Billiard Balls, Wisdom, and Other Connections

Yes, that’s all from one class, namely Thursday’s Enlightenment class.? After giving them a brief talk about revising research papers (that some of them, judging by what they’re asking me via email, have not yet started to write), we dove right into Descartes and his famous cogito ergo sum passage, continuing the discussion about knowledge and skepticism that took off so nicely when Mr. Garrett taught Thomas Reid.? Some of them rolled their eyes as we got into questions of whether one could doubt anything, and people who would not stand up for Thomas Reid last week jumped right in and reiterated his arguments against Hume this week.? I suppose that’s the 2004 presidential election polls phenomenon–when folks were asked if they’d vote for “a generic Democrat” againt George W. Bush, they said yes to the tune of 65 percent or so.? When asked if they’d vote for John Kerry, it was more like 46 percent.? (No, I could not run down a source for that, but I do remember reading it.)

Descartes, of course, did not invent doubt (Augustine famously said that if he could doubt in the first place, he must exist), but Descartes did formulate the famous rationalist system beginning with cogito ergo sum, proceeding to the need for a philosophers’ God in order to account for ideas superior to the idea-contemplator, and the existence of the physical world because a God worthy of the name would not deceive all human minds–being a deceiver is morally inferior to being truthful, and God is superior in all ways.

Eventually my students were alright with that, though my atheist students had to admit that, with regards to the origins of superior being, they had to remain agnostic.? The real fun came when we started in on Hume’s billiard balls.? According to Hume, cause-effect relationships in the world–his example is one billiard ball traveling in another billiard ball’s direction until impact–are only matters of custom; what we really see are events which share the following, actually-verifiable relationships:

1. Events are contiguous–they happen in a flow of uninterrupted moments.
2. Events happen in relationships of priority–one event happens after another in that series of moments.
3. Events happen with constant conjunction–billiard balls act the same way every time.

Hume does not deny that he himself expects the second billiard ball to move in a certain way, he says that such an expectation is a function of belief rather than law.? In other words, returning to an extreme form of Ockhamist empiricism, he says that any “physical laws” in the world are products of mental construction rather than anything inherent in the world itself.? There’s no way logically, according to Hume, to say that the so-called “laws of nature” are constant–we human beings just prefer to believe they are.

Such a philosophical bombshell, I told my students, led to the rise of Kant and Hegel, arguably the starting points for most of modern philosophy and social theory.? I walked them through the basic solutions that they presented to Hume’s problem, hoping to steer them towards further philosophical study, and then we turned to Postman’s chapter for the week.

I’ll admit that I lost it again when a student who did not read Postman tried to invent Postman for the sake of breaking the silence.? Had nobody read I would have just lectured, but some students, less apt to speak in class, did in fact read, and the discussion kept getting short-circuited.

But that’s not what’s great about Postman this week.? In his chapter, dealing with the late twentieth century’s information glut (it didn’t go away in the twenty-first century), Postman makes a couple suggestions that reminded me why, even when he infuriates me, I love reading Neil Postman.? His first idea was a new sort of section in the daily newspaper, a wisdom section.? Unlike the editorial section, it wouldn’t just rehearse politicians’ views on things.? Instead, it would offer philosophers’ and novelists’ and mothers’ and farmers’ questions about the stories in earlier sections, for the sake of getting some wise questions from folks without the tunnel-vision of modern “expertise.”? The second idea was that, instead of organizing the paper into sections about national news, local news, sports news, and whatever else, some paper somewhere should organize its sections by the deadly sins–a gluttony section followed by a pride section followed by an avarice section followed by a wrath section.? I could just imagine such a paper, and frankly, it’s more sensible than what many newspapers I’ve seen do.

Now if we could just find someone crazy enough to publish it…