Saturday, March 17, 2018

Plato and Hume on life before birth: Part 1


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Plato and David Hume on Life Before Birth: Part 1

Plato
In the Socratic dialogue Meno, Plato has the character Socrates prove that there is life before birth.  Socrates bases this on an inductive argument designed to prove that our ability to solve problems in mathematics and philosophy can only be explained by the “fact” that we must have known the answers to these problems all along.  And if it is strongly probable that we were not taught the answers in this life, then we must have had this knowledge “in” us at the time of our birth.  All we neede is a good teacher (like Socrates) to help us remember what we already know.  From this breathtaking premise, Socrates makes the even more breathtaking (and invalid) leap to the conclusion that we have been alive before the birth of our physical body.
I do not want to repeat Plato's detail account of Socrates getting an unschooled slave boy to correctly deduce the answer to a series of questions posed by Socrates about a geometrical theorem. You can read all about it in Meno, and of course it has been discussed ad infinitum in the literature.

Instead, I want to discuss a common response to Plato:  It is not logically possible to prove the proposition that there is life before birth.  

David Hume
The first thing we should notice is that claims about the existence of objects or events are claims about matters of fact.  To prove this, the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume made an important distinction between matters of fact and relations of ideas.  If it is claimed that “the Kiwi bird exists,” I am expressing this as a matter of fact.  If I claim that “Bachelors are unmarried,” then I am expressing this as a relation of ideas (between “bachelor” and “unmarried”).  

To find out whether “Bachelors are unmarried” is true, all we need to do is to examine the meaning of the words “bachelor” and “unmarried.”   We would not confirm that “Bachelors are unmarried” is true by interviewing bachelors to find out whether they are indeed unmarried.  This is unnecessary because the idea of “unmarried” is logically related to (contained in) the idea of “bachelor.”  The proposition “Some bachelors are married” expresses a contradiction.   It is false, not because  we have searched for and failed to find a married bachelor, but because the term “bachelor” logically implies “unmarried.”

By way of contrast, we cannot confirm the truth of “the Kiwi bird exists” by analyzing the meaning of “Kiwi bird.”  There is no relation of ideas between the concept “Kiwi bird” and the concept “exists.”  To say “Kiwi birds do not exist” might be false, but it does not express a contradiction.  If I am concerned about the existence of such birds, I would attempt to make the relevant observations in those places where Kiwi birds are said to exist.  In general, we discover the whether a matter of fact proposition is true or false not by an analysis of the concepts in the proposition (“Kiwi bird” and "exists"), but only through experience and observation.

Let's apply Hume's distinction to the search for the existence of life before birth in order to determine whether it is about (1) the relation of ideas, or  (2) matters of fact. 
(1) If it is about the relation of ideas, then we should be able to analyze the relevant ideas (concepts) to find the answer.  Someone might say this: Suppose that “birth” means “conception” and the life of a human does not begin until conception.  Then to say that there is life before conception is to say, “There is life before life,” or “I was alive before I was alive.”   This is either tautological nonsense, or it requires an explanation.  

(2)  Any explanation puts the ball in the matters of fact court.  If we substitute different meanings for the word "life" in the previous sentences, then we get (for example) "I existed as a disembodied soul before I was born into this body," or "I existed as a snail before I came to live in this body."  It is now abundantly clear that the problem to be solved is no longer about a relation of ideas. The search for the existence of life before birth is about matters of fact.  The relevant terms makes the quest for life after birth amenable to an empirical search.  

This may be what Plato is attempting to do in Meno.  The life one lives prior to incorporation in the human body is the life of a soul, not the life of a physical substance.  Hence, to say that there is life before birth is to say that there are souls that exist prior to the birth of a body, and they inhabit the body when it (the body) is born (is conceived, is a viable fetus, emerges from the womb).  The attempt to prove that there is life before birth now becomes an attempt to confirm the truth of a matter of fact proposition: “Our soul exists before the birth of our physical body.”   This takes the problem out of the hands of the philosopher and into the hands of the scientist who must collect relevant evidence discovered by careful observation and experience. 

I’ll discuss possible scientific attempts to prove life before birth in my next blog post.

For my student guides on Plato and Hume, go to my website HoulgateBooks.com

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