Foundationalism in itself is not completely unhelpful. When we do truly find a universal foundation point, there is so much that can (and is) built upon that to better our lives. The geniuses who found principles of air lift and drag coefficients allow engineers to build a wing that safely lifts a plane through the air, and lets me visit my kids in Florida.
Perhaps one problem is in the assumption of foundationalism, the underlying confidence that I’m capable of finding universal truth that everything can be built upon. The downfall comes in how easily we are guilty of metaphorically looking down into the well, seeing our own reflection in the water, and thinking that defines universal reality. With foundationalism, people can become really confident we’ve found the unbiased and the universal, the true foundation—even when our beliefs are riddled with our perspective and bias.
I think we can go deeper than that. Foundationalism is a profoundly Western way of viewing the world, rooted and dependent upon Plato. Plato saw the world as if there exists a perfect “form” or expression of truth. These forms are the ultimate reality, but they don’t exist in the physical world. Things made of matter can only approach, but not replicate exactly, these pure forms. Perfect forms only exist if they are untainted by matter.
In Plato’s world, when we draw a circle, we call it a “circle” because it approaches the perfect form of a circle. But a circle never achieves perfection of form in a physical way. The universal perfection or form is an abstraction, separate and detached from the physical world.
This does some dangerous things to us. It actually disconnects truth and the universal from the physical world we live in. Our perception of the foundation, of the form, of the universal, becomes more true than the actual material things around us—more real than data points, more real than even our experience. Because from the beginning, in the Western world shaped by Plato, we just “know” that reality will fall short of universal truth.
If what we see and touch doesn’t match the perfect, universal truth we believe that we know—well, then, we ascribe that to the imperfection of that particular piece of matter or data. We think we can throw it out, and hold on to our “universal” form or truth.
We can actually discount reality that we see and touch, because it doesn’t match our view of the universal we think we have discovered.
Comments