Questioning the Qestions

The folowing piece starts things off because it was the only one I had with me in Carbondale Colorado when I was setting my blog up. However it does deak with issues and problems that have been at the center of my thinking for some time. I have long been convinced that false steps were taken in the 17th century project of creating a secular framework of thought to replace the theological one that had dominated the feudal era. This essential and necessary project was mishandled because of a mistaken belief that the old theological framework could be secularized by simply substituting an archtypical concept such as that of




Questioning the Questions 1


We need to ask two sorts of questions about the problems that have dominated philosophy in our time. One is about their origins and the other about their consequences. Many of those problems that have taken up much time and energy fail on both counts as we hope to show. They were generated by mistaken conceptions of the problems that needed to be dealt with in the birth of modernity and in turn they have generated impossible projects and unnecessary and insolvable problems.
Modern philosophy was founded at the time of, and in the wake of, the momentous social changes that accompanied the dismantling and destruction of the rigid feudal system of social hierarchy and land tenure that had dominated the Middle Ages in Europe. The new philosophy aimed both to reflect, and to make sense of those changes in human life, which had taken place in that era. It was also an era of secularization, and this provided another shaping force for the new philosophers who saw the great challenge facing them to forge a whole new secular framework of thought to replace the theological framework that had shaped thought in the Middle Ages.
The aim in what follows will to be to bring out and analyze the false problems, projects and assumptions that these shaping forces were wrongly taken to impose on the new philosophy – so that we can free philosophy from them. There are two main sources of these false problems and assumptions. One is the philosophic individualism that attempted to mirror the new social individualism that grew out of the introduction of private property. This philosophic individualism started from, and incorporated the false assumption that humans were individuals first and social creatures only later. This in turn generated a number of false problems as well as false assumptions and theories that were seen as necessary to make sense of that assumed social transition as well as explaining the transition from a theological framework of thought in which God was the principle and basis for explanation to the scientific framework in which nature and nature’s laws were the basis. The first and most incoherent of these theories was the Social Contract theory, which held that there was a historical moment when humans agreed to become social. But there were later and more subtle assumptions made in order to represent the transition as a natural one that arose out of a common view of the things of the world that generated a common language. The fact that this picture inverted reality was not so obvious and needed a bit of analysis to bring out the fact that it was a common language that generated the common view of things – though that common language itself reflected a shared form of life.
The second source of trouble was the assumption on the part of the new philosophers that if they were to surpass and replace the old theological framework of thought of the Middle Ages with a new secular framework they would have to be able to produce the same absolute and final explanations that the theologians had offered by appealing to God as the ultimate and final cause. To do this the new philosophers introduced a concept of nature that could stand in for God and was thus lifted above the world and became transcendentalized. Transcendentals are always a problem in philosophy precisely because they are meant to stand outside as foundations of analysis and explanation and are therefore not subject to philosophic understanding and proof themselves. The great advantage to transcendentals is that you can give them whatever properties that are needed to explain whatever it is that you want to explain and no one can say you ‘nay’ and show that they do not have those properties. These transcendentals were the inevitable result of the new fundamentalism that had left philosophers searching for ultimate and final explanations.

Individualism
The emergence of private property in land and the private ownership of the products of it freed up the landowning classes it created, and the buying and selling of the products of the land led to the growth of the cities with their markets which in turn led to the possibility of the serfs to ‘run away to the city to seek their fortune’ - in the phrase of the fairytales. One’s fate and one’s occupation were no longer determined by the exact place one was born into in a rigid caste system that defined and was defined by the whole feudal system of production. These changes created a generation of individuals with new freedoms to define themselves and set their own course in life.
This new freedom in turn inspired a philosophic individualism that aimed at reflecting those new possibilities of shaping one’s own life and making choices. One was no longer defined by the system one was born into and could see oneself as something separate from the system – in other words, as an individual. The new philosophic individualism tried to reflect this new social reality but did it in a way that denied or ignored the social and historical origins of the system itself and the new possibilities it offered. The philosophic individualism sought to represent it as an ahistorical fact about humans as such – that they were individuals first and social creatures only as the result of choice or development. We shall argue that this inverted the actual historical reality so that as a starting point for philosophic analysis it managed to generate confusions, false problems and impossible projects.
Ahistoricism
The other great source of false problems and impossible projects was the fundamentalist search for absolute and final explanations. These came to be regarded as the only legitimate and genuine explanations for philosophy because the founding fathers of modern philosophy set themselves the task to turn philosophy into a secular substitute for the theological framework of thought that had dominated the Middle Ages. Since within the theological framework God provided an absolute and final explanation of things, the new philosophers deceived themselves into thinking that the new philosophic framework would have to offer equally absolute and timeless final explanations if it was to offer a genuine substitute for that previous framework. In their efforts to produce such final and absolute explanations and theories they introduced transcendentals – such as the transcendentalized conception of nature which they wanted to make the secular substitute for God, who provided those absolute and final explanations within the theological framework. We shall argue that result of this trancendentalizing was not the production of a secular account but the deifying of the concept of nature. We shall also argue that transcendentals have no legitimate place in any account claiming to be secular and that their proper place is within a religious framework.
What the new philosophers should have done was to examine and deconstruct the old framework instead of trying to produce a would-be substitute secular framework that aimed to imitate and replace it. That analysis might also have helped with the problem that has beset our time – the inability to mark a clear distinction between the religious and the secular and to see that they have different roles and functions in human life and are not in any competition. The Creationists are only one symptom of this failure, which prevents them from seeing that they are demeaning and distorting the Bible in setting it in competition with Darwin’s evolutionary theory. The truth of the Bible is not in any way like that of a scientific theory – established by evidence and possibly modified or disproved by further evidence. Its truth is a matter of faith not evidence, and its object is not to show us how to manipulate and navigate in the material world the way scientific understanding does. As I have often said, we don’t open the Bible to learn how to generate electricity – and on the other hand, we don’t consult social anthropology to work out how to conduct a service or frame a prayer.
The new philosophy was also constructed as a replacement for the theological framework of thought that had set about making its own sense of, and justifying the feudal social arrangements. In the old framework this justification was captured in the saying – ‘God made three sorts of men – Those who work, Those who fight, and Those who pray.’ The suggestion was that the feudal system was ordained by God. The Reformation made the first breach in the rigidity of the system by its principle that one’s membership in a particular church should be a matter of mature choice and not a matter of birth. This already set individuals outside the system allowing them to define their relation to it. No doubt one would tend to continue in the church of one’s parents, but that should nevertheless be a matter of choice not necessity. The new framework of thought being constructed was meant to reflect and make sense of these momentous changes in human life as well as to justify the institutions of the new social and economic system. We need to look hard and carefully at that sense and that reflection because there are distortions in both that have sent philosophy down a rocky road of false assumptions and impossible projects. It also gave the new philosophy the ideological role of presenting the new social order as ‘natural’ and therefore inescapable.
The first mis-reflection we have to scrutinize and criticize is the philosophic individualism which has for too long been allowed to put a distorted and distorting set of false epistemological problems at the heart of modern philosophy. This started from the false assumption that humans are individuals first and only social beings as the result of their own efforts to come to terms with the world and those other similar beings surrounding them. One of the first results of this twisted picture was the impossible fantasy of the ‘Social Contract’, which was meant to mark a historic agreement of humans to become social creatures. As my old colleague Arthur MacIver used to say: ‘All one has to do is to ask about this fantasy “In what language were the negotiations conducted?” for the picture to fall to pieces.’ The problem it was meant to deal with ought to fall apart at the same time and be seen as a non-problem. The underlying fact that it denies is that humanity has distinguished itself from all other species and escaped evolution as its sole principle of development by becoming a social species that develops historically. Social groups with a common language have the ability to reflect on past performance and institutions and improve on them according to their own standards of improvement. That is called a ‘historical’ development because it is determined from inside not causally from outside the developing entity and is a product of experience of and reflection on the past. It also reflects the fact that humanity was that species which had turned its back on evolutionary development by setting about to modify its environment instead of being modified by it through natural selection.
Even if we do not indulge in the foolish and impossible fantasy of the Social Contract, philosophical individualism generates the impossible problem of trying to explain how separate humans come to a common view of the world which will allow them to communicate with one another and form common languages – which was seen as a condition of their forming social relations with others. This problem is impossible because it starts from an inverted view of reality. Humans are social creatures first, and by definition, and only later differentiated into individuals as the result of historical development – both of the society of which they are a part and of the particular human in its relation to others.
In the earliest and most primitive forms of society one was no doubt simply defined by the role one played in it. Only as societies developed and became more complex did it become possible to reflect on one’s role and consider other possibilities. This was an essential step in the process of becoming an individual and not just a creature of some system. And of course different social systems encourage and make possible different degrees of individuality. All we have to note and take on board is that the social system is a condition of becoming an individual and precedes individuality - so that the inversion underlying the would-be problem of the origins of society out of individuals inverts reality in a deeper way than just the actual historical facts. We have to say that the social necessarily precedes the individual.
Also, when the newborn first becomes a social creature by relating to its parents or carers it is hardly able as yet to see itself as a separate being. Being an individual is not something given with birth. The possibility of being an individual is something that comes with the development of society in a way that allows one to see oneself as a separate being. Also the actual becoming an individual is something that comes with the development of the newborn within that society. And, of course humans attain different degrees of individuality even within a single social system. So we can say that a great deal of modern philosophy struggled with non-problems based on a false picture of humanity.
One of those unnecessary non-problems that was generated was to show how those individuals would be able to come to a common language in which to communicate with one another. Making the having of a common language a condition for becoming social creatures reverses the actual historical truth. We share a language with others because we share a common form of life and are taught that common language by our parents or carers who are already social beings sharing that language with others of their culture. Being part of a social group or culture is a condition or even a cause of having a common language, rather than the reverse – as was assumed.
Tackling this non-problem involved making a number of false assumptions such as that all humans are endowed with exactly the same senses and intellectual equipment which would necessarily deliver to each separate individual the same picture of the world. It was this assumed common picture of the world presented to each that was supposed to be the basis of the common language that enabled humans to communicate and come into social relations with one another. Perhaps we should here take note of Marx’s view that ‘The forming of the five senses is the labor of the entire history of the world down to the present,’ and add the fact that separate cultures and ways of life have developed the senses of their members in different ways. This shows that the senses are not givens but are shaped historically in the growth of the individual and the culture in which that individual is becoming part. What we are all given is the same sensory equipment, but the use and development of that equipment is something else. We are taught the ability to use it in certain ways – or we simply absorb those abilities from those around us.
I remember being taught to hear an octave interval – with difficulty, I remember, though that finally I learned to hear one and to reproduce one. This was only possible because the musical system of my culture was based on the octave. Someone from a different musical culture might not be able to be taught to hear such an interval – or at least they would have to be inducted into a wholly new musical culture before being able to be taught it.
It can also be shown that this making common perceptions the basis of a common language reverses the truth in yet another way. In reality it is the common language and way of life of different human societies is the basis of their common perception of the world. All we have to do is to look at the great variety of perceptions shown by different cultures around the world and we will see that we are taught to see and feel different things as we are growing up and are taught the common language of our society. One is told that the Inuit are taught to perceive 27 varieties of snow – for which, no doubt their language has separate names. I was once taught to take blood-pressure which involved learning to hear the special sound made when the blood first forces its way through the veins that have been closed by the pressure arm band. And entering into most professions involves learning to hear, see, smell and feel things that had not previously been part of one’s sensory capabilities. It is also true that not only does that assumption of an imposed and unlearned set of sensory abilities reverse the truth but it ignores the obvious fact that we are taught the common language of our society by those who are bringing us up and don’t need to come to it on our own. This also shows how social precedes the individual and, as we have said, even is the condition of individuality as the distinguishing oneself from others.
These facts about the association of perception and perceptive abilities with historically developing cultures or even particular occupations are ones that stand behind that challenging statement of Marx’s that ‘The forming of the five senses is the labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.’ The cultures and the occupations that shape those perceptions and perceptive abilities have a history of development. We can easily imagine the huge differences that would mark the perception of a stone-age inhabitant of Manhattan and a modern day financial director.
One could even say that humans are almost by definition social animals since in prehistoric times the species homo made the transition ‘from herd to tribe’ (in Marx’s useful and illuminating way of putting it) and set off on a wholly different trajectory of development that was historical rather than evolutionary. It was historical because it came from reflection on past performance and experience and seeing how skills and projects could be improved. This is how the species homo became homo sapiens. How this prehistoric transition took place we can only speculate and try to construct believable accounts, ones that hopefully will not reverse the historical truth in the ways we have been looking at. One thing seems pretty certain, however, that it hinged on the development of the ‘opposable thumb’, which allowed a more varied and articulated modification of the environment. Since there are other species with opposable thumbs that have not become social it is equally clear that this was a condition not a cause.
There is a sense in which that problem of the transition from the pre-social to the social lies behind the philosophic individualistic picture. However, we can be sure that the herd preceded the tribe - so that this picture of isolated individuals waiting to be made into social ones has no relation to human history and doesn’t in any way illuminate the problem of the transition.

The Pursuit of the Timeless
Another false move that helped dictate that picture of timelessly given sense abilities is one that also sent philosophy down a number of other false trails in pursuit of impossible projects, was the turning its back on history and assuming that any genuine explanation had to be in terms of timeless principles that stood outside of history. There were two historical causes of this ahistoricism. One was that the new philosophers were modeling their new framework of thought on the previous theological one that stood itself outside of history with a timeless God as the cause and explanation of everything. Also, at that period, history itself was cramped into an insignificant examination of the lives and acts of ‘great’ men because the 17th century was a time when the true age of the world was unknown, and Archbishop Usher could get away with claiming that the world was created in 4004 BC. It was only with the development of the science of geology in the next generation that the true age and the vast vistas of time began to be revealed - ones that called for, and made possible, a whole new order of historical explanation. The new vistas showed that things previously thought of as timeless were actually subject to historical development.
Ironically, the adopting of this ahistorical and individualistic model of explanation itself needs to be understood historically. We need to note that at a time when secularization was the chief thrust of European thought the founding of modern philosophy saw its main task as that of secularizing the theological framework of thought that had dominated the feudal era. Since that framework based its explanations on a timeless God that was the source and explanation of everything, the new philosophers felt that all they needed to do to produce a secular framework suitable for the new era was to find a secular equivalent to that timeless God who had been the basis of the previous framework. Unfortunately, they did not examine and criticize the framework itself and come to see that it had to do with faith and not with the secular understanding and practical manipulation of the things of the material world. The result was when they proposed an ahistorical conception of Nature as a secular substitute for God in that framework, they in effect deified their conception of Nature instead of secularizing the previous theological framework. The framework was too powerful in shaping thought and could not itself be secularized. It was inextricably bound up with religious faith and not with a secular understanding of the material world. This is shown in the appeal to transcendentals that the search for timeless and absolute accounts and explanations necessarily brought about.
That would-be secularized framework they were constructing out of the old one also left us also with the belief in what was essentially a ‘Gods-eye view’ of the world - now called ‘objective truths’ – truths that were supposed to confront all of humanity in exactly the same way – completely independent of any language, culture and view of the world of the humans confronted by it. This could only be conceived as some sort of ‘God’s-eye view’. We will have more to say about the incoherences of this conception later. But we should note that the conception is still very much with us despite those underlying incoherences. We can say that there is a material world which is independent of the various cultures and languages of humans - but the views of that material world have to be expressed in those languages and are not independent and do not ‘confront’ humanity as a whole in precisely the same way. Thery are not truths that stand independent of language and no language that stands independent of humanity.
The secularization that the 17th century philosophers were seeking needed a whole new framework that incorporated history and not one that rejected history and historical explanation and sought timeless explanations - explanations that were not only timeless and independent of history but ones that were supposed to be independent of any language or culture. Such absolute explanations independent of history and above the human world were regarded as the only legitimate ones because they were supposed to derive from absolutes from which there was no appeal. What was not noticed at the time, was that the search for absolutes as starting points for explanation was incompatible with the search for secularization. We shall argue that those absolutes and transcendentals have their proper place in a religious context and no place in a secular one.
It was this rejection of historical understanding that lay at the heart of the conception of knowledge as the search for absolute and timeless truths as well as the conception of truth as something separate and objective, something with no admixture of the human and the social. That would-be secular conception of a truth as separate and absolute confronting all humanity equally has pretty obvious affinities with the Christian conception of a God that stands above all of humanity equally and is the source of the truths we confront. This is also the beginning of a conception of truth as a separate objective entity that stands before all humanity ahistorically and with no reflection of the historical culture and language of those who are meant to be taking in those truths. But how anyone is meant to take in and hold onto a truth except by formulating it in their own language is beyond understanding.
This would-be secular ‘objective truth’ would have to stand outside all the particular languages of human societies and could not be identified with, or be already expressed in, any one of them if it was to maintain this would-be ‘objective’ status. Though ‘objective truths’ could not be identified with any actual language they would have to be assumed to be expressible in any of them in order to attain the status of ‘tuths’. One would like to say ‘translatable’ into any, but that would imply that those truths were already linguistic – though in no human language (and what other is there?)
Of course we use the words ‘true’ and ‘truth’ in various metaphorical ways – such as in describing someone as a ‘true gentleman’. But if the phrase ‘objective truths’ is intended in any way literally it creates an impossible conception - since truths cannot be separated from languages and propositions and sited in the never-never land of transcendentals .– [That realm is a favorite of metaphysicians since it sets things safely beyond the scope of close analysis and criticism.] It is pretty clear that the notion of ‘objective truths’ is yet another place where the influence of the previous theological framework is making itself felt and that the language behind them is, as it were, ‘God’s language’ and they represent a ‘God’s-eye view of the world’. So whenever we meet the notion of ‘objective truth’ being used, we need to be very cautious and circumspect to make sure that it is not smuggling in the theological notion of a God’s-eye view and God’s language into the analysis.
Languages can be translated and what we call the ‘same truth’ can be expressed in many different languages. We say ‘Il est chaud’, ‘It is warm’ or whatever, and regard them as telling us the same thing - but this is not to say that there is something out there, independent of all human languages which can still be called a ‘truth’. What is out there is the weather about which we can formulate true or false propositions. But there is no would-be proposition ‘out there’, which is supposed to be ‘true’ independent of all human languages and just waiting to be translated into some human language or other. It is hard to figure out what the role of this would-be entity ‘objective truth’ independent of all human languages was meant to be – except that it was meant to supply the would-be secular replacement for the absolute truths that God supplied within the theological framework. As for making actual and literal sense of the notion - that is beyond us despite the frequency with which the phrase is used. This is another place where the theological underpinnings of the modern framework of thought show themselves if we look carefully – another place where the theological and the secular have been mixed up – since ‘objective truths’ would have to be absolutes and confronting all of humanity the same and timelessly – in the way the Christian God was supposed to.
The problem that faces us here is that of separating and making clear the difference between faith and secular understanding. We can say that the beliefs of faith express agreement among the members – whereas agreement in secular understanding comes about as the result of experience, scientific experiment and investigation. These generate those agreements and do no start from them. Of course there will be a body of beliefs that guide those experiments and help identify the results, but those beliefs will have been established by previous experimentation and investigation and what is important is that they will be subject to modification by further experience. We have to see that faith generates and incorporates absolutes and transcendentals in a way that scientific investigation and experiment do not. In fact we can say that transcendentals have no legitimate place in any secular system of understanding. Anything that has been established by experiment and experience can always be challenged and unseated by further experiment and later experience – something that transcendentals are safe from - which means they have no legitimate place in any secular account except as the foundations and starting points which we adopt to get a system of understanding under way.
The founding fathers’ assumption that they could provide an adequate secular framework of thought simply by substituting ‘Nature’ for ‘God’ in the old theological framework gave rise to one of the chief sources of confusion in our time namely, the failure to distinguish clearly between beliefs determined by faith and those arising from experience and investigation which we regard as secular understanding. The beliefs imposed by faith as well as those induced by experiment and investigation both have their bearing on practice - but in the case of the secular beliefs arrived at through experience the practice can reflect back on the beliefs and cause us to modify them. This is because those beliefs are generally meant to help us achieve our practical goals. If they do not, or if some other understanding does the job better, they will be modified. The beliefs of faith and the practices dictated by them are not intended to help us achieve ordinary practical goals in this world and so are not subject to modification according to their practical success or failure. Religious beliefs do get modified over time but not in that way nor for those practical reasons. The goals of religious practice – such as salvation or ‘the good life’ are not of a character that would allow the beliefs to be judged and rejected or modified in the light of their success or failure to achieve those goals. In a sense they even define those goals.
It was this whole dominant conception of genuine truth as separate and timeless and confronting all humanity the same that Marx challenged head-on in that passage in the manuscript of the German Ideology in which put forward the view that nature itself has a history and one that is connected dialectically to the history of humanity. Here, as elsewhere, he could have made his meaning clearer and his case stronger if he had talked of ‘the history of the various human cultures’ instead of using the blanket term ‘humanity’ since we know that different cultures note different regularities and make different classifications of things in the material world and those classifications and those regularities noted in a particular culture constitute their conception of nature. The regularities noted and the classifications made in any of these cultures will pretty obviously be subject to historical development. And this view is clearly connected to Marx’s assertion that the senses are themselves subject to historical development with the development of a society. In the end the senses and what they allow us to distinguish are all subject to the test of praxis – do they produce results? do they enable us to move on? It is precisely because different cultures engage in different practices that reflect the different lives they lead with different projects and aims, that those cultures make different classifications and note and make use of different regularities. In effect they face different worlds with those senses developed in different ways over the history of their culture.
The argument has been that we need to accept that radical view that nature has a history and one that is inextricably bound up with the history of humanity. Nature is not something ‘objective’ that confronts and imposes itself on all humans in precisely the same way throughout history. We can see that in the variety of perceptions of nature that reflect the variety of practices and projects of the various human cultures around the world. And we have also argued for the equally radical view of Marx’s that the human senses are not fixed throughout time but have equally developed and continue to develop in ways that reflect the historically developing different practices and projects of those various human cultures.
If we can accept all that we will have eliminated the last traces of the theological framework that has continued to infect modern philosophy and has generated all those impossible problems that have taken up philosophy’s time unnecessarily.
Questioning the Questions 1


We need to ask two sorts of questions about the problems that have dominated philosophy in our time. One is about their origins and the other about their consequences. Many of those problems that have taken up much time and energy fail on both counts as we hope to show. They were generated by mistaken conceptions of the problems that needed to be dealt with in the birth of modernity and in turn they have generated impossible projects and unnecessary and insolvable problems.
Modern philosophy was founded at the time of, and in the wake of, the momentous social changes that accompanied the dismantling and destruction of the rigid feudal system of social hierarchy and land tenure that had dominated the Middle Ages in Europe. The new philosophy aimed both to reflect, and to make sense of those changes in human life, which had taken place in that era. It was also an era of secularization, and this provided another shaping force for the new philosophers who saw the great challenge facing them to forge a whole new secular framework of thought to replace the theological framework that had shaped thought in the Middle Ages.
The aim in what follows will to be to bring out and analyze the false problems, projects and assumptions that these shaping forces were wrongly taken to impose on the new philosophy – so that we can free philosophy from them. There are two main sources of these false problems and assumptions. One is the philosophic individualism that attempted to mirror the new social individualism that grew out of the introduction of private property. This philosophic individualism started from, and incorporated the false assumption that humans were individuals first and social creatures only later. This in turn generated a number of false problems as well as false assumptions and theories that were seen as necessary to make sense of that assumed social transition as well as explaining the transition from a theological framework of thought in which God was the principle and basis for explanation to the scientific framework in which nature and nature’s laws were the basis. The first and most incoherent of these theories was the Social Contract theory, which held that there was a historical moment when humans agreed to become social. But there were later and more subtle assumptions made in order to represent the transition as a natural one that arose out of a common view of the things of the world that generated a common language. The fact that this picture inverted reality was not so obvious and needed a bit of analysis to bring out the fact that it was a common language that generated the common view of things – though that common language itself reflected a shared form of life.
The second source of trouble was the assumption on the part of the new philosophers that if they were to surpass and replace the old theological framework of thought of the Middle Ages with a new secular framework they would have to be able to produce the same absolute and final explanations that the theologians had offered by appealing to God as the ultimate and final cause. To do this the new philosophers introduced a concept of nature that could stand in for God and was thus lifted above the world and became transcendentalized. Transcendentals are always a problem in philosophy precisely because they are meant to stand outside as foundations of analysis and explanation and are therefore not subject to philosophic understanding and proof themselves. The great advantage to transcendentals is that you can give them whatever properties that are needed to explain whatever it is that you want to explain and no one can say you ‘nay’ and show that they do not have those properties. These transcendentals were the inevitable result of the new fundamentalism that had left philosophers searching for ultimate and final explanations.

Individualism
The emergence of private property in land and the private ownership of the products of it freed up the landowning classes it created, and the buying and selling of the products of the land led to the growth of the cities with their markets which in turn led to the possibility of the serfs to ‘run away to the city to seek their fortune’ - in the phrase of the fairytales. One’s fate and one’s occupation were no longer determined by the exact place one was born into in a rigid caste system that defined and was defined by the whole feudal system of production. These changes created a generation of individuals with new freedoms to define themselves and set their own course in life.
This new freedom in turn inspired a philosophic individualism that aimed at reflecting those new possibilities of shaping one’s own life and making choices. One was no longer defined by the system one was born into and could see oneself as something separate from the system – in other words, as an individual. The new philosophic individualism tried to reflect this new social reality but did it in a way that denied or ignored the social and historical origins of the system itself and the new possibilities it offered. The philosophic individualism sought to represent it as an ahistorical fact about humans as such – that they were individuals first and social creatures only as the result of choice or development. We shall argue that this inverted the actual historical reality so that as a starting point for philosophic analysis it managed to generate confusions, false problems and impossible projects.
Ahistoricism
The other great source of false problems and impossible projects was the fundamentalist search for absolute and final explanations. These came to be regarded as the only legitimate and genuine explanations for philosophy because the founding fathers of modern philosophy set themselves the task to turn philosophy into a secular substitute for the theological framework of thought that had dominated the Middle Ages. Since within the theological framework God provided an absolute and final explanation of things, the new philosophers deceived themselves into thinking that the new philosophic framework would have to offer equally absolute and timeless final explanations if it was to offer a genuine substitute for that previous framework. In their efforts to produce such final and absolute explanations and theories they introduced transcendentals – such as the transcendentalized conception of nature which they wanted to make the secular substitute for God, who provided those absolute and final explanations within the theological framework. We shall argue that result of this trancendentalizing was not the production of a secular account but the deifying of the concept of nature. We shall also argue that transcendentals have no legitimate place in any account claiming to be secular and that their proper place is within a religious framework.
What the new philosophers should have done was to examine and deconstruct the old framework instead of trying to produce a would-be substitute secular framework that aimed to imitate and replace it. That analysis might also have helped with the problem that has beset our time – the inability to mark a clear distinction between the religious and the secular and to see that they have different roles and functions in human life and are not in any competition. The Creationists are only one symptom of this failure, which prevents them from seeing that they are demeaning and distorting the Bible in setting it in competition with Darwin’s evolutionary theory. The truth of the Bible is not in any way like that of a scientific theory – established by evidence and possibly modified or disproved by further evidence. Its truth is a matter of faith not evidence, and its object is not to show us how to manipulate and navigate in the material world the way scientific understanding does. As I have often said, we don’t open the Bible to learn how to generate electricity – and on the other hand, we don’t consult social anthropology to work out how to conduct a service or frame a prayer.
The new philosophy was also constructed as a replacement for the theological framework of thought that had set about making its own sense of, and justifying the feudal social arrangements. In the old framework this justification was captured in the saying – ‘God made three sorts of men – Those who work, Those who fight, and Those who pray.’ The suggestion was that the feudal system was ordained by God. The Reformation made the first breach in the rigidity of the system by its principle that one’s membership in a particular church should be a matter of mature choice and not a matter of birth. This already set individuals outside the system allowing them to define their relation to it. No doubt one would tend to continue in the church of one’s parents, but that should nevertheless be a matter of choice not necessity. The new framework of thought being constructed was meant to reflect and make sense of these momentous changes in human life as well as to justify the institutions of the new social and economic system. We need to look hard and carefully at that sense and that reflection because there are distortions in both that have sent philosophy down a rocky road of false assumptions and impossible projects. It also gave the new philosophy the ideological role of presenting the new social order as ‘natural’ and therefore inescapable.
The first mis-reflection we have to scrutinize and criticize is the philosophic individualism which has for too long been allowed to put a distorted and distorting set of false epistemological problems at the heart of modern philosophy. This started from the false assumption that humans are individuals first and only social beings as the result of their own efforts to come to terms with the world and those other similar beings surrounding them. One of the first results of this twisted picture was the impossible fantasy of the ‘Social Contract’, which was meant to mark a historic agreement of humans to become social creatures. As my old colleague Arthur MacIver used to say: ‘All one has to do is to ask about this fantasy “In what language were the negotiations conducted?” for the picture to fall to pieces.’ The problem it was meant to deal with ought to fall apart at the same time and be seen as a non-problem. The underlying fact that it denies is that humanity has distinguished itself from all other species and escaped evolution as its sole principle of development by becoming a social species that develops historically. Social groups with a common language have the ability to reflect on past performance and institutions and improve on them according to their own standards of improvement. That is called a ‘historical’ development because it is determined from inside not causally from outside the developing entity and is a product of experience of and reflection on the past. It also reflects the fact that humanity was that species which had turned its back on evolutionary development by setting about to modify its environment instead of being modified by it through natural selection.
Even if we do not indulge in the foolish and impossible fantasy of the Social Contract, philosophical individualism generates the impossible problem of trying to explain how separate humans come to a common view of the world which will allow them to communicate with one another and form common languages – which was seen as a condition of their forming social relations with others. This problem is impossible because it starts from an inverted view of reality. Humans are social creatures first, and by definition, and only later differentiated into individuals as the result of historical development – both of the society of which they are a part and of the particular human in its relation to others.
In the earliest and most primitive forms of society one was no doubt simply defined by the role one played in it. Only as societies developed and became more complex did it become possible to reflect on one’s role and consider other possibilities. This was an essential step in the process of becoming an individual and not just a creature of some system. And of course different social systems encourage and make possible different degrees of individuality. All we have to note and take on board is that the social system is a condition of becoming an individual and precedes individuality - so that the inversion underlying the would-be problem of the origins of society out of individuals inverts reality in a deeper way than just the actual historical facts. We have to say that the social necessarily precedes the individual.
Also, when the newborn first becomes a social creature by relating to its parents or carers it is hardly able as yet to see itself as a separate being. Being an individual is not something given with birth. The possibility of being an individual is something that comes with the development of society in a way that allows one to see oneself as a separate being. Also the actual becoming an individual is something that comes with the development of the newborn within that society. And, of course humans attain different degrees of individuality even within a single social system. So we can say that a great deal of modern philosophy struggled with non-problems based on a false picture of humanity.
One of those unnecessary non-problems that was generated was to show how those individuals would be able to come to a common language in which to communicate with one another. Making the having of a common language a condition for becoming social creatures reverses the actual historical truth. We share a language with others because we share a common form of life and are taught that common language by our parents or carers who are already social beings sharing that language with others of their culture. Being part of a social group or culture is a condition or even a cause of having a common language, rather than the reverse – as was assumed.
Tackling this non-problem involved making a number of false assumptions such as that all humans are endowed with exactly the same senses and intellectual equipment which would necessarily deliver to each separate individual the same picture of the world. It was this assumed common picture of the world presented to each that was supposed to be the basis of the common language that enabled humans to communicate and come into social relations with one another. Perhaps we should here take note of Marx’s view that ‘The forming of the five senses is the labor of the entire history of the world down to the present,’ and add the fact that separate cultures and ways of life have developed the senses of their members in different ways. This shows that the senses are not givens but are shaped historically in the growth of the individual and the culture in which that individual is becoming part. What we are all given is the same sensory equipment, but the use and development of that equipment is something else. We are taught the ability to use it in certain ways – or we simply absorb those abilities from those around us.
I remember being taught to hear an octave interval – with difficulty, I remember, though that finally I learned to hear one and to reproduce one. This was only possible because the musical system of my culture was based on the octave. Someone from a different musical culture might not be able to be taught to hear such an interval – or at least they would have to be inducted into a wholly new musical culture before being able to be taught it.
It can also be shown that this making common perceptions the basis of a common language reverses the truth in yet another way. In reality it is the common language and way of life of different human societies is the basis of their common perception of the world. All we have to do is to look at the great variety of perceptions shown by different cultures around the world and we will see that we are taught to see and feel different things as we are growing up and are taught the common language of our society. One is told that the Inuit are taught to perceive 27 varieties of snow – for which, no doubt their language has separate names. I was once taught to take blood-pressure which involved learning to hear the special sound made when the blood first forces its way through the veins that have been closed by the pressure arm band. And entering into most professions involves learning to hear, see, smell and feel things that had not previously been part of one’s sensory capabilities. It is also true that not only does that assumption of an imposed and unlearned set of sensory abilities reverse the truth but it ignores the obvious fact that we are taught the common language of our society by those who are bringing us up and don’t need to come to it on our own. This also shows how social precedes the individual and, as we have said, even is the condition of individuality as the distinguishing oneself from others.
These facts about the association of perception and perceptive abilities with historically developing cultures or even particular occupations are ones that stand behind that challenging statement of Marx’s that ‘The forming of the five senses is the labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.’ The cultures and the occupations that shape those perceptions and perceptive abilities have a history of development. We can easily imagine the huge differences that would mark the perception of a stone-age inhabitant of Manhattan and a modern day financial director.
One could even say that humans are almost by definition social animals since in prehistoric times the species homo made the transition ‘from herd to tribe’ (in Marx’s useful and illuminating way of putting it) and set off on a wholly different trajectory of development that was historical rather than evolutionary. It was historical because it came from reflection on past performance and experience and seeing how skills and projects could be improved. This is how the species homo became homo sapiens. How this prehistoric transition took place we can only speculate and try to construct believable accounts, ones that hopefully will not reverse the historical truth in the ways we have been looking at. One thing seems pretty certain, however, that it hinged on the development of the ‘opposable thumb’, which allowed a more varied and articulated modification of the environment. Since there are other species with opposable thumbs that have not become social it is equally clear that this was a condition not a cause.
There is a sense in which that problem of the transition from the pre-social to the social lies behind the philosophic individualistic picture. However, we can be sure that the herd preceded the tribe - so that this picture of isolated individuals waiting to be made into social ones has no relation to human history and doesn’t in any way illuminate the problem of the transition.

The Pursuit of the Timeless
Another false move that helped dictate that picture of timelessly given sense abilities is one that also sent philosophy down a number of other false trails in pursuit of impossible projects, was the turning its back on history and assuming that any genuine explanation had to be in terms of timeless principles that stood outside of history. There were two historical causes of this ahistoricism. One was that the new philosophers were modeling their new framework of thought on the previous theological one that stood itself outside of history with a timeless God as the cause and explanation of everything. Also, at that period, history itself was cramped into an insignificant examination of the lives and acts of ‘great’ men because the 17th century was a time when the true age of the world was unknown, and Archbishop Usher could get away with claiming that the world was created in 4004 BC. It was only with the development of the science of geology in the next generation that the true age and the vast vistas of time began to be revealed - ones that called for, and made possible, a whole new order of historical explanation. The new vistas showed that things previously thought of as timeless were actually subject to historical development.
Ironically, the adopting of this ahistorical and individualistic model of explanation itself needs to be understood historically. We need to note that at a time when secularization was the chief thrust of European thought the founding of modern philosophy saw its main task as that of secularizing the theological framework of thought that had dominated the feudal era. Since that framework based its explanations on a timeless God that was the source and explanation of everything, the new philosophers felt that all they needed to do to produce a secular framework suitable for the new era was to find a secular equivalent to that timeless God who had been the basis of the previous framework. Unfortunately, they did not examine and criticize the framework itself and come to see that it had to do with faith and not with the secular understanding and practical manipulation of the things of the material world. The result was when they proposed an ahistorical conception of Nature as a secular substitute for God in that framework, they in effect deified their conception of Nature instead of secularizing the previous theological framework. The framework was too powerful in shaping thought and could not itself be secularized. It was inextricably bound up with religious faith and not with a secular understanding of the material world. This is shown in the appeal to transcendentals that the search for timeless and absolute accounts and explanations necessarily brought about.
That would-be secularized framework they were constructing out of the old one also left us also with the belief in what was essentially a ‘Gods-eye view’ of the world - now called ‘objective truths’ – truths that were supposed to confront all of humanity in exactly the same way – completely independent of any language, culture and view of the world of the humans confronted by it. This could only be conceived as some sort of ‘God’s-eye view’. We will have more to say about the incoherences of this conception later. But we should note that the conception is still very much with us despite those underlying incoherences. We can say that there is a material world which is independent of the various cultures and languages of humans - but the views of that material world have to be expressed in those languages and are not independent and do not ‘confront’ humanity as a whole in precisely the same way. Thery are not truths that stand independent of language and no language that stands independent of humanity.
The secularization that the 17th century philosophers were seeking needed a whole new framework that incorporated history and not one that rejected history and historical explanation and sought timeless explanations - explanations that were not only timeless and independent of history but ones that were supposed to be independent of any language or culture. Such absolute explanations independent of history and above the human world were regarded as the only legitimate ones because they were supposed to derive from absolutes from which there was no appeal. What was not noticed at the time, was that the search for absolutes as starting points for explanation was incompatible with the search for secularization. We shall argue that those absolutes and transcendentals have their proper place in a religious context and no place in a secular one.
It was this rejection of historical understanding that lay at the heart of the conception of knowledge as the search for absolute and timeless truths as well as the conception of truth as something separate and objective, something with no admixture of the human and the social. That would-be secular conception of a truth as separate and absolute confronting all humanity equally has pretty obvious affinities with the Christian conception of a God that stands above all of humanity equally and is the source of the truths we confront. This is also the beginning of a conception of truth as a separate objective entity that stands before all humanity ahistorically and with no reflection of the historical culture and language of those who are meant to be taking in those truths. But how anyone is meant to take in and hold onto a truth except by formulating it in their own language is beyond understanding.
This would-be secular ‘objective truth’ would have to stand outside all the particular languages of human societies and could not be identified with, or be already expressed in, any one of them if it was to maintain this would-be ‘objective’ status. Though ‘objective truths’ could not be identified with any actual language they would have to be assumed to be expressible in any of them in order to attain the status of ‘tuths’. One would like to say ‘translatable’ into any, but that would imply that those truths were already linguistic – though in no human language (and what other is there?)
Of course we use the words ‘true’ and ‘truth’ in various metaphorical ways – such as in describing someone as a ‘true gentleman’. But if the phrase ‘objective truths’ is intended in any way literally it creates an impossible conception - since truths cannot be separated from languages and propositions and sited in the never-never land of transcendentals .– [That realm is a favorite of metaphysicians since it sets things safely beyond the scope of close analysis and criticism.] It is pretty clear that the notion of ‘objective truths’ is yet another place where the influence of the previous theological framework is making itself felt and that the language behind them is, as it were, ‘God’s language’ and they represent a ‘God’s-eye view of the world’. So whenever we meet the notion of ‘objective truth’ being used, we need to be very cautious and circumspect to make sure that it is not smuggling in the theological notion of a God’s-eye view and God’s language into the analysis.
Languages can be translated and what we call the ‘same truth’ can be expressed in many different languages. We say ‘Il est chaud’, ‘It is warm’ or whatever, and regard them as telling us the same thing - but this is not to say that there is something out there, independent of all human languages which can still be called a ‘truth’. What is out there is the weather about which we can formulate true or false propositions. But there is no would-be proposition ‘out there’, which is supposed to be ‘true’ independent of all human languages and just waiting to be translated into some human language or other. It is hard to figure out what the role of this would-be entity ‘objective truth’ independent of all human languages was meant to be – except that it was meant to supply the would-be secular replacement for the absolute truths that God supplied within the theological framework. As for making actual and literal sense of the notion - that is beyond us despite the frequency with which the phrase is used. This is another place where the theological underpinnings of the modern framework of thought show themselves if we look carefully – another place where the theological and the secular have been mixed up – since ‘objective truths’ would have to be absolutes and confronting all of humanity the same and timelessly – in the way the Christian God was supposed to.
The problem that faces us here is that of separating and making clear the difference between faith and secular understanding. We can say that the beliefs of faith express agreement among the members – whereas agreement in secular understanding comes about as the result of experience, scientific experiment and investigation. These generate those agreements and do no start from them. Of course there will be a body of beliefs that guide those experiments and help identify the results, but those beliefs will have been established by previous experimentation and investigation and what is important is that they will be subject to modification by further experience. We have to see that faith generates and incorporates absolutes and transcendentals in a way that scientific investigation and experiment do not. In fact we can say that transcendentals have no legitimate place in any secular system of understanding. Anything that has been established by experiment and experience can always be challenged and unseated by further experiment and later experience – something that transcendentals are safe from - which means they have no legitimate place in any secular account except as the foundations and starting points which we adopt to get a system of understanding under way.
The founding fathers’ assumption that they could provide an adequate secular framework of thought simply by substituting ‘Nature’ for ‘God’ in the old theological framework gave rise to one of the chief sources of confusion in our time namely, the failure to distinguish clearly between beliefs determined by faith and those arising from experience and investigation which we regard as secular understanding. The beliefs imposed by faith as well as those induced by experiment and investigation both have their bearing on practice - but in the case of the secular beliefs arrived at through experience the practice can reflect back on the beliefs and cause us to modify them. This is because those beliefs are generally meant to help us achieve our practical goals. If they do not, or if some other understanding does the job better, they will be modified. The beliefs of faith and the practices dictated by them are not intended to help us achieve ordinary practical goals in this world and so are not subject to modification according to their practical success or failure. Religious beliefs do get modified over time but not in that way nor for those practical reasons. The goals of religious practice – such as salvation or ‘the good life’ are not of a character that would allow the beliefs to be judged and rejected or modified in the light of their success or failure to achieve those goals. In a sense they even define those goals.
It was this whole dominant conception of genuine truth as separate and timeless and confronting all humanity the same that Marx challenged head-on in that passage in the manuscript of the German Ideology in which put forward the view that nature itself has a history and one that is connected dialectically to the history of humanity. Here, as elsewhere, he could have made his meaning clearer and his case stronger if he had talked of ‘the history of the various human cultures’ instead of using the blanket term ‘humanity’ since we know that different cultures note different regularities and make different classifications of things in the material world and those classifications and those regularities noted in a particular culture constitute their conception of nature. The regularities noted and the classifications made in any of these cultures will pretty obviously be subject to historical development. And this view is clearly connected to Marx’s assertion that the senses are themselves subject to historical development with the development of a society. In the end the senses and what they allow us to distinguish are all subject to the test of praxis – do they produce results? do they enable us to move on? It is precisely because different cultures engage in different practices that reflect the different lives they lead with different projects and aims, that those cultures make different classifications and note and make use of different regularities. In effect they face different worlds with those senses developed in different ways over the history of their culture.
The argument has been that we need to accept that radical view that nature has a history and one that is inextricably bound up with the history of humanity. Nature is not something ‘objective’ that confronts and imposes itself on all humans in precisely the same way throughout history. We can see that in the variety of perceptions of nature that reflect the variety of practices and projects of the various human cultures around the world. And we have also argued for the equally radical view of Marx’s that the human senses are not fixed throughout time but have equally developed and continue to develop in ways that reflect the historically developing different practices and projects of those various human cultures.
If we can accept all that we will have eliminated the last traces of the theological framework that has continued to infect modern philosophy and has generated all those impossible problems that have taken up philosophy’s time unnecessarily.