Theory versus Seeing-As: Reflection on a Thought of Wittgenstein

                                       

 

      Consider these pictures or understandings of ‘that which is’ – Being, reality, the cosmos, the universe, names that are themselves different understandings.

1.   The whole of Creation is a looking-glass, a reflection of God in time and space that originated in the mind of a loving God; a story authored by a loving God.
2. “There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao (Tao Te Ching).”   One achieves harmony with nature through accepting that the Tao connects all things, of which you are a part, and accepting your place in the interconnectedness.
3. The world is made up of two things: spirit and matter. Spirit is things that cannot be seen or touched whereas matter is things that can. Spirit is more important than matter because matter can be destroyed and spirit cannot. The world is an illusion. Maya is a veil that stops people from seeing the truth of everything around them. The only point of existence is to reach enlightenment so that we can clear their minds of concern with material and temporary things. All matter will go through different stages:  everything is created, remains in existence and then is destroyed. This links to the Trimurti, as Brahma is the creator, Vishnu is the preserver and Shiva is the destroyer.
4. Physicist: I'm talking about the universe. All space, all time, just.....a temporary convulsion. And I get paid to prove it. // Writer: You feel sure of that, when you look out on a night like tonight...and see all those millions of stars? That none of it matters? // Physicist: I think it's just as beautiful as you do. And vaguely evocative of some deep truth that always just keeps slipping away. But then my professional perspective overcomes me,// a less wishful, more penetrating view of it and I understand it for what it truly is. Haphazard, morally neutral and unimaginably violent. (Woody Allen, September)
5. “The whole land is sacred.” A member of the Navajo describes the religious significance of land, “Every inch of ground, all vegetation and the fauna on it are considered sacred because they exist.”
6.   The world is a canvas for human beings to create on.
7.  “The world is nothing but spatiotemporal arrangements of fundamental physical objects and properties [i.e. subatomic particles]. You and I, rocks and galaxies, toads and scrambled eggs are just processes, the successive states of which are spatial arrangements of elementary physical objects. These elementary physical objects, arranged in different configurations, account for all the astonishing variety that we encounter in our day-to-day lives.” (Paul Humphries)
8.  Same as above, but add the human capacity for technological rationality and an autonomous will that defines for itself value and reality.
9. Reality is chaos, and human life a constant defense against reality.
10. The physical world is not really the 'real' world; instead, ultimate reality exists beyond our physical world, in the realm of Ideas and archetypes.
11. The world is flawed because it was created in a flawed manner. Earthly life is filled with suffering. In order to nourish themselves, all forms of life consume each other, thereby visiting pain, fear, and death upon one another (even herbivorous animals live by destroying the life of plants). In addition, so-called natural catastrophes -- earthquakes, floods, fires, drought, volcanic eruptions -- bring further suffering and death in their wake. Human beings, with their complex physiology and psychology, are aware not only of these painful features of earthly existence. They also suffer from the frequent recognition that they are strangers living in a world that is flawed and absurd.

Obviously, I could add to this list. I want to call these world versions, after Nelson Goodman. Now consider a few epistemological images, equally condensed.

-Our minds and hearts are either more or less in tune or out of tune with the way the world really is.

-The world is a subjective representation structured by inherent categories of the mind.

-We construct world versions according to community needs, power relations, and psychological urges.

-Evolution plants such programs into our brains in the service of perpetuating the species.

-We are really brains in vats, and our world versions are downloaded into our brains by an Artificial Intelligence.

-Our world versions are myths, public dreams, symbolic intimations of a transcendence that must remain a mystery.

-God has given us an inner eye with which we can see the world as it really is – as Creation.

 

Notice the world versions and the epistemologies are related, parts of the same whole. So the world version of Woody Allen’s physicist is more compatible with the idea that our world versions are products of evolutionary computing than insights of a divinely-given inner eye.

   Now I will just assert here that these world versions and epistemological versions are not susceptible of empirical testing. They are not possible scientific hypotheses. It is not possible to imagine conditions under which any could be definitively refuted in a definitive scientific sense – as some aspect of Newton’s physics is thought to have been refuted by Sir Arthur Eddington’s  confirmation of Einstein’s hypothesis as a result of the solar eclipse of 1919. It’s not that “evidence” or sorts is completely lacking. The death of children by cancer, famine, pestilence, or war makes the view of Woody Allen’s physicist seem probable, or supports the Spartan view of nature as chaos to be mastered. However, such evidence is never definitive. The view of nature as Creation, a looking glass was taken from a novel dealing with a child dying of cancer and the novel was quite persuasive. All of these world versions, even the brains in vat, make sense of certain kinds of experience, organize experience in such a way as to make sense of experience that is taken to be fundamental.

 

   Rather than seeing world versions or epistemological versions as pseudo-scientific hypotheses, I see them as cases of what Wittgenstein termed ‘seeing something as….’ Wittgenstein somewhat misleadingly uses the rabbit-duck illusion to illustrate the principle.

 

                                         

                          

 So you can see it equally well as a rabbit or a duck, depending on your perspective  – the image supports both. Reality doesn’t dictate seeing it as one or the other. The evidence is equally good for one or the other.

 

          Consider these images of a human fetus.

                                            

           

 

                                             

                      

  Then ask how someone inhabiting some of the world versions would see these images and the reality (or phenomenon if you don’t want to admit that the fetus is real) represented therein.

 

·   - an offspring of a human or other mammal in the stages of prenatal development that follow the embryo stage (in humans taken as beginning eight weeks after conception) (dictionary definition)

 

·    - “my baby”  (a pregnant woman I know)

 

·    - a creature, an ensouled body or a bodily soul, loved by God (Thomist Christian)

 

·   - “…the fetus is indeed part of the maternal organism. First, it is immunologically tolerated by the pregnant organism. Second, it is directly and topologically connected to the rest of the maternal organism via umbilical cord and placenta, which is composed of fetal and maternal-origin cells, without a clear or defined boundary between the two. Third, the fetus is physiologically integrated  into the pregnant organism, and regulated as part of one metabolic system. Whilst none of these are perfect indicators of organismic parthood, they jointly pose a very strong case. Note that all of these change radically at birth: the baby is no longer topologically connected (and placenta and umbilical cord are discarded); the baby is now its own physiological, homeostatic and metabolic unit (although still heavily dependent on maternal care/provision and care); and it is no longer in direct contact with the maternal immune system.” (Elselijn Kingma, Associate Professor of Philosophy)

 

·   - A soul in the process of being imprisoned in a gross material body, condemned to an existence in the evil physical world. (Gnostic)

 

·  - A great source of stem cells and other useful materials for biological research. (corporate executive, genetic engineer)

 

·  - one arrangement among many of the elementary particles described by physics (scientific reductionist)

 

·   - depends on the race of the fetus (racist)

 

You can, in a purely logical sense, see the fetus as all of these things and more.  Some ways of seeing don’t exclude others – there are levels of depth involved. Unlike the duck-rabbit illusion, however, reality does talk back to you.  My ex-wife, the mother of two of my children, a woman who has done me some wrong and is in many ways a damaged human being, just lost her baby (her description) in the 7^th month while the baby was still in her womb. Her grief was inexpressible. We all felt grief. The child was lovingly delivered. The child was lovingly buried. Obviously, she – and no one of the family – could see the child as a great source of stem cells; the race plays no role. Was it nothing but a part of her body? Would she grieve over an appendix that was removed? Moreover, the thought that her grief was nothing but an instinct, a leftover from evolution, a culturally programmed behavior, a form of patriarchal brainwashing – or whatever reductive explanation you can imagine – doesn’t do justice to the grief.  The thought that “therapy” could cure her by cutting the thread that connects her grief to reality – i.e. making it purely subjective, disclosing nothing about the reality of the baby she lost – should make one sick. This is an example of life (reality) – not philosophical argument – refuting reductive world versions.

      The point I wish to make is this: the meaning we attach to a being such as a fetus – what we see it as – depends on such experiences and the world version within which we make sense out of them. Two obstetricians, one in a Christian world version and the other in the one inhabited by Woody Allen’s physicist or the philosophy professor, could both know all the science there is to know about the fetus, yet still see it as something radically different. If we start out with the intelligibility of using fetuses for stem cell research, of course the grief and burial could only seem sentimental – not a lucid response to reality. If maternal love is nothing but an instinct, no different from a cat’s, then the grief and the loving burial would also seem less than a lucid response to reality. The mother cat soon forgets her dead kitten (we suppose) and goes on to make more. (‘You can always have more’ would not really console the grieving woman who had just lost her baby.) She didn’t throw a party in gratitude that the baby’s soul was liberated from the prison of its nasty flesh, as a true Gnostic might.

       The grief – or the intelligibility of grief; it does not depend on every woman actually suffering grief – belongs to a world version; the grief radiates out, making the world version clearer even as the world version allows the grief to be and be intelligible. Seeing the baby as an intelligible object of love and grief is illuminated by some world versions, made sentimental or absurd by others.  That does not imply one concrete world versions. Grief for an unborn child is consistent with different world versions I am familiar with. If you are born into a Christian world, some version of that larger world version may comfort or make sense of the loss. Of course, sentimentality is always possible; only the lucid responses matter. But at bottom, the grief of a mother is something humanly natural, something grounded in the reality of the thing itself. Only an ideology imposed from the outside makes it sentimental in principle. A Spartan or the kind of genetic engineer or the liberal-feminist I have in mind might reproach my ex-wife for her grief. To them it might seem that she were grieving over nothing that should lucidly evoke grief. But that is only because – a priori – they have come to inhabit a world version in which such humanly natural responses to loss are denied a place, denied conceptual space.  A world version that denies conceptual space for a mother grieving over the loss of an unborn baby is thereby refuted, though not in any logical or scientific sense. I cannot give an argument to refute them. But they are refuted in a human sense.

     You might say: but you admit that you have only ultimately subjective reasons for your world version or set of world versions that you could take seriously. That means you have no grounds for finding your world version in any sense true. Well, I admit the subjective sources in human experience; I see no non-question-begging argument why a world version that flows from this source may not be taken seriously – i.e. may not be in some sense true. All world versions have their source in human experience – where else should they come from? The strip miner who sees the forest covering the mountain and the coal inside the mountain as neutral resources just waiting to be extracted and turned into profit and things of value for consumers has a no less subjective source for his view of nature as raw materials to be exploited.   

            Still, I also appealed to something humanly natural (grief over the loss of a baby) as limiting for the world versions that I can take seriously and that make sense to me. In other worlds, such humanly natural things as grief, remorse, horror over evil-done, love, the celebration of a new life, joy over beauty – that which can be seen as related (positively or negatively) to that which is good without qualification – can be seen not just as products of certain world versions but as independent sources of justification of a world version that makes space for them.

      Now you might object that the strip miner can say that deforestation and mountaintop removal are humanly natural things to do, since human beings are partly defined by the power they have over nature and other human beings in the form of tools and technologies. And who would like to live a pre-human life completely devoid of any tools or technology. Human existence itself, he could argue, naturally exploits nature.  

      Another example: some women suffer from post-partum depression and experience no love even for a newborn baby. Other women feel resentment against the fetus that comes into being in an unwanted pregnancy. Moreover, a strip miner might feel nothing for the forest and the mountain because he has inhabited a world version in which nature was seen only as raw material, whereas money and economic productivity were keys to all that did matter. Such things, too, are humanly natural, just as natural as grieving over the loss of a baby. Therefore, we are back with the rabbit-duck illusion: reality (here the humanly natural) doesn’t really make any demands on us; it doesn’t talk back. We are free to see nature so or so.

     My reply: when I chose the expression ‘humanly natural’ I did not mean ‘humanly natural’ in the mere sense that human beings do it or suffer it. In that sense, all kinds of bad things are humanly natural. Evil itself is humanly natural. In my use, humanly natural intended only those things that make humanly potentially loveable; that make human life something worth affirming, the loss of which leads can lead intelligibly grief or the violation of which can intelligibly lead to remorse. A mother might feel resentful towards her newborn baby, perhaps for reasons she doesn’t fully understand. And while I would never presume to judge such a woman, it is perfectly intelligible that she might come to feel some sense of remorse or regret at some point in her life that she couldn’t love the baby – who is innocent – as the very being of the baby cried out to be. That view of things in any case makes more sense to me that a woman believing the baby was nothing but a certain arrangement of subatomic particles in space and time or a biological automaton such that any such emotion as remorse would be irrational or sentimental. Clearly, none of my response is world-version-neutral – and that should not be a criticism of the world version but a kind of non-viciously circular justification of it.

      With respect to the strip miner, while it is true that our humanity is bound to being creatures whose technology mediates between human nature and nature itself, and thus that a relation to nature and each other mediated by technology is humanly natural in a neutral sense, it does not follow that all and any possible uses of technology to exploit nature and other human beings are humanly natural in the sense I intended it. Raping nature does not make anyone loveable. Using machines to degrade human labor doesn’t either. I actually ceased being an adherent of the secular Enlightenment – the Star Trek world version – over this. And whereas before under the influence of Hayden White I also saw roots of the destruction of nature in Christianity, in Genesis (1:28)

 

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

 

I was later taught by Wendell Berry and Philip Sherrard how poor a reading of scripture that was. Indeed, the Christian idea of the relationship between technological man and the Creation was stewardship: the Creation is “good, very good”; it is of God and God’s will and pleasure keeps it in existence; humanity has been permitted the use of the Creation for genuine human good, but privileged also to be able to share in God’s love for it. That, too, is not world version neutral. It is a world version within a world version, so to speak.

     You can take all my personal takes or leave them. What I have tried to do was to show how and why world versions illuminate our experience and our experience illuminates our world version – or not. In that they are not unlike theories in that they are tested – by life. It is even rare that a scientific theory is refuted by one knockdown argument or experiment. An accumulation of experience and reflection on that experience can undermine a world version or deepen it. I have been through that. That is as much as philosophy can do. 

        This brief, highly condensed sketch served as an illustration of the kind of thing we do when we think about world versions. Even if you thought reality was a blank screen onto which we project our emotional life, or an arrangement of matter and energy in time-space, and I asked you to justify your view, your account would be – necessarily I maintain – just a reflectively personal. Indeed, it is through reflection that we may deepen our world version, or even come to reject it. It is through the will to understand and the love of truth – not world version neutral – that we make a world version our own, become individuals in Simone Weil’s sense of becoming a unique perspective on the world. An unreflective life is unworthy of a human being – I will end with that quote from Socrates and the belief that no world version that does not leave space for that truth can escape being superficial. And I would add, that any world version that leaves no conceptual space for a love of the world or any world version that does the dirt on life are self-refuting versions that reveal a damaged soul or culture. I think Socrates’ attitude toward philosophy was connected to a profound love of the world.

       There are other attitudes to the relationship with the world versions that people inhabit: narcissists take and alter world versions that elevate their ego vis-à-vis others; many people relate to world versions that rationalize guilt; others relate to the world version sentimentally, idealizing reality into constructs that offer comfort or self-righteous emotions.  But for my money, Socrates’ attitude is infinitely more humanly valuable.