Readings
Texts
Notes
Synopsis
Something massively important happened in Athens 2,500 years ago, and you need to know about it.
To begin at the very beginning, consider the case of a caveman seeing his buddy Thog killed by lightning:
You see, our caveman is hanging out in his cave (where else?) one day when he sees Thog coming from down the valley to visit. Just as the caveman waves at Thog, a great bolt of lightning strikes Thog, killing him dead on the spot. The caveman, stunned and terrified, retreats back into the safety of his cave to ponder Thog's dramatic demise.
"Surely," he says to himself, "Thog must have offended the Gods! Knowing Thog, he likely didn't sacrifice enough to the Gods, saving a bit more of the kill for himself and the family than the Gods approved. Angered and vengeful, the Gods struck him down!"
"Thog," he mutters, "deserved their divine and just retribution. I, however, shall not make the same mistake!"
He dutifully proceeds to make a great sacrifice to the Gods, so as to ensure they well know that he, at least, should be in their favor.
Our caveman, note, seeks to explain Thog's sudden death so as to use that explanation as a prediction and control what will happen to him.
To be sure, he relies on a supernatural explanation, but notice that the rationale for the appeal to the supernatural is exactly the same as the appeal to science. We appeal to science so that we can explain and predict, and we use those explanations in developing technologies which enable us to exert control over our environment. The motivation is the same in both cases: explanation enabling prediction, which in turn enables control. That we are vulnerable humans eking out a miserable existence in a harsh environment only serves to highlight the strength of the motivation.
What, then, is the difference between the supernatural explanation and the scientific explanation?
We have historically sought to tell stories about the world to explain the world. It is much easier to explain that lightning is Zeus' belligerence than telling the full, complicated, and surprisingly incomplete story of fulminology, the science of lightning. Thus by attributing agency to phenomena, we at once believe ourselves to have a better understanding of them while we feel ourselves better able to control them.
As I say, these twin desires, understanding and control, are expressed in modern terms as science and technology. If I'm right, the impulse that originally led us to religion is precisely the same impulse that now leads us to science.
Yet science springs from a very different assumption than religion. Science rejects religion's appeal to the supernatural in explanation. That is, natural phenomena can only be explained by other natural phenomena for an explanation to count as scientific. We call this principle 'naturalism'. It asserts that the natural world is explanatorily closed, barring any appeal to a supernatural world in explanation.
The reason for naturalism, of course, is that appealing to the supernatural (gods, demons, spirits, souls, ghosts, or what have you) in explaining a natural event begs the explanatory question. After all, if what explains Thog's death is God, what explains God? Since we cannot explain anything about the supernatural world--it being inaccessible to us, if it exists--we are left with a mystery. Put another way, we try to explain a sudden, puzzling event (Thog's dramatic demise) by appeal to something even more mysterious, God in this case. Necessarily lacking any explanation for God, our explanation of Thog's death by lightning strike by appeal to God may make our caveman selves feel better, but we are in fact none the wiser for it.
We must be careful, however. As we shall see, rejecting supernatural explanation in favor of natural explanation so as to avoid begging the explanatory question may be taken by those who find comfort in the supernatural as a rejection of the supernatural altogether. For them, the assertion that invoking the supernatural in explaining natural phenomena is illicit because it is question-begging (and, thus, an empty explanation) necessarily presupposes rejecting the existence of the supernatural altogether. But why should we agree? Perhaps there are supernatural facts just as there are natural facts. All we insist is that the former facts not be used to explain the latter, which is clearly not to reject them or the possibility of their existence altogether.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the reasons for having religious belief today are different than the reasons we originally had for religious belief. Our caveman selves just get confused on this point, and understandably so. Naturalism recognizes that explanations by appeal to the supernatural merely explain at the cost of inviting far more troubling puzzles and mysteries, which themselves are not open to investigation. Naturalism is only about the natural world, however. It is mum on anything not in the natural world, a point which bears careful consideration.
But I digress. What has naturalism to do with Plato's Republic, our first reading for today? Why indeed are the Ancient Greeks credited with a revolutionary turn of thought that has echoed, resonated, and amplified down the ensuing milenia?
Permit me to quote the opening paragraph of Kaufmann and Baird's "Ancient Philosophy":
Something unusual happened in Greece and the Greek colonies of the Aegean Sea some 2,500 years ago. Whereas the previous great cultures of the Mediterranean had used mythological stores of the gods to explain the operations of the world and the self, some of the Greeks began to discover new ways of explaining things. Instead of reading their ideas into, or out of, ancient scriptures or poems, they began to use reason, contemplation, and sensory observation to make sense of reality.
To be sure, this is not to say the Greeks lacked such a religious tradition. Homer's Illiad and Odyssey are substantially stories about the interventions of gods in the oft-hapless lives of mortal men and women. Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony catalog the important gods, their origins, and how they came to make the world as it is. As best we can tell, Homer and Hesiod were writing in approximately the 8th century BCE. Everything changed in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE.
Greek thinkers--we unfairly lump them altogether and call them "presocratics"--at this time began to eschew supernatural explanations in favor of natural explanations. This is an extraordinary break which arguably set western philosophy (and, with it, the very sciences it would eventually birth) on a unique trajectory. Roughly, the presocratics' novel idea is that the natural world is intelligible on its own terms, should we make the effort of applying our faculty of reason and our senses to understanding it. Speculation about divine agency may make us feel we have an explanation, but such explanations invariably beg the question: Having explained the natural world in terms of the supernatural world, we find we have the altogether more obscure puzzle of explaining the supernatural world. Best stick to the natural world to see what philosophical--really, rational, and today broadly deemed 'scientific'--inquiry yields. As Kirk, Raven, and Schofield put it in "The Presocratic Philosophers":
...the transition from myths to philosophy, from mythos to logos as it is sometimes put, is far more radical than that involved in a simple process of de-personifying or de-mythologizing, understood either as a rejection of allegory or as a kind of decoding; or even than what might be involved (if the idea is not complete nonsense) in an almost mystical mutation of ways of thinking, of intellectual process itself. Rather, it entails, and is the product of, a change this is political, social and religious rather than sheerly intellectual, away from the closed traditional society (which in its archetypal form is an oral society in which the telling of tales is an important instrument of stability and analysis) and toward an open society in which the values of the past become relatively unimportant and radically fresh opinions can be formed both of the community itself and of its expanding environment.
It is that kind of change that took place in Greece between the ninth and the sixth centuries B.C.--a change complicated, to be sure, by the exceptional persistence of non-literacy there. The growth of the polis, the independent city-state, out of earlier aristocratic structures, together with the development of foreign contacts and a monetary system, transformed the Hesiodic view of society and made the old divine and heroic archetypes seem obsolete and, except when they were directly protected by religious cult, irrelevant. Much, no doubt, of the rational undertone of the Homeric tradition, as well as the classificatory craft of Hesiod, survived; but in the speculative and cosmopolitan societies of Ionia, not least in Miletus itself, they took on a sharper form and were applied, without too much distraction from myths and religion, to a broader and more objective model of the world.
This was an important, even radical departure from the kind of supernatural explanation so typical in the rest of the world. (In fact, it is interesting to note that the pre-socratics are sometimes called 'proto-scientists', although I don't think this is quite fair to either science or the pre-socratics.)
Thus, in many respects the presocratics set much of the naturalist stage for Plato and Aristotle. The presocratics investigated such questions as
- What is the fundamental stuff of the universe?
- How is change possible?
- What is real, and what is illusion?
- How do we come to have knowledge of the universe?
To be sure, these are fairly traditional questions. What sets the presocratics apart is their refusal to allow supernatural explanations. In this they set western philosophy on a largely distinctive course, culminating in the various sciences and technologies we enjoy today. To the extent that supernatural explanations of natural phenomena are troublingly question-begging, that is to say, their insistence on natural explanations of natural phenomena presage philosophical--read, "rational"--inquiry and the enterprise of science itself. Of course, such a strategy is only possible if the universe is fundamentally explicable. So among other things, they had to assume that the universe was rationally intelligible, even if what we perceive to be the case is radically at odds with what turns out to be the case.
There is, however, a challenge to naturalism which is profound. I highlighted this last time when I invited us to consider the most interesting or fascinating phenomenon we encounter taking a stroll on the beach. There were many excellent suggestions, including the wind, waves, and sunrises, the crabs scuttling from their burrows in the dunes, the jellyfish and sea shells washed ashore, the fish and sharks in the water, and the many seagulls, pipers, and pelicans.
I suggested, however, that as fascinating as all of these phenomena might be, the phenomenon of our walking the beach and being fascinated by all of the other phenomena is itself the most astonishing of the all the phenomena. In short, we ourselves are the most interesting things on the beach, and the reason is simple: We have properties it appears almost nothing else in nature has. We, or our minds, have beliefs, desires, intentions, wishes, hopes, fears, perceptions, memories, deliberations, and choices. Yet none of those properties are, it seems, physical. Physical objects have properties like location, mass, velocity, opacity, extension, etc., basically all the sorts of properties that are the quantifiable (that is, measurable) properties about which physics builds its theories.
Now recall the question I asked last time, what are the differences to be found between my recent biography and that of a rock? Another way to put the same point is a thought experiment with which I began the class today, what is the most remarkable thing to be found on the beach?. After cataloging the many beautiful, amazing, curious, and intriguing things we find on the beach, I suggested that the most remarkable thing to be found on the beach is, unequivocally, you. After all, you alone of all the things found on the beach are amazed by what you find, curious about what you find, delighted by what you discover, awed by the beauty you experience, and so on.
This important point was not lost on the Ancient Philosophers. Certainly understanding the mind and its place in nature was of central interest to both Plato and Aristotle. Moreover, they came to develop distinct positions which set the course for two very different traditions in philosophy I propose to briefly describe this semester.
Indeed, let us note that our discussion of all these views is hasty almost to the point of scholarly irresponsibility. All of the philosophers we will be considering have carefully worked-out theories and arguments any one of which would require an entire semester's work to fully grasp and appreciate. We can, however, get a sense of the overall framework each philosopher has developed, and that will be enough to ground our subsequent study of contemporary issues in the foundations of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. So, whatever you do, do not come away from these views thinking them ridiculous or absurd. Any perceived silliness is surely an artifact of our brevity in considering them.
First for our consideration is Plato's complicated view of the mind. To understand the portion of the reading you were given, it is useful to understand Plato's project in the Republic. The Republic consists of a lengthy, involved, and sometimes heated discussion between Socrates and his friends on the nature of justice or morality. The question that preoccupies the Republic is, why be moral if there were no consequences to being immoral? To answer this question, Socrates proposes that the state be viewed as the individual person writ large. If we can understand why it is good for the state to be just or moral, then we can understand by analogy why it is good for individual to be just or moral. Socrates is busy explaining all this, and thereby explaining his famous tripartite distinction of the soul in your reading.
To understand Plato's tripartite division of the soul, it may help to draw on the analogy Plato uses in another dialogue, the Phaedrus. According to Plato, the human mind is composed of three parts which are akin to two horses drawing a charioteer. One of the horses is driven by its desire for food, the other is high-spirited and driven by its emotions, while the charioteer is put in the position of having to control the two unruly, uncooperative animals. What this boils down to is the proposal that the human mind or soul has three distinct parts:
- The Rational Soul
- The Passionate Soul
- The Appetitive Soul
No one of these parts is intrinsically bad. Rather, evil arises when the Rational Soul cedes primacy to either the Passionate Soul or the Appetitive Soul. The just or moral soul, exactly analogous to the just or moral state, is the well-ordered soul (or state).
Thus Plato is able to explain the complexity of human behavior in terms of a kind of complexity in the human mind. As we shall find, this approach to explanation is a forebear to much of current psychological explanation. Indeed, even Freud, it was noted, employs a similar tripartite distinction of the human mind in his discussions.
Is the platonic/freudian approach to explaining the mind satisfactory, though? This is where our discussion gets interesting. The point I tried to make in class is that if we conceive of the Appetitive Soul, the Rational Soul, and the Passionate Soul (or the Id, Ego, and Superego, respectively) as minds themselves--and there is no reason whatsoever to think either Plato or Freud saw them as anything else--then we must conclude that these cannot be satisfactory explanations. After all, we are being asked to accept an explanation of the mind which uses minds in the explanation. It's an altogether pointless circularity, from the standpoint of needing an explanation.
This problem raises, I submit, a fascinating question: In what terms, then, shall an explanation of mind be given?
Our ordinary folk-psychological approach is to explain minds by citing the beliefs, desires, and intentions that presumably comprise them. In doing so, we construct a theory of mind for those whose behavior we are attempting to understanding--including, notably, ourselves!
Yet as fodder for proper scientific investigation, mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions seem spectacularly ill-suited. How, for example, does one measure them? Where are they located? How are they individuated (identified) in the first place?
Theory of Mind, which we all employ in understanding one another, seems not to fit the standard reductionist approach in the sciences to showing how a natural phenomenon in question can be boiled down, as it were, to physics. That is, if our difficulty is in just how to give a naturalistic explanation of the phenomenon of mind, it seems pointless to turn around and invoke phenomena like believing, desiring, and intending which appear at least as mysterious from the naturalist's standpoint as the mind they are intended to help us explain.
Perhaps, then, we should eschew mental states per se in favor of neurological states. This gets us much closer to the overall project of today's cognitive science, but as we shall see, we've many hurdles to cross before we get there.
Returning now to the two ancient traditions in question, it bears noting as we did not in class describe as clearly as I would have liked Plato's discussion of the soul is interwoven with epistemic worries about the nature of human knowledge and metaphysical worries about the underlying nature of reality. That is, it is only by the use of reason that man is able to apprehend the eternal and unchanging perfection of the realm of forms which underlies the messy and changing reality we actually perceive. (Put that way, Plato has a very different idea than us of what counts as a good explanation!)
Reading Plato is always a pleasure, but where Plato may be best appreciated by those with a literary and humanist bent, Aristotle often appeals to those with a more scientific attitude. For Aristotle is especially interested in developing principled classifications by which all things can be distinguished. For example, in De Anima, or On the Soul, Aristotle notes that all living things are to be distinguished from inanimate things insofar as that which lives takes nutrition, grows, dies, and decays. Thus plants, animals, and humans are to be distinguished from rocks by having a nutritive soul. Animals and humans are distinguished from plants by having appetitive, perceptive, and locomotive souls in varying degrees. Humans are distinguished from animals in having also rational souls. There is, it must be admitted, a certain elegance to this explanation. We have at least an account of a kind of fundamental hierarchy into which all organisms fall.
As with Plato, though, Aristotle considers mankind to occupy the apex of this hierarchy.
The takeaway from our discussion today is that Plato and Aristotle each take different approaches to the apparent chasm between us and everything else in the world. In effect, they anchor distinct intellectual threads to be further developed by later philosophers.
For Plato we really are discontinuous with the natural, perceived world, because we ourselves have immortal, rational souls that are our 'true-selves', which only happen to be momentarily forgetful of the reality of the realm of the forms when we are embodied and also, incidentally, confused by the addition in embodiment of the appetitive and spirited souls. The gap or chasm between mind and the perceived world is there because the mind is real, but the perceived world is merely a dim reflection of the real world--aka, the realm of the forms. One day the rational soul, unbound from the body, will again apprehend the forms and the gap in question will be grasped or seen to have been only an apparent, not a real, gap.
The thread Aristotle weaves is much less complicated. There is no gap between us and the world if we pay attention to the continuities of capacities we share with other living things. Plants and animals are capable of self-nourishment, and so are we. Plants and animals are capable of growth, decay, and reproduction, and so are we. Animals are capable of sensation, and so are we. Animals are also capable of locomotion, and so are we. The only capacity setting us off from the rest is our rationality, so if there is a gap, it is scarcely (for Aristotle) unbridgeable. We are simply another kind of animal, as it were, the rational animal.
Next time we will take up Descartes, who inherits Plato's inclination to see the gap between me and the rock as profound, but who also brings to bear vastly more sophisticated arguments in favor of the position.