What Is Philosophy—On "The Cat That Isn't There": B. The Transformation of Detachment (Column 158)

With God’s help

Well, I decided to pester you with one more column so that we can finally wrap up the matter of the cat (Yishai can no longer wait).

In the previous column I began a systematic critique of Ron Aharoni’s book, The Cat That Isn’t There. I addressed the core disagreement between us, and connected it to the discussion and definition of philosophy that I proposed in the two columns that preceded it. I explained that, when we come to critique the book, we must examine two aspects: 1. whether circularity, that is, the mixing of the inquirer and the object of inquiry, is really a flaw. We did that in the previous column. 2. whether he in fact succeeds in hanging all the important philosophical issues on this mixing—that is, whether they really “evaporate” once one makes the separation in question between the inquirer and the object of inquiry.

I explained that even if some problem thereby becomes a scientific problem, Aharoni has still not necessarily proven his thesis about it, since there may, alongside it, be another philosophical problem (one that deals with the idea rather than the concept or the term), and that problem cannot be solved by means of scientific observation. One can invoke the halakhic term “temurah,” regarding which it is said, then both it and its substitute shall be holy (“both it and its substitute shall be holy”; Leviticus 27:10, 33). When one tries to exchange one consecrated animal for another, the Torah determines that the substitution duplicates the holiness rather than transferring it. That is, after the exchange both animals are holy. So too in our case: even if one converts the philosophical problem into a scientific one, that does not mean the original problem has disappeared. It means only that, at most, there are now two problems here. We shall see this below.

In this column I will briefly address several examples that Aharoni brings and try to examine his claims and illustrate my objections. As I mentioned in the previous column, to derive maximum benefit it is highly advisable first to read his book for yourselves, and only afterward to examine my claims. Obviously I will not go through the whole book here, but I will offer a commented overview of it, focusing in particular on the first part.

Chapter 1: The heroine of the story

In this chapter Aharoni describes several proposals for defining philosophy and characterizing the sense of philosophicality that arises in us when we encounter certain questions or topics that belong to it. The proposals are fairly parallel to what I described in the previous column, so I will not repeat them here. But the focus of the discussion is his assumption that the world is divided into two exhaustive categories: a. descriptive claims. b. what he calls “decisions,” that is, arbitrary subjective determinations (what I called “hallucinations,” in the sense that they make no claim at all about reality). In the end, this chapter is nothing more than an elaboration of the introduction, which we already dealt with in the previous column. There we saw that this very assumption dictates the conclusion; in other words, the conclusion is begged from the outset. If one assumes that there are only these two categories, it is no wonder that the third category, philosophy, comes out empty and meaningless.

Chapter 2: Circularity

As noted, his claim is that the root of everything is circularity in philosophy, that is, the failure to distinguish between the inquirer and the object of inquiry. To clarify this he devotes a chapter to circularity itself. There he describes operative circularity, that is, defining a task in a way that assumes the task has already been completed. This is of course impossible (like the flashlight and the eye from the previous column). But that is fairly trivial and not especially interesting.

He then goes on to describe paradoxes and shows that at the basis of all of them lies a circularity that leads to failure. But there is not much novelty in that either, for everyone understands that circularity is prone to failures. But as I explained in the previous column, in order to establish his claim Aharoni needed to show that circularity is necessarily bound up with failure, not merely that it is prone to it. That is, it is not enough to point to paradoxes that disappear once the circularity underlying them is exposed. Those are cases in which we have proof that the circularity there is indeed problematic and defective, since it generates a contradiction. A paradox is an argument that leads to the simultaneous adoption of two claims with opposite or contradictory content. Thus the Liar Paradox is based on circularity, and therefore the very existence of the paradox proves that the circularity at its basis is defective (anything that generates a contradiction is necessarily false). But questions such as whether the external world really exists, or whether we have spirit and not only matter, are ordinary philosophical questions and not contradictions or paradoxes. Now let us assume, for the sake of discussion, that Aharoni succeeds in exposing a circularity underlying them. Does that necessarily mean the questions are meaningless? More precisely, that they are necessarily either scientific—that is, descriptive claims to be settled empirically—or “decisions”? Certainly not. Perhaps what is involved is perfectly legitimate circularity, in which case the question still stands?

In short, the big question is how to relate to circularity that does not lead to contradiction or paradox (in the previous column I gave the example of the sentence: “All sentences are composed of words”). Suppose we showed that a certain philosophical topic (according to him, all of them) is based on circularity. So what? Does that prove the topic is empty and meaningless? Or that it can be mapped onto science or a “decision,” as he assumes? Certainly not. Only if you assume from the outset that philosophy is a kind of failure, does exposing a circular component lead you to hang the problem on the circularity that has been uncovered. And then indeed the conclusion is that the circularity here is defective (since it generates a failure, or a paradox). But as stated, that is a blatant begging of the question. By the same token, if I assume that a philosophical topic has a unique meaning of its own (a third category: neither science nor “decision,” as I explained in the first two columns), then I will argue that the circularity uncovered at its basis (even if we have indeed succeeded in showing that there is circularity there—and that too is another question) is not defective. It is meaningful circularity, and it is entirely possible that the question still stands and is worthy of discussion and clarification.

All this is so even on the assumption that circularity truly underlies all philosophical topics (and even the very same circularity: mixing the inquirer and the object of inquiry). Another question is whether that is in fact the situation. That is, beyond the question whether the circularity here is a failure, with which I have dealt until now, there is also the question whether Aharoni is really right in claiming that circularity underlies all these topics, and that in its absence they “evaporate” on their own (that is, become scientific-descriptive questions or “decisions”). Below we will touch on the first question (which was already discussed in the previous column) and deal mainly with the second.

Chapter 3: Definition

In this chapter Aharoni defines the transformation of separation, or detachment, which according to him instantly evaporates all the topics of philosophy. If I redirect the “philosophical” question so that it concerns someone or something else instead of myself, the problem will disappear. In such a case, Aharoni claims, there is no real need actually to redirect the problem. The transformation is only an indication that helps our diagnosis. It shows us that we should simply formulate the question so that even if it refers to ourselves, we separate the inquirer from the object of inquiry; that is, we should relate to ourselves as someone or something else. If we do that, Aharoni argues, we shall immediately see that the problem is either scientific-descriptive, or merely a “decision,” or an illusion. His claim throughout the book is that the transformation of separation obliterates philosophy as a whole at a single stroke. It is important to understand that this is the focus of the book, since this is the diagnostic device by means of which he diagnoses problems as philosophical (if they disappear through the application of this transformation).

In the terminology of the previous column, this is the essence of the second component of his argument. Up to this point we have seen that he claims circularity is a failure, and that is what I addressed in the previous column and in my critique thus far. He now proposes that we use the transformation of separation on every philosophical topic and see that it disappears. According to him, this proves that the topic is illusory, since it is based on circularity (which in his view is, as noted, a failure). So now we have arrived at the critique of the second component. Here we will have to examine two things: a. whether all philosophical topics are indeed based on circularity—that is, whether the transformation of separation really makes them disappear, or at least maps them onto a scientific-descriptive problem. b. even if so—what that says about the original problem. To sharpen the matter further, I will now take the first four examples that he himself brings in this chapter (from p. 68 onward) to demonstrate his technique of separation. Unsurprisingly (for those who read the previous columns), the four examples deal with metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology. That will make it easy for me to examine them against the definition I proposed in the first two columns.

1. Metaphysics: Is the whole world my dream?

Here he deals with the question of idealism-solipsism. Does what I know really exist out there somewhere, or is it a hallucination or dream that exists only within me (inside consciousness)? Let me say at the outset that in my view this is a classic philosophical question, since it is not accessible to the tools of scientific observation, and therefore it does not concern the description of simple physical reality as I perceive it, but the question about that reality itself. Hence it can be answered only by means of intuition and not by scientific tools, and therefore, by my definition (in the first two columns), it is a philosophical question.

It is important to understand that this is not to say that I am troubled by it. I most certainly am not. But I am not troubled because my intuition tells me that the world indeed exists (my senses are reliable in my eyes), that is, because I have found an answer, not because the question is mistaken by definition. That also explains the feeling many people have that this is a foolish, detached question, with no feet on the ground, and that no one seriously thinks the world is an illusion or a dream. All that is true, but not because the question is undefined or contains a contradiction, circularity, or conceptual confusion, but because in our view we have an answer to it. Just as no one today is troubled by the question whether there is gravity. It is an excellent question, but we are not troubled by it because we already have a satisfactory answer.

Aharoni writes there about this question as follows:

This question depends entirely on the fact that a person asks it about himself. Separation turns it into something ridiculous: ‘Is the whole world Reuven’s dream?’ is a senseless question. In this case, not only does the sense of philosophicality disappear under separation, but the whole problem disappears. This means that the problem has no real content and no existence of its own. It is nothing but the positing of the circular structure and a declaration about the paradoxicality born of it.

He applies here the transformation of separation, and redirects the question from himself to Reuven. Now indeed the question becomes ridiculous. Why? Because it is clear to me that the world I am observing is not Reuven’s dream. His dreams are not accessible to me, and that option does not exist. In this case the problem simply evaporates.

It is important to note that he distinguishes here between two possible outcomes of applying the transformation: either the disappearance of the whole problem (a mere hallucination, conceptual confusion), or the disappearance of the sense of philosophicality that accompanies it (its becoming a descriptive-scientific-observational question). Later on (end of chapter 3: pp. 76–77) he defines the first type as archetypal problems and the second as non-archetypal problems. In any event, in our case the problem itself disappears, that is, this is an archetypal problem.

Critique

But his claim here is problematic in several respects (which can be seen as different aspects of the same problem):

• Even if the problem disappears, why does that indicate that the circularity is a failure? Perhaps we should simply not apply the transformation, and the question will remain in its philosophical sense and require an answer. In other words: the question whether the world is my dream still stands.
• Again, if the question itself, or at least one of its horns, were paradoxical, then applying the transformation of separation would be relevant. It would prove that the circularity that mixes object and subject is a failure, since it leads to a contradiction. But I myself assume that the question is a good question, that is, that each of its horns has a clear meaning. There is no contradiction in the claim that there is no world out there, and in principle that is entirely possible. If so, why does the fact that we have exposed circularity here prove anything? We have already seen that circularity is not necessarily a failure. The conclusion could be that there is here a respectable circularity that raises a good question, and we should try to answer it. He assumes that the question is meaningless, and then discovers that… it is meaningless because flawed circularity lies at its basis. By contrast, if we assume that the question has meaning—then even if circularity underlies it (see below that even this is not true), that proves nothing at all.
• He assumes that the question is: Is the world my dream? But the real question is whether a world exists at all, not whether it is my dream. When I ask whether a world exists, there is no subject here that can be redirected into another subject. If so, one cannot perform the transformation of separation on that question.

Of course one can ask: if the world does not exist, what is the meaning of the perceptions that are within me? And here the dream hypothesis enters (that is his formulation of the problem). But the claim I am considering is whether these are one sort of illusion or another (not necessarily a dream). True, illusion is a scientific concept that can be examined scientifically (as with illusions tested in the laboratory), but that is not the case here. One cannot test scientifically whether all my perceptions are illusions, for I have nothing against which to compare them. When I examine scientifically whether some perception of another person is an illusion, I compare it to the perceptions of others (for example, of the experimenter or of a third person). But here I am asking the question about the whole world, including the experimenter. Therefore there is no possibility of empirical examination here, and once again we are left with a philosophical question.

• Let us now assume that the transformation of separation did evaporate the problem. What does that mean? Does it mean that this is a pseudo-problem, or a scientific one? Not at all. It has a scientific aspect (and in this case an absurd one)—is the world Reuven’s illusion?—and it has a philosophical-metaphysical aspect—is it there at all? When we performed the transformation, we arrived at a formulation of the scientific question, but that certainly does not mean that we solved the philosophical question. Aharoni assumes that if there is a scientific variation then the philosophical question necessarily has no meaning, but that is not so. We saw this above with regard to democracy and with regard to the definition of philosophy itself.

We will come to the biggest problem in Aharoni’s analysis later, after we touch on the next three examples as well.

2–4. Ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology: What are the “good,” the “beautiful,” and the “true”?

The next three examples have the same structure. When we ask, “What is the ‘good’?”, this is one of the fundamental questions of ethics (incidentally, it has several different meanings: what the meaning of good is, which acts are considered good, and more). Ostensibly, a central philosophical-metaphysical question. And again, Aharoni applies the transformation of separation here:

‘What is the good?’ becomes, when viewed from the side, the question ‘What are Reuven’s moral or justice values?’ or, ‘What are the values of Israeli society today?’—questions that are entirely descriptive and arouse no sense of philosophicality whatsoever. The problem of defining ‘good’ does not disappear when it is attributed to another, but it ceases to be philosophical. This means that it was not born of the absence of separation, and that it has content of its own, beyond the anguish generated by the fear of losing an anchoring point. Only its sense of philosophicality was born from the identification of the inquirer and the object of inquiry.

So too with the “beautiful”:

‘What is the beautiful?’ is also a question about values, and its fate under separation is similar. It becomes ‘What are the standards of beauty of a particular society, or of a particular person?’—descriptive problems in which there is not a trace of philosophicality.

And likewise with the “true”:

‘What is truth?’ becomes, under separation, ‘How do human beings (or even the questioner himself) use the concept of truth?’ In this problem too, real content remains after separation, but the sense of philosophicality disappears.

Unlike example 1, which was archetypal in his terminology, in these three examples applying the transformation of separation does not make the problem disappear, but only the sense of philosophicality that accompanies it; that is, these are non-archetypal problems. Separation here converts the philosophical question into a descriptive one: what is beautiful, true, or good in a particular society or for a particular person? This is of course a legitimate and meaningful question, but it is not a philosophical one.

The transformed questions in this case are indeed susceptible to observational-scientific resolution, since what is involved is deciding between descriptive claims (“For Reuven, the good is to do X,” or “For Reuven, the good is to do Y”). But again we must ask why this shows anything about the philosophical question. I will not repeat the analysis of the previous example, because the situation here is very similar as well. To answer the philosophical question requires intuitive observation of the Idea of the good, the beautiful, or the true, and the reaching of an insight or conclusion on that basis. These philosophical questions are well defined, there is a way to answer them (even if not to arrive at full agreement), and there is certainly no paradoxical dimension in them. So why does the fact that the transformation of separation converts them into descriptive questions prove anything? Even if circularity stands at their basis, there is still no proof here of failure. We now come to the heart of the problem: is there any circularity at all at the basis of these questions? We shall immediately see that the answer is no.

He came to curse and ended up blessing

At first glance, despite the criticism, Aharoni’s analysis is interesting and useful. It seems that he really did expose the fact that some circularity underlies every philosophical question, one that identifies object with subject, or the inquirer with the object of his inquiry. The indication of this is that applying the transformation of separation eliminates at least the philosophical dimension of the question (if not the entire question). Hence, even if I did not accept the first component of his argument, namely that circularity (or the mixing of the inquirer and the object of inquiry) is necessarily a failure, still the second component—that such mixing underlies all philosophical questions—remains standing. In that sense, it would seem, at least ostensibly, that he nevertheless brings us closer to the definition of philosophy (just without his conclusion that this is an empty domain). A philosophical problem is always a problem in which the object of the problem is part of the subject who wonders about it. As I wrote in the previous column, it seems that he may have come to curse, but in the end he turned out to bless.

Has a separation really been performed here?

But now I will make a further claim: even this is not accurate, at least not always. When I apply the transformation of separation I ask: what is moral in Reuven’s eyes? But that is not a transformation of the original question. In the original question I am not asking a descriptive question: what is moral from my point of view? I am asking a normative question: what ought to be moral from my point of view? That question cannot be answered by scientific observation, but only by the use of intuition (observation of the Idea of the good). So if I now apply the transformation properly and carefully, what I will get is: what ought to be moral in Reuven’s eyes? But as expected, that too is not at all a descriptive question, and therefore no sensory-scientific observation will be able to decide it. Even after the transformation, we have in fact been left with the same question (assuming morality is supposed to be universal and objective, that is, identical for me and for him). We have obtained an obviously philosophical question, whether we formulate it about me or about Reuven.

It turns out that this whole analysis is an illusion. In fact, Aharoni is not performing a transformation of separation here, but changing the question. He could have directed the question to me myself, without transferring it to someone else, and asked: what is moral in my eyes? Already there he would have obtained a descriptive rather than a normative-philosophical question. There is no need for separation and for moving the question to someone else.

But if that is so, then it is not true that the definition of a question’s philosophicality requires a mixing of the inquirer and the object of inquiry. Not at all. The question can be philosophical whether it is directed at Reuven or at me, and it can be descriptive whether it is directed at him or at me. Contrary to Aharoni’s claim, there is no dependence whatsoever between the target or addressee of the question and the sense of philosophicality that accompanies it.

The conclusion is that if these examples clarified anything at all, they clarified my definition of philosophy, not his. The conclusion is that a philosophical question is a question about the world that cannot be decided by empirical scientific tools, and therefore requires intuitive observation (or eidetic viewing, in Husserl’s terminology). In the domains of ethics and aesthetics this is not at all a descriptive question but a normative one (or a descriptive question about the Idea), and in the metaphysical domain it is a factual-descriptive question, but one dealing with non-physical entities (metaphysical rather than physical ones). Therefore it too is not accessible to our scientific and observational tools. Thus, the question “What is good in my eyes (or in Reuven’s eyes)?” is indeed not a philosophical question but a descriptive one; but the question “What is the good?” (that is, what ought to count as good for me or for him) is a philosophical question, and this is so entirely apart from separation and detachment. It turns out that detachment is not at all relevant to clarifying the degree of philosophicality of any given topic or question.

Chapters 4–11: The specific problems

In the second part of the book he analyzes specific philosophical problems, one after another, and tries to apply there the technique that has been presented thus far. In chapters 4–7 he deals with the four classic archetypal problems of philosophy (see the list on p. 77), and in chapters 8–11 he deals with several non-archetypal problems (mainly in modern analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of action, questions of meaning and intention, and so forth). In each chapter he shows that applying the transformation of separation to the problem under discussion either makes it disappear entirely (chapters 4–7), or at least removes the sense of philosophicality that accompanies it (chapters 8–11).

Each such discussion is fascinating quite apart from our own discussion, for he analyzes the problems with great elegance and sharpness, and shows unexpected connections and implications. But for us to discuss them would require considerable elaboration, and in the end, from the standpoint of my disagreement with him, exactly what I showed in the nutshell examples discussed here would happen. My principled criticism has been completed here, and I therefore decided to stop at this point.

It turns out that I prepared the ground a bit too well, and there is no point in going into the details of Aharoni’s analysis. This column concludes the critique of his book. Even so, it is important to me that readers understand that matters are not quite as simple as they may appear from here. For that purpose they should read his book (and while doing so, examine and verify that my analysis is indeed applicable there to those topics), and I am sure that no one who does so will regret it.