From Philosophy to Economics: Early Essays: Second Edition

By Neil Shandalow

Diverse, introductory, and interesting essays on Descartes, Schopenhauer, Marx, Bergson, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Kuhn, Hecksher, Ohlin.

Topics include: certainty, conditions for knowledge, empirical and a priori knowledge, ego, duration, consciousness, free-will, alienation, naturalism, scientific revolutions, profits, rents, classical and marginalist economics, foreign trade theory. These essays were written when I was a graduate student in philosophy in the late 1960s at New York University and then a decade later as a graduate student in economics at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research.

After reading and digesting these essays the reader will be able to converse with philosophers and economists on these topics at dinner parties and other social gatherings, as long as the reader keeps the conversation on a superficial level.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475965360

Neil Shandalow

Neil Shandalow, currently a retired medical economist, with degrees in philosophy and economics, has previously published the initial version of this book, From Philosophy to Economics: Early Essays. He has taught philosophy at SUNY and economics at Fordham University and Hunter College. He retired in 2003 and now spends most of his time writing books on a wide range of topics. His Studies in Twentieth Century Dystopian Fiction will be published in 2013. He and his wife, Annette, live in New York City and upstate New York with their two dogs.

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Copyright © 2010, 2013 by Neil Shandalow.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-6535-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6536-0 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012922924

iUniverse rev. date: 12/21/2012

To ARL

For thirty-two years of support and encouragement

Acknowledgements

to the Second Edition

I would like to thank Jennifer Morse—a photographic artist working in New York’s Hudson Valley—who helped me get this second edition ready for publication.

Her talents as an artist helped me redesign some of the visual aspects of this book—essay title pages, the Bibliography and Endnotes. In addition, Jennifer word-processed the new chapter—A.J. Ayer and the Problem of Knowledge and corrected typographical and other errors to the text of the original edition—published in 2010.

Some of her work can be seen on her website—

www.JenniferLynnMorse.com

Preface

to the Second Edition

The main difference between the original edition and this edition is that a new essay has been added and typographical and other errors in the original edition have been corrected.

The essay added is A.J. Ayer and the Problem of Knowledge, which is essay 8 in the Philosophy section of the book, is a study of the first two chapters of Ayer’s book.

In addition to the correction of typographical errors there have been some stylist changes to the Bibliography and Endnotes, and font size at certain locations in the book. Also, the size of the book has been reduced from 6x9 to 5x7. Any stylistic changes that remain between the essays in the book is due to the fact that they were written over a ten year period, and I have maintained the original formatting in the second edition as much as possible.

I hope that with these changes the book is more accessible and readable to the non-academic reader for whom it was originally intended.

New York    N.S.

October, 2012

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the following people for their assistance in producing this book. Shanti Vinci and Rose Turmo for transforming a PDF file into a Word document and for making all the editorial and formatting changes the text required. To Steve Kerner of Woodstock, NY for helping me find Shanti and Rose to Word process the original document which was in a non-computerized form. He also evaluated the cover and back cover design produced by iUniverse. To my wife, Annette, who offered to proof read the final text. To my graduate school professors in philosophy and economics who first suggested that I publish some of these essays. To iUniverse for all their assistance in helping me get this book ready for publication

Preface

A note about the history of these essays. These essays were written a long time ago. I was a graduate student in philosophy in the late 1960s when the philosophy essays were written. Then a decade later in the late 1970s I wrote the economics essays when I was a graduate economics student. PCs had not yet come into existence and these essays were written on an electric typewriter. They have been in a storage facility in Long Island City for at least twenty-five years. Recently, they were retrieved. I read them and some were selected be in this volume.

My professors at the time suggested that some of them should be published, but also told me they should be rewritten; that put an end to it right there. When I recently reread them I came to the conclusion that some of them were better than I had thought at the time they were written; and so I decided to take up their suggestion to publish some of them. However, I did not take up their other suggestion—that they be rewritten. All I was willing to do was to lightly edit them.

And so, this volume contains seven essays in philosophy and five essays in economics. The economic essays, written a decade later when I was no longer in my early twenties, are better written and are closer to being what is considered acceptable academic scholarship. The philosophy essays bare the mark of a young, enthusiastic and to some extent arrogant young student of philosophy. Some of them have gold in them, as one of my well-know professors said. At the time I did not think so; but forty years later I have come to agree with that professor.

The first four philosophy essays are on historical subjects: Descartes, Schopenhauer, Marx and Bergson. These are followed by three short essays on: sense experience, a priori knowledge, naturalism.

The economic essays are on variety of topics: profits and rents in Smith and Ricardo, the concept of the economic role of the state in various economic traditions, the application of Kuhn’s model of a scientific revolution to Marginalist economics, an examination of the argument of a book, The Fiscal Crisis of the State, and lastly a exposition of the Hecksher-Ohlin theory of international trade.

An attempt was made to keep the style and format of the original essays. Thus titles which now on computer-generated text can be italicized are underlined. All the essays are independent, and thus the reader can read anyone without having to read any other.

I have been helped by many people in getting these essays ready for publication. And I would like again to thank them for this.

One final note: two books were recently added to the Bibliography for the Hecksher-Ohlin essay. They did not exist when this essays was written in the late 1970s.

New York                            N.S.

April, 2010

Contents

Philosophy

1 Descartes’ Theory Of Knowledge

2 Schopenhauer’s Essay On The Freedom Of The Will: A Critical Commentary

3 The Concept Of Alienation In Marx: A Critique

4 An Introduction To Bergson’s Philosophy

5 Sense Experience And Reality

6 The Linguistic A Priori

7 Naturalism And Circularity

8 A.J. Ayer And The Problem Of Knowledge

Economics

9 Smith And Ricardo On Rents And Profits

10 The Concept Of The State In Classical, Neo-Classical, Keynesian And Marxist Theories Of Public Finance

11 Marginalist Economics As A Kuhnian Scientific Revolution

12 An Examination Of The Argument Of The Fiscal Crisis Of State (1973)

13 The Hecksher-Ohlin Theory Of Comparative Advantage: An Exposition

PHILOSOPHY

1

Descartes’ Theory of Knowledge

We seem to have made a discovery which I could describe by saying that the ground on which we stood and which appeared to be firm and reliable was found to be boggy and unsafe. That is, this happens when we philosophize, for as soon as we revert to the standpoint of common sense this general uncertainty disappears.

-Wittgenstein

In this essay I will be dealing with the concept of certainty in Descartes. What I have to say will be based on Descartes’ three main epistemological works: Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Field of Science; Rules for the Guidance of Our Native Powers; and Meditations on First Philosophy. This essay will be both expository and critical. There are unimaginable complexities in Descartes’ thought and I hope the following brief essay will convey this.

Descartes tells us in the Discourse on Method that it will consist of essentially two things: to describe the paths he has taken in his search for truth, and to present a sketch of his whole life. I think it will be to our purposes as a sort of preface or background to our study of the idea of certainty if we said something about Descartes’ life. For as Unamuno says, In most of the histories of philosophy that I have known, philosophic systems are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously, and their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inner biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that explains for us most things. (Tragic Sense of Life).

What most struck Descartes in the early part of his adult life was the fact that there were differences in opinions between various people on the same subject. This experience and Descartes’ reaction to it seem to have been the most important experience of Descartes’ life. From this Descartes came to the conclusion that everything subject to differences in opinion was doubtful, uncertain, and insecure, and that consequently everything was built on mud and sand. This difference of opinion was even present in philosophy, and since Descartes believed that philosophy is the foundation of the other sciences, he came to the conclusion that this was another reason for its doubtful and uncertain character. This had the following three consequences: (1) Descartes decides to withdraw within himself to study his own self, and to seek for no other knowledge than that which he might find within himself. (2) Descartes decides, as regards the opinions which he had received since his birth, that he could do no better than to reject them completely. (3) Descartes decides to seek for a method of obtaining knowledge of everything that his mind was capable of obtaining.

All these three decisions: to reject all previous opinions, to withdraw into himself, and to seek for a method of knowing are of critical importance. But the most important is the decision to seek for a method of obtaining knowledge. It is this idea of a method that we must say something about here. Descartes was obviously not the first to conceive of the idea of a method, but he was certainly one of the first to go beyond the mere idea of a method and actually start to construct or develop one. It is indeed doubtful whether Descartes’ whole philosophical activity would have been essentially devoted to epistemological and in particular methodological considerations if it had not been for the extreme experience of doubtfulness which he attached to all intellectual activities. He thus consequently made the very important distinction between knowledge and a method which was to lead to knowledge, and asserted the priority of method over knowledge, and went a considerable way in his methodological investigations. What is Descartes’ idea of a method? Descartes really does not tell us what a method is in the Discourse; here he only lists certain rules of his method. It is in the Rules that we get the concept of method or rather the concepts of method, since Descartes defines method in different though often very related ways. In Rule 1 of the Rules Descartes defines a method as rules or principles of right understanding which guide the understanding to truth. In Rule IV he defines method as regulated studies, which consists of rules which are certain and easy and such that whoever will observe them carefully will: (1) never assume what is false to be true and (2) will gradually and steadily advance in knowledge and obtain a true understanding of all those things which lie within his power. However, in Rule V Descartes defines method as consisting in the orderly handling of the things upon which the mind’s attention has to be directed and concentrated if any truth bearing on them is to be discovered. These are the three concepts of method I have found among the three epistemological works listed above.

The above fairly well describes the nature and direction of Descartes’ philosophical activity. The awareness that there were differences of opinion lead Descartes to proclaim that where there were differences of opinion there also was doubt and uncertainty. This led Descartes to reject all previous beliefs, to withdraw into himself and to assert: the distinction between method and knowledge, the need for a method, and the priority of method over knowledge. Descartes’ subsequent philosophical activity is the attempt to formulate a method which will lead to knowledge. Method is but a part of knowledge which will lead to every other part of knowledge. And the question here is what distinguishes this part of knowledge from the other parts of knowledge to which it leads?

The Rules contain the essentials and even the details of Descartes epistemological theory. I would, therefore, like now to go on to examine this work. Descartes by asserting the need for and the prior necessity of method over knowledge was really saying that if we want to reach truth and obtain knowledge we had better first get clear about what knowledge is. To assert the necessity and the priority of method is to force upon oneself the basic problem of epistemology: what is knowledge?

Descartes’ epistemological theory leaves much to be desired; and its fault consists essentially in the fact that it is radically incomplete, and leaves completely undiscussed certain of the more important problems and issues which his ideas embody. There is much that is obscure in Descartes’ epistemology. In Rule VIII Descartes asserts: Now there is assuredly nothing that can at this time and stage be more usefully chosen for prior treatment than the question: what human knowledge is, and how far it extends. And so we are brought back to the question which we considered should be examined prior to all others . . . In order to answer this question Descartes divides it into two: what is the nature of the epistemological subject, and what is the nature of the epistemological object. For Descartes the epistemological subject consists of four faculties: (1) the understanding (2) imagination (3) sensation (4) memory. The epistemological objects are either absolute or relative. Descartes tells us in Rule VI that the chief secret of his method is that all things can be arranged in a certain series, in the order in which each item contributes to those that follow it. To arrange things in a certain series we have to note that all things can be said to be either absolute or relative. He defined in Rule VI the absolute as whatever possesses in itself a pure and simple nature. In Rule XII Descartes tells us more clearly what this amounts to. He tells us that the simple is an object of cognition so perspicuous and distinct that it cannot be divided by the mind into others more distinctly known. According to Rule XII, relative is an object: the cognition of which is neither perspicuous nor distinct and consequently can be divided by the mind into others more distinctly known.

For Descartes these simple natures are epistemological objects, the objects of knowledge and fall into three classes. Either they are (1) purely mental natures or (2) purely material natures or (3) they are natures which are common to both purely mental and purely physical natures. Descartes does not point out that those belonging to group three—those natures which are common to both purely mental and purely physical natures—are radically different. Examples of these are: experience, unity, duration. Descartes threats them as if they are on the same level and of the same kinds as the other simple natures. Examples of the material simple natures would be such natures as: corporality, extension, shape. Examples of purely mental natures would be: knowledge, doubt, ignorance.

So far then we have distinguished the objects of human knowledge for Descartes, which consists of simple and complex natures. And we have made a preliminary characterization of the epistemological subject as consisting of four distinct though of course related faculties: understanding, sense, imagination and memory.

I have tried to avoid the use of any epistemological concepts or predicates beyond those of epistemological subject and epistemological objects. The time has now come for us to begin to introduce these important concepts and thus to make a more substantial beginning in the reconstruction of Descartes’ epistemological theory. Let us then now return to the four faculties which Descartes has divided the epistemological subject into.

In Rule II Descartes maintains that there are only two ways we arrive at knowledge of things: (1) experience (2) deduction. But then he immediately goes on to state that experience really cannot give us knowledge in the strict sense of knowledge: sure and evident knowledge. For our experience of things is often fallacious. Descartes goes on in the very same Rule to imply that the very concept of experience, of empirical experience, is logically incompatible with the concept of knowledge. There is something about experience that just rules it out in relation to knowledge. By experience Descartes means ordinary perceptual experience—the data that we are provide by our five senses. But this so called incompatibility between knowledge and experience must also apply to the two other experiential faculties of the mind: imagination and memory. The only other faculty of the mind that we seem to be left with as providing us with knowledge is the understanding. And since the two basic operations of the understanding are intuition and deduction, there are only two ways of arriving at certain knowledge: intuition and deduction. As Descartes says in Rule III: An examination of all those actions of our understanding by which we are able to arrive without fear of deception at knowledge of things indicates that knowledge is obtainable only from what we can clearly and evidently intuit or can deduce with certainty.

We must go on to examine these two basic operations in which the totality of our knowledge is said to consist. We shall soon see that Descartes’ theory of knowledge is out-and-out Platonic. In considering intuition and deduction we must keep in mind that Descartes has before his mind at all times the two mathematical sciences of arithmetic and geometry. They are for him the two basic models of certain knowledge and most of Descartes’ theory of knowledge is based on a careful examination of these two mathematical sciences.

Intuition and deduction are for Descartes the simplest of all mental operations and therefore are primary. Let us begin with the study of intuition. Descartes defined intuition as that non-dubious apprehension of a pure and attentive mind which is born in the sole light of reason. Descartes throughout the Rules keeps on demanding that if we are to attain sure and evident knowledge we must start with the simple. And it’s just such an object which is an object of intuition. Intuition deals with an object so simple and pure that falsity cannot be attached to it. For Descartes, therefore, various objects have corresponding to them various degrees of certitude. He declares in Rule XII that the simple natures are one and all known and never contain any falsity. But this is an ambiguous point. Since certainty is an epistemological relation it would be more accurate to talk of objects which admit of certainty in relation to an epistemological subject. Certain objects cannot be known with certainty because they cannot be the objects of an intuition. In the Rules all knowledge is grounded on intuition. But more needs to be said about intuition and its object. For Descartes if a certain object is placed before the mind’s eye and cannot be intuited then it can’t be known; it is then not a proper object of knowledge. But what does it mean to intuit an object, even a simple object (nature) such as extension? Does it mean to understand what the idea of extension means? Descartes is never really clear about what it means to intuit something. If intuition is, as Descartes refers to it in Rule III, a non-dubious apprehension of a pure and attentive mind which is born in the sole light of reason, of a simple nature, how can intuition be a mode of knowledge, since knowledge is a claim that something is the case? It would appear that deduction comes closer to knowledge than intuition does since deduction does make a claim that something is the case, that a certain proposition follows from another proposition, that if the first proposition is true then the second one will be true. It makes sense to apply the concept of knowledge to deduction because deduction claims that a certain relationship holds between two propositional entities. But in intuition there is no claim that is made at all. Descartes’ intuition is like Russell’s concept of knowledge by acquaintance: it can’t be false. But if it can’t be false it really can’t be true either. The concept of knowledge doesn’t apply to what Russell is talking about when he is talking about knowledge by acquaintance. Russell is here very close to the position held by Theatetus when in response to the question by Socrates what is knowledge replies that knowledge is perception. Of course, in the case of that dialogue it is soon agreed that knowledge is not perception by rather about perception. Knowledge is always a claim of a sort. It seems to me that Descartes is doing the same thing with intuition as Russell is doing with knowledge by acquaintance and Theatetus with his identification of knowledge with perception. In intuition I intuit a simple nature such as extension. Such an operation of the mind is not even propositional. Therefore, the concept of knowledge is more applicable to the second operation of the understanding. Perhaps a more plausible interpretation of this might be that the objects of intuition are those objects which we can define. In this way it would be possible to transform what seems to be a mere apprehension into a propositional claim such as, a triangle is a three sided figure the sum of whose angle is 180 degrees. But then again the triangle would not be a simple nature in Descartes’ conception of simple nature. For this violates the condition that a simple nature is a non-reducible object of cognition, which I take to mean that it can’t be defined in any other terms; it is