Chapter 15 Chapter XIV The Scope of Philosophical Knowledge

So far, almost everything we have said about philosophy has not touched the many problems that occupy most of the work of most philosophers.Most philosophers - there are many philosophers, at any rate - admit that the basic tenets of religion, the fundamental rationality of the universe, the illusion of matter, the unreality of all evil, can be proved by a priori metaphysical reasoning, etc.No doubt there are many men of philosophy who have devoted their lives to the hope of finding reasons to believe such arguments; and for them this hope has been a chief encouragement.However, I believe this hope is in vain.Knowledge of the universe as a whole does not seem to be attainable by metaphysics; the evidence given by mere laws of logic, that certain things must exist and certain others cannot, do not seem to stand up to critical scrutiny .In this chapter we shall briefly consider the manner in which this reasoning is taken, with the aim of discovering whether we may expect it to be valid.

Hegel (1770-1831) is a great modern representative of this view whom we wish to study.Hegel's philosophy is very difficult, and different interpretations have different opinions on the real interpretation of Hegel's philosophy.What I am going to adopt is that of the majority, if not the interpretation of most interpreters, which has the merit of providing an interesting and important type of philosophy.On this interpretation, his main argument is that whatever lacks "wholeness" is obviously fragmentary, and obviously cannot exist without the rest of the world to complement it.Just as a comparative anatomist can see from a single bone the whole of a living being, a metaphysician should, in Hegel's opinion, also be able to see from any fragment of reality what the whole of reality looks like—at least, he should You can see its general outline.On the surface, each of the separate fragments seems to have hooks to hook it with other fragments.The other piece of reality has a new hook, and so on, until the whole universe is re-established.According to Hegel, this essential incompleteness occurs equally in the world of thinking and in the world of things.In the world of thought, if we take any abstract or incomplete idea, we shall find, after some study, that if we forget its incompleteness, we shall be in contradiction; Contradiction turns the idea in question into its opposite or antithesis.To avoid this, we must find a new and more complete idea, which is a synthesis of our original idea and its opposite.This new idea is more complete than the one from which we started; yet it will be found that not only is it still not quite complete, but it becomes its own opposite, with which it must in consequence recombine. A new synthesis.Hegel proceeds in this way until he reaches the "Absolute Idea"; according to him, the Absolute Idea has no incompleteness, no opposite, and needs no further development.The Absolute Idea is therefore fitted to describe Absolute Reality; and all the lower Ideas describe Reality as it is seen in parts, and not as it appears to one looking at the whole at the same time.Thus, Hegel concludes, Absolute Reality forms a single harmonious system of its own, which is beyond space and time, contains no degree of evil, is wholly rational, wholly spiritual.In the world we know, any phenomenon contrary to this, he believes, can be proved logically: it is entirely due to our partial observation of the universe.If we look at the universe as a whole from the point of view that we assume God, then space, time, matter, and evil, and all effort and struggle, will disappear; what we see should be an eternal existence. The perfect and unchanging spiritual unity.

In this conception there is something undeniably sublime about him, and we are all ready to admit it.However, a careful study of the arguments in support of this notion reveals that they contain many delusions and many assumptions which do not warrant their validity.The basic tenet on which this system was built was that everything that is incomplete must not survive by itself, but must be supported by other things before it can exist.The reason maintained is that anything which is related to things other than itself must necessarily include in its own nature some relation to those things other than itself.Therefore, a thing cannot be what it is if there are no things outside of itself.A man's nature, for example, is constituted by his memory, by the rest of his knowledge, by the feelings of love and hate which he has, etc.; It would be impossible for him to be himself.He is basically obviously a fragmentary part, and as a real whole, he would be self-contradictory.

The crux of the whole point of view, however, is the notion of the "quality" of a thing, which seems to mean "all the truths about the thing."This, of course, refers to a truth which connects one thing to another, and if the other does not persist, the truth cannot persist either.But the truth of a thing is not a part of the thing itself, though it must be part of the "nature" of the thing, according to the above convention.If by the "nature" of a thing we mean the whole truth about it, then it is evident that we cannot know the nature of a thing unless we know the relation of all things in the universe to all other things. "nature".But if we use the word "nature" in this sense, we must have the opinion that without knowing the "nature" of a thing, at any rate, without fully knowing its When it is in nature, this thing can still be known to us.When the word "quality" is used in this sense, knowledge of things and knowledge of truths are confused.We can have knowledge of a thing by knowing it, even though we know very few propositions about it—theoretically, we need not know any propositions about it.Therefore, the so-called knowledge of a thing does not include knowledge (in the above sense) of the nature of the thing.Although knowing a thing involves any of the propositions we know about a thing, it does not involve knowledge of its "nature" (in the above sense).Therefore, (1) knowledge of a thing does not logically include knowledge of its various relations, and (2) knowledge of certain relations of a thing does not include knowledge of all its relations , nor knowledge of its properties (in the above sense).For example, I can know that I have a toothache without a dentist (who does not directly feel my toothache) telling me the cause of my toothache, and therefore without knowing its nature in the sense of "quality" mentioned above, and this knowledge is The knowledge of full and complete cognition; therefore the fact that a thing has relations does not prove that its relations are logically necessary.That is to say, from the mere fact that the thing is as it is, from the mere fact that it should have the various relations that it actually has.This seems understandable since we already know this.

We cannot therefore prove that the universe as a whole is self-contained as a single harmonious system, as Hegel believed.And if we cannot prove this, we cannot prove the unreality of space, time, matter, and evil, since this is deduced by Hegel from the nature of the fragments and the nature of the relations of these things.We are therefore left to examine the world piecemeal, and are unable to recognize the properties of parts of the universe which are quite different from our experience.This result, though disappointing to those who had hoped for the systems proposed by the philosophers, is nevertheless in harmony with the inductive and scientific temperament of our age, and is confirmed by the whole investigation of human knowledge, This has been stated in previous chapters.

One of the most ambitious attempts of the metaphysician is to prove that such and such an appearance in the actual world is self-contradictory and therefore cannot be real.The whole tendency of modern thought, however, is more and more to point out that these supposed contradictions are false, and to point out that there is little that can be proved a priori from our consideration of how things must be.Space and time provide a good example of this.Space and time, both seem infinite in extent, and infinitely divisible.If we follow a straight line in either direction, it is hard to believe that we will eventually reach a point beyond which there is nothing, not even empty space.In the same way, if we imagine traveling forward or backward in time, it is difficult to believe that we can reach a beginning or an end - beyond which there is nothing, not even empty time.So, the extent of space and time seems to be infinite.

Again, if we take two points on a line segment, however small the distance between them may be, there are obviously some other points between them; every distance can be divided into two halves, and both halves It can be divided into two halves again, so that it can be divided indefinitely.It is similar with respect to time.However short the elapsed time may be between two moments, it is evident that there are other moments between them.In this way, both space and time appear to be infinitely divisible.But the arguments that philosophers have advanced, contrary to these obvious facts—namely, the infinite extent and infinite divisibility of space and time—have sought to show that the collection of things cannot be infinite, Hence the number of points in space, or the number of instants in time, must be finite.Thus a contradiction arises between the apparent properties of space-time and the supposed impossibility of infinite accumulation.

Kant was the first to emphasize this contradiction, he deduced the impossibility of time and space, he said that both space and time are only subjective.Since him, many philosophers have believed that space and time are pure phenomena, not that they are really properties of the world.But because now the painstaking work of mathematicians, most notably Georges Cantor, has shown that the impossibility of infinite aggregation is false.They are not factual contradictions, but merely contradictions of certain more persistent psychological prejudices.Thus the reasons for considering space and time to be unreal have become null and void; one of the main sources of metaphysical thought structures has been dried up.

Mathematicians, however, were not content to point out that space might be as generally conceived; they also pointed out that many other forms of space are equally possible, so far as logic can dictate.Some of Euclid's theorems are indispensable to common sense, and were also considered indispensable by philosophers in the past; but we now know that they appear to be indispensable only because of our familiarity with actual space, and not because of our familiarity with actual space. Not from any a priori logical basis.Mathematicians have imagined worlds in which Euclid's axioms could not hold true, using logic to get rid of some common-sense biases and pointing out that there might be spaces that are more or less like the one we inhabit different.Some of these spaces differ so little from Euclidean space (the latter only concerns distances that we can measure) that it is not possible to discover by observation whether our actual space is strictly Euclidean or belongs to these spaces. One of the other class spaces.In this way, the situation is completely reversed.In the past, it seemed that experience left only one kind of space for logic, but logic indicated that this kind of space was impossible.Now, as far as possible from experience, logic proposes many kinds of spaces, and experience can only make partial decisions in them.Thus, while our knowledge of what is appears to be less than we once thought we would be, our knowledge of what could be is greatly increased.We find that we are now not shut up within narrow walls where nooks and crannies can be explored, but in a vast world of possibility, where much remains unknown , because there is so much to know.

What takes place in space and time has also taken place in other respects to a considerable extent.The attempt to regulate the universe by a priori principles has failed.Logic is no longer an obstacle to possibilities, as it was in the past, but a great emancipator of human imagination: it offers countless methods, which are beyond the comprehension of unreflected common sense; and it leaves the burden of choice to Experience, when a choice is possible, lets experience choose for us among the many worlds that logic proposes.Thus knowledge of all that exists is limited to what we can know from experience—and not to what we can actually experience; of things without direct experience.But, as far as all descriptive knowledge is concerned, we need certain relations between universals to enable us to infer from this or that data some object which our data represent.Thus, in the case of physical objects, for example, the principle that sense-data are representations of physical objects is itself a relation of universals; and only by means of this principle can experience give us knowledge of physical objects.The same applies to the laws of causality, or to less general principles such as the law of gravitation.

Principles like the law of gravitation are confirmed by experience and some completely a priori principle (such as the principle of induction), or show a great probability.Thus our intuitive knowledge (which is the source of all our other knowledge of truth) is of two kinds: one is purely empirical, which tells us about the existence and some of the properties of the particular things we know, and the other The first is pure a priori knowledge, which tells us about the relations between universals and enables us to draw inferences from particular facts provided by empirical knowledge.Our derived knowledge always depends on some kind of pure a priori knowledge, usually also on some kind of pure empirical knowledge. If all that we have said above is true, then there is basically no difference between philosophical and scientific knowledge; there is no source of knowledge which is only absorbed by philosophy and not science, and the results obtained by philosophy are not the same as those obtained by science. There are fundamental differences in the results obtained by science.The fundamental feature of philosophy is criticism, and it is this feature that makes it a different kind of learning from science.Philosophy has to study critically the principles used both in science and in everyday life, and to find in them inconsistencies; The results of critical research are accepted.Many philosophers have believed that if the principles on which science is based, freed from the entanglement of all irrelevant things, could give us knowledge of the universe as a whole, this knowledge would require us as much as scientific knowledge Faith; but our inquiries have not revealed any such knowledge, and the particular doctrines of the bold metaphysicians, therefore, can chiefly have negative results.But with regard to what is generally accepted as knowledge, our results are mainly positive; we find little reason for rejecting such knowledge, as a result of criticism, and we think there is little reason to think that man does not Incapable of possessing the kind of knowledge which he is ordinarily believed to possess. However, certain limits must be added when we say that philosophy is a critical knowledge.If we take the attitude of the complete skeptic, placing ourselves entirely outside of all knowledge, and from this standpoint demand that we must return to the sphere of knowledge; then we are demanding the impossible, and our doubt Doctrine will never be refuted.For all disputation proceeds from knowledge common to the disputants; no argument should proceed from empty doubts.Therefore, if any results are to be achieved, the critical knowledge employed by philosophy must not be of the destructive kind.There is no logical argument against this absolute skepticism.But it is not difficult to see that such skepticism is unreasonable.Descartes' "methodological skepticism," the beginning of modern philosophy, does not belong to this category; The thing is to have a little obvious knowledge, and after some thinking, he wonders for himself whether he feels that he really knows this thing.This is the critical method that constitutes philosophy.Some knowledge, such as that of the existence of our sense-data, however calmly and thoroughly we think about it, appears beyond doubt.The critique of philosophy is not that we should not believe in this knowledge.But some beliefs—for example, the belief that physical objects are precisely like our sense-data—are beliefs we hold until we start thinking about them;Beliefs like this, unless new arguments are discovered in support of them, philosophy advises us to discard.But there are beliefs which, however carefully studied, seem irrefutable.To dismiss this belief is unreasonable, and it is not what philosophy is about. In short, the critique we are aiming at is not a decision to reject every obvious knowledge without reason, but to weigh every obvious knowledge according to its value and, having weighed it, retain whatever appears to be knowledge. .Because human beings are fallible, the danger of error must be admitted.Philosophy may rightly think that it reduces the danger of error, and, in some cases, makes error so small that it is in fact insignificant.In a world where mistakes are bound to happen, it is impossible to do more than this.And no serious advocate of philosophy would say that they were going to accomplish more than that.