Evolution, Enlightenment and American Philosophy a blog by Jeff Carreira

Charles Sanders Peirce’s Integrally Evolving Universe

December 8, 2009 · Leave a Comment

To continue this discussion and approach the evolutionary metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce, I first want to return to Kant. As I wrote about earlier, Kant’s big insight was that the world as we perceive it is interpreted through certain apriori – before thought – categories of mind.  His categories include such obviously fundamental elements as time, space and causation. I have come to think of Kant’s categories as forming what might be called a Kantian Theater – a stage upon which reality as we know it unfolds. If we apply this idea to the evolution of the universe then the process of evolution unfolds in the Kantian Theater of time, space, causality, etc. This was a notion that Peirce challenged.

Peirce, perhaps partly influenced by the strict empiricism of Chauncey Wright, was unwilling to generalize the understanding of the universe that we received from measurement and observation to include aspects of the universe that could not, or had not yet been, measured. To return again to the example of angles in a triangle that I have written about earlier, Peirce did not want to assume that just because the angles of all triangles that had ever been measured added to 180 degrees that the angles of all triangles that could be measured would all add up to 180 degrees. If that were the case then it would hold true even for infinitely large triangles and that would imply that space spread infinitely in all three dimensions so that no matter how large a triangle you measured it would always lie on a flat plan and therefore its angles would always add to 180 degrees.

It didn’t make rational sense to Peirce that the universe would simply spread infinately in all directions. It made much more sense that the universe was bound in some way which meant that space must curve however slightly so that the universe would not go on forever. So Peirce believed that if we could measure a triangle large enough, we would eventually find that its angles would add to either slightly less than or slightly more than 180 degrees depending on whether the curve of space was concave or convex.

Peirce didn’t believe that the universe as we observed it in our tiny location was necessarily the same throughout all of space. Likewise he didn’t believe that the universe as we observed it in our tiny time frame would hold true for all time. In fact, he believed that since the universe was an evolving event, everything about the universe must have evolved, including the Kantian categories of time, space, causality, etc. Peirce didn’t see evolution as a play that occurred in a static Kantian Theatre, he saw a theater that was itself also evolving. In other words he didn’t believe that evolution only happened to things in the universe, he believed that the entire universe was one evolving as whole event.

And so Peirce was compelled to rethink Kant’s categories to figure out what was truly universal about the universe. What he came up with were the modes of being he called Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness that I have also mentioned earlier. Firstness is the essence of things, Secondness is the experience of encountering an essence, and Thirdness is the understanding of relationships that bind essences to experience and create a mental picture of reality. So we can use the words essence, encounter and understanding in place of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.

Essence, encounter and understanding are the three unchanging characteristics of the universe and the universe co-evolves and co-unfolds simultaneously in all three modes of being.

Peirce’s view of evolution was Integral in the sense that he saw these aspects of being evolving simultaneously. In a more Kantian sense, which most of us have absorbed deeply, you would tend to view the essence of reality as primary and preexisting. In that way of thinking as we encounter more of reality we see ourselves as experiencing more of what was already there. Similarly we tend to see our experience of reality as preexisting our understanding of reality, so that as we understand more about our experience we tend to see ourselves as understanding more about experiences we have already had (or already could have had) connected to an essential reality that was already there.

Peirce didn’t see it this way. He saw these three aspects of being as co-emerging and co-evolving integrally. That means that as we experience more of reality there is actually more of reality being created. As we understand more about reality there is more experience of reality and hence more of reality itself being simultaneously created. In this way he saw our growing understanding of reality as the growth of reality itself. Our investigation into truth was the growth and evolution of the universe in a very literal sense. This was Peirce’s formulation of conscious evolution.

This is very challenging to conceive of because it is counter to our more conventional notion of a static universe that preexists and that we in turn have an expanding encounter with and a growing understanding of. On the contrary to Peirce everything evolved at the same time so as the essence, encounter and understanding of the universe co-evolved into the universe as we know it, the aspects of time, space, causality and all of our physical laws, also slowly came into being through a process of variation and selection.

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Scientific Fundamentalism

November 27, 2009 · 20 Comments

To finish (at least for the time being) with this idea of Scientism vs. Science. I want to take it a little further so that I hope I am able to make clear what I percieve as a problem that arises  sometimes (and not always) in the scientifically minded. As I attempted to make clear in my last post, I do not feel – at this point at least – that science itself is problematic. I feel that science is sometimes applied and generallized in ways that are problematic. This isn’t really a problem of science itself; if anything it is a problem of the philosophy of science. Getting back to this idea of Scientism, I believe that Scientism could also be called Scientific Fundamentalism. Science is a method of inquiry utilizing hypothesis and experimentation. Science is also the body of knowledge accumulated through that method. Scientific Fundamentalism is the belief that all knowledge gained through, and all conclusions drawn from, the scientific method are true. When this kind of Scientific fundamentalism is confused for the scientific method it creates a bounded circular reality in which things are true according to scientific fundamentalism (now confused with the scientific method itself) because they were produced by the scientific method. Conversely, knowledge which is not gained through the scientific method is at best suspect and often dismissed as illogical and untrue because it was not obtained through the scientific method.

Adherence to this scientific fundamentalist view over time can lead to the creation of what I see as a very limited worldview. In other words if you only believe in knowledge which is obtained through the scientific method, soon you only see as real things that have been, or conceivable could be, obtained through the scientific method. Your fundamental notion of reality becomes bound by what has been, and what you can imagine could be, confirmed through experiment, observation and measurement. The scientific worldview that results tends to have certain fundamental characteristics. It tends to be materialistic in the sense of seeing the world as made up of only those things that can be observed and measured. It also privileges the third person, objective, external perspective of reality to the first person, internal, subjective perspective of reality. And it sees the world as constructed from the bottom-up, with parts combining to form wholes, as opposed to top-down with wholes exerting influence over the development of the parts that create them. This leads to a view of an unintelligent process of creation proceeding blindly as opposed to a process guided by a larger whole.

The problem with any form of fundamentalism is that it inherently limits inquiry by establishing boundaries around what is possibly real. Christian fundamentalism limits what is real with a literal interpretation of the bible. There can be an argument made for the moral value of adherence to a literal interpretation of the bible, but most of us would agree that it creates a very limited, predetermined worldview. Scientific fundamentalism works the same way. By using the criteria that only knowledge that is obtained through the scientific method defines what is real, and then taking the even bigger step of applying that criteria (consciously or unconsciously) not only to the knowledge at hand, but to all possible knowledge, we draw a circle around not only everything that is real, but also everything that could ever be real. Both of the original Pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, as well as their friend and mentor Chauncey Wright, were opposed to such scientism albeit for different reasons.

Chauncey Wright was too much of an empiricist to fall into scientism. He believed that only things that had been empirically measured were true and he did not believe in generalizing measured results to included as yet unmeasured instances. Peirce followed Wright in this strict empiricism. Both men would go so far as to say that just because the three angles of every triangle ever measured add to 180 degrees doesn’t mean that every triangle that could ever be measured would add up to 180 degrees. Further they would also say that because our ability to measure the angles of a triangle is limited by the instruments that we use to measure with, we can’t even be sure that the angles add to 180 degrees. They were in affect too scientific to believe in the superstition of scientism.

Peirce had an additional reason for avoiding scientism. Peirce’s famous motto and guiding principle was “Do not block the way of inquiry.” Peirce was by far the most accomplished scientist of the early Pragmatists, but he would never adhere to a scientism that would limit the ability of his expansive mind to encompass new and diverse information. William James was a trained doctor, and he was also the most mystically and morally inclined of the three. He avoided scientism because it ruled out the possibility of belief in mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences that he was so drawn to and he felt held moral advantage for humanity.

The Pragmatism that was first conceived by Peirce and James was a magnificent creation. It was in almost equal parts an extension of the scientific method and especially Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection into the world of philosophy. At the same time it stood as a defense of the mystical and religious in the gathering battle with materialism of scientism.

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Religion, Science and Perspective: Let the Games Begin

November 24, 2009 · 3 Comments

I actually had a different post in my queue, but this conversation got so interesting that I thought that I would throw my two cents in and bring it front and center before continuing with my own modest critique of science and introducing the phenomenology of Charles Sanders Peirce as planned.

Tom, I haven’t as yet read Feyerabend, but I certainly will now, and when I do I will print my thoughts here. I have been re-reading Thomas Kuhn on the nature of scientific revolution, a little Wilfred Sellers and his critique of science and some contemporary philosophers namely Joseph Margolis and Robert Brandom. These have all given me a great deal to think about in terms of placing science in context of the progression of human thought.

At Brian’s suggestion I have also read a couple of Michael Shermer’s books and he is, of course, a scientific apologist, ever defending logic and rationality against the dogma of religion and belief. I don’t think he is a joke, in fact he seems like a thoughtful critic of certain entrenched ideas (and he often presents himself as more open-minded than he is sometimes represented by Brain.) In some ways, however, he strikes me as fighting a battle that has already been won – at least among the people I tend to associate with in Integral/Evolutionary circles. Few people in that group are struggling with belief in unfounded dogmatic ways, they either have given up dogma for something new (which could always be a new dogma) or they have found reasons to feel comfortable holding on to more traditional religious beliefs as they move into the future. I think Michael Shermer is largely talking to a different audience.

In one recent book Shermer dismantles the “Intelligent Design” evolutionary position. I myself ascribe to a variation on this idea – that there is some form of teleology in the universe – but the way I think of teleology is far from the intelligent designer personified that is often being promoted by many in the Intelligent Design movement. Pulling apart Intelligent Design as a cardboard veneer stapled over Christian Creationism isn’t terribly hard, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. There is lots of sloppy thinking and bad science mixed in with the great stuff in the intelligent design debate and Shermer has many years of good work ahead clearing it up. Yet again, I don’t think that I or we are really his audience; we are already on his side in that battle.

The battle that I am currently following is the battle in the second half of the 20th century that Tom is referring to in which the shortcomings of science have been placed under a microscope by some brilliant and insightful thinkers. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Science has no method, although Feyerabend may change my mind. I still see science as the triumph of the Western World that has given us so much we enjoy in modern life. I am not ready to tell all the scientists to pack it up and go home because they are not really following a method. I want them to keep going with their method and discover new cures to diseases, better methods of communication and travel, and generally continue to improve the standard of living for people on this planet.

On the other hand and in accordance with many of sciences critics, I don’t want them dictating what is real and what is unreal. When science brought logical positivism, rationality and empiricism to the for front of the Western Mind it rightfully claimed that it had a better handle on truth than did the traditional religion that was its main competitor. At the same time the traditional religions had a right to tell science not to move so fast and throw out the baby with the bathwater. After all it wasn’t science that pulled Western Europe through the Dark Ages. It was, for all it faults, Christianity that stopped warlords from killing each other and everyone else in the process by getting them to pledge allegiance to a common king in the person of Jesus and then sending them off to fight a common enemy in the crusades. As horrendous as the crusades were – and they were for sure – they also bought Western Europe enough peace to rebuild the population that had been decimated by the plagues and then move beyond the system of feudalism to the nation state.

Similarly as the limits of science are being explored we also want to keep the discussion in a historical context. Science is a perspective on reality that mistakes itself for the whole of reality – hmmmm, the same could be said about religion. The kind of objective handle on truth that science claims is not objective. Science often fails to see its assumptions about reality as assumptions and mistakes them for “givens” (Wilfred Sellers). Science also fails to see itself in the historical context in which it was developed (Kuhn) and therefore neglects the cultural forces that have helped shape its point of view.

So the modernism of science has been overrun in some quadrants – and not those in which Michael Shermer is currently fighting the good fight of modernism  – by post-modernism. Post-modernism sees right through the problems of science. It sees how scientists fail to recognize that their point of view is not merely a strictly objective assessment of observed facts. Science is a perspective that has been shaped by some complex of conclusions based on observed facts, personal preferences and biases of the scientists involved, and cultural influences that are often mistaken for reality. And so science has been on the run – again in certain quadrants – for decades trying to prove itself and finding its truth claims falling short of its promise in many ways.*

In turn post-modernism is and will find that its own foundation – that all knowledge is a matter of perspective and cultural influence – is also a perspective. Once again we will have mistaken the most recently discovered part of the picture for the whole of reality and we will get up, dust off and continue with our rush toward an ever more integrated understanding of knowledge, ourselves and our relationship to the world. 

*(An interesting example of science on the run is the defense of Behaviorism that Carl is often an eloquent champion of in this blog. I often find myself agreeing with everything Carl says about the powerful perspective of seeing human activity as pure behavior, and yet disagreeing with the spoken and unspoken implications that go along with it. I have read some things that Carl has generously given to me and I can’t (as yet) agree with the hard determinism and denial of internal being that seems to come along with that view. I have also read other contemporary thinkers on the matter and from what I have found the strict interpretations of Behaviorism are generally disregarded as already haven been proven wrong (although I haven’t found that proof in a satisfactory form yet.) Often I think what Carl and some of his circle like Robert Epstein are acctually doing are advancing Skinner’s original work to keep Behaviorism in step with more recent advancements in science, but this is a digression from my original point although an avenue of inquiry that I want to keep on the table.)

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Science vs. Scientism

November 18, 2009 · 14 Comments

I spent my last post explaining how the philosophy of Pragmatism was shaped by hard science and now I am going to explain how one of the ironies of Pragmatism is that although it was heavily influenced by science, it was also battling against the encroaching materialistic worldview of science. This is a debate that continues to this day to define many of the contours of American Philosophy. In this post I want to begin to outline some of my early – and most likely poorly formed – thoughts on this topic and expose myself to the sharp minds of you my readers, for the betterment of my understanding and our investigation.

One crucial distinction that must be understood to be able to perceive what this ongoing debate is about is the distinction between science and scientism. Science is a method of inquiry and the knowledge acquired by that method. The scientific method – inquiry by hypothesis, experimentation, observation and conclusion – was the explosive discovery that ignited the age of Enlightenment in Europe and skyrocketed humanity out of the Dark Ages. Scientism as described by Joseph Margolis in his book The Unraveling of Scientism is “the assured validity of a metaphysics deemed…overwhelmingly favored by the self-appointed champions of science.” In other words, as I understand it, scientism is the belief that the methods of science and the worldview of science are obviously correct over all other methods and worldviews.

The first Pragmatists were scientifically inclined and even scientifically trained, yet they still opposed this type of scientism.  Even Chauncey Wright, a most ardent empiricist, materialist and even nihilist, was disinclined toward scientism. In fact it was the strictness of Wright’s adherence to empiricism that might account for his insistence that his belief in God, and Religion in general, should be held separate from the demand for scientific validation.

Both Chauncey Wright and Charles Sanders Peirce were professionally occupied with scientific measurements and both were very familiar with the limits thereof. For this reason neither of them felt that any of our so-called natural laws could be taken as fact. The measurements that human beings are able to make are always approximate and therefore no law could ever be proven beyond being a useful approximation. For this reason we cannot assume that we are correct about our scientific theories or conclusions, but can only state that those theories and conclusions are the best fit to the evidence that our current ability to measure yields. Wright would therefore never want to generalize in the way that scientism does and to assume that the ideas and methods of science have some special advantage beyond what is verifiable through direct observation and measurement.  

In a later post I will expand on how this position led Charles Sanders Peirce to develop a powerful evolutionary metaphysics, but for now I want to explain more deeply what I see as scientism by illustrating with any example. On this blog the notion of Occam ’s razor has been used in comments to argue in favor of Natural Selection over teleology, and for Behaviorism over freewill. Occam ’s razor as I understand it is a rule of thumb for inquiry. It states that given two explanations for the same phenomenon it is best to assume the one that requires the least number of assumptions is correct. Certainly this is a good guide for reason and inquiry, but it is not a proof.

If we argue that the theory of Natural Selection explains evolution and then use Occam’s razor to assert teleology is not part of the evolution process then I feel that we are slipping into scientism. This, in my mind, is an over-extension of Occam’s razor. Just because the explanation of Natural Selection does not require the assumption of teleology doesn’t mean that there is no teleology. In fact the use of Occam’s razor circumnavigates the real issue at hand which is that Natural Selection cannot explain all of evolution. It explains a great deal of evolution, but to say that it proves that all of evolution takes place without any guidance other than chance variation and survival of the fittest is extending and generalizing the theory beyond what it could possibly be validated through observation and therefore Natural Selection can only be a theory that could never be completely proven. Some would say that it is the best theory we have to explain evolution, but others would claim differently. Neither could prove their point.

My point here however is not about this particular argument; it is to illuminate the idea of scientism as I am coming to understand it. The scientism in this example rests not in the argument, but in the fact that the agreement with the methodology of Occam’s razor is presumed to be a complete assurance of the validity of the claim. In other words it is assumed that agreement with Occam’s razor is proof enough and this kind of scientism often expresses a sense of obviousness designed to make any disagreement seem ridiculous. In Margolis’ book he writes about how over the last century scientism and the philosophies that have latched onto it, have not come any closer to proving their superiority in explain certain critical aspects of reality like human knowledge, human behavior or ethical conduct, in spite of working explicitly to do so.

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Chauncey Wright and the Strong Arm of Science

November 16, 2009 · 2 Comments

Over my last two posts I have been reflecting on some of the ideas of Kant and Hegel and how they were picked up by the early Pragmatists. The German Idealism of Kant and Hegel was a new way of thinking about reality not as a pre-existing static background, but as a creative participatory event. Human beings were part of the creative process that fashioned and maintained our perception of reality and carried and expanded that reality through time.

Now I want to start to show how the American Pragmatists brought an original angle to this image of a co-created reality. The thinking of the American Pragmatists had an interesting almost earthy quality, a certain leaning toward physicality that might be a result of the fact that the two men most closely associated with the birth of Pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, were both scientists and not philosophers. Charles Peirce studied chemistry at Harvard where William James received his medical degree.

Perhaps even more than the scientific backgrounds of Peirce and James, it might have been their association with Chauncey Wright that brought that particular flavor of grounded empiricism to their thinking. Wright was also studied science at Harvard and his teacher, Asa Grey, was Charles Darwin’s most fervent supporter in America and made the arrangements for the publication of On the Origin of Species in America. Like his teacher, Chauncey Wright would himself become a close correspondent of Darwin’s.

Wright worked as a calculator for the Nautical Almanac and tried to make all of his scientific calculations in a small portion of the year so that the rest of his time could be occupied with is favorite activity – engaging in philosophical conversation with friends about the relationship between science and religion. Wright was an empiricist to the extreme. He felt that in describing reality we should resort to neither supernatural (in the sense of being outside of nature) or metaphysical (in the sense of being beyond the physical) explanations for anything in the universe.

To Wright reality was made up of a collection of separate, interacting, observable and quantifiable empirical facts. He understood the workings of the cosmos to be very much the same as the workings of the weather. The weather is composed of a combination of air, water, barometric pressure, temperature, wind speed, etc. these separate empirical facts interact together and create the weather as we know it. There is no reason to appeal to any supernatural entities or metaphysical principles or motives to explain the weather. Wright referred to his conception of the universe as cosmic weather. Wright also believed that in describing evolution we must similarly appeal to nothing outside of the empirical facts. In his essay The Evolution of Self Consciousness, one of his few written pieces, Wright defends his belief that there is nothing required to explain the emergence of Self Consciousness through evolution beyond that which we can see.  

Wright was part of the circle of young intellects that were engaged in dynamic debate in and around Cambridge Massachusetts in the 1860’s and 70’s. One particular circle of young thinkers calling themselves The Metaphysical Club included Wright, Peirce and James among others. According to James and Peirce, Wright was something of the master in these discussions and he most certainly challenged his friends not to appeal to anything outside the observable to explain their conclusions. Both Peirce and James had greater spiritual, metaphysical and even supernatural leanings than Wright. And James in particular argued against what he saw as Wright’s nihilistic tendencies in his paper, Against Nihilism. Both James and Peirce in their own way believed that the universe and the process of evolution through which the universe emerged, had some inherent purpose, or at least that there were very good reasons to defend believing in such purpose.

The end result was a description of reality that was co-creative like Kant, and historical like Hegel, but the picture of the evolving universe that the American Pragmatists, and especially Peirce, began to paint was one of a self-contained evolving system. Their intellectual sparring partner, Chauncey Wright, would not allow the young Pragmatists to appeal to anything outside of the universe to explain it. In response the universal conceptions that Peirce, James and later Dewey would come up with adhered to this demand in an interesting way. They simply pulled everything into the system of the universe. What they began to create was an early “Integral” model of reality in which all aspects of the universe were seen as part of one dynamic whole system – like cosmic weather. In my next post I intend to go more deeply into the picture of the universe that the pragmatists were working on.

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The Individual and Society

November 12, 2009 · 9 Comments

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 –1831) was a leading figure in the movement of  German Idealism initiated by Immanuel Kant and Hegel’s philosophy  expanded on Kant’s theory of knowledge by adding a social and historical element.

Kant had recognized that human beings create knowledge by using laws of reason to incorporate new sensual information cohesively into their previous understanding of reality. The demand to maintain a coherent picture of what is real – a necessary transcendental unity – creates rules of thinking that shape our view of reality.

Hegel realized that not only must individuals maintain a cohesive picture of reality, but societies and cultures must also maintain a collectively held cohesive understanding of what is real. It is not enough for me to know that I am a doctor. If I am truly to be a doctor other people must also see me as a doctor and thereby give me the authority and demand from me the responsibility of being a doctor. Reality is not only individual, it is shared. Hegel further saw that the collective understanding of reality that is held in common by all human beings of particular societies of culture develops through the course of history. In his book The Philosophy of History Hegel outlines a theory of how this development occurs. .You might be able to imagine even from this brief description how Hegel’s ideas were in turn developed by Karl Marx. Marx started with Hegel’s philosophy and added to it his insights about how oppression and class struggle are the drivers of history.

John Dewey was the third great American Pragmatist along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, but unlike Peirce and James, Dewey started his philosophical career as an Hegelian. John Dewey was not associated with Harvard as Peirce and James were. He attended the University of Vermont. The University of Vermont’s first president was James Marsh who was a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the central figure of what is known as Vermont Transcendentalism. Marsh was a Kantian and ran a very liberal philosophy program at the University of Vermont. By the time Dewey was an undergraduate in that same philosophy department the philosophical alignment of the program had moved from Kant to Hegel. Dewey’s thinking turned toward Pragmatism after reading William James’ The Principles of Psychology.

Dewey’s version of Pragmatism maintained a Hegelian flavor in a number of ways. For one he wrote much more extensively than the other major Pragmatists of social topics. John Dewey is perhaps the most influential philosopher in American history. During his long career Dewey made major contributions in the areas of logic, ethics, sociology, democracy, and most famously education. Dewey saw the individual as inseparable to society. Society is what defines the individual. Without society there can be no individual. If the individual is the foreground, society is the background. If the individual is the object, society is the context. Without a background there can be no foreground. Without a context there can be no object.

I see Dewey’s thinking as typical of the advancement on German Idealism that the American Pragmatists were exploring and that advancement was process thinking. Having the advantage of Darwin’s remarkable theory of evolution and over a century of remarkable scientific advances, the American Pragmatists were beginning to see things in terms of whole systems . Dewey saw the relationship of the individual to society as a system and Peirce and James saw evolution as an evolving whole system.

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Commitment and Reality: From Kant to Peirce

November 6, 2009 · 10 Comments

There was more implied in Kant’s theory of knowledge than the fact that what we see is not an objective world in itself, but rather a picture that is created by us based on sense experience. (As if that wasn’t enough.) Besides stating that we are in an essential way the creators of the world as we see it, he was also saying that creating that world as it did had a responsibility inherent in it.

Kant recognized that as we go through life we are bombarded by sensual impressions and from those we compose an ongoing moving picture of reality. The picture of reality that we create must conform to certain rules of necessity in order to create a picture that is intelligible. As we put together our moving picture of reality all sorts of laws of necessity will demand our picture of reality must look a certain way so as to remain consistent and therefore intelligible. Some of these laws are enforced apriori, or prior to thought. Kant identified certain categories such as, time, space and being that all sensations were necessarily ordered into.

Other aspects of ordering are done more consciously using thought and reason. Every way in which we order reality has implied within it certain other necessary orderings. For instance, let’s say that we perceive a certain sequence of sensations – a shape, that is furry, has four legs and two eyes and barks and we put these sensations together into a dog. To remain consistent seeing this mental object as a dog means that by necessity the same object cannot also be a cat. In order to be consistent something being a dog makes it impossible for it to also be a cat. Within all of our conceptual categories there are uncountable numbers of implied laws that order and structure the rest of reality.

To put it another way, Kant understood human reason to be a constantly integrative process. As human beings are bombarded with a barrage of varied and incoherent sensations. These sensations are instantaneously filtered, ordered and congealed into a coherent picture of reality. This picture of reality, what Kant called a necessary transcendental unity, is the contextual background of all of our experience. The demand that this contextual background remain coherent from moment to moment places a constant demand on the way we order our perceptions.

Kant went beyond this more mechanical understanding of how reality is constructed by the mind by recognizing that by seeing objects in certain ways we were also committing to them being that way. In other words, if we see the object as a dog, we are committing ourselves to acting as if it is a dog. If it is a dog then we don’t go up and start talking to it and expecting it to answer back in human language. The laws of necessity are not only rules for how we must perceive things. They are also laws governing how we must act in relationship to things. When we see things a certain way we are committing ourselves to acting as if that is the way they are and we are responsible for acting in accordance with the way we see things.

It is a small leap from Kant here to William James’ conception of “The Will to Believe” in which he sees that what we choose to believe in fundamentally orients our perception of reality and as a result the way we act in the world. Truth in James’ brand of Pragmatism was created by our actions and our actions were determined by what we chose to believe.

Of all the American Pragmatists, however, it was Charles Sanders Peirce who was following on most directly from Kant. He held an integrated view of reality in which he simultaneously acknowledged the existence of different modes of being while insisting that all were equally real. His three modes of being were a rethinking of Kant’s fundamental categories.

Peirce claimed that reality was comprised of three modes of being that he called “Firstness,” “Secondness” and “Thirdness.” These were his three catagories. Firstness is the quality or character of things. It is “redness” or “hardness” or “coldness.” Secondness is the brute actuality of things. It is the event of experiencing the quality of something. Thirdness is the laws and habits that allow us to create a mental understanding of reality by relating things and qualities. In this we hear echos of Kant’s unknowable thing in itself, firstness, his concept of sensations, Secondness, and his transendental unity, Thirdness.

To Peirce, Thirdness was not a view of some external reality; it was an actual part of reality itself. Peirce did not see ideas as simply mirrors of the “real world;” they were as real as anything else. To appreciate the metaphysics of the Pragmatists, this point is critical and it has also become central to all forms of Evolutionary Spirituality that we find in the popular literature today.

It was in this third domain of reality that Peirce’s evolutionary philosophy was rooted because he saw our growth in knowledge about the universe as part of the growth of the universe itself. In Peirce’s understanding, the fate of the universe was in human hands because it would ultimately be determined by what Peirce imagined as an “unlimited community” of investigators. These investigators, through their shared inquiry into the nature of reality, would slowly converge toward a final agreement about what was ultimately true, and that truth would define the concluding state of the universe.

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Kant and the Creation of Reality

November 1, 2009 · 13 Comments

The American Philosophers from the Transcendentalists to the Pragmatists were all following in the footsteps of the great German Idealist Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804). This isn’t too surprising because all of Western Philosophy follows in the footsteps of Kant. In 1781 Kant published The Critique of Pure Reason and rocked the world of philosophy. What Kant articulated and what later generations of philosophers picked up on was that reality as we perceive it is not purely objective – it is at least partly subjective.

It is easy to believe that reality as we see it is a reflection of reality as it actually is. In other words we tend to assume that the perceptual function that the mind plays is passive, like a mirror, and doesn’t alter the image of reality that it reflects to us. Not so, said Kant. Our perception of reality might start with sensations of something outside of ourselves, but by the time we perceive it our mind has organized, categorized and arranged those raw sensations into reality as it appears to us.

We can’t know reality directly. We don’t perceive of things in themselves. What we perceive as reality is in part created by our minds. And this creation of reality isn’t only the unconscious work of the mind as a machine, as some before Kant had believed, the creative process that constructs reality as we see it is also influenced by us. Of all of the infinite sensations, physical, emotional and conceptual that we experience at any given time we are only aware of a small percentage. The rest we ignore, but those that we attend to are compiled into reality as we see it.

One of the things that influences what we attend to and therefore what we see is our purpose at any given moment. If we are late for a train we will notice the sound of a clock ticking and use it to find the clock that we need to look at, while at other times when our purposes do not involve time we might not notice the sound of the clock at all.

In addition the picture  of reality that we construct has to be consistent with reality as we have known it in the past. All of the incoming information that we get from our senses has to be ordered not to conflict with the past. We constantly must create a necessary unity between the present moment and the  past.

What Kant did for Western Philosophy was make human beings part of the creative process of reality as we see it. In this he dealt a blow to both religion and science. To religion he insisted that we can’t perceive of God directly because our perception of God will also be partly of our own construction. To science likewise he takes away the ruse of objectivity because everything we observe will always be influenced by us.

This profound connection between human perception and the creation of reality set the stage for the rest of Western Philosophy and more recently for the pursuit of Evolutionary Spirituality. The American Pragmatists were building on Kant’s insight when they connected truth to human activity. In their view, not only was our perception of reality partly a product of our own influence, but truth itself was partly created by our own actions. Ideas became true when they were acted on. Reality was created as we lived it out. Charles Sanders Peirce – yes finally back to Peirce – in his early writings was very directly trying to rearticulate Kant’s work.

What Kant did for us was redefine reality. Where we at one time had a fixed stage that we observed passively from a seat in the audience, we now had a cooperative process of creation right in the middle of the production. This insight opened doors that philosophers have been walking though ever since and I intend to walk through a few myself.

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The Purpose of Philosophy and Science

October 31, 2009 · 3 Comments

The existence of God, the nature of freewill – we just seem to keep running into some of the same BIG questions that have orbited around Western philosophy for centuries. I thought it might be a good moment to step back again and consider the best way forward.

Carl in a comment on my post called Cosmic Evolution evoked the use of Ockham’s Razor to explain why he believed that we shouldn’t add any teleology to the picture of evolution. William of Ockham was a monk in the Middle Ages who is credited with the notion that we should always prefer explanations that have the least number of assumptions. The notion of Ockham’s Razor has been used in science and is certainly a good principle to follow. At the same time it isn’t always the case.

 The way that Ockham’s Razor is used in relation to evolution is by saying that chance variations that occur in individuals and the natural selection that occurs through survival advantages can account for the movement of evolution. Since those principles are enough to explain evolution, we shouldn’t add any type of purpose or direction to the explanation. This is certainly a worthy application of Ockham’s Razor, but it doesn’t prove that there is no deeper directionality also at work in evolution.

Our understanding of evolution isn’t at a point where we could either disprove or prove the existence of a directional force in the universe’s evolution. The best counter argument to the above comes from the so-called Anthropic Principle. If we assume that there is nothing but chance variation and survival to account for evolution then we are saying that the universe as we see it has come about randomly.

The Anthropic Principle states that the conditions of the universe necessary for a life form like ours to have evolved are so exact and so complex that the odds of this universe having evolved are virtually infinity to one against. With odds such as that it seems impossible to rule out at least the possibility of some guiding principle at work in tandem with chance variation and natural selection. The Anthropic Principle certainly doesn’t prove the existence of such purpose – as some of its more religious minded adherents would like to think – but at least in my mind it does leave open the possibility.

Similarly on the individual level as Carl has also pointed out Behaviorism can explain the development of human behavior on the basis of reinforcement and conditioning. Again as powerful an explanation as this is, it isn’t proof that there is nothing else at work.

What I find interesting is why do we as individuals choose to tend to lean toward one side or the other in these debates. William James believed that in the end it was a matter of temperament. He claimed that any person tends to be either hard-minded or tender-minded. The hard-minded find solace in facts and determined causes. The tender-minded find solace in more mystical notions of purpose and intent. In the end James believed that how we saw things had more to do with our character than any objective account of reality.

I believe there is something to this, but I would add a related notion which has to do with the purposes we are invested in. If our purposes are more scientific (and I mean this in a very broad sense) then we are motivated to try to find the objective truth. That is the truth that most accurately and unbiased reflects observable facts. If our purposes are more philosophical (again in a very broad sense), I believe that we are (or should be) motivated to create a picture of reality that creates the optimal navigation system for human development at all levels. I suppose that already shows my bias, but I think it is something worth considering. Are the aims of philosophy and science the same or different?

Carl also said in his comment that he felt that we can build a morality based on humanistic values. I am not so sure about that. I think that ultimately our moral sense is directly related to our most fundamental conception of the nature of reality. That is why I believe that the reality of evolution provides a potential platform upon which to rethink our moral basis. The Western World has moved largely outside of the influence of the great religious traditions and so far a humanistic morality has not emerged that seems compelling enough to guide us. Maybe evolution will be the basis for a new morality.

I had a thought the other day that I wanted to use my next few blog posts to run through a thought experiment trying to experience the development of the Western Mind from the fall of Rome to modern times. Could be interesting…

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Evolutionary Enlightenment and American Philosophy

October 26, 2009 · 1 Comment

Before continuing with our fascinating discussion I wanted, in the interest of transparency, to tell a little more about my interest in American Philosophy.

The last decades of the 20th century saw a resurgence of interest in progressive and evolution thinking in both academic as well as popular philosophy. The author Louis Menand in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Metaphysical Club attributes this resurgence of progressive, forward-looking thought to the ending of the cold war and links it back to the classic American philosophy of . Today this line of thinking can be found in the increasingly popular literature of Evolutionary Spirituality. Some of the most prominent contemporary proponents of this philosophy are the recently deceased Pragmatismbut enormously influential Fr. Thomas Berry, the cosmologist Brian Swimme, the futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, the author Ken Wilber and my own spiritual mentor Andrew Cohen.

I first encountered Andrew Cohen in November of 1992 when I saw him speak in Cambridge,Massachusetts. At the time he was teaching a somewhat westernized version of an Eastern Enlightenment tradition called Advaita Vedanta. I left his talk intrigued, but honestly feeling that I had not understood anything of what he was saying. I was inspired enough, however, to pick up a copy of his book Enlightenment is Secret and my imagination was soon captivated by the message that I was reading in it. As I understood it, Cohen’s message was devastatingly simple and profound; if you truly want to be free there is nothing in this world that can stop you! What Cohen was pointing to was the deep sense that most of us have of being victimized by the experience of life. We feel burdened by our emotional and psychological experience and often see our ability to make choices as being severely limited by circumstances, social roles and responsibilities, and our personal inadequacies. This sense of limitation, according to Cohen, was an illusion. It was, in fact, a stance, a position that we were freely choosing to adopt in relationship to the complexity of human life. And because it was a position that we were choosing to take, we could just as easily stop choosing it. That was the mysterious key to liberating the human spirit. I didn’t know it at the time, but this notion revolved around one of the central themes that had developed through the history of American Philosophy; the question of freewill and creative potential.

After reading and rereading Cohen’s book I finally had the chance to see him speak again. This time I was determined to walk away with at least some understanding of what he was saying so I resolved to ask him a question about what I was thinking. “I believe what you are writing and speaking about is true.” I stated, “But, where do I find the faith to follow that path and know that everything is going to turn out OK?” I asked. His answer was as devastating simple and direct as his teaching. “Who says everything is going to turn out OK?” he questioned in response and then continued. “If you knew that everything was going to turn out OK you wouldn’t need any faith.” He went on to speak about the nature of risk and human life, but I had already gotten the answer to my question and although it wasn’t necessarily the answer that I had wanted it was the answer that I was looking for. Again, I had no way of knowing it, but my question about faith and Cohen’s implied instance that human life was a risk was also a central theme in American Philosophy. It was, in fact, the central question that propelled the entire career of America’s great psychologist philosopher William James.

In the year’s since my early encounter with Andrew Cohen his teaching has grown and developed enormously. What began as a plea for personal liberation became increasingly couched in an evolutionary philosophy that always considered the liberation of the individual in the context of their power to affect the development of our world. Again this line of thought is in many ways the central organizing notion that unifies the great tradition of American Philosophy. Over the past few years I have read and studied some of the historical development of American thought and have been continually strengthened to learn that the teaching that Andrew Cohen calls Evolutionary Enlightenment is very directly connected to the development of philosophy in America.

Two of the main roots of American Philosophy rushed into this nation during the period of colonization from two streams of thinking that had burst into being during the age of reason. One of these came directly from the scientific revolution of the European Enlightenment that was painting a picture of a world governed not by god, but by natural law. At the same time the Protestant Reformation was removing power from a church that it saw as an unnecessary obstacle to and direct access to the divine. These two lines of thought found their way into the American mind where they were shaped by the utopian ideals and challenges of colonization. The American mind began to take shape in the decades during and after the war for independence and finally came into its own during the cultural and spiritual movement led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists of Concord. The next generation of thinkers were the first American professional philosophers and they created the greatest original American contribution to world philosophy; Pragmatism.

Pragmatism was an evolutionary philosophy that flourished during the early decades of the 20th century as modernism peaked in American culture. After the great depression and two world wars the progressive spirit of modernisms was called into question by many and Pragmatism and the progressive spirit from which it came was temporarily submerged beneath the post-modernist philosophies  and social movements of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. The resurgence of interest in Evolutionary Spirituality today is perhaps a second look at the evolutionary thinking at the heart of American philosophy and a chance to recreate Pragmatism in light of the many lessons learned through the 20th Century.

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