BEYOND WHOSE HEAD?
“The World is my idea … To have brought this proposition to clear consciousness, and in it the problem of the ideal and the real, i.e. of the world in the head to the world outside the head … is the distinctive feature of modern philosophy.” Thus Arthur Schopenhauer, a real philosopher, in 1818. On the one hand, then, the world-as-perceived (the phenomenal world); on the other, the-world-in-itself (the noumenal world). Two distinct sets of events: the phenomenal within the head, and the noumenal beyond it. And we can no more understand the noumenal by naively applying to it the categories of the phenomenal than we could find our way around Paris with a London A to Z.
But, of course, we experience only the phenomenal set. Hence, the only way, if at all, we can acquire knowledge of the noumenal set is by using our intelligence (that same intelligence we have used to deduce that such a set exists) to infer its attributes from those of the phenomenal. Not, one might think, an impossible task, since, our heads having arisen as part of the world, the phenomenal world must presumably have derived from the noumenal. Not impossible, but, to go by the track record, not easy either. Take, for instance, the case of David Hume: not really a real philosopher, but not nearly so “uncommon weak-minded” as his mother gave out. David found that, try as he might, he couldn’t get off the starting line. Whereupon he declared the whole thing a complete waste of time, took up backgammon, and initiated that crisis of reason in which the world is still officially immersed.
Be that as it may, the scientists, those virtuosi of the phenomenal surface, met with no such difficulties. Stout old Galileo (nothing airy-fairy or niminy-piminy about him!), a man who went around with a tape in one hand, a ‘clock’ in the other. and scales between his teeth, let it be known that the phenomenal world possessed two sets of attributes: a primary set which it shared with the noumenal world, and a secondary set which it did not. And, by the happiest of coincidences, the primary set comprised just those attributes on which he could get to work with his instruments. For Newton, the crowning justification of this Galilean fiat, the world consisted, at bottom, of “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles” straight from God’s own hand, enduring unchanged through time, and moving obediently around in space; which time and space, he thought, would be much the same even if no particles existed. And all this despite Leibniz telling him (not in so many words, of course) that only an ontological neddy would believe such stuff. For Leibniz (another real philosopher) time was an order of succession of events, just as space was an order of coexistence of events.
For two centuries after Newton this picture of minuscule, made-to-last ball-bearings, whizzing and banging about in a space now filled with vibrating jelly (wish-fulfilment of a childhood fantasy, perhaps?) dominated the so-called scientific world-view. And one might have been pardoned for judging that systematic thought about the nature of the world could sink no lower. However, as things fell out, this seemingly impossible feat was soon to be accomplished with ease. Towards the end of the last century, experimental advances finally forced the mechanics to vacate the theoretical driver’s seat. But only in favour of their even less philosophically equipped colleagues – the mathematicians. Since when the world has been visited with a plague of truly creepy fantasies: space-time, relativity, photons, the indeterminacy principle, wave packets, the big bang, infinite wave fields, multidimensional superstrings, etc. etc. – the list is endless. Omniincompetence of this order would have gobsmacked even a case-hardened Cicero, for whom there was “nothing so absurd but that it may be found in the books of the philosophers”. As for attempting to sort out noumenal from phenomenal within this meaningless welter of formalisms and pseudo-notions – that would be to make a category-mistake indeed.
If this long fools’ progress has anything to teach us it is surely this: that if scientists want to come within light-years of depicting nature as it really is, they must somehow acquire sufficient sense (and humility) to take seriously the arguments of those who, unlike themselves, possess sufficient sense to take noumenal-phenomenal distinctions seriously – by whom, of course, I mean real philosophers. To end with another quote from the same representative of this rare and precious breed with whom I began: “Physics cannot stand on its own feet but requires a metaphysic [an ontology] to lean upon, whatever airs it may give itself towards this latter … the greatest advances in physics will make the need of metaphysics [ontology] ever more keenly felt”.