Why Not Naturalism or Skepticism or Pragmatism?

Naturalism is one of many variations on what Husserl termed “skeptical relativism” about logical laws and about truth.[1] For polemical purposes it’s sometimes also termed “nihilism”, but I’m going to try minimizing polemics here. Skeptical relativism comes in many varieties: psychologism, historicism, lingualism, cultural relativism, biologism, anthropologism, pragmatism, instrumentalism, etc. What the variations have in common is that they imply that truth (in case truth is countenanced at all) of any proposition is dependent upon, contingent upon some set of facts (psychological, historical, linguistic, biological, anthropological, etc. respectively) other than the proposition’s being true. However, there is no way to know that this set of facts on which a proposition’s truth allegedly depends is invariable. This implies that so far as anyone can know

any true proposition can become untrue or even false

any false proposition can become true

even if no proposition has ever been both true and untrue this could cease at any time to be so; exceptions to the law of contradiction are possible.

But if I am to know anything at all then I must know that none of these theses can be true: I must know that in case something I believe to be true is true then it cannot also be other than true. Skeptical relativism renders knowing impossible. MORAL: if some theory you hold implies that there might be (so far as you can know) exceptions to the law or identity or to the law of contradiction then that is a theory that you would be better off without.

Lingualism implies that we know nothing about language (or anything else).

Psychologism implies that we know nothing about psychology (or anything else).

Cultural relativism implies that we know nothing of cultural variability (or anything else).

C.S. Lewis for example, does quite a good presentation of this anti naturalistic line of thought in Of Miracles, but his opposition to naturalism is supernaturalistic and monistic, mine (and Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, Ortega’s as I want to read them) is neither of these things.[2]

Now there is really one and only one fairly simple set of conditions that must be satisfied for some particular proposition or statement to be true. The set of necessary and sufficient conditions for its truth is that it be about something and that what it is about be as the proposition says it is. To the extent that a proposition satisfies this condition it is true, otherwise it is untrue. Your believing something about a given state of affairs generates a set of facts, and this set includes the fact that you believe such and such about that state of affairs: that the music you are hearing was composed by Prokofiev, for example. The state of affairs, the music itself, as you believe it to be, is (that is, was) a group of sounds; it is and was no more a thought in your mind than Hallett’s Peak, about which I have beliefs, is a thought in my mind. I myself haven’t any doubt that I am indeed thinking of Hallett’s Peak and what the weather is like up there and how it looks just now from Flattop Mountain and about the sound you heard and about which Prokofiev piece that was. My thinking about these things depends very much upon the neurophysiology of my brain, and upon my social background, and upon what language I am thinking in. The truth of these states of affairs as I believe them to be (the truth of the proposition) does not depend upon these conditions in whose absence I would not think these things about the states of affairs. How could anyone ever have come to think otherwise about such things, come to think such drivel?

Apparently because all the way through the 19th century the champions of truth (in my vocabulary “absolute truth” is redundant) all agreed with the skeptical relativists that propositions must be mental contents since they are ideal. So they had to posit a mind with constituents that are ideal atemporally or eternally or transcendentally and so not subject to vicissitude as all flesh and everything psychological are. Throughout the 19th and on into and through the 2Oth century it was quite rightly thought impossible any longer to defend this notion of a super-temporal and independent (substantial) mind, self, or what have you. But that meant that the death of god entailed the death of truth (or at least of nonrelative, “absolute” truth)—unless someone were willing to revise the concept of what a proposition is so as to purge the mental of propositions (but for those explicitly about some mind). Except for Husserl and Heidegger, as I read them anyway, and their close readers (such as Ortega), no one has had the stomach for this, including virtually all Husserlians and Heideggerians. No wonder then that Heidegger concluded the interview for the broadcast celebrating his eightieth birthday with a statement that he attributed to Heinrich von Kleist {Heidegger, 1970, 77}, , “Ich trete vor einem zurück, der noch nicht da ist, und beuge mich, ein Jahrtausend im voraus, vor seinem Geiste” (source not given)[3].

The principal alleged advantages of a naturalistic way of thinking are just as available to anti-naturalistic (transcendental) ways of thinking provided that the transcendentalist is willing to adjust her concepts of what all is given through experience. The principal advantage of naturalism and skepticism has ever been its facile acceptance of the ways in which consciousness, the mental is conditioned by circumstances. For research in the ever increasing variety of specializations dealing with behavior continually alleges new ways in which consciousness would be dependent. I am myself certainly willing to allow that these allegations are often correct, so were Husserl and Heidegger and Ortega, in my reading of them, and all phenomenologists should have seen themselves in a position to allow the possibility. Phenomenology stemming from Husserl has never been obliged to claim that there is some sacrosanct, purely rational aspect of the mental that functions spontaneously yet independently and so not “am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit” and "in Lebensfluten, im Tatensturm”[4] [Faust I 509, 501].


Phenomenology has no reason to deny that spontaneous consciousness is conditioned physiologically, biologically, socially, economically, culturally, historically, psychologically, or linguistically... None of these ways of being conditioned is a threat to there being truth — and knowable truth — about any state of affairs whatsoever so long as the state of affairs can be given, so long as consciousness is open to it. No set of prior conditions, however extensively and exhaustively the set be elaborated, will be more than a necessary condition for knowing a belief to be true. The condition that makes the set sufficient is that the state of affairs be so and be so given with clarity (be evident): the Principle of all Principles. So long as this potentiality can be fulfilled, dependence or “relativity” of beliefs is no obstacle to knowable truth.

Truth is historical. How truth can, and indeed must, claim nevertheless to be super-historical--not relative but absolute--is the great question...the resolving of this question within the realm of the possible is the theme of our time” [emphasis added {Ortega y Gasset, 1960, p.50}.]

But many anti-naturalistic positions have — so long as they sought to retain the absoluteness of truth — staunchly resisted each new alleged dependence of thinking upon circumstances. Because it arbitrarily restricted the range of the clearly given to that of the perceivable, this sort of transcendentalism had consistently to regard each new alleged dependence as a fresh threat to truth within the mental realm which was conceived to be self enclosed, windowless.

If universal states of affairs are transcendent entities having ways of being given then there is no threat to a priori truths or even to a priori knowledge when it is admitted that everything mental is dependent upon a variety of conditions. There must simply be that one general principle that, for the truth of an a priori proposition, the universal state of affairs being as it is declared to be is both a necessary and a sufficient condition. Its being so given is at least a necessary condition for its being known (principle of all principles). That’s the proper intuitionist credo in epistemology.

Works Cited

Heidegger, Martin, Martin Heidegger im Gespräch, ed & introd by Richard Wisser (Freiburg im Breisgau; Munich, 1970), pp.á67–77.

Husserl, Edmund, Logical Investigations, trans. John N. Findlay, International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method (London; New York, 1970).

Kleist, Heinrich von, Heinrich von Kleist. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Helmut Sembdner (Munich, 1952).

Murdoch, Iris, `Art is the Imitation of Nature', in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, preface by Peter J Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York; London, 1998), pp.á243–57.

Ortega y Gasset, José, What is Philosophy? (New York, 1960).

NOTES

[1] “Prolegomena to Pure Logic” §§34-61 {Husserl, 1970, 138–221}.

[2].The older ("Modern"?) varieties of naturalism and relativism (psychologism, biologism, pragmatism, cultural relativism) held that propositions are ideal objects and that these are thoughts and so are either psychological or "transcendental" mental constituents (mental contents). The newer and Ultramodern varieties hold that so-called thoughts are linguistic or otherwise semiotic facts. (They are held to be "information"; literary monism {Murdoch, 1998, 250} is information theory or cybernetics for humanists.) So-called thoughts are sets of signs, and the signifiers they involve signify only other signifers. All "thoughts" are thoroughly conditioned semiotically. The psychological, social, historical, cultural, and linguistic facts that "thoughts" depend upon are various domains of sign-complexes. Were there such a thing as truth, it would be a trait of complex signs. Therefore, truth of any proposition would be thoroughly conditioned in all these ways and subject to variation.

[3] "Before someone who is not yet there, I step back and bow a milenium in advance before that person's spirit." The passage occurs in Kleist’s letter to his sister, Ulrike von Kleist, of 26 October 1803 from St. Omer; he wrote,

…Das Schicksal, das den Völkern jeden Zuschuβ zu ihrer Bildung zumiβt, will, denke ich, die Kunst in diesem nördlichen Himmelsstrich noch nicht reifen lassen. Töricht wäre es wenigstens, wenn ich meine Kräfte länger an ein Werk setzen wollte, das, wie ich mich endlich überzeugen muβ für mich zu schwer ist. Ich trete vor einem zurück, der noch nicht da ist, und beuge mich, ein Jahrtausend im voraus, vor seinem Geiste. Denn in der Reihe der menschlichen Erfindungen ist diejenige, die ich gedacht habe, unfehlbar ein Glied, und es wächst irgendwo ein Stein schon für den, der sie einst ausspricht… {Kleist, 1952, volume 2, 735–736}

[4] "at Time's rushing loom, in life's torrents" and "in the tempest of deeds"