2.49
‘You’ve discussed the case of an inebriated man who mistook rivulet for river (§2.37). But what about other related cases? What about the person who thinks that reality, at a deep level, isn’t as it seems in experience? For instance, what could we say if someone insists that we’re just brains in a vat and all appearances are illusory? Or we’re brains in a lab and appearances are electrochemically induced by scientists, or aliens? Or we’re hallucinating or dreaming — we’ll wake up and realize that we’re actually in a padded room, in a computer simulation, or we’re about to die and this is our life flashing before our eyes? — In other words, what about all-encompassing cases? Doesn’t your thinking lead to the need to accept these as true or legitimate, for like the poet (§2.48) they all say, “see things like this”?’
How do you know you’re not a brain in a vat, a madman hallucinating, or someone whose life is flashing before their eyes? — Well, but why would it matter? This is the set of phenomena you experience; this is the world within which you live.
‘But how can you be happy with that? What about reality?’
This is real. We’re really experiencing this.
‘Well, but isn’t the reality of one who believes they’re seeing their life flash before their eyes informed by this belief? Based on what you’ve said so far, how would you deny that this view is a legitimate one?’
— Yes, their reality would be constituted in large part by such beliefs.
How would I deny these beliefs? – They don’t gain purchase or traction in our experience. Sure, they’re possible…but what do we mean by possibility, here?
‘But the same could be said for beliefs from other groups! Why should we take seriously other beliefs as viable if you won’t take these ways of seeing as viable?’
Viability has to do with responsiveness to our situatedness. We say: Could this be true? If so, how? How, phenomenologically, could these odd ‘beliefs’ be true? How would it be to see things this way?
Group beliefs emerge from an ongoing dialogic encounter with phenomena, and so emerge as responses to what is. Sure, the strange philosophical thought-experiments—our society’s neuroses—are responses, though caught up in the metaphysics of sensory uncertainty/rational certainty, and fallenness/enlightenment. But how, phenomenologically, could these be true? If, precisely, we doubt our lived, bodily existence; if we assume some totalizing deception based on possibility and doubt. But how can we phenomenologically doubt our very phenomenology? Through universalizing particular moments of illusion or error, thereby reducing experience itself to a form of localized moment, i.e., through substituting the continuousness of experience with moments of error or, in other words, through self-refuting reductionism, reducing one’s experience to the experience of an error, to the error of experience.[1]
‘Well, but of course, these could be true. They say, “Look at things this way” and reorient the totality, just as, for example, Augustine’s view does: “And to all things which stood around the portals of my flesh I said, ‘Tell me of my God. You are not he, but tell me something of him.’ Then they lifted up their mighty voices and cried, ‘He made us.’”[2] How are you going to say these views are wrong?’
Here, we get to the core of the issue: what are the criteria for better and worse, for right and wrong, for true and false, if we accept my position? If I say criteria are contextual, how do we make a decision here?
One of the criteria is what best accommodates the phenomena, for our positions are always responses to what is. There are cases in which several positions could equally well explain the phenomena. In such cases, we can learn from these other positions. Perhaps we’ll learn that these positions are unequal in terms of investments or commitments they demand (e.g., other claims they entail). Or, perhaps we won’t, and any position will do.
What about Augustine’s position: a convergence theory of truth based on a distinction between creator and creation, where all things point to God but are not him. I’ve been offering an alternate view, which, in part, has to do with not seeing how creation/creator or a convergence theory of truth fit the phenomena. Do we experience that the horizon of meaning of the world is a harmonious one (e.g., creator God) or is the world a series of, at times harmonious and at times conflicting, forces (e.g., the gods war amongst each other)? Do all things point to a single creator, or do things stand forth in their being and spin off into their own constellations? Are things created and derive their sense from the creator (the centre outside the system; §1.98), or do things derive their sense immanently? If the this-worldly is held together by the this-worldly, what need have we for the other-worldly?[3]
We must be strong enough to face our situation without recourse to an everlasting entity, since there’s nothing in our experience that points to this. We may be inclined to want an everlasting guarantee—an immortal soul, the promise of morality and progress, an omniscient all-seeing confessor and bestower of rewards, an omnipresent accounting, as found in the One True God—but this inclination reveals more about our disposition: viz., that we can’t face up to our situation without it. A respectful stance, then—one that respects the phenomena—is a strong stance: it requires strength of spirit to face phenomena.
If my claims about the variety of worlds go through (contemporaneous and historical human, non-human animal, plant, stone, and thingly worlds), then we should agree that there is no über-world that encapsulates these other ones (§2.35), i.e., that harmonizes or acts as a convergence ‘behind the scenes,’ for such a postulate would extend beyond phenomenological experience.
[1] None of this is meant to deny possible heuristic benefits of such thought-experiments.
[2] Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), Book X, p. 202–3.
[3] This ‘other-worldly’ should be understood as the heavenly or eternal realm.