Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lessons in Metaphysics for Recovering Idealists

The conventional translation of the name Ishmael from Hebrew is ‘God hears’. But there is an equally plausible alternative: ‘Man is God’.* This could well be Daniel Quinn’s satirical intent. First called Goliath, then renamed Ishmael, but acting like Socrates, Quinn’s central character is a gorilla who teaches his idealistically minded, now middle-aged, seeker that God is precisely what Man is not. And he does this expertly.

The term ‘metaphysics’ in understandably confusing to most people. It does after all refer to that which is beyond rational knowledge. Esoteric philosophy and religious mysticism are probably the first things that come to mind. But metaphysics is neither esoteric nor mystical. Rather, it is the very straightforward stories we tell ourselves about how things have come to be as they are. In fact these stories are so straightforward, so obvious, and so universally accepted that they are effectively invisible - unless one happens to have a Socratically adept non-human primate at hand.

The way to discover what the metaphysics of any culture are was perfected by Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century. He called it ‘transcendental deduction’, another intimidating term but something far simpler than it sounds. In fact we do it all the time, particularly when we’re confronted with events that are somehow disturbing or traumatic. Why, for example, does a terrorist act the way he does? Why do very wealthy people put so much effort into increasing their wealth? What is the real reason for a couples’ divorce?

These are questions which seek a certain type of answer, namely: What must be true - in terms of motives, reasoning, or factual circumstances - for people to act the way they do. The trick in transcendental deduction is to take into account everything we know about the behaviour or the situation in question, progressively removing those motives, reasons, and facts which are not necessary to explain what’s going on. This takes skill but it is not magic. In fact according to Quinn, gorillas are not bad at it al all.

Ishmael’s transcendental deduction of modern culture is eye-opening, even if one doesn’t agree entirely with the implications he draws from it. Here’s one metaphysical revelation, for example: The debate between Evolutionists and Creationists is completely meaningless and merely distracts from a universal presumption of modern culture that is taken as true without question. According to both secularists and religionists, mankind is the most important result of creation - for the former because Homo sapiens is the most advanced rung on the ladder of evolution; for the latter because he has been assigned the role of master of creation in holy scripture. Any other difference in their respective views are mere quibbles.

This presumption of human dominance over the Earth, all its contents, and its other inhabitants is the beginning of the metaphysical story which Ishmael elicits. There is also a middle and end to this story that are likewise uncovered in a similar well-paced dialogue. Quinn never let’s Ishmael miss a step in his progression back through the ‘obvious’ presumptions that we take for granted about the world; nor as he moves forward into the unfortunate implications of these presumptions which increasingly appear as disasters, for ourselves as well as the rest of the planet.

Although Quinn is clearly making a cultural point, his principal message is very personal: What any one of us might think of as doing good, may very well be contributing to the substantial reduction not just of human well-being but also of life on Earth. Tempering exuberant idealism could be an essential modern virtue. Not being God demands caution as well as hard work. This doesn’t mean thinking smaller but bigger, with rather wider metaphysical horizons than we’ve allowed ourselves to have.

* Ishmael = איש = ישמעאל or ish = man; אֵל or el = deity

Postscript: I don’t think I’ve encountered reviews more polarised on Goodreads than for this book. Most ratings are either 5’s or 1’s, very few in between. I suspect there are two reasons for this. Some folk find the Socratic method annoying, either because it proceeds at a pace they find tedious or because they really can’t follow the step by step development involved. Others, I think, balk at the central theme of the book, namely the dangers of cultural idealism. This latter group is the ‘hard market’ for the book, I suppose, and simply doesn’t want to consider much less understand what Quinn is suggesting.

Further postscript 23Feb18: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/t...

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