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suppose will ever yield very strong decision procedures, and which
deal with just the kind of subject matter which may be liable to
radical indeterminacy of interpretation.
In face of such considerations, the most ambitious ideas that have
been entertained of the absolute conception must fail: the idea, for
instance, of a cumulative, convergent, self-vindicating unified sci-
ence of man and nature. How much less than this positivist fantasy
mind and its place in nature 287
will do? What is the minimum? Perhaps just this: that we should
make sense of how natural science can be absolute knowledge of
reality, and of why we cannot even agree how much else is absolute
knowledge of reality. There is no obvious impossibility in the idea
that the natural sciences should be able to give absolute explan-
ations of a determinate and realistically conceived world, while the
social sciences could not do this and should not be expected to. On
such a scheme, philosophy will belong, presumably, with the social
sciences. Since, unlike the results and methods of the natural sci-
ences, it hardly transcends the local interpretative predispositions
of various cultural communities on earth, there is not much reason
to think that it could transcend the peculiarities of humanity as a
whole.
It may seem, however, that there will have to be at least one piece
of philosophy which has absolute status: that, namely, which
makes clear why natural science can be absolute knowledge of how
things are, while social science, common perceptual experience and
so forth, cannot (with the result that we cannot even agree how
much other knowledge we have). But that piece of philosophy
would constitute almost all of philosophy. So does not even this
minimum hope for an absolute conception end, as other more
ambitious hopes have ended, in the conclusion that philosophy
itself is absolute knowledge perhaps even the highest form of
absolute knowledge? And that is a conclusion which we, unlike
those earlier philosophers, must reasonably see as a reductio ad
absurdum. But we are not forced to that result. The absolute status
of philosophy would not be required just by there being some
absolute conception of the world, but rather by our knowing that
there was, and what it was. We have agreed all along that we should
need some reasonable idea of what such a conception would be like,
but we have not agreed that if we have that conception, we have to
know that we have it. The absolute conception was taken to be a
presupposition of knowledge about the world, and it is knowledge
about the world that is our objective. To ask not just that we should
know, but that we should know that we know, is (as we remarked a
long time ago) to ask for more very probably for too much.
In holding on, if rather grimly, to Descartes s aspiration for
288 mind and its place in nature
an absolute conception which abstracts from local or distorted
representations of the world, we have left behind his transcen-
dental guarantee of knowledge, his project of pure and solitary
enquiry, and his picture of the enquiring mind as transparent
rationality. We left behind also, and importantly so, the demand
that the conception be grounded in certainty we have separated
the demand that the conception be absolute from the requirement
that it be indubitable. It is one consequence of this last point, that
we have just encountered. More generally, we can perhaps glimpse,
in these last considerations, ways in which these various rejections
of Descartes turn out to be deeply connected with one another. This
only reflects something which this study has, at more than one
point, tried to bring out the extent to which Descartes s remark-
able project, its conception and its execution, were all of a piece.
NOTES
* Title of Chapter 10 was originated by C. D. Broad.
1 As is his determinedly naturalistic and non-teleological view of
reproduction: (Primae) Cogitationes circa Generationem Animalium
(not published till 1701): XI 505ff., see 524.
2 Summa contra Gentiles ii 57; cf. Aristotle, De anima, 413a8 9. For this
and other material on Descartes s formulation, see Gilson,
Commentaire, pp. 430 ff.
3 Perhaps only large ships have pilots. In smaller ships, as in smaller
motor cars, the famous phrase may underestimate the controller s
capacity to feel the vehicle as an extension of himself.
4 See Leibniz, Explanation of the New System of the Communication of
Substances; in Philosophical Writings of Leibniz, Everyman edn selection
(London, 1934), p. 113. See also above, p. 261. Descartes himself
seems never explicitly to state this consequence of his views, but Mr J.
Secada has suggested to me that it is implicit in the detailed treatment
of the movement of the pineal gland in the Traité de l Homme, even
though that work barely deals with the interventions of the soul, a
topic which was left by Descartes for the unwritten, or missing,
treatise on the soul. See René Descartes, Treatise of Man, translated
and edited by T. S. Hall (Harvard, 1972), which has in general useful
information on Descartes s physiological work.
mind and its place in nature 289
5 The function of the pineal gland is still not wholly understood, but it
is known to be a light-sensitive organ which controls the activity of
various enzymes. Although it is located in the cranium, connected to
the brain, and in mammals originates embryologically as part of the
brain, it is not actually part of it, receiving its sole neuronal input from
the peripheral automatic nervous system. See The Pineal Gland, a
CIBA symposium, eds. G. E. W. Wolstenholme and J. Knight
(Edinburgh and London, 1971). The findings are notably distant from
Descartes s understanding of its function: see e.g. J. Herbert, The role
of the pineal gland in the control by light of the reproductive cycle of
the ferret.
6 The infinite or creative aspect of linguistic capacity as a genetic
peculiarity of the human mind has been much emphasized by Noam
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