When the editor
asked
me to write something about Bertrand
Russell,
my admiration and respect for that
author
at once induced me to say yes. I owe
innumerably
happy hours to the reading of Russell's
works,
something which I cannot say of any
other
contemporary scientific writer, with
the
exception of Thirsted Veiled. Soon,
however,
I discovered that it is easier to give
such
a promise than to fulfil it. I had
promised
to say something about Russell as a
philosopher
and epistemologist. After having in
full
confidence begun with it, I quickly
recognized
what a slippery field I had ventured
upon,
having, due to lack of experience,
until
now cautiously limited myself to the
field
of physics. The present difficulties
of his
science force the physicist to come
to grips
with philosophical problems to a greater
degree than was the case with earlier
generations.
Although I shall not speak here of
those
difficulties, it was my concern with
them,
more than anything else, which led
me to
the position outlined in this essay.
In the evolution of philosophic thought
through
the centuries, the following question
has
played a major role: what knowledge
is pure
thought able to supply independently
of sense
perception? Is there any such knowledge?
If not, what precisely is the relation
between
our knowledge and the raw material
furnished
by sense impressions? An almost boundless
chaos of philosophical opinions corresponds
to these questions and to a few others
intimately
connected with them. Nevertheless there
is
visible in this process of relatively
fruitless
but heroic endeavours a systematic
trend
of development, namely, an increasing
scepticism
concerning every attempt by means of
pure
thought to learn something about the
"objective
world," about the world of "things"
in contrast to the world of mere "concepts
and ideas." Be it said parenthetically
that, just as on the part of a real
philosopher,
quotation marks are used here to introduce
an illegitimate concept, which the
reader
is asked to permit for the moment,
although
the concept is suspect in the eyes
of the
philosophical police.
During philosophy's childhood it was
rather
generally believed that it is possible
to
find everything which can be known
by means
of mere reflection. It was an illusion
which
anyone can easily understand if, for
a moment,
he dismisses what he has learned from
later
philosophy and from natural science;
he will
not be surprised to find that Plato
ascribed
a higher reality to "ideas"
than
to empirically experienceable things.
Even
in Spinoza and as late as in Hegel
this prejudice
was the vitalizing force which seems
still
to have played the major role. Someone,
indeed,
might even raise the question whether,
without
something of this illusion, anything
really
great can be achieved in the realm
of philosophic
thought -- but we do not wish to ask
this
question.
This more aristocratic illusion concerning
the unlimited penetrative power of
thought
has as its counterpart the more plebeian
illusion of naive realism, according
to which
things "are" as they are
perceived
by us through our senses. This illusion
dominates
the daily life of men and of animals;
it
is also the point of departure in all
of
the sciences, especially of the natural
sciences.
These two illusions cannot be overcome
independently.
The overcoming of naive realism has
been
relatively simple. In his introduction
to
his volume, An Inquiry Into Meaning
and Truth,
Russell has characterized this process
in
a marvellously concise fashion:
We all start from "naive realism,"
i. e., the doctrine that things are
what
they seem. We think that grass is green,
that stones are hard, and that snow
is cold.
But physics assures us that the greenness
of grass, the hardness of stones, and
the
coldness of snow are not the greenness,
hardness,
and coldness that we know in our experience,
but something very different. The observer,
when he seems to himself to be observing
a stone, is really, if physics is to
be believed,
observing the effects of the stone
upon himself.
Thus science seems to be at war with
itself:
when it most means to be objective,
it finds
itself plunged into subjectivity against
its will. Naive realism leads to physics,
and physics, if true, shows that naive
realism
is false. Therefore naive realism,
if true,
is false; therefore it is false. (pp.
14-15)
Apart from their masterful formulation
these
lines say something which had never
previously
occurred to me. For, superficially
considered,
the mode of thought in Berkeley and
Hume
seems to stand in contrast to the mode
of
thought in the natural sciences. However,
Russell's just cited remark uncovers
a connection:
if Berkeley relies upon the fact that
we
do not directly grasp the "things"
of the external world through our senses,
but that only events causally connected
with
the presence of "things"
reach
our sense organs, then this is a consideration
which gets is persuasive character
from our
confidence in the physical mode of
thought.
For, if one doubts the physical mode
of thought
in even its most general features,
there
is no necessity to interpolate, between
the
object and the act of vision, anything
which
separates the object from the subject
and
makes the "existence of the object"
problematical.
It was, however, the very same physical
mode
of thought and its practical successes
which
have shaken the confidence in the possibility
of understanding things and their relations
by means of purely speculative thought.
Gradually
the conviction gained recognition that
all
knowledge about things is exclusively
a working-over
of the raw material furnished by the
senses.
In this general (and intentionally
somewhat
vaguely stated) form this sentence
is probably
today commonly accepted. But this conviction
does not rest on the supposition that
anyone
has actually proved the impossibility
of
gaining knowledge of reality by means
of
pure speculation, but rather upon the
fact
that the empirical (in the above-mentioned
sense) procedure alone has shown its
capacity
to be the source of knowledge. Galileo
and
Hume first upheld this principle with
full
clarity and decisiveness.
Hume saw that concepts which we must
regard
as essential, such as, for example,
causal
connection ,cannot be gained from material
given to us by the senses. This insight
led
him to a sceptical attitude as concerns
knowledge
of any kind. If one reads Hume's books,
one
is amazed that many and sometimes even
highly
esteemed philosophers after him have
been
able to write so much obscure stuff
and even
find grateful readers for it. Hume
has permanently
influenced the development of the best
philosophers
who came after him. One senses him
in the
reading of Russell's philosophical
analyses,
whose acumen and simplicity of expression
have often reminded me of Hume.
Man has an intense desire for assured
knowledge.
That is why Hume's clear message seems
crushing:
the sensory raw material, the only
source
of our knowledge, through habit may
lead
us to belief and expectation but not
to the
knowledge and still less to the understanding
of lawful relations. Then Kant took
the stage
with an idea which, though certainly
untenable
in the form in which he put it, signified
a step towards the solution of Hume's
dilemma:
whatever in knowledge is of empirical
origin
is never certain (Hume). If, therefore,
we
have definitely assured knowledge,
it must
be grounded in reason itself. This
is held
to be the case, for example, in the
propositions
of geometry and in the principle of
causality.
These and certain other types of knowledge
are, so to speak, a part of the implements
of thinking and therefore do not previously
have to be gained from sense data (i.
e.,
they are a priori knowledge). Today
everyone
knows, of course, that the mentioned
concepts
contain nothing of the certainty, of
the
inherent necessity, which Kant had
attributed
to them. The following, however, appears
to me to be correct in Kant's statement
of
the problem: in thinking we use, with
a certain
"right," concepts to which
there
is no access from the materials of
sensory
experience, if the situation is viewed
from
the logical point of view.
As a matter of fact, I am convinced
that
even much more is to be asserted: the
concepts
which arise in our thought and in our
linguistic
expressions are all -- when viewed
logically
-- the free creations of thought which
cannot
inductively be gained from sense experiences.
This is not so easily noticed only
because
we have the habit of combining certain
concepts
and conceptual relations (propositions)
so
definitely which certain sense experiences
that we do not become conscious of
the gulf
-- logically unbridgeable -- which
separates
the world of sensory experiences from
the
world of concepts and propositions.
Thus, for example, the series of integers
is obviously an invention of the human
mind,
a self-created tool which simplifies
the
ordering of certain sensory experiences.
But there is no way in which this concept
could be made to grow, as it were,
directly
out of sense experiences. It is deliberately
that I choose here the concept of a
number,
because it belongs to the pre-scientific
thinking and because, in spite of that
fact,
its constructive character is still
easily
recognizable. The more, however ,we
turn
to the most primitive concepts of everyday
life, the more difficult it becomes
amidst
the mass of inveterate habits to recognize
the concept as an independent creation
of
thinking. It was thus that the fateful
conception
-- fateful, that is to say, for an
understanding
of the here-existing conditions --
could
arise, according to which the concepts
originate
from experience by way of "abstraction,"
i. e., through omission of a part of
its
content. I want to indicate now why
this
conception appears to me to be so fateful.
As soon as one is at home in Hume's
critique
one is easily led to believe that all
those
concepts and propositions which cannot
be
deduced from the sensory raw material
are,
on account of their "metaphysical"
character, to be removed from thinking.
For
all thought acquires material content
only
through its relationship with that
sensory
material. This latter proposition I
take
to be entirely true; but I hold the
prescription
for thinking which is grounded on this
proposition
to be false. For this claim -- if only
carried
through consistently -- absolutely
excludes
thinking of any kind as "metaphysical."
In order that thinking might not degenerate
into "metaphysics," or into
empty
talk, it is only necessary that enough
propositions
of the conceptual system be firmly
enough
connected with sensory experiences
and that
the conceptional system, in view of
its task
of ordering and surveying sense experience,
should show as much unity and parsimony
as
possible. Beyond that, however, the
"system"
is (as regards logic) a free play with
symbols
according to (logically) arbitrarily
given
rules of the game. All this applies
as much
(and in the same manner) to the thinking
in daily life as to the more consciously
and systematically constructed thinking
of
the sciences.
It will now be clear what is meant
if I make
the following statement: by his clear
critique
Hume did not only advance philosophy
in a
decisive way but also -- though through
no
fault of his -- created a danger for
philosophy
tin that, following his critique, a
fateful
"fear of metaphysics" arose
which
has come to be a malady of contemporary
empiricistic
philosophizing; this malady is the
counterpart
to that earlier philosophizing in the
clouds,
which thought it could neglect and
dispense
with what was given by the senses.
No matter how much one may admire the
acute
analysis which Russell has given us
in his
latest book on Meaning and Truth, it
still
seems to me that even there the specter
of
the metaphysical fear has caused some
damage.
For this fear seems to me, for example,
to
be the cause for conceiving of the
"thing"
as a "bundle of qualities,"
such
that the "qualities" are
to be
taken from the sensory raw material.
Now
the fact that two things are said to
be one
and the same thing, if they coincide
in all
qualities, forces one to consider the
geometrical
relations between things as belonging
to
their qualities. (Otherwise one is
forced
to look upon the Afield Tower in Paris
and
a New York skyscraper as "the
same thing.")*
However, I see no "metaphysical"
danger in taking the thing (the object
in
the sense of physics) as an independent
concept
into the system together with the proper
spatio-temporal structure.
In view of these endeavours I am particularly
pleased to note that, in the last chapter
of the book, it finally turns out that
one
can, after all, not get along without
"metaphysics."
The only thing to which I take exception
there is the bad intellectual conscience
which shines through between the lines.
* Compare Russell's An Inquiry Into
Meaning
and Truth, 119-120, chapter on "Proper
Names."
|
