A Philosopher's Wardrobe of Abstractions
ABELSON, RAZIEL
A Philosopher's Wardrobe of Abstractions The Paradox of Cause and Other Essays By Jonathan William Miller Norton. 192 pp. $14.95. Reviewed by Raziel Abelson Professor of Philosophy, New...
...It is suspiciously easy to bridge the gap between appearance and reality by defining reality as reliable, socially shared appearance...
...Nature is thus a product of human action...
...Divine thought and action...
...It is, therefore, a "midworld" between subject and object, consisting primarily of artifacts, social institutions and historical events...
...Miller writes: "The problem of knowledge occurs because of a distinction between appearance and reality...
...So I cannot see how the "midworld" of society and artifacts can be any more real than the galactic lumps scattered endlessly through space...
...it is constantly being "revised" through history...
...Adept at turning a phrase, in short, Miller makes platitudes sound like deep insights and the preposterous seem credible...
...Moral theory apart from history has become...
...In a word, culture is more real than brute nature...
...Miller's contention seems to be that the function of art is to capture fleeting experience by revealing its ordered structure, thereby contributing to our understanding of nonesthetic experience...
...Hence, it is either trivial or false, like most metaphysical "systems...
...He propounds a composite viewpoint of the late 19th-century pragmatic idealists??Royce, Dewey and Santa-yana...
...Miller comes close to matching that with: "What we mean by rights...
...More recent philosophical trends, such as logical positivism, linguistic analysis and phenomenology are brushed aside with a wave of the pen as "proposing nothing more robust than the study of word-usage...
...He assumes he need merely state his conclusions on the perennial issues others have agonized over...
...a lawful world...
...The concepts employed in the law find their meaning in constitutional history and nowhere else...
...In them Miller elaborates on his main point: that reality is produced by transactions between human agents and the objects they manipulate...
...The next two essays are about the role of art in culture...
...Having distilled and refined over the many years of his career as a professor of philosophy the problems, concerns and positions of classical thinkers, Jonathan William Miller writes with self-confidence??an elegant self-confidence that disdains detailed explanation or argument...
...The alleged paradox of causality ??that neither its success nor its failure "offers hope for freedom"??can be resolved, according to the author, by recognizing that causality is not contrary to purpose but entails purpose: "All order is process, all process is dynamic, teleological, ideal...
...what Hegel had in mind??is another story altogether, but it is not one told by Miller...
...The words action, ideal, limitation, actuality, midworld, functioning object, history, and freedom are to his liking, while being, permanence, infinity, fact, logic, reality, and perfection are non grata...
...And he trusts the reader to appreciate that if he thinks it so, it is likely to be so...
...Miller distinguishes two kinds: those like Plato's Republic that look back nostalgically to a lost golden age, and "liberal" Utopias that look forward to the fulfillment of practical ideals...
...It apparently follows that if Hitler had won the War, racism would not be morally evil...
...The fourth essay purports to solve "the problem of knowledge...
...he was constantly revising it...
...Miller's own method of thinking is to look over his ample wardrobe of abstractions and select those that suit his impeccable taste for verbal harmony...
...Miller sensibly prefers the latter...
...Unless by "real" Miller really means interesting...
...Truth, Miller claims, is not absolute...
...In that case, his thesis would be trivially true...
...stale, flat and unprofitable...
...Essay 10 criticizes philosophers who have denied the reality of time, and argues for the priority of action to essence, and of individuality to universality...
...In the first, a critique of mechanistic determinism, Miller claims that universal causality, rather than supporting mechanism, "refutes it...
...The third essay maintains that "the accidental is an ontological concept, defining a condition of...
...The 13 essays here are diverse in subject, connected only by their author's sensibility...
...is discovered in the crises which have led to their assertion...
...Just what that is will be clear only to those already convinced they know what it is...
...His proposed solution seems to be that we should give up our belief that anything exists apart from the human experience of it...
...This idealist view, however, even in its more palatable Deweyan form, has always struck me as rather facile...
...Totalitarian states, which pretend to have realized perfection, are denounced as worse even than backward-looking Utopias...
...We give nature its order and help create its causal laws by experimental inquiry and measurement...
...Nicely phrased as usual, it is nonetheless out of place in a book of serious philosophical thought...
...Even the physical world is constructed of yardsticks and other measuring instruments...
...The final essay is a commencement address that extols the virtues of liberal arts education...
...To the claim of Hegel and Royce that nature is a product of mind, Miller adds Dewey's qualification that the interactions of scientific inquiry must be governed by objective and publicly testable procedures...
...they will not be so boorish as to demand more evidence...
...Stalin would have agreed...
...The next two pieces make some extraordinary claims reminiscent of Hegel's proclamation: "Die Weltge-schichte is das Weltgericht" (World history is world justice...
...He has turned 19th-century rowdy revolution into 20th-century conservative gentility...
...For won't there still be reality even when all sentient life has been destroyed and there are no more appearances...
...Miller sums it up gracefully: "It is no accident that there are accidents...
...By "joining," I take him to mean justifying inferences from perceptual appearances to the real processes of nature that go on independently of our perceptual experiences...
...What we are supposed tobeactingonwearenottold...
...The problem takes the form of joining these two factors somehow...
...Similar considerations apply to philosophy...
...Once again, though, one is forced to confront the fact that there are plenty of things in the world that are in no way dependent on human thought or action...
...It is certainly not clear to me...
...How this pure contingency squares with the universal causality defended in the first essay is not explained...
...Reviewed by Raziel Abelson Professor of Philosophy, New York University There is a quaint charm about these reflections on reality, knowledge, history, politics, and art...
...Essay eight, entitled "The Midworld," and nine, "The Functioning Object," are the book's centerpieces...
...The second piece is on Utopias...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 2
