Class Reading: Metaphysics - The Nature of Reality PDF

4 The Nature of Reality Humankind cannot bear very much reality. y...

4 The Nature of Reality Humankind cannot bear very much reality. y —T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” Opening Questions 1. How “real” are the following items? (Rate them on a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is most real, 1 is least real.) The person sitting next to you _____ The chair you are sitting in _____ God _____ The planet Uranus _____ Beethoven’s music _____ The headache you had last night _____ Human rights _____ Electrons _____ The woman or man in (not “of”) your dreams _____ Angels _____ The number 7 _____ Water _____ Ice _____ Love _____ Beauty _____ Genes _____ The theory of relativity _____ Einstein’s brain (when he was alive) _____ Einstein’s ideas _____ Your own mind _____ The color red _____ 107 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 108 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality A red sensation (in your own mind) _____ “Unreal numbers” _____ The NFL _____ Your own body _____ Your soul _____ 2. Do you believe that the earth is flat and does not move, while the stars, sun, moon, and planets circle around it in more or less regularly shaped orbits? If not, why not? (If so, why?) 3. If a tree falls in the forest when there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Why or why not? If no one ever sees, hears, or touches the tree itself, what sense does it make to say that the tree is “real”? 4. Does the universe itself have a purpose? If so, what is this purpose? If not, is it, as some modern philosophers have argued, just a universe of “matter in motion”—particles and electromagnetic fields acting according to the laws of physics? The Real World y Much of what we believe about the world we believe on faith. As children, we believed what our parents told us, often without understanding it and only rarely testing their answers for ourselves. Most people most of the time throughout most of history have believed that reality—the ultimate nature of the world—was pretty much what their religious leaders told them it was, whether the world was a flat island or a plate on the back of an elephant supported on the back of a tortoise supported by another turtle (and from there on, “turtles all the way down,” ac- cording to a traditional Indian tale) or an infinite expanse bounded only by God. In this chapter we consider basic philosophical questions about reality, be- ginning with the one we have just raised: what is real? We proceed to discuss the traditional view that reality admits of degrees, so that some things are more real than others. The exciting philosophical question then becomes: what is most real? The next several sections comprise an historical survey of some of the an- swers of ancient Greek philosophers, who were divided on the issue of whether ultimate reality is material or immaterial. We devote particular attention to Plato’s two-worlds theory, which attempts to explain the connection between the imma- terial world that he takes to be ultimately real and the everyday appearances of material things. From this we segue into the questions of whether minds, physi- cal bodies, or both are real, and if the latter, how minds and bodies are related. Taking the latter question first, we discuss Descartes’s view that mind and body are separate substances, and then the alternative views of Berkeley and Leibniz. We then return to the question of what is most real and consider the arguments given by modern German philosophers in defense of idealism (the view that ideas Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  The Real World 109 and minds are ultimately real) along with the modern resurgence of the two- worlds theory. We next consider the question of teleology, the issue of whether the world has any ultimate purpose, and close with some observations about two general beliefs shared by virtually all Western philosophers: the belief that reality endures and that reality coheres into a unity. Today most of us believe that reality is what our scientists tell us it is. None of us has ever seen or felt an atom. Very few of us could even offer any evidence that there is such a thing as our solar system, despite the fact that we have been looking at charts and drawings of it ever since we were children. When students are asked why they think that the sun doesn’t move around the earth (as our very language, with words like sunrise and sunset, would seem to indicate), only a small number of them may be capable of giving any half-convincing answers. Contemporary scientists do theorize about what is ultimately real, but such theories often make use of mathematically subtle concepts that are scarcely de- scribable from a layperson’s point of view. String theory, for example, postulates that the fundamental reality consists of tiny vibrating “strings,” which may be a closed loop or, alternatively, open. Furthermore, although themselves simple par- ticles, the strings have reality in nine or ten spatial dimensions (or 26 dimensions according to some versions of the theory) and can vibrate along any of these di- mensions. We find ourselves puzzling over this idea if we try to visualize it. The main merit of string theory is that it unifies a number of theories of basic physical forces in a way that is consistent with both quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. However, most of us are not able to follow the compli- cated mathematics that demonstrate these theoretical gains, and as yet no one has provided any experimental verification of the theory. Science and Reality The learned physicist and the man in the street were standing together on the threshold, about to enter a room. The man in the street moved forward without trouble, planted his foot on a solid unyielding plank at rest before him, and entered. The physicist was faced with an intricate problem. To make any move- ment he must shove against the atmosphere, which presses with a force of 14 pounds on every square inch of his body. He must land on a plank trav- elling at 20 miles per second around the sun—a fraction of a second earlier or later the plank would be miles away. He must do this while hanging from a round planet, head outward into space.... He reflects too that the plank itself is not what it appears to be... it is mostly emptiness, very sparsely scattered in that emptiness are myriads of electrical charges dashing about at great speeds.... It is like stepping on a swarm of flies. —Sir Arthur Eddington, English astrophysicist, 1882–1944 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 110 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality In any case, such theories indicate that even if we think the “real” thing is the material object, there are many levels on which that material thing might be described: such as the chair you are sitting on, for example. Is it the wood or other material it is made of, the molecular structure of that material, the atoms that com- pose them, the subatomic particles? Or is it something immaterial—the idea of a chair, which guided the chair’s designer and anyone involved in its construction? Before science came to claim complete domination over our picture of real- ity, during the past several centuries the ready answer to the question of what is ultimately real was God. According to this view, the material universe is real only insofar as it is kept in existence by God. (In fact, for hundreds of years it was considered heresy to believe that what was ultimately real were the “illusory speculations” of the scientists.) Also real were souls, angels, and other spiritual beings, whether or not these could be observed or tested by science. In the mod- ern scientific worldview, which most of us accept without question, on the other hand, what is real is the physical universe. The reality of such nonphysical things as numbers, spirits, minds, souls, an- gels, and even God is at least questionable—and if they are to be believed in, they must be justified somehow, preferably by appeal to the physical universe. Thus, minds are believable because they explain why various bodies behave as they do. And belief in God can be defended, for example, by the so-called argument from design, from the intricacy of the physical universe (see pp. 91–92). God as Reality The perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one divine reality- substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately appre- hended except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit. Why should this be so? We do not know. It is just one of those facts we have to accept, whether we like them or not and however implausible and unlikely they may seem. —Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1946 We can see from the start that an answer to the question “What is real?” might begin with two very different starting points: an appeal to science on the one hand and an appeal to religion on the other. A religious person might still accept the findings of science, of course; philosophers such as Pascal and Leibniz were religious men as well as scientists. But for the religious person, the order of the universe is first of all a sign of the infinite wisdom and goodness of God. The scientist, however, approaches reality as being measurable and testable. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  What Is Most Real? 111 What Is Most Real? y In Opening Question 1, the point of asking you to rank as “real” various entities (the more proper philosophical word for “things”) was to make some preliminary, crude attempt to get you to order your own sense of reality. This is what philoso- phers call an ontology. Ontology is essentially the study of what is real and the ef- fort to establish a hierarchy of levels of reality; an ontology is a specific taxonomy of entities in accordance with such a hierarchy. Some people will formulate a com- monsense ontology, with the most real entities being chairs, bodies, people; some will take a more scientific viewpoint and say that what is most real are those things discovered (or postulated) by science, like rons and genes. Other people will take a more spiritual approach and rank God highest, along with soul; some will al- ways take people to be most real. Most people have the most trouble figuring out where to place such peculiar entities as Beethoven’s music and the number 7. Some people say that nothing is real and give a low ranking to virtually ev- ery entity on the list. We might then ask, “Real—compared to what?” For what becomes evident in such an exercise is the fact that “reality” is an evaluative term, a way of weighing what is most basic to our view of the world. To say that nothing is real is to say, in effect, that we don’t believe in the world at all or, for that matter, in the existence of our own minds believing in the world. Surely, there is something odd about this. On the other hand, some people (including some important philosophers) have said that everything on the list is real. In fact, one might say this: everything is “real” for the kind of thing that it is. (Thus, the number 7 is real as a number; Beethoven’s music is real as music; angels are real as angels; and the person sitting next to you is real in the way that people in gen- eral are real.) But this clever answer tends to miss the point of ontology, which is to discover what is most real, what is most basic, and what is to be accounted for in terms of what. If we say that in their own way Sherlock Holmes, or the Loch Ness monster, or the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow are just as real as you, me, and other people, as your own dog, or as the pots and pans in your friend’s kitchen, then we seem to have lost our grasp of the notion of “reality” altogether. The whole purpose of thinking about reality is to somehow separate what is most basic and undeniable in the world from what is less so. Appearance and Reality The distinction that causes the most trouble in philosophy is the distinction between “appearance” and “reality,” between what things seem to be and what they are. The painter wants to know what things seem to be, the practical man and the philosopher want to know what they are... but if reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing whether there is any reality at all? —Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 1912 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 112 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality The Reality Behind the Appearances Now, why should this question “What is real?” be so important? Consider this: Our dog (and your dog, too) couldn’t conceive of such a question. The dog certainly learns a complex series of causes and effects (when the can opener whirs, he learns to expect dinner). He might also learn to ignore certain experiences as unimportant or untrustworthy. But what he never seems to learn is explanation. He never asks, “Why?” He apparently has only expectations, not theories. The connection between the can opener and dog food is enough for him; his life is seemingly a sequence of events, most of them expected, a few of them unexpected, but he cannot account for the connections between them, or presumably even follow such an account. A child, on the other hand, asks “Why?” persistently. “How does a watch work?” for example. We could, if we wished, take it apart and show the child the mechanism. The surface movements are not enough for us; we want to know what is inside. Simply being aware of the sequence of lightning–thunder is not enough for us: we want to know what causes them, whether it is the bad temper of Zeus or the collision of convection currents in the atmosphere. And so we be- gin to postulate a reality behind the appearances, an attempt to account for the sequence of events that are seen in terms of other events unseen. “Primitive” my- thologies populate this world behind the scenes with spirits, demons, gods, and goddesses. Science populates it with atoms and electrons and electromagnetic forces. Christianity fills it with God and a spiritual world only dimly perceived by those of us in this one—that eternal world is far more important than the mere passing appearances of this one. The distinction between what we simply see, what appears to be the case, and the “deeper” picture that allows us to explain it, forces us to introduce the concept of “reality.” This concept enables us to distinguish the ways things ap- pear to us and their inner reality, and we learn to explain things to ourselves and make sense of them. Essence and Appearance Only as creators!—This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin—all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appear- ance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and effective as such. How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  What Is Most Real? 113 that counts for real, so-called “reality.” We can destroy only as creators.— But let us not forget either: it is enough to create new names and estima- tions and probabilities in order to create in the long run new “things.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882 From: Trans. W. Kaufman. New York: Vintage, 1974. §58. The Basis of Metaphysics In what we have said already in this chapter, we have anticipated some of the main themes of what philosophers call metaphysics. Metaphysics is the at- tempt to say what reality is. Cosmology, or how we think the most real things have come into being, is one of the components of metaphysics; another is on- tology, the study of what is. In developing an ontology, as part of our attempt to formulate our metaphysical views, we have to evaluate the different entities in the world, picking out those that are most basic. We have already anticipated two of the tests that often are imposed on this notion of what is “most real.” First, that which is most real is that upon which all else is dependent. For a religious person, God is most real because all else de- pends on him; for a scientist, what is most real are the principles and particles on which all of reality can be reasoned to be based. Second, that which is most real is that which itself is not created or destroyed. It does not change. Thus, God cre- ated the earth, and he can destroy it, but God was neither created nor can God be destroyed. You can destroy a chair, by burning it up or chopping it to pieces, but you cannot destroy the basic particles and forces out of which the chair is made. When we look back to the very beginnings of Western philosophy and metaphys- ics, when people first made the attempt to formulate their view of the world in terms of what was most real and what was not, we find these same two tests being invoked. Indeed, both modern science and modern theology, as well as Western philosophy itself, are continuations of this same ancient metaphysical tradition. In this chapter we will primarily consider the basic metaphysical question of what is real. However, we should note that the range of matters covered by the term “metaphysics” is considerably broader, and that different issues have been given more or less prominence at various times. Some metaphysical questions— such as the question of how the mind and the body are related (considered in Chapter 6) and whether our actions are really free (considered in Chapter 7)— have been longstanding issues, but some answers have been proposed fairly re- cently as a consequence of developments in the sciences. Other topics have been taken up or recast in recent times, such as the relationship between time and space, how parts make up wholes, what could and what could not have been dif- ferent from the way it actually is, and how we should understand our ideas about possibilities (which may or may not be actualized). Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 114 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality The First Metaphysicians y Thales The disciplines of metaphysics and philosophy, as these are practiced in the Western tradition, began in the Aegean region about 2,600 hundred years ago. The first Western philosopher is generally agreed to have been a man named Thales, who lived from about 624 to 546 bce. He was said to be somewhat eccen- tric: he once fell into a well while thinking about philosophy, but he also made a fortune on the olive oil market. His philosophy in a sentence was this: water is the ultimate reality. This sounds simpleminded, but it was a momentous achievement, and it is not as silly as we might initially think. Try to suspend your knowledge of modern science—of the hundred-plus elements that have been discovered. Try to look at the world yourself; try to understand it in your own terms. And suppose you have the idea that, in order to make sense of the world, the first thing to do is to discover which element is most basic. (Remember that Greek science identified only four elements—earth, air, fire, and water.) And now try to imagine what the world is ultimately made up of. What, you may ask, is so monumentally important about this? Whether the world is actually made of water is not really the issue. What Thales saw, and what we now take for granted, is a difference between the way the world seems to be and the way it really is. The world seems to be made of all kinds of dif- ferent materials; it took a stroke of genius to suggest that all of these might be made out of a single basic element. Think how difficult life would be, to take but one simple example, if no one had ever noticed that water and ice were actually the same material under different conditions or if no one had ever dis- covered that basic food substances could be transformed (through mixing and heating) into an almost infinite variety of different things to eat. Modern scien- tific theory, which replaces Thales’s initial theory about water with a complex system of elements and subatomic particles, is nevertheless an extension of the same strategy, to distinguish the way the world appears to be from the way it re- ally is and to explain why it appears be as it does. Once we have made this basic distinction, a whole new world opens up to us, a “real world,” behind (or above or below) appearances. The Pre-Socratic Materialists After Thales, a number of other pre-Socratic philosophers challenged his view of water as the basic reality of the world and suggested theories of their own. A student of Thales named Anaximander went one step further than his teacher and suggested that everything was made of some basic “stuff” (his word was apeiron, or “indefinite”) that we could never experience as such; we could only know its manifestations. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  The First Metaphysicians 115 The West’s Oldest Philosophical Fragment, from Anaximander The Non-limited is the original material of existing things; further, the source from which existing things derive their existence is also that to which they return at their destruction, according to necessity; for they give justice and make reparation to one another for their injustice, according to the arrangement of time. — Sixth century bce From: Freeman, Kathleen. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948. Black Sea MACEDONIA Adriatic Sea ITALY Abdera Mount Stagira Olympus Elea Troy IONA PELOPONNESE (TURKEY) Delphi Samose Ephesus Athens Miletus Ionian Sea SICILY Sparta CRETE © Cengage Learning 2014 Mediterranean Sea AFRICA Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 116 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality Anaximander had a student named Anaximenes who thought that every- thing was made of air, so water was thickened air and earth was thickened even more than that. A philosopher named Heraclitus suggested alternatively that everything was more like fire than it was like the other elements—always changing and consuming. Before those thinkers, called the pre-Socratics, philosophers both in Greece and in other societies had also made the distinction between the world of ap- pearances and the real world—for example, by appealing to gods and goddesses behind the scenes. But the pre-Socratics made a monumental step forward: they now tried to explain the world, as it normally appeared to them, in a systematic way, not by appeal to the moods and whims of invisible deities. With the Greek philosophers, the daily world of appearances, in which different things simply happen one after another, is supplemented by another world, a world in which the world of appearances can be explained. Today perhaps none of us has an ontology as simple as that of the pre- Socratics. It is clear to us that there is more to the world than earth, air, fire, wa- ter, and the possibility that there is some fifth element, “stuff,” which we have never seen. But the pre-Socratics, too, were aware that the world of ultimate reality might be more complex than at first they had imagined. Another pre-Socratic phi- losopher, Democritus, developed a picture of the world that is remarkably close to our current scientific views. He suggested that the world consisted of tiny inde- structible elements, which he called atoms (derived from roots meaning “not cut” or “not divided”), that combined and recombined in various ways to give us the different elements and all the complex things of this world. These things might change, be created, and be destroyed, but the atoms themselves are eternal. Only a little imagination is required to see that we debate the ultimate nature of reality in much the same terms as these ancient philosophers did. Democritus’s view is still very much with us; we no longer believe that atoms themselves are these most basic particles, but we still postulate some such basic elements. A few decades ago, protons, electrons, and neutrons were said to be the basic building blocks of reality. Today, physicists refer to even more basic building blocks, elec- trons, quarks, and leptons, or, according to string theory, vibrating strings that manifest as electrons and quarks. But even if the particles are still smaller, the idea is the same. Eternal Fire This world that is the same for all, neither any god nor any man shaped it, but it ever was and is and shall be ever-living Fire that kindles by measures and goes out by measures. —Heraclitus Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Early Nonphysical Views of Reality 117 Ancient Materialism Thales (624–546 bce, Miletus)—Reality is ultimately water. Anaximander (610–546 bce, Miletus)—Reality is indefinite “stuff” (apeiron). Anaximenes (585–528 bce; Miletus)—Reality is essentially air. Heraclitus (536–480 bce; Ephesus)—Reality is like fire. Democritus (460–371 bce; Abdera)—Reality consists of tiny atoms. *All dates are approximate. So, too, we can understand Heraclitus in modern terms as the view that the nature of ultimate reality is not matter but energy. This view, which became as powerful as it is now only in the late nineteenth century, rejects the traditional emphasis on physical matter (whether tangible matter such as earth or water, or microscopic building blocks such as atoms) and instead declares ultimate re- ality to be power and forces and energy states, which somehow produce mat- ter as their effects. A still more modern concept would be the view that reality consists of neither matter nor energy as such but some more basic element— matter-energy—which can manifest itself as either matter or energy. This, of course, is much like the view of Anaximander. Laypersons often talk as if modern science has established what the ultimate nature of reality is. But the basic debate—whether reality should be thought of in terms of basic building blocks or rather, perhaps, in larger, more holistic terms, whether matter or energy should be primary—still goes on. Some people clearly do interpret the universe as Democritus understood it, consisting of an elaborate order of singular elements that can be understood by taking them apart and ana- lyzing them. Some people do see the world as Thales did: comprehensible, solid, and substantial, like a pool of water, like the Mediterranean. Some people see the world with Anaximander, as unknowable, mysterious, beyond everyday experi- ences. And some people see the world as constant energy and change, with excite- ment and enthusiasm being among its manifestations. Metaphysics is not just an ancient, unsophisticated set of views about science. Metaphysics is a basic outlook on the world, and its terms are much the same today as they were 2,500 years ago. Early Nonphysical Views of Reality y You have no doubt noticed that all five of the pre-Socratics we have named sug- gested that the basic element of reality was one of the physical elements (includ- ing “stuff” and “atoms,” even though we can’t sense them). But there were also Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 118 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality pre-Socratic philosophers who thought that ultimate reality was not physical at all. One of them was Pythagoras; he believed that the ultimate elements of reality were numbers. (If he had answered our opening questions, he would have given the number 7 a “10.”) For Pythagoras, numbers were eternal and indestructible; the things of this world were in some sense dependent upon numbers for their existence. The heavens, in particular, were divine examples of the mathematical order of the universe. (Pythagoras said that “the whole of heaven is a musical scale and a number.”) He and his followers also believed in the immortality of the soul and in reincarnation. Why did Pythagoras think that numbers were more real than trees and tables? Because numbers were eternal; they never changed, whereas trees and tables could be chopped up, used for firewood, and destroyed. Reality, according to the view that has been dominant from then until now, is what underlies all change, what does not itself change. Another pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides, went so far as to suggest that the world of our everyday life, because it was so filled with changes and things coming into being and disappearing, could not be real at all. The other pre-Socratics had said that the things of our world were only less real than some more basic reality. Parmenides said that our world was actually unreal. Pythagoras of Samos (ca. 570–490) was the leading mathematician of the ancient world, as well as a philosopher who, in southern Italy, led a pow- erful religious cult whose views were at odds with most of the philosophy of pre-Socratic Greece. He believed in the immortality of the soul and in rein- carnation, and he established a brotherhood of religious believers in which numbers and mathematics, as the basis of all things, held a special place in the universe. His discoveries in mathematics are still central to the sciences of geometry and acoustics. The Pythagorean theorem is named after him: “The sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse,” or “a2 1 b2 5 c2.” He was the first to prove it. b c (hypotenuse) a The Pythagoreans also placed great importance on the connections between mathematics and music. They noted, for instance, that if you halve the length of a vibrating string you produce the “same” note at a higher pitch (a discovery you can test for yourself on a guitar). Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Early Nonphysical Views of Reality 119 The principle, that what is real is eternal and unchanging, formed the framework within which most of the pre-Socratics, and almost all modern indi- viduals (including scientists and religious people) developed their view of the universe. One of the pre-Socratic philosophers, however, challenged this basic principle. This was Heraclitus, whom we have already met as the philosopher who believed that fire was the basic model for reality. But fire is a violent ele- ment, always changing and never the same. So Heraclitus came up with the suggestion that must have upset the other early philosophers even more than Parmenides telling them that the world they lived in wasn’t really real. Heracli- tus said that change is real, thus contradicting the basic principle that reality is what doesn’t change. (One might say that the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself, but this is a good way of tying yourself up in logical knots.) Hera- clitus expressed the idea that everything is constantly in flux by saying that you cannot step in the same river twice. Some of his more radical followers claimed that in actual fact you cannot step in the same river once because there is no moment when the water is not in the process of flowing past. (On the other hand, it has been pointed out by some of his more facetious critics that you can step in the same river twice if, having stepped in once, you jump out, run downstream, and jump in again!) We should note, however, that the Heraclitean view of reality is so radical that not even Heraclitus actually held to it. He may have believed that reality was change, but he also believed that underlying all change was an eternal principle, logos, that did not change. Thus, he did believe in eternal reality after all. In our own era, Einstein reiterated this view when he claimed that, although nature may change continuously, the laws of nature stay forever the same. But some philosophers and many scientists now believe that not even the laws are perma- nent; does this mean that nothing is real? Philosophers have argued about this for 2,500 years. From our abbreviated discussion of the earliest Western philosophers, we can already see many of the possibilities for a metaphysics, an account of ulti- mate reality, according to which you can articulate your own understanding of the world. The Law of Logos Listen... not to me, but to the Logos. — Heraclitus First, a metaphysics may hold that reality consists of purely physical or ma- terial components, whether these are elements such as water or fire or modern components such as atoms, electrons, quarks, and electromagnetic and intranu- clear forces. This is called materialism. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 120 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality Ancient Immaterialism Pythagoras (c. 570-c. 490, Samos)—Reality is ultimately numbers. Parmenides (539–492 bce, Elea)—Reality is unchanging and unknown to us. Zeno of Elea (fifth century bce)—Reality is unchanging and motion is unreal. (“Zeno’s paradoxes” were intended as proofs of this. See, for exam- ple, the paradox of the arrow on p. 21.) Heraclitus (540–480 bce, Ephesus)—Reality is change, but with an under- lying logos, or logic. Thus, Heraclitus is sometimes interpreted as saying that reality is logos. *All dates are approximate. Second, and opposed to materialism, is the view that the basic components of reality are not physical or material at all, but are, for example, spirits, or minds, or numbers. This is called immaterialism. The whole history of Western thought, in fact, has tended to be split between these two sets of views. Most scientists are materialists, whereas many religions defend immaterialism. But many scientists are also religious, and they recognize the importance of immaterialism, too. And most religious thinkers recognize the material nature of the physical world. So one of the most enduring problems of philosophy is the reconciliation of the two. Plato’s Forms y The ancient philosopher Plato (see p. 12) tried to have both materialism and im- materialism, but he clearly thought that what was more real were the immaterial entities, which he called Forms. The Forms represent Plato’s attempt to capture the mathematical insights of Pythagoras and to correlate being and becoming, fol- lowing Parmenides and Heraclitus. Like Pythagoras, Plato emphasized the im- portance of form over material content. Like Parmenides, he emphasized the idea that ultimate reality must be changeless; accordingly our ordinary world of expe- rience cannot be ultimate reality. But like Heraclitus, Plato also appreciated the importance of apparent change, and the need for some underlying logos or ulti- mate principle, to make sense of it all. Plato’s Forms are his version of the logos. An example of a Form is this: Suppose you draw a triangle on this piece of paper and attempt to prove a theorem of Euclidean geometry about triangles. Now the first thing to notice is that this particular triangle, as you have drawn it, is not even close to being an accurate triangle; but even if you used the most precise instruments in the world, it would still not have exactly straight sides, the lines would still have some thickness (which a true line does not have), and the Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Plato’s Forms 121 angles would be slightly in error. In other words, it is impossible to draw a true triangle. Second, even if the triangle were much better drawn, how is it possible that by proving something about this triangle you have thereby proven something about all triangles? Plato’s answer is: Because, what you are really dealing with here is not this triangle at all, which is only a poor material example. You are re- ally dealing with the Form triangle, an immaterial perfect triangle that does not exist anywhere in this material world. Where does the Form triangle exist? Today most people would say, “In our minds” or “It doesn’t.” But Plato thought that it does exist. Indeed, his whole philosophy is based on the view that there are two worlds, this world of ordinary material existence, in which we spend most of our time and energy, and another world, a world of pure Forms, which is eternal, immaterial, and more real than this one. The first world consists of material things that change, die, and disap- pear; Plato called it the World of Becoming. It is not unreal, but it is less real than the other world, the truly real world, which he called the World of Being. In his book The Republic, Plato gives us a dramatic account of the relationship between these two worlds in terms of a myth, “the myth of the cave.” The cave represents the world of shadows, the World of Becoming, in which we all live. The sun- light represents the truth, the World of Being, which we can know only through reason, not through experience. B A C The Myth of the Cave (excerpt) SOCRATES: Imagine men to be living in an underground cavelike dwell- ing place, which has a way up to the light along its whole width, but the entrance is a long way up. The men have been there from childhood, with their neck and legs in fetters, so that they remain in the same place and can only see ahead of them, as their bonds prevent them turning their heads. Light is provided by a fire burning some way behind them, and on a higher ground, there is a path across the cave and along this a low wall has been built, like the screen at a puppet show in front of the performers who show their puppets above it.... See then also men car- rying along that wall, so that they overtop it, all kinds of artifacts, stat- ues of men, reproductions of other animals in stone or wood fashioned in all sorts of ways, and, as is likely, some of the carriers are talking while others are silent.... Altogether then... such men would believe the truth to be nothing else than the shadows of the artifacts? (continues) Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 122 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality The Myth of the Cave (excerpt) (continued ) GLAuCON: They must believe that. SOCRATES: Consider then what deliverance from their bonds and the cur- ing of their ignorance would be if something like this naturally happened to them. Whenever one of them was freed, had to stand up suddenly, turn his head, walk, and look up toward the light, doing all that would give him pain, the flash of the fire would make it impossible for him to see the objects of which he had earlier seen the shadows. What do you think he would say if he was told that what he saw was foolishness, that he was now somewhat closer to reality and turned to things that existed more fully, that he saw more correctly?... And if one were to drag him thence by force up the rough and steep path, and did not let him go before he was dragged into the sunlight, would he not be in physical pain and angry as he was dragged along? When he came into the light, with the sunlight filling his eyes, he would not be able to see a single one of the things which are now said to be GLAuCON: Not at once, certainly. SOCRATES: I think he would need time to get adjusted before he could see things in the world above.... Then, at last, he would be able to see the sun, not images of it in water or in some alien place, but the sun itself in its own place, and be able to contemplate it... After this he would reflect that it is the sun which provides the seasons and the years, which governs everything in the visible world, and is also in some way the cause of those other things which he used to see. From Plato. The Republic. Bk. VII. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis, Hackett: 1974. In Plato’s view, people who devote all their attention to things in the physical world—the world we experience through our senses—are like people who spend their entire lives watching television. They deal only with images, never with the reality that lies behind those images. To come to know this reality is the work of the intellect and the ultimate task of philosophy. Now you can see how Plato has saved both sides of his predecessors’ philo- sophical views: he has the Heraclitean notion of constant change but also his lo- gos, which lies in the Forms; he has Parmenides’s spectacular claim that the things of our ordinary experience are not truly real; and he has Pythagoras’s view that the most real things are eternal patterns and principles, such as those of mathemat- ics. Now notice what Plato has done: he has taken the parts of all those views he agrees with, and he has integrated them into a single dramatic and compelling pic- ture of the way they fit together in a single worldview. Lesser philosophers might Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Aristotle’s Metaphysics 123 have said, “Well, I believe in material things, of course; I also believe in num- bers, and in some eternal principle underlying them.” But Plato has worked out a view in which all of this ties together. The views themselves, as you have seen, are not particularly original. But almost everyone would agree that Plato is one of the greatest philosophers not only of Greece but of all times, and the reason is the bril- liance and imagination with which he has put his views together. Aristotle’s Metaphysics y It is at this point in our history that Aristotle (see p. 12) enters the scene. Aristotle, who was Plato’s student, found Plato’s two-world view implausible. Aristotle was a far more commonsense thinker, who insisted that reality has to be the everyday world of things, trees, and people, not some other world that we never actually experience. So in effect he brought Plato back down to earth; he rejected Plato’s World of Being and the Forms and insisted, along with what philosophers usu- ally call the “ordinary person” (in other words, all of us as nonspecialists when we are thinking about philosophy), that this world is the real world and there is no other. However, although Aristotle insisted that our everyday reality is reality, he did not therefore reject the all-important distinction between reality and appear- ances that had been developing over several centuries. But whereas Plato sep- arated them into two different worlds, Aristotle instead said that the forms of things are in the things themselves and have no separate existence. (Let’s use the lowercase letter f to show that there is nothing “otherworldly” here.) And in Aristotle, the ultimately real things—to which he gave the very important name substances—are nothing other than particular things in the world—horses, flow- ers, people, rocks, and so on. The distinction between reality and appearances stays intact, however, for it is not always true that we understand the essential nature, or what Aristotle called “the essence,” of these individual substances. For example, just because we are all familiar with people-substances (that is, people), we don’t necessarily understand what it is to be human, what it is to be a person. And, to take a far more dramatic example, just because we are familiar with our small part of the universe in everyday life, it does not follow that we understand the universe as a whole. Indeed, Aristotle’s picture of the universe is arguably even more dramatic than Plato’s; he envisioned the universe as a gigantic organism, growing and rest- less, seeking knowledge of itself. The conflict between their starting points, between Plato’s view that reality is something other than our everyday world and Aristotle’s view that the ultimate realities are the substances of our daily life, is one that has continued in phi- losophy until the present day. (In fact, both views became models for Christian thinkers. Plato’s view of another, immaterial and eternal world, different from the material world of daily life, became the central thesis of Saint Augustine’s philosophy and the main doctrine of Christian theology for centuries to come. Aristotle’s view of a living, growing, goal-directed universe played an important Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 124 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality role in the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and it is still an important part of Christian theology.) We can now say quite clearly what we are trying to do. Philosophy—and metaphysics in particular—is an interpretation of the world. It is our attempt to make sense of it, our attempt to explain it. Some of our efforts will be directed toward specific issues—for example, what things can we properly consider real? Or, when are a person’s actions to be considered as free and as his or her own responsibility? Some of our efforts will be aimed at the whole picture, and we’ll ask such questions as “What is the origin of the universe?” and “Why is there a universe at all?” One way to answer such questions is by the pre-Socratic tech- nique: pick out an essential element or set of elements and show how the world can be explained in terms of the chosen element(s). Another way is the Platonic approach: postulate and design a world “behind” this one, which explains why things are the way they are. A third way is the Aristotelian way: assume the com- monsense world but then show that there is much in it that we do not yet under- stand and that the whole picture cannot be grasped from the details of life alone. The choice largely depends on your views; the pre-Socratic way is initially attractive for its simplicity, but you will find that there is much that cannot be easily accounted for with a single element or set of elements. The Platonic and Aristotelian pictures are much more difficult, but it is for good reason that many philosophers consider virtually all philosophy done in the past 2,500 years to be modeled after Plato, after Aristotle, or after both. Between Plato’s imaginative synthesis of the variety of views before him and Aristotle’s hardheaded analysis of individual things and their properties, our concept of reality has continued to be formed and re-formed, from generation to generation, and whatever we decide to say about such matters, we can be certain that one or both of them had already anticipated it. Mind and Metaphysics y Consider this table in front of us, which has hitherto roused but the slightest thought in us. It is full of surprising possibilities. The one thing we know is that it is not what it seems. Beyond this modest result, we have the most complete liberty of conjecture. Leibniz tells us it is a community of souls; Bishop Berkeley tells us it is an idea in the mind of God; sober science, scarcely less wonderful, tells us it is a vast collection of electric charges in violent motion. —Bertrand Russell, 1912 You may have noticed that one familiar answer to our question of what is real has not been raised. That is the idea that, ultimately, mind or consciousness is real. Today most of us would insist that mind be at least part of the answer, and some people—called idealists—would insist that it be the whole answer. An idealist believes that the basis of the existence of all things is the mind (whether our own minds or the mind of God). We realize that we know of the existence of material Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Mind and Metaphysics 125 things only through their effects on our minds. Numbers exist because we think them, according to idealists. Beethoven’s music exists because we can hear it when it is played, hum it to ourselves, read it from the score if we have had some musical training. According to an idealist, such things are real only insofar as they are experienced in the mind; in other words, it is mind that is most real, and other entities are dependent on mind or minds. Why did none of the Greeks mention this? The fact is they had no such concept of something being “in the mind” but not in the external world; the idea would never have occurred to them. This, more than anything else, marks the greatest single difference between their metaphysics and most of ours. Even if you don’t accept the idealists’ view that the ultimately real entities are minds, it is still hard to deny the claim that minds are part of reality (although ma- terialism is still alive and well in many quarters, and there are many philosophers and scientists who hope to be able to explain the existence of minds in strictly physical and physiological terms). Others, however, believe minds to have their own kind of existence. Three different views of minds and their place in reality have dominated Western thinking for the past several hundred years. All three begin with the idea that mind is a substance (or an aspect of a substance), which is precisely the concept that the Greeks did not have. But in one view, minds are but one kind of substance; in another view, minds are but part of a substance; and in yet another view, minds are the only substances. These three views were represented by three European philosophers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the French philosopher René Descartes, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. René Descartes René Descartes (see p. 28) was a pluralist, in the sense of being a philosopher who believes in more than one substance. (“Pluralism” can have other mean- ings, too; for example, it can refer to someone who is tolerant of various meth- odological approaches within philosophy.) Descartes is usually referred to as a dualist because he accepts two basic substances—mind and body—but in fact he thought there were three kinds of substances: physical bodies, minds, and God. God created the other two substances, and except by God, they could be neither created nor destroyed. The overriding problem of Descartes’s metaphysics was how to connect the various substances—in particular, mind and body. It is obvious that each of us is, in some sense, a complex of both mind and body, mental and physical properties and therefore mental and physical substance. But if substances are by definition ultimate and totally independent of anything else, then how can they possibly interact? How is it possible for events happening to your body (a nail in your foot, for instance) to produce an effect in your mind (pain)? How is it pos- sible for events in your mind (drive to the grocery store, for instance) to have an effect on your body (you walk to your car, put the key in the ignition, and start the engine)? Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 126 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality One suggestion might be that the two substances infiltrate one another, as copper and zinc combine (but don’t chemically interact) to form brass. Descartes sometimes suggested this. But the interaction between mind and body still seems to go unexplained. In fact, it gets even more complicated when we see that Descartes defined mental substance as that which is not in space (or unextended as opposed to physical things, which are extended in space). Once we have de- fined mind and body as two different substances, there seems to be no way of getting them together. And this is even before we begin asking how God as a separate substance can interact with the substances he has created. Descartes never solved the problem of how substances interact. To solve the problem, there seem to be only two solutions: Either (1) mind and body are not sep- arate substances but parts of the same substance, or (2) they are separate substances, all right, but they don’t interact after all. Spinoza would choose the first way; Leibniz chose the second. (We talk about this mind-body problem in Chapter 6.) There are two important points to make about all of this right away. First, don’t think that what we are debating are just the complexities of a technical word (that is, substance). The word is merely a convenient way of referring to what is ultimate reality—whatever you think that might be—and the debate be- tween Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz is about the nature of reality, not about a word. Second, don’t think that these debates about reality are not connected to the more urgent questions about the meaning of life and belief in God: these de- bates about the nature of reality and substance are in fact attempts to answer just those questions, different ways of conceiving of God and his relation to us, and different ways of conceiving of ourselves. A Question of Substance Descartes Spinoza Leibniz Nature of Mind, body, and The Universe Monads (minds) substance(s) God (God) Number Three types: One Indefinitely many, of substances many minds, plus God (the many bodies, supermonad) one God Interaction Causal Substances do Substances do between interaction not interact. not interact. substances Mind and body Monads only are two of the appear to many attributes interact, of the one orchestrated substance. by God. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Mind and Metaphysics 127 Baruch Spinoza Baruch Spinoza (see pp. 77–78) saw that Descartes, having defined mind and body as separate substances, could not explain how they interact. Very well then, he said, the solution to this problem is that the are not separate substances, but different aspects—or what he called attributes—of one and the same substance. Furthermore, if God is a substance separate from the substance of which mind and body are attributes, then God cannot interact with the world, which is non- sense. Therefore, Spinoza concluded, God must be that same substance and, in fact, “God” is just another name for that substance. Indeed, the starting point of Spinoza’s whole argument is that, because substance is ultimate and totally independent, and because substances cannot interact, there can be only one sub- stance. A philosopher such as Spinoza who believes in one substance is a monist. Spinoza’s Metaphysics, From Ethics Spinoza presented his metaphysical system in the style of Euclid’s geom- etry, with definitions, axioms, and a sequence of “propositions” (theorems) that he proved one at a time. Here are some sample definitions, axioms, propositions, and proofs. Definitions I. By that which is self-caused, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent. II. A thing is called finite after its kind, when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature; for instance, a body is called finite because we can always conceive another greater body. So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body. III. By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed inde- pendently of any other conception. IV. By attribute, I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance. V. By mode, I mean the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself. VI. By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite—that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, in which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality. (continues) Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 128 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality Spinoza’s Metaphysics, From Ethics (continued) Axioms I. Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else. II. That which cannot be conceived through anything else must be conceived through itself. III. From a given definite cause an effect necessarily follows; and, on the other hand, if no definite cause be granted, it is impossible that an effect can follow. IV. The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause. V. Things which have nothing in common cannot be understood, the one by means of the other; the conception of one does not involve the con- ception of the other. VI. A true idea must correspond with its ideate or object. VII. If a thing can be conceived as nonexisting, its essence does not involve existence. Propositions Prop. I. Substance is by nature prior to its modifications.... Prop. II. Two substances, whose attributes are different, have nothing in common. Proof.—... evident from Def. III. For each must exist in itself, and be con- ceived through itself; in other words, the conception of one does not imply the conception of the other. Prop. III. Things which have nothing in common cannot be one the cause of the other. Proof.—If they have nothing in common, it follows that one cannot be apprehended by means of the other (Ax. V.), and, therefore, one cannot be the cause of the other (Ax. IV.). Q.E.D. [Latin, quod erat demonstrandum, a phrase used in traditional logic meaning “which was to be demonstrated.”] Prop. IV. Two or more distinct things are distinguished one from the other either by the difference of the attributes of the substances, or by the differ- ence of their modifications.... Prop. V. There cannot exist in the universe two or more substances having the same nature or attribute. Prop. VI. One substance cannot be produced by another substance... From Spinoza, Baruch. “Ethics.” The Rationalists. Trans. R. H. M. Elwes New York: Doubleday, 1960. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Mind and Metaphysics 129 In Chapter 3, we pointed out that Spinoza was a pantheist because he be- lieved that God and God’s universe were identical. Now we can see why that must be so. But Spinoza’s metaphysical view has other dramatic results as well: because mind and body are attributes of the one substance, our everyday divi- sion between ourselves as individuals is arbitrary and ultimately unreal. We are in fact all “one” (as some Asian mystics have long taught, too). Individuality is an illusion. So, too, is what we call “freedom.” Because we are all an integral part of the one substance, we are wholly determined in our thoughts and our behavior by what goes on in the rest of the one substance. (We will consider the issue of freedom and determinism in Chapter 7.) So Spinoza’s philosophy, which turns on the concept of substance, ultimately presents us with a picture of reality very dif- ferent from our everyday views; it is a reality in which we are all a unity, in which individuality doesn’t count and in which free choice is an illusion. It is a reality in which we are identical to (or part of) God and should not take ourselves as individuals at all seriously. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, on the other hand, agreed with Descartes that there is a plurality of substances—that is, more than one. But Leibniz also agreed with Spinoza that substances cannot interact. Therefore, Leibniz postulated a world in which there are many substances, all of them created by God. These substances are all immaterial, and Leibniz called them monads. (God, too, is a monad, but something of a supermonad.) Monads, as substances, do not interact. How then, does it seem as if the world is composed of interacting substances? Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716), who has been called “the last of the universal geniuses,” grew up in Leipzig and traveled frequently. A philosopher of the highest caliber, Leibniz also was one of the inventors of the calculus, the father of modern formal linguistics, the inventor of a primitive computer, a military strategist, and a physicist who, in his own time, was the main rival of Newton. Leibniz, like Spinoza, used his metaphysics as a basis for an imaginative and unusual view of the world. But where Spinoza believed that all things are a unity and that there is no individuality, Leibniz was very much an individualist, and it is for that reason that his pluralism of monads is so important to him. For Leibniz it was also important that God is not simply identical to the universe, but sepa- rate from it and watching over it, guaranteeing that this is “the best of all possible worlds” (see pp. 86 and 399). Spinoza saw the world as wholly determined and without freedom; Leibniz thought that what is most important—and what in fact defines each monad—is its individuality and spontaneity. To prove this, he devel- oped the following view of reality. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 130 Chapter 4–The Nature of Reality An Introduction to Monads: Leibniz 1. The Monad, of which we will speak here, is nothing else than a simple sub- stance, which goes to make up composites; by simple we mean without parts. 2. There must be simple substances because there are composites; for a com- posite is nothing else than a collection or aggregatum of simple substances.... 8. Still Monads must have some qualities, otherwise they would not even be ex- istences. And if simple substances did not differ at all in their qualities, there would be no means of perceiving any change in things. Whatever is in a com- posite can come into it only through its simple elements and the Monads, if they were without qualities, since they do not differ at all in quantity, would be indistinguishable one from another. For instance, if we imagine a plenum or completely filled space, where each part receives only the equivalent of its own previous motion, one state of things would not be distinguishable from another. 9. Each Monad, indeed, must be different from every other. For there are never in nature two beings which are exactly alike, and in which it is not possible to find a difference either internal or based on an intrinsic property. —Monadology, 1714 Each monad is something like an individual mind. There are no physical substances as such, only appearances of them. Moreover, the monads don’t interact; they only appear to do so. Imagine yourself in a room, not merely surrounded by television screens but by the most sophisticated equipment of virtual reality. Television offers visual experiences that are limited to two di- mensions and audio experiences that are limited by the placement and range of the speaker system. But a virtual-reality room, such as the holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation, provides holistic experiences. You can travel to dis- tant lands, test your ability to be a good parent, or even indulge in a sexual fantasy that you would never consider in “actual” reality. The equipment does not intrude itself: you see no wires, tubes, or boxes, and you can sense no difference between the apparent world and the real world. On the holodeck, you experience the world or, rather, images of the world, and each of us—each in our own little rooms—experiences on the holodeck our own perspective on the world. God has programmed all of us to have the right perspective and the right images so that it seems as if we are all looking at the same world and at each other, but in reality we are not. Like all other monads, we never actually see ea