I would submit that postmodernism and scientism in their various guises are the contemporary heirs to the two tendencies Harper identifies, and degenerate heirs at that.  Postmodernist views essentially absorb all reality into the contingent cultural and linguistic products of the human mind, specifically – a far cry from, say, the Absolute Spirit of Hegel.  And the scientism of contemporary celebrity scientists and New Atheist types is, as I have chronicled on this blog over the years, philosophically so shallow that it makes even the materialism of Marx look sophisticated by comparison.

Thomas Harper is one of the great forgotten Neo-Scholastic writers of the nineteenth century.  I discussed his wonderful little book The Immaculate Conception in a blog post many years ago.  He is especially notable for his unusually rigorous and thorough treatment of abstract topics in metaphysics, in works such as the massive three-volume The Metaphysics of the School.  Harper will sometimes interrupt a sustained exercise in abstract reasoning with a non-technical aside, as he does in the course of discussing the metaphysics of truth in Volume I.  He there offers (at pp. 461-466) a commentary on Francis Bacon’s “idols of the mind” which is even more relevant now than it was in Harper’s day.

The idols of the mind are four persistent sources of error which Bacon took to stand in the way of intellectual progress.  He discusses them in The New Organon and labels them the idols of the tribe, the idols of the cave, the idols of the marketplace, and the idols of the theatre.  The idols of the tribe are biases resulting from the limits of human nature, such as our tendency to be fooled by the surface appearances of things.  The idols of the cave are biases deriving from an individual’s temperament, experiences, education, etc.  The idols of the marketplace are biases stemming from the habitual ways of describing and conceptualizing things that we pick up from our social context.  The idols of the theatre are biases deriving from unexamined philosophical assumptions.  Harper elaborates on each of these, especially the second and third, in illuminating ways.

Idols of the tribe and the theatre

It is somewhat ironic that an unreconstructed Scholastic like Harper should treat Bacon’s account in a sympathetic way, given that the Scholasticism of Bacon’s own day was one of Bacon’s targets.  But then, it is typical of a good Scholastic to look for whatever truth there is to be found in a view, and Bacon’s general points are well taken even if one can disagree with his application of them to certain specific cases.

As I discussed in an earlier post, in their own elaboration on the idols of the tribe, Bacon and his early modern successors took what a Scholastic is bound to regard as an excessively skeptical view of the deliverances of perceptual experience.  But Harper does not discuss this issue.  In his own treatment of the errors deriving from the limits of human nature, he emphasizes instead the Aristotelian theme that though the human intellect can arrive at knowledge of universal natures, it must (unlike angelic intellects, which are entirely separated from matter) abstract them from particulars known through the sense organs.  This opens the door to all the sorts of intellectual mistakes that might result from the incompleteness and admixture of error to which perceptual knowledge is prone (even if the Aristotelian will not agree with early modern proponents of the primary versus secondary quality distinction about the specific ways in which perception can lead us into error).

In his treatment of the idols of the theatre, Harper identifies idealism and materialism as the two main philosophical errors to which thinkers in the nineteenth century were prone.  Naturally, your mileage may vary, but Harper (like yours truly) is looking at things from an Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view.  And from that point of view, as Harper points out, idealism tends to overemphasize the abstract and speculative and materialism tends to overemphasize the concrete and practical.  The metaphysical implications of each tendency are, of course, that idealism absorbs all reality up into mind and materialism drags all reality down into matter.

I would submit that postmodernism and scientism in their various guises are the contemporary heirs to the two tendencies Harper identifies, and degenerate heirs at that.  Postmodernist views essentially absorb all reality into the contingent cultural and linguistic products of the human mind, specifically – a far cry from, say, the Absolute Spirit of Hegel.  And the scientism of contemporary celebrity scientists and New Atheist types is, as I have chronicled on this blog over the years, philosophically so shallow that it makes even the materialism of Marx look sophisticated by comparison.

Anyway, Harper does not say more about the idols of the tribe and those of the theatre – which are, respectively, the most concrete and most abstract of the sources of error.  His focus is on the other two, middle ground, idols.

Idols of the cave

Of the idols that reflect individual temperament and formation, Harper identifies two as of special interest.  The first he labels with the wonderful old-fashioned and forgotten term “viewiness.”  The viewy personality type is that of someone overly impressed with an idea because it is original, bold, or paradoxical, even if it is half-baked at best.  Such a person is intellectually lazy and superficial, unwilling to examine the idea critically and rigorously and to consider how it might need to be refined or even faces serious difficulties.  The fanciful idea instead becomes the lens through which everything is viewed.  As Harper writes, such people “do not master their idea; the idea masters them” (p. 462).  The “viewy” sort of thinker, Harper says, is inevitably interesting but also unsafe as a guide.

When one considers currently fashionable claims to the effect that there are dozens of “genders,” that the police should be “defunded,” that “white supremacy” lurks under every bed and around every corner, and other harebrained ideas light on evidence or argumentation but put forward with maximum dogmatism and shrill intolerance, it is evident that “viewiness” has in recent years reached pandemic proportions.

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