The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 5

With the framework of the last chapters in hand we can walk back through the history of philosophy and read it as a sequence of selections from a single menu.

A philosopher picks a rung of the ladder, a subset within that rung, and converts it into the contents of a world. The narrative of progress can then be retold as that of relocation: the error moves to a new address rather than disappears.

Naive realism is the prereflective viewpoint of most people, philosophers included up to the moment of philosophizing. The world arrives as given: the color sits in the leaf, the pain is in the tooth. A philosophical objection against this posture reads as elaborate machinery that can be dismissed by returning to the posture itself. The canonical demonstration is Samuel Johnson's response to Berkeley's immaterialism: "I refute it thus," delivered by kicking a large stone with enough force to rebound from it. This was not an argument — Berkeley could have replied that the idea of a foot produced the idea of the pain — and that is precisely the point. Johnson performed the ontologization rather than defended his position. The installation of qualities as features of the world runs in the body well below the level at which arguments land. For most people, the first rung of the ladder has not been climbed as it is not perceived as a rung at all.

The earliest philosophers known to us already worked with a concept that belongs to the second rung: the arche, the first principle from which everything derives. The demand that multiplicity reduce to a single source is itself a product of recursive distinction. What keeps them on the first rung is the content they put into the frame. They selected a perceived, tangible stuff and declared it the substance beneath everything else. Thales took water and announced that everything is ultimately water. Anaximenes put forward air and derived other substances from its condensation and rarefaction. Heraclitus took fire. The contingency of the selection is obvious — water, air, fire are all available to any observer, and the preference among them reflects temperament and local landscape more than argument.

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THE VANISHING POINT: A LEFT-HAND PATH READING OF

PHILOSOPHY

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Empedocles generalized by selecting four elements instead of one, and Anaxagoras multiplied further into an indefinite number of seeds. Pluraliza-tion softens the arbitrariness of picking a single item, at the cost of retaining every item picked. Leucippus and Democritus took the decisive next step and posited imperceptible atoms and void with the perceptible qualities demoted to effects of arrangement and motion. This already begins to move off the first rung, since atoms are posited rather than perceived. The naive realism of the Milesians has been replaced by a theoretical realism about entities that no sense has ever registered.

The modern empiricists returned to the first rung with a cleaner program.

Locke grounded knowledge in sense experience and treated ideas as the raw material of thought. Primary qualities received mind-independent status, while secondary qualities (color, taste, sound, smell) were relocated into the perceiver.

This is a case of partial ontologization inside a single rung. The new physics needed to keep primary qualities real; the secondary ones could be handed back with no damage to the project.

An ontologization strong enough to organize a school of thought generates a countermove. The chosen substrate is shown to be derivative, incoherent, or empty, and the school is dismantled. What the countermove seldom eliminates is the technique that installed the substrate in the first place.

Berkeley saw the inconsistency and pressed it. If secondary qualities depend on a perceiver and belong to the mind, the same holds of primary qualities, which also appear only to a subject and through a perceptual apparatus. Esse est per-cipi: to be is to be perceived. Material substance was abolished as an incoherent posit, and the familiar world was relocated into the minds, with God holding the whole arrangement in place by perceiving it continuously.

This looks like an escape from ontologization, and in the standard narrative it is celebrated as the first serious criticism of naive realism. The rebuttal is only partial. Berkeley stopped short of applying the same analysis to the perceiver.

Minds, ideas, and God were left standing with full ontological weight. The substrate moved from matter to spirit, and the procedure that installed matter as the ground was run a second time to put spirit as the base.

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DENYS SPIRIN

A similar result was achieved by Leibniz. His monads are subject-like units whose essence is perception and appetition; extension, causality, and interaction among bodies are phenomena grounded in the coordinated perceptions of monads. The metaphysical machinery looks nothing like Berkeley's: there are infinitely many monads rather than a finite collection of minds plus God, each monad is closed to every other, and the coherence is guaranteed by a pre-established harmony. What the two systems share is that both dissolve the materiality of the first rung and introduce a mental or quasi-mental substrate in its place.

Berkeley chose a minimal replacement; Leibniz suggested a maximal one.

Hume went further and began to dissolve the tenant as well. Causation, substance, and self were examined and turned out to be habits of association.

Hume stopped at the habits themselves, which he left in place as psychological facts about human beings — a residual ontologization at the level of empirical psychology, where the earlier ontologizations had been cleared away.

Taken as a whole, the first rung amounts to a series of redistributions rather than a sequence of approximations to a correct answer. Water gives way to air, four elements give way to atoms, matter is replaced by spirit, spirit is converted to habits of association, which turn in to the psychology.

The textbook opposes rationalism to empiricism as two rival answers to a single question: where does knowledge come from? Both presuppose that knowledge arrives — from the senses or from reason. For us, knowledge does not arrive.

The subject produces it by distinguishing. The empiricist ontologizes one level of distinction, the rationalist another, and the debate over sources is a fight over which illusion is more real.