Philosophy as Knowledge

“The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity.  It may well be.  But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough.  This is not science.  To question this is not to give in to racism.”

-Reported to be the words of gene scientist, James Watson

The understanding that all humans are born equal does not specify what they are equal in.   Were that specification to be understood in finite terms, it would immediately be absurd.  All are born into infinity.  All are born blue-eyed apparently …  But there the finitude of comparison ends: in that infinity.  Size, weight, energy, physical condition, hair colour, strength - make all unalike.  So if being born equal is not an assertion that all are born alike - well then .. well, you say! 

What is the infinity of the human circumstance?  Perhaps we should say that that idea doesn’t have a specifc sense.  That if a value is to be found in infinity then it is through the agreement that no sort of finite criteria such as Watson understands are to be applied to it, for if those criteria are applied then inequality is the consequence. 

In the context of equality we can only agree in infinity. 

‘Watson’, speaking as reported above, stands the agreement whereby our words have a sense of values to one side.  What is insisted on is ’science’: all sense, it is implied (’scientifically’) is measurable.  It being a fact that some people are more intelligent than others, then, as a fact, that is a scientific finding - .  As a fact it has to be admitted - we have to be honest.  But is it a fact?  Or how so?  (For instance our voting system operates on the opposite assumption.)

To be brief … What we are looking at the question of where fact ends.  At what the limits of ‘being factual’ might be.

… ‘Watson’s’ words seem to make this peculiar presupposition; a common sense one perhaps.  The quotation seems to suppose that reason is a faculty; that the ability to reason like sight or hearing exists finitely: that it is contained by something; that like the eye it is stopped in space, even though what stops it, a wall of emptiness, or lightlessness, is merely suggestive of continuation.  Hence that people can have measurably greater or lesser degrees of it.  Watson is alluding to genetic inheritance, and what black people or white have inherited as an average, and thence applies ’quantity’ to ‘quality’ on the view that quality must be finite.   And again: he applies the concept of genetic inheritance to acquired ‘mental faculties’.  But this cannot be said.  What are intelligence, reason, rationality - ?  Eyesight can be measured.  Numbers can be produced.  Someone will have 20/20 vision or a variation.  Some will be short-sighted, longsighted, colour-blind.  Or suffer tunnel vision.  Definite physical measurable criteria will differentiate one person as compared to another.  But an IQ test’s attempt to measure ‘quantity’.   Someone with poor eyesight might be argued to be less qualified in what they say about what they see is correct because their sight is defective, but can others be argued to be defective in their capacity to reason - but, and here is a paradox, not on the grounds of what it is that they actually say or think - their demonstrated intelligence - but on the grounds that their intelligence has been measured to be less than the intelligence of someone else who belongs to a group classed as more intelligent?  (Suppose here some simple clash where the ‘intelligent’ person says something transparently stupid and the ‘inferior’ person something clearly sensible.  Are we to say that the one - the first - ennunciates the ’better seen’ (and therefore the preferred position) of the two so that the second - because the first has a ‘20/20′ intelligence - is simply wrong?  Reason is not a faculty.  Intelligence is not a faculty.  But so - what then is intelligence? My view is that it is simply a product of the human imagination.  It originates there and only there exists: in ‘inexistence’.  Of course, this suggestion seems to be of the vaguest provenance but it stands with logic and sense …What is interesting at this stage is the way this forces us to confront the basic metaphysical crisis in Western thinking. 

Tags: Equality, Infinity, Philosophy, Watson