Philosophical Dread
- I live in the world.
This one fact, perhaps above all else, seems to be transparently obvious. It hardly seems in need of justification. It is a fundamental condition of our being from the moment we are born, kicking and screaming, into the world. On a day-to-day level of waking up, having breakfast, going to work, and so on, there is no need to consider it. Yet, when we scratch the surface and begin reflecting on this fact there emerge genuine problems.
- What is the nature of the world?
- What is my relation to it
- Who am I in the world?
- How can I be sure the world is out there external to me?
I certainly do not mean to say that it is not true. What I intend is that the relationship between who I am and the world I live in is problematic. It is as if they are joined by a bridge that has crumbled away and between the world and I is an abyss. And the more deeply I look into the abyss for an answer, the deeper and wider it becomes.
We quickly find that the way we think we live in the world is tenuous, dubious even. Descartes showed how we could doubt the basic proposition ‘I live in the world’. What exactly is my relation to the world? Am I just flesh and blood in a material world, or am I a disembodied spirit aloof from the world? And if the world is external to me, how can I be sure it really exists out there beyond me? Is the world just some kind of elaborate illusion? Idealist philosophers such as Berkeley have gone so far as to suggest that, fundamentally, we do not live in the world, but rather that the world is given in me. As absurd as this conclusion may sound to our common sense, it has proved difficult to refute. I do not think kicking a stone is sufficient.
It is this problem of making sense of living in the world, in the face of scepticism, that puzzles me. I am driven by the wonder of finding myself in a world, but also by dread that I am blind to my true place in the world. If I cannot be sure who I am in the world or what the world is, how can I act in the world. How do my intentions make any sense? I’m left in a state of paralysis.
Transcendental Philosophy
Immanuel Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. When I read it back in 1995, it was a revelation to me. Here was a book that developed a rigorous world view centred around our experience, by exploring the conditions necessary in order to have experience. It seems to me that Kant’s critical philosophy is the most important methodological development in modern philosophy. He shows that we live in a natural world given directly in experience. On the other hand, there is a mysterious side to Kant’s philosophy too, since he also argues that our world is manifest from an unknowable shadow world of things-in-themselves: an ultimate reality of noumena. Schopenhauer goes on to show that this ultimate reality cannot be a collection of things as we usually conceive them, since it is beyond conception, hence it is best thought of as an undifferentiated One. Schopenhauer was aware of the parallel with Eastern ideas. I am particularly struck by the similarity between the Kantian notion of noumena and the Tao in Chinese Taoist philosophy, first expounded (perhaps) by Lao Tzu (probably before 300BCE).
The Dao is an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled.
Oh, unfathomable source of ten thousand things!
… hidden deep but ever present.Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching): verse 4
I find both Kantian and Taoist metaphysics – converging from different times and cultures – compelling. As both Kant and Lao Tzu realized, there is a limit to the power of analytic philosophy. Is it possible to explore beyond those limits using non-conceptual methods such as mindful meditation? Certainly, the Eastern tradition has developed an extensive range of methods over the centuries.
Bringing Kant into the 21st century
Kant was a man of his age and he was particularly inspired by the work of scientists such as Newton. He used many of the Newtonian concepts in his work. One of his aims was to derive a Newtonian world view from first principles. Of course, Newtonian mechanics has now been superseded by the New Physics. Einstein has since developed relativity theory with a non-Euclidean model of physical space and established quantum theory. Therefore, we can look back at Kant’s work and criticize it for being too closely tied to Newtonian concepts. But I wonder how Kant might have developed his philosophy if he lived now? He was trying to develop a theory of knowledge based on solid analytic methods. In his own day, all he had was the Newtonian model, but if he lived today he would have a rich source of methods at hand from the New Physics to information theory. In particular, I am interested in how we could marry Kant’s critical philosophy with algorithmic information theory to form a theory of knowledge and learning from first principles.
For me, philosophy is the path to understanding nature, exploring who we are, and ultimately transcending nature. These are not separable goals. To live full and authentic lives, we must first understand who we are and what the world is, fully and authentically.
Though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience. Kant
