An Aristotelian Foundation for Objectivity

    And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the second of today's Featured Articles by H. Acstonus.  This brilliant article discusses Objectivity in today's world:

    Objectivity has been under attack for generations. Today, it’s under a particularly destructive assault. Postmodernists reject the very notion of objective truth, and many hold that there are separate realities-as well as truths-for separate groups based of such things a economic status, gender, race, and culture. This approach is self-contradictory, and if taken literally would amount to the complete destruction of all knowledge. It has come to the forefront because of epistemological confusion: the concept of objectivity has not been properly understood, and is consequently in danger of being abandoned. This confusion is the fault of the philosophers.

     Rather than showing the other disciplines proper methods needed to acquire knowledge, philosophers for the last two hundred years have been proclaiming that knowledge is impossible. Kant, one of the most influential philosophers in history, proclaimed: “All attempts which have hitherto been made to answer natural questions … have always met with unavoidable contradictions, we cannot rest satisfied with … the pure faculty of reason itself.” Once the possibility of real knowledge is rejected, only subjective or social “reality” is left standing. The world becomes an arbitrary social construct. Truth becomes mere fiction.

     Most of humankind’s past has been spent mired in supernaturalism, faith, and tradition. For brief periods, like sparks in a sea of darkness, limited progress in epistemological methodology was made. But the Enlightenment changed everything-for the first time since Ancient Greece a rational outlook on the world became widespread. Rather than being a brief spark, the Enlightenment set the world afire. It seemed that humankind would finally be free from the constraints of superstition. But the scientific outlook on the world was incomplete, and it was not long before the Enlightenment came under attacks which its advocates could not defend against. Reason as a method of achieving knowledge was not fully understood, and could not be properly defended against critical scrutiny.

    As soon as it seemed the debate over science vs. faith had been won by the advocates of the Enlightenment, several thinkers dealt a series of crippling blows to the very notion of rational enquiry. Philosophical objections were leveled against science and reason by thinkers such as Hume and Kant, and these objections have yet to be answered by any prominent modern thinker. Consequently, an intellectual revolt against reason occurred during the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century most intellectuals had abandoned the Enlightenment. One could even say that an Anti-Enlightenment Project has been under way-an intellectual assault on reason and science. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the assault continues.

     Because thinkers throughout history have overwhelmingly spent their efforts on the negation of knowledge rather than the search for it, little is known about how to attain it. Millennia dominated by supernatural views of existence, with comparatively little effort spent on developing a philosophy of reason, have left our civilization with an impoverished understanding of rational inquiry.

   What would a defense of objectivity, and of reason and science, consist of? Such a defense would have to do several things: it would have to answer the attacks on the validity of sense experience, ground the basic principles of logic in irrefutable first principles, formulate a proper understanding of causality, and show how abstract conceptual knowledge can correspond to an external reality. Twenty-four centuries ago the foundations for such a defense were already laid by the philosopher Aristotle, and it is from an essentially Aristotelian base that a modern attempt to refute the attacks against reason and science must be made.         

Aristotle is considered, along with Plato and Kant, to be one of the three most influential thinkers in the history of western civilization. But Aristotle’s thought has never dominated western civilization in the way Plato’s used to and Kant’s does now. Lost for hundreds of years, his work was not even seriously studied by westerners until one and a half thousand years after his death, in the thirteenth century. After the re-discovery of Aristotle’s major works, Catholic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas began to incorporate certain aspects of his system into their religious views. A kind of Aristotle-by-proxy was consequently advocated by medieval scholastics.

   By the renaissance, philosophers and scientists were already beginning to reject Aristotle as part of their revolt against the dogmatism of the Catholic Church. But they threw the baby out with the bathwater. What they were rejecting was not really Aristotle’s system at all, but the rationalistic fantasy of medieval scholasticism. Whereas medieval monks would argue about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, the real Aristotle collected biological specimens. Aristotle the earthly, ancient Greek thinker was never fully understood or discovered in the twenty-four centuries after his death. 

  Aristotle was very much a this-worldly thinker. Between Plato, Kant and Aristotle, only Aristotle concentrated on the natural world of experience. Plato was a metaphysical dualist, dividing reality into an imperfect material realm and a supposed “higher” world of forms. Kant also divided reality in two. In his system there is a noumenal world of “things-in-themselves” and a phenomenal world of mere “appearance.” A proper defense of reason and science would require a complete rejection of dualism in any form-an Aristotelian approach. It would require the discovery of principles applicable to everything which is.    

    Aristotle grounded his first principles in what he called “being qua being”-the very nature of reality itself. Aristotle’s world was not split in two, but a single whole. His first principles applied to all of existence. In his work Metaphysics, Aristotle says the job of the philosopher is to discover the most basic principles which are the foundation of all knowledge: “The discussion of these truths will belong to him whose inquiry is universal … he whose subject is existing things qua existing must be able to state the most certain principles of all things ... this is the philosopher.”

    To exist, according to Aristotle, is to be something in particular, as opposed to the nothing of a contradiction: “Evidently then there is a principle which is most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect.” This formulation is known as the principle of non-contradiction. Everything which exists is what it is, and cannot be what it is not. Modern philosophy would decry this as a tautology, but Aristotle did not lock himself inside of language-he looked outward at the world. The modern objection to tautologies is a function of Kant’s noumenal-phenomenal dichotomy, and would be dismissed out of hand by Aristotle.   

  According to Aristotle, the contents of a human mind are not circular linguistic constructs, but abstract formulations derived from a straight-line relationship between the subject and external reality. Thus the principle of non-contradiction is not an arbitrary linguistic convention, but the understanding of a universal attribute of existing things qua existing. Aristotle derived the method of logic from the principle of non-contradiction. Logic is the non-contradictory integration of one’s knowledge, and is therefore crucial to the foundation of a proper epistemology. In any analysis of one’s thinking logic calls a halt when a contradiction is discovered. Thus logic is a check on one’s understanding and a means of rooting out error. What is commonly called “common sense” is merely an implicit understanding of logic.

    Importantly for Aristotle, logic was a practical tool meant to be applied to the real world. The method of non-contradictory integration is to be applied to knowledge derived from sense experience. Aristotle identifies sense experience as simply a component of certain living organisms, a means by which they process information about the external world. All attacks on the validity of the senses have stemmed from the notion that because sense experience is a process, it distorts. But for Aristotle, the fact that the sensory apparatus apprehends the world via a certain process is not a disqualification, but a confirmation that the senses are valid. The sensory apparatus interacts in a necessarily predictable manner with the external world because that apparatus and the world are causally linked to each other. Thus, in whatever sensory form a particular organism is aware, that organism is aware of the external world, and its senses are valid.   

  Causality, at least since Hume, has been conceived of as a chain of events, each antecedent event causing the other. This conception has led to confusion. While it is true that antecedent factors play a role, a proper conception of causality would have to incorporate a wider context. In Aristotle’s view, cause and effect is rooted in the identity of acting things. What a thing is, says Aristotle, will determine what it does. An acorn can become an oak tree, and not a catfish, because that is its nature. The actions an entity can take are determined by what that entity is. On this view, when one billiard ball strikes another it sends it rolling because of the nature of the balls and their surroundings, not just antecedent events.

    The incompleteness of modern science lies in the fact that it rests on a purely mechanistic, non-Aristotelian view of causation. Consequently it cannot be defended against critics such as Hume. Aristotle’s view provides a basis for a better understanding of cause and effect, and has the potential to ground science and induction in first principles. Aristotle has the potential to provide for modern science the philosophic foundations it never had.   

  Aristotle also has a unique understanding of abstract knowledge. For him, knowledge does not exist in a vacuum, but is built on previous knowledge and must be related to the whole of one’s understanding. Discovery is not a passive process of diaphanously absorbing truth, but an active process of identification and integration. This is why we need logic-because we need a self-correcting method of inquiry. Applied to sense data, logic becomes a powerful tool with which we can constantly check, double check, and adjust our abstract understanding accordingly. If a contradiction is discovered in one’s understanding, Aristotle’s approach calls a halt. If one’s understanding contradicts the data of sense experience, Aristotle’s approach calls a halt. One must always check one’s premises, making adjustments when new evidence contradicts them. This is the proper foundation for science, and the basis for the scientific method.

    The scientific method has been criticized because, it is claimed, it can never arrive at certainty. But this objection is based on an incoherent formulation of the concept “certainty.” The human mind is not omniscient; indeed the very notion is impossible. At any stage, the amount of knowledge a mind has available to it will be limited. This is not just an attribute of human consciousness, but of any consciousness. On the Aristotelian view a conscious organism, like any other entity, has identity. Because existing things qua existing must have a specific, delimited nature, any form of awareness must also have a specific, delimited nature. Thus any conception of certainty which demands omniscience is based on an impossible standard and should be rejected as nonsense.   

  The fact that science does not lead to epistemic certainty-to infallibility-is not a valid objection to its validity. Rather than being a liability, it is the very self-correcting nature of the scientific method which gives it its tremendous power. It is precisely because of the fallibility of human understanding that we need a proper epistemological methodology. And only by using a proper methodology can we discover facts.

    Reality is not merely a “construct.” What actually exists actually exists. But as long as the notion of objectivity continues to be attacked, our confidence in our ability to discover truth will be shaken. To be defended, objectivity must be properly defined and validated. What is objectivity? Metaphysically, it is the notion that facts exist independently of our understanding of them. Epistemologically, it is the notion that we can discover those facts.   

  Postmodernism is the result of two centuries of post-Kantian philosophy. To refute it would require a counterattack against Kant and other philosophers such as Hume. Indeed the entire modern philosophic tradition which has been derived from such thinkers must be challenged. Of the great thinkers of the past, only Aristotle provides an adequate base for such a challenge. Any modern attempt to vindicate reason, science, and objectivity must therefore start with a re-discovery of Aristotle.      

Source Material

Barnes, Jonathan. Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Cahn, Steven M. Exploring Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. (Translated by F. Max Muller). New York:     Doubleday, 1966.

McKeon, Richard. The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Modern Library, 2001.

---H. Acstonus (Crossposted to the Egosphere)

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