Philosophy While There Is Plenty to Criticize

Philosophy

While there is plenty to criticize in the work of Descartes, Locke, and Hume, one cannot justifiably claim that Jose Vasconcelos criticisms of traditional Western views on the nature of knowledge apply to these theorists if only because Vasconcelos' criticisms do not really apply to anything, as his criticisms are largely based on straw men. This is not to say that traditional Western views on the nature of knowledge should be free from criticism, but rather that the problems with these traditional views are more fundamental than Vasconcelos realizes, to the point that Vasconcelos suffers from many of these same issues. Essentially, both Vasconcelos and the previously mentioned authors suffer from a simply ignorance regarding the functioning of the human brain, the nature of consciousness and memory, and the evolutionary processes by which organisms and ideas evolve, with this ignorance born out of an implicit or explicit maintenance of religiously constrained thinking.

While it would of course be enjoyable to engage in a robust "trolling" of these philosophers, rather than attempt to detail all of the various ways in which these author's ignorance reveals itself in their texts, it will instead be more useful to propose how one not confined by these limitations is able to describe knowledge and the way in which it is obtained. Put simply, the creation and consideration of all knowledge is essentially biological. While the humanities in general and philosophy in particular have continuously striven to erect a wall between the "hard" sciences regarding physical laws and processes and the humanities' more ephemeral cultural considerations, this distinction is largely arbitrary and only serves to further ghettoize philosophy, thus precluding it from producing politically effective work (due to the fact that any human production in the modern world cannot be produced in isolation, and thus is essentially political, serving either to reinforce the dominant power structures or challenge them). All thought, and thus knowledge, is the product of the human body, both in terms of the sensory information gathered and the synthesis of that information.

Recognizing this does away with a number of previous "problems" in Western philosophy far more elegantly than any of Vasconcelos' criticisms, because questions of empiricism vs. rationalism or the mind vs. The body disintegrate in the face of the realization that the biological basis of consciousness and thought is all that anyone has to go on. While one is entirely free to question the reality of physical existence or propose some other plane of reality or consciousness, there is no evidence in support of this skepticism or arbitrary divisions, such that any philosophers attempting to say something useful or intelligible must always return to biological foundations, because anything else is merely an exercise in magical realism, like a debate over the proper taxonomical category of imaginary animals.

Thus, the potential for consciousness, thought, and knowledge is entirely contained within the human body, so while one may reasonably argue that these phenomena are examples of an emergent complexity born out of a relatively simple arrangement of and interaction between constituent parts, to suggest that consciousness, thought, or knowledge are somehow existent or meaningful outside of the human body is as laughable as suggesting that the meaning gained from reading this sentence is somehow distinct and extricable from the sentence itself and the experience of reading it.

Furthermore, recognizing that human knowledge is inherently and inextricably tied to the evolution of human biology does away with any of the assumed differences between modes of thinking based on regional or cultural distinction. While there are undoubtedly differences in Eastern and Western philosophy, these differences do not represent fundamentally different modes of thinking, but rather different flavors of human thought, as all human thought is continuously and forever bound together by its shared biological underpinnings. In this way, one may begin to consider the similarity between different modes of thought, rather than abandon useful investigation in the face of seemingly impenetrable differences.

It is worth pointing out that this is not merely a dodge; proposing the dominance of biology and evolution over thought and knowledge is not a means of obviating the need to consider different modes of knowing, but rather offers a useful starting point for this consideration, because if one begins with the faulty assumption that there are somehow fundamentally different modes and methods of knowing depending on one's cultural background, then there is ultimately no point in continuing on with any discussion or analysis, because one cannot hope to reach any essential conclusions regarding knowledge due to the impossibility of bridging this (self-imposed) gap. Thus, while some of Vasconcelos' criticisms may even be accurate, they cannot serve to generate useful insights into the nature of knowledge and knowing because they criticize Western philosophical thought from an equally flawed and unsustainable perspective.

While one may view Vasconcelos' motivation behind his criticisms as admirable, he ultimately suffers from the same ideological rigidity as the philosophers he criticizes, and as such one cannot claim that his criticisms are relevant or applicable. In reality, Vasconcelos' work is merely another entry in a long line of philosophers arguing amongst themselves without ever realizing that the only work performed by those arguments is the maintenance of an ignorance which serves to reinforce the dominant power structures of society.

There is no reasonable argument for the existence of an essential self or soul, although acknowledging this fairly simple fact requires deflating a number of comfortable illusions regarding human experience and the relationship of consciousness to the body. In particular, one must discard the notion that there exists any kind of separation between the mind and body and address the concept of emergence as it relates to consciousness. Thus, one may read John Locke and David Hume's conceptions of personal identity as two blind men's accounts of the proverbial elephant, while Plato and Descartes' theories of the soul may be almost entirely discarded, based as they are on reductive and unintelligible assumptions regarding biology, psychology, and the nature of consciousness.

Before explaining in detail why the notion of an essential self or soul is largely a comfortable fantasy, it will be worthwhile to briefly explain how this notion became so common. Initially one may blame Plato, who formulated a theory of the soul in order to fit the problem of personal identity into his altogether laughable dichotomy of the material world and the world of essential Forms or ideas. Plato claimed that the soul was that part of a human which existed in the world of ideas, only temporarily inhabiting the body until death. Descartes essentially follows along in this same line, although, like all of the superstitious attention to religious dogma present in his works, he manages to clean up the language so that it does not come across as quite so apparently fantastical.

Thus, where Plato discussed a soul coming from an eternal world of essential ideas, Descartes simply proposes a distinction between the mind and body in which the mind is something immaterial which nonetheless receives information from the physical body, leaving the reader to follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion (which is essentially that there is a soul, and it is eternal). The claim of a mind-body division and the subsequent notion of an essential self or soul is attractive for a number of reasons, because it obviates the very basic human fear of death by proposing that some part of an individual is immortal, thus rendering physical death less frightening. This fact explains why the notion of a soul is crucial to nearly any organized religion, because religions rely on being able to convince their followers that there is something more to reality than the synthesis of sensory information and that the only way to experience that metaphysical reality is by following the dictates of said religion.

From here, religions are able to essentially transport the fear of death from the physical world to the immaterial, because even though the notion of a soul obviates the threat of physical death, religions use the notion of a soul to claim that disobedience will result in a kind of eternal death or punishment for the soul itself. Religions which focus on imposing moralizing precepts in the name of protecting the sanctity of some eternal soul essentially play off of a combination of fear and vanity, using human beings' desire to imagine themselves as somehow unique amongst organisms and thus deserving of existence following physical death as a means to control those physical bodies by controlling their minds. Thus, while the notion of an essential self or soul likely arose out of humans' ignorance concerning the functioning of the brain and its relationship to consciousness, this concept was reiterated and maintained because it provides such an ideal means of controlling large populations who would otherwise rebel from the altogether arbitrary rules imposed by religion.

One of the most crucial ways in which the hegemony of the soul has been challenged is by John Locke, who recognized that what people consider to be "the self" is essentially the synthesized memories of experience, or consciousness. That is, the combination of past memories, present sensory perception, and assumptions and predictions regarding the future all combine to create consciousness, and thus the personal identity. However, Locke somehow does not recognize that this is essentially an argument against the soul, or at least against the soul as any kind of useful, relevant, or productive concept. Nonetheless, Locke's theory is the first step in doing away with the notion of a soul.

Hume subsequently expands on this by noting that personal identity and consciousness is dependent on a contiguity between experiences, such that the individual always perceives him or her self to be the same individual regardless of time past. An easy way to see this phenomena at work is to note a point of rupture; oftentimes when someone looks at a photo of themselves from years earlier, there is a kind of uncomfortable dissonance which arises due to the fact that the individual's assumption of a contiguity of personal identity is challenged by seeing a "different person" that he or she nonetheless claims to be (and to have been).

Despite Locke and Hume's advances, however, neither proposed a sufficient argument against the notion of an essential self or the soul, because both largely sidestepped these concepts by discussing consciousness and identity without realizing the implications of their own claims. Put simply, one may conclusively argue against the existence of a soul or essential self by noting that there exists no mind-body distinction, due to the fact that consciousness, thought, and everything else are nonetheless physical phenomena. Consciousness is merely the emergent state which arises out of the interaction of cells and electrical energy in the brain, such that one may consider consciousness and the self to be separate from the body only as much as any computing environment or software is separate from the hardware which runs it. Quite simply, there is no need for a soul or essential self in order to sufficiently explain consciousness or the nature of thought, because an accurate understanding of the physiology of the brain can account for the entirety of human sensory experience and thought.

As a concept, freedom has been so frequently deployed so as to become meaningless, or at least composed of so many disparate meanings that it may be used with confidence that the reader or listener will assume an altogether different meaning that the one the speaker or author intends, which is a crucial aspect of any effective propaganda. Thus, uncovering what freedom can mean and its relation to human behavior is necessary because the notion of freedom is one of those areas in which the philosophical is laid bare for what it really is, namely, political. Philosophy has been neutered by those outside and withing the field, in the case of the former as a means of reducing its potential for resisting the dominant power structure, and in the case of the latter as a means of protecting the relative comfort afforded to philosophy, a comfort only maintained through a tacit agreement that philosophy have no bearing on "real life." Thus, considering the notion of freedom will not only serve to upset some of the more commonly deployed tools of ideological repression, but also help to demonstrate philosophy's productive purpose as it relates to political change.

John Hospers points out the now-ephemeral nature of freedom when he notes that "like so many words, 'freedom' and 'liberty' have come to refer to almost any kind of condition of which the speaker approves," and in order to cut through this almost intentional ambiguity, Hospers proposes that freedom may be considered in two distinct but related ways. Freedom-from refers to freedom from restriction, whether that be a repressive government or a debilitating disease, and freedom-to refers to the possible actions available to someone following his or her freedom from said restriction. This distinction is crucial because it allows one to see the way in which notions of freedom may be used as a means of control. For instance, a politician may argue that companies need freedom from restrictive regulations in order to make the economy grow, but this freedom-from actually has the effect of restricting individual's freedom to act, for instance by doing away with regulations that allowed for consumers to sue over certain behaviors on the part of a company. Thus, freedom is not a universal, admirable notion, but rather an ever-shifting means of disguising control by pointing out areas of relative (but never complete) freedom.

This is essentially what BF Skinner is arguing when he claims that freedom is an illusion, because the discourse of freedom has resulted in the idea of an autonomous individual, completely aware of the various mental and physical limitations placed upon him or her and thus able to decide what course of action to take. In reality, human behavior is controlled not only by the limitations of human evolutionary biology and psychology, but also by any number of social standards and norms that have been so effectively ingrained that individuals are scarcely aware of their own indoctrination. The idea of an autonomous individual further serves to support the entrenched power structure, because it obscures the very real means by which control is distributed into the assumptions of the individual, such that a belief in freedom is itself a means of restricting freedom.

Thus, when Jean-Paul Sartre claims that "existentialism is a humanism," he is essentially demonstrating how one may only begin to move towards a genuine freedom by first recognizing and discarding any assumptions regarding human behavior or existence that have been built up within human culture. "What is alarming in the doctrine that" Sartre proposes is "that it confronts man with a possibility of choice," specifically by demonstrating that the only restrictions on human behavior are those imposed through human society, and not any fundamental laws governing the morality of behavior. While one might be inclined to argue that Sartre is proposing a standard of behavior by claiming that an individual should act in such a way that humanity as whole might use his or her example as the standard by which to live, this is merely a further acknowledgment that there are no preexisting standards of behavior, but rather only those born out of repetition and imitation. Thus, individuals have total freedom to do anything, except they have been conditioned to believe that this freedom is restricted by fundamental limitations, when in reality those limitations only exist as a means of ensuring freedom for some while hampering it for others.

Human beings have evolved standards of behavior which serve to facilitate cooperation between individuals and groups, but these standards have subsequently been glorified and institutionalized in such a way as to maintain control through the continual reiteration of a conception of freedom which only serves to obscure the socially-constructed limitations on genuine freedom. As the texts discussed above demonstrate, freedom is both total and illusory, because the word freedom and its myriad definitions and deployments actually serve to preclude individuals from attaining the actual freedom possible when one discards the ultimately superstitious notions of morality and socially-imposed standards of behavior which discourage confrontation with the reigning power structure. Hegemony depends on individuals believing that they enact the total freedom that is the right of any consciousness every day, when in fact their decisions are almost entirely governed by the socially-imposed restrictions placed upon thought and behavior which are so pervasive that they have been almost entirely integrated into the individual's internal thought processes.

The notion of freedom is crucial to any understanding of how religious and moral ideas have corrupted human society such that any reasonable ethics has largely been replaced by arbitrary legal and social codes which serve to protect the powerful while precluding effective resistance, because any attempt to discuss the "best" possibilities for human behavior must first acknowledge that there are no preexisting standards for that behavior, and furthermore, that "best" is largely subjective. However, this freedom to do whatever one will not only demonstrates the arbitrary nature of religion and moral precepts, but also offers the starting point for a logical ethics that may result in reasonable standards for behavior not born out allegiance to any particular fictional character.

Although one would hope that the following need not be said at this point in human history, the continued dominance of religion over nearly all aspects of life on the planet Earth necessitates a brief description of religion as such. In short, religion (and thus morality) is a socially-constructed phenomena not born out of any "natural" or preexisting laws except for those governing the evolution of the human species and the functioning of the brain. Put another way, religion is simply a pervasive lie, and because it is a lie, one must examine all of religion's claims with an eye towards the deception it maintains. In this case, the most crucial observation is that despite the claims made by religion, the moral precepts established by any given religion are not eternal or preexisting, and do not function to ensure the individual's eternal health following death. Because this is the case, one must subsequently examine what purpose these morals precepts actually serve, since they clearly do not function in the way religion claims. Firstly, it is clear that moral precepts do not function to ensure the psychological and mental health of individual humans, because moral precepts make any number of generalizations and arbitrary classifications that serve to favor one group over another (such as the religiously justified subjugation of women or mandated persecution of homosexuals). Secondly, moral precepts do not serve to maintain the successful functioning of society, because any society governed largely by religiously-inspired moral precepts can only maintain control through force and coercion. Thus, the only purpose served by moral precepts is the continued support of whatever religion those precepts are born out of. Thus, the United States' enormous prison population is not considered a failure of U.S. society, but rather further evidence that more and harsher enforcement of religiously-inspired laws is needed.