Philosophy in the Mechanical and Deterministic Era

Once the sincere belief of the Middle Ages in God had disappeared, Europeans were unable to construct a generally accepted, monistic, i.e. completely coherent, world-view that was based on a single fundamental principle. ²⁹⁸ The qualitative and teleological conception of nature was substituted by a quantitative and mechanical one and a penetrating study of the post-Newtonian philosophers quickly reveals the fact that they were philosophising in the light cast by

achievements of natural science.. The new science acted as a stimulus to philosophy and generated metaphysical speculation on a great scale.³⁰⁰ As a generalisation, it can be said that both the philosophers’ work and the reception given to their thinking was conditioned by the mechanistic-deterministic conception of reality employed by natural science.

Although the mechanistic view of nature was a source of great stimulation for science, it

confronted philosophy with the difficult problem of the real relationship between the subjective

297 Dijksterhuis 1986, 432. Burt 1980, 34, 25. Burt thinks that modern metaphysics is in large part a series of unsuccessful protests against the new view of the relationship between man and nature.

298 Ketonen 1989, 100.

299 Ketonen 1989, 100.

world of our perceptions and feelings, and the external world of mechanical processes which is so different in character. Most philosophers sought a place where to locate immaterial reality, God and the human soul in a world of facts that seemed indifferent to man man and his affairs.

The way of thinking adopted by science could not satisfy critical philosophers of the modern age, who had to face the hopeless problem of deriving psychic phenomena from physical ones in a way which could preserve the idea of free will and moral responsibility. In attempting to provide more precise explanations of the basis of both reality and knowledge, thinkers have not,

however, been able to mount a credible challenge to the basic ontological presumptions of a mechanistic material world that were employed in physics. Philosophy as such lost a significant amount of its cabability to explain as it had to take seriously into consideration the

presuppositions and facts of natural science. In some respects, the situation can be seen as analogous to the age of Scholastic philosophy, when thinkers were forced to work within the confines of Christian dogma.

Even though materialism had a powerful effect on both scientific culture and public opinion, Dualism was a more popular viewpoint among philosophers. Dualism can be taken as an auxiliary hypothesis which people leaning on the Christian dogma were infected by when they wanted to assign themselves some freedom to speculate in the world of matter and time

independent of religious concepts. The development of natural science can in some way be seen as requiring the ontology of Cartesian dualism, in which the authority of reason could be

defended in relation to the whole of nature, whose laws it investigated and tried to command.³⁰¹ Many philosophers actually challenged Dualism even during Descartes' lifetime. Since humans were neither simply soul or spirit, but had a material body that was subject to natural laws, the problem was the question of the relationship between these two substances, i.e. how human mind could have any influence in a completely deterministic material world.

When philosophers paid serious attention to the spiritual side of human beings, their reason and mental abilities, only a small number of them accepted Materialism. In particular, it was difficult to explain knowledge, meaning or intention by employing the concept of matter consisting of separate particles. The birth of knowledge or the spontaneous workings of the mind simply did not appear to be describable in quantitative and materialistic terms; as changes concerning particles which moved in space and time. The feeling of free will had to be viewed as an illusion, based, for example, on each individual’s ability to be aware of their own self. Even though in the

300 Jones 1969,114-117.

causal theories of action, each individual’s mental states such as desire, purpose and beliefs could be regarded as causes for their action, free will was lost. Attempts to ”rescue” the principle of free will were often the motivation for the production of non-causal theories of action , which in their turn found it difficult to explain how free will, released from causal links, could influence events in a world of deterministic matter.³⁰²

The basic ontological framework born out of Cartesian dualism has remained unchanged through the centuries. Those who have not accepted Descartes’ dichotomy have however been bound to it in their representation. Materialists have typically attempted to reduce mental phenomena to matter while Idealists have wished to restore material to the spirit.³⁰³ When stressing the importance of the mind Idealists realized that it could not have any links with a factor so completely alien as matter. Through idealism, the whole of the material world can be seen as nothing more than a by-product of the spontaneously active and autonomous mind. Combining the viewpoints of Materialism and Idealism is presumably impossible without significant alterations in the concepts of material or knowledge. For Dualism, the problem is interaction or lawful parallelism between two completely different substances.

In a similar way to the basic ontological setup, the starting point for epistemology, i.e. that humans are subjective observers of an objective world, has also now remained almost unchanged for several hundred years. Regardless of whether observers are considered to be immaterial or material, it is believed that they are able to form a truthful description of the reality of the world by using their reason or experience.

3.3.1. Materialism versus Idealism

In philosophy, the term substance has traditionally signified something that exists by itself.

Descartes tried to save the sense of human freedom and to the claims of universal mechanism by his concepts of res cogitans and res extensa. If they are understood as substance, the relationship

301 Ketonen 1989, 87. Aspelin 1995, 192.

302 Niiniluoto 1983, 162-3. the doctrine of Compatibilism is located between these stances, asserting that it is possible to give reasonable content to the concept of free will even when human actions are determined by deterministic or probabilistic laws.

303 In materialism, attempts have been made to solve the psycho-physical problem through elimination, reduction or emergence, which aim to either eliminate mind, reduce it to matter or somehow make it emerge from complex material systems. In dualistic interactionalism, mind and matter are assumed to somehow interact, while in parallelism, both obey their own laws which are synchronized in time.

between them becomes a problem. How can matter and mind appear to be connected to each other in many ways if they do not have a common source, why would a hand rise when its owner wanted it to rise? Some supporters of Descartes attempted to resolve the problem through a doctrine called Occasionalism, in which the human soul and the finite events of the world reverted to the infinite founder of the universe, i.e. God. The mainstream of western philosophy travelled from Descartes to Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant. They all considered mind and matter to be separate things, with God in some way as the source of both.³⁰⁴ The great system builders of philosophy did not, however, achieve a common view of the nature of reality.

Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) like Descartes was impressed by the achievements of science and mathematics and he tried to strengthen Descartes’ teachings by the doctrine of Pantheism, which was both more systematic and more coherent that Giordiano Bruno’s way of thinking. In his Ethics, Spinoza applied geometry and the axiomatic method systematically to metaphysics and mental entities employing one of the most beautiful philosophical systems ever created. In his vision, the universe is seen as an ordered unified whole – not as a lifeless world of innumerable separate things.³⁰⁵ Spinoza founded his naturalism on God, not the personal God of Christianity but the pantheistic totality of nature. This eternal substance, which had an infinite number of properties or attributes, existed by itself. It was a being of both infinite dimensions and infinite rationality, both nature and God. In this wholeness, mind and matter were two different attributes which humans could perceive. As they were nothing more than two different ways of viewing the same substance, material particles and mental thoughts inevitably acted in harmony. The organisation of beings and ideas was the same, and the nature of both was preordained. Spinoza was not, however, able to say why something that had extension should also think, or vice versa.³⁰⁶

Spinoza’s view of God as the only substance, with everything being different forms of manifestation or aspects of him, was well suited to the idea that the universe worked in the manner of a perfect clockwork mechanism. Since it was logically impossible for God to be otherwise than he actually was, the laws of the cosmos could not be changed, nor could the world be other than it was. While Descartes saw the human soul as free, in Spinoza’s doctrine the body was a specific mode of dimensional attribute and the soul was a specific mode of

304 Aspelin 1995, 194. Collingwood 1960, 104-105. As Descartes appealed to God who guaranteed the psycho-physical parallelism, it can be thought that he also actually only had one substance, God.

305 Spinoza 1997.

cognitive attribute. With their mental and bodily activity, humans belonged to the world of predermined beings. In contrast to the general understanding, humans were not to be seen as a

”state within a state”, they did not have free will or absolute power in connection with their acts.

Human behaviour and emotions were belonging to the consistent system of nature and

characteristics of mental life could be deduced from the nature of mind and be investigated using

”geometrical methods” in the same way as lines, surfaces and particles.³⁰⁷

In the last part of his Ethics, Spinoza attempted to define the nature and role of emotions more precisely, and to point out the path which humans should follow to gain control of their

affections. At the level of confused thought man sees himself as a unique self with a private good but when man raises to a level of the true state of affairs, his nature and inner and outer

behaviour change as he is able to act in accordance with his own nature and the universal order.

Spinoza meant his psychology concerning emotional development was meant to be strictly scientific; correct insight and intuition could lead humans to inner freedom and increased happiness. At the same time, the workings of the body would expand, since every bodily state corresponded to a specific state of consciousness, and every act of the soul was paralleled by some physiological event. In developing oneself to the fullest extent, intuition, the highest form of thought, could clearly understand the nature of all entities. The rational road of knowledge could finally free humans from the deceptions of experience, and lead to an awareness of eternal substance and the affinity of all beings. In the end, perfect science became religion. Spinoza’s doctrine offered an internally-coherent world-view based on a single basic principle, in the same way as Materialism. Many people could not accept his teachings because of his critique of the Bible. Deeply religious Spinoza was said to be a man with the mark of damnation on his forehead.³⁰⁸

Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) did not accept Spinoza’s monism, naturalism and pantheism even though he also attempted to achieve a sound Cartesian kind of compromise by showing that new scientific world view was compatible with orthodox conception of God and the notion of teleological universe. He considered extension, the reality of which both Descartes and Spinoza took for granted, to be the source of problems. Extension was an ultimate, but not the ultimate physical concept. To unite metaphysical laws and laws of extension, metaphysical axioms like cause and effect and activity and passivity was needed, which meant that the really basic concept

306 Trusted 1991, 112-113. Collingwood 1960, 106.

307 Jones 1969, 210-212. Aspelin 1995, 312-315.

308 Ketonen 1989, 100. Aspelin 1995, 305, 314, 316-317.

in physics is a psychic concept. The fundamental indivisible units or elements of things out of which Being consists are monads which exist beyond “a purely geometrical concept of matter”

and “purely geometric laws of motion. The monads do not have extension and thus they have to be spiritual i.e. immaterial units. Everything that was material could be seen as phenomena related to these spiritual realities which able to develop and understand their environment³⁰⁹

As a mathematician and natural researcher, Leibniz did not doubt that nature’s physical processes should take place in accordance with physical laws, but he wanted to link the new doctrine of natural science to the traditional metaphysical system. For Leibniz, the world was – more or less – our experiences, but at the level of phenomena, he considered it quite in order to speak of bodies acting upon one another and of causal relationships. He agreed with most of the ancient philosophers that ”Every spirit, every created simple substance is always united with a body and no soul is ever entirely without one”.³¹⁰ Leibniz considered that every part of the world was somehow connected to every other part and the coalesce of matter and spirit was possible, since bodies were aggregates of monads and the mental laws governing the mind were clearly differed from physical laws. Physics was adequate to represent deductive systems, such as mechanics. It is able to tell what is happening, but not why it is happening. Physics is useful and reliable, but it is also limited.

In his New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz commented widely on the thoughts of the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). In his philosophy, Locke had attempted to chart the nature of human understanding and mental laws by using scientific approach. He believed it was possible to explain the capabilities and limits of reason by empirical method.³¹¹ Leibniz admitted that knowledge begins in experience but was critical of Locke’s concept that the soul is a blank writing tablet on which nothing has yet been written – a tabula rasa – and that everything inscribed there comes solely from the senses and from experience. As a rationalist, Leibniz believed, like Plato and the Scholastics, that only reason was capable of establishing reliable rules. Although the senses are necessary for the acquisition of knowledge, they are not capable of providing all of it. Leibniz was critical of Locke for not being able to see that we have something potential within us. We have reason and acquired dispositions of which we are not always

309 Jones 1969, 220-226. As a monad was not a body it must be a mind. Reasoning follows from the Cartesian dualistic principle that everything that is not a body is mind

310 Aspelin 1995, 319, 324. Leibniz 1981, 58.

311 Ketonen 1998, 90-95.

actually aware.³¹³

In the style of ancient thinkers, Leibniz also paid attention to problems connected with the division of matter. In his youth, he had been strongly influenced by atomic theory via Gassend, and he considered Descartes’ concept of extended matter to be contradictory and inadequate as a way of explaining the whole of reality. Leibniz viewed the atomic hypothesis as valuable natural science, but insufficient for metaphysics, in which the search was for ultimate principles. If it is presumed that matter is continuous and infinitely divisible, there can be no true parts, only arbitrary division. On the other hand, if matter is presumed to consist of different indivisible parts, a whole formed from these parts cannot be a real whole, only a arbitrary collection. This kind of metaphysical theorising about the relationship between parts and wholes has received new impetus as a result of modern physics, since in some specific situations matter appears as localised particles, while in others it appears to be continuous waves.³¹⁴

As an idealist monist, Leibniz did not have a fundamental belief in the absolute existence of space and time, he thought that we conceived the idea of them via our natural disposition to fix and relate phenomena. As the world was an organism which consisted of countless minute perceivable spiritual organisms (i.e. monads) no substance ever lacks activity. There is never a body without movement and at every moment in time, there is within us an infinity of

perceptions which are alterations in the soul itself.³¹⁵ Like Spinoza, Leibniz rejected Descartes’

interactive doctrine and adopted the idea of parallelism. States consisting of monadic complexes which we called living bodies and states of conscious monads which we called souls

corresponded perfectly to one another. Leibniz was not however viewed as having been able to provide a more satisfactory explanation of the relationship between mind and matter than either Spinoza or Descartes. The orderliness in the sequences of well-founded phenomena was a

consequence of the pre-established harmony ordained by God.³¹⁶ The connection between mental and material aspects was evidently impossible to understand from a dualistic standpoint, in which the mind could only be aware of its own state and the material world was just a mechanical machine obeying absolute laws.

312 At the same time, Leibniz realised that the study of probabilities might lead to valuable theoretical and practical results if this mathematical method could define the statistical probabilities of possible events. Aspelin 1995, 321-322.

313 Leibniz 1981, 48-49, 51-52.

314 Aspelin 1995, 325.

315 Leibniz 1981, 53.

316 Trusted 1991, 88-92. Aspelin 1995, 326. Collingwood 1960, 110-112

George Berkeley (1685-1753) Berkeley was a sincerely religious man who was deeply concerned about the conflict between scientific and religious views. For him the root of the trouble was the supposed independent existence of matter which he aimed to deny, without denying the validity of scientific enterprise. Berkeley leaned towards Idealism pointing out that both the primary and secondary qualities are relative to the perceiver. Even though the physical world was said to contain only quantitative properties, the world of which people had explicit experience consisted of secondary qualitative things and phenomena. Nowhere could quantity be found without quality. Quantity without quality was therefore merely an abstraction, a formal view of specific aspects of reality. Consequently, the physicist’s material world was no actual reality, it was a pure abstraction derived from the world of the mind. To be means

to-be-perceived, to be an object for mind. Since substance was something that depended only on itself, only the mind could be substance and nature as we saw it was a product of the mind. ³¹⁷

Berkeley did not ask exactly which mind carried out the creation of the physical world. He was however satisfied that it was not created by the finite human mind but by the infinite mind of God, since the latter guaranteed the existence of physical bodies even when no-one observed them. In this way, Berkeley rejected the pantheism of Renaissance thinkers in which the world was the body of God. To Berkeley, as to Plato of the Christian theologists, God was a

Berkeley did not ask exactly which mind carried out the creation of the physical world. He was however satisfied that it was not created by the finite human mind but by the infinite mind of God, since the latter guaranteed the existence of physical bodies even when no-one observed them. In this way, Berkeley rejected the pantheism of Renaissance thinkers in which the world was the body of God. To Berkeley, as to Plato of the Christian theologists, God was a

In document Quantum Metaphysics : The Role of Human Beings within the Paradigms of Classical and Quantum Physics (sivua 114-139)