Chapter 3: The Epistemological Necessity
THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL NECESSITY
THE PROBLEM
Epistemology means the theory of the method or grounds of knowledge —the theory of knowledge, or how we know, or how we know we know. Epistemology is the central problem of our generation; indeed, the so-called generation gap is really an epistemological gap, simply because the modern generation looks at knowledge in a way radically different from previous ones. I have dealt with the reasons for this at some length in two earlier books,[4] so I will in this work only touch upon what I covered in those books concerning Thomas Aquinas and the dilemma brought about by the development of his assumptions and system. But here we shall start farther back than Aquinas, in the time of the great Greek philosophers.
The Greek philosophers spent much time grappling with this problem of knowledge, and the one who wrestled with it most, and with the greatest sensitivity, was Plato. He understood the basic problem, and that is that in the area of knowledge, as in the area of morals, there must be more than particulars if there is to be meaning. In the area of knowledge you have particulars, by which we mean the individual “things” that we see in the world. At any given moment, I am faced with thousands, indeed, literally millions of particulars, just in what I see with a glance of my eyes. What are the universals which give these particulars meaning? This is the heart of the problem of epistemology and the problem of knowing.
A related problem is in our learning. For example, in considering apples, we could list the different varieties every time we spoke of apples, and name two or three hundred kinds. But in practice, we draw these all together under the word “apple,” and so have a greater comprehension of what we are looking at and what we are talking about. So we are all moving from particular to universals.
It is much the same in terms of science. Science is looking at the particulars and trying to make laws which cover sufficient numbers of particulars for us to see the association and understand properly. “Super” laws (for example, electromagnetism and gravity) are laws which go further than that, and reduce all the particulars in the material universe to as few universals as possible. So whether we are talking about apples or about science, in learning we are constantly moving from particulars to universals.
This is not only a linguistic thing; it is the way we know. It is not just an abstract theory, or some kind of scholasticism, but the matter of actually knowing, and knowing that we know. The Greek philosophers, and especially Plato, were seeking for universals that would make the particulars meaningful.
Now we can understand this very easily in the area of morals. In the previous chapter, I dealt with the area of morals, that we need universals (absolutes) if we are to determine what is right and what is wrong. Not having universals, the modern concept is finally sociological: one assesses the statistics of public opinion of right and wrong, and a majority determines moral questions. Or we can think of an elite emerging to tell us what is right and what is wrong. But both these approaches are merely matters of averages. The Greeks understood that if we were really to know what was right and what was wrong, we had to have a universal which would cover all the particulars.
Now while we can see this more easily in the area of morals, in reality it is even more important in the area of knowledge. How can we find universals that are large enough to cover the particulars, so that we can know we know? Plato, for example, put forward the concept of ideals that would provide the needed universal. For example, let us think of chairs: let us say that there is somewhere an ideal chair, and that this ideal chair would cover all the particulars of all the chairs that ever were. Thus, a chair had meaning in reference to the ideal chair and not to the particular one. So when we use the word “chair,” there is a meaning that is beyond our mere gathering up of the particulars about chairs. This is Plato’s solution: an “Ideal” somewhere that would cover all the possible particulars that anybody could ever possibly find about chairs. There would be no chairs outside this universal or beyond the concept that was covered by the “ideal” chair. Anything outside of it was not a chair.
From the parallel in the area of morals, we can see the problem of knowledge, of knowing, of being sure. The Greeks thought of two ways to try to come to this. One was the sense of the polis. The word polis simply means “city,” but in Greek thinking, the polis had meaning beyond merely the geographic city. It had to do with the structure of society. Some Greeks had an idea that the polis, the society, could supply the universal. But the Greeks were wise enough soon to see that this was unsatisfactory, because then one is right back to the 51 percent vote or the concept of a small elite. So one would end with Plato’s philosopher-kings, for example. But this, too, was limited. Even if one only chose the philosopher-kings in the polis, eventually they are not going to be able to give a universal that would cover all the particulars.
So the next step was to move back to the gods, on the grounds that the gods can give something more than the polis can give. But the difficulty is that the Greek gods (and this includes Plato’s gods) simply were inadequate. They were personal gods —in contrast to the Eastern gods, who include everything and are impersonal —but they were not big enough. Consequently, because their gods were not big enough, the problem remained unsolved for the Greeks.
Just as society did not solve the problem because it was not big enough, so also the gods did not settle it because they were not big enough. The gods fought among themselves and had differences over all kinds of petty things. All the classical gods put together were not really enough, which is why, as we saw in a previous chapter, in the concept of fate, in Greek literature, one never knows for sure whether the Fates are controlled by the gods, or whether the Fates control the gods. Are the Fates simply the vehicle of the action of the gods?, or are the Fates the universal behind the gods? And do they manipulate the gods? There is this constant confusion between the Fates and the gods as the final control. This expresses the Greeks’ deep comprehension that their gods simply were not adequate: they were not big enough with regard to the Fates, and they were not big enough with regard to knowledge. So though Plato and the Greeks understood the necessity of finding a universal, and saw that unless there was a universal, nothing was going to turn out right, they never found a place from which the universal could come, either for the polis or for the gods.
Thomas Aquinas picked up the dilemma of the Greek philosophers. Before his time, the Byzantine world had no real interest in particulars. They lived in the midst of them but they had an entirely different thought-form. They were not interested in nature or in the particulars. We can thank Thomas Aquinas for the fact that, because of his view, nature was again brought into importance in man’s thinking.
Gradually, as Thomas Aquinas’ emphasis spread (as I pointed out in Escape from Reason), it began to be understood and disseminated in the area of the arts. Cimabue (1240–1302), for example, began to paint in a different way. Then Dante (1265–1321) began to write in a different way, in which nature had its emphasis. But there was also arising a tension between nature and grace. In nature, you have men and natural cause and effect affecting the world; in grace, you have the heavenly forces, and how these unseen forces can affect the world. In nature, you have the body; in grace, you have the soul. But eventually we always come down to the problem of particulars and universals. In nature, you have the particulars; in grace, you have the universal. These men, Cimabue and Dante, and others, like Giotto (1267-1337), who followed them, began to emphasize nature. This is to the good, as we have said, but there is the problem. There is that which is good, because nature was being reestablished and reemphasized in men’s thinking; there is that which is bad, because they were making the particulars autonomous and thus losing the universal that gave the particulars meaning.
As I have emphasized in my previous books, there is a principle here; that is, if nature or the particulars are autonomous from God, then nature begins to eat up grace. Or we could put it in this way: all we are left with are particulars, and universals are lost, not only in the area of morals, which would be bad enough, but in the area of knowing. Here you can see the drift toward modern man and his cynicism. It was born back there. We are left with masses of particulars but no way to get them together. So we find that by this time nature is eating up grace in the area of morals, and even more basically, in the area of epistemology as well.
This is where Leonardo da Vinci is so important. He was the first modern mathematician, and he really understood this dilemma. It is not that I am reading back into him our dilemma of modern cynicism. He really understood it. He understood, in the passage of all these hundreds of years between himself and modern man, where rationalistic man would end up if man failed to find a solution. This is what real genius is —understanding before your time —and Leonardo da Vinci did understand. He understood that if you began on the basis of rationalism —that is, man beginning only from himself, and not having any outside knowledge —you would have only mathematics and particulars and would end up with only mechanics. In other words, he was so far ahead of his time —that he really understood that everything was going to end up only as a machine, and there were not going to be any universals or meaning at all. The universals were going to be crossed out. So Leonardo really became very much like the modern man. He said we should try to paint the universals. This is really very close to the modern concept of the upper-story experience. So he painted and painted and painted, trying to paint the universals. He actually tried to paint the universal just as Plato had had the idea that if we were really to have a knowledge of chairs, there would have to be an ideal chair somewhere that would cover all kinds of chairs. Leonardo, who was a Neo-Platonist, understood this, and he said, “Let man produce the universals.” But what kind of man? The mathematical man? No, not the mathematical man but the painter, the sensitive man. So Leonardo is a very crucial man in the area of humanistic epistemology.
At this point in Escape from Reason, I developed the difference between what I call “modern science” and the “modern modern science.”
In my earlier books I have referred to Whitehead and Oppenheimer, two scientists —neither one a Christian —who insisted that modern science could not have been born except in the Christian milieu. Bear with me as I repeat this, for I want in this book to carry it a step further, into the area of knowing. As Whitehead so beautifully points out, these men all believed that the universe was created by a reasonable God, and therefore the universe could be found out by reason. This was their base. Modern science is the original science, in which you had men who believed in the uniformity of natural causes in a limited system, a system which could be reordered by God and by man made in the image of God. This is a cause and effect system in a limited time span. But from the time of Newton (not with Newton himself, but with the Newtonians who followed him), we have the concept of the “machine” until we are left with the only machine, and you move into the “modern modern science,” in which we have the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, including sociology and psychology. Man is included in the machine. This is the world in which we live in the area of science today. No longer believing that they can be sure the universe is reasonable because created by a reasonable God, the question is raised that Leonardo da Vinci already understood and that the Greeks understood before that: “How does the scientist know; on what basis can he know that what he knows, he really knows?”
So rationalism put forth at this point the epistemological concept of positivism. Positivism is a theory of knowing which assumes that we can know facts and objects with total objectivity. Modern “scientism” is built on it.
It is a truly romantic concept, and while it held sway, rationalistic man stood ten feet tall in his pride. It was based on the notion that without any universals to begin with, finite man could reach out and grasp with finite reason sufficient true knowledge to make universals out of the particulars.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is crucial at this point, because he changed the formulation from “nature and grace” to “nature and freedom,” absolute freedom. Rousseau and the men around him saw that in the area of “nature,” everything had become the machine. In other words, “downstairs” everything was in the area of positivism, and everything was a machine. “Upstairs” they added the other thing, namely, absolute freedom. In the sense of absolute freedom upstairs, not only is man not to be bound by revelation, but he is not to be bound by society, the polis, either. The concept of autonomous freedom is clearly seen in Gaugin, the painter. He was getting rid of all the restraints, not just the restraint of God, but also the restraint of the polis, which for Gaugin was epitomized by the highly developed culture of France. He left France and went to Tahiti to be rid of the culture, the polis. In doing this, he practiced the concept of the noble savage that, of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had previously set forth. You get rid of the restraints, you get rid of the polis, you get rid of God or the gods, and then you are free. Unhappily, though not surprisingly, this did not turn out as he expected.
So what we have is not a destructive freedom only in morals (though it shows itself very quickly in morals, especially quickly, perhaps, in sexual anarchy), but in the area of knowledge as well. In metaphysics, in the area of being, as well as morals, we are supposed to have absolute freedom. But then the dilemma comes: How do you know and how do you know you know?
We may imagine the Greeks and Leonardo da Vinci and all the Neo-Platonists at the time of the High Renaissance coming in and asking Rousseau and his followers, “Don’t you see what you have done? Where are the universals? How are you going to know? How are you going to build enough universals out of particulars, even for society to run, let alone build true knowledge, knowledge that you really know and are sure that you know?”
It is only a step, really, from men like Gaugin to the whole hippie culture, and as a matter of fact, to the whole modern culture. In one sense there is a parenthesis in time from Rousseau until the birth of the hippie culture and the whole modern culture that is founded on the view that there are no universals anywhere —that man is totally, hedonistically free; the individual is totally, hedonistically free —not only morally, but also in the area of knowledge. We can easily see the moral confusion that has resulted from this, but the epistemological confusion is worse. If there are not universals, how do we know reality from non-reality? At this point, we are right in the lap of modern man’s problem, as I will develop later.
Now let us go back to the period immediately after Rousseau, to Immanuel Kant, and Hegel, who changed the whole concept of epistemology. Before this, in epistemology, man always thought in terms of antithesis; the methodology of epistemology had always been antithesis. That is, you learn by saying “a” is not “non-a.” That is the first step of classical logic. In other words, in antithesis, if this is true, then its opposite is not true. You can make an antithesis. That is the classical methodology of epistemology, of knowing. But Hegel argued that antithesis has never turned out well on a rationalistic basis, so he proposed to change the methodology of epistemology. Instead of dealing with antithesis, let us deal with synthesis. So he set up his famous triangle —everything is a thesis, it sets up an antithesis, and the answer is always synthesis. The whole world changed in the area of morals and political science, but it changed more profoundly, though less obviously, in the area of knowing and knowing itself. He changed the whole theory of how we know.
In my books I move quickly to Kierkegaard, who took this a step further. He set up, as I have indicated, the absolute dichotomy between reason and non-reason. Kierkegaard, and especially Kierkegaardianism that followed him, teaches that that which would give meaning is always separated from reason; reason only leads to knowledge downstairs, which is mathematical knowledge without any meaning, but upstairs you hope to find a non-rational meaning for the particulars. This is Kierkegaard’s contribution.
All of this flows from four men —Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard —and their thinking in the area of epistemology. From Hegel, this kind of thinking has replaced antithesis with synthesis, so turning the whole theory of knowledge upside down. Today, existentialism has three forms: the French, Jean-Paul Sartre; the German, Heidegger; and that of Karl Jaspers, who is also a German but lives in Switzerland. The distinctions between the forms of existentialism do not change the fact that it is the same system even though it has different expressions with these different men, namely, that rationality only leads to something horrible in every area, including knowledge. Indeed, not including knowledge, but first of all knowledge —principally knowledge. To these men as rationalists the knowledge we can know with our reason is only a mathematical formula in which man is only a machine. Instead of reason they hope to find some sort of mystical experience “upstairs,” apart from reason, to provide a universal.
Here we can feel again the whole drift of the hippie movement and the drug culture as well. Man hopes to find something in his head because he cannot know certainly that anything is “out there.” This is where we are. I am convinced that the generation gap is basically in the area of epistemology. Before, man had a romantic hope that on the basis of rationalism he was going to be able to find a meaning to life, and put universals over the particulars. But on this side of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, this hope no longer exists; the hope is given up. Young people today live in a generation that no longer believes in the hope of truth as truth. That is why I use the term “true truth” in my books to emphasize real truth. This is not just a tautology. It is an admission that the word “truth” now means something that before these four men would not have been considered truth at all. So, in desperation, I have coined the expression “true truth” to make the point, but it is hard to make it sharp enough for people to understand how large the problem is.
After Kierkegaard, rationality is seen as leading to pessimism. We can have mathematical knowledge, but man is only a machine, and any kind of optimism one could have concerning meaning would have to be in the area of the non-rational, the “upstairs.” So rationality, including modern science, will lead only to pessimism. Man is only the machine; man is only a zero, and nothing has any real meaning. I am nothing —one particular among thousands of particulars. No particulars have meaning, and specifically, man has no meaning —specifically the particular of myself. I have no meaning; I die; man is dead. If students wonder why they are treated like IBM cards, it is for no less reason than this.
So man makes his leap “upstairs” into all sorts of mysticisms in the area of knowledge —and they are mysticisms, because they are totally separated from all rationality. This is a mysticism like no previous mysticism. Previous mysticisms always assumed something was there. But modern man’s mysticisms are semantic mysticisms that deal only with words; they have nothing to do with anything being there, but are simply concerned with something in one’s own head, or in language in one form or another. The modern taking of drugs began as one way to try to find meaning within one’s head.
The present situation is one where we have in the area of the rational positivism for “scientific fact,” that which leads to mathematical formulae and man as a machine; and in the non-rational area we find all kinds of non-rational mysticisms.
Now we must turn our attention again to the “downstairs” positivism. This was the great hope of rationalistic man, but gradually positivism has died. I remember when I first lectured at Oxford and Cambridge, one had to change gears between the two great universities because in Oxford they were still teaching logical positivism, but in Cambridge it was all linguistic analysis. Today it is linguistic analysis almost everywhere in the world. Gradually, positivism has died. For a careful study as to why this has happened, I would recommend Michael Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge: An Introduction to Post-critical Philosophy. Polanyi is a name that hardly ever appears in the popular press, and he is unknown by many, but he is one of the dominant thinkers in the intellectual world. His book shows why positivism is not a sufficient epistemology, and why the hope of modern science to have any certain knowledge is doomed to failure. And truly there is probably not a chair of philosophy of importance in the world today that teaches positivism. It is still held by the undergraduate and by the naive scientist who, with a happy smile on his face, is building on a foundation that no longer exists. Now we must notice where we have come. The first of the modern scientists —Copernicus, Galileo, up to Newton and Faraday, as Whitehead pointed out —had the courage to begin to formulate modern science because they believed the universe had been created by a reasonable God, and therefore, it was possible to find out that which was true about the universe by reason. But when we come to naturalistic science, that is all destroyed; positivism is put in its place, but now positivism itself is destroyed.
Polanyi argues that positivism is inadequate because it does not consider the knower of what is known. It acts as though the knower may be overlooked and yet have full knowledge of certain things, as though the knower knew without actually being there. Or you might say positivism does not take into account the knower’s theories or presuppositions. You can assume that he approaches the thing without any presuppositions, without any grid through which he feeds his knowledge.
But there is the dilemma, as Polanyi shows, because this simply is not true. There is no scientist in the positivistic position who does not feed knowledge through a grid —a theory or worldview through which he sees and finds. The concept of the totally innocent, objective observer is utterly naive. And science cannot exist without an observer.
When I was younger, people would always say that science is completely objective. Then, some years ago in Oxford, it began to be insisted that this is not true, that there is no such thing as science without the observer. The observer sets up the experiment and then the observer observes it —then the observer makes the conclusions. Polanyi says the observer is never neutral; he has a grid, he has presuppositions through which he feeds the thing that he finds.
I would go a step further. I have always insisted that positivism has an even more basic problem. One must always judge a system in its own total structure; you cannot mix systems, or you get a philosophical chop suey rather than any real thought. Within positivism as a total structure there is no way of saying with certainty that anything exists. Within the system of positivism itself, by the very nature of the case, you simply begin nakedly with nothing there. You have no reason within the system to know that the data is data, or that what is reaching you is data. Within the system there is no universal to give you the right to be sure that what is reaching you from outside is data. The system of positivism itself gives you no certainty that anything is there, or that there is really in the first move any difference between reality and fantasy.
There is a further problem. Not only does the positivist not know certainly that anything is there, but even if it is there, he can have no reason to think he knows anything truly nor anywhere near truly. There is no reason within the system to be sure that there is a correlation between the observer —that is, the subject —and the thing —that is, the object.
To bring it further up to date, Karl Popper, who is another of the well-known thinkers of our own day, has until recently argued that a thing is meaningless unless it is open to verification and falsification. But in a recent book he has taken a step backwards. He now says there is no possibility of verification. You cannot verify anything —only falsify. That is, you cannot say what a thing is; you can only say certain things that it is not. When Polanyi finished destroying logical positivism so beautifully, he was left with total cynicism in the area of epistemology concerning knowing; in his new book Karl Popper has really come to the same place. In science the same problem is involved with much of the “model” concept. One often finds that the objective reality is getting dim, and all that remains is the model in the scientist’s head.
We are left then with this. Positivism died and has been replaced everywhere by linguistic analysis. Positivism did not leave one with knowledge but only with a set of statistical averages and approximations, with no certainty that anything was there finally and no certainty of continuity in the things that were there.
One can relate this to Alfred Korzybski’s and D. David Bourland’s “General Semantics,” which would not allow the verb “to be” ever to be used. All their books are written without the use of the verb “to be.” Why? Because they say there is no certainty of continuity. I would add that it seems to me also to be related to the stream-of-consciousness psychology that ends up with nothing but a stream-of-consciousness because it is not sure that an “I” is there.
I should like to turn to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who is in many ways the key to this whole matter. There is an early Wittgenstein, and there is a later Wittgenstein, but in his Tractatus, to which we refer here, we are concerned with the early Wittgenstein. Later he moved into linguistic analysis, but in this early stage, he argued that down here in the world (in the area of reason) you have facts: you have the propositions of natural science. This is all that can be said; it is all that you can put into language. This is the limit of language and the limit of logic. “Downstairs” we can speak, but all that can be spoken is the mathematical propositions of natural science. Language is limited to the “downstairs” of reason, and that ends up with mathematical formulations.
But, as Bertrand Russell emphasizes, Wittgenstein was a mystic. Even in his early days, there were already the elements of mysticism. In the “upper story” he put silence, because you could not talk about anything outside of the known world of natural science. But man desperately needed values, ethics, meanings to it all. Man needs these desperately, but there is only silence there. It was at this point that the title of this present book was born. It is Wittgenstein’s word “silence” that has given me this title. Wittgenstein says that there is only silence in the area of the things man desperately needs most —values, ethics, and meanings. Man knows it needs to be there, he argues, but he cannot talk or even think about it. Values, ethics, meanings are all upstairs. No matter how much we need them, there is only silence.
From this he plunged into linguistic analysis, which is now the dominant philosophy all over the world. It was born at this place in the desperation that followed when positivism was seen to be inadequate. The “old” Wittgenstein and the existentialist really are very, very close at this particular point, though if you move from England to the Continent in the study of philosophy you find that people usually assume that they are completely at variance. Yet there is a way of looking at them in which they are very close: at the moment when Wittgenstein says there is no real value or meaning in all these things, only silence.
For those who know Bergman’s film The Silence, this will ring a very familiar bell. Bergman is a philosopher who came to the place where he decided that there would never be anything spoken from this upper level, that God (even as the existentialist would use that word) was meaningless. At that point he made the film The Silence, and Bergman himself changed from that point onward. In other words, he agreed with what Wittgenstein, the brilliant philosopher, had said many years before. So really Bergman and Wittgenstein must be seen together, and the film The Silence was a demonstration of this particular point.
What we are left with, let us notice, is an anti-philosophy, because everything that makes life worthwhile, or gives meaning to life, or binds it together beyond isolated particulars, is in an “upstairs” of total silence.
Thus we are left with two anti-philosophies in the world today. One is existentialism, which is an anti-philosophy because it deals with the big questions but with no rationality. But if we follow the later Wittgenstein’s development, we move into linguistic analysis, and we find that this also is an anti-philosophy, because where it defines words in the area of reason, language leads to language, and that is all. It is not only the certainty of values that is gone but the certainty of knowing.
Speaking of Wittgenstein and his moving into the area of language, as we have seen, it is well to mention at this point the later Heidegger, who also dealt with language, though in a very different way. Heidegger was originally an existentialist who believed that there was only the angst toward the universe that gave the hope that something was there. But later he moved on into the view that because there is language in the universe, we may hope that there is something there, a nonrational hope of an ultimate meaning to it all. So Heidegger says, “Just listen to the poet,” not the content of the poet who is speaking. In other words, because there is a being —that is, the poet —who speaks, we can hope that Being —that is, existence —has meaning. He adds a different note in an attempt to make his position empirical and not just abstract. What he did was to claim that there was, in the far past, in the pre-Socratic age before Aristotle, a great, golden language when there was a direct, “first-order experience” from the universe. This was purely hypothetical. It had no base historically, but he proposed it as an act of desperation in an attempt to lay a historical foundation on or under an otherwise purely hypothetical and nebulous concept.
We must understand that these things are not just theoretical in their effects. The later Heidegger is crucially important in theology, in the new hermeneutics. These things have their effect in the student world as well. They are not abstract. They are changing our world.
Let us at this point note an important factor. Whether we are dealing with Heidegger saying, “Listen to the poet,” and offering an upper-story semantic mysticism that seems to give hope, or with Wittgenstein who moves in the opposite direction and is more honest in saying that there is only silence upstairs, and therefore, all we can do is define words, which will never deal finally with meanings or values; whether we look at Heidegger or Wittgenstein, who move in opposite directions at the point of language, the interesting thing is that modern man has come to conclude that the secret of the whole thing lies somehow in language. This is the age of semantics at this very basic point.
Notice what this means to us. The whole question with Heidegger and Wittgenstein —and with Bergman —is whether there is anyone adequately there in the universe to speak. We are surrounded by a sea of anti-philosophy. Positivism, which was an optimistic rationalism and the base of naturalistic science, has died. It has been proved to be an insufficient epistemology. But the remaining alternatives —existentialism on the one hand, and linguistic analysis on the other —are anti-philosophies that cause man to be hopeless concerning ethics, values, meaning, and the certainty of knowledge. So in epistemology we are surrounded by a sea of anti-philosophy. Polanyi, for example, who was so magnificent in destroying logical positivism, ends up with pure cynicism in the area of epistemology and knowing. So, as we have seen, does Karl Popper. Modern man is stuck right here. Positivism is dead and what is left is cynicism as to knowing. That is where modern man is, whether the individual man knows it or not.
Those who have been raised in the last couple of decades stand right here in the area of epistemology. The really great problem is not, for example, just drugs or amorality. The problem is knowing. This is a generation of anti-philosophy people caught in an uncertainty of knowing. In the downstairs area that modern man ascribes to rationality, and concerning which he talks with meaningful language, he can see himself only as a machine, a totally determined machine, and so has no way to be sure of knowing even the natural world. But in the area of the upstairs, which he ascribes to nonrationality, modern man is completely without categories, for categories are related to reason and antithesis. In the upstairs he has no reason to say that this is right as opposed to that being wrong (or non-right, perhaps, to use the more modern idiom). In the area of morals, in the upstairs he has no way to say one thing is right as opposed to another thing being non-right. But notice it is more profound and more horrible. Equally, living upstairs he has no way to say that this is true as opposed to that which is non-true. Don’t you feel the desperation? This means that he has no control (and I use the word “control” with the French meaning, the possibility of checking something), he has no way of having such control in the upstairs.
Now we see this vividly in the cinema. I have dealt with this already at some length in Escape from Reason and elsewhere, but it is a necessary part of the picture here, too, and so I am going to repeat myself. Antonioni’s film Blowup is an example of this. The main character is the photographer. He is a perfect choice because what he is dealing with is not a set of human values but an impersonal photographic lens. The camera could be just as easily hooked up to an impersonal computer as to this photographer. The photographer runs around taking his snapshots, a finite human being dealing only with particulars and totally unable to put any meaning into them, and the cold camera lens offers no judgment, no control in any of what it sees. We recall the posters advertising Antonioni’s film: “Murder without guilt, love without meaning.” In other words, there are no categories in the area of morals —murder is without guilt; but equally, there are no categories in the human realm —love is without meaning. So Antonioni pictures the death of categories.
In the area of morality, there is no universal above; we are left only with particulars. The camera can click, click, click, and we are left with a series of particulars and no universals. That is all that rationalistic man can do for himself, Antonioni says, and he is absolutely right. All the way back to the Greeks, we have for two thousand years the cleverest men who have ever lived trying to find a way to put meaning and certainty of knowledge into the area of rationalistic man, but man, beginning with himself with no other knowledge outside of himself, is a total failure, and Antonioni points it out beautifully in his film.
But the modern cinema and other art forms go beyond the loss of human and moral categories. They point out quite properly that if you have no place for categories, you not only lose categories where moral and human values are concerned, but you also lose any categories that would distinguish between reality and fantasy. This is seen in many modern films and novels, for example, Belle de Jour, Juliet of the Spirits, In the Balance, Rendezvous, and —closest to our own moment as I write this, and very well done —the film of Bergman, The Hour of the Wolf.
The drug culture enters into this, too. At the very heart of the thing is the loss of distinction between reality and fantasy by the taking of drugs. But even if modern man does not take drugs, he has no categories once he has moved out of the lower area of reason. Downstairs he is already dead; he is only a machine, and none of these things have any meaning. But as soon as he moves upstairs, into the area of the upper-story mysticism, all that is left is a place with no categories with which to distinguish the inner world from the outer world with any certainty or to distinguish what is in his head from that which is in the external world.
What we are left with today is the fact that modern man has no categories to enable him to be at all sure of the difference between what is real and what is only in his head. Many who come to us at L’Abri have suffered this loss of distinction between reality and fantasy.
There are four groups of categories involved here. We have considered three of these: first, the moral category; second, the human; third, the categories of reality and fantasy. The fourth, which we examine now, concerns our knowing other people.
The third group of categories is concerned with moving from inside the head to outside the head with certainty, and being sure that there is any difference between reality and fantasy. The fourth group is the reverse: how can two people meeting ever know each other —moving from outside their heads into each other’s heads? How do we have any categories to enable us to move into the other person’s thought world? This is the modern man’s alienation; this is the blackness that so many modern people face, the feeling of being totally alienated. A couple can sleep together for ten or fifteen years, but how are they going to get inside each other’s heads to know anything about the other person as a person, in contrast merely to a language machine? It is easy to know the façade of a language machine, but how can you get in behind the language and know the person in this kind of setting? This is a very special modern form of lostness.
I had this brought strongly to my attention a number of years ago when a very modern couple came to L’Abri. We put them in one of the chalets. They keep everyone awake night after night because they would talk all the way through the night until morning —talk, talk, talk. They were driving everyone crazy. Naturally, I became intrigued. I wondered what they were talking about. These people had been together for a long time; what did they talk about all the time? When I got to know them, I found out, and it turned on a new dimension for me as it dawned on me what the dilemma really is. I found out that they talked because they were trying desperately to know each other. They were really in love, and they were talking and talking in order to try to find one sentence or one phrase that they could know exhaustively together so that they could begin to know each other and to move inside of each other’s heads. They had no universals in their world, and thus they had to make a universal by a totally exhaustive point of contact. Being finite, they could not reach this.
So how do you begin? You are left with only particulars. Moving outward, you have no certainty that there is anything there, outside. Moving inside, inward, you are trying to move into somebody else’s head. How do you know you are touching him? In this setting, human beings are the only ones who are there. There is no one else there to speak —only silence. So if you do not have the exhaustive phrase, how do you begin? You just cannot begin by knowing something partially; it must be exhaustive because there is no one else anywhere to provide any universals. The universal, the certainty, must be in your own conversation, in one exhaustive sentence or one exhaustive phrase to begin with. The problem is in the area of epistemology, and it centers on language.
Modern man is left either downstairs, as a machine with words that do not lead either to values or facts but only to words, or he is left upstairs, in a world without categories in regard to human values, moral values, or the difference between reality and fantasy. Weep for our generation! Man, made in the image of God and intended to be in vertical communication with the One who is there and who is not silent, and meant to have horizontal communication with his own kind, has, because of his proud rationalism, making himself autonomous, come to this place.
I would end this chapter with a quotation from Satyricon of Fellini. Toward the end of the film, a man looks down at his friend, who is dying a ridiculous death, an absolutely absurd death. With all his hopes, he has come to a completely absurd end. Modern man, made in the image of God and meant to be in communication with God and then with his kind, has come to this place of horrible silence. In the film Fellini has the voice say, “O God, how far he lies from his destination now.” There was never a truer word.