The broad-leafed trees are all gone. Only small pines are left. Many of these have twisted and stunted shapes.
Soon stunted pines disappear entirely and we’re in alpine meadows. There’s not a tree anywhere, only grass everywhere filled with little pink and blue and white dots of intense color. Wildflowers, everywhere! These and grasses and mosses and lichens are all that can live here, now. We’ve reached the high country, above the timberline.
I look over my shoulder for one last view of the gorge. Like looking down at the bottom of the ocean. People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.
The road turns inward, away from the gorge and into snowfields.
The engine backfires fiercely from lack of oxygen and threatens to stop but never does. Soon we are between banks of old snow, the way snow looks in early spring after a thaw. Little streams of water run everywhere into mossy mud, and then below this into week-old grass and then small wildflowers, the tiny pink and blue and yellow and white ones which seem to pop out, sun-brilliant, from black shadows. Everywhere it’s like this! Little pins of colored light shoot forth to me from a background of somber dark green and black. Dark sky now and cold. Except where the sun hits. On the sun side my arm and leg and jacket are hot, but the dark side, in deep shadows now, is very cold.
The snowfields become heavy and show steep banks where snowplows have been. The banks become four feet high, then six feet, then twelve feet high. We move through twin walls, almost a tunnel of snow. Then the tunnel opens onto dark sky again and when we emerge we see we’re at the summit.
Beyond is another country. Mountain lakes and pines and snowfields are below. Above and beyond them as far as we can see are farther mountain ranges covered with snow. The high country.
We stop and park at a turnoff where a number of tourists take pictures and look around at the view and at one other. At the back of his cycle John removes his camera from the saddlebag. From my own machine I remove the tool kit and spread it out on the seat, then take the screwdriver, start the engine and with the screwdriver adjust the carburetors until the idling sound changes from a really bad loping to just slightly bad. I’m surprised at how all the way up it backfired and sputtered and kicked and gave every indication it was going to quit but never did. I didn’t adjust them, out of curiosity to see what eleven thousand feet of altitude would do. Now I’m leaving them rich and sounding just bad because we’ll be going down some now toward Yellowstone Park and if they aren’t slightly rich now they’ll get too lean later on, which is dangerous because it overheats the engine.
The backfiring is still fairly heavy on the way down from the summit with the engine dragging in second gear, but then the noise diminishes as we reach lower altitudes. The forests return. We move among rocks and lakes and trees now, taking beautiful turns and curves of the road.
I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind.
If all of human knowledge, everything that’s known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all.
Few people travel here. There’s no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people makes the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile.
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one’s way out.
What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it? — How do we really know anything? Is there an “I”, a “soul”, which knows, or is this soul merely cells coordinating senses? — Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent? — When it’s said that something means something, what’s meant by that?
Many trails through these high ranges have been made and forgotten since the beginning of time, and although the answers brought back from these trails have claimed permanence and universality for themselves, civilizations have varied in the trails they have chosen and we have many different answers to the same question, all of which can be thought of as true within their own context. Even within a single civilization old trails are constantly closed and new ones opened up.
It’s sometimes argued that there’s no real progress; that a civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, that destroys the dignity of individuals by subjecting them to a forced mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and agricultural existence of prehistoric times. But this argument, though romantically appealing, doesn’t hold up. The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life… the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself.
One can see how both the informal and formal processes of hypothesis, experiment, conclusion, century after century, repeated with new material, have built up the hierarchies of thought which have eliminated most of the enemies of primitive man. To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions. It’s such a powerful, all-dominating agent of civilized man it’s all but shut out everything else and now dominates man himself. That’s the source of the complaint.
Phædrus wandered through this high country, aimlessly at first, following every path, every trail where someone had been before, seeing occasionally with small hindsights that he was apparently making some progress, but seeing nothing ahead of him that told him which way to go.
Through the mountainous questions of reality and knowledge had passed great figures of civilization, some of whom, like Socrates and Aristotle and Newton and Einstein, were known to almost everyone, but most of whom were far more obscure. Names he had never heard of before. And he became fascinated with their thought and their whole way of thinking. He followed their trails carefully until they seemed to grow cold, then dropped them. His work was just barely passing by academic standards at this time, but this wasn’t because he wasn’t working or thinking. He was thinking too hard, and the harder you think in this high country of the mind the slower you go. Phædrus read in a scientific way rather than a literary way, testing each sentence as he went along, noting doubts and questions to be resolved later, and I’m fortunate in having a whole trunkful of volumes of these notations.
What is most astonishing about them is that almost everything he said years later is contained in them. It’s frustrating to see how completely unaware he is at the time of the significance of what he is saying. It’s like seeing someone handling, one by one, all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose solution you know, and you want to tell him, “Look, this fits here, and this fits here”, but you can’t tell him. And so he wanders blindly along one trail after another gathering one piece after another and wondering what to do with them, and you grit your teeth when he goes off on a false trail and are relieved when he comes back again, even though he is discouraged himself. “Don’t worry”, you want to tell him. “Keep going!”
But he’s such an ab
ominable scholar it must be through the kindness of his instructors that he passes at all. He prejudges every philosopher he studies. He always intrudes and imposes his own views upon the material he is studying. He is never fair. He’s always partial. He wants each philosopher to go a certain way and becomes infuriated when he does not.
A fragment of memory is preserved of him sitting in a room at three and four in the morning with Immanuel Kant’s famous Critique of Pure Reason, studying it as a chess player studies the openings of the tournament masters, trying to test the line of development against his own judgment and skill, looking for contradictions and incongruities.
Phædrus is a bizarre person when contrasted to the twentieth-century Midwestern Americans who surround him, but when he is seen studying Kant he is less strange. For this eighteenth-century German philosopher he feels a respect that rises not out of agreement but out of appreciation for Kant’s formidable logical fortification of his position. Kant is always superbly methodical, persistent, regular and meticulous as he scales that great snowy mountain of thought concerning what is in the mind and what is outside the mind. It is, for modern climbers, one of the highest peaks of all, and I want now to magnify this picture of Kant and show a little about how he thought and how Phædrus thought about him in order to give a clearer picture of what the high country of the mind is like and also to prepare the way for an understanding of Phædrus’ thoughts.
Phædrus’ resolution of the entire problem of classic and romantic understanding occurred at first in this high country of the mind, and unless one understands the relation of this country to the rest of existence, the meaning and the importance of lower levels of what he said here will be underestimated or misunderstood.
To follow Kant one must also understand something about the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume had previously submitted that if one follows the strictest rules of logical induction and deduction from experience to determine the true nature of the world, one must arrive at certain conclusions. His reasoning followed lines that would result from answers to this question: Suppose a child is born devoid of all senses; he has no sight, no hearing, no touch, no smell, no taste… nothing. There’s no way whatsoever for him to receive any sensations from the outside world. And suppose this child is fed intravenously and otherwise attended to and kept alive for eighteen years in this state of existence. The question is then asked: Does this eighteen-year-old person have a thought in his head? If so, where does it come from? How does he get it?
Hume would have answered that the eighteen-year-old had no thoughts whatsoever, and in giving this answer would have defined himself as an empiricist, one who believes all knowledge is derived exclusively from the senses. The scientific method of experimentation is carefully controlled empiricism. Common sense today is empiricism, since an overwhelming majority would agree with Hume, even though in other cultures and other times a majority might have differed.
The first problem of empiricism, if empiricism is believed, concerns the nature of “substance.” If all our knowledge comes from sensory data, what exactly is this substance which is supposed to give off the sensory data itself? If you try to imagine what this substance is, apart from what is sensed, you’ll find yourself thinking about nothing whatsoever.
Since all knowledge comes from sensory impressions and since there’s no sensory impression of substance itself, it follows logically that there is no knowledge of substance. It’s just something we imagine. It’s entirely within our own minds. The idea that there’s something out there giving off the properties we perceive is just another of those common-sense notions similar to the common-sense notion children have that the earth is flat and parallel lines never meet.
Secondly, if one starts with the premise that all our knowledge comes to us through our senses, one must ask, From what sense data is our knowledge of causation received? In other words, what is the scientific empirical basis of causation itself?
Hume’s answer is “None.” There’s no evidence for causation in our sensations. Like substance, it’s just something we imagine when one thing repeatedly follows another. It has no real existence in the world we observe. If one accepts the premise that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, Hume says, then one must logically conclude that both “Nature” and “Nature’s laws” are creations of our own imagination.
This idea that the entire world is within one’s own mind could be dismissed as absurd if Hume had just thrown it out for speculation. But he was making it an airtight case.
To throw out Hume’s conclusions was necessary, but unfortunately he had arrived at them in such a way that it was seemingly impossible to throw them out without abandoning empirical reason itself and retiring into some medieval predecessor of empirical reason. This Kant would not do. Thus it was Hume, Kant said, who “aroused me from my dogmatic slumbers” and caused him to write what is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophical treatises ever written, the Critique of Pure Reason, often the subject of an entire University course.
Kant is trying to save scientific empiricism from the consequences of its own self-devouring logic. He starts out at first along the path that Hume has set before him. “That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt”, he says, but he soon departs from the path by denying that all components of knowledge come from the senses at the moment the sense data are received. “But though all knowledge begins with experience it doesn’t follow that it arises out of experience.”
This seems, at first, as though he is picking nits, but he isn’t. As a result of this difference, Kant skirts right around the abyss of solipsism that Hume’s path leads to and proceeds on an entirely new and different path of his own.
Kant says there are aspects of reality which are not supplied immediately by the senses. These he calls a priori. An example of a priori knowledge is “time.” You don’t see time. Neither do you hear it, smell it, taste it or touch it. It isn’t present in the sense data as they are received. Time is what Kant calls an “intuition”, which the mind must supply as it receives the sense data.
The same is true of space. Unless we apply the concepts of space and time to the impressions we receive, the world is unintelligible, just a kaleidoscopic jumble of colors and patterns and noises and smells and pain and tastes without meaning. We sense objects in a certain way because of our application of a priori intuitions such as space and time, but we do not create these objects out of our imagination, as pure philosophical idealists would maintain. The forms of space and time are applied to data as they are received from the object producing them. The a priori concepts have their origins in human nature so that they’re neither caused by the sensed object nor bring it into being, but provide a kind of screening function for what sense data we will accept. When our eyes blink, for example, our sense data tell us that the world has disappeared. But this is screened out and never gets to our consciousness because we have in our minds an a priori concept that the world has continuity. What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses. Now stop and apply some of the concepts Kant has put forth to this strange machine, this creation that’s been bearing us along through time and space. See our relation to it now, as Kant reveals it to us.
Hume has been saying, in effect, that everything I know about this motorcycle comes to me through my senses. It has to be. There’s no other way. If I say it’s made of metal and other substances, he asks, What’s metal? If I answer that metal’s hard and shiny and cold to the touch and deforms without breaking under blows from a harder material, Hume says those are all sights and sounds and touch. There’s no substance. Tell me what metal is apart from these sensations. Then, of course, I’m stuck.
But if there’s no substance, what can we say about the sense data we receive? If I hold my head to the left and look down at the handle grips and front wheel and map carrier and gas tank I get one pattern of sense d
ata. If I move my head to the right I get another slightly different pattern of sense data. The two views are different. The angles of the planes and curves of the metal are different. The sunlight strikes them differently. If there’s no logical basis for substance then there’s no logical basis for concluding that what’s produced these two views is the same motorcycle.
Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.
Kant comes to our rescue. He says that the fact that there’s no way of immediately sensing a “motorcycle”, as distinguished from the colors and shapes a motorcycle produces, is no proof at all that there’s no motorcycle there. We have in our minds an a priori motorcycle which has continuity in time and space and is capable of changing appearance as one moves one’s head and is therefore not contradicted by the sense data one is receiving.
Hume’s motorcycle, the one that makes no sense at all, will occur if our previous hypothetical bed patient, the one who has no senses at all, is suddenly, for one second only, exposed to the sense data of a motorcycle, then deprived of his senses again. Now, I think, in his mind he would have a Hume motorcycle, which provides him with no evidence whatsoever for such concepts as causation.
But, as Kant says, we are not that person. We have in our minds a very real a priori motorcycle whose existence we have no reason to doubt, whose reality can be confirmed anytime.
This a priori motorcycle has been built up in our minds over many years from enormous amounts of sense data and it is constantly changing as new sense data come in. Some of the changes in this specific a priori motorcycle I’m riding are very quick and transitory, such as its relationship to the road. This I’m monitoring and correcting all the time as we take these curves and bends in the road. As soon as the information’s of no more value I forget it because there’s more coming in that must be monitored. Other changes in this a priori are slower: Disappearance of gasoline from the tank. Disappearance of rubber from the tires. Loosening of bolts and nuts. Change of gap between brake shoes and drums. Other aspects of the motorcycle change so slowly they seem permanent… the paint job, the wheel bearings, the control cables… yet these are constantly changing too. Finally, if one thinks in terms of really large amounts of time even the frame is changing slightly from the road shocks and thermal changes and forces of internal fatigue common to all metals.