AN EXCHANGE ON HUME, POSTMODERNISM, AND LOST KNOWLEDGE
A favorite correspondent of mine, Regi Firehammer of “The Autonomist”, began writing about how Hume wrecked philosophy in the 18th century and laid the foundation for postmodernism. Firehammer is a student of Objectivism, the philosophy of novelist Ayn Rand, and has done considerable work of his own in ontology, epistemology, and ethics. So Firehammer indicted Hume from a generally Objectivist perspective. I found much to agree with in what he had to say about the woeful legacy of Hume on modern thought. However, I had a key disagreement with Firehammer about Hume and postmodernism.
Firehammer views modernism as the unblinkered embrace of objective reality that the Enlightenment epitomizes. Thus, the postmodernist rejects modernism by wading into a subjectivist swamp of whims, contradictions, and outright mendacity. Hume blazed the trail for postmodernism by a queer rationalism in empirical disguise that undermined the certitude by which anyone can claim to know anything beyond the raw experience of the senses. There is much to be said for this take on postmodernism and Hume.
But on my view postmodernism is not a rejection of modernism but the completion of it. Modernism is a radical reductionism that pigeonholes all of reality as the effects of a single principle – i.e., nature, or in the extreme, matter. The modernist project began with stripping Aristotelian formal and final causes (essence and purpose) from ontology, leaving only the material and efficient ones (matter and mechanics) to explain everything. Postmodernism completes the project by reducing reality to whatever the individual makes of his subjective experience of the world. Indeed, postmodernism is a black hole into which reality disappears. Hume’s role in this radical reductionism was to formulate a skepticism of objective knowledge which is logically man’s epistemic limit in a universe devoid of essence and purpose.
Thus, in this edited series of exchanges over the past few weeks I responded to Firehammer’s critique of Hume …
THE LOST KNOWLEDGE OF THE MODERN AGE
[T]he hallmark of modernist thought is the primacy of the material and efficient causes over the formal and final ones. Often that primacy is to the complete exclusion of the formal and final causes as real, thus physicalism. Otherwise, it may be a subordination of those causes to the material and efficient ones, which results in a soft physicalism. Or the formal and final causes may be an epistemological, rather than an ontological, issue for the modernist: They may be real, but they are not knowable to man.
Therefore, what is common to all modernists is the belief that man cannot apprehend any fundamental order or purpose to existence. That is because either the modernist, in a physicalist fashion, declares they are not real or he says, whether or not they are real, they cannot be known. While this mode of thought does not greatly impair a deep understanding of what is physical, it cripples any understanding of the mental (broadly construed) realm of existence. This is because matter and mechanics are insufficient for a sound grasp of human nature.
[Consequently] there is no foundation for modernist beliefs about man and the universe once the formal and final causes are denied, either ontologically or epistemologically, as objective knowledge of what is real. … As to the fundamental order of the universe (its formal cause), science offers no answer and cannot offer any answer. That is because science must presume order to explain order, as I explained in this forum recently in my article "Argument from Order: God Exists". I can also offer a non-theist argument that science is incompetent to explain the fundamental order of the universe. To account for that order which brings forth all of the order we observe in the universe, a formal cause of the universe must be identified. The formal cause is the principle of organization of each and every entity. In the case of an organism, the principle of organization is specifically the principle of life. However, the principle of organization is qualitative and not quantitative. It is not subject to measurement and so identification other than through its effects upon matter. Science by definition is restricted to knowledge that can be obtained through quantification and measurement, and so is restricted to that which is physical. Because a thing can only be quantified or measured if it has order, science must presume its order to explain it. For this reason science cannot account for the fundamental order of the universe.
Regarding the fundamental purpose of the universe (its final cause), I agree that requires the existence of a being responsible for the existence of the universe. That being is God. As we covered this territory before, including the definitions of "existence" and "universe" that are peculiar to Objectivism, I won't get into your objection regarding my use of the word "existence" other than to say I should have been more careful and wrote either "our existence" or the "existence of the universe". I'll rely upon my previous statements in this forum to support my claim that a being requires extension -- i.e., physicality -- only if he exists within spacetime, which God as the creator of spacetime -- i.e., the universe -- does not. But I will say that the denial of a fundamental purpose of the universe is a hallmark of modernist thought, which is evidenced by the frenzy of utopianism and nihilism that has plagued the modern era.
POSTMODERNISM COMPLETES MODERNISM
Hume's skepticism is the quintessence of these deficiencies of modernism. The denial of the validity of formal causes means the denial of any genuine knowledge about nature. The denial of the validity of final causes means the denial of any basis for an objective morality. He made invincible ignorance about man and the universe respectable, and by the twentieth century we reaped the whirlwind filling the vacuum of that invincible ignorance with monstrous utopian schemes, the nihilistic assault upon objective morality by Neitzsche and his postmodernist progeny, and an Orwellian reduction of knowledge that denies most the vocabulary to comprehend the problem -- and so formulate solutions for recovery.
[So] I am persuaded that modern philosophy went off the rails when the final and formal causes (i.e., essence and purpose) were jettisoned from ontology. I think this occurred primarily because the scientific method proved very successful in explicating the material and efficient causes of physical entities; indeed, so successful, that modernists came to think all things should be comprehensible by the same means. Because knowledge of the formal and final causes cannot be obtained by the scientific method, modernists have rejected them as real, or at the very least as objectively knowable. Thus, the modernist fallacy has been to let a particular means to knowledge determine all that can be knowledge – broadly speaking, scientism.
Hume’s skepticism is the product of taking the modernist rejection of the formal and final causes to its logical conclusion. I agree with you that postmodernism is rooted in this skepticism. However, I don’t see postmodernism as a falling away from modernism. Rather it is a continuation of the corruption of philosophy that began with modernism, the first glimmer of which was Ockham’s nominalism. And so over the past half-millennium the modern age has been in a way a dark age, because of the lost knowledge of essence and purpose in all things. Without this knowledge, morality is loosed from its objective moorings and floats in the currents of those wielding power. Little wonder then that the extraordinary scientific and technological advances of the modern age resulted in the means to corrupt, oppress, maim, and murder on scales unimaginable in prior “unenlightened” eras.
Also without knowledge of essence and purpose, reason is cut off from knowledge of God. So if the modernist holds a belief in God, he does so through fideism. Therefore, modernist epistemology is plagued with the rationalisms of scientism and fideism – and so the false dichotomy of reason and faith. All this said, it is not my argument that an ontology that incorporates all four of the Aristotelian causes must lead to the conclusion that God exists. As I have written before, an atheist can be a hylomorphist (in fact, I believe there are Randians who are). What the loss of this knowledge of essence and purpose does entail is the severing of fact from value. “Is” and “ought” are torn asunder, and morality is no longer grounded in what is real but rather in what is wished. This is the breach in modernist thought that all of the intellectual pathologies of our age have swept in to fill.
THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE
Regi Firehammer a.k.a. The Autonomist: “Quite seriously, Bill, I do not see how believing in either final or formal causes makes any difference one way or the other to science.”
Because it doesn't. We are all Baconians now when it comes to science. Modern science by definition restricts itself to observation and explanation of the material and efficient causes of things -- i.e., matter and mechanics. The formal and final causes -- i.e., essence and purpose -- are beyond the ken of science.
So when you ask, "Can you think of anything in science that has been discovered that required them?", the answer is no. Similarly, I don't rely upon mathematics to spell words correctly. The scientific method can only produce knowledge about matter and mechanics, because it restricts itself to the collection and analysis of physical properties. Physical properties are the effects of an entity's extension in space and time -- e.g., size, duration, mass, structure, chemical composition, and interaction with other physical entities. Those effects are what make an entity objectively identifiable because they are reducible to quantitative data such as measurement or enumeration. This is what makes scientific knowledge so reliable and relatively indisputable.
So science is our best tool for understanding that which is physical. Of course, there is more to what exists than the physical. Therefore, it should be clear that science has its limits as a means to knowledge. Yet, one of the great follies of our era is to believe that if something cannot be identified and understood through science, then it must not exist. Like the man with a hammer who sees everything as a nail, the modern man of science sees everything in terms of matter and mechanics (material and efficient causes). Thus, for him there is no need to account for the essence and purpose of things because such principles (formal and final causes) do not exist -- at least not in any manner that permits objective knowledge of them.
Metaphysically this error is scientific naturalism (physicalism or materialism in its extreme form) and epistemologically it is scientism. It conflates a means to knowledge with knowledge itself. As powerful a means to knowledge as science is, it is only a means and not the only one. There is more to what exists than the physical, and we all know from our experience that we can have knowledge of the non-physical -- i.e., the mind. So we should know that science is not the end-all of knowledge. Indeed, a hallmark of the human mind is consciousness. There is simply no scientific means by which I can objectively identify the consciousness of any other human being, yet I have no doubt that all other human beings are conscious.
Is my lack of doubt merely a matter of faith? Or does it rest solely upon reason? If the latter, then there must be a means of knowledge other than science by which I can know that the minds of others objectively exist. That means is philosophy, through which I can identify and understand that which is not physical (in addition to employing science properly as a method of knowledge of the physical).
The problem that arises with a philosophical examination of the non-physical is that the mind, for example, is not reducible to quantitative data. There is nothing to measure; there are no parts to analyze. (To argue that the electro-chemical activity of the brain can be measured and analyzed, thus the mind is quantitatively reducible and so subject to science, begs the question. That activity is the physical effect of the mind and not the mind itself.) So the quantitative data that makes us confident of the objectivity of scientific knowledge is absent. In other words, there is more room for dispute when it comes to the philosophy of mind because there are far fewer hard points of indisputable data.
That doesn't mean the truth about the mind is inaccessible, only that there is a much greater probability of (honest) error being made with the only means of knowledge of the mind -- i.e., philosophical inquiry. As I have argued, one of the profound errors of the modern era has been to jettison the principles of essence and purpose (the formal and final causes) from ontology in favor of a scientistic view of the nature of existence.
Firehammer: “No scientific description of any physical thing is ever complete.”
Indeed. So what is it about a thing that science cannot describe? The answer lies in its formal and final causes.
Also, a quick note on purpose ...
Firehammer: “The only things to which purpose has meaning are beings capable of having goals and ends, that is rational beings, i.e., men.”
I agree except that I would have written, "The only things to which purpose has meaning are beings capable of having goals and ends, that is rational beings, e.g., men." When I speak of a thing having a purpose in itself, I speak of its God-given purpose. How can I discover what that is? How do I learn of anything that I do not directly perceive?
Finally, a short comment about science ...
Firehammer: “What science restricts itself to is what can be objectively observed, directly or indirectly, whatever it is. It excludes nothing. What else would you have a science that has the world that we are directly conscious of study?”
If you want to define science in the Quinean sense that encompasses all objective knowledge, that's fine. That doesn't change the distinction I have been making between the physical and the non-physical -- i.e., the physical is reducible to quantitative data and the non-physical is not. Moreover, if science is to be defined as objective knowledge, then science must be open to the study of both the natural and the supernatural. To say that it cannot include the supernatural begs the question. So again, Regi, I'm not sure how defining science as you do refutes my argument that the formal and final causes of an entity are as real as its material and efficient ones.
THE END RESULT: SEVERING FACT FROM VALUE
Firehammer: “I gave a very long explanation of what I meant by, 'no scientific description of any physical thing is ever complete,' and it had nothing to do with formal or final causes. I think your statement both ignores (no intention implied) my explanation and interjects what cannot be justified based on my argument. Scientific descriptions must be incomplete because science is open-ended, and however much we learn about anything there will always be more to learn. Science can only address the physical attributes conceptually and since concepts are by nature discrete, and physical reality is 'analog' (think continual verses continuous), no scientific description can ever be complete (for the same reason not digital image can ever capture everything, no matter how small the pixels are).”
Your last sentence puts it quite nicely. You are making my point that science is inherently limited in what it can describe, just as a digital image can never fully capture analog reality, because it is a quantitative method of knowledge. Oddly, you implicitly appear to agree with me on this, yet you have made explicit objections to my statement that the scientific method is quantitative. Your objections have not been persuasive for a couple of reasons.
First, some of your refutations are in fact quantitative in nature. One example you used was that the relationship between the hypoteneuse and legs of a right triangle is not quantitative. Perhaps you are making a distinction between what is geometric and what is strictly numerical, but surely if that relationship were not quantifiable, there would be no Pythagorean Theorem to generalize it.
Second, your other refutations are not quantitative in nature, but then that's what makes their study art rather than science. For example, you spoke of how a pharmacological researcher might use a subject's identification of his pain to evaluate the effectiveness of new drug. There is no objective measurement of that pain, because only the subject of the test can be conscious of it. His experience of pain is a mental not physical phenomenon, and it is precisely the irreducibility of the mind to quantity that defeats the study of mental phenomena by scientific means.
Now I have no argument with you, Regi, that we can study the mental as well as the physical by rational means, if not always by empirical means. Objective and subjective observation of particulars allows us to form hypotheses to be tested, either empirically or logically; and if those hypotheses are validated, then they can function as general theories of how the world works. If all of that goes under your label of "science", OK. But that doesn't eliminate the fundamental distinction between the physical and the mental.
To wit: The physical is matter and its effects, the defining characteristic of which is spatial and temporal extension. Thus, at least in principle, the physical is objectively perceivable and ultimately quantifiable. The mental is the mind and its effects, and though embodied in creatures, as opposed to God, is only subjectively perceivable and elusive of quantification. The physical is manifested in our universe through the material and efficient causes, or matter and mechanics. The mental is manifested through the formal and final causes, or essence and purpose, principles that only a mind can devise. Whose mind is a key question. Just as we have discussed the God-given purpose of entities, their essence is the design of their Creator.
Of course, what I have to say about the mental realm of reality probably isn't compelling to the adherents of metaphysical naturalism. However, they can only account for what appears to be essence and purpose in things as either: [1] purely human constructs, i.e., nominalism, or [2] epiphenomenal of nature's orderliness which must be accepted as a given without explanation. As I have said elsewhere, I don't think these are necessarily intellectually disreputable conclusions to draw from one's experience of the world, but consistency with them does ruin to ethics; at least ethics predicated upon an objective relationship between fact and value.
[For the full text of this discussion, click here.]
