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Rationally Speaking: January 2005
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A monthly e-column by
Massimo
Pigliucci
N. 57, January 2005
Nonsense on stilts, an example
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This column can be posted for free on any appropriate web site and reprinted
in hard copy by permission. If you are interested in receiving the html
code or the text, please send an email.
Nonsense on stilts, an example
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Philosophy is supposed to be about clarifying concepts and bringing
rigor and critical thinking to the analysis of complex problems.
Socrates, for example, thought of himself as a philosophical midwife,
helping people bringing into the clear what they really believed by
questioning them until they were aware of the contradictions in what
they thought. Unfortunately, much technical and popular philosophical
writing seems to do exactly the opposite, with authors indulging in
statements that equivocate and obfuscate matters, resulting in the
regrettable propagation of much nonsense. As an example, I will comment
on a recent article by John-Francis Phipps on the philosophy of Henri
Bergson, which appeared in Philosophy Now (October/November ‘04). I am
picking on Phipps not because his article is worse than many others,
nor because Bergson’s ideas are particularly bad, but simply because it
just happens that I’m writing this column during a trans-Atlantic
flight, and my most obvious example of nonsense on stilts (as
philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously referred to shaky reasoning) was
Phipps’ essay.
Phipps starts out with an unequivocal example of purely rhetorical
statement: he says that he read Bertrand Russell’s critique of Bergson
and found that it “provided unconvincing reasons to justify his
[Russell’s] prejudice.” Why was Russell’s opinion of Bergson a
“prejudice,” rather than an informed opinion based on the examination
of the Frenchman’s philosophy? When people begin their attacks with
rhetoric rather than substance, one can smell more nonsense coming up,
and I was not disappointed just a few lines further into Phipps’
article. Bergson, apparently, started out his career being “wholly
imbued with mechanistic theories” (his words), and as we all know this
quickly leads to the cold and unfriendly view of the world and humanity
promoted by science. Fortunately, Bergson saw the light and produced a
new theory of time as soon as he recognized “to my [Bergson’s] great
astonishment that scientific time does not endure” (original italics).
Come again? What does it even mean that time does not endure?
If Bergson had simply pointed out the difference between time as
conceived by science and psychological time as perceived by human
beings in the course of their lives (the starting point for his
doctoral thesis), all would have been well -- if a bit dull. But he had
to go on and claim that the mechanistic time of science is (as Phipps
summarizes) “based on a misperception: it consists of superimposing
spatial concepts onto time, which then becomes a distorted version of
the real thing.” The trouble is that science does not have any such
concept of time at all. In science, and in particular according to
Einstein’s theory of relativity, time is a dimension of the fabric of
the universe, akin to the three classical dimensions of space (and to a
few more that we cannot perceive directly, if more recent physical
theories are correct). Indeed, Bergson publicly debated Einstein on the
question of time, and soundly lost (except in Phipps’ view, since he
claims that “there aren’t really winners or losers in any debate about
time” -- a sweeping generalization that is simply handed to us with no
argument to back it up).
Phipps then moves on to Bergson’s conception of the relation between
mind and body. While indubitably the Frenchman had several interesting
things to say on this (as on much else), he proposed an entirely
unhelpful analogy, which Phipps takes to be a deep insight. This
mistake is so commonplace in much popular philosophical, scientific,
and especially mystical/new age literature that it is worth quoting the
paragraph in its entirety; Bergson says: “As the symphony overflows the
movements which scan it, so the mental/spiritual life overflows the
cerebral/intellectual life. The brain keeps consciousness, feeling and
thought tensely strained on life, and consequently makes them capable
of efficacious action. The brain is the organ of attention to life.”
What? Once again, what does this mean? If Bergson is telling us that it
is the brain that allows animals to keep track of and react to events
in the world that may affect them, this is a truism that requires no
particularly deep philosophy or science. If one tries to unpack the
terms embedded in the paragraph in search of a deeper meaning, one
immediately runs into a quagmire that Phipps doesn’t bother to clarify
(presumably because the stunning insight is, well, so stunning!). For
example, why is mental equated with spiritual, and cerebral with
intellectual? Is the mental somehow supposed to be separate from the
cerebral? Can we have a mental life without a brain? But you can see
how my mechanistic prejudice clearly shows through...
Phipps correctly points out that Bergson’s best known work is his 1907
book, Creative Evolution, in which the concept of “vital force” is put
forth to “explain” why living beings are fundamentally different from
inanimate matter. Any modern biologist who hears about vital forces
automatically reaches for his gun, but this isn’t because of a
mechanistic prejudice: the fact of the matter is that saying that
living beings are different from rocks because the first have a vital
force that the latters lack explains precisely nothing. It is the same
as “explaining” the motion of objects by saying that they are compelled
by the moving force, or that someone got sick because his health left
him. Duh. This, incidentally, is the problem with much (if not all)
mystical or non-scientific “explanations”: they sound deep and
insightful, until one applies a modicum of critical thinking and
scratches just below the surface, to find simply an empty and useless
tautology.
Phipps reaches the apotheosis of nonsense toward the end of his
article, when he speculates on what sort of world we would live in if
we had paid more attention to Bergson, abandoned our ill-conceived
scientistic prejudice and whole-heartedly embraced Bergson’s “greater
respect for all expressions of the life force.” What a world it would
have been! Apparently (with no argument to butress his speculations, of
course), Phipps thinks that “by now we would have had an
environmentally-friendly form of global politics ... Political and
economic priorities would by now have changed dramatically and war
would be seen as an absolute last resort ... There could therefore be
no question of any nation, however powerful, embarking on pre-emptive
wars against any other nation.” And so on.
Wow, and all of this didn’t happen because we insist on science and its
despicable reductionist attitude! Never mind, of course, that in this
so-called scientific era, and in the most scientifically-minded country
in the world (the United States) about half of the population believes
that the earth is 6,000 years old; moreover, it is apparently
irrelevant to the argument that both the 9/11 attacks and the
counter-attack against Afghanistan and Iraq have been informed not by
science and reductionism, but by the sort of mindless “vitalism”
butressed by non-sequitur arguments that is so similar in structure
(although, thankfully, not in effects) to new age thinking and the sort
of philosophy that Bentham referred to as “nonsense on stilts.” I am no
friend of radical reductionism, and I am mindful of the limitations of
science as a tool to understand the real world. I would also not deny
that the realm of human experience is much richer than a purely
scientific framework can account for. But this does in no way justify
sloppy thinking, obscure metaphors, and an anti-science attitude that
is all too common in this era supposedly overwhelmed by scientific
thinking. Please, let’s get off the stilts and pay more critical
attention to what we (and others) say!
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