Category Archives: Philosophy

Thoughts of a Solitary Walker V: The Logic of Extremism

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My mind ranges far and wide on my solitary walks. Today I want to bring you into a recent internal conversation that focused on clarifying the notion of extremism. One can become an extremist in any area of thought: theology, morality, metaphysics, politics, and many others. What is extremism? How do “extreme” positions become plausible to those who come to hold them? How do you know if you are an extremist? Is there any objective way to determine what positions are extreme? Or, are extremes “in the eye of the beholder”? Is the label “extremist” simply one more rhetorical weapon in a struggle for cultural control?

The Nature of Extremism

I have seen people move gradually from what seemed to me moderate theological, moral, theological, and political positions to extreme ones. During this process their entire system of beliefs and even their personalities change. How does this happen? Many factors come into play. Changes in psychological, physical, and political conditions can facilitate changes in beliefs. But I am not going to address these factors. I want to focus on logic.

I focus on logic because whatever other factors influence our beliefs, we always assert our beliefs as true. And once the mind latches on to a belief as true, two mental processes get triggered. First, the mind begins automatically to unfold the implications of that belief. This process is driven by the logical law that says that the valid implications of a true proposition are themselves true. Second, the mind becomes very sensitive to propositions that directly or by implication contradict that belief. We cannot believe that two contradictory assertions are both true at the same time.

The Path to Extremism

Once we embrace a belief as true for whatever reason, rational or irrational, our minds begin the process of extending its reach and defending it against rival beliefs in the neighborhood. If it weren’t for challenges from other people, our minds might be content to adjust a few of our other beliefs in the immediate vicinity. Clearing a little space around our beloved belief might reinforce it enough to put our minds at ease. But when we are confronted with competing beliefs, we must make a choice. We can modify our treasured belief to take into account the force of its competitors or we can double down and deny any truth to the alternatives. The second option is the path to extremism! Happily, most people don’t follow this path all the way to the extreme. I won’t say they are lazy. Perhaps they are simply pragmatic enough not to be bothered by their inconsistency and arbitrariness.

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth

The first mistake extremists make is assuming that any belief/proposition can embody “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Extremists will not allow any other truth claim to modify their axiomatic belief because any change in that belief would imply that it was not originally “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” A dispiriting prospect of endless modification and compromise would loom before them. Extremists treat beliefs as if they are either wholly true or wholly false. And if it’s discovered to be partially false it must be in fact wholly false. The logical law of the excluded middle would seem to support them, that is, for any proposition P, P is either true or false. There is no middle ground between true and false. When dealing in abstract symbols such as P and Q, which are bereft of existential content, no one can doubt the law. But in ordinary human language it does not work. Concrete existence cannot be translated clearly and without loss into language. Words and sentences are always imprecise and incomplete.

Gravitational Logic

We noted above that the move to extremism can take the straight path of the logic of implication—sometimes called “the slippery slope”—or a zig zag path of reacting to contradictions, sometimes called “dialectical logic.” Both of these logics tend toward extremism. But I think there is also another form of logical adjustment by which one may minimize the temptation to extremism. For lack of a better term, I call it gravitational logic.

Consider the way the entire universe consists of one gravitational field in which every point and particle is in communication with every other. The closer objects are to one another the more powerful the attractive force and the further apart, the less. But no matter how far apart, the gravitational interaction between two physical objects never reduces to zero. Likewise, the more massive an object, the more gravitational force it exerts. Any change in one place affects the whole and every point within it to some degree.

Let’s apply the analogy of the universal gravitational force to logic, the science of relationships among propositions. Every assertion about any state of affairs within the universe simultaneously asserts something about the whole universe, even if it mentions only one thing explicitly. This must be true because every particular thing in the universe exists only in relation to every other thing and the whole. To change one’s belief about one state of affairs requires adjustment in every other belief. The closer (logically) one belief is to another or the larger (that is, more general its scope) the more adjustment will be required.

The moon’s gravity affects the ocean tides on earth twice as much as the Sun because, though much less massive, it is much closer to earth. And the harmony or tension between two moral beliefs will be much more apparent than harmony or tension between a moral belief and belief about the geology of Australia. Moral beliefs live in the same neighborhood and speak about things within the same space. And yet, beliefs about morality, history, cosmology, and geology speak about the same universe and condition each other however slightly.

Avoiding Extremism without Falling into Relativism

In my view, this analogy helps us avoid extremism without falling into a morass of relativism and never-ending compromise. First, because in our world everything is related to everything, there can be no statement in human words that embodies the ideal of “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” There is always more to learn and some adjustments to be made. Extremism is thus deprived of its basic premise. However, because beliefs live in regions, neighborhoods and even local streets—such as morality, natural science, metaphysics, history, etc.—we can assert with confidence the reliability of our beliefs as long as we take the lay of the adjacent land into account and stumble on no unanswerable objections. Though it is not impossible, we need not worry that a belief about a state of affairs in another galaxy will defeat or severely modify our beliefs about matters nearer to home.

Next Time: Shall we experiment with some beliefs to see how this works?

Thoughts of a Solitary Walker III: Do We Live in a Material World?

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In this series, I am sharing with you some thoughts I had on my daily walks. And yes, I really do think about such things on my solitary walks. Walk with me as we explore connections among ideas that have stimulated the minds and stirred the hearts of people from ancient times to today. Thinking won’t solve every problem, but no problem will be solved without it.

Misplaced Realism

In my account of Solitary Walk II, I mentioned a thought I did not pursue. Early modern natural science rejected Aristotle’s hypotheses about why things behave the way they do, calling them “occult” (that is hidden or non-observable) only to replace them with their own occult entities. Instead of things being moved by inner strivings toward ends and given structure by intelligible forms, the new scientists postulated tiny material particles that relate to each other the way the parts of a machine relate in the macro world. And they treated this imaginary model as if it described what is truly real. I don’t know for sure whether Galileo, Gassendi, and Newton took these models realistically or merely as guides for further discovery. But many of their followers took them literally, and that is the way westerners have been taught physics and chemistry ever since.

This misplaced realism has had a profound cultural and religious impact on the modern world. Treating the material/mechanical model as truly describing the constitution and activity of the real world dramatically changes our relationship to the natural world. The external world gets evacuated of every spiritual, mental, psychological, and aesthetic quality. These qualities are transferred to a God outside and beyond nature or inside the human mind.  The world becomes a material machine that exists and runs on its own. Matter becomes the enduring substance of the world and effectively takes the place of the sustaining power of God. We can no longer see God doing anything or feel God’s presence. And the loss of a sense of divine presence and activity in the world lies at the origin and growth of modern agnosticism and atheism.

But the material/mechanical model should never have been taken realistically. The model has not and cannot be shown to be true by the mathematical methods of modern science. And there are good reasons to think it false.

Whence the Concept of Matter?

Consider the idea of matter, beginning with common experience. We encounter the world in two fundamental ways. On the one hand, we think the intelligible world of ideas, patterns, concepts, feelings, imaginings, and our own minds. These things exist inside our minds and do not conform to the physical laws that describe the external world. They do not occupy physical space. It takes no more space to imagine a galaxy than to imagine an electron. On the other hand, we experience the world as brute resistance, impenetrable by mind, unordered stuff out of which every physical thing is formed. We cannot think matter. We experience it as a dumb medium that impacts the five senses only to unload (or download!) the information encoded in it.

Let’s consolidate. The only world we can think, understand, or feel exists within our minds. Where else could we get in touch with it? And yet, there are two reasons we naturally believe that there exists an external world. First, we do not have a sense that we generate the countless ideas and endless variation of things that constitute the world we experience. Second, we experience the world as offering resistance to penetration by our minds. It confronts us with an apparently unthinking and unthinkable substance, a mere medium, which we call matter.

Let me make one more important distinction. We often confuse the concept of “the physical” with the concept of “the material.” We can experience and at least partially understand physical things. A physical thing, whether a rabbit or an atom, is a combination of a thinkable, intelligible order and what common sense calls matter. No physical thing is purely material. Matter is the physical stripped of all intelligible order. So, kicking a stone or pounding your hand on a table does not prove that there is a material world. At best, it points to the physical world.

Matter is Not a Scientific Idea but a Philosophical One

Ancient Philosophy

Plato reasoned to the necessity of matter by deducing the necessity of a place or space where the intelligible forms—the ideas of things—can exist as physical. What we would call “matter” is for Plato emptiness not substance. For Aristotle, the concept of matter is necessary to account for continuity of existence through the process of substantial change. For example, a burning log loses its substantial “log” existence and becomes smoke and ash. Matter is the unchanging stuff that accounts for the continuity within the change. Otherwise, substantial change would result in annihilation and re-creation from nothing. Matter never exists on its own. It exists only as a contributing cause to the existence of physical things.

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas adopts Aristotle’s rather than Plato’s concept of matter. Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that matter is necessary to account for continuity through substantial change—log to smoke and ash. However, whereas for Aristotle both matter and form exist eternally, for Aquinas God created matter from nothing. God alone exists eternally and possesses the power of self-existence. Created matter functions within the created world much like eternal matter functioned in Aristotle’s eternal world. However, two great differences stand out. First, created matter, because it is not self-existent, cannot function as the ultimate ground of the persistence of the physical world through all changes. Second, matter cannot be purely opposed to mind, absolutely unintelligible. For whatever God creates, God thinks and understands. For us, matter may be an unintelligible medium for information or mere resistance, but God sees right through it. Everything that exists, exists within God’s mind. So, the distinction we make between form and matter is secondary, relative to our experience of the world and not absolute. For God—and therefore in truth—there is no non-mental world.

Escaping the Material/Mechanical Model

Once we understand that the material/mechanical model is a philosophical postulate—not an empirical observation or a scientific theory—and that taken realistically it contradicts the Christian doctrine of God and creation, we can get free from its mesmerizing power and begin to recover our sense of God’s presence and activity in the world. Realizing that the power that holds the world together is not matter but God’s continual command of “let it be” opens whole new vistas of perception. We now can perceive the presence and activity of God in the presence and activity of physical things. The beauty, rationality, purpose and goodness we see in the world can be received as the beauty, rationality, purpose and goodness of God. The durability of the world can be felt as the faithfulness of God.

Next Time: We will take another walk. Can the order and activity of the world best be explained as that of a big mindless machine or of a living organism. Do plants have souls or are they machines within machines?

Thoughts of a Solitary Walker

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I take a walk almost every day. Not only is walking healthy for the body, it is good for the soul. It also stimulates the mind. In this series, I want to share with you some thoughts–philosophical, theological, moral, and political–I’ve had while walking.

Let me tell you first about my title “Thoughts of a Solitary Walker.” Years ago, in preparing a lecture for one of my classes, I ran across a book of essays by J.J. Rousseau by the title The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Each chapter describes Rousseau’s experiences and feelings on a walk. Rousseau (1712-78) is known as the “father of the romantic movement.” I am amazed at his ability to describe his inner feelings and reactions to passing scenes. My admiration for him is limited to his gifts, however, not the use he made of them. Though brilliant and extraordinarily talented, Rousseau was a deeply flawed man. Like Karl Marx, Percy Shelly and other unemployed intellectuals that came after him, he was a narcissist, a moocher, and a grifter. He sponged off of his friends and abused them when they complained. He forced his mistress to surrender their five children to the local orphanage.

Nevertheless, to begin this series I want to give credit to Rousseau for my title and for the idea of the series. Below I quote Rousseau’s account of his fifth walk. In the lecture to which I referred above, I have students compare and contrast the experience Rousseau describes in this reading with the experiences Augustine describes in his Confessions, Books 9 & 10.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Fifth Walk)

“I have noticed in the vicissitudes of a long life that the periods of the sweetest joys and the most lively pleasures are not, however, those of which the memory attracts me and touches me most. These brief moments of delirium and passion, however lively they may be, are still, and by their very vivacity, only points scattered along the line of life. They are too rare and too rapid to constitute a state. And the happiness that my heart regrets is not composed of fugitive instances but is a simple and permanent state—a state which is nothing lively in itself but whose duration increases their delight to the point of finding there, at last, the supreme happiness.

All is in a continual flux on earth: nothing on it keeps a constant and fixed form, and our affections, which attach us to exterior things, pass and change necessarily as the things pass and change. Always ahead of us or behind us, they recall the past which is no longer or anticipate the future which often is not to be: there is nothing solid there to which the heart can attach itself. Also, here below one scarcely has anything but fleeting pleasure; as for lasting happiness, I doubt that it is known here. Scarcely is there in our most lively joys an instant when the heart can truly say to us: I wish that this instant would last forever; and how can one call “happiness” a fugitive state which leaves us with a heart still troubled and empty, which makes us regret something before or still desire something after?

But if there is a state where the soul finds a solid enough base to rest itself entirely and gather together there its entire being without having to recall the past or to step over into the future; where time is nothing for it, where the present lasts always, without, however, marking its duration and without any trace of succession, without any other feeling—of privation or joy, of pleasure or pain, of desire or fear—than that alone of our existence, and this feeling alone can fill it completely; [then] as long as this state lasts, whoever finds himself in it can call himself happy, not with an imperfect happiness poor and relative such as what one finds in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient happiness perfect and full which leaves in the soul no void which it feels the need of filling. Such is the state where I found myself often on the Island of St. Pierre in my solitary reveries, whether lying in my boat which I let drift at the mercy of the water, whether sitting on the shore of the agitated lake, whether somewhere else on the edge of a beautiful river or of a brook murmuring on the gravel.

What does one enjoy in such a situation? Nothing exterior to the self, nothing except the self and one’s own existence. As long as this state lasts, one is sufficient to oneself, like God. The sentiment of existence, stripped of all other affections, is by itself a precious sentiment of contentment and peace which would be sufficient alone to make existence dear and sweet to whoever knows how to set aside from himself all the sensual and earthly impressions which ceaselessly come to distract us from it and to disturb its sweetness here below. But most men, agitated by continual passions, hardly know this state and, having tasted it only imperfectly for a few instances, keep only an obscure and confused idea of it which does not make them feel its charm. It would not even be good, in the present constitution of things, that, eager for these sweet ecstasies, they would be revolted by the active life for which their needs, always reborn, prescribe the duty to them. But an unfortunate who has been cut off from human society and who is no longer able here below to do anything useful and good for others or for himself can find in this state some consolations for all human happiness—consolations that fortune and men could not take away from him” (pp. 68-69).

Next Time: Is the world a material machine or a spiritual organism?