When a Book Calls to you from Across the Bookstore...
Nietzsche said that he had not heard the name Schopenhauer when he came across The World as Will and as Representation by chance in a bookstall. He said the book called to him from across the room.
Sometimes you find a writer who speaks to you how you speak to yourself or how you wish you could speak to yourself. One day at Powell’s bookstore in downtown Portland I found an author who had written a systematic, far-reaching philosophy in three large volumes. Robert Cummings Neville called the series Axiology of Thinking and the first volume was titled Reconstruction of Thinking. What he wrote spoke to me. Neville’s philosophy was an attempt to bridge the gap between quantitative and qualitative thinking, a binary today originally unified for the ancient Greeks and split asunder by the European Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution which, as Neville puts it, ushered in the epistemic dominance of the mathematical sciences.
His thesis was that value, evaluation, beauty, and questions of what ought to be had been erased from the list of legitimate forms of cognition and knowing. These qualitative forms of thinking were relegated to second-class status by the success of the quantitative sciences starting with the revolutionary paradigm shift that became more and more dominant starting with Copernicus, and going through Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, and Newton.
Neville’s “reconstruction” of thinking was his project to build from the ground up a new account of cognition that gave proper cognitive status to qualitative forms of analysis. It was a big project, extremely ambitious and his prose read like Kant’s.
In a review of his work, a philosopher named David Hall, who was thanked, I noticed, in the acknowledgments, wrote: “Because of its timeliness, the brilliance of its arguments, and the profundity of its conclusions, there is good reason to believe that this work will shortly become the focus of genuine and widespread discussion.” But that did not happen.
His system seemed good to me. But it did not gain popularity. I asked myself whether Neville was happy. Can philosophical toil, in hard-working obscurity, provide life satisfaction on its own?
I googled him and when I saw a picture of Neville practicing Tai-Chi, I had my answer.
Western civilization has been dominated by two ideals of thinking, Neville says: qualitative and quantitative thinking. The ancient Greeks possessed a worldview that unified the two types. On the one hand, the important task “of discerning and classifying the qualities of things,” (my italics) was achieved by Aristotle’s “celebrated analysis of scientific knowledge” which distinguished four modes of analysis, discovery, and questioning: “Why is a thing what it is? What form is it? What is it for? What made it?”
And, on the other hand, the ideal of quantitative analysis, associated with Pythagoras and Plato, held that “the most rational form of understanding is mathematical.” If things can be quantified then “the internal perspicacity of ratios and proportions in a mathematical articulation of things,” seemed like “the ideal paradigm of rational understanding.”
Man oh man, I like that phrase “the internal perspicacity” of “a mathematical articulation of things.” I am reminded of a word put to similar use but in the humanities: architectonic. Kant’s writings, for example, are architectonic.
The ancient Greeks, with their “integration of the quantitative thinking of mathematics and the qualitative thinking of observation and practice,” created a worldview in which “the world could be grasped intelligently and viewed as being harmonious.” Their thinking was “thoroughly aesthetic” and involved “appreciation, valuing, and being reasonable about both the intrinsic and extrinsic worth of things.”
For examples of this unifying integration of qualitative and quantitative thinking, Neville offers first Aristotle, who “argued that no substance lacks a purpose or final cause: this gives each thing a value for the universe and often for human affairs.” In “knowing a substance… one could… [also] appreciate it.” Plato, for another example— Plato who “spoke so eloquently for the higher rationality of number and proportion”— embodied this integration of fact and value, and even “called his highest category the ‘form of the Good’.” Plato held that the justifying purpose of knowing “is not the contemplation of truths for their own sake but the guidance of social and personal life toward greater value.”
Before the paradigm shift of the Scientific Revolution was entirely complete, Shakespeare, Neville says, could express “the Aristotelian confidence that integrating values [Neville means values-that-integrate] are intrinsic to nature apart from forcible ordering by human will.” In other words, Shakespeare could count on his audience understanding the worldview in which nature is arranged hierarchically in a value-ordering that is not imposed by us but is essential to the natural world. In Henry V the Archbishop of Canterbury advises the king:
I this infer,
That many things, having full reference
To one consent, may work contrariously.
As many arrows, loosed several ways,
Come to one mark; as many ways meet in one town;
As many fresh streams meet in one salt sea;
As many lines close in the dial’s centre;
So may a thousand actions, once afoot,
End in one purpose, and be all well borne
Without defeat.
A few years later Shakespeare hits another note useful for Neville when he has Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida lament what happens when “degree” is undermined: by degree is meant order, rank, evaluation and hierarchy.
Degree being vizarded,
The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.
[…]
O! when degree is shak’d,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick.
[…]
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark! what discord follows; each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should [i.e., “would”] lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength would be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son would strike his father dead:
Force would be right; or rather, right and wrong—
Between whose endless jar justice resides—
Would lose their names, and so would justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
One-hundred years after Shakespeare’s death the European Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution would have completed its gradual and ultimately total domination of the Western mode of cognition.
The development of the mathematical sciences from roughly 1550 to 1700 seemed initially to be a good “first step toward integrating qualitative and quantitative thought.” But, Neville argues, it ultimately was a “misstep” because “the conception of mathematical science excluded rational thought about the values of things.” Mathematical science “knows things as facts and therefore thinks of the world as a totality of facts,” which is, of course, Wittgenstein’s terminology. (“The world is all that is the case… The world is the totality of facts…”) Values, however, cannot be shoe horned into that understanding of facts.
“Mathematical science is definitely not the integrative ideal the Greeks had in mind… Neither Plato nor Aristotle would have recognized his ambitions in the work of Newton,” Nevill writes.
Valuing is a different kind of thing. “Events of valuing may be treated as facts,” but valuing “is a different kind of thinking from rational knowing which accords with the ideal of mathematical science.”
What is it about the ideal of mathematical science that excludes valuation? First understand what Neville means by “ideal.”
“An ideal construct selects certain elements of its subject as being important and then articulates them as existing in some ideal relationship. Mathematical science is an ideal construct (or rather, a whole family of ideal constructs) of what cognitive experience ought to be.”
“If an ideal construct is powerful within a culture, it serves to legitimate or de-legitimate various elements of actual experience… Mathematical science… has legitimated those elements of experience that lend themselves to scientific interpretation…”
“Thus, within our experience we have come to view as real those things that might be knowable according to some conception of mathematical science, while prizing the approaches to knowing that lead to science.”
The cultural dominance achieved by mathematical science contributed enormously to “the impoverishment of the conception of knowledge in areas having to do with value” and Neville mentions here political theory, ethics and aesthetics. But I would say it led to the impoverishment of all disciplines within the Geisteswissenschaften.
“Generally speaking, in all areas, the approach to the values involved has become increasing harder to classify as cognitive because the ideal construct of mathematical science dictates another meaning for cognition.”
For example, in political science political debate is called a process of “democratic will formation,” not one of “cognitive discovery of the best policy,” that latter formulation being how the Greeks would have understood political debate.
Another example: “In industrialized countries, ethics is regarded by most lay people, and by many philosophers as well, as noncognitive valuation.” And aesthetics is a function of “feeling in contrast to knowledge.”
If this binary between real, knowledge-producing cognition like science and subjective feelings, opinions, evaluations and values (is versus ought) strikes you as no-duh, as unimpeachable, then more to Neville’s point. He is saying that this binary is powerful and all-pervasive. But it has a history, he reminds us. There was a time without it. Because it is up to us we are responsible for it. And his ambition is to build up a systematic philosophy of thinking that bridges that obvious-seeming gap between fact and value.
But one more example of the exclusion of valuation from meaningful cognition: Neville offers Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (which I already mentioned) as the philosophical paradigm inherited from mathematical science boiled down to its essence.
“The world is the totality of facts… All propositions are of equal value. The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. [Wittgenstein intentionally does not say “things happen as they should or ought to happen,” a view from another epoch.] In it there is no value… Hence also there can be no ethical propositions…. It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed… [He means cannot be expressed with the rigor required of proper meaningful expressions of facts.] Ethics [Wittgenstein continues] and aesthetics are one.”
Neville finds among philosophers a small number of allies. Pierce, James, and Dewey “showed that actual thinking experience is shot through with values and valuing.” Whitehead provided a reinforcing “comprehensive theoretical vision” and Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty “began the systematic description of the basic dimensions of experience that demonstrate qualities for the understanding of which mathematical sciences simply would be inappropriate.” Neville is talking about consciousness.
But lest an important question be begged, Neville also tasks himself with showing positively that “valuation is a legitimately cognitive part of thinking,” and to discuss the following questions, answers to which are assumed in the need for the reconstruction of thinking: “What if there is no valuational knowledge? What if moral values cannot be grounded? What if art is mere illusion? What if there is no unitary nature of human life, no transcendental principle on unitary consciousness, no ideal of spiritual perfection worth pursuing?”
“The only genuine proof of these and other valuations would have to be a long-range construction of a new conception of the foundations of thinking, one that succeeds in legitimating the value aspects of prima facie experience where the ideal of mathematical science failed.”
And if that doesn’t do it for you, there’s always Tai-Chi.