Standing back from the world

A name for the people who used to be philosophers

In the early 1830s the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a young society that met every summer in a different university town (York in 1831, Oxford in 1832, Cambridge in 1833), had an awkward problem. It was gathering the people who studied nature, and it had no word for them. In March 1834 a Cambridge philosopher and historian of science, William Whewell, put the problem in print, in an unsigned review of Mary Somerville’s book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in the Quarterly Review. There was, he wrote, a “want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively.” “Philosophers” was “felt to be too wide and too lofty a term,” and had been forbidden them, he added, by the poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The French savant was “rather assuming, besides being French instead of English.” Then came the proposal: “some ingenious gentleman” had suggested that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist. The review adds that the idea “was not generally palatable.” The historian Sydney Ross showed in 1962 that the ingenious gentleman was Whewell himself, and in 1840 he proposed the word again, now without hiding behind a stranger: “I should incline to call him a Scientist.”

It took a long time to catch on. In the United States the word had replaced “man of science” by the late nineteenth century; in Britain it was accepted only around 1900, and many scientists disliked it. (A popular version of the story has Whewell inventing the word on the spot at the 1833 Cambridge meeting, in answer to Coleridge. His own review does not say that, so treat it as a legend.) What the episode shows is simpler and stranger: until about two centuries ago there was nothing for “scientist” to name, because the people we call scientists were philosophers. Isaac Newton’s great book of 1687 is called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.” The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, has published since 1665 a journal titled Philosophical Transactions, and it still does. In the medieval and early modern university, everything outside theology, law, and medicine was “philosophy,” natural philosophy included.

That inheritance is the subject of this lesson. This course argues that the sciences are best understood as philosophy’s children: they carry its habit of mind, and each moved out of the house by tightening one rule. The habit of mind has a name in this course, and it is the one-word answer to the question “What is the philosophical way of looking?” The word is objectification. In this reading, it describes the whole career of Western philosophy, and it explains both what philosophy gives us and what it leaves out.

Making a world into an object

To objectify something is to stand back from it and treat it as a thing out there, separate from you, which anyone could examine and describe in a way that would hold for everyone. The first great stepping back is credited to Thales of Miletus, on the coast of what is now Turkey, around 600 BC. Aristotle reports, in his Metaphysics (983b), that Thales said the first principle of everything was water. Whatever we make of the answer, look at the form of the question. Thales was not asking which god made the sea, or telling a story about it. He was asking what the world is made of, as if the world were a thing that could be asked.

The first picture of a philosopher in the record is of someone who has stepped back so far that he cannot see where he is standing. Plato tells it in the Theaetetus (174a): Thales, watching the stars, fell into a well, and a witty Thracian servant girl teased him that he was so keen to know what was in the sky that he could not see what lay at his feet. Plato was writing about two centuries after Thales, and the story is a joke that has traveled well, but it fixes the image this lesson needs. The look of philosophy is a look from a distance, and distance has a price.

The cleanest statement of what stepping back removes comes two thousand years later. In 1623 Galileo published The Assayer, a polemic about comets. In a famous passage (in Stillman Drake’s translation) he says that whenever he imagines a material thing, he feels he must think of it as having a shape, as large or small, in some place at some time, in motion or at rest, touching or not touching other things, one or few or many. But that it is white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, of sweet or foul smell, his mind does not feel forced to add. Without the senses, he guesses, reason would never arrive at such qualities. So, he concludes, tastes, odors, and colors “reside only in the consciousness,” and “if the living creature were removed,” all of them “would be wiped away and annihilated.” Elsewhere in the same book he writes that the “grand book” of the universe is written in the language of mathematics, with triangles, circles, and other figures for its letters.

Put the two passages together and you have the program: describe the world as if nobody were in it, using only what can be measured. The idea was not entirely new. A saying attributed to the ancient atomist Democritus, which comes to us through later writers, says that by convention there is sweet and bitter and color, but in truth there are atoms and the void. Galileo made it a method, and John Locke later gave it the names we still use, “primary” and “secondary” qualities, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689, dated 1690).

The words that traded places

Here is a small surprise, which Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison put in one sentence in their history of the idea: “objective” and “subjective” almost entirely reversed their meanings between the time of the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus and the middle of the nineteenth century. In the scholastic vocabulary the “subject” is the thing that exists in itself, the bearer of its properties. The “object” is what is presented to a mind: a thing as it is thought of. When René Descartes argued in his Third Meditation (1641) about the “objective reality” of an idea, he meant the reality an idea has as an idea, which is the old sense. Over the next two centuries the words traded places, as philosophers made the mind’s awareness of itself the starting point. The “subject” became the person who looks and thinks, and the “object” became the thing looked at. Historians trace the change to the eighteenth century, with Alexander Baumgarten often named, though it is sometimes credited to Kant alone.

Descartes shows why the reversal happened. His Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1641) begin by doubting everything he can doubt, and arrive at one thing he cannot: that he is doubting. From that point the world is something a thinking self has to reach, by ideas that are clear and distinct. The knower stands on one side, the known on the other. That is the dualism this course has in view: a split between the one who looks and what is looked at, organized around the hope of getting the truth about the second.

The story then takes a turn that is easy to miss. In the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787, Preface, B xvi), Immanuel Kant suggested that metaphysics might get further if we stopped assuming that our knowledge must conform to objects, and tried assuming that objects must conform to our knowledge. He compared this to Copernicus, who, finding no progress in explaining the heavens while the stars were assumed to circle the observer, tried making the observer move and leaving the stars at rest. (The phrase “Copernican revolution in philosophy” is a later label; the comparison is Kant’s.) Schopenhauer took the thought to its edge. His The World as Will and Representation (the first volume appeared at the end of 1818, dated 1819) opens with the sentence “The world is my representation.” The more the world was treated as an object, the more the subject, the one doing the treating, became a puzzle in its own right.

That is worth holding onto. In this reading the history of philosophy is a history of objectification, and every step back made it harder to ignore the person standing there. Objectifying the world and discovering the knower are one story, told from two ends.

Science narrows the look

If philosophy objectifies the world with reason alone, what did the sciences change? In this course’s reading, they kept the stance and added a stricter rule. A scientific claim must be exposed to the world: it must be a hypothesis that an observation or an experiment could count against. The Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper made that the center of his account in Logik der Forschung (published in 1934, English translation The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959): what marks a theory as scientific is that it could, in principle, be refuted by a test. Notice that this is narrower than a simple “prove or disprove.” Popper’s point was that a test can refute a theory but cannot prove one.

Philosophy, on this picture, keeps the stance but not the laboratory. It proceeds by argument, by definitions, by imagined cases, by logic. Bertrand Russell, in the introduction to his History of Western Philosophy (1945), gave the most quoted description of the position: philosophy, he wrote, is “something intermediate between theology and science.” Like theology, it speculates about matters on which definite knowledge has so far been impossible; like science, it appeals to human reason, not to authority. “All definite knowledge,” he said, belongs to science; between it and theology lies “a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack from both sides,” and that land is philosophy. (A catchier line that is sometimes attributed to a popular American magazine, that philosophy starts where science stops and science starts where philosophy stops, we could not trace to a source, so we do not rely on it.)

The border is also less tidy than the slogan suggests. Philosophers use thought experiments, and so do scientists. Galileo’s argument in Two New Sciences (1638) that a heavy stone and a light one tied together cannot fall at different speeds is a thought experiment; so are Philippa Foot’s runaway trolley (1967) and John Searle’s Chinese room (1980). Since about 2000, a movement called experimental philosophy, associated with Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols, Jonathan Weinberg, and others, has run surveys and experiments on how people judge cases that philosophers had only argued about. A famous early result, from 2001, claimed that Western and East Asian students judged a classic puzzle about knowledge differently; later attempts to repeat it did not confirm the difference. The story of that result is itself a lesson in how the laboratory can discipline a philosopher’s hunch. So “philosophy never enters the lab” is true as a description of the classical style, and less true of philosophy today.

What stepping back leaves out

In 1986 Thomas Nagel opened The View from Nowhere by calling it a book about a single problem: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included. His point is that the stance that has worked so well for physics, stepping back until your own position drops out of the account, works worst on the one thing it cannot step out of: the fact that there is something it is like to be you. The tool that tells us what the world is made of has trouble saying what it is for someone to taste an apple. Galileo noticed the gap in 1623 and put the apple’s taste on the other side of it.

This is where this course turns. If looking from a distance is philosophy’s method, and the looker is the one thing the method leaves out, then philosophy has a job beyond describing the world: to take care of the person who looks. In this reading, philosophy therefore has three parts, which become the rest of this course. The first is contemplation, the steady, patient looking itself. The second is spiritual exercise, the training that prepares the looker. The third is a way of life: the looking must be lived, or, as this course puts it, a philosophy you leave behind when you walk out of the lecture hall is a false one.