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The Revolt Against Dualism
The Revolt Against Dualism, first published in 1930, belongs to a tradition in philosophical theorizing that Arthur O. Lovejoy called "descriptive epistemology." Lovejoy's principal aim in this book is to clarify the distinction between the quite separate phenomena of the knower and the known, something regularly obvious to common sense, if not always to intellectual understanding. This work is as much an argument about the ineluctable differences between subject and object and between mentality and reality, as it is a subtle polemic against those who would stray far from acknowledging these differences. With a resolve that lasts over three hundred pages, Lovejoy offers candid evaluations of a generation's worth of philosophical discussions that address the problem of epistemological dualism. In his stunning new introduction, Jonathan B. Imber offers a reassessment of Lovejoy's career as a thinker and as an active participant in the worldly affairs of academic life. He introduces to a new generation of readers some enduring principles of the vocation of the scholar to which Lovejoy not only subscribed but to which he also gave substance through his activities as an academic man. The opening statement provides both a fit tribute to a great pioneer in the history of ideas, and an example of intellectual history in its own right. The Revolt Against Dualism will be a significant addition to the libraries of philosophers, sociologists, and history of ideas scholars.
- GenresPhilosophy
452 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 1960
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About the author
Arthur O. Lovejoy
42 books30 followersArthur Oncken Lovejoy was an influential American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the field known as the history of ideas.
Lovejoy was born in Berlin, Germany while his father was doing medical research there. Eighteen months later, his mother committed suicide, whereupon his father gave up medicine and became a clergyman. Lovejoy studied philosophy, first at the University of California, then at Harvard under William James and Josiah Royce. In 1901, he resigned from his first job, at Stanford University, to protest the dismissal of a colleague who had offended a trustee. The President of Harvard then vetoed hiring Lovejoy on the grounds that he was a known troublemaker. Over the subsequent decade, he taught at Washington University, Columbia University, and the University of Missouri. He never married.
As a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University from 1910 to 1938, Lovejoy founded and long presided over that university's History of Ideas Club, where many prominent and budding intellectual and social historians, as well as literary critics, gathered. In 1940, he founded the Journal of the History of Ideas. Lovejoy insisted that the history of ideas should focus on "unit ideas," single concepts (often with a one-word name), and study how unit ideas combine and recombine with each other over time.
In the domain of epistemology, Lovejoy is remembered for an influential critique of the pragmatic movement, especially in the essay The Thirteen Pragmatisms, written in 1908.
Lovejoy was active in the public arena. He helped found the American Association of University Professors and the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. However, he qualified his belief in civil liberties to exclude overriding threats to a free system. At the height of the McCarthy Era (in the February 14, 1952 edition of the Journal of Philosophy) Lovejoy stated that, since it was a "matter of empirical fact" that membership in the Communist Party contributed "to the triumph of a world-wide organization" which was opposed to "freedom of inquiry, of opinion and of teaching," membership in the party constituted grounds for dismissal from academic positions. He also published numerous opinion pieces in the Baltimore press. He died in Baltimore on December 30, 1962.
Lovejoy was born in Berlin, Germany while his father was doing medical research there. Eighteen months later, his mother committed suicide, whereupon his father gave up medicine and became a clergyman. Lovejoy studied philosophy, first at the University of California, then at Harvard under William James and Josiah Royce. In 1901, he resigned from his first job, at Stanford University, to protest the dismissal of a colleague who had offended a trustee. The President of Harvard then vetoed hiring Lovejoy on the grounds that he was a known troublemaker. Over the subsequent decade, he taught at Washington University, Columbia University, and the University of Missouri. He never married.
As a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University from 1910 to 1938, Lovejoy founded and long presided over that university's History of Ideas Club, where many prominent and budding intellectual and social historians, as well as literary critics, gathered. In 1940, he founded the Journal of the History of Ideas. Lovejoy insisted that the history of ideas should focus on "unit ideas," single concepts (often with a one-word name), and study how unit ideas combine and recombine with each other over time.
In the domain of epistemology, Lovejoy is remembered for an influential critique of the pragmatic movement, especially in the essay The Thirteen Pragmatisms, written in 1908.
Lovejoy was active in the public arena. He helped found the American Association of University Professors and the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. However, he qualified his belief in civil liberties to exclude overriding threats to a free system. At the height of the McCarthy Era (in the February 14, 1952 edition of the Journal of Philosophy) Lovejoy stated that, since it was a "matter of empirical fact" that membership in the Communist Party contributed "to the triumph of a world-wide organization" which was opposed to "freedom of inquiry, of opinion and of teaching," membership in the party constituted grounds for dismissal from academic positions. He also published numerous opinion pieces in the Baltimore press. He died in Baltimore on December 30, 1962.
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November 24, 2011
This review is tl;dr and fuck you if you wanted an easily digestable sound byte.
This book is a history of philosophy. It deals with the history of when there was a serious philosophical movement against dualism.
Arthur Lovejoy writes as if the war of the dualists and monists is over with the dualists firmly established.
The history for the latter half of the 20th century wasn't so kind to the dualists. The monists won.
Is it still worth reading? Yes, because I still think there is a compelling argument for dualism. Personally, I am a metaphysical dualist.
I review this book by exploring four questions below:
I. How does the existence of memory imply epistemological dualism?
II. How can memory be used as a starting point for epistemology?
III. What would an outline of a psycho-physical dualist argument look like?
IV. What are the weaknesses in Lovejoy's argument?
I. The argument that the existence of memory implies epistemological dualism is based upon the following assumptions. First, it is held that the memory image, e.g. "a party last Friday," is not the same thing as what it represents, for "merely to remember is to be aware of a contrast between the image presented and the event recalled." (Lovejoy, 381) The memory’s objects of reference, what it "points" to, can be absent or no longer existent, "yet that something which somehow exhibits their character is an item in… experience today." (Lovejoy, 381) Second, "[t]o remember is eo ipso to assign to the object a date in a temporal sequence which is not the date of the act of retrospection nor of the givenness of the image." (Lovejoy, 382) When one remembers, there is "contained" in the memory image the time and place of the object referred to in the memory.
Epistemological dualism is taken to be a "hypothetical proposition" that states: "if you postulate the externality of the entities to be known… i.e., spatial externality to the knower’s body, temporal externality to the date of the event of perceiving or remembering… then in that specific case your knowledge cannot be direct." (Lovejoy, 31) The image recalled is "external" to what it represents, for that which is represented may no longer exist or be elsewhere. The "pastness" of the memory is given to me, but I do not take the image to be the thing represented. If the object were given to me directly through memory, then what was is now, and that leads to the absurdity that there is no time, for it would be like saying, "The party which I remember to be on Friday is happening right now." Since, the objects known through memory are external, knowledge gained through memory cannot be direct. In all important aspects, this hypothetical proposition is the same as the definition set forth for epistemological dualism by Lovejoy.
II. In epistemology, Lovejoy believed that "… the type of cognitive… experience with which epistemological inquiry ought to begin is not perception but retrospection, or, more specifically, remembrance." (Lovejoy, 380) By beginning with memory rather than perception, the difference between sense data and the object of sense data become illuminated, for "at the moment when any man believes himself to be, e.g., remembering, there is before him both a particular concrete datum - usually an image - and the conception of a mode of relatedness in which mutually external existences, including this datum, may stand to one another." (Lovejoy, 390) Memory contrasts the present with the not present, hence with regards to this particular species of knowledge the existential status of data and object are always opposite each other. If I recall anything, the memory is, but the object to which it refers is not. Moreover, this opposition of existential status implies that memory is mediate - if it didn’t, past would be present - and that its dualism is "immediately manifest." (Lovejoy, 381) Since knowledge of causal laws depend upon memory, "science is based upon the experienced." (Lovejoy, 384)
If one wished to demonstrate epistemological dualism by starting with perception, then one is misled right off the bat, for unlike memory "[o]bjects are not sensibly present in duplicate." (Lovejoy, 43) Without reflection one falls into naïve realism, the belief that what you see is what you get, and that what is seen is of one substance, matter. Certain metaphysical discoveries must be made before asserting the duality of content and object known, yet a few confusions, which were - in part - a result of 17th century philosophers fusing the two sorts of dualisms together into the concept of idea, still manage to arise.
When applied to perception, the word "mental" seems to imply "mind-like." Beginning with perception misleads certain philosophers into thinking that mental means mind-like - as was the case with Russell, whose philosophy of mind implied that the coldness of ice water became a quality of the mind. (Lovejoy, 293) Hence the dualist, when giving his/her account of perception, confounds his realist foes, who believe that the dualist account of perception is really just a rosy path to idealism. If you do not perceive the what is known directly, then perhaps there is nothing to perceive indirectly at all given that one cannot imagine anything without placing a perceiver’s in that imagining. By starting off with perception, the dualist bears the onus of countering the idealist’s firm belief that esse est percipi.
"When the dualist describes sensory content as ‘mental,’ he need not be understood to say it has the same properties as are (for some philosophers) connoted by the noun ‘mind." (Lovejoy, 48) Rather, the mental "exists only as a function of the event of sensing." (Lovejoy, 48)
III. The outline of an argument for psycho-physical dualism should be written, "If the argument for epistemological dualism is cogent, and if no place among physical objects can be found for perceptual and other data as epistemological dualism conceives of them, then, on these grounds alone, psychophysical dualism (with respect to content) would be established." (Lovejoy, 40) For Lovejoy five aspects of experience which show that the object of knowing must be different from the content of perception: (a) the duality of memory and its objects (as mentioned in section I above), (b) the time lag between the way an object is, and how it is perceived at the same time, (c) the relativity (conditionality) of perception, (d) the distortion of perception through different medium, and (e) the experience of error and illusion. (Lovejoy, 21ff.) Briefly I will explain how each of the latter four aspects demonstrate the cogency of epistemological dualism.
In (b) two phenomena sufficiently demonstrate that how an object appears to us, is different from how it is at the same moment: the finite velocity of light, and the lapse of time that occurs from the nerve ending to the cerebral cortex. If I look at the sun 8 minutes before it sets, and if it takes light 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth, what I see is an appearance of the sun. The actual sun is already below the horizon. To affirm epistemological monism would require rejecting the finite velocity of light, thus requiring scientists to "reconstruct optics and astronomy so extensively." (Lovejoy, 82)
Whenever two or more perceivers look at the same object, the perceptual content of the idea must differ between them by virtue of their position relative to the object, and by virtue of qualities inherent in themselves (i.e. one might be color-blind). This is what is meant by the relativity (conditionality) of perception. A coin might appear circular to me, but elliptical to you, because of our differing viewpoints, but what can be known about the object "will be untransformed by the accident of your present knowing of it." (Lovejoy 160) The percepts that led you to this immutable knowledge of the object itself demonstrate another aspect of dualism.
The distortion of perception through a medium demonstrates epistemological dualism in a way similar to the finite velocity of light. If the stick that I see in a tank of water is actually bent, then the laws of refraction would have to be rejected.
The experience of error and illusion shows epistemological dualism to be the grounds of their possibility, for "[i]n so far as cognoscendum and content are identified, error is excluded; in so far as the possibility of error is admitted, cognoscendum and content are set apart from one another." (Lovejoy, 28) Illusions are capricious and at times convincingly real, yet "that we are capable of recognizing them as illusions" (Lovejoy, 54) points to a knower’s ability to ascribe to illusions additional properties that do not belong to the physical world, i.e. being private, capricious, and lacking correspondence with a retinal image.
From the above it seems that if a knower is able to recognize the percept to be a distortion of what s/he takes to be the object known, and if a percept can refer to what is not present to the knower, any attempt at monism would conflate a function of knowing (the percept) with the world itself. But experience shows that if I take my memory to be of the present, or launch a rocket at a planet I see in the sky believing that it is there as I see it, then Lovejoy’s conclusion that for theoretical concerns "it is simpler to give up the theory of the identity of perceptual datum and physical object." (Lovejoy, 82)
Given Lovejoy’s notion that physical things "exist without dependence upon a specific kind of relation to a specific kind of events, namely, brain-events accompanied by perception," (Lovejoy, 183) we discover that space, i.e. the ability to place objects in front of us, side by side, are a part of perceptual content. Given the 5 qualities of epistemological dualism above, and philosophers inability to subsume them into the category of physical things, one must conclude that there is a psychophysical dualism, a bifurcation of nature.
IV. The point at which Lovejoy’s argument seemed weak was where he argued from the existence of memory to epistemological dualism. To briefly recapitulate: (1) Epistemological dualism is the creed that if what is known is external, then knowledge is mediate. (2) One is immediately aware that memory is mediate because the memory image refers to what is past. (3) Hence, the content of memory is, whereas what it refers to isn’t. (4) Given (2) and (3) memory implies that it’s content is external and thus mediate, which is what epistemological dualism means.
This seems to me to be an incomplete view of what memory is. I grant that in some cases of remembering one assigns "to the object a date in a temporal sequence which is not the date of the act of retrospection," (Lovejoy 382), but memory isn’t so dutiful, nor can it be. When I remember a proof which I have learnt in geometry years ago, there seem to be two things going on. Perhaps attached to the recollection may be when I learned the proof, but if I focus on recalling the proof alone, to help me solve a problem, there seems to be no past perception mixed in with it. At times, with some proofs, I feel that I am relearning it. This implies that if I cannot find the reference to the past to be united with me idea of the proof, I am remembering two things: (1) my experience of learning the proof, which is mediate, and (2) the proof itself which is immediate! Moreover, if in relearning I should add that which later show to by products of my imagination, remembering is very prone to skeptical arguments of error and illusion, thus requiring our caution.
This book is a history of philosophy. It deals with the history of when there was a serious philosophical movement against dualism.
Arthur Lovejoy writes as if the war of the dualists and monists is over with the dualists firmly established.
The history for the latter half of the 20th century wasn't so kind to the dualists. The monists won.
Is it still worth reading? Yes, because I still think there is a compelling argument for dualism. Personally, I am a metaphysical dualist.
I review this book by exploring four questions below:
I. How does the existence of memory imply epistemological dualism?
II. How can memory be used as a starting point for epistemology?
III. What would an outline of a psycho-physical dualist argument look like?
IV. What are the weaknesses in Lovejoy's argument?
I. The argument that the existence of memory implies epistemological dualism is based upon the following assumptions. First, it is held that the memory image, e.g. "a party last Friday," is not the same thing as what it represents, for "merely to remember is to be aware of a contrast between the image presented and the event recalled." (Lovejoy, 381) The memory’s objects of reference, what it "points" to, can be absent or no longer existent, "yet that something which somehow exhibits their character is an item in… experience today." (Lovejoy, 381) Second, "[t]o remember is eo ipso to assign to the object a date in a temporal sequence which is not the date of the act of retrospection nor of the givenness of the image." (Lovejoy, 382) When one remembers, there is "contained" in the memory image the time and place of the object referred to in the memory.
Epistemological dualism is taken to be a "hypothetical proposition" that states: "if you postulate the externality of the entities to be known… i.e., spatial externality to the knower’s body, temporal externality to the date of the event of perceiving or remembering… then in that specific case your knowledge cannot be direct." (Lovejoy, 31) The image recalled is "external" to what it represents, for that which is represented may no longer exist or be elsewhere. The "pastness" of the memory is given to me, but I do not take the image to be the thing represented. If the object were given to me directly through memory, then what was is now, and that leads to the absurdity that there is no time, for it would be like saying, "The party which I remember to be on Friday is happening right now." Since, the objects known through memory are external, knowledge gained through memory cannot be direct. In all important aspects, this hypothetical proposition is the same as the definition set forth for epistemological dualism by Lovejoy.
II. In epistemology, Lovejoy believed that "… the type of cognitive… experience with which epistemological inquiry ought to begin is not perception but retrospection, or, more specifically, remembrance." (Lovejoy, 380) By beginning with memory rather than perception, the difference between sense data and the object of sense data become illuminated, for "at the moment when any man believes himself to be, e.g., remembering, there is before him both a particular concrete datum - usually an image - and the conception of a mode of relatedness in which mutually external existences, including this datum, may stand to one another." (Lovejoy, 390) Memory contrasts the present with the not present, hence with regards to this particular species of knowledge the existential status of data and object are always opposite each other. If I recall anything, the memory is, but the object to which it refers is not. Moreover, this opposition of existential status implies that memory is mediate - if it didn’t, past would be present - and that its dualism is "immediately manifest." (Lovejoy, 381) Since knowledge of causal laws depend upon memory, "science is based upon the experienced." (Lovejoy, 384)
If one wished to demonstrate epistemological dualism by starting with perception, then one is misled right off the bat, for unlike memory "[o]bjects are not sensibly present in duplicate." (Lovejoy, 43) Without reflection one falls into naïve realism, the belief that what you see is what you get, and that what is seen is of one substance, matter. Certain metaphysical discoveries must be made before asserting the duality of content and object known, yet a few confusions, which were - in part - a result of 17th century philosophers fusing the two sorts of dualisms together into the concept of idea, still manage to arise.
When applied to perception, the word "mental" seems to imply "mind-like." Beginning with perception misleads certain philosophers into thinking that mental means mind-like - as was the case with Russell, whose philosophy of mind implied that the coldness of ice water became a quality of the mind. (Lovejoy, 293) Hence the dualist, when giving his/her account of perception, confounds his realist foes, who believe that the dualist account of perception is really just a rosy path to idealism. If you do not perceive the what is known directly, then perhaps there is nothing to perceive indirectly at all given that one cannot imagine anything without placing a perceiver’s in that imagining. By starting off with perception, the dualist bears the onus of countering the idealist’s firm belief that esse est percipi.
"When the dualist describes sensory content as ‘mental,’ he need not be understood to say it has the same properties as are (for some philosophers) connoted by the noun ‘mind." (Lovejoy, 48) Rather, the mental "exists only as a function of the event of sensing." (Lovejoy, 48)
III. The outline of an argument for psycho-physical dualism should be written, "If the argument for epistemological dualism is cogent, and if no place among physical objects can be found for perceptual and other data as epistemological dualism conceives of them, then, on these grounds alone, psychophysical dualism (with respect to content) would be established." (Lovejoy, 40) For Lovejoy five aspects of experience which show that the object of knowing must be different from the content of perception: (a) the duality of memory and its objects (as mentioned in section I above), (b) the time lag between the way an object is, and how it is perceived at the same time, (c) the relativity (conditionality) of perception, (d) the distortion of perception through different medium, and (e) the experience of error and illusion. (Lovejoy, 21ff.) Briefly I will explain how each of the latter four aspects demonstrate the cogency of epistemological dualism.
In (b) two phenomena sufficiently demonstrate that how an object appears to us, is different from how it is at the same moment: the finite velocity of light, and the lapse of time that occurs from the nerve ending to the cerebral cortex. If I look at the sun 8 minutes before it sets, and if it takes light 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth, what I see is an appearance of the sun. The actual sun is already below the horizon. To affirm epistemological monism would require rejecting the finite velocity of light, thus requiring scientists to "reconstruct optics and astronomy so extensively." (Lovejoy, 82)
Whenever two or more perceivers look at the same object, the perceptual content of the idea must differ between them by virtue of their position relative to the object, and by virtue of qualities inherent in themselves (i.e. one might be color-blind). This is what is meant by the relativity (conditionality) of perception. A coin might appear circular to me, but elliptical to you, because of our differing viewpoints, but what can be known about the object "will be untransformed by the accident of your present knowing of it." (Lovejoy 160) The percepts that led you to this immutable knowledge of the object itself demonstrate another aspect of dualism.
The distortion of perception through a medium demonstrates epistemological dualism in a way similar to the finite velocity of light. If the stick that I see in a tank of water is actually bent, then the laws of refraction would have to be rejected.
The experience of error and illusion shows epistemological dualism to be the grounds of their possibility, for "[i]n so far as cognoscendum and content are identified, error is excluded; in so far as the possibility of error is admitted, cognoscendum and content are set apart from one another." (Lovejoy, 28) Illusions are capricious and at times convincingly real, yet "that we are capable of recognizing them as illusions" (Lovejoy, 54) points to a knower’s ability to ascribe to illusions additional properties that do not belong to the physical world, i.e. being private, capricious, and lacking correspondence with a retinal image.
From the above it seems that if a knower is able to recognize the percept to be a distortion of what s/he takes to be the object known, and if a percept can refer to what is not present to the knower, any attempt at monism would conflate a function of knowing (the percept) with the world itself. But experience shows that if I take my memory to be of the present, or launch a rocket at a planet I see in the sky believing that it is there as I see it, then Lovejoy’s conclusion that for theoretical concerns "it is simpler to give up the theory of the identity of perceptual datum and physical object." (Lovejoy, 82)
Given Lovejoy’s notion that physical things "exist without dependence upon a specific kind of relation to a specific kind of events, namely, brain-events accompanied by perception," (Lovejoy, 183) we discover that space, i.e. the ability to place objects in front of us, side by side, are a part of perceptual content. Given the 5 qualities of epistemological dualism above, and philosophers inability to subsume them into the category of physical things, one must conclude that there is a psychophysical dualism, a bifurcation of nature.
IV. The point at which Lovejoy’s argument seemed weak was where he argued from the existence of memory to epistemological dualism. To briefly recapitulate: (1) Epistemological dualism is the creed that if what is known is external, then knowledge is mediate. (2) One is immediately aware that memory is mediate because the memory image refers to what is past. (3) Hence, the content of memory is, whereas what it refers to isn’t. (4) Given (2) and (3) memory implies that it’s content is external and thus mediate, which is what epistemological dualism means.
This seems to me to be an incomplete view of what memory is. I grant that in some cases of remembering one assigns "to the object a date in a temporal sequence which is not the date of the act of retrospection," (Lovejoy 382), but memory isn’t so dutiful, nor can it be. When I remember a proof which I have learnt in geometry years ago, there seem to be two things going on. Perhaps attached to the recollection may be when I learned the proof, but if I focus on recalling the proof alone, to help me solve a problem, there seems to be no past perception mixed in with it. At times, with some proofs, I feel that I am relearning it. This implies that if I cannot find the reference to the past to be united with me idea of the proof, I am remembering two things: (1) my experience of learning the proof, which is mediate, and (2) the proof itself which is immediate! Moreover, if in relearning I should add that which later show to by products of my imagination, remembering is very prone to skeptical arguments of error and illusion, thus requiring our caution.
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