Aporetics: Rational Deliberation in the Face of Inconsistency

7. Philosophical Aporetics

102  How Apories Pervade Philosophy The big issues of philosophy regarding truth, justice, meaning, beauty,andthelikewereencapsulatedinImmanuelKant’ssummary of the key questions regarding one’s place in the scheme of things as a rational free agent: What can I know? What shall I do? What may I hope? What should I aspire to? However, thanks to the inherent complexity of the issues, the elaboration and substantiation of answers to such questions inevitably result in contentions that become enmeshed in aporetic conflicts. We have many and far-reaching questions about our place in the world’s scheme of things and endeavor to give answers to them. Generally, the answers that people incline to give to some questions are incompatiblewiththosetheyinclinetogivetoothers .(Wesympathizewith   7 Philosophical Aporetics Philosophical Aporetics 103 the sceptics, but condemn the person who doubts in the face of obvious evidence that drowning children need rescue.) We try to resolve problems in the most straightforward way. But the solutions that fit well in one place often fail to square with those that fit smoothly in another. Cognitive dissonance rears its ugly head and inconsistency arises. And the impetus to remove such puzzlement and perplexity is a prime mover of philosophical innovation. So, while philosophizing may “begin in wonder,” as Aristotle said, it soon runs into puzzlement and perplexity.1 The doctrinal positions of philosophy standardly root in apories —in groups of individually plausible but collectively incompatible contentions. Just here, for example, lay the basic methodological insight of Plato’s Socrates. His almost invariable procedure was a process of Socratic questioning to elicit a presystemic apory that sets the stage for philosophical reflection. Thus in the Republic, Thrasymachus was drawn into acknowledging the aporetic triad: 1. What men call justice is simply what is decreed by the authorities as being in their own interest. 2. It is right and proper (obligatory, in fact) that men should do what is just. 3. Men have no obligation to do what is in the interest of the authorities, particularly since those authorities may well themselves be mistaken about what these interests really are. After all, the problem context of philosophical issues standardly arises from a clash among individually tempting but collectively incompatible overcommitments. Philosophical issues that standardly center about a family of plausible theses that is assertorically overdeterminative in claiming so much as to lead into inconsistency. Or consider another example. Ordinarily, we would say that a person might have acted differently from the way he did, and, had he done so, would still be the very same individual. But Spinoza flatly denies that this is true for God and substantiates this claim by a thought experiment: 104 Philosophical Aporetics [It is wrong to say] that God can change his decrees. For if God’s decrees had been different from what in fact he has decreed concerning Nature—that is, if he had willed and thought differently concerning Nature—then he would necessarily have had a different intellect and a different will from that which he actually has [and so would not be the being he is].2 With God, as Spinoza sees it, a change of mind would mean having a different mind and thereby being a different being. And of course since God (as Spinoza sees it) could not possibly be a being different from the one he is, this argumentation is to be seen as a reductio ad absurdum of God’s decrees—and thereby the actual world—being different in any respect. In addressing philosophical apories in the light of experience, the standard policy proceeds by breaking the chain of inconsistency at its weakest link. And in the setting of philosophical concerns, this will be a matter of weakness in point of assessed plausibility. This issue of philosophical plausibility will here be a matter of consonance with one’s fundamental commitments, which is—and is bound to be—a matter of experience. The sort of data that a philosopher’s course of experience has brought his way is going to be pivotal in this regard. In these cases of collective inconsistency, something obviously has to go. Whatever favorable disposition there may be toward these plausible theses, they cannot be maintained in the aggregate. We are confrontedbya(many-sided)cognitivedilemmaandmustfindaway out. It is clear in these aporetic cases that something has gone amiss, though it may well be quite unclear just where the source of difficulty lies. The resolution of such an...