A friend of mine has asked me his opinion on a philosophy paper he’s just written not sure if he did it for uni or personal pleasure, but thought I’d share it with you lot 'cause I reckon it’s pretty funny.
Kit
Which if any of the following is preferable: dualism, monism or pluralism?
The issue becomes a lot clearer if we use a dialogue…
Imagine two people stood in front of a wall:
#1: I wonder what is behind the wall?
#2: A truck.
#1: How do you know that?
#2: The wall is exactly large enough to cover a truck from our view.
#1: but it’s only large enough to cover a small truck; it couldn’t cover an articulated truck.
#2: What’s your point?
#1: Well… just saying ‘it’s a truck’ doesn’t tell us enough, does it? We don’t know what kind of truck is behind the wall; for all we know , the wall could cover a single egg…
#2: Why would the wall be so big then?
#1: So maybe it’s an egg and a duck.
#2: Whoever heard of two things behind a wall?! The very idea is absurd!
#1: Why?
#2: Well, there is only one wall. So there must be only one ‘thing-behind-the-wall’!
#1: But there is the wall as well as the ‘thing-behind-the-wall’, so I deduce that there are two ‘things-behind-the-walls’.
#2: But if you will say that there are two ‘things-behind-the-walls’, what is stopping there from being ten, or even twelve ‘things-behind-the-walls’?!
#1: Hmm… good point… well I can see at least twenty different bricks that make the wall, so perhaps there are many ‘things-behind-the-walls’! ‘Behindthewall’ could be pluralistic!
#2: Perhaps… but even if there are, let’s say, twenty ducks and ( if we want to be really crazy) five geese, maybe even some eggs as well… if there are all these things, aren’t they all still ‘Behindthewall’?
#1: I suppose…
#2: So we can say that the true nature of ‘Behindthewall’ is monistic – these geese and ducks and eggs are actually one; they are all ‘Behindthewall’ – we talk of ‘Behindthewall’, which is one thing, so ‘Behindthewall’ must be monistic, otherwise how could we talk of ‘Behindthewall’?
#1: Ahh, but you’re forgetting the wall, remember? There is a wall and ‘Behindthewall’. The back of the wall is obviously ‘Behindthewall’, but because we can see the front of the wall, we know that the back of the wall must be a kind of ‘Behindthewall’ that is ‘NotBehindthewall’. So there are two kinds of ‘Behindthewall’, one of which is a kind of ‘NotBehindthewall’ –they are both different but connected in a way I cannot explain. I thus deduce that ‘Behindthewall’ is by nature [Cartesian] dualistic.
#2: It’s a toughie… perhaps we will never know the true nature of ‘Behindthewall’…
#1: Don’t say such a thing!
#2: Well, think about it; all we can see is ‘Infrontofthewall’ and we can never tell if ‘Infrontofthewall’ has anything to do with ‘Behindthewall’; I mean it really could be anything…
#1: Anything?! Even a dog?!
#2: Yes, even a dog!
#1: But we should still try to find out the nature of ‘Behindthewall’…
#2: Oh yes! But we shall have to be rigorous: no more guesswork! We must be scientific about this! The only way we can discover the true nature of ‘Behindthewall’ is by closely studying and defining the nature of ‘Infrontofthewall’ – we must list all the bricks and find out how they work…
#1: Hold on… we don’t know what ‘Behindthewall’ is like, do we?
#2: No…
#1: If we don’t know what ‘Behindthewall’ is like at all, how can we know that ‘Infrontofthewall’ has anything to do with ‘Behindthewall’? Even if the nature of ‘Infrontofthewall’ held any facts about ‘Behindthewall’, we could never verify them, precisely because we cannot see behind the wall to get any kind of grounding-in-fact of our guesses.
#2: We could only know the nature of ‘Behindthewall’ if we had already seen it?
#1: Exactly.
#2: So… we haven’t even seen ‘Behindthewall’ and therefore cannot know anything of its nature… in fact… we cannot even know ‘Behindthewall’ exists!
#1: Blimey, you’re right!
#2: So if we don’t know the nature of ‘Behindthewall’, it could be a pluralism, a monism, a dualism, something we haven’t thought up, or none of these?
#1: Yes.
#2:And there are no grounds that we have, or can have for considering any of these positions as ‘preferable’?
#1: Correct…
#2: So our debate as to the nature of ‘Behindthewall’ has been nothing more than fanciful dreamery and oft-confused guesswork which lacks any concrete meaning?
#1: I suppose so…
#2: Yes! That’s it! We only dreamt up ‘Behindthewall’ once we had noticed, or maybe even dreamt up ‘Infrontofthewall’. Haha! How could we ever have thought we could have knowledge of something we had imagined! We wanted ‘Behindthewall’ to be there, so we dreamt it up. We wanted it to be monist, so we dreamed up ways for it to be monist; and the same with pluralism and dualism! We weren’t looking at the ‘true nature’ of ‘Behindthewall’ (how can you have a ‘true nature’ of a concept?!) we were just looking at our own ways of imagining how ‘Behindthewall’ ‘was’ – we were looking at our own ways of imagining how an imaginary thing might be!
#1: Good God! You’re right! How stupid and futile this whole thing has been. I feel all dirty!
#2: Well yes. But I’m glad we got that sorted out – just to think, we could still be debating the benefits of monism over dualism right now! Lets go get some chips.
#1: Yes, lets!
As #1 and #2 walk off, their fading voices can be heard…
#2: I say, what do you imagine a God who made us would be like?
#1: Well… I’d say he’d have to be all powerf… oooh! You almost caught me with that one!
Their laughter can be heard as they walk away.
ALTENATIVE ENDING:
Instead of going to get some chips, the two men walk off and we se that the ‘wall’ was just a painting in an art gallery.
In Summary: Metaphysics is nonsense; a game for bored romantics. This is fine, but we tend to get rather muddled when we think it has anything to do with anything (anything to do with ‘life’).
