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Rationally Speaking.
N. 57, January 2005
Nonsense on stilts, an example
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 shacky 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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