In Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (which is a fantastic book, but I won’t even attempt to summarize it – you can check out its Wikipedia page if you are interested), there are a variety of secular monastic orders, and one group, called the Lorites, believes that every possible idea has already been thought. Thus, they dedicate themselves to knowing history and constantly revealing as “old” any “new” idea that others propose. This is an issue that is surprisingly close to reality. In a recent post I discussed the importance of “knowing the literature” as a means to establishing our arguments (especially critiques) in a developed stream of thought. This helps us avoid the pitfalls that commonly occur when we try to base arguments on experience alone, ignoring the vast troves of wisdom already available which have tackled similar issues in a systematic way. However, a recognition of the wisdom that has come before also reveals that very few ideas today are truly “new.” That is not to say that we are not generating new information. Particularly in the sciences, new information is discovered all the time. But questions that get at the most basic elements of existence—Why are we here? What is the fundamental nature of reality? What is truth?—all seem to have been answered and re-answered in the same ways down through the ages. In many ways, there is nothing new under the sun, which, of course, was known in the 3rd or 4th century BC – how much more so today.
I recently stumbled upon a great example of this phenomenon. Postmodernism is assumed by most to be one of the most current philosophies, given its name (though there is also now Post-postmodernism). Postmodern thought (and offshoots like constructivism) centers around a rejection of objectivity, instead suggesting that reality is socially constructed, and thus, subjective. Reality is dependent on context, and no one “reality” can ever be said to be truly real. In fact, the most radical postmodernists would say we cannot be sure anything exists, and no scientific enquiry will ever fix that. Coming as a refutation of positivism (which has also dictated the entire educational process in the West for centuries), postmodernism does indeed seem radically new. But its ideas have actually been proposed by philosophers since at least the 4th century BC.
Hume do you seek?
Let’s work our way backwards.
David Hume (1711-1776), a Scottish philosopher, is the first step back into history. In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (section XII), Hume thinks through whether or not we can actually be sure that, for instance, the table in front of us is real or if we only perceive it to be real:
It is a question of fact, whether the perceptions of the senses be produced by external objects, resembling them: how shall this question be determined? By experience surely; as all other questions of a like nature. But here experience is, and must be entirely silent. The mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connexion with objects. The supposition of such a connexion is, therefore, without any foundation in reasoning.
In other words, we cannot be sure that what we perceive is at all connected to reality. We assume that an object we perceive with our senses does in fact have some physical reality, apart from our sensation (would the table still exist if no one was there to see it?), but there is no way to really know.
But Hume built upon ideas already propounded by George Berkeley (1685-1753) thirty years earlier in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. In this case, a summary of Berkeley’s thoughts captures what we are after:
If, says Berkeley, our knowledge of the material world consists in the ideas of it we have in our heads, what reason is there for supposing that anything other than the ideas exist?…Berkeley abolishes matter and declares the world to be a creation of the mind. Everything is ‘really’ mind.
– From the Introduction to Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms, p. 16
Berkeley, like the most radical of postmodernists today, didn’t think matter was really there.
Now let’s jump way back to ancient Greece. Pyrrho (c. 360-270 BC), whose views were recorded by his student Timon (c. 320-230 BC), was the source of the ideas later leading to Skepticism (the general philosophy we are discussing here). Eusebius (c. 263-339 AD) explains Pyrrho’s main thesis:
…[Pyrrho] reveals that things are equally indifferent and unstable and indeterminate…for this reason, neither our perceptions nor our beliefs tell the truth or lie….For this reason, then, we should not trust them, but should be without opinions and without inclinations and without wavering, saying about each single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not.
– Accessible at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-ancient/#EarFigPyrTim
There is no truth, just perception. Nothing can be said to be in existence any more than it can be said to not exist.
In some ways, these ideas all go back to Plato and his theory of forms, which suggested that true reality existed outside of the world we perceive (as shadows in a cave, illuminated by the light from the “true” reality). What we see is not as “real” as what we do not see on the higher plane. The same ideas are also present outside of the Western tradition. In India, Jainism also promotes the stance that all truth/reality is subjective, depending on the point of view, and no viewpoint can be said to be completely true. In Islam, al-Ghazali (1058-1111 AD) embraced a form of skepticism which led him to conclude that nothing in this world is causal, and all causation comes from God instead (i.e., even though we perceive that fire is burning something, in reality that is not happening – God is burning it, and thus reality is disconnected from perception). This thought is not all that different from the Christian view explained by the Apostle Paul in Colossians that in Christ “all things hold together,” which suggests that what we understand as cause and effect is illusory – without God, no cause or effect would occur. And of course Platonic dualism (mind/body, good/evil, this lower world/pure forms) had a huge influence on the Christian understanding of the current world we inhabit versus the higher world to come. While many Christians would like to disconnect Christian theology from Platonism, still most Christians conceptualize this world as something to be escaped, at least in part because it is less real than the world to come (though I do not think Jesus actually taught this form of escapism whatsoever).
So there you have it. Postmodernism, so modern that it is beyond modern, is actually anything but. It is merely a restatement of questions that philosophers have been asking for millennia. But there is nothing wrong with bringing up the same questions over and over again. Every generation needs its own thinkers to frame a debate in modern terms, to re-expose good ideas to contemporary society so that the ideas are not forgotten (or expose “new” arguments as old ones that were refuted long ago). There is no shame in repetition. There is nothing new under the sun, but many things are not directly exposed to the light because of the impeding detritus that builds up over time. Removing these impediments is one duty of thinkers and readers in every generation.
Filed under: Philosophy/Religion Tagged: Anathem, Berkeley, Hume, Neal Stephenson, new ideas, Plato, postmodernism, Pyrrho 
