What is a philosophical theory? Wittgensteinians are partly right, partly wrong.

  

There is much debate over the nature of philosophical theories.  Are they like scientific theories?  Is so, to what extent? Wittgenstein thought that no realm of phenomena is the special business of the philosopher.  Paul Horwich in his article "Was Wittgenstein Right?" published in The Stone Reader, says that for Wittgenstein there are no phenomena about which a philosopher "should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments." Further "There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible 'from the armchair' through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis." 

So this is what I think.  Philosophical theories and arguments are stories which are more or less illuminating depending on the context.  They are a priori only in the loose sense that they are not tethered close to sense data or scientific experiment.  But they are based on experience, and there is nothing to keep philosophers from developing their theories in a way that is at least consistent with contemporary science.  Philosophical theories are based on philosophical dialogue (whether implicit or explicit.)  Sure, philosophy tends to be done in armchairs, although that's true for a lot of science too.  And philosophers are not horribly limited by that since their armchairs are generally in front  of computers connected to the web.  And usually those armchairs are in well-stocked libraries.  

So the question remains whether there are startling discoveries that philosophers can make.  Probably not, or not often.  However there are moments of inspiration.  There are discoveries.  I like to think of these as sudden revelations of essences, although, in an unorthodox way, since I see essences as evolving through history.  It is more like "I now see how to say something interesting about art that is relevant to our own times" rather than "I now see art's eternal unchanging essence."

Horwich describes Wittgenstein's attitude as "in stark opposition to the traditional view, which continues to prevail.  Philosophy is respected...for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives."  I partly agree with the traditional view and partly do not.  Yes, Philosophy should be respected for its promise to provide fundamental insights.  However I doubt there is just one human condition, or that there is just one ultimate character of the universe.  Philosophy can just reveal essential things about the world as we experience it, and that world changes.  Doing this, revealing essences, however, is enough to lead to vital conclusions about how we should arrange our lives.

Wittgenstein thinks we are bound to be disappointed if we take the traditional view, and I agree.  But Horwich goes on to say that the perennial controversy of philosophy is an embarrassing failure.  I would say, taking more of a Hegelian line, that it is not embarrassing at all...something more like a wondrous success story.  Each successful philosophical project, i.e. the ones that ultimately make it into the history books, is both insight and invention.... a further development in the ongoing evolution of essences.    

Horwich/Wittgenstein (for now I treat them as the same) believe that traditional theorizing must be replaced by "painstaking identification of its tempting bu misguided presuppositions and an understanding of how we ever came to regard them as legitimate."  This is a fine thing to do.  But this is part of the dialectic, and there are other parts to the dialectic.  It is the process of destroying the thesis.  But dialectical process, and hence Philosophy, is not complete until it provides an antithesis and a synthesis.   

So Wittgenstein thinks that philosophical investigation should only destroy everything interesting.  I think it does this, but only to make new interesting things.  He thinks the point of Philosophy is "clearing up the ground of language on which they [the so-called interesting things] stand."  I think that this is just one sub-project in philosophy.  

So, unlike Horwich and Wittgenstein, who are extreme pessimists about Philosophy, I am an optimist.  (Although I must say that I am a pessimist about a lot of other things.)  The difference between me and Wittgenstein here is that he is a disappointed absolutist.  I never was an absolutist and so, hopefully, avoid the illusions of being a disappointed absolutist.

So I have no problem with the primary goals of traditional philosophy, which Horwich describes as "to arrive at simple, general principles, to uncover profound explanations, and to correct naive opinions..."  I just disagree with anyone who wants to see these things as much like what scientists do under the same names. 

The place where I most agree with Horwich is when he says:  "our concepts exhibit a highly theory-resistant complexity and variability.  They evolved, not for the sake of science and its objectives, but rather in order to cater to the interacting contingencies of our nature, our culture, our environment, our communicative needs and our other purposes."  Hear hear!  Except that I disagree with "theory-resistant."  This evolution is theory-dependent, or better, it just is the development of theory.  I also agree that "the commitments defining individual concepts are rarely simple or determinate and differ dramatically from one concept to another."  The "general principles" we look for here are very unlike the ones we look for in science:  they are best seen as philosophical definitions offered as part of the ongoing dialectic.

But it is fundamental to Wittgenstein to avoid theory-construction and to be merely therapeutic, and this will be an exposing of irrational assumptions on which theory is based.  I just do not see why this is an either/or situation.  Theory-construction IS story-telling that is therapeutic.  To expose some assumption of an opposing theory is just what one does in dialectic.  Be prepared for that to happen to you too, later down the line.

Horwich then goes on to apply this thinking to the evolving idea of "truth."  His point, as always with the Wittgensteinians, is that the entire history of the concept is a history of failures.  But no theory ever really fails, it just recedes, or is sublated.  It goes underground, for awhile.  It can be reinterpreted and enter the fray again.  True, "truth" is not like an empirical concept such as "red" or "magnetic."  It is, to follow Gallie's terminology, an essentially contested concept.  So it doesn't quite stand for a property:  it stands for an object of philosophical contest, an essence.  But this means that Horwich is profoundly wrong when he concludes that "Truth emerges as exceptionally unprofound and exceptionally unmysterious" because he accepts the disquotational theory of truth, i.e. ""It's true that E = mc2" is equivalent to E=mc2."" This is just ignoring the problem of truth.  It is a deliberate avoiding of Philosophy, and I think there is something inauthentic going on here.  

No, all of the essentially contested concepts are profound, all are mysterious.  Diving deep into the nature of anything is diving deep into a nested collection of essences and thus, for example, into an entire culture.  What he calls a "wild goose chase" is really the point...except it is never just one goose.  

Of course belief in the disquotational theory of truth is belief that there is one final definition of truth, one that, it turns out, is marvelously unmarvelous.  This is the path of a disappointed absolutist who is still, really, an absolutist at heart.  

  

      

Does Nietzsche reject Truth in his "On Truth and Lie"? Definitely not.

"On Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense" is a justly famous short work of Nietzsche.   It discusses the nature and value of truth in a way that is radically different from most other discussions of these topics.  The fundamental opposition of the essay is between the rational man and the intuitive man.  But to see it as favoring just one of these is problematic.  Instead, N. gives us clear reason to believe that humanity needs both types.  In a sense the essay seeks to bridge the gap between what C.P. Snow called the two cultures. However, some have seen the essay as mainly a denial of truth itself.  Such writers, for example, Maudemarie Clark in her Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1990), see a radical break between the truth-denying early Nietzsche and the truth affirming, even Kantian, later Nietzsche.  I will not talk about the later Nietzsche here.  Instead, I will argue against the notion that N. denies truth in this essay, either its reality or its value.  What he does, and admittedly he is sometimes confusing on this point, is to insist that much of what we consider truth is really a form of deception. However, this is not his last word on the topic. Deception, on his view, can actually be quite valuable.  More than that, it is necessary for human life, and essential to what it is to be human.  Man is essentially the deceptive as much as the rational animal, and in fact, is deceptive insofar as he is rational.  The deceptive structure of concepts and categories, deceptive because we take it to be true, to mirror the world of things-in-themselves, which it cannot, is actually immensely useful not only for action and science but also as a framework within which the the artist or creative thinker can function, and without which he or she cannot. The artist functions within that world by way of messing with it, by way of crossing categories and creating metaphors.  What Nietzsche called the columbarium, after the Roman burial building, turns out to be a set of dead things (concepts as dead metphors) that can come alive only with the right, artistic or creative or imaginative, treatment.  

Readers should think of the relationship between the rational man and the intuitive man is much like, although not the same as, the relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in the Birth of Tragedy.  It is similarly a kind of marriage that involves both conflict and reconciliation.  N. speaks of their conflict, for example, when he speaks of ages in which the rational man fears intuition and the intuitive man scorns abstraction.  But there are also implicit reconciliations in the need that the intuitive man has for the very structures set up by the rational man.  You cannot creatively violate structures if they are not already constructed.  The Dionysian represents the inexpressible truth of the real world that underlies all of our experience, and it is expressible only by way of myth of the tragic play.  So too, the intuitive man cannot express what he perceives except in metaphor and image.  Note that even when the intuitive man is dominant, presumably in the classical period of ancient Greece, and has assured "art's mastery over life," it is through a kind of illusion (different from that of the rational man), one based on disregarding the very needs to which the rational man is so attentive, for example "foresight, prudence, and regularity." The point is that there is disguise on both sides, both for the rational man and for the intuitive man, the later disguising needs under or behind "illusion and beauty."  

In a culture like that of classical Greece, houses, personal style, clothes, and pottery are all invented and beautified with less regard for need than for expression of happiness.  Nietzsche, interestingly, identifies this with the Apollonian world of "Olympian cloudlessness."  So, we are not to strictly identify the Socratic or Alexandrian rational man with the Apollonian.  Actually the reverse is true since, here, the Apollonian/Olympian is identified with the man of intuition.  

Now, to be sure, the intuitive man is a different type than the rational man, and Nietzsche would certainly rather be an intuitive man than a rational man.  For example, the rational man only seeks to avoid pain whereas the intuitive man reaps "continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption" while, at the same, time avoiding misfortune.  And when he does suffer he does so more intensely and frequently.  Nietzsche likens him to Thales, the ur-philosopher, who falls into a ditch when looking at the stars. The intuitive man is just not practical and does not learn from experience.  Nietzsche ends this unfinished essay with a contrast between the intuitive man and the stoical man (presumably a sub-type of the rational man). The later creates his own deception insofar as in misfortune he wears a mask "with dignified symmetrical features."  But if he were to go on he would surely say that the rational man is needed as much as the intuitive man for the further development of culture.  Also, since the intuitive man represents what he later calls the Apollonian, and the rational man represents what he later calls the Alexandrian, we should anticipate his also introducing the Dionysian man, which, of course, he does in The Birth of Tragedy.  

The essay, one might say, is more about intellect than it is about truth.  For example, at the beginning we learn that man is just another animal and that his intellect is a tool much like claws for a bear.  To put human intellect in its place is not to deny truth or to deny that truth exists, however.  For Nietzsche, the intellect deceives us in the first place by the haughtiness and self-satisfaction we get from the knowledge we have (or perhaps the "knowledge" we have).  This seems like such a great thing that man is deceived about the value of his own existence.  His evaluation of knowledge is itself self-flattering.  We think ourselves greater than other species because we have this marvelous thing called knowledge. What the intellect mainly does however (and intellect is not really to be distinguished here from "knowledge"), in its effort to preserve the individual, is to simulate, deceive, flatter, lie, cheat.... etc. So how do we make sense of the notion of the "pure urge to truth"?  That is Nietzsche's main question.  

But this question is not, in itself, a denial of truth or a claim that truth does not exist.  The trouble is with language, the main instrument of our intellect, and more particularly with language in its static, literal or, to be more dramatic, dead state. Nietzsche does not deny that there is a world that we experience or even gain knowledge of.  The problem is with our instrument, or rather with how we usually see it.  We usually see it as paradigmatically literal. And the problem isn't that literal language is without value.  It has immense value.  The value however is not contained in the notion that it is the main instrument of the search for truth.  Actually, it is metaphorical language that is the main instrument for that search. Bear in mind that, as creativity researchers have long known, only when creative thinkers break conventional boundaries and use words in non-literal ways do we have advances in knowledge. 

In reading the essay one must always keep in mind the radical distinction between real truth, or perhaps better, just Reality, and what we will call "truth."  I will refer to the former as Truth and the latter by putting "truth" with scarequotes. "Truth" consists of most of the things that are actually held to be true and which constitute, however, a kind of useful illusion.  For example, we might think that the explanation for why someone does something honest is because he has the internal quality of honesty, but in fact, "honesty" is just a useful fiction that "explains" without really explaining.  (This kind of fiction can get in the way of being a good teacher, for example when one thinks that a student plagiarizes because he is a dishonest person.  Useful falsehoods are not always useful.)  Truth is available to the intuitive man (or, rather, the intuitive aspects of ourselves and our cultures), or better, to the tragic man who combines both the Apollonian and the Dionysian.  By contrast, "truth" is the only thing available to the rational man.  Nietzsche does not deny truth.  But neither does he deny "truth," since "truth" does have value.  He simply denies that "truth" is equal to truth, i.e. the true truth. 

A nice way to understand Truth for Nietzsche is that it is like Heidegger's notion of truth as unconcealment.   

Clark worries about the common belief that "Nietzsche proves the non-existence of truth, at least of any truths accessible to humans." And yet there is nothing to worry about here since he does not deny such existence and even allows that truth is accessible to the intuitive man (and implicitly to man insofar as it is only by  working together that the rational and intuitive man can arrive at it).  Or, perhaps better, it is accessible to the Dionysian man, or even better, the tragic man.

But part of Clark's concern is whether he denies that "any of our beliefs correspond to reality."  What would Nietzsche say in response to that?  If all of our beliefs are in the form of statements made using words that are essentially dead metaphors then I doubt that he does believe that any of those correspond to reality.   Words that are living may not correspond to reality if one means by that that there is a one to one matching of sentence to fact as in "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white.  But they could well be said to correspond to reality when they express truth via live metaphor, if by "correspond" is meant that there is a harmonious convergence between the language and that which it expresses.  

Clarke finds an "explicit denial of truth" in the famous paragraph that begins "What, then, is truth?"  Nietzsche follows the question with an answer:  it is a "mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms" so that it is really "a sum of human relations" which have been enhanced and embellished, at first, but then, and this is important, have been used for so long that they "seem firm, canonical, and obligatory."  It is from this point that he comes to the conclusion that "truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are."  Clearly N. is talking here not about truths but about "truths."  The rational man lives with "truths" and with the illusion that they are not dead metaphors.  Ironically the original metaphors from which they came are more true than they are.  Nietzsche speaks of "truths" as "metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power."  This is intended to contrast with the metaphors that have not lost sensuous power,  i.e. the metaphors that give us access to true truth.  Following this, the "urge to truth" is really the urge to "truth," that is, metaphors that are "customary" and hence dead

Relying on "truths" based on dead metaphors is nothing more than lying "according to fixed conventions."  It is an unconscious lie. Clark thinks this is a denial of truth, but it is only a claim about the uses of "truth."  And it isn't even a denial of "truth" since, again, it is not denied that "truths" are immensely useful.  (One could say that Nietzsche holds a pragmatist theory of "truth" but not a pragmatist theory of Truth.  Again, his theory of Truth is more like Heidegger's.)  Clark thinks these are not really lies since to lie you have to consciously tell a falsehood, but of course one can lie by way of being in denial about something one knows deep down.  

Clark believes that N. thinks that all assertions we call truths are actually false:  but this is not true.  It is that all assertions that the rational man calls truths are false.  Only some of the assertions the intuitive man calls truths are false.  So N. is not guilty of claiming that any true assertion is also false and is not guilty of absurdity. The point is so simple, one wonders how carefully Clarke read the text.   Clark's mistake in interpreting and evaluating N.s theory is just another example of what happens when philosophy fails to recognize the centrality of aesthetics to its enterprise.  In fact, her mistake is just exemplification of over-reliance of the rational man, and no real recognition of the intuitive man, or the way in which they two inter-relate, all of which is pretty typical of contemporary professional philosophy.

Thinking about a friend's comments on this piece I want to make clear that I am not coming here from a position of dualism.  My thought is that in order to even talk about deception you have to believe there is some truth that is being hidden by the deception.   So I do not see how N. can reject truth.  He must hold that although almost all things previously thought true are deceptions what HE is giving us is at least closer to truth.  Similarly, to know, as N. claims, that men are deceived about the value of existence one has to have knowledge of the true value of existence. When N. asks “If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation!” he is saying that “the stone is hard” is both false and totally subjective.  Any claim that something is false, and N. makes such a claim, implies that one believes something else is true.  If “truth” is worn metaphors without sensuous meaning then Truth is live metaphors.  Illusion is created by language, yes, but when that language is living, and is no longer merely a matter of propositions claiming to correspondence, then truth is possible, not as revelation but as poetic truth.  Not only does N.s view of Truth overcome dualism it also overcomes subjective/objective duality.   Hence it makes sense to speak of Truth as something that happens, in Heidegger's sense.

Scruton on poetry, truth, Heidegger and everyday aesthetics

Roger Scruton's "Poetry and Truth," in The Philosophy of Poetry (Oxford, 2015) ed. John Gibson (149-161) is one of the more interesting discussions of the topic, especially given that Scruton begins with a discussion of Heidegger's concept of poetry as "the founding of truth" which Scruton takes to be true! Scruton rightly takes "truth" to refer here not to evaluation of sentences in terms of truth value, so loved by Frege and friends, but in the sense of revelation, or as Heidegger would put it, unconcealment.  Poetry, according to Heidegger, is a bringing forth which is also a bestowing.  Scruton says that Heidegger is "attempting to gives a secular version of [a religious idea of revelation].  And by attributing the process of revelation to poetry - in other words, to a human product, in which meaning is both created by human beings and also 'bestowed' by them  he can be understood as advocating revelation without God."  (150)   In relation to my posts on aesthetic atheism, I like Scruton's idea, taken from Wagner's essay "Religion and Art," that "religions have all misunderstood their mission, wishing to propose as true stories what are in fact myths...that cannot be spelled out in literal language."  (150) and that "the meanings of the myths must be grasped through art, which shows us the concealed deep truth of our conditions, in dramatized and symbolic form."  He also mentions (as a more bleak view) Nietzsche's similar idea that we need art "so that we will not perish of the truth" i.e. that God is dead.  

For Scruton, "the heart of poetry is the poetic use of language" i.e. as distinct from everyday and scientific uses, a use that involves figures of speech that do not describe connections but make them in the mind of the reader.  He makes a strong distinction between the poetic and the prosaic use of language, the later being instrumental, having the property of aboutness, having an interest in truth as correspondence, and having substitutivity of equivalent terms. 

Scruton says that Keats in his "Ode to the Nightingale" "does not describe the bird and its song only:  he endows it with value. The nightingale shares in the beauty of its description, and is lifted out of the ordinary run of events, to appear as a small part of the meaning of the world."  I have argued elsewhere that Scruton originated the idea of the aesthetics of everyday life back in the 1970s, although, of course, the true grandfather of the movement was John Dewey.  Scruton has continued to make major contributions to the field, most notably in his book Beauty.  I have also argued that everyday aesthetics happens when the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and that that often happens when everyday phenomena are seen with the eyes of the artist.  Scruton shows, through the Keats example, how poetry can make this happen.  As he puts it "poetry transfigures what it touches, so that it is revealed in another way" and the test is "truth" in something like Heidegger's sense.  Scruton understands the idea of poetry bestowing truth partly in this way: Eliot in Four Quartets "is looking for the sincere expression of a new experience, one that will remain true to its inner dynamic, and how what it is to live that experience in the self-awareness of a modern person.  He is looking for words that both capture the experience and lend themselves to sincere and committed use." (159)  Yet Eliot's idea may seem overly subjective. By contrast, Heidegger insists on an objective dimension in the grounding that poetry bestows. 

Scruton finds in Rilke's "Ninth Elegy" the source of Heidegger's thought, where the truth of the thing, e.g. the house, "is a truth bestowed in the experience." Further "Its measure is the depth with which these things can be taken into consciousness and made part of a life fully lived."  (160) So Scruton concludes that there is an inner truth to things, one bestowed by poetry, and that this inwardness is of our experience: "the fusing of a thing with its associations and life-significances in the poetic moment" (161) i.e. achievements that are "fruit of a life lived in full awareness."  

Over time, I have become a bigger and bigger fan of Scruton (don't like his politics):  he has the broad vision one might call wisdom and stands far above the usual in the realm of analytic aesthetics. Here is one final quote:   we question what is the meaning of a world that has come to this:  "The right answer is that answer that enables us to incorporate the things of this world into a fulfilled life.  For each individual object, each house, bridge, fountain, gate, or jug, there is such an answer.  And the poet is the one who provides it....His answer is true when it shows how just such a thing might be part of a fulfilled human life..."   

Plato's Apology from an Aesthetic Point of View

Most people who read the Apology think about the ethical issues involved.  However, there are some points relevant for aesthetics that are worth considering.  I will only consider one here.  It comes at the beginning of the dialogue.  Socrates begins by making a big distinction between the way that he will speak in court and the way an orator would.  Presumably, an orator would be an artist of speech.  Socrates insists that he will only speak the truth.  His sayings will not be "expressed in elegant language like theirs [the orators], arranged in fine words and phrases," which style he also refers to as "polished" and "artificial"  (I will be using the Reeve translation as found in Introductory Readings in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, Hackett, 2015).  By contrast, he will be speaking "extemporaneously in whatever words come to mind" with a view to what is "just" or true.  Again, he wants his judges not to pay attention to his "manner of speaking" but to what is true.  So he is not claiming just that he has a different style than the orators, but that his style is irrelevant:  only the truth is relevant.  This of course assumes that truth value of a statement is radically other than its style, and that the second feature may be ignored in favor of the first.  It is implied that there is something wrong about elegant language, fine words, the polished and the artificial.  Aesthetically pleasurable language is likely to disguise the truth.  This is not to say that he is opposed to the orator's art:  it is just that that art lies in "telling the truth." 

I am not convinced that Socrates is without style, that his "spontaneous" style is not a style, or that there is such as thing as simply telling the truth in a way that radically separates manner from content.  What we love about Socrates is in part his ironic style.  Can we separate his style from the truth value of what he says?