Ben-Ami Scharfstein

I had this book on the shelf for twenty five years before I finally took it down to read it. By some strange accident, it fit neatly in with several other books and themes I’ve been on with lately in my reading (Plato’s ‘scientific’ universals, Cartesian atomism v. Spinoza’s monism, rel="nofollow" target="_top">the limits of Wittgenstein’s binary logic, scientism, vagueness, inter alia)—evidence that a book can resonate at a moment or in a way never anticipated by the reader, and another good reason for keeping books around.

Scharfstein endorses what he calls ‘empirical philosophizing’ in a discussion of questions regarding the problems of relativism and context. He explores a number of tributaries and tangents in a clear and engaging style that is both a model of and a call for the humble but determined pursuit of knowledge.

The book begins with the familiar story of the emergence of cultural relativism in anthropology and subsequent assertions in other fields that the only truths to be found are contingent upon context. Scharfstein gives the concern for context a thorough philosophical going-over and convincingly concludes that absolute individuality is untenable and that the many worlds assumed by cultural relativists are better taken as versions of the one and only world. Life would be impossible, he says, if not for the degree of unity and uniformity that experience reveals.

Taking context to the extreme limit means that things would become utterly unique, absolutely incomparable, and consequently subject to a paradox developed by the Skeptics: to know that something is new and different, we have to rely on experience, but we can only know those aspects of the new thing that resemble what we already know, and so we are ultimately unable to recognize that it is unique. Individuality must have limits if we are to know anything.

The idea of context is philosophically problematic, then, but it is also liberating. It fits naturally into a world whose infinite relationships tie together everything that comprises it into an infinitely varied unity. This point was made by Spinoza, who described a unified whole composed of the connections between things rather than an atomistic world of distinct, discrete pieces. For Scharfstein, a ‘web of contexts’ ties all individuals into an inextricably single world.

"For instance, the web of contexts for James Joyce would be composed of Irish history, European literary history, Homer, Hamlet, the problem, as Joyce saw it, of artistic creation; scholastic thought; the streets, pubs, people, and character of Dublin; the eternal recurrence of events; the polarities of existence; relativism, the problem of which bother his character Stephen; aggression; and sexuality in all its forms, and much else…"

The idea of a ‘web of contexts’ is the solution to the problem of relativism, says Scharfstein. There are grounds for assuming that the world is best judged to be one rather than many, and that the different cultures are to a significant degree commensurable with one another, but our conventional models and ways of thinking are inadequate for dealing with cultural density, vagueness, complexity, and unpredictability.

The world is ambiguous and indeterminable by ordinary two-valued logic, which tends to lead to polarized thinking— uniqueness v. universality, relativism v. absolutism, emotion v. intellect. A position intermediate between two poles is closer to the way in which we actually think and live. Experience proves to be always both individual and general, or different and somehow the same, always both bitter and sweet, both opposites at once. "An inconstant vagueness, indeterminism, or neitherness seems to be as close as we can get to what we genuinely experience and so often find hard to say or depict in thought." Measurement and mathematics are always imprecise and approximate. Quantum theory tells us that what we once thought were deterministic laws of nature are at best probabilistic. We neither know what we can finally learn nor what we cannot.

Two concepts seem promising for helping us deal with the complexity and ambiguity inherent in the world, according to Scharfstein: turbulence describes an unsmooth flow containing eddies, not unlike the traditional Chinese view of nature as a tangle of forces; and cloudiness takes account of geometrical irregularities, varying densities, holes, instabilities, and vague boundaries. He leaves it to others to take up the philosophical development and application of these concepts.

Scharfstein advocates an intellectual strategy based on the destruction of extremes by one another. "Because the argument between relativism and absolutism is inevitable and insoluble, the most reasonable attitude we can adopt is to see the two as equally essential and mutually necessary": the absolute depends upon the relative, the relative depends upon the absolute. Everything individual is better understood if we can see its universal dimensions, and everything universal is better understood if we can see the individuality lent it by its occasion and its manner of expression. The intermediate position is unstable because it is threatened by inconsistency, but it fits our endless attempt to understand the world in which we exist. The constant adaptation of the position to different empirical circumstances may give it an ad hoc quality at times, says Scharfstein, but this quality is justified in the sense that our intellectual constructions never prove adequate to all that we experience.

There is no use in trying to win a full victory for either the relative or the absolute, admits Scharfstein, but we should not abandon the search for truth nor dismiss the notion of unified reality. "We cannot determine the rightness or wrongness of worlds or versions without some more or less uniform standards for determining rightness and wrongness, and uniform standards seem to imply a uniform truth, and a uniform truth an underlying reality." The inability to prove that something is finally or exclusively true is not the same as to disprove its truth. The Hindu philosopher Udayana (b. 1050) said that the inexpressibility of the nature of an object may be admitted without necessarily admitting the nonexistence of the object. This is on the supposition that the object’s inexpressibility is due to our difficulty in knowing it. To learn, perceive, and act we must see through the differences in experience to the similarities. Scharfstein uses a line from Montaigne to make his keenest point: “our lives are harmonies composed of contraries.”… (mehr)