My Epistemological Problem.
There is a
philosophical or conceptual issue I have not yet thought through. Thinking of
the world or Being as a limited whole, interpreting Being as a limited whole
sub specie aeternitatis, as Wittgenstein put it. On the one hand, thinking
itself presupposes such an interpretation. What do I mean? Imagine you are
standing by the river you grew up beside (The Green River for me). You don’t
just see patches of color, motion, and sound. You see a river. That re-cognition
already implies an interpretation of what kind of thing the world is. For
example, it’s a connected whole in which you, the perceiver, are situated. There
are enduring things with identity through time (this river, not just flowing
sensations). Causality and order exist (the current flows downstream, the
stones resist the water). None of these are objects in your field of vision;
they are the very preconditions under which objects show up at all. You could
not see this river unless, tacitly, you already understood yourself as living
in a world that is one, structured, intelligible, and temporally continuous: that
is, as a whole in which beings appear and make sense. Even if you don’t think
about metaphysics, your perception enacts one. So in ordinary seeing, you
presuppose an interpretation of Being-as-a-whole, i.e., a world that hangs
together, within which you and the river and the flow of time coexist
intelligibly.
Or this. Now imagine you’re talking with
your son. He asks you something personal, and you hesitate. Do you tell the
truth? In making that moral choice, you presuppose not just facts about
psychology or social norms but a sense of how things ultimately are: that truth
is better than falsehood; that the person you address is not just an object but
a being who deserves honesty; that the world is, at some level, a moral order; that
integrity matters; that good and evil are real distinctions, etc. You may not
formulate any of this, but it’s built into the very sense that it matters what
you do. If you truly thought the world were a meaningless flux, or that all
values were mere constructions, the distinction between truth and deception
would have no weight. The moment it matters, you’ve already committed to a view
of Being-as-having-moral-significance or a whole in which persons and truth
have a real place.
So in ordinary moral life, too, you
presuppose an interpretation of Being-as-a-whole as a world that is not just
physically coherent, but meaningful. In both perception and moral experience,
thinking or acting presupposes a tacit grasp of the whole, a sense of what it
means to be at all. You can’t “switch off” this metaphysical backdrop: to doubt
it already presupposes it. That’s what Wittgenstein meant, in part, by seeing
the world sub specie aeternitatis. The world is not just a collection of
facts but a totality, something already disclosed as meaningful. We don’t stand
outside it; our very capacity to think, see, or value is already a
participation in an interpretation of the world as a meaningful whole.
If you call this into doubt, you get either
'the mystical' or some form of rejection of metaphysics altogether, whether
Goodman's irrealism or deconstruction, etc. At the level of abstract thought
and cultural differences, we are confronted different and partly
incommensurable interpretations of Being as a whole: Greek ordered cosmos,
Christian idea of Creation, Buddhist idea of emptiness, reductive scientific
naturalism, Marxist historical materialism, etc. etc. And you can't compare
interpretations of Being as a whole with the thing itself because you can't get
outside of all them to compare them with the independent, unconceptualized,
unperceived object 'Being'. Metaphysics seems hopeless.
The other, positive side of the same coin:
theories of Being - ontologies - that purport to be absolute, godlike.
Scientism presupposes a reality totally explainable by science, for example. Or
theological pictures that claim to put God's absolute knowledge in human form
on the authority of a church.
I hold that from our finitude and fallibility, any claim to absolute knowledge of Being is misconceived, negative or positive. But the other option of incommensurable interpretations that never reach their object is not the only option. I can know something about the world - my son, music, the river I grew up by, what science can teach me about it, etc. - without knowing everything about the world or my son, the river, etc. Knowing, understanding can be deepened practically infinitely, given our finitude and fallibility. This real understanding can inform our interpretations of Being as a whole, even make judgments possible. A reductive scientism cannot account for many things about my son that I cannot doubt, that are based on intimate familiarity, for instance. Our finite understandings are not arbitrary constructions; they are constrained and informed by real participation in what is. The face of your son, the movement of the river, the moral beauty of a gesture: these are not “interpretations” in Goodman’s sense but manifestations of Being, disclosures that draw us into deeper understanding.
Yet logically it is always possible that if I knew the whole absolutely, it would overturn what I think I understand of my son, the river, etc. as well as the kinds of interpretations of Being as a whole that we all necessarily have (through intimate familiarity or even through the embrace of speculative theories). Thus my understanding is radically tentative, and I cannot refute other interpretations (world versions, ontologies, frameworks, theologies, etc.) in any logically, rationally absolute way.
So - and this is my problem - it seems difficult to separate my limited, conditioned realism from the radical kind of irrealism or deconstruction (and all the myriad other forms of anti-realism, of Nominalism, of relativism) if pressed. Knowing the shore, I seem to know something; but my understanding of the shore is based on limited experience and might be overturned if I could experience the depths. Without experiencing the depths, how am I justified in saying anything at all about the shore? Was Wittgenstein not right, perhaps, to leave it at the mystical and remain silent?
Wittgenstein himself changes positions in the Philosophical Investigations: meaning is not a mirror but a practice, a form of life. What cannot be said absolutely may nevertheless be shown or lived through participation in shared forms of understanding. That transition from saying to showing, from representation to participation, is exactly where a finite yet real metaphysics becomes possible even if Wittgenstein did not want to go there. Aquinas’s dictum fits here perfectly: “Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.” We speak truly of Being, but always according to our finite mode of participation.
