Do You See What I See? Language, Ideas and Things
By Daryl Culp
Philosophy literally means the “love of wisdom.” Throughout history, men and women
have searched for truth, argued with each other about what is good, and examined their
lives for meaning. The history of philosophy is a record of arguments about the questions
that re-occur in every age. Why do we disagree? Don’t we all see the same world? But
our eyes are not cameras. We do not just receive input from the world; we interpret the
scene that is presented to our eyes.
Philosophy teaches us to think clearly about our life. All aspects of life are open
to critical thought: our society, our relations with other people, and the nature of the
world. How do we know what is real? Reflecting upon the way we think can help us
understand ourselves and each other better. Arguing with each other helps us clarify our
own views and understand the different sorts of reasons that count in philosophical
arguments. We compare our interpretations in order to get closer to reality (knowing that
any of us might be misinterpreting what we see).
Plato: the cave
“There is a perfection which all knowledge ought to reach, and which our pupils ought
also to attain” http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.8.vii.html
In ancient Greece, there were many philosophers. Everybody wanted to have an answer
to the big questions. Socrates was apparently a rather ugly man who wandered through
the marketplace asking people what they thought about issues like justice, love and truth.
He never wrote anything down, but his student Plato captured his thoughts in a collection
of writings called the Dialogues. In one of the most famous dialogues, The Republic,
Plato records Socrates asking about how we know things. Socrates gives a famous image
of a cave. Imagine that you are trapped
in a cave, strapped to a chair and forced
to look straight ahead. There is a fire
behind you and people use objects to
cast shadows on the wall of the cave.
This is all you have ever known and this
is what you think reality is. It’s like
being trapped in a movie theatre!
Socrates says that our life is like
this. We are born into this world and
forced to view images through our eyes.
That is our reality and that is all we have
ever known. It’s like the movie The Matrix. The main
http://languagelearningresource
character, Neo, thinks that he is living a normal life:
center.org/anglais/read_films/m
going to work, walking the streets of the city, living
atrix/themes/resources/platos_c
in his apartment. But all of these images are fed into
ave.htm
his brain through wires connected to a huge
computer. The point is: How do you know what is real if you have nothing to compare it
with? For those of us trapped in front of our TV screens, Socrates would say,
“Experience reality instead of these flickering images!”
Socrates then asked: What if you could break free from your chains and escape
from the cave? You would walk out into the real world and feel the sun on your skin and
see reality for the first time. In The Matrix, Neo escapes from his slavery to the computer
with the help of freedom fighters who rebel against their alien masters. How can we
break free from our slavery to our sensory perceptions?
With our mind, answers Socrates. By taking in our sense perceptions and
analyzing what is constant and pure beyond all of the rapidly changing images that we
see. We need to see the essential qualities of things, he says. For example, if you hold up
three fingers, they all look slightly different but they are all called by the same name:
“finger.” We have an idea of what a finger is even though every finger is a little bit
different. This is the activity of generalization. We have many observations through our
senses but we extract what is common to all of those different images and give it a name.
Socrates calls this process “dialectic” but I prefer to use a more modern word:
abstraction. What we see in front of us throughout our daily lives is the material world.
Our ideas (summarized in language) are abstract concepts that are short forms for the
common elements of all of the things that we identify having a particular set of
characteristics. If you look up a definition in a dictionary, you will see that every word is
defined by a description of the essential qualities of a thing. For example, a finger is
defined as “one of the four long thin parts that stick out from the hand”
(http://www.oxfordadvancedlearnersdictionary.com/dictionary/finger). That is what
every finger is, although each one looks a little bit different. Socrates suggests that the
idea of a finger is actually more real than the finger, since the idea is more perfect than all
of the examples of fingers that we see. These ideas are actually implanted within us
before we are born and all learning is discovering what we already knew but was hidden
to us.
This is intriguingly like what some scientists say today. Paul Dirac, one of the
foundational thinkers of quantum physics, said “it is more important to have beauty in
one's equations than to have them fit experiment” (Scientific American May 1963). He
thought that advances in mathematics could result in understanding the world better.
Equations were the answer, and our observations would just have to match up with the
mathematical ideas that make the most sense.
Aristotle: “All men by nature desire to know.”
My four-year-old nephew is constantly asking “why?” He has to have an explanation for
everything. Aristotle, a student of Plato, said that “all men desire to know”
(Metaphysics). We need to understand why things happen the way they do. It’s difficult
to figure out sometimes. Human beings have constantly revised their theories about how
things work. What is the best way to figure it out?
Aristotle defined a human being as the one who thinks (the “thinking animal”).
He was aware of how much we share with the animals (because of his
investigations of the body) but also what makes us different. We can
reflect on our own experience, imagine possibilities and make inferences.
However Aristotle disagreed with Plato about how we know what we
know. Aristotle thought that our observations really give us knowledge
about the way that things really are. Our language is just a pointer to the
things that are all around us, not a pointer to some invisible world of
ideas. Aristotle thought that ideas were simply classification devices. We use them to
summarize the main features of the things that we see.
Sensory observation, then, was for Aristotle the best way to obtain knowledge. He
made many observations: of the stars, the way
lungs pump air through the body, and the
In Raphael’s painting, “The School of
different classifications of animals. He laid the
Athens,” Plato points to the heavens (the
groundwork for science: examination and
realm of ideas) and Aristotle points to the
explanation of the things we see.
grounds (the material things).
Locke
In sixteenth-century England, a new emphasis on sensory observations began to change
the way that knowledge is obtained. John Locke argued that our mind is a “blank slate”
and that our minds process the images that we perceive. But our minds can also imagine
things that are not real by combining different sense impressions. He gives the example
of the concepts of “gold” and “mountain” being combined into a “golden mountain”
which does not exist anywhere on this earth. Therefore, he concludes, we must check
every idea we have in our minds to see if there is something that corresponds with that
idea in the real world. This theory is called empiricism and it is the bedrock of modern
science.
How do we translate what we see into something that we know? After all, there
are tags identifying every object for us to read. Our minds give objects names (and
language records this over the generations, so that teaching a child to speak is often
teaching the names of things). Different languages divide the world up into different
pieces and name them in the local dialect. A society or culture therefore is in some sense
an organization that has solidified language into a system that adequately points out the
things in the environment.
Hume
"The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation." David Hume, An
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. "Of the
Origin of Ideas" http://www.bartleby.com/37/3/2.html
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher who took empiricism to radical conclusions. He
noticed that every experience has its own immediacy. He said “The dullest experience is
more vivid than the richest imagination” (David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. "Of the Origin of Ideas"
http://www.bartleby.com/37/3/2.html). You can see this is true for yourself. Imagine the
feeling of water running over your hand. Now go and do it for real. Our experiences are
so real to us because our senses are the primary mode of getting information from the
world. But this means that everybody experiences the world in their own way. It’s no
good appealing to somebody else’s experience for the truth. If you don’t experience
something for yourself, it may not seem real to you.
Even more surprising, our experiences are fragmentary and fleeting. Hume
realized that we experience something different every moment of our existence. We
notice recurring patterns, of course, but there is no reason to believe that what happened
in the past is a reliable guide to what is going on now or in the future. Hume was a
skeptic to the nth degree. He even thought that we do not experience our ‘self’ as a
distinct entity. All we experience are the sense-impressions that we receive from the
world and our minds integrating those experiences into a unity.
Even logical concepts like ‘causality’ are attempts by the mind to impose a unity
on our experience. Hume argued that we cannot show a necessary link between cause and
effect. We only observe these links habitually. From the common patterns in our sense
experience we suppose that there is a logic to reality that connects each cause to a
specific effect. But we can never observe the totality of experience and so can never be
sure of that relation (he draws the problem of induction to its logical extreme of
skepticism).
Kant
The world conforms to our categories
Immanuel Kant famously said that Hume woke him up from the deepest slumber. Kant
was a metaphysical thinker who at first tried to deduce the nature of reality by simply
thinking about it logically. But Hume’s skepticism made Kant realize the importance of
not only the experiences that we have but also the ways that we organize them into
meaningful ideas. He proposed a universal set of rules of thinking that he called the
categories. We interpret the world according to these guidelines. For example, the
category of “cause and effect” is used to predict what is going to happen by noticing a
repeated pattern of a particular cause producing the same effect over and over again. If
you strike a match, you will see a flame.
Ironically Kant came to a conclusion somewhat similar to Hume. Kant argued that
the world conforms to our categories. Our thoughts organize the world, not the other way
around. It sounds paradoxical because we think that reality is “out there.” But Kant
argued that every person has their own reality in a sense because the categories that we
use impose a meaning on the ambiguous information given off by the world. It would be
possible to structure our experience according to different thought-systems, although
Kant thought that the one that he proposed was the one that made the most sense.
This idea leads to the suggestion that different cultures actually have different
experiences of the world because they structure their interpretation according to the
thought patterns and language that they have developed. Does this mean that truth is
relative?
A contemporary twist on this perspective was provided by Benjamin Whorf, who
was an anthropologist studying aboriginal languages. He argued that the Hopi Indian
language provided a completely different framework through which to see the world. He
observed that time was perceived differently because this language did not have the pastpresent-future tense structure of English. Instead, events were described as continuous
and enduring. [citation?]
Imagination and virtual reality
Our mind is running a virtual reality program all the time. We receive information
through our senses but it is recreated in our mind through the faculty of the imagination.
Our sensations of the world are interpreted through our intellectual framework of ideas
and we reflect on that set of ideas as we postulate alternative understandings of the world
in which we live. It's as if our mind has created a virtual version of reality that we explore
through our imaginative powers. Of course, the virtual reality is a pale imitation of the
true nature of things, just as computer simulations are mere echoes of the real world.
However, virtual realities can present new and creative modifications of the world of
ideas and present these to us as sensations. Our mind can play the same tricks on us.
So how do we distinguish between the matrix in our mind and the real world? In
some ways, we can't. We always live inside the always interpreted sensations that our
mind plays with at will. Of course, we check our version of the world with sense
observations (which are of course also already interpreted, but hopefully with an eye to
correcting false versions).
Perhaps our mind also allows us to experience the images produced by our
imagination in a real way. Mirror neurons might be involved in getting us to feel as if the
images presented to us by our minds are real. It may be possible that the motor neurons,
for example, might fire if presented with an image of doing something (just as they fire
when presented with an image of somebody else doing something). This might explain
why movies are so real to us. They fire neurons in our brains as if we were experiencing
the action in the film.
Where is your imagination?
The imagination lies in the nether world between our experiences (because both real and
imagined experiences are, after all, experienced by nobody but ourselves). What happens
when the brain processes images? Does the same part that interprets sensations from our
eyes also replay the internal creations of our mind? If so, how would we ever tell the
difference between them? This is Descartes’s problem: How do we know that we are
dreaming because it feels so real? The images played upon our mind’s eye are
experienced as if they are really happening. The mind, of course, plays all kinds of tricks
with the imagined reality that plays over our inward eye. The disjointed character of
dreams, the lack of an internal time frame and the lack of the intrusive stubbornness of
reality help us to realize when we are dreaming. But if images are running through our
minds we can only reflect upon and check them later. In the semi-conscious dream state
we may not have access to these higher-level cognitive functions.
With more abstract ideas it is even more difficult to tell. The theological
imagination, for example, develops the idea of God and builds it out of the metaphors of
our experience. The idea that someone is watching over us is a logical extension of the
relationships that we already have. But when that idea is re-presented to us and played
over with our mind’s active participation, we may experience some higher-level cognitive
actions that mimic and extend our sensory activities. Perhaps mirror neurons play a role
when we hear stories of God’s actions as they have been interpreted by religious
authorities. Then our mind may engage in this experience of the abstract idea of God and
actually mimic a conversation with an invisible other. This would make the imagination
an other-worldly environment, peopled by ideas rather than things.
Sartre
Existence comes before essence
For Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, life was an adventure. He lived in Paris when
the Nazis invaded and was put into a prison camp where he wrote some of his most
intriguing philosophy. He said that during the occupation by the Nazis he felt alive
because every decision was fraught with danger and moral seriousness. But the meaning
of life was not an easy thing to try to solve. Sartre thought that every person must come
to their own decisions. He called this existentialism because his philosophy gave priority
to the particular existence of each individual.
Sartre talks about life during the war: "Never were we more free than under the
Germans. We had lost all our rights, first and foremost the right to speak; … Everywhere
we looked--on the walls, in the newspapers, on the movie screens--we kept seeing that
foul and insipid image that our oppressors wanted us to believe was the way we really
were. Because of all this we were free. … each accurate thought was a victory; since an
all-powerful police was trying to coerce us into silence, each word became as precious as
a declaration of principle … The often frightful circumstances of our struggle enabled us
finally to live, undisguised and fully revealed, that awful, unbearable situation we call the
human condition. Exile, captivity and especially death, which in happier times we
conceal from ourselves, were the objects of our constant concern, and we came to the
realization that they are not avoidable accidents nor even constant threats from without:
no, we saw that they were in fact our lot, our destiny, the profound source of our reality
as men. Every second of our lives we felt the full meaning of that banal little phrase:
"Man is immortal." And every choice that each of us made was authentic, because it
could be expressed in the form: "Death rather than…" (BBC broadcast, reproduced in
Sartre: By Himself, text of a film directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat,
translated by Richard Seaver).
Existence is more fundamental than essence because for Sartre it is the ineluctable
specificity of each life that gives it meaning. More specifically, it is the decisions that we
make that make us who we are (not some grand narrative of culture or family or genes).
Every decision is a specific act that arises out of circumstances that we cannot control.
We are thrown into life without any conscious awareness of the factors that shape us, but
none of those factors control our decision-making process. Our choices thus arise from
the particular pushes and pulls on our self but we are the ones who make the choice. This
renders our concrete life and its realities more important than any general ideas or beliefs
that seek to express our identity. Nation, state, family, religion: all are tremendously
important cultural forms that shape us, but our decisions take place in the intersection of
all of these complicated thought-forms and render our self highly personal and unique.
Wittgenstein
Language-games
In his early philosophical career, Ludwig Wittgenstein was influenced by the Vienna
Circle, a group of philosophers in his city that focused on the logical uses of language. He
fashioned his own analysis of logic, which he titled Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This
somewhat enigmatic book, in his eyes, solved all of the problems that had perplexed
philosophers for years. However, many who read his book were themselves confused by
it. Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein’s supervisor at Cambridge University in England, got
into a heated argument with Wittgenstein over the meaning of a central phrase, the “truthfunction” of language.
Wittgenstein quit philosophy, gave away the inheritance from his wealthy father
and went to be a schoolteacher in rural Austria. Later he built a house for his sister in
Vienna (which today houses the Bulgarian embassy). Eventually he went back to
Cambridge University and taught there for the rest of his life. He turned his back on his
previous philosophical program and began to analyze the many functions of language in
our ordinary life. He proposed that language is like a game because it operates according
to shared rules that people follow (although they are artificial constructions that simply
allow us to conduct tasks).
The game of language follows many different rules, he thought. Each instance of
language is embedded in what he called a “form of life” because it functions in order to
bring sense to particular actions (or sets of actions). The rules of language are as different
as the many tasks we get it to play in our lives. He likened language to a toolbox because
it has so many different uses in practical circumstances. Every instance of language plays
a different role in our lives.
This view of language led Wittgenstein to think about the many ways in which we
use language to think about difficult topics. He was not convinced that philosophy was an
effective use of language in order to clear up confusions. In fact, he thought that
philosophy helped to create confusions about things. His later philosophy was an attempt
to bring clarity to our thinking by reflecting how we actually use language. He meditated
on the tools that language uses to help us live (even religion is seen as a way of making
sense of life more than an attempt to name the unseeable ground beyond what we know
as reality).
Bibliography
Aristotle, Metaphysics. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.1.i.html
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. The Harvard Classics.
1909–14. "Of the Origin of Ideas" http://www.bartleby.com/37/3/2.html
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Norman Kemp Smith, 1787.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/reason/ch01.htm
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Volume I. MDCXC, Based on
the 2nd Edition.
Plato, “The Republic” http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.8.vii.html
Jean Paul Sartre, BBC broadcast, reproduced in Sartre: By Himself, text of a film directed
by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat, translated by Richard Seaver
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations