I cannot start this chapter. This opening sentence is undermined by my very act of writing it. Yet my opening sentence describes a possible state of affairs. Pragmatic paradoxes are contingent sentences that behave like contradictions or tautologies. In Aristophanes’s The Clouds, the debt-ridden Strepsiades swears that after Sokrates teaches him enough sophistry to evade creditors, Strepsiades will pay him a huge fee. Strepsiades’ promise to pay for knowledge of how to break his promises resembles a contradiction, but it is not a logical falsehood like “Someone promised something and no one promised anything.” After all, Strepsiades could keep his promise if Sokrates is trusting enough to accept a self-undermining assurance. Pragmatic paradoxes were common in Greek comedies. Greek orators used them as rhetorical devices. But Greek philosophers did not take pragmatic paradoxes seriously.
Augustine is the first on record to use them dialectically. Unlike traditional paradoxes that are normally cited in attacks against established beliefs, pragmatic paradoxes are normally cited in defense of established beliefs.
Until Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly in 1509, the last treatment of the skeptical paradoxes was Augustine’s Contra Academicos. As a brilliant student of rhetoric, Augustine (354-430) admired Cicero’s presentation of Academic Skepticism. However, at the age eighteen, feeling that he was overcoming a fear of inquiry, Augustine became a follower of the Persian prophet Mani. The Manichees considered themselves Christians. Like Yoda in Star Wars, Mani taught that the world is a moral arena in which two cosmic forces contend. The force of good, which is identified with light, is equally matched against the force of evil, which is identified with darkness. God, who is also identified with the force of good, tries his best to combat evil but his opponent is too formidable to extinguish. Mani easily explained the presence of evil. God is not in total control. Events need to be ultimately explained in terms of two conflicting superagents, not a single all-powerful creator of the universe. The Manichees did not require a division between material reality and spiritual reality. Everything is corporeal. Nor did the Manichees ask for a leap of faith. The Manichees claimed all of their tenets were demonstrable by reason alone.
Around 383, Augustine concluded that the Manichees had overstated their logical credentials. He returned briefly to the skepticism of the Academy. However, a stream of probabilities could not quench Augustine’s thirst for certainty. He waded into the Neoplatonism of Plotinus. During that period, he worked on a response to skepticism. Eventually, Augustine had a religious experience and converted to the Christianity of his mother. Much of Plato’s influence persisted.
Augustine felt that the skeptic can only be answered with God’s assistance. Citing Scripture, Augustine averred that the power of human reason was degraded by the original sin of Adam and Eve. From his own experience, Augustine believed that human beings often refuse to accept the consequences of their beliefs. When he understood that he ought not to fornicate, Augustine prayed “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet!” As a boy, he joined his friends in stealing pears from an orchid. He did not steal because he was hungry. He stole for the joy of trespass and theft. Augustine disagreed with Socrates about the relationship between knowledge and virtue. Augustine believed people wittingly and even intentionally pursue evil. Augustine presented his pear-thieving as living testimony. From his own case, Augustine also concludes that people form many beliefs because of the benefits that accrue from those beliefs rather than on the basis of evidence. In the case of philosophers, arrogant pride in their powers of reason lead them to irrationally insist upon beginning all inquiry with reason.
Augustine regularly cites Isaiah 7.9, which he reads as “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” Sometimes this prefaces a defense of knowledge based on authority. To learn about the world, children must believe in their parents and take their testimony on trust. They cannot first study whether their parents are reliable informants. As children mature, they form further bonds of trust with friends and teachers and spouses. These attachments give them basic beliefs necessary for understanding more subtle propositions. Some assertions must be accepted without reason as a precondition for understanding other assertions.
“Unless you believe, you will not understand” is also invoked by Augustine to underscore the emotional dimension of understanding. Augustine insists that when he first read the Scriptures, he knew what they meant but did not understand them. To understand “Jesus died for your sins,” you must be motivated to act upon it. This motivation requires a combination of gratitude, awe, shame, and love. These emotions rest on beliefs. An atheist cannot be grateful to God for surviving a lightning strike. He cannot feel shame for his sins. The atheist can hold nothing sacred.
Augustine thinks reason plays a role in sorting out reliable authorities from unreliable authorities. He objects to astrology by recounting how a slave woman and a rich woman simultaneously gave birth. The slave child and the rich child had very different futures. If their futures were determined solely by celestial conditions at the time of their births, then their futures would have been the same.
Reason plays a role in distinguishing authentic religious texts from spurious ones. Church fathers relied on intricate deductions to prevent the New Testament from being polluted with apocryphal stories about Jesus. Even inadvertent omissions can corrupt Scripture. In 1631 a royally authorized edition of the Bible overlooked just one word. The omission rendered the seventh commandment as “Thou shalt commit adultery.” When the bishop of London reported the mistake to the king, the errant Bibles were rounded up and the printers were fined 3,000 pounds.
Even if the sacred text is uncorrupted, Augustine concedes, reason is needed for its interpretation. Augustine regards “Jesus is a rock” as a metaphor and “Jesus is light” as the literal truth.
Augustine’s concession that reason is needed for sorting out authorities is poignant. Augustine’s Latin Bible fumbles the verse that serves as Augustine’s springboard for discussing the relationship between reason and faith (Kretzmann 1990). The modern Revised Standard Version renders Isaiah 7.9 less paradoxically: “If you will not believe, surely you shall not be established.”
Despite a few paragraphs in which Augustine disparages reason, he regularly engages in long chains of inferences. He meets his reservations about reason by wrapping each deduction in a prayer. Sometimes he prays to avoid fallacies. Sometimes he prays for positive guidance.
Can praying improve your reasoning? I once questioned a student about his suspicious behavior during a logic examination. He confessed that he was praying for the correct answer. I felt this was cheating. Even if God did not give him the answer, the student was soliciting the answer from Someone Else.
If you think there is a knowledgeable deity that is responsive to your pleas, then it is perfectly logical to ask for help. From earliest antiquity, the ancient Greeks believed prayer improves memory. Like the bards who prayed that they might remember the poems they were about to recite, Socrates prayed to recall a complicated sophistical argument from the previous day. He prayed for success in discovering the nature of justice and for general aid in an argument. Plato has the Athenian precede his proof of the existence of the gods with a prayer for their help in making their own existence evident to reason:
To the work, then, and if we are ever to beseech a god’s help, let it be done now. Let us take it as understood that the gods have, of course, been invoked in all earnest to assist our proof of their own being, and plunge into the waters of the argument before us with the prayer as a sure guiding rope for our support.
(Laws, 893 b1–4)
Since the prayer presupposes that the gods exist, the point is only to supplement faith with reason. But even someone who was uncertain whether the gods exist might be inclined to pray; he might reason that a call for assistance could not hurt and it might help!
Augustine begins his Confessions with a prayer. The prayer concerns an epistemological paradox about prayer. How can one know God through prayer? To address God rather than someone else, Augustine needs to know something about God. But if God can only be known through prayer, then Augustine would have no way of making first contact. In a culture swamped with false gods, how does a pious man commune with the true instructor?
Protestantism correlates with less worry about misaddressed supplications. When the antiwar agitator Bertrand Russell reported to Brixton prison to serve his sentence in 1918, the warder at the gate took his particulars. When asked “Religion?” Russell replied “Agnostic.” The warder heaved a weary sigh, entered the answer into his log, and took solace in the fact that “Although there are many religions, they all worship the same god.” Prisoner 2917 said this kept him happy in his cell for a week.
Catholic intellectuals deny that idol worshippers, heathens, and Buddhists worship the same God. One’s beliefs about God need to be roughly on target to count as praying to God. Although Augustine does not develop his epistemological paradox about prayer, contemporary Catholics are careful to grant reason independent access to the Almighty.
Following Augustine’s example, medieval philosophers commonly inject paradoxes into prayers. Saint Anselm (1033-1109) has an almost irreverently wide range of them. Devout philosophers used paradoxes as foci in their meditations just as philosophy teachers use paradoxes to stimulate class discussion. Augustine’s feeling of being dizzy with sin makes it natural for him to punctuate speculative ascents with the pure oxygen of prayer. With divine inspiration, Augustine’s fallen faculties can be resuscitated to meet superhuman tests of faith.
For the next thousand years, Christian philosophers prayed on the job. They prayed even to learn what can be known without praying: John Duns Scotus (ca. 1266-1308) begins “A Treatise on God as First Principle” with “Help me then, O Lord, as I investigate how much our natural reason can learn about that true being which you are . . . ”
Augustine believed that reason alone is enough to secure some knowledge against the skeptic. With an originality that is commonly overlooked, Augustine credits us with knowledge of appearances. Even if an apple is not yellow, the sufferer of jaundice knows that it looks yellow to him. Unlike Sextus Empiricus, Augustine treats statements about appearances as assertions that are true or false. Sextus assumes that a speaker always tries to fit an appearance to an external reality. When Sextus uttered sentences of the form “It appears to me that p,” he took himself to be merely expressing a feeling. “Ouch!” can be uttered sincerely or insincerely, but it is neither true nor false. Augustine innovates by construing appearance statements as reports of an interior reality.
Augustine also believes that we can know tautologies such as “If Cicero executed the Catliniarian conspirators, then Cicero executed the Catliniarian conspirators.” Sextus never bothers to attack tautologies because he does not consider them to be assertions. They do not try to match appearance to reality. When people talk about the weather, they do not predict “Either it will rain or not.” Tautologies are empty remarks akin to the schema “Either____or not___.” If you cannot get it wrong, you cannot get it right!
But Augustine is right. People do mistakenly reject tautologies and mistakenly accept contradictions. In a reductio ad absurdum, you demonstrate that the supposition implies a contradiction and, on that basis, you assert the negation of the supposition. Sextus often seems to assume that he can block proofs merely by refusing to grant premises. But many philosophical arguments do not employ premises; they just use inference rules. Indeed, Sextus’s own internal criticisms are indirect arguments of this sort. When he uses conditional proof, he concludes by asserting a conditional proposition even though he never asserted a premise.
Augustine’s third class of certainties (in addition to reports of appearances and tautologies) involve pragmatic paradoxes. If Augustine were to say “I am dead,” then his assertion would be a pragmatic contradiction. But it cannot be a semantic contradiction because when I say “Augustine is dead,” I utter a truth.
The opposite of a pragmatic contradiction is a pragmatic tautology. My utterance of “I am awake” is vindicated by my very act of asserting it. Augustine believed that pragmatic tautologies could be turned into a reply to the skeptic. Academic Skeptics argued that every judgment about what exists is fallible because it is always the case that one might be merely dreaming that the thing exists. In the City of God Augustine is heartened by an exception:
I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who say, What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am? For it is certain that I am if I am deceived. Since, therefore, I, the person deceived, should be, even if I were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am. And, consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For, as I know that I am, so I know this also, that I know.
(1872, xi, 26)
This is an anticipation of Rene Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore, I exist”). When this passage was pointed out to Descartes, he replied in a letter of November 14, 1640, to Colvius, that Augustine fails to use the argument to show that “this I which thinks is an immaterial substance with no bodily element.” However, in The Trinity (10.10.16), Augustine does seem to gravitate toward this conclusion from the premise that he can doubt that he has a body but not that he has a mind.
Descartes claimed that he had never heard of Augustine’s cogito. Descartes’s Catholic education at La Flèche makes this unlikely. Augustine’s writings were popular among Descartes’s Jesuit instructors. Augustine presents his cogito seven times in such intensively studied works such as The Trinity and City of God.
Augustine’s loosely strung anticipations of Descartes’s Meditations do not constitute an attempt to systematically found a philosophy inside out à la Descartes. Descartes is far and away the more precise and organized thinker. Yet Augustine clearly had more than a lucky premonition of the Cartesian mind-set.
Sextus Empiricus was aware of an argument that you cannot deny the existence of your soul because you must have a soul to make the denial. Sextus underestimated the significance of the argument because he lacked Augustine’s preoccupation with the distinction between the interior realm of the mind and the outer material world.
Augustine is unprecedently introspective—even for a Christian anticipating the apocalypse. Augustine is the first to propound the argument from analogy to other minds. (The Trinity 8.6.9) By introspection, he can see that his actions are correlated with feelings and thoughts. Since others engage in the same types of actions, Augustine infers that there are similar feelings and thoughts underlying their actions.
The argument from analogy supports the method of empathy. A historian understands the decisions of Alexander the Great by hypothetically adopting Alexander’s beliefs and desires. The historian tries to survey the battlefield through the eyes of Alexander and then replicate his thinking.
Mental simulation is effective only to the degree that the parties truly resemble each other. After Alexander conquered Egypt, the Persian king offered Alexander fabulous terms for peace. Alexander sought advice from his general Parmenion, who answered, “If I were Alexander, I would accept these offers.” “So would I,” retorted Alexander, “if I were Parmenion.”
Augustine displays no anxiety about the inference to other minds being based on a single case (one’s own). If I discover a flea in my hat, I gain evidence that someone else has a flea in his hat. But this sample is too small to support the hypothesis that everybody with a hat has a flea in it. Augustine knows that, in his own case, his moans are caused by pains. But what entitles him to infer that the same holds for all other human beings? Augustine needs a larger sample. Alas, he can only introspect his own mind.
From a logical point of view, solipsism (“Only I exist”) is a straightforward alternative. But the hypothesis that only you have a mind is nearly unthinkable for normal people. Solipsism is such an unneighborly thought that no one took it seriously until John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) started to codify practices of inductive reasoning. Mill was an extreme empiricist, a phenomenalist, who struggled to explain how we know that other people have experiences. Mill maintained that the self is just a bundle of actual and possible experiences. Thomas Reid (1710-1796) had earlier objected that if the self is not a substance, then no one would be able to tell whether other bodies have experiences. Mill’s reply was that phenomenalism did not introduce any extra difficulty in ascertaining whether there are other minds. He suggests that people reason by analogy to the existence of minds other than their own. Mill concedes that if the evidence was simply a correlation that holds for one’s own case, “the inference would be but an hypothesis; reaching only to the inferior degree of inductive evidence called Analogy. The evidence, however, does not stop here.” (Mill 1979, 205) Mill goes on to maintain that the real proof of other minds springs from our knowledge that mental events and bodily events are connected by laws. Isaac Newton does not need to drop a great variety of objects to prove that each object is attracted to every other object. People do not need direct access to other people’s experiences to grasp the laws binding experience and behavior. The problem of other minds became more alarming as philosophers became increasingly persuaded by the negative remarks of both Reid and Mill and less persuaded by their positive remarks: Yes, phenomenalism did not give one basis to believe that there are other minds. Yes, this is not a problem peculiar to phenomenalism. But no, phenomenalism lacks the resources to justify the inference. Common sense is equally impotent. Gosh, belief in other minds seems like a leap of faith! It is a dogma no sane person can forbear—but it is dogma all the same.
“Do I know that others have minds?” is an example of a paradox that was posed and carefully answered for fifteen hundred years prior to being revealed as a paradox. Only in the nineteenth century did philosophers discover surprisingly good arguments for a negative answer.
Augustine deployed Christian dogmas to drown the skeptical paradoxes. However, Christianity itself generates paradoxes—at least for Christians. (The phenomenon is general; introducing almost any apparatus to resolve paradoxes makes that tool the subject of other paradoxes.)
To oppose the Manichees, Augustine had to portray God as all-powerful. This generates the problem of evil. If God knows that there is evil and is able to stop it, then how could he be all-good if he refrains?
Augustine offers two inharmonious answers. His Neoplatonic answer is that, strictly speaking, evil does not exist. What is real is good. What we call evil (blindness, poverty, hopelessness) is the absence of certain things. There are degrees of reality; evil is a tear in being.
Augustine’s more classically Christian solution is that human beings are responsible for evil because of their own freewill. God cedes people control that they frequently abuse. This freedom does not mean that God is surprised by our misbehavior. Since God is all-knowing, there was never a time at which he failed to know that Eve would tempt Adam to eat an apple from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. There was never a time when God did not know the whole course of human depravity. So why did God make creatures he knew would disappoint him?
Shipwrights made boats they knew to be vulnerable to fire. Timber has this engineering limit. Could God be resigned to limits imposed by raw matter itself?
Not according to Augustine. Deferring to Genesis, he denies that God made anything from material that predated his activities as creator. God created the whole world from nothing. In The Timaeus, Plato allowed that the demiurge began the universe in the sense of organizing a preexisting state of chaos. But everyone in antiquity agreed that the universe could not have had a beginning.
The Manichees teased Christians by asking what God was doing before he created the universe. If God waited, then he was an idler. And an arbitrary idler at that; there would be no justification for starting the creation at one point of time rather than another.
Augustine answers that God created time when he created everything else. By this, he does not mean that time depends on the existence of periodic public phenomena such as the movement of planets. We can make sense of there being no physical events occurring. For instance, we can perceive a long silence. What is inconceivable is for time to pass in the absence of mental change.
Augustine warns that if we think of time as a mind-independent phenomenon, we fall into a paradox of measurement. The objective present is a boundary between the past and the future. If that boundary has duration, we can divide the present’s earlier stage into the past and its later stage into the future. But what was the case cannot be what is now the case. And what will be the case cannot now be the case. Thus, the objective present must be a durationless instant. Since the past no longer exists and the future is yet to exist, things are available only for an instant—according to the objective mode. But wait! To measure the length of a spoken sentence, one must hear the beginning of the sentence and its end. All utterances take longer than an instant. Therefore, it is impossible to measure the length of an utterance—or of anything else!
Augustine dismisses this result as absurd. He traces our false step to the attempt to model measurement in terms of the objective present. Measurement requires a subjective present—what early-twentieth-century psychologists called “the specious present.” Some measured its duration as six seconds, others measured it as twelve seconds. When a doorbell goes ding-dong you hear the ding and the dong as a single pattern. Similarly, short melodies and sentences can be taken in as a single chunk. When the sounds become too long, you must rely on memory rather than perception. According to the subjective account of time pioneered by Augustine, the past corresponds to what we remember, the present to what we perceive, and the future to what we anticipate. We can measure intervals in the specious present because it does have a duration.
Since observers vary in their span of perception, the meaning of “present” is relative to an observer. Since the human perceptual span is less than a minute, the present is less than a minute. Much is in the past. Much is in the future.
God has an unlimited perceptual span. Everything is in the present for him. He grasps the entire history of the universe in one panoramic glimpse. If we relativize “past” to God, there is no past. Hence, God cannot literally have waited to create the world. If we relativize “future” to God, then there is no future. Hence, God cannot literally have fore-knowledge of Adam and Eve’s wicked decisions. God is omniscient in virtue of what he perceives, not in virtue of what he predicts.
We naturally tend to relativize our temporal vocabulary to a human perspective. This is fine for understanding ordinary affairs. But if we hope to solve theological paradoxes, we must scale up to the mind-boggling terrain of eternity. Augustine agrees this stretch may be too far for a human being to achieve on his own. But if you put your hand out, the Lord might take hold and guide you to a vision of eternity.