Set in Stone

Monuments. Yesterday I was walking past a small stone monument (on the Tabor campus) that was erected on the tabor campus sometime in May (I think) and I considered the granite or marble or whatever sort of stone it was. I considered the actual material and its being used to communicate a few words. Here we have the literal meaning of the phrase 'set in stone.' Words are carved into the surface of granite and the words are set in stone--you cannot erase them, unless you destroy the monument. And you must completely destroy the monument: smash and grind the whole stone into a fine gravel, so that no pieces remain which might give some fragment of what it was that somebody was trying to communicate to the distant future.

The words become set in stone so that generations from now, the words will still be there and can be read to pass on some bit of history. This is what we often want to do: to set something in stone so that it is immovible, or at least it has some semblance of unchangability. Of course, and this is trivial in the case of the monument, this is only an illusion, because we must acknowledge that nothing of the sort is possible in the manner we imagine it is: nothing is immovable: all is subject to change.

Frames of Reference. Einstein made us give up the idea of an absolute frame of reference with respect to our notions of space. I would like to do something similar with respect to our notions of knowledge: knowledge is just like the monument: appearing to be beyond change, beyond reproach, once it is discovered. There is not an absolute frame of reference for knowledge. This is the idea: we are only constructing our meanings, our propositions, our beliefs and we erect them as knowledge.

Science, e.g., supposedly uncovers the structure of the world, but in reality it is merely constructing a framework: the structure is not being discovered but is being built upon whatever foundation we have put in place. But this foundation is not resting upon anything but an abyss of assumptions, getting more and more vague as one sinks to the bottom. At this bottom is the problem of existence of which I have spoken before. This is one way of thinking about the problem: to locate it in some metaphor. It is the soundless depths of assumptions upon which all our structures reside.

But that isn't even the most important aspect of the structures we build during inquiry. The point I want to emphasize is the constructedness of the results of inquiry as opposed to the results being conceived as things "already there" in the world, external, just waiting to be discovered.

Something particularly annoying is the idea that the truths of mathematics, science, logic, etc. would "exist" even if there were no people to discover them. This is an idea one sees very often in contemporary writing. Indeed this is often the objection made to more social theories of truth which give primacy to people's truth judgements as opposed to a more propositional ("objective") theory of truth which gives primacy to the abstract notion of the "proposition." But the objection rests on the assumption that truth must exist even if there had been no people. This assumption is curious indeed, especially when the concept of truth is such a human phenomenon. At the moment I cannot think of how there is anything like the notion of truth manifested outside the realm of humankind. And if one thinks one has an example, one must be careful; this is a tricky situation.

Of course, we can conceive of the world as existing without people and everything else remaining the same. Trees will fall the same way: gravity will operate just as it does. All the biological processes of the living things that are present would be exactly the same way as we observe them now. The sun would still glow and get its energy from fusion of atoms of Hydrogen. The earth would still orbit around the sun in a slightly elliptical orbit. Everything would be the same except that humans are absent. Now we must ask the question whether or not the laws of science, the theorems of mathematics, the principles of logic, etc. would exist under this scenario? Certainly there are those who answer in the affirmative. Indeed, there is something satisfying about this--something intuitive; somehow it works. For example, the earth would travel around the sun just as it does now, apples would fall from trees just as they do now; hence, the equations which model the motion of such entities now, would still model the motion under the hypothetical situation. Hence we would say that the laws of science would still remain. The same reasoning seems to work for the theorems of mathematics. Certainly two points would still uniquely determine a line. Certainly we still have two and two equals four. It is hard to think how it would fail to be the case that the Continuum Hypothesis and the Axiom of Choice are independent of the axiom system ZF. And what about modus ponens? reductio ad absurdum? It seems, even to me, to be absurd to think that all of these principles and laws would fail to "work" even if humans were absent or even if nothing existed but empty space and there was nothing to exemplify them. Somehow it seems like the laws and theorems and principles would persist. But at bottom I cannot accept this.

The only justification I can give at present is that all of the aforementioned principles, theorems, and laws are manmade things and if man is absent then they are absent. Of course, there are those who think that man has not made these things but has discovered them as some structure of the universe and this is why they would persist in man's absence. So how do I justify saying that man has not discovered them? I can, at present, merely assert that man has constructed them. And to justify this assertion I can, at present, only say that these things (theorems, and laws) are analogous to the cars and buildings and tools etc. that man has made during his existence as a tool making creature.

If man did not exist, surely it would be absurd to claim that automobiles would yet exist. Why do we not say, then, that it is absurd to say that the Continuum Hypothesis and modus ponens etc. would yet exist? I can see that an automobile would remain possible to exist (even in the extreme case, perhaps, when nothing but empty space exists--I am not speaking of physical possibility, but of possibility of form--i.e. if the resources to make such a thing as an automobile existed, then one could make an automobile) and in this sense we might be compelled to say that this is sufficient for existence. But really that would be absurd to say so because actuality and potentiality are two different things, though they are related. An automobile would potentially exist but would not actually exist.

All of these considerations leaves me with the feeling that I am getting nowhere. I have strayed into metaphysics too far without realizing it.

Metaphysics. Trying to uncover the absolute structure of reality. Or: trying to study the properties which are universal to existence; the categories of existence.

But I do not admit that such a structure exists to be studied. But isn't asserting that there is no such structure itself a claim about the structure of reality?

Well...I have reduced myself to a sort of Socratic perplexity--aporia.

However I know what I want to do. Something akin to what Gianni Vattimo does in his After Christianity in explaining Nietsche's saying that "God is dead." Vattimo says that this is not intended as an atheistic thesis (i.e. Nietsche is not claiming that God does not exist) but "means nothing else than that there is no ultimate foundation" (Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D'Isanto, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002; p. 3). Of course to claim this is just what I wondered about above: this too is metaphysics: saying that there is no foundation. I read Vattimo's book once, last summer, I shall have to read it again to get the full details of what he means.

As a final note: Vattimo has an interesting claim in his work which should make anyone stop worrying about the absence of absolute foundation. It is the idea that the absence of the philosophical (metaphysical) God actually promotes a rebirth of the true God of the Scriptures. From what I remember reading the first time this means that the God of the philosophers (Aquinas, Ansealm, Augustine, et al) is "dead" in the sense that it never was alive but was an extrapolation of the philosophers from the Scriptures, and hence we have reclaimed room for true faith: faith in the sense of Abraham. (I am interpreting quite a little bit here what Vattimo says, but I am not stretching it too far.)