PHILOSOPHY TOWERS
The towers of a university challenge those of nearby
churches. If you tarry in them awhile you will forget why you felt the fear of
churches, of unbelief masquerading as belief.
Here you feel the strength of your leg muscles against the fortress
floors, the enclosed towers with winding stairs only wide enough for one student
at a time.
Look for a center lobby and there you will find some
amalgamation, some laconic emblem, but when you try you are routed inevitably
to another room perhaps also in a circle around the lobby, but still without a
door or even an entrance hall to it.
If you follow the winding stairs to the top floor you will
find a door in a gothic frame that is such heavy wood it would be hard to open
if it were not so perfectly balanced on its elegant iron hinges. When Descartes is in he welcomes you courteously,
having retained the formality of the military man. It takes the meditations of several days
before you see what he means, in spite of his beautiful language, still moving
from the theological to the revised Aristotelian language. He always comes back
to the experience that can be pointed out, shared even, like the observers of
nature communicating with Aristotle for his encyclopedia, copied out in quick
notes by students. Which students
? Not the dull-witted ones, surely, but
the enthusiasts who might not question things they failed to grasp. There is a
small fireplace In the corner of the room, transverse in the corner, with no
screen to catch sparks, in spite of the papers strewn over the floor, piled
uncertainly on the table and amongst the books on the shelves.
If you sit within this room you can imagine the possibility
of pedestrians on the pavement far below and the inadequate images of them that
you might perceive. How do I know that
is a man with a hat? Perhaps it is a
tall woman with a wig. How can you trust your own eyes? Think as well of the
distortions of uneven lighting and false analogies. We cannot trust our own eyes. So, what can we be sure of?
If I’m sure of it, does that imply that it is something known?
Descartes raises his eyebrows and gazes below at the figures on the pavement.
His hands are elegant, the long fingers adjusting his velvet waistcoat,
removing his rimless spectacles to gaze into my eyes, the doubt lying far
inside. His nose is formidable, marking him as a French aristocrat. That cannot be falsified. That cannot be in doubt. But these thoughts
merely wrinkle the corners of my mouth, possibly unnoticeable in the shadows of
the corner where I am seated.
Is it just a trick? Or is it an insight hidden in
language of apparent lucidity. But the transparent is lucid too but without
substance. Gaze on your doubt and there is certainty. Indeed, the basic
certainty of doubt projects into its other reality: certainty.
The meditation is over and he rises, bowing me from the
little room. Adjuring me to wipe these thoughts from my mind and think only of
the steak for dinner, he bows slightly and scuffs back inside in his slippers,
sprinkled with soot from the hearth.
Some thoughts can
arrive only after the moon rises, flooding you and your sheets with the cool,
slightly blue appearance of otherworldliness. Recommencing the meditation, it
veers off into another hallway, where I shall meet Hume, a Scot renowned for
bawdy laughter and incomprehensible brogue, endearing him to anglophobic
Frenchmen. That hallway is easily identified by the smell of whiskey, so
bracing when you’ve been stuck with the sickening odor of sweet wine produced
near the sea but eschewing its tartness.
His portly figure is collapsed on a wooden chair like one
used by Henry VIII, whose belly rivaled his own. There’s no belying the senses so Hume
chuckled when I mention the royalty of his seating, perhaps inferring something
bawdier than my intent.
Causation begins with billiards, as we all know. I’m rather
apt at billiards so his confidence in its exactitude delights me. He grins
indulgently, reflecting his doubts about my expert knowledge, but doubt, after all,
is his stock in trade. You don't know anything at all when you think you can
predict how to ricochet balls off the counters and each other. You merely have
a habit of thinking this way and by applying the very heart of the empirical
you show it cannot support itself. The idea dissolves itself.
Kant's towers are so high they must be connected by flying
buttresses and even then they shake when there is a mild earthquake. Hume was a
mild earthquake and finally Kant, at somewhat advanced age, betook himself to concentrated
philosophical thinking and, wow!, what a structure was raised. It is supported
not by the solid earth of Prussia but the tower we are seated in, apparently
ungrounded but while you are there,
watching him adjust his wig and wipe his eyes, and then get up and tottering on
his skinny legs, slams the window -- muttering imprecations against the music,
all music -- it seems impossible the tower could collapse. He motions me
forward through a door with a short bridge to the upper floor of another tower.
When we reach the top of the tower we see a control board
mounted on one wall of the room, between two small slit windows for shooting
arrows, presumably obsolete. Lighted are a large monitor and two smaller ones
which show what appear to be flourescent rooms . Kant shows me how the two
rooms share a wall, displayed on the large monitor. Kant coughs and bends
toward me, asking if I would like to inspect the rooms shown on the screens. In
spite of being somewhat disoriented, I nod and try to look very deeply
involved. We we walk down another narrow
flight of stairs pasted against an arching wall. When we reach the surface of the door between
the rooms, we walk through it. It is
entirely made of light. There are no solid materials anywhere in the two rooms
and the intervening wall. Images from one room merge with images from the other
room to produce the phantom wall.
One room is the functioning of the Understanding, the other
the functioning of the sense of sight, the center wall is the functioning of
mental representation, bringing together the contents of the two rooms.
What creates the wall is our use of its
capacities. What creates the light energies of the two rooms is unknown and
unknowable. In the model in the tower, of coures, there are sources of energy
at the base of the tower, but these are part of the model, not Reality which it
models.
Keen to display his model, Kant rushes me back to the
control room, where he begins to turn dials and input data into two sites. The
control room trembles with light from the screens. At first it appears that
there are two sources of constantly rotating and mixing lights, interacting on
an intermediary wall that might be solid material, but also changes slowly, new
images appearing and slowly vanishing. Nature and Mind meet and Reality is
found in their interaction, powered by the functions of the Mind.
My quest seems unfulfilled, but I bow as I leave, knowing
there is here a model that shook the world and helped construct the one we now
have.
These are Kant's inventions to re-enact mental procedures,
the lights have sources at the base of the tower,but there is no way to learn
how these are really produced.is is a necessary addition to explain Nature and
the Mind.
When he bows me out of the gothic tower he comforts me.
