In his novel “Rationality in Action”, Searle attempts to expose the fundamental weaknesses within the dominant theory of reason in the Western tradition while positing an alternative which supports a self as an autonomous agent. This topic has partially been discussed in my post involving Frankfurt’s second order desires. However, Searle’s work would benefit from a more thorough description which contrasts the Classical Model with his revisionist account.
His main points are summarized as follows:
1) The Classical Model, which holds that rational actions are caused by beliefs and desires, fails to account for the experience of the gap between intentional states and the decision itself. We cannot simply sit back and let the causes act upon you. Rather, you must choose a reason upon which to act. What fills the gap? In a Sartrean style he states, “Nothing. Nothing fills the gap”. (p.17) On the contrary, typically only irrational actions contain a set of beliefs and desires which are causally sufficient reasons for acting, such as when a person is in a grip of an addiction.
2) Rationality is not a separate faculty but rather is tantamount to possessing capacities for language, thought, and intentionality. You can only have rationality where there is the possibility of being irrational. Similarly, only a moral agent has the possibility of being immoral. That is, only an agent who had the possibility to do otherwise where is actions were not causally determined. Thus, a clinically insane person is removed from standards of moral assessment precisely because he is no longer in control of his behavior.
3) Weakness of will is a common feature of rationality which cannot be accounted for under the Classical Model where the causes of an action set up sufficient conditions for its completion. This is a feature of the gap which is due to the possibilities open to the agent.
4) Contrary to the Classical Model, there are desire-independent reasons for acting. This is what sets us apart from Chimpanzees. Under the original model, agents must appeal to a desire in their current motivational set for acting. However, this has the absurd consequence that no one can have a reason for acting unless they currently have an intentional state for such action. Thus, in the case of a smoker who has a desire to smoke cigarettes, it is perfectly rational under the Classical Model to do so even with the recognition that the behavior will likely result in early death and such a smoker will not want to suffer this fate. (p.129) In short, the Classical Model cannot account for forward planning and evaluation.
5) Unlike the Classical Model which holds that one must have a set of compatible desires, Searle shows that it is common to have incompatible and conflicting desires and it is in fact the task of practical reason to reconcile. The real difficulty is determining what you really want to do. In contrast, the Classical Model is simply means to ends reasoning. The desires are assumed to be consistent and the task is determining ends for satisfaction.
For Searle, rationality then must require a robust and irreducible notion of the self. He states, “Neither a Humean bundle nor a Strawsonian “person” having both mental and physical properties, nor even a Frankfurt-style person who has second-order desires about his first-order desires is by itself sufficient to account for agency.” (p. 91)
Moreover, the capacity for language is essential as assertives, directives, and commissives (promises) involved in speech acts are necessary for desire- independent reasons for action. Searle argues that inherent to the structure of such speech acts is normativity. This is because nearly all speech acts involve a commitment of some sort and have the possibility of going wrong. He argues, “The world does indeed consist of facts that are largely independent of us, but once you start representing those fact, with either direction of fit, you already have norms, and those norms are binding on the agent. All intentionality has a normative structure.” (p.182) Assertions, such as the statement, “The cat is on the mat” commits the speaker to the truth of the statement and has a propositional content which has conditions of satisfaction in the world. The principle “You ought to tell the truth” is internal to the notion of an assertion; there is no gap between the statement and a commitment to truth. Similarly, the speech act of promising is a commitment to future action. The obligation and normative structure is internal to the speech act itself. Why? An insincere promise is only intelligible in light of the understanding that a promise is binding upon an agent. He states, “Once I have made a promise, it is not open to me to say, “Yes, I made the promise, but I do not see why that places me under an obligation.” Similarly, if I said “It is raining, it is not open to me to say, “Yes, I said that but I do not see why that constitutes making a statement.” (p.179) The importance of this fact is that the Classical Model treats obligation as external from promising, thereby making it impossible for an agent to act under the concept of duty separate from desire. In Searle’s view speech acts such as promises create desire-independent reasons for acting which function as a form of external motivator. In this case, the reason (obligation) acts as the source of the desire, rather than the desire functioning as a cause of action.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
How do you get an Ought from an Is?
This question relates to the assignment of normative value in the world. How does such value get attributed in light of only brute facts which are presented to us? That is, how can we derive purpose from a world which exists purely as atomic matter in fields of force? This philosophical dilemma arises between the juxtaposition between the world of science and the human world of meaning, purpose, and morality. Put more succinctly, this conflict creates the problem of deriving an “ought” from a world that “is” (Proposed by Hume). When I view a certain object such as a painting and assign it aesthetic characteristics such as beauty, I have created value it does not possess in virtue of its physicality alone. Such assignment of value is often referred to as observer relative. To illustrate this point, the world of physical matter contains electrons and quarks, gravity and electromagnetism, but nowhere within the realm of existing particles can I find meaning. Within the third person ontology of empirically determined objective reality, there is no room for first person subjectivity which creates such notions as beauty. There is nothing over and above the way in which physical particles interact within what we call a painting which could constitute this phenomenon. There are brute facts of the existence of atoms in a particular arrangement but there is not additionally a scientific fact of aesthetic appeal. Or once again, consider music. How can it be that particular brute sound waves are regarded as pleasing or beautiful to the hearer? This can be illustrated in the same format in which Searle seeks to explain the creation of social reality whereby X counts as Y in particular C. In this case, the brute fact of sound waves counts as the aesthetic fact of music only in light of a human observer.
Is the content of such assignment my free choice, a cultural phenomenon, or universal and innate? As when I might say, “This picture is lovely”, what is it that makes me believe that it is lovely? Once again we are left with a debate as to the nature of man of whether such conveyance of value is truly subjective in the sense that it occurs as a matter of preference to a human observer. This position would hold that mankind develops ideas of meaning freely as they choose; things have value because you value them. We confer meaning on a world which exists purely as brute matter, as an “is”. Alternatively, proponents who argue that there is an inherent meaning or purpose within the universe would posit that normativity is not derived but is given. Is the idea of a “beautiful sunset” already in my mind prior to my birth? This is the position of Plato as man has thoughts which precede his very existence (essence precedes existence) of the “perfect” sense of justice, perfect good, etc. (Theory of Recollection) In this way, the idea of beauty was programmed into my mind and genetic code and when I view a beautiful picture or draw back in horror at the sight of something ghastly I am doing so not because I have assigned by own, subjective sense of what is beautiful or ugly but rather I have an innate, universal sense of beauty and the good. This is not to say the assignment does not require humans, it of course is still observer relative. But rather the value itself is something universal and not a matter of opinion, something ingrained in human nature. This agrees with evolutionary evidence regarding the nature of genetic wiring. Or as Kant argued, we can never be a blank slate because we see the world with the underlying forms of sensibility and understanding which shape our perception. This also seems to accord with experience as although there are differences between personal taste, much of mankind accords to the same ideas of justice, the good, and perhaps even beauty. This affirms a sort of universality and natural law of the ancients over the provincialism and cultural relativism of post-modernism which denies absolute truth.
Is the content of such assignment my free choice, a cultural phenomenon, or universal and innate? As when I might say, “This picture is lovely”, what is it that makes me believe that it is lovely? Once again we are left with a debate as to the nature of man of whether such conveyance of value is truly subjective in the sense that it occurs as a matter of preference to a human observer. This position would hold that mankind develops ideas of meaning freely as they choose; things have value because you value them. We confer meaning on a world which exists purely as brute matter, as an “is”. Alternatively, proponents who argue that there is an inherent meaning or purpose within the universe would posit that normativity is not derived but is given. Is the idea of a “beautiful sunset” already in my mind prior to my birth? This is the position of Plato as man has thoughts which precede his very existence (essence precedes existence) of the “perfect” sense of justice, perfect good, etc. (Theory of Recollection) In this way, the idea of beauty was programmed into my mind and genetic code and when I view a beautiful picture or draw back in horror at the sight of something ghastly I am doing so not because I have assigned by own, subjective sense of what is beautiful or ugly but rather I have an innate, universal sense of beauty and the good. This is not to say the assignment does not require humans, it of course is still observer relative. But rather the value itself is something universal and not a matter of opinion, something ingrained in human nature. This agrees with evolutionary evidence regarding the nature of genetic wiring. Or as Kant argued, we can never be a blank slate because we see the world with the underlying forms of sensibility and understanding which shape our perception. This also seems to accord with experience as although there are differences between personal taste, much of mankind accords to the same ideas of justice, the good, and perhaps even beauty. This affirms a sort of universality and natural law of the ancients over the provincialism and cultural relativism of post-modernism which denies absolute truth.
Monday, January 4, 2010
The Argument from Design
In 1802, theologian William Paley wrote the best known argument for God by design in his “watchmaker analogy”. The treatise, which is still used today by ID proponents, posits that man and the world is too complex, organized and beautiful to have arisen by chance alone. He therefore attributed the appearance of design and fine tuning to God. He states, “suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place… the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other an artificer.” A watch found on a brief jaunt would presuppose a designer in a way that a rock or other natural artifact would not. Biological life, like the watch, appears too intricate to be the product of random causation.
In his 1986 book “The Blind Watchmaker” which I recently completed, Richard Dawkin’s purpose is to illustrate how evolution is better at explaining the existence of complexity in the world than Paley’s attribution of God. This is not to suggest the two are necessarily incompatible, although he does reach that conclusion. In his clear and somewhat acerbic prose, he argues persuasively that Darwinian evolution, like a blind watchmaker creates the illusion of design through cumulative natural selection. Complicated organisms he concedes necessity a special explanation as they have 1) constituent parts that are arranged in a way that is unlikely to have occurred by chance, 2) the appearance of being constructed with qualities specified in advance as if engineered for a purpose. As such, you may combine cells together randomly in billions of different arrangements for a billion years, and would still never reach the organized complexity of biological life. So how is it possible for life to occur?
Darwin states that to reconcile this paradox, we must look to the gradual step by step transformations from “entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance.” (p. 43) That is, each step independently is sufficient to have arisen by chance, but the entire process itself is in fact nonrandom because it is acted upon by natural selection and the theory of the survival of the fittest. Thus, the misconception that evolution is a purely blind process is somewhat of a misunderstanding as the random mutations in the gene pool are acted upon selection which leaves those species best adapted to the given environment and that possess the largest reproductive advantage in nature. The process itself requires countless generations, geological rather than human time in billions of years to occur. The final product of biological life has the appearance of great design because it has had the effects of millions of generations of short-term selection towards simple survival, although this process has no final goal. This is possible due to mutations in the genes determining development. Thus, an eye may be created from no eye if we allow enough simple step transformations to occur in between. “Provided the difference between neighboring intermediates in our series leading to the eye is sufficiently small, the necessary mutations are almost bound to be forthcoming.” (p.79) This is because any degree of sight would confer a survival advantage over creatures with no sight at all.
The process itself is written into the genetic memory and information processing of successive generations. “Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA getting itself transmitted vertically. (passed down through generations)” (p.122) This is due to the horizontal success genetic information confers on bodies, i.e. speed, strength, intelligence, mobility, which creates an arms race between genetic information between species. The basis of evolution is RNA and DNA replication which Dawkins believes must also have arisen through a single step transformation, rather than a deity. There is no unmoved mover because “any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machines itself.” (p. 141) That is, we cannot explain complexity by positing something just as complex as what we seek to reconcile. It leaves unexplained the origin of God. ‘”You have to say something like ‘God was always there.” But if this is the case, we could eliminate a step and state that the process for forming complexity itself was always, or moreover the universe (or multiverse) was always.
In his 1986 book “The Blind Watchmaker” which I recently completed, Richard Dawkin’s purpose is to illustrate how evolution is better at explaining the existence of complexity in the world than Paley’s attribution of God. This is not to suggest the two are necessarily incompatible, although he does reach that conclusion. In his clear and somewhat acerbic prose, he argues persuasively that Darwinian evolution, like a blind watchmaker creates the illusion of design through cumulative natural selection. Complicated organisms he concedes necessity a special explanation as they have 1) constituent parts that are arranged in a way that is unlikely to have occurred by chance, 2) the appearance of being constructed with qualities specified in advance as if engineered for a purpose. As such, you may combine cells together randomly in billions of different arrangements for a billion years, and would still never reach the organized complexity of biological life. So how is it possible for life to occur?
Darwin states that to reconcile this paradox, we must look to the gradual step by step transformations from “entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance.” (p. 43) That is, each step independently is sufficient to have arisen by chance, but the entire process itself is in fact nonrandom because it is acted upon by natural selection and the theory of the survival of the fittest. Thus, the misconception that evolution is a purely blind process is somewhat of a misunderstanding as the random mutations in the gene pool are acted upon selection which leaves those species best adapted to the given environment and that possess the largest reproductive advantage in nature. The process itself requires countless generations, geological rather than human time in billions of years to occur. The final product of biological life has the appearance of great design because it has had the effects of millions of generations of short-term selection towards simple survival, although this process has no final goal. This is possible due to mutations in the genes determining development. Thus, an eye may be created from no eye if we allow enough simple step transformations to occur in between. “Provided the difference between neighboring intermediates in our series leading to the eye is sufficiently small, the necessary mutations are almost bound to be forthcoming.” (p.79) This is because any degree of sight would confer a survival advantage over creatures with no sight at all.
The process itself is written into the genetic memory and information processing of successive generations. “Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA getting itself transmitted vertically. (passed down through generations)” (p.122) This is due to the horizontal success genetic information confers on bodies, i.e. speed, strength, intelligence, mobility, which creates an arms race between genetic information between species. The basis of evolution is RNA and DNA replication which Dawkins believes must also have arisen through a single step transformation, rather than a deity. There is no unmoved mover because “any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machines itself.” (p. 141) That is, we cannot explain complexity by positing something just as complex as what we seek to reconcile. It leaves unexplained the origin of God. ‘”You have to say something like ‘God was always there.” But if this is the case, we could eliminate a step and state that the process for forming complexity itself was always, or moreover the universe (or multiverse) was always.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
On Post-Modernism and Meta-Narratives
Post-Modernism, which has its origins in the works of philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, is associated with the rejection of rationality as a means for understanding reality, giving rise to subjectivity and ‘perspectivism’. In some sense, this is also deeply Socratic as it rejects the possibility of absolute knowledge. This commonly is juxtaposed with the objectivity and order of Enlightenment thought. What characterized modernity is the belief that reality operated in ways which could be understood and brought to light by human reason. There was a sense that man could conquer nature through his faculties and scientific inquiry because the universe operated in a predictable manner. Post-Modernism rejects these claims and the base of objectivity on which they stand.
Although post-modernism is often criticized by advocates of rationalism and universalism that it collapses into moral relativity and nihilism (a critique I do not think unfair), I do think that as a movement it offers many valuable and important suggestions which aid in 1) recognizing the limitations of reason and 2) the way in which we as a collective culture impose subjective stories which masquerade as truth. The latter is referred to as a “meta-narrative”, which is defined by John Stephens as “a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience". The post-modernist treats such overarching stories with skepticism as they are oversimplifications which are commonly used to perpetuate an existing power structure.
Put differently, this world is your world: it is shaped by our language and how we bring our language to bear on what we conceive as reality. In the process, we as a society (and in particular, those in power) create stories regarding history, society, and values. These narratives not only situate participants within a polity, they create a shared yet subjective meaning. This includes national narratives, collective symbols, and ideas which serve to build a common culture and political structure. But these stories are also subjective in the sense that they depict only one way of viewing history. They do not so much describe the past as they create a vignette or characterization of history from one vantage point. They are stories about stories, and ‘yours’ due to the fact that they lack any third-person objectivity. Throughout Anglo-American history this has had the effect of idealizing the founding fathers and marginalizing minorities, the oppressed, and divergent political systems in order to garner a collective acceptance from generation to generation. We elevate these stories to the detriment of issues such as equality, global poverty, etc.. But notice that there are other narratives that are socially constructed which form our expectations about the way the world operates, how we should act within society, and who we should be. These all comprise an invisible, yet ponderous layer upon our general understanding.
The largest meta-narrative according to the post-modernist is the myth of the triumph of universal reason and logos over chaos, the victory of science over irrationality. This is gestured towards interestingly in Nassim Taleb’s 2007 book “The Black Swan” in which he posits that we neglect rare events because we underestimate our ignorance due to the collective illusion of objective truth or knowledge given by the progress of the science. We our misled by a narrative of absolute truth, but in fact such objectivity is a fiction. This can also be best described in his sardonic style by Nietzsche in his book “Philosophy and Truth”. He writes,
Although post-modernism is often criticized by advocates of rationalism and universalism that it collapses into moral relativity and nihilism (a critique I do not think unfair), I do think that as a movement it offers many valuable and important suggestions which aid in 1) recognizing the limitations of reason and 2) the way in which we as a collective culture impose subjective stories which masquerade as truth. The latter is referred to as a “meta-narrative”, which is defined by John Stephens as “a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience". The post-modernist treats such overarching stories with skepticism as they are oversimplifications which are commonly used to perpetuate an existing power structure.
Put differently, this world is your world: it is shaped by our language and how we bring our language to bear on what we conceive as reality. In the process, we as a society (and in particular, those in power) create stories regarding history, society, and values. These narratives not only situate participants within a polity, they create a shared yet subjective meaning. This includes national narratives, collective symbols, and ideas which serve to build a common culture and political structure. But these stories are also subjective in the sense that they depict only one way of viewing history. They do not so much describe the past as they create a vignette or characterization of history from one vantage point. They are stories about stories, and ‘yours’ due to the fact that they lack any third-person objectivity. Throughout Anglo-American history this has had the effect of idealizing the founding fathers and marginalizing minorities, the oppressed, and divergent political systems in order to garner a collective acceptance from generation to generation. We elevate these stories to the detriment of issues such as equality, global poverty, etc.. But notice that there are other narratives that are socially constructed which form our expectations about the way the world operates, how we should act within society, and who we should be. These all comprise an invisible, yet ponderous layer upon our general understanding.
The largest meta-narrative according to the post-modernist is the myth of the triumph of universal reason and logos over chaos, the victory of science over irrationality. This is gestured towards interestingly in Nassim Taleb’s 2007 book “The Black Swan” in which he posits that we neglect rare events because we underestimate our ignorance due to the collective illusion of objective truth or knowledge given by the progress of the science. We our misled by a narrative of absolute truth, but in fact such objectivity is a fiction. This can also be best described in his sardonic style by Nietzsche in his book “Philosophy and Truth”. He writes,
“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of the universe…there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history”…” (p.79) “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.” (p. 84)
Saturday, April 18, 2009
T.S. Elliot: "Four Quartets"
This post will seek to analyze the major philosophical and religious themes in T.S. Elliot’s “Four Quartets”. Although most regard “The Wasteland” as his greatest work (and indeed it is one of the greatest of the 20th century), Elliot himself believed that “Four Quartets” perhaps surpassed it. Printed in its entirety in 1943, the poem is written mainly in free verse and ties in themes of the nature of time and the divine through metaphor and repetition. It is divided into four sections- Burnt Norton, East Coker, the Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding. What Elliot attempts to convey in the poem is a theory of the true nature of reality as eternal. Ultimately, this reveals a Christian and Platonic ontology which reflects Elliot’s own Anglican faith and is illustrated in the poem through religious imagery. He opens, “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable.” Time is closely connected with the divine as it serves to represent the concept of the everlasting. Perhaps most well known is the line “In my beginning is my end” which begins East Coker, and culminating with “In my end is my beginning.” He also later states that the “End and Beginning were always there.” This seeks to reinforce the theme of perpetuity and a changeless state. And this is once again repeated throughout many other portions, such as Dry Salvages: “There is no end, but addition: the trailing/Consequence of further days and hours.”
The nature of reality is also gestured towards with the concept of logos, which was used by ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Heraclitus writes: “The cosmos, the same for all, none of the gods nor of humans has made, but it was always and is and shall be: an ever-living fire being kindled in measures and being extinguished in measures…Changing, it rests.” The world itself is a constant flux as symbolized by fire. Fire is always in movement but remains the same substance. Likewise, the world of experience is one of change but it is the divine which is permanent and immutable. This moves towards the ontology of Parmenides, who posited change to be only apparent. This is illustrated with the line in Burnt Norton: “At the still point of the turning world./ Neither flesh nor fleshless;/ Neither from nor towards;/ at the still point, there the dance is.” This describes a world in perpetual change due to one unmoved mover, or God. Morris Weitz states of this line, “In God is the source of movement and the temporal. Not that God is movement; rather from Him emanates movement, to utilize a neo-Platonic idea. There is the temporal, the flux; but without God, the Timeless, there would be no temporal.”
This is also seen in the fragments of Heraclitus’ work which argue that the universe was governed by a single divine law, or logos, which was common to all but recognized by only few. That being said, logos also translates as “the Word”, meaning the truth and divine. Heraclitus’ writes, ““A fool is excited by every word”. This indicates that many fail to come to realize the truth although it is evident. They become attached to numerous false dogmas or ‘words’ but never come to know God who is ‘The Word’. Elliot also mirrors this in certain portions of “Four Quartets” in the lines which states: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality.” The bird is used here as a messenger of the Truth, which is not recognized by most in the realm of experience. To use Plato’s allegory of the cave, when the prisoner first is released from his chains, he looks into the light of the fire and is blinded. He then would sooner doubt the reality of the fire than the previous shadows which he believed to constitute all of reality. Experience fundamentally is set out to mislead because it distracts one’s attention from the realm outside of the cave, which is the form of the good or God. Elliot writes, “We must start with the temporal, the ever-changing experience; and come to see its dependence upon the Timeless (God)”
The form of the good itself is symbolized by the sun, which like God, gives rise to all the other representations in the sensible realm. But this form of the good is ultimately indescribable and ineffable to the cave dweller, who cannot recognize it as the source of his experiences. It is only the philosopher king who is able to leave the cave who sees that his experience does “Point to one end, which is always present.” Thus, Elliot rejects the virtue of a posteriori synthetic knowledge derived through empiricism. In short: our eyes deceive us. Elliot writes, “We had the experience but missed the meaning” and in East Coker, “There is, it seems to us/At best, only a limited value/In the knowledge derived from experience./The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies.” This amounts to a rejection of the ability for scientific empirical discovery to properly discover the nature of reality. Rather, for Elliot we must submit to faith: it is only by recognizing the Word that we may find redemption.
The nature of reality is also gestured towards with the concept of logos, which was used by ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Heraclitus writes: “The cosmos, the same for all, none of the gods nor of humans has made, but it was always and is and shall be: an ever-living fire being kindled in measures and being extinguished in measures…Changing, it rests.” The world itself is a constant flux as symbolized by fire. Fire is always in movement but remains the same substance. Likewise, the world of experience is one of change but it is the divine which is permanent and immutable. This moves towards the ontology of Parmenides, who posited change to be only apparent. This is illustrated with the line in Burnt Norton: “At the still point of the turning world./ Neither flesh nor fleshless;/ Neither from nor towards;/ at the still point, there the dance is.” This describes a world in perpetual change due to one unmoved mover, or God. Morris Weitz states of this line, “In God is the source of movement and the temporal. Not that God is movement; rather from Him emanates movement, to utilize a neo-Platonic idea. There is the temporal, the flux; but without God, the Timeless, there would be no temporal.”
This is also seen in the fragments of Heraclitus’ work which argue that the universe was governed by a single divine law, or logos, which was common to all but recognized by only few. That being said, logos also translates as “the Word”, meaning the truth and divine. Heraclitus’ writes, ““A fool is excited by every word”. This indicates that many fail to come to realize the truth although it is evident. They become attached to numerous false dogmas or ‘words’ but never come to know God who is ‘The Word’. Elliot also mirrors this in certain portions of “Four Quartets” in the lines which states: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality.” The bird is used here as a messenger of the Truth, which is not recognized by most in the realm of experience. To use Plato’s allegory of the cave, when the prisoner first is released from his chains, he looks into the light of the fire and is blinded. He then would sooner doubt the reality of the fire than the previous shadows which he believed to constitute all of reality. Experience fundamentally is set out to mislead because it distracts one’s attention from the realm outside of the cave, which is the form of the good or God. Elliot writes, “We must start with the temporal, the ever-changing experience; and come to see its dependence upon the Timeless (God)”
The form of the good itself is symbolized by the sun, which like God, gives rise to all the other representations in the sensible realm. But this form of the good is ultimately indescribable and ineffable to the cave dweller, who cannot recognize it as the source of his experiences. It is only the philosopher king who is able to leave the cave who sees that his experience does “Point to one end, which is always present.” Thus, Elliot rejects the virtue of a posteriori synthetic knowledge derived through empiricism. In short: our eyes deceive us. Elliot writes, “We had the experience but missed the meaning” and in East Coker, “There is, it seems to us/At best, only a limited value/In the knowledge derived from experience./The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies.” This amounts to a rejection of the ability for scientific empirical discovery to properly discover the nature of reality. Rather, for Elliot we must submit to faith: it is only by recognizing the Word that we may find redemption.
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