Chapter 3 - The Epistemological Necessity The Problem
Epistemology means the theory of the method or grounds of knowledge -the theory of knowledge, or how we know, or how we know we know. Epistemology is the central problem of our generation: indeed, the so-called 'generation gap' is really an epistemological gap, simply because the modem generation looks at knowledge in a way radically different from previous ones. I have dealt with the reasons for this at some length in two earlier books', so will in this work only touch upon what I covered in those books concerning Thomas Aquinas and the dilemma brought about by the development of his assumptions and system. But here we shall star, further back than Aquinas, in the time of the great Greek philosophers.
The Greek philosophers spent much time with this problem of knowledge, and the one who wrestled with it most, and with the greatest sensitivity, was Plato. He understood the basic problem, which is that in the area of knowledge, as in the area of morals, there must be more than particulars if there is to be meaning. In the area of knowledge you have particulars; by which we mean the individual 'things' which we see in the world. At any given moment, I am faced with thousands, indeed literally millions of particulars, just in what I see with a glance of my eyes. What are the universals which give these particulars meaning? This is the heart of the problem of epistemology and the problem of knowing.
A related problem is in our learning. For example, in considering apples, we could list the different varieties every time we spoke of apples, and name two or three hundred kinds of apples. But in practice we draw these all together under the word 'apple', and so have a greater comprehension of what we are looking at and what we are talking about. So we are all moving from particulars to universals.
It is much the same in terms of science. Science is looking at the particulars and trying to make laws which cover sufficient numbers of particulars for us to see the association and understand properly. 'Super' laws (for example, electro-magnetism and gravity) are laws which go further than that, and reduce all the particulars in the material universe to as few universals as possible. So whether we are talking about apples or about science, in learning we are constantly moving from particulars to universals.
This is not only a linguistic thing, it is the way we know. It is not just an abstract theory, or some kind of scholasticism, but the matter of actually knowing, and knowing that we know. The Greek philosophers, and especially Plato, were seeking for universals which would make the particulars meaningful.
Now we can understand this very easily in the area of morals. In my previous chapter I dealt with the area of morals, that we need universals (absolutes) if we were to determine what is right and what is wrong. Not having universals the modern concept is finally sociological: I can assess the statistics of public opinion of right and wrong, and a majority determines moral questions. Or, we can think of an elite emerging to tell us what is right and what is wrong. But both these approaches axe merely matters of averages. The Greeks understood that if we were really to know what was right and what was wrong, we had to have a universal which would cover all the particulars.
Now while we can see this more easily in the area of morals, in reality it is even more important in the area of knowledge. How can we find universals which are large enough to cover the particulars so that we can know we know? Plato, for example, put forward the concept of ideals which would provide the needed universal. For example let us think of chairs; that there is somewhere an ideal chair, and that this ideal chair would cover all the particulars of all the chairs that ever were. Thus a chair had meaning in reference to the ideal chair and not to the particular one. So when we use the word 'chair' there is a meaning that is beyond our mere gathering up of the particulars about chairs. This is Plato's solution: an 'ideal' somewhere that would cover all the possible particulars that anybody could ever possibly find about chairs. There would be no chairs outside this universal or beyond the concept which was covered by the 'ideal' chair. Anything outside of it was not a chair.
From the parallel in the area of morals, we can see the problem of knowledge, of knowing, of being sure. The Greeks thought of two ways to try to come to this. One was the sense of the polis. The word polis simply means 'city', but in Greek thinking the polls has meaning beyond merely the geographic city. It has to do with the structure of society. Some Greeks had an idea that the polis, the -society could supply the universal. But the Greeks were wise enough soon to see that this was unsatisfactory, because then you are right back to the 5 1 Per cent vote or the concept of a small elite. So you would end with Plato's philosopher kings, for example. But this, too, was limited.
Even if you only chose the philosopher kings in the polis, eventually they are not going to be able to give you a universal which would cover all the particulars.
So the next step was to move back to the gods, on the grounds that the gods can give us something more than the polis can give us. But the difficulty is that the Greek gods (and this includes Plato's gods) simply were inadequate. They were personal gods - in contrast to the Eastern gods, who include everything and are impersonal - but they were not big enough. Consequently, because they were not big enough, the problem remained unsolved for the Greeks.
Just as society did not solve it because it was not big enough, so also the gods did not settle it because they were not big enough. The gods fought among themselves and had differences over all kinds of petty things. All the classical gods put together were not really enough, which is why, as I've said in a previous chapter, in the concept of fate, in Greek literature, you never know for sure whether the Fates are controlled by the gods, or whether the Fates control the gods. Are the Fates simply the vehicle of the action of the gods or are the Fates the universal behind the gods and manipulate the gods? There is this constant confusion between the Fates and the gods as the final control. This expresses the Greeks' deep comprehension that their gods simply were not adequate: they were not big enough with regard to the Fates and they were not big enough with regard to knowledge. So though Plato and the Greeks understood the necessity of finding a universal, and saw that unless there was a universal nothing was going to turn out right, they never found a place from which the universal could come either for the polis or for the gods.
Thomas Aquinas picked up the dilemma of the Greek philosophers. Before his time, the Byzantine world had no real interest in particulars. They lived in the midst of them but they had an entirely different thought-form. They were not interested in nature, or in the particulars. We can thank Thomas Aquinas for the fact that because of his view nature was again brought into importance in man's thinking.
Gradually, as Thomas Aquinas's emphasis spread (as I pointed out in
Escape from
Reason), it began to be understood and disseminated in the area of
the arts. Cimabue (1240-1302), for example, began to paint in a different
way. Then Dante (1265 to 1321) began to write in a different way, in which
nature had its emphasis. But there was also arising a tension between nature
and grace. In nature you have men, and natural cause and effect affecting
the world; in grace you have the heavenly forces, and how these unseen
forces can affect the world. In nature you have the body, in grace you
would have the soul. But eventually we always come down to the problem
of particulars and universals. In nature you have the particulars, in grace
you have the universal. These men, Cimabue and Dante and others, like Giotto
(1267 to 1337) who followed them, began to emphasize nature. This is to
the good, let us notice; but there is the problem. There is that which
is good, because nature was being re-established in men's thinking and
re-emphasized; there is that which is bad, because they were making the
particulars autonomous and thus losing the universal that gave the particulars
meaning.
As 1 have emphasized in my previous books, there is a principle here: and that is, that if nature or the particulars are autonomous from God, then nature begins to eat up grace. Or you can put it in this way: all you are left with are particulars and universals ae lost, not only in the area of morals, which would be bad enough, but in the area of knowing. Here you can see the drift towards modern man and his cynicism. It was born back there. We are left with masses of particulars but no way to get them together. So we find that nature by this time is eating up grace in the area of morals, and, even more basically, in the area of epistemology as well.
This is where Leonardo da Vinci is so important. He was the first modern mathematician, and he really understood this dilemma. It is not that 1 am reading back into him our dilemma of modem cynicism. He really understood it. He understood, in the passage of all these hundreds of years between himself and modem man, where rationalistic man would end up if men failed to find a solution. This is what real genius is - understanding before your time; and Leonardo da Vinci did understand. He understood that if you began on the basis of rationalism - that is, man beginning only from himself, and not having any outside knowledge - you would have only mathematics and particulars and would end up with only mechanics. In other words, he was so far ahead of his time that he really understood that everything was going to end up only as a machine, and there were not going to be any universals or meaning at all.
The universals were going to be crossed out. So Leonardo really became very much like the modem man. He said we should try to paint the universals. This is really very close to the modern concept of the upper storey experience. And so he painted and painted, trying to paint the universals. He actually tried to paint the universal just as Plato had had the idea that if we were really to have a knowledge of chairs, there would have to be an ideal chair somewhere that would cover all kinds of chairs. Leonardo, who was a neo-Platonist, understood this and he said, 'Let man produce the universals.' But what kind of men? The mathematical man? No, not the mathematical man but the painter, the sensitive man. So Leonardo is a very crucial man, in the area of humanistic epistemology.
At this point in Escape from Reason I developed the difference between what I call 'modern science' and the 'modem modern science'.
In my earlier books I have referred to Whitehead and Oppenheimer, two scientists - neither a Christian - who insisted that modern science could not have been born except in the Christian milieu. Bear with me as I repeat this for I want in this book to carry it a step further, into the area of knowing. As Whitehead so beautifully points out, these men all believed that the universe was created by a reasonable God and, therefore, the universe could be found out by reason. This was their base. Modern science is the original science, in which you had men who believed in the uniformity of natural causes in a limited system, a system which could be re-ordered by God and by man made in the image of God. This is a cause and effect system in a limited time span. But from the time of Newton (not with Newton, but with the Newtonians who followed him), we have the concept of the 'machine' until we are left only with the machine, and you move into 'modern modem science', in which we have the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, including sociology and psychology. Man is included in the machine. This is the world in which we live in the world of science today. No longer believing that they can be sure the universe is reasonable because created by a reasonable God, the question is raised which Leonardo da Vinci already understood and which the Greeks understood before that
'How does the scientist know, on what basis can he know that what he knows he really knows?'
So rationalism put forth at this point the epistemological concept of positivism. Positivism is a theory of knowing, which assumes that we can know facts and objects with total objectivity. Modern 'scientism' is built on it.
It is a truly romantic concept, and while it held sway rationalistic man stood ten feet tall in his pride. It was 1 based on the notion that without any universals to begin with, nevertheless even though man is finite he could reach out and grasp with finite reason sufficient true knowledge to make universals out of the particulars.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is crucial at this point, because he changed the formulation from 'nature and grace' to 'nature and freedom', absolute freedom. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the men around him saw that in the area of 'nature', everything had become the machine. In other words, 'downstairs' everything was in the area of positivism, and everything was a machine. 'Upstairs' they added the other thing, that is, absolute freedom. In the sense of absolute freedom upstairs, not only is man not to be bound by revelation, but he is not to be bound by society, the polis, either. This concept of autonomous freedom is clearly seen in Gauguin, the painter. He was getting rid of all the restraints, not just the restraint of God, but also the restraint of the polis, which for Gauguin was epitomized by the highly developed culture of France. He left France and went to Tahiti to be rid of the culture, the polis. In doing this, he practised the concept of the noble savage which, of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had previously set forth. You get rid of the restraints, you get rid of the polis, you get rid of God or the gods; and then you are free. Unhappily, though not surprisingly, this did not turn out as he expected.
So what we have is not a destructive freedom only in morals (though it shows itself very quickly in morals, especially quickly perhaps in sexual anarchy), but in the area of knowledge as well. In metaphysics, in the area of Being, as well as morals we are supposed to have absolute freedom. But then the dilemma comes, how do you know and how do you know you know?
We may imagine the, Greeks and Leonardo da Vinci and all the neo-Platonists at the time of the High Renaissance coming in and asking Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers, 'Don't you see what you have done? Where are the universals? How are you going to know? How are you going to build enough universals out of particulars, even for society to run, let alone build true knowledge, knowledge that you really know, and are sure that you know?'
It is only a step, really, from men like Gauguin to the whole hippie culture, and as a matter of fact, to the whole modern culture. There is a parenthesis in time in one sense from Jean-Jacques Rousseau until the birth of the hippie culture and the whole modern culture which is founded on the view that there are no universals anywhere; that man is totally hedonistically free, the individual is totally, hedonistically free, not only morally but also in the area of knowledge. We can easily see the moral confusion that has resulted from this, but the epistemological confusion is worse. If there are no universals, how do we know reality from non-reality? At this point, we are right in the lap of modern man's problem as 1 will develop later.
Now let us go back to the period immediately after Jean-Jacques Rousseau. and to Immanuel Kant, and Hegel who changed the whole concept of epistemology. Before this, in epistemology, man always thought in terms of antithesis, the methodology of epistemology had always been antithesis. That is, you learn by saying 'a' is not 'non-a'. That is the first step of classical logic. In other words, in antithesis if this is true then its opposite is not true. You can make an antithesis. That is the classical methodology of epistemology of knowing. But Hegel argued that antithesis has never turned out well on a rationalistic basis, so he proposed to change the methodology of epistemology. Instead of dealing with antithesis, let us deal with synthesis. So he set up his famous triangle - everything is a thesis, it sets up an antithesis, and the answer is always synthesis. The whole world changed in the area of morals and political science, but it changed more profoundly, though less obviously, in the area of knowing and knowing itself. He changed the whole theory of how we know.
In my books I move quickly to Kierkegaard, who took this a step further. He set up, as 1 have indicated, the absolute dichotomy between reason and non-reason. Kierkegaard, and especially Kierkegaardisrn that followed him, teaches that, that which would give meaning is always separated from reason, reason only leads to knowledge downstairs, which is mathematical knowledge without any meaning, but upstairs you hope to find a non rational meaning for the particulars. This is Kierkegaard's contribution.
All of this flows from four men -Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard - and their thinking in the area of epistemology. From Hegel, this kind of thinking has replaced antithesis by synthesis, so turning the whole theory of knowledge upside down. Today, existentialism has three forms: the French, Jean-Paul Sartre; and the German, Heidegger; and Karl jaspers, who is also a German but lives in Switzerland. The distinctions between the forms of existentialism do not change the fact that it is the same system even though it has different expressions with these different men, namely, that rationality only leads to something horrible in the area of everything, including knowledge. Indeed, not including knowledge, but first of all knowledge, principally knowledge. To these men as rationalists the knowledge we can know with our reason is only a mathematical formula in which man is only a machine. Instead of reason they hope to find some sort of mystical experience 'upstairs' apart from reason to provide a universal.
Here we can feel again the whole drift of the hippie movement and the drug culture as well. Man hopes to find something in his head because he cannot know certainly that anything is 'out there'. This is where we are. I am convinced that the generation gap is basically in the area of epistemology. Before, man had a romantic hope that on the basis of rationalism he was going to be able to find a meaning to life, and put universals over the particulars. But on this side of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard, this hope no longer exists; the hope is given up. Young people today live in a generation that no longer believes in the hope of truth as truth. That is why I use the term in my books 'true truth' to emphasize real truth. This is not just a tautology. It is an admission that the word 'truth' now means something that before these four men would not have been considered 'truth' at all. When men talk about 'truth' today they are talking about something that before these four men would not have been accepted under the term 'truth'. So in desperation I have coined the expression true truth to make the point, but it is hard to make it sharp enough for people to understand how large the problem is.
After Kierkegaard, rationality is seen as leading to pessimism. We can have mathematical knowledge but man is only a machine, and any kind of optimism One could have concerning meaning would have to be in the area of the non-rational, the 'upstairs'. So rationality, including modern science, will lead only to pessimism. Man is only the machine, man is only the zero, and nothing has any real meaning. I am nothing, one particular among thousands of particulars. No particulars have meaning, and specifically man has no meaning, and specifically the particular of myself. 1 have no meaning; I die; man is dead. If the students wonder why they are treated like IBM cards, it is for no less reason than this.
So man makes his leap 'upstairs' into all sorts of mysticism's in the area of knowledge -and they are mysticism's, because they are totally separated from all rationality. This is a mysticism like no previous mysticism. Previous mysticism always assumed something was there. But modem man's mysticism are semantic mysticism's that deal only with words; they have nothing to do with anything being there, but are simply concerned with something in one's own head, or in language in one form or another. The modern taking of drugs began as one way to try to find meaning within one's head.
The present situation is one where we have in the area of the rational positivism for 'scientific fact', that which leads to mathematical formulae and man as a machine; and in the non-rational area we find all kinds of non rational mysticism's.
Now we must turn our attention again to the 'downstairs' positivism. This was the great hope of rationalistic man, but gradually positivism has died. I remember when I first lectured at Oxford and Cambridge, one had to change gears between the two great universities because in Oxford they were still teaching logical positivism, but in Cambridge it was all linguistic analysis. Today it is linguistic analysis almost everywhere in the world. Gradually, positivism has died. For a careful study as to why this has happened, I would recommend Michael Polanyi's book., Personal Knowledge, An Introduction to Post Critical Philosophy. Polanyi is a name that hardly ever appears in the popular press and often he is unknown, but he is one of the dominant thinkers in the intellectual world. His book shows why positivism is not a sufficient epistemology, and why the hope of modern science to have any certain knowledge is doomed to failure. And truly there is probably not a chair of philosophy of importance in the world today that teaches positivism. It is still held by the undergraduate and by the naive scientist, who is building with a happy smile on his face on a foundation that no longer exists. Now we must notice where we have come. The first of the modem scientists, Copernicus Galileo, up to Newton and Faraday, as Whitehead pointed out, had the courage to begin to formulate modem science because they believed the universe had been created by a reasonable God and, therefore, it was possible to find out that which was true about the universe by reason. But when we come to naturalistic science, that is all destroyed; positivism is put in its place, but now positivism itself is destroyed.
Polanyi argues that positivism is inadequate because it does not consider the knower of what is known. It acts as though the knower may be overlooked and yet can have full knowledge of certain things, as though the knower knew without actually being there. Or you can say, positivism does not take into account the knower's theories or presuppositions. You can assume that he approaches the thing without any presuppositions, without any grid through which he feeds his knowledge.
But there is the dilemma, as Polanyi shows, because this simply is not true. 'acre is no scientist in the positivistic position who does not feed knowledge through a grid - a theory or world-view through which he sees and finds. The concept of the totally innocent objective observer is utterly naive. And science cannot exist without an observer.
When I was younger, people would always say science is completely objective. Then ,some years ago in Oxford, it began to be insisted that that is not true; there is no such thing as science without the observer. The observer sets up the experiment and then the observer observes it and then the observer makes the conclusions. Polanyi says the observer is never neutral, he has a grid, he has presuppositions through which he feeds the thing which he finds.
I would go a step. further. I have always insisted that positivism has an even more basic problem. One must always judge a system in its own total structure; you cannot mix systems or you get a philosophical chop-suey rather than any real thought. Within positivism as a total structure there is no way of saying with certainty that anything exists. Within the system of positivism itself, by the very nature of the case, you simply begin nakedly with nothing there. You have no reason within the system to know that the data is data, or that what is reaching you is data. Within the system there is no universal to give you the right to be sure that what is reaching you from outside is -data. The system of positivism itself gives you no certainty that anything is there, or that there is really in the first move any difference between reality and fantasy.
There is a further problem. Not only does the positivist not know anything is there certainly, but even if it is there he can have no reason to think he knows anything truly or anywhere near truly. There is no reason within the system to be sure that there is a correlation between the observer, that is, the subject, and the thing, that is, the object.
To bring it further up to date, Karl Popper, who is another of the well known thinkers of our own day, has until recently argued that a thing is meaningless unless it is open to verification and falsification. But in a recent book he has taken a step backwards. He now says there is no possibility of verification. You cannot verify anything but only falsify. That is, you cannot say what a thing is, you can only say certain things about it that it is not. When Polanyi finished with destroying logical positivism so beautifully, he was left with total cynicism in the area of epistemology concerning knowing, and in his new book Karl Popper has really come to the same place.'
We are left then with this. Positivism died and has been replaced everywhere by linguistic analysis. All positivism left one with, was not knowledge but a set of statistical averages and approximations, with no certainty that anything was there finally and no certainty of continuity in the things that were there.
One can relate this to Alfred Korzybski's and D. David Bourland's General Semantics, which would not allow the verb 'to be' ever to be used. All their books are written without the use of the verb 'to be'. Why? Because they say there is no certainty of continuity. It seems tome also to be related - 1 would add, in parentheses - to the stream of consciousness psychology that ends up with nothing but a stream of consciousness because it is not sure that an 'I' is there.
I should like to turn to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who is in many ways the key to this whole matter. There is an early Wittgenstein and there is a later Wittgenstein, but in his Tractatus, which we are dealing with here, we are concerned with the early Wittgenstein. Later he moved into linguistic analysis, but in this early stage, he argued that down here in the world (in the area of reason) you have facts: you have the propositions of natural science. This is all that can be said, it is all that you can put into language. This is the limit of language and the limit of logic. 'Downstairs' we can speak, but all that can be spoken is the mathematical propositions of natural science. Language is limited to the 'Downstairs' of reason, and that ends up with mathematical formulations.
But, as Bertrand Russell emphasizes, Wittgenstein was a mystic. Even in his early days, there were already the elements of mysticism. In the 'upper storey' he put silence, because you could not talk about anything outside of the known world of natural science. But yet man desperately needed values, ethics, meanings to it all. Man needs these desperately, but there is only silence there. It was at this point that the title of this present book was born. It is Wittgenstein's word 'silence' that has given me this title. Wittgenstein says that there is only silence in the area of the things man desperately needs most - values, ethics and meanings. Man knows it needs to be there, he argues, but he cannot even talk or think about it. Values, ethics, meanings axe all upstairs. No matter how much we need them, there is only silence.
From this he plunged into linguistic analysis, which is now the dominant philosophy all over the world. It was born at this place in the desperation that followed when positivism was seen to be inadequate. The 'old' Wittgenstein and the existentialist really are very, very close at this particular point, though if you move from England to the Continent in the study of philosophy you find that people usually assume that they are completely at variance. Yet there is a way of looking at them in which they are very, very close at the moment when Wittgenstein says there are no real values or meaning in all these things, only silence.
For those of you who know Bergman's film Silence this will ring a very, very familiar bell. Bergman is a philosopher who came to the place where he decided that there would never be anything spoken from this upper level, that god (even as the existentialist would use that word) was meaningless. At that point he made the film Silence and Bergman himself changed from that point onwards. In other words, he agreed with what Wittgenstein, the brilliant philosopher, had said many years before. So really Bergman and Wittgenstein must be seen together, and the film Silence was a demonstration of this particular point.
What we are left with, let us notice, is an anti-philosophy, because everything that makes life worthwhile, or gives meaning to life, or binds it together beyond isolated particulars is in an 'upstairs' of total silence.
Thus we are left with two anti philosophies in the world today. One is existentialism, which is an anti-philosophy because it deals with the big questions but with no rationality. But if we follow the latter Wittgenstein's development, we move into linguistic analysis, and we find that this also is an anti-philosophy, because where it defines words in the area of reason, language leads to language and that is all. It is not only the certainty of values that is gone but the certainty of knowing.
Speaking of Wittgenstein and his moving into the area of language, as we have seen, it is as well to mention at this point the later Heidegger, who also dealt with language though in a very different way. Heidegger was originally an existentialist who believed that there was only the angst towards the universe that gave the hope that something was there. But later he moved on into the view that because there was language in the universe, we may hope that there is something there, a non-rational hope of an ultimate meaning to it all. So Heidegger says, 'Just listen to the poet' not the content of the poet, but listen just because there is a poet who is speaking. In other words, because there is a being, that is the poet, who speaks, we can hope that Being, that is existence, has meaning. He adds a different note in an attempt to make his position empirical and not just abstract. What he did was to claim that there was, in the far past, in the pre Socratic age before Aristotle, a great, golden language when there was a direct, 'first order experience' from the universe. This was purely hypothetical. It has no base historically, but he proposed it as an act of desperation in an attempt to lay an historical foundation on or under an otherwise purely hypothetical and nebulous concept.
We must understand that these things are not just theoretical in their effects. The later Heidegger is crucially important in theology in the new hermeneutics. These things have their effect in the student world as well. They are not abstract. They are changing our world.
Let us at this point note an important factor. Whether we are dealing with Heidegger saying 'listen to the poet' and offering an upper storey semantic mysticism which scum to give hope, or with Wittgenstein who moves in the opposite direction and is more honest in saying that there is only silence upstairs and therefore all we can do is define words which will never deal finally with meanings or values; whether we look at Heidegger or Wittgenstein, who move in opposite directions at the point of language, the interesting thing is that modern man has come to conclude that the secret of the whole thing lies somehow in language. This is the age of semantics at this very basic point.
Notice what this means to us. The whole question with Heidegger and Wittgenstein - and with Bergman - is whether there is anyone adequately there in the universe to speak. We are surrounded by a sea of anti-philosophy. Positivism, which was an optimistic rationalism and the base of naturalistic science, has died. It has been proved to be an insufficient epistemology. But the remaining alternatives existentialism, on the one hand, and on the other hand linguistic analysis - are anti philosophies which cause man to be hopeless concerning ethics, values, meaning and the certainty of knowledge. So in epistemology we are surrounded by a sea of anti-philosophy. Polanyi, for example, who was so magnificent in -destroying logical positivism, ends up with pure cynicism in the area of epistemology and knowing. So, as we have seen, does Karl Popper. They end up in cynicism about knowing. Modem man is stuck right here. Positivism is dead and what is left is cynicism as to knowing. That is where modern man is, whether the individual man knows it or not.
Those who have been raised in the last couple of decades stand right here in the area of epistemology. The really great problem is not, for example, just drugs or amorality. The problem is knowing. This is a generation of anti-philosophy people caught in an uncertainty of knowing. The problem of modern man is this. In the downstairs area which he ascribes to rationality, and concerning which he talks with meaningful language, he can only see himself as a machine, a totally determined machine, and so has no way to be sure of knowing even the natural world. But in the area of the upstairs, which he ascribes to non rationality, modern man is completely without categories, for categories are related to reason and antithesis. In the upstairs he has no reason to say that this is right as opposed to that being wrong - or non right, perhaps, to use the more modem idiom. In the area of morals, in the upstairs he has no way to say this is right as opposed to this being non right. But notice it is more profound and more horrible. Living upstairs he equally has no way to say that this is true as opposed to that which is non true. Don't you feel the desperation? This means that he has no control (and 1 use the word control with the French meaning, the possibility of checking something), he has no way of having such control in the upstairs.
Now we see this vividly in the cinema. 1 have dealt with this already at some length in Escape from Reason and elsewhere, but it is a necessary part of the picture here, too, and so I am going to again repeat myself. Antonioni's film Blow-Up is an example of this. The main character is the photographer. He is a perfect choice because what he is dealing with is not a set of human values but an impersonal photographic lens. The camera could be just as easily hooked up to an impersonal computer as to this photographer. The photographer runs around taking his snap-shots, a finite human being dealing only with particulars and totally unable to put any meaning into them, and the cold camera lens offers no judgement, no control in any of the matters that it sees. We recall the posters advertising Antonioni's film: 'Murder without guilt, love without meaning'. In other words, there are no categories in the area of morals, murder is without guilt; but equally there are no categories in the human realm, love is without meaning. So Antonioni pictures the death of categories.
In the area of morality, there is no universal above; we are left only
with particulars. The camera can take click, click, click, and we are left
with a series of particulars and no universals. That is all that rationalistic
man can do for himself, Antonioni says, and he is absolutely right. All
the way back to the Greeks, we have for two thousand years
the cleverest men who have ever lived trying to find a way to put meaning
and certainty of knowledge into the area of rationalistic man, but man
beginning with himself with no other knowledge outside of himself is a
total failure, and Antonioni points it out beautifully in his film.
But the modern cinema and other art forms go beyond the loss of human and moral categories. They point out quite properly that if you have no place for categories, you not only lose categories where moral and human values are concerned, but you also lose any categories which would distinguish between reality and fantasy.
This is seen in many modem films and novels, for example Juliet of the Spirits, Belle de Jour, In the Balance, Rendezvous, and - closest to our own moment as I write this, and very well done - the film of Bergman, The Hour of the Wolf. The drug culture enters into this, too. In the very heart of the thing is the loss of distinction between reality and fantasy by the taking of drugs. But even if modern man does not take drugs, modem man has no categories once he has moved out of the lower area Of reason. Downstairs he is already dead, he is only a machine, and none of these things have any meaning. But as soon as he moves upstairs into the area of the upper storey mystical, in that area all that is left is a place with no categories with which to distinguish the inner world from the outer world with any certainty or to distinguish what is in your head from that which is in the external world.
What we are left- with today is the fact that modem man has no categories to enable him to be sure at all of the difference between what is real and what is only in his head. Many who come to us at L'Abri have suffered this loss of distinction between reality and fantasy.
There are four groups of categories involved here. The first is the moral category, the second the human, the third concerns reality and fantasy. The fourth which we consider now concerns our knowing other people. The third group of categories is concerned with moving from inside the head to outside the head with certainty, and being sure that there is any difference between reality and fantasy. The fourth group is the reverse -how can two people meeting ever know each other - moving from outside their heads into each other's heads? How do we have any categories to enable us to move into the other person's thought world? This is the modern man's alienation, this is the blackness which so many modern people face, the feeling of being totally alienated. They can sleep together for ten or fifteen years, but how are they going to get inside each other's heads to know anything about the other person as a person, in contrast merely to a language machine? It is easy to know the facade of a language machine, but how can you get in behind the language and know the person in this kind of a setting? This is a very special modern form of lostness.
I had this brought strongly to my attention a number of years ago when we had a very modern couple come to L'Abri. We put them in one of the chalets. They kept everyone awake night after night because they would talk all the way through to the morning every night - talk, talk, talk. They were driving everyone crazy. Naturally, I became intrigued. 1 wondered what they were talking about. These people had been together for a long time, what did they talk about all the time? When I got to know them, I found out and it turned on a new dimension for me as it dawned on me what the dilemma really is. I found out that they talked because they were trying desperately to know each other. They were really in love, and they were talking and talking in order to try to find one sentence or one phrase which they could know exhaustively together so that they could begin to know each other and to move inside of each other's heads. They had no universals in their world and thus they had to find a universal they could make by a totally exhaustive point of contact. Being finite, they could not reach this.
So how do you begin? You are left only with particulars. Moving outward, you have no certainty that there is anything there outside. Moving inside, inward, you are trying to move into somebody else's head. How do you know you are touching them? Human beings, in this setting, are the only ones who are there. There is no one else there to speak, there is only silence. So if you do riot have the exhaustive phrase, how do you begin? You just cannot begin by knowing something partially, it must be exhaustive because there is no one else anywhere to provide any universals. The universal, the certainty, must be in your own conversation, in one exhaustive sentence or one exhaustive phrase to begin with. The problem is in the area of epistemology and it centres on language.
Modern man is left either downstairs as a machine with words that do not lead either to values or facts but only to words, or upstairs to a world without categories in regard to human values, moral values, or the difference between reality and fantasy. Cry for our generation. Man made in the image of God and meant to be in vertical communication with the One who is there and who is not silent, and then to have horizontal communication with his own kind has, because of his proud rationalism, making himself autonomous, come to this place.
I would end this chapter with a quotation from Satyricon of Fellini. Towards the end of the film, a man looks down at his friend who is dying a ridiculous death, an absolutely absurd death. With all his hopes, he has come to a completely absurd end. Modern man, made in the image of God and meant to be in communication with God and then with his kind, has come to this place of horrible silence. In the film Fellini has the voice say, 'Oh, God, how far he lies from his destination now.' There was never a truer word.
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Notes:
(1) Escape from Reason (Inter-Varsity Press, London) and The God Who is There (Hodder and Stoughton, London, and Inter-Varsity Press, in U.S.A.)
(2) In science the same problem is involved with much of the 'model' concept. One often finds that the objective reality is getting dim and all that remains is the model in the scientist's head.
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