Little Errors in the Beginning

LITTLE ERRORS IN THE BEGINNING I N HIS INTRODUCTION to De Ente et Essentia St. Thomas Aquinas remarks that "a little error in the beginning leads to a great one in the end." He is here rephrasing an observation made by Aristotle in De Caelo, I, 5: "The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold." The insight thus expressed is applicable to mathematics and the experimental sciences and, in fact, to all human enterprises as well as to philosophy, but I am going to concentrate upon its significance for philosophy. I am also going to try to show that many of the problems characteristic of modern philosophical thought have resulted from the failure to correct little errors in the beginning. Methodologically, the rule would appear to be a simple one to follow. When you disagree with a philosopher's conclusions, regard them as untenable, or find them repugnant to common sense, go back to his starting point and see if he has made a little error in the beginning. A striking example of the failure to follow this rule, and one with disastrous consequences for philosophy in the last 150 years, is to be found in Kant's response to Hume. Hume's skeptical conclusions and Hume's phenomenalism were unacceptable to Kant, even though they awoke him from his own dogmatic slumbers. But instead of looking for the little errors in the beginning that were made by Hume and dismissing, as unfounded, the Humean doctrines and conclusions that he found unacceptable, Kant felt it necessary to construct a vast piece of philosophical machinery, designed by him to produce conclusions of an opposite tenor. The intricacy of the apparatus and the ingenuity of the design cannot help but evoke admiration, even from those who are suspiCious of the sanity of the whole enterprise and who 27 ~8 MORTIMER J. ADLER find it necessary to reject Kant's doctrines and conclusions as well as Hume's. Though they are opposite in tenor, they do not help us to get at the truth, which can only be found by correcting Hume's little errors in the beginning and making a fresh start from correct premises that lead to conclusions that are neither Hume's nor Kant's. What I have just said about Kant in relation to Hume applies also to the whole tradition of British empirical philosophy following Locke and Hume. All of the philosophical puzzlements , paradoxes, and pseudo-problems that linguistic and analytical philosophy and therapeutic positivism have tried to eliminate, by the invention of philosophical devices designed for that purpose, would never have arisen in the first place if the little errors in the beginning made by Locke and Hume had been explicitly rejected instead of going unnoticed. I will presently comment on these particular errors as well as discuss some others. But, first, I would like to call attention to the two ways in which little errors in the beginning occur. In some cases, they are made because something that needs to be known or understood has not yet been discovered or learned. Such mistakes are, of course, excusable, however regrettable they may be. In other cases, the errors are made as a result of culpable ignorance-ignorance of an essential point, an insight or distinction, that has already been discovered and expounded . It is mainly in this second way that modern philosophers have made their little errors in the beginning. When they are made in this way and then perpetuated by the same ignorance that accounts for their origin, they are ugly monuments to failures in education-failures that have one or both of the following sources: on the one hand, corruptions in the tradition of learning, like the corrupt and decadent scholasticism of the 15th and 16th centuries, the effects of which are so evident in the writings of Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke;1 on the other 1 Though the 15th and 16th centuries were the centuries of Cajetan and Jean Poinsot, their work exerrcised little influence on current scholastic thought, and none outside it. LITTLE ERRORS IN THE BEGINNING 29 hand, an attitude of antagonism toward or even contempt for the...