Thursday, April 14, 2005
Universal Truth vs. Nominalism?
In his new book, The Cube and the Cathedral, George Weigel draws contrasts Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. He tells us that Aquinas saw freedom as the opportunity for self-perfection, living within law being the equivalent for the soul of making good music by building on what is already known of the art.Ockham, we are told, goes in a different direction. Arguing that absolutes exist only in our minds, he consequently undermined the notions of human nature and the natural philosophical laws derived therefrom.
Weigel notes that Kant tried to overcome Ockham's "Nominalism" with the categorical imperative. He suggests Kant failed.
Certainly, given the relativism we know today, Kant did fail to bring the world around to his viewpoint. It's harder to say, though, where to go from there. However, I think that Kant does show the way.
The problem that we run into is that neither Ockham nor Aquinas fully square with reality. The absolutes don't exist, as I've elsewhere argued, at least not in a way that is knowable to human. But just because an absolute, a Platonic essence, doesn't exist, doesn't mean that species of it don't. There is no such thing as the quintessential cat, yet this morning I saw two of them. One of them was, sadly, dead; it had been struck by a car. Another was sitting in the neighbor's window. No speaker of the English language could have failed to identify either specimen as a cat. Had I pointed to either and said, "dog," a child of three years would have corrected me.
Where philosophers go astray is in focusing on absolutes. This is silly, for even exacting scientists know better.
A chemist cannot say exactly how much an atom weighs, except relative to other atoms. When you perform an experiment, the last thing you do is calculate the margin of error and note the perceived reliability of your results. If you're doing something big and new, you note the parameters in which the experiment works.
At the far end of margins for error, the physicist with an electron microscope or a supercollider must confide that once he registers something, it's not there. That's the nature of the beast at that level. Observation alters at the quantum level, so at that level we can only stab at what was, not know what is.
Why, if science has limitations, shouldn't philosophy? I submit that it does. The quantum physicist cannot pinpoint where that quark shot out, but he can reliably tell you that it wasn't in Jersey when he detected it. Likewise, philosophy may not be able to locate absolute truth, but it can detect relative truth, giving a rough idea where it is to be found.
Like science, philosophy cannot refine truth down to the incontestable, absolute and absolutely precise. But it can help us locate the truth within a certain orbit. What's on the outer edges may be in dispute, but what's in the middle need not be, according to this model.
I don't believe there are absolute essences. I'm surer still that humans wouldn't know them if they saw them. But if Platonic essences exist, or even if there exist definitions for the essential or ideal of things, there is only one way of knowing them, perhaps. The way to do this is tricky. You must be God. This is a challenge that most of us cannot meet. Only one man fits that bill as far as the Christians are concerned. As for Jews, Muslims, Hindus and others, I don't think they perceive the existence of even one man who is God. So what do we do with that?
It's time to get back to Kant and look at his categorical imperative. Kant created his system in an effort to disprove Hume's absolute empiricism by showing that our experience is refracted though a priori cognition, that we have not only sense organs but internal systems for decoding the information they provide. In understanding the setup, we find a way of hunting for and finding truth, felt Kant (in the unlikely event I both fully and correctly understand him). In his efforts, he was quite correct: we are incapable of decoding the whole of the electron soup we inhabit but we are not reliant upon sense systems to decode so much as to decide what to leave out.
If we see the Kantian categorical imperative as the key to finding absolute knowlege, we are out of luck; however, the major part of the categorical imperative is to decide how to filter out things we don't need to know, subtleties we don't need to perceive. So if we take it as a tool for situating things in the proper categories, then we find in it not the key to finding The Truth, but a means for working toward an understanding of truth that, like our definition of cat, is neither absolute nor necessarily of complete universality, but which gives human civilization in the main something to go on. That is, while the categorical imperative doesn't help us achieve the impossible - knowing everything with certainty - it implies that we are meant or shaped to find order and make sense of things. This implies that by design of God, evolution or both, Ockham's Nominalism may be a reality we must face, but Aquinas' quest for freedom in excellence is what drives us onward.
Looking at the knowledge resulting from the categorical imperative, we can reconcile Thomas and Ockham, seeing that Nominalism, though true, is only useful if not totally accepted, while Thomas' postulation of universals, while not technically true, conforms to our experience of a working civilization. And thus we come upon a new precept to confound both the absolutists and the relativists: The relative truth of individuals is not completely relative, but hints at the unknowable but absolute truth that lies at the foundation of our world.
posted by gbarto at 11:23 PM