Back to Monism!

 

Back to monism!

That’s a nice rallying cry, don’t you think? It’s kind of like, "Let’s get back to the old-fashioned values, when we taught our kids that everything was a unity that was reducible to one substance or essence!"

Nah, I don’t see that happening, either.

But just where were we before I got carried away with Hume and Kant and how do we know what we know?

We were talking about monism.

We were talking about the first Greek philosophers, the so-called Milesian school (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes), remember? They get called "monists" because they theorized that everything in the universe was made of one kind of "stuff," right? Thales thought it was water, Anaximander thought it was the indefinite (or apeiron), and Anaximenes thought it was aer (like air, but a little thicker, like in L.A.).

And they were all wrong, right?

Okay.

Well, actually Anaximander kind of got kind of closer to the truth than the other guys, didn’t he? I mean, he reasoned that the essential stuff couldn’t be any one particular element that you’d find in the world, right? It would have to be something that was more fundamental and indeterminate than that if it could change into everything else, wouldn’t it?

Hmm . . . What does modern science say?

Like I mentioned once before, it kind of sounds like way physicists talk about energy, isn’t it? I mean, if I understand them correctly, everything in the universe is convertible to energy, right? And energy can neither be created or destroyed - there’s always just so much out there. (Presumably just the right amount.)

Well, doesn’t that kind of sound like what Anaximander was talking about?

Of course, Anaximander didn’t say anything about energy. He never brought his theory up to a scientific level where you could test it to see if he was right, did he? Nah, he was more of what we’d call a proto-scientist. He was dealing in abstract concepts, which is basically all the guy had to work with.

So if we’re good Kantians (I presume everybody here is by now), we’d have to say that Anaximander really wasn’t dealing with "the phenomenal world" of empirical reality where you can use your senses to determine the truth, could we?

No, the apeiron was something just a little too abstract for that.

So Anaximander was dealing with what?

That’s right! He was dealing with the "noumenal world." And we can’t know anything about that, can we?

Well?

Kant says we can’t, right?

Okay, let’s take a closer look at the difference.

If Anaximander was talking about "the phenomenal world," then when he said "the world" or "reality" or "everything" (or whatever it was he said in Ionian Greek), he would have to be referring to "the physical universe that we can observe." But Anaximander didn’t know anything about "the physical universe," at least not in our sense of the term, did he? I mean, he didn’t know about star systems within multiple galaxies, forming a vast complex of a unified system that operated under universal laws, did he? Nor did he have an inkling of an idea about the miniscule world of the atom and subatomic particles, where things seem to behave a little differently. Nope.

Hey, let’s cut the guy some slack. He lived in the 6th century BCE for crying out loud!

But when Anaximander thought about "the world" (or whatever he called it), he had some sort of picture in his head, didn’t he? And though we know that the Milesians couldn’t have been thorough-going materialists (since the distinction between the material and the non-material had yet to be made clear), he seems to have thought, probably a lot more than most people did in those days, in generally materialistic terms. I mean that’s what he and the other Milesians were all on about essentially, right? Matter? Stuff? Physis? What was everything made of?

Okay, so let’s say that Anaximander was kind of scientific. He was also kind of philosophic, too.

Now, I’m not saying that he thought of "the world" as a purely abstract realm of being. He didn’t. Some later Greek philosophers thought that. Anaximander wasn’t one.

He kind of fell more in the middle of the question. Hey, it was a new question. And it was kind of vague. Once again, slack.

So when Anaximander said that everything was made out of the same stuff, and this stuff was the unlimited indeterminate (or apeiron), he wasn’t being purely scientific, and he wasn’t being purely philosophic either.

I mean, he wasn’t scientific because he couldn’t test to see if he was right about about the apeiron. And he wasn’t really purely philosophic because he never raised his theory to a formal, abstract theory about being in itself, right? The guy basically couldn’t see the difference. This is why I say he kind of fell into a crack halfway between the two.

Now, what if Anaximander had said something along the lines of, "There is such a thing as Absolute Being, and that is all that exists. And that Absolute Being is formed out of an unlimited or unbounded indeterminate, which I declare is a formal abstract principle (or arche), out which everything ultimately derives."

Well, I think then he’d definitely be in pure philosophical territory. And that’s "the noumenal world." So Kant would have to come along and tell him something to the effect of, "You may be right. But you’ll never know it."

Are we all on the same page here?

I think we all can grasp the basic difference, right? If we’re talking about observable material reality, then we can test to see if we are right. If we’re talking about a purely abstract concept, then there’s no way that we can prove it.

Right?

Okay. I basically accept that.

It just seems a little strange to me that we can look at something as vast and immense as the physical universe and meaningfully (and truthfully) say: "That thing is a unity." But we can’t look at an abstract concept like being itself and say exactly the same thing.

Well, you know the reason we can’t, right? Because being itself doesn’t have a definition that we can exhaust, that we can observe and measure. It’s just an idea, and we can’t prove that it’s anything more than just an idea!

Ah!

But what if we say something like . . .

"You know, since the whole physical universe is a unity, I bet that being itself is probably something like a unity, too."

Can we say that?

Well, of course we can say that. We can say anything. But does it mean something? And more importantly, is it really a valid argument?

　Hmmm . . . let's think about that for a minute. Anybody got any ideas?

Wait, what did Kant say about analogies?

I forget.

Naw, I didn't really forget. But that doesn't mean I understand what the hell he's talking about exactly. I mean, come on, does anybody?

But what if . . . I mean just think for a moment . . . what if all philosophical statements - and (hey!) all religious statements, too (come to think of it) - are actually, ultimately, fundamentally, when you get right down to it, nothing more and nothing less than . . .

METAPHORS?!!!

Well, I don't know. What if?

Let me think about it.

- petey