1. VIEWPOINT AHEAD
What mammals see, they see from the perspective of a form of life. "The dog trots freely in the street . . . and the things he sees are his reality" (Lawrence Ferlinghetti).
I am a mammal evolved by natural selection, shaped by culture and motivated by drives and emotions. Sartre wrote that it is self-deception or bad faith to pretend that we are not free without limits. Science tells us that mammals are limited by nature and nurture. The belief that species evolve is a form of essentialism.
For Albert Camus "the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions," while Robert Nozick denied that the purpose of life was to search for the purpose of life. The grammar of the term "design" requires, in most cases, a maker with a purpose. "This object, which Tom designed, is a claw hammer. He uses it to pull nails." What use has a Maker for humans? "God created humans to provide carbon dioxide for dandelions," someone suggested. Sartre discussed God as an artisan in "Freedom and Bad Faith."
If there is a God with a purpose, "the purpose is not ours" (A. J. Ayer). Suppose you do not know how to formulate a meaning for your existence, but you are satisfied that someone else does. When you cede responsibility to someone else, you become responsible for what that she does.
Is it helpful to say that humans have an incomprehensible purpose? Mrs. Dalloway thought "on, on, on; even though. . . there may be no goal for us whatever, still on, on. . . ." Mrs. Dalloway acted. Trout act. Trout demonstrate the meaning in their lives. A steelhead achieves its purposes in meaningless water. If a river has no purpose, it doesn't follow that I have no purpose.
I form purposes. There is meaning in some forms of life; there is no meaning of life. We walk in beauty and horror. The Earth transcends us. A stone flying through space cannot be meaningful in itself. That which transcends us is meaningless.
2. AS FAR AS YOU KNOW
According to Diogenes Laertius, who in his biographies made reference to 365 books by 250 authors, Agrippa the Skeptic was noted for his claim that all proof requires further proof and so on backwards to infinity. If I claim to know something, you are entitled to ask for proof and then proof of that proof and proof of that proof and so on; so, for the followers of Agrippa, there is no starting point for obtaining knowledge. This lack of bedrock makes uncertain the ethics of ordinary life, a comfort to philosophers who supported Stalin or Hitler in the first half of the 20th century. Truth is merely a hypothesis; facts are fictions; judgment should be suspended.
The authority of Diogenes Laertius (also known as Laertius Diogenes) might be in question. For one thing his hometown is unknown, unless it was Laerte in Caria or another place with the same name. He is generally considered superficial. Werner Jaeger, a well-known 20th century classicist, described Laertius as "that great ignoramus." It is unclear if Laertius subscribed to any school of thought or understood the Greek metaphysicians he wrote about.
Another version of Agrippa's claim has come to us from Sextus Empiricus, a Greek who argued that we should give up judgment about whether anything is knowable (there is no ultimate justification for claims of knowledge). We are free to believe in what our senses tell us; but we can not prove with words that our beliefs and knowledge are certain.
This approach does not ask where the system that provides us with proofs comes from or why knowledge should be certain. We've all known things that turned out later to be incorrect. In fact, knowledge is (a rule of grammar) always theoretically subject to disproof and must be, by definition, uncertain.
***
Consider two aspects of Agrippa's remarkable position. The first is its popularity, which takes the form of constant rebirth. For over twenty centuries some version of radical skepticism has returned again and again. Agrippa himself may be almost unknown in Sonoma County, but his arguments, freshly rebottled, have enjoyed considerable support among artists and academicians, including existentialists and postmodernists. The second remarkable aspect is that most of these well-motivated and powerful thinkers, with no bedrock beneath them, have not remained neutrals with judgment suspended, living by habit or by reference to their immediate senses; instead they have supported, for the most part, what they believe to be movements of liberation. Some have supported dictators. To offer support, the descendants of Agrippa discard his basic premiss in favor of an invented bedrock on which to build hope.
The goal of discarding judgments and deep thought and instead living by habit and impulse, while not practical, has always had adherents. The human mind, a linguistic engine, is capable of producing metaphysical crap by the wagon load. Escape from metaphysics has been an interesting goal, whether in Sextus Empiricus or among the ancient philosophical daoists of China and their zen descendants.
Our own next generation will present Agrippa's insights in novel metaphors, experiencing them as fresh insights, and the cycle will begin again.
***
A Southern California tribe once held that the earth rested on the backs of seven gigantic turtles. When the turtles shifted their feet, earthquakes rumbled. These seven turtles were cosmological bedrock for the Indians.
There is, as many have repeated, a better known turtle/ontology tale attributed, in a variety of forms, to a range of people that includes the ancient Hindus, a little old lady, John Locke, Stephen King, Linus Pauling and Bertrand Russell. In one version, the world rested on the backs of seven turtles and the seven turtles stood on the backs of 14 turtles, and the 14 turtles stood on the backs of 28 turtles and "it was turtles all the way down."
***
Aristotle responded to the problem of proof of knowledge and infinite regress by arguing that not all knowledge has to be proved. We automatically accept what we see around us as truly being present. These assumptions don't require proof, and because regress must end in immediate truths, they must be undemonstrable. (Aristotle was on the right track generally speaking, but truths and knowledge do need proofs, so he wasn't quite there.)
What Aristotle missed (and Wittgenstein and some others did not) is that you get infinite regress only if you hold that knowledge is founded on knowledge and proof on proof, as if something could be founded on itself, as if you could grab your own bootstraps and pull yourself up into the air. In fact, knowledge and proof must be founded on something else. If so, the infinite regress stops there.
The 20th century saw attempts to dig down to the bedrock responsible for the shape of the human perspective, human language and human behavior. Two explanations were that (1) biology is destiny and (2) existence precedes essence. Nature vs. nurture. A third attempt was the postmodern explanation that humans are created by language and culture. Or its sociological opposite, that language and culture are created by humans.
Biologists, I once read, agreed that we are shaped by nature and nurture, not one or the other. But which came first?
***
On this broad topic Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings struck Professor Avrum Stroll of San Diego, a former Guggenheim Fellow, as being to the point. Philosophers had sometimes found Wittgenstein's prose mysterious--what Stroll discovered was that if you supplied the right context, many of Wittgenstein's obscure sentences became examples of simple logical reasoning. (The reader will find this and much more in Stroll's publications.)
For example, "Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination" (OC 475). Why not? Because you need a sophisticated language before--not after--you can think logically.
***
In ON CERTAINTY Wittgenstein probed for what shapes our point of view and language. For him language and linguistic knowledge had to emerge from something else, a prelinguistic foundation. We know that monkeys shout a variety of warnings to one another. We can see dimly what the beginnings of language might have resembled. But that does not tell us much about the particular shape of our human view of the world.
Wittgenstein believed that the language of a lion, if it existed, would not resemble the grammar and words of human language. "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" (PI, p.264). He thought that a language would reflect its species. (An example might be useful here: in a species that depends very heavily on eyesight, its speakers might use "I see"--and not "I smell"--to mean "I understand.")
Human languages are translatable from one tongue to another because our 2,000 languages emerge from one species. We are genetically the same, and our languages do the same things in much the same ways.
Wittgenstein was too strict here, I believe. We do communicate with more distant relatives to a degree. Dogs understand the hiss of a cat. (With reptiles, fish, insects and birds, communication may be more difficult.)
That's general information--what specifically shapes our human perspective and language? What bedrock ends the infinite regression of Agrippa? Something ends it--in everyday life no one is troubled by radical skepticism.
The position taken by skeptics is that philosophers trying to avoid infinite regression merely offer ideas they cannot prove. Wittgenstein's response--driven by his conversations with G. E. Moore--was to offer basic certainties for which attempting proof would be absurd. (These basic certainties cannot be proved and are not knowledge. What Wittgenstein did was separate certainty and knowledge. Knowledge--this is a matter of grammar--requires proof, while certainty is free of doubt.)
Suppose Moore were to say, "The world is older than I am." No one doubts that. Something no one doubts is, by definition, certain. But if he were to say, "I know that the world is older than I am," he would need proof.
***
For Wittgenstein, what guides our perceptions and language are foundational certainties, by which he meant unchanging presuppositions that no sane adult genuinely doubts. These presuppositions are what our species lives by. They are embodied in our actions, including in how we talk. They are embodied in what Wittgenstein calls our language-games (our discourses).
Descartes never doubted the existence of the French language. He just thought--and no doubt dreamed--in French. (We know that infants learn French from someone else. There are no exceptions. So if you are able to form this question--"Do other people exist?"--an answer might be, "Yes, if you are speaking French.")
Putting unchanging certainties into words can be tricky--Wittgenstein used as an example of something certain the fact that we cannot go to the moon. Twenty years later men went to the moon. Better examples might be: (1) Language exists and (2) the earth is older than I am and (3) there are many small objects in the world. Of this kind of basic certainty, Wittgenstein wrote, "I want to conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal" (OC 359). Our certainties are the bedrock on which language itself is constructed. Because we do not doubt that we are surrounded by objects, we invented nouns.
I can write in longhand that "I doubt that objects exist," and to do it I take a pencil in my hand. I am about to lie.
In short, there exist a set of presuppositions on which human life, language and culture depend. We take these certainties for granted, as if they were transparent glass--we see through them. We don't justify them. We don't prove them. They are just there. From that spot we build our lives and our language.
If you set out to write a history of forks, you do not begin your paper by proving that language exists or that forks are older than you are. These foundational presuppositions are in place. They will never change, as far as you know. If they did change, we would have to scrap art history, geology, the Torah, the biographies of Derrida, the theory of natural selection, etc.
These unchanging presuppositions are certain in the sense that we do not doubt them (the definition of certainty). They are the external support of all of our discourse, including the discourse we developed to prove or disprove verbal claims.
These certainties form some of the rules (or deep grammar) of the language-games we play. For example, "language exists" is a basic rule of grammar, although seldom taught in English courses. It is one of the rules that set up the game, a presupposed rule we take for granted.
Rules are not true or false. Some rules are inventions. If you want to play a game, you follow the invented rules that make the game. But Wittgenstein, at a certain point, must have found the idea that our grounding presuppositions are rules (or rules of deep grammar) too narrow to cover the range that presuppositions had. "Language exists" might be considered a rule of grammar. "Noise exists" is not--because it is shared by horses who are easily startled but cannot say why. This presupposition is "something animal."
***
How would people view me if I asserted in a serious way: "The English language exists, and I can prove it"? (Wittgenstein would say that this assertion breaks the rules of the language-game, so the assertion lacks sense. I suppose you can't use language to prove the existence of the foundational certainties that underpin language.)
To respond to Agrippa, knowledge is a word in a language-game (a discourse). Language is shaped by grammar (in the broadest and deepest sense), and grammar, the rules of the game, emerges from the animal nature of the species.
***
I wrote the above without once doubting the existence of words. That may have been an error . . . unless Wittgenstein was right when he wrote that "the absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game. . ." (OC 370). In any case, becoming aware of our bedrock, while satisfying in some way, has made no difference in how I live my life. That is the oddly useless outcome Wittgenstein discovered. We can't change our basic certainties. We don't need to name or number them. What they are is what we are. In this respect the farmer and the pedant are equals.
We might turn common sense into something else by saying that knowledge is grounded in the grammar of life, as we perceive it.
