Reconstructing Science

Reconstructing Science

In a powerful and influential piece in The Monthly Review for March 1997 ('Against the Social De(con)struction of Science') Meera Nanda raises some tough, deep and important questions about 'the unity (i.e. the universality) of truth, reason, reality and science.' That rather impressive list of questions has occupied philosophers for some centuries and is obviously not going to be unraveled and made plain by the work of a day. Still, they are questions that are important from a Marxist perspective because of the ideological role that has been given to science in the modern era in supporting the world-view of that social system based on market relations that was growing up in Europe in step with the Scientific Revolution. Perhaps the best we can aim at here is to try to disentangle the ideological use of that composite entity 'science' in founding the bourgeois world-view - from the actual human practices and activities which constitute the particular sciences.
The thrust of Nanda's argument is against what is called the 'social deconstruction of science' which gives us a cultural relativism that awards equal status to the knowledge systems of each culture. All that can be required of them, we are told by the deconstructionists is that they serve the needs of that culture and its way of life. Any claim of superiority for that system of scientific knowledge that grew up in Europe in the seventeenth century with the Scientific Revolution, with Galileo and Newton, is from this perspective branded as 'Western cultural imperialism'. Nanda's complaint is that this perspective sells the pass to the religious fundamentalists and cultural conservatives in those countries in which the elites are forced to cling to non-capitalist forms of domination and oppression. She sees this perspective as helping to maintain oppressions of caste and gender because it neutralizes and subverts the power of a crucial weapon in the hands of progressive forces trying to overcome those oppressions by replacing the beliefs and the mind-set and undermining the myths that support those oppressive practices.
Nanda sees as a unifying, internationalizing and universalizing force, the practices and beliefs and canons of rationality and evidence of that science which evolved out of the Scientific Revolution. It is a force tending to undermine those separate, and in this case, oppressive cultural practices and tending to bring all of humanity into a single community of beliefs and practices.
The same, we need to remind ourselves, can be said of capitalism (as was also said of Christianity in the previous era). And as Marxists we may suspect that it is not a historical accident that the Scientific Revolution and the social revolution that replaced feudal relations with those based on the rationality of the market both of them occurred in the same era and in the same place. And we may suspect also that it may not be an accident that they both share in that internationalizing and universalizing character that recognizes neither status nor boundaries. However exploring those interesting questions fully is going to have to wait for another day.
What we have to look at now is the view of 'the unity (i.e. universality) of truth, reality, reason and science' that Nanda counterposes to the fragmented truth and reason that the social deconstructionists seem to be offering us. One can reject the idea of 'separate but equal' sciences, whether Vedic mathematics or Creationist biology, or whatever At the same time one can well think that the deconstructionists have badly misunderstood and misapplied T.S. Kuhn's notion of the 'incommensurability of paradigms' in coming to their conclusion that all paradigms are equally good. Yet at the same time we can find deeply problematic Galileo's image of 'The Book of Nature' in which the sciences are already ‘written in mathematical symbols’. Equally problematic is the picture of scientific progress as the approach to some ultimate and final truth. That view of a truth standing above and outside of all of humanity, human interests, human practices and human languages has a pretty clearly theological character that ought to ring some alarm bells amongst Marxists.
It is not that we have to find some via media between the 'realist' and the 'anti-realist'. We have to see that both positions are incoherent and unintelligible. To do that, I think we have to return to Marx himself.

‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it in circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.’
The Eighteenth Brumaire

That observation of Marx's gives us the starting point of the kind of dialectical understanding that is needed to escape the blind alleys, false projects and and incoherent notions that we have been led into by the one-sided and foundation-seeking conceptions of explanation and understanding that have dominated the modern era. The conception that truth and reality come from one side only and must be waiting there in all their fullness simply to be perceived by humans, by contrast to the dialectical, gives us those images of an absolute and ultimate reality which have definite theological overtones. In this picture, humanity can only stand passive in the face of a fully articulated reality, the only function left to humans being to open their eyes, to unstop their ears and to organize their thoughts so that they can arrive at conceptions that correspond to this ‘one true reality’.
It is this quasi-theological conception that the deconstructionists have tried to deconstruct, with the results that Meera Nanda complains of that they seem to have ended by giving equal status to a whole range of systems of knowledge or science that have been developed in different cultures or groups around the world, leaving us no way to choose among them.
All that the deconstructionists seem to require of these systems of knowledge is that they be grounded in and related to the way of life and needs of the culture and its people. This, she complains dismantles science as one great weapon in opposing the oppressions of gender and caste that deface many cultures. A prime example of such an oppression would be the repellent practice of female circumcision and the conception of property in the female and especially her womb that underlies it. In a manner parallel to the cultural relativism that the deconstructionists want to impose on the sciences, some people tell us we are meant to tolerate that appalling practice because it is part of the 'value system' of some culture, and that we are being culturally imperialist and imposing our own values when we condemn it.
What is common to these two forms of cultural relativism is the conception that each culture and way of life is completely enclosed and self-sufficient. If they were really so isolated and faced no form of external criticism or constraint, those cultures and ways of life would have no development and no history. They would be static and eternal.
But of course every culture, even those disappearing few which are sufficiently isolated not to face irruptions from other cultures such as our own, nevertheless faces a material world, a world that may be partly of its own making, but never entirely. Paradoxically, it is those cultures whose world is least of their own making, namely, nomadic ways of life, which leave the terrain much as they found it, that are perhaps the most conservative and resistant to change and development. This is only partly because of their nomadic way of life discourages accumulation, which is the great engine of change and development that fires the world of capital. Another contributor to that conservatism is the constant movement and occasional dispersal of those peoples which requires great stability of institutions, practices, rituals and shibboleths if the cultures are to maintain their identity and not face annihilation.
We can say, echoing Marx, that each culture produces its own world, but not from materials of its own making. Each generation receives from the previous one a world that has been transformed to some degree: fields that have been cleared, bridges that have been built, houses, tools and machinery and the skills and knowledge to use them. Each generation will also have received practices, institutions, traditions and attitudes and a whole language with which to think about, and negotiate a way through that world they have inherited. That world may be a human creation, but it is not a free creation as the deconstructionist might have us think. Its material constructions are made in a struggle with the materials that were identified and recognized by the previous generations through their own struggles to live and prosper, and its intellectual constructions are subject to the material criticism of practice, the criticism of the failure or success that meets its trials and attempts.
But that material and practical criticism of the way of life and the equipment, material and intellectual that a people has forged in its struggle to live in the world and carry out its projects, is not a criticism that comes from an abstracted and idealized 'ultimate reality', a single truth that stands outside and above its everyday working life. We never meet anything like that in our daily living and working, and no such abstraction could be the source of the admittedly universalizing force of that system of scientific rationality that developed in step with the development of the equally universalizing and dynamic system of market rationality that is spreading itself around the world.
That market rationality has also been represented as the one true and natural rationality for human society, a rationality that is rooted in that most mystified of notions, the notion of 'human nature'. Capital's ideologues have constantly appealed to 'human nature' in grounding and justifying the system and rationality of the market, and it is important for Marxists to be alive to the explanatory emptiness and nullity of that notion. It is simply a blank check on which any figures can be written without anyone being able to tell whether there are funds there to meet it .
It is neither Marxist nor helpful to picture scientific progress in the way Meera Nanda wants to, as 'increase in truthfulness', that is, as an approach to to some (presumably unattainable) ideal, an 'ultimate truth'. I have criticized this 'approach' model of progress elsewhere (also in Philosophy and Mystification - ch.11, 'On Misunderstanding Science'). Here I will say only that it is both undialectical and un-Marxist, and that we can make sense neither of the ideal nor of the notion of approaching it. (It has its political counterpart in the utopian socialisms that were roundly and rightly criticized by Marx and Engels.) The dialectical perspective, by contrast, sees progress as an improvement over some definite and concrete previous condition, not as an 'approach' to something indefinable and unattainable.
My progress in drawing or piano playing is hardly an approach to some ideal but simply an improvement over my previous playing or drawing. I can now negotiate passages or capture things fluidly that I could not previously. A dialectical account is a concrete one that is rooted here in this world and has no need of indefinable and unattainable ideals that lie in a Platonic heaven somewhere beyond it.
None of this should be taken as going against Meera Nanda's objections to the deconstructionist setting of all knowledge systems as equally valid and of equal value. That deconstructionist view is not so much a defense against cultural imperialism as a prescription for it, as we, from on high as it were, allow those other cultures to hang onto their particular belief systems that will never compete with our own scientific and technological power. They will be allowed to remain as quaint customs and beliefs for the amusement of intellectual tourists from the developed world.
The deconstructionist account is in any case mere attitudinizing, even though it may play into the hands of fundamentalist ideologues. Of what effect is it, really, to be told that we must treat all systems of knowledge as equal? Will this really stop the march of 'Western science', its penetration and displacement of local systems? That injunction will have no more effect than Hitler had in trying to displace and downgrade Einstein's relativity theory by calling it 'Jewish science'. He may have had a brief influence on some German scientists and held up for a time the work toward an atomic bomb, but not for long. In the same way the religious fundamentalists may have some temporary success in resisting the advances of capitalism and its 'universal' rationality of the market, but as we have seen in recent history, this is driving them to more and more extreme and destructive measures. Nowhere is this more evident than in Algeria, where the fundamentalists, with government complicity, have taken to slaughtering hoards of innocent women and children in aid of reestablishing the ‘purity’ of their way of life and faith. One wonders about the 'purity' and the 'faith' that can allow themselves to be restored in that way.
There is still an essential question to be dealt with: if we reject as unintelligible that picture of scientific progress as an approach to some grand, single, universal truth standing outside of, and confronting humanity and all its peoples equally, how are we to understand and account for the great universalizing force of science? That force, we are confident, has the potential to displace and overwhelm other competing belief systems. And it is no doubt a half-conscious recognition of this that has steeled the fundamentalists to take outrageous defensive measures. They are threatened by the universalizing force not only of science, but of capital and its rationality of the market. Embattled, they are turning up the volume on the oppression of women and tightening control on whole populations by increasingly brutal methods. We are seeing the reverse of that secularizing process which took place in Europe in the transition from the feudal to a market society.
My contention is that the notion of an 'external reality' goes no way toward explaining the notion of scientific progress nor can it help us to understand the universalizing force of the sciences. The phrase itself sets us onto a path of mystification. 'External to what?' we need to ask. External to me as a historical individual? Or external to humanity as such, humanity considered abstractly and ahistorically? This latter sense, the one which is needed for its would-be role in explaining the universalizing force of the sciences, that sense leads us straight away from history, the dialectic and Marx and into quasi-theological mystification. What we need is an understanding which appeals to concrete historical forces rather than one that sets before us mystical entities of which we can have no direct knowledge.
I think that the source of the universalizing force of science and of capital is much the same, and that to see this we have to start by looking at the difference between those social systems, institutions and practices, and systems of belief which have a strong inner dynamic for change and development, and those which are inherently defensive and conservative. Add to that self-critical and developmental dynamic of science, the orientation toward manipulation and control of the material world that issues in ever more powerful practices and products, and the sources of its appeal and its power are not hard to understand. Because that universalizing force of the sciences can be understood materially and concretely in a way that is independent of the metaphysical appeal to an 'external reality', we need have no worry that it will be in any way disabled or diminished by the deconstruction of that metaphysical story.
What I am saying in all this is that we need to make a concrete social and historical analysis of the working of science and to understand its interaction with other cultures and knowledge systems in a way that is parallel to the way that we understand the globalizing power of capital and its power to swamp other cultures - for example by turning hunting or agricultural peoples into pitifully paid wage-workers producing its jeans and trainers. As Marxists we would never accept the 'human nature' accounts of that global force of capital. As Marxists we should not accept appeals to the metaphysical abstractions of 'ultimate reality' or 'absolute truth' to explain the universalizing force of science any more than we should accept tales in terms of ‘human nature’ as explanations of the globalizing force of capital. Those notions are neither explanatory nor even coherent. Appealing to them also involves turning one's back on dialectical analysis and historical explanation, turning from the concrete to the abstract, from real to ghostly explanation.

There are many deep issues I have not touched on about our relation to other cultures and what respect for them might consist in. What it would not consist in would be encouraging the people of another culture to hold onto beliefs that are false and potentially stunting or damaging. It would not consist in condoning or encouraging practices that are oppressive and degrading to a section of their people.
But before setting out to remove the mote from our brother's eye, we had better first try to cast the beam out of our own, since no serious person could pretend that the rule of capital and of science has eliminated oppression and exploitation from the world in which they reign, and has brought 'liberty and justice for all'. The slogan 'Knowledge will make you free' which the Enlightenment emblazoned over our capitalist social order has about the same force as the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' that was set over the gate of the Nazi camps.

Guy Robinson

Language and Lies

Language and Lies

. . . a people who love drink and honor lack of clarity as a virtue, for it has the double quality of a narcotic that both intoxicates and befogs.
Nietzsche - 'An Attempt at Self Criticism'

We can learn a lot from looking carefully and with as much clarity as we can muster at the view of science and of human knowledge, language and concepts that pictures them as in themselves, and necessarily, coercive and restrictive, as interposing between ourselves and some external reality, a grid or web of ideas which, as human artifacts, necessarily misrepresent that reality. This view has been expressed in different ways by many of the contemporary French philosophers ranged under the 'poststructuralist' label and has been taken up elsewhere. It comes originally from Nietzsche, where the most concentrated source is a short piece called 'Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense'.
There are two quite different aspects to this picture that take very different types of analysis. One is social and involves trying to look at the place and suitability of the notion of coercion in talking about language and concepts; the other is metaphysical and concerns the sense that can be given to the phrase 'external reality'. That phrase has too long been used as though it were unproblematic.
The social dimension of the picture and the questions it raises is a result of the fact that if we are to take the notion of coercion at all seriously and not as an overheated poetical flourish, we have to recognize a personal or social agency behind it. That agency has to be agency in the strict sense involving intentionality and purpose. Except jokingly, I do not say that I was 'coerced' into stopping my car by the fallen tree.
Naturally, if we are pressed to designate an agency of that kind in order to justify the use of the words 'coercive' and 'oppressive', an obvious candidate, pretty well the only candidate, is going to be a culture or a society. Individuals, whether individual teachers, parents, peers or siblings, might be seen as the instruments of that cultural coercion, but they should not be seen as acting on their own behalf or according to their own lights in inducting the child into the practices and the language of a culture. That independent acting would not provide the uniformities of concept and understanding that could issue in a common language and common way of life.
Of course, those individual teachers, peers and parents may impose their own agenda on top of that process of primary socialization and coerce the child in other ways that might be either corrupting and damaging, or else might benefit the child, enhancing later life with skills, sensitivities and enjoyments the child might not have had if it had not been pushed unwilling to school or dragged in from play for piano lessons.
However we are here only concerned with the coercion that is meant to attach to a particular set of concepts, a language, a world view and perhaps a way of life, so that our interest is only in the culture, and the individual concerns us only as agent or instrument of that culture in the process of that socialization which is here being seen as coercive and to result in the imposition of views and concepts that blind and narrow.
There are, of course, all too many examples of the cultural imposition of views and attitudes of just that damaging kind: the blind racism among the neo-nazis, the Aryan Brotherhood, or in some segments of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland; or the pitiful but necessary acceptance by women in certain cultures of the outrageous practice of female circumcision (an Egyptian woman once described it as 'tidying things up'!) - all would be good examples of such constricting and damaging cultural impositions.
It would also be fair to describe some of these views as having been coercively imposed. In prison in the US, for example, it is necessary to join one gang or another in order to survive, and the Aryan Brotherhood is generally the largest and most dominant. Joining them means accepting their racist beliefs and acting on them. What may feel uncomfortable at first is soon seems natural and unforced as the comfort and safety of belonging overwhelms initial reservations.
The question we have to address, however, is whether all cultures together with their concepts, systems of knowledge and practices, are coercive impositions on the individual, - whether they are that by their very nature, and without distinction. One thing we have to look at here is the role and appropriateness of the word 'coercion'.
Like the word 'violent', the word 'coercive' implies not only a disruptive agent but that there is a natural and unforced direction and development which is being deflected and distorted by something external. If we want then to describe humanity as a whole as being coerced in some way, we have to ask: 'By what external thing?' There are not many choices for answer. And we have also to ask serious questions about the implied existence of a 'natural' development of the individual human and the implied existence of undistorted apprehensions and perceptions by the imagined individual human who has not been shaped by socialization and acquiring the language of some particular society.
In effect we have to confront the question whether there is a universal and a historical human essence that is given with the biological makeup of the species (As has been assumed by so many philosophers and others. It appears in the Cartesian 'innate ideas', for example) - or whether humanity is precisely that species that has transcended the forces of natural selection and whose nature is determined, and its development driven, by social and historical forces.
From this latter point of view, the human essence is not seen as a 'natural' one but as a social and historical one. Any individual who is imagined as existing entirely outside and untouched by, those human social and historical forces would be a member of the biological species only and only potentially a human being in a full and proper sense. If Aristotle is right in describing humanity as zoon politikon, there is no humanity outside of society and history and the picture of language and culture being 'coercive' begins to evaporate. Language and culture become conditions of one's humanity and one's rationality itself and are not barriers to some abstract and 'universal' humanity set outside all society and culture. We will have to return to the myth of the feral individual implied in this latter picture.
But we need first to come down from that metaphysical pinnacle where the questions are abstract and ahistorical ones concerning the coercion of an ahistorical abstraction called 'humanity' by some other ahistorical abstraction called 'language' or 'culture' so that we end up talking about 'essences' and not about concrete things that may actually exist somewhere and at some time. When we have come back to earth where we can look at actual historical cultures and social forms together with their organizing myths and linguistic tropes we can analyse concretely the actual and genuine sources of coercion that have existed in almost every society and culture up to the present.
None is perhaps so deeply, and at the same time so invisibly coercive and oppressive as that social form that flew the Enlightenment flag of 'The Liberation of Humanity'. The sources of this oppression are nicely hidden behind the 'impersonal forces of the Market' which are presented to us as though they were laws of nature - not of physical nature, perhaps, but of the nature of humanity and of societies as such. Not only are the sources hidden, but the character of the oppression is hidden by dressing it up as the very opposite of an oppression - as an opportunity. That opportunity, which the Enlightenment proclaimed as a liberation, was the new 'opportunity' to sell to another one's ability to work, that is, to put one's human creative capacities underthe control of another, to alienate them in return for a wage that enables one to live. This act of alienating of one's human creative capacities is then presented as the natural condition and aspiration of humanity, so that someone who has not been able to sell their human creative capacity to another is regarded as failing in some way or as being simply misfortunate in being 'unemployed'.
That social form whose central organizing feature is the buying and selling of that human creative capacity and the accruing of its products to the purchaser, is now dominant in the world and shows itself able to overwhelm and obliterate all other social forms. It is perhaps the unconscious sense of the coerciveness of this particular concrete historical reality that may be showing itself in an abstracted form in many of the themes characteristic of poststructuralism. There is perhaps in those themes a recognition of the hidden coerciveness of this now dominant social form, a recognition that is distorted and displaced by being abstracted and attached not to this specific social form but to some 'essence' or essential nature of cultures or societies in themselves.
This abstract treatment not only turns our eyes away from the specific oppressions of this particular social form but gives us the message that there is no point in trying to struggle against those dehumanizing oppressions because any other social form will be as oppressive. (I am going to have to defend the use of the word 'dehumanizing' here - particularly since I have criticized the Nietzcchean/poststructuralist picture of the coerciveness of all cultures and languages in so far as it requires a conception of a 'natural' human development and apprehensions of the world that might lie outside of all culturation. That is for later.)
If we come down from that pinnacle of abstraction, we can point to and specify the oppressiveness of many particular social forms - the slavery of the ancient world, the antebellum South, Sudan and Arabia, the oppressions of feudal serfdom, or the outrageous oppression of women by the Taliban and to a lesser, though still unacceptable extent in many Muslim societies. And we must not forget the oppressiveness of that social form that requires people to alienate their human creative capacities, to put them in the hands of another in order to live
By looking at those specific societies we can uncover the mechanisms of coercion, mechanisms which are both physical and ideological. We can then look at systems of ideas whose function is to benefit one segment, - and not only to disadvantage another segment but to convince both the oppressed and the oppressors that the arrangement is just and natural.
But if we turn from these specific forms of coercion or oppression by specific forms of society back to the abstract thesis that every form of society or culture is oppressive in itself and by its nature, then we have a thesis which is dubious in so far as it has any content at all and is not simply gaseous. Also, one of the strange consequences of trying to attach coerciveness abstractly to cultures and societies as such is that, as we noted above, we get a theoretical hankering after that impossible creature of an earlier metaphysical imagination - the abstract, pre-social human individual who nevertheless is already kitted out with some kind of human nature and some kind of primitive, natural and asocial apprehension of the world.
If we are to talk about coercion and distortion, then we are committed to the existence of the possibility of a natural and undistorted life, a socially uncoerced apprehension and development. We seem to be back with the 'wolf-children' that so fascinated the Eighteenth Century. Neither Nietzsche nor any of the poststructuralist have given an adequate account of this unsocialized human creature of the imagination. Not surprisingly, - for they have not addressed themselves to the question of what the humanity of this creature would consist in.
Nietzsche tries with his idealisations of ancient Greek culture and his talk of the 'Apollonian' and the 'Dionysian' elements of it, to give us his conception of what a 'really human' life and spirit would be, but that is quite a different thing from defending the thesis that there could be some development that could be called 'human' outside of social and cultural contact with others, - and to specify what that development would be. Perhaps the most important thing about Nietzsche's attempt to define an ideal for humanity and in that way give a conception of what progress might be is that in forging it he looks within human history and human societies and not outside them. Those who want to picture all human cultures and their languages as coercive and distorting must, by contrast, look outside of history and historical societies for their conception of the undistorted life and undistorted apprehension. We have already raised the question whether the humanity of members of the genus homo is a biological given or is the product of their personal history and socialization. This question goes to the heart of the issue of the coherence of the picture we are considering and will have to be dealt with carefully.

The Enlightenment claims to be liberating all of humanity with the knowledge systems and the social systems that were then being forged have turned out to be manifestly false. In the face of this failure Nietzsche and the poststructuralist philosophers have wanted to turn the Enlightenment optimism on its head and to suggest that all cultures and conceptual systems are in and of themselves oppressive, and so we get the natural sciences, the centerpiece of Enlightenment 'liberation', described as 'Eurocentric' and as 'patriarchal' and even 'phallocentric' and so forth by poststructuralist philosophers
But those descriptions themselves create a certain tension because their tone of criticism and even condemnation seems to imply and require a standpoint outside of the cultures and knowledge systems being criticised, - a standpoint that is not subject to the same criticism as biassed and representing only an arbitrary point of view. We may doubt whether there room for such a standpoint within this picture. This tension itself also creates a hankering after the notion of an apprehension that is unmediated by culture, an 'original intuition' either belonging directly to the individual unspoilt by the socializing process, or else, - in the bizarre fantasy of Deluze and Guattari - an individual 'liberated' by schizophrenia from the oppressive overlay of civilization.
What is interesting and striking about this attempt to reach back behind what are regarded as the oppressive overlays of civilization, is that it seems, as we have said, to take us back to the Eighteenth Century hunt for the elusive 'wolf-children' and to the mythical 'pre-social individual' that was required by that equally mythical account of the 'origins of society', - the Social Contract Theory. Of course this feral individual of modern theory is not required to have the language and reason and calculation of advantage that was necessary to that wonderful earlier creature conjured up by the Social Contract Theory. Those earlier 'natural', pre-social individuals had laid on them the momentous task of conducting negotiations for the founding of society itself, creating the social out of a pre-social barbarism.
The only theoretical task laid on this later feral individual born out of post-Enlightenment disillusion is that of revealing to us the supposed falsehood and oppressiveness of all socially and linguistically mediated forms of apprehension - though that is a large enough task in itself. Those descriptions of language and culture as 'coercive' and 'oppressive' necessarily and in themselves can only be licensed by showing us that there is an alternative unmediated and uncoerced pre-cultural intuition that can be set along side of the oppressed one. Our latter-day feral individual is meant to do that for us.
One thing we would need to know in order to give substance to this picture, is whether the 'original and unmediated intuitions' of this imagined feral individual are claimed to be the same for every such imagined individual 'unoppressed' by culture and language or else 'freed by madness' from it.
Unfortunately for the project of making out such a claim, there is no way in which an identity or even similarity between those 'intuitions' of separate feral individuals could be discovered in the absence of a common language and way of life. There is even no sense that we could give to the notion of the 'original intuitions' of those individuals being the same or different, - nothing for that sameness or difference to consist in. The consequence of that is that we would then have no reason to regard them as 'intuitions' at all or as telling us anything about anything. It begins to look as if nothing can be found to correspond to that phrase 'the original unforced intuition' and this throws a doubt over the whole attempt to portray language and culture as in themselves coercive and oppressive. The coercive can only be contrasted with the natural and unforced. Where there is no place and no possibility of the latter, the former has no place either.
Taking another tack in the attempt to give us some sense of the ways in which our culture and even our physical being may limit and determine our conceptual and perceptual grasp - even if not oppressively - Nietzsche often suggests that we consider imaginatively the different perceptions of a bird or a bee, a fish or a plant, so that we can consider the radically different possibilities in perception - differences so radical that we might be justified in saying that the bee or the snail do not simply have a different perspective on our world, but inhabit radially different worlds.
But we must be careful here, because there are serious questions about the legitimacy of transferring wholesale the notion of 'inhabiting a world' from humans to other species. At a minimum, I think we need to insist that the legitimacy of that phrase would require it that the inhabitants of these 'different worlds' mark a distinction between themselves and the 'world' they are being said to inhabit. This rules out solipsists and probably our snail, as well as infants in their first weeks.
We may well be persuaded by our imaginative projections that the perceptions of a hawk, a hare or a hippopotamus are as different from one another as from human perceptions. Though we needn't reach for such exotic examples. Even among the human inhabitants of one city, the bond trader, the traffic cop, the homeless street person, the artist, the pickpocket, will all have very different perceptions when looking down the same street at the same time. The traffic cop will see the illegally parked cars or the driver jumping the lights; the bond trader may manage not to see the street person, while the pickpocket is sizing up the chances of bumping into the bond trader 'accidentally', and the artist is taken by the juxtaposition of the homeless street person in his cardboard, and the well-lit display of furniture and bedding in the adjacent shop window.
But we have to ask just what those differences of perception show us apart from the fact that what we see or hear, taste or smell is a matter of our interests, training and skills. Can those differences show us negatively that the differences of perception that reflect those differences of interest and training are evidence of a coercion and distortion by that training and culturation? Or do they not rather undermine that picture and that notion of coercion by suggesting that there is no one 'correct' and 'objective' view of things that has got distorted by the learning of language and the acquiring of skills and interests?
This question brings us face to face with the metaphysical aspect of our problem - the question whether we can give sense to the notion that there is some single 'external reality' and a single way of viewing it which is independent of and prior to all language, training, socialization and interests?
But before trying to tease out the metaphysical assumptions needed to give sense and substance to that picture, we need to look at an example of Nietzsche's that has been thought to support the picture of language and culture as coercive and oppressive, though that example could be taken to show the opposite, namely that there is no single objective view that we are being blinded to by being inducted into a particular culture and linguistic group.
In trying to combat the Platonic view encapsulated in the myth of the Forms and to show that language has a human origin and does not take its origin 'from the essence of things' Nietzsche takes the example of the formation of the idea of leaf, and through it tries to show the essential falsehood of any human language. He says:
Let us especially think about the formation of ideas. Every word becomes an idea when, rather than serving as a sort of reminder of that unique, entirely individualized first experience to which it owes its origin, it instead simultaneously must fit innumerable, more or less equal (which means never equal and therefore, altogether unequal) cases. Every idea originates through equating the unequal. As certainly as no one leaf is exactly similar to any other, so certain is it that the idea "leaf" has been formed through an arbitrary omission of these individual differences, through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities, and this idea now awakens the notion that in nature there is, besides the leaves, a something called the leaf, perhaps a primal form according to which all leaves were woven, drawn, accurately measured, colored, crinkled, painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy had turned out correct and trustworthy as a true copy of the primal form.
('On the Pathos of Truth' from Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books (1872)

This can stand to draw attention to the implausibilities that leap out at us as soon as we try to take Plato's demiurgos as anything but a mythical picture meant to put a comfortable order onto ordinary facts. However, I have myself italicized the word 'arbitrary' in the above passage in order to call attention to its failure as an inditement of language itself for perjury or a conviction of it for falsehood through 'equating the unequal'. There are two things to note here: One is that Nietzsche is misusing the notion of equality in describing the formation of an idea as requiring 'the equating of the unequal'.
Things are equal or unequal only under some aspect or in some category. Things may be equal or unequal in age, size weight, color, number, taste, or whatever, but there is no sense to their just plain 'being equal' or 'unequal'. The notion of 'absolute equality' is a non-starter because in its ideal completion there would no longer be two things to be set equal. And it makes no sense, and we are told nothing, if someone says that the thing is 'equal to itself'. [The notion of identity does not suffer that fate because we can identify something from one moment to another - so that latter notion therefore, by contrast, has an important use.]
If through our use of the word 'leaf' we set two things equal, that means they are being said to be equal as leaves and in no other way. We may go on to make further distinctions among leaves, describing them as 'palmate', 'pinnate', 'ovate', 'compound' and so forth, but they are all still leaves and from that point of view quite equal. There is no falsification in that equation, nor are the simplifications involved in the classification itself arbitrary ones as Nietzsche has suggested. The simplifications that any people makes in forging its language and system of identifications it develops, reflects its way of life and the interests and skills that have developed among that people. And as that life, those skills and those interests progress and change, so will the language.
It is by talking about some abstract essence called 'language' something separated from any particular people and its life, interests and skills, that we get into tangles, confusions and mystifications. When we return to earth we can see that the simplifications that go into their language and the identifications that any people makes are in no way arbitrary, as Nietzsche claims in the above quotation, but are reflections of their interests, their skills. their practices and their whole way of living in the world.

This is perhaps the moment to pass on to the general 'problem of reflection' because the accusations against language of coercion,distorting, and lying (even if this is as Nietzsche says lying in a 'non-moral sense' to which no blame attaches) all of them require a contrast between an accurate and a distorted reflection of something.
There are several difficulties with the metaphor of 'reflection' - particularly where the paradigm examples are the inanimate (mirrors) and the involuntary (reflexes). We will have to examine these difficulties with a view to moving back to the center of attention the human activity of reflecting on things in the sense of 'turning one's gaze on' and 'examining' and bringing out what is implicit. The injunction to 'reflect on your actions' or 'on your motives' is a call to look for and to bring out what is implicit in them. We can also reflect on practices to bring out and formulate the rule implicit in them. [We will have to deal another time with the question whether the practice is prior to the implicit rule or the rule prior and determinative of the practice - as is suggested by the once common phrase, 'rule-governed behavior'. We will need also to question the assumption that there must be a definite determinative priority in one direction or the other.]
It is perhaps itself a 'reflection of' the dominance of the 'mechanical world-view with its aim explaining all things mechanically, that the passive and involuntary 'reflection of' has provided the dominant sense for 'reflection', pushing to the margin ad obscuring the human activity of 'reflecting on' even where, paradoxically, it is human knowledge and understanding that is under examination and being reflected on. In the Nietzschean picture language is being seen as a mirror, but as a faulty and distorted one that reflects things badly.
The problem lies in seeing human language, and human knowledge in terms of that 'mirror' metaphor at all, with its implication that they stand in a passive relation to something (something which tends to get called 'the world' or 'external reality'.) In the above passage, Nietzsche implies that language ought to stand in a perfectly passive relation to 'the world' but that it fails to do so and is prevented by the intervention of the human activity of 'omission of differences' which he then wrongly describes as 'arbitrary' as a result of the picture he is working with. As we have pointed out above, there is no arbitrariness in the many different simplifications that go into the making of the great variety of human languages.
Those simplifications and those identifications will be different for different languages certainly, but that fact does not carry the implication that they are therefore arbitrary. On the contrary, it calls attention to the fact that languages are human artifacts which are shaped by their role in human life and that the differences between the different languages arise from the range of forms of human life in which they function. Those differences in the identifications made in different languages are not the products of some imperfect mechanical process. As artifacts, those identifications are the result of human activity, the shaping of a language to meet new needs, possibilities and aspirations - possibilities and needs that may have been generated in part by earlier developments and distinctions made and embodied in the language.
Despite his strictures on 'the shallow optimism of science', Nietzsche seems to have fallen under the spell of the scientistic world-view in his conception of an ideal and proper function of language as the mechanical and passive 'reflection' of some single 'external reality' confronting all of humanity indifferently - rather than seeing the great variety of human languages as the product of an active human engagement with the material world in which those humans carry on their greatly different forms of life.
We would expect great variety and great difficulties of inter translatability between the languages of the nomads of Mongolia or the Sahara, the Innuit in the Arctic wastes, the stone age tribals of New Guinea or the Amazon, the primitive agriculturalists of Africa, Asia and the New World, and that group of languages which Benjamin Lee Worf called 'standard average European'. And they don't disappoint us. We would be astounded if the language of any of those tribal peoples matched our own completely, word for word, distinction for distinction, and that astonishment is evidence that we don't seriously believe that all of humanity confronts a single 'external reality' which the languages of the world attempt to reflect. The fact that the picture is not seriously believed in makes it harder, not easier to combat.
Now we need to turn to another aspect of the 'mirror' metaphor and what it implicitly claims about the nature of the world that gets reflected.
The World as Material and the World as Form
Myths and fantasies involving mirrors and reflecting surfaces such as still water have from the myth of Narcissus onward involved seeing them either as windows onto, or gateways into separate worlds. Narcissus fatally takes his image in the pool to be his deceased twin sister and dies trying to join her. Alice enters a reversed world through the looking glass, a world in which the sentence comes before the trial and the White Queen remembers things that happen 'the week after next'. The protagonist in Cocteau's film Le Sang du PoEt begins his adventures by diving through the mirror and swimming into a surreal dream world, and in Borges' invented Chinese myth the mirror-creatures threaten to get out of hand and act independently, perhaps even conquering the reflected world.
All of these fantasies are fantasies precisely because they deliberately violate the fundamental fact about mirrors that mirrors reflect the visible form of the things placed in front of them without their matter. And this tells us something about the conception of the world that is implied in the use of the metaphor of reflection to characterize the concepts of knowledge and truth, and it raises some questions about the appropriateness of that metaphor and whether the metaphor is helpful or misleading in our attempts to understand and give a coherent account of human knowledge.
The first thing to notice about the mirror metaphor is that it represents human knowledge and understanding as passive and at best mechanical. In the end this picture is part of an attempt to carry forward that program of explanation that constitutes the 'mechanical world-view' a program and an ideal of explanation which, for important historical reasons came to dominate the intellectual scene in the seventeenth century. The mirror metaphor leaves nothing for the human side but the possibility of imperfection and distortion, a falling away from the true reflection of a mechanically perfect surface. In this conception, reflecting is not an activity and there is nothing for humans to do except perhaps to 'cast the beam' out of their eye. And even what that might consist of is made impossible to understand if one takes that metaphor seriously and follows out its logic.
This metaphor and conception of reflection also carry with them the implication that there is only one correct view and only one true language which captures correctly that which is there to be reflected. The sounds assigned to ideas and distinctions may differ, but in so far as they are advancing (where this gets the sense of 'advancing on the truth') all languages must converge. And, of course, convergence has been made the test if not the meaning of 'truth', by Peirce, for example.
Of course we do in fact find convergence in the development of the languages of the world. The French, for example, have found to their distaste an invasion of Americanisms which no laws and no minister of culture have been able to prevent. But this is hardly because the American language better reflects an abstract reality and truth. The understanding of that convergence is also not advanced by appealing to an abstract and transcendent 'truth' or 'reality' whose mode of action on human consciousness would be impenetrably mysterious and beyond unravelling.
On the other hand, that convergence can easily be understood concretely and historically. American dominance of film and TV production has, for example, led to the dissemination throughout the world of a set of values and aspirations associated with a seductive picture of life as it is purported to be lived in America. The desire to participate in that supposedly desirable life can manifest itself in minor imitations of dress and talk as well as in those values and aspirations.
One needs also to look at the enormous social changes that have been wrought throughout the Third World, for example, by the imposition of market relations on nomadic, peasant and tribal societies and the destruction of their subsistence economies and their absorption into the the global, commodity-producing, market-driven network organized and policed by the IMF and the World Bank. Those changes have inevitably brought with them linguistic changes that reflect, and are made necessary by the tremendous changes in the life and organization of those societies.
When we have at hand concrete historical explanations of convergence of that kind, of what use to us are explanations that appeal to abstractions such as 'truth', 'reality' and so forth?
That program and set of aspirations which has been called 'the mechanical world-view' has dominated the intellectual landscape of the modern era and largely set the agenda for philosophy and shaped the ruling conception of what is an adequate explanation. The acceptance of that program and that agenda insured that the mechanical interpretation of the metaphor of 'reflection' as a representation of human knowledge and understanding would displace the conception of reflection as turning one's gaze inward or onto the activity or the practice one was engaged in so as to improve it or advance it, to embrace or reject it.
The mirror as an image of human knowledge and its relation to its object becomes one of a mechanical process in which humans are passive receivers not active participants. The mechanistic agenda combines with the equally dominant individualist agenda in which the collective and the social is required to be seen as no more than an aggregate of individual motives and actions. The combination these agendas produces a false conclusion to the passivity of human collectivities and of humanity as such, from the passivity with which any individual human receives the accrued knowledge, language, skills, customs and practices of the surrounding culture. This false inference reinforces and is reinforced by, the passive/mechanical reading of the image and metaphor of the mirror.
One can't describe either the 'mechanical world-view' or the individualistic paradigm that have dominated the modern era as 'incoherent' because they are both of them better understood as offering us a set of aspirations, a program and a set of standards of what we are to count as an adequate explanation in their respective areas rather than being seen as an actual theory or account which could be true, false or incoherent. They are best described as unrealistic and unhelpful, as requiring us to take a narrow view that ignores or denies the existence of facts and phenomena that are obvious from other perspectives. The determinism about which generations of philosophers have pretended to worry while at the same time going about their lives without a thought of it, is simply the product of the unrealizable fantasy of carrying through to some imagined end, the mechanistic program of explaining everything in mechanical terms. But the strength of the commitment to the mechanical paradigm can be measured by the fact that determinism was thought to be a 'problem' and not simply evidence for the unrealizability of that program of universal explanation.
The main success of the project of explaining mechanically and causally everything including human knowledge, judgment and action has been in generating intractable pseudo-problems such as that of determinism. However, the historical motivations for adopting that project have long since disappeared. Originally, that motivation was the ideological one of breaking the hegemony of the feudal system by displacing the associated theological world-picture which had been articulated by the scholastic philosophers. The newly emerging scientific forms of understanding were co-opted and given the impossible task of giving a complete scientific account of the world that could stand against the theological and overthrow it.
This inappropriate and impossible task laid on the sciences and scientific forms of understanding has generated nothing but mischief, mystification, pseudo-problems and serious misunderstandings of the sciences themselves. Even now there are scientists and others who think that the problem of the 'origin of the Universe' is a mystery that can be laid to rest by the sciences. That they are wrong in this belief, any serious analysis of progress and development in the sciences would show them
If we put aside the project of explaining everything mechanically and causally and allow ourselves other forms of understanding, we can see the mischief caused by the mirror metaphor as a representation of human understanding as passive. We can then move back to the center of our thought the human activity of 'reflecting on', a move and change of perspective which transforms and dissolves many problems. The chief point is that if we are to understand human activity and the languages, institutions, sets of values, ways of life, and systems of knowledge which humans have created, we are going to have to see humans as active agents and not the passive transmitters and transformers of causal impulses coming from elsewhere.
The first and greatest problem that gets transformed by this move and change of perspective is the problem of progress and development, whether in the sphere of science and knowledge generally or in the area of the moral or social. It has seemed almost universally and not just to those laboring to fulfil the mechanistic dream that the ideas of progress and development in themselves require a standard, goal or limit that is external to the activity or endeavor such that it can act as a test or measure of it. It has seemed that examination, measurement, comparison and criticism are possible only from a standpoint which is not only independent of the activity, practices, system of values or institutions under inspection, but a standpoint which itself is based on a fully articulated set of values and is at the same time justified by principles that are external and independent with a force and appeal that is supposed to bear on every individual human from whatever culture and circumstance simply in virtue of their humanity and human rationality. Lying behind this view are all of Plato's arguments for the existence of the Forms, and lying in its path are all of his later arguments in the Parmenides to show that the Forms are fifth wheels that can have no place or function in human life or understanding - and therefore, one might add, no existence.
In any case this fine ideal has not surprisingly proved impossible to achieve in practice. This for the simple reason that it requires us to step entirely outside our human skins and look down god-like on ourselves, our beliefs and our fellow humans as though we were a transcendent form of being in touch with Plato's transcendent and ultimate realities as well as ultimate, unassailable and potentially universal forms of rationality.
If we are going to make progress in unravelling these matters we are going to have abandon that ideal and that project which dates from a historical era which needed metaphysics to take on the role of a kind of secular theology and turned it into a hunt for absolute and transcendent entities and principles that stood outside of and confronted all of humanity equally. We are going to have to content ourselves with an account of progress, development and criticism which finds its base within human life and actual human abilities.
It is here that moving 'reflecting on' to the center gives us some purchase even though it will not generate that Archimedian fixed point outside the world that the old metaphysics thought necessary to make sense of the notion of progress as well as to enable and justify criticism.
Reflecting on our actions, practices, way of life, institutions, beliefs, theories, assumptions, aims or values and trying to formulate the principles involved or simply to describe them to ourselves is precisely to attempt to set ourselves outside them, to put ourselves in a position to accept, reject, or to modify them.
As with all human endeavors, to make the attempt is not to be guaranteed success. We may fail to identify the principle and we may misdescribe the actions and the aims. This may be because we are not very good at it. We may not be very articulate, or have the right vocabulary, the right perspective or good tools of analysis. Some people are admired as 'reflective' and good at drawing out and setting out those implicit and underlying principles, attitudes and motivations. Those people are thought to be worth listening to. It was once regarded as the role of fiction to set out and describe characters, actions and ways of life in a way that made their moving principles apparent to the reader whether or not they were presented as being apparent to the protagonists.
And some fiction has set before us subtly and convincingly described examples of what we recognize as self-deception. This self-deception may be powered by an unrecognized unwillingness to recognize the implicit principles or assumptions in our actions and decisions because of the perhaps painful and difficult changes that would be enjoined on us once we had seen our behavior or way of life for what it was. Then there are whole ideological systems of thought whose very function and role is to prevent a body of people from getting a clear view of their situation, relations and the principles driving the social arrangements of which they are a part. These ideological systems of ideas should not be thought of as the Machiavellian inventions of manipulative ideologues (though this can happen). They are generally and on the whole more like the myths that primitive people often make up to give a rationale for practices and rituals that have grown up in ways and for reasons that they do not grasp. These myths and ideologies are perhaps the obverse of the reflective activity that we are talking about. Ideology and myths conceal and obscure rather than reveal the reasons for and the principles implicit in practices and institutions.
Not only are there those many ways of going wrong in our attempts to stand back from or outside of practices, behaviors and ways of life that we take part in, we have to add that reflecting on is an activity that never comes to a natural end. It will not give us the ultimates and absolutes that the metaphysicians look for. On the contrary there is always need for enlarging the scope of the reflection to reveal assumptions and doubtful principles that may have limited or distorted those earlier reflections.
Rather than engaging in the fruitless search for absolutes, ultimates and the the transcendent, the function of philosophy needs to be seen as an endlessly reflective one that aims to uncover implicit principles so that we may recognize and either embrace, reject or modify them. But that reflective function also requires philosophers to search out confusions and distortions that may stand in the way of getting a clear view and in that way genuinely distancing ourselves from the behaviors and practices that we are trying to examine.
This process is endless because each act of reflecting and each uncovering of distorting assumptions and confusions itself may itself be subject to other and different distortions and confusions which will need to be uncovered. But progress will have been made, nevertheless even though it will be a progress that is defined as an improvement over what was rather than than as an approach to an imagined absolute goal lying outside the series.
Each imperfect act of reflection if honestly conducted represents an advance in that it lays before us a new act or practice to examine, accept, improve or else to reject as having been colored by confusions or lack of clarity. In that way, though we can never put our human frailty behind us, we can work to identify and to advance past any particular failing. If we aim for more, for the transcendent, we will, like Thales, fall into a well while gazing at the stars.

Getting It Straight

Getting it Straight

For nearly two millennia the sense of Euclid’s own definition of a straight line seems to have escaped the commentators on Euclid’s Elements. Since Euclid’s definition of a straight line as ‘a line that lies evenly with the points of itself’ turns out to be the only genuine definition of a straight line and the only one that has a place or a role in geometry, this failure calls for a serious examination because it suggests that behind it may be an important misconception about the nature of geometry as a piece of human knowledge. The trouble comes with the conception of geometry as a body of knowledge that stands outside and above the concrete practical world. This prevented the commentators from seeing that Euclid’s definition was founded on and related to a practice – that of draftsmen who check the straightness of their straightedge by drawing a line and then rotating the straightedge and drawing a second line on top of the first. If, and only if, the points of the two ‘lie evenly with themselves is the straightedge straight.
Euclid’s definition allows us to move directly to the proposition that ‘Two straight lines cannot have a common segment’ - something which those who didn’t see the sense of his definition often thought had to be added as an axiom if geometry were to have validity. From Euclid’s definition it follows that if lines have two points is common then they have them all in common and are not two lines at all and only one.
The standard would-be definition ‘a straight line is the shortest distance between two points’ may give us a truth about straight lines but hardly tells us what straightness consists in. And it has no place in a geometry that does not involve measurement or comparison of lengths. It would also have no role there in establishing theorems. It is scandalous that such a false definition still appears in school text-books that are pretending to introduce students to rigorous reasoning through geometry.
The failure to understand Euclid’s definition was bad enough but even more damaging to geometry was the would-be definition that was offered in its place. ‘The shortest distance between two points’ is neither a definition nor has it any place in a geometry that does not involve measurement or comparison of length. That ‘definition’ can enter into no proofs – unlike Euclid’s, which immediately establishes the theorem that ‘Two straight lines cannot have a common segment.’ From Euclid’s definition it follows that if they have two points in common they have them all in common and are identical and the same line and not two.
Because he did not understand that definition of Euclid’s and see its function in his proofs, the early commentator, Zeno of Sidon wrongly thought that certain of Euclid’s proofs were faulty and needed the supplement of further axioms such as that ‘two straight lines cannot have a common segment’ to ensure their validity. If he had understood Euclid’s definition he would have seen that it ensured that if two lines had more than one point in common they would have all their points in common and would not be two lines at all but only one.
Reflecting on the reasons why the commentators have been unable to understand and accept Euclid’s definition can tell us a lot about the framework of thought that has dominated the modern era and which needs thorough criticism that can put it behind us and free us up for a better understanding of things. I think that one reason that it was difficult for the commentators to see the sense of Euclid’s definition was that from very early on geometry was seen as a body of ‘higher truth’ lifted well above the practice of builders or carpenters, and coming to us from the heavens and antecedent to any practice. This is why they could not allow a fundamental concept of geometry to derive from and reflect that practice of draftsmen and others to check straightness by that rotational method.



This conception of geometry as a ‘higher truth’ standing above the material world and shaping it is pretty obviously why Plato had ‘Let No One Ignorant of Geometry Enter Here’ engraved in the stones above the entrance to the Academy. It is for that reason completely ironic that Plato himself offered a definition of straightness that not only was derived from a practice of carpenters but was in addition defective and could not have any function in geometry. It left many theorems without a foundation and therefore undermined geometry’s rigor. Plato defined the straight as ‘that of which the middle obscures the ends’. The first thing to say about this is that it comes from the practice of carpenters of sighting along a plank to see if it is straight. To try to turn this practice into a definition requires us to assume that light travels in straight lines – but even to assume this we have already to have a concept of straightness that is prior to the would-be definition. Also that operation of sighting could play no role in geometric proofs and would leave them defective. So at the same time as he was offering geometry as a model of truth and rigor, he was subverting that very rigor with his defective and useless definition of straightness.
The other standard definition: ‘The shortest distance between two points’ also comes from a practice – the carpenter’s chalk line method of laying out a straight line, and it is equally useless in establishing theorems and postulates. It is in fact scandalous that the ‘shortest distance’ definition still appears in textbooks of a subject that is held up as a model of rigor. That definition equally subverts that very rigor in its attempt to detach geometry from human practice and derive it from the heavens. There is no way in which the ‘shortest distance’ definition could enter into a geometrical proof. Geometry does not involve measurement of that kind. It may show lines to be equal or unequal but the process of proof of that would already involve and depend on the definition of straight line.
Euclid’s definition not only enters into the proofs of theorems – for example, by obviating the need for the supplement that Zeno thought was necessary for their validity, it also reflects the role that straightness plays in human life. We make things straight so that there will be no gaps in the floorboards or between the door and the frame. We want the points on the door and the points on the frame to ‘lie evenly’ with one another. Geometry was, to begin with, a practical subject helping builders and carpenters to do their work well and accurately. But it was very early raised up and given an almost religious significance. In the Middle East there was even a sect that built cubes all over the countryside in ancient times, regarding them as objects of reverence. As soon as geometry was given that sort of role in human life, it had to be lifted above the practical role it previously had and the practical definitions that went with that role had to be surpassed. But if we leave those practical definitions behind and rule them out we leave ourselves in a mess. Thomas Heath in his book Euclid published in the early part of the last century which gives a thorough and comprehensive account of Euclid and his commentators was even moved to say that Euclid ‘was attempting the impossible’ in setting out to define something so fundamental as straightness in lines. But it turned out to be not impossible and Euclid did it perfectly well. His definition is the only genuine one that both tells us what a straight line is and allows us to move forward to generate theorems about them. What the commentators could not take in is what was expressed so clearly by Newton in the preface to the Principia; ‘The foundation of geometry lies in mechanical practice.’ This precisely characterizes Euclid’s definition – it is founding geometry in ‘mechanical practice’. It was because later theoreticians saw geometry as necessarily standing before practice and determining it that they could not accept a definition that founded itself on practice and thereby undermined that picture.
What we have to be clear about is that though the founding definitions may derive from practice and in this way give geometry a relation to the practical world, once they are adopted and given that status as founding definitions, they are no longer shaped by practice but are given the role of shaping practice. They now determine our practice and are not determined by it. It is our own decisions and commitments that create this seemingly ‘higher’ world that dictates to us.
Newton turns out to be a Marxist before his time in putting mechanical practice at the foundation of knowledge, while at the same time getting Euclid out of the shadows and allowing the sense of his definition to be seen and to be seen as the only possible foundational definition. It may well be that Newton anticipated me in seeing the sense of Euclid’s definition, and I am willing to believe it though I have no direct evidence.
Heath thought that Euclid was ‘attempting the impossible’ in trying to give a definition of an absolutely fundamental concept such as straight line, but that was because he did not consider the possibility that he could refer to a practice in his definition. Heath was of that school that saw geometry as something above the material world and human practice. And how was it to be raised to those celestial heights? On this view, the definitions of the fundamental terms would have to relate them to things beyond this world, fixed and eternal, things that generally get the title, ‘transcendentals’. The trouble with tramscendentals is that their proper home is in a religious context and not a secular one. They cannot be reached by the senses or checked out by experimental means. They belong in the realm of faith not the world of secular facts. When the founders of modern philosophy thought they could secularize the previous framework of thought by turning nature into a transcendental standing outside the material world yet governing it according to immutable laws, they created a monster beyond human understanding. Even religious faith could not help here because that transcendental monster was meant by them to impact on and control the material world and it was impossible to say how that was meant to take place. The best we can say is that though the definitions that we put at the foundation of geometry may arise out of practices once they are adopted and made foundational, we are bound by those decisions and they generate a system that stands above and guides further practice and does not merely reflect it.
The point we have to seize on here is that it would actually be impossible to give a definition of the most fundamental of the concepts of geometry except by reference to practice. To say that they are fundamental is to say that there are no deeper concepts in terms of which they can be defined. Practice is the only thing that can get those fundamental concepts off the ground and give them substance and content. Newton saw this when he said ‘To draw a straight line is a problem, but it is not a geometrical problem. The solution to this problem is required from mechanics….Therefore geometry is founded in mechanical practice.’ But it is not just the drawing of straight lines that requires ‘mechanical practice’ we need to refer to that practice in order to say what a straight line consists in as well as how to produce them.
This whole issue of Euclid’s definition and what it shows us about how the foundation of geometry lies in practice is of the utmost importance in the challenge it issues to the whole framework of thought that has dominated and defined the modern era. This framework sought the starting points for knowledge and truth in things detached and prior to human practices, things set in the heavens as transcendentals. It was this framework of thought that prevented the commentators from being able to see the sense of, and to accept Euclid’s definition. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this modern framework arose from the attempt of the founding fathers of modern philosophy to save themselves work in creating a new secular framework suitable for the modern era that followed on the feudal. They thought they could simply take the theological framework of the previous era and simply substitute Nature for God.
This attempt to save themselves work landed them with far more work - with insolvable problems and impossible projects. The adapting of the old theological framework of the previous era left them looking for ultimate foundations and absolute starting points to put in the place of God – starting points that stood apart from, and confronted humanity from some unspecifiable place beyond. These were the transcendentals that were thought to be necessary foundation any genuine knowledge. The proper home of transcendentals is in a religious context and the attempt to make a home for them in a secular context is richly productive of mystery and confusion. The attempt to treat Nature as a transcendental governing the material world from somewhere outside created a monster beyond understanding. That is, Nature was held to impose its eternal laws on the material world by means that are never specified and never investigated – for very good reasons – they are beyond understanding.
Something that is claimed to be outside the material world and not part of it, has for that reason got to be something immaterial. Yet that immaterial would-be entity is pictured as controlling the material world and making it adhere to those eternal laws. How something immaterial can be taken to impose a pattern of behavior on something concrete and material is beyond secular understanding – and for that very good reason, the question was never raised by the philosophers who were trying to make Nature a secular substitute for God. In the context of religious faith, God is taken to be something beyond the world yet capable of acting on it. God’s powers were allowed to be mysterious because religious faith is at bottom an acknowledgement of the limitations of human understanding in the face of the universe. But the secular framework that was being constructed could not allow such mysterious powers to operate as part of its system of secular explanation whose whole object was to eliminate mystery and to seek timeless truths that were not the product of faith but had objective roots in the material world.
But that whole framework of thought and its projects and standards are still with us and are the precise reason why it was impossible for the commentators to understand and see the force of Euclid’s definition of a straight line and that human practices were the only place one could start in getting the founding conceptions off the ground. We need to abandon that search for transcendentals as the necessary foundations for truth and human knowledge and accept it that human knowledge grows out of human practices in interacting with the material world and is not founded on mysterious non-entities located in some nowhereland beyond us.

Truth and Lies

Truth and Lies

. . . a people who love drink and honor lack of clarity as a virtue, for it has the double quality of a narcotic that both intoxicates and befogs.
Nietzsche - 'An Attempt at Self Criticism'

We can learn a lot from looking carefully and with as much clarity as we can muster at the view of science and of human knowledge, language and concepts that pictures them as in themselves, and necessarily, coercive and restrictive, as interposing between ourselves and some external reality, a grid or web of ideas which, as human artifacts, necessarily misrepresent that reality. This view has been expressed in different ways by many of the contemporary French philosophers ranged under the 'poststructuralist' label and has been taken up elsewhere. It comes originally from Nietzsche, where the most concentrated source is a short piece called 'Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense'.
There are two quite different aspects to this picture that take very different types of analysis. One is social and involves trying to look at the place and suitability of the notion of coercion in talking about language and concepts; the other is metaphysical and concerns the sense that can be given to the phrase 'external reality'. That phrase has too long been used as though it were unproblematic.
The social dimension of the picture and the questions it raises is a result of the fact that if we are to take the notion of coercion at all seriously and not as an overheated poetical flourish, we have to recognize a personal or social agency behind it. That agency has to be agency in the strict sense involving intentionality and purpose. Except jokingly, I do not say that I was 'coerced' into stopping my car by the fallen tree.
Naturally, if we are pressed to designate an agency of that kind in order to justify the use of the words 'coercive' and 'oppressive', an obvious candidate, pretty well the only candidate, is going to be a culture or a society. Individuals, whether individual teachers, parents, peers or siblings, might be seen as the instruments of that cultural coercion, but they should not be seen as acting on their own behalf or according to their own lights in inducting the child into the practices and the language of a culture. That independent acting would not provide the uniformities of concept and understanding that could issue in a common language and common way of life.
Of course, those individual teachers, peers and parents may impose their own agenda on top of that process of primary socialization and coerce the child in other ways that might be either corrupting and damaging, or else might benefit the child, enhancing later life with skills, sensitivities and enjoyments the child might not have had if it had not been pushed unwilling to school or dragged from play in for piano lessons.
However we are here only concerned with the coercion that is meant to attach to a particular set of concepts, a language, a world view and perhaps a way of life, so that our interest is only in the culture, and the individual concerns us only as agent or instrument of that culture in the process of that socialization which is here being seen as coercive and to result in the imposition of views and concepts that blind and narrow.
There are, of course, all too many examples of the cultural imposition of views and attitudes of just that damaging kind: the blind racism among the neo-nazis, the Aryan Brotherhood, or in some segments of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland; or the pitiful but necessary acceptance by women in certain cultures of the outrageous practice of female circumcision (an Egyptian woman once described it as 'tidying things up'!) - all would be good examples of such constricting and damaging cultural impositions.
It would also be fair to describe some of these views as having been coercively imposed. In prison in the US, for example, it is necessary to join one gang or another in order to survive, and the Aryan Brotherhood is generally the largest and most dominant. Joining them means accepting their racist beliefs and acting on them. What may feel uncomfortable at first is soon seems natural and unforced as the comfort and safety of belonging overwhelms initial reservations.
The question we have to address, however, is whether all cultures together with their concepts, systems of knowledge and practices, are coercive impositions on the individual, - whether they are that by their very nature, and without distinction. One thing we have to look at here is the role and appropriateness of the word 'coercion'.
Like the word 'violent', the word 'coercive' implies not only a disruptive agent but that there is a natural and unforced direction and development which is being deflected and distorted by something external. If we want then to describe humanity as a whole as being coerced in some way, we have to ask: 'By what external thing?' There are not many choices for answer. And we have also to ask serious questions about the implied existence of a 'natural' development of the individual human and the implied existence of undistorted apprehensions and perceptions by the individual human who has not been shaped by socialization and acquiring the language of some particular society.
In effect we have to confront the question whether there is a universal and a historical human essence that is given with the biological makeup of the species (As has been assumed by so many philosophers and others. It appears in the Cartesian 'innate ideas', for example) - or whether humanity is precisely that species that has transcended the forces of natural selection and whose nature is determined, and its development driven, by social and historical forces.
From this latter point of view, the human essence is not seen as a 'natural' one but as a social and historical one. Any individual who is imagined as existing entirely outside and untouched by, those human social and historical forces would be only a member of the biological species and not a human being in any proper sense. If there is no humanity outside of society and history, then the picture of language and culture being 'coercive' seems to evaporate. Language and culture become conditions of one's humanity and one's rationality itself and are not barriers to some abstract and 'universal' humanity set outside all society and culture. We will have to return to the myth of the feral individual implied in this latter picture.
But we need to come down from that metaphysical pinnacle where the questions are abstract and ahistorical ones concerning the coercion of an abstraction called 'humanity' by some other abstraction called 'language' or 'culture' so that we end up talking about 'essences' and not about concrete things that may actually exist somewhere and at some time. When we have come back to earth where we can look at actual historical cultures and social forms together with their organizing myths and linguistic tropes we can analyse concretely the actual and genuine sources of coercion that have existed in almost every society and culture up to the present.
None is perhaps so deeply, and at the same time so invisibly coercive and oppressive as that social form that flew the Enlightenment flag of 'The Liberation of Humanity'. The sources of this oppression are nicely hidden behind the 'impersonal forces of the Market' which are presented to us as though they were laws of nature - not of physical nature, perhaps, but of the nature of humanity and of societies as such. Not only are the sources hidden, the character of the oppression is hidden by dressing it up as the very opposite of an oppression - as an opportunity. That opportunity, which the Enlightenment proclaimed as a liberation, was the new 'opportunity' to sell to another one's ability to work, that is, to put one's human creative capacities under the control of another, to alienate them in return for a wage that enables one to live. This act of alienating of one's human creative capacities is then presented as the natural condition and aspiration of humanity, so that someone who has not been able to sell their human creative capacity to another is regarded as failing in some way or as being simply misfortunate in being 'unemployed'.
That social form whose central organizing feature is the buying and selling of that human creative capacity and the accruing of its products to the purchaser, is now dominant in the world and shows itself able to overwhelm and obliterate all other social forms. It is the unconscious sense of this concrete historical reality that may be showing itself in an abstracted form in many of the themes characteristic of poststructuralism. There is perhaps in those themes a recognition of the hidden coerciveness of this now dominant social form, a recognition that is distorted and displaced by being abstracted and attached not to this specific social form but to some 'essence' or essential nature of cultures or societies in themselves.
This abstract treatment not only turns our eyes away from the specific oppressions of this particular social form but gives us the message that there is no point in trying to struggle against those dehumanizing oppressions because any other social form will be as oppressive. (I am going to have to defend the use of the word 'dehumanizing' here - particularly since I have criticized the poststructuralist picture of the coerciveness of all cultures and languages in so far as it requires a conception of a 'natural' human development and apprehensions of the world that might lie outside of all culturation. That is for later.)
If we come down from that pinnacle of abstraction, we can point to and specify the oppressiveness of many particular social forms - the slavery of the ancient world, the antebellum South, Sudan and Arabia, the oppressions of feudal serfdom, or the outrageous oppression of women by the Taliban and to a lesser, though still unacceptable extent in many Muslim societies. And we must not forget the oppressiveness of that social form that requires people to alienate their human creative capacities, to put them in the hands of another in order to live
By looking at those specific societies we can uncover the mechanisms of coercion, mechanisms which are both physical and ideological. We can then look at systems of ideas whose function is to benefit one segment, - and not only to disadvantage another segment but to convince both the oppressed and the oppressors that the arrangement is just and natural.
But if we turn from these specific forms of oppression by specific forms of society back to the abstract thesis that every form of society or culture is oppressive in itself and by its nature, then we have a thesis which is dubious in so far as it has any content at all and is not simply gaseous. Also, one of the strange consequences of trying to attach coerciveness abstractly to cultures and societies as such is that we get a theoretical hankering after that impossible creature of an earlier metaphysical imagination - the abstract, pre-social human individual who nevertheless is already knitted out with some kind of human nature and some kind of primitive apprehension of the world.
If we are to talk about coercion and distortion, then we are committed to the existence of the possibility of a natural and undistorted life, a socially uncoerced apprehension and development. We seem to be back with the 'wolf-children' that so fascinated the Eighteenth Century. Neither Nietzsche nor any of the poststructuralist have given an adequate account of this unsocialized human creature of the imagination. Not surprisingly, - for they have not addressed themselves to the question of what the humanity of this creature would consist in.
Nietzsche tries with his idealisations of ancient Greek culture and his talk of the 'Apollonian' and the 'Dionysian' elements of it, to give us his conception of what a 'really human' life and spirit would be, but that is quite a different thing from defending the thesis that there could be some development that could be called 'human' outside of social and cultural contact with others, - and to specify what that development would be. Perhaps the most important thing about Nietzsche's attempt to define an ideal for humanity and in that way give a conception of what progress might be is that in forging it he looks within human history and human societies and not outside them. Those who want to picture all human cultures and their languages as coercive and distorting must, by contrast, look outside of history and historical societies for their conception of the undistorted life and undistorted apprehension. We have already raised the question whether the humanity of members of the genus homo is a biological given or is the product of history and socialization. This question goes to the heart of the issue of the coherence of the picture we are considering and will have to be dealt with carefully.

The Enlightenment claims to be liberating all of humanity with the knowledge systems and the social systems that were then being forged have turned out to be manifestly false. In the face of this failure Nietzsche and the poststructuralist philosophers have wanted to turn the Enlightenment optimism on its head and to suggest that all cultures and conceptual systems are in and of themselves oppressive, and so we get the natural sciences, the centerpiece of Enlightenment 'liberation', described as 'Eurocentric' and as 'patriarchal' and even 'phallocentric' and so forth by poststructuralist philosophers
But those descriptions themselves create a certain tension because their tone of criticism and even condemnation seems to imply and require a standpoint outside of the cultures and knowledge systems being criticised, - a standpoint that is not subject to the same criticism as biassed and representing only an arbitrary point of view. Is there room for such a standpoint within this picture? This tension itself also creates a hankering after the notion of an apprehension that is unmediated by culture, an 'original intuition' either belonging directly to the individual unspoilt by the socializing process, or else, - in the bizarre fantasy of Deluze and Guattari - an individual 'liberated' by schizophrenia from the oppressive overlay of civilization.
What is interesting and striking about this attempt to reach back behind what are regarded as the oppressive overlays of civilization, is that it seems, as we have said, to take us back to the Eighteenth Century hunt for wolf-children and to the mythical 'pre-social individual' that was required by that equally mythical account of the 'origins of society', - the Social Contract Theory. Of course this feral individual of modern theory is not required to have the language and reason and calculation of advantage that was necessary to the earlier creature conjured up by the Social Contract Theory. That earlier 'natural', pre-social individual had laid on it the momentous task of conducting negotiations for the founding of society itself, creating the social out of a pre-social barbarism.
The only theoretical task laid on this later feral individual born out of post-Enlightenment disillusion is that of revealing to us the supposed falsehood and oppressiveness of all socially and linguistically mediated forms of apprehension - though that is a large enough task in itself. Those descriptions of language and culture as 'coercive' and 'oppressive' necessarily and in themselves can only be licensed by showing us that there is an alternative unmediated and uncoerced pre-cultural intuition that can be set along side of the oppressed one. Our latter-day feral individual is meant to do that for us.
One thing we would need to know in order to give substance to this picture, is whether the 'original and unmediated intuitions' of this imagined feral individual are claimed to be the same for every such imagined individual 'unoppressed' by culture and language or else 'freed by madness' from it.
Unfortunately for the project of making out such a claim, there is no way in which an identity or even similarity between those 'intuitions' of separate feral individuals could be discovered in the absence of a common language and way of life. There is even no sense that we could give to the notion of the 'original intuitions' of those individuals being the same or different, - nothing for that sameness or difference to consist in. The consequence of that is that we would then have no reason to regard them as 'intuitions' at all or as telling us anything about anything. It begins to look as if nothing can be found to correspond to that phrase 'the original unforced intuition' and this throws a doubt over the whole attempt to portray language and culture as in themselves coercive and oppressive. The coercive can only be contrasted with the natural and unforced. Where there is no place and no possibility of the latter, the former has no place either.
Taking another tack in the attempt to give us some sense of the ways in which our culture and even our physical being may limit and determine our conceptual and perceptual grasp - even if not oppressively - Nietzsche often suggests that we consider imaginatively the different perceptions of a bird or a bee, a fish or a plant, so that we can consider the radically different possibilities in perception - differences so radical that we might be justified in saying that the bee or the snail do not simply have a different perspective on our world, but inhabit radially different worlds.
But we must be careful here, because there are serious questions about the legitimacy of transferring wholesale the notion of 'inhabiting a world' from humans to other species. At a minimum, I think we need to insist that the legitimacy of that phrase would require it that the inhabitants of these 'different worlds' mark a distinction between themselves and the 'world' they are being said to inhabit. This rules out solipsists and probably our snail, as well as infants in their first weeks.
We may well be persuaded by our imaginative projections that the perceptions of a hawk, a hare or a hippopotamus are as different from one another as from human perceptions. Though we needn't reach for such exotic examples. Even among the human inhabitants of one city, the bond trader, the traffic cop, the homeless street person, the artist, the pickpocket, will all have very different perceptions when looking down the same street at the same time. The traffic cop will see the illegally parked cars or the driver jumping the lights; the bond trader may manage not to see the street person, while the pickpocket is sizing up the chances of bumping into the bond trader 'accidentally', and the artist is taken by the juxtaposition of the homeless street person in his cardboard, and the well-lit display of furniture and bedding in the adjacent shop window.
But we have to ask just what those differences of perception show us apart from the fact that what we see or hear, taste or smell is a matter of our interest, training and skills. Can those differences show us negatively that the differences of perception that reflect those differences of interest and training are evidence of a coercion and distortion by that training and culturation? Or do they not rather undermine that picture and that notion of coercion by suggesting that there is no one 'correct' and 'objective' view of things that has got distorted by the learning of language and the acquiring of skills and interests?
This question brings us face to face with the metaphysical aspect of our problem - the question whether we can give sense to the notion that there is some single 'external reality' and a single way of viewing it which is independent of and prior to all language, training, socialization and interests?
But before trying to tease out the metaphysical assumptions needed to give sense and substance to that picture, we need to look at an example of Nietzsche's that has been thought to support the picture of language and culture as coercive and oppressive, though it could be taken to show the opposite, namely that there is no single objective view that we are being blinded to by being inducted into a particular culture and linguistic group.
In trying to combat the platonic view and to show that language has a human origin and does not take its origin 'from the essence of things' Nietzsche takes the example of the formation of the idea of leaf, and through it tries to show the essential falsehood of any human language. He says:
Let us especially think about the formation of ideas. Every word becomes an idea when, rather than serving as a sort of reminder of that unique, entirely individualized first experience to which it owes its origin, it instead simultaneously must fit innumerable, more or less equal (which means never equal and therefore, altogether unequal) cases. Every idea originates through equating the unequal. As certainly as no one leaf is exactly similar to any other, so certain is it that the idea "leaf" has been formed through an arbitrary omission of these individual differences, through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities, and this idea now awakens the notion that in nature there is, besides the leaves, a something called the leaf, perhaps a primal form according to which all leaves were woven, drawn, accurately measured, colored, crinkled, painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy had turned out correct and trustworthy as a true copy of the primal form.
('On the Pathos of Truth' from Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books (1872)

This can stand to draw attention to the implausibilities that leap out at us as soon as we try to take Plato's demiurgos as anything but a mythical picture meant to put a comfortable order onto ordinary facts. However, I have myself italicized the word 'arbitrary' in the above passage in order to call attention to its failure as an inditement of language itself for perjury or a conviction of it for falsehood through 'equating the unequal'. There are two things to note here: One is that Nietzsche is misusing the notion of equality in describing the formation of an idea as requiring 'the equating of the unequal'.
Things are equal or unequal only under some aspect or in some category. Things may be equal or unequal in age, size weight, color, number, taste, or whatever, but there is no sense to their just plain 'being equal' or 'unequal'. The notion of 'absolute equality' is a non-starter because in its ideal completion there would no longer be two things to be set equal. And it makes no sense, and we are told nothing, if someone says that the thing is 'equal to itself'. [The notion of identity does not suffer that fate because we can identify something from one moment to another - so that notion therefore has an important use.]
If through our use of the word 'leaf' we set two things equal, that means they are being said to be equal as leaves and in no other way. We may go on to make further distinctions among leaves, describing them as 'palmate', 'pinnate', 'ovate', 'compound' and so forth, but they are all still leaves and from that point of view quite equal. There is no falsification in that equation, nor are the simplifications involved in the classification itself arbitrary ones as Nietzsche has suggested. The simplifications that any people makes in forging its language and system of identifications it develops, reflects its way of life and the interests and skills that have developed among that people. And as that life, those skills and those interests progress and change, so will the language.
It is by talking about some abstract essence called 'language' something separated from any particular people and its life, interests and skills, that we get into tangles, confusions and mystifications. When we return to earth we see that the simplifications that go into their language and the identifications that any people makes are in no way arbitrary, as Nietzsche claims in the above quotation, but are reflections of their interests, their skills. their practices and their whole way of living in the world.

This is perhaps the moment to pass on to the general 'problem of reflection' because the accusations against language of coercion,distorting, and lying (even if this is as Nietzsche says lying in a 'non-moral sense' to which no blame attaches) all of them require a contrast between an accurate and a distorted reflection of something.
There are several difficulties with the metaphor of 'reflection' - particularly where the paradigm examples are the inanimate (mirrors) and the involuntary (reflexes). We will have to examine these difficulties with a view to moving back to the center of attention, the human activity of reflecting on things in the sense of 'turning one's gaze on' and 'examining' and bringing out what is implicit. The injunction to 'reflect on your actions' or 'on your motives' is a call to look for and to bring out what is implicit in them. We can also reflect on practices to bring out and formulate the rule implicit in them. [We will have to deal another time with the question whether the practice is prior to the implicit rule or the rule prior and determinative of the practice - as is suggested by the once common phrase, 'rule-governed behavior'. We will need also to question the assumption that there must be a definite determinative priority in one direction or the other.]
It is perhaps itself a 'reflection of' the dominance of the 'mechanical world-view with its aim explaining all things mechanically, that the passive and involuntary 'reflection of' has provided the dominant sense for 'reflection', pushing to the margin ad obscuring the human activity of 'reflecting on' even where, paradoxically, it is human knowledge and understanding that is under examination and being reflected on. In the Nietzschean picture language is being seen as a mirror, but as a faulty and distorted one that reflects things badly.
The problem lies in seeing human language, and human knowledge in terms of that 'mirror' metaphor at all, with its implication that they stand in a passive relation to something (something which tends to get called 'the world'.) In the above passage, Nietzsche implies that language ought to stand in a perfectly passive relation to 'the world' but that it fails to do so and is prevented by the intervention of the human activity of 'omission of differences' which he then wrongly describes as 'arbitrary' as a result of the picture he is working with. As we have pointed out above, there is no arbitrariness in the simplifications that go into the making of the great variety of human languages.
Those simplifications and those indentifications will be different for different languages certainly, but that fact does not carry the implication that they are therefore arbitrary. On the contrary, it calls attention to the fact that languages are human artifacts which are shaped by their role in human life and that the differences between the different languages arise from the range of forms of human life in which they function. As artifacts, those identifications and those languages are the result of human activity and not imperfect products of some mechanical process.
Despite his strictures on 'the shallow optimism of science', Nietzsche seems to have fallen under the spell of the scientistic world-view in his conception of an ideal and proper function of language as the mechanical and passive 'reflection' of some single 'external reality' confronting all of humanity indifferently - rather than seeing the great variety of human languages as the product of an active human engagement with the material world in which those humans carry on their greatly different forms of life.
We would expect great variety and great difficulties of intertranslatability among the languages of the nomads of Mongolia or the Sahara, the Innuit in the Arctic wastes, the stone age tribals of New Guinea or the Amazon, the primitive agriculturalists of Africa, Asia and the New World, and that group of languages which Benjamin Lee Worf called 'standard average European'. And they don't disappoint us. We would be astounded if the language of any of those tribal peoples matched our own completely, word for word, distinction for distinction, and that astonishment is evidence that we don't seriously believe that all of humanity confronts a single 'external reality' which the languages of the world attempt to reflect. The fact that the picture is not seriously believed in makes it harder, not easier to combat.
Now we need to turn to another aspect of the 'mirror' metaphor and what it implicitly claims about the nature of the world that gets reflected.
The World as Material and the World as Form
Myths and fantasies involving mirrors and reflecting surfaces such as still water have from the myth of Narcissus onward involved seeing them either as windows onto, or gateways into separate worlds. Narcissus fatally takes his image in the pool to be his deceased twin sister and dies trying to join her. Alice enters a reversed world through the looking glass, a world in which the sentence comes before the trial and the White Queen remembers things that happen 'the week after next'. The poet in Cocteau's film Le Sang du PoEt begins his adventures by diving through the mirror and swimming into a surreal dream world, and in Borges' invented Chinese myth the mirror- creatures threaten to get out of hand and act independently, perhaps even conquering the reflected world.
All of these fantasies are fantasies precisely because they deliberately violate the fundamental fact about mirrors that mirrors reflect the visible form of the things placed in front of them without their matter. And this tells us something about the conception of the world that is implied in the use of the metaphor of reflection to characterize the concepts of knowledge and truth, and it raises some questions about the appropriateness of that metaphor and whether it is helpful or misleading in our attempts to understand and give a coherent account of human knowledge.
The first thing to notice about the mirror metaphor as a representation of human knowledge and understanding and the conception of reflection that goes with it is that they are mechanical and passive and in the end derive from that program of explanation that constitutes the 'mechanical world-view' that came to dominate the intellectual scene in the seventeenth century. That mirror metaphor leaves nothing for the human side but the possibility of imperfection and distortion, a falling away from the true reflection of a mechanically perfect surface. In this conception, reflecting is not an activity and there is nothing for humans to do except perhaps to 'cast the beam' out of their eye. And even what that might consist of is made impossible to understand if one takes that metaphor seriously and follows out its logic.
This metaphor and conception of reflection also carry with them the implication that there is only one correct view and only one true language which captures correctly that which is there to be reflected. The sounds assigned to ideas and distinctions may differ, but in so far as they are advancing (where this gets the sense of 'advancing on the truth') all languages must converge. And, of course, convergence has been made the test if not the meaning of 'truth', by Peirce, for example.
Of course we do in fact find convergence in the development of the languages of the world. The French, for example, have found to their distaste an invasion of Americanisms which no laws and no minister of culture have been able to prevent. But this is hardly because the American language better reflects an abstract reality and truth. The understanding of that convergence is also not advanced by appealing to such an abstract and transcendent 'truth' or 'reality' whose mode of action on human consciousness would be impenetrably mysterious and beyond unravelling.
On the other hand, that convergence can easily be understood concretely and historically. American dominance of film and TV production has, for example, led to the dissemination throughout the world of a set of values and aspirations associated with a seductive picture of life as it is purported to be lived in America. The desire to participate in that supposedly desirable life can manifest itself in minor imitations of dress and talk.
One needs also to look at the enormous social changes that have been wrought throughout the Third World, for example, by the imposition of market relations on nomadic, peasant and tribal societies and the destruction of their subsistence economies and their absorption into the the global, commodity-producing, market-driven network organized and policed by the IMF and the World Bank. Those changes have inevitably brought with them linguistic changes that reflect, and are made necessary by the tremendous changes in the life and organization of those societies.
When we have at hand concrete historical explanations of convergence of that kind, of what use to us are explanations that appeal to abstractions such as 'truth', 'reality' and so forth?
That program and set of aspirations which has been called 'the mechanical world-view' has dominated the intellectual landscape of the modern era and largely set the agenda for philosophy and shaped the ruling conception of what is an adequate explanation. The acceptance of that program and that agenda insured that the mechanical interpretation of the metaphor of 'reflection' as a representation of human knowledge and understanding would displace the conception of reflection as turning one's gaze inward or onto the activity or the practice one was engaged in so as to improve it or advance it.
The mirror as an image of human knowledge and its relation to its object becomes one of a mechanical process in which humans are passive receivers not active participants. The mechanistic agenda combines with the equally dominant individualist agenda in which the collective and the social is required to be seen as no more than an aggregate of the individual. The combination these agendas produces a false conclusion to the passivity of human collectivities and of humanity as such, from the passivity with which any individual human receives the accrued knowledge, language, skills, customs and practices of the surrounding culture. This false inference reinforces and is reinforced by, the passive/mechanical reading of the image and metaphor of the mirror.
One can't describe either the 'mechanical world-view' or the individualistic paradigm that have dominated the modern era as 'incoherent' because they are both of them better understood as offering us a set of aspirations, a program and a set of standards of what we are to count as an adequate explanation in their respective areas. They are best described as unrealistic and unhelpful, as requiring us to take a narrow view that ignores or denies the existence of facts and phenomena that are obvious from other perspectives. The determinism about which generations of philosophers have pretended to worry while going about their lives without a thought of it, is simply the product of the unrealizable fantasy of carrying through the mechanistic program of explaining everything in mechanical terms. But the strength of the committment to the mechanical paradigm can be measured by the fact that determinism was thought to be a 'problem' and not simply evidence for the unrealizability of that program of universal explanation.