On Blood and the Impulse to Immortality

Some anthropologists believe that burial in red ocher symbolizes return to the womb of Mother Earth. The evidence does not support this view.


Alice C. Linsley

The question of immortality or "life after death" has drawn the attention of philosophers through the ages: Plato, Porphyrus, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and many more. However, these philosophers hardly agree on what it means to be immortal. Nietzsche's immortality is in his madness, of which Michel Foucault is the most profound observer.

Plato believed the soul to be indestructible even when it is separated from the body. He conceived of the soul as an indivisible whole and "the destruction of a thing consists in separating from each other its parts." (Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2005, p. 423.) Plato's belief in the transmigration of the soul follows logically. The soul must continue to exist in some way or form. It is also likely that he was influenced by the shamanic belief in soul migration that pervaded ancient Eurasia.

The Tyrian philosopher Porphyrus (233-305) was a student of the Neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus. According to Augustine, Porphyrus believed that "the soul, to be happy, must avoid all bodies." (Paul Edwards, ed. Immortality, Macmillan, 1992, p. 96)

Augustine recognized that among the ancient peoples only the Egyptians believed in bodily resurrection and that is why they took geat care in the preservation and burial of their rulers. (J. Davies, Death, Burial, and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity, Routledge, 1999, p. 27) By means of the skillful mummification of their rulers, the Egyptians hoped to avoid the "second death" which results when the soul and body become separated.

The only reference to the second death in the Bible is found in Revelation 2:11 where John encourages those who face persecution: "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes will not be hurt by the second death." Is the context of John's statement Nilotic or Greek? It is possible that this emerges from both contexts as much of classical Greek thought hangs on Plato who studied for thirteen years in Egypt. If the second death concept is found in both contexts, we have evidence of an ancient consensus.

The Egyptians and Augustine believed as did St. Irenaeus that "the resurrection body will have the same shape as the physical body." This was critical to Irenaeus' opposition to Gnosticism.

St. Paul believed that the resurrection body is to the temporal body what the mature kernel of grain is to the wheat seed. In other words, there is a teleological feature that directs the transformation of the mortal into the immortal. Paul qualifies this by saying that this is true for those who are "in Christ" or for those who have died with Christ, a reference to Jesus' statement about his own death that "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." (John 12:24)

The Cartesian approach to the body-soul relationship supported the belief that the soul, being immaterial and extended, can live after death and is indestructible. Descartes wrote, "our soul is of a nature entirely independent of the body, and thus not liable to die with it..."

Arthur Schopenhauer believed that death of the body is not the end as long as the will survives. The will is sufficient to gain bodily objectification, as in reincarnation. Schopenhauer contended that belief in reincarnation was nearly universal among archaic populations, but anthropologists have found no evidence to support his view.

Rather, for ancient populations the hope of life after death was connected to what happened to their ruler in death. It was believed that should he rise from the grave, he would lead his people to immortality. The hope for immortality was not an individual prospect.

The conversation about immortality is further complicated by the fact that Western Philosophy and Eastern Philosophy approach the question from different worldviews. Generally, in the West the physical body has greater importance. This is sometimes taken to the extreme in movements said to guarantee biological immortality through technology and medicine. In recent news, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel has advocated the possible advantages of blood from young persons to slow the aging process.


Immortality as Human Impulse

Given the wide range of thought on this question, it is necessary to begin by defining the term "immortality" as it will be used here.

Immortality pertains to personal existence, not as an old or young person, but as a whole person. Therein rests the true value of the immortal life.

Immortality pertains to a life beyond this temporal realm, but not a pie-in-the sky heavenly existence. There is no risk in immortality of being bored. There is no tedium in living as a whole person.

The immortal nature of angelic beings will not be addressed here. That takes us into idle speculation. (Colossians 2:18)

Since inanimate objects such as rocks never die, they do not enter into the conversation except to note that the Caingang of southern Brazil "at the end of the funeral of one of their people, rub their bodies with sand and stones because these things do not rot." They say "I am going to be like stones that never die." (Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 149).

Immortality does not require that the soul and body be separated after death.This was the great fear of the ancient Egyptians who hoped to cross through Sheol (the realm of shadows) and avoid the second death (the permanent separation of body and soul).

Immortality does not pertain to an immortal soul separated from the body. This is a Gnostic conception which has more in common with Asian dualism than with the Judeo-Christian worldview.

Immortality, as the term is used here, does not include the Hindu and Buddhist conception of non-material escape from samsara. Unlike the religions that seek to escape the material world, the Judeo-Christian tradition values the body and holds that it should not to be destroyed beyond the processes that are natural to death. In Eastern philosophy, the hope of escaping the material requires a level of asceticism that most Asians do not attain, and explains why they hold the monks in such high esteem.

Immortality is a hope expressed by humans. As far as we know, no other living organisms aspire to immortality. It is for humans a yearning. Augustine believed that the yearning for immortality expresses itself in perseverance. He wrote, "It is good for us to persevere in longing until we receive what was promised [resurrection of the body], and when yearning is over; then praise alone will remain." (Discourse on the Psalms)

Paul likens the yearning to an ambition to win something of great value. He speaks of an impulse to run a race in the hope of winning the prize of the "the unsearchable riches of Christ." He wrote,

"Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have laid hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize of God’s heavenly calling in Christ Jesus. All of us who are mature should embrace this point of view." (Philippians 3:13-15)

In this paper, immortality will be considered in the context of a human impulse that is far older than the world religions. This impulse is evident in the widespread practice of burial in red ocher, a symbol of blood.

Red ocher burial has been traced from as early as 100,000 years ago (Qafzeh Cave in Israel) to as recently as 500 years ago (Glacial Kame Culture). The practice is found primarily among Old World populations in Macro-haplogroup L (Mt DNA) and Haplogroup R (Y-DNA). L represents the most ancestral mitochondrial lineage of all modern humans, and R is a widely dispersed Afro-Asian group. There is a high density of R1b in Europe and central Africa.

Dispersion of Haplogroup R1b

Evidence of Immortality

Divergent views on immortality continue into recent times. Consider the philosophers Peter Geech (1916-2013), a devout Roman Catholic, and A.J. Ayer (1910-1989), an atheist and Logical Positivist.

Geech wrote:

"The traditional faith of Christianity... is not going to be shaken by inquiries about bodies burned to ashes or eaten by beasts; those who might well suffer just such death in martyrdom were those who were most confident of a glorious reward in the resurrection." 

In his 1988 article for The Sunday Telegraph, Ayer recounts his near death experience and reflects upon its possible implications. Ayer wrote:

"The admission that personal identity through time requires the identity of a body is a surprising feature of Christianity. I call it surprising because it seems to me that Christians are apt to forget that the resurrection of the body is an element of their creed."

Ayer goes on to speculate how it might be possible for there to be "a reunion of the same atoms" and states that the fallacy of Christian belief in an afterlife is the assumption of the existence of a deity. From a strictly philosophical point of view, evidence of immortality does not prove the existence of God. God is one of various possible explanations.

Considering the wide range of thought on the question of immortality, it is obvious that we are dealing with opinion, speculation, and perhaps a good deal of wishful thinking.

There is no empirical evidence of life after death unless we credit as true the resurrection of Jesus who was called "son of God." According to the New Testament Jesus appeared over a period of forty days to more than five hundred people in his immortal resurrection body. Christian apologists have written volumes about this so I will not delve into the textual evidence of those witnesses.

In reference to the resurrection of Jesus, I wish to point out that the expectation of a divine son who would overcome death and rise on the third day is older than the New Testament and most of the Old Testament. It is found in ancient Nilotic writings such as the Pyramids Texts and the Coffin Texts. This does not prove that Jesus rose from the grave on the third day. It simply verifies that there was an expectation of an event such as described in the New Testament resurrection narratives.

The difficulty in proving immortality by any empirical approach is evident in the fact that Ian Ramsey never mentions the word in his book Religious Language: an empirical placing of theological language. One might consider this odd for an Anglican bishop, but Ian T. Ramsey (1915-1972) was very much the British empiricist.


Evidence of Belief in Life After Death

Though we cannot set forth evidence of immortality that meets the requirements of empirical investigation, employing "positivist tools" we are able to establish substantial evidence of belief in life after death. The evidence comes from archaeological and anthropological studies of human burial practices, and it involves understanding what blood represented to archaic populations.

For at least 100,000 years humans have been buried in red ocher, a naturally occurring ore composed mostly of iron oxide. This was ground to a powder and sprinkled, sometimes copiously, over the body after it had been placed in the grave. Archaeologists and anthropologists agree that the red ocher dust is a symbolic blood covering. However, they do not agree on whether the red ocher is the covering of placental blood or the blood covering of a sacrificial victim.

Placental blood speaks of rebirth from the earth. This is a logical interpretation for populations that believe that their ancestors came to the surface from the depths of the Earth. It is possible that cave burials involving red ocher symbolize a return to the womb, but this has not been proven.

I would be inclined to this view were red ocher burial typically found among populations that held an autochthomous view of human origins. Instead, the red ocher burial is most common among Old World populations and populations that arrived in the New World from Siberia (Clovis) and Northern Europe (Miqmac).

The oldest known burials in red ocher in the Americas date to only 12,000 years before the present (BP). The Red Ocher Complex in southern Wisconsin dates to only 5000 BP. New World populations do not have a long tradition of red ocher burial.

Lévi-Strauss found that the Bororo of central Brazil bury their dead twice, first in a pit in the village plaza where the family members lavishly wash the corpse to hasten the process of decomposition. Once washed of the decaying flesh, the bones are painted red and placed in a basket which is ceremoniously dropped to the bottom of a river. (The Raw and Cooked, p. 192) For the Bororo, however, the most significant symbol of life is water, not blood.

The Mayans practiced secondary burial also and painted the bones of the deceased red. However, the gathered bones were buried on land in ossuary vaults or ollas (funeral vessels), not in water. In arid regions the caves were sources of water and not to be polluted with corpses.

The autochthonous origin of humans also refers to humans being made of the soil (humus), as in the Genesis account of the Creator molding Adam from the adamah (soil). Both words have as their root DM (dammu in Akkadian), which refers to blood. The name Adam is derived from the Hebrew root אדם (A.D.M), which means "to be red or ruddy" (Strong’s #119). The biblical narrative makes a clear connection between red soil pigment and blood.

In Genesis 4:10, we read that the blood of Cain's murdered brother cries out from the ground and is heard by the Creator. The implication is that the ancients believed that the blood of the slain has a voice that calls to God, imploring justice. This may be the deeper meaning behind the biblical phrase: "For the life of a creature is in the blood..." (Leviticus 17:11)

Blood from a sacrificed animal was placed in the holes of Roman boundary stones, and the deity Terminus was called upon to hold the owners of adjacent fields accountable for honoring the boundaries. (Adkins, Dictionary of Roman Religion, p. 221)

Similarly, when chiefs of the ancient Near East met to negotiate land treaties, an animal was sacrificed and a boundary stone was erected. The sacrificed animal became part of the meal that the parties to the treaty ate together.

At ancient Emar in Syria there were three principal festivals involving sacrifice and standing stones. All three involved rubbing the stones with blood from the sacrificial victim and feasting on the sacrificed animal. (Patrick Maxime Michel, "Ritual in Emar" 2013)

Given the evidence, it is a justifiable supposition that red ocher burial among ancient and archaic populations symbolized sacrificial blood, not placental blood.

The relevance of blood to the human impulse to immortality becomes evident when we consider the ontology of the world religions. The soul in Hinduism is the divine Self (Atman). On the rare occasions when an animal is sacrificed it is to enhance the power of a ruler.

The soul in Buddhism is the product of conditions and causes and ultimately is not real. Buddhists do not offer blood sacrifice.

In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam the soul is the real core of the individual person and is perceived to be blemished or fatally diseased. The cure requires a contrite heart and a ritual involving water, as in baptism, and/or blood sacrifice. The writer of Hebrews makes the connection: "According to the Law, in fact, nearly everything must be purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness." (Hebrew 9:22)

In Christianity, historically there is an order to acting on the impulse to immortality. Baptism precedes reception of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist. Ignatius of Antioch (35-108 A.D.) describes the consecrated Bread and Wine as "the medicine of immortality, and the antidote to prevent us from dying, rather that we should live forever in Jesus Christ." (Letter to the Ephesians, Chapter 20).


Blood and Immortality

The question remains as to why the buried body was not sprinkled with the blood of the sacrificed animal? Why use red ocher as a substitute? Among those who believed that humans came from the earth, or are constituted of earth dust, the use of an earth pigment makes sense.

The same conception is found among Christians who observe Ash Wednesday. When imposing the ashes, the priest reminds the recipient, "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return."

Another explanation is the primitive anxiety about blood. Blood was viewed as both a polluting and a purifying agent. After combat warriors underwent a purification ritual overseen by the priests. This is likely the context of the story about Abraham receiving the ruler-priest Melchizedek after the battle of the kings (Genesis 14). Note that Melchizedek came to Abraham with bread and wine.

The connection between blood and purity is evident in the linguistic connections between the words for blood, pure, and holy in the Afro-Asiatic languages. Consider the relationship of these words: Hebrew thr - to be pure, Hausa/Hahm toro - clean; Tamil tiru - holy, Dravidian tor - blood, and ancient Egyptian tr - blood.

Blood anxiety has been observed by such prominent anthropologists as Lévi-Strauss and Colin Turnbull. Lévi-Strauss notes that the Timbira of Brazil have a taboo against eating roast meat with fingers stained with blood from the hunt. (The Raw and the Cooked, p. 151)  The Bororo share this repulsion to blood, believing themselves to be polluted whenever they become stained with blood. (Ibid, p. 152) Turnbull notes that the Pygmies view blood as dreadful, but recognize it as pertaining to both death and life (The Forest People, p. 186).

Blood anxiety is expressed in many cultures in regard to menstrual blood. The woman or girl in menses is required to live apart from the community during her period. The same isolation is required with birthing. The woman giving birth is attended only by other females in a place apart.

Colin Turnbull writes about blood anxiety among the BaBira villagers of the central African plains.

“Blood of any kind is a terrible and powerful thing, associated with injury and sickness and death. Menstrual blood is even more terrible because of its mysterious and regular recurrence. Its first appearance is considered by the villagers as a calamity– an evil omen. The girl who is defiled by it for the first time is herself in danger, and even more important she has placed the whole family and clan in danger. She is promptly secluded, and only her mother (and, I suspect, one or two other close and senior female relatives) may see her and care for her. She has to be cleansed and purified, and the clan itself has to be protected, by ritual propitiation…” (The Forest People, p. 185)

However, among one of the oldest known human populations, the forest Pygmies, first menstrual blood represents life and the girl is secluded for a month with her friends in what might we considered an extended slumber party. Turnbull writes, "The girl enters seclusion, but not the seclusion of the village girl...In the house of the elima the girls celebrate the happy event together." (Ibid., p. 187)

Blood anxiety is a reason to avoid blood, especially in burial with the hope of life after death. In that context red ocher is a safe substitute and a sign to the invisible powers that the buried person is under a propitiatory blood covering.

From the data collected, this researcher concludes that the 100,000 year practice of red ocher burial speaks of a hope for immortality, and that the blood symbolism testifies to a propitiatory impulse among archaic and ancient populations, an impulse that is preserved most intact in the Messianic faith called “Christianity.”

Related: The Question of Immortality; Early Resurrection Texts; Red Ocher Burial of the East Baltic; The Sting of Death; Plato's Image of Immortality; Sheol and the Second Death; An Early Case of Color Symbolism: Ochre Use by Modern Humans in Qafzeh Cave (Harvard Library); Adam Was a Red Man

Theories of Knowledge - Locke and Hume

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things."--René Descartes

Alice C. Linsley


Francis Bacon insisted that methodical observation and experimentation (the scientific method) can progressively increase human knowledge and benefit all of humanity. Bacon also demonstrated through his experiments that the senses can be fooled and thus raised doubt about "common sense" ideas. Bacon insisted that true knowledge must begin with doubt. He wrote, "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties." --Francis Bacon (1605) The Advancement of Learning, Book 1, v.8

Descartes felt it necessary to one reject entirely all beliefs about which there is the slightest doubt. He wanted to build a system of belief based on certainty. Descartes' point of certainty was his own rational existence:  "I am thinking, therefore I am existing." He wrote in Discourse on Method, "But I soon noticed that while I thus wished to think everything false, it was necessarily true that I who thought so was something. Since this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so firm and assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were unable to shake it, I judged that II could safely accept it as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking." (Part Four on "Proofs of the Existence of God and of the Human Soul)

Descartes develops this as a proof for the existence of God. He continues, "After that I reflected upon the fact that I doubted, and that in consequence, my spirit was not wholly perfect, for I saw clearly that it was a greater perfection to know than to doubt. I decided to ascertain form what source I had learned to think of something more perfect than myself, and it appeared evident that it must have been from some nature which is in fact more perfect... I was not the only being in existence..., and it followed of necessity that there was someone else more perfect upon whom I depended and from whom I had acquired all that I possessed. For if I had been alone and independent of anything else, so that I had bestowed upon myself all that limited quantity of value which I shared with the perfect Being, I would have been able to get from myself, in the same way, all the surplus which I recognize as lacking in me, and so would have been myself infinite, eternal, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and, in sum, I would possess all the perfections that I could discover in God."

Here Descartes articulates a form of the argument from design. The reasoning goes like this:  I find imperfection in myself and I recognize it, which means that I have consciousness of something or someone more perfect than myself. That being so, I must have been designed by that greater Perfection. Descartes wrote: "The very principle which I took as a rule to start with, namely, that all those things which we conceived very clearly and very distinctly are true, is known to be true only because God exists and because he is a perfect Being, and because everything in us comes from him. From this it follows that our ideas or notions, being real things which come from God insofar as they are clear and distinct, cannot to that extent fail to be true."

Descartes contributed to the development of new theories of mind and consciousness. He defined thought "to include everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware [conscii] of it. Thus all the operations of the will, the intellect, the imagination and the senses are thoughts."

John Locke (1632-1704)

The British empiricist John Locke believed that experience alone is the basis of all knowledge. He argued this against Descartes's position that the human mind holds innate ideas.

Locke contributed to the development of theories of consciousness. If a thought is something “within us" of which we are conscious, what is the nature of consciousness? Locke insists that the mind is empty at birth, a tabula rasa. All our ideas are shaped by experience; sensations, and reflections.

Locke wrote that "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences." He argued that the "associations of ideas" that one makes as a child are very important because they are the foundation of the self. He warned against letting "a foolish maid" convince a child that "goblins and sprites" are associated with the dark of night for "darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined, that he can no more bear the one than the other." Locke's theory of association influenced educational theory up to the nineteenth century. Educators warned parents not to allow their children to develop negative associations. 

David Hume (1711-1776)

The Scottish philosopher David Hume continues the empiricist trajectory, developing the consequences of Locke's thought. Hume held that in the search for truth, we cannot rely on the common-sense pronouncements, popular notions, or metaphysical speculation. Building on Locke's epistemology, Hume tried to describe how the mind works in acquiring what is called knowledge. He concluded that no theory of reality is possible; there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience. He wrote, "If we take in our hands any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding)

In Hume's view, normal human reasoning is flawed and this raises radical doubt about all claims to know something. When we give the reasons for our beliefs about the world, we find that many of the offered explanations are contradictory. For example, one person asserts that something is true for them, but another denies that it is true in their experience. How can something be said to be true for one person and not for another? After exposing a series of contradictions within the human reasoning process, Hume reaches this conclusion: "The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another." (Treatise of Human Nature)

To the epistemological conversation he adds an additional criterion: do not consent to any belief that is not found to be universally true. This is the ultimate test of truth: that it should be demonstrated mathematically as a universal truth or, following Sir Isaac Newton, as a universal physical law.

Hume conceived of philosophy as the inductive, experimental science of human nature. He sought to discover the causes of human belief. For Hume, this is the proper work of philosophy. Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature and all of the first Enquiry represent his attempts to do exactly this. He wrote, "my intention never was to penetrate into the nature of bodies, or explain the secret causes of their operations. For besides that this belongs not to my present purpose, I am afraid, that such an enterprize is beyond the reach of human understanding, and that we can never pretend to know body otherwise than by those external properties, which discover themselves to the senses." (Treatise of Human Nature, Sec. V)

Despite Hume's radical empiricism, he continued to value common sense, and apparently did not take his own skepticism, such as the problem of induction, to the extreme that others did after him. He recognized that the consequences of his radical skepticism clashed with common sense and his concern for enlightenment scholarship.  [Antony G Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy, rev 2nd edn (New York: St Martin's Press, 1984), p 156].

Related reading: Theories of Knowledge - Part 1; Theories of Knowledge - Part 2; Why You Have to Love David Hume; Why Hume Was Wrong

Theories of Knowledge - Bacon and Descartes

"Knowledge is the rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate"-- Francis Bacon

"I think, therefore I am."--Rene Descartes

"Our only hope, then is in genuine Induction... There is the same degree of licentiousness and error in forming Axioms, as in abstracting Notions: and that in the first principles, which depend in common induction. Still more is this the case in Axioms and inferior propositions derived from Syllogisms."--Francis Bacon

"A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence."--David Hume

Alice C. Linsley


Epistemology explores questions related to knowledge. It is concerned with how knowledge can be acquired and how to substantiate truth claims. Is it possible to know the true nature of something? What can be known? What are the limits of human understanding?  How can I verify that this claim is true? Does our knowledge represent reality as it really is? Does innate knowledge exist? Is it possible to understand natural phenomena solely on the basis of observation and the senses?

From the dawn of human existence, the need to know about things in nature has contributed to human survival.  It moved early humans to explore and discover new places.  It motivated them to sample berries, nuts and grains. Through trial and error they came to know which fruits were good and which would make them sick. Archaic human populations gained knowledge by interacting with their environments, by observation of patterns in nature,and by reasoning.

Plato would say that the earliest humans had some innate knowledge of Truth, assuming that they had souls. Ritual burial, symbolic markings, primitive counting devices, and stone works such as the 70,000 year old carving of a python in the side of a mountain in Botswana, indicate that archaic human populations were essentially "religious" and concerned about knowing what is beyond their day-to-day lives.

Some ideas we have about reality may have been found to be inadequate. If we are thoughtful people, we will re-evaluate these ideas. Throughout history, philosophers have shown that many ideas are not true, or at only partially true, and therefore not reliable. We are wise to exercise a certain amount of doubt, especially when it comes to following people who have shown themselves to be careless and/or pig-headed.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) showed that the senses can be fooled and that appearances can be deceptive. Yet more than any other thinker of his time, he urged that the senses be used in a methodical way to discover the nature of heat, light, wind, motion, the tides and the stars and even the human being. The future belongs to "Those who aspire not to guess and divine," wrote Bacon, "but to discover and to know... who propose to examine and dissect the nature of this very world itself, to go to facts themselves for everything."

Sir Francis Bacon

Bacon is regarded as the father of modern empiricism. His method of investigating natural phenomena involved inductive reasoning, in contrast to deductive reasoning, which had dominated science since Aristotle.  Bacon introduced an inductive method of testing and refining hypotheses by observing, measuring, and experimenting. An Aristotelian might deduce that water is necessary for life since it is evident that organisms cannot survive without water. A Baconian would test the hypothesis by experimenting. The results of those experiments would lead to more informed conclusions about the necessity of water for organic life.

After centuries of knowledge shaped by Roman Catholic beliefs, Bacon issued a summons to feast on knowledge acquired by the senses, through experimentation and logical principles. He organized his first book the Advancement of Learning in two parts. The first was called Experientian Literata. In this section he proceeds from one experiment to another. The second part, the Interpretation of Nature, moves from experiments to general principles or axioms, and then on to new experiments. Bacon loved to innovate!

In The Advancement of Learning and in New Organon, Bacon sets forth the idea of technological and scientific progress.  He is the first to articulate the popular notion that human advancements are progressive, rather than cyclical, static or in linear decline. He held a Utopian view of the gradual acquisition of knowledge, and he advocated this progressivism with the ardor of an evangelist.

The philosopher in the trajectory of empiricism that embodies Bacon's method most fully is David Hume. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume wrote, "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. In such conclusions as are founded on an infallible experience, he expects the event with the last degree of assurance, and regards his past experience as a full proof of the future existence of that event. In other cases, he proceeds with more caution: He weighs the opposite experiments: He considers which side is supported by the greater number of experiments: to that side he inclines,with doubt and hesitation; and when at last he fixes his judgement,the evidence exceeds not what we properly call probability. All probability, then, supposes an opposition of experiments and observations, where the one side is found to overbalance the other, and to produce a degree of evidence, proportioned to the superiority. A hundred instances of experiments on one side, and fifty on another, afford a doubtful expectation of any event; though a hundred uniform experiments, with only one that is contradictory, reasonably begets a pretty strong degree of assurance." (Chapter 10, Concerning Miracles) These words could have been written by Francis Bacon himself!


René Descartes (1596-1650)

Just as Bacon is considered the first modern empiricist, so René Descartes is regarded as the father of modern philosophy. He contributed to the philosophical project in many areas:  theories of consciousness, the argument from design, and moral philosophy. He is an important figure in epistemology because he developed a method of weighing evidence that allowed for innate ideas.

Descartes' method involved setting aside his previously held views in order to begin from a point of logical certainty. He believed that most of what he "knew" was not reliable. He wrote, "All that up to the present time I have accepted as true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely anything by which we have once been deceived." (Meditations on First Philosophy) Here Descartes sets out a principle that guided his epistemology: If there is any reason for doubt, then the entire category should be treated as doubtful and unreliable. His method was simple: don't accept anything as true if there is the slightest possibility that it is not true. This is known as the Method of Cartesian Doubt. Modern philosophy begins with doubt.

In attempting to toss out what he had believed and later doubted, in order to construct a system of belief based on certainly, Descartes began with this: "I think, therefore I am" or "I am thinking, therefore I exist." (Cogito ergo sum.)  His awareness of his own self constituted the point of certainty from which he intended to consider and verify knowledge.

Descartes is often considered the founder of modern philosophy with its bent toward empiricism. He conceived of all the branches of science as a whole and sought a methodology that worked toward a unified science. He wrote that “philosophy is like a tree: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches that issue from the trunk are all the other sciences..." The metaphor is strange in the context of what he attempts. Descartes attempts to show that what is not mental or mind-like is extension, that is, it takes up space. However it is not possible to speak of philosophy as taking up space as a tree does. Here we recognize an inconsistency in Descartes’ thought.

Descartes

Descartes viewed mind and body as distinct entities or substances. He concluded that the basic features of material objects are geometrical. They have size, shape, volume, etc.  The mind can not be measured in the same way.  It is characterized by thinking, reasoning and imagination. For Descartes the essential property of the mind is that it thinks and the essential property of the body is that it is “extended.” Extension is the property of taking up space. In this view, action or movement is explained by the impact of one extended object upon another. How then can mental events, that are without extension, have an impact on objects that take up space? Descartes is a great nightmare for the paranormal cults!

Descartes has been criticized for separating mind and matter into two distinct substances and failing to explain how they may be said to be related and/or interactive. This Cartesian dualism gave rise to fascinating reflections on the Mind of God, which Descartes believed to be the Principle that unites the realms of Mind and Matter. George Berkeley (1685-1753) would take this to a logical extreme with his immaterialism and the idea that all things are an extension of the Mind of the Creator.

Cartesian doubt influenced many thinkers of the modern era. Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is one of them. He began is operations with three theses that he came to appreciate in the conversations of many modern philosophers. They are: (1) philosophy begins with doubt; (2) in order to philosophize, one must have doubted; and (3) modern philosophy begins with doubt.

Related reading: Ontology and the Philosophical Project: Theories of Time and Eternity; INDEX of Topics at Philosophers' Corner; Descartes' Ontological Argument; Theories of Knowledge - Part 1; Theories of Knowledge - Part 3

Leibniz Critiques Descartes

Descartes' project lead him to a problem that he could not overcome: the problem of the interaction between mind and matter. How it is that the mind can influence events? How does the spirit push around material objects? He brought us to the brink of the problem, but then failed to explain the interaction of mind and body or spirit and matter. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)  said, "Monsieur Descartes seems to have given up the game so far as we can see." Descartes dropped the ball, but the ball kept rolling and was picked up by other great thinkers. One of those thinkers was the German rationalist Leibniz who put forward an "impressive interlocking metaphysical system."

Leibniz conceived of reality as consisting of God and non-composite, immaterial, soul-like entities called "monads." Leibniz believed that things seem to cause other things because God pre-ordained harmony between all things in the universe.

He was scornful of Descartes' failure to argue his mind-body dualism to its logical end, but he proposed his own version of the mind-body dualism. In his writings, Leibniz talks a good deal about machines such as watches and clocks. In Section 17 of the Monadology he presents an argument about the relationship between mentality and machines. Leibniz’s “mill argument” is as follows:

Moreover, we must confess that perception, and what depends upon it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is through shapes, size and motions. If we imagine that there is a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will find only parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception. And so, one should seek perception in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine. (GP VI, 609/AG 215)

Imagine walking around inside a large mill or factory. You are able to see the mechanics and observe the processes, but you do not find a "brain" in the factory to explain how the factory thinks and acquires knowledge. Things operate according to their inventor's design. They run and produce, as is true also of the human, so why do we assume that the human brain involves thinking? Mechanical processes do not explain thinking, therefore, external operations and mental operations are two distinct things. This is Leibniz's version of dualism.

Leibniz’s Critique of Descartes

Leibniz observed that if life is a dream (as Nietzsche asserted), it must still have structure. He applied this idea to the relationship of objects. According to Leibniz, every entity whether mental or physical is independent and constitutes a “monad.” Each monad is fixed or determined in its properties according to its essence or nature. Whatever form an entity takes or whatever happens to an entity is entirely determined by its essential characteristics and not from the influence of any other entity (a version of essentialism).

Leibniz overcame Descartes’ dualism by claiming that there is no connection between mind and body, but a harmonization of all (Monism) on the level of kinetic energy. Leibniz believed that the world is not as Descartes claims. It has structure, but what we see is merely the visible outcome of infinitely numerous spiritual things that are not complex and therefore not divisible. Today we might speak of “monads” as the most fundamental units of energy.

Leibniz disagreed with Descartes that God is the mechanism that makes connection of mind-body possible. That would be to cast God as an extension of the mind and would suggest that God can be reduced to constituent parts or analyzed into simpler elements. For Leibniz, the ultimate constituents of the world must be non-material and therefore not divisible. These cannot occupy space and cannot be said to have extension. In this view, God is not a mechanism that connects things, but instead the mind that harmonizes all things. Here Leibniz approaches Baruch Spinoza’s thought. In fact, the two rationalists had spoken face to face. Spinoza conceived of God as “a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” Leibniz would have agreed with Spinoza’s statement that “In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way.”

Leibniz believed that material and non-material entities do not influence one another, but there is a pre-established harmony between all entities. Consider the example of two clocks that keep perfect time and are exactly synchronized. One has a bell that rings when the hour is struck. The other has no bell; when the one clock points to the hour, the other clock rings precisely at the moment. Descartes would argue that the clocks have some connection and the mechanism that connects is God. Leibniz would argue that although the clocks have no relation to each other, they keep perfect time because from the outset they were synchronized by God.

Just as Descartes begins with skepticism to overthrow skepticism so Leibniz begins with Cartesian dualism to overthrown it with his Monism.

Related Reading: Theories of Knowledge (Part 1); Leibniz on Descartes' Principles

Ontology and the Philosophical Project

Descartes and Heidegger duel

Alice C. Linsley

From the time of René Descartes, ontology and speculation about the purpose of Philosophy became intertwined. The Cartesian mind-body problem pushed philosophers to reflect not only on the nature of being and existence, but also on the nature of philosophy itself. Philosophers became conscious of themselves and their work. Philosophy became a self-conscious project with a great proliferation of ideas and innovative thought. Unfortunately, while the questions being considered matter on the level of daily life, the discussion moved beyond the intellectual reach of the average person. Today only those with a background in Philosophy have some understanding of the work of Leibnitz, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida and Wittgenstein.

René Descartes (1596-1650) is often considered the founder of modern Philosophy. He conceived of all the branches of science as a whole and sought a methodology that worked toward a unified science. He wrote that “philosophy is like a tree: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches that issue from the trunk are all the other sciences . . ."

His metaphor betrays his mission. Descartes attempts to show that what is not mental or mind-like is extension, that is, it takes up space. However it is not possible to speak of Philosophy as taking up space. As we will see, others philosophers have recognized this inconsistency in Descartes’ thought.

Descartes regarded the individual mind as the ground of being. His awareness of his own self constituted the point of certainty from which he could proceed to consider and verify knowledge. This is the basis for his theory of knowledge (epistemology).

Descartes viewed mind and body as distinct entities or substances. He concluded that the basic features of material objects are geometrical. They have size, shape, volume, etc. The mind is not measureable in the same way. The mind is characterized by thinking, reasoning and imagination. For Descartes the essential property of the mind is that it thinks and the essential property of the body is that it is “extended.” Extension is the property of taking up space. In this view of the material world, action or movement is explained by the impact of one extended object upon another. The question arises how mental events can impact objects if they are not extended?

Descartes’ view of God must also be questioned. If God is mind-like how can He be the Primer Mover? How can God bring about action or movement? How can God create material things? Descartes does not answer this. His ontological argument for God’s existence is based on his assumption that God is self-evident as are axioms of geometry. God's existence is as obvious and self-evident as the most basic mathematical truth. Descartes is taking a common sense approach. His ontological argument is not a formal proof, but a self-evident axiom grasped by intuitive reasoning. He appears to be more interested in affirming his conception of reality than in affirming God’s existence. God is used by Descartes to certify his epistemological or cognitive confidence in a mathematical science of nature.

Descartes has been criticized for separating mind and matter into two distinct substances and failing to explain how they may be said to be related and/or interactive. This Cartesian dualism gave rise to the concept of other minds and in particular the Mind of God, which Descartes believed to be the Principle which unites the realms of Mind and Matter. Later George Berkeley would take this to a logical extreme with his panentheism.


Ontological Arguments for God

Descartes was not the first philosopher to formulate an ontological argument for the existence of God. St. Anselm in the eleventh century postulated that God necessarily exists because it is possible to conceive of a being a greater than which cannot be conceived. God by definition is that being above which there can be no greater power and no greater majesty. Anselm was approaching the subject from the assumption that faith is necessary for understanding (fides quaerens intellectum).

Descartes' approach is more intuitive and rationalist. He reasons that an entity with essence must necessarily exist. On the other hand, to determine the essence of something allows one to avoid the harder explanation of how the Mind-like Supreme Being is related to the material world. Descartes speaks of God's essence without having to prove his existence. This distinction allows him to avoid the numinous.


Leibnitz’s Critique of Descartes

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716) observed that if life is a dream (as Nietzsche asserted), it must still have structure. He applied this idea to the relationship of objects. According to Leibnitz, every entity whether mental or physical is independent and constitutes a “monad.” Each monad is fixed or determined in its properties according to its essence or nature. Whatever form an entity takes or whatever happens to an entity is entirely determined by its essential characteristics and not from the influence of any other entity (a version of essentialism).

Leibnitz overcame Descartes’ dualism by claiming that there is no connection between mind and body, but a harmonization of all (Monism) on the level of kinetic energy. Leibnitz believed that the world is not as Descartes claims. It has structure, but what we see is merely the visible outcome of infinitely numerous spiritual things that are not complex and therefore not divisible. Today we might speak of “monads” as the most fundamental units of energy.

Leibnitz disagreed with Descartes that God is the mechanism that makes connection of mind-body possible. That would be to cast God as an extension of the mind and would suggest that God can be reduced to constituent parts or analyzed into simpler elements. For Leibnitz, the ultimate constituents of the world must be non-material and therefore not divisible. These cannot occupy space and cannot be said to be extensions. In this view, God is not a mechanism that connects things, but instead the mind that harmonizes all things. Here Leibnitz approaches Baruch Spinoza’s thought. In fact, the two rationalists had spoken face to face. Spinoza conceived of God as “a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” Leibnitz would have agreed with Spinoza’s statement that “In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way.”

Leibnitz believed that material and non-material entities do not influence one another, but there is a pre-established harmony between all entities. Consider the example of two clocks that keep perfect time and are exactly synchronized. One has a bell that rings when the hour is struck. The other has no bell; when the one clock points to the hour, the other clock rings precisely at the moment. Descartes would argue that the clocks have some connection and the mechanism that connects is God. Leibnitz would argue that although the clocks have no relation to each other, they keep perfect time because from the outset they were synchronized by God.


Husserl’s Critique of Descartes

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was a German philosopher and mathematician who believed that for each person one thing is certain: our own conscious awareness. We must begin here if we seek to build knowledge of reality on a philosophically solid foundation. Husserl agreed with Descartes that our own conscious awareness is the one certainty. However, he criticized Descartes’ disembodied ego as the starting point. He argued that when we analyze our awareness we recognize something other than self and although we may mentally distinguish between mind and body, in actual experience we are never able to distinguish between states of consciousness and objects of consciousness.

Husserl stressed the need to consider ordinary phenomena of daily life and to describe them without relying on scientific assumptions. A central feature of Husserl’s thought is “intentionality” or directedness. Husserl called intentionality “the fundamental property of consciousness.”

Husserl is considered the founder of phenomenology, the science of Consciousness. He attempted to develop the phenomenological method as its own distinctive and rigorous science. He insisted that the study of consciousness must differ from the study of nature because it cannot be studied the way we study objects in nature. Husserl argued that information and insight do not come from large amounts of data, but emerge from an intense study of experiences, performed through the phenomenological method. He called intentionality “the principle theme of phenomenology” and set about to demonstrate that direct experience of phenomena moves beyond reasoning to include pains, moods, memories, and any other experience or content of conscious awareness.

Skeptics argue that we can never be certain that objects of our consciousness have separate existence independent of our awareness of them. Against the skeptics, Husserl argued that phenomena of which we are conscious are founded in sensory data and therefore cannot be said to lack objectivity.

Husserl’s work is ontological because it seeks to investigate the parts that make up the whole of conscious experience. He attempted to think about consciousness in terms of parts and wholes. Husserl's Logical Investigations set forth the foundation of the formal theory of wholes and their parts known as “mereology.” However, the term mereology does not appear in Husserl’s book. Mereological thinking involves exploration of sets and their relationship. For example, when we speak of a couple, we are speaking of two people and their relationship. In the case of the sacrament of marriage we are speaking of at least 6 aspects: the man and the woman; their relationship, the relationship of each individual to their Maker, and the covenant relation made before God and witnesses.

When we speak of night and day, we are speaking of two experiences with a range of in-between experiences that we call “dawn” and “dust”. Often the sets are used to express the whole range of experience. For example, the expression “night and day” represents a 24-hour cycle.

A merism is a figure of speech which references an experience using a phrase that enumerates several of its parts. To say that “they searched high and low” is to mean that they searched everywhere. Merisms are common in Biblical poetry. In Genesis 1:1 we read that God created "the heavens and the earth." The merism means that God created the whole universe. In Psalm 139, the psalmist declares that God knows "my sitting down and my rising up”, which is simply to say that God knows all the psalmist's actions. The phrase “good and evil” – as in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - is merism whereby a pair of opposites refer to something greater than the constituents. The tree symbolizes all that can be known. Adam and Eve were barred from eating of this fruit because such a property rightly pertains to God alone.

Jacques Derrida explored merisms, binary oppositions, and reversals in his approach to meaning called “deconstructionism.” Derrida was influenced by Husserl and by one of Husserl’s students, Martin Heidegger.


Heidegger’s Critique of Descartes

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being." Heidegger maintained that philosophy, in the process of philosophizing, had lost sight of the Being it sought. He rejected Descartes’ image of philosophy as a tree, insisting that the roots of the tree must be cut. To grasp Being metaphysics must be overthrown. He maintained that Descartes’ cogito ergo sum does not constitute an unshakable foundation and can never lead to absolute science.

We must conclude that Heidegger is correct. Descartes attempted this starting position as an act of scrubbing his mind of what he has been taught by the Jesuits and what he had experienced. This is hardly possible. Each of us is formed by what we have learned and by what we have experienced. It is not possible to scrub the mind clean and start from scratch, as Descartes attempted to do. After all is said and done, the human consciousness is far more complex than is granted by Descartes. Being is the ground of our experience and though we are able to think about what we experience, thinking is not synonymous with being.


“Being There” as the Necessary Point of Reference

For Heidegger, Being there (Dasein) is meaningless apart from the human. Man alone has being. Rocks and trees exist, but they do not have Being. God and angels may be real, but they have no Being. They are not natural to the world of human experience. The proposition "man alone has Being" does not mean that these other entities are unreal or figments of human imagination. When we say that human Being is, we are asserting something about what can be known by human beings since we are able to distinguish our Being from beings. Man alone can perceive and experience the existential nature of humanness and is conscious of other beings.

Heidegger wrote that “Dasein is its world existingly.” He regarded “Being there” as the concealed and elusive ground of all that we might think, experience or discuss. He was attempting to uncover what he perceived to be an overlooked presupposition of philosophy. Being there, humans are not spectators of a world of objects. Being is vital, not mental. Being stirs Being. It rouses Being to respond to Being. Being makes us yearn for being or causes us to become attached to Being on a visceral level. It is the function of the being being with know-how.

Heidegger wrote, "One of the basic errors of our times is to believe a 'deep' understanding of the human being is to be obtained by groping around in trivial shallows. Human Dasein gains depth only if it succeeds for itself, in its own experience, in first throwing itself beyond itself - to its limits. Only from the height of this high projection does it glimpse its true depths." (The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, p.17)

Heidegger wrote that “Dasein always exists as itself, and being-a-self is in every case only in its process or realization, as is also existence. For this reason, projection of the basic ontological constitution of Dasein must arise by constructing one of the most extreme possibilities of Dasein’s authentic and total capability of being. The projection is directed towards Dasein, as a whole, and towards the basic determinations of its wholeness, even though Dasein in each case is only as existent. To put it another way, attaining the metaphysical neutrality and isolation of Dasein as such is only possible on the basis of the extreme existential involvement [Einsatz] of the one who himself projects.” (The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Indiana University Press, p 139-140)

For Heidegger, Being has remained concealed throughout the history of metaphysics. The fate of metaphysics, in his view, is that it can never uncover its own ground of Being. Ontological concealedness is the very nature of metaphysics, and this is why Descartes’ metaphor of philosophy as a tree misleads us. Dasein is not existence of subject-object consciousness. It is the existence of being qua being.


Related reading: The Story of Ontology; A Closer Look at Martin Heidegger; Introduction to Ontology; What Constitutes Being?; Levi-Strauss and Derrida on Binary Oppositions; Something Older; Crash Course on Phenomenology