Human Nature Podcast 10
Ideas and Human Nature
Albert A. Anderson
Copyright 2006
To open this final podcast on the topic of human nature, I will return to the film MindWalk. I am exploring the suggestion that the ideas that play a central role in Plato’s dialogues are closely connected with some of the fundamental concepts of contemporary physics. Sonia, the physicist, claims that the natural world consists of “sets of relationships.” Here again she is speaking for Fritjof Capra, who developed this way of thinking about nature in his book called The Web of Life (Doubleday, 1996). In his commentary on MindWalk, he puts it succinctly: “As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated building blocks, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of a unified whole (MindWalk Script and Commentary, p. 43).”
What are the parts that are related? If they are not things — and quantum theory makes it clear that they are not — then what are they? They are other relationships. If we leave the sub-atomic world of quantum mechanics, what do we find in our “middle-sized world”? Jack asks Sonia whether there are boundaries between him and her. She tells Jack that “even between you and me … [there is] a real exchange of photons and electrons. Ultimately, whether we like it or not, we’re all part of one inseparable web of relationships” (MindWalk Script and Commentary, p. 83).
Even though Steven Weinberg appeals to the idea of beauty as an important criterion as he dreams of a final theory in physics, he rejects the attempt to unify physics with the social sciences and the humanities.
Some scientists and writers like Fritjof Capra welcome what they see as an opportunity for … reconciliation between the spirit of science and the gentler parts of our nature. I might, too, if I thought the opportunity was a real one, but I do not think it is. Quantum mechanics has been overwhelmingly important to physics, but I cannot find any messages for human life in quantum mechanics that are different in any important way from those of Newtonian physics (Dreams of a Final Theory, pp. 77-78).
Weinberg then develops a dialogue between his view and that of Capra (pp. 78-81), but the arguments it contains are not directly relevant to the way I think Plato might be linked to contemporary physics. Nor do I propose to take sides in this debate. I think that both Weinberg and Fritjof Capra invite the connection to Plato, but neither of them explicitly develops that connection.
In Plato’s dialogue Phaedo Socrates tells Simmias and Cebes that ultimately it is mind and ideas that constitute reality. But what exactly are those ideas? In Book 6 of Plato’s Republic the character Glaucon complains that he does not understand Socrates’ explanation of the nature of ideas.
Socrates: Perhaps you will understand it better after this introduction. I suppose you know that students of geometry, arithmetic, and related disciplines assume concepts such as odd and even, various kinds of geometrical figures, the three kinds of angles, and many others. These are assumptions that everyone is supposed to know and which they take for granted, never explaining them either to themselves or to others. They begin with these concepts and on that basis proceed logically until they arrive at their conclusion.
Glaucon: Yes, I do know that.
Socrates: And do you also know that even though they use and reason about visible shapes, they are not thinking about them but about what they resemble? They are not thinking about the figures they draw, but of the square itself, the diagonal itself, and so on. They make use of the shapes they draw or mold, which also have shadows and reflections in water, but they are really searching for the ideas themselves, which can be seen only with the mind.
Glaucon: That’s true. [511]
Socrates: I talked about this kind as intelligible, even though the mind is required to use hypotheses, because it cannot get beyond making assumptions and proceed to first principles. At this stage, the mind uses the objects of which the shadows are resemblances as images. When compared to shadows, they are more tangible and more highly prized.
Glaucon: I understand. You are talking about geometry and the arts related to it.
Socrates: Now in speaking of the other aspect of the intelligible, please understand that I mean the knowledge that reason itself attains through the power of dialectic, using assumptions not as first principles, but as hypotheses—as ways of access and points of departure—so that it can go beyond assumptions and apprehend the first principle of the whole. Holding fast to that first principle and then proceeding to what depends on it, it descends without the aid of any visible object, moving from ideas to ideas and ending in ideas (Plato, The Republic, Agora Publications, Inc., 2001, Greek pages 510-511).
I think that Plato’s critical evaluation of Orphic religious beliefs in the Phaedo was designed to purge Pythagorean thinking of its irrational and unjustifiable elements. But Plato clearly had great respect for the Pythagorean emphasis on mathematics. Even though he goes beyond thinking of everything as number, his way of thinking of reality in terms of ideas (ta eide) is amazingly close to the contemporary language of physics and the mathematical models it generates to think about what we cannot see or even imagine. Reality consists of ideas. Nature and the human mind have those ideas as their ultimate reality. And that ultimate reality is called nous.
Considerable confusion and misunderstanding of these ideas have emerged in the time between Plato’s era and ours. A major source of error in thinking about ideas comes from the long-standing habit of thinking of ideas as substances, the ultimate things or elements that constitute spiritual reality that are analogous to the ultimate things that comprise material reality. Here again we can point to Descartes as the culprit. He says:
We have already discovered enough to show with sufficient clarity that the corruption of the body does not entail the death of the soul, and so to give men the hope of a second life after death. … The premises from which the immortality of the soul may be concluded depend upon the explanation of the whole of physics. First, we must know that all substances in general — that is to say all those things which cannot exist without being created by God are by nature incorruptible and can never cease to be, unless God himself, by denying them his usual support, reduces them to nothingness (René Descartes, Meditations, Bobbs-Merill, [Synopsis, 14, 10]).
Here Descartes clearly formulates key assumptions that ground his dualistic view of mind and body. Those assumptions come from two separate sources — the Christian metaphysics he learned as a student in the Roman Catholic tradition and the mechanistic materialism of the modern physics he was helping to formulate.
Even though many people connect this way of thinking by Descartes to ideas found in Plato’s dialogues, the differences are more important than the similarities. The major difference is that Plato’s dialogues provide nothing like that theory of substances. Contemporary physics also avoids substance as a basic concept. This becomes clear in the film MindWalk. The ideas presented as ultimate reality in Plato’s dialogues are closer to the patterns or relationships that emerge in the following conversation between Thomas, the poet, and Sonia, the physicist. Thomas turns to music to find a suitable metaphor that links physics and the arts. They are sitting in the chapel at Mont St. Michel, and he plays a chord on the organ. The chord, he says, is the most basic of harmonies with a distinctive feeling, but the individual notes carry none of that feeling. He and Sonia agree that the essence of the chord lies in the relationship among the notes. Relationships are what make music. And Sonia says that relationships are what make matter. Thomas identifies this as the “music of the spheres” that they trace ultimately to Pythagoras, the same Pythagoras whose philosophy appears as a strong influence in Plato’s Phaedo. Sonia concludes: This vision of a universe arranged in harmonies of sounds and relations is no new discovery. Today physicists are simply proving that what we call an object — an atom, a molecule, and a particle — is only an approximation, a metaphor. At the subatomic level, it dissolves into a series of interconnections, like chords of music. It’s beautiful (MindWalk Script and Commentary, pp. 42-43).
The ideas in Plato’s dialogues unfold dialectically. They are not substances already known and formulated in advance. They are goals, not ready-made assumptions. Plato’s student Aristotle distinguished among material, efficient, formal, and final causes. In the 17th century modern physics progressively reduced all causality to material and efficient factors. Formal causes were grudgingly absorbed into mathematics, but for many modern philosophers even mathematical entities were considered to lack reality. They were not genuine causes but only names or tokens. And final causes — the ends or goals that played such a central role in Plato’s dialogues and in Aristotle’s philosophy — were thrown on the trash heap of history. By the time we reach the late eighteenth century, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant shows the intellectual crisis that is spawned by dualism. The assumptions that grow out of classical physics and the Medieval metaphysics that still lingered in the modern worldview leave us with no way out of skepticism. Based on those assumptions, the best alternative in the twentieth century turned out to be pragmatism in science, ethics, and politics. Unfortunately, pragmatism leads to relativism, and philosophy, the love of wisdom, is lost in the process.
Steven Weinberg, in a chapter called “Against Philosophy,” articulates an attitude shared by many people today:
Knowledge of philosophy does not seem to be of use to physicists — always with the exception that the work of some philosophers helps us avoid the errors of other philosophers. It is only fair to admit my limitations and biases in making this judgment. After a few years’ infatuation with philosophy as an undergraduate I became disenchanted. The insights of the philosophers I studied became murky and inconsequential compared with the dizzying successes of physics and mathematics (Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 158).
Given the state of philosophy when he attended college in the middle of the 20th century, Weinberg’s critique of philosophy is easy to understand. But hostility toward philosophy is not new. Socrates and Adeimantus discuss it in Book 6 of Plato’s Republic. Socrates says that “intruders” have forced their way in from the outside and profess to be philosophers when they are not. Rather than “lovers of wisdom,” these intruders are sophists who pretend to know what they do not really know. In our day the sophists have returned in great numbers and with great power. Most recently they have taken control of the government. They also populate the faculty and administration of the universities.
This is not the time or place to respond to Weinberg’s attack on philosophy in detail, but I would like to make two observations. The first is that in spite of his open attack on what he calls philosophy, I find Weinberg’s thinking about fundamental questions to be quite philosophical. If we define philosophy as “the rational analysis and justification of fundamental concepts, principles, decisions, and actions,” Weinberg’s writing engages in serious philosophical reflection. His attack on positivism and relativism is perceptive and Socratic. If philosophy is understood as dialectical, a way of thinking that seeks a “final theory” rather than preaching one, then Weinberg practices the kind of philosophy that Plato also practiced. This leads to my second observation. Weinberg’s dream of a final theory would be strengthened by embracing an understanding of ideas similar to what emerges in Plato’s dialogues. Those ideas are, as Socrates says in the Phaedo, real causes. But they are final causes rather than material, efficient, or even formal factors. Philosophers are lovers of wisdom. They do not, like preachers, claim that they have the truth and attempt to impose it on other people. Nor do they insist, as do Sophists, that there is no truth and that it is their responsibility to create it and convince others to follow their clever plans. Final causes, like Weinberg’s final theory, are goals to be pursued. This is true in all branches of human inquiry, whether in science, politics, ethics, theology, art, or history.
Weinberg is not alone in the quest for a final theory, a way that the various recent theories such as quantum theory and relativity theory can be integrated into a unified whole. Lisa Randall currently teaches physics at Harvard University. She joins the search for a final theory in her book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (published by Harper Collins in 2005). Randall explores the possibility that there are several dimensions of space rather than the three dimensions that dominated Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics. Like Sonia in MindWalk, Randall struggles with the problem of visualizing the concepts of space that are associated with contemporary physics. Her model building in theoretical physics is predicated on the assumption that dimensions of space we cannot directly experience are real causes. These dimensions, she says, can be indirectly experienced through experiments — in this case using extremely sophisticated equipment such as the nuclear accelerator that is being built at CERN in Switzerland, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory.
The ideas Socrates and other characters talk about in Plato’s dialogues are also real causes. They are also invisible, and they can be tested indirectly. When Socrates, in the Phaedo, asks why he is sitting in prison waiting to be executed rather than dining with friends in Thessaly, he is testing the idea of justice. In the Crito he explained his reasons for staying in Athens rather than fleeing as Crito recommended. His basic justification for staying is that it would be unjust to escape. Mind and ideas are real causes. Without them we cannot understand why Socrates does what he does. Mind and ideas are dimensions of reality. If there is only one cosmos, one universe, then mind and ideas — ideas like justice — are dimensions of the cosmos. They are hidden dimensions, but they are essential features of human nature. Such causes are not what Aristotle called material causes, though they are connected to material factors. Socrates could not sit in prison if he lacked a body. He could not drink the hemlock if he lacked a body. But the reason he is sitting there and the reason he drinks the hemlock is that he thinks it is the right thing to do under the circumstances. Justice is a final cause. It is the essential factor that explains Socrates’ decision in the Crito and his action in the Phaedo.
The Capras’ film MindWalk seems to have been created with final causes in mind. However, Fritjof Capra’s books have a kind of missionary zeal that tends to undermine the search for wisdom. The character Sonia offers the outlines of a synthesis between human life and nature in general that she calls “systems theory,” a view that she says recognizes a “web of relationships as the essence of all living things” (MindWalk Script and Commentary, p. 54). The living system she has in mind is self-maintaining, self-renewing, and self-transcending (p. 56). This is an abbreviated version of the holistic view Fritjof Capra develops in his book The Web of Life. That way of thinking is offered as a scheme for integrating human life and nature in a way that might counteract the current threat to the ecosystem and point the way to a sustainable society (p. 59). This is an urgent concern for the entire world, and one of the strengths of this film is its attempt to show the connection between science and technology, on one hand, and human values on the other. Wonderful as it is, Sonia’s approach threatens to become a sermon. Jack, the pragmatic politician, immediately offers her a job as part of his staff in Washington.
But Thomas is not convinced by Sonia’s appeal to systems theory as an alternative to the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton. He says: “I feel just as reduced being called a system as I do being called a clock. Life is just … not condensable” (p. 62). Here I suspect Bernt Capra, the film director and scriptwriter, is distinguishing his point of view from that of his brother. The dialogue in the film reaches its climax with some beautiful poetry by Pablo Neruda.
I want to tell you that the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxes is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure; and that time among the blood-colored grapes has made the petal hard and shiny, filled the jellyfish with life, untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl. I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead of human eyes, dead in the darkness, of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes on the timid globe of an orange. I walked around like you, investigating the endless star, and in my net, during the night I woke up naked, the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind (MindWalk Script and Commentary, pp. 61-62).
This is a good place to end. Poetry, not physics or politics should have the last word. Those who wonder why Plato ends many of his dialogues with mythos rather than logos might find an answer here. Poetry invites interpretation, further reflection, new analysis, and fresh questions. Who am I? What am I? Who are we? What might we become? What should be included in the final theory of nature and human life?
Bibliography
This series of ten podcasts on Human Nature contains short quotations from a variety of primary sources from which I have drawn important ideas. Listeners who wish to dig deeper into this topic may wish to consult the following works:
Rediscovery of the Mind — a book by John Searle (MIT Press, 1992)
Genome — a book by Matt Ridley (Harper Collins, 1999)
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea — a book by Daniel Dennett (Simon and Schuster, 1995)
Plato’s Republic — a dialogue published both in paperback and on audio CD by Agora Publications in 2001 Reflections on the Mind of Plato — by Joseph Uemura, published both in paperback and on audio CD by Agora Publications in 2001 The Biotech Century — a book by Jeremy Rifkin published by Penguin Putnam in 1998
GATTACA — a film written and directed by Andrew Niccol in 1997
On Human Nature — a book written by E. O. Wilson, published by Harvard University Press in 1978 The Phenomenon of Man — a book by Teilhard de Chardin (Harper and Row, 1959)
Discourse on Method and Meditations — books by René Descartes written in the 17th Century The Evolution of Human Nature — a book by C. Judson HHHerrick (Harper and Brothers, 1961)
Brave New World — a novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932 by Harper and Brothers
Brave new World Revisited — an essay by Aldous Huxley published by Harper and Row in 1958
The Singularity is Near — a book by Ray Kurzweil published by Viking in 2005
Minds, Brains, and Science — a book by John Searle published by Harvard University Press in 1984
Foundations of Ethics — a book that contains What is Enlightenment? and Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant. Leo Rauch translated this work that is published by Agora Publications in paperback and on audio CD.
Gorgias — a dialogue by Plato published by Agora Publications in paperback and audio CD in 1994
Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo — dialogues written by Plato (published by Agora Publications in 2005 in paperback and as audio CDs)
MindWalk — a film by Bernt and Fritjof Capra released in 1990
Dreams of a Final Theory — a book by Steven Weinberg (Pantheon Books, 1992)
The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics — a book by Milic Capek (Van Nostrand, 1961)
The Web of Life — a book written by Fritjof Capra (Doubleday, 1996)
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions — a book by Lisa Randall (Harper Collins, 2005)
Ideas and Human Nature
Albert A. Anderson
Copyright 2006
To open this final podcast on the topic of human nature, I will return to the film MindWalk. I am exploring the suggestion that the ideas that play a central role in Plato’s dialogues are closely connected with some of the fundamental concepts of contemporary physics. Sonia, the physicist, claims that the natural world consists of “sets of relationships.” Here again she is speaking for Fritjof Capra, who developed this way of thinking about nature in his book called The Web of Life (Doubleday, 1996). In his commentary on MindWalk, he puts it succinctly: “As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated building blocks, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of a unified whole (MindWalk Script and Commentary, p. 43).”
What are the parts that are related? If they are not things — and quantum theory makes it clear that they are not — then what are they? They are other relationships. If we leave the sub-atomic world of quantum mechanics, what do we find in our “middle-sized world”? Jack asks Sonia whether there are boundaries between him and her. She tells Jack that “even between you and me … [there is] a real exchange of photons and electrons. Ultimately, whether we like it or not, we’re all part of one inseparable web of relationships” (MindWalk Script and Commentary, p. 83).
Even though Steven Weinberg appeals to the idea of beauty as an important criterion as he dreams of a final theory in physics, he rejects the attempt to unify physics with the social sciences and the humanities.
Some scientists and writers like Fritjof Capra welcome what they see as an opportunity for … reconciliation between the spirit of science and the gentler parts of our nature. I might, too, if I thought the opportunity was a real one, but I do not think it is. Quantum mechanics has been overwhelmingly important to physics, but I cannot find any messages for human life in quantum mechanics that are different in any important way from those of Newtonian physics (Dreams of a Final Theory, pp. 77-78).
Weinberg then develops a dialogue between his view and that of Capra (pp. 78-81), but the arguments it contains are not directly relevant to the way I think Plato might be linked to contemporary physics. Nor do I propose to take sides in this debate. I think that both Weinberg and Fritjof Capra invite the connection to Plato, but neither of them explicitly develops that connection.
In Plato’s dialogue Phaedo Socrates tells Simmias and Cebes that ultimately it is mind and ideas that constitute reality. But what exactly are those ideas? In Book 6 of Plato’s Republic the character Glaucon complains that he does not understand Socrates’ explanation of the nature of ideas.
Socrates: Perhaps you will understand it better after this introduction. I suppose you know that students of geometry, arithmetic, and related disciplines assume concepts such as odd and even, various kinds of geometrical figures, the three kinds of angles, and many others. These are assumptions that everyone is supposed to know and which they take for granted, never explaining them either to themselves or to others. They begin with these concepts and on that basis proceed logically until they arrive at their conclusion.
Glaucon: Yes, I do know that.
Socrates: And do you also know that even though they use and reason about visible shapes, they are not thinking about them but about what they resemble? They are not thinking about the figures they draw, but of the square itself, the diagonal itself, and so on. They make use of the shapes they draw or mold, which also have shadows and reflections in water, but they are really searching for the ideas themselves, which can be seen only with the mind.
Glaucon: That’s true. [511]
Socrates: I talked about this kind as intelligible, even though the mind is required to use hypotheses, because it cannot get beyond making assumptions and proceed to first principles. At this stage, the mind uses the objects of which the shadows are resemblances as images. When compared to shadows, they are more tangible and more highly prized.
Glaucon: I understand. You are talking about geometry and the arts related to it.
Socrates: Now in speaking of the other aspect of the intelligible, please understand that I mean the knowledge that reason itself attains through the power of dialectic, using assumptions not as first principles, but as hypotheses—as ways of access and points of departure—so that it can go beyond assumptions and apprehend the first principle of the whole. Holding fast to that first principle and then proceeding to what depends on it, it descends without the aid of any visible object, moving from ideas to ideas and ending in ideas (Plato, The Republic, Agora Publications, Inc., 2001, Greek pages 510-511).
I think that Plato’s critical evaluation of Orphic religious beliefs in the Phaedo was designed to purge Pythagorean thinking of its irrational and unjustifiable elements. But Plato clearly had great respect for the Pythagorean emphasis on mathematics. Even though he goes beyond thinking of everything as number, his way of thinking of reality in terms of ideas (ta eide) is amazingly close to the contemporary language of physics and the mathematical models it generates to think about what we cannot see or even imagine. Reality consists of ideas. Nature and the human mind have those ideas as their ultimate reality. And that ultimate reality is called nous.
Considerable confusion and misunderstanding of these ideas have emerged in the time between Plato’s era and ours. A major source of error in thinking about ideas comes from the long-standing habit of thinking of ideas as substances, the ultimate things or elements that constitute spiritual reality that are analogous to the ultimate things that comprise material reality. Here again we can point to Descartes as the culprit. He says:
We have already discovered enough to show with sufficient clarity that the corruption of the body does not entail the death of the soul, and so to give men the hope of a second life after death. … The premises from which the immortality of the soul may be concluded depend upon the explanation of the whole of physics. First, we must know that all substances in general — that is to say all those things which cannot exist without being created by God are by nature incorruptible and can never cease to be, unless God himself, by denying them his usual support, reduces them to nothingness (René Descartes, Meditations, Bobbs-Merill, [Synopsis, 14, 10]).
Here Descartes clearly formulates key assumptions that ground his dualistic view of mind and body. Those assumptions come from two separate sources — the Christian metaphysics he learned as a student in the Roman Catholic tradition and the mechanistic materialism of the modern physics he was helping to formulate.
Even though many people connect this way of thinking by Descartes to ideas found in Plato’s dialogues, the differences are more important than the similarities. The major difference is that Plato’s dialogues provide nothing like that theory of substances. Contemporary physics also avoids substance as a basic concept. This becomes clear in the film MindWalk. The ideas presented as ultimate reality in Plato’s dialogues are closer to the patterns or relationships that emerge in the following conversation between Thomas, the poet, and Sonia, the physicist. Thomas turns to music to find a suitable metaphor that links physics and the arts. They are sitting in the chapel at Mont St. Michel, and he plays a chord on the organ. The chord, he says, is the most basic of harmonies with a distinctive feeling, but the individual notes carry none of that feeling. He and Sonia agree that the essence of the chord lies in the relationship among the notes. Relationships are what make music. And Sonia says that relationships are what make matter. Thomas identifies this as the “music of the spheres” that they trace ultimately to Pythagoras, the same Pythagoras whose philosophy appears as a strong influence in Plato’s Phaedo. Sonia concludes: This vision of a universe arranged in harmonies of sounds and relations is no new discovery. Today physicists are simply proving that what we call an object — an atom, a molecule, and a particle — is only an approximation, a metaphor. At the subatomic level, it dissolves into a series of interconnections, like chords of music. It’s beautiful (MindWalk Script and Commentary, pp. 42-43).
The ideas in Plato’s dialogues unfold dialectically. They are not substances already known and formulated in advance. They are goals, not ready-made assumptions. Plato’s student Aristotle distinguished among material, efficient, formal, and final causes. In the 17th century modern physics progressively reduced all causality to material and efficient factors. Formal causes were grudgingly absorbed into mathematics, but for many modern philosophers even mathematical entities were considered to lack reality. They were not genuine causes but only names or tokens. And final causes — the ends or goals that played such a central role in Plato’s dialogues and in Aristotle’s philosophy — were thrown on the trash heap of history. By the time we reach the late eighteenth century, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant shows the intellectual crisis that is spawned by dualism. The assumptions that grow out of classical physics and the Medieval metaphysics that still lingered in the modern worldview leave us with no way out of skepticism. Based on those assumptions, the best alternative in the twentieth century turned out to be pragmatism in science, ethics, and politics. Unfortunately, pragmatism leads to relativism, and philosophy, the love of wisdom, is lost in the process.
Steven Weinberg, in a chapter called “Against Philosophy,” articulates an attitude shared by many people today:
Knowledge of philosophy does not seem to be of use to physicists — always with the exception that the work of some philosophers helps us avoid the errors of other philosophers. It is only fair to admit my limitations and biases in making this judgment. After a few years’ infatuation with philosophy as an undergraduate I became disenchanted. The insights of the philosophers I studied became murky and inconsequential compared with the dizzying successes of physics and mathematics (Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 158).
Given the state of philosophy when he attended college in the middle of the 20th century, Weinberg’s critique of philosophy is easy to understand. But hostility toward philosophy is not new. Socrates and Adeimantus discuss it in Book 6 of Plato’s Republic. Socrates says that “intruders” have forced their way in from the outside and profess to be philosophers when they are not. Rather than “lovers of wisdom,” these intruders are sophists who pretend to know what they do not really know. In our day the sophists have returned in great numbers and with great power. Most recently they have taken control of the government. They also populate the faculty and administration of the universities.
This is not the time or place to respond to Weinberg’s attack on philosophy in detail, but I would like to make two observations. The first is that in spite of his open attack on what he calls philosophy, I find Weinberg’s thinking about fundamental questions to be quite philosophical. If we define philosophy as “the rational analysis and justification of fundamental concepts, principles, decisions, and actions,” Weinberg’s writing engages in serious philosophical reflection. His attack on positivism and relativism is perceptive and Socratic. If philosophy is understood as dialectical, a way of thinking that seeks a “final theory” rather than preaching one, then Weinberg practices the kind of philosophy that Plato also practiced. This leads to my second observation. Weinberg’s dream of a final theory would be strengthened by embracing an understanding of ideas similar to what emerges in Plato’s dialogues. Those ideas are, as Socrates says in the Phaedo, real causes. But they are final causes rather than material, efficient, or even formal factors. Philosophers are lovers of wisdom. They do not, like preachers, claim that they have the truth and attempt to impose it on other people. Nor do they insist, as do Sophists, that there is no truth and that it is their responsibility to create it and convince others to follow their clever plans. Final causes, like Weinberg’s final theory, are goals to be pursued. This is true in all branches of human inquiry, whether in science, politics, ethics, theology, art, or history.
Weinberg is not alone in the quest for a final theory, a way that the various recent theories such as quantum theory and relativity theory can be integrated into a unified whole. Lisa Randall currently teaches physics at Harvard University. She joins the search for a final theory in her book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (published by Harper Collins in 2005). Randall explores the possibility that there are several dimensions of space rather than the three dimensions that dominated Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics. Like Sonia in MindWalk, Randall struggles with the problem of visualizing the concepts of space that are associated with contemporary physics. Her model building in theoretical physics is predicated on the assumption that dimensions of space we cannot directly experience are real causes. These dimensions, she says, can be indirectly experienced through experiments — in this case using extremely sophisticated equipment such as the nuclear accelerator that is being built at CERN in Switzerland, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory.
The ideas Socrates and other characters talk about in Plato’s dialogues are also real causes. They are also invisible, and they can be tested indirectly. When Socrates, in the Phaedo, asks why he is sitting in prison waiting to be executed rather than dining with friends in Thessaly, he is testing the idea of justice. In the Crito he explained his reasons for staying in Athens rather than fleeing as Crito recommended. His basic justification for staying is that it would be unjust to escape. Mind and ideas are real causes. Without them we cannot understand why Socrates does what he does. Mind and ideas are dimensions of reality. If there is only one cosmos, one universe, then mind and ideas — ideas like justice — are dimensions of the cosmos. They are hidden dimensions, but they are essential features of human nature. Such causes are not what Aristotle called material causes, though they are connected to material factors. Socrates could not sit in prison if he lacked a body. He could not drink the hemlock if he lacked a body. But the reason he is sitting there and the reason he drinks the hemlock is that he thinks it is the right thing to do under the circumstances. Justice is a final cause. It is the essential factor that explains Socrates’ decision in the Crito and his action in the Phaedo.
The Capras’ film MindWalk seems to have been created with final causes in mind. However, Fritjof Capra’s books have a kind of missionary zeal that tends to undermine the search for wisdom. The character Sonia offers the outlines of a synthesis between human life and nature in general that she calls “systems theory,” a view that she says recognizes a “web of relationships as the essence of all living things” (MindWalk Script and Commentary, p. 54). The living system she has in mind is self-maintaining, self-renewing, and self-transcending (p. 56). This is an abbreviated version of the holistic view Fritjof Capra develops in his book The Web of Life. That way of thinking is offered as a scheme for integrating human life and nature in a way that might counteract the current threat to the ecosystem and point the way to a sustainable society (p. 59). This is an urgent concern for the entire world, and one of the strengths of this film is its attempt to show the connection between science and technology, on one hand, and human values on the other. Wonderful as it is, Sonia’s approach threatens to become a sermon. Jack, the pragmatic politician, immediately offers her a job as part of his staff in Washington.
But Thomas is not convinced by Sonia’s appeal to systems theory as an alternative to the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton. He says: “I feel just as reduced being called a system as I do being called a clock. Life is just … not condensable” (p. 62). Here I suspect Bernt Capra, the film director and scriptwriter, is distinguishing his point of view from that of his brother. The dialogue in the film reaches its climax with some beautiful poetry by Pablo Neruda.
I want to tell you that the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxes is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure; and that time among the blood-colored grapes has made the petal hard and shiny, filled the jellyfish with life, untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl. I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead of human eyes, dead in the darkness, of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes on the timid globe of an orange. I walked around like you, investigating the endless star, and in my net, during the night I woke up naked, the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind (MindWalk Script and Commentary, pp. 61-62).
This is a good place to end. Poetry, not physics or politics should have the last word. Those who wonder why Plato ends many of his dialogues with mythos rather than logos might find an answer here. Poetry invites interpretation, further reflection, new analysis, and fresh questions. Who am I? What am I? Who are we? What might we become? What should be included in the final theory of nature and human life?
Bibliography
This series of ten podcasts on Human Nature contains short quotations from a variety of primary sources from which I have drawn important ideas. Listeners who wish to dig deeper into this topic may wish to consult the following works:
Rediscovery of the Mind — a book by John Searle (MIT Press, 1992)
Genome — a book by Matt Ridley (Harper Collins, 1999)
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea — a book by Daniel Dennett (Simon and Schuster, 1995)
Plato’s Republic — a dialogue published both in paperback and on audio CD by Agora Publications in 2001 Reflections on the Mind of Plato — by Joseph Uemura, published both in paperback and on audio CD by Agora Publications in 2001 The Biotech Century — a book by Jeremy Rifkin published by Penguin Putnam in 1998
GATTACA — a film written and directed by Andrew Niccol in 1997
On Human Nature — a book written by E. O. Wilson, published by Harvard University Press in 1978 The Phenomenon of Man — a book by Teilhard de Chardin (Harper and Row, 1959)
Discourse on Method and Meditations — books by René Descartes written in the 17th Century The Evolution of Human Nature — a book by C. Judson HHHerrick (Harper and Brothers, 1961)
Brave New World — a novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932 by Harper and Brothers
Brave new World Revisited — an essay by Aldous Huxley published by Harper and Row in 1958
The Singularity is Near — a book by Ray Kurzweil published by Viking in 2005
Minds, Brains, and Science — a book by John Searle published by Harvard University Press in 1984
Foundations of Ethics — a book that contains What is Enlightenment? and Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant. Leo Rauch translated this work that is published by Agora Publications in paperback and on audio CD.
Gorgias — a dialogue by Plato published by Agora Publications in paperback and audio CD in 1994
Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo — dialogues written by Plato (published by Agora Publications in 2005 in paperback and as audio CDs)
MindWalk — a film by Bernt and Fritjof Capra released in 1990
Dreams of a Final Theory — a book by Steven Weinberg (Pantheon Books, 1992)
The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics — a book by Milic Capek (Van Nostrand, 1961)
The Web of Life — a book written by Fritjof Capra (Doubleday, 1996)
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions — a book by Lisa Randall (Harper Collins, 2005)