Miss Buddha (94 page)

Although Bacon beat him to it, the work of
Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo (1564-1642) was of even
greater importance in the development of this new, scientific,
worldview.

Galileo surmised that the best way to
formulate, and record scientific experiments and conclusions was to
apply the properties and discipline of mathematics when setting
down such laws.

He accomplished this by, in essence,
creating the science of mechanics, which applied the principles of
geometry to the motions of bodies.

So successful was Galileo in applying
mechanics to discover and formulate reliable and useful laws of
nature, that not only he, but others to follow as well, surmised
that nature must, in fact, be designed in accordance with these
mechanical laws.

These great
16
^th
-
and 17
^th
-century changes engendered two intellectual crises that were
to profoundly affect Western civilization. The first was that the
decline of Aristotelian science called into question the methods
and foundations of his principles, especially since they failed to
explain new observations in astronomy.

The second crisis was that science now
brought a new attitude toward religion that undermined religious
authority and (finally) gave agnostic and atheistic ideas a chance
to be heard.

Descartes

René Descartes (1596-1650), a French
mathematician, physicist, and philosopher attempted to resolve both
crises.

He followed Bacon and Galileo in criticizing
existing methods and beliefs, but whereas Bacon had argued for an
inductive method based on observed facts, Descartes—a mathematician
above all else—made mathematics the model for all science.

Descartes advocated the truth as
demonstrated and contained in the “clear and distinct ideas” of
reason itself. The advance toward true and full knowledge, he
maintained, was only to be made in a progression from one such
truth to another, as in mathematical reasoning.

Descartes further believed
that by following his rationalist method, one could
establish
first principles
(fundamental underlying truths) for all
knowledge—about man, the world, even about God.

And so—for Descartes was nothing if not
ambitious—he resolved to reconstruct all human knowledge on an
absolutely certain (mathematical) foundation by refusing to accept
any belief, even the belief in his own existence, until he could
prove it absolutely true.

As an example of his
approach—in his so-called “dream argument”—he asserted that our
inability to prove
with certainty
when we are awake and when we are dreaming makes
most of our knowledge uncertain.

Ultimately he concluded
that the principal thing about which one can be certain is oneself
as a thinking being. This conclusion forms the basis of his
well-known argument:
Cogito, ergo
sum
—”I think, therefore I am.”

Here one can, and—from a
Buddhist standpoint—should, introduce an important
counter-argument: “I think not, therefore I am not.” Descartes took
a subtle though enormous leap of faith when he assumed that just
because thinking is perceived that there is a specific entity, or a
person—in other words, an
I
—that perceives it. This is not
necessarily the case.

Be that, though, as it may. Back to
Descartes. From this conclusion he went on to argue that, in pure
thought, one can have a clear conception of God and can in fact
demonstrate that God exists. In fact, he held that it was this
secure knowledge of the reality of God that allowed him to harbor
his earlier doubts about knowledge and science.

Despite his mechanistic outlook, however,
Descartes accepted the traditional religious doctrine of the
immortality of the soul and maintained that mind and body are two
distinct substances, thus exempting mind from the mechanistic laws
of nature and providing for freedom of the will.

His fundamental separation of mind and body,
known as dualism, raised the problem of explaining how two such
different substances as mind and body can affect each other, a
problem he was unable to solve and one that has remained a
conundrum for philosophy (and religion, not to mention science)
ever since.

Hobbes

One attempt to solve this
riddle was made by the 17
^th
–century English philosopher
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). In his effort to attain unity, he
asserted that matter is, in fact, the only real substance, and that
mind does not really exist.

Based on this postulate, he constructed a
comprehensive system of metaphysics that provided a solution to the
mind-body problem by reducing mind to the internal motions of the
body—a view that still is very popular in scientific circles.

Spinoza

Whereas Hobbes tried to
oppose Cartesian dualism by reducing mind to matter, the
17
^th
-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
attempted to reduce matter to mind—to divine spiritual
substance.

To achieve this, Spinoza constructed a
precise system of philosophy that offered new solutions to the
mind-body problem and to the now increasingly brewing conflict
between religion and science.

Not unlike Descartes, Spinoza postulated
that all of nature, her entire structure, can be deduced from a few
basic definitions and axioms, on the model of Euclidean geometry.
However, Spinoza believed that Descartes’s theory of two substances
created an insoluble problem of the way in which mind and body
interact, and so concluded that the ultimate substance is God and
that God, substance, and nature are identical.

Thus he supported a pantheistic view that
all things are simply varying aspects of God.

Spinoza’s solution to the
mind-body problem addressed the apparent interaction of mind and
body by seeing them as two forms of the same substance, which
exactly parallel each other, thus only
seeming
to affect each other but in
truth do not.

Spinoza’s bases his ethics, much like
Hobbes, on a materialistic psychology where individuals are
motivated only by self-interest—leading, for the most part to
guaranteed conflict. But in contrast to Hobbes, Spinoza concluded
that rational self-interest can, and often does, coincide with the
interest of others—avoiding, for the most part, such conflict.

Locke

John Locke (1632-1704) also addressed
Cartesian dualism, but he held the more commonsense view that the
corporeal (bodily or material) and the spiritual are simply two
parts of nature that are, by design, always present in human
experience. Beyond that, he made no attempt to define these parts
of nature or to construct a detailed system of metaphysics in an
attempt to explain them.

In fact, Locke believed that such
philosophical aims were impossible to carry out and would lead
no-useful-where.

In contrast to the rationalism of Descartes
and Spinoza—who both believed that knowledge could be achieved
through pure reason and logical deduction—Locke carried on the
empiricist tradition founded by Bacon and later embraced by Hobbes:
knowledge is derived from observation and sense perceptions, and
not from reason alone.

In 1690, with the
publication of his
Essay Concerning Human
Understanding
, Locke gave his empirical
view a systematic framework.

In this essay, Locke
attempted, and in many respects succeeded, to steer philosophy away
from the study of the physical world and toward the study of the
human mind, and as a result made epistemology—the study of the
nature of knowledge—the principal concern of philosophy in the
17
^th
and
18
^th
centuries.

In his theory of the mind, Locke held that
all ideas are but simple elements of experience, but he did
distinguish sensation from reflection as sources of experience:
sensation, he maintained, provided the material for knowledge of
the external world, while reflection provided the material for
knowledge of the mind.

Locke were to greatly influence later
British thinkers, such as George Berkeley and David Hume, by
calling attention to the vagueness of metaphysical concepts and
that inferences about the world outside the mind cannot be truly
proved.

Idealism and Skepticism

Efforts to resolve the
dualism of mind and matter—the problem raised by Descartes—was
still alive and well, and continued to engage philosophers through
the 17
^th
and 18
^th
centuries.

Philosophy during these centuries also grew
increasingly concerned about, and occupied with, the still
relatively new division between science and religious belief;
mostly with the aim of preserving the essentials of faith in God
while at the same time defending the right to think freely.

Natural science, meanwhile, strode ahead,
relying on sense perception and reason to discover ever more
universal laws of nature and physics. Such empirical knowledge
appeared more certain and valuable than philosophical knowledge
based upon reason alone and so, on the religious side, gave rise to
Deism, a view that saw God as the cause of the great mechanism of
the world and therefore more in harmony with science than with
traditional religion.

After Locke, however, philosophers grew
increasingly skeptical about gaining knowledge that they could be
absolutely certain was true. Some thinkers who despaired of finding
a resolution to dualism embraced skepticism, the doctrine that true
knowledge, other than what we experience through the senses, is
impossible.

Others turned to increasingly radical
theories of being and knowledge, among them the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant (see below), probably the most influential of all
because he set Western philosophy on a new path—idealism—that
philosophers travel to this day.

Leibniz

Leibniz (1646-1716), who like Spinoza before
him was a true rationalist, produced a brilliant theoretical
solution to the problems raised by dualism. He devised a subtle
philosophical system that combined the mathematical and physical
discoveries of his time with the organic and religious concepts of
nature found in ancient and medieval thought.

Leibniz saw the world as an infinite (i.e.,
limitless) number of infinitely small (i.e., extremely small but
smaller) units of force, called monads, each of which he postulated
as a closed world that yet mirrored all other monads.

He further held that all monads were
spiritual entities that could combine to form material bodies. To
Leibniz, God was the Chief Monad, the one who created all other
monads and predestined their development.

However, Leibniz’s theory of the
predestination of monads—which is still known as the theory of
pre-established harmony—entailed a radical rejection of causality,
the view that every effect must have a cause, for according to
Leibniz, monads never interact with each other, and any appearance
of causality in the natural world is unreal, an illusion.

And Leibniz didn’t stop there. He also held
that there is no room in the universe for free will. Even though we
enjoy the illusion of acting freely, he said, all human actions are
in fact predetermined by God.

God, in other words, is the only one
responsible for everything, humanity can wash its hands of any
wrong (or right-) doing.

Berkeley

The
18
^th
-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley, like Spinoza
before him, rejected both Cartesian dualism and the assertion by
Hobbes that only matter is real. Berkeley struck out in the
opposite direction (and all the way, at that) by maintaining that
spirit is, in fact, substance, and that only spiritual substance is
real.

Then, expanding upon Locke’s doubts about
knowledge of an external world outside the mind, Berkeley argued
that no evidence exists for the existence of such a world, because
the only things that we can observe are our own sensations, and
these are in the mind. The very notion of matter, he maintained, is
incoherent and impossible.

To exist, claimed Berkeley, means to be
perceived, and in order for things to exist when we are not
perceiving them, they must (at all times) be perceived by God.

Hume

Whereas Berkeley argued
against materialism by outright denial of matter,
18
^th
-century Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) took the
next step by questioning the existence of the mind
itself.

Hume’s skeptical philosophy also cast
serious doubt on the idea of cause as a factor understood in all
previous philosophies and also seriously disputed earlier arguments
for the existence of God.

All assertions—whether physical or
metaphysical—about things that cannot be directly perceived here
and now, are equally meaningless, Hume claimed, and should, as he
put it, be “committed to the flames.”

In his somewhat myopic analyses of causality
and induction, Hume steadfastly maintained that there is no logical
justification for believing that any two events which occur in
sequence are in any way connected by cause and effect or for making
any inference from past to future.

Hume went on to note that while we pretend
to depend on our past experience whenever we form beliefs about
anything that we do not directly perceive and whenever we make
predictions about the future, we do this because experience teaches
us what particular things belong together as causes and
effects.