In "The Life of Samuel Johnson" Boswell narrates a discussion he had with Johnson regarding the philosophy of Berkeley:
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."
A couple hundred years later, Richard Rorty, sketching out the typical (essential?) structure of essentialist vs. anti-essentialist debates noted:
Essentialists typically rejoin at this point, that psychological nominalism is a mistake, that we should retrieve what was true in empiricism and not admit that language provides our only cognitive access to objects. They suggest that we must have some prelinguistic knowledge of objects, knowledge that cannot be caught in language. This knowledge they say, is what prevents the table or the number or the human being from being what they call a 'mere linguistic construct'. To illustrate what he means by nonlinguistic knowledge, the essentialist at this point in the argument, usually bangs his hand on the table and flinches. He thereby hopes to demonstrate that he has acquired a bit of knowledge, and a kind of intimacy with the table, which escapes the reach of language. He claims that the knowledge of the table's intrinsic causal powers, its sheer brute thereness, keeps him in touch with reality in a way in which the anti-essentialist is not.
Oh how little things change.
Berkley's idealism and Rorty's pragmatism are not the same of course, and the arguments they advanced were not directed toward the same ends. Berkley was trying to prove, by a kind of process of elimination, that everything must be an idea in the mind of God. Rorty, who had no use for gods of any kind, was trying to dissolve all "gods," supernatural or otherwise, into a creative naturalistic soup. Nevertheless, there is a connection between Berkley's rejection of abstract ideas, his emphasis that all things come "mixed," "blended," and "complicated," (an insight Hume called "one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made in late years in the republic of letters") and Rorty's anti-essentialist denial "that there is a way to pick out an object from the rest of the universe except as the object of which a certain set of sentences are true;" sentences, he goes on to note, that can only relate objects to one another (a fact that entails all objects so described are "blended," "mixed," etc.).
In this respect at least, in their emphasis on a kind of relational holism, Berkley and Rorty are united together against the rock kickers, as are all who find themselves attracted to thinking that strives to connect "all things" together. In opposition to this syncretic hackery, the rock kickers strive to determine the essential nature of each individual thing and thus, by extension, to discover the most essential things that there are (in order to better kick them).
Here I am running roughshod over further distinctions that could be made (a habit I will continue for at least the remainder of this post), as this is merely an introduction to the primary distinction I would like to make, a division of the world into "rock kickers" and "shit maker upers." Readers may recognize that I am here attempting to put one more spin on what C.P. Snow called "The two Cultures," which, very generally speaking, are the cultures of "science" and "art."
But as the rather informal expressions that make up my two cultures indicate, this is no technical distinction prefacing a delineation of boundaries between the various interfaces of scientific and literary culture. Rather I intend it to function like the distinction offered by William James in his lectures on pragmatism where he suggests that
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments...Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be "not in it," in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him dialectical ability.
James called these two temperaments, these "sentimental" and "hard-hearted" views, the "the tender-minded" and the "tough-minded" positions respectively. James intended that these temperaments stand in for clusters of "traits"--characteristics generally associated with the traditional divide between rationalists and empiricists. Adding to this basic distinction James layered on "idealism" vs "materialism;" "religious" vs "irreligious;" "dogmatic" vs "skeptical," as well as other oppositions. James intended to show how these oppositions might be mediated--or even dissolved--by the application of philosophical pragmatism. Ironically his efforts to mediate the temperamental split have largely earned him a place at the table of the tender-minded. For his pragmatic assertion that "ideas become true just insofar as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience," earned him few friends among the tough minded. Indeed, on the tough-minded view, ideas are true just insofar as they help us get into satisfactory relationship with reality itself, in the way bits of maps relate to bits of the world. To suggest that "ideas" are "true" insofar as they are in "satisfactory relation" with "experience" comes far too close to suggesting that what is true is whatever shit we make up to keep ourselves happy, and that is a truth no self respecting rock kicker can abide.
The cluster of dispositions and philosophical stances that James suggested as representative of the tough-minded temperament are, I think, still largely serviceable for today's rock-kicking contingent. Empirically minded, "going by facts," materialistic (philosophically speaking), irreligious, and skeptical are attitudes/stances with which most modern rock kickers would happily be associated. On the other hand, if we take Rorty as a paradigmatic case of milder than mild realism, a tender-minded fellow who just can't help but peddle his share of fashionable nonsense, we can see that the categories James proposed in conjunction with his "two temperaments" no longer apply (if they ever really did). For Rorty is a materialist through and through, not to mention irreligious and skeptical (exactly what he was skeptical about is point of contention).
That James's traits do not match up well with today's temperaments should come as no surprise: by his own admission, the traits he invoked were somewhat arbitrary, invoked as much to make a general point as to try to nail down once and for all the differences between the two temperaments. Discarding, then, the suggestions James offered, and interested in advancing my own variation on the theme, what basic traits do I suggest for today's loyal opposition?
For my purposes here, I do not think it necessary to go any further than the categories implicitly contained within my original distinction. On the one hand we have rock kickers, who find the truth, either through the careful and meticulous unearthing of rocks that were heretofore hidden from us by layers of obfuscation, or by accident, where the rocks are merely tripped over (or in the case of certain apples, when they are dropped on certain heads). On the other hand we have shit-maker-upers, primarily concerned with the fact that we are makers of things (not to mention ideas) and here we can open up our scope quite widely indeed, for shit-maker-upers are, in their wildest moments of excess inclined to declare that everything is in some important sense "made up," including rocks (at which point rock kicking and table slapping doth commence).
Let us consider some objections to the preceding.
It may be objected, that the label "tough-mindedness" should not be handed over so quickly to the rock kicking realist camp. Who, after all, is more "tough-minded" than the cultural relativist/nihilist, rejecting as he does all final values, whatever the dangers of such a position might be? What could be more "tender-minded" than realist fantasies about future utopias in which all men and women live out their lives happily exercising the commandments meted out by the Very Structure of Reason Itself? The categories are too malleable, they have an all too "aesthetic" or "emotive" feel to them. They are too easily wielded as platitudes to be paid to "one's own kind," or to be delivered as sneering rebukes.
Despite this potential plasticity of use, my own inclination is to let the stereotypical characterizations stand. For if we consider merely the common habits of use in this area, it does seem to be the case that more often than not "the tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and softheads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal," if by "tough" we mean rock kicking realists, and by "tender" all those fuzzy headed purveyors of whatever-they-are-making-up-these-days. As this set of paired lists suggests, and perhaps even illustrates, the tough-minded have a "straight up" attitude, while the tender-minded serve up their thoughts "with a twist."
More difficult are objections to the very notion of temperament as a constitutive element of philosophical positions. The current crop of tender minded thinkers: the "new fuzzies," people who like to focus on the fact that we make a lot of shit up (and who want to contribute their share), will not be so put off by the notion of "temperament" guiding their thinking. Our tough minded rock kickers on the other hand, may not be so enthused by this characterization. For to suggest, as James does, that the realist (empiricist) [rock kicking] position is itself guided by temperament comes close to suggesting that the realist is herself making shit up to suit her position. As James writes, the philosopher "trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it." This will not do. The entire idea behind the current "tough minded" stance is precisely that one is tough because one has suppressed one's own prior commitments in the pursuit of the the reality that lies in wait ready to be discovered. This is what makes "the truth" the truth: that it waits for us ready made, ready to be revealed after we peel back the layers of confusion and uncover the hard kickable rocks that lie underneath (all that shit).
In a sense this is a difficulty that recapitulates the entire debate. The make-shit-uppers want to suggest that it is precisely this fact, the fact that we always have prior commitments, be they temperamental or otherwise, that cause us to confabulate, to organize our very picture of reality around a small core of presuppositions from which we inevitably infer/construct the world, and that there is no final "way that the world really is." The rock kickers assert that it is not our own antecedent commitments that make up the makeup of the world, but rather that it is precisely the antecedent reality of the world that allows us to discover its true nature in the first place. On a tough minded view the suggestion that temperament guides both realist and anti-realist views is itself an entirely tender minded idea. If the rock-kicker admits that the notion of temperament plays an important role here at all, it will likely be via the suggestion that the tough minded realistic view that they espouse produces the kind of temperament we should all want. They may even want to suggest, in fact, that the pursuit of the truth will make us "straight up" folks, in a way similar perhaps, to the kind of linkage that Plato suggested must occur between knowing the good and doing the good.
So perhaps here one must take sides: Kick rocks? Or make shit up? Or is perhaps, some sort of synthesis possible, the way James hoped it might be? In the posts ahead I intend to continue to explore both rocks and other shit, and perhaps shed some light on this seemingly intractable controversy (or maybe I will just make more shit up). For now let us end with a little Wittgenstein, whose writings often seem to me like middle fingers pointed in all directions (a type of synthesis):
But the idealist will teach his children the word 'chair' after all, for of course he wants to teach them to do this and that, e.g. to fetch a chair. Then where will be the difference between what the idealist-educated children say and the realist ones? Won't the difference only be one of battle cry? (Zettel 414)
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