Peter Emmerson

 3.3.1 The Idealist Triumvirate: truth-finders of theology and philosophy continue to influence events through their partnership with the new kids on the block – the pure mathematicians.

Even though they take more of a back seat these days, let’s not forget the importance of religious beliefs in the contemporary discussion of ideals. Since the heady days, before the Reformation, of the European Roman Catholic orthodoxy, Christian ideals have been gradually wedded to the more secular rational analysis of Descartes who used the divine hand of God to explain the perfection that can be found in pure verbal logic and mathematics. This reassessment of religious thinking was also a response to the new scientific impulse that favoured a full on engagement with sensory experience, something not really fitting with the Church’s Platonic/Aristotelian preferences. Descartes re-examined the feasibility of trusting sensory information and rejected it, returning as philosophers do, to the safety of his mind. Mathematics is the key to unlocking the truth of it, he concluded, whether it be to understand God or the world.

The crisis of confidence confronting the long established orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism, that boiled over into the Reformation, was at least theoretically assuaged. Even though a schism had occurred in western Christianity the turmoil was to some extent stabilized by Descartes and others such as Isaac Newton and Leibniz, who were instrumental in the transformation of mathematics into the truth-finding technique par excellence, that would allow the full extension of idealistic forms of analysis beyond the mind so well understood by philosophers, into God’s virtually uncharted factual universe. The capacity of the new mathematics to establish absolute truth in the venture to discover the Laws of God’s universe was miraculous in itself, but it has the added advantage of being far less vulnerable to rhetorical corruption than verbal media such as the Bible. Mathematicians have very quickly become the prime arbiters of the truth of things, providing rational assurance of the veracity of the revolutionary scientific enterprise that lives and works in what the theometaphysicians generally shunned, the uncertain world of sensory reality: the work of Karl Popper exemplifies this position. The voices of western religious truth-finders however, especially since the 19^th century, have not been so discernible.

This reinvigoration of the power of ideal reason vindicated our axiomatic faith in its efficacy and ensured that its influence continues to flow through our culture, largely untrammelled by suspicion or dispute. One significant exception was Nietzsche, who confronted the truth mongers as one of their own, a philosopher, in arriving at the almost intolerable conclusion that the absolute truth is nothing more than an intellectual construction for use in the relentless battle between people for control. For Nietzsche everything boils down to individual human wills; therefore, all is personal and a matter of belief on account of the fact that we can never escape our prejudices, even by using rational techniques such as logic or mathematics. After millennia spent pursuing the Holy Grail of the absolute truth of things, it is not surprising to find the majority of philosophers strongly opposed to such a view. I would proffer two reasons for this: 1) philosophers would have to question their values in the search for ideals; 2) they would also have to face that which ideals were designed to avoid, the fact that life and death, bereft of ideals, are shot through with uncertainty and insecurity; a prospect that for many is too hard to bear. In other words, by rejecting the sanctified position of rationality as the arbiter of doubt, we admit the possibility of ‘relative uncertainty’ with all its implications for our fear structure and sanity; and if Thomas Hobbes is right, our personal safety too.

With the development of the exploration of factual experience, albeit chaperoned by its ideal partner, pure mathematics, theometaphysicians became more vulnerable to challenges from figurations espousing more realistic models which spoke of relative uncertainty. However, the underlying belief in the virtues of ideal styles of rational analysis in western cultures has been extremely resistant to criticism, continuing as it does to have an overwhelming influence on our thinking, discussions and practices. The relative status of the theometaphysicians has changed in Europe such that the once dominant priests have seen a gradual decline in their social influence, as have more recently the philosophers. However, this has been more than compensated for by the rise in authority of their cousins the pure mathematicians, such that idealistic styles of thinking still have an immense impact on contemporary thinking. The theometaphysicians continue to dominate, as the people who are trained to put aside their emotions and prejudices in order to supply what we know and trust, the truths that allow us to control our fear and retain our positions of dominance.