We All Live in a Leaky Submarine

Last night I finally got around to watching Das Boot, the 1981 World War II film about life in a German U-boat. This post isn't about that. Rather, it's about the analogy of living in a little capsule submerged in an ocean of phenomena, and yet, sealed off from any actual contact with it.

What, for example, is the most salient feature of the ocean? Yes, it is wet. And yet, the submarine crew never touches water. Unless something goes terribly wrong -- which it did for 30,000 of the 40,000 men who served in das boots.

I'm tempted to cut straight to the chase and propose that the Christian is a swimmer, while most any other philosophy one can think of is either inside a submarine or floating atop the water. The latter resembles swimming except that only the ship touches water, not the crew.

Nevertheless, there are always rumors of water, and sometimes the real thing if the ship sinks. Sometimes reality floods in... No, it always does, right? This is our reason for hope. The progressive Ship of Fools is taking on water and going down as we speak.

Bob, this sounds like another one of those strained analogies. Where is this going? Well, modern philosophy begins with Kant, who places us inside a skin-encapsulated submarine, such that we never touch reality -- the noumenon -- but only have access to various instrument readings, i.e., those "a priori laws of nature that apply to all objects before we experience them."

See how this works? We come into the world with various factory-installed instruments and idiot lights such as substance, causality, and relation. These instruments may or may not tell us about "reality," whatever that is. We can never know. Again, all we can know is the instrument readings.

But this is a terribly unsatisfying metaphysic, which is why it is generally ignored. It is also incoherent and self-refuting, because Kant is simultaneously telling us about the nature of reality while claiming the impossibility of doing so.

But that's not my point. My point is that science, for example, gives us only instrument readings, but then goes right ahead anyway and conflates the readings with the reality. This is scientism, precisely -- the idea that what can be seen with the scientific method just so happens to coincide with all that can be seen. Like anyone could know that! Besides, scientism obviously isn't seen with the scientific method.

As a matter of fact, I was just reading about this yesterday in C.S. Lewis's surprisingly Coonish Miracles (contained in this giant compilation of seven books, an incredible bargain at eight or nine bucks).

Put it this way: we can never get away from those Two Trees in the garden. We have a choice: let's call one the trees natural, the other supernatural. Note that the first can never account for the second. But the second easily accommodates the first. So why do people choose the first?

I can think of several reasons, but the main one is pride. Functionally speaking we might call it "self-enclosure." This anticipates the principle that ultimate reality is trinitarian or relational, so to choose vertical self-enclosure is to choose... badly.

This is Lewis's approach. i.e., that we must choose either a metaphysic of naturalism or of supernaturalism. Eh, I don't really like the latter. It's too loaded. How about transnatural? In any event, Kant is half-correct in the sense that our perception of reality will definitely be colored by the categories we bring to it. It's just that we have a choice in the matter. We can touch water. Unless we choose not to:

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

What comes first, the evidence or the metaphysic? Again, Kant is half-correct, because our perceptions will be conditioned by our metaphysic. But it's really a complementarity between evidence and metaphysic, because while we must be guided by evidence, some evidence -- indeed, the most important -- is only discerned with recourse to the metaphysic.

To take an obvious example, in my tree, truth is an adequation to reality. But just yesterday we had a visitor who disagrees with this proposition; rather he claims that "any communication is always about reality, no matter what the content." This is the kind of extreme postmodern view that equates Mozart and Taylor Swift.

The same commenter holds the view that "The assertion that deception or manipulation reduces a communication to useless unreality is clearly not the case." This is straight out of the leftist ploybook, in that, once language is no longer an adequation, it is all about power, not truth. And power is quite useful to the left, while truth isn't.

In a way, it all comes down to Truth and Freedom vs. Power and Necessity. Don't worry, we'll have much more to say about the subject, but we're running out of time this morning.

No thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for free will would mean that human beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events.

Humans are at once links in the Great Chain of Being (the "total series of events") while being breaks in that very chain (the power of independent action). How can this be?

That's not how I would put the question. Rather, I would turn it around and ask, "what kind of cosmos must this be in order for free beings to exist?" In other words, begin with what is both experience-near and self-evident. If your metaphysic can't account for the miracle of freedom, it can't account for anything else, because only a free being can know truth to begin with, let alone deny it.