The Oracles

 In one of his early works, the French writer René Guénon attributes the following observation to Leibniz: "every [philosophical] system is true in what it affirms and false in what it denies." (Pallis trans.)

Which is fascinating—because it strikes me that the exact opposite is the case. Pace Leibniz (if he did in fact say this), every system is false in what it affirms, and true in what it denies. 

What I mean by this is that philosophy has proven to be an excellent tool for destruction. Every philosopher is correct so long as they are demolishing the positive assertions of others. But as soon as they start trying to build up constructive systems of their own, they immediately turn deceptive. 

Take Leibniz and the other idealists themselves. Every idealist is correct in so far as they are merely arguing that we have no actual warrant for our common sense belief that the material world exists outside of our minds. 

As Berkeley argued, every "experimental" or "sensory" proof we might offer for the existence of a "substance"—a "material substrate" undergirding our perceptions of the world—is equally consistent with the idealist hypothesis. 

If we think that we touch a stone, say, we could be feeling a "real" stone that exists outside our minds—or we could merely be receiving sensory impressions of it that were generated internally to our own minds. All we have direct access to either way are the ideas and perceptions of the stone that have passed through the apparatus of our own minds. (Kant, of course, argued the same thing.)

So far, so destructive—and so true. We really don't have any sound reason to believe we "know" of the existence of a world outside our heads—a "thing-in-itself" or "noumenon," to use Kant's terms. Our monads are indeed "windowless," in Leibniz's sense—nothing from the outside can get into us. Our perceptions and thoughts are all contained within our own consciousness. 

Where the idealists go astray is when they start to then move from this premise—which so far merely managed to destroy the common sense realist view of reality—to building up constructive systems of their own. For this, they have no more warrant than the objective realists do for believing in a "thing-in-itself." 

Berkeley, for instance, tells us that his system leads to a belief in God, and that we are all ideas in the mind of God. Leibniz reaches the same conclusion, by means of a more complicated but ultimately no more persuasive warming-over of the ontological argument (expect to hear about whether God's "essence" implies his "existence," etc.). 

But no one has ever managed to persuade me that anything in Berkeley or Leibniz is not every bit as compatible with solipsistic atheism as it is with theism. Everything could exist, following either's essential arguments, in my own mind alone; there is not really a warrant in either's philosophy for a belief in other minds, let alone a belief in the divine mind. 

I don't happen to believe solipsism is "true," by the way. Just as, in daily life, I actually do think that there is a "real" stone that my hand can hold, and that continues to exist whether my mind is forming ideas of it or not. But I can't give you any good reason why I think this. Nor could I hope to persuade someone who genuinely believed the opposite. 

My point, then, is not that all constructive beliefs are necessarily false—but simply that the tools of philosophy have never actually managed to get us closer to verifying any of them. 

Thus, every philosophical system I've encountered has been lucid and persuasive so long as it was using the tools of critical reason to tear down other people's ideas. But as soon as the authors were presenting ideas of their own, they became wobbly and vague and cheating. 

As I said of Whitehead, for instance, in a recent post: whenever he is criticizing other constructive systems, he shows that he can write clearly. He accurately points out all the unwarranted logical leaps and unacknowledged unverified assumptions they are making. But when it comes time to unveil his own, alternative system, he suddenly becomes nebulous and mystical. 

And perhaps he does so precisely because—there is nothing there. There is no rabbit in Whitehead's hat. 

In his intellectual biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein—another great destroyer—Ray Monk quotes an episode from Wittgenstein's early study of philosophy. At one point, in his student days, he finally got around to systematic reading in the philosophical classics. 

Wittgenstein was surprised in doing so, he told friends, to realize that all the great philosophers had been either liars or fools ("stupid and dishonest," as a letter from the time recounts Wittgenstein's observation). 

As the poet James Thomson once expressed the same insight: "all the oracles are dumb or cheat." And why is that? It is because—"they have no secret to express." For: "None can pierce the vast black veil uncertain," as Thomson put it. 

In other words: we have no answers to the great riddles that philosophy poses. And all those who protest otherwise are either trying to delude and cheat us—or they are deluding themselves.