Mysticism and Philosophy

 

 

The word “mysticism” has a variety of meanings, but the one of interest to us now is “vague or ill defined religious or spiritual belief, especially as associated with a belief in the occult” (OED). This definition itself contains some vague or ill-defined words, notably “religious”, “spiritual”, and “occult”. For “occult” we find “supernatural or magical powers, practices, or phenomena”. Mysticism is thus understood to include belief in things that are somehow outside the natural, normal, everyday, ordinary, commonsense, intelligible world—the uncanny, spooky, weird, queer, profound, awe inspiring. Is mysticism in this sense a natural part of philosophy? Do philosophers find themselves believing in the mystical as part of their professional occupation? Certainly some philosophers have attracted the label “mystical”: one thinks of Plato’s theory of forms, of Hegel’s metaphysical monism, of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. But is the mystical a more entrenched part of the philosophical enterprise—is it woven into the very fabric of philosophy? If we survey the field do we detect signs of it in positions not avowedly mystical? What about panpsychism? What about David Lewis’s possible worlds realism? What about hardline Fregeanism? What about Godel’s mathematical platonism? These doctrines all traffic in entities that go beyond ordinary experience, and all require a leap of faith if they are to be taken seriously; there is a frisson of exhilaration in accepting them. And there is an aura of religious dedication in the attitudes of their firmest exponents. It isn’t as if the mysticism of philosophy past has completely withdrawn its tentacles from the subject; it still breaks out here and there. The philosopher, even the university-based analytical philosopher, is still in the mysticism business, still adjacent to the Department of Mysticism.

            Why is this? Why hasn’t philosophy outgrown its roots in primitive mysticism? The answer is that philosophical problems themselves involve us in the permanent possibility of the mystical. Mysticism is always hovering in the background waiting to pounce; we either embrace it or seek to ward it off. We might even call philosophy a battle against the bewitchments of the mystical, with some philosophers temperamentally on the side of the mystical and some against it. It can’t be ignored because it is what philosophy is so frequently about. Take the mind-body problem: the whole debate reeks of the mystical, notably in the threat of dualism. We are constantly trying to avoid going down a mystical path, embracing the occult and the spooky. Materialism might be defined as simply anti-mysticalism: it would have little appeal but for its promise to ward off its mystical-sounding rivals. No one ever claimed that materialism can be seen to be obviously true just by inspecting the nature of the mind! That is why the debate is so heated: mysticism looks to be a real threat when it comes to the nature of mind. But the same thing is true of other central problems: free will, the self, necessity, causation, mathematics, ethics, meaning, etc. In each area we find positions that introduce mystical elements, implicitly or explicitly—stuff that strikes us as occult, as suspiciously thrilling, as subversive of commonsense naturalism. Pure voluntarism, the transcendental ego, modal hyperrealism, inscrutable causal powers, abstract objects, objective values, mind-independent senses, etc. The world is threatened with realities not recognized in science and common sense—realities that excite devotion, enlarge our sense of what is, indicate a hidden reality akin to the divine. Some philosophers will fall in love with these mystical elements; others will bend over backwards to avoid accepting them. But they are part of the philosophical landscape: they define the subject. We may as well admit it and call it by its proper name. Isn’t this partly why philosophy has the appeal it has? The sciences don’t generally stray into mystical territory, except in their most philosophical moments, which is reassuring, if somewhat deflating (especially compared to earlier times); but philosophy is really up to its neck in mysticism, either welcoming it or resisting it. David Lewis was a modal mystic entranced with his super-ontology of existing but non-actual worlds. Quine was a desert landscapes mystic if you look deep: he campaigned for a world unified by physical science and radically contrary to common sense, and he was fond of the gnomic pronouncement (“To be is to be the value of a variable”, “Nothing is true but reality makes it so”). Davidson was a meaning mystic whose ruling deity was Alfred Tarski: the theory of truth as the key to all problems, if only we could see that there is nothing to meaning than those tantalizing snow-bound biconditionals. That is why these philosophers spawned cults whose members seemed hypnotized by certain phrases and postures (“Convention T”, “the museum myth”, “the indexical theory of actuality”). The later Wittgenstein was also a mystic, though of a peculiar variety: he was a kind of second-order mystic sternly opposed to the first-order mysticism of the Tractatus. His catchphrases resonate like cultish mantra: family resemblance, language game, form of life, grammar, use, criterion, custom, practice, rules, seeing-as, etc. He introduced a philosophical vocabulary that promoted a liberationist movement, a dream of a better philosophical life, a life of intellectual peace, and of smug superiority. The cult of the later Wittgenstein was itself a form of mysticism—possibly akin to nature mysticism, or the romantic worship of the everyday.

I don’t say that all forms of mysticism in philosophy are necessarily wrong (though I tend to find myself opposed to them); I am merely observing that mysticism is a real phenomenon within even the most recent iterations of Western philosophy (it’s clearly alive and well in Eastern philosophy). Perhaps we find it embarrassing to admit such retrograde intrusions in our enthusiasm to mimic the natural sciences, but it is clear on reflection that mysticism is built into the structure of the subject. Russell published a book called Mysticism and Logic, relishing the jarring juxtaposition, but a book called Mysticism and Philosophy would hardly be eyebrow-raising, simply because the two things are just not so far apart. Mysticism can come in many forms, often in disguise, sometimes clandestinely, and philosophy as we have it now is not immune to its charms, as well as its possible harms. Let’s start talking about it openly. We need, as they say, to have that conversation.  [1]

 

Colin McGinn

 

                

 

  [1] A word on mystery and mysticism: one of main motivations for postulating mystery is the avoidance of mysticism. Instead of declaring some subject matter inherently supernatural we attribute its recalcitrance to understanding to human intellectual limitation. The spooky is just ignorance reified. The mysterian is the least mystical of philosophers. Of course this is compatible with accepting some elements of the mystical viewpoint: some things might really be quite different from other things, and matter might be the most mystical thing of all. There is intellectual room for the mystical mysterian, though he is certainly a rare bird.

 

 

Thinking About Universals

 

In chapter IX of The Problems of Philosophy (1912) Russell makes a good case for the existence of universals in a roughly platonic sense. He ends with these stirring words: “The world of universals, therefore, may also be described as the world of being. The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life.” (100) Let me add other characteristics of universals as traditionally conceived: they are undivided, non-spatial, non-temporal, non-mental, real, knowable, independent of particulars, capable of instantiation, yet not intrinsically instantiated. I want to focus on that last characteristic: in the platonic world (the word is appropriate) universals exist in a uninstantiated form—they are not exemplified in any particular. Hence they are not distributed in space or divided in their being: they are free-floating entities existing in their own right. While particulars cannot exist without dependence on universals, universals can exist in complete indifference to particulars. So they are not essentially and intrinsically instantiated: their original mode of being is not instantiated being. But in the world of sense their mode of being is to be instantiated: there are no universals in the world of sense that are not attached to a particular. You don’t see universals floating around without being tied to particulars. So in these two spheres of reality universals take quite different forms—particular-free or particular-bound. Particulars, however, take only one form—universal-bound.  We can thus say that universals enjoy a double life: in one world they are thus and so, in another they are such and such. The very same entity can appear in quite different guises, quite different incarnations—here unattached to any particular, there attached to particulars at the hip. It is as if the universal undergoes a transformation—a metamorphosis—when it makes the trip to the world of sense. It looks very different at the other end. It undergoes an ontological makeover.

            Plato introduced us to the idea of the cave as an analogy for having no acquaintance with universals as they are in themselves, seeing only particulars (mere shadows of reality). When a cave dweller escapes and encounters the world outside the cave he experiences a brand new reality and has trouble conveying his newfound knowledge to the other cave dwellers. This tells us that knowledge of universals as they intrinsically are is not attainable simply by sense perception, even though particulars exemplify universals (perceptibly so); we need to use our reason, the divine part of the soul. But we can construct another parable that illustrates the transformation wrought upon universals by their exemplification in the world of sense. Suppose there are people that live only on the surface of the planet and know nothing of caves: they have never been inside the earth and imagine it to be a solid block containing no cavities. Imagine there is no night on the surface, just constant sunlight. These surface dwellers are the analogue of beings that know only universals and never particulars; the world of underground caves is unknown to them. They are blissfully ignorant of darkness and shadows. Then one among them discovers a cave and enters its gloomy interior, thereby discovering a new reality. She is amazed by this new world, so different from the one she is accustomed to, but she has trouble explaining to the other surface dwellers what a cave is and is generally pooh-poohed by them. This is the condition of someone who knows only the world of abstract universals by the use of reason and is suddenly given senses through which particulars can be perceived. She had no idea that universals could be hooked up to particulars in this way, assuming them to be essentially autonomous entities. In fact, she doesn’t recognize them at first, finding them to be pale imitations of the real thing; it takes a while before she realizes that these funny little nuggets of appearance are in fact the dear old universals she knows from her use of reason. Ah, she thinks, so universals can actually become attached to things existing in space! Like Alice, she finds life very peculiar in her new world, a kind of distorted simulacrum of normal life outside the cave. The universals have changed into reduced parodies of their usual radiant selves.

            I am saying all this to dramatize the point that universals, as traditionally conceived, exist in two quite different forms, according as they are instantiated or not instantiated. This means that our knowledge of them is also of two types: sense-based and reason-based. They can be perceived and they can be thought about, but they are perceived as instantiated and thought about as uninstantiated. That is, they can enter thought in their pristine form, but they cannot be objects of sense in that form, but only in their instantiated form. There is thus a double epistemology corresponding to their double ontology. I think Russell fails to see this and thus fails to grasp that universals are epistemologically problematic. He writes in chapter X, “On Our Knowledge of Universals”, as follows: “It is obvious, to begin with, that we are acquainted with such universals as white, red, black, sweet, sour, loud, hard, etc., i.e. with qualities that are exemplified in sense-data. When we see a white patch, we are acquainted, in the first instance, with the particular patch; but by seeing many white patches, we easily learn to abstract the whiteness which they all have in common, and in learning to do this we are learning to be acquainted with whiteness.” (101) Here Russell uncritically subscribes to the empiricist’s abstractionist theory of general concepts, not realizing that the step from perceived whiteness to the concept of whiteness in general is not as small and smooth as he appears to think. For the latter concept is of whiteness as uninstantiated but the former experience is of whiteness as instantiated. How do we get from concrete perceived instances of whiteness in space and time, as exemplified by particulars, to a concept of whiteness as unchangeable, undivided, uninstantiated, non-spatial, non-temporal, and intrinsically independent of particulars? If universals in the platonic world are as different from particulars as Russell urges, how is it possible to move from the latter to the former, as the quoted passage suggests? The answer is that it is not possible—abstractionism is a broken theory.  [1] That is why rationalist philosophers, beginning with Plato, have adopted a non-perceptual theory of our knowledge of universals: we have innate ideas of universals that represent them in their original pristine form (allegedly: see below). That is, they adopted a double epistemology of universals to go with their double ontology; they didn’t try to leverage our pure concepts of universals from our perception of the particulars that exemplify them. Nor did they attempt, like Russell, to combine a robust platonic ontology of universals with a simple empiricist theory of concepts of them (Plato would be horrified). No, if you accept the platonic ontology of universals you need to recognize that empiricist epistemology won’t work for them; another epistemic faculty is necessary in order to account for our knowledge of universals. This is particularly true for knowledge of propositions that concern only relations of universals—a priori knowledge, as Russell says.  [2] If you want to stay empiricist in your epistemology, you can’t very well accept a platonic ontology—you need to go nominalist or conceptualist or Aristotelian or skeptical. Russell here lazily combines his mathematician’s fondness for platonic ontology with his British empiricist predilections regarding knowledge. The brief passage I quoted contains a gaping epistemological hole whose existence it is hard to believe he didn’t notice.

            So what should be said about the epistemology of universals under a platonic conception? It seems to me that an admission of inadequacy is in order. First, we do not acquire an adequate conception of universals by perceiving their instances, since (among other things) perception only presents them in instantiated form, which is not their original intrinsic form; nor is this conception derivable from perception by some intelligible procedure. If this were our only access to universals, we would be cognitively closed off from what they really are. But second, our actual intellectual grasp of them leaves much to be desired: we have only the most hazy and sketchy conception of what they like in themselves. Any mental images we might have corresponding to whiteness, say, do little to further our knowledge of the universal; but in their absence only the word provides a solid handle onto what we are talking about—and it is just a word. Notice how negative the list of characteristics is that define universals for us; we are shooting in the dark at an elusive target.  [3] I think it is even unclear whether our thought concerning universals represents them as instantiated or uninstantiated: we know that the platonic tradition says the latter, but earnest self-reflection leaves the question up in the air (I suspect many people would reject the tradition on this point). We really have very little idea what these entities are like—yet if they exist they must have a determinate nature. They can’t be as wispy and airy as they seem. Plato was right to teach that they are extremely hard to know, requiring diligent training and focus; but I see no evidence that any course of training has actually succeeded in bringing them limpidly into our ken. They remain as elusive—as tantalizing—as ever.  [4] I don’t think this casts doubt on their robust reality, but it does suggest that our knowledge of them is shaky and possibly inaccurate. Perhaps they are natural mysteries. Perhaps our grasp of them is like our grasp of the quantum world—just not very penetrating. Perhaps they belong to a world that our epistemic faculties are not well designed to comprehend; we do better with basic cave epistemology. Plato discovered a part of reality that is only dimly glimpsed by us. For those with different epistemic faculties it might present itself very differently. Russell should have considered the possibility that our knowledge of universals is inherently limited and sorely lacking in clarity and distinctness.

  [1] Many criticisms have been made of the theory, which I won’t rehearse, but let me just note a couple of points arising from Russell’s breezy discussion. First, does he really believe that young children consciously go through this process of reasoning in order to come up with the general concept of whiteness? Does he think parents and teachers instruct children to do this in order to acquire general concepts? Second, where do we get the idea of what is in common between things? Isn’t this a general concept that precedes all occasions of (alleged) abstraction? And don’t we see what is in common precisely by already having the universal concept we are supposed to be acquiring? When you judge that snow and milk are similar don’t you judge that both are white?

  [2] All knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori, involves universals, but a priori knowledge is concerned with relations between universals in their uninstantiated form, while a posteriori knowledge is concerned with universals in their instantiated form. Thus we can define the difference between the two types of knowledge by invoking the concept of instantiation.

  [3] Here is a puzzle for you: if you could see the universal Whiteness, would it look white? Maybe it only looks white when it comes exemplified in a particular; in itself it has no color. Then how does it make things look white?

  [4] The idea that we have acquaintance with universals in our cognitive encounters with them seems particularly strained: to suppose that they come before the mind in naked form, fully revealing their contours and texture, is surely wide of the mark. Rather, they remain maddeningly out of reach, especially when no image accompanies their appearance in thought. This is why they have always seemed so speculative and suspicious to the epistemology obsessed. We are acquaintance-deficient with respect to them.

 

A Problem For Direct Reference

 

According to the theory of direct reference, the meaning of a name (and possibly an indexical expression) is the object that is its reference—typically an ordinary concrete object. The weak version of the theory says that this object is at least part of the meaning of the name; the strong version says that the object is the whole of the name’s meaning. In either case we can say, according to a standard formulation, that the object enters the proposition expressed by the sentence containing the name: it is a constituent of the proposition so expressed. Just as senses or intensions or concepts are said to enter into propositions, so objects themselves can be said so to enter. Thus a singular proposition is said to be an ordered pair of an object and a property, not just an assembly of properties. Meanings can be partly composed of objects—extensions not intensions.

            But objects have properties: some people hold that they are just aggregates of properties (bundles, sets). So aren’t properties a part of the package? If objects are contained in the proposition, don’t properties come along for the ride? If properties can be constituents of propositions in their own right, they can also feature in propositions as borne by the objects that instantiate them. Objects can hardly leave their properties behind when they step into propositions—they would not be objects at all if they did that. No, the object brings its properties into the proposition too—all of them (it doesn’t shed some and retain others). But if the object is the meaning, then these properties are also contained in the meaning. The parts of the object clearly accompany it into the heart of the proposition, and so do its actual properties; an object is a complex thing and its complexity survives in the warm environment of the proposition. The idea of direct reference is that the proposition contains at least the reference, but then it also contains what the reference contains—properties as well as parts. If it contains properties as detached from objects, it need not contain more than the properties in question (and their logical entailments); but if it contains objects, it will also contain all the properties that the object possesses. Thus the meaning of a name, so far from being simple and austere, is replete with properties—many more than under a classical description theory. The object itself guarantees that.

            This has a rather startling consequence: all true sentences containing names are analytically true. For every property we can truly predicate of the object is already contained in the meaning of the name via the object named. The properties get uploaded into the proposition via the object and hence anticipate whatever might be truly predicated of the object. If only a single property occurs in the subject position, then we don’t have this consequence—there will only be one analytic truth generated by the name—but if the object brings all its properties along with it, then every true sentence containing the name will be analytic. That means every such sentence will be a necessary truth. Not an a priori truth to be sure, because speakers can’t be expected to know every property of the denoted object, but a truth that follows from meaning alone. This Leibnizian conclusion falls directly out of the direct reference theory, unless some way can be found to block it. It’s like putting a bunch of objects into a drawer: the objects will be in there but so also will their properties—the objects don’t stop having their properties just by being put in a drawer. Take a peek inside and you will see the properties lurking in there. The proposition doesn’t contain bare particulars but propertied particulars. If objects are literally bundles of qualities, then you will be putting such bundles into the drawer—or the proposition. This is not a consequence of the direct reference theory that I have ever seen acknowledged, but it appears inescapable.

            But there is an even more startling consequence in the immediate offing, which I hesitate even to mention. Some may see in the derivation just rehearsed a welcome refutation of the direct reference theory, but what if I told you that the same result, or something very like it, applies no matter what the theory is? Glee might then turn to panic—or hysterical incredulity. Here is one way to put the point: when properties enter into propositions (i.e. sentence meanings) they too have properties—for instance, the property of being instantiated, or the property of being co-instantiated with another property in a certain object. For example, the property of being red has the property of being instantiated by British post boxes and also the property of being co-instantiated with roundness in a cricket balls. Properties thus bring with them other properties that are not analytic entailments of the given property; and this gives rise to what may be called surprise analytic truths—as that redness has instances and is the color of cricket balls. If the property itself has certain properties, then this property will bring these other properties along with it, thereby generating surprise analytic truths. Or consider senses: these too have assorted properties—having a certain reference, being currently grasped by the Queen of England, being sometimes too complex for humans to get their minds around, etc. So when a Fregean Thought contains such senses must it not also contain the properties of those senses? They come with the territory, just as in the case of objects and theirproperties. Why do we assume that only some properties of senses properly belong to the meaning of a sentence expressing them—why not all? By what magic might some properties of senses be incorporated and some not?  [1]Frege compared senses to aspects of references, but aspects are themselves rich with attributes—a given aspect might be an aspect of Mount Everest, or frequently found with another aspect, or apprehended by some individuals but not by others.  So aspects of the aspect are going to find themselves wherever the aspect finds itself—lodged inside a sense. We are beginning to see the outlines of a general problem—the problem that whatever we choose to constitute meaning carries within it too much to be a meaning, as meaning is normally understood. We want meaning to be a thin slice of reality, so to speak, but the available theories always make it a good deal thicker than we bargained for. We could call this the thickness problem—and it threatens to undermine the notion of meaning as we have it. How do we stop too much of the world from getting into the proposition? How do we stop meanings from absorbing too much of reality? Any entities they comprise are bound to be carrying a cargo of extra baggage—to be overstuffed, overly inclusive. The entities will have features that make them (allegedly) suitable to function as meanings, but they will also have other features that are irrelevant to meaning: the features arrive in a package that can’t be broken apart. In the case of direct reference theory, we want the object to be in the proposition for various theoretical reasons, but the object presents other features that disqualify it from doing the job of meaning, notably the totality of its properties. We end up having to say that every true sentence containing a name is analytically true, and that the meaning of sentences containing names can never be fully grasped. It looks like we are headed for the conclusion that meanings cannot be made up of entities at all. But what else could they be? What else could anything be? Objects, senses, properties, functions, and images—all these are entities that bear more properties than meaning intuitively bears. So how could any of them be meaning? But then how could meanings exist at all? We are headed straight for skeptical paradox. Nor will use get us out of trouble, since uses too contain more than meaning does—vocal noises, laryngeal movements, events in the motor cortex, etc. Anything that exists in the empirical world has an abundance of properties that go beyond anything that could constitute meaning, so how could meaning be identical to anything like that? Empirical reality is just too thick to constitute meaning, too multilayered. And abstract entities such as we find in mathematics won’t work either: meaning isn’t mathematical, and anyway the problem will recur in a new guise—for mathematical entities are too ontologically rich as well. Propositions are sparse etiolated things, sliced very thin, but any facts we can mention, empirical or abstract, have too much depth, too much substance, too much thickness. The point is very vivid in the case of the direct reference theory, but apparently much the same problem afflicts theories that deal in more rarified entities. It looks like there is no way out, as a matter of principle. It looks like we have a problem, Houston. Meaning is having difficulty getting back down to earth.  [2]

 

  [1] References don’t present the same problem: they can be as rich and extensive as you like without generating unwanted analytic truths. This is because they are not construed as part of meaning in the Fregean picture, so there is no risk of them stuffing meaning with too much material. But senses are meant to be constitutive of meaning (which is commensurate with linguistic understanding) and so cannot accept any old properties into their constitution–yet they have many properties that go beyond what meaning intuitively contains.

  [2] I am as shocked as the next man by the argument of this paper and I keep thinking there must be a simple answer to it, but so far I have been unable to find one. I put it out there with some misgivings. Perhaps I should announce that I thought of it while trying to interpret an obscure text by an unknown philosopher consanguineous with L. Wittgenstein. It’s certainly a killer argument.