on “Philosophy is an art”
critique of a piece published in Aeon
A few weeks ago, Aeon published an article by the philosopher Peter West titled “Philosophy is an art: For Margaret Macdonald, philosophical theories are akin to stories, meant to enlarge certain aspects of human life.” Like so many of Aeon’s pieces, its promise falls short of what it delivers and takes aim at a mark that it never quite manages to hit. But there are few impulses more natural than the urge to correct a near miss so I would like to offer a short critique by commenting on a few excerpts from the article with the hope of sketching out what I think is a more correct way of conceptualizing what is at stake in questions over the nature of theory.
Refreshingly, the article rejects the Positivist doctrine that “what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know,” as Russell so eloquently expressed it.1 Indeed, West later quotes Russell’s articulation of the view that the second part of MacDonald’s thesis contests:
His imaginative picture of the world, regarded as a poetic effort, is in the main not capable of either proof or disproof. Shakespeare says life’s but a walking shadow, Shelley says it is like a dome of many-colored glass, Bergson says it is a shell which burst into parts that are again shells. If you like Bergson’s image better, it is just as legitimate.2
Taken together, this view amounts to the argument that, whereas scientific theories derive their legitimacy from their inherent beholdenness to empirical observation, non-scientific theories, since they cannot be wrong in that way, also cannot be right. For this reason, they must be conceived as mere matters of personal preference. Hence, there exists no defensible basis for preferring one philosophical theory over any other. Before I proceed with an analysis of some of the key arguments, I would like to observe that, transcendentally-speaking, the argument that Russell and his ilk are seeking to advance makes little sense. When they assert that standpoints on non-scientific questions are only matters of taste and de gustibus non est disputandem, which is, being interpreted, “in matters of taste, nothing can be disputed,” are, will-he-nill-he, sawing of the very branch on which they sit. After all, if the view that “science is the sole criterion for knowledge and taste is mere arbitrary preference” is, by the logic of its own argument, reduced to a matter of arbitrary preference, then there remains little conceivable reason to bother disputing it or to impute to it any veridicality other than as expressions of personal sentiment. So much for the Positivist position.
Neither West nor MacDonald bothers to oppose the sophists in this fundamental manner. Instead, they seem to maintain a lukewarm position towards them and even appear to have accepted some of their tacit premises. Nevertheless, as I mentioned at the outset, still intend to explore some of their arguments for the sake of light it might shed on the fundamental questions at stake.
West opens the article with the statement:
“Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations.” This provocative remark comes from the paper ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Perception’ (1953) by Margaret Macdonald.
and then elaborates on this distinction between the scientific and the philosophical connotation of the word “theory”:
What do philosophers mean when they talk about philosophical ‘theories’? And is it the same thing that scientists mean when they use the word ‘theory’? Macdonald’s answer is a categorical ‘No’.
Macdonald then argues, echoing Popper’s well-known sine qua non criterion of science,3 that the crux of the distinction between the philosopher’s use of the term and the scientist’s use of it lies in whether a theory is subject to empirical verification of falsification. As West explains it:
She [MacDonald] claims that, when scientists put forward theories, they do so to explain empirical facts. Scientists put forward hypotheses (eg, ‘Earth is round’ or ‘physical objects are governed by laws of gravity’), which can then be verified (or falsified) by experiments and observations, leaving behind only plausible theories, and eliminating those that are refuted by factual evidence. Thus, Macdonald writes: ‘Confirmation and refutation by fact is an essential part of the meaning of “theory” in its empirical sense.’
But, according to MacDonald, philosophical theories “cannot be tested”:
Every philosophical theory of perception is compatible with all perceptual facts…Philosophical theories, unlike scientific theories, are not in the business of discovering new facts
According to MacDonald, then, philosophical theories are not subject to the “Darwinian” selection process of “factual selection” by which scientific theories prevail against their competition. A scientific theory, in this view, is subject to an empirical or rational method that determines whether it is right or wrong. A philosophical theory, by contrast, cannot really be wrong because it is, in principle, consistent with all observations. Presumably, the evolution from the classical theory of gravity as “weight,” to the Newtonian theory of gravity as “a universal field of force,” to the relativistic theory of gravity as a local distortion in spacetime is an example of progressive falsification of two incorrect theories with the correct one—a position that I think is distinctly naïve—is an example of scientific theory. West illustrates the nature of philosophical theory with the example below:
Two opposing positions in the philosophy of perception are direct realism and indirect realism (I’m going to oversimplify both here). Direct realism is the view that we directly perceive external objects in the world around us. When I look out of my window, I directly see a tree – and the nature of my perceptual experience informs me (directly) about the nature of the tree. Indirect realism, on the other hand, is the view that I only ever indirectly perceive objects like trees. What I directly perceive are mental representations – ie, ideas of trees – that are produced in my mind when my sense organs (eg, my eyes) are stimulated in the right way and send signals to my brain. I learn about the world around via these ideas (also known as ‘sense data’) in my mind. Direct realism might seem more common-sensical, but indirect realism might seem better equipped to deal with the existence of illusory or hallucinatory experiences, where I am seemingly not perceiving the world the way it really is.
But West concedes that the situation is more complicated than the simple dichotomy would permit:
Given all this, isn’t it true to say that direct realists and indirect realists disagree on the facts? In a sense, yes. But Macdonald’s point is that there is no disagreement on the phenomenological facts: facts about what it is like to have a perceptual experience. Both the direct realist and the indirect realist agree that, when I look out my window, I see a tree. What they disagree on is what it means to say that ‘I see a tree’ – they disagree on the mechanics of what is going on, or how best to explain the fact that I see a tree. Most importantly, for Macdonald, there’s no empirical test available to draw a line between the two theories. We can’t run an experiment to test for the truth of either theory because, on the level of experience, both parties agree that it’s true to say: ‘I see a tree.’
But let us consider this point more carefully. Granted that a philosophical theory is beholden as it were, to “save the appearances” if it is to be of any worth, is this in any way different from the so-called theories that “scientists put forward…to explain empirical facts”? A theory that fails to account for an empirical fact is, in principle, a scientific theory in need of revision whether it presents itself as a scientific theory or a philosophical one. That the process of revisions for scientific theories plays out over centuries can be ascribed to many factors, not the least of which is the obstinacy of scientists—“science progresses funeral by funeral,” as Planck memorably phrased it4—and the fact that the discipline tends towards the study of occult phenomena imperceptible to natural human senses. “Let us here acknowledge, that the history of science is science itself,” Goethe, wrote wrote in 1810.5 In any case, it is one world to which all theory must be ultimately beholden for the same reason that sight is always of something and thinking is always about something. A theory is “a way of seeing.” Different ways of looking disclose different phenomena. Certain ways of looking disclose nothing of moment and others peer into the very mysteries of existence.
MacDonald goes on, after affirming the (to my mind, specious) distinction between scientific and philosophical theories, to argue that merely because the latter cannot be verified per se, they are not, by that token, of no value. She disputes the notion that taste is merely a question of subjective preference by arguing that, while an artistic or aesthetic judgement cannot be proven, nevertheless it can be justified. In other word, while experiments cannot demonstrate the superiority of one judgement to another, reasons can be furnished which justify one of them. In her view, then, philosophical theories are more akin to artistic judgements than scientific theories. But she argues that the affinity between philosophy and art is a nature one, which philosophy should, as it were, embrace rather than continually seek to cozy-up to a haughty discipline that continually spurns her. West continues:
So long as philosophers like Russell keep up the pretence that philosophy ought to be like science, they are judging it by a standard that it cannot hope to meet – precisely because philosophical ‘theories’ aren’t empirically testable.
But Macdonald’s attempts to push philosophy away from science and towards the arts isn’t just a defensive manoeuvre. It’s also, she thinks, a way of making the value of philosophy clearer. For Macdonald, philosophy’s value lies not in providing us with new facts about the world, but rather in helping to see the familiar in a new light, in drawing attention to features of experience that might ordinarily pass us by, and by providing us with stories that can help make better sense of the world around us.
As far as the goes, I think it’s right, and it touches on the essence of theory: theory as theoria. Art functions by fortifying and quickening our interface with reality, and, ultimately, philosophy should serve the same end. We are liable, because of sin, to fail to encounter life with our whole selves, but rather only with parts of ourselves, fragments. We often hold experience, as it were, at an arms length. But, like Kafka observed, arts and philosophy should serve as “an axe, for the frozen sea within us.” Or better, as Plato argued, these disciplines are practices of spiritual heliotropism with the end of putting ourselves in right relation to (the) Go(o)d-beyond-being that shines down in the eternal gift of sunlight thereby to thaw and melt that frozen sea altogether.
What of science? Can it really be defensible to counterpose science as an “empirically testable” discipline of “providing new facts about the world” against philosophy, which represents none of these things? Heidegger enigmatically observed that “[t]hose who idolise ‘facts’ fail to notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light.”6 Facts, as Goethe already observed, are always already saturated with the light of a correlative theory as a condition for them to be perceived in the first place:
Das Höchste wäre, zu begreifen, daß alles Faktische schon Theorie ist. Die Bläue des Himmels offenbart uns das Grundgesetz der Chromatik. Man suche nur nichts hinter den Phänomenen; sie selbst sind die Lehre.7
A translation by the letter reads roughly as follows:
The highest were to grasp that everything factual is already theory. The blue of the heavens reveals the fundamental laws of chromatics. A man should not seek behind the phenomena; they themselves are the teaching.
or, more paraphrastically:
The highest were to grasp that everything sensible is already intelligible. The blue of the heavens proclaims the principle of color-theory. A man should not look past the sensory phenomena, but allow himself to be instructed by them.
In other words, relevant facts cannot merely be “produced” irrespective of a theory—and, by extension, an ecology of theories, or paradigm—by which their relevance is recognized because, without a theory to serve as a standard to which to refer them, you would never know them if you encountered them.
But, more fundamentally, recall the statement from MacDonald that West quoted at the outset of the article:
Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations.
As Collingwood and others have argued, scientific inquiry is always already nested in a story as a condition for it to proceed. Scientific inquiry consists in striving to elaborate and articulate this overarching story, that is presupposed, with finer distinctions. Neither “Darwinian evolution” nor “Big Bang Cosmology,” for instance, two darling theories of modern science, can coherently be described except as stories. The term “natural history” is to be taken literally: scientists, according to Collingwood, must be conceived as historians whose subject matter is nature.
More recently, the unassuming and yet prophetic Orthodox icon-carver Jonathan Pageau has eloquently and cogently laid bare this hierarchical relation of science to an overarching narrative by emphasizing the fact that there exists a virtually infinite quantity of potential data to gather and potential phenomena to study. The only way to get a start, therefore—and to know how to proceed once started, and to evaluate progress at every juncture along the way—is to have assumed some narrative frame as a departure point. That scientists overlook this structure, and that accounts of science systematically “begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated,” as Kuhn argued,8 only illustrates a popular pretense in respect to the real nature of science.
If anything, it’s science, then, and not philosophy which is strayed into the outer darkness and advancing a bad-faith presentation of its actual method. Perhaps in the fulness of time, science will be redeemed and enter again into its father’s embrace, but that is no reason for philosophy to follow its wayward kin. And in any case, philosophy has its own course of wandering from which it must also return.
Russell, Religion and Science (1935), 243.
Russell, “The Philosophy of Bergson” (1912). https://www.jstor.org/stable/27900381
to wit, falsifiability, which he set forth in his 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Sceptics have, of course, posed the question as to whether Popper’s definition of science meets its own criterion.
Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
“…laß uns hier behaupten, daß die Geschichte der Wissenschaft die Wissenschaft selbst sei” (“Zur Farbenlehre,” 14).
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), 307.
Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, 125.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
In short, they [textbooks] have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them. Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense either of the working scientist or of the lay reader of textbook literature extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field.
Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated.
I love this Quote: “Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations.”
Thanks for this! Hopefully, if nothing else, the essay encourages people to read more Macdonald!