The Virtuous Circle

The Objective Standard recently published a very good review by Jon Hersey of my book What Went Right? An Objectivist Theory of History.

By “very good review” I don’t mean just that it is a positive review—it is generally friendly, though Hersey doesn’t quite come out and endorse my theory. What I mean is something more important than whether anyone agrees with me or not: It is a very accurate summary of the arguments in my book, and it engages with them in a serious way. It is exactly the sort of response I had hoped to find for these ideas 15 years ago.

Hersey grasps my central message, which is about the reciprocal relationship between philosophy and other fields of knowledge. As I summed it up:

We can say, metaphorically, that philosophy moves history and that history moves philosophy. But on a deeper level, in literal terms, man moves both. The fundamental reality is man trying to live in the world, for which purpose he observes, forms conclusion, takes actions, learns from the results—and starts the cycle all over again.

Hersey also offers an interesting example for one of these claims.

[W]hereas good ideas spread in both directions—from the bluest of blue-collar workers to the heights of the ivory tower and back—bad ideas tend to be unidirectional, spreading only from the top down. Contrast postmodernism with the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment, for instance. The former was dictated almost entirely by Ph.D.s, and it gave rise to “wokeism” and widespread cultural authoritarianism. The latter was birthed from the “Republic of Letters”—a network of gentleman scholars and curious tinkerers contributing ideas and discoveries, as with Benjamin Franklin’s breakthroughs in understanding electricity.

He ends with a call for further investigation of “the problem of the implicit,” the philosophical question of the nature and role of implicit ideas.

In that regard, I wanted to answer one question he raised: “Certainly, if one already has validated—that is, confirmed the validity of—his ‘implicit knowledge,’ it would be ‘available’ for thought and action—but in what sense would it then be implicit?” Here there is an ambiguity that is useful to clear up. Knowledge can be regarded as explicit on one level while still being implicit on another. An explicit conclusion in economics, for example, can serve as the implicit base for a conclusion in philosophy. This is important for my explanation of how implicit knowledge fuels intellectual progress. An implicit philosophical idea is not just an explicit philosophical idea held in vague and woozy form. It is often an explicit and clearly defined idea from another field which then suggests an implicit philosophical conclusion.

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The most interesting question Hersey raises is about my treatment of the intellectual timeline of Ancient Greece, in which I observe that the height of achievement of Greek philosophy occurs after the great breakthroughs in other fields, rather than coming before them. Hersey writes: “It implies a philosophy-last view, obscuring the fact that the innovators listed were in near constant dialogue with those we’d today call philosophers.”

This is a variation on an objection raised some years ago by the few orthodox Objectivist critics to respond at all to my theory, particularly Robert Mayhew. (The sole online remainder of it seems to be this.) I call it the Thales Objection, because it usually refers to Thales of Miletus (c. 623-545 BC). For this objection, Thales is a good choice, because he really does come very early in Greek intellectual development, in the early sixth century BC, about a generation before just about everyone else. Thales stands at the beginning of the Greek tradition both in philosophy and in science, so if you are inclined to assume that his achievements in science happened because of his breakthroughs in philosophy, you could use him to support a philosophy-first position.

But note that this is already a kind of fallback position. Instead of holding that the achievements of the Greek Golden Age came from one guy, Aristotle—who actually came later—this is a new attempt to find a way that Greek intellectual development could all have come from one guy. It is more plausible in some respects, but it is still not enough.

I would respond by pointing to the whole sweep of Greek development happening independently and in a decentralized way all throughout Greek civilization, often among contemporaries of Thales, not just those who came after him. In one account, for example, Thales wrote a letter to Solon, the great Athenian lawgiver, offering to accompany him in his travels from Athens. Later Greeks regarded Thales as one of a pantheon of 7th and 6th Century proto-philosophers known as the Seven Sages, who were all his predecessors or contemporaries. (To another of these sages, Myson of Chenae, is attributed the saying, “We should not investigate facts by the light of arguments, but arguments by the light of facts.”)

You can literally see this process of intellectual development in the art of the era, particularly advances in the realism of Greek vase paintings. This happens in the evolution from the relatively primitive “geometric style” to the highly refined “black figure” style, a process that began before Thales and came to fruition contemporary with him. So you can see that Thales and his successors as scientist-philosophers arose out of a period of wider intellectual development in Greek civilization. Something special was already happening, and you cannot account for this existing cultural context by pointing to Thales as its source.

Moreover, the fact that Thales, like many of the subsequent Greek thinkers, was both a philosopher and a scientist works in favor of my theory. As I acknowledge in my book, “the scientists, historians, and statesmen were themselves steeped in the philosophical discussions that were pervasive in Greece’s Golden Age, during the era of the ‘Sophists.’… This was particularly true of the scientist-philosophers, from Thales through Pythagoras through Anaxagoras. But philosophy as a separate discipline, considered apart from particular scientific questions—and particularly systematic philosophy, a connected system of ideas applying to all aspects of human life—does not arise except as the product of a long chain of intellectual development.”

Let me expand on that. Thales was a philosopher, but from what we know of him, he started out as a scientist and mathematician. His primary achievements were in geometry, where he is credited with the first geometric proof; in astronomy, where he is often credited with predicting a solar eclipse using a better method than the existing ones developed by the Babylonians; and in engineering and physics. He is also credited, depending on who tells the story, with an innovation in finance: the first recorded options trade.

Let’s look at his creation of the first proper geometric proof. Is this an achievement in mathematics—or in epistemology? The answer, I think, is: both at the same time. This reinforces my point about how philosophy rises inductively out of solutions to problems in other fields. In seeking new knowledge in geometry, Thales also discovered a new method for making knowledge, a method that has uses and implications that go far beyond geometry. But how could he have done that if he had not been immersed in his investigations of geometry in the first place?

Thales’ work in these fields did not come out of nowhere. He came from an environment of learning and intellectual ferment. Miletus was a Greek city on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Turkey, in the middle of bustling area of trade and construction (including the manufacture of those rapidly developing vase paintings). Nearby Ephesus, for example, was a very important city, but it was built several miles from the coast and connected to the sea by a semi-man-made waterway—a river that required constant dredging and, eventually, an artificial harbor. This sort of thing requires a sophisticated, educated society with a high level of technological development by the standards of the time.

The Greeks in that area would have been in contact with the latest achievements of the cultures around them. According to some sources, Thales went to Egypt to study geometry; according to others, he learned mathematics and astronomy from the Babylonians. The historical record is very spotty, so there is little or no supporting evidence for these claims. But the fact that such stories were widely told reflects the fact that Thales’ intellectual development was not coming ex nihilo. It seemed natural to people of his time that he would have been steeped in the knowledge of the cultures around him.

To be sure, what makes Thales unique, and the reason we remember him, is what he did in philosophy: his discovery of logical proof and his advocacy of natural explanations in place of supernatural explanations. But this came out of his work as a scientist, which was an extension of the existing achievements of his time. He is less an example of how everything else comes from philosophy than he is an example of how philosophy comes from everything else.

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I would not really say that mine is a “philosophy-last” theory, though I think philosophy is a high-level achievement that requires extensive intellectual groundwork before it can arise. How could we have gone straight from being cavemen to being philosophers? But as philosophy arises, the relationship between it and other fields is reciprocal.

As I see it, the idea that other intellectual innovators were “in near constant dialogue” with philosophers—indeed, the dialogue between philosophy and the sciences was often an internal one, taking place within the same mind—is not an objection to my theory. It is my theory. But note that a “dialogue” goes both ways: from philosophy to the sciences, and from the sciences to philosophy. It is an inductive process in which evidence is integrated into knowledge, which is then integrated into higher-level knowledge, which raises new questions and opens new avenues of investigation that allows us to make further new inductions, and so on, in a virtuous circle.

This review is, I hope, the beginning of one such virtuous circle, in which anything new that I have identified can be integrated back into work in other fields and put to use in generating new knowledge.