It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly.
Josiah Warren, True Civilization
Some parts of this book will seem "materialistic" to many readers, and those who dislike science (and "understand" new things very quickly) might even decide the whole book has a Scientific Materialist or (they might even say) "scientistic" bias. Curiously, other parts of the book will seem "mystical" (or worse-than-mystical) to other readers and these people might decide the book has an occult - or even solipsistic - bias.
I make these gloomy predictions with great assurance, based on experience. I have heard myself called a "materialist" and a "mystic" so often that I have become wearily convinced that no matter how I change my style or "angle of approach" from one book to the next, some people will always read into my pages precisely the overstatements and oversimplifications that I have most carefully avoided uttering. This problem does not seem unique to me; something similar happens to every writer, to a greater or lesser extent. Claude Shannon proved, in 1948, that "noise" gets into every communication channel, however designed. The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Claude Shannon, University of Illinois Press, 1948.
In electronics (telephone, radio, TV etc.) noise takes the form of static or interference or crossed wires etc. This explains why you may hear, while looking at a football game on TV, some woman interrupting a forward pass to tell her grocer how many gallons of milk she wants that week.
In print, noise appears primarily as "typos" - words that the printer left out, parts of sentences that land in the wrong paragraph, author's corrections that get mis-read and changed one error to a different error, etc. I have even heard of a tender love story that ended, in the author's text, "He kissed her under the silent stars," which startled some readers when it appeared in print as "He kicked her under the silent stars." (Another version of this Old Author's Tale, more amusing but less believable, claims the last line appeared as "He kicked her under the cellar stairs.")
In one of my previous books, Prof. Mario Bunge appears as Prof. Maria Munge, and I still don't know how that happened, although I suspect I deserve as much blame as the typesetter. I wrote the book in Dublin, Ireland, with an article by Prof. Bunge right in front of me, but corrected the galleys in Boulder, Colorado, in the middle of a lecture tour, without the article for reference. The quotes from Prof. Bunge appeared correctly in the book but his name appeared as Munge. I hereby apologize to the Professor (and devoutly hope that he will not appear as Munge again when this paragraph gets published - a bit of typographical noise that would insult poor old Bunge one more time and render this paragraph utterly confusing to the reader...)
In conversation, noise can enter due to distraction, background sounds, speech impediments, foreign accents etc. and a man saying "I just hate a pompous psychiatrist" may seem, to listeners, to have said "I just ate a pompous psychiatrist."
Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say "I love fish," and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).
Semantic noise can even create a rather convincing simulation of insanity, as Dr. Paul Watzlawick has demonstrated in several books. Dr. Watzlawick, incidentally, got his first inkling of this psychotomimetic function of semantic noise when arriving at a mental hospital as a new staff member. He reported to the office of the Chief Psychiatrist, where he found a woman sitting at the desk in the outer office. Dr. Watzlawick made the assumption he had found the boss's secretary. "I'm Watzlawick," he said, assuming the "secretary" would know he had an appointment. "I didn't say you were," she replied. A bit taken aback, Dr. Watzlawick exclaimed, "But I am." "Then why did you deny it?" she asked. At this point, in Dr. Watzlawick's view of the situation, the woman no longer seemed a secretary. He now classified her as a schizophrenic patient who had somehow wandered into the staff offices. Naturally, he became very careful in "dealing with" her.
His revised assumption seems logical, does it not? Only poets and schizophrenics communicate in language that defies rational analysis, and poets do not normally do so in ordinary conversation, or with the above degree of opacity. They also do it with a certain elegance, lacking in this case, and usually with some kind of rhythm and sonority.
However, from the woman's point of view, Dr. Watzlawick himself had appeared as a schizophrenic patient. You see, due to noise, she had heard a different conversation.
A strange man had approached and said, "I'm not Slavic." Many paranoids begin a conversation with such assertions, vitally important to them, but sounding a bit strange to the rest of us. "I didn't say you were," she replied trying to soothe him. "But I am," he shot back, thereby graduating from "paranoid" to "paranoid schizophrenic" in her judgment. "Then why did you deny it?" She asked reasonably, and became very careful in "dealing with" him. Anybody who had experience conversing with schizophrenics will recognize how both parties in this conversation felt. Dealing with poets never has quite this much hassle.
The reader will notice, as we proceed, that this Communication Jam has more in common with many famous political, religious and scientific debates than most of us have ever guessed.
In an attempt to minimize semantic noise (knowing I cannot eliminate it entirely) I offer here a kind of historical glossary, which will not only explain some of the "technical jargon" (from a variety of fields) used in this book, but will also, I hope, illustrate that my viewpoint does not belong on either side of the traditional (pre-quantum) debates that perpetually divide the academic world.
For instance, "Justice is the ideal adjustment of all humans to the Will of God" contains the kind of abstraction that existentialists regard as glorified gobbledygook. It seems to say something but if you try to judge an actual case using only this as your yardstick you will find yourself more baffled than enlightened. You need something a bit more nitty-gritty. "Justice appears, approximately, when a jury sincerely attempts to think without prejudice" might pass muster with existentialist critics, but just barely. "People use the word 'justice' to rationalize their abuse of one another" would seem more plausible to Nietzschean existentialists.
The link between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard remains a bit of historical mystery. Nietzsche followed Kierkegaard in time, but whether he ever read Kierkegaard seems uncertain; the resemblance between the two may represent pure coincidence. Nietzsche's existentialism (1) also attacked the floating abstractions of traditional philosophy and a great deal of what passes for "common sense" (e.g., he rejected the terms "good", "evil", "the real world", and even "the ego") (2) also preferred concrete analysis of real-life situations, but emphasized will where Kierkegaard had emphasized choice, and (3) attacked Christianity, rather than defending it.
Briefly - too briefly, and therefore somewhat inaccurately - when we decide on a course of action and convince ourselves or others that we have "reasoned it all out logically," existentialists grow suspicious. Kierkegaard would insist that you made the choice on the basis of some "blind faith" or other (faith in Christianity, faith in Popular Science articles, faith in Marx...etc.) and Nietzsche would say that you as a biological organism will a certain result and have "rationalized" your biological drives. Long before Godel's Proof in mathematics, existentialism recognized that we never "prove" any proposition completely but always stop somewhere short of the infinite steps required for a total logical "proof" of anything; e.g., the abyss of infinity opens in attempting to prove "I have x dollars in the bank" as soon as one questions the concept of "having" something. (1 think I "have" a working computer but I may find I "have" a non-working computer at any moment.)
"George Washington served two terms as President" seems "proven" to the average person when a Standard Reference Book "confirms" it; but this "proof" requires faith in Standard References - a faith lacking in many "revisionist" theories of history.
Sartre also rejected abstract logic, and emphasized choice, but had a leaning toward Marxism and went further than Kierkegaard or Nietzsche in criticizing terms without concrete referents. For instance, in a famous (and typical) passage, Sartre rejects the Freudian concept of latent homosexuality" on the grounds that we may call a man homosexual if he performs homosexual acts but that we abuse the language when we assume an unobservable "essence of homosexuality" in those who do not perform homosexual acts.
Because of his emphasis on choice, Sartre also denied that we can call a man a homosexual (or a thief, or saint, or an antisemite etc.) except at a date. "Mary had a lesbian affair last year," "John stole a candy bar on Tuesday,U "Robin gave a coin to a beggar on three occasions," "Evelyn said something against Jewish landlords two years ago" seem legitimate sentences according to Sartre, but implying an "essence" to these people appears fictitious. Only after a man or woman has died, he claimed, can we say definitely, "She was homosexual," "He was a thief," "He was charitable," "She was an antisemite", etc. While life and choice remain, Sartre holds, all humans lack "essence" and can change suddenly. (Nietzsche, like Buddha, went further and claimed that we lack "ego" i.e., one unchanging "essential" self.)
One summary of existentialist theory says "Existence precedes essence." That means that we do not have an inborn metaphysical "essence", or "ego", such as assumed in most philosophy. Nor does an iron bar possess the "essence" of "hardness." It merely seems hard to humans, but might seem comparatively soft or pliable to a muscular 5OO-pound gorilla. We exist first and we perforce make choices, and, trying to understand or describe our existential choices, people attribute "essences" to us, but these "essences" remain labels - mere words.
Nobody knows how to classify Max Stirner - a complex thinker who has strange affinities with atheism, anarchism, egotism, Zen Buddhism, amoralism, existentialism, and even Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Stirner also disliked non referential abstractions (or "essences") and called them "spooks", a term for which I have a perhaps inordinate fondness. "Spooks" does not appear in Stirner's German, of course. We actually owe this delightful term to Stirner's translator, Stephen Byington.
My use of this term does not indicate a whole hearted acceptance of Stirner's philosophy (or anti-philosophy), any more than my use of existential terms indicates total agreement with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Sartre.
Edmund Husserl stands midway between existentialism and phenomenology. Rejecting traditional philosophy as utterly as the existentialists, Husserl went further and rejected all concepts of "reality" except the experiential (phenomenological). If I see a pink elephant, Husserl would say, the pink elephant belongs to the field of human experience as much as the careful measurements made by a scientist in a laboratory (although it occupies a different area of human experience and probably has less importance for humanity-in-general, unless I write a great poem about it...)
Husserl also emphasized the creativity in every act of perception (i.e., the brain's role as instant interpreter of data, something also noted by Nietzsche) and thus has had a strong influence on sociology and some branches of psychology.
Jan Huizinga, a Dutch sociologist, studied the game element in human behavior, and noted that we live by game rules which often have never risen to the level of conscious speech. In other words, we not only interpret data as we receive it; we also, quickly and unconsciously, "fit" the data to pre-existing axioms, or game-rules, of our culture (or our sub-culture).
For instance: A cop clubs a man on the street. Observer A sees Law and Order performing their necessary function of restraining the violent with counter-violence. Observer B sees that the cop has white skin and the man hit has black skin, and draws somewhat different conclusions. Observer C arrived earlier and noted that the man pointed a gun at the cop before being dubbed. Observer D hears the cop saying "Stay away from my wife" and has a fourth view of the "meaning" of the situation. Etc.
Phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists sometimes acknowledge an etic reality which is like unto the old-fashioned "objective reality" of traditional (pre-existentialist) philosophy and the ancient superstitions which have by now become "common sense". However, they point out that we cannot say anything meaningful about etic reality, because anything we can say has the structure of our emic reality - our social game rules (especially our language game) -built into it.
If you wish to deny this, please send me a complete description of etic reality, without using words, mathematics, music or other forms of human symbolism. (Send it express. I have wanted to see it for decades.)
Existentialism and phenomenology have not only influenced some social scientists but many artists and quite a few social activists or radicals. Both, however, have had bad repute among academic philosophers and their influence on the physical sciences has not received much acknowledgment. We shall now trace that influence.
According to pragmatism, ideas have meaning only in concrete human situations, "truth" as abstraction has no meaning at all, and the best we can say of any theory consists of, "Well, this idea seems to work, at least for the time being."
Like the other theories discussed thus far, Instrumentalism has had more direct influence on social science (and educational theory) than on physical science, although vastly influenced by physical science.
Common sense, for instance, assumes that the statement "The job was finished in five hours" can contain both absolute truth and objectivity. Operationalism, however, following Einstein (and pragmatism) insists that the only meaningful statement about that measurement would read "While I shared the same inertial system as the workers, my watch indicated an interval of five hours from start to finish of the job."
The contradictory statement, "The job took six hours" then seems, not false, but equally true, if the observer took the measurement from another inertial system. In that case, it should read, "While observing the workers' inertial system from my spaceship (another inertial system moving away from them), I observed that my watch showed an interval of six hours from start to finish of the job."
Operationalism has had a major influence on the physical sciences, a lesser influence on some social sciences, and appears largely unknown to, or rejected by, academic philosophers, artists, humanists etc. Oddly, many of these people, who dislike operationalism as a "cold, scientific" approach, have no similar objection to existentialism or phenomenology.
This seems strange to me. I regard existentialism and phenomenology as the application to human relations of the same critical methods that operationalism applies to the physical sciences.
The new language suggested by Bohr eliminates the same sort of abstractions attacked by existentialism and tells us to define things in terms of human operations, just like pragmatism and operationalism. Bohr admitted that both the existentialist Kierkegaard and the pragmatist James had influenced his thinking on these matters. (Most scientists oddly remain ignorant of this "philosophic" background of operationalism and just regard the operational approach as "common sense" - just as non-scientists regard Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics as "common sense".)
General Semantics has influenced recent psychology and social science greatly but has had little effect on physical sciences or education and virtually no effect. on the problems it attempted to alleviate - i.e., the omnipresence of unacknowledged bigotry and unconscious prejudice in most human evaluations.
Transactionalism also holds that we do not passively receive data from the universe but actively "create" the form in which we interpret the data as fast as we receive it. In short, we do not re-act to information but experience transactions with information.
Albert Camus in The Rebel refers to Karl Marx as a religious prophet "who, due to a historical misunderstanding, lies in the unbelievers' section of an English cemetery."
I assert that, due to another historical misunderstanding, operationalism and Copenhagenism have remained mostly the "property" of physicists and others in the "hard sciences", while existentialism and phenomenology have gained acceptance mostly among literary humanists and only slightly among social scientists. The viewpoint of this book combines elements from both traditions, which I think have more that unifies them than separates them.
I also assert a great unity between these traditions and radical Buddhism, but I will allow that to emerge gradually in the course of my argument.
For now, I have said enough to counteract most of the noise that might otherwise distort the messages I hope to convey. This book does not endorse the Abstract Dogmas of either Materialism or Mysticism; it tries to confine itself to the nitty-gritty real-life contexts explored by existentialism, operationalism and the sciences that employ existentialist-operationalist methods.