METAPHYSICIAN: Of course I would say that! I have many times been puzzled by questions and had no idea what the answer could even be like until I found it. Indeed, I have sometimes even had a wrong idea about what the answer could be like, and when I found the real answer, I realized that I could never have anticipated what it would be like in a million years.
POSITIVIST: If you find an answer, will you know it?
METAPHYSICIAN: Obviously. What a silly question!
POSITIVIST: But how will you recognize the answer when you have found it?
METAPHYSICIAN: I don’t know how I will recognize it; I will just recognize it, and that’s all there is to it!
POSITIVIST: Will you be capable of communicating your answer to others?
METAPHYSICIAN: I am no mystic. If I could not communicate my answer to others, I would not regard the answer as altogether satisfactory.
POSITIVIST: I still would like to know how you will recognize an answer when you find one.
METAPHYSICIAN: You sound like an inquisitor! Let me ask you honestly, Why are you so intent on convincing me that my question is meaningless?
POSITIVIST: Please don’t get so upset! My motives are not as harsh as you might suspect. I am not trying to show that you are stupid or to belittle you in any way. I am indeed trying to influence you to give up this question, but for your own good!
METAPHYSICIAN: Now what kind of nonsense is this!
POSITIVIST: It’s not such nonsense. I cannot help but be concerned at the great number of talented minds like yours who have fallen into purely linguistic traps and are wasting time torturing themselves on speculations that in principle can never lead anywhere. I think that if you would have the patience to listen to my admittedly formalistic and rather dull theory of meaning, then you would fully realize that your question is meaningless and would soon give up asking it.
METAPHYSICIAN: The former perhaps, but certainly not the latter. Perhaps your motives are as good as you say, but if you are going to take this approach, then even from a purely psychological viewpoint, I don’t think it is sound. All right, suppose that by superior logic you could drive me into a corner and compel me to admit—totally against my own intuition—that my question is meaningless. Do you think for one moment that this would in any way dispel my feeling for the meaning of the question? Do you really think that I would be any the less puzzled by why the earth stays up or would in any way cease to try to find out?
ANCIENT PSYCHOLOGIST: I definitely agree with the positivist that your question is pathological, but I disagree with his method of treatment. It is obvious to me that you are suffering from a purely concrete problem that you do not wish to face, so you have transferred all your compulsive anxieties to a purely abstract level on which you feel more safe. But you will never be able to get rid of the question by remaining on the level of philosophical abstractions. You can succeed only by solving the concrete problem that gave rise to it, in which case the philosophical question will disappear by itself. If only you had been brought up right, you would never ask such questions to begin with.
EASTERN MYSTIC: It is as I have been saying for years! If only the metaphysician would follow my exercises in breathing and meditation, then after a few months the question would disappear as if by magic.
PSYCHOLOGIST: I am afraid this approach is not very realistic! The metaphysician is obviously suffering from a concrete problem that was incurred in his early childhood. No amount of breathing or meditating is going to unearth this problem.
MYSTIC: I would say that his problem was incurred long, long before his childhood, but let that pass for the present. Even if his problem does have the genesis that the psychologist claims, it does not follow that the only or even best way to cure it is by remembering it. I have simply observed, in a purely hard-boiled empirical sense, that my exercises do relieve this type of problem without giving the kind of insight so valued by the psychologist. From my point of view, his true problem far transcends any events of his childhood. His real problem consists of his existential anxiety in not knowing who he really is and not knowing his true relationship to the cosmos. For this, no mere analysis of the events of his present life cycle will avail.
POSITIVIST: I think both your approaches are unnecessarily and highly indirect. It may indeed be true that the genesis of his problem is what the psychologist or what the mystic claims. But this is only the genesis. The problem itself is on a purely linguistic level and is perfectly capable of being treated on this level. After all, the metaphysician is an extremely intelligent human being and is capable of reason. He, like so many of us, has been enslaved by linguistic habits that lead to the asking of pseudoquestions. But this can be explained to him on a completely conscious and rational level.
PSYCHOLOGIST: I say you are wrong! No rational, linguistic analysis will help cure his malady. His problem is psychosexual, not linguistic. MYSTIC: I say you are both wrong; his real problem is existential. POSITIVIST: No, no; his real problem is linguistic!
Part II
At this point, the metaphysician quietly left the company, who were far too engrossed in diagnosing his condition even to notice his absence. After wandering about for awhile, the bitter irony of the whole situation really came upon him. The whole company unanimously considered that the solution to his problem was to cease asking the question rather than to successfully find an answer; they disagreed only on what technique could be used to help him cease his enquiry.
A few weeks after this episode, the metaphysician discovered the secret of time travel! He came to the twentieth century, where I met him a few months after his arrival. He had already mastered English perfectly. We struck up a close friendship almost immediately, and he spent his remaining few months of the twentieth century as a guest at our house in Tannersville. He adored my dogs, who barked joyously on his arrival. He loved romping with them in the mornings; the afternoons and evenings he spent mostly in our library. He mastered most of the extant philosophy in a phenomenally short period.
One day, as we were sitting in the library, I asked him how long it took him to find out the answer to his main question, “Why does the earth stay up?” He replied, “Almost immediately on arrival. Every schoolboy knows today that the word up has no absolute meaning.” I then asked him, “Do you today regard the positivist as right or wrong when he declared your question meaningless?” He smiled and replied, “In a way he was right, but for the wrong reasons! He totally misled me by saying that the word why was the cause of the trouble. It was obviously the word up that was the true cause (though nobody in my time could have suspected it). Since the word up has no absolute meaning, then of course the question, ‘Why does the earth stay up?’ has no absolute meaning. But yet I now know the answer! The most remarkable thing that I have learned from this whole experience is something that I never would have dreamed or suspected, namely, that it is not always necessary for a question to be meaningful to obtain an answer. I now obviously know why the earth doesn’t fall down; there simply is no such thing as down. But I could never have known the meaninglessness of this question without first having found the answer! So if I had listened to the positivist, I might have assented to the fact that the question is meaningless, but I never could have really believed it and never could have known why it is meaningless. Besides, had I listened to him, I never would have traveled to the future with the hopes of finding an answer.”
The one topic my friend was secretive about was his method of time travel. When I expressed utter amazement that this could have been discovered in 5000 B.C., he smiled and said, “Your twentieth-century science fiction is totally off the path concerning the correct method. It does not require technology, elaborate machinery, or sources of great energy. The true method of propelling oneself into the future is so ridiculously simple, so obvious, so under our very noses, that virtually no one can perceive it.” He then went on to say that he did not withhold the secret to be mysterious but felt certain that if the method we
re generally known, man would make a vast exodus to the future and too few people would remain to support the future, hence all would perish.
In his last few days with me, his philosophic interests centered mainly around the twentieth-century positivist and analytic schools. His bitterness knew no bounds. For example, upon seeing the title, “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” he exclaimed in horror, “Eliminate metaphysics! Who in his right mind would want to eliminate such a beautiful subject!” To a large extent, I share his feelings. But I still felt duty-bound (partly out of loyalty to friendships I have had with empiricist philosophers) to offer some defense. I pointed out to him that a vast amount of metaphysical trash has been generated in the past, some of it downright fraudulent, and that we shouldn’t be too hard on those of intellectual integrity who—though perhaps somewhat misguided—have made a sincere effort to combat this nonsensical activity. He replied, “I am fully aware of this, but they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Of course their program, if successful, would eliminate much phony metaphysics, but it would also eliminate some of the most beautiful, sincere, and sublime metaphysics produced by the human race.” He also felt that many of the positivists were in a way just downright stupid. He asked, “Can they for one moment have any doubt that any of the earlier competent metaphysicians would have totally agreed with them that their metaphysical questions were metaphysical and had no cognitive meaning whatsoever? But obviously, to a metaphysician cognitive meaning is but a tiny part of meaning in general, so why should the lack of cognitive meaning of their enquiries encourage them to give them up?”
He also made another point that struck me quite forcibly. He sensed, particularly of the early positivists, a certain heartlessness to their approach. As he eloquently expressed it, “They remind me of hardhearted parents whose child is crying and complaining of some sort of pain or disturbance but whose knowledge of language is yet too limited to express exactly what or where the trouble lies, and the parents then respond, ‘Unless you can formulate your trouble more precisely, don’t bother me with your complaints!’”
I tried to point out to the metaphysician that, particularly in more recent years, the analytic tradition had something to contribute that was of real value even to the metaphysicians themselves, namely, that some light might be thrown on certain philosophical disputations as to whether they are real or only verbal. To use an analogy, imagine two societies living side by side in which one of them, for some strange reason, had got the words circle and ellipse interchanged. Imagine now two children, one from each society, standing before a geometrical figure and bitterly arguing, “It is a circle”; “No, it is an ellipse”; “No, it is a circle”; “No, it is an ellipse”; and so forth. Clearly, their difference is not real but semantical. To go one step further, imagine two children of whom we do not know whether they belong to the same or to different societies looking at a figure that is very slightly elliptical; almost a perfect circle, but so faintly elliptical that about half the people would be sensitive enough to perceive it as an ellipse, and the other half would see it as a perfect circle. Now suppose the two children were having the same argument. We could not possibly tell (without further questions) whether they saw it differently or only disagreed verbally. (Similarly, if they agreed verbally, we could not know whether their agreement was real or merely verbal.) It is here that something in the spirit of analytic philosophy could be helpful. We could, for example, ask the one who claimed it circular, “Is it very circular or only slightly circular?” The metaphysician saw the point.
It was sad when the day of parting came. He could not go back to his own time: Backward time travel, he assured me, was totally impossible. But he longed to investigate further into the future. Much as I knew I would miss him, I did not press him to stay. We said our parting words, and warmly shook hands. He then sat in a chair opposite me, smiled, waved goodbye, and quite suddenly vanished.
Afterthoughts
Some General Comments
Several people have asked me where I stand in all these matters. For example, in my piece “Simplicus and the Tree,” do I identify myself with the realistic mystic? Well, I certainly find several aspects of this position of interest, but it is hardly my own. It seems to me that he is essentially an Aristotelian who identifies soul and pattern, which I assuredly do not do! To me, pattern is something purely abstract, whereas soul (or mind or psyche) is as concrete as anything can be. I believe that one of the most tragic philosophical errors of our time is the identification of the abstract with the concrete. For example, a well-known computer scientist recently said, “What’s the difference between the universe and the set of differential equations that describes it?” How anyone can identify something as concrete as a universe with anything as abstract as a set of equations is totally beyond my comprehension. No, I am surely not the realistic mystic. If anything, I would tend to identify with the first Zen master. I heartily agree that statements such as, “I am enjoying this tree,” are perfectly comprehensible without any analysis. In a strange sort of way, I also identify with Simplicus.
When I once read “An Epistemological Nightmare,” to one well-known logician, I was utterly amazed that he could not see why it was funny. He regarded the experimental epistemologist as perfectly sensible! Really now, to have more confidence in a machine’s report of the nature of one’s experience than in the experience itself. How crazy can one get? Besides, even from a purely logical point of view, one’s knowledge of the machine’s report is obtained only through other experiences (seeing where the needles of the dial point, etc.), and so why should those experiences be held more trustworthy than the experiences being tested? I was thinking of adding another scene to this chapter in which there was a second epistemologist present using a brain-reading machine on the first epistemologist at the same time the first one was using a machine on Frank. Then when the first one says to Frank, “Wrong, the book does not seem red to you,” the second one asks the first, “How do you know he is wrong?”
When the first answers, “The dials of my machine are reading 17-06-42-87,” the second asks, “How do you know the dials are reading those numbers?”
The first replies, “It seems that way to me.”
The second epistemologist then says, “It doesn’t seem that way to you!”
Do I make my point?
What Can One Expect from Philosophy?
Aside from my obvious dislike of moralists, the one bias I have clearly shown in this book is my negative attitude toward logical positivism, but even here I have some reservations. I recently read Brand Blanshard’s book Reason and Analysis in which he attacked positivism and much of positivist-oriented analytic philosophy.1 Needless to say, I was delighted with his views and with his skillful use of positivistic techniques against positivism itself. But for some amazing reason, the overall effect of reading it has been to make me more sympathetic to positivism than I was before. Let me explain.
I believe that much of the antagonism toward positivism has resulted, so to speak, from the tone of voice or style of its writings rather than their objective content. For example, the very title, “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” would immediately put anyone with metaphysical interests into an antagonistic frame of mind. It is a pity that Carnap did not choose some alternative title, such as “On the Necessary Limitations of Metaphysics.” Such a title would surely antagonize no one; indeed, it would attract even the metaphysicians themselves. I think the fact is that positivists, particularly the early ones, have been quite hostile to metaphysics (which is quite understandable in view of some of the loose and sloppy work done by metaphysicians) and that their hostility clearly showed through their writings and aroused counterhostility on the part of many readers. This counterhostility may well have prevented, or at least delayed, recognition of what I feel are the useful and positive aspects of positivism. This now brings me to my central point.
Suppose I have a world view that is internally perfectly consist
ent, that is, logically consistent, consistent with all the experiences I have ever had, and consistent with all my feelings and intuitions. For the moment, let us make the further assumption (totally unrealistic as it almost certainly is) that the view is consistent with any experience I ever will have in the future. Let us call such a view a perfect world view. Now suppose that you also have a perfect world view but that yours is logically incompatible with mine. It seems to me that the valuable contribution of the positivists (and, for that matter, the pragmatists) is the realization of the question, “How in principle could you or I ever show each other to be wrong?” In other words, can we really hope to get anything more from philosophy than consistency? But suppose that you and I are both Platonists and that we are not at all satisfied that our views are merely consistent; we both believe in a real world, and we each affirm our views to be true of this real world. These Platonic principles, let us assume, are themselves perfectly consistent with the rest of our perfect world views, and so we both adopt them. The positivists might tell us that we are both wrong in asserting that each other’s views are false since there exists no way of verifying them (from the outside). But you and I both add as further axioms to our systems, “The positivists are wrong,” and let us say our systems are still consistent. Now what can the poor positivist do? In principle, he cannot convince us that our rejection of positivism is wrong. I might also add that although it may be true that in principle we cannot convince each other, it may be consistent for us to claim that we can. So we add as further axioms to our systems, “There is some principle that (if only we could find it!) can show that the other one is wrong,” and we still have consistent systems. I think this is equivalent to our each denying that the other’s world view is perfect. It could well be that our world views are in fact perfect, yet it might be consistent for each of us to deny that the other’s world view is perfect. (Indeed, it might even be consistent to deny that one’s own world view is perfect!) Actually, if I believed your world view to be perfect (though false), I think I am now sufficiently influenced by the positivists to realize that my arguing with you could be of no avail. Thus, I think that our very process of arguing with each other indicates our lack of belief in the perfection of each other’s world views; we hope either to show the other view to be inconsistent or to produce some new experience in the other person that will change his mind or call forth to full consciousness some latent intuition. This, I think, is what metaphysicians of the past have been up to. As Carnap has rightly pointed out, metaphysicians are not content just to present their systems (unlike artists and poets, who only present their works of art), but they try to refute the metaphysical systems of others. I have just proposed what I believe this refutation to really be.
Five Thousand B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies Page 17
