We found one paper that was quite thoroughly-argued and excellent; but there was one thing strange about it. It kept promising that there were even more arguments on the way. "In the second part of this paper, which will be forthcoming," it would say, "we will supply more substantial historical evidence to prove this point."
I asked my friend what had happened to the fabled second part of the essay: the one that would really bring the point home. He confessed with shame: it did not exist. This is what was causing him so much post facto embarrassment. The actual arguments for his position —the ones he could find—had all found their way into the original paper.
Of course they did. If he had had bounteous other evidence at his disposal, he would have written it up. He did not have it, and was hoping that it would materialize before him in the impossible future when he finally wrote part II.
So it always goes with the writing projects we announce to the public. I thought of some of my own blog posts that had been labeled with a presumptuous "Part I," in the heading; only to have the promised sequel never appear. I thought of Norman Mailer's outrageously overlong CIA novel, Harlot's Ghost, which concludes with the pregnant phrase: "To Be Continued...." (Oh, hubris.) It never was.
I thought of Joe Gould, perhaps history's most famous non-writer, who made an entire lifestyle out of promising the forthcoming appearance of what was supposed to be the world's longest work of "oral history." The revelation at the end of Joseph Mitchell's articles about Gould is of course that he never actually wrote it.
Mitchell presented this to the New Yorker readership as a great unveiling. But one gets the impression, from Jill Lepore's 2016 recasting of the Joe Gould story, that the non-existence of Gould's fabled greatest work was an open secret among the Greenwich Village bohemians who knew him. E.E. Cummings even wrote a poem on the subject, the joke of which is that the oral history was never real:
but little joe gould's quote oral/ history unquote might(publisher's note)be entitled a wraith's/ progress [play on Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress"]
Perhaps it came as no surprise to fellow writers that Gould's oft-discussed and seldom-glimpsed work of oral history never actually materialized because this is a common authorial phenomenon. The more one describes one's plans to write something to someone else, the less incentive there is to act on them. The summary of the proposed work often ends up containing all the ideas it has to offer.
The précis not only promises the work, that is to say, but simultaneous completes and "exhausts it," to borrow a recently-quoted critical observation from Robbe-Grillet (Howards trans). This is the reason why so many an authorial promissory note—from Norman Mailer to George R.R. Martin to Joe Gould—ultimately goes forever unredeemed.
I am reminded of a Ted talk I heard on the radio years ago. The thrust of its advice was that you should never announce your intentions to other people if you actually want to get them done. This is because people often provide you the social reward you are seeking simply on the strength of the announcement, leaving you nothing else to aim for.
"Wow, the longest work of oral history in the world?" they must have told Joe Gould. "That's a great idea!"
Having gotten one's praise, one no longer feels any particular need to follow through. One never writes it, because the gratification has already been won. As he did with so many human failings and weaknesses, Hazlitt had noticed this tendency among his fellows long before modern psychology could formulate any advice against it.
In one of his essays, he complains about the type of person who "no sooner meditates some desultory project, than he takes credit to himself for the execution, and is delighted to wear his unearned laurels while the thing is barely talked of."
I know that every time I have ever described something I plan to write to another person, before putting the words on screen, the idea is lost to me forever. I sketch a proposal for a blog series or a story, offering a few scattered ideas. I tell myself that the connective tissue that will lead from one idea to another will somehow materialize when it counts. It never does.
The sketch, the project, it turns out, was the sum total of the idea. I have nothing else.
All of this came into my head the other day, because I finally got around to reading Descartes' Discourse on Method, which is (as will be explained below - I promise, I'll actually explain it, I'll get around to it eventually!) a sort of promissory note of just this form.
Why am I reading it now? Given that the Discourse is such a short, accessible, and yet foundational and classic work, there are few excuses for my having waited so long to finally get around to it. But all such things are better late than never, surely, and oftentimes one has not yet read a book simply because its time in one's life has not come. So there it is: I'm reading it now.
One discovers in Descartes' work, when one finally turns to the original, many of the famous elements that one expected to find there: the experiment of the heated room, the attempt at absolute skepticism, the cogito ergo sum, his version of the ontological argument, his case for why neither animals nor machines could possess human intelligence, and so on.
One also knows, however, that Descartes did not believe that his attempt at skepticism had left him without intellectual foundations. Quite to the contrary, we know that he believed he could rear on the basis of just a few "clear and definite" ideas—such as his "I think, therefore I am"—an entire scaffolding of metaphysics, physics, and the other sciences—the entire superstructure, that is to say, of human knowledge.
One is very curious to see how he does it. How does he conjure an entire world out of a mere few elements of thought? How does he succeed so extravagantly in violating the rules of "Hume's fork" (as summarized for me once upon a time in a book by Antony Flew)—which is, namely, the idea that there are "matters of the relations between ideas" on the one hand and "matters of fact and real experience" on the other, and that one cannot be used to prove the other?
And so one turns to the Discourse in the hope that it will show how Descartes managed to crack this enormous philosophical nut.
It is an expectation in vain. What one finds in the essay, instead, is an utterly charming intellectual biography, explaining how the author first decided to undertake his experiment in radical skepticism, and the precautions he adopted to save himself from moral ruin in the process. The experiment leads him to his famous self-evident proposition that his own existence is implied in the very act of his doubting; therefore it is the one thing he cannot doubt.
Equipped with this sole piece of certain truth, Descartes then argues that the notion of doubting also implies the opposing notion of truth. Now, since Descartes is himself a doubting soul of imperfect knowledge, the idea of truth cannot have come from him, but can only have come from without. This implies the notion of a perfect being, namely God.
But does it, now? Many people will already be suspicious of this whole procedure of manipulating entirely human concepts (like "perfection") to derive claims about the extra-human world (see the Hume's fork difficulty mentioned above). How exactly can the internal connotations of a word invented by human languages tell us something about what actually exists?
More importantly, though, we might ask why the argument about the inconceivability of "truth" from the perspective of the doubter is not just as much an argument against the idea of a perfect god as for it. If a finite intelligence could not have come up with "truth," surely they are just as incapable of thinking of the idea of God, in which case it is an idea unavailable to us.
This argument—essentially the basis of logical positivism—is not in the end wholly persuasive. I have argued before that there is any number of seemingly "inconceivable" ideas (therefore seemingly unavailable to our finite brains) that we nonetheless necessarily have recourse to on a routine basis (the infinite, our own non-existence, etc.).
If the logical positivist argument does not quite work (on its own) to defeat the idea of a perfect Deity, however, it certainly does not prove it, either.
All of this, by the way, is before we get to Descartes' more famous modern version of the ontological argument, which philosophers have already picked apart. This is where he observes that existence is implied in the concept of a perfect being, who must therefore exist, whereas it is not implied in the concept of, say, a triangle. (Why not though?)
Kant famously met this argument with the obscure rejoinder that "existence is not a predicate." That is to say, it is not an attribute that a subject has or does not have. We might add, however, that, even if it is such an attribute, it belongs just as much to the concept of triangle as the concept of God. Both have whatever existence is implied in our thinking it, and no more.
Okay, but let's pretend for a moment that we grant Descartes his idea of a perfect Deity. We are confronted at once with what a staggeringly large amount of work this concept still needs to do. We need to somehow get from the existence of God all the way to the existence of physics, math, the sciences, the rest of what we take for reality—and all without drawing upon anything but what is implied internally by the ideas already established.
What sort of argument could possibly accomplish this for us?
Here is where the Discourse gets downright strange. Because we are told that such an argument already exists, but that Descartes cannot show it to us. What follows is a bizarre series of dilatory excuses, seemingly designed at first to account for why Descartes is not yet willing to present these arguments to the public, but which then indicate that he basically is doing so already, and that this Discourse is the fruit.
But what, then, is the substance of the argument? Descartes resorts to summary, rather than explanation. He boldly declares that if God were to create some other world, it would nonetheless have to approximate this one, according to the internal logic of all things. Thus, we can derive the real existence of this world solely from the a priori ideas already established by Descartes' earlier arguments.
When we ask why this is so, he says that all is revealed in a mysterious treatise that (he claims) already exists in manuscript, but which he is not ready to unveil.
He offers a précis of the contents, however, assuring us that he gets—in the course of this unseen manuscript—all the way from the concept of God to the necessary existence of minerals, plants, and the human circulatory system. He doesn't tell us how; we just have to take his word for it.
He then offers us some of his reasons for withholding this manuscript, thus far, from the public. One of them is the fate of Galileo. While Descartes assures us that he would not question for an instant the wisdom or authority of the Church, he notes that he read Galileo, and when he did so, he didn't see the problem. He is thus somewhat in the position of one who has gone silent on Twitter in the face of a mysterious public "cancellation" whose basis they cannot quite understand, but whose authority they are too afraid to question.
Next, Descartes says that he does not need our approbation anyway, and his researches are merely for the satisfaction of his own mind and the infinitely greater benefit of future generations.
Finally, he says that he eventually changed his mind, and decided to share with us some of his discoveries, but only in order to silence the gossips who have started to give voice to the suspicion that has entered all of our minds by this point: namely, that there is no secret manuscript.
That is, Descartes writes, he decided to publish in order to show up those "who knew of my former intention of publishing certain writings and might imagine that the causes for which I abstained from doing so were more to my disadvantage than they were." (Olscamp trans. throughout)
Okay, great, we think. That means he's going to finally reveal to us the argument that gets us from the a priori concept of God to the real existence of all synthetic knowledge, right? After all, Descartes published the Discourse alongside three scientific treatises on specific topics (light, geometry, meteorology). Perhaps these treatises will display Descartes' a priori method in action?
Again, no. Instead, we are told that Descartes is going to derive his knowledge of these three sciences (in the treatises that follow) through wholly inductive means, familiar to us from the empirical method. That is to say, he will observe the real-world effects of these sciences, then work backward to prove from them the hypotheses with which he started.
Does that mean he has given up on the idea of building up all synthetic knowledge from purely a priori grounds of the sort he was able to find within himself? No, he tells us. Such arguments from the a priori still exist. He just can't tell us what they are, because we are not worthy.
"I have called them hypotheses only in order for you to know that I think I can deduce them from these first truths which I have explained above," he writes, "but that I expressly wished not to do so, because of certain minds who imagine that they can comprehend in a day what has taken another person twenty years to think out, as soon as he has told them only two or three words about it[.]"
Okay then, so the argument from God to the sciences has once again been teased, but not delivered. Is this because it really is so arcane that our feeble intelligences would be likely to misconstrue it? But this, surely, would be a violation of the principle with which Descartes began—namely, that of the equal share of common sense possessed by all people.
Is it because we ought to just take it on faith and authority? This, surely, is the exact opposite of the method for acquiring knowledge that Descartes' whole Discourse recommends to us.
We begin to suspect, at last, that Descartes' secret may not be so very different from Joe Gould's. Perhaps he cannot show us the great argument from God to physics because it does not exist. Perhaps he shows us everything else in his argument except for this, not because it has already been written up too brilliantly elsewhere, but because it is the one crucial piece of his whole systematic edifice that is missing.
Perhaps Descartes ultimately resorts to an empirical a posteriori method of reasoning, when he turns to the sciences, that is to say, not because his true a priori methods are too sophisticated to be revealed to us, and he would not wish to cast pearls before swine, but because he does not possess them.
Perhaps the Discourse—wise and charming though it is in so many places—ought to have been subtitled "a wraith's progress."
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