Idealism Theme Song
Live from the Garden of Eden
The View from Everywhere is now available for those with an Oxford Scholarship Online subscription; hardcopies ship next month (but you can preorder now).
I’ll probably write more about it as the print publication date approaches. In the meantime, I wanted to share a “theme song” I produced (with Suno) to introduce the central theme. For background, here’s how (in the Preface) Helen explains the genesis of the book:
I first began thinking about the ideas developed in this book in 2012, while sitting in on a graduate seminar on perception taught by Mark Johnston and Frank Jackson. Mark supplied my first exposure to a “naïve” view of perception. I was mystified. It was a way of thinking about our relation to the world that was completely at odds with my background conception of how the world works. And I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.
But I think an important part of philosophy is being able to step outside of one’s own worldview and appreciate the perspective of the other side. I think of it like having a collection of “worldview hats” that one can put on to see the world through different eyes. The hats don’t become mine by virtue of doing this, but—if I’m successful—wearing them can enable me to understand what motivates the other sides and how my perspective looks from their perspective.
I wanted very much to understand Mark’s perspective and to develop a “naïve view of perception” hat. Eventually, I found that I could do so… but only given the background assumption that the world was intrinsically experiential. I could make sense of the naïve view of the world… but only as naïve idealism.
So my initial thoughts about idealism were a form of play: seeing how far I could develop this curious not-my view. But as I’ve crafted my idealist hat, I’ve come to the conclusion that the virtues of idealism shouldn’t be ignored.
A challenge you face when you construct worldview hats is this: What do you do when you have a collection of them? Do you keep your initial hat as your hat, and only wear the others to silly hat parties? Do you abandon your first hat and find a better one? How can you know which is better? Does it feel better when you have it on? Does it look better from the perspective of your first hat? What should you do?
I’ve tried to say something about this in Chapter 6, proposing that it’s sometimes possible and desirable to evaluate matters with a bare head.
Two key metaphors are (i) Helen’s picture of idealism as positing a “tapestry” of experiential “threads” that are woven together to form the concrete objects of our acquaintance; and (ii) David Chalmers’ “Fall from Eden”:
In the Garden of Eden, we had unmediated contact with the world. We were directly acquainted with objects in the world and with their properties. Objects were simply presented to us without causal mediation, and properties were revealed to us in their true intrinsic glory.
When an apple in Eden looked red to us, the apple was gloriously, perfectly, and primitively red. There was no need for a long causal chain from the microphysics of the surface through air and brain to a contingently connected visual experience. Rather, the perfect redness of the apple was simply revealed to us. The qualitative redness in our experience derived entirely from the presentation of perfect redness in the world.
Eden was a world of perfect color. But then there was a Fall…
A central theme of The View from Everywhere is that rumors of this “Fall” may1 be greatly exaggerated. On the view Helen develops, causal mediation (and the science of perception more generally) is not in conflict with properties being “revealed to us in their true intrinsic glory.” As Helen writes in Chapter 6:
You might have thought you simply had to resign yourself to death, taxes, and the veil of perception. But idealism, it turns out, can free us from the last. Idealism shows us that the world can be just as it appears, and that the world can be comprehended more thoroughly than merely understanding its structure. Once we see that it is possible to retain each of these intuitive claims, the failure to do so becomes apparent as a cost. Looking out at the space of possible worlds from a theoretically neutral starting point, it looks less plausible that our world is among the materialist worlds—ungraspable, unintelligible, nothing like anything that we’re aware of—and far more plausible that ours is among the idealist worlds: worlds of color, heat, and flow, worlds that we can grasp and comprehend.
Hence the theme song: Return to Eden:
(Is this the first philosophy book with its own theme song? Share in the comments if you know of another!)
As Helen notes in the Preface: “One might think that, having written this book, I must be a card-carrying idealist. I am not to that point yet. But I put a significant degree of confidence (perhaps 30%) in something like the view described in the book being true.”
