From Essence to Meaning - another discussion with my son 

Kili and I were arguing over whether this is a toboggan:

                             

We both agree that this is a toboggan:

                               

A toboggan in my dialect of English is a hat for winter. The first recorded use of the word toboggan for a hat, as I read, was in 1929. Here is what I found:

The word “toboggan” comes from the Micmac word for sled: topaĝan. As this tribal word was adopted into French-Canadian vocabulary, its modern-day spelling transformed. With these changes came other variations in meaning and application, some of which vary dramatically from region to region. Once a word predominantly centered in the northeast, topaĝan in the form of “toboggan” can now be heard around the world in its use for describing winter sleds.

Toboggans generally refer to long sleds used for recreational purposes in the winter. This definition accurately reflects the word topaĝan’s Micmac origin. However, as time progressed, the last century saw enough shifts in the English language to affect even the usage of a new word like toboggan. As those who ride toboggans must dress up warmly against the winter weather, resulting in the wearing of knit caps and other accessories, the word “toboggan” came to mean more than just a sled.

Today, should you travel different regions of North America, it is likely that you will find pockets where commonly used words have a completely different and uncommon use. For example, the word “toboggan”. Although unmistakably to describe the long and heavy sled used for recreation in the winter, “toboggan” has come to mean “knit cap” in other parts of the continent. This trend can be explained as a kind of metonymy that developed as knit caps were commonly worn while riding toboggans. However, the use of “toboggan” as a sled remains the most popular choice for North America. (dictionary.kiwi.com)

 

     How would one define its essential features? Is the material accidental and essential? Is whether it rolls up at the end accidental or essential?

     I asked ChapGPT to define toboggan (as a hat, not a sled). Here is the result:

 

To define the essential features of a toboggan (as a hat, not a sled), we must distinguish between what makes it essentially a toboggan and what is accidental to a particular toboggan. These are the features without which it would not be recognized as a toboggan hat:

·        A knitted or fabric winter cap – The material can vary, but the concept entails a head covering designed for warmth in cold weather.

·        Close-fitting – It is not a broad-brimmed hat or loose-fitting headwear; it is meant to hug the head snugly.

·        Usually extends over the ears (or can be pulled down to cover them) – This is a functional aspect that distinguishes it from purely decorative hats.

·        Soft and flexible – Unlike structured hats (e.g., fedoras, cowboy hats), the toboggan is made of pliable material that conforms to the shape of the head.

 

This confirms my own understanding.

Now the accidental features, the contingent features that vary and are not definitional – again, from ChatGPT:

·        Material – Wool, cotton, acrylic, or synthetic blends all qualify. A hat made of metal or hard plastic would no longer be a toboggan.

·        Presence of a cuff – Some toboggans have a folded brim, but this is optional.

·        Pom-pom or no pom-pom – While some versions feature a decorative pom-pom, its presence or absence does not define the hat.

·        Rolled-up or slouchy fit – A toboggan may be worn rolled up to sit above the ears or left long to cover more of the head and ears.

·        Color or pattern – A bright red, striped, or plain black toboggan is still a toboggan.

 

Thus, a philosophically Aristotelian definition might be:

 

A soft, close-fitting, knitted or fabric winter hat, designed for warmth, typically covering or capable of covering the ears.

 

We can say: that definition identifies the concept expressed in my dialect by the word toboggan. Kili was still not convinced – is he just mistaken? Say his English teacher corrected even his attempt to call his hat a toboggan, saying a toboggan is a sled, not a hat, and my dialect has incorporated an incorrect use of the word toboggan into its linguistic habits. Would he be right?

. . .

 

  Now why for Heidegger or Wittgenstein would this definition – which let's assume clearly draws borders around the concept (it doesn’t; there are fuzzy borders) – not express its meaning or even its 'logical' meaning? Clearly, even though we assume an Aristotelian essential definition draws clear conceptual borders, Heidegger and Wittgenstein would each challenge whether such a definition truly captures the meaning of toboggan in any deep sense.

     For Wittgenstein (especially in the Philosophical Investigations), meaning is not given by definitions with necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather by how a word is used in life. The word toboggan does not have its meaning in some abstract logical structure – the proposition – but in the way it functions in different contexts. If someone from another dialect or region does not know the word toboggan as a winter hat (perhaps they only know it as a sled), no list of essential features would make them "see" what it means. As with my son. They would have to observe how it is used in a particular form of life. Since we live in Germany and I am the only source of native language use in my son’s life, that is difficult for him to do. For Wittgenstein anyway, meaning is not captured by borders but rather by family resemblance across many uses - which Kili does not really have access to. (If he lived in the USA he would notice that some people might call a looser-knit beanie a toboggan, while others might reserve it for a particular style. There is no fixed essence governing its use, only overlapping and shifting conventions based on analogical thinking. Logical meaning in Wittgenstein’s later view is thus not an internal essence but presupposes practice. Kili's practice is based on his personal experience and the idiosyncratic parts of his personality.) 

    This does challenge Aristotle. The Aristotelian definition draws borders, but Wittgenstein would say that real-world language-use is often less rigid, more flexible. A purely logical language wouldn’t work humanly. If someone calls a fleece-lined cap a toboggan in their dialect, there is no fact of the matter that they are "wrong." The definition does not explain how we actually learn the word toboggan, which is through immersion in a way of speaking, not through formal definition. So for Wittgenstein, the Aristotelian definition can be useful, but it does not define meaning itself, which is always contextual, practical, and embedded in life.

. . .

   Heidegger, in Being and Time, would critique an essentialist definition for reducing Being to a set of properties, rather than understanding how an object shows up in lived experience (Erschlossenheit or disclosure). A toboggan is not just a thing with properties; it is something we use in particular ways that are part of our world, the particular world of the southern and midwestern USA in the 1960’s. If you were to ask, "What is a toboggan?" Heidegger would say that to truly grasp its meaning, you must look at how the toboggan is revealed in everyday human existence, what it shows itself to be. The concept toboggan means different things for different existential contexts, to take just some obvious examples:

·        For a child: a source of warmth and comfort in winter.

·        For a factory worker: a product in a manufacturing process.

·        For someone hearing the word for the first time: a puzzle with no intrinsic meaning.

Defining a toboggan in terms of properties (knitted, close-fitting, etc.) misses the more fundamental question: What does toboggan mean as part of Dasein’s world, Dasein being Heidegger’s term of art for human being as a being that is there, in a world?

. . .

So:

Aristotle: The definition sets out necessary and sufficient conditions that capture the essence of a toboggan.

 Wittgenstein: No fixed essence... toboggan means whatever it is used to mean in actual linguistic practices. The definition is a summary of use, not a boundary. For Wittgenstein, meaning lies in the practice, not in conceptual precision.

 Heidegger: The definition is too abstract; meaning depends on how toboggans appear in lived experience (e.g., as warmth, as protection, as part of seasonal rituals). For Heidegger, meaning emerges through being-in-the-world, not from abstract analysis.

    Meaning, as opposed to making a taxonomy, is lived, contextual, and dynamic rather than fixed and essential. The question is not whether a clear essential is possible or not – we have to "look and see" as Wittgenstein wrote – but what it has to do with meaning. By extension, a statement 'my son is wearing a toboggan' can be true or false only if its meaning can be understood. But outside any context it – the 'proposition' in general – has no meaning. (Think of trying to translate contextless sentences.) The notion that you can rip out an utterance from living language, from the realm of meaning, and out of it construct a proposition and compare that to "reality" as it is outside of the realm of meaning, this as the way of philosophy, as the way of seeing the world right – this seems to be the issue, the assumption that meaning and truth can be separated, that we can extract a proposition from the realm of meaning, compare it to a reality that exists outside of meaning, and thereby determine whether it is true.

     This is precisely what Wittgenstein rejects in his later philosophy. The Tractatus assumed that propositions represent reality by picturing states of affairs, as though language were a neutral mirror. But in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein exposes this view. Instead of abstracting a proposition from context, we must ask how it functions within a form of life i.e. within a practice where it already has meaning.

       "My son is wearing a toboggan." For this proposition to have meaning, it already presupposes a shared language (the word toboggan is understood in this dialect); a shared world (we recognize objects like hats, sons, and the practice of wearing them); a form of life (this is an ordinary kind of statement within the human activity of describing clothing). If we rip this proposition out of its meaningful context and try to compare it to "reality as it is in itself," we no longer have anything to compare it to (cf. Goodman). The idea that we can somehow step outside language and check whether this isolated, decontextualized statement corresponds to reality is an illusion. It leads to hopeless paradoxes.

   I think Wittgenstein’s insight was that truth is not a relation between words and some meaningless, pre-linguistic reality. It is internal to language and life. It depends on whether the statement is meaningful within a practice. Thus, instead of saying "This proposition corresponds to reality," Wittgenstein would say: "This proposition makes sense within a human practice." If it makes sense, it can be true or false in that context. If it does not make sense (e.g., saying "My son is wearing a toboggan" in a world where nobody understands toboggan as a hat), then truth and falsity are irrelevant because there is no meaning. The traditional philosophical error, which Wittgenstein and Heidegger both try to undo in different ways, is the idea that: language is an abstract system that refers to a neutral, pre-given reality; truth is a matter of correspondence between propositions and this independent reality. Thus meaning is secondary to logic, something we can set aside to "get to the facts." But there is no such pre-given, neutral reality apart from the ways we engage with it through meaning. Meaning is not separate from reality; it is how reality shows itself to us. Language is “the house of Being,” as Heidegger says. Reality is disclosed to us in this human way. Thus, the philosophical problem is not about establishing truth by correspondence, but about clarifying meaning within human life, and questioning this as to what it discloses about Being – which is what I tried to do in the first entries of this project.

    I will risk drawing this conclusion on the basis of my discussion with my son over the question of what is, and what isn’t, a toboggan. The idea that philosophy’s task is to extract propositions from life and compare them to "the world as it really is" is a misguided assumption. Reality is not "out there" in some pure, independent form waiting to be compared to propositions. Reality shows itself through the structures of meaning that emerge in human existence. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein called this the Mystical. The everyday is mystical. Thus, the issue is not whether essential definitions are possible, but whether essential definitions give us meaning in the first place or whether meaning is always already embedded in the world that is disclosed to us before we ever attempt to define it.

 Going on with my project (8) - Reductionism and Constructivism

Although on the surface of grammar it seems possible to assert we live in a Matrix, and of course we cannot know that we do not, it is not ultimately (humanly) intelligible.  In a passage that goes to the core of this issue, Wittgenstein wrote:

 

'I believe that he is suffering.'  – Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton?  It would go against the grain to use the word in both connections.  (Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but am I certain that he is not an automaton?  Nonsense!). . . .  'I believe that he is not an automaton', just like that, so far makes no sense.  My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul.  I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.

 

The implication of this passage is radical: not only, as a matter of fact, is the question “Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton?” absurd in the sense that it uses a particular language in nonsensical ways; the implication is that it must be absurd in any possible human language, just as impossible for us to imagine as a round square. If I have understood the passage correctly, Wittgenstein's thoughts show that the idea that our conscious life is a shadow of the really REAL conceived as physical events that can be investigated by science is as unintelligible as a round square.

            Of course, if our inner life is nothing but a shadow of physical processes obeying physical laws, then we must imagine ourselves to be automata.  If someone's grief over the loss or a loved one or remorse over a wrong done to some loved one are nothing but insubstantial shadows cast by (what source of light?) the Real physical events taking place in those people's brains and bodies, then what else could they be?  The conscious experience of grief or remorse would then be like a computer screen where what appears is a function of the programming, which itself is determined by physical laws.  The shadow “remorse” (with all the language of remorse: “Oh my God, what have I done”) seduces us into thinking thoughts like “The person who was wronged was unique,” “I could have acted otherwise,” “I can make and keep promises,” and the like – shadows so dark they prevent us from seeing the reality that we are nothing more than automata carrying our physical programs, more complex than the orbit of the planets, perhaps, but just as mechanical.

            People's behavior (at least in science fiction – the Body Snatchers! and perhaps some bureaucrats!) could conceivably make one wonder whether they are automata. Given certain contexts it might indeed make sense to ask the question of a particular person.  But just so? Wittgenstein's point is that robot-like behavior could count as evidence of being an automaton only against the background that no one could seriously doubt that you have real thoughts and feelings.  And if one can't seriously doubt this, then one can't intelligibly entertain the notion our inner lives are nothing but physiological states. This “primitive” response to others as sentient (“attitude towards a soul”) is not an assumption, conjecture, hypothesis, or bit of knowledge concerning the reality of thoughts and feelings; assumptions, conjectures, hypotheses, and knowledge invite questions about whether they are justified. That you are a sentient being is not something we can seriously doubt because sentience happens prior to all thinking and asking questions:  thus it is not something we can sanely question or “have an opinion about.”  It is, in fact, the precondition (like being alive) of doubting, asking questions, and having opinions in the first place.  Grammatically you can ask whether I have an opinion on the question of whether the rest of the people in the class are automata; logically, the question is meaningless.

            The notion that our inner life is a shadow is so obviously flawed, I am tempted to coin the new name for this (actually quite ancient) logical fallacy in its honor – the Matrix fallacy.  This occurs whenever one wants to abandon the difficult job of critically and honestly reflecting on experience, and tries to underwrite one's own particular attitude with – and merely deduce it from – a hypothesis concerning ultimate Reality. All metaphysically reductive hypotheses are like this: Love is nothing but . . . physical events, conditioned behavior, the play of signifiers, discourse masking the will-to-power, a bourgeois ideology, subconscious libidinal forces, and so on – the list of the candidates for the really Real is (embarrassingly) quite long.   One could define the Matrix fallacy so:  one starts off by wanting to account for something meaningful and ends up explaining away the reality of what one began by wanting to account for.  One saws off the very branch one is sitting on.

         It’s like we imagine consciousness as a person inside a submarine who must rely on instruments to have experience of the world outside the submarine. The instruments translate whatever they pick up and can pick up into electrical impulses, that the instrument retranslates back into images, sounds, and so on. Now if someone doubted the the images we see on our instrument panel represented the world outside of the submarine as it really is, as least insofar as the instruments themselves can translate it, we would have to be able to go outside the submarine (i.e. consciousness itself) and compare what a non-conscious, non-representational angelic mind perceived with the images on the instrument panel. But ex hypothesi that is impossible. So we have faith in our instruments – or not. Our instruments have evolved by allowing us to navigate the outside world and even develop a world in the submarine, a world at bottom so real that to doubt it would not be intellectual courage but madness if extended beyond the philosophical armchair. And yet reductionists of all kinds from materialists to Foucault ask us to do just that. (The submarine metaphor I took over from Martin Hollis, though I adapted it for a slightly different purpose.)

 

. . .

 

   I wrote that some time ago (in connection with work on Peter Winch and Raimond Gaita, both of whom make that point in different ways). It seems a natural follow-up to the previous entry. The tendencies of so many post-industrial thinkers from naturalist-reductionists such as Daniel Dennett to postmodernists such as Derrida and Foucault and all kinds of others reduce to this: to invite us to see meaning as reducible to some non-meaning. That is, they explain away love, remorse, beauty, or moral horror by collapsing them into something else that is not, itself, meaning—something material, mechanical, socially constructed, or purely functional.

 

Examples.

 

Metaphysical Naturalists / Scientific Reductionists

 

     Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained) argues that consciousness itself is a user-illusion produced by brain processes. What we experience as “intentionality,” meaning, or love is really just computation at the neuronal level, a function of physical laws. Here, meaning is reduced to neuronal firing patterns—something non-meaningful in itself.

 

    Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) believes that love, morality, and altruism are survival mechanisms created by natural selection. The deep meaning we feel in relationships is actually just genes “selfishly” ensuring their propagation. What seems like meaning is biological programming, no deeper reality behind it.

 

 

Postmodernists / Constructivists

 

     Michel Foucault argues that truth and meaning are just effects of power relations. What we think of as "moral truth" or "objective knowledge" is really a product of historical discourses that serve dominant groups. Meaning is reduced to power dynamics—which, in themselves, are not meaningful, just strategies of dominance.

 

     Jacques Derrida believed (I think!?) Language does not reveal meaning but defers it endlessly in a chain of signifiers. What we think of as deep, stable meaning is just an illusion created by the way language functions. Words don’t "mean" anything in themselves; they only refer to other words. Meaning never reaches its object.

 

Economic and Sociological Reductionists

 

     Karl Marx believed that morality, religion, and culture are not real expressions of meaning but ideological superstructures. These “values” exist to justify economic arrangements and class interests. Meaning is reduced to material conditions and class struggle.

 

    Pierre Bourdieu believed that meanings can be reduced to the social structures that generated them. Our habits, tastes, and moral values are not freely chosen but determined by our social class and upbringing. Meaning is not real—it’s a function of social reproduction.

 

Psychological and Psychoanalytic Reductionists

 

    Sigmund Freud wanted to reduce meaning to subconscious drive. Religious belief, morality, and even love are projections of unconscious desires. Our sense of meaning is an illusion created by our need to repress or satisfy primal urges.

 

     B. F. Skinner believed that thought, emotion, and morality are not real in themselves—they are just behaviors conditioned by reinforcement and punishment. Meaning is nothing but conditioned responses.

 

Existentialist Nihilists

 

     Jean-Paul Sartre thought that since existence precedes essence, meaning is not discovered in reality but created by individual choice. There is no given meaning, only the absurd, meaningless brute fact of existence. (I’m am not sure I want to read Sartre as a reductionist per se but he does believe our everyday experience is meaning is inauthentic, not real.)

 

Albert Camus thought the universe is indifferent to human values, and meaning is ultimately an illusion. The best we can do is rebel against this meaninglessness through personal acts of defiance.

 

The core strategy behind all these modes of thought is to explain away our everyday sense in meaning in terms of something that is not meaning. In every case, what feels like meaning – a love, truth, beauty, moral duty – is dismissed as a mere effect of something else that is itself non-meaningful:

 

·         Biological survival mechanisms (Dawkins, Dennett)

·         Power structures (Foucault)

·         Economic forces (Marx)

·         Social conditioning (Bourdieu, Skinner)

·         Language games without real reference (Derrida)

·         Psychological projections (Freud)

·         Radical, subjective willfulness (Sartre)

 

The error in all of these views is that they attempt to understand meaning from the outside – as if one could study it like a detached observer. But meaning is not an object; it is something we live within, like the spiritual air we breathe.

 

      It's not like I deny that any or all of these non-meanings do condition our lives. All of them and more probably are the matrix from which self-consciousness, meaning, thought, art, religion, the world "emerge" as I believe is the term of art. Or I believe the world and our inner lives transcend all these non-meanings though they never escape them to become angelic, as I believe Descartes thought, and perhaps Kant. I grant this is something of a mystery, a philosophical problem probably impossible to solve. I feel the need to resort to metaphor, perhaps a bad sign for the philosophically-minded. These are the ones I have come across that seem most illuminating. 1) The realm of meaning (Gaita) is like a flame emerging from burning wood. The fire cannot exist without the material, but it is not reducible to the wood alone.  A scientific analysis of the chemical combustion process would not capture the warmth or light of the fire just as a neuroscientific or sociological account of meaning does not capture its reality. Or this: Meaning is like music played on an instrument. The wood, strings, and vibrations are necessary conditions for the sound, but the music is not reducible to them.  The reality of the music transcends its physical medium without ceasing to be dependent on it. A physicist could analyze the sound waves of the Bach “Chaconne” in terms of his equations but would be blind to the music without entering into the realm of meaning. But the “emergence” is actual whether we can understand it scientifically or not.

     The line is crossed when our lives (meaning) is reduced to any one or all of these non-meanings. Meaning does not exist apart from the biological, social, and historical conditions that shape it; but it also cannot be reduced to them. These factors are necessary for meaning to emerge, but not sufficient to explain it away. The human world transcends its material, psychological, and cultural origins – not by escaping them but by deepening them into self-consciousness, understanding, love, and truth. Reductionism in all these forms commits the Matrix Fallacy. It starts by wanting to explain meaning and ends by dissolving meaning into something that is not meaning at all. My view is the contradiction of these views as I affirm 

·         Love, moral horror, beauty, and awe are not illusions, but disclosures of reality.

·         Our fundamental experiences (grief, remorse, joy, reverence) reveal aspects of Being. It is not just our minds "projecting" onto a meaningless universe.

·         Reductionism is a self-undermining project. It destroys the very reality it set out to explain.

·         The rational (and moral) attitude is not skepticism toward meaning, but recognition of it.

 

My view – or the view I represent from my perspective; there is not much original about it and in a way is the plainest common sense – has the advantage that it avoids the Cartesian temptation to treat human reason and meaning as though they float above history and nature as an angelic intellect while also avoiding the reductionist temptation to collapse meaning entirely into its biological, social, or psychological origins. It allows us to acknowledge the real insights of neuroscience, sociology, psychology, etc., without letting them collapse the reality of meaning into their categories. It provides a middle path between scientific reductionism and disembodied idealism. It protects both the contingency and transcendence of human meaning: we arise from history, nature, and social conditions but we are at least potentially not trapped within them – which all the reductionist philosophies themselves just presuppose.

 

   My view also allows for a simple truth that the reductionist view cannot explain. That the Bach Chaconne is real, that the realm of meaning is real, and since real, part of nature. Nature is not a mechanical monster but gives rise to life and love – and philosophy. Every word I write is natural. The Bach Chaconne is as natural as the birch tree in my backyard – I completely agree with people like Dennett and Dawkins on that. Only I don’t reduce nature to what is disclosed by a form of reason whose essence is to reduce reality to study one aspect of it. If we are part of nature, and we experience meaning, then meaning must also be a part of nature. If meaning were just an illusion, we would have to ask: where did this illusion come from? If nature were truly meaningless, how could a being within nature even develop the ability to experience meaning? The fact that we experience love, moral horror, beauty, and awe is not an accident; it suggests that these things are woven into the structure of reality itself. Nature is not reducible to blind mechanism or brute physicality. Meaning is an intrinsic dimension of reality, just as fundamental as matter, energy, and time.

 

     Thus to make space within reality or nature for the realm of meaning, it must follow that nature is not just a system of physical laws but also the condition for love, beauty, and moral truth to emerge; that the human experience of meaning is not an anomaly but the most developed expression of something already implicit in the cosmos. Just as gravity or electromagnetism are part of the universe, so is meaning. We do not invent meaning in the way we invent fictional stories; we participate in it (a way of understanding what Plato meant by “participation” of nature in the Ideas/Forms). The mistake of materialist reductionism is not that it’s wrong about matter or energy but that it ignores nature’s full depth. Reality includes both physical structure and meaning. It is not a machine, but a reality in which life, mind, and meaning emerge as natural developments, not illusions.

 

    This is not an original insight. It expresses with what many great thinkers have recognized but which modern reductionism has obscured. For Aristotle, nature has an inner principle of form and purpose (telos), not just mechanical causation. For Heidegger Being is not just "stuff" but has a meaningful, disclosive character. For Thomists like Josef Pieper nature is intelligible, and meaning is a real aspect of being. What all these thinkers would affirm is the proposition that the world is meaningful because meaning is woven into the fabric of nature itself. We do not create meaning out of nothing. We discover and participate in it. This is a realistic alternative to both scientific reductionism and radical constructivism in which both our finitude (we emerge from nature) and our transcendence (we disclose its depth) are acknowledged.

 

 

 

 

So if the rational arguments for reduction are as unsound as I think, I must ask where the persuasive force of the various reductionisms in popular culture and academia comes from? This is speculation on my part. I think from two sources, interrelated in a unique way in my time: 1) the fat, relentless ego; 2) from social and historical conditions causing alienation, uprootedness. I won’t say much about the first. I will just recall myself as a student when I was very much in the thrall of various reductionisms. I felt quite superior that I could see through all these illusions and pretenses. It made me superior to the common run of men. It also gave me “social capital” as an “intellectual” that I would not have had otherwise. It was sinful. I will leave to others to determine how widespread this attitude is. And of course the capitalist is happy to see nature as meaningless raw material as his mode of existence depends on exploiting or destroying it (including human nature). 

     About the second I have more to say. It must somehow be connected with the phenomenon of "uprooting" on many levels. People are swimming, so to speak, in a massive transformation of humanity itself brought about by the revolutionary takeover of "Science-Technology-Capitalism" - a fusion of all three under the direction of those who control or manage capital. This has caused radical alienation on many levels: from nature, from community, from a notion of transcendence (people who are swimming in the flux just have to keep their heads above water and react, and so can't reflect in general). As our sense of reality is grounded in the very things tendency of "Science-Technology-Capitalism" alienates us from, it has become weaker. The idea that reality is individually or socially constructed seems to reflect this experience. Also it provides a narrative that legitimizes the alienation of modern life and makes it easier to accept the conditions imposed by Science-Technology-Capitalism. Given the philosophical weakness of the argument for reductionism – held by someone who is out to prove a thesis at any cost, perhaps –  I cannot explain its cultural power any other way.

 Going on with my project (7) - Response to a Critic

I can imagine someone critical of my position: "You just have your subjective wishes – wishful thinking – that you irrationally accept, and then just construct a philosophy around that." This harkens to the common view that philosophy is nothing but an elaborate justification of what we happen to believe anyway for irrational reasons.

I want to give my response to this kind of criticism.

 

Step One

    Metaphysically, one can either affirm Hamlet's exclamation to Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy - read: science; or deny it, in which case, logically, there can either be fewer or the same (cf. Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien). To affirm or deny any of these possibilities we would have to achieve a God-like perspective, epistemologically, which is logically impossible. Therefore, any metaphysics or other kind of representation or theory that claims to be a mirror of reality as such is ruled out in advance. It can in the best case only capture limited reality from limited perspectives.

   Hamlet’s exclamation represents a metaphysical fork in the road. One can affirm that reality exceeds what is captured in philosophy/science (Hamlet’s position). Or one can deny it, meaning: Either reality is smaller than what we imagine (unlikely, given the history of human discovery); or reality is exactly as we imagine it (which presumes we have already captured the whole truth, an extraordinarily hubristic claim). Since the latter two positions require an absolute knowledge of reality to assert with confidence, only the first position (Hamlet’s) is epistemically humble and defensible.

   The issue, epistemologically, is that we have no God’s eye view. We are mortal, and thus historical; we experience the world through our bodies; we are finite and fallible. Those are brute facts. There are possible realities in the presence of which we as a species are like dogs watching TV. Any claim to fully represent reality, whether through science or philosophy, assumes an omniscient perspective that is simply not available to us. If we could adopt a God’s-eye view, we could adjudicate between competing metaphysical theories as if from outside all perspectives. But as we are finite beings within reality, we can only access reality through perspectives, traditions, languages, and experiences – never as a complete and final picture.

     The inescapable logical consequence of this is that science and philosophy can only be partial disclosures of reality, at least as far as we know. Any metaphysical or scientific system that claims to be a mirror of reality itself is ruled out in principle because it mistakes a limited view for the whole. The best that science or philosophy can do is capture aspects of reality from limited perspectives, but not reality as such. This does not mean metaphysics or science are worthless; only that they must acknowledge their limits.

      Relating this to the line of thought in the last entry, the imagined neutrality of scientific or philosophical reason cannot be logically maintained. Any framework (like Goodman’s worldmaking or logical positivism) that claims to define reality from a supposedly universal stance is making an illegitimate claim to completeness. This underscores my contention – following Heidegger – that reality is disclosed rather than constructed. Since we cannot step outside Being to compare theories to the “real” reality, we must acknowledge that knowledge is gained through participation, experience, and engagement with Being – also following Gadamer here – and not by pretending we are above it.

    This also justifies a more hermeneutic approach to truth – hermeneutic not in the sense of an art of interpretation but a deep philosophy. If all knowledge is perspectival, then truth is not an exact picture of reality but a deepening of insight through dialogue, tradition, and lived experience, as Gadamer showed to my satisfaction. Truth in the sense that matters for philosophy is unfolding, not static, always richer than any given system because Being cannot be reduced to human constructions, i.e. Being is not a human construct but the condition for the possibility of human constructs and everything else.

 

Step Two

  Now I am interested to know whether there is any connection between that situation and the fact that metaphysical thinking seems circular insofar as it to develop must assume some privileged starting point, not in the sense of a logical foundation but in the sense of entering a logical circle at some point.

     I think there is a connection, but it’s subtle. The finitude of our perspective, which prevents us from having a God's-eye view of reality, is what necessitates circularity in metaphysical thought.

     Since we cannot step outside Being to compare our metaphysical theories to reality as such, we can only work from within a perspective. Every metaphysical philosophy must start somewhere and indeed not from a neutral, absolute vantage point but from a given way of seeing the world (whether that be reason, experience, revelation, tradition, or something else). This starting point is not arbitrary – see the entry on my dogmas – but it is also not provable from outside itself. It must be entered rather than deduced, as though joining in a dance. Thus, metaphysical thought appears circular because it is always unfolding its ways of sense-making from within its founding ideas and deepening its understanding of these ideas rather than proving itself from first principles as in a deductive system. This is very different from a vicious logical circle, where an argument collapses because it assumes what it should prove. Instead, metaphysical circularity is hermeneutic: we enter a logical circle not arbitrarily, but because there is no way not to.

     Since metaphysics must start somewhere, each thinker chooses (or inherits) a privileged starting point:

·        For Descartes, it was the self-evident certainty of cogito, ergo sum.

·        For Heidegger, it was Being as that which is forgotten.

·        For Aquinas, it was the analogy between finite being and divine Being.

·        For Goodman, it was the constructive activity of worldmaking.

Each of these enters the circle at a different place, but none of them escape circularity altogether, because all of them already presuppose a certain way of seeing the world.

    The connection to my earlier point about the limits of knowledge is this: since no human being can achieve an absolute, external view of reality, no metaphysical system can be fully grounded from first principles without already having assumed something about the nature of knowledge and Being. This is why metaphysics is always developing within a horizon, to use Gadamer’s metaphor, never from a blank slate. And this is why metaphysics always requires an act of commitment: a moment where one "steps into" a way of seeing the world. Thus, the limit of our perspective (which prevents us from comparing metaphysics to absolute reality) is the same thing that makes metaphysical reasoning necessarily circular.

     Though metaphysics cannot be grounded in absolute certainty, this is not a flaw: just a condition of human thought. (Philosophy leaves everything as it is, Wittgenstein wrote.) The best way to think about a metaphysical philosophy is not by asking whether it "escapes circularity," but whether it is fruitful, disclosive, and deepens our understanding of Being. Since we always enter a logical circle at some point, we should be more concerned with how a framework lets reality show itself rather than whether it meets an impossible standard of external verification – thus my answer to Goodman.

 

Step Three

   And we are not talking about a method of doing philosophy: e.g. Descartes's mathematical approach vs. Gadamer's hermeneutic approach. We are describing the condition for the possibility of philosophical thought, perhaps any kind of thinking that deserves the name. It is what happens, whether we like it or not. It is constitutive of human reality and human reason. What I am describing – following Gadamer – is not a mere choice between philosophical methods (e.g., Descartes' mathematical rationalism vs. Gadamer’s hermeneutics) but rather the condition for the possibility of philosophical thought itself. It is not optional; it is simply how thinking works, whether we recognize it or not. We always begin within a perspective. We never start from a neutral, absolute position but always within a historically, linguistically, and existentially situated perspective. Thinking is always already underway before we formally begin. We can never logically escape our own finitude. We cannot step outside Being to compare our concepts to “reality as such.” Every philosophy, whether it admits it or not, relies on an entry point – a way of framing reality that is not external to the perspective itself. There is, however, the sublime. The mystical, as Wittgenstein put it. Symbols of which can enter the world (the circle).

     It follows that thinking is inherently circular but not necessarily in a vicious way. Since we can never get behind our own thinking to a "pure," pre-theoretical reality, we must always enter thought somewhere. This is not a failure; it is simply the structure of reason itself. It is why hermeneutic understanding unfolds circularly, why phenomenology must begin with attunement to experience, and why no metaphysical system can ground itself in pure deduction. Even in science, one cannot start from nothing. One must already have a theoretical framework that allows questions to be formulated. The same applies to moral reasoning, aesthetic judgment, and religious thought – we do not derive these from nowhere but engage with them from within lived reality. Thus, this is not just a feature of philosophical systems; it is a feature of human rationality itself.

      I think these truths eliminate the illusion of pure neutrality; there is no "view from nowhere" (Thomas Nagel). It follows, moreover, that metaphysics is not a detached game but an existential engagement with Being; that reason is not a tool that stands outside of reality but something embedded in it. Indeed, reason is itself an unfolding of Being.

 

Conclusion

   So this is my answer to the criticism I formulated at the beginning of this entry. The critic assumes that subjectivity is an automatic disqualification for truth claims. But this argument shows that all thought begins from within a perspective. If they object, they must show how their own position escapes this condition (which they cannot do without contradiction).

     This argument shows why a neutral rationality is an illusion. The critic implies that their approach (whether scientific, materialist, or skeptical) is neutral, objective, and untainted by subjectivity. But no one escapes the structure of reason. We all enter a logical circle somewhere. If their perspective is also situated and shaped by pre-existing commitments, then their objection loses force.

     Furthermore, the hidden metaphysics behind the criticism should be apparent. The assumption that any philosophy influenced by deep human experience (love, remorse, awe, etc.) must be "wishful thinking" is itself a metaphysical stance. It assumes reality is indifferent to such experiences. But that assumption is just as much an entry point into the logical circle as mine is. In fact, it is an arbitrary restriction on reality rather than an insight into it. If all thinking begins somewhere, the question is not whether we have presuppositions but whether our way of thinking deepens insight into reality. A philosophy should not be judged by whether it "escapes subjectivity" (since no one does) but by whether it discloses more of reality than it obscures.

   The critic assumes their position is more rational because it is not based on "personal wishes." But this position is based on hidden premises that they do not question:

·        The idea that reality is indifferent to human experience.

·        The belief that scientific neutrality is the highest or only valid form of truth.

·        The assumption that rejecting deep human experiences as sources of knowledge is a mark of rationality rather than a limitation of perspective.

In this way, my answer here does not just defend the train of thought I have been developing; it turns the objection against the objector, exposing the arbitrary assumptions in their own position.

This answer may not refute the critic in a knock-down way, because someone committed to metaphysical naturalism will still reject (existentially, ultimately) my starting point. But it does undermine their claim to objectivity and makes them defend their own presuppositions. Ok, I am waiting for that defense.

     Finally I would say that my dogmas are not wishful thinking – that our loves must not be illusions, our response to the violations of those loves not illusion must not be based on "wishful thinking." I want to know the reasons the skeptic or the naturalist have for denying that love, moral horror, awe, and remorse are genuine disclosures of reality. At the heart of this response is a crucial distinction: wishful thinking would mean projecting meaning onto the world that isn’t really there, a kind of self-soothing illusion; recognition means seeing what is already there, being attuned to reality in a way that discloses what is true.

  

Implications

      The burden, then, is on the skeptic or naturalist to show why our most profound experiences are not real insights but rather mere projections. People do not construct these experiences like fantasies; they encounter them as something given, something that imposes itself upon them. Love, grief, awe, and moral horror appear in every society, and they function as the most serious, not the least serious, aspects of life. The man in remorse does not feel as if he is trapped in an illusion; he feels as if he has finally seen what he was blind to before. Why should we treat remorse as an arbitrary illusion when it is so deeply woven into human experience? The same for the other phenomena. It is not wishful thinking that the grief of a parent over a lost child is a recognition of something real and not a neurochemical illusion. It is not wishful thinking that love discloses something about the intrinsic worth of its object. It is not wishful thinking that moral horror is a response to the real evil of an act, not just a product of cultural conditioning. To deny this is not neutral. It is a deeply revisionist metaphysical stance that requires justification. And I claim that the skeptic or naturalist cannot provide such justification without circularly assuming their own prior commitment to a reality stripped of all meaning. What are the subjective sources being masked here?

      My response does not just defend my view against the charge of wishful thinking but turns the tables and shows that the real wishful thinking might be the skeptic’s belief that reality is a neutral, indifferent void, thus freeing to ego to be “autonomous” and to create the world in its own image. If the burden is to justify why love, grief, and moral horror should be treated as illusions, then the skeptic is in a much weaker position than they realize. And if reality is ultimately disclosed through love rather than reduced to blind mechanism, then we are seeing things as they are – not constructing fantasies.

I think I am trying to make sense of and defend the plainest common sense.

I try to take seriously what human experience discloses rather than artificially reducing reality to fit a pre-imposed model of neutrality.

I understand that truth may be more than we can fully grasp, but that doesn’t mean every disclosing of reality is false.

     But now I hear my critic saying: that is all too good to be true. Reality can’t really be that meaningful, can it?” I agree! I know the feeling. But that feeling itself assumes a hidden pessimistic metaphysics, an unspoken belief that reality must be less than we hope it to be. And why should we assume that? We have been conditioned to believe that truth is disappointing, that the more we know, the more illusions must fall away, leaving behind cold mechanism, blind forces, and an indifferent universe. But in light of my argument, I hope this feeling has been exposed as an arbitrary bias, a kind of wishful thinking in reverse, where people feel intellectually obligated to expect meaninglessness. I think my position is more metaphysically humble than the skeptic’s. I think humility is a very important intellectual virtue. Perhaps reality is, in the end, better than we expect, not in a naïve way – evil, a negation of reality, is a permanent part of human nature, it seems – but in a way that fits the deepest intuitions and experiences that make us human.