The Blind Philosophers and the Elephant: A Parable About Reality

Illustration by Pamela Zagarenski

By Keith Tidman

The parable of The Blind Men and the Elephant originated on the Indian subcontinent around 500 BCE, from Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain sources, and afterwards spreading widely. The story is very simple: some blind men, for the first time in their lives, encounter an elephant and attempt to determine what kind of thing it is just through their sense of touch. But here’s the catch: their descriptions of the animal vary greatly, based on the particular part of the elephant each got to experience. The elephant has thus stood as a metaphor for reality.

Here, I offer a different take on the parable, raising the stakes by sampling historically rival ideas about reality. In my version, blindfolded philosophers similarly gather around an elephant, again each touching a different part: tusk, ear, head, trunk, leg, shoulders, tail, tongue, foot, and so forth. The philosophers describe the elephant based on their partial impressions. Each claims that their own description is the most accurate, despite their limited knowledge. That is, each philosopher extrapolates to what they presume to be the totality of reality, tending to discount the others’ descriptions.

What does this exercise tell us about what we empirically know regarding reality: especially subjectivity versus objectivity, and each philosopher’s role as presumed witness to reality? A matter as much about epistemology as about reality and truth. In this quest, how well can we get beyond faint apparitions, toward something more reified? Are we bound by principles of uncertainty? In the following discussions, I attempt to unspool several iconic philosophers’ reactions to touching isolated parts of the elephant, drawing on what we know about each philosopher’s historical framing of reality, truth, and theories of knowledge.

Thales: Feeling the elephant’s drenched tongue, Thales of Miletus (BCE) believes the experience confirms his conviction that water is the essential nature of reality — the single element from which all other things in the cosmos derive. The term used by the Hellenic philosophers to characterize that underlying, reality-revealing substance was arche, the original stuff from which the world came to be. For Thales, arche was water, whereas for other Ancients it was the air, or fire, or earth. Water as arche was demonstrated by the qualities of the elephant, based in objective, hard-and-fast materialism rather than in the mythology, lore, or religion of the day.

Plato: Feeling the elephant’s coarse back, Plato might believe the experience confirms his model of a dualistic reality. The dualism stems from there being an imperfect, sensory world of observations and a concurrently existing ideal world of immutable, timeless Forms (or Ideas). Plato considered Forms to be the highest manifestation of reality, from which he developed his theory of knowledge. Plato believed that true knowledge of reality emanates from understanding the Forms rather than derived from one’s bodily senses, like touch. To that extent, what people experience (perceive) in their day-to-day lives — in this case, the rough hide on the animal’s back — is but a flawed representation of ultimate reality — the whole elephant, as reality’s metaphor.

Thomas Aquinas: Feeling the large crown of the elephant’s head, Aquinas would conclude that the skull must contain a large, complexly structured brain. He would not doubt that this impressive head, and the brain it housed, must have been the evolving product of a succession of causes directed toward attaining perfection. This succession of causes and effects is traceable all the way back to the uncaused first cause or prime mover, which he defined as God. Aquinas viewed this striving toward excellence — the most fundamental aspects of being — as the natural order of the cosmos. For Aquinas, reality is split between essence (what makes the thing it is) and existence (the fact of being present in reality).

René Descartes: Perhaps feeling the elephant’s thick, pillar-like leg would convince Descartes that this thing was real, prompting him to ponder the fundamental nature of the object (the trunk of a tree or a column?) he was handling. In so doing, Descartes would be reminded that the acts of pondering and wondering are forms of human thought, which in turn would recall his axiom: I think, therefore I am. But also underpinning Descartes’ philosophy is something called mind-body dualism. That is, the idea that the mind (mental substance) is immaterial — from which “formal reality” emanates as an idea — while the body (in particular, the brain) is physical substance — from which “objective reality” emanates independent of the mind.

David Hume: In his case, feeling the hard-to-overlook enormous chest of the elephant, Hume might be reinforced in his staunch empiricism, observation, and skepticism. He might at the same time concede the entrenched limits of our knowledge, as well as uncertainty as to whether even rigorous inductive reasoning and investigation would be enough to confirm the true nature of external reality, in this instance the whole elephant. In this vein, Hume might split mental perceptions between ideas (thoughts) and impressions (sensations and feelings), making the argument that ideas are faint copies of impressions. 

Immanuel Kant: Feeling the undulating tail of the elephant, and trying to figure out what it might be — a snake or stretch of rope, perhaps — Kant would surely remind himself to distinguish between phenomena (the world of appearances, derived from the innate structure of our minds) and noumena (the world of things as they truly are in themselves, independent of our minds). We can only know the world of phenomena, he would say, and not the external, objective nature of things, as the latter is beyond our cognitive capacity and thus unknowable. Kant would be puzzled, unable to fathom with clarity and certainty the essence of this rope-like thing that he intently grasped.    

Georg Hegel: Feeling the elephant’s expansive shoulders, Hegel might be inspired to reflect on his metaphysics, grounded in idealism, which is that the utmost expression of reality actually stems from the mind, or what he labeled the “absolute spirit.” As the mind evolves, and self-awareness and knowledge of truth are gained, it does so channeled by a procedure he called dialectics. This starts with a hypothesis (the thesis), then leads to a counterargument (the antithesis), and concludes by reconciling the best of the two prior propositions (the synthesis). Hegel concludes that the synthesis of all the philosophers’ collective experiences with the elephant’s body parts would best reflect the physical world — the elephant in its meaningful entirety — that the philosophers were encountering.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Feeling the slowly waving ear of the elephant, Nietzsche might think that he was in contact with a fan. This would fit with his belief that reality is a matter of individual viewpoint, shaped by people’s instincts and interpretation of what they experience through the senses. This view was steeped in a denial of ultimate reality— of an objective, unchanging reality—but rather in empiricism and what Nietzsche referred to as the “will to power”: that is, the alluring urge to stamp reality with our own values, convictions, passions, and predispositions.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: In his case, feeling the hard tusk of the elephant, Wittgenstein might decide the object was a spear. That being said, he would choose with care the language to describe the object and its presumed functions, convinced that reality (our worldview) is shaped by the words, phrases, and logical structure of our language — bearing on what we think. As Wittgenstein pointed out, there is a direct correspondence between the limits of language, consisting of propositions that provide pictures of reality such as the whole elephant, and the limits of our understanding (perception) of facts and context-based reality. In other words, language’s meaning is derived from the societal and cultural conditions in which it’s used, differing among languages, which Wittgenstein referred to as “language games.”

Daniel Dennett: Finally, Dennett, the last of our philosophers, feels the trunk of the elephant, giving him the impression it is a tube through which materials pass. Manipulating the trunk to discern its function might fit nicely, for him, with his physicalist model of reality. Dennett considers that experience requires both consciousness and mind to happen, translatable through the neurophysiological operations of the brain. The brain, as the material seedbed of consciousness, relates to the reality of subjective experience. That is, the mind is not dualistically separate, mythically hovering apart from the brain as some have insisted. He believed science is a key path to better understand the processes involved. However, he acknowledges that experiences, like his contact with the trunk, do not always precisely mirror external reality, given the biased preconceptions about the reality and truth we harbor and which notionally influence us all.

I propose that the parable can be used in this manner to illustrate the diverse ways, over the centuries, that a sampling of key Western philosophers described the world. Some painted reality as subjective and empirically knowable, others as coming in both subjective and objective form, though they would be unsure how to parse the two. In every case here, there’s an instinctive yearn for symmetry between ultimate reality and the bounded information captured by the senses and curated and interpreted by the brain. Yet, beyond our sample, other philosophers argue that ultimate reality is opaque, obscure, and even changeable, and so to those extents it’s a reality that eludes certainty.

Humanism: Intersections of Morality and the Human Condition

Kant urged that we ‘treat people as ends in 
themselves, never as means to an end’

Posted by Keith Tidman

At its foundation, humanism’s aim is to empower people through conviction in the philosophical bedrock of self-determination and people’s capacity to flourish — to arrive at an understanding of truth and to shape their own lives through reason, empiricism, vision, reflection, observation, and human-centric values. Humanism casts a wide net philosophically — ethically, metaphysically, sociologically, politically, and otherwise — for the purpose of doing what’s upright in the context of individual and community dignity and worth.

Humanism provides social mores, guiding moral behaviour. The umbrella aspiration is unconditional: to improve the human condition in the present, while endowing future generations with progressively better conditions. The prominence of the word ‘flourishing’ is more than just rhetoric. In placing people at the heart of affairs, humanism stresses the importance of the individual living both free and accountable — to hand off a better world. In this endeavour, the ideal is to live unbound by undemocratic doctrine, instead prospering collaboratively with fellow citizens and communities. Immanuel Kant underscored this humanistic respect for fellow citizens, urging quite simply, in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morality, that we ‘treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end’. 

The history of humanistic thinking is not attributed to any single proto-humanist. Nor has it been confined to any single place or time. Rather, humanist beliefs trace a path through the ages, being reshaped along the way. Among the instrumental contributors were Gautama Buddha in ancient India; Lao Tzu and Confucius in ancient China; Thales, Epicurus, Pericles, Democritus, and Thucydides in ancient Greece; Lucretius and Cicero in ancient Rome; Francesco Petrarch, Sir Thomas More, Michel de Montaigne, and François Rabelais during the Renaissance; and Daniel Dennett, John Dewey, A.J. Ayer, A.C. Grayling, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey among the modern humanist-leaning philosophers. (Dewey contributed, in the early 1930s, to drafting the original Humanist Manifest.) The point being that the story of humanism is one of ubiquity and variety; if you’re a humanist, you’re in good company. The English philosopher A.J. Ayer, in The Humanist Outlook, aptly captured the philosophy’s human-centric perspective:

‘The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect; tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions; respect for one another’s rights and feelings; awareness of one another’s needs’.

For humanists, moral decisions and deeds do not require a supernatural, transcendent being. To the contrary: the almost-universal tendency to anthropomorphise God, to attribute human characteristics to God, is an expedient to help make God relatable and familiar that can, at the same time, prove disquieting to some people. Rather, humanists’ belief is generally that any god, no matter how intense one’s faith, can only ever be an unknowable abstraction. To that point, the opinion of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume — ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence’ — goes to the heart of humanists’ rationalist philosophy regarding faith. Yet, theism and humanism can coexist; they do not necessarily cancel each other out. Adherents of humanism have been religious, agnostic, and atheist — though it’s true that secular humanism, as a subspecies of humanism, rejects a religious basis for human morality.

For humanists there is typically no expectation of after-life rewards and punishments, mysteries associated with metaphorical teachings, or inspirational exhortations by evangelising trailblazers. There need be no ‘ghost in the machine’, to borrow an expression from British philosopher Gilbert Ryle: no invisible hand guiding the laws of nature, or making exceptions to nature’s axioms simply to make ‘miracles’ possible, or swaying human choices, or leaning on so-called revelations and mysticism, or bending the arc of human history. Rather, rationality, naturalism, and empiricism serve as the drivers of moral behaviour, individually and societally. The pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras summed up these ideas about the challenges of knowing the supernatural:

‘About the gods, I’m unable to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form: for there are things that hinder sure knowledge — the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life’.

The critical thinking that’s fundamental to pro-social humanism thus moves the needle from an abstraction to the concreteness of natural and social science. And the handwringing over issues of theodicy no longer matters; evil simply happens naturally and unavoidably, in the course of everyday events. In that light, human nature is recognised not to be perfectible, but nonetheless can be burnished by the influences of culture, such as education, thoughtful policymaking, and exemplification of right behaviour. This model assumes a benign form of human centrism. ‘Benign’ because the model rejects doctrinaire ideology, instead acknowledging that while there may be some universal goods cutting across societies, moral decision-making takes account of the often-unique values of diverse cultures.

A quality that distinguishes humanity is its persistence in bettering the lot of people. Enabling people to live more fully — from the material to the cultural and spiritual — is the manner in which secular humanism embraces its moral obligation: obligation of the individual to family, community, nation, and globe. These interested parties must operate with a like-minded philosophical believe in the fundamental value of all life. In turn, reason and observable evidence may lead to share moral goods, as well as progress on the material and immaterial sides of life's ledger.

Humanism acknowledges the sanctification of life, instilling moral worthiness. That sanctification propels human behaviour and endeavour: from progressiveness to altruism, a global outlook, critical thinking, and inclusiveness. Humanism aspires to the greater good of humanity through the dovetailing of various goods: ranging across governance, institutions, justice, philosophical tenets, science, cultural traditions, mores, and teachings. Collectively, these make social order, from small communities to nations, possible. The naturalist Charles Darwin addressed an overarching point about this social order:

‘As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him’.

Within humanism, systemic challenges regarding morality present themselves: what people can know about definitions of morality; how language bears on that discussion; the value of benefits derived from decisions, policies, and deeds; and, thornily, deciding what actually benefits humanity. There is no taxonomy of all possible goods, for handy reference; we’re left to figure it out. There is no single, unconditional moral code, good for everyone, in every circumstance, for all time. There is only a limited ability to measure the benefits of alternative actions. And there are degrees of confidence and uncertainty in the ‘truth-value’ of moral propositions.

Humanism empowers people not only to help avoid bad results, but to strive for the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people — a utilitarian metric, based on the consequences of actions, famously espoused by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham and nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill, among others. It empowers society to tame conflicting self-interests. It systematises the development of right and wrong in the light of intent, all the while imagining the ideal human condition, albeit absent the intrusion of dogma.

Agency in promoting the ‘flourishing’ of humankind, within this humanist backdrop, is shared. People’s search for truth through natural means, to advance everyone’s best interest, is preeminent. Self-realisation is the central tenet. Faith and myth are insufficient. As modern humanism proclaims, this is less a doctrine than a ‘life stance’. Social order, forged on the anvil of humanism and its core belief in being wholly responsible for our own choices and lives, through rational measures, is the product of that shared agency.

Farmer Hogget, the Limited God

Posted by Eduardo Frajman

One beautiful autumn afternoon not too long ago, my daughters and I were coming home from an errand. They ran ahead of me, headed for our front yard to climb our knobby, twisted tree, or jump headfirst onto a leaf pile, or some other such wholesome activity that would add a tiny brick to the edifice of their innocent, golden childhoods. 

As I reached them I saw my eldest had stopped. She was prodding at something with her foot, nudging it back and forth. Though half-buried, I immediately recognized it for what it was. “What is it?,” my freckled-faced cherub asked. I saw her little sister step towards us curiously, an expectant smile on her face. The thing was roundish, about the size of a plum. Two blade-like stalks protruded out of one end. Amid the black dirt, I could make out patches of fur and a rigid, unseeing eye. “It’s a rock,” I said. My daughter shot me an incredulous, accusatory look as she wailed “Then why does it have ears?!”