Much of the philosophical and religious thought that may very loosely be categorised as ‘Eastern’ endeavours to show people how to ‘liberate themselves’ both from the ego and from step-by-logical-step thinking. This is a deliberate abdication of precisely our most valuable attributes. Of course, it does not do this because it is stupid—it isn’t. It chooses this path because those attributes are admittedly imperfect. Unfortunately, this is like giving up entirely on going to the doctor because medicine, too, is imperfect.

But this is not a solely philosophical matter. It is also illuminating to look at it from a political perspective. Oriental philosophy by and large enjoins accepting things as they are, going along with the flow—as exemplified by the key Taoist concept of wu-wei, ‘not striving’ (among other translations), since any striving is regarded as counter-productive and surely destined to fail. It hardly seems coincidental that this is a philosophy arising among, and especially suited to, people who politically and socially lacked much agency for change and, hopefully, improvement.

To state it more bluntly: in this regard, it is a philosophy tailored for vassals who are to be kept in their place, and for political systems that see evolutionary change as inherently bad. A dynasty may be toppled and followed by another dynasty, but the idea itself of being ruled forever by dynasties (kingly or even of a modern, more corporate type) is not to be questioned. Give me stasis, or I’ll give you death.

The above qualifications ‘very loosely’ and ‘by and large’ reflect the obvious fact that Oriental religio-philosophical thinking is not monolithic but varied. Yet, even granting this diversity, it would be inattentive not to notice overall patterns. At the same time, parts of this thinking are not exclusive to the East, either. For one example, just turn to the US’s late grand old man of geopolitics, Henry Kissinger, the heart of whose political philosophy, as he made clear in his book World Order, was that something is good if it keeps a lid on things. (He regretted the French Revolution, for example, not on any grounds related to whether people were better or worse off because of it—that was largely immaterial to him—but because it swept away a self-correcting European order that had held since 1648.)

But again, the general pattern is that the preference for immutability is more of an Eastern than a Western thing; the West tends to see stasis as stagnation. The major exception to this dichotomy is in religion—specifically, religion defined not in association with a general system of philosophical thought, but with an organised, hierarchical structure. Religion in this form is always a tool for social control and a belligerent guardian of the status quo in West and East alike. (For social control, much of the East hasn’t even needed it where a non-religion, Confucianism, has been there to perform that role.)

The West stands for a never-ending struggle for change for the better, despite stumbles and setbacks. A lot of bad things can be said about the West (although such rather widespread impressions as that imperialism or slavery are uniquely Western traits are grotesquely misinformed). But the notion that it is better to seek progress than to preserve existing conditions at all costs is one that should genuinely be cherished. This idea has allowed the West to achieve progress in many areas—and to keep working on its own, and others’, problems.

It is logical that populations which see no chance of ever escaping a preordained hard lot or severely subservient position will seek evasion in mystical doctrines that take them away from themselves and their reality. Conversely, their adherence to such thinking helps keep the systems that preordained their miserable position in business. It’s a loop.

The West is also the birthplace of the self as associated with an individual who is more than a cog in the whole. That clearly doesn’t mean that otherwise people don’t know who they are; it means that they don’t define themselves only in relation to a community which they form part of and must, above all other considerations, serve. Of course, a balance needs to be struck between the individual and the group, between the ego and the collective. (It should be clear that ‘ego’ is herein used simply in the sense of self-awareness, not in the Freudian sense or that of an excessive self-regard.) But the moral and practical imperative to be solidary with others need not and should not mean giving up the self. According the ego its proper place is one of the triumphs of Western thought. Having a self-aware ego is our most basic treasure.

Wild, to-hell-with-the-others individualism is bad—and so is the opposite extreme position, that hell is me. (And that thus, I need to abandon or ‘transcend’ my ego. By the way, what a contrast, quite coincidental of course because the context is different, from Sartre’s ‘Hell is other people.’) Every person born comes with an ego. The alternative to coming to life, with the attendant ego, would be to remain in nothingness forever; the birth and the ego are a win in a cosmic lottery that offers staggeringly low chances. To throw the ego away is therefore an appalling waste.

Why does Eastern philosophy want to jettison it? Because it says the self—what Hinduism calls atman, although equivalences in these matters are seldom complete—stands in the way of realising the true nature of reality. Two points about this. First, it takes it for granted that the ego could not, by being made aware of the danger, in some way hold itself in check and see things straight after all.  

Second and more seriously still, what is that true nature of reality which the ego allegedly clouds? In that worldview, it is that we, along with everything else, are just part of, or emanations from, a mystical supreme entity or unchanging ultimate essence, whose existence it posits (Brahman, in Hinduism; Buddhism doesn’t give it a name but believes in it). There are many nuances to all this but in any case, making a prior assumption of what is the ultimate reality isn’t at all what we understand by searching for reality. So, sacrificing the ego to facilitate this ‘search’ is pointless.

Another reason that Eastern philosophy, Buddhism in particular, asserts that the self is an impossibility is that it is in eternal flux: our ego of a moment ago is gone with the moment itself. (This goes for everything else; nothing then really exists except in the actual now.) This is in a way comparable to Zeno’s paradoxes of motion and to the solipsist’s failure to prove the existence of anything outside his or her own mind.

As I have intimated in an earlier article on persistent philosophical errors, in these matters the shortcomings belong to philosophy, not reality. In actuality, even as the philosophers with such proclivities tie themselves into knots, Achilles does catch up with the tortoise¹. Things outside solipsists’ heads do exist and would do so whether solipsists themselves existed or not. And our self does manage to hold on to itself despite being presented with the notion that it was a different thing a moment ago. (Let’s face it, worse things have happened to our sense of self. We thought our organism was singular, and it turns out that we are symbionts with bugs, countless bugs, inside us. Yet here our ego still is. The question of whether the minute creatures have their own little egos remains open. But if they do, they should prize them.)

Next comes the decisive matter of rational, careful, step-by-step thought. The Oriental religio-philosophical persuasion—again, loosely defined—actively works to undercut or at least bypass it. Instead, it puts its faith in a direct apprehension of reality.    

Rational thought is one of our greatest properties as individuals and as a species. For someone in the Western tradition, it feels silly merely to state something so obvious. The fact that increasing numbers of animals are finally winning the acknowledgement that to varying extents they too can think rationally, and not just instinctively, and that they have degrees of self-awareness that could be likened to an ego, does not in any way diminish the paramount importance of these gifts for us.

It is the West (why not say it more precisely? Greece) that is the birthplace of the espousal of linear, rational thought for pursuing any line of enquiry and even for its own sake—and not mainly to create, justify, and extend religious or quasi-religious systems.

Why does the Eastern tradition distrust rational thinking? Because it feels that the latter’s way of categorising and labelling things destroys their wholeness. It may have a point—as long as this wholeness is understood only as a possible complex and fragile inner connectedness, and not as some mystical attribute. But it goes too far, not least with its underlying assumption that only the wholeness is worth considering, not the inner workings.

Oriental thinking, with Buddhism to the fore in this, also holds that the reality of the world is simply too elusive, too full of complexities for rational thought to stand a chance with it. From this elusiveness and complexity—and this is the crucial point—it reaches the conviction that it’s useless to try; Buddhism calls the attempt to do so trishna, ‘grasping’.

Actually, that something is difficult does not mean that it is necessarily impossible or that it isn’t even worth attempting. Attempts to show the inherent uselessness of ‘grasping’ via analogies, like that of a fist trying to get hold of itself or a net trying to catch water, beg the question of whether those analogies are the appropriate ones. Rational, ordered thought does lead to greater understanding in many cases—and even in cases in which ultimate success is not reached, much may anyway be learned during the attempt. Meanwhile, the difficulty of the attempts is made greater by the defeatist attitude inherent in ideas of trishna and the like.

As usual, what is needed is to find a balance (even if that itself may be difficult). Eastern thinking could be less of a quitter when it discovers that the world makes no effort to be readily understandable. And the Western line of approach could be more welcoming of lateral thinking and a hunch here and there. Reason is indeed limited in several ways (it needs to be tempered with compassion, we aren’t all that good at it anyway, it should sometimes stay out of the bedroom, and so on). And yet our ability to be rational, or at least as rational as we can manage, remains our best resource. Pace Oriental philosophy, no, it isn’t doomed from the start.

A word (all right, a paragraph) about any claims that Oriental thinking is a source of superior ‘spirituality’ or ‘wisdom’. The very idea that people were or are spiritually better off when under the thumb of superstition or religious establishments or essentially escapist philosophies is nonsense. However one may feel about that, the proof is in the results: the claims in question ring hollow in populations provenly just as subject to brutal spasms of violence as those in the West.

One should abandon neither one’s self, nor rational thought, nor the rational world—instead, if able and willing to do anything about them, one should work on improving them.

Related reading

Two cut-the-nonsense thinkers who overcame the philosopher’s curse(s), by Nicholas E. Meyer

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The rise and fall of god(s) in Indian politics: Modi’s setback, Indic philosophy, and the freethought paradox, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

1. Corrected 14 September 2024. It originally read ‘hare’ rather than ‘tortoise’. ︎

The post Awry in the Orient: some problems with Eastern philosophies appeared first on The Freethinker.

A previous article of mine mentioned a number of pitfalls into which many philosophers have fallen over the millennia. But what of those who have, more or less, overcome the philosopher’s curse(s)?  

The Modern Cosmopolitan

If pressed to name a philosopher who stands for sensible, resolutely non-mystical while deeply probing thinking, Karl Popper comes eminently to the fore. If, in addition, the search is for a thinker who confronts and makes advances in concrete issues, not just in philosophy but in society and in politics; and further, if someone is sought who made it a point to produce writing that is sturdily clear, Popper keeps, well, popping up.

He may well have been the most important philosopher of the twentieth and, so far, twenty-first centuries. And yet he was the very model of the philosopher who doesn’t assert what he or she imagines to be the definitive position on anything. His basic attitude is no more than that of proposing something that he considers workable, rather than laying down the law—a welcome attitude in philosophy (and, it goes without saying, further afield too). Popper’s writing is peppered with phrases like ‘where we believed that we were standing on firm and safe ground, all things are, in truth, insecure and in a state of flux’ and ‘most of our theories are false anyway.’

No, in the above statement on Popper’s importance, I did not overlook Wittgenstein, his old nemesis. Nobody made more significant contributions than Popper (and in more fields than Wittgenstein); the difference was that W. had charisma, which to P.—who didn’t—was a big irritant. In any case, their rivalry—which reached its high point in the famous episode with the poker—was a great pity, since they had so much in common. Not just that both were brilliant Viennese philosophers from wealthy, cultured Jewish families (although the Poppers were ‘merely’ rich, and the Wittgensteins were the Rockefellers, update that to the Bill Gateses, of Austria), but they were both enrolled in the same good cause, that of ridding philosophy of mumbo-jumbo and baseless dictums.

The above phrase ‘their rivalry’ perhaps requires some qualification: it was Popper who felt it was a rivalry, while Wittgenstein hardly considered him or anybody else to be his rival—virtually the only real intellectual respect he felt was for Bertrand Russell.

Popper’s texts are so clear that one may sometimes get the impression that one is reading a dumbed-down version of them, but that was just the way he wrote—and thought. One of his principal, and best-known, advances was to establish that what allows a statement to be considered scientific isn’t, as was commonly thought, that it be verified by experiment, but that it be possible, at least in principle, to try to disprove it experimentally (as opposed to metaphysical and mystical propositions, which can’t). Sometimes this ‘falsifiability’ principle has been likened to the earlier ‘fallibilism’ of Charles Sanders Peirce, although fallibilism seems closer not to this specific epistemological tool but to Popper’s overall position that our knowledge is fundamentally uncertain. In any event, Popper admitted that he wished he had known Peirce’s work earlier—and went so far as to write that Peirce was ‘I believe, one of the greatest philosophers of all time’.

He also had an answer to those who held that the falsifiability criterion was useless because any theory refuted by experiments could nevertheless be propped up by introducing additional hypotheses (‘It didn’t really fail, it’s just that there was an external factor that modified things’). He said: ‘As regards auxiliary hypotheses we propose to lay down the rule [notice the ‘propose’] that only those are acceptable whose introduction does not diminish the degree of falsifiability or testability of the system in question, but, on the contrary, increases it.’ His theory of knowledge was, essentially, that it advances by making conjectures, based on any source at all, and then submitting them to criticism (and after stating this theory he characteristically added, ‘which I wish to submit for your criticism’.)

Always wary of unforeseen, unintended consequences, in practical politics Popper showed the virtues of piecemeal, careful improvements above all-at-one-stroke ‘utopian engineering’. He dug political theory out of a morass born of a demoralising realisation about democracy, namely that people are capable of democratically voting for a Hitler or for religious extremists. He did it by pointing out that the key to a democracy, even above formal conditions such as the separation of powers, is to have mechanisms that don’t allow rulers who turn out to be incompetent, larcenous, or dictatorial, to do too much damage. It isn’t elections that define a democracy, he taught, but containment afterwards.

Popper championed freedom—his major book on this subject being titled The Open Society and Its Enemies—yet cautioned against ‘unrestrained’, i.e. entirely free, capitalism. He wasn’t perfect (he had all along been saying that nothing is). He could be self-aggrandising, aggressive, and hurtfully dismissive. In inviting criticism professionally, he was Dr Jekyll; in responding to it in person, he was Mr Hyde. He could also contradict his own thinking: take the just-mentioned issue of capitalism. His stance was that it was the state’s duty to defend the weak and poor, and wrote that ‘we must demand that the policy of unlimited economic freedom be replaced by the planned economic intervention of the state.’ And yet, out of his fervid anti-communism (based partly on errors he detected in Marx and very strongly on the dictatorial nature of the Soviet Union), he ended up not raising an almighty fuss when his teachings were misappropriated by Margaret Thatcher, the heartless and supreme political champion of untrammelled capitalism.

Then there was his fiercely critical attitude towards Israel. Popper never managed to get over the shock, as someone who grew up feeling entirely assimilated into mainstream Austrian society, of being pigeonholed as Jewish by the Nazis. It left him unwilling to even try to understand Israel’s dilemma, that of having to defend its very existence even as it was attempting to very hurriedly yet democratically work out its ultimate identity. This is a process that has normally taken nations scores or hundreds of years—he might have considered the case of his own country, Austria.

Popper must have known that Israel was born containing a welter of groups pushing wildly different interpretations of what it should be, including an intractable ultra-religious minority holding the balance of power. And yet over time, whilst permanently threatened by Arabs from outside, Israel actually increased, not decreased, the participation of its native Arabs in its institutions. Maybe it was Popper’s own past identity flux that led him to censure the Jews of Israel with startlingly disproportionate harshness. In any case, there is a time-hallowed, sadly applicable word that, among its meanings, includes that of finding far more fault with Jews than with others acting comparably or worse. That word is anti-Semitism.

The Ancient Savant

In a time long before and a country far away, there lived another thinker who deserves to be singled out for appreciation as a philosopher utterly determined to root out the bogus: Wang Chong (27 – c. 97 CE).

Not just clear-sighted, Wang Chong (alternative transliteration: Wang Ch’ung) was also courageous in a way that we today cannot—and thankfully need not—emulate (unless, of course, we happen to live under a fundamentalist religious regime and want to let it be known that we are deep-down sceptics who reject hocus-pocus and intend to subject received tenets to hard scrutiny).

In fact, for us, it’s easy not only as regards the politics (with the above reservation), but as regards the actual thinking. We can rely on all the demystifying work done by many notable philosophers and scientists in recent centuries. Wang, on the other hand, lived anciently—the precisely two-thousandth anniversary of his birth will take place three years from now—and in a China (in his case, under the Han dynasty, in its second or Eastern phase) that was steeped, as it almost always has been, in a culture of unquestioning obedience to power and obeisance to sacrosanct texts. His dubiousness had only a few thin precedents to go by. (By the way, the British new wave band Wang Chung, whose name gets prominent screen display in the recent film The Idea of You, was definitely not named after the savant.)

Our Wang was a Renaissance man avant la lettre, an encyclopaedic historian, astronomer, meteorologist, physicist, and so on, as shown in his compilation text Lunheng (variously rendered as ‘Measured Treatise’, ‘Disquisitions’, ‘Discussive Weighing’, ‘Balanced Discussions’, and other titles). But it was as a philosopher, one stubbornly unimpressed by authority, whether philosophical or political, that he most impresses us today.

Wang remained tied to a number of prevailing concepts, although he criticised and, when he saw the need, modified them—like destiny (ming) and vital energy (qi). But here’s the crucial thing: he demanded proofs for affirmations, spurned superstitions, belittled supernatural explanations, and dismissed the belief that things only happen because they are preordained. He held truth even above tradition (gasp!). The official worldview in his China was positively Panglossian (again, avant la lettre), the epitome of wishful thinking, in the sense that what was regarded as ideal was thought to be actually the case. For example, the worthy person will no doubt get ahead: it ain’t necessarily so, sang Wang. Good deeds are inevitably rewarded and bad ones punished: hardly, noted Wang. If the ruler is a good person and is happy, prosperity will necessarily smile on his subjects and even the climate will be benign: just not so, declared Wang.

And this is amazing: he got away with it. He wasn’t decapitated, or forced to drink hemlock (as Socrates had been 400 years earlier), or ordered murdered by his own son because his thinking was too free and offended religion (as happened to the great astronomer-mathematician Ulugh Beg of Samarkand 1,300 years after Wang’s time), or stabbed in the eye (as well as various other parts of the body, as happened to Salman Rushdie all too recently). While the year of his birth is generally accepted to have been 27 CE, so peaceful and unremarkable was his death that its date is only approximately known, set as c. 97.

Wang Chong. Here was a person who truly thought freely.

East, West

To complement the praise-fest, here are two thinkers (in a way, diametrically different from each other) whom I cherish specifically as historian-commentators of philosophy. People who don’t care to go into any one Western philosopher’s thinking in great detail but could use a very pithy one-volume overview of it all can be directed to Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Alan Watts, even in a slim book like The Way of Zen (1957), elegantly renders a similar service as regards the East.   

Russell was, of course, himself a towering figure in philosophy as well as mathematics. In A History, he brings his big brain to bear on philosophy’s past—seeking to put it in its historical context—and he doesn’t just set forth the diverse thinkers’ positions. He gives his own assessments—and his commentaries can be acid. Kant, he says, ‘is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers. I cannot myself agree with this estimate…’ Of Hegel’s Philosophy of History he writes, ‘Like other historical theories, it required, if it was to be made plausible, some distortion of facts and considerable ignorance. Hegel, like Marx and Spengler after him, possessed both these qualifications.’

And yet he is scrupulous in pointing out meritorious aspects even among theories he finds fault with. One complaint that can be made is that, with quite uncharacteristic modesty, he is comparatively, and disappointingly, brief about what he calls ‘the philosophical school of which I am a member’—logical analysis.

One way to describe the task pursued by logical analysis, and the overall current it forms part of, is (in loose terms—not Russell’s own), ‘Let’s sweep away the twaddle.’ Russell did a lot of sweeping himself. Alan Watts, on the other hand, is—how to put this?—in a different tradition. He is selling mysticism and ‘don’t think, float along’ elixir by the barrel. The reason to turn to him, as suggested above, is to obtain a compact outline of philosophical thinking, Eastern division. This he provides: in order to put the Zen in the mentioned book’s title in context, he gives a genial guided tour of Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism in general.

Watts writes with style and clarity—and affably works every gram of reasonableness he can into the narrative. His tone is quite the opposite of the sanctimoniousness his largely religious subject matter might tempt him into.

Zen is about gaining ‘Wow, I suddenly see it!’ moments. A personal takeaway: The Way of Zen not only describes such events, but actually generated one in me—with the small catch that what I suddenly saw wasn’t what Watts intended.

It concerned the issue of spontaneity. The Eastern philosophy that Zen distils sets enormous store by spontaneity; acting on reasoned decisions is for the unenlightened. In consequence, devotees strive strenuously to achieve that ideal attitude. Unfortunately for them, this is self-defeating—since striving for something is precisely the opposite of being spontaneous about it. But it turns out Zen has a wonderful solution up its sleeve. Can you help it, it asks the victims of this trap, if you can’t stop striving? No? Then your striving is itself spontaneous! So you have been spontaneous all along! Watts quotes a Zen master: ‘Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh.’

The cleverness of the table-turning bowled me over. Wow, I suddenly did see something: namely, that with gambits like that, one can let oneself off any mental hook.

One can get away with anything!

Some philosophy-related further reading

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

A French freethinker: Emile Chartier, known as Alain, by Michel Petheram

‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’: interview with Alex Byrne, by Emma Park

‘The real beauty comes from contemplating the universe’: interview on humanism with Sarah Bakewell, by Emma Park

On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony, by Emma Park

Image of the week: Anaxagoras, by Emma Park

Image of the week: Portrait bust of Epicurus, an early near-atheist, by Emma Park

Can science threaten religious belief? by Stephen Law

Lifting the veil: Shelley, atheism and the wonders of existence, by Tony Howe

The post Two cut-the-nonsense thinkers who overcame the philosopher’s curse(s) appeared first on The Freethinker.

From earliest times, philosophers have been found labouring under a misapprehension: that, if it appeared to them to be only logical (or soul-satisfying, or ultimately just aesthetically pleasing) for the world to have this or that property—for things in reality to be some given way, and not another—then that was it. Things were actually so.

However, this is a delusion. The world, and all reality, material and nonmaterial, have no need to conform to what any philosopher, under his or her way of thinking, believes should be the case. And the delusion has been extensive enough throughout philosophy to constitute a curse, for it has kept many otherwise supremely brilliant and ever-so-subtle minds from suspecting that their conclusions might just possibly be resting on unwarranted or indeed solipsistic grounds. But it goes deeper than that: the delusion has often obscured the need, in tandem with the work of cogitation, to try, wherever possible, to actually find things out. This obscuring has even occurred in cases in which lip service was paid to the idea—which stretches back to Parmenides the Greek—of checking with reality.

Cases in point of thinkers being sure that things are the way their intellect—and/or their hunches or their personal or social proclivities—has decided they should be are embarrassingly plentiful. Here are three.

One: the Zen position (which is not exclusive in Eastern philosophy) that an immediate subjective apprehension of reality is necessarily superior to reasoning or research.

Two: Gilles Deleuze’s argument that the foundation, ‘the absolute ground’, of philosophy equates with the plane of immanence. (By this, he meant a kind of soup—more precisely, a consommé—in which everything, ideas, things, the lot, coexist but without differentiation or delimitation of any kind. There, they are ‘in themselves’, which means immanence, not ‘beyond themselves’, i.e. in transcendence.)

Three: the Rig Veda’s account of the dismemberment of Purusha—primaeval man, mind, or consciousness. From his mouth came the Brahmins; from his arms, the warriors; from his thighs, the common people; from his feet, the menials; from his head, the sky; from his mind, the moon; from his eye, the sun; from his feet once more, the earth. Even if this is taken symbolically, as a poetic expression of myth, it is hard to deny that it expresses its originators’ view that society and the world ought to be organised hierarchically—and therefore, that that is how the world surely is organised.

If only such statements were phrased more tentatively. A philosopher might write, especially in areas of thinking that scarcely lend themselves to experimental probing, ‘This position I am stating is not one that I can prove to be the case—but it provides a solid, workable interpretation or model of the case. I see it as superior to previous models of how things are; so, until, and if, a better one is developed, it should stand.’ Yes, the philosopher might write something along those lines. But the chances are overwhelmingly that he or she won’t.

In some cases, the reason for this may be that the philosopher is afraid of not having the same impact, not gaining the same level of renown, if he or she seems to sound wishy-washy instead of categorical. (To be consistent: in the present essay, categorical statements are to be understood as meaning the best interpretation of the known facts thus far.) In the majority of cases, though, the reason philosophers don’t write that way is that it doesn’t cross their minds that their conclusions could be anything less than definitive. What goes for philosophers goes, equally or even more so, for theologians.

The above title, ‘The philosopher’s curse(s)’, obviously refers to a curse(s) that philosophers have lived under, not a curse(s) issued by them. The suggested plurality of curses is due to the fact that from the above overarching fallacy—‘I think so, therefore it is so’—follow others. They are derived or comparable to it, yet aren’t identical to it. Then there are also some that are unrelated to it. This article lists a total of six, including the Big One already mentioned.

Here’s the second—one which, although it can be seen as a particular case of the Big One, is distinctive enough to constitute a category unto itself. It is the belief that the material world that we see, hear, and touch is inferior and/or less real than some other, ungraspable one. This conception is widespread in Eastern philosophy, yet it is not restricted to it. Kant was also one of those holding that the material world is less real than the spiritual world (however that often woolly concept is defined). The mental mechanism by which mankind arrived at this idea is transparent: the world was found to be mysterious, dangerous, and incomprehensibly complex, not to mention often unfair. Unsurprisingly this led to a yearning for a superior, even if invisible, world, and from yearning, the next step was utter conviction that such a world indeed exists. 

Notice that when philosophers gave themselves the task of apprehending the nature of the alleged ultimate reality, of finding what lay behind the multiplicity of appearances, their respective speculations—or gut feelings—took them to different conclusions, about which, naturally, each was always convinced. The example that springs most immediately to mind is that of the Presocratics, each of whom identified different elements as the underlying substance/principle, or arche, of reality: water, air, or fire. But examples also range as far and near as the Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna, for whom the root of everything was the Void, or Schopenhauer, for whom behind all reality lay the Will, or Heidegger, for whom nothing other than Being fitted the bill.

It needs to be underlined here that the list of six fallacies refers to nefarious basic approaches in philosophy—not to the simple procedural errors or the writing vices that specific philosophers might fall into, even if the line between the two may not always be hard and fast. To illustrate: the listing doesn’t refer to unwittingly falling into some hooey or inconsistency that the very same philosophers may be arguing against. It doesn’t refer, either, to grating individual idiosyncrasies, like writing in a needlessly obscure way (with never an example to clarify the points being made) just to show off the author’s cleverness.

Nor does it refer to the fallacy of prior assumption, wherein a philosopher fails to notice, much less prove, some assumed point before continuing with his or her argument. The above-mentioned search for the ultimate reality behind the world provides a good example of this fallacy. The prior (unproven) assumption is that there is one such ultimate underlying substance. (Sometimes the philosophers’ brainwork led them to the conclusion that there is not one but two underlying substances which are opposite, complements, and rivals.)

Incidentally but significantly, why one or two ultimate realities? Why not five? Why not one hundred and one? Why not even none at all? They merely thought it obvious that there had to be one (or the two that are forever fighting it out between themselves) since they found the idea of a fundamentally heterogeneous and messy universe offensive. Many people (possibly most) still do, but this is no more than a preference—in this case, of an essentially aesthetic type. Preferences, and philosophies based solely upon them, do not establish fact.

Reality may on occasion agree with someone’s preferences about the way things ought to be (in which case they won’t agree with the preferences of others who have thought differently). But that will have been no more than coincidental—analogous to the case of someone obsessed with Tuesdays who declares, every day, ‘Today is Tuesday!’ and periodically happens to be right.

Here comes the third of the accursed philosophical delusions: the thought, often conscious but sometimes subconscious, that the way things are in the world depends on human understanding of them. George Berkeley, who took this idea furthest, condensed it in Latin: Esse est percipi—to be is to be perceived. For those who share this conclusion, the arguments are apparently so strong that they obscure the fact that if human understanding colours all facts about the world—or indeed precedes them—this only happens for humans. (If the philosophers fail to say so, it’s because they have failed to connect these particular dots, or because they do not attach any importance to the connection.) As for the rest of the world, it would go about its merry way, or grim way, if there were no humans to perceive it, and even if humans had never existed.

It boils down to this: it could be that, yes, human philosophy truly cannot prove there is a world outside of people’s thoughts and/or their perceptions—however, that’s hardly the fault of the world. The shortcoming belongs to human philosophy.

At the heart of any delusion that things are otherwise is human vanity, even if masked by sleight of brain. What is needed, in this as in so much else, is some humility. Not, in this case, personal humility, but a collective humility based on a true assessment of our standing as tiny creatures on the surface of a minute mote in the universe. Imagine that, one day, humans not only destroy the Earth but manage to create a black hole that swallows up the planet itself and also everything else in its vicinity. Even in that extreme case, the idea that the universe as a whole depends on humans or any of their attributes is an exhibition of hubris on a staggering scale. This, by the way, is quite typical of a lot of human thinking. Here’s a case in point: the idea that mighty planets, stars, and constellations make it their business to determine the characters and fates of humans.

The fallacy extends to science—even, or especially, in its most modern areas. The delusion appears whenever science neglects to say—or to see—that if something remains indeterminable, it may only be so to us. Science will never be able to precisely know, at one and the same time, a particle’s position and momentum. But that doesn’t mean that the particle doesn’t have a precise position and a precise momentum at any given time, even as scientists’ measurements are messing with them; it’s just unknowable to us, and therefore meaningless to us as scientists. The particle isn’t responsible for being knowable or meaningful to us.

We may not know if Schrödinger’s famous cat is alive or dead until the dust has settled. But at any given moment, the cat itself is either alive (even if dying) or dead: a certain scientific wave function keeps observers in the dark about the cat’s status—but that can mean little to it.

Einstein himself, who suggested Schrödinger’s thought experiment in the first place (albeit with a non-feline example), did refer to ‘reality as something independent of what is experimentally established.’ However, this standpoint of his didn’t gain much traction. What is true is this: science genuinely cannot advance except with what is experimentally established (actually, with what is experimentally disprovable). But science, human knowledge of the world, isn’t the same thing as the world—except when human self-importance conflates the two, or faulty thinking fails to distinguish between them.

Some bad philosophical habits that harden into curses aren’t as pervasive as the above ones, although they are still too frequent. (Always read ‘philosophical’ as ‘philosophical/theological’. The medieval Scholastic period was one in which philosophy and theology were particularly hard to tell apart, but there are plenty of other cases in which one has shaded into the other. In some religions the distinction is purposely meaningless.)

One bad habit—the fourth in the list—involves philosophers whose thinking has led them to results that are mutually contradictory or absurd in a way they wouldn’t normally countenance, or who find themselves forced to choose among alternatives when they would prefer to hang on to all options. They could question their original assumptions and start afresh; or they could accept that a few things may just be unsolvable (like finding a complete and consistent foundation for mathematics, which Gödel proved to be impossible). Instead, philosophers with the bad habit in question simply paper over the problem with a layer of mysticism.

Then, after the mystical attitude has shown the way to reconciling the antithetical or closing any annoying inconsistencies, if there are any remaining doubts about details, they can be declared solved through the invocation of a mystery: the obdurate details are not for human beings, or at least uninitiated human beings, to understand.

And if even that fails, mysticism allows direct appeals to supernatural agencies as a way out of philosophical dilemmas. Take the bitter medieval debates over the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, and then, between God the Son’s human and divine aspects: Father and Son could be decided to be mystically at once distinct and similar; the Son’s two aspects could be pronounced to be separate but commingled.

Then there is, for instance, Berkeley’s solution to the dilemma raised by Esse est percipi—namely, that things dematerialise the moment people close their eyes or look away and exist anew when they are perceived again. He fell back on God (he was, after all, a bishop). God, obviously being always awake and seeing everything, keeps everything in existence. Objection overruled.

A fifth fallacy: extrapolating one’s conviction, not to the nature of the world as in the first item, but to the minds of other people. Philosophers who fall for this are merely following a widespread human practice (although perhaps they, of all people, should know better). The practice is exemplified by those who repeat the dictum that ‘Everybody needs to believe in something’, originated by those who themselves need to believe and extrapolate their need to all others. The dictum can be refuted by simply pointing to people who do not believe in anything, in the specific sense of ‘believe’ that is meant here, and who do not miss it. But that would require going out to find if some such people do exist, and it is much easier to generalise in armchair comfort.

Descartes, too, was extrapolating to everyone else when he decided that perceptions are reliable if they are clear and distinct. He was clearly imagining that if they were clear and distinct to him they would be so to others—never conceiving that the person alongside him might be having a clear and distinct perception quite divergent from his own. Different people find different things to be unarguably evident.

And so to the sixth and final curse: a curse lurking in language. Philosophers may build up claims based on language phenomena that only occur in the tongue they happen to work in. German philosophers must guard against their language’s propensity for agglutinating words: putting together a single word for a concept tends to give it added substance (particularly since German nouns get Capitals). Thus, ‘being in the world’ is, in English, an idea; the equivalent German, In-der-Welt-sein, constituting just one (albeit hyphenated) word, is much more. In-der-Welt-sein, Heidegger’s concoction, becomes an actual Thing. (The usual English translation is ‘being-in-the-world’, the hyphenation carrying over to give it a similar standing.)

And consider Jacques Derrida’s key concept différance. The fact that in French it’s pronounced identically as under the usual spelling, différence, is innocent enough wordplay. But it’s not innocent that Derrida makes something out of the coincidence that in French différer can mean both ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’. A philosopher who thought in English might as well, when bringing up that ‘God’ is ‘dog’ written backwards, seriously find some significance in that fluke.

Philosophy is a wonderful enterprise. It is just a shame that its practitioners have fallen, again and again, into pitfalls that could have been avoided.

Philosophy-related further reading

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

A French freethinker: Emile Chartier, known as Alain, by Michel Petheram

‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’: interview with Alex Byrne, by Emma Park

‘The real beauty comes from contemplating the universe’: interview on humanism with Sarah Bakewell, by Emma Park

On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony, by Emma Park

Image of the week: Anaxagoras, by Emma Park

Image of the week: Portrait bust of Epicurus, an early near-atheist, by Emma Park

Can science threaten religious belief? by Stephen Law

Lifting the veil: Shelley, atheism and the wonders of existence, by Tony Howe

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