Geertsema

Een samenvatting van het artikel 'Science and person' van Geertsema. Het artikel is voor mij echt een openbaring. Voor een master moest ik het artikel samenvatten in het Engels. Helaas heb ik niet de tijd om er een Nederlandse versie (en persoonlijke reflectie) op te maken. Het blijft dus bij een Engelse samenvatting.

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Samenvatting Geertsema

Cartesian philosophy

An important part of Cartesian philosophy is its emphasis on objectification - that is, overcoming subjectivity by taking a third-person or 'Gods-eye' view in all matters - as a method for secure knowledge. This method of objectification however, gives rise to several problems:

1. Since Descartes locates the mind 'in' us and we cannot be 'in' other minds, the only way to study the mind would be individual introspection. This makes knowledge of the mind in the eyes of the objectification principle, subjective and therefore unreliable. Attempts to overcome this subjectivism by only taking into regard those aspects of humankind that can be studied from a third-person perspective (behaviourism, naturalism) fail. They must somehow deny or explain away mental phenomena, that in fact have a nature of their own;
2. One can analyse oneself. But the 'Gods-eye' point of view that one takes in order to do so cannot be the object of analysis at the same time: complete objectification always escapes the subject that is doing it, since he cannot objectify himself along the way;
3. Viewing human behaviour from a third-person 'objective' perspective, as is done in the sciences (by pointing to the fact that humans are determined by causal relationships), leaves no room for freedom and responsibility. It thereby undermines fundamental characteristics of being a human being.

The position of Thomas Nagel (in his book 'The view from nowhere')

Thomas Nagel rejects the reduction of the mental to the physical (in terms of aspects, not of substances), which reveals a Cartesian dualism. In both realms though, objectification is what we should strive for in order to know the world as it is in itself. Nagel admits that objectification can never be total. The very fact that it steers away from subjective human experience in order to discover what is universal, implies that objectification leaves out subjective experiences and is therefore never complete. There is also another problem with objectification, namely that it is necessarily the act of a subject. Although Nagel is aware of the irreducibility of the first-person perspective, his aim is, the integration of the subjective and the objective perspective.

Critical discussion of Nagels view

Nagel points us to three general tendencies in contemporary philosophical debate about the human person:

1. Replacing or securing our ordinary knowledge of ourselves, by scientific knowledge;
2. A tension between ordinary knowledge of ourselves as free human agents and the view from science that deterministically explains our behaviour in terms of cause and effect;
3. The Cartesian dualism of mind and body as a background for the interpretation of the relationship between our intuitive understanding of ourselves as subjective agents and the results of scientific research: it is understood either in a dualistic or reductionist way.

a. objectification

Nagels idea of objective knowledge contains two elements: to transcend a particular point of view and (thereby) to conceive the world as a whole. Both aren't possible: subjective experience cannot be reconstructed by objective method and objectification presupposes a subject. When the 'subjective' necessarily escapes objectification: then how does objectification conceives the world as a whole? In fact it is the other way around. Our primary, subjective experience conceives the world as a whole. Different sciences (objectifications) use specific concepts that are isolated, abstracted from the world as a whole. They are isolated in order to study that part of experience that fits the specific concepts. Because science abstracts from ordinary or subjective knowledge it can never replace it. If ordinary knowledge is the presupposition of scientific knowledge, then the results of scientific research should be integrated in this.

b. things in themselves

Nagel argues that in order to see things as they are in themselves, we should leave out 'secondary qualities' (taste, colour). These qualities depend on an observer and therefore are necessarily subjective. These secondary qualities should be explained in terms of 'cause' of the primary qualities (form, weight). But then, how complete can an objective world view be, when it leaves out the description of some consequences that first qualities have? And how can qualities that depend on perception be reduced to first qualities, while at the same time saying the the physical and the mental realm cannot be reduced to each other? It is more promising to acknowledge that things as they are in 'themselves' can never be seen apart from the relationships in which they exist and that secondary qualities are as 'objective' as the primary ones. Absolute knowledge is impossible.

c. dualism

Science gains knowledge by using specific concepts that are abstracted from reality in order to describe that segment of reality which fits the concepts. The fact that there are many sciences apart from psychology and physics that cannot be reduced to one or another, indicates that both, dualism and monistic materialism fall short by definition. We need a framework that acknowledges the large diversity of justified sciences with their own frameworks and the coherence of these seperate experiences.

d. transcendence

The method of objectification, in Nagels terms' means to 'transcend a particular point of view, in order to conceive the world as a whole'. If it is true however that objectification is bound to specific viewpoints that abstract from reality as a whole, it will never lead to an absolute conception of the world. This does not mean that we can never relate to the world as a whole, only that it cannot be done through science.

Our subjective self can not be understood correctly by the first, nor by the third-person perspective. We are born in world that already exists and we are bound to respond to other human beings that were already there. This implies the need for a another perspective: the second-person perspective. The first-person perspective of subjectivity and the third-person perspective of objectivity are preceded by the second-person perspective of responsiveness or answerability.