Paleolithic Philosophy

Paleolithic Philosophy

I wish to introduce a new academic discipline to be named “paleolithic philosophy” (aka “caveman philosophy”). This subject investigates the original causes of philosophically interesting concepts. The central tenet of paleolithic philosophy is what I will call “evolutionary empiricism”, the doctrine that our basic concepts derive from the primitive environment of our distant ancestors in (roughly) paleolithic times (when people got stoned a lot). So, cave men (also cave women—though this was contested at the time) hit upon certain concepts as a result of their interactions with their environment, before much real thinking had begun; and these interactions shaped the concepts acquired. There is no commitment here to classical empiricism with respect to innateness; no doubt the concepts in question partly arose by means of genetic selection in some way. What matters is which features of the environment did the prompting. We are to think of the minds of these people as barely above the animal level of their ape ancestors, but sophisticated enough to get real thinking off the ground (how we don’t know). They were no doubt naïve to a fault, but aspiring, curious, open-minded. I venture to suggest that there were four main things that would have impressed themselves on the childlike minds of these individuals: the sun, the sky, the earth, and the (other) animals. They noticed these things and distinguished them in their minds. The sun would have seemed mightily impressive, as it still does: its movement across the sky, its appearance and disappearance, its warmth or lack thereof, its ability to produce light thus creating day and night. As we know, it was man’s first god—the prototype of all gods. The idea of God grew from the sun—a supernatural agent of some sort. Religion sprang from the sun. No sun, no god, no religion. Simply put: the sun caused religion (along with other factors). The sky caused the idea of heaven—for the sun dwells in the sky. It may also have caused the idea of hell, what with lightning and thunderstorms. The sky ruled over the earth and the sun was its right-hand man (probably the boss, like the toughest cave man). The earth they took for granted—it was what you stand on, what you must not fall from a great height on. Caves were holes in it, so it couldn’t be that bad (pity about the damp). Other animals were everywhere and not always friendly, though occasionally helpful. That was it. That was life. It was all you had to think about, the basis of your theories and dreams.

The thesis, then, is that it all comes from this, fundamentally. From the sun we get the ideas of knowledge, the good, and the beautiful: what we know is what the sun throws light on; the good is the warmth of the sun; the beautiful is the sun in the morning and evening (you couldn’t look at it the rest of the time). Thus, the sun is ultimately responsible for science and human knowledge in general, for morality, and for aesthetics. The sun is bright, warm, and beautiful (not dark, cold, and non-descript). It brings knowledge, life, and delight. It instigates a huge swath of our early conceptual scheme. This is the solar theory of almost everything. The sky is the source of wonder, the unknown, the infinite. At night it turns black and twinkles with inscrutable points (and that pale-fire moon). It hardly bears thinking about. It eventually causes astronomy and man’s knowledge of his insignificance. What about the earth? Well, it gave our ancestors the idea of the earthy: the mundane, the daily toil, the coefficient of resistance. Eventually it would produce physics, but in those far-off days it mainly produced depression (the mud, the rocks, the sharp edges, the rigid laws). You had to live with the earth, like it or not. Ultimately it would lead to existentialism (the in-itself). It wasn’t very moral, but not all that immoral either, just indifferent. Facticity, as the existentialists would say. As to other animals: thereby hangs a tail. The animals were vexatious, enthralling, delicious to eat, dangerous. They caused so much conceptualization in our ancestors, as they patrolled the earth, tracked the sun, and monitored the sky. So many animals, of so many kinds, so much to digest. The cave men found animals too extensive and unpredictable to take in; they had only the vaguest idea what they were about. Nothing like the sun or the sky. They gave rise to ideas of generations, birth and death, fighting and surviving (our ancestors recognized their kinship with the animals). Ideas of taxonomy took hold, domestication, hunting methods—all leading to the science of biology and eventually Charles Darwin. The sight of an elephant in the daytime, a lion at night prowling. Then the flies, the rats, the snakes, the ants. All so overwhelming. They formed the scary part of our conceptual scheme, and so morally confusing (you loved them and you hated them). But, let me emphasize, the sun was preeminent in those simple-minded days: it was the focus of their attention, their constant preoccupation. The sun was the main cause of caveman philosophizing. When you left your cave in the morning the question was what the sun would be doing that day. Above all, the sun was the source of all knowledge: the knowable was the visible and the visible was what the sun cast its light on. The concept of knowledge was indissolubly linked to the sun’s powers. Epistemology centered on the sun (as the later empiricists implicitly recognized[1]). If there were no sun, there would be no epistemology worthy of the name: all would be ignorance, skepticism, the dark and gloomy cave (shades of Plato). Paleolithic philosophy is heliocentric, sun-obsessed. The sky is the sun’s home, the earth is what the sun sheds its light and warmth on, animals are the objects the sun enables you to track. The sun is everything. As we now know, this world-view is largely correct (the origin of the planets, the seasons, photosynthesis, etc.), at least so far as human beings are concerned. It got human thought off to a brisk start (according to evolutionary empiricism): it was the big bang of the human conceptual scheme. The earth orbits the sun, but human thought orbits it too. Astronomy begets psychology.[2]

[1] To say that all knowledge derives from the senses is to say that vision is the primary method of knowledge acquisition, but vision only provides knowledge with the aid of light, mainly sunlight. So, really, it is the sun that is the enabling condition of knowledge. The sun plays no role in implanting innate knowledge. Empiricism is, in effect, the doctrine that the sun is the source of (nearly) all knowledge. This is to physicalize the origins of human knowledge.

[2] Paleolithic philosophy is very interdisciplinary: it includes psychology, biology, geology, and astronomy. The human conceptual scheme is affected by all these things. Its origins reflect the basic facts of the universe, particularly our planet. And origins never really go away; they linger and permeate. This is cognitive science writ large. It takes in astronomical-psychological laws.