, and yet their vision of the world is advocated with undisguised moral passion. Their utopianism is justified on the grounds of an appeal to science, but when its claims to be a science is attacked, the concept of truth is ridiculed as a fiction used to impose our will. It is claimed that all knowledge claims are an epiphenomenon of the struggle for power. It is simply a question of who has the power to impose their particular conception of what they desire.

Polanyi describes the fusion which takes place in Marx of egalitarianism and materialism, a “dynamo-objective” coupling. The Nazi Party in Germany, on the grounds of a Darwinian conception of evolution, claimed that we are engaged in a continual struggle for survival. Life is nothing more than struggle, it is only a question of who dominates. Classical Liberalism sought to create a society, and ultimately an international order, in which everybody has the freedom to live as they wish, as long as this freedom is consistent with the freedom of others to live as they wish. Everybody should have the freedom to live as they wish. It opposes any central direction other than that which was required to bring about a Liberal society, but the end is the same as Marxism. The creation of a society, by those with true understanding of the world, within which everybody has the freedom to live as they wish, subject only to those directions which are required to bring this society into existence. Freedom in this vision is an end in itself. Marxists have the same end, but they claim that living as we would like to live cannot be achieved in the absence of economic equality, and that an economic system which protects private property needs to be replaced because it destroys the goal of equality. We can only be free if central planners have the power to create a society organised in accordance with the principle that we are equal.

Those who advocate an egalitarian society make the assumption that we are the same, and because we are the same, in a state of nature we live in a state of equality. In this view inequality only exists because of oppression. Once oppressors are eliminated class conflict will disappear. This ignores that to the extent that we are equal in a hunter/gatherer society it is because we are all equally poor. The means by which wealth can accumulate and generate civilization is undermined by envy. Why should somebody have more? Everything should be equally distributed. If wealth is fixed, to have more implies that somebody else is having less. In a subsistence economy this is true, and it is how our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years. Societies which protected those who generated wealth from predators created an incentive for innovation. It is wealth in this account which gives people the autonomy to live as they wish, not the State who seeks to direct society on the grounds of an enforcement of equality. For advocates of a free society the function of a State is to secure and enforce property rights. The enemy of freedom in this vision is not the State, it is those who use the power of the State to extract resources for itself. Predation by the State is justified by its apologists on the grounds that they are seeking to achieve social justice. Intellectuals justify this extraction on the grounds that the right sort of society is run by people who know how it should be spent.

It is on the grounds of the assumption that all values are wholly subjective that it is claimed that we should dedicate ourselves to the task of creating a society in which everybody is free to live as they wish, subject only to the restraints which are imposed on everybody as a consequence of adherence to the rule that we should behave as we want others to behave. Polanyi rejects the claim that Scepticism has proved that truth and justice are unreal. A Post-Critical philosophy denies that what is true and just can be determined by following a method which can settle the correctness of what is being asserted, and replaces it with an account in which we make claims we believe to be true but may be false. On the assumption that wealth gives us the freedom to do what we like, it is claimed that it is not possible for us to be free until we live in a state of equality with each other. If some have more than others we are not all equally free. In accordance with this collective ownership by the State is needed in order that we may bring about economic equality. It is evident however that the more power you give to the State the less individual freedom there is to do as we like. This loss of freedom is justified on the grounds of an appeal to the notion that true freedom is only possible in a centrally directed order which ensures that everybody is equal.

Contrary to this vision Polanyi defends a conception of a free society in which dedicated communities are given the freedom to pursue their ends independently of the State. Instead of opposing free markets he claims that the number of adjustable relations that render an advanced society possible means that no modern economy can function without them. A centrally directed complex society is impossible. Polanyi does not justify a free society on the grounds of an appeal to moral neutrality. Classical Liberalism takes itself to be opposing intolerance. It takes religion to be the source of this intolerance. Polanyi however notes that a morally neutral defence of freedom is built upon a logical contradiction. If moral values are grounded in nothing more than subjective preference, why defend a free society rather than another sort of society which endorses the pursuit of other ends? The nihilistic implications of Classical Liberalism were avoided in England via what Polanyi calls a veritable suspension of logic. The moral ground was supplied by the Christian religion. In France however the Marquis de Sade concluded that if moral claims cannot be proved why should we be moral? Why not live lives that are unconstrained by the demands made upon us by others.

Liberalism assumes that all that is required for the functioning of a free society is an imposition of the right rules. But all rules have to be interpreted. The American constitution was accepted because Americans were already familiar with the English traditions from which its principles were abstracted. It was a tradition that assumed that what is true and just cannot be wholly defined. They serve as objects of continuous discovery. The purpose of the State in this vision is not to direct a society, but to create the conditions which enable discoveries to be made in a dispersed manner independently of the State. A free society is justified by the recognition that discoveries are unpredictable. It is a moral tradition whose practices are evolving in response to changing circumstances. The French revolutionaries discovered that an appeal to universal rights is not sufficient to settle conflicts, because there is no agreement about how we should interpret them. When does it become right to restrain your freedom to do as you wish on the grounds that everybody ought to be able to do whatever they want? It was claimed that the right sort of society is regulated by the right sort of laws, and as a logical extension of that claim nations ought to be subject to international laws. An appeal to international law justified to an appeal to reason would undermine whatever legislation a majority in a national legislature voted into existence.

Some C19th German historians came to the conclusion that history is nothing more than a struggle between nations. If the Germans are a more powerful nation this is sufficient justification for making their neighbours slaves. Christianity endorses the claim that what is right and wrong is determined by who has most power, but in their account it is God who has the most power. But who determines what is his will? A society that believes in transcendent ideals endorses the claim that what is just is a process of continual discovery. In the English Common Law tradition Parliaments, judges, and juries make judgements that accumulate as precedents. Contrary to a Rationalist account, justice is not something which laws can wholly capture. In the Common Law the law is a dynamic tradition passed on in practices which are open to the possibility of change. Polanyi is therefore claiming that authoritarianism and nihilism both undermine a free society. The first because it assumes possession of the knowledge which justifies control, and the latter on the grounds that morality has no ground except power. Polanyi concludes that “General Authority” is superior to “Specific Authority” because whereas the former seeks total control, the latter protects the freedom to discover.

7) Emergence

‘To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters. The truth is that the peculiar combination of letters is nothing but a property of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The French or German versions of the play “own” different combinations of letters’

E.F.Schumacher A Guide For The Perplexed (1977) pp.28-9.

The two people with the greatest claim to be spiritual founders of Western civilization, Socrates and Jesus, were both executed by the State. The narrative of their life and death was written up in accounts which moved and inspired those that came after them. Among the Thirty Tyrants, who ruled Athens in the aftermath of its defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, were two followers of Socrates called Charmides and Kritias. They defended the claim that moral judgements cannot be rationally justified. The only reality which grounds morality is the power to impose your view. This gives us the context of the arrest and trial of Socrates. Charmides was Plato’s uncle and Kritias his cousin. In his dialogues Plato defends Socrates against the charge that his teaching had corrupted the young by undermining their morality. Socrates was trying to describe what is a good life for a human being. Plato denied that he was telling us that moral claims are wholly subjective. Nor was he saying that the universe is a meaningless chaos, on the contrary he was saying that it has an order which determines what is good. The most famous pupil of Plato was Aristotle. In what seems to be his surviving lecture notes Aristotle claims that what is a good life for you depends on your nature. What nature you have depends on your place in a natural hierarchy. The conditions which enable an oak tree to flourish are particular to oak trees, and they are not the same as those required by humans.

In his play The Clouds Aristophanes gave a comic caricature of Socrates as a Sophist coming up with bogus naturalistic explanations of everything, and misleading and confusing people with fallacious reasoning. In his History of the Peloponnesian War the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides describes a world in which it is might that determines what is judged to be right. In the Phaedo Plato recounts the final hours of Socrates, and he describes how he insisted on obeying the law rather than giving the jailer a bribe so that he may escape. He explains that his conviction that this is the right thing for him to do cannot be reduced to material causes, it arises from his love of justice. He is behaving in the way a good citizen ought to behave after having been convicted. But what is it that grounds this behaviour? Aristotle, like Socrates, rejects the claim that everything can be explained in material terms. Material causes are not an adequate account of why things happen. The puzzle is why anybody would think otherwise. If your purpose is to get me to accept that everything is wholly determined by properties of matter, in order for your claim to be right this would mean that your claim, and my assent to it, would also have to be determined by these properties, which undermines the purpose of anybody trying to persuade anybody of anything.

Polanyi claims that particulars are identified as such within the context of a whole. We do not register bits of sense data, we identify the object hiding in the bushes as a lion. We perceive its various particulars within the context of our recognition that what we are looking at is a lion. In The Origin of Species (1859) the naturalist Charles Darwin rejected the Aristotelian claim that it is possible to divide living organisms up into unchanging species. This conclusion was inspired by the work of two economists. According to Adam Smith wealth is increased if labour is differentiated into specialist tasks, and Thomas Malthus claims that as a consequence of reproduction living organisms will increase in number until the point where they will exceed the food supply. Putting these ideas together Darwin came to the conclusion that living organisms are in a state of continual competition with each other, and that any changes which better adapt them to their environment increase their chances of leaving descendants behind. Selection pressure will therefore result in diverse forms of life. Life was not created by a divine command, it is continually evolving as a consequence of diverse individuals being in a state of continual competition with each other for food and sexual partners.

How does mind fit into this account? Thomas Huxley, the leading contemporary defender of Darwin, claimed that what we call mind is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of the body. A state of consciousness, according to Huxley, has no more causal significance than a steam whistle on a train. It accompanies physical events but plays no causal role in them. Polanyi however claims that the way in which our perception integrates two levels of awareness helps us to understand how it is possible for a higher level of reality to emerge from a lower level. Aristotle claims that the cosmos has more than one level of reality. In the account which Polanyi supplies each level emerges from the level immediately below it. This is possible because every level operates within boundary conditions which leave open the possibility of direction by a higher level. Material properties are only one level of reality. Each level of reality is constrained but not wholly determined by the properties of its lowest level. Polanyi calls this “Dual Control”. The boundary conditions of one level leave open the possibility of organisation at a higher level. Direction by a higher level ordering principle is in accordance with what Polanyi calls the “Principle of Marginal Control”. This is how it is possible for us to reflect upon and then direct our behaviour, deciding what we are going to do.

Although they are rendered possible by lower levels, higher level properties are not reducible to those properties. Polanyi denies that what it is to be a higher level of reality exists independently of lower levels, but he also denies that all higher level properties can be reduced to lower level properties. He claims that a mind cannot exist without a body, but nor can it be wholly reduced to a body. A higher level of causality exerts a downward causality over lower levels. This downward causality is constrained by what the properties of lower levels render possible, but a mind exists at a higher level of reality than material properties. The French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace declared that if it was possible for him to travel back in time to the beginning of the universe, and he was able to record the position of every atom and all the forces acting on them, he would be able to predict the entire future of the universe. Using the example of a machine Polanyi explains why this would not be possible. A machine is made of parts that jointly serve a purpose. What this purpose is cannot be reduced to its physical properties, because it is not these properties which make it a machine. What makes it a machine are its operational principles. A machine is rendered possible by laws of physics, but it is its operational principles which is what makes it a machine.

Humans create machines to achieve various purposes. An understanding of the laws of physics may help us understand why a particular machine has broken down, but an exhaustive description of its physical properties will not explain what it is that makes it an effective machine; because that purpose for which it was created is at a higher level than its physical properties. According to Polanyi biologists are mistaken if they believe that they can wholly reduce living organisms to the properties of matter. Laws of physics make no reference to sentience. Any account which leaves out the fact of sentience is going to be an inadequate account of what it is to be a human being. It is true that we are rendered possible by properties that physicists describe, but it does not follow that our actions can be wholly reduced to these descriptions. To illustrate what he means Polanyi uses the example of giving a speech. In a speech we make noises, which we then constrain to produce words organised into sentences, in accordance with a literary style, which is in accordance with literary standards. These different levels are studied respectively by the disciplines of phonetics, lexicography, grammar, stylistics, and literary criticism. These standards are not reducible to their physical properties.

When we ask if what we are saying is true our answers are not wholly determined by physical properties. When we are seeking to tell the truth we impose obligations on ourselves that transcend what it is that we would like to be the case. The concept of truth functions as a transcendent ideal. Socrates accepted his punishment because of his commitment to an ideal, namely his pursuit of the goal of acting in accordance with what he believed to be just. To be a human being cannot be wholly reduced to physical properties, because we are also biological and social beings. Polanyi claims that it is possible to situate these levels of reality within a process of evolutionary emergence. Reducing evolution to the selective advantages which take place as a consequence of particular changes distracts us from the most important feature of the process of evolution; the emergence of new levels of reality that cannot be reduced to the properties of matter. The higher the level the richer the meaning. A plant uses the energy it derives from the Sun to break down and re-combine molecules as it manufactures itself. Animals consume plants, and some animals consume other animals. A nervous system gives animals the ability to respond quickly and flexibly to predators. Our nervous system gives us the ability to use symbols such as words and numbers.

In accordance with his claim that particulars are identified as such within the context supplied by a whole, Polanyi claims that when attempting to understand the behaviour of another person we are seeking to understand the mind that directs their behaviour. What it is to be a mind is not the sum total of our actions, it is what directs our behaviour. Our mind is the meaning of our body. We decide how we are going to act. This is not to claim that our actions are unconstrained. It would not be possible to exist as a human being without the reality of lower level properties, but a mind exerts a downward causality over our body. If it is only the properties of matter which are real we become meaningless to ourselves. Truth becomes nothing more than whatever we find useful, the arts have no function other than amusement, and that which is just is reduced to custom. What actually happens is that a commitment to justice transforms our behaviour. The existence of downward causality led to the conviction that it is possible for a consciousness to exist independently of a body, but in an emergent account such a claim makes no sense. Polanyi suggests a definition of reality as that which has the potential to surprise us. In accordance with this definition of reality, what it is to be a pebble is less real than what it is to be a mind. Although a pebble is more tangible, our minds are less predictable.

Symbols enrich our understanding of our experience. It is our use of symbol systems which enables us to formulate concepts such as truth and justice. These concepts impose demands on us that separate us from the rest of nature. Although it is we who bring them into existence, they create the possibility of living a life dedicated to higher ends. In Christianity demands that the highest ends make upon us manifest themselves in the form of having a conscience. The similarity of the word to consciousness is no accident. To lack a conscience is to be less than human. To possess a mind is to be aware of higher ends than satisfying desires. Mathematics for example can give us answers we would prefer not to be the case; when looking at our bank balance for example. Truth imposes demands on us that cannot be wholly reduced to that which works. At a pragmatic level all that is required is achieving our goal, but satisfying the quest for truth imposes obligations which transcend what works. To pursue what is true is to say what we believe to be true, even when a claim that we know to be false may be more useful. Animal behaviour is determined by satisfying desires, but humans use language to reflect on our behaviour, and as a consequence of this reflection we ask if we should act on those desires. Humans not only have the capacity to reflect on what is the best way of getting what we want, we also have the capacity to reflect on whether or not we are pursuing the right goals. It is not the case that what we decide to do is wholly determined by the properties of matter. Human beings create self-set goals.

8) Moral Passion

“Miguel de Unamuno was certainly right in stating that the real defect of Descartes' method is not his resolve to doubt everything - although this is self-defeating enough…The defect lies in Descartes resolve ‘to begin by emptying himself of…the real man, the man of flesh and bone, the man who does not want to die’…As Unamuno quickly added…the real Descartes slipped back to the scene almost immediately…no man can discourse for long as a disembodied spirit.”

Stanley L. Jaki Angels, Apes & Men (1983) pp.17-18.

To understand each other we appeal to our shared experience. If all we have are various explicit assumptions, and we rely on different explicit assumptions, agreement is impossible. A Rationalist will seek to justify their claims about what is the case on the grounds of an appeal to reason. To persuade them of the truth of your claims however you will need to do more than convince them that your claims are consistent, because claims can be consistent and false. In the absence of any shared experience we will not convince, or even understand, each other. On the grounds that all experience is interpreted, Polanyi endorses freedom of inquiry. The ground for his position is not the claim that experience is finite, and therefore it is always interpreted, nor is it that interpretations differ, it is conviction that we have experiences in common, to which we appeal when attempting to understand each other. Differences of interpretation may divide us, but we can change our mind and accept alternative interpretations. These changes of mind are not arbitrary, they are guided by our tacit knowledge. This tacit knowledge is not interpretation all the way down, it is grounded in our experience of what is the case. We do not create what is real, we discover it, albeit fallibly.

In an interdisciplinary conference on the theme The Mind and the Computing Machine held at Manchester University on the 27th October 1949 Polanyi rejected the claim by his friend Alan Turing that knowing is a process that can be wholly captured by rules, which can then be replicated by a machine. Polanyi reminds us that even Kant conceded that it is not possible for rules for interpreting rules to go on ad infinitum. At some point knowledge claims rely on informal judgements. We accept new interpretations because they supply us with ways of comprehending things that we are persuaded are better than other explanations. Polanyi rejects the assumption that our interpretations are grounded in nothing more than the acquisition of an arbitrary practice. We subject practices to criticism. We do this in the conviction that we can add to the accumulation of insights into what is true and good and beautiful. Polanyi is not claiming that our convictions and practices should not be subjected to criticism, but he is saying that all criticism ultimately relies on what we already believe to be the case. What enables us to understand each other is the tacit knowledge we have in common. The ultimate ground of this is not rules hardwired into our nervous system, or practices we acquire in a tradition, but our experience of what is the case. It is the fact that we have tacit knowledge which transcends what articulation can capture that renders it possible to understand each other and change our minds.

Advocates of the claim that computers are able to think assume that mind is matter organised in accordance with rules. These rules are what is left after a process of natural selection, or they are what we impose on a machine to get it to do what we want. Our behaviours are the result of a process of competition. We designate as true that which serves our purposes, and gets us what we want. In this view the assumption that we decide how we are going to live is an illusion. Our behaviour is wholly determined by the properties of matter. In this materialist account the notion that we are free to decide is simply folk psychology. A story we tell; ourself that has no ground in anything real. Materialists in other words commit themselves to the purpose of telling us that purposes are illusions. There are only material properties. They seek to convince you (and themselves) that our claims are wholly determined by the properties of matter. The absurdity is clear. They are relying on that which they deny. Their claims are inauthentic, because nobody actually lives their lives as if this is true. The function of such claims, other than pride in supplying a theory of everything, is that such a claim undermines what everybody else is saying while at the same time claiming to know the truth. How they know it is true, given that they believe that everything they do is wholly determined by the properties of matter, is not resolved.

Nor is it the case that determinist accounts are only bottom up explanations. In an Objective Idealist philosophy it is the Absolute Spirit which determines our choices. The German philosopher Hegel claimed that in the course of our reflections on our experience it is possible to discover the logic of how an Absolute Mind, which in his Objective Idealist account determines everything that happens in the universe, evolves into a state of understanding. In this view it is the immanent rationality of the universe which determines everything which happens, not the existence of personal commitments. Polanyi acknowledges that our actions are constrained by the conditions which render us possible, and so it is not the case that our actions are wholly undetermined, but within these constraints we choose. Our judgements are not wholly reducible to either material or formal causes. The assumption that reality is rational is reasonable: science depends on the belief that the universe has an order that we can comprehend. The claim that only the rational is real however is an overclaim. Hegel declared that the number of planets in the solar system can be deduced through philosophical reasoning, yet the history of astronomy shows that observations can contradict what philosophers claimed to be the case. This serves to undermine the assumption that science ought to serve as a handmaiden of philosophy.

This however does not serve as an endorsement of the notion that scientists ought to become the arbitrators of what is real. The claim that thought progresses from religion to philosophy to science ignores that the first two are concerned with issues that are not scientific questions. The fact that they are not scientific questions does not render them invalid. Nor does it follow that if science cannot describe something then it does not exist. If it is claimed that only the sciences can answer the question what is it to be a human being, all this is doing is replacing the delusion that philosophy is a science with the no less delusional claim that what the sciences describe is real. It is not only an attack on the humanities, it is an attack on what it is to be a human being. In any conflict between the humanities and the sciences each has a distinct domain, but science is a branch of the humanities, the humanities are not a branch of the sciences. This is the lesson which Polanyi derives from his study of the history of knowledge. Science is produced by human beings, it is not something that can be reduced to rules that a computer can process. Scientists can use computers to facilitate what it is to do science, but any claim that humans ought to be replaced by computers ignores that we rely on our tacit knowledge. The assertion that theories are nothing more than pragmatic claims, or that truth claims are the product of nothing more than a struggle for power, does not supply an accurate account of science.

A life of perfect happiness exists only in the minds of people who believe that with the right religion, or the right technology, we can live in a state of perfect contentment. Denying the existence of this utopia does not carry with it the implication that we should not seek to improve our lives, all it implies is that utopia is a nowhere place. This eschatological conviction which motivates utopianism derives from Christianity, and to reject it is to perhaps reject Christianity, but in my view what is valuable in Christianity is its conviction that we can elevate the meaning of our existence by pursuing a way of life that lives in accordance with a higher level of reality than that which can be described by the sciences. This is the meaning of the claim by Saint Paul that we can become born again in Christ. The personal obligations which are imposed on us by the pursuit of spiritual ends is the primary legacy of Christianity, especially when it is combined with the Ancient Greek conviction that we live in a universe in which the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty is possible. Christianity is more amenable to a humanistic approach than other religions because it endorses a conception of the universe in what it is to be a human being is important. Not the least contribution to this conception is the conviction that God lived as a human being. In this way living at a higher level of being comprehensible to us instead of being wholly alien.

Hegel claims that reflection on our experience inevitably moves us towards an end in which the factual and the ideal are reconciled. In this vision of our humanity our function is to live as an agent of the World Spirit. From the Ancient Greeks he derives the conviction that the particular only has meaning insofar as it participates in the universal. In the Christian tradition, it is what is particular that is important, because it is as particular agents that we decide how we are going to live. The inconsistency between these Hellenic and Hebraic conceptions is in my view what has generated the dynamism of Western civilization. There was an attempt to integrate the assumption that there is an order to the universe and the assumption that meaning is imposed on reality by agents who have the freedom to choose. In a Christian account life is not completed by politics. The declaration by Jesus that we should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s is what underlies the Gelsian division between the temporal and spiritual. It is this distinction which lies at the root of the desirability of living in a free society. The Pope taking on political power was a violation of this division. There are Christian grounds for rejecting the demand that the State should take upon itself the task of telling us how we should live. For Protestant reformers why should Christians be required to submit to demands made upon them by the Pope.

For the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus chance is just another name for ignorance. The Stoics declared that we can overcome any feeling of alienation by comprehending ourselves as part of an order which goes beyond subjective feelings. The Neo-Platonists envisaged the universe as a hierarchy of increasing perfection. For Saint Augustine however to be a human being is to exist in a state of conflict between Amor Sui and Amor Dei, between love of self and love of God. In this conflict Marx denies the existence of the divine pole of our existence. We have no sacred duty to ideals, our only loyalty should be to what we want to be the case. In this vision we are the God that those who oppress us invoke in order to impose their will upon us. Marxism is a nihilistic religion, in which the object of worship is ourselves. There is no sin except preventing others from living as they wish. We ought to be masters of our own destiny. The contradiction between this claim and materialism is evident, but materialism in Marxism serves the purposes of undermining the reality of God, in order that God be replaced with worship of ourselves. Instead of aspiring to redeem ourselves by reducing our significance we should on the contrary view ourselves as what is most important.

Instead of central direction Polanyi supplied a vision of communities of specialists having the freedom to pursue their inquiries independently of the State. When politicians aspire to tell scientists what they should conclude they undermine the practice of knowing. Polanyi also opposes seeking to elevate scientists to the role of authorities who are given the power to instruct everybody else on how they should live. Outside their areas of expertise their judgments are no more reliable than those of anyone else, and within the confines of their expertise they should accept the possibility that what they believe to be true may be incorrect. Every attempt to secure knowledge relies on assumptions which may be false. The Logical Positivists, in their Kantian defence of Critical Philosophy, declared that if no appeal to logic or experience is able to solve a problem then this renders it meaningless; but in order for this to be true this claim would also be meaningless. Kant, in his attempt to secure conditions for the possibility of knowledge fails to recognize that the assumptions that generate Critical Philosophy are themselves knowledge claims. In other words he presupposes what he is supposed to be demonstrating. This incoherence is conveniently ignored by those who claim on critical grounds that philosophy can become a science.

In a Post-Critical philosophy all knowledge claims are viewed as fallible. Absolute knowledge is a delusion. Nor can disputes be resolved by an appeal to method. Major innovations in science change our assumptions, which change the way in which we interpret our experience. Polanyi does not conclude from this that truth is whatever we want to be the case. A claim about what is the case is true or false regardless of what we would like to be true. The same applies to determining if an action is just. If values have no foundation other than power, this undermines civilization. In the sense which the Roman orator Cicero gave the word, culture is the pursuit of truth and goodness and beauty. He applied the word humanitas to the qualities associated with a person who is civilized. Anthropologists relativized the meaning of the word culture. On the basis that values have no reality other than arbitrary interpretations we impose on the world, it was claimed that every culture is an equally valid answer to the question: how should we live? Not because we ought to recognize that our judgments might be wrong, but because all judgements of right and wrong are nothing more than what those with power want you to believe.

Polanyi’s favourite sister died in a Nazi concentration camp. One of his nieces went to live in the Soviet Union and was arrested and charged with the crime of being an enemy of the State. As a result of a campaign by Arthur Koestler (who partly based his novel Darkness at Noon (1940) on her experience) she was eventually released. Other than R.G.Collingwood and C.S. Lewis philosophers in Oxford preferred to talk about logic and language than reflect upon the political changes which were taking place in mainland Europe. What role did the assumption that moral values are wholly subjective play in these events? A very important role Polanyi claims. On the grounds of an appeal to materialism, the ruling ideology in Nazi Germany and the USSR viewed moral claims as wholly subjective. In the Old Testament Moses was supplied with tablets on which were inscribed divine commandments. Jesus rejects the claim that what it is to be a good person is reducible to rules. You can follow the letter of the law and be evil. What counts when determining the righteousness of your actions is your intention. How is it possible to know when people are evil? Jesus says we shall know them by their fruits. According to Polanyi, what motivates scientists to come up with theories is not submission to rules, or the pursuit of the useful, but a passion for truth.

Polanyi calls this commitment Ultra-Biology. The assumption that our beliefs are wholly determined by lower level properties is self-refuting. If our claims about what is true are wholly determined by the properties of matter, science would not be possible. The same incoherence can be found in the theological doctrine of predestination. The British theologian Pelasgius assumed that we can save our souls without the need for any divine intervention. Saint Augustine responded that this relies on a false conception of what it is to be a human being. Our natural disposition is to defy God. On the grounds of his assumption that God is omnipotent, Augustine claims that it is the will of God alone that determines who is saved or damned. This theology however is incoherent. Either everything is determined by God or we choose. It cannot be both. The same argument applies to materialism. Denying freedom of choice on the grounds of an appeal to science forgets that science is a practice which assumes that we can make choices. Polanyi claims that what it is to be human is rendered possible by the existence of the lower level physical properties which physicists attempt to describe, but the choices we make are not wholly reducible to them. A human being is a person.

Polanyi situates the practice of pursuing ideals within dedicated communities. But what strikes anybody who reads about his life is the way in which he makes his own choices. At the age of 18 his friend the mathematician George Polya told Polanyi’s mother that Mishi [Polanyi’s nickname in Hungarian] ‘walks alone’. As a student he attended meetings organised by various radical groups, but he rejected their utopianism. To mollify his mother, who wondered how he was going to support himself, he trained and qualified to become a physician. One of his teachers sent a paper on thermodynamics that Polanyi had written while he was recovering from diphtheria to Einstein, who was so impressed with his ideas that they were accepted as a doctorate in physics. In 1920 Polanyi was employed as a physical chemist at what is now called the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, and in 1926 he was appointed a professor. In accordance with Max Planck, Polanyi reminds us that theoretical physicists assume that the universe has an order which is comprehensible. When the Nazi Party came to power Polanyi accepted a professorship in physical chemistry at Manchester University in England. When his interests shifted to economics the Vice-Chancellor set up a chair in Social Science for him.

The only formal professional training Polanyi ever received was in medicine, but this did not prevent him from having a successful career in physical chemistry. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize several times. Two of his students were awarded that prize, as was his son John, although he failed to achieve it himself. The American economist Paul Craig Roberts (who was Assistant Secretary to the Treasury under President Reagan) claims that the analysis which Polanyi gave of the importance of the money supply was a generation ahead of other economists. His opposition to centrally planned scientific research however was influential. Hayek acknowledges that he took the phrase “Spontaneous Order” from Polanyi, but because he was a Classical Liberal, Hayek rejected his assumption that a free society is justified by what is essentially a religious commitment to the reality of spiritual ideals. Hayek instead defended the claim that values are wholly subjective. The denial by Polanyi that science is a practice grounded in method was very influential, but his opposition to the Marxist assumption that science can be explained in sociological terms was less welcomed. Polanyi societies were established in the UK and the USA, and the latter continues to this day. Polanyi described himself a Christian, and many of his supporters are Christian, but he avoided detailing exactly what this commitment implied.

What preoccupies Polanyi was the damage being done to civilization as a consequence of what he understood to be a false account of knowing. He saw his writings on philosophy as his contribution to the Allied war effort. When he retired he was appointed a Fellow of Merton College at Oxford University. This elicited some negative comments: such as ‘who invited that charlatan’ (one of his fellow Hungarians Lord Kaldor), ‘he is a philosophe not a philosopher’ (Geoffery Warnock), and ‘he should have stuck to chemistry’ (Isaiah Berlin). Planck remarked upon the tendency among professionals to attack or ignore those views which they see as threatening their orthodoxy. Upholding standards is converted into a determination to exclude heretics. Planck declared that progress in sciences takes place via the graveyard, in other words it is only when the advocates of an orthodoxy die that it evolves. This is a rather optimistic assessment of how change takes place, because when professors retire the people who replace them are generally their disciples. So where does this leave his argument that the State should refrain from interfering with the process of discovery and leave specialist communities to decide for themselves? Well, Polanyi is not asserting that mastery of any particular tradition renders you infallible.

9) Philosophical Anthropology

‘Humanity is constructed in such a way that it must define itself and then escape its own definition. Reality is not something that allows itself to be completely contained in its form.’

Witold Gombrowicz Diary (1953-69) Translated by L.Vallee (2012) p.114.

The cultural roots of Western civilization lie in the Eastern Mediterranean. Western civilization is the product of the interaction between two distinct traditions: the Hellenic and the Hebraic. For both of them the question, what is it to be a human being, is central, but they give different answers. From a similar starting point they move in opposite directions. Classical texts situate humans within a natural order, but in the Bible the focus is on the personal relationship between us and the supernatural creator of the universe. As a Western thinker both elements are present in the writings of Polanyi, as is the modern tradition. His philosophy is an attempt to supply a new interpretation of this tradition in a way that counters the risk of nihilism. In the Biblical account God transcends nature and is known only to the extent that he reveals himself. Human beings are his special creation. What separates us from the rest of nature is that we are made in the likeness of God. Like God we are free to decide how we shall live. Shall we put our trust in God or shall we defy him? This conflict is sometimes explained in Manichaean terms (a religion whose roots lie in Persia) as a conflict between good and evil, but it is better seen as a conflict between two spiritual orientations, which Saint Augustine describes as two different cities; the City of Man and the City of God.

In the Christian synthesis of the Jewish and Ancient Greek traditions our life is a pilgrimage in a vale of tears, but in this journey God is on our side. Those who follow Jesus, who the Gospels revealed was God, shall be saved. What this means exactly Christian theologians seek to elaborate. The essential message is we should forgive others their sins, just as Jesus Christ forgives us, and let him into our heart. Saint Augustine explained that to live in a City of Man is to seek material success, and power over others. We are motivated by love of self. To live in the City of God by contrast is to submit to the will of the creator of the universe. All human beings dwell in both cities, but a good life is when God is our primary focus. To be a human being is to have the freedom to choose how we shall live. The conflict between a Classical and a Biblical conception of how we ought to live, and the failure to wholly reconcile them, is the tension which animates Western civilization. In the Ancient Greek account we exist within an order that we can understand and which determines how we live. We exist within a natural order that we are capable of understanding. Human flourishing occurs when we understand and accept our place in the natural order. Pascal seeks to reconcile these two notions in his description of human beings as a reed, but a thinking reed.

In Late Antiquity the Classical assumption that history is cyclical was replaced by the conviction that human history has an end. In the Middle Ages there was an attempt in the West to create a unified Christendom under the authority of the Church. This project ultimately failed but the consequences were not a decline into obscurity, but regeneration in the form of the Modern Age that now dominates humanity. All humans now live in Modernity. The problems that this has generated are what Polanyi seeks to address in his Post-Critical philosophy. Old errors of thought have led to new problems, but his response is not to repudiate Western civilization but to counter its faults and endorse and celebrate the contributions it has made to the human spirit. Not the least of these is the conviction that what it is to be a human being, for all of our failings and falling short of the ideals we set ourselves, is a wonder that no attempt to reduce us into something lower can undermine so long as we are able to resist the temptation to think of ourselves as divine rather than merely human. We are right to think of ourselves as different from the rest of nature, but the assumption that this difference makes us divine is hubristic. It ends up as the conviction that values have no ground other than will.

In the Modern Age there was a revival of interest in the Ancient Greek philosophy of atomism, and the Pythagorean conviction that mathematics is able to supply us with a key to understanding everything. In the political realm a hierarchical conception of the universe was replaced by a vision in which we come together and make our own rules. Advocates of radical political change not only sought to replace a hierarchical throne and altar conception of social order, they aspired to bring into existence a society in which everybody is equal. The higher material standard of living which the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution created was accompanied by a spiritual crisis. For some the solution to this crisis is what the philosopher Eric Voegelin described as Gnostic Political Religions in which we seek to create a new reality in which satisfying our desires is elevated into the supreme end. He also noticed the popularity of books among his students that advocated Eastern mysticism as an alternative to the assumption that life is nothing more than maximising pleasure in a meaningless universe. Some Enlightenment thinkers claimed that the freedom to maximise our pleasures can only take place in a society which limits the power of the State. In a materialistic society we should be free to live our lives however we please.

As it was being drafted Benjamin Franklin succeeded in persuading Thomas Jefferson to change the opening line of the United States Declaration of Independence from the claim “We hold these truths to be sacred” to “We hold these truths to be self-evident”. What was being defended however is only “self-evident” to somebody who has been brought up in the English political tradition. Jean-Jacques Rousseau supplied an alternative vision in which true freedom can only take place in an egalitarian social order. We ought therefore to destroy the existing society and replace it with a new egalitarian order. In this society the alienation from the universe which a materialist account of the universe generates will be replaced by a sense of oneness; with both nature and ourselves. Instead of the falseness of civilization built on hierarchy we shall abolish property and return back to a state of nature. In this new political order the Christian declaration that we have a fallen nature is replaced with a different vision which abolishes sin. Through knowledge our task is to change the world into something better. Polanyi recognises the power of thought to change and enrich our lives, but he rejects the assumption that it is only that which can be described which counts as knowledge.

The limits of the world are not what language is able to describe. All knowing relies upon tacit knowing, and this tacit knowing is not grounded in arbitrary choices, but in our engagement with our experience of what is the case. What is the case is structured by conditions of possibility that are an opportunity for us to create new realities, but also serve to constrain what is possible. We cannot create any reality we like. Although our attempts at understanding are inherently fallible, we can discover truths. The incompleteness of our quest for understanding should not be viewed as a failure, it is a recognition of the fact that we are human. The assumption that knowledge only counts as such if it can be secured as a set of justified true beliefs sets such a high bar for knowledge that it ends up as the notion that all knowledge claims are unjustified. Nor is coherence an adequate substitute for the pursuit of truth. We endorse coherence because consistency is consistent with something being true, but it is possible for a set of beliefs to be consistent but false. Recognizing that discovery is a process which cannot be wholly captured by rules, Critical Philosophy hands over the discovery process to psychology and sociology. Acknowledging that all knowing is situated however does not carry with it the implication that we ought not make truth claims.

The reason why knowing is not simply a process of manipulating symbols in accordance with rules is that our knowledge claims are guided by our tacit knowledge. This knowledge is supplied by our consciousness. Accepting that every state of consciousness is situated does not imply that knowing is impossible. As the C17th French writer Pierre Bayle put it “I know too little to be a dogmatist, but too much to be a sceptic.” We engage in inquiry. It is possible for claims that we believe to be true to be false. It is also the case however that what we believe to be true may be correct. Polanyi views knowing as a continual process of discovery. To claim that we have arrived at a state of absolute knowledge defies our situatedness. Nor is there a method which can secure what is true. We exist between birth and death, between the higher and lower, and our knowledge claims about what we believe to be the case exist in the tension between certitude and ignorance. A pebble on a beach knows nothing of the struggles that accompany what it is to be human, but it exists in a state of meaninglessness. Kant points out that determining the value of a human life on the grounds of a strategy which adds up pleasures and pains is absurd. It falls short of being an adequate account of what it is to be a human being.

Using a calculator to add up if the sum total of our pains exceed the sum total of our pleasures leaves the question of whether or not our lives are worth living unanswered, because what it is to be a meaningful human existence is not something that it is possible to reduce to a calculation about how we can maximize our pleasure. As is recorded in the Gospels Jesus declared that we do not live on bread alone. We are spiritual beings engaged in a quest for meaning. When the Ancient Greeks sought to give their existence a meaning they situated human beings within a natural order. Particulars were viewed as instances of universals. The Bible says little about the natural world. In his Confessions Saint Augustine declares that there are only two things which interest him, God and his soul. In accordance with the Ancient Greeks he views happiness as our goal, but he claims that our restless heart can only find true happiness in God. What it is to be a human being is orientation towards the divine. This can take the form of a rejection of the world, or it may take the form of engaging with the world. As our confidence in our abilities increased, so did our confidence in our ability to transform the world into somewhere better. Through technology we can transform our existence, but without any recognition of the reality of the spiritual what we create is a desert.

In conclusion, Polanyi’s philosophy has three elements; there is a consciousness which makes judgments, a context within which these judgements take place, and integrations which generate wholes. He claims our consciousness has two levels of awareness, a subsidiary and focal awareness. The former arises as a consequence of our reliance on the latter. Integrating a subsidiary into a focal awareness generates meanings. Although our judgements are fallible we are able to discover truths. What is real transcends the context which renders our experience possible. Our consciousness is not separate from nature, we are able to know what is the case because we are part of what is the case. We rely upon tools as an extension of our body. Our most powerful tool is language. We use symbols as tools for exploring the meanings created by our integrations. Our ability to use symbols enables us to formulate ideals, but to be a human being is not to exist in a state of absolute freedom. Our existence is rendered possible by constraints. When we dedicate ourselves to ideals we impose obligations on ourselves. Via the phenomenon of conscience we seek to behave better. It is not the case that the real is unchanging, it is also dynamic. Our pursuit of ideals brings a higher level of reality into existence.

10) Ghosts

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

G.K.Chesterton Orthodoxy (1908) p.14.

I am claiming that Western civilization is a humanistic tradition that passes on its achievements by relying on symbols, the most of which are the symbols of the alphabet. The importance it gives to articulation gives it a bias in favour of that which it is possible to describe. It is animated by three foundational assumptions. The first is the conviction that what is real can be understood. The second assumption is the conviction that we should live a moral life. The third assumption is that progress in knowledge and morality is reliant upon the agency of the individual. Polanyi endorses each of these assumptions, and his Post-Critical philosophy supplies us with a philosophy that justifies them. His justification counters the assumption that only that which can be articulated counts as knowledge, and rejects the assumption that articulation gives us a secure path to knowledge. Nor should we seek to draw a sharp line between facts and values. What we believe to be reliable facts is a valuation, and all valuations rely upon what we take to be facts. This is a consequence of the fact that all knowing is personal. The claim that it is possible for our articulations to transcend the context of our understanding and secure absolute knowledge is a conviction which ends up as the conviction that no knowledge is possible. It is the dark side of the same delusion. It is Western assumptions taken to their excess.

It is not the case that our descriptions are the word of God, they are what we create in our fallible attempts to make sense of our experience, as are all of our symbolic creations. But that does not mean that there are only descriptions, and nothing other than descriptions, because what renders our descriptions meaningful is our tacit knowledge. This tacit knowledge arises as a consequence of our experience of reality. This reality has an order which determines what is possible, but it also contains degrees of freedom that leave open the possibility of creative freedom. We are engaged in a process of continual discovery. Our actions are not wholly determined, and we make commitments that go beyond what we can know, but it is not the case that we can be anything we want. This is another overclaim. In his humanist philosophy Polanyi restores the humanistic core of Western civilization while undermining and seeking to counter its excesses. He is not the only philosopher who set themselves the goal of moderation, but claiming that they know what Gods know is a temptation many in the Western philosophical tradition have found hard to resist. I now want to shift my attention to the writings of another thinker, who supplies his own answer to the problems which Polanyi addressed, and whose answers I believe fit in well with the approach to philosophy which I have described in the previous chapters.

The best-selling contemporary book of philosophy in the C20th was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Robert Pirsig wrote it between 1968 and 1972, and after 121 rejections it appeared in print in 1974. His narrative is situated within the context provided by a motorcycle journey across the United States which he took with his youngest son Chris, in 1968. He sent a first edition copy of the book to Michael Polanyi. They both emphasize the importance of consciousness, and view science as an acquired practice that is guided by values. They describe science, and they extend this claim to all types of knowing, as a continual process of discovery, which relies on values whose reality transcends our subjectivity. In our acquaintance and exploration of reality, no method which can secure the truth of our beliefs. It is also the case that our understanding is facilitated and augmented by our reliance upon symbols, the deployment of which raises our existence to a higher level of being. Pirsig calls what we explore, Quality. He uses this word because values are something we discover, they are not something we impose upon our experience. The claim that values are arbitrary and wholly subjective creations is not only false it is pernicious.

To be a human being is to be an embodied consciousness, and our actions like the rest of reality are in accordance with the reality that values track. Indeed for Pirsig values are the reality that we seek to track. The claim that values are wholly subjective is an attack upon the meaning of our existence, but this is not to say that they can be wholly defined. The attempt within Western philosophy to wholly define values relies upon a mistaken conception of knowledge. In his early thirties Pirsig was diagnosed with schizophrenia and intermittently spent a couple of years in a mental hospital. He links the mental disturbance that led to his confinement to his obsessive search for a ground for value, and designated the philosophical part of nature, Phaedrus. It makes sense to me that his desire to make sense of everything, and the fact that this aspiration was coupled with alienation from what others were taking for granted, generated a state of mental disorder. It is not absurd in my opinion to suggest that a disturbed mind may engage with truths that a more compliant mind will ignore. The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt declares that non-conformism is the sine qua non [= essential condition] of intellectual achievement. The rejection of a consensus may be a consequence of failing to connect with reality, but it may on the contrary be an engagement with reality and a rejection of delusions.

Opposing a consensus, no matter how settled its beliefs, is not in itself proof that you are deluded. You may be drawing attention to what is being ignored, and on the grounds of a commitment to truth be refusing to go along with a delusion. In his book, Pirsig implies that the disruption to his family which his pursuit of truth caused was justified. Not only because the search for a foundation for value mattered deeply to him, but because he thought his quest for a ground for value was important for the sanity of humanity. His books make no mention of his eldest son, who for a period ceased contact with him, and took the side of his mother, but the popularity of his book is evidence that others recognised and shared his preoccupations. He opposes an approach to philosophy which only grants the status of knowledge to science, and rejects the prevailing assumption that values are wholly subjective. The book ends with his youngest son declaring he never believed that his father was mad; and this is taken by Pirsig to be a statement of the truth. It is our contemporary reliance on delusional assumptions which is deranged. We should replace them with something better. Pirsig was not alone in believing that there is a problem. A Hungarian called Max Nordau in his book Degeneration (1892) claimed that despite scientific advances, the arts are telling us that contrary to appearances, the West is not in a state of spiritual health.

Contrary to those in the Enlightenment era who claimed that all knowledge can be reduced to the properties of matter, a materialist vision of the universe falls short of supplying us with an adequate account of what it is to be a human being. It is the refusal to accept any reality other than matter, and the assumption that the values which direct our lives are wholly subjective, which is generating what Nordau saw as a state of spiritual crisis. The dominant mood is nihilistic. Contrary to what was predicted by enthusiasts for technological change, modern science was failing to deliver the promised utopia. The advances that were taking place in our material standard of living were accompanied by an increasing sense of alienation. Pirsig contends that materialism ought to be replaced by a better metaphysics: one which acknowledges the achievements of Western rationality but which situates it within a context supplied by the reality of values. Pirsig rejects the materialist claim that we impose values on a valueless universe. To exist as a human being is to be conscious of a universe that has values built into it. We are the highest level of consciousness, and as such it is possible for us to be guided by values that go beyond what lower forms of life can understand.

Pirsig was expelled from university because of poor grades. It was not because he lacked intelligence. At the age of 9 he scored 170 in an IQ test, and he graduated from his high school in Minneapolis aged 14. Nor did he lack curiosity. On the contrary, his passionate interest in the sciences led him to go beyond what was expected of him, and he was uncomfortable with simply repeating whatever his teachers told him. Pirsig decided to join the army. and after serving two years in Korea he returned to the University of Minnesota to complete his biochemistry studies. He began to obsessively reflect on the assumptions which his teachers were taking for granted. As he told his son Chris during their motorcycle trip, materialists mock those who claim that ghosts exist, but theories in science are no more tangible than ghosts. Physics is a practice which relies on ways of thinking about our experience that have been discovered by earlier scientists. The British physicist Isaac Newton for example in his book Principia Mathematica (1687) came up with new laws of motion and gravitation. If you question if the laws which Newton devised supply us with a description of what is the case, you are directed to the validation they receive from adherence to the rules of the scientific method.

Pirsig came to the conclusion that no method can secure a claim as true. Theories in science are neither discovered nor justified by an appeal to rules. The scientific method is 20/20 hindsight. Our theories cannot wholly describe what is the case, but they do enable us to explore a physical order which transcends the subjective. When I read what Pirsig says about scientific method it is clear to me that he had read Personal Knowledge, although he makes no mention of Polanyi in any of his published writings. It would explain why he sent him a first edition copy of his book. As he was formulating his ideas it also seems likely that as he was familiar with the writings of Jacques Barzun, who was interested in the distinction between a Classical and Romantic understanding. Zen and the Art of Archery (1953) by Eugen Herrigel was another clear influence upon him, and he seems to have been aware of On The Road (1957), a novel by Jack Kerouac about a journey across America in search of meaning. The literary critic George Steiner claims that the novel Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville, in which Captain Ahab obsessively pursues a whale, was another influence. I find this claim unconvincing however because Ahab declares the means he uses to pursue the whale are sane but his end is insane.

In his 1999 introduction to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig acknowledges the influence on him of a short story by the American novelist Henry James. In The Turning of the Screw (1898) James describes a governess trying to protect the children in her care from a ghost. The children die. The story leaves it ambiguous whether the children die because of the ghost or because of her belief in the ghost. Henry James maintains this ambiguity by only giving us the narrative of the governess. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance uses a similar strategy. Because of the disruption he causes the narrator is hostile to Phaedrus. Pirsig had noticed that Plato in his dialogues would sometimes give names to the people which suggest their character. Pirsig calls his alter-ego Phaedrus because he thought it meant “wolf” in Ancient Greek. In a novel which was popular in the Sixties called Steppenwolf (1927) by the German writer Herman Hesse the main character feels extremely isolated from everybody. A no less popular novel by the same author entitled Siddhartha (1922) is about the spiritual quest of a man living in India at the time of the Buddha. “Siddhartha” combines two Sanskrit words, and means “he who achieves that for which he is searching.”

In his book Phaedrus is on a philosophical quest to discover the ground of value. Like the boy in Hans Christian Anderston’s fairy tale, he draws attention to the fact that the emperor, in this case the materialist assumption that everything can be reduced to material properties, is deluded. As he was writing his book the film Easy Rider (1969), in which two bikers travel across America, became a commercial success. As an illustration of the precise and systematic approach which Pirsig claims Western philosophy invented, he discusses a motorcycle repair manual. In a systematic way a manual tells us how to solve problems in a specified domain. Pirsig was familiar with manuals because at one point he earned his living writing and revising them for the Honeywell Corporation. Pirsig describes a motorcycle as a realisation in steel of concepts (the ghosts) in the mind of an engineer who designs it. An engineer attempts to solve problems, but from where do the solutions come that enter their heads? Is it a process of trial and error? Pirsig claims that we do not deduce concepts from observations, mental innovations supply us with new interpretations. The number of different ways in which it is possible to interpret our experience however is potentially infinite.

When we make use of language we rely on the assumption that we can identify universals in our experience, but what grounds this conviction? In an Empiricist account what we take to be universals are derived from arbitrary conventions, but how is science possible if that is correct? Knowing can be described as a process that attempts to arrive at a correspondence between the beliefs of a subject and the realities they are trying to understand, but except in cases where it is the formal identity of two different descriptions which is being settled (in other words conceptual disputes) it is not the case that our descriptions can be proved. As the French physicist, philosopher, and historian Pierre Duhem pointed out in the late C19th, it is not possible for an observation to transform a hypothesis into an incontestable truth because there are many different ways of interpreting the same observation. The French mathematician Jacques Hadamard put together a collection of different accounts of how mathematicians arrived at their discoveries. The mathematician Henri Poincaré, who was a contemporary of Duhem, recounts that after a long and fruitless attempt to solve a difficult mathematical problem a solution came to him just as he was boarding a bus. He claims that the solution did not come to him randomly, it was selected from among an infinite number of possibilities by his “subliminal self”; something that cannot be described.

This is not the first time that it has been claimed that something more than rule following is going on when we arrive at a solution to a problem. It is an issue Plato addresses in his Meno dialogue. He asserts that our knowledge claims are guided by what we have experienced in a previous life. Saint Augustine declares that it is God who guides us towards correct solutions. The benevolence of the creator of the universe ensures that we are able to comprehend it. The C17th French philosopher Descartes took the argument by Augustine that we cannot doubt that we exist as the foundation of his philosophy of knowledge. His younger contemporary, the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, was also influenced by the writings of Saint Augustine. He claimed that in addition to formal reasoning we are guided by our intuition. When Newton formulated his laws of motion and the inverse square law of gravitation they were a new way of making sense of our experience, but he did not arrive at these conceptions via process of trial and error. This fails to explain why it is so often the case in the history of science that scientists independently arrive at the same solutions to a problem. Newton and Gottfried Leibniz came up with calculus within only a few years of each other, leading Newton to falsely accuse Leibniz of stealing his ideas.

Calculus was a new type of mathematics which relies on derivatives, that measure an object's speed at any instant, and integrals, which calculate areas under curves. This enabled Newton to not only describe the motion of objects on Earth, it also enabled him to describe the motion of the planets. Pirsig claims that Newton arrived at this new way of understanding via a “bootstrapping” process. He began with concepts that were familiar to him and started to think about them in a new way. His invention of infinitesimals was criticised by the philosopher George Berkeley on the grounds that they lacked any formal justification. Berkeley described them as the “ghosts of departed quantities”'. It was not until the C19th that mathematicians supplied a formal foundation for these claims, in the form of a new definition of limits. Newton was for a time a professor at Cambridge University in England. Pirsig claims that institutions of learning, with a set syllabus to teach and staff to pay, impede rather than stimulate discovery. They are places where you go in order to be accredited as a professional. Students are not inspired to think about their experience in new ways, they are provided with questions and answers to defined problems, creating what Pirsig calls a “Church of Reason”.

Between 1958 and 1960 Pirsig taught a creative writing course at Montana State College. Because he believed that schools stifle creativity he told his students that they could write about anything they wanted. His students knew how the education system worked. To get the highest mark they would maybe make some minor contribution of their own, such as coming up with new examples, but nobody was deceived. The A students reproduce what their teachers tell them. C students are happy if they can remember enough of what they have been told to enable them to pass. The F students have little idea of what they are supposed to be repeating. When his students told him that they did not know what to write about, Pirsig told them to start anywhere; write about the brick at the top left corner of the entrance to the local opera house. To encourage their creativity he informed them that he was not going to grade their essays, instead he would read out what they had written to the rest of the class and ask them to give it a grade. Pirsig observed that there was general agreement about which were the best essays, but other than rules which settle correct grammar and spelling, students were unable to precisely describe what it was that made one essay better than another.

11) Quality

‘On éonnaît Dieu facilement, pourvu qu'on ne se contraigne pas à le définir.’

[It is not hard to know God, provided one does not trouble oneself to define him.]

Joseph Joubert Collected Thoughts (1838) VI

Pirsig recollects that if there was one moment which changed the course of his intellectual life it was when one of his colleagues at Montana State College, Sarah Vinke, came out of her office one day to water some plants and told him “I hope you are teaching quality to your students”. At that moment, as Pirsig recalls it, he experienced a flash of insight. What was guiding his students when they were deciding which were the best essays was Quality. It is Quality which was guiding Poincare as he was struggling to find the answer to his mathematical problem. It is Quality which directs an engineer towards a solution to a problem. Solving a problem may require them to make a leap of imagination, but the solutions they come up with do not come out of nowhere. A mathematician or engineer is guided to solutions by something they cannot wholly describe. They are guided by what Polanyi would call our tacit knowledge. Physicists sometimes describe a theory which solves a problem as beautiful. When they say this they are not simply declaring that they find it beautiful, they are telling us that we should also find it beautiful. What Pirsig is claiming is that the leaps of understanding which enable us to find solutions are neither simply deductions from rules, nor are they simply random guesses.

Our experience of Quality is not something that we are able to wholly describe, but because we expect others to agree with our feelings nor is it It is not the case however that our judgements are beyond questioning; we make mistakes. Judgements are neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective. This is a false opposition. To make a judgement is to be guided by that which transcends our subjectivity. Quality is the name Pirsig uses as his label for that which transcends our subjectivity. It is not only real, it is something that determines what is right. He rejects the claim that our judgements about what is right and wrong are wholly subjective. We are exploring a reality that not only transcends our subjectivity, it determines what is correct. Such a conception runs counter to a materialist account of the universe, but it is consistent with our experience. When we say that something is beautiful we are not saying, it just so happens that I happen to find it beautiful, when we call something beautiful we are saying it is beautiful. Although we can say something about why it is beautiful, what grounds our judgement that it is beautiful is primarily tacit. This should not be surprising, the bold and you could say extreme claim is that only what you can wholly define counts as knowledge.

It is obvious that what we know goes beyond what we can describe. Our claims rely on our tacit knowledge. We are guided by what has not been described. Articulation is always incomplete. It is not the case that what it is to understand is a process that is wholly reducible to rules. The ultimate ground to which we appeal when making sense of what somebody is telling us is to our shared experience. This knowledge cannot be wholly described. Adherence to rules facilitates our ability to communicate, but what it is to know is not something which can be wholly reduced to rules. To claim that our experience of beauty, or truth, or what is morally right, can be wholly reduced to rules is a false account. Something definite is offered as a substitute for that which cannot be wholly captured by even the most exhaustive description. Polanyi called this strategy a “pseudo-substution” The analogy is losing a key in the dark and going to look for it somewhere else which has more light. Pirsig is not saying we should not seek to describe why we make the value judgments that we do, what he is saying is that all such attempts will always be incomplete. Knowing is predominately tacit, and although it can be evoked and enriched by our descriptions, what is the case cannot be wholly reduced to them, except in the case of those wholly formal claims in which what we are seeking to describe is the description.

Sarah Vinke taught Classics. Pirsig read a book by the British Professor of Ancient Greek H.D.F.Kito which told him that the key to understanding Ancient Greek culture is the concept of excellence. The word the Ancient Greeks used was Ἀρετή [Areté]. Excellence in sport is about having strength, skill, and stamina. To have political excellence in a Polis is to submit to its laws, and having the ability to convince others of the truth of your judgements. There were teachers in Athens who set out to teach that skill. Excellence in philosophy is about supplying answers to philosophical questions. William James claimed that what makes a question philosophical is that we do not know where to look for an answer. Something becomes a philosophical question when the question and how to answer it is what is in question. The teachers who claimed that they could teach you how to win arguments were called Sophists. What they were selling were skills which they claimed will enable you to flourish as a human being. According to Plato what distinguishes a philosopher from a Sophist is that instead of teaching you tricks which help you to win arguments, is that they set themself the task of discovering what is true. As Pirsig would put it, they are motivated only by love of Quality.

If you want to be popular you may set out to tell people what they want to hear. A truth teller however seeks to find out what is actually the case. They are dedicated to finding out what is the case regardless of what we would like to be the case. On what grounds are the claims which a Sophist makes justified? They claimed to be teaching excellence, but is what they are saying true? The Ancient Greeks not only applied the concept of Areté to physical, social, and intellectual activities, they also saw it as relevant to moral judgments. Moral excellence is virtue. To find out what is virtuous Socrates tried, with anybody who was prepared to discuss it with him, to define what it is that makes something virtuous. It is not enough to claim that you are virtuous, you actually have to be virtuous, and how can you know what is virtuous if you cannot define it? To find out more about this approach to understanding what has Quality, Pirsig decided to study Ancient Greek philosophy at the University of Chicago. Although he makes no mention of Christianity or Biblical texts, Pirsig knew enough to know that what had been passed down in the writings of the Ancient Greek philosophers had a foundational significance in Western civilization. So if you were serious about philosophy you ought to make yourself familiar with the writings of Plato and Aristotle.

In his interview at Chicago University Pirsig was asked about his substantive field, and he replied that it was English composition. This elicited the reply that English composition is a methodological not a substantive field. This claim did not sound right to Pirsig. Is it not the case that every method is an interpretation, and every interpretation relies upon assumptions about what exists? Pirsig found out that inspired by the conviction that it is possible to discover methods which can bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities, some academics at the University of Chicago had set up a Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods. On the basis of their conviction that use of the right methods will help us to make sense of our experience, they revered Aristotle. There was a time in Europe when the reason why people attended a university was in order to learn about Aristotle. He was revered as the greatest thinker who had ever lived. More broadly, going to university was not only about becoming familiar with Aristotle, but with all those texts which the Western tradition revered as the greatest achievements of the human spirit. A university was a place where you studied and reflected upon those writings, and sought to obtain an understanding and appreciation of the achievements of those who were believed to be its finest minds.

The Great Books Program at Chicago (and the approach to learning which Jacques Barzun promoted at Columbia University in New York) set itself the task of acquainting students with what the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold in his book Culture and Anarchy (1869) described as “the best that has been thought and said”. They wanted students to have the knowledge and the methods that enabled them to recognize excellence beyond their teaching in a speciality. Included in this vision was some familiarity with the history of science, and what has been achieved by non-Western cultures. This approach relied on the assumption that what is right and wrong, better and worse, is not wholly subjective, or grounded in nothing more than struggles for dominance between different competing groups. Once you believe that truth is nothing more than what people with power want to believe, because it suits them for us to believe it, going to university becomes pointless. That however is what humanities departments in universities were teaching. They did so on the grounds that unlike everybody else they knew there was no such thing as truth. Everything is nothing more than what power makes you do. There is no right and wrong, there are only people who want to tell you what to think. The people who claim this excuse themselves from the claim, and expect you to pay them for supplying you with this revelation. They are Sophists, because instead of telling you how to find things out, they want to show you how people exercise power.

In opposition to what the Sophist Protagoras claimed, Plato asserts that it is God not man who is the measure of all things. What makes us human is not our ability to create tools which help us to get what we want, what makes us human is our ability to orient ourselves to that which is true, and good, and beautiful. You might think that Pirsig would defend Plato, but on the grounds of his conviction that Western philosophy got the assumption that reality is something that can be wholly described from Plato, he defends the Sophists. Pirsig rejects the assumption that it is possible for descriptions to wholly capture our experience. What words do is put a label on abstractions from our experience, but they evoke that experience in a way that enables us to share our experiences without wholly capturing it. Pirsig claims that the attempt by Richard McKeon (the professor at Chicago with whom he battles but does not mention by name) to get students to repeat Aristotle is a strategy which elevates the professor and what they are teaching at the cost of discovering what is actually true. He claims that familiarity with Aristotle is of little use to people today, although he acknowledges that the way in which a manual describes the relationship between the parts of a motorcycle is an Aristotelian approach.

Pirsig learned that Ancient Greeks philosophers set out to replace myth μῦθος [Mythos = stories] with a λόγος [Logos]. In everyday usage Logos in Greek means word or supplying an account, but in Greek philosophy it has the meaning of the principle which underlies the order of the universe. Pirsig denied that we can separate knowledge claims from the context within which they have a meaning. After graduating, Pirsig studied philosophy at the University of Benares in India, but he abandoned this plan and returned home when his teacher instructed his class that everything is an illusion. In his view this claim is not in accordance with our experience. Reality is not only not an illusion, if you pay attention to your experience it will reveal to you that what is most real is Quality. Pirsig speculates that the origin of the substance versus method division is the distinction in Greek grammar between objects and predicates. An object is what something happens to, and a predicate is what you can say about an object. Pirsig discovered that the Chinese language does not make a distinction between objects and predicates. It relies on context and word order. A word can function as a subject, object, or predicate. As a consequence Chinese is sensitive to ambiguity and relational meaning; an approach that is consistent with a philosophy which assumes that reality transcends categorization. This suggested to him that the language we use plays a role in how we interpret our experience.

The German language uses the same word [vernünftig] to mean what English divides into two distinct concepts; that which is rational and that which is reasonable. In the English tradition that which is reasonable is that which accords with our common sense. Adherence to doctrine is less important than adherence to truth. If this leads to contradictions, so much the worse for logic. What matters is that something be true, not that it be logically consistent. Truth is logically consistent, but what is true is an aspiration, and so in the meantime our descriptions may not be wholly consistent. Rather than rejecting them as false, it is hoped that better explanations will eventually come along. This is an aspiration not an achievement, and is not the same as claiming that we can arrive at a state of absolute knowledge. A wise person is aware of the fact that what we believe to be true goes beyond what we can know with certainty, and this justifies having a society which is tolerant of difference of opinion. Institutions ought to have the freedom to make discoveries about what is the case without being told what to conclude by a central planner. This approach resists the claim that if only we had the right concepts we can discover a path to absolute understanding. That is a very convenient conviction for somebody who wants to tell others what they should do, and how they should live.

There is an obvious connection between the assumption that it is only that which can be described which counts as knowledge and the assumption that values are wholly subjective. If we are unable to wholly describe why we value something, and we assume that it is only that which can be described that counts as knowledge, it follows that values do not count as knowledge. Pirsig claims that if the West is only going to return to spiritual health it needs to recognize that values count as knowledge. He begins Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by claiming that we are living at an ever faster pace, and for the same reason our lives are becoming more shallow. If there is no ground for values how do we know if we are going in the right direction? Our civilization could be moving at an ever faster pace towards our destruction. Pirsig endorses those who claim that we need to find a ground for values. The importance of discovering such a ground is what Plato calls a περιαγωγή [periagoge = turning around] to what is good. The word which Pirsig uses is Chautauqua. In 1874 in Chautauqua in New York State they set out to educate Sunday school teachers. They wanted to train teachers who inspired those who listened to them to improve their lives in accordance with Christian values.

Pirsig in his discussion of Quality carefully excludes any mention of Christianity, or the tradition within Christianity of understanding the divine as a personal encounter that goes beyond any possible intellectual understanding. He instead supplements his endorsement of the desirability of Western rationality with an approach inspired by Eastern writings such as the Tao Te Ching [“道德经” = the way of virtue], which sets forth an approach in which no μετάνοια [metanoia = changing your mind] is required because what is the case is already good. In this Chinese Taoist philosophy there is no need for contrition or forgiveness because we are without sin. There is no struggle between good and evil because everything is good. We should simply submit to the flow. Goodness is built into the universe. In his Phaedrus dialogue Plato describes the soul as a charioteer (reason) driving two horses, one noble (moral) and one base (desire), but Pirsig wants us to conclude that what is in charge of the chariot is Quality is not reason. What has Quality cannot be wholly defined. WE should simply submit to it. Because we cannot wholly describe the order which determines when an action is the right action, we should let ourselves be directed by Quality. He arrives at this conclusion on the grounds that what has Quality goes beyond what it is possible to describe.

In his discussion of the Phaedrus dialogue Pirsig fails to mention that Plato is not claiming that what is the case can be wholly described, his focus of interest is on the difference between truth as it is experienced, and the truth as it is described in a text. In his Seventh Letter Plato makes it clear that he believes that our descriptions cannot wholly capture what we know. Writing carries with it the risk of believing that our descriptions can wholly capture that which is true. Plato is defending the claim that philosophical inquiry is guided by our intuition. This is why he writes philosophy in the form of dialogues. For an understanding of what is the case to take place an awareness of truth is presupposed, and without this awareness we could never agree. In any pursuit of truth, debate is a necessary part of any inquiry, because that which is discovered can only be arrived at by a process of debate. This explains the centrality of διαλεκτικός [dialektikos = to have a conversation] in philosophy, at least as Plato understood it. Pirsig however leaves you with the impression that what Plato is doing is securing what is true, and then forcing everybody else to live in accordance with what philosophers have discovered. There is some truth in this charge, but it fails to pay sufficient attention to the fact that in his philosophy Plato is seeking to defend an approach to knowing in which what is true is discovered through debate.

Plato conceives the Good as an ideal that transcends what is physically the case, but Aristotle views the Good as immanent in nature. Recognizing that knowledge claims rely upon what we take for granted Aristotle deduces knowledge from axioms. He halts any infinite regress by taking these axioms to be self-evident. In his Elements (one of the great achievements of Western mathematics) Euclid organises his claims in the form of a deductive system. In the early C19th however, mathematicians began to question the self-evident truth of the Fifth Postulate. This inspired some to create a Non-Euclidean geometry. This is the geometry which physicists use when applying the ideas which Einstein came up with in his “General Theory of Relativity”. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that we acquire the skills which facilitate the possibility of us living a good life in an apprenticeship to a practice. These practices cannot be wholly reduced to rules. Pirsig does not mention this in his discussion of Aristotle. He wants to leave you with the impression that he is objecting to Aristotle because he is claiming that reality can be wholly described. What Pirsig is actually objecting to in Aristotle is his failure to see that knowing is an unending process of continual discovery.

Another omission in Pirsig is the absence of any discussion of German philosophers. Pirsig does briefly mention Hegel, in whose view everything is the coming to self-knowledge of an Absolute Mind, but only in order to reject his Rationalism. His opposition to Plato is similar to the approach taken by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Allan Bloom, in his book The Closing of the American Mind (1987) agrees with his German-American mentor Leo Strauss that it is Nietzsche and Heidegger rather than Karl Marx who is the primary inspiration for the attack upon Western culture that currently dominates the humanities departments of American universities. In accordance with the assumption that we make ourselves, Marx endorses the declaration that via technology we create our word. Heidegger opposes this claim and traces reverence for technology back to what he takes to be the pernicious “Will to Power” tradition of Western humanism. In this tradition man is seen as the measure of all things. Pirsig however celebrates the power of technology to improve our lives, and to this extent he is in accordance with Marx, but unlike Marx he does so on the grounds of a metaphysics in which that which is right and wrong is not reducible to power.

12) The Church of Reason

‘The first law…philosophy always buries its undertakers…Our second law…man is a metaphysical animal…our third law, that metaphysics…searches for first principles, or first causes, of what is given in sensible experience...Our fourth…as metaphysics aims at transcending all particular knowledge, no particular science is competent…to judge.’

Étienne Gilson The Unity Of Philosophical Experience (1937) pp.246-9.

The word school [σχολή = skholḗ] derives from the Greek word for leisure. A higher education was for those who had the leisure to cultivate higher purposes. A liberal education was not a liberation from standards, it was the freedom to submit to them. In the Hellenistic period you joined the school of philosophy which most appealed to you. Teachers of philosophy advertised themselves as being sources of knowledge that once mastered will improve your life. In Late Antiquity instead of studying philosophers there was increasing interest in salvation religions. A dynamic culture will respond to changes. The Jewish scriptural tradition embraced change by adding new texts to their canon, generally in the name of old authors. This was justified on the grounds that the writers of these texts saw themselves as divinely inspired. The Book of Isaiah for example was written by at least two different authors. Identifying different authors in the Bible is one of the greatest achievements of Western scholarship. In places such as the Alexandria scholars copied and supplied commentaries upon the texts which they judged to be the best. This process kept the canon of texts with which an educated person was expected to be familiar to a number that could be mastered.

In democratic Athens judgements about Quality were settled by a vote. Accusations of bad behaviour were settled in a court. If a jury of citizens found you guilty, the defendant and prosecutor would each suggest a punishment. The philosopher Socrates was found guilty of worshipping new gods and corrupting the young by undermining their faith in the old gods. The prosecutor recommended that he be executed. Socrates responded by declaring that asking questions about what is good contributes to the excellence of a society, and his punishment therefore ought to be maintained at public expense in the Prytaneum (a hall which was reserved for honored citizens and Olympic victors) for the rest of his life. The jurors were not persuaded that Socrates was adding much to the quality of life in Athens, indeed they agreed with his accuser that he was a corrupting influence on the young; so a majority of them voted to approve the sentence recommended by the prosecutor. Socrates offered to pay a fine of one mina of silver, and the court was told that his friends would pay an additional 30 minas, but with an increased majority the jury decided to vote for his execution. Socrates claimed to be doing nothing more than reflecting upon what was being assumed to be right, but his opponents saw him as undermining tradition via a misguided appeal to reason.

After he overturned the money changing tables in the temple in Jerusalem, Jesus was identified as a trouble maker. The temple priests wanted him to be punished, and because he was seen as a threat to public order, the Roman authorities condemned him to the most humiliating, painful, and prolonged death that humans had managed to devise. Jesus had told his followers that they should give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belonged to God, but three centuries later when Christianity became the imperial religion, it was the Church who were the persecutors. The emperor Constantine established Synods which voted on which religious doctrines should be compulsory. The revival of Roman Law in the Middle Ages was used to punish deviations from what the Church had decided was orthodox. If you promoted what the Church had settled were incorrect beliefs, and refused to recant your errors, you were taken to a public place and burned to death. In medieval universities there were attempts to reconcile Christianity with philosophy. Students were taught to clarify language with logic. Via an appeal to the concept of a Summum Bonum [= highest good] attempts were made to supply answers to every question that was amenable to reason. The answers to questions that reason could not solve were justified by Biblical revelations; the correct interpretation of which was secured by Papal authority.

The ruling elite took on the task of becoming benefactors to the universities, and the costs of running them was funded in large part by taxes raised by the Church. In the Middle Ages society was divided into three unequal groups. There were rulers, who obtained political power through military conquest, and via a process of intermarriage and rewards for those who served them, created a ruling elite. There were peasants (the taxpayers) who worked to produce the goods that were necessary for human flourishing, and there were clerks and priests, who, living off the wealth which was extracted from the peasants, justified this arrangement. Whereas the Pope justified his authority on the grounds of an appeal to the apostolic tradition, clerks sought to ground their authority in reason. Relying on the power and authority of the State to punish transgression, it was assumed as long as people followed the right method, what was true and justified could be settled. The word method is derived from two Greek words μετά [meta] and ὁδός [hodos], which in this context mean “with” and “path”. It was assumed that if a claim about what is the case is arrived at by adhering to the right method, we are justified in designating it as knowledge. On grounds of an appeal to this secured knowledge people were instructed in how they should live their lives. God, or at least those who claimed to be familiar with his will, was the guarantee that the freedom to live as we want is not the purpose of our existence.

For anybody who is familiar with the history of Western philosophy, the phrase “Critical Philosophy” is confusing. It is what Kant called his attempt to delimit and secure the boundaries of what we can know. Hegel condemned such an approach as no wiser than the declaration by the philosopher Scholasticus not to enter the water until he had learned to swim. We do not live apart from the reality we seek to describe. The British philosopher Edward Craig describes Hegel as a transition figure between what he calls an “Insight” and “Practice” conception of philosophy. In the former it is assumed that knowledge is a state equivalent to a divine understanding, while in the latter conception knowledge is what is taken to be true at a particular time. Hegel claimed that everything is a mind engaged in an ascent to self-knowledge. Existence is not static, it is a state of continual change. He claims that he is able to comprehend how this change takes place. You could describe his approach as reducing history to philosophy, and reducing philosophy to dialectic. In the sense in which I am using it, Critical Philosophy is an approach which assumes that it is possible to identify the method which supplies us with knowledge. Hegel in my view is therefore also in the Critical tradition.

Pirsig rejects the assumption by the Church of Reason that adherence to what is claimed to be the correct method supplies us with a path to truth. The German philosopher Heidegger claimed that it is not possible to transcend what is granted to us by time. What we believe to be true depends on when we live. In accordance with Hegel he views knowing as an activity that takes place in history, but he denies that there is a method that will enable us to understand that history. Inspired by Kant, he sought instead to describe the conditions under which we make judgements. In his critique of Kantian philosophy the Protestant theologian J.G. Hamann pointed out that notwithstanding his declaration that he is placing limits on knowledge in order to make room for faith, the claim by Kant his Critical Philosophy that he had secured an island of knowledge surrounded by fog was deluded “The soundness of reason is the cheapest, most self-authorized, and most shameless self-aggrandizement, whereby everything is presupposed that remains to be proved, and whereby every free investigation of the truth is more brutally barred than by the inerrancy of the Roman Catholic Church”. For Hamann it would be better if we returned back to Hume and acknowledged that to make sense of our experience we rely on faith. To claim anything more than this generates a crisis in reason, which Critical Philosophy cannot resolve.

In a Post-Critical approach there is no method which philosophers can discover that can secure a path to knowledge, but nor is what is believed to be true grounded in nothing more than what our era happens to believe is true. Pirsig believes that it is a mistake to believe that what has been described can capture all there is to know about what is the case. This is a Rationalist delusion. Our inquiries are grounded in our experience of Quality, and Quality goes beyond what can be wholly described. It is untrue to say that it is possible to exist in no place in particular, but Pirsig also rejects the claim that it is not possible for us to discover general truths. What we believe to be true however is an endeavour that goes beyond what reason is able to secure. The claim that nothing exists but matter, and that our actions are wholly determined by its properties, is as deluded as the claim that nothing exists but mind, and that any order in our experience is what we impose upon it in order to make sense of it. Materialism and Idealism are both reductionist over-claims. It would be better if we accepted that Quality is real, but what is real goes beyond what it is possible to wholly describe. The desire to know and improve our lives is an endeavour which should not be opposed, but this endeavour does not require us to believe that a theory of everything is either possible or desirable.

Socrates, who declared that philosophy is the highest form of life for a human being, devoted his leisure time to debating the meaning of words. In the Middle Ages philosophers devised a terminology capable of making elaborate conceptual distinctions. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (1946) claims that Scholastic thinkers ought not be called philosophers because they were looking for reasons to justify claims they already believed to be true. Russell however, together with A.N.Whitehead, wrote a work called Principia Mathematica (1910-13) which he set out to prove that two plus two makes four; a claim he already believed to be true. Russell rejected the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages because it relied on Christian presuppositions. What Russell believed he set out in his article “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903). In that article he asserts that our beliefs, loves, and hopes are nothing more than the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms. He assumes that what science supplies us with is knowledge, and its claims are justified by an appeal to the scientific method. The sciences are a collection of convictions that adherence to method is able to justify as that which is entitled to be called knowledge. Within a Post-Critical understanding of what it is to make a knowledge claim however this approach is delusional.

Pirsig has less faith in universities than Polanyi. In his view it is the desire to impose an understanding on everybody else that motivates the conviction that a method exists which can secure what is true. It would be an error however to make the assumption that the Western tradition excludes the possibility that we rely on more than we can say. Socrates asserted that he was guided by a daimion; an inner divine voice. In his quest for certainty Descartes acknowledged that his method cannot teach deduction and intuition to those who do not already know how to do them. It would however be correct to assume that the dominant philosophical tradition in the West, and the modern era in particular, is the assumption that it is possible to discover a method which can tell us when a claim is entitled to be called knowledge. Pirsig is also correct when he traces the origins of this tradition back to the Ancient Greeks. A study of the history of Western philosophy tells us that what was once assumed to be true can change, but Hegel responds to this by declaring that his approach to philosophy does not require you to accept any presuppositions. He asserts that what he is doing is supplying us with a method that enables anybody who wants to know how our concepts evolve over time.

Hegel claims that his philosophy is no mere love of knowledge, it is actual knowledge. It is knowledge of the means by which a mind progresses towards understanding. The way in which he transcends the objective-subjective distinction is by supplying us with a phenomenology that, on the grounds of his assumption that only the mental is real, supplies us with the key to understanding the process through which change takes place. What is real is the changes which take place in the World Spirit. Everything is the World Spirit. Hegel views himself as having achieved the task of not only explaining what is real but also how it changes. In his political philosophy Hegel describes the State as the march of God in the world. True freedom is submission to the ethical order imposed by the State. The State overrides individual purposes in order to realize collective ends. In his definition of freedom to be free is not to be free to do whatever you want, it is the freedom to submit to the rational, by which he means the freedom to submit to God. The task of the philosopher is to comprehend the order of the universe. As Plato explained it in The Republic, on the basis of knowledge which philosophers secure by pursuing the correct method, experts will instruct us on correct thinking. This approach is in direct opposition to the conception of what it is to be a free society that the English political tradition defended.

As Hegel conceives of it (a conception contested by Schopenhauer) we exist, whether we like it or not, in a rational order. The real is not purposeless. The task of philosophy is to understand that order. On the grounds that it is desirable for us to live in an ordered rather than a disordered society, some aspire to create human societies which are run by computers. Pirsig opposes the assumption that it is possible to discover a method that is able to detect that which has Quality. Our experience of what is real goes beyond what any description can capture, and therefore Rationalists are pursuing a fantasy. In his view knowing cannot be reduced to a process of deduction. What guides us is our experience. The Neo-Platonist Porphyry of Tyre quotes from a book which the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus deposited in his local temple. In that book he asserts that everything in existence is beautiful, good, and just, because everything is a manifestation of the divine. Only a few quotations from his book survive. Aristotle recounts an occasion when Heraclitus had visitors and they found him warming himself by his oven. He told them to enter, the gods are here too. This understanding is consistent with what Pirsig is claiming to be the case, except that he does not claim to understand the process of change.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig describes watching some mechanics repairing an engine. A radio is playing and they look bored. Pirsig says that they are approaching their task with the wrong attitude. They are failing to understand that everything participates in Quality. They were understanding what they were doing as a means to something else, and viewing the something else as what was important. Pirsig rejects the notion that science and technology only have value insofar as they supply us with the means to achieve something else. He rejects the claim that technology is nothing more than a process of imposing purposes on a meaningless reality. Technology enables us to realise purposes which are already present in the universe. In the philosophy that Pirsig advocates everything participates in Quality, and this includes the task of repairing a motorcycle. Ignoring Christianity, he defends a conception of the good that is immanent not transcendent. Goodness is not something brought into existence by a will. The universe is already good. To do a task well is to transcend what your ego would like to be the case, and open yourself up to what is already good. In this vision moral righteousness is not brought into existence as a consequence of following rules. Morality is not something imposed by a transcendent agency on a valueless reality. It is an exploration of an immanent reality in which moral goodness already exists, even if only as a potential.

13) Classical & Romantic

‘“In the Hegelian system humanity becomes what it is, or achieves unity with itself, only by ceasing to be humanity.”

Leszek Kolakowski Main Currents Of Marxism (1978) Volume One p.77.

To what extent is a human being at home in the world? Immanentism is the view that everything, including our thoughts, is wholly contained within a natural order. If this order determines what happens this raises the question of how we can stand back from what is the case and reflect upon it - describing, evaluating, and making choices about how we ought to live? Transcendence is the claim that there is a reality which is not reducible to any natural order, and it is the existence of this supernatural reality which renders it possible for an agency to impose their will on the natural order. If genuine freedom requires that human action be grounded in a reality that exists beyond natural causation, then immanentism cannot accommodate it. Transcendence renders possible an alternative source of causality that is different from the causality which takes place in a natural order. In a materialist account nothing is good or bad there is only what exists. In a teleological account of the natural order there are purposes, and what renders something good or bad is relative to these purposes. In the absence of any purpose nothing can be good or bad.

A transcendent account denies that nature has purposes. A purpose is something which is imposed on nature from something outside its laws. It makes no sense for something to be good or bad in wholly immanent terms, there is only what is the case. What exists is good or bad relative to a standard that is judged to be superior. Who does the judging and on what grounds is it judged to be superior? In a transcendent account what does the judging is will, and the grounds on which something is judged is if something accords with its will. In an immanent account the claim that we exist somewhere else than the natural order alienates us from that order, and if we deny any reality other than the natural, this will return us back to a state of being at home. For advocates of a transcendent order it is our discovery of a higher order that makes us human, and all attempts to deny this are disingenuous, because nobody lives as if their actions are determined by nothing more than what is natural. We make decisions about how we are going to live, and we make decisions on the grounds of an appeal to principles which transcend what is the case. There are therefore two different sorts of reality, and we exist in the tension between them. Attempting to wholly reduce us to either reality is misguided.

The Ancient Greeks believed that it is possible to understand what is the case, and on the basis of this knowledge do what is right. But this assumes the possibility of agency. Plato grounds this agency in the fact that we have a soul. Our soul has had a past existence, from which it has learned truths about an alternative reality, in comparison with which our immediate experience is simply a confused realm of opinion. A good life is when we live our lives in accordance with a correct understanding of what is the case. In the Eastern tradition the word Zen (禅) is a transliteration into Japanese of the Chinese word chán (禪), which is a transliteration of the Sanskrit word dhyāna [= meditation]. Pirsig claims that missing from a motorcycle repair manual is the state of mind which accompanies the successful achievement of a task. To successfully maintain a motorcycle you not only need the right tools, and the right skills, you also need to have the right state of mind. This right state of mind is not trying to escape from your experience in order that you may contemplate another reality, it is about paying attention to your experience because you love it, instead of viewing reality as nothing more than a source of frustration. To focus on what you would prefer to be the case is to become distracted by your ego. A good life is a life that is attuned to what is real.

Unlike Plato, an Eastern approach does not claim that it is possible to wholly understand what is the case, all that we can do is submit to it. Pirsig reminds us that what is the case goes beyond what we are able to describe. It is also the case that what we describe may be an entirely false account. How do we ensure that what we say is a description of what is true? A correct description goes beyond what you would like to be true and connects you with what is true. If we are to apply instructions successfully we have to interpret them correctly. We have to be able to connect instructions with our experience. Language is a tool which enables us to evoke and reflect upon our experience, and guided by that experience we are able to read a book of instructions and successfully repair a motorcycle if it breaks down. We are successful if we achieve a task, but what grounds the concept of something being successful? Is a task something which is imposed on what is the case in order that it may be made meaningful? In a materialist account there are no meanings other than the ones that are imposed. The tasks that we impose on reality are determined by physical properties, and the reason why there are such properties is nothing more than chance. It just so happens that we live in a universe that has the properties which bring humans into existence. Other universes, and other properties are possible.

Reality is a stubborn thing. It behaves in ways that defy our wishes. In order to achieve our purposes it helps us if we have a correct understanding of what is the case. In a materialist account this explains why we have developed a nervous system. It has been selected in a process of competition with other arrangements of matter because it helps us achieve purposes. Relying upon his understanding of Zen Buddhism, Pirsig claims that a Western approach to problem solving seeks to detach the subject from the object, whereas an Eastern approach emphasizes non-duality. Pirsig approves of the approach to problem solving supplied by Eastern thinkers. He claims that what it is to be a subject and object are abstractions from the same reality. When Pirsig studied Buddhism in India his teacher told him that reality is an illusion, a claim he rejected. The Chinese Taoist approach however does not say that reality is an illusion, it says that reality goes beyond what we can describe. Contrary to a materialist account however, Taoism denies that what happens is because of chance, there are purposes. What these purposes are however go beyond what we can understand. A meaningful life in this vision is not a life in which we seek to impose our ends on a meaningless reality, it is a life lived in accordance with the purposes that already exist, even though we may not be able to understand them. Instead of trying to impose our will, a correct approach to knowing is to accept that the order which brought us into existence determines how we behave.

In accordance with this opposition to dualism Heidegger in his Being and Time (1927) makes a distinction between Vorhandenheit (something present at hand) and Zuhandenheit (something ready to hand). When you hold a hammer in your hand and use it, the hammer is present at hand, but otherwise it is ready to hand. The first understanding takes place within the context of a task whereas the latter is a detached encounter which is independent of any care. In the first case we impose our requirements on reality, and in the latter case we accept what is given to us by reality. Heidegger claims that Western philosophy attempts to subordinate technē (= skill) to epistēmē (= theoretical knowledge), and that this is a misguided approach which he traces back to Plato. It prioritizes what is said over what is experienced. Heidegger describes the prioritizing of theory as a process of Seinsvergessenheit, or “forgetting of Being” which directs our focus away from our experience of what is the case to abstractions. In his The Question Concerning Technology (1954) he describes technology as an imposition of will, and that the concept of imposing our will derives from a misguided Western humanist philosophy in which it is we who give meaning to everything in existence.

Influenced by the phenomenology of knowledge that Heidegger supplied, the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty, in his book The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) rejects any attempt to sharply divide what it is to be a body and what it is to be a mind. All encounters with the world are through our body. We do not exist apart from our body. In his Philosophical Investigations (1953) and On Certainty (1969) the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claims that to understand how language becomes meaningful has to be situated in the context of a practice. This practice cannot be wholly described. Rejecting his earlier conception that meaning can be reduced to logic, he claims that it is not possible to make sense of what a language means independently of the way in which it is used. Nor can we wholly describe those practices. All we can say is that at some point our spade hits rock. Changing his metaphor he claims that our practices are like the banks of a river that because of erosion and an accumulation of silt gradually changes its course. We cannot determine what is meaningful from a point outside the forms of life that render them possible. What all these claims have in common is the assumption that what it is to be meaning cannot be determined separately from the context that made them possible. We should not seek to transcend our situatedness and impose general claims.

In accordance with his assumption that the right sort of life is a submission to what Being chooses to disclose to us, when Heidegger was appointed the Rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933 he gave a speech praising Hitler, describing him as an authentic expression of the destiny of the German people. In 1947 Merleau-Ponty wrote a book which attacks those who criticised Stalin. His response to the fact that people being imprisoned and starved and executed, was to justify what was happening on the grounds that what was happening ought to be situated in the context of a practice that had egalitarianism as its purpose. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty both oppose the strategy of appealing to transcendent values. They reject Christianity, and endorse the approach which Nietzsche called a “transvaluation of values.” Heidegger in his later writings tells us that we should return back to the approach to knowledge taken by Pre-Socratic philosophers. Instead of believing in the reality of abstract concepts, such as truth, and goodness, we should be guided by whatever it is that time has supplied to us as the context of understanding. Inspired by the claim that human history can be reduced to class struggle, Merleau-Ponty recommends we study Marx.

For Pirsig what exists is morally good. What makes it good is that it is determined by Quality. There is no transcendent reality, there is only our encounters with that which is the case, and what is the case is good. Our use of language enables us to evoke our experience, but language does not create what is good. In this way Pirsig seeks to counter nihilism. We do not live as if nihilism is true. If we lived our lives amorally such a way of living would rightly be identified as a disorder. An amoral person is a psychopath. This is not how we should live. No matter how many times you are told, or you tell yourself, that value judgments are wholly subjective, you do not live as if that is true. Polanyi claims that people who claim to be nihilists are inverting the moral passions they derived from Christianity into a defence of immorality. They are not thoughtlessly immoral, on the grounds of an appeal to the claim that life is meaningless they chose to be immoral. They are choosing to express their disgust at life for being meaningless. They are in short tacitly relying on what they are explicitly denying, that our lives should be meaningful, and if they are not meaningful then they express their anger by finding people they can blame.

What is it that grounds what is morally good and bad? Ought we to submit to what is the case and seek to ignore all questions about what is morally good and bad? Polanyi claims that we formulate ideals, and commit ourselves to living in accordance with them. What we judge to be morally correct arises as a consequence of our dedication to the concept of moral goodness, which our use of language enables us to formulate. We judge the morality of our actions relative to moral ideals. It is not the case that we are passive instruments of whatever happens to be the case. What is morally good transcends whatever happens to be the case. It is untrue to say that truth and rightness are grounded in nothing more than whatever we happen to believe. What is true and good and beautiful are discoveries. We are exploring Quality. Pirsig claims that it is untrue to say that judgements of moral rightness are wholly subjective. To be a moral being is to act in accordance with what our conscience tells us to do. After formulating the concept of doing what is morally right, we bring this higher level of being into existence by imposing obligations on ourselves that we have formulated. We chose to live a way of life that creates our humanity.

What it is to be a human being cannot be understood independently of ideals that transcend whatever happens to be the case. Living as if whatever we want to be true is real is a derangement. Whereas Polanyi views our existence as being in a state of tension between the immanent and transcendent, Pirsig reframes this a tension between a Classical and Romantic understanding of knowing. A Classical approach creates systems that it believes describe a rational order, whereas a Romantic approach seeks to return us back to the uniqueness of our experience. According to Pirsig our interpretations of what is the case are guided by feeling, but it is not the case that these feelings are wholly subjective. Our feelings connect us to a reality that transcends the subjective. In his account Classical and Romantic modes of understanding are not in a state of conflict, they are simply two different ways of encountering the same reality. For Pirsig, trying to sharply divide subjects and objects is as misguided as trying to make a sharp distinction between mind and body. They are the same reality. To view our experience in dualistic terms ignores that subjectivity and objectivity are two different ways of comprehending the same reality. It is true that knowing always takes place somewhere in particular, but this does not carry with it the implication that only the subject is real. Subjectivity is reality being experienced.

A Classical approach recognizes that particulars are identified as such within the context supplied by a whole. Romanticism, in its quest to return us back to the particularity of our experience, risks making everything subjective. Since every consciousness interprets its experience, it is claimed that it is the subject who is responsible for making what counts as real. Pirsig rejects this, and claims that what is real is determined by Quality. In his integration of a Classical and Romantic understanding Pirsig asks us to imagine knowledge as a train. In a Classical understanding knowledge is the carriages, with each carriage a different speciality. On the grounds of the assumption that what it is to know is a process of continual discovery, a Romantic understanding reminds us that it is not the case that everything remains the same, the train does not stay in the station, it moves to a new destination. The knowledge train moves into new territory, but the newness at the edge of the train is not arbitrary, it is determined by a track. The track is what Pirsig calls Quality. What powers the train is what the Ancient Greeks called ἐνθουσιασμός [enthousiasmos] the literal meaning of which is possession by God. In order to facilitate progress toward a destination, obstacles to thinking should be removed. One obstacle Pirsig identifies is value rigidity. Quality is not a Static Order it is a Dynamic Order brings new realities into existence.

In Lila, his second book, Pirsig makes a major change to the approach he set out in his first book. He asserts that Quality is uniform, it is hierarchical. He rejects the assumption that everything is equally good. There are four levels, Inorganic, Biological, Social, and Intellectual Quality. Living organisms direct physical objects. In accordance with the same analysis, Social Quality directs Biological Quality. It was because of his submission to Social Quality that Socrates did his duty and fought as a hoplite in defense of Athens at the Battle of Potidaea. Pirsig claims that the execution of Socrates was a failure to recognize that Intellectual Quality is a higher level of Quality than Social Quality. The jury should have recognized its superiority. This is not to say that Intellectual Quality can exist independently of the lower levels that render it possible. In accordance with Polanyi he acknowledges that higher levels are constrained by what lower levels render possible. This is not the claim that a higher level is reducible to what is lower, because the higher directs the lower, it is the acknowledgement that a higher level operates within what the lower levels render possible. This is the reason why utopias fail. It is not the case that saying something should happen is enough to make it happen. Hierarchy explains the possibility of transcendence. Humans exist at every level of existence but it is the possibility of exploring the highest level that makes us human.

Notwithstanding his opposition to Aristotle, what Pirsig is defending is an Aristotelian philosophy. Right action is when we acquire those virtues which facilitate the possibility of us achieving a goal. A virtue is a practice which facilitates correct action. What makes something a correct action are not arbitrary practices but the reality that justifies the correctness of an action. Although Pirsig fails to mention this, Aristotle points out that what makes something morally right cannot be wholly captured by a set of rules. Virtues rely on what Aristotle calls Φρόνηση, [Phronesis] i.e. practical judgements. In his account of what it is to be a good life it is not beliefs which make an action right or wrong. Good judgements discern the order which determines whether something is good. This order is not something we impose on reality, it is an order that we discover. Plato was hostile to the Sophists on the grounds of his claim that truth is not reducible to what is useful. What is true is useful because it is true, it is not true because it is useful. What determines the goodness of an action is Quality. Pirsig agrees with Plato and Aristotle that it is the order of reality which is what makes something good. Pirsig emphasizes however that Quality is an object of continual discovery. This is consistent with Polanyi, except that Polanyi grounds moral judgements in obligations that we impose on ourselves.

What is being defended is the claim that reality is not uniform; it is hierarchical. To be a human being is to exist at more than one level of being. New levels of reality emerge, which in accordance with what Taoist philosophers in China called the Tao 道 (= “the way”) go beyond what we are able to wholly describe. To put it in Western terms, reality is apophatic [= to deny]. Reality not only goes beyond what we can wholly describe, it goes beyond what we can wholly know. Knowing is a fallible process. Pirsig claims that a subject and an object are both Dynamic Quality, which builds on lower levels of reality to create new levels of being. In his view Quality and Care are what he calls the external and internal aspects of the same reality. For Polanyi any account of what it is to be a human being fails to acknowledge the importance that freedom of choice is an inadequate account of what it is to be a human being. Language enables us to create a way of thinking about our existence that goes beyond satisfying immediate needs. It creates a level of existence that we call the spiritual. This is the claim that materialists find so puzzling. How can there be matter and spirit? In the Modern era there was a revival of materialism. The reason why it was revived is that Christianity had de-divinised nature. This account of nature helped prepare the way for modern science. If reality is reduced to what modern science can describe this leaves no room for the spiritual. Matter becomes the raw material upon which we imposed our purposes. We understood ourselves as not only the creators of meaning but the ground of all meaning.

The belief that it is possible for us to be anything we want generates hostility towards that which is higher, on the grounds that it becomes an obstacle to living as we please. Why subject ourselves to the demands made upon us by anything that transcends what it is that we want? In the Enlightenment era it was assumed that God was invented by priests in order to get us to do what they want, or perhaps it is a delusion caused by ignorance or a disordered mind. As part of their opposition to constraints that civilized societies impose, some declared that we ought to try living a more natural existence. In his Discourse on the Arts (1750) Rousseau claims that the arts and sciences have not improved our morals. In his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755) he asserts that we should aspire to create a society in which everybody is equal. The Marquis de Sade was hostile to Christianity. We should live a more natural life. Civilization is an unnatural restriction upon our freedom to do as we wish. To behave in a civilised way is inauthentic. In his immanent philosophy Schopenhauer asserts that nature is not a benevolent order it is an expression of nothing more than Will. This Will has no purpose, all that exists is endless conflict. The best approach is to seek to erase the self and acknowledge that reality is meaningless.

14) Back to Nature

‘The project of radical immanence ends by reversing the project of dominance over nature by man into a domination by nature over man.’

Rémi Brague The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project (2015) Translated by P.Seaton (2018) p.197.

In my opinion there are three main reasons why the two philosophy books which Pirsig wrote became bestsellers. The first is that despite his science and technology background he taught English composition, and so he went to some trouble to make his books work as pieces of literature. Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville and Walt Whitman were all writing literary masterpieces prior to Mark Twain, so Ernest Hemingway was only half serious when he said that American literature began in 1884 when Mark Twain published his novel Huckleberry Finn, nevertheless there is something characteristically American about that novel. The desire to free yourself from the hypocrisies of life as it is lived in the more European influenced cities of the Eastern United States is a clear influence on Pirsig and on some of the writers who influenced him such as the author of “On the Road” Jack Kerouac. I mentioned that his books were popular “despite” his science and technology background, but in my opinion this background also contributes to their success. In the American philosophy of Pragmatism the emphasis is on coming up with new solutions instead of simply following existing customs or what is expected of you given your place in the class system. In the USA what happens to you is more a consequence of what you want to be, and the desire to improve your life.

Pirsig gives character sketches of some of his friends and opponents. Needless to add, it is very selective. He omits to mention for example that his father was a distinguished law professor, or that he eloped with his first wife to Minatitlan in Southern Mexico. His personal reminiscences serve the purpose of illuminating his recognition of the importance of Quality. It is a meditation upon his life with the end of revealing to us what matters in life. This is a familiar strategy in Western literature. From the Ancient World the dialogues of Plato, the Gospels, and the Confessions of Saint Augustine are other examples, and in the Modern era so are the writings of Montaigne, Descartes, and Rousseau. This approach to philosophy is not an approach favoured by the universities. You will not find out much about the life of Saint Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae because he understands his task as supplying a text which defines what it is that reason can and cannot prove about the dogmas imposed by the Catholic Church. Philosophers have often been inspired by scientific discoveries, and sometimes they are the people who have made these discoveries, but usually their scientific knowledge is very superficial. You could make a good case that the Critical Philosophy tradition in the West is in large part a history of various misguided and failed attempts to convert philosophy into a science.

The second reason for the popularity of his books is the demand for self-help books. Socrates claimed that knowing what is a good life for a human being is the primary task of philosophy. In the Ancient World the Epicurean, Stoic, and Neo-Platonists schools all saw themselves as supplying their students with a guide to living. Inspired by the desire to convert philosophy into a science, discussions within universities were conducted in specialised terminology that took many years to master. Discussions in universities in the Middle Ages often took the form of extended debates about the precise meaning of terms, which unlike debates about how we ought to live were of little interest to those outside the Academy. Converting philosophy into a science in practice was generally an adherence to whatever doctrine was temporarily fashionable among academics, only for it to be replaced in the next generation by another transiently fashionable doctrine. The desire to settle philosophy into an orthodoxy was constantly being frustrated by people supplying new opinions, or more often by a return back to various already familiar counter positions appearing in a new form. On the grounds that knowledge is that which progresses some conclude that philosophy is a waste of time.

Although from the outside the universities it may appear that philosophical debates seem little more than struggles for status, with debates about what counts as good philosophy nothing more than clashes between people with different subjective preferences, I agree with Pirsig that there is a standard of excellence against which contributions to philosophy can be judged. Defending free debate Pirsig claims that what is good and bad will always be a topic of discussion. The first question you ask when someone tells you about a book they have read is to ask them if it is any good? You might read what others have said about the book before deciding if you want to read it, but there is no method to which you can appeal that will settle its excellence. What is deemed to have Quality is that which is settled on in the long run. If you read a book by a professor of philosophy you may read what it says with more respect than a pronouncement made by the local drunk, but not necessarily. Marjorie Grene, after she was sacked from her job at the University of Chicago (as it happens by the same professor with whom Pirsig clashed) went on to work as Michael Polanyi’s assistant. She later went on to teach philosophy at UC Davis in California. In her philosophical memoir she claims that the more esteemed and revered a living philosopher is among their fellow academics the more likely in her opinion is that they are a charlatan.

The third reason why Pirsig is popular is that he gives us a more persuasive account of how we experience values than anything a materialist can supply. Whatever nihilists claim it is not the case that judgements of what has Quality are nothing more than arbitrary preferences. Nor do we believe that our judgements are wholly grounded in the properties of matter. Living as a human being and nihilism are incompatible. If it is only the properties of matter that determine what we take to be morally right, the claim that we ought to pay attention to our conscience is an illusion. Nobody lives as if that is the case, even if they want it to be true. In our reflections our conscience, in some more than others, will undermine those beliefs which it may better suit our career to promote. It is not simply a case of submitting to an orthodoxy. We ask ourselves if that orthodoxy conforms to our experience of what is the case. We may still delude ourselves, but not for cynical reasons. An intellectually sensitive person who is dedicated to finding out what is true will challenge an existing orthodoxy if they cease to believe it, even though to do so is to risk being a cause of irritation. We ask ourselves if what we have done or what we are going to do is morally correct, by which I mean is consistent with that which we believe to be correct. We can accept that what we believe to be the case may be false, but it does not follow that this assumption releases us from the duty to say what we believe.

When Pirsig taught at Montana State College one of his colleagues was an anthropologist called Dusenberry, who was fascinated by native American culture. He was told by leading authorities in his academic discipline that for his studies of the American Indians to count as knowledge he should ignore his feelings. Dusenberry rejected this approach. To understand what it is like to be another human being requires empathy. Pirsig agreed with him that a dispassionate approach is delusional. We cannot avoid being guided by our feelings, even if we refuse to acknowledge it. The Native Americans found the claim that anthropologists are dispassionate ridiculous, they felt that the anthropologists who came to study them secretly looked down on them. Native Americans were not opposed to those trying to acquire knowledge, they admired them, but by knowledgeable they did not mean by this somebody who repeated what they had read in a book, they admired those who had acquired their knowledge as a consequence of paying attention to their experience. Because values exist in the form of a relationship between a knower and what is known, if the attempt to wholly articulate what it is to be a value they are reduced into something that is either in a subject or an object, instead of the relationship between them, value disappears.

Saying that values are in objects forgets about the knower, and only focusing on the knower forgets about the object. So what it is to be a value disappears, and is deemed to have no reality. Pirsig seeks to transcend the object/subject and replace it with an account which sees both as part of the same reality. As a consequence of his attempts to introduce some order to the anthropological evidence which Dusenbury had accumulated, Pirsig shifted the focus away from Eastern philosophy and towards native American culture. He claims that the laconic directness and egalitarianism of the native Americans was a greater influence on American life than was generally appreciated. According to Pirsig, as you move towards the East Coast of the USA life gradually becomes more hierarchical and formal, and less equal and natural. From the money he earned from the sales of his first book, Pirsig bought a boat, and in one of his trips he decided to sail down the Hudson river. He noticed mansions built by those who had prospered in the industrial expansion that followed the ending of the American Civil War. It was a period in which it was assumed that technological progress would bring about moral improvement. This era had ended with the First World War. It was realised that advances in technology were improving our ability to destroy ourselves. Technological progress was occurring in a moral vacuum.

In the Romantic period some writers declared that literature ought to replace religion as the source of meaning. Others set out to write about the spiritless world that a revival of materialist philosophy has created. They explored the underground beneath the Crystal Palace of modernity which Victorian engineers were constructing. Despite what Enlightenment inspired advocates of progress were promising, many increasingly doubted the claim that science and technology was making the world a better place. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme in the First World War 20,000 British soldiers were killed. It is clear that while technology was reducing travel times and improving our access to information it was also enhancing our ability to cause suffering and death. With the promise of making the world a better place the Bolshevik coup in Russia created a bloodbath that surpassed even the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars. A value neutral conception of politics is no more adequate than a value neutral conception of science. It fails to recognize that human practices are guided by values. Pirsig and Polanyi both connect nihilism with materialism. In a materialist philosophy what ground do values have other than what we want to be true because it makes us happy.

Pirsig wrote his second book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals as a response to the murder of his son Chris. He was stabbed in the heart outside a Buddhist centre in San Francisco by somebody attempting to get money to fund his drug habit. Pirsig creates a character called Richard Rigel who asks Pirsig if he is claiming that everybody knows what is good even though it is undefinable. He responds that we all live our lives in accordance with Quality but have different conceptions of Quality. Rigel responds that in his work as a lawyer he is very familiar with people who have their own conception of what is right and wrong. We call these people criminals. Rigel claims that when Pirsig was writing his book people all over the USA were committing criminal acts, and seeking to justify these acts via an appeal to their feelings about what was right and wrong. Rigel claims that although Pirsig is keen for us to keep motorcycles in a good state of order he does not direct his attention to the problem of how to keep human societies in a state of good order. His claim that Quality is real but undefinable may be the sort of message people who want to do wherever they feel like doing want to hear, but laws are not only created with the purpose of restraining our desire to do whatever it is we feel like doing, they are also an attempt to define unacceptable behaviour.

Rigel tells Pirsig that a philosophy which encourages people to do whatever they feel like doing is morally depraved. When the native American tribes, that Rousseau celebrated as noble savages, raided their neighbours, they murdered the old people and the children, raped the young woman, and tortured the men. Rousseau had claimed that to be born in a state of nature is to live in a state of freedom, but this is incorrect. We are born utterly dependent on others, and through a process of rewards and punishments it is possible for us to become civilized. In the process of making our lives better we compete with each other, which creates inequalities. The metaphor which conceives of humans as starting off as a blank sheet is a fantasy. Nor is it the case we ought to live however we please. In the Victorian era those philosophers who wrote books about how much better it would be to live lives that were free from all moral restraint did so by relying on the social order that supplied them with the conditions that enabled them to write. A return to nature is a return to savagery. The moralism of the Victorian era, against which the people in the elite subsequently rebelled, was a response to the French Revolution. Instead of bringing about heaven on Earth the attack upon constraint that the French Revolution inspired served only to create chaos, slaughter, and tyranny.

Rejecting an Aristotelian vision of the universe as a hierarchical order in which a Summum Bonum [= the “highest good”] defines how we ought to live, Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651) claimed that human beings are machines determined by passions and aversions. What is natural to us is a state of perpetual war. In order to maximize happiness those with the most power in the best sort of State will, on the understanding that everybody fears death, impose order on everybody else. This peace will be justified by a social contract in which everybody agrees to accept rules of behaviour. We shall be free to live however they want, but this freedom will be constrained by what those with most power require of us in order that social order be maintained. In accordance with his Nominalism Hobbes views language to be a tool which facilitates how we organize our meanings. These meanings have no transcendent ground, they are meanings we impose on reality. Only matter is real. All talk of spiritual realities is a Kingdom of Darkness. Modern science tells us what is real. Locke declared that we should tolerate delusion but reject fanaticism. The conviction that we are able to secure what is true is the delusion that sustained the slaughter and strife of the Wars of Religion. The Pope claimed to be the Vicar of Christ and the Protestants disputed the right of anybody in authority to tell them what to think.

Locke declared that we should recognize that minds are limited and dependent on our experience, and therefore prone to error. Hume concluded that we ought not seek certainty beyond what our intellect can secure. The best way of ensuring human flourishing is to protect our life, liberty, and private property in an arrangement that contrary to Hobbes places restrictions on the power of the State to interfere in our lives. What Hume calls “monkish virtues” are justified by the conviction that true happiness is only possible in some other reality than the one in which we live. Hume seeks rather to reconcile us to our existence. Rousseau claimed that living a good life is not adherence to rules, or teachings contained in texts, it is living in harmony with our feelings. Although he promoted the gospel of self-love he rejected Amour Propre [ = that love of self which seeks fame] because it is too dependent on the approval of others. We should focus instead on Amour de Soi [= autonomous love of self] and the feelings we have of benevolence towards others. We should create societies in which we are free to live as they wish, in a state of harmony with each other instead of in a state of contention. Kant claimed that such a society is possible if instead of viewing others as a means to our happiness we seek instead to view others as ends in themselves.

Instead of conceiving reason as something we impose on our experience, Hegel set out a philosophy in which reason correctly understood reconciles us with reality. The experience of alienation in his philosophy is simply a stage of the spirit as it progresses towards self-understanding. A mind interprets its experience. It seeks to make sense of it. Through a process of negation a mind seeks to reach a better understanding of that which is the case, until it arrives at a state of Absolute Knowledge. By this Hegel did not mean that once it arrives at a state of Absolute Knowledge, mind knows everything there is to know, he meant that it arrives at the understanding that everything is mind. Once we understand this we are reconciled to the contradictions we experience in our lives as we progress towards an understanding of the reality which is not something other than ourselves but is the divinity of we are a part. In accordance with what Henrich Heine claimed to be the true religion of the Germans, Hegel endorses a Pantheism in which everything is God, and for this reason everything is good. This is consistent with Pirsig, except that Pirsig rejects the Rationalist claim that what is real in accordance with what reason determines to be the case. What is real is an object of continual discovery. There is no method which supplies us with the key to understanding.

In his Naturphilosophie Pirsig rejects the claim that every human being is a blank slate. We participate in a hierarchy of levels, each level of which is determined by values. The reason why iron filings move toward a magnet is because they value it. Plants value light because they need light for photosynthesis. Neo-Platonist philosophers, in accordance with Aristotle, believed that the universe exists in the form of a hierarchy of being. The best life for a human is to exist in a state of ἕνωσις [henosis = unity] with the order of the universe, and in this account any experience of alienation will disappear once we integrate our soul within the whole. This cannot be wholly described, it has to be experienced. Pirsig rejects however the notion that what is good is an emanation from an already existing higher level of being. Pirsig In his “Metaphysics of Quality”, and in accordance with Hegel, envisages levels of reality emerging from lower levels. Our interactions with each other not only obey material and biological principles, they are also in accordance with social standards. We are embodied conscious beings living in communities of other humans. Like the Idealist critics of materialism he does not ask himself how consciousness is possible, he simply accepts that it is real.

Unlike the Idealists however he does not assume that consciousness is the only reality, material properties also exist. When the author and literary critic Samuel Johnson was told that Berkeley on the grounds of his assumption that Esse est percipi [= To be is to be perceived] had concluded that only consciousness exists, he kicked a stone and said I refute it thus! Polanyi claims that there are emergent levels of being that cannot be reduced to the properties of matter, but contrary to both Aristotle and Pirsig he does not seek to explain physical properties in terms of purposes. A purpose is something that comes into existence with life. By this he is not claiming that purposes are only biological. What Polanyi calls a transcendent ideal is ultra-biological. It is rendered possible by lower level properties but cannot be wholly reduced to these properties. What it is to lust for example, like all of our emotions, arise as a consequence of our animal nature, but human emotions go beyond our animal nature. We can be morally good in ways that animals cannot understand, and for the same reason humans also have a capacity for evil. To be a human being means that we can empathise with how others are feeling, but this also gives us a capacity for cruelty. Saint Paul notes that possessing knowledge of a better way of life does not mean we will live it.

In the vision that Pirsig offers, what it is to be a value is built into the order of the universe, but in his humanist vision Polanyi claims that living in accordance with moral goodness is a self-set ideal. This does not mean that he is claiming that our judgements about what is moral are arbitrary, no more than it is the case that the self-set ideal of truth renders our truth claims arbitrary. When I say that 1 + 1 = 2 this is a discovery that our experience is able to confirm. It is not the case that 1 = 1 = 3 if that is what we prefer. Without changing his conviction that the universe is good, in his second book Lila Pirsig recognizes that what it is to be good has to be situated within a hierarchy. To create a good society lower levels have to be subordinated to higher levels. Polanyi however claims that it is not the case that moral goodness is wholly a discovery, it is also something we bring into being. As language users we formulate the ideal of living a life of moral goodness, and as human beings we change our existence by seeking to live, imperfectly, in accordance with its demands. Why be moral? Because it reveals the possibility of living a life that is not simply about seeking to get your own way, and imposing your will on others, but exploring a level of reality which changes who we are and creates the possibility of living as human beings.

15) Modernity

‘I have already said enough to put Anglo-American civilization in its true light. It is a product…of two perfectly distinct elements which elsewhere have often been at war with one another…I mean the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.’

Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (1835) I Translated by George Lawrence (1956) p.360.

The Western cultural inheritance is primarily a fusion of Hellenic and Hebraic assumptions passed on within an alphabetic tradition. Claims about what exists and how we should live created the thinking that now dominates humanity. An alphabetic information technology however, at the same time as enhancing our ability to make sense of our experience also carried with it a tendency to deform the knowing process into that which can be articulated. It was assumed that what is true and how we ought to live can be secured. If you seek answers all you need to do is find the right book. If you look for a book and discover that it does not exist, then you should write it yourself, or at least get others to write it for you. In this approach if it cannot be described it is not real. This evolved into the conception that reality is what our descriptions create, which in turn became the claim that all attempts to give meaning to our experience has equal validity. Who says that your description is the one which everybody else should be forced to follow? This in turn became the claim that what is right and wrong is nothing more than what those with power impose on everybody else. We should create a society in which everybody has the freedom to live how they wish to live, in accordance with their values.

The popularity of the materialist philosophy that some Ancient Greeks advocated faded away in Late Antiquity due to its failure to account for the order of the universe. With the emergence of modern science it returned to prominence. When Darwin published his account of how life evolves this was a cause of celebration among materialists because of his claim that he is able to account for order in nature without the need to postulate a designer. This has been described as the Darwinian Revolution. The claims that a new way of thinking is revolutionary, in the sense of radical change, became a favoured metaphor in modernity. Economic historians claimed that an Agricultural Revolution created the wealth that rendered civilization possible. Historians of the Middle Ages talked about a Papal Revolution in which the Church, inspired by among other things a revival of Roman Law, sought to create a hierarchical Christian political order. The French Revolution was inspired by those who believed that instead of endorsing a hierarchical order we should create a new order in which we are all equal. Relying on the new knowledge that scientists were discovering and engineers were applying, we no longer have to wait for Jesus Christ to make a just world.

The failure of Darwinian evolution to explain the origin of life, and the inadequacy of its explanation of how it is that complex organisms come into existence, now makes the jubilation over the Darwinian theory of evolution faintly comic, although the belief that our existence is nothing more than a struggle between races darkens the mood. When cosmologists discovered that the universe has a beginning, and that without a particular set of physical constants life would be impossible, materialists via a leap of faith relied on the assumption that our universe is one of an infinite number of other universes. There must be an infinite number if the sheer implausibility of our universe having the properties it has is to be rendered intelligible. Not the least failure of materialism as a philosophy is its vision of what it is to be a human being as nothing more than a machine for pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. This ignores the importance that the pursuit of meaning has in our lives. On the grounds of an appeal to the authority of science it undermines the practice of science. If truth is nothing more than what we want others to believe, where does this leave the claim that it is a fact that everything can be reduced to laws of physics? It would be better if we accepted that science is a practice which is orientated by the pursuit of truth.

Instead of the State being conceived as an arrangement justified by a divine order, in the Modern era a conception of the State as a value neutral arrangement for maximizing individual pleasure was advocated. This had to confront the challenge that planners do not have the knowledge they need in order to render such an order possible. Some concluded from this that in order to ensure that people have the freedom to live as they wish, limits ought to be placed on the power of the State. After the Second World War the Beatniks in the USA viewed social conformity as a threat to our freedom to discover meaning for ourselves. They rejected the claim that science supplies us with all the knowledge there is to know. Nor did they accept that we are nothing more than machines for maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Humans are beings who via the power of love can transform the world into a place where conflict disappears. Contrary to Christianity our lives are not a vale of tears, with the right understanding of existence we can all be happy. Pirsig claims that everything is good, and the right use of technology can help us realize that goodness. With the right philosophy we can create a society in which our desires are satisfied, and we live in harmony with each other.

In ancient Athens the place where the human quest for meaning was realised was the Polis, and when this political arrangement was replaced by an imperial order, worship of local deities was replaced by worship of a universal God. The Gospels claim that Satan is the ruler of our world, but God will save us. In the Modern era Non-Conformist Christians, in accordance with the assumption that the life of the spirit transcends political arrangements, declared that a good State lets us live lives that are in accordance with what our conscience tells us is the right way to live. In this vision rights are what God gives us as a consequence of the fact that we are persons with the capacity to choose. In defence of an authoritarian State some declared that rights are not divine in origin, we ought to live in accordance with them because they are grounded in what reason justifies. The State is envisaged as being the means through which it is possible to create a new society in which everybody is equal, with every other social order a time of darkness when an unequal distribution of power meant that all those without power were exploited. Imposing equality deprives us of our freedom to live however we wish, but we happily accept direction by the State because submission to the State gives us the freedom to submit to reason.

Realist philosophers in the Medieval universities promoted a vision in which our intellect is able to comprehend the order of the cosmos. Our task is to know our place in its order. It is on the grounds of their understanding of this order that philosophers should tell us how we should live. Some Christians however supplied an alternative account in which it is divine commandments not reason that informs us how we ought to live. The only way to know what is morally right is to know his will. If we want to find out about the universe which God created, instead of seeking for the answers in reason we should study our experience. In this approach knowing is not a process of arguing about abstract concepts. We are situated beings who, relying upon and guided by our experience, use concepts as tools which help us organize our experience. We organize our experience in ways that suit our purposes. These purposes are not derived from nature, we impose them in accordance with our will. The British philosopher Duns Scotus claimed that it is the haecceity [the property of being unique] which is primary, and its reality can be experienced but not wholly stated. Reality consists of individuals not universals. We are individuals. We seek to impose our will. For Nominalists language helps us achieve our purposes. It does not describe a rational order to which we must submit; to be human is to decide how we are going to live.

On the basis of a Realist understanding of universals, which conceived universals as thoughts in the mind of God, Scholastics assumed that reason can supply us with a correct understanding of nature. For the German Idealists however the task of the philosopher is to explain how mind imposes order. Not via empirical inquiry into psychology, but on the grounds of an appeal to the understanding that philosophy provides. Some Christian theologians opposed the claim that what it is to be a human being derives from our place in a rational order. The assumption that there is such a thing as formal and final causes was rejected. Instead of studying Aristotle we should endeavour to find out through empirical inquiry about the universe which God decided to create. It is assumed that because of his benevolence God has created a universe we can understand. Via the concept of divine illumination Augustine claims that God guides our understanding. Understanding requires faith. For Hegel, science becomes possible because the universe is rational. According to Schopenhauer it is not the case that nature is benevolent, it is blind will engaging in a process of endless and irrational struggle. Although they offer different accounts they both view philosophy as supplying us with a correct way of understanding what we observe in the natural world.

Modernity arguably begins when people start to reject the assumption that everything of importance has already been discovered. Renaissance philosophers saw themselves as reviving ancient wisdom, but advocates of Modernity conceived human beings as engaged in a continual process of discovery. It is not about reviving ancient wisdom, it is about making new discoveries. In time this evolved into the claim that the Ancients have nothing to teach us, and that what is needed is new knowledge that can be secured and justified via our use of the right method. On the basis of this knowledge a new social order can be created which replaces the old order. Denying the existence of any divine reality, Marx believed that a society in which everybody is equal does not come into existence as a consequence of the will of God. The only allegiance we owe is to ourselves. Technology enables us to create a new order. Contrary to a vision that seeks to reduce everything to material causes, it was speculated that although it was foreign invasions which caused the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire, its deeper cause was a collapse in faith in its ideals. I am not sure if the Roman Empire can be described as an idealistic enterprise, according to Saint Augustine it was driven by nothing more than lust for power, but the collapse of civilization was real enough, and it was revived by relying on spiritual ideals.

Pirsig claims that despite our material prosperity, to be alive in the Modern era is to exist in a state of crisis, and that crisis is spiritual in origin. In his first book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig looks to Eastern philosophy to provide us with a solution to this crisis. In his second book Lila he shifts his attention to native American culture. In both approaches however he claims to be rebelling against the West. He opposes the Great Books tradition and seeks instead to celebrate technology. He agrees with opponents of the Western tradition that it is arrogant and elitist. We ought to have the freedom to pursue their own conception of the good. Contrary to egalitarianism however, Pirsig grounds right and wrong in an order which transcends the subject. It has a divine foundation. In the Enlightenment era some claimed that God is a concept thought up by people who want to tell others how they should live. Marx claimed that we are inevitably evolving towards a society in which everybody will be free to live as we please, and rejected any account which requires us to submit to anything other than what we choose to impose on ourselves. We impose values on the world, they are not a reality for us to discover. The only reality is material properties, and the will to impose on these material properties any order that we desire.

This is not the approach which Pirsig takes. He is a critic of modernity and takes us back to the approach taken by Plato and Aristotle, but he reinterprets it in ways that make their claims more amenable to somebody living in the Modern era. The Ancient Greeks liked to tell a story about Thales, who they designated as their first philosopher, falling into a well while contemplating the heavens. They liked this story because they approved of the fact that Thales viewed the successful achievement of mundane tasks as lower in importance than contemplating the eternal. Pirsig rejects the assumption that the successful achievement of everyday tasks is in conflict with philosophy. Both are an opportunity to explore Quality. In accordance with Plato and Aristotle however he claims that it is not human beings who create what is right and wrong. What grounds moral rightness is the order of the universe. Contrary to Socrates, who sought knowledge via the analysis of concepts, Pirsig claims that the ground of what determines what is right and wrong cannot be wholly described, it can only be experienced. What exists cannot be wholly captured by any description. What is real goes beyond what any articulation can wholly describe. He endorses the claim that reality is not a static order, what it is to know is a process of continual discovery. Like Hegel he claims that the universe ought to be comprehended as a dynamic order that is evolving towards a higher understanding.

In Critical Philosophy it is assumed that via a process of doubt the objective can be separated from the subjective. Polanyi and Pirsig reject this claim and view knowing as a process guided by what cannot be wholly described. In their approach nihilism is the product of a false account of knowledge. It is assumed that to count as knowledge everything has to be described. This assumption generates nihilism because if values cannot be wholly described, which is what Polanyi and Pirsig both claim, and only that which can be wholly described counts as knowledge, values end up being viewed as having no ground other than arbitrary will. The claim that values are wholly subjective derives from a false account of knowledge in which the divine ground of values is replaced with ourselves. Endorsing modernity, Polanyi claims that humans create the concept of God, but he does not on those grounds view God as an arbitrary creation. We are exploring a higher reality. It is this orientation which is responsible for the emergence of the human. In his account Polanyi asserts that all knowing is personal, and our awareness of what is the case cannot be wholly captured by articulation. Both Polanyi and Pirsig share this conviction. Both endorse the assumption that we try to make sense of our experience via the guidance supplied by our tacit knowledge.

Pirsig goes too far however when he implies that the belief that only that which can be described counts as knowledge is the whole substance of the Western tradition. The Neo-Platonists (which were only labelled as such in the C19th) claimed that the universe is an emanation from a single ineffable source. This ultimate ground cannot be described. There is also a mystical tradition in Christian theology which claims that to know God is to be guided by what we are unable to wholly describe. This assumption is as much part of the Western tradition as the assumption that if it cannot be described it does not count as knowledge. Pirsig ignores this, and assumes that Western philosophy reduces to Critical Philosophy. It would be more accurate to say that Critical Philosophy has been a constant temptation in the Western tradition, especially in the Modern era. The response should not be to repudiate the claim that language supplies us with the power to describe reality in a way that is unavailable to other animals. We should instead seek to situate what takes place in knowing within a human context. In other words, to be an adequate account it would be better if we returned back to the humanist core of Western civilization, and resisted the claim that we can have absolute knowledge.

I claim that the defining feature which distinguishes Western civilization from other civilizations is its humanism. According to the Jews we are made in the likeness of God, and in their approach to religion they emphasize personal commitment. In Christianity the claim that all knowing is personal is radicalized into the claim that God became a man. We are not divine but what is divine took a human form. In its humanism Christianity emphasizes human imperfection, and the consequent importance of forgiveness. The Buddhist tradition also promotes compassion, but contrary to humanism it views humanity as something to be overcome. It denies the reality of the self, which it takes to be an illusion. In Taoism a wise person is somebody who acknowledges that we are part of a cosmic order. Both approaches emphasize passivity. Few would deny that Western civilization is now the dominant world culture, but this does not amount to the claim that every educated person is familiar with the poems of Catullus, the paintings of Velasquez, or the novels of Leo Tolstoy. What is meant by this claim is that Western science and politics are now dominant. People may reject them but they do so with knowledge of what it is that they are rejecting. Its opponents claim that the West became dominant because of its imperialism, and they respond by declaring that all human cultures are equal. This however is a Western claim. It is not a view shared for example by Islam.

In my view the origins of modernity lie in North-West Europe, and more specifically in England. A conception of the State was developed which had the defence of private property, trade via free markets, and the protection of individual autonomy as its primary purpose. The assumption that science enables us to understand how the universe works was accepted, but the assumption that we arrive at our understanding via pure reason was rejected. God could have created a different universe. Scientists have the task of finding out about the order of our particular universe. The assumption that we ought to be Christians was defended, but the assumption that our religious beliefs are supplied to us and justified by the Catholic Church was rejected. It was assumed that we should live in a society governed by laws, but the assumption that justice can be deduced from universal principles was rejected. In the English Common Law justice is an object of continual discovery. The law is that which emerges as a consequence of judgements made by juries and judges in specific cases. The function of the State is to supply and secure a political order that enhances the possibility of discovery. This was extended into the claim that all knowledge arises from experimental inquiry.

In his book The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy (1471) Sir John Fortescue claimed that the key difference between the English and French political system is that before imposing a tax the king of England must obtain the support of a national Parliament, whereas Parliaments in France are regional assemblies. In the C17th the English Parliament was elevated to the highest political authority. Only those with property were allowed to vote, in accordance with the conviction that those who supply most of the revenue of the State ought to be given a say in how it is raised and spent. This electorate in this system operates as a check on the agency of those who view themselves as entitled to rule. Individuals and institutions are given the autonomy to pursue their purposes without being directed by the State. The State has defined tasks. One of its functions is to issue sound money. In a free market system the State does not determine what has value, what has value is determined by what free markets discover via a price mechanism. This accords with the assumption that value is something that is continually being discovered: in Neo-Classical economics value is not something derived from the order of the universe, it derives from subjective preference.

The English language (unlike the French language) was not regulated by an Academy. As a consequence of the Viking and Norman invasions English grammar was greatly simplified, but because it was unregulated its vocabulary greatly increased. English literature is a tradition in which its writers prefer to explore individual characters rather than general types. In this respect the medieval writer Geoffrey Chaucer can be seen as a forerunner of William Shakespeare, whose plays were described by Hegel as characterised by individuals in a continual process of inventing themselves. The attacks on the Church by the author who wrote Piers the Plowman (a contemporary of Chaucer) parallel the views of his contemporary John Wycliff, who encouraged scholars to translate the books of the Bible into English “so that every ploughboy can read it for themselves”. Undermining the authority of the Church, Wycliffe denied that priests in Holy Communion transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. The aim was to encourage thinking for yourself. The Quaker George Fox (1624-91) asserted “You will say Christ says this, and the Apostles say that, but what doth thou say?” It is not what priests tell you to do that grounds what is morally right and wrong, you have to discover what is morally right and wrong for yourself.

The religious and philosophical reform movement associated with John Wycliffe and William of Ockham took place in the C14th. The former planted the seeds of the Reformation, and latter created the Via Moderna Nominalist philosophy. Luther in C16 Germany challenged the authority of the Pope, but his challenge was a repetition of the questions which John Wycliffe had posed in the C14th. In histories of Western philosophy Descartes is frequently described as the founder of modern philosophy, but the origins of modern philosophy can be traced back to England three centuries earlier. Descartes was a new start, but his approach is better understood as a Rationalist attempt to rescue philosophy from its Nominalist critics. In the C17th another wave of modernity became influential. A conception of science as a process of experimental inquiry rather than an appeal to the authority of Aristotle culminated in the Philosopiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) by Isaac Newton. The “New Science” that Galileo Galilei defended against the Church was an attack upon Aristotle, but this opposition can be traced back via John Buridan (1301-62) and Nicole Oresme (1320-82) in Paris, to the approach to science that was pioneered in England by the C14th Oxford Calculator school. Mathematics was taken to be a tool of experimental inquiry.

A bottom up rather than a top down approach to knowing has its political equivalent in the English Glorious Revolution (1688), which rejected monarchical absolutism. Those who were enthusiasts for the French Revolution were inspired by political changes which had taken place in England. The political approach that had evolved in England however was exported to France minus its Christian context. Instead of conceiving freedom as the freedom to worship God in whatever way we believe to be appropriate, this was converted into the claim that freedom is what reason is able to secure via an appeal to the concept of universal rights. Instead of equality as everybody equally subject to the law, it became the assumption that everybody should be equal. In the C19th there was an economic and literary transformation which also has its origins in England. The wealth that the Industrial Revolution generated created a culture that was sustained by popular demand rather than royal or aristocratic patronage. The shift in the English novel away from formal literary structure and stock characters to individuals engaging with particular experiences, both ordinary and extraordinary, is an approach to literature that was adopted by French and Russian novelists, and via cinema became universal.

16) God

‘The common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy is the problem of divine law. They solve that problem in a diametrically opposed manner.’

Leo Strauss The Rebirth of Political Rationalism (1989) p.248.

The claim that modernity began in England can only be a partial answer to what is after all a complex development, but that modernity is a Western development is harder to deny. In the Western tradition what is good is discoverable, either through our capacity to reason or because we are supplied with revelations. The Modern era emphasizes that what is good is an object of continual discovery. It is not simply a case of passively submitting to reason or revelation, what is true and just and beautiful are objects of continual discovery. The realisation that it is not possible to know when and where these discoveries will be made, or who will make them, shifts the focus to the individuals who make them. This element has always been present in the Western tradition, but the Modern era explored the possibility that it is our agency which is decisive. The Ancient Greeks celebrated our capacity for understanding, and Christianity accepted that personal agency creates the possibility of denial. We may rebel against being told what to do. Why should we do as we are told? Other people are annoying if they do not do what I want them to do, or they have beliefs that I do not endorse. When we are born only my feelings count. A logical extension of this is having to acknowledge that there is a reality which transcends what we want to be true is an insult to our pride. In this approach reality should be in accordance with what I want to be the case.

One way of dealing with this insult to our pride that is caused by reality not being the way we want it to be is to claim that at least I know what is true. What makes me special is that I know what is the case. This may be generalized into the assertion that what separates us from the rest of nature is that we are able to understand it. How do we know that our claims are true? In the pre-modern period God guarantees the truth of our claims. We are his special creation. This knowledge restores our dignity. Does this satisfy our ego? What we are is determined by what is the case. On the grounds of this knowledge some sought to use this knowledge to degrade our humanity. We are nothing special, all we are is determined by the properties of matter. The theological equivalent is this is the claim that God is everything and we are nothing. All we can do is submit to what is the case. The claim that we can know everything and the claim that we know nothing are contrary claims that rely on the same assumption. We are special because we can know, even if we reduce that knowledge to the claim that we cannot know anything. On what grounds is this claim justified? In the Modern era some began to claim that the ultimate reality is will. In its extreme form this became the claim that we create what is real, and so we can be anything we want. Knowing is not a process of discovery, it is a process of creation.

Pirsig rejects this approach and claims that what makes something right and wrong is the reality which brings us into being. The ground for value is built into reality. Conceiving values as something we impose on reality implies that morality has no ground other than what we want to be the case. He does not say that it is Christianity which is responsible for this conception of morality, but in opposition to Christianity he seeks to re-sacralize nature. We should accept the goodness of reality and not seek to replace it with our own conception of what is right and wrong. Materialism fails to recognize Quality. It cannot even explain how scientific inquiry is possible. Science is not an accumulation of random guesses. This ignores that our judgements (in science as well as everything else) are guided by Quality. The belief that values are subjective is his explanation for what is going wrong with modernity. We cannot be human and live as if nihilism is true. Polanyi says that we can invert values and with moral passion claim that they are nothing more than what we want to be true, but the desire to deconstruct values is still a personal commitment. It is grounded in the conviction that we know what is the case and that others should accept what we know. You can claim that what it is to be a human being can be reduced to the properties we share with a pebble, without repudiating what it is to be human, what makes us special.

In Modern philosophy it is assumed we can make any society we want, it is only a question of cui bono i.e. whose interests are being served. We impose meaning on a meaningless reality. The Christian conviction that it is possible to save our soul becomes the claim that we can be anything we want; our wants become the sole ground of value. Marxism replaces love of God with the rejection of any world in which we are not all equal. It replaces Original Sin, that we oppose God and think only of ourselves, with the claim that we ought to re-make the world into something that satisfies our desires. All such visions are utopian, which is to say they are a nowhere place, because any satiation of desires is always temporary. That is why Buddhists seek nirvana [= to extinguish] which is a state in which all desire is extinguished. Schopenhauer endorsed this aspiration on the grounds that this is the only way we can escape from reality. This is not the position which Pirsig advocates. In his vision reality is good. We do not decide what is right and wrong, the reality into which we are born already determines it for us. Our task as human beings is to live at the highest level of consciousness. To live in accordance with what he called intellectual Quality. Not only is it the case that reducing human beings to what we have in common with a pebble is a mistake, we have the potential to exist at the highest level that is possible in the universe.

There is an obvious connection between Liberalism and the claim that moral judgements are wholly subjective. It is assumed that we should have the freedom to pursue our own values. Marxism adds some additional Christian elements, such as the claim that we are progressing to an end time in which the existing order will be destroyed and replaced with a new order in which justice shall arrive from the hills like the waters of a stream. Liberalism appeals to universal rights secured by reason, and defends a morally neutral conception of the State. Only give to the State what we require from it in order to bring about a free society. If we accept these rules we shall be saved by material prosperity. This vision is less utopian than Marxism, but it is a matter of degree. The Catholic German philosopher Carl Schmitt describes Liberalism as a secularized theology, in which human rights take the place of divine commandments. Inspired by Thomas Hobbes, he decided to support the Nazi Party, on the grounds that in his view the State needs to become authoritarian if we are to avoid getting into a state of endless war. Humans should be forced to submit to collective purposes. In his opinion the best form of submission is a society in which everybody acts in accordance with the demands imposed on them by the Catholic Church.

Liberalism is attacked by the Right on the grounds that making freedom the supreme value destroys tradition, hierarchy, and excellence, replacing it with a procedural neutrality which undermines cohesion, moral order, and cultural continuity. In a materialist account values are real only insofar as they are reducible to processes in which morality does not feature. All moral judgements are nothing more than the struggle for power. The attack upon Liberalism from the Left is that struggle between classes creates unequal societies. The Bolsheviks asserted that morality is nothing more than a desire to impose your will on others. They believed that the logic of history is such that we will inevitably end up in a social arrangement in which everybody is equally free to pursue their own purposes. The appeal to materialism in this account is simply the desire to deny that there is any source of authority higher than our will. All appeals to morality are repudiated as nothing more than an attempt to impose our will. If everybody had the freedom to live however they wished, this would create paradise. If you believe that you will believe anything. It relies on the assumption that reality can be anything we want it to be. Do they believe it? I think they want a society in which they get their own way. They enjoy telling how others should live, via an appeal to egalitarianism.

Pirsig claims that Quality is not an arbitrary fiction, it is a reality to which we submit. He discovered that the word rta [= rightness] in India meant cosmic order. In the Greek language an “a” sound is sometimes added before a word. There is therefore a link between the Greek word areté [= excellence] and the words aristocrat and arithmetic, and ritual and right. In this vision a society which justifies itself on the grounds of an appeal to freedom as an end in itself will inevitably destroy itself. A good society is a society in which its participants live in accordance with Quality. If everything is determined by Quality what prevents me from saying that whatever I want is right? That something is right because I want to do it. To defend himself against the criticism that a society in which everybody has the freedom to pursue their own conception of Quality is a lawless society, Pirsig revises his claim by asserting that all values have to be placed in a hierarchy. Like the philosopher Max Scheler he envisages values as existing in the form of a hierarchy. The best sort of society is a society which realises the potential of what is highest in our nature. Everything is what ought to be the case, but Quality is dynamic, and in the process of cosmic emergence levels of being emerge which direct lower levels. In this hierarchical cosmology it is not the case that everything is equally good. There are higher and lower values.

Rejecting the claim that Quality can be wholly captured in descriptions, Pirsig urges us to accept that we are servants of that which cannot be wholly described. Prior to description there is a non-intellectual awareness of reality. The English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelly claims that poetry can lift “the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects as if they were not familiar”, and in the same vein the English Romantic poet William Blake asserts that “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing will appear to man as it is, infinite.” In the Sixties psychedelic drugs became fashionable. Pirsig tells us that the native American tribe that he visited with Duesberry had rituals which involved the consumption of peyote, which contains mescaline, a naturally occurring psychedelic. Pirsig set himself the task of correcting what he described as the Western “squareness” of reducing everything into descriptions. We should supplement descriptions with an appreciation of the ineffable nature of reality. If everything is reduced into what can be described, the experience of Quality goes missing. The desire to return back to a state of nature, and the interest in Eastern philosophy, are both attempts to revive a sense of immediacy.

The American philosopher William James claims that there is an inevitable discrepancy between concepts and reality, because concepts are static and discontinuous whereas what is real is dynamic. Pirsig recognizes that Quality can exist in the form of static structures, but he claims that Dynamic Quality builds on Static Quality and creates higher levels of being. In a materialist account inorganic-biological patterns are reducible to the properties of matter, and values are arbitrary social-intellectual constructions. In this account the inorganic-biological is objective, and the social-intellectual is subjective. Pirsig claims that this approach relies upon a false subject-object philosophy. If you reject this dichotomy the determinism versus freedom conflict disappears. Everything is Quality. In order for it to be understood correctly science needs to be justified by the right philosophy. He claims that once we recognize that everything is Quality we can acknowledge that science and technology are practices grounded in the pursuit of value. In his philosophy Quality is an immanent reality that is not wholly definable. He rejects a transcendent conception of God, and implies that the divine is present in all reality. This approach is Pantheism. It is a metaphysical understanding in which God is synonymous with everything.

In the Ancient World philosophers supplied four main accounts of what it is to be divine. By the Ancient World, I mean the Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian cultural legacy. In the first approach what we call God is the order of the universe and this order is good. Everything in the universe is determined and everything is in accordance with that order. The second approach denies the existence of any divine order. Everything is in a state of chaos. Insofar as there is any order it is temporary and arises by chance. Humans are transient beings and therefore we ought to make maximising our pleasure our priority. There is no ground for happiness other than which gives us pleasure. In the third approach God created the universe and gave human beings the freedom to choose. To recognize his role in creating everything we should worship him. We ought to follow his instructions. Although it is possible to make sense of the natural order, the divine creator of our universe exceeds what we can know. In the fourth approach the universe was created by an evil demiurge (dēmiurgós = craftsman). In this account the evil material world will eventually be replaced. In his support for the first of these approaches Pirsig claims that his philosophy is in accordance with Zen Buddhism. Instead of attempting to wholly describe the universe we ought to submit to what Quality disclosed to us in our immediate experience.

Richard Gelwick invited Pirsig to attend a conference on Polanyi he was arranging to take place at Harvard University. In his response to this request to attend the conference Pirsig claimed that he had not heard of Polanyi before (which is not true because he had sent Polanyi an inscribed first edition copy of his first book) but after reading him he was delighted to discover the convergence in their thought. He therefore accepted the invitation to attend the 1991 Polanyi conference. At the end of the conference Pirsig gave a short speech in which he said that in the process of reading and hearing about what Polanyi had written “he felt like Robinson Crusoe who had come upon footprints in the sand and discovered that he was not alone, but someone else was also working on the same problem.” A few months later however Pirsig wrote to Gelwick and told him that after further reflection he had come to the conclusion that although Polanyi had arrived at similar conclusions their philosophical views are not wholly compatible. In Polanyi personal agency is central. All knowing is personal. Pirsig however is seeking to supply a metaphysics in which Quality is foundational. In this vision what it is to be a person is reducible and wholly determined by the reality that Pirsig calls Quality.

I believe that Pirsig is correct. Although they rely on many of the same assumptions, this is a key difference. Pirsig is implicitly hostile to Christianity, whereas Polanyi describes himself as a Christian. In Pirsig, Quality is immanent in the universe. He defends an approach in which the centrality of the person is replaced with a conception in which everything is determined by Quality. In Christianity morality has a transcendent foundation: faith “overcomes the world”. An action is moral not because it is in accordance with nature but because it is in accordance with what is willed to be the case. Christianity de-sacralizes nature and elevates the person. We are free agents and make commitments. In his youth Polanyi was a materialist, but in 1913 he read The Brothers Karamazov and became a Christian. In a letter he wrote to Karl Manheim in 1944 Polanyi explained that after 1913 his faith in God never left him, although he believed in the divinity of Christ only in rare moments. In his philosophical writings Polanyi claims that it is our commitment to set-set ideals that creates the obligations that we endeavour to satisfy. These commitments are not grounded in any natural order, they are trans-natural integrations which create a new level of reality. This reality is not a creation grounded in nothing but will, it explores the highest possible level of existence.

Pirsig and Polanyi are in agreement that the universe is not a static order; it is dynamic and layered. Over time higher levels of reality emerge which are built over existing layers. In the account which Polanyi defends the highest levels of existence possible via our capacity for articulation. This is reminiscent of the approach taken by Hegel. The universe has an order which evolves the capacity to reflect upon itself. Polanyi wrote “I have suspected myself for a long time of actually being a Hegelian, but to me he seemed to be always much more crazy…I have begun to doubt that. The amount of my craziness seems to approximate his.” but in my opinion it is Pirsig who is closer to Hegel. Both conceive human beings as executors of Being. In accordance with his Christian assumptions Polanyi emphasizes the importance of personal agency. In his account humans emerge as a consequence of our pursuit of self-set ideals, which indwelling in language renders possible. Transcendent ideals do not describe any natural order. To be a human being is to exist in a state of in-betweenness that it is not possible to wholly reduce into either physical or mental properties. What renders humanity possible is the cosmological emergence of a combination of mental and physical properties.

17) Pantheism

‘As Jacobi says, in an explication of the whole matter, “it is undeniably the spirit of speculative philosophy…to make unequal the natural man’s equal certainty of these two propositions: I am, and there are things outside me. It seeks to subjugate one of these propositions to the other…in order that…just one truth may be seen.” In these terms, says Jacobi, “the two chief ways of philosophizing, materialism and idealism have the same goal: the attempt to explain everything.”’

Thomas McFarland Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969) p.346.

The cry liberté, égalité, fraternité was a favourite declaration of intent among supporters of the French Revolution, and in the C19th each of the words of this slogan inspired the distinctive political movements of Liberalism, Socialism, and Nationalism. The State was re-imagined as a contract between citizens in which politicians are given power in return for a promise that they would defend their rights. If they failed to deliver on this promise the people were then justified in replacing them. In democratic States the property requirements for those deemed eligible to vote were gradually relaxed, until the franchise was extended to include every adult. Conservative opponents of Liberalism, such as the Comte de Maistre in France, sought to return everything back to the social arrangements which were in place before the French Revolution; not because it was a paradise, but on the grounds that in spiritual matters people accepted the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. De Maistre claimed that it was Enlightenment thinkers who prepared the way for the French Revolution, and this event served the providential purpose of revealing the consequences of atheism. In the French National Assembly in 1789 those who supported tradition, the monarchy, and limiting the power of the State sat on the right side of the presiding officer, whereas those politicians who were in support of radical change, equality, and an expansion of the power of the State sat on his left.

The British conservative politician Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution but he also rejected the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, endorsing instead the English Protestant Glorious Revolution of 1688. His friend Adam Smith was enthusiastic about the potential of free markets to increase happiness. Not only would free markets generate new wealth, those who were successful in business would form a new elite. This elite would not be hereditary but determined by talent. The State would not direct people except to maintain the existing arrangements, and defend them from attack by its enemies. Adam Smith wanted everybody to have the freedom to pursue their own purposes, and in accordance with benevolence, an instinct which he took to be natural to human beings, the "invisible hand” of the market will adjust between the plurality of demands that exist within a Civil Society. Utilitarian philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham, endorsed any action that could be justified by an appeal to the principle of maximizing happiness. This may justify intervention by the State. Marx, on the grounds of human equality, aspired to abolish private property. The State would initially impose egalitarianism, until after a process of education, or should I say a process of re-education, creates a society in which everybody accepts equality.

In his philosophy Marx, like Hegel, repudiates any attempt to separate facts from values. What people value is determined by what is the case. In his view what is the case is determined by who has power. In an egalitarian society the State will ensure that everybody has the freedom to live as they wish. There is no transcendent ground for values, the only ground for values is power. Hegel takes what is the case to be the progress of the Absolute Mind towards self-understanding. For Marx however what is the case is what our technology renders possible. In an egalitarian society any alienation from reality will be abolished. We impose our will on the world and make it submit to our purposes. Being at home in the world does not arise, as the philosopher Hegel claimed, from the realisation that we are all participants in a divine order, it comes from the recognition that the social order is our creation, and we can make any order we want. What determines what is the case is not thoughts, it is who has power. Engineers shall make a world in which everybody is able to live as they wish. Those who Communism are only motivated by class interest. If you are privileged by the social system you will defend it. Radicals will do whatever is required in order to bring about progress towards a society in which everybody is free to live as they wish.

Radicals are not constrained by appeals to transcendent ideals such as truth or justice. What happens will be in accordance with laws of history. What these laws assert is that society will be organised to serve the interests of whoever has the most power. To bring about a state of equality all existing traditions should be replaced, on the grounds that they serve the interests of the previous elite, and replaced by a Communist vision. This is not utopianism, Communism is inevitable. Those who bring about a Communist society are justified in using any means possible to undermine the norms of the existing society, in order that a new society can be created in which the needs and pleasures of the many are satisfied, instead of the needs and pleasures of the few. Whereas Christianity sets up the ideal of the rich giving to the poor, Communism endorses a conception in which the poor take from the rich. Whereas free markets seek to facilitate wealth creation, Communism seeks to take the existing wealth and redistribute it. In Christianity only God can create a perfect world, but in Communism we make our own history. There is no order which serves as an object of discovery in a fallible process of inquiry, there is only the order we impose on reality in order so that it submits to our will.

Pirsig and Polanyi are both keen to endorse the value of science and technology, but they do not endorse them on the grounds that they enable us to do whatever we want, they endorse them on the grounds that they serve spiritual purposes. They deny the claim that science carries with it the requirement to accept materialism. Science is a practice that is grounded in a spiritual commitment to truth. The end of truth is not justified on the grounds of an appeal to whatever services our interests. It is an end in itself. Justice is also a spiritual end. It is not the case that justice is grounded in nothing more than power. A society which justifies itself on the grounds of an appeal to the notion that only power is real inevitably leads to tyranny. Far from creating a free and equal society, every Communist society is a return back to a Feudal society, except with different slogans and different people in change. Even that is too generous, because in the Middle Ages rulers were accountable to God for their actions. The Church advocated worship of God and saw itself as the advocate and guardian of Christian values. Protestantism was not a rejection of these spiritual standards, it was a critique of the Catholic Church as a defender of these values. Change was advocated on the grounds of an appeal to ideals.

Pirsig and Polanyi both deny that there is a royal road to absolute knowledge. Truth and justice are ideals that can never be wholly described, they are objects of continual inquiry. They cannot, or at least should not, be settled by central planners. All knowing is situated and therefore fallible, and the best way of facilitating inquiry is to protect the freedom to discover. Nor is it the case that reality is anything we want it to be, our actions are constrained by the conditions which render it possible. We cannot create any reality we want, and any attempt to do so if it ignores these constraints will be a failure. It will not only fail to deliver, it will kill the spirit of innovation and replace it with failures that no amount of propaganda will be able to convince us are triumphs. To disconnect yourself from reality is not to produce a paradise, on the contrary it is to produce a society in which lies cannot disguise the failure to engage with what is the case. Discoveries about the good, and true, and beautiful, cannot be wholly predicted. The claim that if only we could create powerful enough machines we can make the world into anything we want is a delusion. We would still be left with human beings. The logic of this argument is that humans get in the way of utopia and should therefore be replaced by machines. At best it will be a world run by and for machines. What it is in reality is a world in which the spiritual values which humans bring into existence are eliminated and replaced with nothing.

At this point a difference between Polanyi and Pirsig becomes evident. It is the difference between a pagan and Christian understanding. Pirsig is in effect endorsing a return back to the pagan philosophy of the Ancient Greeks. Not the Paganism of the Pre-Socratics but the Paganism of Plato and Aristotle. This commitment is not immediately obvious because he frames his philosophy as an attack upon the West. He gives you the impression that in accordance with Nietzsche and Heidegger he is rejecting Western civilization and advocating a return back to something more authentic. But what he is actually doing is endorsing Plato and Aristotle, but supplementing their approach with an account that justifies continuous inquiry. Pirsig endorses an account which grounds Quality in more than one level of reality. We ought to live in accordance with the highest level of Quality. He claims that there is such a level of reality, and that attempts to reduce everything into the properties of matter is a repudiation of our humanity. We are great not because we can invent machines, we are great because we are beings capable of living in accordance with spiritual ends. It is these ends which create a civilization, not its level of technology. We do not make ourselves, we submit to the demands imposed on us by spiritual ideals

In his opposition to Christianity Pirsig appears to be rejecting Western philosophy, but what he is actually doing is agreeing with those in the West who think that we ought to abandon the quest for absolute knowledge. The primary difference between Pirsig and Polanyi is that Pirsig is a Pantheist (whether or not he describes himself as one) whereas Polanyi is a Christian. They both believe in the existence of emergent levels of reality, but Polanyi rejects the claim that we are divine. He denies that everything in existence is already justified simply by the fact of its existence. Instead, knowing is a fallible commitment made by persons; a reality that is not wholly reducible to either matter or spirit. According to Polanyi language gives us the ability to formulate transcendent ideals, and what it is to be a human being arises as a consequence of us submitting to the ideals we create. This of course leaves us with a question about the universe. Why does it have the order it does, and why should we act morally? A Pantheist account supplies the answer that everything in existence is divine, and that our purpose is to contribute to the realization of its being. It is claimed that God needs us in order to understand itself. This explains why it is that human beings are special.

In this hierarchical arrangement, higher levels emerge from lower levels of reality and direct them. This philosophy however fails to acknowledge the reality of evil: the freedom which human beings have to choose to do evil. It is not only the case that reality is not good, and only has the potential for goodness that can only be imperfectly realised, it is also true that what is the case can be evil. In the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism the reality of evil was acknowledged by conceiving the cosmos as engaged in a process of conflict between good and evil which will eventually be resolved by the triumph of goodness. The influence of this approach on Christianity is clear. In Christianity God in the form of Jesus becomes human and directs us towards the possibility of a better life. In a pagan account the world is as it is and cannot be changed, we should simply accept it. Pirsig endorses this conception. Polanyi however endorses the Christian message that we can choose to be good, and our efforts always fall short of a state of perfection because we are human not divine. What it is to be morally good exists as a potential rendered possible by the fact that we are conscious beings who can formulate ideals. These ideals are not arbitrary however, they exist as a potential that accompanies what it is to be a self-conscious intelligence.

When the C17th philosopher Benedict Spinoza rejected Christianity there was no originality in the fact of the attack, or his desire to justify his claims on the basis of an appeal to reason. His philosophy was a return to assumptions which were formulated by the Ancient Greeks. Spinoza claimed that the incompatibility between mind and matter is a legacy of the attempt by Descartes to supply a philosophical justification for the claims of modern science. It can be resolved once we acknowledge that matter and spirit are two aspects of a single reality. The C19th German Romantic philosopher F.W.J. Schelling claimed that once it is understood that subject and object are the same reality the distinction vanishes. Agreeing with the claims made by the German critic of Objective Idealism, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes Objective Idealism as a disguised form of anti-Christian atheism which undermines human agency. According to Jacobi we can call the whole matter or spirit, but what is implied remains the same, a monist Paganism. He characterized German Idealism as nihilistic, because it acknowledges no reality beyond consciousness and what it creates for itself. In Hegel everything is good, even when it is evil, because in accordance with what he describes as the “cunning of reason” everything is reduced to God progressing towards a state of self-understanding.

In a Christian account the reality of being a person is central, and this carries with it the implication that we ought to be held accountable for our actions if we fall short of the goals we set ourselves. A personal knowledge account gives persons priority over schemes that assume that everything is already determined; whether this determinism is explained in material or in Idealist terms. Nor does the hubris (ὕβρις = insolence) of claiming that we can solve the riddle of the sphinx justify its inversion into the claim that we cannot know anything. In a Personal Knowledge account we make claims we believe to be true, while accepting that they may be false. To deny that knowing is possible is inauthentic, because while we can accept that we may be mistaken, we cannot live as if our claims are wholly delusional. Marxism assumes what it denies. It views truth claims as fictions whose content are determined by class interest, but it takes that claim to be true. If an opponent points out that the claim that humans are a blank slate is unsupported by science, this is dismissed on the sceptical grounds that they are relying on the false assumption that science is a discipline whose conclusions are not determined by class interest. At the same time however when they assert that all knowledge claims are determined by class interest they exempt this claim from scepticism. They do this because they want to tell you what to do.

I am claiming that it is Christianity which lies at the foundation of the creation of a free society in England, and since I am claiming that England is the origin of modernity, I am claiming that it is Christianity which created modernity. This appears paradoxical because is it not the case that Liberalism was an attack on the intolerance of the Church? It is true, but this claim obscures the fact that Christianity is not reducible to what a Church says is, indeed Christians rejected the authority of the Catholic Church on the grounds that it was insufficiently Christian. They saw it as corrupted by the pursuit of worldly power, and insufficiently liberated from worship of idols. Nor is it the case that the claim that we can do as we like created a free society. A free society is an attempt to protect freedom of inquiry. A society which justifies freedom on the grounds that values are wholly subjective undermines the justification for defending it. The claim that freedom is justified on the grounds that it facilitates our pursuit of truth can also be undermined by the claim that we know what is true, so no further inquiry is needed. When some claim that their beliefs are correct because God has told them what is correct, this is just another version of the royal road to truth delusion. What protects a free society is the need for freedom of inquiry, because we never arrive at a state of absolute knowledge. Our beliefs about what is true may be wrong, including the claim that truth is a delusion. It is a negative version of the same overclaim; that a path to absolute knowledge has been discovered. What is needed is an acknowledgement that all knowing is personal, and on those grounds fallible, but the fact that we are part of what is the case means that what we believe to be the case is not arbitrary but guided by our tacit knowledge.

18) Ecce Homo

‘The universe exists apart from us; but the meaning of its existence does not..There is no arrogance…in stating this. To the contrary: it is a recognition of humility…[T]he limitations of the human mind does not impoverish but enriches us…such a recognition may open the way to a new…kind of humanism (one even including a Christian sense of the sinfulness of human nature.)’

John Lukacs We at the Center of the Universe (2016) p.65.

In a Pantheist philosophy our choices are not our own, and therefore guilt about not behaving as we ought is misplaced. Hegel claimed that everything in existence is a World-Spirit engaging in a process of self-understanding. When it realizes that all “otherness” (nature, society, conflict, alienation) was not separate from itself, it then knows itself. Philosophy is a science which tells us that everything is part of a rational whole. According to Danish philosopher Soren Kirkegaard this is to confuse ourselves with God. Humans cannot escape from the fact of our personhood. To be a human being is to make choices. Under the influence of Neo-Platonism, Saint Augustine declared that evil is not real, it is simply the absence of good. When he converted to Christianity he concluded that evil takes place when motivated by the concupiscence (concupīscēns = longing) that takes place when everything is understood as a means to satisfying our desires. God guides us to an understanding that transcends love of self but we defy him. It is this defiance which explains the Fall. If we lift our eyes to God it is possible to transform ourselves and save our soul. Christianity is a commitment to that which goes beyond what we can prove, but faith enables us to accept the possibility of understanding.

Hegel is essentially defending a Neo-Platonic philosophy that integrates the history of humanity in the progress of the Absolute Mind towards knowledge. The Neo-Platonists claimed to be followers of Plato, but according to Coleridge what they actually do is invert him. Their starting point is not an orientation to the transcendent, it is the assumption that everything is God. As Coleridge explains “In the works of Plato and Aristotle you see a painful and laborious attempt to follow thought after thought to assist the evolution of the human mind from its simple state of information to the highest extent it faculties will reach, but in the works of Plotinus it is all beginning no middle”. Everything is reduced to a cosmic process. Relying on this assumption, but minus any concept of progress, Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) rejects the claim that it is a capacity to choose between good and evil which is what separates us from the rest of the nature. Contrary to Hegel, material properties are viewed by Nietzsche as wholly devoid of meaning. We impose a meaning upon them. Everything can be understood as nothing more than will to power. We should accept our fate as a manifestation of purposeless material properties. It is humans who create meanings, it is simply a question of whose meanings dominate, those created by healthy and strong people or those meanings that are created by the sick and envious.

The message Nietzsche preaches in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886) is that truth and morality are false idols. In opposition to the Aristotelian assumption that everything in existence has a purpose he assumes, in accordance with the German philosopher Schopenhauer, that everything is a manifestation of blind will. The British scholar and author C.S.Lewis in his Riddell Memorial Lectures (published in 1943 as The Abolition of Man two years before Polanyi made his own contribution to that lecture series) denies that values are nothing more than subjective preferences. In a materialist account it is what Lewis describes as the “appetites of the belly” which motivate our behaviour, to which evolutionary processes added “the head” that devises new ways of satisfying our desires. Counter to this narrative Lewis claims that in addition to a belly and a head we have another organ which he calls “the chest” that directs the passions of our body towards the end of goodness. The virtues which bring morality into existence are not derived from subjective whims, they arise as a consequence of the fact that to be a human being is to be conscious of a reality which transcends our subjectivity. The name which Lewis gives to this moral order is the Tao. This is the axiological order which Pirsig calls Quality.

From the same starting point the Ancient Greeks and the Jews chose two different paths. From the assumption that everything happens for a reason Ancient Greek philosophers claimed that everything is determined by a natural order. Contrary to this approach Biblical texts claim that God is the supernatural source of moral judgements. A righteous life is a life which is lived in accordance with divine commandments which tell us which of our actions are moral. If on materialist grounds we take ourselves to be the only source of judgements about morality, the assumption that it is God who determines what is morally correct is transformed into the assumption that it is our will that determines what is morally right or wrong. On the basis of his Christian convictions William of Ockham denies that moral judgements are derived from natural law. God is a free agent who can make any morality he wishes. Nor is it the case that our reason is able to determine truths about the order of the universe. nature of the universe. The facts of our universe derive from divine choices. After our death God judges the choices which we have made. A final judgement on our moral choices will be made by Jesus when he returns. This prompts the question: why do we have to die before we receive our reward for making the right choices? Also, why submit to demands made upon us by a God whose existence requires faith?

Rejecting Christianity, some Western philosophers turned to Eastern philosophy. In a chapter of his book Génie des Religions (1842) entitled “The Oriental Renaissance” the French historian Edgar Quinet declares that ‘This is the great subject of philosophy today…the Pantheism of the Orient, transformed by Germany.’ Some made a distinction between Pantheism and Panentheism. Pantheism (Greek πᾶν [pan = All] and θεός [theos = God) is the claim that everything is God. Panentheism [en ἐν = in] is a word that was invented by Karl Krause in 1828 with the end in mind of distinguishing the approach taken by Hegel from the approach taken by his contemporary Schelling. Krause says that Pantheism is when God is identical with the universe, whereas in Panentheism God is responsible for the universe but transcends it. In the C19th the Scottish Idealist philosopher Andrew Seth (who to benefit from a legacy changed his surname in 1898 to Seth Pringle-Pattison) sought to make a distinction between what he described as Personal and Absolute Idealism. Absolute Idealists however reject his approach (and Personalism generally) on the grounds that in that account reality is reduced to interpretations made by persons, leaving us with no grounds for explaining how it is that persons can understand each other.

Materialists reject the Idealist assumption (shared by both Subjective and Objective Idealism) that reality is mental, declaring that Idealism confuses debates about the conditions under which knowing takes place with the reality that is being described. It seems to me however that reducing everything to the properties of matter is no more convincing as an account of what it is to be a human being than Idealism. Both are monistic philosophies which claim to know everything. A better approach is a philosophy which neither denies the reality of consciousness, nor denies the reality of material properties. Humans rely on both realities. When faced with the challenge of supplying a foundation for morality modern philosophers tend to opt for one of three general approaches. Some ground moral claims in natural instincts. Lewis describes this as “the belly”. David Hume for example reduces morality to feelings of sympathy which take place as a consequence of our awareness of the happiness of others. Kant rejects the assumption that it is our feelings which make an action moral. He asserts that what makes an action moral is our reason. We become moral beings when instead of viewing others as means to our ends we view them as ends in themselves. Lewis claims that this understanding of what it is to be a moral person is an understanding of morality as an approach that is entirely derived from the head.

According to Lewis, a philosophy which supplies us with an account of what it is to be a human being that leaves us "without chests” gives us only two possible grounds for morality. Either it is derived from “base instinct” or it is derived from “cold reason”. A virtue based account of morality however seeks to supply us with a complete vision of what it is to be a human being. Our task is to cultivate those ways of living which facilitate our flourishing. What it is to live a moral life cannot be wholly captured by rules. To be a human being is to be more than animals, but less than God. As moral beings we behave as we ought, with no certainty that the judgements that we make are correct. As Polanyi understands it God is a self-set ideal. By comprehending moral passions as nothing more than wholly subjective feelings Polanyi claims that it is a belief in materialism that generates moral inversions; in which the moral passions which Christianity inspires are re-directed into passionate denunciations of morality. In his “transvaluation of values” Nietzsche takes life to be a struggle in which everybody is seeking to impose their will. He views the endorsement of guilt and humility rather than strength and vitality to be a “slave morality". In the struggle between the weak and the strong an appeal to morality is a strategy which the weak use to undermine the strong. The strong ignore this approach and create their own morality.

Materialism is the approach which Aristotle rejected in his search for a ground for morality. But modern science began as a rejection of Aristotelian physics. If you reject an Aristotelian account of the universe it cannot serve as a ground for morality. Nietzsche claims that the conviction that a virtuous life will be rewarded after your death devalues life, and the cultivation of an existence inspired by the concept of denying pleasure is an unhealthy repression of our natural instincts. His declaration that "God is dead" is not simply the claim that materialism undermines Christianity, it is the claim that on the grounds of an appeal to what is natural we ought to create human societies grounded in strength, will, and an affirmation of life. The connection between this approach and the way of life that the Nazi Party advocated are clear. When the focus of his intellectual interests moved away from physical chemistry and economics towards philosophy, Polanyi asked himself why Continental Europe was dominated by Fascist and Communist States? He not only rejected these approaches he claimed that a morally neutral defence of a free society is unable to defend itself against its enemies. Why have an “Open” rather than a “Closed” society if the former does not give us meanings?

Although Polanyi and Pirsig both supply a foundation for morality they do so on a different ground. Polanyi comprehends morality as a human creation, whereas Pirsig views it as grounded in the order of the universe. Polanyi, in accordance with his Christianity, emphasizes personal agency. In accordance with his humanism Polanyi claims that language enables us to formulate the concept of transcendent ideals. Contrary to both materialism and Absolute Idealism he rejects the assumption that our lives are wholly determined. We make choices. Nor are our choices arbitrary. Our ability to use a language gives us the ability to create ideals such as truth and justice. Once these concepts are brought into existence they impose obligations on us which transcend our subjectivity. We bring them into existence but we submit to them. We do so because they bring into being a higher form of existence that gives our existence meaning. Life ceases to be nothing more than a struggle for survival. We are converted to a better way of life. Nor are we simply supplied with various beliefs, we choose them. Polanyi claims that humans are created by a commitment to ideals. Transcendent ideals are not a description of what is already the case, we bring a reality into being via our articulations.

This is not a morally neutral conception of what it is to be a human being. It justifies dedicated communities sustained by a commitment to transcendent ideals. These ideals are not arbitrary, they impose obligations on us that are grounded in a vision of how we ought to live. Transcendent ideals do not supply a fixed conception of what is morally right and wrong, because they serve as objects of continual discovery. They transcend what is already the case. A free society is a society which protects our freedom to make discoveries. It is not a nihilistic vision in which we have the freedom to do whatever we feel like doing at that moment, restricted only by the requirement that we respect everybody else’s arbitrary whims. It is a vision in which there are better and worse ways of living, and a higher form of existence which humans can discover; that is our creation but which imposes obligations on us that change how we behave. In the account which Polanyi articulates it is not the case that everybody is as good as everybody else, but nor is it the case that what is morally right can be settled. What we believe may be false. The assumption that adherence to the right method will deliver truth is a delusion. All knowledge claims are fallible. Anybody who denies this is seeking to impose their will.

Polanyi and Pirsig both recognize the importance of emotions in directing our behaviour, and they acknowledge that our imagination can supply us with new interpretations of our experience, but they deny that moral claims are grounded in nothing more than will. Value is not wholly reducible to whatever we want to be the case. To exist as a human being is to engage in a process of discovery. Pirsig grounds moral judgements in the order of the universe. In accordance with his Christianity Polanyi denies that moral judgements are derived from nature. The attempt by Scholastic philosophers in the High Middle Ages to reconcile Christianity with Ancient Greek philosophy was a failure. It was the rejection of the claim that philosophy can secure a ground for values that generated the Modern era. In the vision which Polanyi supplies, a return back to a Pagan understanding of morality is neither possible nor desirable. In accordance with the ideals of the Modern era he views morality as grounded in self-set ideals. But the fact that we bring these ideals into existence does not mean that they can be anything we want. A claim is true regardless of what we want to be the case. Ideals impose obligations on us that transcend our subjective preferences. Is this enough to undermine the charge that he is a subjectivist?

19) Persons

‘‘In the 15th and 16th centuries the…rise of the Humanities…took place inside a European culture that was still dominantly Christian…[T]heir critique was not hostile to…religion, just so long as it was informed by a proper feeling for the limits to the practical and intellectual powers of human beings. Rather, it discouraged intellectual dogmatism of kinds that elevated disputes over liturgy or doctrine to a level at which they might become matters of political dispute - or even of life and death.’

Stephen Toulmin Cosmopolis (1990) p.25.

The period between 1273, when shortly before his death Thomas Aquinas stopped writing the Summa Theologica, and 1637, when the Discourse on Method by Descartes was published, was an era in Western philosophy between the the system-building tradition inspired by Aristotle and the system-building era that was inspired by modern science. In the Renaissance the sciences and humanities were not perceived to be in a state of conflict. What was in turmoil was Christianity, or to be more precise the authority of the Roman Catholic Church to determine doctrine. The transition from the Medieval to the Modern era was a period of intense creativity. In Italy there was an attempt to revive and match earlier achievements, but Modernity was the creation of something new. By the C19th most people in the West were conscious of the fact that the West was creating an era of unprecedented vitality, and most accepted that a return to the way of life that was created in the Middle Ages was not possible. The era was dominated by two great achievements: the rise of modern science and the defence of individual freedom. In the Romantic period an artist was not only viewed as a craftsman who served an apprenticeship in a tradition, they were seen as creators of meaning.

Polanyi and Pirsig are both heirs of the reaction against Enlightenment materialism. They claim that materialism is an inadequate account of our experience of being human. A metaphysics which replaces meaning with nihilism is unsustainable, but few saw German Idealism as a satisfactory alternative. As a theory of everything, Objective Idealism is as fictional as it is deluded. It was an attempt to restore religion by replacing Christianity with a revived Neo-Platonism. All three of the thinkers which I discuss in this book seek to address what they perceive as a spiritual crisis. Inspired by the Enlightenment some sought salvation in the sciences and technology and economic growth, whereas others identified the sciences and technology and the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution to be the source of the trouble. In my view what is needed is a humanist philosophy which recognizes both the power and the limitations of the sciences as a source of knowledge about what it is to be a human being. A humanist approach denies that the sciences are wholly distinct from other human practices. The sciences are better understood as a branch of the humanities in which specialists rely upon the exactitude which mathematics supplies as a tool to describe reality.

The charge against Western philosophy (largely from thinkers within the Western tradition) is that it was too confident. It was arrogant. They sought to counter this arrogance by reminding us that we interpret our experience, and on those grounds that what we claim to be true is wholly determined by our assumptions. In this view truth claims are illusions. It is an analysis which relies on the assumption that only that which can be described and justified counts as knowledge. If however you draw attention to the fact that we not only say more than we know we also know more than we can say, the Critical Philosophy tradition dissolves. All knowing is grounded in our tacit knowledge, and our tacit knowledge is grounded in the fact that we are embodied conscious agents seeking to make sense of our experience. The fact of our situatedness may lead us to make false judgements, but our judgements are not arbitrary. They are grounded in our experience of what is the case. They become deranged only when we get trapped in a web of assumptions that, although they may be internally consistent, are detached from the experience which gives them their meaning. The result is the Rationalist and Nominalist delusion that it is our thoughts which are what creates our experience of order.

Philosophy continually returns to the same conflicts, such as the disputes between Rationalism and Empiricism, Realism and Nominalism, and Idealism and Materialism, with philosophers declaring that they have secured the correct method. Descartes is not the founder of modern philosophy, that happened centuries before he was born. Nor did he supply new arguments, he made use of arguments that had been formulated by Saint Augustine and the Scholastics, but what was new was applying them to the task of justifying the New Science. He starts from consciousness, and from that beginning (via an appeal to God) defends a materialist account of the universe. Following Descartes philosophers set out to identify the rules which a rational person ought to follow if they are going to secure knowledge. Adherence to these rules is what became known as the “Scientific Method.” Although a Cartesian approach failed to explain how mind and matter interact, it gave Western philosophy its framework of assumptions for the next 200 years. Ignoring consciousness, materialists revived an Atomistic account of the universe. They addressed the problem of how minds can interact with matter by eliminating the mental. Idealists took the opposite path of reducing everything to mind. I claim that both of these approaches are misguided.

Modern science begins with the rejection of Aristotle. This rejection was inspired by the conflict between Greek philosophy and Christianity. The Medieval philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas set out to reconcile Aristotle and Christianity. William of Ockham opposed this reconciliation and sided with those who claimed that it would be better to ignore Ancient Greek philosophy because its claims about reality are incompatible with Christianity. Modernity did not begin with the replacement of Christianity by science, it began with a rejection of Aristotle. In this sense Pirsig is a Post-Modernist philosopher. Ockham views reason not as a key to understanding the universe but as a procedure for identifying logical inconsistencies. It was claimed by some of his followers that knowledge arises from experimental inquiry. Some within this tradition advocated a return back to an atomistic account of the universe, and a vision of knowing in which experiments supply us with data that enable us to provide mathematical summaries. The assumption that God created a universe we can comprehend goes beyond Nominalism, because it assumes that the universe has an order that reason can identify. Aristotelian claims about essences and final causes are replaced by a vision of science as experimental inquiry which uses mathematics as a tool of understanding.

The pioneers of modern science assumed that the universe behaves in accordance with the rules which God imposed upon it at the creation. Our task is to discover those rules. It is because God gave us minds that are separate from nature that we are able to stand back from the universe and understand it. Instead of justifying rights on the grounds of an appeal to the order of nature, William of Ockham sought to justify them by grounding them in an appeal to the will of the creator. To be human is to be a person with the capacity to make choices. Descartes is taken to be the founder of modern philosophy because instead of undermining the value of reason he gave philosophers the task of justifying modern science. But if you are a materialist his defence of modern science is unpersuasive. If you want to reduce everything into material properties how can there be such a thing as consciousness? Leibnitz claimed that atoms (to which he gave the name monads) are conscious, and the universe has the order it has because what takes place is in accordance with divine instructions. Opposing this Hume claimed that only experience and the formal truths which can be deduced from the principle of non-contradiction supply us with knowledge; all other beliefs are overclaims.

Responding to the Empiricist denial that knowledge can be secured by deduction, Kant sought to create a new ground for knowledge by claiming that the order we encounter in our experience is an order that we impose upon it to render it intelligible. In accordance with the Nominalist denial that morality has a natural origin, Kant sought to deduce it from rules that we impose on ourselves. Pirsig seeks to restore an account which grounds morality in the order of the universe. The claim that moral claims are derived from principles we impose on ourselves falls short of being an adequate answer to the question: why be moral? According to Polanyi morality is a submission to a transcendent ideal. Like Kant he does not derive morality from the order of the universe. The same criticism therefore applies: why submit to them? Pirsig also has an objection to answer. If everything is determined by Quality, what about the agency of the knower? Pirsig assumes that our actions are in accordance with the order of the universe; but is it true that the universe is good? If we look at the workings of the universe we may conclude that it is amoral. On the grounds that moral claims are not justified by the order of the universe, materialism grounds morality in nothing but will.

The conflict between Polanyi and Pirsig is a recapitulation of the conflict between Christianity and Ancient Greek philosophy, although it is not a precise analogy, because Polanyi does not present himself as a Christian apologists, and Pirsig unfavourably contrasts Ancient Greek philosophy with Eastern philosophy. In his defence of human agency, and his orientation towards the transcendent, the influence of Christianity upon Polanyi is clear. As for Pirsig, he believes that our task is to comprehend the order of which we are a part. What Pirsig adds is the qualification that when we make value judgments we are guided by what we cannot wholly describe. Polanyi and Pirsig reject the assumption that everything can be reduced to the properties of matter, and both acknowledge the existence of levels of reality which transcend the material. For both it is not the case that value judgements are arbitrary. Where they differ is that Pirsig defends an account in which it is the order of the universe that determines and justifies which actions are morally correct, whereas for Polanyi moral rightness comes into existence as a consequence of persons indwelling in language and making use of it to formulate the concept of transcendent ideals. Morality is a consequence of commitments by persons.

What do we mean by person? The word can be traced back to the Latin for “mask” [per-sonare = to sound though] and it was originally used to mean characters in a play portrayed by actors in masks. The word person was extended in Roman law to mean a citizen who has legal rights. To be a person is to be dominus sui [= own master] which is to say to be an “I” who is not a slave but is somebody who makes autonomous choices. Saint Thomas Aquinas defines a person as a rational embodied spirit. Humans are self-conscious persons made in the likeness of God who seek to make sense of the universe as a whole rather than simply focusing on our immediate experience. A human being is an embodied mind that is dynamically engaged in a quest for understanding; we are an exploring spirit that goes beyond our particularity and has the capacity to understand the whole. The Neo-Thomist scholar Norris Clarke draws out from Aquinas the assumption that a person is not something which God inserts into nature, but nor is a person an essence that can be defined. A person cannot be wholly reduced to what the sciences can describe, but nor are we wholly spiritual. We are material and spiritual. We try to make sense of the whole from the particularity of our embodied consciousness.

Aquinas claims that a person is an existence which transcends an essence. An essence is a limited form of existence, but a person transcends nature. As Norris Clarke explains it, what it is to be an essence has a reality that can be shared, but what it is to be a person cannot be shared, it is unique. We are not in Thomist terms an essence, we are existence in a state of self-consciousness engaging in a process of understanding. The phrase which Pirsig uses to describe the ultimate reality of the universe is Dynamic Quality. This way of understanding reality brings Pirsig closer to Polanyi. A person is an embodied chooser. We are reality in the form of a person, trying to make sense of the situation we find ourselves in as a consequence of being born. What Pirsig describes as Dynamic Quality relies upon lower levels of existence to create higher levels of reality. Every new layer of being is reliant upon the properties of the level which is immediately below it, but it is not possible to wholly reduce it to that level. Each new level brings new properties into existence. Persons bring the highest level of being into existence. The highest level is a state of understanding. From the particularity of our existence we endeavour to bring about an understanding which transcends our subjectivity.

In Christianity this quest for understanding is sustained by our love of God. Saint Paul declared “The life I now live is not my life, but the life which Christ lives in me”. This is not a claim that can be understood in material terms. Any attempt to do so destroys the reality of the person. Contrary to most Eastern religions Christianity does not view a person as an illusion. A person is an embodied conscious agent. Nor is it the case that everything is morally good. A person may be wholly self-centered, which is to say they may exist in a state in which satisfying its wants are the only thing which matters to it. I agree with Saint Augustine that this is the origin of evil: it is an approach in which what satisfies our arbitrary desires is the only measure of excellence. Every form of understanding requires a starting point, but it does not follow from this that it is only what you want that is important. In my view a philosophy which sets itself the goal of extinguishing the self is also, paradoxically, a form of selfishness. To de-personalize is to try to avoid facing up to the moral obligations which accompany what it is to be a person. Because Christianity starts with personhood it addresses the obligations which arise as a consequence of our ability to make choices. One way of understanding this is to see a person as an expression of Dynamic Quality.

All claims about what is true and good and beautiful are made by persons. We pursue them as ends in themselves. To be a human being is to be directed by our conscience, which is to say our actions arise as a consequence of the fact that as self-conscious beings we reflect upon our actions. The agency that accompanies our personhood separates us from the universe, but it is not the case that we are isolated from reality. We are a part of reality making sense of its experience and deciding how it ought to live. Our experience is not from nowhere, it is from somewhere. Knowing is always from somewhere in particular, but we are able to explore that which transcends our subjectivity. Maybe humans are Dynamic Quality realizing itself in the form of a person. The claims we make are not arbitrary, we rely upon our tacit knowledge. It is our ability to do as we ought rather than do whatever we feel like doing which separates us from the rest of nature, but our judgments do not take place in isolation from the context that renders them possible. Although a person is the highest level of existence, our exploration of truth, and goodness, and the beautiful is a process of discovery. It is a process of discovery facilitated by our use of tools, particularly our use of language.

20) Language

‘‘Philosophers…occupy themselves exclusively with words. As everyone is apt to overestimate the importance of his own occupation, delusions about the power of words are an occupational hazard with philosophers. In fact that is putting it much too mildly…a difficulty in distinguishing words from the world…gives philosophy a deep affinity with lunacy”

David Stove The Plato Cult And Other Philosophical Follies (1991) pp.31-2.

The book of Genesis declares that humans were made by God in his likeness. Adam named the animals in the Garden of Eden and had dominion over them. God instructed us not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and when Adam and Eve disobeyed him they were banished from paradise and prevented from eating the fruit of the tree of life which would make us immortal. Why did God create us? The Bible says that God created us so that we might recognize and worship him. Some theologians claim that God created us out of loneliness but others declare that God is self-sufficient. The Neo-Platonists assert that God exists in a state of self-sufficient perfection. Everything else is an emanation and therefore a lesser form of perfection. The greater distance we are from God the greater our imperfection. Hege claimed that everything is God engaged in a process of knowing itself but in Christianity God is already perfect and exists beyond change. When we transcend our existence by contemplating the divine ground of everything the change that takes place is within ourselves. We are separate persons with the capacity to choose who we shall worship. The Church brings us up in its traditions but to be an adult is to decide for ourselves who we worship. All true worship is a choice. A commitment to that which is higher than ourselves. This commitment is motivated by love of God not ourselves.

The difference between the positions advocated by Polanyi and Pirsig is a manifestation of the difference between two different cultural traditions in the West, the Hellenic and the Hebraic. In the Hebraic tradition all knowing is personal. The connection between God and ourselves is personal. God guides and loves us as if we are his children, but in the Hellenic tradition the universe is indifferent to our desires, we simply submit to what is the case. For some the universe is a benevolent order and for others it is nothing but endless conflict. In this latter vision purpose is what we impose on reality and has no ground other than will. The fervour with which people seek to impose their view on others is grounded in nothing more than the desire for power. In Marxism we should do what we want, and should not be told what to do unless what we are being told to do is accept that everybody is equal. For a narcissist it is a perfect combination of refusing to do what somebody else tells you to do and telling others how they should live. It leads to the paradox of societies dedicated to equality justifying inequality on the grounds that to bring about the right sort of society the Party should rule, and reward themselves for their efforts, because they do not trust others to make the right decisions, they have to make them for them. Everything is therefore contained within the State, and those who run the State should have absolute power.

To this Polanyi and Pirsig defend an account in which not only is right and wrong grounded in a reality, and that reality exists in the form of a hierarchy, but what can be known about that reality cannot be wholly described because language is a tool which evokes and indexes our experiences it does not replace it. Language facilitates our ability to discover, and renders possible the highest level of reality, but it does not create that reality nor is it possible for language to wholly capture it. This is bad news for those who want to impose on others their conception of the real, not only because what is the case determines what is real, but because it goes beyond what can be captured in any description. This carries with it the implication that we ought to create societies which give us the freedom to discover what is the case. That life is a continual process of discovery, and must be so, both for the individual and for the universe of which we are a part, because it is not the case that we come into existence fully formed with nothing more to discover. Even the universe itself is situated, or so at least a conception of reality as engaged in a continual process of discovery would assert. Pirsig calls this Dynamic Quality, and for Polanyi it manifests itself in us as the reality known as persons.

To name things is to separate ourselves from them, and so when we reflect upon ourselves we are both a subject and an object. An advocate of language might argue that it is our use of language which is what sets us apart. It might be protested that other animals use language. Do bees not signal to other bees where they have found an abundant source of pollen? In this much cited example the communication is tightly bound to a specific task. When we use symbols however, we not only transmit signals, our attempts to communicate with each other rely upon a self-awareness that is not shared by bees. Language supplies us with a point from which we reflect on our existence and make choices. We bring into existence a higher level of reality. God knew that we had tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge once we became self-conscious and sought to hide our nakedness. It is not a conception that makes any sense to apply to a bee. Polanyi and Pirsig recognize the power which language gives us to organize and index and enhance our awareness of what is the case, it is intimately associated with our capacity for self-consciousness, but they are also keen that we remind ourselves of its limits.

We cannot with the right words arrive at a state of absolute understanding. Nor is it the case that with knowledge of the right words we can create any reality we like. Neither do they claim to have identified the limits of what it is possible to say, what they do is ground the meaning of our articulations in our tacit knowledge. Our meanings do not arise in nowhere in particular, all understanding is situated. Critical Philosophy insists that in order to count as knowledge what is known has to be described and justified. Polanyi and Pirsig reject this assumption. Our knowledge is predominately tacit. Nor does language create what is the case, what exists may not be what we want to exist, reality is not anything we want it to be, it is what is the case regardless of what we want to be the case. This claim offends those who think reality ought to submit to what we want to be the case. The sheer power of language has led some to believe that through the power of language we can bring what we want into existence. Polanyi and Pirsig however claim that reality transcends what any description can capture. Language has limitations that restrict what is possible. This is the seriousness of life. Nor is it possible to know these limits in advance, because all knowledge claims are fallible. Attempting to secure what is meaningful is totalitarian.

When seeking to make sense of our experience we look for patterns. Our ability to spot patterns predates language. In the struggle for existence we need to know what to avoid. It is not a case of choosing which delusion to follow, it is a question of making the right choices. In the absence of our tacit knowledge no language would make any sense to us. Language enables us to attach words to the patterns we rely upon when interpreting our experience, and via metaphors we extend these descriptions into new domains. Metaphors are created, and accumulated, and passed on, within traditions. It is not only poets who create metaphors, all reflection relies upon metaphors. Translation between the different languages is possible because languages are not ex nihilo [= created from nothing] the words we use become meaningful via our reliance upon our tacit knowledge. Rationalists contemplate the possibility of creating a universal language, in which meanings are derived from universal rules. At the other extreme it is claimed that translation between languages is impossible because all meaning is grounded in specific experiences. Both defy what our common sense tells us, that language facilitates communication but a state of absolute understanding is unobtainable.

The Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski reminds us that a map is not a territory, a map is a re-presentation of a territory. It is not our symbols which are primary but the reality which we use symbols to evoke. Language facilitates understanding by labelling what we abstract from our experience, but it is not our abstractions that are fundamental. What is fundamental is the experience from which we abstract. In the absence of any consciousness no abstraction is possible because there is nothing to abstract from, which is why all knowing requires a knower. Nor is it the case that we merely submit to our experience, we interpret it. The interpretations we make are not infallible, we may have false beliefs, but in the absence of any awareness there cannot be any knowledge. All articulations go beyond our experience, but this does not undermine the possibility of making correct claims. From the fact that what we claim to be true transcends our experience it does not follow that all of our claims about what is true are false, all it means is that they are fallible. This is what Personal Knowledge amounts to; what we claim to be true may be mistaken but guided by our experience of what is the case we can make commitments that can correspond with what is true. Our experience of what is the case guides our knowledge claims and leads us to make discoveries. This process is facilitated by our use of language.

Pirsig calls the fundamental reality of the universe Dynamic Quality, claiming that everything is grounded in and guided by it. To be a person in this view, is to be an embodied, self-conscious awareness that is experiencing and responding to the flow of what is the case. Language refines and extends this awareness. How consciousness is possible is a mystery. Philosophers pick out different elements of this mystery: indexicality is the way in which meaning is always anchored in a starting point - an “I” “here,” “now”: qualia is the taste of coffee, which even the most exhaustive descriptions cannot capture: intentionality is directedness, our thoughts are about something, real or imagined, that exists beyond itself. Language relies upon these features without exhausting them: a situated speaker points something out, evokes a particular experience, and seeks to describe it, but only within the limits of what our use of language as a tool renders possible. What Pirsig calls Dynamic Quality cannot be reduced to language. Language cannot replace reality. The ground of all meaning [= intensionality] and understanding is the tacit knowledge supplied by the fact that we are a situated and embodied consciousness. It is the ground upon which we rely in our attempts to make sense of our existence and make judgements about how we shall live.

Language facilitates our ability to reflect on the fact of our existence. It not only reflects upon what is the case it also creates something new. It enhances our ability to make decisions about how we are going to live. This capacity does not mean that what it is to be a conscious being is unconstrained. We may view it as an injustice to be prevented from doing whatever it is they want to do, and we may seek to correct this by creating a new reality, but it is the very fact that there are constraints which render existence possible. It is to engage in magical thinking to believe that it is possible for us to be anything we want to be, if only we had the knowledge and tools to bring it into existence. In this conception everything has no other purpose than as a means to the end of getting our own way. The claim that getting our own way can include within it the desire that others should also have the freedom to get their own way as well does not disguise its narcissism. Your feelings towards others may be one of benevolence or hostility, depending on whether or not you view others as facilitators or as impediments to your will, but the measure of what is correct in this understanding is the desire to get your own way. To not get your own way is taken to be an injustice, because what you want to happen is very important to you. What makes it important is the fact that you want it. In this vision the only reason for accepting what others think is because you want to tolerate it, this is transformed very quickly into intolerance of others if they have thoughts that you do not approve of, denying the inherent equality of everybody for example.

We do not live in a state of continual contentment. In a humanist account the solution is not to extinguish all desire, because a life without desire is an inhuman life. Humans are important because they bring truth, goodness, and beauty into existence as ideals to be pursued. What gives meaning to these abstract ideals is our already existing experience that something is the case, that something is better, that something creates a feeling of admiration in us. What language does is make us self-conscious. We are able to detach ourselves from our experience and reflect on how best to achieve our ends in ways that give ourselves agency. Those who bring new meanings into the world are reliant upon, but not wholly determined by, the constraints imposed on them by lower level realities, but the decisions we make are not wholly determined by those lower level realities. Language facilitates our ability to decide what we are going to do and how we are going to live. Refusing to recognize the existence of any level of reality other than that which can be reduced to the properties of matter is nihilistic. Language enables us to live at a level of reality which transcends the properties of matter. This pursuit exists as a potential in non-linguistic animals, but language elevates our self consciousness. We are persons with the capacity to make choices.

Language facilitates our ability to abstract from our experience and discover meaning in it, but language is not a substitute for that experience. What saves us from nihilism is our dependence on our tacit knowledge. It is our tacit knowledge that supplies us with the ground which gives our words their meaning. Our experience is more fundamental than the language we use to explore it, but language can transform as well as describe our experience. Within the constraints which render our experience possible we make choices. We create and program a computer to achieve the tasks that we set for it. The claim that we ought to replace ourselves with machines ignores that machines are not conscious. We may seek to pretend that we are machines, but that does not make it true. Because the tacit knowledge supplied by our consciousness is particular, our experience cannot be captured by rules. Our tacit awareness goes beyond that which any rules can describe. What is real cannot be wholly captured by abstractions. It is a failure to recognize this that motivated the rejection of Scholasticism. What is real cannot be wholly captured by abstractions. The substitution of descriptions for realities undermines the case for exploration. All we need to do is find the correct description in the right sort of book. As a manifestation of Dynamic Quality our task as persons is to explore what is the case, and create new forms of understanding, we should not hand over this task to machines.

The claim that we are machines is a false and pernicious metaphor that ignores the fact of consciousness. It is claimed that we don’t know anything about consciousness, what we know about are the properties of matter. It is claimed that if you want to know what is real you ought to consult a physics textbook. This is typical of the absurdity that Critical Philosophy generates. Of course we know about consciousness. As Descartes (following Augustine) sought to point out, our consciousness is what is most real to us. The fact of our consciousness is what is most certain. Unlike physics we can be sure that consciousness is real. We know more about our consciousness than we do about physics. A materialist says that if you read a physics textbook there will not be any equations in it that describe consciousness, and from this they draw the conclusion that we cannot know anything about consciousness. Even more absurdly, some claim that if we open a physics textbook and can find no description of consciousness in it then consciousness does not exist. Now it is true that the emergence of consciousness is a mystery, and maybe perhaps always be a mystery, but so is the reality of there being something rather than nothing, or the fact that the universe has an order that enables us to exist in it, but that does not imply that we ought to refuse to believe in science, or the possibility that physicists can discover laws which help us to understand what is the case. If somebody denies that they are conscious we should be concerned for their sanity.

If you are a Christian, answering the question why be moral is no problem for you, or at least it is only a problem if you are wanting to be evil. The question is an easy one to answer because as a Christian you believe that your purpose is to submit to the will of God. If you are a Pantheist the problem is also easy to answer. The order of the universe directs you to do good. You behave as you do because everything is organised in such a way that everything in existence is good. If you are a materialist why you ought to be moral is a more difficult challenge. Let us assume that the reason why you are rational is because the capacity of rationality has been selected for because it improves your chances of surviving. The reason why this capacity was passed on to you is because your ancestors lived long enough to have offspring. Their survival is a consequence of the fact of their rationality. In this account reason tells us to treat others as they would like to be treated themselves. They behave in the way in which they do because their reason tells them how they should behave. It is possible however that the reason your ancestors survived long enough to pass on their genes to their children is because their genes directed them to only think of themselves. Perhaps they adhered to the principle: get what you want. Maybe their reason told them to be selfish.

One answer to this is to claim that morality is grounded in the feeling of benevolence. We care about ourselves but we also care about others. Not to the same extent, but enough to care about what happens to others. This argument fails. Doing what is morally right may not make you feel good. Conversely, doing what makes you feel good may have bad consequences for others. If it is your feeling that renders something moral the question of whether or not you are doing any good becomes irrelevant, but as an explanation of morality it fails. For an action to be moral it is not enough that an action makes you feel good, it has to actually be good. Indeed your feelings may be something which you have to overcome if you are going to do the right thing, rather than it simply being a case of doing those things which make you feel good. If you cannot justify what your conscience is telling you to do, and doing it is not pleasant, you might come to the conclusion that your compulsion to do it is some sort of derangement. The fact that you may not be able to describe or justify the reality which compels you to do what you believe to be the right does not however carry with it the implication that what is morally right is not grounded in any reality other than whatever it is that we happen to feel at that moment. What is the morally right thing to do may be grounded in a reality that goes beyond what language can describe.

21) The Divided Brain

‘‘The Middle Ages drew a distinction between the understanding as ratio and the understanding as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive, logical thought…of abstraction, of definition and drawing conclusions. Intellectus on the other hand, is the name for the understanding in so far as it is the capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye.”

Josef Pieper Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1952) p.9.

It is an axiom of Western philosophy that we can explore what is the case via the ability which language gives us to contemplate and transform our experience. By following the correct method we can step back from the reality of objects and describe them. Modern philosophy is in large part Rationalists trying to rescue from the scepticism of the Empiricists claims secured by reason. Before what Kant described as his “Copernican Revolution” Rationalist philosophers sought to reach a level of understanding which falls short of, but is comparable to, divine understanding. Kant sought to secure these truths via the thought structures that we impose on our experience in order that we may understand it. Hegel claims that not only is it the case that everything is in a state of change, his understanding of the way in which this change takes place is the culmination of Western philosophy. In his view the logic of everything in existence is an Absolute Mind that is undergoing a process of contradiction and resolution as it progresses within time towards a state of self-understanding. Because in his view he supplies us with an understanding of this process he claims that his transcendence of the subject-object dichotomy completes Western philosophy.

Instead of viewing the universe as the means through which God arrives at an understanding of themselves, Marx views us as self-conscious beings who have arrived at the realisation that the universe has no meaning other than the meaning which we impose upon it in the pursuit of our purposes. Inspired by Christianity Marx claims that we are able to change how we live and create a world in which we love others as we love ourselves. Unlike Christianity this is achieved not by submitting to divine commands but by worshipping ourselves as the creators of meaning. Everybody should have the freedom to pursue their own purposes, and this state of freedom can only be achieved in a society in which all private property is abolished and everybody lives in a state of equality. Once technology renders unlimited abundance possible any social arrangement that distributes that which is created unequally will be abolished. To bring this utopia into existence all we need is the right sort of people in charge to bring it into being. They recognise that any state of inequality is a product of an inequality of power, which will be extinguished once new structures are put in place that distribute all resources in accordance with the principle that every human being is equal.

A Post-Critical approach seeks to return us to the reality of what it is to be a human being, and an understanding of the tools which enable us to enhance our understanding. Instead of assuming that perfection is possible it claims that situatedness limits what we are able to achieve. We are not divine, we are human beings operating within the restraints that render our existence possible. Although we fall short of the ideals we impose on ourselves, this is not a defect that adherence to the correct method will rectify, because absolute knowledge can only take place by leaving our humanity behind and viewing ourselves as divine, which is not only delusional it implies that we should destroy the restraints that civilization imposes on us on and replace it with an imaginary society in which everybody is free to do as they like, with all conflict resolved once those who seek to bring about a state of equality are in charge. This is a quite different vision from Christianity in which life is a vale of tears saved by our awareness of a higher level of reality that gives our life meaning. It is a realm which is inaccessible to science, we glimpse it as though a glass darkly. Because this level of existence cannot be reduced to any science, the claim that only science gives us knowledge generates nihilism.

In a culture which assumes that it is only the sciences which give us knowledge, changes in our self-understanding are unlikely to come from philosophy, whose claim to be a science are rightly going to be disputed; it is going to come from discoveries that are made within the sciences. This is indeed what happened when the literary scholar Iain McGilchrist, dissatisfied by attempts to convert the study of literature into a science, decided to pursue a career in medicine. At a lecture at the Maudsley Hospital in London given by the neurophysiologist John Cutting he learned that changes in behaviour caused by strokes give us an insight into the different way in which each hemisphere of our brain makes sense of the world. Following through the implications of this claim, McGilchrist in effect endorses what Polanyi and Pirsig are claiming about the importance of our tacit knowledge. Our left hemisphere helps us to make sense of our experience, but our understanding works best when it is the right hemisphere which is dominant. To put it in terms which are familiar from Polanyi and Pirsig, the awareness which the right hemisphere generates is more sensitive to what Polanyi describes as our tacit knowledge, and which Pirsig in his philosophy views as direction by Quality.

Central to McGilchrist’s argument, which he set out in his book The Master and His Emissary (2009) and elaborated further in his two volume work The Matter with Things (2021), is the claim that the division of the brain into two hemispheres gives us an insight into what is going wrong with modernity. The right hemisphere processes our experience in a holistic, relational, and context-sensitive manner that comprehends reality as something dynamic and meaningful. The left hemisphere is adept at abstraction, categorization, and manipulation of mental models, with the end in mind of achieving specific purposes. McGilchrist claims that many of the problems that modernity is generating are being caused by the left hemisphere usurping the dominance of the right hemisphere; creating a view of our existence which is characterized by fragmentation, the prioritization of utility, and reductionism. In this mode of understanding there is a failure to appreciate that knowing goes beyond what can be described. In accordance with the approach taken by Polanyi and Pirsig, McGilchrist asserts that the manipulation of abstract representations which characterizes formal reasoning should be situated within the presentational reality of our immediate experience.

Within Critical Philosophy a sharp distinction is made between what can be discovered by psychology, which attempts to understand how beliefs are formed, and philosophy, which examines the grounds upon which beliefs may rightly be held. Locke, who in his Empiricist philosophy attempts to demarcate the boundaries of human understanding, confuses these domains by treating the psychological origins of ideas as the basis for their legitimacy. McGilchrist in his approach is not seeking to reduce justification to neurology, but he is claiming that an understanding of our neuropsychology helps us to understand how knowing takes place. The way in which we make sense of our experience is conditioned by the mode of attention that is characteristic of each hemisphere of our brain. This approach begs the question of whether this approach conflates psychology and philosophy, but what McGilchrist is doing is rejecting the assumption that knowledge claims can be isolated from the language using embodied minds in which they take place. He rejects the assumption that we can sharply demarcate our attempts to justify our knowledge claims from the characteristics of that which we are relying upon when we are making our judgements. The two are inextricably interconnected.

He asks why our brains are organised into two different hemispheres rather than relying on a single system. A brain structure called the corpus callosum (from the Latin for “tough body”) links the two hemispheres, but this is a relatively late development. Two hemispheres appeared very early in vertebrate evolution, whereas fossil evidence suggests that the corpus callosum first emerged in mammals. Only 2% of the neurons in the nervous system of a brain connect the two hemispheres. McGilchrist speculates that each hemisphere addresses different needs. Whereas the right hemisphere supplies a more general awareness, and is particularly associated with avoiding predators, the left hemisphere concentrates on getting and grasping things, and is particularly associated with the task of obtaining food. These supply different forms of attention. Whereas the right hemisphere is more attuned to what is novel, the left hemisphere is more focused on achieving ends by identifying and manipulating what is familiar. The left hemisphere relies upon familiar procedures and is better suited to processing abstract representations. In comparison with a right hemisphere interpretation the interpretation which is supplied by our left hemisphere is more fixed.

McGilchrist is not seeking to reduce understanding into brain functioning, but he reminds us that it is not the case that knowing takes place from nowhere in particular. He claims that constructing theories and maps and diagrams comes more naturally to the left hemisphere than it does to the right. To put it into the terms which Pirsig uses, the left hemisphere generates a Classical approach to knowing, in which exactitude rather than Quality is prioritised. The right hemisphere generates a Romantic approach, in which uniqueness and discovery are prioritised. The fact that the right hemisphere is more receptive to what is new in our experience is why it is better if the right hemisphere dominates. It is less likely than the left hemisphere to trap us within fixed interpretations. The understanding supplied by the right hemisphere is more open to what our experience delivers. The left hemisphere prefers to reduce experience into that which it already understands. It gives us a powerful way of making sense of experience, and helps us achieve specific objectives, but it is also prone to creating delusions. It prefers to rely on ways of interpreting its experience that are familiar to it, rather than paying attention to the new content which is being supplied to us by our experience.

The similarity between a left hemisphere approach and a Critical Philosophy is easy to see. This may seem paradoxical, because does not the Critical Philosophy tradition place a high value on doubt? The paradox is resolved once you understand that it uses doubt to secure knowledge. Knowing is seen more as an explicit deduction from principles rather than a fallible exploration of reality as it is experienced. McGilchrist is not rejecting abstract models, but he does place our understanding of these models within the context of our situated awareness. This is the context of knowing. For Polanyi our tacit knowledge is the “from” upon which we rely when pursuing the “to” which is supplied by our goals. The pursuit of ends should be situated within a context. Our understanding not only relies on the fact that we have bodies, and particular tools, it is also culturally situated. The context supplies our tacit knowledge. McGilchrist supplies Post-Critical philosophy that is in accordance with what Polanyi and Pirsig are advocating. Knowing is a heuristic process of making sense of our experience. Our sense making relies upon the context which is supplied by the two hemispheres of our brain; each of which supplies us with a different way of understanding our experience.

In his exploration of neurophysiology McGilchrist is not providing us with another reductionist account of what it is to be human. He is not saying that if we want to understand ourselves all we need to do is study the brain. He is saying that the knowing process is illuminated by an understanding of our neurophysiology. He is not claiming that what it is to be a human being can be wholly reduced into an object of scientific inquiry. What it is to be a human being cannot be wholly captured by any of the sciences, it is the object of inquiry of the humanities. He opposes a materialist philosophy. Materialism fails to acknowledge the existence of realities which cannot be reduced to physical properties. What it is to be a human being is not wholly reducible to the properties that physics describes, just as it cannot be wholly reduced to biological principles. But nor is it the case that human languages supply us with a royal road to understanding what it is to be a human being. We formulate and are guided by our commitment to transcendent ideals. It is this commitment which generates the human. This is not the claim that it is only our thoughts which are real. Objective Idealism is just as delusional as reductive materialism. A human being is an existence that is both material and spiritual.

The delusion of Critical Philosophy is that it is possible to acquire a divine understanding, which is to say arrive at a point of absolute knowledge. I am claiming that God is the Transcendent Ideal which integrates all others, and it is our creation. Not in the sense that it is arbitrary, it is the ultimate destination of the life of the spirit, but this journey takes place in persons; it is not a universal mind directing everything in existence. It exists as a potential that becomes a reality as a consequence of the fact of our existence; not as something achieved, but as an ideal which creates the potential of being a human being. We are in that sense quite different from everything else in the universe, but this does not mean that we are God; the divine remains an ideal that transcends our existence. The claim that we can know absolutely is a delusion. This criticism is not only applicable to Western philosophy, it applies to all beliefs (and this includes philosophies of the East) which claim to have arrived at a state of enlightenment. It is absurd to aspire to understand ourselves in terms which can only apply to God. A Post-Critical approach is a philosophy that is appropriate to our humanity. The recognition of our finitude does not degrade us, it inspires awe in us at our achievements.

22) Neurological Evidence

‘‘The approach of Anglo-American philosophy to mind and language seems quite bizarre. This is especially true of what Michael Dummett calls the central idea behind both Anglo-American philosophy and phenomenology in the tradition of Brentano and Husserl, namely ‘the extrusion of thoughts from a mind’...to take thought as being external to the mind, with human biology and psychology irrelevant to the nature of thought.”

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Philosophy In the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999) p.256.

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Conclusion

Glossary

Agathon - The Good. A term Plato uses as his term for the ultimate source of truth, knowledge, and rightness. In Polanyi it functions as an ideal.

Aition - The term which Aristotle uses as his label for the explanatory reason why something exists. In materialism everything is a product of a causal process which can be explained in terms of material properties.

Anamnesis - In Plato the process of arriving at an understanding of reality by recollecting a previous life. For Polanyi it is the tacit knowledge a consciousness relies upon when making knowledge claims.

Classical - Focusing your attention on the typical rather than the particular.

Common Sense - Knowledge that has not been articulated. Without human users A.I. lacks common sense. Voegelin labels claims which are wholly disconnected from common sense - ideologies. An ideologist lives in a “Second Reality” whose ground is what they want to be the case.

Consciousness - Voegelin describes consciousness as the place where the transcendent and immanent meet. As a consequence of the fact of our self-consciousness we do not wholly belong to either one or the other, we exist in an in-between. Plato calls this state of betweenness a metaxy. Polanyi differentiates consciousness into a “subsidiary” and “focal” awareness.

Dynamic Quality - value which manifests itself in the form of novel patterns that arise independently of the order supplied by static structures.

Egophanic - For Voegelin a refusal to acknowledge any reality other than your will.

Experience - William James claims that the distinction between the knower and the known is an artificial distinction imposed on pure experience.

Gnosis - For Voegelin the claim that a state of absolute knowledge is possible.

God - God for Polanyi is the reality which those seeking to pursue it bring into existence. It elevates the meaning of our life in ways that cannot be wholly conceptualized. It is an understanding that has to be experienced.

Hypostatization - Comprehending the concepts that our use of symbols enables us to formulate as if they are a concrete reality. It ignores that it is we who make concepts in our efforts to make sense of our experience. It is our experiences which render our concepts meaningful.

Language - Polanyi views symbols as tools for evoking and reflecting upon our tacit awareness. Without this awareness language is meaningless.

Metaxy - This is neither subjective awareness nor an object that exists independently of our awareness. It is a state of in-betweenness that transcends every attempt to wholly reduce it into either a subject or an object.

Philodoxy - For Voegelin ending a questioning process by supplying an account with the intention of replacing the need for any further inquiry.

Positivism - The declaration that the methods used by scientists give us the techniques which determine what is eligible to be called knowledge.

Romantic - Focusing your attention on the particular rather than the typical.

Static Quality - value which manifests itself in the form of enduring patterns that serve the purpose of preserving the order supplied by existing structures.

Endnotes

Bibliography

This bibliography includes all the books cited in the notes plus others I found useful in the preparation of this book.

Polanyi, M. Full Employment and Free Trade Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1945)

Polanyi, M. Science, Faith and Society Oxford: Oxford University Press (1946)

Polanyi, M. The Logic of Liberty London: Routledge (1951)

Polanyi, M. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy London: Routledge (1958)

Polanyi, M.The Study of Man London: Routledge (1959)

Polanyi, M.The Tacit Dimension London: Routledge (1966)

Polanyi, M. Knowing and Being (Edited by M. Grene) London: Routledge (1969)

Polanyi, M. Scientific Thought and Social Reality: Essays by Michael Polanyi (Edited by Fred Schwartz) Madison: International Universities Press (1974)

Polanyi, M. Meaning (with Harry Prosch) Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1975)

Polanyi, M. Society, Economics, & Philosophy: Selected Papers (Edited by R.T.Allen) New Jersey: Transaction Publishers (1997)

Pirsig, R. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values New York: William Morrow and Company (1974)

Pirsig, R. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals London: Bantam Press (1991)

McGilchrist, I. The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World New Haven: Yale University Press (2009)

McGilchrist, I. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmasking of the World: Volume One London: Perspectiva Press (2021)

McGilchrist, I. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmasking of the World: Volume Two London: Perspectiva Press (2021)

Preface

Main Works

Introduction