The Ship of Theseus and the Demon of Descartes
Philosophy traditionally was divided into seven major branches:
- Epistemology: the study of knowledge. What is truth?
- Logic: the study of formal reasoning. What follows truth? Wither leads it? What conclusion must be true if a given statement is true?
- Metaphysics: the study of first principles. What precedes truth? Whence come it? What premiss must be true when a given statement is true?
- Ethics: the study of virtue. What ought men do to be true?
- Natural Philosophy: the study of the visible order of creation.
- Aesthetics: the study of beauty, both in creation and created by man.
- Theology: the study of the invisible order of creation.
Theology includes the study of revealed truth, which of necessity touches all these foregoing studies. Theology alone unifies all branches of philosophy, hence is rightly called their summit, culmination, and queen.
From these seven, several further branches spring:
Epistemology includes Empiricism, Rationalism, Revelation, and perhaps more.
Semantics, which asks how words are used, is a handmaiden to Logic, as statements must be put in signs or words. Geometry is logic applied to figures and ratios; Arithmetic is geometry expressed as magnitudes.
Metaphysics, the study of first principles, includes Ontology, the study of first substances.
Ethics includes Politics, which is the art of how to live in civilization, which necessarily includes Economics, the study of the trades in goods and services.
Natural Philosophy includes the study of the inanimate world, Astronomy and Ballistics, Geography and Geology and Meteorology, and the various elements and energies of which they are composed, and includes also naturalism, which studies the growth and decay in due season of flora and fauna, their origins and destiny, and includes the study of man, his nature and his works.
Aesthetics, ironically, also informs Rhetoric, which is the study of the figures of pleasant and persuasive public speaking, since persuasiveness is a type of beauty.
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It is amusing to toy with the conceit that the order of creation in Genesis follows this order, at least by analogy.
Epistemology: The first day sees light, which separates truth from error.
Logic: The second day separates above from below, eternal from temporal, as formal reasoning is separated from the surges of ever-changing opinion.
Metaphysics: The third day separates land from sea, as solid and simple first principles are separated from the composites of complex conclusions.
Ethics: The fourth day peoples heaven with the planets and stars which give men light, guidance, and influence their natures, and which tells men the proper times to sow and reap. The hosts of heaven display in constellations images from tales of old, as mementos to instruct, or signs of things to come.
Natural Philosophy: The fifth day peoples sea and sky with fish and birds, the first of living things, while the earth is still bare of beasts. These lower animals are aware of the visible world, as are we, and the study of nature includes both animate and inanimate.
Aesthetics: The sixth day bring forth beasts and man in all their glory, and of created beasts, man alone reflects the creative spirit of the Creator, and he alone, as the Creator did, speaks words to make works of beauty.
Theology: The sabbath is the culmination in which all these prior things come to rest.
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Please note that, without theology, ethics and natural philosophy have no overlap, no common ground, no common purpose, and neither does epistemology and logic.
Indeed, one often hears bumbling modern philosophers uttering nonsense statements about the relation between the logical and empirical by saying whatever is certain is not true, and whatever is true is not certain.
This is more befitting a Zen koan of a mystic seeking to escape the illusion of self-awareness than a statement of a philosopher seeking to clarify an ambiguity.
But without theology, how can the modernist even open the question of the relation between rationality in creation and reason in man? For, without theology, creation is merely a sequence of chaotic events, not a work of a hand of surpassing craft, whose order and beauty is open to discovery.
Neither was the cosmos made to be investigated by man, for it was not made at all; nor was man made with faculties fit to investigate the cosmos, for he, like it, arise by blind happenstance.
Without theology, any perception of order in the motions of stars and planets, tides and seasons, ballistics and billiards, is a by-product of human brain motions, hence, at best, a happy accident.
Without theology, psychology, anthropology and ethics, the study of man and his works and the study of what man ought to do, have no necessary relation to each other, and to deduce from what man is to what he ought is a fallacy.
One cannot deduce an imperative conclusion from an observation in the major premiss without an imperative in the minor premiss. Without theology, statements of imperative express only human will, not a moral universal. Hence, from observations of human nature one can only deduce further observations, and say what man is or did, not what he ought do.
In such a case, there is no study of ethics, nor of politics, because there is no subject matter to study. Ethics is merely an observation that strong urges overpower weaker urges, politics that strong men overpower weaker men. Reason flatters rather than rules the soul. Justice plays harlot to despots.
Without theology, the only beauty in nature is in the mind of man, and the only beauty in art is in the eye of the beholder. Without theology, statements of aesthetics express only subjective human taste, not an objective aesthetic universal. Thus, without theology, there is no aesthetics, no study of beauty, because there is no subject matter to study. All is merely a matter of taste, or, rather, once toilets usurp museums, of tastelessness.
Without theology, truth is not a man and a god and a savior who lives in us and grants life and motion to the cosmos. Truth is merely what happens to be. And whatever happens to be, just so happens without any point or aim or purpose.
Logic is an arid study, merely a word-game without application or purpose. Reason cannot reach truth and truth cannot seek virtue.
Without theology, philosophy is rightly despised as mere ethical maxims on serving self-interest, or other sorts word-games without meaning.
Without theology, philosophy is an abortive form of physics, taking speculations about the principle of cause and effect and the persistence of unobserved objects as if these were theories confirmed by empirical observation, rather than axioms without which empiricism is nonexistent.
Without theology, philosophy is rightfully neglected.
Note that I do not restrict my comments to Christian theology. The classical philosophers, Plato and Aristotle and their epigones, Epictetus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, and their disciples, most certainly speculated about divine things, and, in the absence of revealed truth, human reasoning rose admirably to the summit of unaided human effort: it ill behooves any student to mock to nobler precepts of Stoicism, Hedonism, Eudaemonism, or Neoplatonism, without which the triumphs of the medieval scholastics, led by Aquinas, could not have been achieved.
But the limits of pagan theology should likewise be clear to any student of the ancient world. The ethics of Cato of Utica led him both to proud defiance of Caesar’s populist despotism, and to the prideful sin of suicide. The ethics of Marcus Aurelius led him both to cultivate the virtue of the inner light within, as a personal divinity, while the outer world crumbled into chaos; and to persecute the innocent Church, which was the sole institution that would save and preserve his realm.
But the lack of theology cripples philosophy on topics which would seem only remotely related, if not unrelated.
It has long been known among the wise that evil is not a substance of its own self, but a shadow or perversion of some solid object or some healthy good gone wrong.
When, in the hierarchy of ideals, some derivative ideal elevates itself to supremacy above the ideals from which it is derived, chaos results. No evil is evil in itself; evil arises when, like Lucifer attempting the throne of God, some lesser good unseats a greater good.
For example, when Communism elevates compassion for the poor above justice, Communism condones and requires deceit, conspiracy, expropriation, gulags, assassination, show-trials, and genocide.
Compassion for the poor is indeed a good thing, but it is derived or deduced from a higher principle of justice for the poor, and of justice for all.
The usurpation placing the lesser in place of the greater is both illogical and impossible. Nothing but evil results because nothing but evil can result.
So, here. In the modern age, with the abandonment of philosophy as the study and source of truth, natural philosophy usurps its place. For the same reason Communism, by replacing justice with compassion for the poor, cannot produce anything but misery for the poor, likewise Science, by replacing love of wisdom with skeptical agnosticism, cannot produce anything but windy ignorance.
Instead of studying Ethics, for example, a modern might study Freud, and come to bizarre conclusions holding ethical scruples to be a source of repression, and self indulgence to be a source of liberation. By contrast, Jung first asked any patient of his which church he ceased to attend, and asked him to return — whereupon nearly half his patients needed no second visit.
Likewise, instead of Metaphysics, we have Quantum Mechanics, where allegedly empirical theories hold forth on non-empirical matters, such as the persistence and behavior of particles not under observation, or the nature of cause and effect, or whether the universe is one continuum or multiple parallel continua each forever out of observation with each other.
But any continuum parallel to ours is by definition outside any possible reach of any observation, for no interaction of events is or can be possible across the continua. Speculations about the unobserved and unobservable, based on what must be true under all circumstances, regardless of contingent facts, is not a part of physics. It is a speculation about axiomatic truths underpinning all reality. This is the very definition of metaphysics.
And in cosmology, we end up with elliptical speculations about the cosmos arising from nothing for no reason as incomprehensible to the reason as the riddles of a Zen Master.
Myself, I have no ill will toward Zen Masters, but let him lecture on the illusionary nature of the soul, not on the quantified nature of photoelectric effect.
If the Zen Master cannot even explain the double slit experiment without recourse to a riddle making a wave both a particle and not a particle, I would prefer to depart his lecture, and find a real scientist willing to lecture real science, which confines itself to theories open to observational falsification.
Politics is in the worst condition of all.
Politics in the West concerns two theories: First is the theory that the kingship is sacred, and derives its just powers from heaven, whose mandate is lost when and if the king’s law exceeds the limits of divine law; second is the theory that all men are created equal, and endowed by the Creator with natural rights, and that governments are instituted by men among men on a secular basis to ensure those rights, whose mandate is lost if the government exceeds the limits of the institution.
Both theories, the monarchical and the republican, define heavenly limits to earthly governments. Without theology, there can be no heavenly limits, because heaven is empty void. Hence, politics is merely the Machiavellian study of power struggles between the opposed powers of church and state, nobles and commons, despots and demagogues: an ongoing game without justice or mercy.
Philosophy, instead of being a living and energetic teacher to the world on matters of ethics and politics, logic and metaphysics, without theology, is a decapitated body, dying but not dead, with some still working organs pumping and excreting during their linger last spasms of motion. Without theology, philosophy is an engine running on fumes.
True, some noble pagans, such as Ayn Rand or Stefan Molyneux, attempt to erect metaphysical, ethical hence political theory on a purely secular basis, in the footsteps of Aristotle or the Stoics.
But the same limitations which hindered the ancient prechristians hinder even intelligent and well meaning postchristians: even as Aristotle’s theory excused and promoted slavery, Ayn Rand excuse and promoted selfishness, condoned adultery, and called altruism a source of evil. She seeks a philosophy to express man as an heroic being, and ends up worshipping Asmodeus and Mammon, demons of lust and avarice.
In other words, the highest a noble pagan can reach, when limited to a philosophy based on crude and primitive pagan theology, is an ethical and political theory in keeping with the crude and primitive state of pagan ethics and politics.
Pagan ethics is either stoic devotion to duty without hope of reward in this life or the next, or is hedonistic devolution to long term self interest, despite that in the long term, we are all dead. Neither allows for a rational reason to draw on one’s own coffers to open a children’s hospital , nor to draw the sword in civil war to free the slave.
Pagan ethics can and do teach the merits of the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance; pagan ethics must and do dismiss higher virtues of faith, hope, and love as futile and foolish. Such is their limit.
Absent theology, even trifling questions of philosophy become insurmountable. Two commonplace examples will suffice.
Among sophomores, it is a profound question to ask whether, if all knowledge is rooted in sense-experience, how we can know any other man is a conscious and self-aware being, as opposed to, say, a well-constructed wax mannikin set in motion by a cunning Cartesian cacodemon.
If we accept the premiss that only sense-experience permits knowledge, then we are forced into the conclusion of solipsism, namely, that we only have true knowledge of our own consciousness; the existence of other conscious entities in the cosmos becomes a matter of speculation or mere opinion.
Now, to me it seems simple enough to say that if one’s premiss leads to a manifestly absurd conclusion, check the premiss. If solipsism were true, and the existence of all other men’s minds mere matter of speculation, then every intellectual product of other men’s minds would necessarily be matter of speculation as well, which includes the theory of solipsism.
If the mind of Descartes did not exist, then the speculation about an evil demon able to animate a cunning wax mannikin, and the theory of solipsism based on such speculation, likewise cannot exist, unless I invented it myself; which I did not.
Likewise, if Descartes existed as a self-aware mind, but I cannot know for sure he did, then likewise the theory of solipsism currently in my mind exists but I cannot know for sure it does, since it came from his mind.
But, upon reflection, all the content of my mind, if not coming directly from other minds, are composed of elements coming from other minds. If nothing else, the English language in which this sentence is written is not my invention, even if the words selected in this order are my invention.
So I can be certain of nothing in my mind. Which means I cannot be certain that I am uncertain. But even that uncertainty is rooted in the meditations of Descartes, not my own. One cannot be a solipsist without doubting one’s own mind as well.
If the foolishness of solipsism is not self-evident, nothing is. I call it self-evident because in this discussion of solipsism, unless you are the one writing the words in this sentence you now read, this part of the discussion originated in a mind not your own. As with discussion, so with all discussions. If solipsism were sober, and the doubt about the existence of other minds legitimate, then there would be only one solipsist in the universe, and, like the King of Pointland, he would have nothing to discuss with us.
In either case, it is more reasonable to conclude that the premiss is wrong, and that not all knowledge is rooted in sense-experience: such as, for example, my own knowledge of my own self-awareness.
A theological approach makes this question even more pellucid. One begins the study of man not with man, but with man’s Creator.
Given that the Creator created Man in His image and likeness, and given one’s own self-awareness of one’s own self-awareness, it is simple enough to say that one’s own spirit recognizes kindred spirits, which explains both the sympathy and camaraderie between man and pet, who clearly can share love and loyalty, as well as between man and man, who can share as well thoughts and abstractions.
Now, one might object that it is not self-evident that Man is created in the Image of God, for this is a doctrine of faith accepted on faith. In fact, it is a mysterious statement, whose meaning and implications are hard, perhaps impossible, to elucidate.
Well said, and quite true. But the cost of not accepting this non-self-evident mystery is that one makes a mystery out of the self-evident, such as the self-evident proposition that other men’s minds exist.
Likewise, it is a profound question among sophomores to ponder the Ship of Theseus. This same is the ship wherein Theseus returned in triumph from Crete, preserved as a monument of glory by the Athenians, replacing decayed planks with new, year after year, down even to the time of Demetrius of Phaleron, a millennium later. The question among philosophers is whether this is the same ship, or not the same.
I happened to come across such pondering by a television superhero, the Avenger called The Vision: this artificial being was confronting an exact duplicate of himself, as artificial as was he, and they debated whether either of them were the original.
Aristotle can resolve the issue without recourse to theology, by distinguishing the formal cause from the material cause. While the matter of the ship is replaced, the design remains the same, as does the purpose or “final cause” of the ship as monument. Thomas Hobbes slyly asked what would happen if the cast off planks were gathered up and reassembled into a second ship following the same design; but since the question presumes the cast off planks are decayed, one would have a pile of rotting lumber.
Some scoffers might say the question is a matter of semantics, or is unanswerable, or is otherwise a waste of time. From an empirical point of view, it must be admitted, the scoffers are quite right.
Examine as one will, to one’s heart’s content, the length and mass and molecular and elemental composition of each plank, both the cast offs and the replacements, study the nails and weigh and measure and take their temperature by day and night: One will never once, at any time, find among the elements and measurements, the concept of “original” or “copy” or a molecules spelling out the words “same” or “different” in Greek or in any barbaric tongue. This is because concepts are not made of material elements, and molecules are mute.
From a legal point of view, the question is quite different and quite more clear, since the question of what is and is not original, what is a copy, and what copies are permissible, forms the core of copyright and trademark law. The elements of which a paper book is composed, or an iron engine, might be sublimely indifferent to the question of who invented what, who owns what, and who copied what, but clearly the creator of the work does care. But this is not an empirical question, but a legal hence an ethical one.
But even the ethical question turns on a metaphysical one: what about the Ship of Theseus is an essential property, and what is accidental?
An essential property is one that cannot change without making the thing into another thing. An accidental property can change without changing the thing.
Example: A white triangle painted black still remains triangular. It is essentially a triangle. The color is incidental. Whereas a white flag of surrender painted black becomes the black flag of anarchy. The color of the flag is essential. It cannot be a white surrender flag without being white.
In the case of the Ship of Theseus, if any one particular planks is accidental, then each can be replaced, or all of them, without any change to whatever it is that make the ship what she is, that makes her the Ship of Theseus and not merely some other Greek trireme. On the other hand, if the sum of the planks is not accidental, and all have been replaced not once but many times, then essentially she cannot be the same ship.
Nor is the matter made clearer by Aristotle, if we suppose in our hypothetical that the replaced planks slowly changed the overall shape and form of the ship, perhaps very subtly, but accumulated to visible changes over time. If the form is no longer the same, is she the same ship?
Now, a theological approach might be more helpful. If the ship was Christened when was named, she became a “she” and was a real ship, no longer merely a collection of wood in a shiplike shape. At that point, she has a spirit, and a name. Even if the body grows or changes, as long as it does not pass away entirely, the spirit remains, and she is the same ship. Once the spirit dies, she is dead, even if the hulk remains.
In the same way the question of solipsism is sufficient to prove to any mind wiser than a sophomore that knowledge is more than what sense impressions convey, so, here, the Ship of Theseus is sufficient to prove that a ship is more than merely the planks of which she is composed.
A wise man once wrote a tale where a schoolboy was talking with a fallen star named Ramandu. The schoolboy scoffs, saying, “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
If anyone asked me about the Ship of Theseus, I would not ask the evil version of Captain Kirk, after he had been split into twins by a transporter accident. Good Kirk and Evil Kirk might give varying answers.
And if one twin of Kirk married Miramanee the lovely space squaw during the division, while suffering Monument-induced amnesia, would she be married to the recombined Kirk one he recovered his memory, after Scotty undivided them?
Nor would I ask anything of Dr. Who before an after his regenerations. He may be the same man, but he is clearly portrayed by different actors, and one of them is Scottish.
No, instead I would put the question to the Tin Woodman of Oz, Nick Chopper, whose axe was cursed by a witch, so that he cut off, one after the next, all his limbs, to have them replaced by tin, and next his chest, midriff, and waist, which were also replaced, and finally his head.
However, the tinsmith did not replace his heart when cloven in two, but left the tin man’s breast quite empty. Was he missing an essential part? If so, was he the same man or different?
Since, in the book TIN WOODMAN OF OZ, he goes to his old haunts and finds his severed head in a cabinet, still quite alive and in a foul mood, the question is perhaps more difficult than first appears, either with or without a theological approach.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
