In Chapter 5 of Mind
and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost
Certainly False, Thomas Nagel takes a decisive (though unacknowledged) step
in the direction of Socratic rationalism.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
all assumed that the brute fact of logos,
the human capacity for rational thought and speech, implied a certain view of
the Kosmos. In the Phaedo, Socrates grounds the fundamental turn in his thought (how Socrates
became Socratic) in the insight that if reason is to be reliable, this can only
be because K is rational.
I heard someone reading, as he said, from a book of
Anaxagoras, that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was delighted at
this notion, which appeared quite admirable, and I said to myself: If mind is
the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best, and put each particular in
the best place; and I argued that if any one desired to find out the cause of
the generation or destruction or existence of anything, he must find out what
state of being or doing or suffering was best for that thing, and therefore a
man had only to consider the best for himself and others, and then he would
also know the worse, since the same science comprehended both.
And I rejoiced to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a
teacher of the causes of existence such as I desired, and I imagined that he
would tell me first whether the earth is flat or round; and whichever was true,
he would proceed to explain the cause and the necessity of this being so, and
then he would teach me the nature of the best and show that this was best; and
if he said that the earth was in the centre, he would further explain that this
position was the best, and I should be satisfied with the explanation given,
and not want any other sort of cause. And I thought that I would then go on and
ask him about the sun and moon and stars, and that he would explain to me their
comparative swiftness, and their returnings and various states, active and
passive, and how all of them were for the best.
For I could not
imagine that when he spoke of mind as the disposer of them, he would give any
other account of their being as they are, except that this was best; and I
thought that when he had explained to me in detail the cause of each and the
cause of all, he would go on to explain to me what was best for each and what
was good for all.
Socrates supposed that, if K is
rationally comprehensible, then K must involve the rationally good.
Whether Nagel must move in that
direction is not clear to me yet; though I see some signs of it. He argues in Section 5 of Chapter 4 that the
human capacity for rational thought is as big a problem as the big problem of consciousness. Consciousness that divides the world into
self and not-self is one thing. A grasp
of objective reality and objective value, independent of the subjective position,
is quite another. Here is how he lays
out the implications.
If there is such a thing as
reason, then:
1. There are objective, mind-independent truths of different kinds;2. By starting from the way things initially appear to us, we can use reason collectively to achieve justified beliefs about some of those objective truths;3. Those believes in combination can directly influence what we do;4. These processes of discovery and motivation, while mental, are inseparable from physical processes in the organism.
If reason is what it appears to
be, then two big consequences about K follow: there are objectives truths about
the parts and the whole of K and the history of K includes the appearance of
creatures that can discover those truths.
This was the basic assumption
of classical philosophy and perhaps of all possible philosophy: that the human
mind and the Kosmos operate according to the same (or mostly the same) basic
principles. Otherwise all rational
investigation (including all scientific investigations) would be vain. That means that mind belongs not only to
human beings but to Being itself.
What this commits us to is not
clear. Do we have to believe, as
Socrates clearly does, that any explanation of astronomical phenomena must
include the concept of what is best?
That would require a very big leap beyond the boundaries of modern
scientific thought.
It is not altogether out of the
question. The cosmological constants
argument for the existence of an intelligent designer rests on the claim that K
is fine-tuned for the existence of life on earth. If gravity were just an infinitesimal bit
weaker or stronger (along with a considerable number of other cosmological
constants), there would be either no K at all or a K without the possibility of
life.
Apart from the theological
implications of this argument, it is conceivable that they prove Socrates
right. Whether or how we conceive of G,
it might be the case that we cannot explain K without the concept of what is
best. I’m not buying in just yet, but I
think that the possibility is open.
Without deploying teleology on
a cosmic scale, it remains a fact that the universe is rational if indeed it
exists as science imagines it. The fact
that such creatures as ourselves exist in it is central to understanding it, as
Nagel argues.
