Solid Ground For Standing Upon:
Preliminary Questions: How important is how you know what you know, to what you know?
Questions of perspective - Understanding our loss of understanding, and the question of getting it back
Metaphysics: Metaphysician: Heal thyself! 1-4
The Real Choice - Metaphysician: Heal thyself! pt1
What the Reality of the Abstract is - 'What is Truth' pt2
What is Truth: 'it is what it is' or it's 'Turtles: all the way down' - 'What is Truth' pt3
'IS' demonstrates that what is objectively true, is where the action is - 'What is Truth' pt4
Causality & its effects parts a-g
A well rounded knowledge of the root causes - causality & its effects (a)
The Causation of egg on our faces - causality & its effects (b)
Of Cause and Causelessness - causality & its effects (c)
Causation Squared - causality & its effects (d)
Distracting You With What Isn't Actually There - causality & its effects (e)
Facts are only as stubborn as you are - causality & its effects (f)
The Logical consequences of either caring about or ignoring 'What Is Truth?' - causality & its effects (g)
Epistemology: You keep using that word 1-6 (+1)
Epistemology: You keep using that word - 1
Epistemology's meaning is meaningless without Reality - You keep using that word 2
Logic: Observing and deactivating the boobytraps of modernity - You keep using that word 3
The Ethics of Epistemology - Escaping the Inigo Montoya Trap - You keep using that word 4
Would you recognize it if one of your beliefs was wrong? How? - You keep using that word 5
Enlightening the Dark Ages once again: Grammar as an Epistemology worthy of the name - You keep using that word 6
Why are our Culture Wars focused upon winning battles instead of winning the war - where's our Gen. Sherman?!
Preliminary Questions: How important is how you know what you know, to what you know?
Questions of perspective - Understanding our loss of understanding, and the question of getting it back
Metaphysics: Metaphysician: Heal thyself! 1-4
The Real Choice - Metaphysician: Heal thyself! pt1
What the Reality of the Abstract is - 'What is Truth' pt2
What is Truth: 'it is what it is' or it's 'Turtles: all the way down' - 'What is Truth' pt3
'IS' demonstrates that what is objectively true, is where the action is - 'What is Truth' pt4
Causality & its effects parts a-g
A well rounded knowledge of the root causes - causality & its effects (a)
The Causation of egg on our faces - causality & its effects (b)
Of Cause and Causelessness - causality & its effects (c)
Causation Squared - causality & its effects (d)
Distracting You With What Isn't Actually There - causality & its effects (e)
Facts are only as stubborn as you are - causality & its effects (f)
The Logical consequences of either caring about or ignoring 'What Is Truth?' - causality & its effects (g)
Epistemology: You keep using that word 1-6 (+1)
Epistemology: You keep using that word - 1
Epistemology's meaning is meaningless without Reality - You keep using that word 2
Logic: Observing and deactivating the boobytraps of modernity - You keep using that word 3
The Ethics of Epistemology - Escaping the Inigo Montoya Trap - You keep using that word 4
Would you recognize it if one of your beliefs was wrong? How? - You keep using that word 5
Enlightening the Dark Ages once again: Grammar as an Epistemology worthy of the name - You keep using that word 6
Why are our Culture Wars focused upon winning battles instead of winning the war - where's our Gen. Sherman?!
Wednesday, November 02, 2022
How important is how you know what you know, to what you know?
Here's an odd question: Do you think that knowledge is relevant to Education? Odder still, how you answer that question puts you on one side or the other of a wide Grand Canyon-like divide in epistemology. Epistemology being:
Do you think that that matters? To put the matter in a more familiar context, here's a statement that depends upon a traditional epistemology:
If you know nothing about epistemology - yours or theirs - how are you going to argue the point?
Note: The question is not 'should you use an epistemology?', but rather 'Are you aware of the epistemology that you are using?!' You are using a form of epistemology in evaluating what is 'claimed to be known', and in justifying what you think is worth knowing, but if you aren't at least somewhat familiar with the uses and misuses of how such matters are justified and verified, then your thinking will be muddled, and the other side will roll over your 'b...b...buh..but!'s like a tank.
What does it mean to say that something is justifiable? Ironically, even asking the question means assuming the existence of the same objective truth that the Woke despise, but handily enough for them, denying it also 'frees' them from any such logical concerns, yet it doesn't do away with the fact that the traditional view is not only what our nation was founded upon, but is the True North which our ideas of Education were once rooted in and oriented around. And neither position frees you from the responsibility of consciously considering whether or not "... that particular knowledge is objective and universal...", and whether or not understanding that it's true "... is desirable, or even possible..." - and evaluating how to understand and affirm or deny those questions, is what epistemology does.
The fact is that epistemology sets the tone for every claim - sensible or nonsensical - in our culture, politics, law, and the education of those who go into each of those fields. Sound epistemology is critical to being able to identify and orient towards True North, and unsound epistemology is what we all use to justify wandering off of the straight & narrow, whether that be the sloppiness of slightly astray, or the deliberate thumb in the eye of a 180* turn in the opposite direction.
Speaking of which, as we like to look back on the 1940s and 1950s as being fairly solidly patriotic decades in America, have you ever wondered how it was possible that John Dewey's people were able to send an official invitation to the members of the Marxist Frankfurt School, to come to America and set up shop at Columbia University (more on that invitation in coming posts)? Do you suppose that their cool German accents charmed everyone and got them a free pass? Or... was it that those at the heart of our school systems who were exceedingly familiar with the meanings and justifications of epistemology, even then, understood and welcomed such a radically incompatible set of Marxists into America, knowing that their intention was to undermine and subvert the ideals that America was derived from, and confident that they could get away with doing so?
And yet most Americans, and certainly most students, were unable to recognize what those beliefs meant to their own lives, and to the lives of their children, and grandchildren, and because they didn't recognize the threat, and wouldn't have been able to defend their beliefs against them if they had, we are in the position we are in today where it's not only Academic America that is rabidly and openly anti-American in their beliefs and actions.
If we don't learn to recognize and defend the ideas of those truths that we hold to be self-evident, from the supporters of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion who mean to eradicate them, what effect do you suppose that will have upon your children, and grandchildren, and nation tomorrow?
The fact is that the values and rules of behavior that a society develops, are based upon what they're able to agree upon as being right and wrong, and for that to be possible, they first need to be able to say that something is (which is Metaphysics), and from there we must give consideration to how we know what does and does not qualify as knowledge of it and how to verify it (Epistemology), because only then can anyone have anything meaningful to say about what is right & wrong to do in light of what is known to be true (which is Ethics).
When arguing with someone (which does not mean either fighting or debating) who disagrees with you, you're engaging in a process of reasoning with them by identifying what each of you see from your varying perspectives, and then comparing your initial mental sketches to what you both can see of the actual landscape, and that often involves (and requires) congenially directing and shifting your vantage points this way & that to see things from the other person's point of view so as to compare and find what landmarks you can agree upon - or the lack of them -between your wordscapes and the actual landscape that you both inhabit. Progress in an honest argument isn't marked by a win or a loss, but by finding that your sketches have revealed something clearer - whether that be a mere glimpse or full scenic view - of what can be agreed upon between you, and better understood about each other, and verified, as being real and true, and that is employing and practicing the epistemological process that was implicit in the traditional reasoning that our Founder's era was familiar with.
Under that traditional view, notions typical of its adversary in Social Epistemology, such as 'what's true for you, may not be true for me', would be dismissed out of hand as being unserious and potentially dangerous sentiments that undermines and outright attacks our ability to reason together towards some mutual understanding. It's not looking for an honest (meaning what?) argument, even as it demands the results of one with your agreement (or compliance) without its cause: having reasoned towards a mutual understanding of what is real and true. What they want to avoid at all costs, is an honest argument. Statements such as that are not a call for truce, but a passive/aggressive attempt to verbally overpower your moral objections to their position, which gives them a foothold in your own mind, from your having implicitly legitimized their falsehoods by accepting them as possibly *true* (meaning what?), when in fact what is real and true, are obstacles to the wordscapes they expect you to either accept, tolerate, or submit to. When you nod along with such statements, you're missing the fact that whatever you had thought was important to adhere to, has been reduced to their level as a now meaningless *truth*, as you've surrendered the epistemological battle you didn't even realize you were fighting.
Solzhenitsyn's call to 'Live not by lies' is truly meaningless, if you cannot recognize or defend what is and is not true.
Prior to modernity, the process which epistemology now refers to wasn't seen as being so distinct, intricate, or confusing enough, to warrant being designated as a distinct field of study, as other than a handful of outright cynics and skeptics which most reasonable people generally dismissed out of hand, the fundamentals of philosophy - metaphysics, logic, ethics - already covered what could be known and how we could know it, as naturally followed from Aristotle's first rule of thought, from his metaphysics, essentially that:
A good first step in that direction: 'What do you mean by 'True'?
We tend to marvel at people not being reasonable today, but anyone who fails to engage in reasoning without anchoring their effort in the reality below their thinking, and with truth as the star above that guides it, cannot reasonably be expected to maintain even the appearances of being reasonable for long. Without a regard for what is real and true, the need to find mutual understanding and a connection to what is true, all 'arguments' and statements must devolve into either conveniences of mutual admiration, or confrontations which can only be 'resolved' through some contest of power, whether that be by tallying up the quantities of 'likes' and 'dislikes' for it, or by physical force or the threat of it, and as Thrasymachus put such notions of 'Might makes Right' to Socrates:
I've surely made it clear that I've very little (and by 'little', I mean less than zero) respect for the textbooks, materials, and purposes, employed in our schools today, but as bad as the sketchy facts, ideological spin, and lies by omission or commission (hello 1619 Project) of most educational content is, those alone don't have the power to implant their 'key facts' into a bored student's memory, or to significantly alter how they think. How such materials leave their mark on a student's mind has less to do with what's laid out on the page in black & white, than with what questions are asked, and how they're expected to answer them. Schools devote a significant amount of time to drilling in the habit of how students are expected to ask and answer questions (quizzes, worksheets, tests, homework), because that pattern is what will persist in their thoughts & actions long after the 'key facts' and details of their more recent test scores, or total cumulative GPA, have been forgotten.
Sometimes of course, the purpose of a bad question is obvious.
It's easy to spot the 'Have you stopped beating your wife?' types of questions, which can only be there to subvert its subject and demean the student's impression of it, such as with this far too typical question on an exam that was recently given to a friend's child in a local high school:
Less obvious, and IMHO more damaging, are the more mundane questions and answers which tend to either go unnoticed, or worse, are applauded by parents and politicians alike for being the 'right answers' that flatters the Red/Blue leanings of their own communities (physical or political), with very little thought given to how such 'Ok' lessons might affect the thinking of the students being educated through them. With that in mind, I've got a three-part question that might help alter your perspective when reviewing the various "Things to consider", and chapter quizzes in textbooks and worksheets, and the additional quizzes and tests which are used in sculpting your child's thoughts, and that's this:
Of course, answering that question requires asking a few more questions, about the types of questions and answers that are being used in our schools, in order to develop how their student's will think about their subjects:
For example, the questions and answers that concern me most, are those seemingly innocuous fact-check types of questions, which require more than a simple fact to be answered well, the kind that a quick glance through your school's materials will prove to make up the bulk of their student's chapter quizzes, fill in the blank worksheets, and bubble tests, such as:
You see, the more important point has little to do with whether 'A' or 'B' is the expected answer, the point is that whichever one of those answers will get their students a good grade, will 'work' just fine for one community, and vice-versa for the other, and what students learn from that is that what is real and true is not the point of their lessons. And that lesson - repeating the 'answer' that will work, as the answer - is the real lesson that our students are being inundated with, in nearly all of their lessons, worksheets, quizzes, and tests, which is the point that's being missed in nearly every Red/Blue community in America today.
That memorization, and deliberation have different purposes, isn't a new point, only a forgotten one (at best), one that Aristotle was pointing out 2,500 years ago in his Nichomachean Ethics:
What do you suppose happens when a student memorizes a list of 'The six causes of the American Revolution', and is given an 'A+!' for doing so? That's right, worse than such answers being simply wrong or inadequate, awarding 'A's for such answers, gives students the impression that mindlessly recalling lists of facts, is equivalent to understanding the issue at hand, and each time that students are led to ingest such 'answers' as understanding, reduces the likelihood that they'll engage in that type of deliberation in the future, which is what a deeper understanding of such matters requires.
That's what I mean by 'Questions and Answers' that aren't worth being pursued, because finding them might do more harm than good, certainly more harm, than 'getting straight A's!' could ever compensate for. Helping a student to understand what is important, and training students to parrot a 'key fact' on cue, are two very different educational goals, and we need to recognize that when students are being taught and graded in this way, then the primary purpose for the materials, the questions, and the expected answers to them, is to further a narrative and habituate students to getting answers from 'those who know best', and that is the 'educational norm' everywhere today.
Coincidentally (not !) that same approach is what we see being followed daily in our news media, Left and Right, and no doubt the familiar approach is what their successful ratings depends upon: A source declares that issue X is important, 'key facts' are provided, and experts advise that the acceptable answer is A (or B). That familiar approach is what propaganda depends upon and is spread through, and the metaphysical & epistemological methods that are implicit in it, convey its 'answers' that we are expected to accept, and repeat, on demand, despite what can be seen to be real and true by those who bother to look past the surface (See the Munk Debate on the topic of 'Don't trust mainstream media' between Douglass Murray, Matt Taibi vs New York Times celebrity authors Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg, and see the latter two cluelessly attempting to use their 'expert status' to define their opposition, and lose badly as scored by the audience, who weren't buying it at all).
Questions worth considering
The funny thing is, that when the point of a question is understanding, rather than boosting test scores, then following in the wake of a reasonably in-depth study of those nations' histories and cultures, that very same opening question can be used between a teacher and their students, as a first step down paths of understanding that are well worth travelling, guiding them into considering something that their lives will be richer from knowing.
So the initial answer to the first part of my question, is does a question lead you into an understanding of what is real and true? If it doesn't, or if it expects you to accept something in place of that, it's because those asking it don't want you to understand it. Is a question being asked in pursuit of what is real and true? If you're not able to tell, or if it settles for a diversion or a simulacrum of that, it is not only not worth pursuing, but it is leading you, either by intention or incompetence, away from what is real and true, and habituating you to continue doing that, which is exceedingly harmful to your education, and to your life.
OTOH, when a student is becoming aware of how and why the questions they are being asked, and the answers they are finding themselves giving to them, not only fit together, but instill in them the sense that something is developing in their mind and body that thrives from their being fitted together, then those questions and answers are leading them to a wider and deeper understanding of the issue, which is a sign that an education is occurring within them. But that sense of understanding will not develop from retrieving approved 'answers' that are taken from someone else's conclusions, for them to repeat as needed for test scores, or for eliciting the politically correct approval of others.
Here then is a question that's worth asking:
The problem is that while follow-up questions that help develop understanding can come from a teacher orally testing a student's knowledge, that engagement is unlikely, if not impossible, to come from the sort of printed tests with answer keys that we began using in America, as noted in previous posts, after Horace Mann injected them into standard practice for American schools in the early 1800s. As was also noted previously, what Mann especially liked about written tests was, they fostered a data collection strategy which he infamously used as a means for controlling and developing a narrative in public opinion about education, and to control which educators would be permitted to continue educating students in their society, in order to form and control that public's opinion.
Along with the innovation of written tests, came the replacement of original sources with textbooks, quizzes, graded work, and standardized tests, not to mention separating students into age related 'grades', and moving students as the bell rings, from one classroom to another, to study materials that are treated as very 'separate' subjects. The shallow pursuits that have accompanied those innovations, are mostly pointless and trivial wastes of time, which are educationally destructive, and whether that destruction comes by way of a sledgehammer of failure, or the slow rot of getting 'straight A's!', the aims being achieved are the same.
Here's a 'key fact' that's worth recalling: uniform written tests and 'Final Exams' as we know them today, did not exist in our Founding Fathers' era - instead they used oral examinations, where the teacher would ask questions of individual students, who would respond, and be questioned further based upon their responses. None of those features that we now take as normal today, were involved in the education of our Founding Fathers' generation - they had no grades, no test scores, no GPAs - does anyone seriously imagine that they were less educated than our 'straight A!' students are today (see Walsh's 'Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic')?
I'm not attempting to push some gibberish of 'Grading student's work is too stressful, just let them groove to the lessons!', I'm saying that the system of grading your student's work, is being used to con you - it's not the student's education that's being graded, but your willingness to accept that those grades indicate that your child is being educated!
That realization is what startled Pete Hegseth into realizing that we are all to some extent today, products of a 'Progressive Education', in that we can hardly conceive of the subject without them, and all of those 'experimental' innovations reflect the underlying pro-regressive approach to, or evasion of, what is real and true. And because more and more people are coming to that realization, an education that's actually educational not only can still be found today, they're becoming increasingly easy to find, but it does require looking outside the realm of textbooks and answer keys, where students can be led into observing and understanding just how significant it is that from its earliest foundations in so many diverse languages and cultures, whether coming from our Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian roots, through the likes of Socrates or Proverbs, the embrace of reality and reason, and a reverence for truth, virtue, and wisdom is what, has been both the needle and the pattern from which the Western ideal has been woven.
The sad truth is that 'education', as traditionally understood, has become a foreign concept to both 'conservative' and 'woke' schools, each of whose texts are primarily used for fact fishing exercises that do little more than train students in efficiently retrieving and repeating approved answers, in order to build up what their [school, school system, community, business, govt, ...?] sees as being a useful narrative, while also outputting a steady stream of useful human resources.
In short: Ideas have consequences, and ignoring how ideas are understood and validated has severe consequences for those who are under the power of those same ideas. That being the case, the question that parents and politicians should be asking, is whether such questions and answers that fill their textbooks and tests are even worth being asked or answered, by any student, in any school at all? Or more pointedly:
How you question your answers, matters
The traditional Western approach that began with Socrates, and which Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas perfected, involved a methodical approach to questioning and understanding and verifying that what you know, conforms to what is real and true, a sense that's now called 'Epistemic Adequacy', essentially meaning how to know that "'it,' is what it is", which is the beating heart of the West.
Our founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence which Thomas Jefferson intended to be "... an expression of the American mind..." were drawn from "... the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c...", which were deeply concerned with, and rooted in, what was understood to be true, and with how you, their reader, could know it. For 'We The People' to be capable of enjoying Liberty and Justice for all under a Rule of Law, we must care about what is real and true, and we must understand how we know if something is objectively true, and to care about how that integrates with the rest of what we're able to know is real and true.
In contrast to the Western standard of 'epistemic adequacy', the pro-regressive 'Progressive' and the 'Woke' are less concerned with what is real and true, than with what their group desires others to accept as 'true', a view that naturally gravitates towards using power to transform 'their truth' from wishes into demands, which others will be forced to accept, in line with the age-old standard of 'Might makes Right'. Those who dare to point out that 'their truth' is demonstrably untrue, will be hit with the accusation of 'epistemic oppression!', because your expectation that their words should conform to what is real and true, interferes with their desire to impose 'their truth' upon you, and they'll berate you at the top of their lungs, for interfering with their desire to abuse you as they please.
For all of their load mouthed bravado, what the bullies and tyrants of Wokeness detest and fear the most, is the Western method of asking questions that expect to find a correspondence between what is real and what is true. That fear is as real to them today as it was 2,500 years ago when their forefathers put Socrates to death for refusing to stop practicing and teaching his method; the same method that Pontius Pilot hurriedly washed his hands of.
The West in general would not, and could not, have grown, prospered, and persisted without an understanding of the importance of asking good questions and then pursuing the answers that follow from them, and America in particular, cannot long endure if our educational system is permitted to systemically muddy or even sever our ability to identify and acknowledge what is objectively true.
The issue with our schools isn't that they need to improve their student's grades & test scores, or that we have to somehow get schools 'back to basics'; the issue is that we need to break free of the narrative of lies that we've enmeshed ourselves in, through the lessons they've been teaching us. If being an American doesn't imply a familiarity with and understanding of the ideas of those 'public books of right' that Jefferson spoke of, then being an American can mean little more in the minds of those living in America, than a checkmark on a legal form, or a geo tag reference on their phone, and if that becomes the case, then neither Liberty nor Justice for any, can long endure within the geographic area legally known as the United States.
Ironically, the modern field of Epistemology was itself first formally created (its methods were implied or contained within classical metaphysics, but it wasn't made into a field of its own, until the assault of modernity began) by the German idealists (Kant, Fichte, Hegel) for the express purpose of breaking us away from the Western habit of rooting our understanding in what you know to be real and true, demanding that you dispense with what can be known (Metaphysics), and dialectically refocusing instead on how we know 'it' (Epistemology) - you might hear the echo of Progressive Education's mantra "Don't teach what to think, teach how to think!".
The clownish complexity of their Rube-Goldberg contraptions of convoluted and equivocal language that these idealists have crafted for their assault, evokes the showiness of the stage magician waving his left hand to distract the audience from what the right hand is doing, and, and what that wacademic abracadabra has culminated in, is the lethal epistemological variant of 'Social Epistemology', as described in the Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology:
If your own education neglected to inform you of such matters, you have my sympathy - mine didn't either, and it's been a struggle to learn about it on my own. If doing so yourself doesn't appeal to you, again, you have my sympathy, but - and I hope this doesn't come as a surprise - our feelings about that don't matter. If you don't put in the effort to at least familiarize yourself with these matters that are threatening to destroy your children's future and our nation, then both will be consumed by it.
Sorry, way it is. Your choice. And your choice will have consequences.
The first line of Aristotle's Metaphysics is "All men by nature desire to know", but while the desire to know comes naturally to all men, not all men desire to know or acknowledge what is actually true. It should come as no surprise then that much, if not most of the narratives that we're struggling against in education today, come from those who habitually put scare quotes around the words 'objectively true' - is it really surprising that a person who's less interested in what is real and true than with how they'd prefer things to be, would deliberately obscure or conceal any truth that'd frustrate their desires? What might actually be surprising, is that what lies at the root of our clarity or confusion over what is real and true, are the almost forgotten concepts of metaphysics, and no narrative could long persist without their use or misuse. In the previous post, I'd mentioned that the choice to engage with or ignore metaphysics and epistemology, was yours, but for us to make an informed choice about them, requires first giving some attention to what it is that our society has made such a concerted effort to steer us clear of.
So what sorts of grand and powerful terms are we talking about here? Well... I think 'grand and powerful terms' are part of the problem, as to anyone but academics, the terminology itself (ontology, nihilism, correspondence theory, empirical, existential, causal... ) stands squarely in the way of people being able to grasp and use what it is that they refer to, even as what it is that they refer to - how we all 'do' metaphysics from moment to moment and day in and day out - is routinely handled by each and every one of us through very simple, familiar, commonplace terms. As I list a few of these, keep the adage in mind that 'big things come in small packages' and try not to laugh, because Metaphysics' study of First Principles involves giving respectful attention to concepts that seem to be anything but impressive, a few of which, in no particular order, are:
My warnings aside, you might be tempted to smile at these seemingly simple terms, but their simplicity can be deceiving (innocently or intentionally), as respecting these concepts are the very things which make a good life attainable and our specialized fields & sciences possible, and they are key to whether our minds can be depended upon to operate intelligibly and smoothly, or instead are prone to become easily confused and abused.
One concrete example of confusing and abusing these concepts, is something you've probably often had recommended to you, which is some formulation of this:
The upshot of this is that by attempting to take their statements seriously, their own words are telling you to not believe or take their own words seriously. The problem with laughing such carelessness off though, is that it probably indicates how unaware they are of how far their own beliefs have led them out of the realm of Science, and into the ideology of Scientism, whose "excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques" bestows upon its believers the heady power to define Truth itself (not to mention 'right' and 'wrong'). It is especially important to realize that these people who claim the authority to speak for 'science', are, knowingly or not, in hot pursuit of the power to impose their opinion of what the 'smart thing to do' is, upon you, who, after all, lack their credentials for making those decisions about your own life. Case in point, if past performance is any indicator of future results, you'd do well to do some homework on Eugenics, as that is just one example of the horrific mistakes of history which they will be repeating in your future, if our continued carelessness and ignorance of these concepts permits them to do so.
The takeaway here is that when you hear otherwise intelligent people like David Hume, C.S. Peirce, Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, making such metaphysically nonsensical statements as that above, you should understand right away that not only do they not know what they are talking about, but that they have probably never given any serious thought to the meaning and potentially dangerous consequences of their own thoughts, or, if they have, they don't think it matters, as with this leading advocate of scientism, ticking off 'reasons' for his belief:
Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on the group think of scientists' Lost in Math
Having even a moderate grasp of metaphysics & epistemology (and again, more their focus and processes than technical aspects) would arm you against being conceptually mugged by such notions as that, but more to the point is how easily the careless (or intentional) misuse of metaphysics & epistemology can be used to subdue & subvert those who're unaware that they should be paying close attention to how those concepts are being used, and how we are being led to use them. The inconvenient truth of the matter is that without a basic understanding of metaphysical concepts such as what Truth is and is not, no field of science would even be possible, and even 'small' metaphysical errors that are missed or ignored, have huge consequences for those sciences and scientists attempting to build upon them. Their error - if it is an error - is that they've allowed the abstract nature of the metaphysical terms they use and abuse to mislead them into shadowy areas which they assume their own cleverness will be bright enough to illuminate their way through. Either that, or they are counting upon our unfamiliarity with such concepts, to enable them to nudge us into submitting to what we should not - for 'the greater good', no doubt. Either way, these are not roads we should travel down.
The good news is that the circular reasoning of Scientism is self-refuting; the bad news is that the views that such people have popularized in our society, have left a great many people blind to their falsity, and such metaphysical blindness has real world consequences. Giving more careful attention to the metaphysical & epistemological concepts which are so used & abused around us today, would reveal a number of misleading, impractical, and downright dishonest efforts being advocated for, which puts us all at the mercy of ideologs who've become used to the convenience of our enabling them to slip their half-baked notions right past us, and too often with our approval and support.
Metaphysician: Heal thyself!
Metaphysics matters because it helps us to take notice of those big things that so often hide, or are hidden, in small conceptual packages, which, once they've been slipped past us, have an outsized impact on our ability to live lives worth living. Recovering those abilities doesn't require us to learn technical terms or famous disputes over them, it simply requires that we do metaphysics, and to that end I'm proposing a mini metaphysical 'back to basics' exercise over the next few posts to see how the fundamentals are being used around us, against us, and by us, by focusing upon the use of three simple words, which, not to go all Pontius Pilot on you, are:
IMHO, if 'We The People' are to escape the muddy traps of our public discourse, it'll be as a result of our reclaiming our ability to deliberately engage in taking small, sure, steady steps upon solid metaphysical ground, because that's what has the best chance of bringing about the one thing that truly can defeat the grand Leviathan looming up all around us today - a widespread popular outbreak of sound reasoning, that's primarily concerned with what is real, and true, and right.
Up next: 'What' we are talking about.
We of course use 'What' as a placeholder for anything, usually something that hasn't yet been identified, but which the question expects, or at least hopes, will be identified - and while that 'What' can potentially refer to anything, we expect the reply we receive to refer to a particular thing within the context of the question being asked. In short, 'What' is referring to some part of, and by extension to all of, existence itself. That something exists and that we can know that, is the fundamental principle of metaphysics, and leaving a few big-brained fools aside for the moment, few doubt that because it is absurd to question the reality of existence, but it is absurdly common for us to confuse some idea in our heads, with it being real, and seeing how we do that, and how to keep from doing that, is what we're using 'What' for.
If I point at something and ask "What is that?", depending upon the context, the answer received could be anything from applesauce, to a 'bottom operated clapper valve', and while I know enough about applesauce to safely assume many delicious details about it (though depending on who I'd asked that of - waitress or friend or foe - other questions might be asked before taking a bite of it), the other merely names something whose concept means little more to me than the "what" I'd asked of it to begin with, right?
The natural reaction towards the unexpected or unknown, is - demonstrating what Aristotle said that all men desire - to ask more questions in order to make the unknown meaningful enough for it to fit into our understanding. How much is enough, depends upon the context, and fitting some unknowns into your world might not require much at all - if they reply, 'It's something found often on railroad cars', unless I had a deeper interest or need to know about trains, that'd be enough to make this particular "what" real enough in my mind for me to move on to the next squirrel.
But what about when the concept is a familiar one? How often do we assume we know something about what's being discussed, when we actually know little more about the familiar term, than we do of the unfamiliar one?
To get the gist of this, let's imagine a simple example of using a mostly abstract concept, where my wife tells me there's a problem with a room in our house. "What's the problem?" I ask, "it's too dark", she says. "Too dark", I nod. "What we need is a chandelier to brighten the room up" she says, and I nod my head, yep, we need a chandelier.
In this case, the unknown 'What' was filled in by 'chandelier', but annoyingly enough, knowing that we need this general kind of thing called a 'chandelier', though its familiar to me, it hasn't told me enough to even leave the room with, let alone run off to buy one, because although I've got a vague image in my mind of what a chandelier could be, it's no more concretized in my mind than a 'bottom operated clapper valve' is. Far too many of its potential properties are still too abstract in my mind, meaning that - in my mind - they can still hold 'any' value, though you can bet she has a very particular chandelier in her mind, and if I don't want to be left in the dark I need to turn my attention to filling in some of the hazy blanks, such as its price range, or how low it should hang, or whether it should have a simple on/off or dimmer switch, and so on.
The human mind (especially that of conmen) delights in lazily leaving those sorts of abstract details populated with nothing more than our tendency to accept our assumptions as being enough. But for our thoughts to be worth thinking, we need to develop the habit of fleshing those defaults out with questions that direct our attention to filling them in with realistically specific values, or value ranges - concretizing them - in order to identify, to make known to ourselves, the particular 'What' that should be pointed to by the 'what' that we as yet only 'think' we have in mind. Only after doing so can we knowledgeably say "Yes' to this chandelier, and definitely No to those chandeliers, and without doing so, we truly do not know the 'What' that we're talking about.
How appropriately abstract it is for a concept to remain, changes with the context. By that I mean, having no real interest in trains, knowing the 'bottom operated clapper valve' had to do with trains, was all I needed to know about it in that context, whereas in the context of my wife first identifying the solution of a "chandelier", even though the word told us nothing about the many possible details that were as yet entirely abstract in our minds, it was appropriate enough in that context to simply name the concept of a hanging lighting fixture, to distinguish it from all other possible options such as a lamp, skylight, candle, etc.,. But in the context of budgeting and going out to shop for a chandelier requires concretizing it further, even if only generally for issues like price, size, etc., in order to get a clearer understanding of what to look for and where. And yet even that somewhat more concretized status which would be appropriate enough for narrowing the field, would still be inappropriately abstract for the context of my going out to select this or that particular chandelier: what about its material - wood? metal? crystal? - or its shape - round? square? multiple arms? - how about color? size? number of lights?.
Those conceptual details whose concrete values had not yet been shared between our minds (if they were even in my mind at all), not to mention those several other properties that she'd be sure to have in her mind that'd never, ever, cross into my mind, would guarantee that if I were to trot out myself and buy what only seemed to be in my mind, her reaction to what I brought home would be anything but abstract.
To avoid such mishaps, requires our noticing that the same flexibility that enables concepts to be so mentally productive in identifying enough of what we have in mind in a given context (especially in the more specialized fields of science, technology, and literature), is the same feature that makes them so dangerous when we're not sufficiently wary of the abstract nature of the concepts we're using - it's too easy to think (or to give others the impression) that what we have in mind (if anything), is what they do as well. Those abstracts which default differently from one person to another, are what enable those peddling supposedly wise advice, such as the scientistic "...You should only believe a truth that is scientifically verifiable!" assertion, to sound sensible enough to those who habitually think no further upon them than whether or not their sound is pleasing enough to the ear to win their approval. We too easily fail to give those too familiarly used & abused metaphysical concepts the respectful attention they require. Of course the mischief that can result from leaving too many abstract components unpopulated in the concept of a chandelier, are but a pup-tent in comparison to the veritable skyscrapers that metaphysical concepts enable us to carelessly presume we know enough about, and the real world consequences of doing so (such as scientism and Eugenics) can be infinitely worse than confidently buying what you mistakenly thought was the right 'chandelier' at Home Depot.
Developing an attention to metaphysics helps to heighten our conscious awareness of the difference between what is metaphysically real (this physical chandelier), and what is still metaphysically abstract (any chandelier), the abstract is a valuable means for moving towards what's real, but we need to guard against it being mistaken for the real thing. Doing so begins with a conscious awareness of whether our grasp of 'What' + 'Enough' + 'Context' = a calm, or a doubtful state of mind.
One example of a lack of context is the cartoon I've got in the graphic with this post, of two characters standing on either end of a numerical shape and pointing, as one insists '6!' and the other '9!', and the caption invites you to take the relativistic view of 'it's all a matter of perspective', but however useful it is to realize that perspective can influence perceptions, what's more useful is to look for the wider context involved - if the shape is laying on a parking lot, then one end will designate which end is up, and if there is no such context available, then it is only a shape that can be used as either a '6' or a '9', in which case both are wrong for insisting it is one way or the other. That seemingly 'reasonable' path towards relativism is a favorite of modernists (that on the molecular level, a solid is 'akshually!' mostly space is another, more on that in later posts) - reject the ploy and look for the context.
And for those who wish to put feelings and preferences first, there's the other cartoon from the graphic, which shows 'your house' as it's preferred to be seen by you (a nice comfy house), by a buyer (a cheap shack), a lender (an only slightly better shack), and by your tax collector (who prefers to see it as a palace). When you leave too much to the abstract, you lose, bring your ideas into contact with reality, especially question what you assume to be 'true', don't leave your understanding to be defined by feelings and preferences - of theirs or yours - concretize them, or in the end they'll come crashing down on you like a ton of bricks.
Get into the habit of asking a few conscious questions: Does this belong with that?; Is the meaning clear or opaque?; What am I assuming about this from what I've been told, and how much of that was I actually told?; When being advised to do or accept something: Did they provide substance to support their urgency, or did they focus on fanning feelings of peril? Am I being expected to make assumptions about what they didn't say? What reasons do I have to believe that the reality which will follow from this advice, will match up with what they led me to assume about it?
Acting in accordance with reality
Not being so careless as to neglect the metaphysical basics, is a simple, and valuable, habit to learn and acquire, and the good news is that by giving just a little more conscious attention to what those too familiar words of 'is', 'trust', 'should', etc., can provide an otherwise inappropriate cover for, we can eliminate the insubstantial weeds that a careless inattention enables to take root in our minds - especially regarding advice given by 'those who know best'.
How we've come to be so careless and ignorant of metaphysics, is largely due to our schools having pragmatically ensured that we would, and sadly with very little push-back from We The People. If you want to test whether I'm being too harsh or inaccurate, just ask yourself and your friends about what the 'Three Acts of the Mind' are, I'll wait.
Oh... hi again. That was quick.
Were you familiar with it? How many of your friends were? If some recognized the term, how well did they know what it referred to? That's but one of many commonplace fundamentals that 'every school boy' once knew, and the reason why they did, was because familiarity with such concepts was a known means to aiding us in knowing better, what it is that we mean, when we say that something is true.
For those who aren't familiar with the term, here are the three acts that our minds routinely perform:
So what more can we now know about scientism's advice that: "We should only believe to be true that which can be scientifically proven"?
We can imagine that the image which the phrase expects us to have in mind regarding science being able to provide efficient and reliable answers to us, but we can also see that many important questions and answers which those 'should' (would) apply to, are being left for us (and especially for them) to simply assume, and for everyone to assume that all would go well, without looking any closer at their advice.
If you do give some attention to moving past the abstract defaults by asking some questions, you'll find yourself engaging the Three Acts of the Mind to identify what something is, to understand enough of its nature and purpose, and to reason your way through how such details would and should (and can't and shouldn't) be applied to what, and how, you're understanding of the reality which such unscientifically vague possibilities would entail, and that will likely lead you to so some stark metaphysical clarity about where following such advice might lead you to.
For as you begin reasoning your way through a number of scenarios, you'll surely begin to notice that men in lab-coats are not particularly suited to scientifically examining and testing whether or not you love and believe in your spouse or your children, or whether the issues you care to speak out on are quantifiable or verifiably of value under laboratory conditions (and can you 'scientifically verify' something outside those conditions?). You'll surely also soon discover that other issues such as your own preferences for food and drink and entertainment, are somewhat less than scientifically justifiable, let alone 'scientifically verifiable' (are they even the kinds of values that are 'scientifically identifiable'?), such as what you might choose to read, or what you might think your child's 'education' should entail. You may rest assured though, that the lab-coated ones, who after all, 'do know best' (as they'll authoritatively tell you), will surely have many calculations available, as well as a number of equally 'scientifically verifiable' advisories attached to them, by one committee (soviet?) or another, regarding what they've determined would be best for you, and your family, to do, and what not to do, for the greater good (quantities over qualities!).
Likewise, you'd soon find that they have no ability whatsoever to scientifically test the need or value of your having an individual right to freedom of speech, or whether and what church to attend or if government should establish one (or perhaps a more appropriate alternative) for you, or of the value and need for individuals to petition their government for a redress of grievances, or anything else related to what our Bill of Rights secures for us in the 1st, or any of its other amendments to our Constitution (BTW, is that a 'scientifically verifiable' document? Ummm... no, it's not. Neither, BTW, is 'Justice', hence the addition of 'Social', to transform it into a quantity, rather than a quality).
What you'll see instead, should you dare to apply the metaphysical eye for the Western guy, is that there are plenty of people who're exceedingly happy to don the lab-coat and clipboard garb of scientists, to formulate tests no matter how untestable they might be (which, BTW, is how the 'Teaching Laboratories' in our Teachers Colleges have come up with how to teach what is taught to those who teach you and your kids what not to think about), and they're quite happy to substitute many quantities for any qualities at issue, and then to cite numerous studies so as to tally up very impressive numbers which will be claimed to show that the greater good would be best served by some fraction of, or total and complete infringement upon, one or more or all of those issues of individual rights and property that Western Culture in general, and our Constitution in particular, secure for us.
You'll also find yourself being tut-tutted that 'individual rights' are passe, and that 'Human Rights' are what we... er... 'should'... concern ourselves with today - for the greater good - and that you 'should' be happy with the pleasant efficiencies which they secure for and impose upon you.
How?
The undeniable fact is, that with regard to what we mean by the concepts we use 'What' to refer our attention to, not only does it matter that we have enough clarity in our minds about what we're expected to make judgements upon within our minds, but that what that 'What' designates - the metaphysically real vs the metaphysically abstract - allows or leads us to contextually define, or leave undefined, matters which matter a great deal to our lives.
It's essential to know how we engage with, or else flee from, the reality that is inherent in our consideration of What Is Truth?, and we'll look at the 'Truth' of that, next.
Keeping the Western mind more focused on and in touch with what's real and true, was a lot easier when we consciously kept one foot firmly in each of our culture's Greco/Roman - Judeo/Christian foundations, and the first principles which they were formed from. As noted previously, we aren't ignorant of these concepts because they're difficult to grasp, but because they go untaught, and it's because they go untaught, that we're enabled to remain ignorant of their importance in our lives. Fortunately, the concepts themselves are mostly simple - that's why they work - and we only need to develop the habit of attending to what they otherwise keep out of sight, to benefit from them. For instance, there's nothing complicated about Aristotle's simple test for whether or not a fact is true:
OTOH, their simplicity and similarity to other concepts, is where our attention is required in order to make those distinctions between them that inattentiveness otherwise too easily lets slip past us, and equivocation - false equivalents - can introduce small errors that can grow, or be exploited into, larger ones. One such difference that's worth noting, is between what we can see is 'True', and what is meant by 'Truth' - do you see the distinction? We say something is true, as a judgment about a claim, but what Truth is, is what it itself is, which is different from a judgment about it.
Taking up the thread from Aristotle (and Plato), Thomas Aquinas put what it is we mean by what Truth is, as being when our thoughts correspond to what is real:
So with just a few basic metaphysical principles: that reality exists, that what exists is intelligible, that Truth is our understanding conforming to what is real, and that discovering and acknowledging what is true is of the utmost importance to a life worth living, we have what were and are recognized as being vital by both halves of our Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian cultural foundations. I'll save the details for later posts, but the first significant shot felt around the world in modernity, was fired upon those foundations by Descartes, with his claim that since reality could always be doubted, the only thing that couldn't be doubted, was whether or not you were in doubt about something within it (or 'it' itself) - meaning... that... rather than Truth being what you have when your thought conforms to reality (and is therefore able to be verified against reality as being true), the new arbiter of 'truths' became whether or not you clearly and distinctly believed that your own thoughts agreed with your own thoughts, and were therefore 'true'.
Through this new doubtful formulation, people soon began imagining that their own thoughts could subdue reality simply by doubting it, as what you don't doubt about what you think, became the 'truth' - 'my truth' - that the remainder of your thoughts should conform to (and of course if some fudging of 'facts' was needed to maintain that conformity, so long as you didn't doubt that it was needed... it was. (Shhh!)). Descartes' blending of pervasive skepticism with strident certainty in his philosophy and 'Method of Doubt', has intrigued Modernity into a labyrinth that soon after began to enclose and imprison us within it, and in a very real sense, only the earlier understanding of Truth can set us free of it.
Not surprisingly, the weapon that the modernist most often uses against what is real and true, is an inexhaustible supply of artificial and causeless doubt. Since Descartes' day, Kant gave the term 'doubt' a more respectable suit of clothes in the form of 'the critical question' (and which Marx much later weaponized as 'subject everything to relentless criticism'), and any reality the modernist desires to be free from respecting (made easier by Kant's declaring we can never really know reality 'as it is'), they simply and endlessly doubt the truth of it, typically by demanding endless 'proofs' of the self-evident.
But what more can be said about Truth, than that it conforms to reality?
Believe it or not, that question is a bit of a metaphysical minefield which you should approach very carefully, because as ideas have consequences, so does engaging with ideas that don't respect the metaphysical guardrails of reality that are meant to keep you on the road to objective truth. The question that should be asked before going down such paths, is not what more can be said about Truth than that it is what conforms to reality, but what would the attempt look like, and should we attempt to say anything more about it, than that?
What would attempting to do so entail? Wouldn't seeking 'something more' require either using some notion that's even more abstract and so further distanced from what is real and true, or by using something... else ... that'd require referencing something that doesn't exist and so is unreal... to verify what is real? Wouldn't you need to know what is real (i.e. self-evidently true), in order to identify what isn't real, in order to use what isn't real, to verify what is really true? Didn't that thought just take our thoughts and spin them around in a circle?!
There are of course some issues that require us to come at them from other perspectives, but a perspective that requires circular thinking and endless regress, will never be one of them. Such practices that lead into self-evidently circular reasoning, will quickly sweep your mind up along with it, but as a general rule, what is even better than exiting such loops, is not entering into them in the first place. A grasp of metaphysics helps us to avoid such traps by identifying their hazards and keeping our attention upon what is real, while exposing what is not true, and cannot be.
The stubborn fact is that it is unreasonable to ask for an argument to demonstrate what is already self-evident, it is unreasonable to demand a 'proof!' that by definition cannot be logical, because the attempt would fall into an endlessly circular regress of 'explanations', which could add nothing more meaningful to the discussion than the endless assertions of the Turtle Lady. The Turtle Lady being the apocryphal story of an old woman chiding an astronomer for saying that the earth revolves around the sun, when, as she says, 'Everyone knows the earth rests on the back of a turtle!'. The astronomer peers at the old lady over his glasses and says to her "If the world is resting on the back of a turtle, what is the turtle standing on?", and she replies 'A larger turtle, of course!", and before he can ask what that turtle's standing on, the Turtle Lady replies as anyone who seeks the comfort of meaningless circularity, does :
If you want to get a firm hold upon the truth that modernity has alienated itself from, then brush the likes of the Turtle Lady, Descartes, and the rest of modernity aside, and return to the metaphysics which gave us our first solid grasp on our world in the first place, and which will steer you clear of spinning your wheels in such follies.
The key to keeping your premises conforming to reality, is to begin by adhering to the first principle of thought, which Aristotle identified in the fourth book of his Metaphysics, as the law of non-contradiction:
What we know of reality begins with what we can perceive of it, and however high-flying an ideal might be, if it is a valid one, it can be traced back step by step to a less abstract and more concrete concept, until you finally reach its foundation in what is objectively real and true, and there's no need to pretend that it's possible to go any further down that road than you have, and it would be unwise to attempt it. As Aristotle goes on to say of those who demand proof of the self-evident:
That some people do this by either demands or doubts is undeniable - several post-modernists like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, all authored papers doubting the reality of authors - but why? Shakespeare, with characters like Iago and Edmund in his head, nailed the point well::
What such skeptics, relativists, and out & out liars all depend upon, is being able to slip some detail past us within the abstract, to involve us in positions that contradict some aspect of reality, identity, consciousness, which a more careful attention to the metaphysical details can help spare us from, if we pay attention to what it is that they are saying.
What the meaning of the word 'IS' is, in the phrase 'What is Truth?', is what we'll get into in the next post.
Clinton of course wasn't carefully pointing out an important nuance of detail that the court had somehow not noticed was true, he was utilizing a post-modernist blend of technicalities & equivocations to lie by omission while also using his own lawyer and others as proxies to spread the lie and conceal the fact that he'd engaged in inappropriately intimate behavior with a young intern under his power. His words expertly exploited the assumptions of 'those who know best' in his fellow college educated judge, lawyers, and media, not to mention similarly muddled thought throughout society on matters of politics, party, and justice itself, which left enough people unable or unwilling to apply the principle of non-contradiction to his actions, in either a court of law or in the court of public opinion.
The effect of our president legitimizing a sordid lie by blatantly misusing and distorting the common understanding of our words, spread the seeds of a disdainful metaphysical blindness into every aspect of our society. From that point on, it seems to me, that those who'd already been visibly flinching at the mere mention of objective or self-evident truths, were emboldened to come out of their post-modern closets and openly treat those concepts and those still using them, with laughter and derision, as everyone else seemed to (shamefully) sigh and turn away as from a battle not worth fighting. Ideas have consequences, and the consequences of either torturing or turning a blind eye to the meaning of our words, was that meaningful discussions were that much less possible to engage in, and so people began looking no further than tribe and party for where to stand in every conflict that has since followed.
Word games and obfuscations aside, behind the verbiage there is always a 'What' that is being referred to, and the truth is that that is either real and so true, or it's nothing more than words, and that goes for objects and actions, and concepts as well - at some point they must connect with reality in order to be seen to be objectively true, or... not. It is essential for each person to understand that all of the intricately complicated and abstract ideals which civilized life requires and depends upon, from civility to principles of law, are ultimately traceable down to their rock hard foundations in reality, and without which its loftiest structures sway perilously in every tremor and breeze that comes along.
Every person who has a concern for what is real and true should also recognize that those who attempt to obscure or sew unwarranted doubts about those foundations, or to deny them outright, or even the possibility of them, are making a vicious attack upon the ability of every person within that society to live a life worth living. Such people as those who want to get away with the unreal, need you to not notice the lack of substance that underlies the webs that their words are spinning, and that requires distraction and misdirection on their part, and the more popular modernist and post-modernist means of doing that, is to involve you in attempting to argue how best to 'go further' than what can be demonstrated as being self-evidently true.
There are two very good reasons for you to not engage with their project:
1) As with the Turtle Lady and Bill Clinton, the argument they propose isn't intended to widen your knowledge, or to reveal nuances, but only to rattle your foundations and separate you from what is real and true.
2) You can't - not if you have any regard for logic and the issue in question.
If you allow yourself to be drawn into attempting to 'justify' or 'prove' their doubts about what is self-evident in the three Acts of the Mind, you'll find yourself stumbling into contributing to some form of a '... it's turtles all the way down!' argument yourself. There is no truth to be found in obfuscation and no logic to be found in circularity, and no value gained from giving the impression that greater understanding can be had by demanding 'more' than what is easily observed and intelligible for all reasonably healthy humans to understand - it already is -- wait for it -- objectively true.
It's also worth noting that in our society today we are far more likely to be directed away from making that observation ('What is a woman? Sorry, I'm not a scientist...'), than towards it, because so much of what we're intended to assume and accept, depends upon our not noticing that an obvious lie has some convoluted verbiage that 'justifies' it is 'true' (hello antiracism, men can be women, etc.).
At root, a self-evident truth is recognizably true, because it either denotes a perceptible fact that is apprehendable to the First Act of the Mind, from,
Someone with an honest question or misunderstanding about a matter of observation, judgement, or reasoning, may have reasonable doubts or questions about those, which further explanations might enlighten them (or perhaps you) about, but that is a very different thing from the person who doubts or denies whether or not the chandelier in your hand is a chandelier, or that or that it is designed to be hung, or that having done so its purpose is to bring more light to the room than darkness. For the person that hurls comments such as 'you just think that, but you can't really know it, no one can know anything for certain!', what is there to argue with such a person about?
Any 'argument' that is focused only upon denying or pretending an unnatural and arbitrary doubt ('well it could be!'), can serve nothing other than the eradication of your ability to argue for what is true. To doubt or deny the self-evident truth that the chandelier in your hands is in fact a chandelier, or that it is to be hung to provide light, is no different than their doubting or denying the self-evident truth of mortality, or responsibility, or property, or anything else that is true. The doubts of such philosophical conmen are not meant to bring understanding, their purpose is to degrade your understanding and return you to the darkness they take cover in ('it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is', is' ).
But while you can't and shouldn't attempt to prove what actually is self-evidently true, you can, and should, demonstrate that their denials violate what is true. One means of doing so is through a method which was pioneered by Socrates, and perfected by Aristotle, and Aquinas, and has been employed down to our day by everyone from the Jesuits, to Ayn Rand, called 'Retortion', or sometimes 'Retorsion'. It derives its effectiveness through a metaphysical attention to the abstract defaults which hasty rhetoric tends to leave unexamined, empty, or even deliberately concealed, and by drawing attention to the fact that their claims depend upon what isn't actually there, or that they depend upon what is true in order to deny it, it uses the skeptic's and relativist's own words, to reveal what they'd left unsaid.
For instance, for the skeptic or relativist (same coin, different side) who claims (and I've actually had several people insist this to me) that:
Even attempting to deny your ability to know anything, is itself a claim to know something, reaffirming human nature once again with the opening line of Aristotle's metaphysics: 'All men by nature desire to know', and it brings the skeptic face to face with the self-refuting nature of their own positions. As Aristotle pointed out, for a skeptic to behave consistently with their 'ideals', they'd have to sit silently and motionlessly awaiting death to take them away, as taking such ideals seriously would permit nothing less, and that of course would be far too opposed to the nature of human nature, for anyone to do.
And for the skeptic and relativist who takes the bait and attempts to deny the reality of human nature, you can deliver the verbal beating they've been begging for by drawing their attention to the universal fact that everyone, everywhere, by nature, engages in the same three mental operations, all at once, in apprehending what exists, making judgments upon that, and reasoning what to do about it - even prior to the Three Acts of the Mind. Ask them to close their eyes, hold your hand up, and tell them to open their eyes and tell you what they see, and without going any further than that, they will have to admit that their mind engages in three inseparable operations, and by inseparable, I mean that you cannot even conceive of one of the three, without also engaging the other two, as with tweaking an observation of Ayn Rand's (as what she calls 'axiomatic concepts')
Luckily... wait, what's that? Oh, ok, I hear a couple of you out there, so you think you can affirm or deny one of those points without utilizing and confirming them all together? Ok, go for it, I'll wait... on second thought, long-form blogging isn't so interactive. I tell you what, I'll just go ahead and argue the matter for you. So, here we go: You'd argue that:
Ok, so summing up your tightly argued refutation against the fact that the three - Reality, Identity, Awareness - are implicit in the nature of every human being's observation, necessitated your pointing into the reality which exists and contains yourself and who you are pointing at, to identify me, as someone who you are consciously aware of, and who is aware of you.
Is that about right? [... you nod again]. And all of that was implied in your very first word? [c'mon man, nod again]. Nice... soOo... we're done here, right? Alrighty then. Moving on.
Luckily enough you don't need a formal grasp of logic for any of this, only need a rudimentary grasp of grammar - even my feeble grammatical skills will do just fine - and a willingness to pay attention to what is (and isn't) being said. Elaborate arguments and proofs aren't the point of, or a necessity for, anyone to be albe to live their life well, the point is only to not allow what 'is not', to appear to aquire substance and consequence in your life, and all that's truly needed for guarding against that, is to notice and point out contradictions where they exist. And that is afterall, the very first rule of logic - that if the premises are not true - meaning that they contradict reality - there is no logical method that can be performed with or upon them!
By deriving self-evident truths from observations, to judgments, to a reasoned understanding of matters, an observant and informed person who's also willing to further develop their understanding against those thoughts as might be found "...in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c...", is very likely to find themselves reasonably connecting the conceptual dots to reveal that higher understanding which forms the basis of Individual Rights,
But, for those others who merely and obnoxiously deride and deny that '...Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness...' is self-evident, scoffing at everything from our ability to choose our own actions, to denying that anyone can know that anything is true, and for those who have no reply to those retortions that reveal the errors and dishonesty within such positions, who reply primarily with anger and/or deliberate defitional evasions - there truly is no reasoning with them. Such folk will likely soon resort to asserting that 'what everybody knows' as 'a people', is a more significant 'standpoint' than what any one individual can know is real and true (which is where 'systemic power' enters into the picture, but that's for the upcoming posts on Epistemology), and you're better off just letting them know that you've seen the emptiness behind their mask, and then simply move along.
Reality - what exists - is the fundamental Object of our thoughts, and our thoughts indicate our relation to it, as the subject which knows the object. It's not an issue of Objective vs. Subjective, it's more like the Objective and Subjective operating in concert, that enables our minds to work. Our judgments about reality can be true, and our perceiving that there's a relation between one judgment and another, can lead us to yet another judgment between that and another thing we've judged to be true, and so on, building up to the reasoning that is the Third Act of the Mind, and doing so should bring two very important points to mind - one obvious, and one that's soOooo obvious that it usually escapes our attention altogether:
1) The merely obvious point, is that the reasoning that we build our judgments upon can be impressive, can be eloquent, persuasive, and even stirring, and yet, even the most persuasive and stirring reasoning can be utterly and completely false. And conversely, as Socrates demonstrated to the point of being put to death for doing so, a thoroughly true and well-reasoned argument can be misunderstood, ignored, or flat out denied.
Obviously, that's a problem.
However impressively reasoned and logical an argument seems to be, if its premises are not true, and/or if those you're reasoning with do not realize (or care) that they are true, then all is for naught. Aristotle's first rule of logic - the one that is usually ignored today - is that we must first ensure that our premises are true, and then and only then, can you begin to say something logically worthwhile about it.
What Retortion is effective at doing, is dealing with the perceptible aspects of the abstractions in those too often unexamined premises, which are what both the honest error and the deliberate lie are built upon, and that's why the importance of being familiar with metaphysical concepts is so important. For as the abstract nature of 'chandelier' encompasses the various differences in style and materials of hundreds or even thousands of very physically different chandeliers, a concept such as 'is', which potentially encompasses all of existence and being in itself, it's vital that the appropriate levels of abstraction that could otherwise be smuggled past your awareness, be identified, within the context of the moment, because carelessly leaving those in the abstract, which is the habit that our schools have helped to instill in us, is the very thing that the unscrupulous count upon using to exploit us.
Those who persist in claims that minimize or ignore metaphysics, are not engaging in philosophy - the love of wisdom - but only a deliberate sham of avoiding and attacking it, aka: Sophistry [see the 'nothing new under the sun' nature of the pre-modern state of post-modernism's 'i. Nothing exists, ii. Even if existence exists, it cannot be known, iii. Even if it could be known, it cannot be communicated', as the IEP notes was being taught by the sophist who was confronted by Socrates in 'The Gorgias']. It should also be no surprise that those who exist in continual conflict with reality, and the continuous need to fake it, while attempting to hide it behind those words they fake it with, tend to be rather bitter and hostile - their own thoughts are actively alienating them from the real world that they actually do live in, no matter how much they might want to deny it. Having rejected Truth, they have only the illusion of power to appeal to, which endlessly depends upon your not noticing the ever-present reality that they must endlessly obscure and deny, through the force of their words alone. That has got to be exhausting.
Don't consent. Don't submit. Don't enable those who desire the power to play God with their own lives, to unleash chaos amongst ours.
Do recognize that to devalue or deny Knowledge and wisdom, is an attack upon every aspect of your ability to live a life worth living. Take the time to think through the placeholders to what is true. To identify and respect the nature of what is, enables your mind to integrate with what is real and true, and conversely, to ignore or deny what is, is to alienate your mind from existence, and from truth, and from yourself, imprisoning you in the same faked world as theirs. Truly, when we carelessly and negligently misuse metaphysical abstractions, we're heading into a whole world of trouble, stepping into a jail cell and locking the door behind us. Fortunately for us, the Truth will set you free - if you engage with it.
2) The too obvious point that I mentioned, is one that's rarely given the attention it deserves, is that we all place a value upon what we know is true - even Marxists listen to who knows the truth about how best to sell a lie - and we do so because it's an accurate reflection of some aspect of reality as it is. People are judged to be fools or wise, based upon how well their thoughts and actions corollate with and conform to what is objectively real and true. The wisdom of that bit of obviousness was apparent even in Aristotle's day, as he noted in his Metaphysics, book 1, chp 1,
How the causes of those ideas go about producing consequences in our lives, is what we'll look at next.
Philosophy has separate branches for going more in depth into these two key terms, with Epistemology clarifying what we mean by knowledge and how to verify that it is what it claims to be (which we'll get into in coming posts), and for the aspect of causation I'm most interested in, the Ethics clarifies how you should respond to Causes in your life (whether from external circumstances or what you internally come to understand), and while Aristotle goes into more depth on both in other books like his Nichomachean Ethics, Analytics, and even the Physics, in the Metaphysics he looks at their foundations, and as it's a safe bet that a better understanding of that can have a sizable impact on your day to day doings and possibly even the entire course of your life, it's worth taking a closer look at those basics, and we'll begin that in this post with Knowledge.
One of the potentially course correcting nuggets that the Metaphysics provides, is in making an important distinction about the nature of knowledge, in that knowledge, which always aims at some form of good, can be categorized by how much calculation and deliberation is or is not involved in apprehending and applying that knowledge. On one end of the scale is the fact that some knowledge involves little or no degree of chance or context in it or in the principles derived from it, while the remaining forms of knowledge involve ever increasing degrees of chance and context in how we go about both grasping and applying that knowledge. What Aristotle notes in book VI of his Nichomachean Ethics,
To illustrate, beginning with the extreme end which Aristotle includes the categories of mathematics and theology in, we know that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle in a Euclidean plane (an important caveat) will always be 180* - and that knowledge is as true today, as it will be true tomorrow, just as it has been from the beginning of time, and as it will be to the end of time. No chances of context or material configuration need to be allowed for in that invariable truth - there is nothing to deliberate about, no judgements to be considered and weighed - for once it is understood by observation, that knowledge only needs to be identified, to be known and applied, and we'd be rightly concerned about the person who continued to deliberate upon and 'fact check' the sum of degrees in every possible triangle (it's worth noting, because it is so often misused & abused, that Math & Geometry are not pure truths somehow existing apart form and unsullied with reality and experience - their is no concept of a line, or a number, except through experience and inferring from quantities of it. Dualism is false, even on that level).
OTOH, every other form of knowledge outside of mathematics and theology, contains some variability of chance and context to be considered and deliberated upon, so as to make a worthwhile judgement about it. How well your knowledge can serve the good you are aiming at, depends a great deal upon how well you recognize the nature and variations within it. With that in mind, let's take a look at how Knowledge can be generalized into three basic categories, varying in degree from that which requires the least judgment in attaining and applying that knowledge, to the most :
Those who lack (or ignore) that understanding, tend to embody the old joke about 'if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail' - or the equally appalling "You should only believe a truth that is scientifically verifiable". By having some depth and dimension to what you know about what you know, you are less likely to mistake what is appropriate with one form of knowledge, as also being appropriate to another - our knowledge of the molecular structure of water and how it interacts with what contains it, is not known in the same way as how best to convey that water, or whether or when water should be charged for or provided free of charge - and not knowing those distinctions, implicitly degrades the quality of all of what you do know, and what you might attempt to do with that knowledge.
That being said, it's worth poking just a little bit further into the essentials of the three basic categories of knowledge:
The wise and prudent person understands that, contrary to popular (modern) belief, knowledge is not power, or it is at least not the obedient servant that we've been led to think of it as being, and knowledge severed from principled understanding and experience, is a blinding danger to all. Knowledge, when its variations are rightly understood, and when we are cognizant of how and why matters both large and seemingly small can lead to unexpected consequences in our lives - always mindful of the context of choice and chance - can be put to work which benefits all - but that requires the pursuit of understanding, rather than the pursuit of power.
However dazzling the improvements that the Scientific Method has brought to modernity, it's important to keep in mind that the judgments of those in science and technology, are typically concerned with much narrower calculations to improve measurable efficiencies for comfort and/or profit within their society - conveniently ignoring the fact that a society, a culture, are forms of knowledge that science and technology can neither conceive of, nor create, nor maintain - the scientific method, and the ability to apply it, is a very different thing from the weight of making judgments about immeasurable aspects of how best to live, or how best to respond in life or death contexts, and while each life is immeasurably improved by knowledge of what is wise, the wisest person cannot possibly know the manifold circumstances and context that each individual has to consider in the decisions they make every day in the living of their lives. All forms of knowledge are important, but it's even more important not to confuse one for the other.
The role of a well-rounded education is to impart how the essentials of science, technology, and the Humanities (arts, literature, history), fit into and form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, with the understanding that being able to see that whole through each part's perspective, helps to convey an appreciation of how those differences are all needed to form a solid and sound whole, and without which we are limited to seeing less of what there is to see - both in the form of better appreciating the whole, and what endangers it. Those with the interest and aptitude to delve into a particular field at greater depth, so with the larger picture in mind, as they pursued a more detailed knowledge of the part which interested them most, within the whole.
This is not to minimize or ignore the feats of ingenuity and even courage that may be involved in operating in any one of these fields, but to point out the importance of distinguishing between the varying forms of knowledge and judgement involved in scientific, technical, and intellectual fields, so as to have the depth to avoid being misled by seemingly 'obvious answers' that lead to long lasting harm. Especially today, as the ideal of a broad and well-rounded education has been displaced by a focus upon narrowly specialized skills, we too easily risk mistaking a person's abundant cleverness in their own field, as being equivalent to that wisdom they lack, and who - whether that be ourselves or the follies of the likes of a Neil deGrass Tyson that we began these posts with - see no issue with freely advising and advocating for using legislative power to order how others 'should' be made to live, because that's 'obviously' for the 'greater good', and the popular approval of that sort of thinking, spreads it, and endangers us all.
If it isn't clear to you what value is gained by making those distinctions within what you know and how you know it, which is what a well rounded education provides, the absence of that understanding is on full display in the bloody and destructive global history of the 20th Century for you to learn from (did you know that the ideal of a well rounded education was mostly gone by 1895?). There you'll find an abundance of lessons for learning hard truths from, with each one demonstrating that those paths forged for 'the greater good' of all, inevitably, invariably, have led and will lead to vast numbers of people experiencing lives rent by the greatest misery and destruction imaginable.
What drove those events, was that worst development of modernity, Ideology (conceived of in 1796 as a 'science of ideas'), which inherently targets the ideal of a 'well rounded education', preferring to reduce all knowledge to 'scientific' facts and skills, as well as in planning for, and applying them. Ideology despises chance, free will, choice, virtue, morality, art, wisdom, and all the other 'irrationalities' which make human life worth living well, ignoring and denying them in its drive to impose its certainty (of what?) upon society as a collective whole, with the presumption that individuals are little more than empirical factors to be scientifically managed through their theories.
There is nothing smart about proposals which measure all that's worth knowing by 'Science!', or that decide right and wrong by what 'Artificial Intelligence' tells us, or that justifies slighting or slandering the individual rights of any for 'the greater good!', and there is no 'progress' that can be found in going down such paths, only regress.
How science and technology get passed off as the highest of high judgment, overlooking what's essential to knowledge and the application of it, has a lot to do with how little we consider what causes us to think and do this or that, and the role of judgment involved in acting and reacting to those causes, which is what we'll look into next, with Causality.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
The consequences of theories of causation gain in intensity through how they do or don't attend to the lowest and highest considerations of causation, as modernists tend to deliberately ignore and even ridicule those aspects that come closest to Identity (what Is) and Telos ( direction, intent) - which, ignored or not, aims and becomes the aim of their thoughts, which in a thousand different ways are insinuated into the popular opinions that we typically think with. That telos affects whether such patterns of thought will tend to lift you up into the broad light of day, or drive you down into the narrow darkness of an endless night of facts shorn from truth.
Pre-modern philosophers like Aristotle, began considering causation by observing the physical nature and effects of what was visible around them, and in a number of his works, including his physics (yes, still worth reading), he confined his observations, as Newton would do long after him with Gravity, to describing the effects of causality that he could see, without claiming to either fully understand or deny what he couldn't see in it. His ideas of Actuality and Potency, intuited principles of what was most likely happening just beyond the visible surface, from those particulars that could be observed occurring, which enabled something such as the hardened state that a metal like bronze holds as its normal Actuality, to also have the Potency - the potential - to change by melting into a liquid form under significantly high temperatures. The high level language he used to describe those features is still remarkably applicable to, or at least doesn't outright contradict, the very much more detailed molecular & chemical knowledge of today, which he lacked (though some modern physicists do think that ol' Aristotle's Act and Potency was more on target than he himself could've imagined).
Importantly, Aristotle didn't attempt to pass off either his ignorance or what doubts he might've had about what he couldn't be certain of as 'knowledge', that was suitable for guiding or declaring what else could be known, and the reason why was that the purpose of his philosophizing was to attempt to describe what was in fact True, rather than concocting a popular narrative that might be made socially or politically... useful.
The Sophists, OTOH, then as now, are primarily concerned with concocting narratives that ape philosophy's love of wisdom, by making a sensational use of a 'critical dialectic', which they pass off as being equivalent or superior to philosophy. Aristotle dismantled those sophistries elsewhere in his Metaphysics, but it was the nature of their imitation of appearances, that he remarked on here, as:
Where philosophers seek first to know what IS, and from there pursue what they can intuit is truthfully compatible with that in order to enlarge understanding, the Sophists assert & sow doubts in order to deny what IS, so as to claim that anything could be, or could be anything other than what it is, in order to cause discord and encourage action, so as to, as Marx infamously declared that:
For decades we've made the mistake of laughing off the absurdities that've been taught on our college campuses as merely pointy-headed foolishness, while ignoring the fact that generations of American youth have been taught to take those claims and ideals seriously, which has left us particularly vulnerable to being swept up in the downstream effects of these absurdities, as they've flipped our Corporate HR Dept's, and financial rating schemes, around to imposing those 'pointy headed absurdities' of DEI, through the exceedingly pointy end of dangerously powerful policies and laws which are maiming our children's lives in our schools, and across the workplace and society as a whole.
The Sophist's 'Critical Dialectic', whether in classical Greece, the opening of Modernity, or today's Post-Modern America, is to propose that we (uncritically) ingest whichever set of doubts they've proposed as being of value, while ignoring what their sum total actually amounts to: causeless doubts which have no substance. When they're successful at peddling such beliefs, their dialectic begins to function as a philosophical acid, dissolving whichever knowledge of the prevailing wisdom is being targeted by them, in order to carry out its primary purpose - transforming that meaning (especially that which aids you in conceiving of and living a good life), into meaning nothing to you. Of course where there is no meaning, no vision, '...the people perish', and many sophists see in that perishing the opportunity ('don't let a crisis go to waste') to pursue and capture the power which they intend to fully utilize for however long their '15 minutes' of infamy might be made to last.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Dialectic, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
The truth about such 'paradoxes' though, is that they are dis-ordered truths which vanish once they're put in the proper order & context, in that the supposed 'empty space' is a necessary feature of how solidity is achieved - when molecules, atoms, and particles are arranged so as to form a solid object, they are configured in such a way that, taken out of context, can be portrayed as 'empty space', but that arrangement on the sub-atomic level, is what creates what we experience 'up here' as solidity on the human level! The fact is that we are better able to understand the world around us, by using all those philosophic principles of science, techne, and wisdom, so long as they are properly ordered and aligned, to establish sound knowledge of what is real and true. So far from their supposed 'paradox' being a cause for you to doubt what you know, it is a confirmation of our knowledge and ability to understand what is real and true, which should heighten your wariness of the dangers of accepting baseless doubts, as actual knowledge.
It is by artfully equivocating between very different forms of knowledge, again, as those like deGrasse-Tyson do, that the shallowest of observations are rhetorically transformed through a semblance of logical proofs, so that such unexamined sophistries that might have seemed foolish to those who knew better, are revealed to be a very practical means of nudging popular opinion along into accepting a set of assumptions based loosely upon physical causes and vague aspirations, which encourages one or two or both extremes of thinking, as:
Notice also that what both sides of that sophistical coin ignore, beginning and end, corresponds to Identity & Telos. In Aristotle's system, you begin at the beginning by identifying what you're dealing with, and following where that leads, much like 'character is destiny', sets the direction of your thinking, and without those two formulations of beginning and end, you can easily, not to mention carelessly, construe what you will with what remains between them. To escape this modernist muddle of materialistic Cause & Effect, requires recovering those discarded aspects of Causation - beginning and end, and much more of what lies in between - and with that interest in looking honestly at reality, we're brought back around to Aristotle and his conception of 'The Four Causes'.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
Taking a little closer look at the Four Causes:
1st Material Cause begins with 'that out of which' the issue in question comes to be - be mindful of what it is that you are considering, and how does the identity of that impact the overall cause and resulting effects being considered? This first level of causation is what moderns often minimize and ignore, at least partly because separating your thoughts from Identity, 'frees' a person from the responsibility of considering the inevitable consequences of that knowledge. Conversely, paying closer attention to it, can reveal everything from the nature of Bronze, to the ramifications of an entire philosophy
2nd Formal Cause, 'the form' of what's being considered - what is giving shape to the cause being considered, and how deeply should you consider that form, in relation to its function? A statue's form might be a human form, but the difference between what results in a Five & Dime store mannequin, or Michaelangelo's David, is how deeply the subject's form has been considered
3rd the Efficient Cause, where “the primary source of the change or rest” - in the case of a statue, that is likely the sculptor, but what if you're looking for the efficient cause of something less obvious, such as of America for instance, where in the materialist view answering either '1776' or '1619' might get you a passing score on an utterly worthless test, both such answers would utterly fail to even point towards an understanding of the cause in question. Coming at the cause in question by employing Aristotle's view, would encourage and lead towards a much deeper understanding of what it is that you're trying to understand the cause of. To understand the cause of something, it's important to not allow a quick 'answer' to put a premature end to considering 'what brought this about'.
4th the Final Cause, 'the end being sought', the Telos, the Goal - is not limited to the immediate end or physical effect of something, but is enlarged by what you seek to conceptually understand of what is being brought about by it - not just What, but Why. While a final cause might begin with the 'What' of 'a statue was needed for decoration', looking for the 'Why' of a cause, encourages us to look further than the shallow surface answer, and enables us to make greater distinctions about what is being brought about by the object under consideration. For instance, the final cause behind putting a statue of George Washington in a park, might be to provide the park setting with a decoration that will bring into the minds of those visiting there, a consideration of the ideals and virtues embodied by the 'Indispensable Man' of the American revolution, and the principles he fought to have our nation founded upon.
Properly considering the 'Four Causes' of something that is happening, or that you want to happen, is a fruitful means of not only gaining a better understanding of what has happened, or is happening, but the habit is excellent practice for how to 'reverse engineer' what you observe, better equipping you to plan for what you want to cause to occur, as the better you understand a single step, the better you'll understand the preceding and succeeding steps. Where the modernist approach would be a disintegrated 'the ends justify the means' approach, Aristotle's Four Causes leads you into a deeper understanding of what is being accomplished, and why, and how each step does, and should, relate to and follow from all of the others.
It's well worth noting that Thomas Aquinas added an additional level of depth to the four causes that Aristotle had identified, with a fifth cause:5th the Exemplary Cause then, “what guides the intellect ”, is taking note of not only what you are observing, or planning, but giving due attention to a higher level purpose beyond the features that are immediately visible, and in the case of what caused a statue of George Washington to be put up in a park, the exemplary cause might be the care and commitment of a person or group, to the health and prosperity of their community, and nation.
The materialistic views which animate the modern views of scientism, focus almost exclusively on only surface aspects of the middle two of Aristotle's Four Causes, gathering primarily disintegrated facts, and (easily manipulated) observations of immediate stimulus/response, cause & effect, which not surprisingly tends to exclude metaphysics in general, and causality in particular, from popular consideration.
Consider how the two approaches might be applied to something as simple as what causes a duck to swim for breadcrumbs tossed onto a pond:
A likely materialistic cause & effect, and response to Why the duck swims for breadcrumbs:
Looking for the Four Causes behind that same scenario, might be seen as:
It's not difficult to imagine how differently those two approaches might play out upon a more significant scenario, such as that of the woman who was recently beaten on her doorstep when a riot recently 'broke out' in Chicago. The modernist approach is all too familiar and frequently repeated in the news media:
A likely materialistic cause & effect, and response, to a woman having been beaten by rioting youths:
OTOH, what might be expected from an Aristotelian Four Causes approach to looking for relevant causes reflecting the reality behind a woman being beaten by rioting youths, is that before even beginning, it'd be obvious that the 'Youths', or 'poor Youths', or 'black youths', is an entirely inadequate starting point, as many, most youths, regardless of color, don't riot upon women in doorways, and looking for causation would require beginning with what sets apart - identifies - other youths, from these youths who rioted?
What causes the modernist approach, begins with considering what it is that they believe is being referred to by causation - (material cause) modernists fundamentally assume and presume that there are no real causes to anything beyond the material actions they can measure, and believing that there is no real meaning to anything, human life is believed at best as being about making the best of 'one damn thing after another', they (formal cause) have no expectation of developing a deeper understanding of what is meaningful in life - that's not their intent, or goal, or even a consideration for them. Instead, they (efficient cause) seek only whatever shallow surface level 'explanation', seems to provide a useful rationalization - a narrative - for doing what they'd wanted to do all along. It's no coincidence that the modernist approach to causation is (final cause) an invaluable aid to keeping pre-modern ideas 'out of mind' for most of us in modernity, which (exemplary cause) aids in subverting the higher ends of the pre-modern world and serves the lower purposes that are more common today - all of which provides a glimpse into what causes the thugs of blm & antifa, who exemplify the modernist mindset, to riot and tear down statues of the likes of George Washington.
It's also worth pointing out that the modernist's 'Exemplary Cause', is what has been taught to generations of 'educators', and it thoroughly pervades the curriculum and administration of what is taught in our schools - public and private - to America's youth. Truly, causes - including an ignorance of them - do have effects, and ideas, especially bad ones, most definitely have consequences.
If you want to know how we've come to such a meaningless world, a central cause of that is our popular lack of understanding of what causes anything at all. Just how easily we're distracted by what isn't there, we'll see in the next part.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
How we got to the point where such considerations would be easily, even routinely, disregarded, and have sophistries be seen as being 'legitimate', is worth looking into (a deep dive in coming posts on Epistemology), but it shouldn't be too surprising that the first step in that process began, as it had to, by discarding the pre-modern understanding of metaphysics, and its attention to identity and the necessity of making distinctions, which enables you to expose and discard contradictions from your thinking.
As with most of the absurdities of modernity, that process began taking shape with Rene Descartes (with an assist from Hobbes) and his blatantly arbitrary 'method of doubt', and along with that came his idea of mind/body dualism, which necessarily asserted that a human being is but a meat machine, which the mind 'somehow' causes to move about from within it. How it was that a substance-less thought of 'mind' was somehow able to cause your physical muscles to flex and strike a match to light a candle, was, according to Descartes, accomplished by the Pineal gland. How? Somehow. Why? Because reasons ("don't doubt him!" Ahem).
Of course, eventually those who followed after Descartes did begin to doubt that the Pineal gland could be 'the answer' for how immaterial thoughts could affect physical reality, but that was because its actual identity was never part of the equation, only what 'could be' arbitrarily doubted into consideration - this is a key point that's too often missed.
Accepting the advice to 'Doubt everything!', makes it as easy to arbitrarily doubt something both out of, as into, existence, as it requires no more substantive reasoning to claim that 'I doubt the Pineal gland does any of this stuff!', than to say 'I doubt that the Pineal gland isn't central to this stuff!', and the reality is that the reality of what the Pineal gland was, its Identity, was not the point of the exercise; what could be 'doubted' into the popular narrative, was, and is. The acceptance of causeless Doubt, surreptitiously elevates, legitimizes, and inserts the habit of arbitrariness into the essence of your thinking, and reduces the conception of a whole Truth, to a shard of splintered facts, and in doing so it forms and conveys an (irrational) illusion that your thoughts have power over reality itself.
It's worth noting that 'Arbitrary' means without basis, and without regard to what is true, or false, or completely contradictory (and fully opposed to Aristotle's 1st Law of Thought, the law of contradiction). Developing the habit of raising and accepting arbitrary doubts as key to your method of thinking, can just as easily lead people to skepticism, as to unfounded beliefs, precisely because that acceptance severs the habit of relating your thoughts to reality.
Once a person begins employing the sophistical 'Critical Dialectic', fully arbitrary justifications are offered as sufficient 'cause' for whenever and wherever the sophist feels the necessity of them, serving to further their purposes and further thwart whatever grip on reality that might still remain, as well as a forced pretense of certainty that they couldn't possibly be wrong. This is reflected in what I see as a signature distinction between the moderns and the pre-moderns, and we can see an example of it, in that where Issac Newton had affirmed his willingness to observe and measure the effects of Gravity, even though he didn't understand it, and he would not pretend to know what it was or how it operated, while in a full reversal of that, most moderns, such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Bentham, have stridently doubted and denied the existence of observable realities such as Free Will (despite every human being having a continuous first hand empirical knowledge & experience of), because they couldn't explain how it could operate, and so they therefore concluded, rather pridefully, that it did not in fact exist.
Another distinguishing feature which separates people of modern times, from the pre-moderns, is the rise of indecision, faithlessness, and anxiety at the core of the modern mind, which, IMHO, is an unsurprising reflection of continually feeling that what you see as being important information and beliefs, are continually subject to arbitrarily being revised, denied, and 'canceled'. And yet, oddly enough, it's common for modernists to presume that 'reality' is the problem, and not their conception of it - they will routinely assert that their ideas trump reality.
Even the Empiricists, who saw themselves as the rational arm of the enlightenment, and who doubted Descartes' rationalist conclusions, continued to employ his methods, and so gravitated towards the notion that all of our actions and apparent 'choices' are and must be reducible to a physical chain of material causes & effects that are triggered by external environmental circumstances - a necessary consequence of having concluded that Free Will must be only an illusion,
Thomas Henry Huxley (Darwin's bulldog, the grandfather of 'Brave New World's author, Aldous Huxley) asserted that our thoughts are less like motive powers, than like the whistle on a steam powered train, contributing nothing to it's power and motion, other than as noise added onto its exhaust. It should be no surprise that in such mechanistic and deterministic views, the role of govt and schools are expected to be used to form an environment around you that is suitable to how they need you to behave, and to keep you, useful little widget that you are, on track towards their idea of the 'greater good'.
What Nicolás Gómez Dávila said with "The permanent possibility of initiating causal series is what we call a person.", should be kept in mind with sophists whose dialectic is so focused upon denying that we can have knowledge of causality, and that Free Will is a dillusion, and even that the 'Self', is a delusion. If that's not clear enough, obfuscating or denying causality, is a means of eliminating the irritant to the state of 'individual rights', and a Constitution devised to uphold and protect them.
When the ploys of these dialectics come your way, whether it be the denial of Free Will, or that solid objects are only illusions, one question to ask yourself when their sensational statements cause you to pause and think, would the identity and telos of that direction they're intending to take your thinking in - are they informing, or deforming, your thoughts? And what would you need to already know, in order to know that (psst! That's Metaphysics)? Whether that which they are proposing to drive your thinking with from there on out, is rooted in sound causes (of what are real and true), or a fuzzy causelessness (everything from 'your truth may not be their truth' to 'a more diverse people and sustainable future'), is an extremely important distinction to make, as is knowing how, and how not, to make it.
Causality and the distorting of it
Do we understand Causation better today, than in Aristotle's day? Well, yes, and no, as we are able to understand more about causation today, than in Aristotle's day, afterall, even for all he knew of physics, biology, logic, rhetoric, ethics and politics, he had no understanding of individual rights in the sense that we do, and little of the idea of equality before the law, because the thought that all human beings are created equally human, and that no one is a lesser human because of the circumstance of birth, race, ethnicity, or wealth, was unknown to them. The idea that all men are created equal was unheard of in Aristotle's day, it took the Judeo-Christian half, to reveal that truth to the Greco-Roman half, of our Western world.
Similarly on the material side of causation, whereas what was known prior to modernity was only what could be observed on the surface, and they could only speculate about what lay beyond that, today we've developed a more detailed knowledge and scientific understanding of the chemical and molecular nature of the world around us, which penetrates past surface appearances to reveal the hidden structures of characteristics that make a thing like metal, metalic, while also explaining why both hardness and melting are fully consistent with the nature of being a metal.
And yet for all that, with the hierarchical understanding of the forms of knowledge they had (Empeiría/Epistemé, Tékhne, and Sophia), they had a better understanding on the whole, of the little that they knew, than most of us have today (especially the 'educated'), as knowledge itself has been collapsed by modernity, into a semi-empirical mush.
So while we are able to know and 'know thyself' more thoroughly than pre-moderns like Aristotle could, most of 'those who know best' in modernity, have actively evaded, denied, and even denigrated, what the pre-moderns understood about Metaphysics in general and about Identity and Causality in particular, without which a person cannot properly understand what they should. Fortunately, the only real power the moderns have over any of us, is our remaining ignorant of that understanding which they've discarded, and so while we today are still able to understand and penetrate deeper into the nature of the world around us, and into the Logos (a broader understanding of Reason, than the moderns ascribe to 'reason') within, than at any time in the past - we only need to be willing to see what there is to see, IOW, will you continue on with the causal Blue Pill you were fed in school, or choose to take the Red Pill?
To see how distorted our understanding of causality has become, we need to be clear on what causality does and does not entail, for despite surface appearances, it would be wrong to say that certainty is the measure of Casuality (though that is a common ploy for impugning our understanding of it), for while we can predict with certainty that applying sufficient heat to metal will cause it to melt, and with a lesser degree of certainty that stating that 'there are only two genders' will cause a Woke person to meltdown, we can only calculate the probability of being able to cause the result desired from the Quantum realm's waves and particles and Schrodinger's boxes seemingly full of cats that are both living and dead, even so, it would be wrong to say that our understanding of Causality is affected by those varying degrees of certainty, or to assume that those differences indicate that Casuality operates any differently in the material, human, or quantum, realms.
Casuality is not about making predictions, it is about recognizing the importance of identifying what you are considering, so as to properly integrate that within the forms of knowledge involved within a given context. It is of course true that with sound knowledge, we're often able to make a number of accurate predictions, but causality will not provide us with either the omniscience or absolute certainty, which have no part of the identity of being human. And yet as we'll see, it has been by treating Causality in modernity as if it could provide such abilities, or by presuming that lacking those abilities somehow invalidates or diminishes what we as human beings can know, which has played a large role in undermining our understanding of Causality, of Identity, of Metaphysics, Knowledge, and our ability to 'know thyself'.
Again and again in modernity, our ability to understand has been assaulted by denying or ignoring what can be understood, while dropping the relevant contexts, in order to evade what we should know, to plant false expectations of what we can know, and to dissuade us from looking for what is real and true, in order to 'legitimize' any number of heinous fictions that require treating human beings as deterministic meat puppets, into popular belief.
What we do not know, and what we cannot know, does not invalidate what we do know, within the context of what we can understand, and while further developments of our knowledge will likely reveal additional distinctions and contexts for us to consider and anticipate, it won't diminish what we already understand about the causes behind them, or how to apply that to our understanding here on the human level of reality, both materially, and immaterially.
Casuality reflects and confirms the identity and telos of what we are considering within a given context, affirming that Casuality is identity in action, and interaction, no matter whether what is being examined is animate, or inanimate.
Why all of this matters outside of lecture halls, is that there's no basis for understanding and respecting a person's ability and need to think and make choices, without a grounding in metaphysics in general and causality in particular, for without that a person has little basis for understanding and defending an individuals inalienable rights, or the importance of their society upholding and defending those for all.
The central drama in our regressing to the illiberal state of affairs we find ourselves in today, was formed from the notions that were proposed by the very modernist Enlightenment-age skeptic, David Hume, who believed, despite believing that nothing can be known, that he could confidently explain exactly how he knew that the cause of causation was all an illusion (a veritable harvest of contradictions are always sure to follow in the wake of skeptics who don't just question what is and can be known, but unironically claim to know that nothing can be known).
Those foundations of The West that Descartes began fracturing, Hume began the process of shaking them down to the ground (where we are nearly at today), by declaring that we don't and can't really know anything about Causality at all, that we don't actually know how and why the sun rises, or even what causes one billiard ball to roll when hit by another, and so on, worser & worser.
According to Hume, what we thought we knew, was nothing more than a matter of playing the odds from what preceded and followed the occurrence of something yesterday, would probably do so again tomorrow. IOW: Those events we know of as sunrise, noon, and sunset, are simply events that just happen to follow each after other, and have nothing to do with what we think we know of and about them, and although probability says they'll happen in the same order, we don't know that for certain, and they could easily happen in reverse, or entirely out of order. You see, our knowledge then, is but a scheme of statistics and odds making (of what, he doesn't say, as he cherry picks and discards which bits of understanding is convenient to the reality he just knows we don't know of), was what Hume declared to be 'Science!', and a great many in modernity agreed, and still agree, with that.
Hume of course took the implications of that further than our inability to know what causes the sun to rise, in that if we can't know what causes those appearances, what can we possibly know about what causes humans to behave as we do? And by reducing science to statistics, what isn't measurable and quantifiable, isn't science (you may recall that measurability is a necessary, though lesser part (Empeiría), of what Science (Epistemé) is), and if it isn't Science well then, it's of no cause or value at all (good news for Neil deGrasse Tyson, bad news for religion, art & music). The fulcrum of this notion, which he uses to pry our minds apart from reality, rests on the observation that a thing or event, is not the same as our evaluation of it - IOW 'identifying' that this liquid is poison, is a different thing from identifying this liquid as bad - and soOooo, if they aren't the same, how can two identifications refer to the same thing? He's serious about that. He goes on to say:
Once you've allowed causation to be equivocated down to the flattest of facts, the fact that what 'ought' to result from a cause upon inanimate objects is all too easily ignored, and isn't determined in the same way that it is for animate objects, such as people. You might object that metal has no choice in responding to heat, while the human being most definitely does, but Hume had a way around that difference, as for you to be able to know anything at all about causality, you must be a you, and that too Hume denied, saying that:
Of course, although you might want to point out that his saying that 'You ought not say that an is implies an ought', is saying that an IS implies an Ought, but... if you've ceded the ability to say what IS, you certainly cannot say what ought to follow from that. Do you see how slippery this slope soon gets? All of metaphysics - identity, knowledge, causality - are eliminated through Hume's kill shot (if you accept and permit it). Once you allow the connection between truth and reality to be severed, or even frayed, you've let go of your ability to claim to know anything at all, or to claim any interest in or concern with truth or goodness, or beauty. Gone. Wfft. As with your credibility in saying that this, might lead to that, and therefore you ought not to permit it. All gone.
To come at the problem from another direction, the necessity of his denial of Free Will, is that his own is-ought issue is the wrong question; or rather it is a misdirection, which deliberately ignores the identity of a human being, and leads the listener away from grasping that the reality of human life, is that the question if asked at all, ought to be asked more like this:
Despite how Hume and modernity's attack our ability to know anything at all, with our inability to be free from error, it's not a failure for society or any individual in it to lack omniscient and unerring 'knowledge', rather recognizing that in us all, is a sign of having successfully identified ourselves as being human! While on the purely material level (which, you'll remember, is what science provides us the lowest level Knowledge of), an 'IS' does imply an 'Ought' - heating bronze to xDegrees ought to result in its melting, its material identity provides for only that reaction - but the possibilities of which 'Ought' to result from provoking a human being, whose very different identity and knowledge isn't constrained or determined in the same manner as metal is necessarily determined to respond to heat. Instead, based upon the knowledge and understanding of the person involved, and the context the provocation is posed within, there are some, sometimes many, responses that a person ought to make in response to an IS, and they might choose from those, or originate something entirely new and previously not considered, not as a result of happenstance, but from reasoning.
That is one of the consequences of being human, but Hume's skepticism had blinded himself to that identity, and that right there, between necessity and possibility, lies what the materialist hates and fears the most: Choice and Chance.
The modern materialist evades and abhors chance and choice, and however harmful it will be to their own selves, they will adamantly assert that for human beings 'an IS doesn't imply an Ought!', which is a half-truth (AKA: a full lie), whose abuse of truth has been highly causal in the philosophical disintegration, anxiety, and soph-destruction, we are drowning in today.
Denying and evading the full understanding of what the pre-moderns knew, which the modernist places safely out of mind, Hume advised::
When a society lacks a solid grasp of metaphysics in general, and identity, knowledge, and causality in particular, then skepticism (causeless doubt and/or denial of knowledge) rushes into the vacuum of popular imagination, and for those skeptics amongst them to preserve their skepticism (and oh will they ever fight to do that), they will evade, deny, denigrate, and claim the need to treat human beings as only a slightly higher form of inanimate matter, having no choice or rights that need to be respected, so that those who (somehow) see themselves as being those who *know* best, will be empowered to 'perfect' the lesser folk for 'the greater good'.
Ironically, to know anything of causality, or even to be able to deny such knowledge, requires making the choice to understand or evade it - Free Will must exist in order to deny the existence of Free Will - and yet most of modernity, especially the post-modernists, deny and evade it. It requires the deliberately chosen denial of Free Will, to successfully deny reality. And whether admitted or denied, we are able to understand, materially and philosophically, that causation is the result of the deepest identity of what something is, and that 'change' is what results from being in sufficient proximity with what something else is.
IOW, Causation is Identity in action (and interaction), and because we are human beings we are able to choose to understand that. But of course, we're also able to choose to evade and deny that, and for those who choose to seek power over their fellows, you need to deny and lie about what everyone can clearly see is true - which is easier than you might think.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Dialectic, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
However counter-intuitive that may seem, you can check it for yourself by borrowing one from the playbook of our sophistical college professors:
I'm betting that you had no problem imagining the fake facts of the first items - like ice sinking - than attempting to fake a concept and principle (or did you somehow visualize a four-sided triangle?). And if you continue on down that path, as college professors have been teaching their students to for well over a century, you quickly and easily begin not only incorporating the ability to fake facts as needed into your thinking, but the person who's (unwittingly) practiced at it, will find it the simplest of things to go along with the faking of observable facts (or perhaps you missed the whole 'Masks are useless/You must wear masks!/No one forced anyone to wear masks' episode of the Covid years'?).
Well, without getting epistemologically ahead of ourselves (that's for future posts), what that question acquires its 'legitimacy' through, is the Analytic/Synthetic dichotomy (be very wary of it), and it's been used as a key tool of professional Sophists (AKA: College Professors) for at least a century now, to get students to question, doubt, and abandon, what had been their deepest convictions, as well as their ability to understand and reasonably support their beliefs. The first thing to point out about it, is that the pose, that there is a 'Analytic/Synthetic dichotomy', is itself a lie. There's no such thing. What that is, is a single concept or fact or principle, juxtaposed with a composite of numerous other concepts, facts, and/or principles, with one or more falsehoods embedded into them, with which they then equivocate upon as if it were simply another individual fact/concept/principle.
To be 'fair', the name and cursory description of 'Analytic/Synthetic' hints at that being what it is, the forming together of multiple concepts, facts, and/or principles, but that is admitted to only on the surface (surprise), and having cursorily said so, they go on to use the reference as a means of not only invalidating the composite concepts (which is what makes our ability to think so powerful), but as a means of separating you and your mind, from reality, and from that ultimate composite: Truth.
Make no mistake, if you were to isolate the essentials of the false concept of ice sinking under normal contexts, that would be every bit as unimaginable as a four-sided triangle or an married bachelor (another favorite example of theirs), but by artfully phrasing it as they do, they get away with epstimecide ( to turn one of their own terms against them: the murder of sound thinking), as easy as pie.
What a proper understanding and application of Aristotle's four causes would provide (and quickly expose and banish the Analytic/Synthetic dichotomy ploy), even with the more material matters, Ice, for instance, is a means of closely securing your conceptual understanding of a physical variable, to its identity, and how and why they behave as they do within a given context, and that attention to the relation between immaterial concept and physical reality to reveal the principles by which they are properly understood, which makes it logically difficult to arbitrarily treat them as ludicrous as imagining ice that sinks or a four-sided triangle. And when viewed in that light, the suggestion to use an invalid images, to guide legitimate reasoning, begins to reveal something disturbing in the request.
By simply neglecting and ignoring that pre-modern approach to understanding what you know, your knowledge and thinking quickly becomes conceptually anorexic and incapable of facing up to the rigors of reality, and the conceptual muddle you are left with to take notice of, becomes painfully easy to populate your 'imagination' with appearances only, as if thinking were nothing more than a process for scribbling out mental cartoons, where one shape labeled 'ice', is able to 'sink' into other shapes labeled 'water', and in your absence of awareness of those facts, concepts, and principles that are and should be every bit as impossible to 'imagine' as a four-sided triangle, you and your mind becomes separated from what is real, and true, and beautiful, and right.
Notice that this is not at all the same thing as engaging the imagination by asking listeners to imagine sinking ice or impossible geometry in the service of a story - not at all. That's not the case or the intent of the Sophist who'd request you to 'imagine' unimaginable falsehoods as legitimate standards and landmarks of an 'educated' mode of thinking; they do so as a means of destabilizing your ability to think coherently, with the intent to separate your understanding, from reality, so that the sophist can 'have their way' with you. By that means of drilling such an absence of true thinking into the thoughts in our modern minds, it becomes exceedingly easy to imagine even your own actions, as being the thoughtless reactions of a purely material body pinballing through the environment. In that scenario, your thinking is easily deformed into a manner where 'you' and your 'thoughts', become meaningless side-effects of that process, and in accepting that, modern minds find themselves easily taking the final step of denying what actually is materially causeless: Free Will, unaware that even the thought of 'you', has been taken from you.
FWIW, that's not a process of 'enlightenment', but one of endarkenment. See The News, for further reference.
If you aren't seeing how this issue of IS's & Oughts matters to your life, then consider how the modern and pre-modern views of human beings might affect your ability to live your life in society. Prior to modernity, the prudent person understood causation and the nature of being human well enough to seek to mitigate the volatility of choice & chance in society, through sound education, morality, and placing a high value on sound reasoning. OTOH, for the ideological person of modernity - of both the Left and Right - having philosophically removed 'Free Will' from the identity of human beings, it has become possible and appropriate for them to treat peoples as volatile substances whose reactive behaviors must be managed by 'those who know best', for 'the greater good'.
By willfully blurring or ignoring those differences and limitations that are involved in asking 'what causes that?', we're led to assume more (and less) than what can actually be known about both material and immaterial matters, which swerves us all further away from the company of Sophia, and into a more disreputable association with the Turtle Lady, and worse, those who prefer to pretend that their thoughts and doubts about how they think that reality should be, are more real and certain than what is in reality true.
Once we begin to allow, or ignore, such sophistries being gotten away with, ever more choices become just as easily explained by, and blamed upon, the environment, and as nothing is or can be truly known in such a world as that, no one can be held responsible for anything, and anything goes. That is the substance and root of our modern state of Demoralization (see Yuri Bezmenov's interviews on this), and there is no better way for those who desire power over a people, to attain it, than by having that people believe in what gives those who seek to impose their power upon them, a clear pathway to doing just that, and no clearer pathway is imaginable, than having those people believe that there is no right, no wrong, and no credible cause for believing that there is or should be such 'beliefs'.
By having been armed with such metaphysical views, including this corruption of causality, statements such as these from the guru of 'white fragility', Robin Diangelo, 'make sense' to those thinking their thoughts with those habits and beliefs:
Given how this has developed in modernity, it's important to add that the knowledge we have of the nature and causes of such matters, goes deeper than those sequential occurrences which might 'cause' us to associate one event, with another, because they occurred in sequence (ala David Hume's assertions about and the sun rising in the day following night or billiard balls rolling after being struck).
For now, I'll close with a reminder that Metaphysics is about paying attention to what it is you are thinking about, and with, and noting distinctions that bring clarity to your thought and understanding, and there are dire and deadly consequences that are caused by habitually ignoring the nature of causation and the variety of causes in our lives, I've already gone into here. You don't need to become a scientist or a philosopher to study metaphysics, but if you want to have a better and more complete understanding of what is going on around you, or of what is sweeping you away through your ignorance of it, you should develop a basic understanding of the subject.
The human mind which you are graced with, is far too powerful for you to remain safely ignorant of its identity, causes, and effects, and after all, with great power comes great responsibility, right?
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
When we're able to understand that the subject of our thinking, conforms to that aspect of reality that is the object of our thoughts, we recognize that reality is intelligible to us and affirm our relation to what is real and true. That is so far from being a small thing. Metaphysics is the science of those first principles, and its role is not to play word games, but to put you in closer contact with and understanding of, what is real and true, and the life that recognizes, abides by, and resonates most with them, is a life that surer to be well worth living, than one who is ignorant of that.
The person that is surprised and confused by the events of 'one damn thing after another', is living in a very different world from the person who has an understanding of the principles behind the causes of those things, and their own role in them.
The attention we give to metaphysical fundamentals, enables our thinking to become and remain firmly grounded in reality, and by respecting what can and cannot be known through it, our knowledge is able to lead to a wisdom that is rooted in what is real and true and worthy of knowing, and enables us to live lives that are worth living. That same ground is also a fertile one for developing a scientific understanding of what is, and how and why that understanding can best be utilized.
The conscious attention to that 'Why' will lead you into ethical considerations of what you should and should not do, all of which presupposes a link between the thoughts and questions you're thinking them within, and about - AKA: What Is Truth.
With that in mind, it's worth considering what telling or ignoring or living by lies, does to the very heart of yourself, and the life you are in reality living.
Those who are arrayed against reality, whether the Sophists of 2,500 years ago (see the Socratic dialog: Gorgias), or the Woke of today, begin and center their attacks upon metaphysics, in order to separate our thoughts from what is real and true. As Josef Pieper put it in his excellent 'Abuse of Power - Abuse of Language',
What actually led to the first scientific experiments in modern times, as I noted here some time ago, began centuries earlier, with two clergymen who were steeped in the philosophy and religion of Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian civilization. Beginning with Robert Grosseteste, followed later by Roger Bacon, between the 1100-1200's, who, believing that God's creation is good, and intelligible, and worth knowing, they judged that it would be worth the time to apply their metaphysical understanding of reality to the particulars of the world they found themselves within, both to further their understanding and appreciation of it, and in the belief that the practice would surely bring the types of benefits that predictably accompany a greater knowledge and understanding of what is real and true.
Those first principles of methodical reasoning in conjunction with careful action, and the examination of the results, are what these two clergymen were the first to put into practice as proto-scientists, and as their methods were grasped, it guided and improved our knowledge and experience in such a way as to become the general scientific method, which has been summed up as,
But always the point is to learn what is in reality true, to the degree the context warrants, and to do so by respecting what is true. To sum up,
Next up - Laundering the unreal through Epistemology.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
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Saturday, October 28, 2023
Epistemology: You keep using that word - 1
In the movie the Princess Bride, in response to his Sicilian employer repeatedly blurting out the word 'unbelievable!', the character Inigo Montoya utters what has become an iconic and meme-tastic line:
But, to avoid the Inigo Montoya treatment, before going into that use and abuse, we should clarify what the word means, which the search-engine branch of the Oxford English Dictionary defines as:
How did a term coined by an obscure Scotsman, James F. Ferrier, become accepted in modernity as the name for their 'ancient' and oh-so important '4th branch of philosophy'? Possibly because the name for that part of the German idealism behind their new '4th branch's system for 'justified belief', 'Wissenschaftslehre', wasn't exactly a catchy term, and even though it was doing an impressive job of dividing knowledge from reality, it was far too cumbersome and thoroughly modern sounding of a term to be credibly associated with the 'great philosophers' of ancient Greece, who plainly could have had no knowledge of either it or their new '4th branch of philosophy'.
The word 'Epistemology', OTOH, coined from the Greek term 'Episteme', which Aristotle had used in his metaphysics for one of the forms of knowledge, looked and sounded the part, and it could easily be used to work modernism and the 'great philosophers' of ancient Greece, into the same breath. Taking a glance at an Engram viewer (which references the number of mentions of a term in the libraries of books that've been scanned), together with a helpfully misleading reference from, of all places, Wikipedia, illustrates that the new term had come into 'popular' usage in less than a century, which helped serve an additional purpose:
, and true to its misleading origins, we can cue Inigo Montoya once again here, over associating with the word 'bridge', as it's use has less to do with being a 'bridge' between competing modern philosophies, than as an offramp created to detour unwary thinkers away from any remaining paths to premodern philosophy; it's used to give the impression that the only worthwhile philosophical destinations were (are) one or more of modernity's many fractious varieties, while at the same time portraying any classical alternatives as little more than pesky footnotes (IYKYK) that aren't worth exploring.
And that's why I say that Inigo Montoya's "You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.", is the perfect meme for modern 'Epistemology'.
Epistemology: A method in need of its meaning
How the ancients managed to do that without the use of modernism's shiny new '4th branch of Philosophy', was by not approaching philosophy as a conglomeration of compartmentalized 'branches', but by employing philosophy as a system whose features enabled us to examine and give guidance for your thinking, from "First Principles" (Metaphysics) that root your reasoning in experience, and identifying what is, and what truth is, through the three forms of knowledge we grasp all of that through, together with the analytics which uses logic to validate your knowledge (as a carpenter would use a tool), with ethics clarifying how to properly respond in light of what you know to be real and true, and how best to express that through the rhetoric and poetics. In short, in their view the purpose of philosophy - the love of wisdom - not only required your being able to meaningfully know what is real and true, and how to justify it, that was central to philosophy as a whole, rather than one of a number of compartmentalized branches that tend to produce incomprehensible answers bereft of meaning, as it tends to operate in our world today.
From classical times on up into the Renaissance, not only had philosophy provided the means for bringing method and clarity to how people thought, it also stressed the importance of exposing those shadowy notions which sophists are so adept at using to acquire the power to operate within and upon society. But of course, as what the modernists desire most is the power to reinvent reality in their own image, they needed those shadowy uncertainties to operate within, and so to one degree or another, they all - from Descartes through Hegel, and on down the line to today - gravitated towards ever more clever means to 'muddy the waters to make them appear deep'.
As it turned out, the Scotsman's new 'ancient term' of 'Epistemology' gave a useful appearance of legitimacy to the modernist's new '4th branch of philosophy', and ever since then, it (in actual practice, rather than its supposed meaning) has been the primary tool for moving the philosophical goal posts away from what can be known to be real and true, and over onto the turf of whichever ideology seems most suited to the moment for steering popular thought away from the clarity and wisdom of premodern philosophy, which had for over two thousand years made modernity's new tool and branch unnecessary.
And yet with all that having been said, I've often spoken of the importance of Epistemology... why? Because despite my hostility to how the term has been foisted upon us and to how it is routinely misused & abused, the fact is that Epistemology - its purported meaning, rather than its modern practice - entails the unified application of metaphysics, logic, and ethics, and anyone who takes the time to employ the term in accordance with its proper meaning, will regain the ability to safely navigate around the many booby-traps that modernity has positioned in our path, and every instance of doing so helps with putting the West back upon solid ground again.
We'll look at how to align what Epistemology does, with what the word means, over the next few posts.
Modernists, OTOH, having begun by denying that we can know what is real and true, have used the meaning of the word as a deceptive cover, while the system behind it condemned 'philosophy' to being learned through textbooks, each securely wrapped up in the specialized technical jargon of various subfields, which typically rationalized whichever ideological positions of the moment - 'Standpoint Epistemology', 'Epistemology of Ignorance', 'Social Epistemology', etc., - seemed best suited to serving the greater good of that moment in time, without reference to what is 'real and true' across time.
The typical reaction of those who've only encountered what the modernists call 'philosophy' in school, is that they have no intention of bothering further with philosophy at all, but no matter how understandable that reaction is, that particular 'good intention' is one that's paved many a private road to Hell, as it immediately puts you at odds with the reality of what and who you are as a human being. Like it or not, no one has a choice about whether or not they will have a philosophy: you already have one! Whether you're a drug addict, a working stiff, student or professor, it is an inescapable part of the identity of being human. The only choice that is open to you, is whether you'll have a sound and coherent philosophy that orders and serves your life, or an unconscious mishmash of contradictory notions that is more likely to benefit those seeking to exercise power over you for their own ends.
Even those who have no burning interest in philosophy - and most don't - should still have a grasp of its basics and the common pitfalls to watch out for, just as those who have no burning interest in mathematics, should still be familiar with the basics of arithmetic, multiplication & division, and know some 'gotcha!'s like not to divide by zero, especially as the consequences of miscalculating your ability to pay your bills, is nowhere near as consequential as those philosophical errors that can easily hamper your ability to live your life well, gut your life of meaning, and even bring your society to ruin.
The good news is that it doesn't take a lot of effort to learn what you need to know, or to recognize the philosophical pitfalls & poisons lurking around us in the modern world today. In fact, even briefly hitting the highlights of what was recently covered here across several posts, would help with putting your own sense of wonder back on solid ground, as with just a little watering of attention to the essentials will take root and develop, if you only habituate yourself to consciously and actively asking and answering three simple questions:
You could start on your own with those three questions and be far ahead of those who don't do even that, but there are a number of enticingly false trails that've ensnared and consumed the time of many truly great minds who've pursued those questions before you; or instead, giving your consideration to these highlights will reveal them and the ways they found around the more obvious detours, exits, traps and dead-ends, that lay in wait for you, and spare yourself the same trouble. Doing so will not only give you access to their wisdom & experience, it'll also reveal to you the enormous state of confusion, and the many mis-directions that the modernists have injected into the daily assumptions surrounding us in our world today, and so help you to disentangle your own thoughts from them.
To begin a 'quick' (well, quicker than seven posts) review of those highlights, we'll begin at the beginning with The Three Acts of the Mind:
The first to notably begin paying conscious attention to the process of reasoning were the Greeks, and the first of them to begin trying to methodically identify and clarify what our words referred to, and whether or not what they were leading us towards, was, or could be true, was Socrates. He famously put his Socratic method to use by publicly questioning the leading voices in Athens who claimed to know something of the reality behind the popular assumptions of his time - what was meant by Good, Virtue, Piety, Justice, Power - and revealed that all too often the primary concerns of those leaders were for how those assumptions could be used to their own social and political benefit while ensnaring their audiences through them, rather than communicating something real and true with them.
Despite Socrates being put to death for practicing it, his Socratic method of reasoning (what he called the 'Dialectic', is not like what goes by that name today) caught on and was spread by followers of his like Plato, and by Plato's own student, Aristotle, who further refined their methods into a system of requirements, rules, and common errors to be watched out for when doing so, which were applicable not only to questioning members of society, but also to examining the world around us through what would become the framework for biology, physics, the arts and more.
The fundamental principle that was at the root of the entire system, was what Aristotle called the first rule of thought:
How to validate, communicate, study, and argue for what is true for all, within the reality we all share, begins with identifying the three different forms of knowledge which we come to know that through:
The philosophical awareness that reality is the basis of what we're able to recognize as being true, and that truth is the measure of what is good, provides an ever-clearer sense of man's place within the world, and in practice reveals those otherwise unseen relationships which surround and incorporate us all within what is real and true.
Coincidentally (not!) that same philosophical awareness of reality is what the modernist's misosophy (hatred of wisdom) seeks to divorce you from. How? Think about what is happening within and to a person's thoughts when they advance any of the positions plucked from the bitter fruits of modernity, such as:
You might say "Well, but they don't really believe that", but that means that they've consciously advanced a lie at the center of their mind to achieve surreptitious ends, and how could that not accomplish the very same thing? Such modernisms disengage your sense of self from the world, and deprive you of being able to trust in your fellows - what can trust be without Truth?! - and puts you in opposition to what is real and true, separating each person's words and concepts from what they refer to, ultimately rendering the intelligible world, intelligence, and the logos, into little more than meaningless sounds to be parroted as verbal tricks. Those who've been taught such modernisms, have been cast adrift in their own private chaos (see Sartre who embraced that chaos as the ideals of existentialism).
Not only are all such beliefs necessarily chaotic, but their inconsistencies and contradictions are also almost comical to listen to, as "That may be your truth but it's not my truth" is itself declaring a universal truth while claiming that truth can't be universally known, just as the claim that "No one can know anything!", is itself a claim to know something! Or how about this oh-so Modernist gem:
Failings such as these were as obvious and applicable to the sophists of Aristotle's time, as they are to the skeptics of our own, and the reality is that they have no choice but to implicitly, and often explicitly, utilize every aspect of what they're so dramatically denying, in order to deny them! Not for no reason did Aristotle note that if a skeptic actually took their own positions seriously, they'd have to close their mouths, and sit down to await their deaths, motionlessly & silently, since,
In matters of material causation, the same principle applies, in that the deeper understanding we have of the identity of what something is, the better we'll be able to understand how it changes with the circumstances of its present context which determines its Actuality and Potentiality to change (the example given previously, Baking Soda and Vinegar cause a very different reaction, than when Baking Soda is combined in a cake mix), in that 'change' is what results from being in sufficient proximity with what something else is - IOW, Causation is Identity in action (and interaction).
That attention to what is, how we know it, and what is caused by that, reveals that whatever the sophist and skeptic might say about how seriously they take their own positions and inconsistencies, if they acted on them consistently - from crossing the street without looking, to disregarding 'too rigid' warnings on powerful medications - they'd soon be dead, and yet their shadowy inconsistencies are effective at ensnaring popular opinion, and the power & influence which that leads to, is what they do take seriously. Likewise, then as now, while Sophists are unconcerned about the weaknesses of their claims, in having turned away from the pursuit of truth (a wrong turn which modernity's off-ramp of 'epistemology' has detoured generations of students with), they thrive on the confusion which naturally spreads out through mishandling concepts of identity, causation, and change, easily inflames popular passions through whatever it is that is the 'Irritant of the Day' - as has happened from the Persians of Socrates' day, to the 'economics' of Marx's, and down to the global warming of today - giving them easier access to the levers of power while further undermining popular norms, as sophists have excelled at doing since the time of Zeno's paradoxes (look up Achilles losing a race to a tortoise).
Hume answered his own question, declaring that:
Ironically, for an 'empiricist', such sentiments are only possible by evading the evidence of his own senses. That Hume willfully evaded seeing this, we can easily see from his own words which make plain that he is making use of his own ability to perceive and conceive of what is real and true, in order to deny his own ability to perceive and conceive of what is real and true. Right? What, after all, is a memory? What is a 'fact'? Is a fact a tangible 'thing' (no, it is our conception of a tangible thing, in the context of other facts) that exists, and if not, how are you speaking of it? How do empirical 'facts' get into memory? How are such things committed to and recalled from our mind, except by some form of causation that's necessarily formless in nature, and which in considering it, conveys what knowledge you have of it, knowledge that can be added to, examined, and verified? Sorry Hume, but you cannot deny metaphysics, causality, and knowledge, while making use of metaphysics, causality, and knowledge, in order to deny metaphysics, causality, and knowledge - not to mention doing so with the appearance of a logical argument when logic also depends upon all three (more on that in the next post).
Hume's ultimate target was not causation, but identity, and especially the responsibility that recognizing both entails, in that upon his asserting his conclusion that any metaphysical, moral, or ethical teachings, are but reckless conjectures which Hume advised readers to 'Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion', and why wouldn't he, since he claimed that on having gone in search of his 'self' he came up empty, and remarked:
His necessarily meaningless assertions to the contrary, Causation, is not a mysterious force, and there is no need to look for a separate object of 'causality' (which would do what exactly?), nor is there some sort of causal pixie dust that somehow evaded Hume's observations, there is only reality as it is, which is open to all who don't refuse to see, and identify what we can see.
Perhaps the best reply to such willful blindness comes from the response that Aristotle gave in his Physics to the Sophists of his time, who, like Hume, preferred to spin up their own mental notions which they 'thought' were somehow more preferable to the reality which they refused to see:
When you deny that, as Hume did, you soon lose the ability to even recognize yourself. His blindness to them was a choice, made through the free will which he denied that he or we have, and was likely the result of a long and habitual rebellion against reality - outside and in - to the point of his having divorced himself from reality, inside and out. Sad. And modern Epistemology, which Kant formed in reaction to Hume (more on that in coming posts) - not by trying to correct his claim's errors, but by accepting his claims and extending them into a system that begins by denying our ability to know what is real, should be a non-starter for anyone concerned with what is real and true, as the meaning of the word 'Epistemology' is necessarily meaningless, without reality.
Summing up: It is what it is
Socrates, when asked about his new system and his role in it, had the humility and self-awareness to realize that ultimate wisdom was beyond the reach of man, but what we could and should do, was recognize its priceless value and the need to pursue it, which he called Philosophy, the love of wisdom.
Premodern philosophy's love of wisdom necessarily entails the pursuit of knowledge of what is objectively real and true, while always being aware of the possibility of being wrong or lacking important context, and engaging in that pursuit in that way leads us into a deeper understanding of ourselves, the world, and our place in it. Armed with the understanding that reality not only exists, but is worth knowing, and that knowing it is good, a society leads itself towards a flourishing level of education, the practice of science, and the development of technology that is beneficial to human life.
Two thousand years after Socrates' time, Hegel had no such sense of humility or any suspicion that he could be wrong, and convinced as he was that he already knew all that needed to be known, he concluded that he needn't pursue the wisdom he was sure he already had (conveniently he also pooh-poohed Aristotle's concern over contradictions), and all that he felt was left for him to do was to teach his wisdom to those who weren't too stupid to grasp it (an attitude which has been a 'tell' of those following in his misosophical footsteps to this day).
Modernity's doubtful certainties, lead only to false pretenses, anxiety, isolation, willful ignorance, and a regression to 'communicating' your desires through lies and the exercise of brute power and violence, while very likely devising and utilizing technologies suited to further those ends. The 'position' that we cannot know what is real and true, and that there is no issue with holding contradictory positions, is and should be beneath contempt, and that far from being the positions of a 'realistic skeptic', they are, at best, confessions of willful ignorance and intentional blindness in mind and spirit.
To reload our bullet points, how we come to understand anything, is through The Three Acts of the Mind:
And one last point and peril to be aware of, is the crucial importance of recognizing the difference between a legitimate doubt that comes unbidden to your mind, and the artificial 'doubt' that modernity is intent upon your developing the conscious habit of inserting into your every thought.
These are the doubtful distinctions between a true doubt, and an arbitrarily fabricated 'doubt' of corrosive skepticism:
It would be especially hard for anyone interested in Epistemology to treat Logic as a separate and distinct system, as Logic cannot be 'done' without paying due attention to the metaphysics it is derived from, as identifying what is, what is true, what you know, and what follows from that, are the fundamental requirements that must be known before Logic can be used to test an argument's validity. Any exercise in 'logic' which ignores whether the terms or propositions it is built from reflect reality, is a waste of time and intellectual effort, as logically it cannot be interested in Logic. Yes, the rules of Logic's most visible feature, the Syllogism, are used to validate your argument, but that's just a means to an end, the actual point of logic is to detect inconsistencies, errors, and contradictions in your thinking and in what it is you think you are thinking about, and that requires clearly identifying the nature of your terms, noting how one term actually relates to another, and whether or not your premises are in fact true, and support - or invalidate - your argument.
That's why this primary prerequisite for Logic isn't just a formality, it's the whole point of the process:
Disclaimer - I'm no expert on Logic, and I'm not intending to teach it here, but only to point out the too often neglected fundamentals, without which you can have no real ability to be logical. If you are interested in learning Logic properly and fully, I can suggest a comparatively brief, and very readable introduction to logical reasoning, in Peter Kreeft's 'Socratic logic: A Logic Text Using Socratic Method, Platonic Questions, and Aristotelian Principles (the first few pages are excerpted here). In that, Prof. Kreeft points out that the rules of logic are, perhaps surprisingly, rather simple, for instance, concerning the archetypal syllogism:
Not surprisingly, in the modernist's treatment of logic, as with the supposedly 'mathematically rigorous' symbolic logic (Prof. Kreeft gives an excellent explanation of why that is of little value in reasoning), that fundamental rule is rarely even mentioned, and is more likely ignored or evaded, because modernism fundamentally ignores and evades identity, causality, and existence itself. Play your word games all you want, but don't pretend that dressing such games up in the operational rules of logic could make them any more logical, than dressing a man up in women's clothing would make him a woman.
Elementary my dear Watson
The practice of attempting to 'do logic' by the technical rules while ignoring its overall purpose, often leads to one of the common excuses or *criticisms* of syllogisms, such as: "That just deals with deductive logic!', meaning that it's too simple, and also that deductive logic is somehow more obviously and perceptually *true*, and then that inductive or inferential logic deals with conjectures that we cannot ever be ultimately 'certain' of. Before we open ourselves up to the Inigo Montoya treatment, let's get clear on what the meaning of the words we're using, are:
Look again at the classic example of deductive logic:
To be logical, your basic logical units, the Terms used, and the propositions formed from them, must be clear, and unambiguous, meaning that there can be no doubt about what is being referred to (Identity). The 1st particular concrete term, is identified as belonging to the 2nd general abstract term, and all within the 2nd general term are related to the particular attribute of the 3rd term, forming the conclusion which clearly follows by demonstrating that there is a relationship between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd terms. That integrated meaning causes the conclusions, and not the happenstance of a premise's position in an argument, or the surface rules it abided by, and modernity is fundamentally opposed to that understanding (more on that in coming posts).
One too common example that's given of inductive reasoning today, is this exceedingly poor example which was the very first result I received from a Bing search (from liveScience.com),
We can easily come up with a better and more appropriate example of inductive logic practically off the cuff, by looking at how the experience of different particulars, leads to a conclusion that relates to every particular instance, by way of a generalized abstraction of 'mortality':
The last words there, of "... all men are mortal", of course are what form the 2nd premise of the classic 'Socrates is...' example of deductive logic, and what you should infer from that, is that all such abstract terms are arrived at through the same inductive manner (soundly or unsoundly), which begin in experience, and rising up by abstraction to become accepted concepts - and inescapably lead to the conclusion that the premises used in Deductive logic, are derived from Inductive reasoning. The terms of a deductive syllogism are the answers at the end result of a process of inductive reasoning that created them, and while it can and does save time, it shouldn't be forgotten that it can and should be used as a means of making more plain any oversights or errors that might've been missed in the more detailed process of inductive reasoning.
To fully appreciate Logic and the benefits it reveals to us, we need to understand the nature of the reciprocal 'fact checking' role that is implicit in the complementary roles of deductive and inductive reasoning, which they'll perform for each other, if attended to diligently, in that - so long as you expect that to the best of your knowledge your premises & terms are true - if your deductions and inferences are technically valid, and yet the inescapable conclusion differs in some way from what experience actually shows, that's an indication that there are gaps or even errors in your assumptions and knowledge of the terms you're reasoning with.
For instance, the following example which abides by only the surface rules of the syllogism:
Discovering errors in your logical reasoning, by means of logical reasoning, is not a bug, that's a feature, and it means that there's more to learn in what you're thinking about, and it clearly shows you that your premises and possibly even your terms, need to be explored further, qualified, and possibly even entirely revised.
To ensure that our 'logically inescapable' conclusions don't become traps for us, we need to do our best to ensure that every step in our logic, and our understanding of its premises, and that its terms are clear and unambiguous, all fully comport with what is real and true. The rules for arranging terms and premises in a syllogism are an important part of the process of logical reasoning, but they do not substitute for the entire process which they too depend upon. That requires that you incline towards a wider view of your knowledge, and ensure that it is more than an arrangement of 'facts', and that there are good reasons to believe that the soundness of your knowledge, and the terms and premises derived from it, lead to, rather than are constricted by, the technical rules of the syllogism itself. By adhering to the primary rule, before, during, and after, we are able to learn from what we know.
Deductive Logic, and Inductive Logic, are two complementary and interdependent approaches to validating your reasoning, and you can bet that when people criticize logic as being 'too pat', or rationalistic, it's because they've allowed those terms to become divided from each other in their minds. It should come as no surprise that modernity was practically established upon pitting deductive and inductive reasoning against each other, they've a number of methods for confusing you into allowing them to do just that.
This issue came to the forefront with Hume, and then exploded in maximum density with Kant's reaction to him, but it is enough for now to know (we'll get into further details in later posts) that when you see the terms 'analytic vs synthetic', or in their more technically detailed form of 'a priori' vs 'a posterori', in either case you'd be wise to treat them as flashing red warning signs being used to divert you into taking the offramp of their '4th branch of philosophy', which is designed to lead you astray from what is, and what can be understood to be, real and true.
You should know that those lights are flashing red, whenever you see examples such as this:
Before looking closer, how they typically define these terms are, that Analytic or:
We can and should say that, and without advancing a materialist position, it is true that there is nothing that we can know of this world, independent of experience. The word 'Bachelor' was not magicked into our minds from somewhere beyond time or space, we know that a bachelor refers to an unmarried man, and because through experience we know what a man is, and we know what marriage is, and that 'Bachelor' is the word we use to identify a man that is not married - it is self-evident that the word, its terms, and its premise, are all derived from experience.
The same goes for their other favorite examples, that the sum of degrees in a triangle is always 180* is 'true in every universe', because we understand from experience the nature and properties of a triangle. Likewise with Number and numbering, as far from numbers being mysteriously ethereal concepts, they are what we arrived at after having abstracted the particulars being counted - apples, oranges, spears - away from the quantities being handled, we were able to give the names of 'one, two, three' to them, as a means of greatly simplifying the counting of them.
Yes, numbers show up in the darndest of places, but that's because quantities of this and that is all there is... everywhere! No part of 27÷9=3 exists outside of or prior to experience, and in case you've forgotten, learning that the answer to what 27 divided by 9 is, is devilishly difficult to get to - ask any 1st grader to verify that for you. It's only after you've understood what a number is, and what particular numbers refer to, and after you've experienced working through and counting it out a few times, that it gets easier. Yes, numbers, math, can be applied anywhere in place and time, and would apply whether or not people existed... by whichever intelligent creature existed that was able to learn the concept from experience. Don't fall for the 'a priori/a posterori' con, it is purely philosophical sleight of hand, and it is intended to take something from you - one of your most important handles on reality. Whatever example is waved in your face, don't buy into their conceptual Three Card Monty game - concepts are applicable in nearly every scenario we can imagine, but that does not mean that we came to know any of them through any means other than from experience.
Note: In recent years there've been attempts to dodge this, by objecting that "What makes something a priori is not the means by which it came to be first known, but the means by which it can be shown to be true or false" (Baggini), meaning that once it's been learned, we no longer need to refer to experience, to know what a triangle is, to which I give all the respect which is due that argument in my reply: B.S.! Someone who has somehow never seen or heard of a triangle, will not 'know' it by saying the word 'triangle', and until you ask them to imagine the shape made from three straight lines, laid end to end with the last connecting back to the first, they will then understand it, from having had that experience of imagining it, or you can show them a triangle and after having experienced seeing it, they'll recognize it... from that experience.
There are many technical differences between what I've lumped together here as being roughly equivalent between 'analytic vs synthetic', 'a priori' vs 'a posterori', but they are differences of degree, not kind, and the ugly fact is that people are working very hard to discredit your ability to apprehend reality, and they will try to confuse the issue of what is, and is not real, but their efforts are no more worthy of trust than those of the Three Card Monty dealer - don't fall for it. After cutting through all of the dense verbiage, what they're doing is attacking both Identity and Causality, and they're doing so in order to capture your mind - decline to accept their 'hypotheticals' - they're trying to bounce you right on out of the real world. I'd advise against accepting their invitation.
As we've already seen with the premise that 'man is mortal', when we examine our experiences, we don't simply infer a conclusion from a sequence of observations, as the lame example of taking coins from a bag asserted, rather, as we saw with 'man is mortal', we observe that in examining our experiences, when we find that the totality of our observations show the same results, which are also affirmed through all other conceivable variations, we are able to infer with certainty that within those contexts that conclusion is able to be understood to be true.
It's important to point out that the famous 'black swan' event, is not a valid case of inference or exception, relying as it does on nothing more than the feeble 'this coin was a nickel, and the next coin was a nickel, so all coins are nickels' mockery of inference, in that as we know that chemical processes which produce the coloring of a swans feathers, are fully capable of producing other colors, and there's no reason to suspect that a mutation would be unable to produce a single black swan or even a new breed of them. The fact that swans are most likely to be white, is valid as a general rule of thumb, but the existence of one or more black swans does nothing to invalidate inferential reasoning.
With that being said, we can move onto the other evasion of 'synthetic' or 'a posteriori' examples, which are typically positioned through common examples of:
As we've seen, the premises that 'man is mortal' or 'bachelor is an unmarried man', are inferred from experience in just the same manner as 'grass is green' (in most varieties, not all), and the sum of degrees within a triangle is always 180*. It is only from experience that we are able to conceive of and conclude with certainty that all triangles in a flat plane (important point) sum up to 180*, because we can quickly see that there are no possible variations within a flat plane, that could result in more or less that 180* - it isn't possible. And while laying a triangular shape upon a convex or concave surface will produce more or less that 180*, that's no longer dealing with triangles in the context of a flat plane. And we don't validate our concepts through hypotheticals such as 'imagine grass that's red, or striped', because experience shows that hypotheticals that do not exist in reality, are not valid 'points of view' for considering reality from.
That man is mortal, is a result of inference. That all triangles contain 180* is the result of inference. That Red is a color, is a result of inference (and the fact that there are edge colors where its difficult to say are blue or green, does not invalidate either, and the fact that noticing there are fuzzy edges affirms, rather than calls into question, that solid ground can be identified). That a Bachelor is an unmarried man is no less an inference because it is defined to express the difference between men, and married men. Even 2+2=4 is an inference. The fact that some terms and premises take more or fewer instances to reliably infer a conclusion, has no effect on the validity of inference. BTW, the same applies in ethical conclusions, when an argument is made that:
The supposed 'ideal' of inerrant and infallible certainty, which they hold up as an ideal, is a confession of their failure to understand and hostility to, mankind and man's means of understanding.
Are you Certain?
Is logical reasoning infallible? Of course not, and neither is it a criticism of either logic or reasoning to point out that both can make errors (ehm... discovered... how?),and seeking after infallibility, is itself an attack upon your ability to know what is real and true. Those who make such points as criticisms of logic and/or reasoning aren't seeking after what is 'right', they mean to suggest that it is possible to be human and inerrant, which is a confession that they seek to escape the burden of judgment, they seek after systems that are so perfect that they won't ever need to risk being in error, and more than anything else, they seek to escape the responsibility of taking their own judgment seriously. Ultimately what that means, is that they seek to escape from reality, and truth, in the comfort of the grandest lie of all, which is but a euphemism to divert attention away from the death and destruction that follow in its wake.
Stay on the road to reality, don't take the detours and offramps. The reason for the rules of logic that Aristotle formulated, and why we should follow them, checking and verifying that your thinking is either valid, or invalid, is to bring clarity to our understanding of what is real and true, and to bring order to our thinking. Logic is less about proving that something is true, than with clarifying whether your ideas of what is true, correspond to what actually is real and true, and reveals to you whether the fault is to be found within your argument, or with your premises, or even the terms, that you're using.
With all of that having been said, and reviewed here, there are a few other notable cautions and root fallacies noted in previous posts, to point out here, as an awareness of them helps in keeping your mind on track:
What 'Epistemology' is defined as being, then - though rarely practiced as such - a system that 'distinguishes justified belief from opinion', is only able to see that it's justified, because it first identifies what is real and true, and so can be argued for logically, and be ethically justified.
That process is, and was, and should again be, understood to be one that utilizes metaphysics, logic, and ethics, in identifying what is, what follows, and what, if anything, should be done about that, by examining claims in a methodical, reasonable, and logical manner... and the Ethical portion of how we go about determining 'what, if anything, should be done about that', is what we'll look at next.
For those who'd rather engage with ideas that actually help them to better understand themselves, the world, and how to live a life worth living within it, they'd do best to avoid the presumptions and practices of modern 'epistemology', and instead rediscover how premodern philosophy put what that word claims to mean - a theory of knowledge that distinguishes justified belief from opinion' - into action. The premoderns accomplished that through the only possible means of doing so, by establishing what is real and true, demonstrating how to soundly argue to affirm or refute claims about that, and by identifying what if anything should be done regarding that, which they did through the unified use of Metaphysics, Logic, and Ethics.
In coming posts we'll look at the details of how the modernists did what they've done and the subsequent ill effects that's had on the lives we now lead, but first, to avoid falling into the Inigo Montoya trap which the moderns stumbled upon with 'epistemology' ("You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means"), we need to look at the meaning of the word Ethics, which is generally defined as:
How do I mean that? Like this: it is not possible to meaningfully pursue the purported meaning of epistemology, without ethics - how would you justify - 'justify' being a term of ethics - belief, while having no belief in, interest in, or concern for, what is right and true? What can 'justified' possibly mean without a regard for what is real and true, and what, if anything, should - 'should' is also an ethical term - you do about that? Should you say anything if you notice an error in how something's been justified? What if that'd be inconvenient for you? Does it matter if you don't? Given its treatment of such stated concerns, it's not so surprising that modern philosophy has spawned a succession of evermore coldly antagonistic and brutal ideologies (utilitarianism, materialism, socialism, communism, pragmatism... etc.,), whose ideals are in constant competition to 'manage society', while agreeing only upon the belief that what is real and true, doesn't matter and can't be known by anyone anyway.
The truth is that it is not possible to be concerned with what we are told 'epistemology' means, without incorporating an Ethics that's more worthy of its name, than the '4th branch of philosophy' is of its name - the desire for knowledge without ethics, is a lust for power unburdened by wisdom. Or, to fit it to the season, knowledge without wisdom is monstrous.
Taking a different tact with the 3rd Branch of Philosophy - differences of degree, not kind
How we approach Ethics, necessarily has to differ from how we approached metaphysics and logic in the previous two posts (here, and here), and you can see why in the differences between the first two of the three philosophical questions, in relation to the third - they are again:
Put another way, imagine a scene viewed through a telescopic lens, where you see the ground of a yard with a house upon it and a nearby tree being the tallest figure within the scene - then as you zoom out, while the ground remains at ground level, the single house is seen to be one of many houses in a neighborhood, and the tree which had been the highest point visible has become dwarfed by the mountain which had been obscured behind it when zoomed in. Similarly, while the ground of metaphysics and logic remain solid and unchanged, as their ethical high ground had been raised upon standards that are now understood to be considerably lower from our perspective in time, so that what they saw as the high ground back then, we can now see as standing lower, overshadowed in places, and in some cases is now even seen as being disreputable, if not downright evil.
Because the fundamentals of what we accept as ethical behavior, are nearest to the timeless principles of metaphysics and logic which they are derived from, what we believe to be right and wrong in relation to those fundamentals (virtue, murder, theft, etc.,) change very little over time.
But. Since the breadth and depth of knowledge available to us has grown far beyond what was understood when the philosophical pursuit of wisdom was begun by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, that enables a difference in ethical perspective that's often glaring to our eyes today, which was unavailable in their own time. So that where on the surface there seems to be a common baseline understanding of what is ethical - murder was wrong in their time, as it is in ours - what was thought to be an ethical application of that knowledge can differ as much as its scope - i.e. the understanding of what does and does not constitute murder, has changed a great deal between their day and ours.
For instance, you've heard of the term 'decimated'? That comes from the Roman army's practice of discipling poor performance of the soldiers by lining up the troops and going down the line and killing every tenth soldier where they stood. In their eyes, that was not murder, that was simply maintaining discipline.
That's how much degree can vary within kind. And the more closely you look into the past, the more such differences of degree are revealed.
For instance, on the one hand, there were numerous positive developments over even the course of the 300 years from Socrates' time to Cicero's, where their knowledge and experience of the nature and purpose of the state (government and politics being a subset of Ethics), had further developed the idea of a Republic, into one that contained features of democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy (which was hugely influential on our founder's thinking). Also, the character and performance of the Roman's idea of a Republic depended greatly upon the character of their people, and especially upon the importance of the family unit. That also compelled them to seek out and admit more input from the people, and so they also began to see that The Law needed to be much more than an arena for verbal gamesmanship and rules for the rulers to rule their society through - which was the norm in Socrates' time - and instead needed to be based upon a principled understanding of right and wrong, which needed to be able to stand up to reasonable scrutiny, in order to be considered sound and acceptable as law (see especially Cicero's 'Republic' and 'The Laws').
On the other hand, while these were important and sound advances, advances that could be foreseen only dimly, if at all, from Socrates' position in time, from our perspective perched high atop of their shoulders, we're able to look back and down into their details, and see problems which they could not. For instance, as important as the family was believed to be by Romans to the Roman way of life, the near total power that the Roman Husband/Father, the Paterfamilias, had over the lives of his wife and children - he could put either to death if they had in some way (determined by him) dishonored the family - is something we're able to see today as being intolerably wrong and corrupting. And for all that they'd advanced in an understanding of the Law, and of Government, it was not uncommon for leading citizens and politicians, from Lucius Cornelius Sulla to Marc Antony and Octavian (later Augustus), to issue proscriptions for the good of the state, in which were listed the names of hundreds and even thousands of people who were to be hunted down and put to death, based solely upon the say so of whichever eminent figure had put their names onto that list - Cicero himself met his end in that way.
Those differences in degree, follow from not just ignorance, but from the scope of knowledge and understanding that was available to them. In Aristotle's day at the opening of the philosophical pursuit of wisdom, the good of the polity, the state, marked the upper limit of known value and virtue, and that meant that the value of the individual was measured by their ability to serve the needs of society and the state. It was from that perspective that it was believed in Aristotle's time:
Note: Far from this being an argument for 'relativism', it's in fact the very opposite, in that it is because the range and scope of what we know today - not just in quantity, but the height and depth of understanding that is available today - that it's possible for us to see more clearly what is right and true and good and proper in relation to what is and can be known, than could even be imagined in the absence of that understanding. Note Also: Attempting to reverse that perspective, to judge them by the wider perspective of our day which they lacked, is being anachronistic - imposing something from one time, out of place upon another - and should not be engaged in, as doing so doesn't make you look superior to them, but only shows your judgment to be inferior to the knowledge that is available to you.
And yet, the differences are worth noting, if only to highlight the importance of understanding what is available for you to know, and the enormity of what can be missed through ignorance.
It's also important to point out that a vital part of what made our elevated perspective possible - even imaginable - to us today, are due to the major additions to knowledge and understanding that came from the Christian quarter of what was fast becoming the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West, and that raised the bar in ways that truly were inconceivable to Aristotle, and to Cicero as well.
In addition to the four Cardinal Virtues that had been known to them - Prudence, Justice, Courage, Temperance - were added three more virtues of Faith, Hope, Charity, which altered how the original four were understood to be applied. And so, in holding that violence was not only wrong, but that every person was made in the image of God, it was able to be understood that every person - child, mother, father - should be seen as equally human in the eyes of those whose own eyes had been opened to that. From that perspective it gradually became more and more difficult to not see the rich & powerful, as well as their humblest servants, as being equally human, and so equally deserving of the mutual respect and civility that should be extended to all as members of society.
The (very) Slow (then really fast) Progress of History
We today hardly notice how revolutionarily new these innovations were, and many today even cynically treat them as being outdated - not as a result of any new knowledge of ours, but out of a new ignorance of our old knowledge. What we miss, at the very least, is that these new ideas were such that within a remarkably short time they'd defeated the 'gods' of mighty Rome, within Rome! True, they couldn't stop the rot which centuries of corruption had already brought Republican Rome to ruin, and raised the Roman Empire up in its place, but Rome was able to continue on for another two centuries in the western half of the empire, before collapsing from opposing forces within and without at around the 400s. OTOH, the eastern half of the empire in Byzantium - which had never stopped thinking of itself as Rome - endured and prospered for another thousand years, before it too was finally defeated, though more by external forces than internal failures (though those last weren't lacking).
Centuries more passed by before Thomas Aquinas was able to bring that new Christian understanding, into Aristotle's philosophy, while the 'little people' continued to receive very little benefit or recognition of what we would understand today as 'individual rights', and even once violence, slavery, and immorality, had been brought into clearer disrepute, there were still few substantial barriers to stop the powerful from abusing the weak, as 'needed'. As the centuries passed, the ideas began to bubble up as with England's Charter of Liberties, and still centuries after that before monarchs began to be bound to respect the lives & property of their subordinates (barons, earls, etc.,) began to be codified into British law with the Magna Carta, and still several centuries more before people would begin to see that those same rights should be extended to the non-aristocratic population as well, and only then was the understanding expressed by Sir Edward Coke, able to begin to be infused into British Common Law with the idea that 'Every man's home is his castle', and the corollary realization that everyone's 'Castle' depended upon everyone recognizing that every person was due the equal protections of society's laws which were to be defended by the state, against all enemies, foreign & domestic.
With the solid foundation in fundamentals provided by the early Grecco/Roman half of the West, expanded and humanized by the Judeo/Christian half, and refined over the course of the developments of Europe and especially Britain over the course of two thousand years and more, their accumulated experience and discoveries and knowledge, eventually achieved such an elevated understanding as what began to be expressed with the idea of the English 'Bill of Rights'.
The ethical development of the 'Rights of Englishmen', was a tipping point, spanning as it did across Ethic's subsets of governance, law, economics, and societal norms, and became a new norm that America's Founding Fathers refused to relinquish it, even though England was clear across the ocean. They soon set about refining the idea further still, and then extended the theory of its applicability to mankind as a whole, with the understanding that not only did and should the choices of individuals have value and standing before the law, but that government must be barred from infringing upon those fundamental individual rights. With that understanding becoming widespread, a new soundness and prosperity of their entire society soon followed, and hard on the heels of that came the realization that it all depended upon the people having a moral and liberal education, because an uneducated people, as John Adams put it:
America's Declaration of Independence, its federal Constitution (and those of its united States), and Bill of Rights, arguably expressed the most radical and revolutionary leap of political progress in human history, and though 'self evident' to them then, it took over two thousand years for that knowledge to be developed and understood, before it could become 'self evident' to our Founders. It is important for us to understand today, that though we share essentially the same understanding of metaphysics and logic and the same Cardinal Virtues of ethics understood in Aristotle's & Cicero's time which our Founders understood to be invaluable 'common judgments of public right' and are still of immeasurable value to us today, 'The Spirit of 1776' was an ethical development that was utterly and completely beyond the ability of anyone to perceive in Aristotle's & Cicero's time.
Ethics develops from our understanding of the knowledge available to us, which is just one reason why it is so unforgivable when systems of education fail to teach our youth the history which our standards of ethical behavior depend upon - how else do you think we came to have college campuses where students chant for death to Israel?! Students protesting for 'free speech' by supporting terrorists, is what it looks like when a person is given an education that has had metaphysics, logic, ethics, and the knowledge they make possible, removed from their understanding.
Ethical understanding is developed from what we know, and that cannot be ignored in any attempt to identify a 'theory of knowledge for justified belief', and it is our ethical responsibility today to carry that on, which means that you cannot blindly accept the judgments of any time - theirs or ours - without giving reasonable consideration to what is right and wrong, if only to ensure that you understand what you're doing and why, rather than timidly obeying a set of rules that then can have no meaning to you.
Because we have abandoned our ethical responsibility in what we accept as a 'theory of knowledge for justified belief' from modern 'epistemology', we now thoughtlessly accept almost any rule that experts tell us is 'justified', and it has taken less than a century of that for our own people to become largely unable to see what had been seen as self-evident in our Founders' era.
We'll take a look at how the three branches of philosophy work together and are embedded in the ethical virtues that need to be recognized in order to defend against that, and the key epistemological method that was used to blind us to all of that, next.
As Aristotle pointed out in his Nicomachean Ethics, Socrates was wrong in thinking that ignorance makes one wicked, or that knowledge makes one virtuous - knowing is important but it's not enough, you also have to be in the habit of doing what you know to be right and true. Knowing 'the answers' doesn't make a person virtuous, any more than being ignorant of the right answer could make one depraved and evil. Believing isn't guided primarily by facts, but by what we are in the habit of acting upon, and anyone who's attempted to 'fact check' the beliefs of someone on the other side of the political aisle, has very likely seen that firsthand (and perhaps ignored it in themselves).
Those who're able to meaningfully recognize that the knowledge they've habitually acted upon as a 'justified belief', is wrong, are able to do so because they are already in the habit of cross-checking the facts they now know, with what is inarguably real and true, in order to see where their knowledge, understanding, and behavior, may need to be altered in light of that new information. They do so because they at least implicitly understand that failing to do so, would lead them or their people into living within an illusion of unjustifiable beliefs, falsehoods, and chaos, which would be at odds with what is real and true, and so of value to their lives.
In an irony that Plato would surely enjoy, modern 'philosophers' who use the term and branch of 'Epistemology' that was devised to deny and justify (!) our inability to know what is real and true, do so while knowing that their system has produced those ideologies of 'justified belief' that've darkened the modern world with illusions that most people are unwilling to acknowledge amidst their lives today. And of course they do so, confident that any 'fact checking' will reference only those facts that support the opinions that they've certified as being acceptable, and that by making themselves captive to those same beliefs, and safe in the knowledge that those they've taught to accept those facts and opinions in the educational systems that they dominate, will applaud them as being knowledgeable and correct.
What that means for you and me, is that if you'd like to be justifiably confident that your beliefs will help you to live a life worth living, then you first need to take the modernists at their word and ignore their literally ignorant advice, and look instead to the premoderns who actually cared about establishing what is real and true (Metaphysics), and about demonstrating how to soundly argue the merits of any claims about that (Logic), and understood that it was important to identify what if anything should be done in light of that (Ethics). Philosophers before the modern era did so, because unlike the modernist, they thought that wisdom was important, and valuable, in the pursuit of a life worth living.
Caring about what is true is the path to liberty and the pursuit of happiness
But getting back to answering our opening question, for a person to change what they believe and behave by, they first need to understand and believe that when we mistakenly believe something that is actually false, to be true, it is a consequential problem that truly matters to their life and ability to live it well, and to be in the habit of correcting themselves because of that. Those who don't believe that, are in the habit of dealing with errors and falsehoods, only when they present problems that interfere with their immediate plans and actions, and once those problems are 'resolved' into being out of sight, they are also out of mind.
Those who believe that gaps and errors in their understanding are consequential to their life and ability to live it well, are inclined by that towards developing those habits of mind across time that become 'second nature' to their character, which we recognize as the mark of a virtuous person - AKA: One who is up to the challenges of living a life worth living. For them, errors and falsehoods once discovered, can no longer be tolerated, no matter what comforting norms might have grown up around them, and it's those kinds of people who are able to come to see - no matter what popular opinion might say against them - that:
At the foundation of ethics, are those fundamental virtues that 'fact-check' our behavior and keep us in accordance with first principles of knowledge and behavior, and a child's education should raise them up in those habits of thought and action, in knowledge and story. These habits of mind are what have been known since classical times as the Cardinal Virtues:
These virtues are foundational to the West, which upholds (upheld?) the importance of acting deliberately by choice at the level of the individual, their family, extended friendships, and community, which became a vital component in bringing about what is the truest wealth of the West. The Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West is not wealthy because of its resources - or resources taken from others - but because virtue, morality, and trustworthiness, became an expected norm in its communities, which made them as much or more inclined towards celebrating goodness, than power, and from that common sense, wealth and prosperity naturally followed in abundance.
The expectation of trust and accompanying trustworthiness, ushered in the circumstances which Adam Smith observed as the 'natural liberty' of each person, when they were, to the greatest extent possible, able to act as they saw fit without external interference. As Smith observed, those able to make their own decisions in regards to their affairs, on the basis of conditions & needs they had first-hand knowledge of, with little or no fear of being forcibly interfered with by either criminal or civic officials, that produced a market and pricing system that excelled at spreading the most reliable information of the value of products, supplies, and related concerns, throughout society, and it brought about an unheard of explosion of efficiency and prosperity not only for their immediate communities, but to society as a whole.
It's important to note that what was involved in those first stirrings of a Free Market, which they'd produced, involved far more than what the modern field of 'economics' concerns itself with, and is best addressed under the wider scope of Political Economy, which is what two of the last worthwhile Frenchmen, Jean Baptiste Say, and Frederick Bastiat operated within (with apologies to deTocqueville). Although Adam Smith essentially originated the field of Political Economy before them, both Say and Bastiat would make its principles even more clearly understood than Smith had (Thomas Jefferson explicitly recommended Say's clearer and far briefer study of 'Political Economy':
All of which rests upon, and depends upon, a regard and respect for what is real and true, and without that understanding which Ethics insists upon, Western knowledge and understanding could not have reached as high as it did with Aristotle, and higher with Cicero, and higher still with the Christian era. Without that full foundation, the English Common Law could not have been developed, let alone what followed in our Founders' era with the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and the realization of their understanding of a Free Market (which is NOT what libertarians & establishment GOP present as being 'Free Trade'), which are what have made the better aspects of our current world possible.
All of which goes to say, that Epistemologically speaking, where Metaphysics tells us what is, and Logic demonstrates what is arguably true, Ethics extends those into telling us whether or not such and such a conclusion is justifiable, and what should or shouldn't be done about that, and no 'epistemology' worthy of the meaning given to that name, can legitimately be practiced without employing all three. More to the point, undermining either one is an attack upon all three, and upon your ability to act in accordance with what you know to be real and true. Further, eliminating the expectation of the possibility of truth, has the effect of concealing all lies as such - what significance can a lie have, to a people who have no particular regard for what is real and true? - the lie is neatly cloaked in the attire of 'whatever' and 'just my opinion, man', and its corruption spreads with ease.
The Modern cost of Epistemology without Metaphysics, Logic, and Ethics (Narrator: Everything)
At the vague beginnings of modernity, those who saw themselves as 'modern' began moving away from that understanding, perhaps first and most notably with Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote such things as that it would be advisable for a Prince to send in a brutal authority to discipline and even kill troublemakers in a region, and then once having brought them under control, to then make a show of killing that authority who'd been acting on the prince's orders
Both of them imagined that such plans somehow could be effective, and therefore would be justified (if you apply Aristotle's 1st rule to the logic preceding the 'therefore', you'll find it to be lacking), and Hobbes's Leviathan was subject to the same contradictions and falsehoods for 'the greater good', as Machiavelli's, so that neither forerunner of 'real politik' could establish a 'justified belief', and so neither could ever truly be either desirable, admirable, or effective. A reasonable understanding of ethics, which enables us to see into the wider context beyond the present moment, would show that no such actions could be justifiable, nor since they ignore the likelihood of unforeseen consequences of committing wrongs, could they be effective - by definition such actions taken in contradiction to what is real and true - and no such shortsighted effort could ever be 'practical' in the end, and could not be because they are wrong in their beginnings.
What the term Epistemology was coined to mean, was being practiced in premodern philosophy long before its modern name was coined. To consider something philosophically, began with what Metaphysics could tell you is, which Logic examined and showed how arguably it could be justified, which led into an ethical understanding which disclosed what should or shouldn't be done about that. Doing so was and is inseparable from practicing the virtues of Prudence (a sound judgement about what is true), Justice (seeing that wrongs are appropriately righted), Courage (prudently applying justice even in adversity), and Temperance (doing what is right, in right measure, neither excessively or neglectfully). Practicing epistemology in a manner that lives up to the meaning assigned to it - distinguishing between justified beliefs, and opinion - is vital to determining whether or not a conclusion is not only the 'right answer', but is ethically justifiable to believe, stand by, and act upon - it doesn't make you infallible or omniscient, but it does help you to behave in a manner that is reasonably in accordance with what is real and true.
Epistemology, according to what its modernist granddaddy, Immanuel Kant, taught, was and remains thoroughly opposed to that premodern meaning which epistemology was coined to give modernism cover from. His, and every modernist system since his radical 'Copernican Revolution', which he conceived of in reaction to David Hume, he fashioned a gimmick (the details of that I'll leave for latter posts) in his 'Critique of Pure Reason', which responds to Hume's skepticism, by accepting his conclusions, and uses them as a pretext for devising a way 'around them',
What is a 'Categorical Imperative'? They are statements which Kant and other 'experts' have rationalized - necessarily independent of 'real reality' - as being 'truths' that it is your duty to
If that didn't clear things up for you, consider this scenario which Kant actually gave as an example of his ideal that “The Categorical Imperative commands us not to lie”, and you should keep in mind that "Kant subsequently says that a categorical imperative:
If it's not yet entirely clear how vastly different the modernist's approach is from the premodern one, a scenario that should make matters clearer, is one that Kant gave as an example of his ideal, which is in radical opposition to the premodern view (and I'll bet yours too). So let's take a look at the scenario itself, and then at how differently it might be approached from the premodern, and then the modernist, points of view:
This should not be surprising, as modernism and all its children in highbrow pretenses, Marxism, pragmatism, post-modernism, wokeness, etc., all tell you that you cannot know what is real and true, and so 'logically' (by ignoring the fundamental rules of logic) you should (again, an ethical term) ignore the meaning of any and all terms and premises in favor of abiding by the Kantian Categorical Imperative to 'tell the truth' - if you cannot know 'the thing itself', then obviously your knowledge is not, should not, and cannot, be integrated or comprehensible, and so your only duty is to obey the rules of experts, and any judgment that'd violate those rules is wrong.
Remember, modern philosophy isn't about helping you to become wise, it's about what & who you should obey.
However many modernist experts have come and gone, and whichever ideological label, from Idealism, to Dialectical Materialism, to Pragmatism, and post-modernism they've operated under, and whichever political death-cult of socialism, communism, Marxism, Maoism, Pro-Regressivism, etc. that've brought in and out of favor, that fundamental 'truth' has remained a constant command - you kant know what's true, don't think for yourself, obey the experts.
You might recall from an earlier post on Fichte's influence in our school systems, that (Fichte was the first to lay out exactly what the meaning and consequences of this new '4th branch of philosophy' actually meant), advised upon reforming education in his 'Addresses to the German people', in order to eliminate the 'problem' of independent thought, and so make students more perfectly obedient to authorities (a message heard and transmitted into America by the likes of Horace Mann). If you ever wondered where the death camps of the fascists and communists came from, there's your answer - those are the ideas which those horrors originated from (and yes, they persist in the design of your current school systems), as does the modernist's reasons for using 'epistemology' to separate metaphysics, logic, and ethics, from your conscious consideration, comprehension, and judgement.
Whatever its claims, Modernist philosophy didn't fix the errors and weaknesses of premodern philosophy, it replaced their honest gaps and errors with deliberate falsehoods and fantasies. Modern Epistemology and the 'philosophy' it supports, makes a mockery of Philosophy - the love of and pursuit of Wisdom cannot be engaged in after first having denied everything in its foundations and goals that makes such a pursuit possible.
Beliefs are justified by what is real and true
What is real and true matters, and distinguishing between what is properly a 'justified belief', and 'opinion', can only be understood by those who care about and respect what is metaphysically true, logically arguable, and ethically understood. Those who deny what is real and true, can only follow rules and flow charts prepared and approved of by one expert or another, to achieve ideological ends which they expect you to have exchanged your ability to reason for (oh hi there 'Critical Thinking'), in order to obey what the experts tell you.
If the meaning ascribed to epistemology in the 1880s is to be taken seriously - as opposed to how the modernist's '4th branch of philosophy' actually presumes and operates - you could not even begin to identify a 'theory of knowledge', without first understanding the metaphysical importance of identifying what is real and true, and the importance of responding to that knowledge ethically, and no belief 'justified' without that understanding can have any real and true value. An understanding of and respect for Justice, is required for determining the proper response to popular ideals, and pursuing what correctives might be warranted, without excess or inappropriate rancor, and you could not justly stand for a justified belief without the courage to say that you've discovered what is popularly supported, is in fact false. The ignorance of or denial of that, is what lays behind the moderns' denial of our ability to perceive reality as it is, and our inability to say what is real and true (what is a woman?), and any 'justified belief' that's justified without that, can only serve to subvert what truly is so.
Outside of the vain pursuits of power, real power begins with a respect for truth, and having the humility to not only recognize the possibility of your being wrong, but the desire to discover that error, to treat people with respect, civility, kindness, and trust, comes naturally only to those who have a love of Truth. In that same soil is sure to be found a sound metaphysics, with a respect for logical reasoning, and an ethics which reflects and insists upon both, in liberty with their fellows in society, under heaven above.
One question worth asking after all of this, is that if philosophy and an epistemology of metaphysics, logic, and ethics is so important, and if the great majority of people have little or no interest in its pursuit, how is such a society to come about, let alone endure? A quick look at history will show us that it is not necessary that everyone be an academic - just as recent history will show how disastrous such an effort is - but a people can still develop a meaningful habit of epistemology in everyday practice, through an education that fundamentally values and transmits "the best that has been thought and said" through its culture's stories, arts, letters, and religion.
For a glimpse at how that once was done, and what had to be trivialized in order to dispense with it, we'll look at Grammar's role in implementing or abandoning an epistemology of metaphysics, logic, and ethics, next.
We began this series of posts with Inigo Montoya's 'You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means' being the perfect meme for 'Epistemology', whose philosophical system bears little relation to what the word was coined to mean. As it turns out, much the same applies to Grammar. But to avoid the Inigo Montoya treatment, let's have a look at what that word is now defined to mean, which the Merriam-Webster's online dictionary has as:
With that in mind, let's turn to the question asked at the end of the previous post, which was essentially that if having an epistemology of metaphysics, logic, and ethics is as important as I've argued it to be, and if most people aren't interested in even philosophy, let alone epistemology, what are we supposed to do about that? And the answer is that we don't need to teach any new subjects, we only need to teach a subject we're already teaching, but begin teaching it as we once did and are no longer doing: teach Grammar as a meaningful subject.
From the earliest years of schooling (hello: 'grammar school') grammar is the first subject taught, because like philosophy, which everyone has whether they are conscious of it or not, everyone will learn grammar in some form - the words we do or do not learn to refer to our world through, what we do or do not learn of prefixes and suffixes that help us in identifying a word's nature, and all of the other parts of speech which exist to help us to understand what is being spoken of, and why - and whether crude or polished, a person's grasp of grammar is what they'll be using to think with and communicate to others through.
And yet as necessary as grammar is to communication, that was understood as the minimum measure of it, as in its larger sense, grammar was to function as philosophy in miniature, as the ancient grammarian quoted above wrote: "Words admitted into our ears knock on and arouse our understanding", in pursuit of that clarity of expression that would bring both writer and reader nearer to a wisdom that could improve their ability to live their lives well.
That purpose is not served with 'grammar lessons' of "See Spot run. Run Spot; run fast.". What the *author* of this 1908 primer intended instead, was primarily to make lessons so easy and trouble-free for students being introduced to "...the struggle with word-forms..."(!), as to ensure that "...there must be no steep hills to climb..." in learning.
Well... mission accomplished. God help us.
Such treacherously easy 'grammar lessons', pointlessly teaching what isn't worth learning, has left more than a century of student's hearts and minds comfortably ignorant of what it takes to engage with beauty, truth, and goodness, and unaware that the dark age we live in today is even worse than the last one, whose people were at least aware that what was worth learning, had seemed to have been lost.
Grammar as the cradle of philosophy
The ability to recognize and put into words what is real and true, and to extract meaning out of what others have written, was once seen as the vital and beating heart of an education in the liberal arts. The alternative definition of Grammar given above, came from one of those now forgotten guides to education that've been around since the 1100s, a work called The Metalogicon (which I highly recommend to modern readers - even though it was written by an Englishman before English as we know it existed, it's the principles of it that matter, not the particulars - it is exceedingly relevant to our world today), which had been prepared for England's Thomas Beckett by an English monk,
John of Salisbury, and it has a well-earned reputation for teaching grammar as a subject that employs metaphysics, logic, and ethical considerations, in the intelligent use of language.
From that form of Grammar School education, students gained a handle on the liberal arts, which:
It's important to point out that the ability to understand and communicate which came out of that Pre-Modern grammatical cradle, was once a normal expectation of a 'grammar school education' (as was having some ability to read and write Greek & Latin, up until the 20th Century). It was a normal expectation that when the grammarian taught students how to read, he wasn't just teaching how to sound out words from the letters on a page, but was teaching how to read, think, question and reason their way through the thoughts those words formed, and their own grasp of them, in an intelligible manner, with the goal of understanding what is real and true and what is not.
Learning the grammar of what words mean and what the parts of speech refer to in the process of thinking, from "the best that has been thought and said" - not textbooks as we know them - was in a very worthwhile sense, 'doing metaphysics'; as being able to understand and confirm the statements and conclusions of those works while also assessing how accurate and intelligible their claims are, is 'doing logic'; just as assuring that an idea is treated honestly and appropriately - neither inflated, minimized, or turned away from - is 'doing ethics'. And whether engaged in extracting a sound understanding from what you've read, or putting your own understanding into words that others could understand your meaning from, conveying both a belief, and identifying whether or not its meaning is justified, is in the most meaningful sense 'doing epistemology'.
Of course that realization is what those who desired a more easily controlled populace, figured out long ago.
Modernists on both sides of the Atlantic were fully aware of how essential it was to their 'new philosophy' (of old sophistries) and to the 'new man' they wanted to create with it, that people's minds not be furnished with the priceless treasures of the West, as those fostered the ability to spot the snares of ignorance which the unfurnished mind was more easily entrapped with. They quickly realized that in order to have a populace who'd be willing to accept what they were told they needed to know, without habitually questioning what they were told and who told it to them, it wasn't the publishers and booksellers they needed to gain control of, but the schoolhouse and what and how its students were taught within it. After all, there's little need to engage in the messy business of banning and burning books and authors, when the same results can be had by simply teaching students that grammar is nothing more than a number of arbitrary rules of where to place commas and apostrophes and to make sure you write 'i before e except after c... sometimes'... as teaching 'grammar' in that manner, is even more damaging to a student's ability and interest in reading, than not teaching grammar at all.
Learning the rules of Grammar is of course important and necessary, just as erecting a scaffolding is necessary and useful in constructing a building. But to focus upon the rules, as less a means, than your purpose, is like focusing only on constructing scaffolding, while ignoring the building that it was supposed to help with constructing. Through the use of ever more efficient modern textbooks of 'Grammar', which focused upon teaching students to memorize 'the rules of grammar', while neglecting the very best uses of language known to man which demonstrate the best use of those rules, in the language that could have helped their students to learn them by heart... without that, students' familiarity with those works soon began to fade from popular awareness. As people cheered the efficiency and usefulness of innovations like Noah Webster's exceedingly popular - and very useful -'Blue Back Speller's, few noticed what students were no longer learning to read from, and why.
It's of course easy to see how far 'See spot run!' has fallen away from the language used in Webster's spellers, but what's not as easily seen, is how far the efficient lessons of textbooks such as Webster's, had already fallen away from the language of Cicero & Shakespeare that had been used before them. Analogous to the pull of physical gravity, under which a falling object accelerates at the rate of 32' per second, per second', the downward pull of intellectual gravity's rate of acceleration, is measured through the absence of eloquence and wisdom which is typically only noticed by the parent, not the child, and the great-great-great grandparent's perspective never enters the picture. And unlike physical gravity, where acceleration is eventually stopped by impact with the ground, the impact of intellectual gravity is felt in an immediate and continuous endarkening of the mind, which is only indirectly noticed by the victim through increasing feelings of anxiety, confusion, and lack of self-control.
Nevertheless, for those who take the trouble to look past the appearances of the moment, it is easy enough to see that stepping off the educational ledge of the best that had been thought and said, into the textbook plunge from the Blue Back Spellers, to the McGuffey Readers (this will shock many, as both seem great from our perspective downstream, but consider that they too are downstream from what came before - a post on this to follow), to 'Whole Language', 'See Spot Run', Ebonics, 'whiteness', and whatever new horror that tomorrow will bring, has been demonstrating intellectual gravity's ever accelerating rate of conceptual freefall into the language we use today in promoting narratives without regard for the truth, wisdom, or beauty, that they do, or even could, contain.
Those who shake their heads and fists at what's happening in our schools today, as if it's a recent result of negligence, error, and/or incompetence, would do better to spend less time looking for errors and incompetence, and give more consideration to how students receiving such an education as that might be of value to those who're insisting that you and your children receive it. If you start following where questions such as that might lead, they'll bring to your attention instances such as when Woodrow Wilson's speech on 'education' to the new 'High School' teachers, said the quiet part out loud, back in 1909:
Never forget: The modernists goals for 'education' was not well educated students, it was (and is) a means of implanting the most 'useful facts' (what today we'd call a 'narrative') into the minds of the students in their care, so as to progressively produce - manufacture - a populace who're less questioning and more accepting of what authorities tell them, as a means of making a more perfect world (under their power). They felt then and still feel today, that their ends fully justify their means, and in their judgment, what is real and true, plays no part in either (except to interfere in their plans).
Education for Life
The sort of education that's concerned primarily with transmitting 'useful skills', isn't one that can enrich your life and character. Frederick Douglass risked everything as a slave, to study the best of what had been thought and said, by illegally purchasing his treasured 'Columbian Orator', in order to escape the limitation of only being trained in useful skills. He described that kind of training in his essay on the "Blessings of Liberty and Education", as intending for students:
, trading as it does the development of understanding and wisdom, for the confused equivocation of shallow cleverness with the skill to manipulate materials, their fellows, and of course themselves as well, in order to gain some measure of the world, at the expense of the wealth which cannot be weighed upon those scales.
Those who give their time and attention to "the best that has been thought and said" in our culture's stories, arts, letters, and religion, will benefit from the experience of reading from what is well written, engaging, and thought provoking, such as is found in the pages of Homer, the Greek Tragedians, The Bible, Shakespeare... Dostoevsky... J.R.R. Tolkien... even Agatha Christie. In doing so, a person enters into the landscapes and palaces of the West, and to the extent that they pause and ponder upon their surroundings, they're drinking from its philosophical well. But how deeply they'll be able to drink from the well of the West, will be limited by how familiar they are with the philosophy with which that well operates.
Of course, most people have little need or interest in studying philosophy, and likely especially not epistemology - but fortunately, they don't need to.
However wise it would be to familiarize ourselves more explicitly with both, a premodern education that intelligently teaches the grammatical basics through the words, concepts, and ideas of the best that has been thought and said on what actually matters in life, and how to convey your understanding of that, will be implicitly teaching the habit of epistemological thinking to students as they identify what is being referred to and how (metaphysics), learn how to judge the veracity of that (logic), and recognize what that understanding requires of them in thought and action (ethics). That, which at one time was the normal expectation of a 'Grammar School Education' through quality literature, would work just as well for us, as it did throughout our Founders' era, for them. If, that is, we also point out the dangers which we can see from our vantage point in time, that were not yet obvious to them, in their time.
The Modernists not only don't teach that, they ridicule and undermine that, and even when they are made to teach some part of it, they do so disjointedly and through a materialist, pragmatic, and utilitarian (to say nothing of Marxist) lens, which is more harmful than having learned nothing of such matters at all.
Similarly with philosophy itself, as I've been pointing out over the last several posts, instead of teaching the unity of its three branches (metaphysics, logic, and ethics) as you might identify the head, torso, and limbs of a person in order to better understand and appreciate the whole human body, the modernists approach the subject as a vivisectionist would, using their new '4th branch of philosophy' as a tool for severing one from the other.
The modernist does what they do because they believe that the world will be improved by remaking it (and you) in their own image... for 'the greater good', which necessarily requires abandoning the pursuit of truth and wisdom, in favor of seeking power over you (which is the only means they can experience their 'reality' through), and that requires that you think of such things as grammar and philosophy as being little more than arbitrary and meaningless rules. The power which that gives them over you, leaves you with little or no control over yourself - how could it be otherwise? In such a world as that, you don't get ahead by understanding what is real and true, but by studying meaninglessly useful facts in order to 'get good grades and get a good job!', which those schools had been designed to fit your life into, as a harmlessly useful cog in that world which, in their expert opinion, would best serve 'the greater good'.
For those inclined to say that 'We pick up grammar, even philosophy, through day to day experience and so there's no need to waste time on studying either!', I'd advise you to keep in mind something about the experience of experience: untutored experience is limited to the good and bad you have experienced so far, which is always one step behind the next hard knock you've not yet learned from experience to look out for. To say nothing of the common experience of those who don't know where to put their 'i's and 'e's and apostrophes, makes them the easy butt of jokes from those who take pride in their belief that those rules are the height of learning - learning by such painful experience is possible, but it is by no means preferable. In the end, experience shows that one very useful benefit of a good education, is that it enables you to learn from the invaluable - and often fatal - experiences of some of the best who've ever lived.
Learning grammar and literature as the premoderns taught it is not in any way opposed to benefits of Science & Technology that we enjoy in the world today, on the contrary, it's the best way to ensure that both continue to develop (and less likely that we'll kill ourselves with it). If your initial reaction to the mention of premodern society is to snicker & roll your eyes, you've probably internalized the modernists' deflection of temporal provincialism, which preserves our ignorance of what they understood, with an easily derisive laugh at the 'foolish' appearances of those not yet 'smart enough' to have our technology.
Escaping from the Dark Ages once again
If you look past the modernist blinders, you'll find that it was not the modernists that introduced us to the 'scientific method' - that began with English monks in the 1100s, who realized that if God said the world was 'good', it would be good to investigate how it worked. Neither was it the 'Age of Enlightenment' that introduced the logical method and 'ReasonTM' into our world - as you've seen from the Metalogicon, those were already central to the Liberal Arts that the premoderns educated students to know and understand. Despite what popular notions would have you believe, the leading lights of premodern thought, are the ones who carried the West through classical times, revived and rejuvenated them through Christian efforts during the middle ages (see Alcuin of York's influence under Charlemagne), and kept that wisdom alive and accessible through works like the Metalogicon and 'The Didascalicon' of Hugh of St. Victor in the 1100s, and on through St. Aquinas in the 1300s and beyond.
It was the premodern's focus on reality, logic, and reason, that made the Renaissance possible, and gave rise to that better aspects of thinking which we associate with the Enlightenment, and became the basis for the scientific developments we enjoy today. That same practice can get us through the dark ages we find ourselves in the midst of today - the absence of truth, beauty, and understanding, is the definition of a dark age - as learning well the ordering of and aims of language, will reveal to a reader what sound thinking is and is not, and will expose the follies lurking within what they'd previously assumed to be 'obviously true'.
As Frederick Douglass put it,
For all of the shortcomings and errors that were present in premodern philosophy and the liberal arts, and there were many, their fundamental approach, including their honest errors in applying it, were and are far superior to the dishonest and malevolent approach that pervades modernist philosophy, the humanities, and wackademia in general. You needn't read much of modern misosophy to realize that clarity, understanding, and a respect for what is real and true, have been designated as enemy combatants by it. Sadly, those 'theories of knowledge' which modernist epistemology dominates our world through today, have attacked grammar and literature from the start, and have a lot to do with why 'the best that has been thought and said', a number of which Frederick Douglass's treasured 'Columbian Orator' enabled him to study, are now nowhere to be found in the materials which students are typically 'educated' with today.
Those promoting 'Ebonics', or who criticize paying attention to grammar as 'whiteness', or promising that students can each have 'their own truths', are not enlightening them, they are ensuring that their thinking will suffer from the absence of beauty, a lack of regard for truth, and little or no understanding of what is right and wrong, which are the hallmarks of our new dark age. The unfortunate 'good student' of such lessons as these, are led by them into a linguistic ghetto that's sure to be well populated both by those trained into their own 'activist' mindset, and those limited to comprehending only Woodrow Wilson's 'specific difficult manual tasks'... and of course, it's sure to keep them at a usefully safe distance from those 'who know best', who are those who did not '...forego the privileges of a liberal education...' (corrupted, though even that may be).
In the name of 'education reform!' especially across the 20th century, those materials that had been understood to be the most worth studying, have been removed from modern school systems. Such reforms have so savaged our students ability to read, that a sizable number of those who 'graduate' from school today, are unable to comprehend much beyond empirical step by step instructions, with the result that a horrifically large percentage of those who're able only to 'decode' words, see no purpose or pleasure in doing so - and so are becoming assimilated into the machinery themselves. Perhaps no better example of which, is the enthusiastic support by faculty and students for the murderous terrorists of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, over that of Israel and its people.
In the end, if grammar, logic, and reasoning, do not lead you to a better understanding of who you are, and what is real and true, and how to understand that yourself and communicate it to others, what possible value can such an 'education' have (to you)? Is the key to escaping a dark age more likely to lay in understanding the meaning that flows through the words which you understand your life with, or through the careless disregard of both their meaning and consequences?
Giving due consideration to those words which your mind is racing around in, putting your thoughts in order, verifying their soundness, and ensuring that the direction they're taking you in is justified and true, is what Grammar (and more formally, Epistemology) is meant to aid your mind in doing. Whatever tends to undermine, muddle, or otherwise degrade your ability to grasp and use such knowledge as you have, will tend to be harmful to your life and your ability to live it, and you should be on your guard against that (especially if it comes wrapped up in a diploma or degree).
And with that in mind, my next series of posts will start digging into how modernity has used its 'Epistemology' as the '4th Branch of Philosophy', to establish a new 'Social Epistemology', which gives the illusion of support to some of the most disastrous ideologies of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Socialism, Communism, Diversity-Equity-Inclusion, Social and Emotional Learning, etc., etc., etc.,..
So... strategy. I'm not a big strategist myself, but I do get some of the basics. Like, the point of strategy & tactics is ultimately to win, and that using your opponent's strategy & tactics that are designed to ensure you lose, won't help you to win. Pretty basic stuff. So why do so many who are to the right of the...[what, Left? Woke? Modernists? Establishment? Ah, here's a term that entails them all:] Pro-Regressives, fail to grasp that? In our Culture War's battle of ideas today, too many enter the argumentative fray to 'own 'em!' and accumulate 'likes', clicks, and glory, unaware that their strategy & tactics are utilizing those that were developed by their opponents to oppose them with, the effects of which they'll use to launch new attacks with that will always be one step ahead of the losing side - ours.
Why does the Right's approach to strategy and tactics in our Culture Wars today, differ so much from how winning strategies & tactics were developed in, say, our Civil War? At the start of that war, the strategy of the establishment favorite Gen. McClellan, looked good on paper, seemed sensible, popular, and sure to hold this or that piece of ground and win glory for the Union. However as it soon proved to be effective only at producing loss after loss as Gen. Lee chewed the North's ground up and spat them back out upon it, the Union's strategy & strategists were soon changed. Gen. Grant, elevated because 'at least he fights', began utilizing the North's greater ability to absorb casualties to win battles, but he soon realized that his 'terrible arithmetic' was primarily leading towards more and more battles, rather than to ending the war, so he listened to Gen. Sherman's idea that the path to victory lay in identifying & eliminating the Confederacy's ability to stand and fight against them, and despite there being little popularity or glory in battling agriculture, plantation houses, and morale, he began burning them to the ground in his "March to the sea", and so brought about a swift end to the war.
That is not how strategy & tactics have progressed in our Culture Wars today. We're still using the 'good on paper' establishment strategies of textbooks, testing, and 'choice', that Pro-Regressives have been chewing up & spitting out The West with, for a decade of decades. And though the recent parents' revolt against CRT & SEL seemed for a moment to be an indication that we'd taken a Gen. Grant-like turn to at least start fighting, beyond a handful of parents and grassroots groups, few others are following their lead. Instead, most others attitude seems to be that given a choice between doing the work of identifying and burning down what sustains the Woke confederacy, or posturing about with ineffective strategies & tactics that bring popularity, clicks, and glory, most today choose clicks & glory.
Why? Maybe because they aren't as far to the right of the Pro-Regressives as they imagine themselves to be?
The main issue though, is that there's work to be done before we can begin burning down what sustains the Pro-Regressives, beginning with learning to identify what it is that needs to be burned down - not to mention separating ourselves from it. So, what is it that sustains the modern Pro-Regressives, is it Academia? Entertainment? Media? The Administrative State? Our school systems? Those are all important grounds that have been captured, no doubt about it, but what we need to begin publicly targeting and burning to the ground, IMHO, is what gave the illusion of legitimacy to those pro-regressive ideals and positions which enabled those grounds to be captured in the first place.
What it was that enabled the typical American to first begin accepting those positions as seemingly credible, is modern Epistemology; it is what provides the illusion of legitimacy and credibility to those ideas that fuel and sustain the Pro-Regressives' positions to this day. But as laying its falsehoods bare for all to see is even more lacking in glory than battling against agriculture ever was, glorious or not, it is the unexamined lie which lies within the heart of modern epistemology which sustains the legions of ideologies that they've swamped our culture with.
End that, and the Pro-Regressives' ability to project power over others - be they from the Left, Woke, Modernists, Establishment, or others - ends with it.
Doing that effectively will require our consistently subjecting their premises to an epistemology of metaphysics (what is), logic (what follows), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it), in order to expose their true nature to such widespread public ridicule, that they won't dare to speak openly of them again, and so bring the Culture Wars to an end.
Few have shown any interest in even bothering to identify what sustains the Pro-Regressives, and not a few are actively using and even unwittingly (?) promoting the opposition's strategies & tactics, which can only work against their own, and they do so without a care in the world.
Why?
Possibly because they either don't see its connection to what sustains those who see them as their enemies (details to follow), or they don't really think such things matter, and that's a big part of what sustains the Culture War they're waging against us. Unfortunately as the habits of modern epistemology have been engrained in us through 12-16 years of schooling, it escapes our attention how much time & energy we waste in furthering those strategies & tactics that were designed to waste our time and energy, and so most of us unwittingly end up giving aid and comfort to ideals & positions that are actively undermining the very ground we're trying to make our stand upon, while our side just stares in amazement as both the positions and grounds we'd been clinging to, are progressively lost.
What first brought this to mind was seeing another fruitless exchange several months ago from someone nominally on 'my side' doing just that, and then something recently that was unlooked for and out of the blue where several people of national and even worldwide prominence, casually employed a Sherman-like strategy that burned the positions of the person confronting them, to the ground, in front of their peers and the general public. They were glorious moments, that, unfortunately seem to have been brushed off as amusing 'hot takes' which no one else seems to see anything of significance in, and so I'll do what I can to bring the attention of as many people to them as I can.
First to the worst, with a moment of despair from a few months ago when in a comment thread that'd been highlighted in my newsfeed under a post against "people "deconstructing" their faith", an fb 'friend', JR, whose libertarianish positions have occasionally aligned with mine (though rarely deeper than a 'Yes' or 'No' on an issue), was making comments that were directly advancing the strategies & tactics of those who're opposed to his positions, and was succeeding in burning nothing to the ground but time.
The post itself was too focused upon sectarian issues for my tastes, but the thread of his that'd been highlighted in my feed drew a painful lol from me with his comment that:
Why'd JR have no issue 'simply' using the term 'Deconstruction' without understanding what it means (a point he later unconcernedly admitted to)? My guess would be that he assumed it to be just one of many legitimate means for examining an issue to better understand it, possibly because of what he assumed he knew of 'Deconstructionism', had come from one of those 'humanities 101' courses that engineering and business students are required to take, which present their convoluted and confused ideas as being the height of modern intellectual engagement. If so, perhaps his good intentions and false assumptions about what it probably meant, outweighed any concerns being raised over the actual meaning of what it was he was advising other people to engage in.
Unfortunately, his assumption was at least as 'problematic' as it would be if he were to advocate for communist policies and statist controls to improve the Free Market with, on the basis of his intending such advice to be helpful. If a similar idea had been put to him in terms of Marxist economic theory, he'd doubtlessly have recognized it for what it was and spurned it right away, but because it comes from the 'soft' humanities, it apparently held no real meaning, importance, or concern for him (which is an epistemological legacy of the 'empirical' thinking he sadly prides himself on). The problem is that all such efforts give aid & comfort to the enemy of all that is worth valuing, and cannot avoid doing so, and our ignorance of this is one of many factors that have us continually shooting ourselves in the conceptual foot before any battle of ideas is even begun.
For those who do take the trouble to read beyond the required reading list and venture into the Deconstructionist's founding theories and how it's been practiced, they'll find that the intent of its authors (one of whom authored a paper arguing that there is no such thing as an Author), is to artfully employ equivocation and fractured logic to disassemble and destroy any and every Western ideal and concept (hello: de-construct), not for the purposes of developing a better understanding of them, but for bringing about an end to the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture of The West. That is their stated purpose (see below) and it should not be excused, ignored, or forgotten.
My problem with issues like these, is how do I condense a useful amount of the preceding into a comment that's brief enough to be read? And sadly, being the last one to look to for tips on brevity, I have no good answer to that. Still, with past interactions with JR in mind and not wanting to sidetracked either of us into a pointless skirmish that would have no winner, I still hoped that I could at least get him to give a bit more thought to what he was encouraging other people to get engaged in. For good or ill, I commented that:
It seemed likely that this was going nowhere fast, but keeping in mind that other people reading along might be persuaded to give the matter further consideration, I pointed out that:
Worse still, blindly using words with double (and often malevolent) meanings, transforms those who imagine themselves to be neutral, or even opposed to what its concealed meaning serves (think 'diversity', 'equity', 'inclusion'), into the 'captured opposition' who unwittingly enable the solid ground that their position once held, to be infiltrated, undermined, and repurposed, into hostile ground (oh hi Harvard!).
JR, as blind to the irony of his own words as he was to the epistemology that formed them for him, had the gall to conclude by asking me:
The failed strategy of doubtful definitions
Brushing off the meaning of words as 'mere semantics', and expecting definitions to make arguments for you - which they are not and cannot be - is a failed strategy. A definition does not persuade or provide an argument, it only provides a high-level "...statement expressing the essential nature of something..." from someone presumed to have an authoritative knowledge of the subject, but what is accepted without questioning, is believed without understanding. Attempting to use a definition as an 'answer' to an argument that has not been made, is engaging in an 'argument from authority' fallacy, which not only hinders understanding, but is likely to become the proverbial 'answer that kills the question'.
Definitions can be used to raise a philosophical point, and they can, as I often do here, be used to indicate questions that need to be considered, but they can't make that philosophical point or pursue those questions for you, or install an understanding of its meaning in anyone's mind.
Checking back on the thread one last time, I saw that JR had actually gone to Wikipedia to find a definition of 'deconstruction' that was friendly to his assumptions, and from that he astoundingly concluded that:
Bad as that and his interpretation of it was, even those who're wise enough to prefer dictionaries to Wikipedia, will typically find 'Deconstruction' being defined, as Webster's online does, as being just another philosophical term:
In practice that means confusing our language (which has been job#1 since before Plato) into weaponized terms that're primed to explode in the public's face at some later date, just as 'antiracist' by definition purports to oppose racism, while in practice it entails promoting aggressively racist activism throughout our society. That ulterior motive of 'Deconstruction' can be glimpsed by reading between the lines of one of the supporting explanations found on the link JR didn't dare venturing to, taken from Jonathan Culler's "On Deconstruction", from Cornell University Press, which takes a very favorable view of Deconstructionism, says in part:
Derrida began his project of Deconstruction by exploiting issues he found in those philosophies that Post-Modernism evolved from, with Structuralism (language has less to do with meaning, than with functioning to signify differences in objects and societal structures), Existentialism (life is absurd and meaningless), and Phenomenology (metaphysics is rejected in favor of the belief that meaning comes from how our own attention shapes perceived experiences into structures of consciousness). He used criticism of them to target Platonic metaphysics (through a Kantian lens) with the intent of challenging even the status of the idea of a pure 'substance' of reality - the 'thing in itself' that Kant said we can never truly know - being higher than the words it dimly appears to us through (again, Kant). Derrida contended that the phenomena of being is not pure, as from the moment of experience it is 'contaminated' with memory and expectation, conditioned by time - past, present, and future - to form binary oppositions spiraling away from the instant being experienced, and the words we vainly attempt to capture it with.
To the extent that Derrida's ideas actually mean anything at all, this meant that as the instant being experienced by us is being fractured by a "violence, a rending of oneself, an incision" in the moment and is contaminated by memory and expectation, that gap between being and becoming:
To Derrida this 'means' that all 'true' meaning is lost to time, and that our words are therefore meaning-less to us, but as they are all we have, then all we can and must do, is to continually 'Deconstruct' the binaries of experience and our words for it, seeking to reveal at least some shade of what has been repressed in them, in an endlessly recursive and futile effort that justice nevertheless demands we relentlessly subject our every thought and action to.
This new plan of Deconstruction hit Kant's 'Copernican Revolution' with a revolutionary spin that not only flattened its hierarchy by reducing it to a binary of "essence and appearance", but then inverted it by concluding that since our words are all that we actually experience, they are more real and important to us than the Kantian experience of reality which only distantly gives rise to them.
In applying Deconstructionism to a few of the binaries he found, Derrida revealed that:
Are you getting the picture? Does that sound like somehting you'd recommend to others as a mental template to help them get a better understanding their lives, premises, and religion? Would you gloss over the differences between that, and reasonable thinking, as merely an issue of 'semantics'? Even the 'Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy', which overall gives a fawning analysis of Derrida and Deconstruction, says that his thinking:
Having done all of that, he concluded that the belief that words have meaning is an illusion, as are our ideas of right and wrong, and true and false, etc., and indeed that the relentless deconstruction of such binaries, which we must do, will take us ever further away from a better understanding of what is real and true.
Those who've followed after Derrida, have continued to operate (wherever it suits their purposes) on the assertion that since words as such are meaningless, then the only thing that is of any 'value' in the words we use, is the power found in their reactions to hearing the sound of them, and it's that power, and indeed Power in and of itself, that in practice (or praxis) is in the end all that matters (resist asking if they mean that - that's how their virus is spread).
These tools of Post-Modernist and Deconstructionist thought have been relentlessly used to strike at the heart of the West's thinking for quite some time now, and what Derrida intended them to do to that heart, was, as his translator puts it, the
It's high time we realize that Derrida's 'illogical and imprecise' language, and that of his compatriots, is less a result of error or ineptness, than a deliberate effort to construct tools for accomplishing a very particular kind of job: Deconstructing the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West.
That strategic intent was perhaps most vividly illustrated by Audre Lorde, the Marxist, black, lesbian, feminist, activist (do you feel "the exasperated etc” in that listing?), who's infamous statement has become a rallying cry of what Deconstructionism is all about:
And when the tools at hand in the activist's tool-belt aren't up to handling the heavier demolition work that's often required, they'll reach into their toolbox for the 'academically respected' power-tools of Deconstructionism, Queer Theory, Intersectionality, and others, which they put to expert use - as often as not with our invaluable aid and unwitting assistance - in dismantling those fundamental ideals of Western Civilization, which our entire culture and understanding rest upon.
Consequently, when we reply - oh-so logically - with 'but I'm not racist!', or 'a boy can't menstruate!' to them, as if they had somehow made legitimate errors in an attempt to make an actual argument, we are not countering their statements in doing so, we're furthering them! By engaging directly or indirectly with such provocations, we give the impression that their 'arguments' have made a valid point to be argued with, when in fact they've only made an arbitrary (and absurd) point that isn't even up to the level of being wrong, and our engaging with them enables their statement to slide forward into our discussions as if they'd said something worthy of rational discussion, when they most definitely have not.
Not for nothing was it once commonly understood, that to keep conversatins rational and reasonable, you must be quick to:
When we allow their terms and statements to slip through our conversations without having been fully stopped and utterly rejected (which is not the same as disagreeing with them), it informs them that they've been successful at de-constructing at least one more small part of 'The Master's House' which your life and peace of mind represent. The foundations of that House become progressively undermined and de-constructed by way of the arbitrary and unreasonable confusions that they're allowed to sow into people's sensibilities of what is good, beautiful, and true, by way of their 'illogical and imprecise' language, operating upon us from within our own minds.
Whatever the particular issue happens to be, and no matter what or how absurd they claim an issue to be about, we need to remember Alinsky's dictum, that:
Pardon me for repeating that - the issue is never the issue, the issue is always about furthering the revolution. When we engage with their deliberately confused and deconstructed language by arguing with their 'points', we're helping them to spread their weopanized language ever wider into our personal and societal conversations, like a virus, which is the nature of what Derrida and others consciously modeled their ideas upon: ideas which are sure to sicken all who engage with them.
The practice of being sure to doubt everything except what you believe (?!), didn't start with Derrida
What enables their arbitrary and unreasonable attacks to move forward, are a set of common assumptions that underlie the actions and priorities of people like JR, which are assumed to excuse their own stated intentions, such as his claim to be 'critically examining ALL of one’s premises', while never questioning his own. The manner of thinking behind that, goes all the way back to Rene Descartes and his 'Method of Doubt'.
That was where the advice was first given that in order to be certain of anything, we should methodically doubt everything we are certain of - not by reasonably questioning our way towards a deeper understanding of a matter, while honestly acknowledging & examining any discrepancies that might be found regarding it, but by causelessly and arbitrarily doubting everything ('relentlessly criticize all that exists!', is how Marx would re-apply it centuries later), and actively assuming everything to be false until you feel that something 'somehow' satisfies those doubts which you had no actual cause to feel in the first place.
And how do you know that these doubts have been satisfied well enough that you can now be certain of something? When you 'clearly and distinctly believe [it] to be true' - IOW what you feel no doubt about, is what you can be certain of!
That, ladies & gents, is not a method for carefully examining your own premises in order to discover what is real and true, it's a method for attacking everyone else's premises and defending what you wish was 'true'!
Not so surprisingly, the 'Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy' points out that:
One way to visualize that worldview, which might bring it more clearly home, is to imagine it through the judicial context of presuming all defendants to be 'Guilty as charged... until proven innocent', versus that of presuming each person to be 'Innocent until proven guilty' - which do you suppose tends more towards constraining those in power to the pursuit of justice, and which is more likely to entices them towards imposing a tyranny they find favorable? Imagine the self-satisfaction of being a 'good' prosecutor, who can be certain of what you most want to believe, and having the power to dismiss any quibbles about what you have no doubt about, as... mere semantics.
Given that Justice at the level of society, is a reflection of the sense of justice that is understood and practiced by its people, is it really so surprising that the state of justice in our world today is as it is, when this worldview is at the root of so much of what we say and do?
It's no coincidence that Descartes is who moderns of all stripes cite as the beginning of 'modern epistemology', and though others preceded him (Occam, for instance, the father of Nominalism), it was his works more than any other that succeeded at leading popular philosophical thinking away from pre-modern Metaphysics, and instigated the undermining of the foundations of Logic, and the separation of Ethics from both. That trend began to hit critical mass with Hume's skeptical 'empiricism', followed by the German idealists' reaction to that in the late 1700s, which took form in their '4th branch of philosophy', and fully kicked into gear under the label of 'Epistemology!' in the mid 1800s. From that point on, the Pro-Regressives (Left & Right) began explicitly operating outside of, and in opposition to, a sound and integrated understanding of Metaphysics, Logic, and Ethics (which is what Epistemology must be to live up to the name coined for it).
The problem for us today is that we've become deaf to traditional metaphysics, and so we easily become lost in the echoes of Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Dewey, while we're not even somewhat aware of how they've re-terraformed the logos out from under our feet, with most being unaware of how unsteady the mental ground that we stand upon, has become. Mistaking our shaky foundations for steady ones, leaves us tending to ignore those seemingly incomprehensible quibbles of 'social constructs' and 'mere semantics' that arise, and are too easily assumed to be of no real importance, and those assumptions leave us unable to identify, let alone burn down, what it is that sustains the Pro-Regressives strategies & tactics that are actively acting against us.
Remaining blind to those realities, means continuing to accept their illusory positions 'for the sake of argument', as if they were 'only fair' - effectively 'sowing the dragon's teeth' into the ground we're fighting over - a ground that's easily transforms into an army of strawmen who derive real power over us, through new societal norms derived from them. Rest assured, that as those doubts rise up around you, your own familiar 'binaries' (you know, True & False, innocent/guilty, Man & Woman) will be deconstructed by them, into the itty bitty pieces of logic defying narratives that post-modernists and deconstructionists glibly use, to become the new 'privileged' of our society with, and all without the need for or benefit of, having any 'useful merit'.
Should you object that their rules 'make no sense!', you'll soon see firsthand what the very real-world consequences of modern epistemology are. The responses you'll receive to any objection you might make to them, are sure to make Kant seem like a model of brevity and succinctness, and unless you strike them like a Gen. Sherman, rather than Gen. McClellan (or even Gen. Grant), they'll verbally pin you to the mental ground in the blink of an I, as surely as if they were Andre the Giant, rather than as the illusory wisp of nothingness that they actually are.
We need to become aware that the disintegration of our understanding, is what each and every instance of deconstructionist & post-modernist thinking is aimed at.
Those like JR who assume being 'smart' is even more valuable than knowing what they presume to talk about, see themselves as being the empirical voices of 'reason!' and 'science!', and do so precisely because their unconscious epistemology is derived from the modern claims that we cannot know what is real and true. They're also especially quick to take a dim view of those ideas and concepts that can't be reduced to measurable quantities (oh hi again Neil deGrasse Tyson!) of this or that accepted fact. Such nominalistic 'STEM' centric thinking, which is self-limited to having no more depth than an instruction manual, mistakes the machine-like logic of spreadsheets & flowcharts, for the due consideration and reflection required for honest Science and Reasoning, and lead to views that readily lend themselves to virtue signaling, and calling people to doubt any 'non-scientific' certainties that hinder the advancement of one utilitarian effort after another 'for the greater good!', epistemologically blinded as they are, to the fact that they are steadily distancing themselves ever further from being able to understand what is real and true.
Never forget that the Pro-Regressive's real focus is not on the issue that they've succeeded at getting you to fight them over, but on winning the war - "The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution"!
As such our Culture Wars cannot be won with tactics that are focused on engaging (enabling) and besting the Pro-Regressive on the grounds of whichever issue they've lured you into being outraged over once again, or by relying upon definitions - or redefinitions ('racist' for instance) - instead of insisting upon arguments that are epistemologically sound (adhering to metaphysics (what is), logic (does it follow), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it)), and every moment of pretended legitimacy that they gain by your battling them on the ground they prepared for that purpose, cedes that much more of your ground into their control.
If we want to stop losing ground, we've got to stop using the strategies & tactics which they've prepared that ground with so as to benefit them, in every battle waged against you upon it. The consequences of brushing their philosophical strategies and tactics off as 'simply' semantics, borders on a criminal level of intellectual negligence.
Look through Gen. Sherman's eyes: Identify & locate their 'intellectual homeland' and burn it to the ground
So that was what I'd despaired over a few months back. What brightened my outlook, OTOH, were a few choice media moments which showed that some are refusing to be suckered into the same old verbal battles of attrition that the Pro-Regressive confederacy wants and needs us to fight on, and did so in a very Gen. Shermanesque manner, that showed that we might actually have a chance of escaping from the long line of unlearned lessons of history that we need to stop repeating. If we do, the rickety foundation of lies that their whole pseudo-reality is built upon, will come tumbling down in flaming ruins.
The first thing they didn't do, was step into the Utilitarian and 'Pragmatic' pattern of 'being practical' which conservatives have been mistaking for 'common sense' for well over a century. Although such actions have the shallow appearance of practicality, what it actually entails is the rejection of thinking in principles, in favor of a narrow focus on the details of the moment, which necessarily rejects anything worth conserving. Semantic Deception at its 'finest'.
An excellent example from the recent past of how this works, was the question that lured conservatives into being chewed up and spat out in their opposition to 'Obamacare', with:
The truth is that there is no compromising between principles, only the abandonment of them. That's not a knock against compromise, but against habitually using the pretense of compromise, as a cover for abandoning your principles. Compromise, when mutually struck within a larger principle, can be reasonable and even admirable. It is, for instance, very reasonable to compromise over price and terms for what someone has the right to sell to you - that is seeking a principled compromise by finding common ground. But dickering over price & terms of stolen property, is digging your own grave beneath the common ground which the more ruthless villain will soon be walking over.
We've become so conditioned to 'pragmatic' thinking, that we rarely even think to turn to first principles when facing a problem, and those that do, are too easily led to undermine them afterwards with pragmatic concerns over what's 'practical'.
What enables error and falsehood to appear to be 'common sense' is modern epistemology, which begins in the assertion that you cannot know what is real and true, and therefore we must settle for what others accept it to be. Even if you didn't realize that to be the case, nearly everyone you listen to and look to for advice, abides by that presumption, and if we don't soon recognize that for what it is, it will fully consume us. Truly, our Culture War is 'not against flesh and blood', but against principalities and powers, and any battle of ideas that doesn't insist upon starting with what is real and true, is begun in failure and can only continue to fail, as it has from the start of the 20th Century, on down to today.
It was with that almost unbroken pattern of failure in mind, that I was startled to see not one, or two, but three examples of, if not exactly the Gen. Sherman strategy I've had in mind, at least the spirt of it in action. And surprisingly - or not - they came from the 'fight world', two from the mixed-martial arts world with UFC fighter Shane Strickland, and a follow-up smackdown from UFC owner Dana White, and 1 1/2 from the political arena of Argentina's new president, Javier Milei. Milei's solid first strike knocked my socks off with his rebuke to a reporter who wanted to 'engage him' in a discussion about Leftist policies, which he delivered in a direct and fiery style that cut the 'engagement' off before it could begin :
And then came the press conference for Sean Strickland's fight. He refused to treat a reporter's 'trans' question as being worth answering, and instead went straight to the heart of the matter that the reporter was attempting to advance by baiting Strickland about his 'insensitivity'. Strickland knocked his question aside and then beat him down with the ridiculousness of it, showing the reporter to be the worthless and opportunistic ideological poser he was:
While neither of these instances went as far as going for the epistemological root of the matter, they each struck low enough to the ground-level of their opponent's ideological positions, to identify and expose the pretended 'principles' within the questions being asked of them - which they identified and mocked, rather than swallowing and groveling before them. In each of these instances, the person being targeted by the interviewer pointedly refused the usual invitation to get bogged down in fighting a pointless battle on the pragmatic 'factual' grounds that'd been prepared for them to be defeated upon, and by doing so they successfully exposed their questioner's agenda and burned it to the ground! If that approach were to become anything of a norm, it would knock the pro-regressive Left & Right back on their heels, and they'd have to withdraw from the public ring for at least a while. Maybe even for years.
But. Without formally burning their epistemology to the ground, the Pro-Regressives would eventually be able to return, and I'd much prefer that they be utterly destroyed for both now, and for the foreseeable future.
Study these fighter's moves: notice how they look past the opponent's tactics to identify their motive 'principle' (which they hope to disarm you with) and burn that to the ground. Learn to see the latest outrage being waved in our faces as the latest pragmatic tool of anti-principled thinking that it is, identify its motive power that traces its roots down to modern Epistemology itself, and burn their entire intellectual plantation to the ground.
Imagine if a Ricky Gervais style of roasting Hollywood celebrities were to become the norm that the post-modernist & deconstructionist Woke-folk had to look forward to in their everyday conversations and public interviews! If it became the norm to identify the noxious ideological roots of every ridiculous proposal they throw at us, to be publicly exposed, mocked, and brushed aside, we'd be well on our way to taking back the grounds that've become the dark-heartland of Modernity during their 'long march through the institutions', and to putting an end to the Culture War as swiftly as Gen. Sherman's march to the sea had.
But doing so will absolutely require us to practice an epistemology of metaphysics (what is), logic (does it follow), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it), to burn out the sustenance of modern misosophy, burning it out at its roots and salting that ground, to finally bring this war against the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West to an end.
And then of course there's the fact that Gen. Sherman had an army to direct and execute his strategy - we don't - and we can't wait for such 'leaders' to come along and give us our marching orders.
SoOooo... what do we do?
What we have to do, is to become an army of Gen. Sherman's ourselves, with each of us having an understanding of the strategy to be practiced, and each willingly taking the lead ourselves, in our own corner of the war. Recruit your fellows to understand and take on Gen. Sherman's role themselves; each of us, one at a time, giving no more time to their skirmishes than is needed to march on and burn their epistemology to the ground, by understanding and exposing what it really is, we can deprive them of the ability to sustain themselves upon our lack of attention, which is what they always relied upon and expected from us.
It's true, there's no glory in learning to fight against our modern Pro-Regressive's epistemology, but it's the only path to defeating those who absolutely depend upon you accepting their positions as solid or respectable ground. And just as there seemed to be no glory in battling against crops and burning down plantations, learning to do so is the only thing that will save those like JR who blindly assume that they are fighting the 'good fight' and championing what is 'real and true', when in fact their actions are undermining everyone's ability to live a life worth living, in our still very real world. The culture wars won't end on our terms unless we begin cutting their legs out from underneath them, and doing so requires our exposing and destroying the epistemology which their every action is rooted in and dependent upon - that is what it will take to burn the modern Pro-Regressive (Left & Right) homeland to the ground.
With that in mind, what I've laid out in the previous posts, is the ground we need to map and hold as our home ground. What I'm going to turn to in the coming posts, is identifying and exposing the source of what enables the enemy's figments and lies to appear solid and formidable, both with what it draws from, and how it shapes them into an appearance of substance, which it can only do with our blind acceptance and participation. That should bring to mind once again, Solzhenitsyn's powerful and fundamental point:
How important is how you know what you know, to what you know?
Here's an odd question: Do you think that knowledge is relevant to Education? Odder still, how you answer that question puts you on one side or the other of a wide Grand Canyon-like divide in epistemology. Epistemology being:
"...the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity."And if you hadn't noticed that there was a divide, allow me to point out that if you think that 'Knowledge' indicates something that can be objectively known to be real and true, that puts you on the traditional side of that divide, and then way, way, over on the other side of that divide - where your schools are - are claims such as this:
"...Given that the transmission of knowledge is an integral activity in schools, critical scholars in the field of education have been especially concerned with how knowledge is produced. These scholars argue that a key element of social injustice involves the claim that particular knowledge is objective and universal. An approach based on critical theory calls into question the idea that “objectivity” is desirable, or even possible..." Sensoy, Ozlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, first edition. Teacher’s College Press: New York, 2012, p. 5, then 7SoOooo... the Woke believe that 'Knowledge' matters, that it matters how it's 'produced', and that it is unjust to teach that knowledge has an objective meaning (a meaning that is objectively true for you, true for me, and true for anyone else, no matter their feelings or prejudices) to your kids, in our schools.
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| The Epistemological Drama |
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", and here's a very different claim that depends upon a very different epistemology than that of our Founders:
"We support Diversity, Equity and Inclusion"These two examples represent two entirely different epistemologies, and they are entirely incompatible with each other - each is a refutation of the other - don't you think that you should understand whether either of those statements are true, or false, and how to justify one or the other?
If you know nothing about epistemology - yours or theirs - how are you going to argue the point?
Note: The question is not 'should you use an epistemology?', but rather 'Are you aware of the epistemology that you are using?!' You are using a form of epistemology in evaluating what is 'claimed to be known', and in justifying what you think is worth knowing, but if you aren't at least somewhat familiar with the uses and misuses of how such matters are justified and verified, then your thinking will be muddled, and the other side will roll over your 'b...b...buh..but!'s like a tank.
What does it mean to say that something is justifiable? Ironically, even asking the question means assuming the existence of the same objective truth that the Woke despise, but handily enough for them, denying it also 'frees' them from any such logical concerns, yet it doesn't do away with the fact that the traditional view is not only what our nation was founded upon, but is the True North which our ideas of Education were once rooted in and oriented around. And neither position frees you from the responsibility of consciously considering whether or not "... that particular knowledge is objective and universal...", and whether or not understanding that it's true "... is desirable, or even possible..." - and evaluating how to understand and affirm or deny those questions, is what epistemology does.
The fact is that epistemology sets the tone for every claim - sensible or nonsensical - in our culture, politics, law, and the education of those who go into each of those fields. Sound epistemology is critical to being able to identify and orient towards True North, and unsound epistemology is what we all use to justify wandering off of the straight & narrow, whether that be the sloppiness of slightly astray, or the deliberate thumb in the eye of a 180* turn in the opposite direction.
Speaking of which, as we like to look back on the 1940s and 1950s as being fairly solidly patriotic decades in America, have you ever wondered how it was possible that John Dewey's people were able to send an official invitation to the members of the Marxist Frankfurt School, to come to America and set up shop at Columbia University (more on that invitation in coming posts)? Do you suppose that their cool German accents charmed everyone and got them a free pass? Or... was it that those at the heart of our school systems who were exceedingly familiar with the meanings and justifications of epistemology, even then, understood and welcomed such a radically incompatible set of Marxists into America, knowing that their intention was to undermine and subvert the ideals that America was derived from, and confident that they could get away with doing so?
And yet most Americans, and certainly most students, were unable to recognize what those beliefs meant to their own lives, and to the lives of their children, and grandchildren, and because they didn't recognize the threat, and wouldn't have been able to defend their beliefs against them if they had, we are in the position we are in today where it's not only Academic America that is rabidly and openly anti-American in their beliefs and actions.
If we don't learn to recognize and defend the ideas of those truths that we hold to be self-evident, from the supporters of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion who mean to eradicate them, what effect do you suppose that will have upon your children, and grandchildren, and nation tomorrow?
The fact is that the values and rules of behavior that a society develops, are based upon what they're able to agree upon as being right and wrong, and for that to be possible, they first need to be able to say that something is (which is Metaphysics), and from there we must give consideration to how we know what does and does not qualify as knowledge of it and how to verify it (Epistemology), because only then can anyone have anything meaningful to say about what is right & wrong to do in light of what is known to be true (which is Ethics).
When arguing with someone (which does not mean either fighting or debating) who disagrees with you, you're engaging in a process of reasoning with them by identifying what each of you see from your varying perspectives, and then comparing your initial mental sketches to what you both can see of the actual landscape, and that often involves (and requires) congenially directing and shifting your vantage points this way & that to see things from the other person's point of view so as to compare and find what landmarks you can agree upon - or the lack of them -between your wordscapes and the actual landscape that you both inhabit. Progress in an honest argument isn't marked by a win or a loss, but by finding that your sketches have revealed something clearer - whether that be a mere glimpse or full scenic view - of what can be agreed upon between you, and better understood about each other, and verified, as being real and true, and that is employing and practicing the epistemological process that was implicit in the traditional reasoning that our Founder's era was familiar with.
Under that traditional view, notions typical of its adversary in Social Epistemology, such as 'what's true for you, may not be true for me', would be dismissed out of hand as being unserious and potentially dangerous sentiments that undermines and outright attacks our ability to reason together towards some mutual understanding. It's not looking for an honest (meaning what?) argument, even as it demands the results of one with your agreement (or compliance) without its cause: having reasoned towards a mutual understanding of what is real and true. What they want to avoid at all costs, is an honest argument. Statements such as that are not a call for truce, but a passive/aggressive attempt to verbally overpower your moral objections to their position, which gives them a foothold in your own mind, from your having implicitly legitimized their falsehoods by accepting them as possibly *true* (meaning what?), when in fact what is real and true, are obstacles to the wordscapes they expect you to either accept, tolerate, or submit to. When you nod along with such statements, you're missing the fact that whatever you had thought was important to adhere to, has been reduced to their level as a now meaningless *truth*, as you've surrendered the epistemological battle you didn't even realize you were fighting.
Solzhenitsyn's call to 'Live not by lies' is truly meaningless, if you cannot recognize or defend what is and is not true.
a thing cannot both be, and not be, at the same time and in the same context., the ability to give reasonable consideration, and the ability to apply the logical method, follows from understanding that, and through that understanding, a person can be expected to reliably come to know the nature of what they do and do not know, and to understand how they know it, which forms an informal epistemology of how 'you know what you know', and the ability to logically verify it. As a result of attempting to deny that first rule of thought, we now have not only a field called 'Epistemology', and something called 'epistemic adequacy' (that you know that 'it is what it is'), but wildly divergent systems of epistemology which accept and justify 'concepts' that are in conflict with that first rule of thought, and any thought which follows from it. That is of course still the basis of a valid epistemology, and any claim that denies, or attempts to spin that statement, is invalid and an unjustifiable epistemology, as are those ideals and ideologies that are built upon them. And yes, if you know that, and know that their claims are based upon invalid epistemologies, all you need to do is expose that, and their game of ideological Jenga comes tumbling down.
A good first step in that direction: 'What do you mean by 'True'?
We tend to marvel at people not being reasonable today, but anyone who fails to engage in reasoning without anchoring their effort in the reality below their thinking, and with truth as the star above that guides it, cannot reasonably be expected to maintain even the appearances of being reasonable for long. Without a regard for what is real and true, the need to find mutual understanding and a connection to what is true, all 'arguments' and statements must devolve into either conveniences of mutual admiration, or confrontations which can only be 'resolved' through some contest of power, whether that be by tallying up the quantities of 'likes' and 'dislikes' for it, or by physical force or the threat of it, and as Thrasymachus put such notions of 'Might makes Right' to Socrates:
'...I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger'.Reason without truth is ideology, its aim is power, and its means are the politics of force, which require that the laws of right reason be transformed into arbitrary rules to be obeyed without question, or else. We'll begin taking a deeper dive into what this is, and isn't, and how your ability to know can be undermined, in the next post.
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Wednesday, February 01, 2023
Questions of perspective - Understanding our loss of understanding, and the question of getting it back
How sure are you that what you know, is actually so? How sure are you that what your child is learning, is worth knowing? Do these questions seem worth answering? Or asking? If not, does this one give you any concern:
Of course, I think you'd have to follow that up with this:
- What if what you think you know, that isn't so, is harmful to you?
"Is there some situation where believing falsehoods and lies, is not harmful?"Sure, that may lack nuance, but is determining whether you or your kids are going to be eating food, or poison, the place for nuance? Because IHMO, that's the perspective that educational content should always be viewed from.
I've surely made it clear that I've very little (and by 'little', I mean less than zero) respect for the textbooks, materials, and purposes, employed in our schools today, but as bad as the sketchy facts, ideological spin, and lies by omission or commission (hello 1619 Project) of most educational content is, those alone don't have the power to implant their 'key facts' into a bored student's memory, or to significantly alter how they think. How such materials leave their mark on a student's mind has less to do with what's laid out on the page in black & white, than with what questions are asked, and how they're expected to answer them. Schools devote a significant amount of time to drilling in the habit of how students are expected to ask and answer questions (quizzes, worksheets, tests, homework), because that pattern is what will persist in their thoughts & actions long after the 'key facts' and details of their more recent test scores, or total cumulative GPA, have been forgotten.
Sometimes of course, the purpose of a bad question is obvious.
It's easy to spot the 'Have you stopped beating your wife?' types of questions, which can only be there to subvert its subject and demean the student's impression of it, such as with this far too typical question on an exam that was recently given to a friend's child in a local high school:
"17. What were the American motives to imperialize? What are some examples of American imperialism?", and the intentions of such questions are so obvious that, at least in early stages, they quickly attract the necessary outrage of the moment required to deal with it.
Less obvious, and IMHO more damaging, are the more mundane questions and answers which tend to either go unnoticed, or worse, are applauded by parents and politicians alike for being the 'right answers' that flatters the Red/Blue leanings of their own communities (physical or political), with very little thought given to how such 'Ok' lessons might affect the thinking of the students being educated through them. With that in mind, I've got a three-part question that might help alter your perspective when reviewing the various "Things to consider", and chapter quizzes in textbooks and worksheets, and the additional quizzes and tests which are used in sculpting your child's thoughts, and that's this:
Whether that question's perspective is one you're willing to try out, or is one you'd rather ignore, or if you're simply puzzled by it, likely has much to do with how your own education implicitly taught what this question is concerned with, by example, day in, and day out, year in and year out. What it's concerned with is what most 'educational content' typically avoids, which is the stuff of metaphysics (which is not what you find in the 'New Age' section of your bookstore) and epistemology (which increasingly should only be found in the 'New Age' section of your bookstore). Why? Because they govern what we tend to pay attention to, and how we do so, which sets the stage for our deciding whether or not to take one action, or another, or none at all, and there are few things more important, and more commonly ignored today, than that.
- How do you know if a question is worth asking, and whether or not the answer to it is worth being pursued, and whether or not finding it might do more harm than good?
Of course, answering that question requires asking a few more questions, about the types of questions and answers that are being used in our schools, in order to develop how their student's will think about their subjects:
Does the expected answer provide a meaningful complement to the question, and clarify the importance of having asked it? Or are most answers simply 'key facts' to be recalled as 'the answer' whenever prompted ('Remember class, this will be on the upcoming test.')? Some facts do of course need to be committed to memory, and students should be able to retrieve them almost without thinking - math times tables, names & dates of history, the rules of grammar - those need to be effortlessly at hand as brick & mortar for the constructing of sound thinking with. But with other kinds of questions, questions such as 'what caused the American Revolution?', those are matters of a very different nature, and they require a depth of consideration and deliberation in order to reach a depth of understanding which the recalling of lists of 'key facts', and names & dates, and tax rates, couldn't possibly equal.
- Why are the questions there, what's their purpose?
- How are students' expected to answer them?
- Do they help in developing a wider and deeper understanding of what is justifiably worth knowing?
- Are their answers meant to be understood, or are they simply 'key facts' to be recalled as 'the answer', whenever prompted?
For example, the questions and answers that concern me most, are those seemingly innocuous fact-check types of questions, which require more than a simple fact to be answered well, the kind that a quick glance through your school's materials will prove to make up the bulk of their student's chapter quizzes, fill in the blank worksheets, and bubble tests, such as:
- "Question: #1: How is America similar in kind to other nations such as France, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, England, etc.?"
- "Answer: A - each are members of Western Civilization" , or
- "Answer: B - These Western nations are the source of systemic racism and oppression of persons of color"
You see, the more important point has little to do with whether 'A' or 'B' is the expected answer, the point is that whichever one of those answers will get their students a good grade, will 'work' just fine for one community, and vice-versa for the other, and what students learn from that is that what is real and true is not the point of their lessons. And that lesson - repeating the 'answer' that will work, as the answer - is the real lesson that our students are being inundated with, in nearly all of their lessons, worksheets, quizzes, and tests, which is the point that's being missed in nearly every Red/Blue community in America today.
That memorization, and deliberation have different purposes, isn't a new point, only a forgotten one (at best), one that Aristotle was pointing out 2,500 years ago in his Nichomachean Ethics:
"...in the case of exact and self-contained sciences there is no deliberation, e.g. about the letters of the alphabet (for we have no doubt how they should be written); but the things that are brought about by our own efforts, but not always in the same way, are the things about which we deliberate... Deliberation is concerned with things that happen in a certain way for the most part, but in which the event is obscure, and with things in which it is indeterminate..."Of course it's useful for students to memorize the alphabet and 2x2=4, and deliberating over such facts and unvarying results would be a waste of time - memorize them and have them at hand forever without giving them another thought (though some may recall Common Core Math demanding extensive deliberation over just such facts). But what of matters such as the causes of revolutions? Are those mindlessly repeatable facts like 2x2=4? Do such matters always turn out in the same way, or do variations in time and circumstance, tend to produce unpredictable results, such as the differing outcomes of the American and French Revolutions?
What do you suppose happens when a student memorizes a list of 'The six causes of the American Revolution', and is given an 'A+!' for doing so? That's right, worse than such answers being simply wrong or inadequate, awarding 'A's for such answers, gives students the impression that mindlessly recalling lists of facts, is equivalent to understanding the issue at hand, and each time that students are led to ingest such 'answers' as understanding, reduces the likelihood that they'll engage in that type of deliberation in the future, which is what a deeper understanding of such matters requires.
That's what I mean by 'Questions and Answers' that aren't worth being pursued, because finding them might do more harm than good, certainly more harm, than 'getting straight A's!' could ever compensate for. Helping a student to understand what is important, and training students to parrot a 'key fact' on cue, are two very different educational goals, and we need to recognize that when students are being taught and graded in this way, then the primary purpose for the materials, the questions, and the expected answers to them, is to further a narrative and habituate students to getting answers from 'those who know best', and that is the 'educational norm' everywhere today.
Coincidentally (not !) that same approach is what we see being followed daily in our news media, Left and Right, and no doubt the familiar approach is what their successful ratings depends upon: A source declares that issue X is important, 'key facts' are provided, and experts advise that the acceptable answer is A (or B). That familiar approach is what propaganda depends upon and is spread through, and the metaphysical & epistemological methods that are implicit in it, convey its 'answers' that we are expected to accept, and repeat, on demand, despite what can be seen to be real and true by those who bother to look past the surface (See the Munk Debate on the topic of 'Don't trust mainstream media' between Douglass Murray, Matt Taibi vs New York Times celebrity authors Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg, and see the latter two cluelessly attempting to use their 'expert status' to define their opposition, and lose badly as scored by the audience, who weren't buying it at all).
Questions worth considering
The funny thing is, that when the point of a question is understanding, rather than boosting test scores, then following in the wake of a reasonably in-depth study of those nations' histories and cultures, that very same opening question can be used between a teacher and their students, as a first step down paths of understanding that are well worth travelling, guiding them into considering something that their lives will be richer from knowing.
- "Yes, America is, like those, a Western nation, but it also differs from other Western nations by degree - often significantly so - how important are those differences to what America was founded to be?"
"Yes, those are significant differences. How is it that, with differences such as those, that the West somehow shares a common literature in works from Homer to The Bible, from Plato to Virgil, from the anonymous poet of Beowulf, to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Rostand, despite each coming from as many and more different languages and 'cultures'?"When questions have a purpose, they are able to lead to replies that can lead to further questions, and develop into a pursuit of the subject that serves to develop a student's ability to make meaningful distinctions, and even reveal within them a sense of wonder over how such a ... er... 'diversity'... of sources, managed to become woven into the recognizably Western understanding of what is right and true, which both serves and reflects the ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and yes, religion, which underlies and supports it. It's that broad understanding which has (or at least had) instilled Westerners with a widespread regard for the Rule of Law and a disdain for the arbitrary ultimatums of tyrants who'd demand that their subjects submit or die, which is what the subject of my 'perspective question' is very much concerned with.
So the initial answer to the first part of my question, is does a question lead you into an understanding of what is real and true? If it doesn't, or if it expects you to accept something in place of that, it's because those asking it don't want you to understand it. Is a question being asked in pursuit of what is real and true? If you're not able to tell, or if it settles for a diversion or a simulacrum of that, it is not only not worth pursuing, but it is leading you, either by intention or incompetence, away from what is real and true, and habituating you to continue doing that, which is exceedingly harmful to your education, and to your life.
OTOH, when a student is becoming aware of how and why the questions they are being asked, and the answers they are finding themselves giving to them, not only fit together, but instill in them the sense that something is developing in their mind and body that thrives from their being fitted together, then those questions and answers are leading them to a wider and deeper understanding of the issue, which is a sign that an education is occurring within them. But that sense of understanding will not develop from retrieving approved 'answers' that are taken from someone else's conclusions, for them to repeat as needed for test scores, or for eliciting the politically correct approval of others.
Here then is a question that's worth asking:
Q: Can any form of education which lacks, or attacks, that central Western root, be of use for anything other than the destruction of the West?And here's the only answer that's worth giving:
A: No.Understanding, or data collection and narrative building?
The problem is that while follow-up questions that help develop understanding can come from a teacher orally testing a student's knowledge, that engagement is unlikely, if not impossible, to come from the sort of printed tests with answer keys that we began using in America, as noted in previous posts, after Horace Mann injected them into standard practice for American schools in the early 1800s. As was also noted previously, what Mann especially liked about written tests was, they fostered a data collection strategy which he infamously used as a means for controlling and developing a narrative in public opinion about education, and to control which educators would be permitted to continue educating students in their society, in order to form and control that public's opinion.
Along with the innovation of written tests, came the replacement of original sources with textbooks, quizzes, graded work, and standardized tests, not to mention separating students into age related 'grades', and moving students as the bell rings, from one classroom to another, to study materials that are treated as very 'separate' subjects. The shallow pursuits that have accompanied those innovations, are mostly pointless and trivial wastes of time, which are educationally destructive, and whether that destruction comes by way of a sledgehammer of failure, or the slow rot of getting 'straight A's!', the aims being achieved are the same.
Here's a 'key fact' that's worth recalling: uniform written tests and 'Final Exams' as we know them today, did not exist in our Founding Fathers' era - instead they used oral examinations, where the teacher would ask questions of individual students, who would respond, and be questioned further based upon their responses. None of those features that we now take as normal today, were involved in the education of our Founding Fathers' generation - they had no grades, no test scores, no GPAs - does anyone seriously imagine that they were less educated than our 'straight A!' students are today (see Walsh's 'Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic')?
I'm not attempting to push some gibberish of 'Grading student's work is too stressful, just let them groove to the lessons!', I'm saying that the system of grading your student's work, is being used to con you - it's not the student's education that's being graded, but your willingness to accept that those grades indicate that your child is being educated!
That realization is what startled Pete Hegseth into realizing that we are all to some extent today, products of a 'Progressive Education', in that we can hardly conceive of the subject without them, and all of those 'experimental' innovations reflect the underlying pro-regressive approach to, or evasion of, what is real and true. And because more and more people are coming to that realization, an education that's actually educational not only can still be found today, they're becoming increasingly easy to find, but it does require looking outside the realm of textbooks and answer keys, where students can be led into observing and understanding just how significant it is that from its earliest foundations in so many diverse languages and cultures, whether coming from our Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian roots, through the likes of Socrates or Proverbs, the embrace of reality and reason, and a reverence for truth, virtue, and wisdom is what, has been both the needle and the pattern from which the Western ideal has been woven.
The sad truth is that 'education', as traditionally understood, has become a foreign concept to both 'conservative' and 'woke' schools, each of whose texts are primarily used for fact fishing exercises that do little more than train students in efficiently retrieving and repeating approved answers, in order to build up what their [school, school system, community, business, govt, ...?] sees as being a useful narrative, while also outputting a steady stream of useful human resources.
In short: Ideas have consequences, and ignoring how ideas are understood and validated has severe consequences for those who are under the power of those same ideas. That being the case, the question that parents and politicians should be asking, is whether such questions and answers that fill their textbooks and tests are even worth being asked or answered, by any student, in any school at all? Or more pointedly:
What using expensive textbooks, curriculums, and standardized tests, to install 'key facts' into an entire class of students, rather than developing individual student's understanding of what is real and true, is the visible track marks of a metaphysics and epistemology that purposefully does not lead students into paths of thoughtfulness (and couldn't even if it tried). What our students gain with their diplomas, is the false sense of knowing something that they do not in fact have knowledge and understanding of, and that misplaced sense of 'knowing the answers', is what our schools are teaching our students to 'learn', and the habit of fetching & accepting someone else's answers to questions that they haven't explored or understood themselves, is the means by which that lesson is being taught in nearly all of our schools, by example after example, day in, and day out, month after month, year after year.
- Q: Can the purpose of such questions and answers, be educational?
- A:No, IMHO, they cannot.
How you question your answers, matters
The traditional Western approach that began with Socrates, and which Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas perfected, involved a methodical approach to questioning and understanding and verifying that what you know, conforms to what is real and true, a sense that's now called 'Epistemic Adequacy', essentially meaning how to know that "'it,' is what it is", which is the beating heart of the West.
Our founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence which Thomas Jefferson intended to be "... an expression of the American mind..." were drawn from "... the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c...", which were deeply concerned with, and rooted in, what was understood to be true, and with how you, their reader, could know it. For 'We The People' to be capable of enjoying Liberty and Justice for all under a Rule of Law, we must care about what is real and true, and we must understand how we know if something is objectively true, and to care about how that integrates with the rest of what we're able to know is real and true.
In contrast to the Western standard of 'epistemic adequacy', the pro-regressive 'Progressive' and the 'Woke' are less concerned with what is real and true, than with what their group desires others to accept as 'true', a view that naturally gravitates towards using power to transform 'their truth' from wishes into demands, which others will be forced to accept, in line with the age-old standard of 'Might makes Right'. Those who dare to point out that 'their truth' is demonstrably untrue, will be hit with the accusation of 'epistemic oppression!', because your expectation that their words should conform to what is real and true, interferes with their desire to impose 'their truth' upon you, and they'll berate you at the top of their lungs, for interfering with their desire to abuse you as they please.
For all of their load mouthed bravado, what the bullies and tyrants of Wokeness detest and fear the most, is the Western method of asking questions that expect to find a correspondence between what is real and what is true. That fear is as real to them today as it was 2,500 years ago when their forefathers put Socrates to death for refusing to stop practicing and teaching his method; the same method that Pontius Pilot hurriedly washed his hands of.
The West in general would not, and could not, have grown, prospered, and persisted without an understanding of the importance of asking good questions and then pursuing the answers that follow from them, and America in particular, cannot long endure if our educational system is permitted to systemically muddy or even sever our ability to identify and acknowledge what is objectively true.
The issue with our schools isn't that they need to improve their student's grades & test scores, or that we have to somehow get schools 'back to basics'; the issue is that we need to break free of the narrative of lies that we've enmeshed ourselves in, through the lessons they've been teaching us. If being an American doesn't imply a familiarity with and understanding of the ideas of those 'public books of right' that Jefferson spoke of, then being an American can mean little more in the minds of those living in America, than a checkmark on a legal form, or a geo tag reference on their phone, and if that becomes the case, then neither Liberty nor Justice for any, can long endure within the geographic area legally known as the United States.
Ironically, the modern field of Epistemology was itself first formally created (its methods were implied or contained within classical metaphysics, but it wasn't made into a field of its own, until the assault of modernity began) by the German idealists (Kant, Fichte, Hegel) for the express purpose of breaking us away from the Western habit of rooting our understanding in what you know to be real and true, demanding that you dispense with what can be known (Metaphysics), and dialectically refocusing instead on how we know 'it' (Epistemology) - you might hear the echo of Progressive Education's mantra "Don't teach what to think, teach how to think!".
The clownish complexity of their Rube-Goldberg contraptions of convoluted and equivocal language that these idealists have crafted for their assault, evokes the showiness of the stage magician waving his left hand to distract the audience from what the right hand is doing, and, and what that wacademic abracadabra has culminated in, is the lethal epistemological variant of 'Social Epistemology', as described in the Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology:
"...Breaking with an ancient philosophical tradition, social epistemology adopts a social perspective upon knowledge, construing it as a phenomenon of the public sphere rather than as an individual, or even private or “mental”, possession. Knowledge is generated by, and attributed to, not only individuals but also collective entities such as groups, businesses, public institutions and entire societies...."That perfectly describes the active process of severing the minds of the unsuspecting, from the traditional understanding that wisdom depends upon their knowing, and knowing what is true, and it is key to what has delivered us up to Cancel Culture of today. For us to recognize and effectively combat that, we, you, need to have at least a grasp of how it has progressed through the questions we ask - or ignore - into our everyday assumptions and considerations, and what I'll be going into in the next few posts, will, I think, give you the basis for doing that, or at least a functional starting point for it. Those who don't bother with even trying to understand how that process works, are - whether willfully or negligently - leaving themselves and their children at the mercy of those who are eager to use their ignorance as a means of gaining more power over them both.
If your own education neglected to inform you of such matters, you have my sympathy - mine didn't either, and it's been a struggle to learn about it on my own. If doing so yourself doesn't appeal to you, again, you have my sympathy, but - and I hope this doesn't come as a surprise - our feelings about that don't matter. If you don't put in the effort to at least familiarize yourself with these matters that are threatening to destroy your children's future and our nation, then both will be consumed by it.
Sorry, way it is. Your choice. And your choice will have consequences.
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Friday, April 07, 2023
The Real Choice - Metaphysician: Heal thyself!
'All men by nature desire to know'
Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book 1, line 1
By Metaphysics I'm not referring to what's in the 'new age' section of your book store, the latest notions of theoretical physicists, or any alleged 'metaphysics' of post 1600 philosophers, those, rather, are the modern means of evading the metaphysics that followed from Aristotle's consideration of First Principles
So what sorts of grand and powerful terms are we talking about here? Well... I think 'grand and powerful terms' are part of the problem, as to anyone but academics, the terminology itself (ontology, nihilism, correspondence theory, empirical, existential, causal... ) stands squarely in the way of people being able to grasp and use what it is that they refer to, even as what it is that they refer to - how we all 'do' metaphysics from moment to moment and day in and day out - is routinely handled by each and every one of us through very simple, familiar, commonplace terms. As I list a few of these, keep the adage in mind that 'big things come in small packages' and try not to laugh, because Metaphysics' study of First Principles involves giving respectful attention to concepts that seem to be anything but impressive, a few of which, in no particular order, are:
'is', 'isn't','Truth', 'true', 'false', 'why', 'cause', 'effect', 'identity', 'confirm', 'change', 'experience', 'good', 'bad', 'because', 'therefore', 'sensible',..., and other such equally lofty and dazzling nuggets as those.
My warnings aside, you might be tempted to smile at these seemingly simple terms, but their simplicity can be deceiving (innocently or intentionally), as respecting these concepts are the very things which make a good life attainable and our specialized fields & sciences possible, and they are key to whether our minds can be depended upon to operate intelligibly and smoothly, or instead are prone to become easily confused and abused.
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| Scientism is unscientific |
"You should only believe a truth that is scientifically verifiable", and perhaps the first thing to notice is that this statement is itself a verifiably unscientific and self-refuting statement - how would you formulate an experiment to scientifically test that with, and with what weight, measure, or Bunson burner, would you quantify its results? Still more worthy of notice, is that neither Truth, nor Verifiable, nor Should, are concepts of science. 'Truth' is a metaphysical concept, 'Verifiable' comes from epistemology, and 'Should' comes from Ethics, and their function is to tell you what is, how you know it, and what to do about it, which when taken together describes how to verify 'the science!', meaning that it's science that is subordinate to metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, not the other way around! And as ludicrous as the notion is of scientifically verifying all of your beliefs (how is your belief in the value of art to be justified scientifically, by weighing it on a bathroom scale perhaps?), do we even need to note what 'believe' applies to?
The upshot of this is that by attempting to take their statements seriously, their own words are telling you to not believe or take their own words seriously. The problem with laughing such carelessness off though, is that it probably indicates how unaware they are of how far their own beliefs have led them out of the realm of Science, and into the ideology of Scientism, whose "excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques" bestows upon its believers the heady power to define Truth itself (not to mention 'right' and 'wrong'). It is especially important to realize that these people who claim the authority to speak for 'science', are, knowingly or not, in hot pursuit of the power to impose their opinion of what the 'smart thing to do' is, upon you, who, after all, lack their credentials for making those decisions about your own life. Case in point, if past performance is any indicator of future results, you'd do well to do some homework on Eugenics, as that is just one example of the horrific mistakes of history which they will be repeating in your future, if our continued carelessness and ignorance of these concepts permits them to do so.
The takeaway here is that when you hear otherwise intelligent people like David Hume, C.S. Peirce, Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, making such metaphysically nonsensical statements as that above, you should understand right away that not only do they not know what they are talking about, but that they have probably never given any serious thought to the meaning and potentially dangerous consequences of their own thoughts, or, if they have, they don't think it matters, as with this leading advocate of scientism, ticking off 'reasons' for his belief:
"...What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them., or, the same sentiment is re-worded in such a way as to shift around the location of the error, to make a distinction without a difference, as Tyson frequently states:
Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral..."
"The good thing about Science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.", and the problem with this is that it is not proper to say either that 'Science' is true or that 'Science' is the kind of thing one should 'believe' in - neither is true! What Science is, is a method for formulating and determining the accuracy of propositions whose results are measurable, and as every scientist should be well aware of, history has frequently demonstrated that as our ability to measure those results improves, and as changing contexts cause scientists to rephrase those propositions more appropriately, we often find that the results of 'the science' does not in fact continue to warrant belief in the original proposition. That's not a problem with science - that's its strength - that's a problem with those who're carelessly misusing the powerful concepts which 'Science', 'is', and 'belief', are! Even more problematic is that the smugly dismissive statements of representatives such as Tyson, smuggle equivocations and errors into popular thinking, which can all too easily lead those who have even less familiarity with these concepts than they do, into unwittingly believing what should not be believed (hello again eugenics), and that road cannot lead to a good destination (we should give dishonorable mention here to Al Gore and Dr. Fauci).
Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on the group think of scientists' Lost in Math
The good news is that the circular reasoning of Scientism is self-refuting; the bad news is that the views that such people have popularized in our society, have left a great many people blind to their falsity, and such metaphysical blindness has real world consequences. Giving more careful attention to the metaphysical & epistemological concepts which are so used & abused around us today, would reveal a number of misleading, impractical, and downright dishonest efforts being advocated for, which puts us all at the mercy of ideologs who've become used to the convenience of our enabling them to slip their half-baked notions right past us, and too often with our approval and support.
Metaphysician: Heal thyself!
Metaphysics matters because it helps us to take notice of those big things that so often hide, or are hidden, in small conceptual packages, which, once they've been slipped past us, have an outsized impact on our ability to live lives worth living. Recovering those abilities doesn't require us to learn technical terms or famous disputes over them, it simply requires that we do metaphysics, and to that end I'm proposing a mini metaphysical 'back to basics' exercise over the next few posts to see how the fundamentals are being used around us, against us, and by us, by focusing upon the use of three simple words, which, not to go all Pontius Pilot on you, are:
"What is Truth?"These three words, separately and together, are in one way or another essential to our every thought and action, and muddying their usage has been central to the traps of circular reasoning and unsound beliefs & practices, which those claiming to be '*those who know best*', have used to lead our society into becoming so lost within, and imprisoned by, our own thinking. And for those who're not sure what I mean by muddying their usage, circular reasoning and unsound beliefs & practices, if nothing strikes you as unsound in "fiery but mostly peaceful protests', or that 'this trans Bud is for you', you really need to stick around for the next few posts, as what we're going to do is focus on how each word can be used to either conceal, or reveal, our world to us. By doing so I think you'll also see why it is that I think that the most important philosophical stands that you and I can take today, have less to do with waging grand public battles against Leviathan, than with consistently making small, often very small points, in daily conversations, so that each of us will see more clearly what it is that is actually being talked about.
Up next: 'What' we are talking about.
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Tuesday, April 11, 2023
What the Reality of the Abstract is - 'What is Truth' pt2
The point of turning our attention to metaphysics (see previous post), is not to wrestle with fancy concepts or to see which big brained person said what impressive (or baffling) thing about this or that obscure issue, but so that when we are talking about something as if it is something worthy of our attention, we will have more clarity on whether it actually is something or not, and if so, grasp whether that discussion is taking us towards, or away from, it becoming realized - and is either prospect a good thing?
In proposing to get the hang of this by looking at the three words of:
"What is Truth?", we'll come at the phrase itself last, after first working through the words individually and from an angle, looking less at the word 'What' itself, than with whatever it is that we use it to refer our thinking to.
We of course use 'What' as a placeholder for anything, usually something that hasn't yet been identified, but which the question expects, or at least hopes, will be identified - and while that 'What' can potentially refer to anything, we expect the reply we receive to refer to a particular thing within the context of the question being asked. In short, 'What' is referring to some part of, and by extension to all of, existence itself. That something exists and that we can know that, is the fundamental principle of metaphysics, and leaving a few big-brained fools aside for the moment, few doubt that because it is absurd to question the reality of existence, but it is absurdly common for us to confuse some idea in our heads, with it being real, and seeing how we do that, and how to keep from doing that, is what we're using 'What' for.
If I point at something and ask "What is that?", depending upon the context, the answer received could be anything from applesauce, to a 'bottom operated clapper valve', and while I know enough about applesauce to safely assume many delicious details about it (though depending on who I'd asked that of - waitress or friend or foe - other questions might be asked before taking a bite of it), the other merely names something whose concept means little more to me than the "what" I'd asked of it to begin with, right?
The natural reaction towards the unexpected or unknown, is - demonstrating what Aristotle said that all men desire - to ask more questions in order to make the unknown meaningful enough for it to fit into our understanding. How much is enough, depends upon the context, and fitting some unknowns into your world might not require much at all - if they reply, 'It's something found often on railroad cars', unless I had a deeper interest or need to know about trains, that'd be enough to make this particular "what" real enough in my mind for me to move on to the next squirrel.
But what about when the concept is a familiar one? How often do we assume we know something about what's being discussed, when we actually know little more about the familiar term, than we do of the unfamiliar one?
In this case, the unknown 'What' was filled in by 'chandelier', but annoyingly enough, knowing that we need this general kind of thing called a 'chandelier', though its familiar to me, it hasn't told me enough to even leave the room with, let alone run off to buy one, because although I've got a vague image in my mind of what a chandelier could be, it's no more concretized in my mind than a 'bottom operated clapper valve' is. Far too many of its potential properties are still too abstract in my mind, meaning that - in my mind - they can still hold 'any' value, though you can bet she has a very particular chandelier in her mind, and if I don't want to be left in the dark I need to turn my attention to filling in some of the hazy blanks, such as its price range, or how low it should hang, or whether it should have a simple on/off or dimmer switch, and so on.
The human mind (especially that of conmen) delights in lazily leaving those sorts of abstract details populated with nothing more than our tendency to accept our assumptions as being enough. But for our thoughts to be worth thinking, we need to develop the habit of fleshing those defaults out with questions that direct our attention to filling them in with realistically specific values, or value ranges - concretizing them - in order to identify, to make known to ourselves, the particular 'What' that should be pointed to by the 'what' that we as yet only 'think' we have in mind. Only after doing so can we knowledgeably say "Yes' to this chandelier, and definitely No to those chandeliers, and without doing so, we truly do not know the 'What' that we're talking about.
How appropriately abstract it is for a concept to remain, changes with the context. By that I mean, having no real interest in trains, knowing the 'bottom operated clapper valve' had to do with trains, was all I needed to know about it in that context, whereas in the context of my wife first identifying the solution of a "chandelier", even though the word told us nothing about the many possible details that were as yet entirely abstract in our minds, it was appropriate enough in that context to simply name the concept of a hanging lighting fixture, to distinguish it from all other possible options such as a lamp, skylight, candle, etc.,. But in the context of budgeting and going out to shop for a chandelier requires concretizing it further, even if only generally for issues like price, size, etc., in order to get a clearer understanding of what to look for and where. And yet even that somewhat more concretized status which would be appropriate enough for narrowing the field, would still be inappropriately abstract for the context of my going out to select this or that particular chandelier: what about its material - wood? metal? crystal? - or its shape - round? square? multiple arms? - how about color? size? number of lights?.
Those conceptual details whose concrete values had not yet been shared between our minds (if they were even in my mind at all), not to mention those several other properties that she'd be sure to have in her mind that'd never, ever, cross into my mind, would guarantee that if I were to trot out myself and buy what only seemed to be in my mind, her reaction to what I brought home would be anything but abstract.
To avoid such mishaps, requires our noticing that the same flexibility that enables concepts to be so mentally productive in identifying enough of what we have in mind in a given context (especially in the more specialized fields of science, technology, and literature), is the same feature that makes them so dangerous when we're not sufficiently wary of the abstract nature of the concepts we're using - it's too easy to think (or to give others the impression) that what we have in mind (if anything), is what they do as well. Those abstracts which default differently from one person to another, are what enable those peddling supposedly wise advice, such as the scientistic "...You should only believe a truth that is scientifically verifiable!" assertion, to sound sensible enough to those who habitually think no further upon them than whether or not their sound is pleasing enough to the ear to win their approval. We too easily fail to give those too familiarly used & abused metaphysical concepts the respectful attention they require. Of course the mischief that can result from leaving too many abstract components unpopulated in the concept of a chandelier, are but a pup-tent in comparison to the veritable skyscrapers that metaphysical concepts enable us to carelessly presume we know enough about, and the real world consequences of doing so (such as scientism and Eugenics) can be infinitely worse than confidently buying what you mistakenly thought was the right 'chandelier' at Home Depot.
Developing an attention to metaphysics helps to heighten our conscious awareness of the difference between what is metaphysically real (this physical chandelier), and what is still metaphysically abstract (any chandelier), the abstract is a valuable means for moving towards what's real, but we need to guard against it being mistaken for the real thing. Doing so begins with a conscious awareness of whether our grasp of 'What' + 'Enough' + 'Context' = a calm, or a doubtful state of mind.
One example of a lack of context is the cartoon I've got in the graphic with this post, of two characters standing on either end of a numerical shape and pointing, as one insists '6!' and the other '9!', and the caption invites you to take the relativistic view of 'it's all a matter of perspective', but however useful it is to realize that perspective can influence perceptions, what's more useful is to look for the wider context involved - if the shape is laying on a parking lot, then one end will designate which end is up, and if there is no such context available, then it is only a shape that can be used as either a '6' or a '9', in which case both are wrong for insisting it is one way or the other. That seemingly 'reasonable' path towards relativism is a favorite of modernists (that on the molecular level, a solid is 'akshually!' mostly space is another, more on that in later posts) - reject the ploy and look for the context.
And for those who wish to put feelings and preferences first, there's the other cartoon from the graphic, which shows 'your house' as it's preferred to be seen by you (a nice comfy house), by a buyer (a cheap shack), a lender (an only slightly better shack), and by your tax collector (who prefers to see it as a palace). When you leave too much to the abstract, you lose, bring your ideas into contact with reality, especially question what you assume to be 'true', don't leave your understanding to be defined by feelings and preferences - of theirs or yours - concretize them, or in the end they'll come crashing down on you like a ton of bricks.
Get into the habit of asking a few conscious questions: Does this belong with that?; Is the meaning clear or opaque?; What am I assuming about this from what I've been told, and how much of that was I actually told?; When being advised to do or accept something: Did they provide substance to support their urgency, or did they focus on fanning feelings of peril? Am I being expected to make assumptions about what they didn't say? What reasons do I have to believe that the reality which will follow from this advice, will match up with what they led me to assume about it?
Acting in accordance with reality
Not being so careless as to neglect the metaphysical basics, is a simple, and valuable, habit to learn and acquire, and the good news is that by giving just a little more conscious attention to what those too familiar words of 'is', 'trust', 'should', etc., can provide an otherwise inappropriate cover for, we can eliminate the insubstantial weeds that a careless inattention enables to take root in our minds - especially regarding advice given by 'those who know best'.
How we've come to be so careless and ignorant of metaphysics, is largely due to our schools having pragmatically ensured that we would, and sadly with very little push-back from We The People. If you want to test whether I'm being too harsh or inaccurate, just ask yourself and your friends about what the 'Three Acts of the Mind' are, I'll wait.
Oh... hi again. That was quick.
Were you familiar with it? How many of your friends were? If some recognized the term, how well did they know what it referred to? That's but one of many commonplace fundamentals that 'every school boy' once knew, and the reason why they did, was because familiarity with such concepts was a known means to aiding us in knowing better, what it is that we mean, when we say that something is true.
For those who aren't familiar with the term, here are the three acts that our minds routinely perform:
First Act: Apprehend (Understand) - We open our eyes, and whether seeing something for the first time, or understand that we know it by name, a Rock for instance, we apprehend it, conceptualize, identify itWe aren't ignorant of these terms because they're difficult - the Three Acts of the Mind isn't all that difficult to grasp, some might even rank it on a scale from the simple to complex, as a mere 'duh', but most of us aren't ignorant of the concept because it's difficult to learn, but because our schools deliberately stopped teaching it - I sure as heck didn't learn of it in any of my schools, did you?
Second Act: Judgment - The act of mind which combines or separates two terms by affirmation or denial. 'Rock is hard' is a judgment
Third Act: Reasoning - From our observations and judgments, we move towards further conclusions and applications of them. 'As rocks are hard, I should avoid striking my toe against them.'
(To the Logic folk: Correct, that isn't a syllogism, and Reasoning is not synonymous with Logic - logic is a power tool of reasoning, but that comes much later in the process we're looking at here)
It's rather telling that running multiple searches under different engines for videos on the subject, only two videos specifically about 'The Three Acts of the Mind' pop up on YouTube, one coming from the Catholic Thomistic Institute: The Three Acts of the Mind (Aquinas 101)
, and from a professor at a Catholic college, Christopher Anadale, who addresses it from a logical point of view: Intro to 3 Acts of the Mind
Lots of other pages can be found on it, such as a study group for C.S. Lewis on the Three Acts of the MInd, and even an Artificial Intelligence enthusiast grasps how vital the Three Acts of the Mind are to actual intelligence, but for videos, only those two.
And what of the person who's ignorant of it and/or denies it's importance? Just thank them for affirming its relevance to their life. And if they look at you blankly, you can point out to them that in responding to you, they clearly affirmed that they:
, and from a professor at a Catholic college, Christopher Anadale, who addresses it from a logical point of view: Intro to 3 Acts of the Mind
Lots of other pages can be found on it, such as a study group for C.S. Lewis on the Three Acts of the MInd, and even an Artificial Intelligence enthusiast grasps how vital the Three Acts of the Mind are to actual intelligence, but for videos, only those two.
1st) apprehended what you said,And if they continue to stammer or stare slack-jawed at you, you can ask them why it is that their education has left them ignorant of, or even ridiculing, something which they're now unconsciously employing in everyday life? And do they think that their thinking is more likely to be improved by being ignorant of such matters, or by consciously employing and improving the use of them?
2nd) made a judgment about it, and
3rd) reasoned out a response to it.
So what more can we now know about scientism's advice that: "We should only believe to be true that which can be scientifically proven"?
We can imagine that the image which the phrase expects us to have in mind regarding science being able to provide efficient and reliable answers to us, but we can also see that many important questions and answers which those 'should' (would) apply to, are being left for us (and especially for them) to simply assume, and for everyone to assume that all would go well, without looking any closer at their advice.
If you do give some attention to moving past the abstract defaults by asking some questions, you'll find yourself engaging the Three Acts of the Mind to identify what something is, to understand enough of its nature and purpose, and to reason your way through how such details would and should (and can't and shouldn't) be applied to what, and how, you're understanding of the reality which such unscientifically vague possibilities would entail, and that will likely lead you to so some stark metaphysical clarity about where following such advice might lead you to.
For as you begin reasoning your way through a number of scenarios, you'll surely begin to notice that men in lab-coats are not particularly suited to scientifically examining and testing whether or not you love and believe in your spouse or your children, or whether the issues you care to speak out on are quantifiable or verifiably of value under laboratory conditions (and can you 'scientifically verify' something outside those conditions?). You'll surely also soon discover that other issues such as your own preferences for food and drink and entertainment, are somewhat less than scientifically justifiable, let alone 'scientifically verifiable' (are they even the kinds of values that are 'scientifically identifiable'?), such as what you might choose to read, or what you might think your child's 'education' should entail. You may rest assured though, that the lab-coated ones, who after all, 'do know best' (as they'll authoritatively tell you), will surely have many calculations available, as well as a number of equally 'scientifically verifiable' advisories attached to them, by one committee (soviet?) or another, regarding what they've determined would be best for you, and your family, to do, and what not to do, for the greater good (quantities over qualities!).
Likewise, you'd soon find that they have no ability whatsoever to scientifically test the need or value of your having an individual right to freedom of speech, or whether and what church to attend or if government should establish one (or perhaps a more appropriate alternative) for you, or of the value and need for individuals to petition their government for a redress of grievances, or anything else related to what our Bill of Rights secures for us in the 1st, or any of its other amendments to our Constitution (BTW, is that a 'scientifically verifiable' document? Ummm... no, it's not. Neither, BTW, is 'Justice', hence the addition of 'Social', to transform it into a quantity, rather than a quality).
What you'll see instead, should you dare to apply the metaphysical eye for the Western guy, is that there are plenty of people who're exceedingly happy to don the lab-coat and clipboard garb of scientists, to formulate tests no matter how untestable they might be (which, BTW, is how the 'Teaching Laboratories' in our Teachers Colleges have come up with how to teach what is taught to those who teach you and your kids what not to think about), and they're quite happy to substitute many quantities for any qualities at issue, and then to cite numerous studies so as to tally up very impressive numbers which will be claimed to show that the greater good would be best served by some fraction of, or total and complete infringement upon, one or more or all of those issues of individual rights and property that Western Culture in general, and our Constitution in particular, secure for us.
You'll also find yourself being tut-tutted that 'individual rights' are passe, and that 'Human Rights' are what we... er... 'should'... concern ourselves with today - for the greater good - and that you 'should' be happy with the pleasant efficiencies which they secure for and impose upon you.
How?
"Shhh... don't be a science denier! And stop messing around with such old fashioned ideas as 'Metaphysics'! That's an unscientific subject which you shouldn't believe in!"Get the picture?
The undeniable fact is, that with regard to what we mean by the concepts we use 'What' to refer our attention to, not only does it matter that we have enough clarity in our minds about what we're expected to make judgements upon within our minds, but that what that 'What' designates - the metaphysically real vs the metaphysically abstract - allows or leads us to contextually define, or leave undefined, matters which matter a great deal to our lives.
It's essential to know how we engage with, or else flee from, the reality that is inherent in our consideration of What Is Truth?, and we'll look at the 'Truth' of that, next.
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Friday, April 14, 2023
What is Truth: 'it is what it is' or it's 'Turtles: all the way down' - 'What is Truth' pt3
In the previous post we began taking a metaphysical dive into the phrase 'What is Truth?', by beginning with the role that 'What' plays in that - what is being referred to, how well we know it, and how easily we fool ourselves into mistaking what we assume we know, for what we actually know about that what - and it's the role of metaphysics, to keep those unconscious assumptions to a minimum, and the clarity of our thoughts to a maximum. We'll look at what it is that we mean by 'Truth' itself in this post, and then at how 'Is' actively puts 'What' and 'Truth' together in the next post, to see more clearly how our inattention to metaphysics today, has made it so much more difficult to put these three words together in a meaningful manner.
How we determine what is true with some degree of confidence (which should not be mistaken for infallible certainty - that's not an option for the human mind), is more of a question for epistemology, than for metaphysics. Before attempting that, we first need to be more mindful of how it is that these concepts and first principles of metaphysics help us to integrate our ideas, and add clarity to the process of thinking, and how disintegrated, unnecessarily complicated, and confused, even hostile ('That's "your truth", not mine!'), our thinking becomes when we're neglectful of them.
In previous posts concerning the progressive regress of education in America, I've covered a fair amount of the 'Why' behind why we're no longer taught to be mindful of the basics of metaphysics, and it was with his awareness of the causes behind a similar widespread lack of that clarity in his day, that Aristotle wrote of the need for a science of first principles (in his day, 'science' meant only a methodical study, it'd be nearly two thousand years before the term 'science' would break off from the mother-ship of philosophy and become the quantified method of experimentation that it is today), in Book 1, Chp 1, of his Metaphysics, that:
"...And these things, the most universal, are on the whole the hardest for men to know; for they are farthest from the senses. And the most exact of the sciences are those which deal most with first principles; for those which involve fewer principles are more exact than those which involve additional principles, e.g. arithmetic than geometry. But the science which investigates causes is also instructive, in a higher degree, for the people who instruct us are those who tell the causes of each thing..."Being unfamiliar with the metaphysics which Aristotle noted most people were least likely to have a solid understanding of, leaves us with an illusory cushion between our thinking and the gritty details of reality. But as with the 'chandelier' noted previously, those assumptions too easily lead us to behave as if we 'somehow' grasp enough of the details contained within them, when in fact we know more about our assumptions, than the realities which our inattentiveness is shielding us from. On a related note, despite the caricature of moral and virtuous people being cluelessly 'above it all', because true morality and virtue are rooted in sound metaphysics, those who are truly moral and virtuous are far more aware and connected to reality than the supposedly 'hard edged' skeptic ever will or can be. But that's for a later post as well.
Keeping the Western mind more focused on and in touch with what's real and true, was a lot easier when we consciously kept one foot firmly in each of our culture's Greco/Roman - Judeo/Christian foundations, and the first principles which they were formed from. As noted previously, we aren't ignorant of these concepts because they're difficult to grasp, but because they go untaught, and it's because they go untaught, that we're enabled to remain ignorant of their importance in our lives. Fortunately, the concepts themselves are mostly simple - that's why they work - and we only need to develop the habit of attending to what they otherwise keep out of sight, to benefit from them. For instance, there's nothing complicated about Aristotle's simple test for whether or not a fact is true:
“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”True or False, it is what it is, right?
OTOH, their simplicity and similarity to other concepts, is where our attention is required in order to make those distinctions between them that inattentiveness otherwise too easily lets slip past us, and equivocation - false equivalents - can introduce small errors that can grow, or be exploited into, larger ones. One such difference that's worth noting, is between what we can see is 'True', and what is meant by 'Truth' - do you see the distinction? We say something is true, as a judgment about a claim, but what Truth is, is what it itself is, which is different from a judgment about it.
Taking up the thread from Aristotle (and Plato), Thomas Aquinas put what it is we mean by what Truth is, as being when our thoughts correspond to what is real:
“Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus” (Truth is the equation of thing and intellect), meaning that Truth itself is the general quality of our understanding conforming to what is real; and True is that particular judgment which identifies that a particular thing 'is what it is' - if you hold up an orange and say "This is an Orange", I'll acknowledge that this particular judgement of yours is True. As Aquinas put it, restating from Aristotle, that:
"...the judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality. Moreover, the intellect judges about the thing it has apprehended at the moment when it says that something is or is not. This is the role of "the intellect composing and dividing."..."When you give the matter some consideration, it seems obvious enough, but it turns out that this most commonsensical of concepts, is ground zero in the philosophical and spiritual battle we've been engaged in for nearly all of modernity.
So with just a few basic metaphysical principles: that reality exists, that what exists is intelligible, that Truth is our understanding conforming to what is real, and that discovering and acknowledging what is true is of the utmost importance to a life worth living, we have what were and are recognized as being vital by both halves of our Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian cultural foundations. I'll save the details for later posts, but the first significant shot felt around the world in modernity, was fired upon those foundations by Descartes, with his claim that since reality could always be doubted, the only thing that couldn't be doubted, was whether or not you were in doubt about something within it (or 'it' itself) - meaning... that... rather than Truth being what you have when your thought conforms to reality (and is therefore able to be verified against reality as being true), the new arbiter of 'truths' became whether or not you clearly and distinctly believed that your own thoughts agreed with your own thoughts, and were therefore 'true'.
Through this new doubtful formulation, people soon began imagining that their own thoughts could subdue reality simply by doubting it, as what you don't doubt about what you think, became the 'truth' - 'my truth' - that the remainder of your thoughts should conform to (and of course if some fudging of 'facts' was needed to maintain that conformity, so long as you didn't doubt that it was needed... it was. (Shhh!)). Descartes' blending of pervasive skepticism with strident certainty in his philosophy and 'Method of Doubt', has intrigued Modernity into a labyrinth that soon after began to enclose and imprison us within it, and in a very real sense, only the earlier understanding of Truth can set us free of it.
Not surprisingly, the weapon that the modernist most often uses against what is real and true, is an inexhaustible supply of artificial and causeless doubt. Since Descartes' day, Kant gave the term 'doubt' a more respectable suit of clothes in the form of 'the critical question' (and which Marx much later weaponized as 'subject everything to relentless criticism'), and any reality the modernist desires to be free from respecting (made easier by Kant's declaring we can never really know reality 'as it is'), they simply and endlessly doubt the truth of it, typically by demanding endless 'proofs' of the self-evident.
But what more can be said about Truth, than that it conforms to reality?
Believe it or not, that question is a bit of a metaphysical minefield which you should approach very carefully, because as ideas have consequences, so does engaging with ideas that don't respect the metaphysical guardrails of reality that are meant to keep you on the road to objective truth. The question that should be asked before going down such paths, is not what more can be said about Truth than that it is what conforms to reality, but what would the attempt look like, and should we attempt to say anything more about it, than that?
What would attempting to do so entail? Wouldn't seeking 'something more' require either using some notion that's even more abstract and so further distanced from what is real and true, or by using something... else ... that'd require referencing something that doesn't exist and so is unreal... to verify what is real? Wouldn't you need to know what is real (i.e. self-evidently true), in order to identify what isn't real, in order to use what isn't real, to verify what is really true? Didn't that thought just take our thoughts and spin them around in a circle?!
There are of course some issues that require us to come at them from other perspectives, but a perspective that requires circular thinking and endless regress, will never be one of them. Such practices that lead into self-evidently circular reasoning, will quickly sweep your mind up along with it, but as a general rule, what is even better than exiting such loops, is not entering into them in the first place. A grasp of metaphysics helps us to avoid such traps by identifying their hazards and keeping our attention upon what is real, while exposing what is not true, and cannot be.
"I know what you're doing sonny, but it's no use, it's turtles all the way down!"Truth is thought conforming to reality, and it's not being thoughtful or deep to seek something 'more' through an endless circularity of ever-receding series of explanations which must mean less than that. It is important to realize that the Turtle ploy isn't about the 'turtles' - it's about getting away with an infinite regress of 'all the way down', which enables them to seem to say that there is something that they mean to say, without ever identifying what it is that they say that they mean. The ploy is deployed by modernists & post-modernists alike to distract you from the nullity of the assertions they're perpetually spinning their wheels in, as a surefire means of getting away with their signature circular spiraling down into nothingness - which is what everyone from Hegel to Heidegger to Kimberle Crenshaw have used and do use to separate minds from what is real and true - and they'd like nothing more than to suck you down into that infinite loop so that you'll become as miserably lost within it as they are - misery, and nihilism, love company.
If you want to get a firm hold upon the truth that modernity has alienated itself from, then brush the likes of the Turtle Lady, Descartes, and the rest of modernity aside, and return to the metaphysics which gave us our first solid grasp on our world in the first place, and which will steer you clear of spinning your wheels in such follies.
The key to keeping your premises conforming to reality, is to begin by adhering to the first principle of thought, which Aristotle identified in the fourth book of his Metaphysics, as the law of non-contradiction:
"...For a principle which every one must have who understands anything that is, is not a hypothesis; and that which every one must know who knows anything, he must already have when he comes to a special study. Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect; we must presuppose, to guard against dialectical objections, any further qualifications which might be added..."That a thing cannot both be, and not be, in the same manner and context, is inarguable and incontrovertible, and is the fundamental requirement of all knowledge. Even attempting to deny that (which Hegel did, and the Woke still do - we'll get to that in the next post), is to entangle oneself in inconsistencies and contradictions which simply cannot be, and once we acquire the habit of making ourselves aware of the simple concepts involved, no honest person would or should support any such claims.
What we know of reality begins with what we can perceive of it, and however high-flying an ideal might be, if it is a valid one, it can be traced back step by step to a less abstract and more concrete concept, until you finally reach its foundation in what is objectively real and true, and there's no need to pretend that it's possible to go any further down that road than you have, and it would be unwise to attempt it. As Aristotle goes on to say of those who demand proof of the self-evident:
"...Some indeed demand that even this shall be demonstrated, but this they do through want of education, for not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education. For it is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything (there would be an infinite regress, so that there would still be no demonstration); but if there are things of which one should not demand demonstration, these persons could not say what principle they maintain to be more self-evident than the present one..."As with the abstract lighting concept of a Chandelier, is built upon a lower level abstraction of a lighting fixture, which is built upon a lower level abstraction of a lamp, which is built upon a lower level abstraction of a candle, all of which are intended to output some measure of that concrete reality of light which emanates from them, as it does from the sun, moon, and stars - the abstract concept of a Chandelier allows for thousands upon thousands of variations on that theme, but what do you say to the person who demands more proof that the chandelier in your hand, is a chandelier?, or who demands that you prove that light provides light? They aren't seeking after what is true, they're attempting to cause you to doubt that anything at all can be known to be true.
Note: Investigating deeper into understanding how something comes to be what it is, as a prism demonstrates that white light is made up of a spectrum of colors, adds to our understanding of the nature of light, it doesn't invalidate or give cause for us to doubt our ability to perceive that light is light. Don't permit a misosophical hacker to instill doubts in you with comments such as "Physics proves that nothing is solid, as what you think is solid, is mostly empty space between molecules! It's all an illusion!", when the fact is that what physics actually shows us, is that solidity in the context of our lives, is made possible by how molecules form and interact across the molecular space between them - that 'emptiness' is what solidity is formed from.
That some people do this by either demands or doubts is undeniable - several post-modernists like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, all authored papers doubting the reality of authors - but why? Shakespeare, with characters like Iago and Edmund in his head, nailed the point well::
Take but degree away, untune that string,, which the philosopher Peter Kreeft put more plainly in that what confusing or doubting the meaning of our words 'accomplishes' in our thinking, in his book 'Socratic Logic', :
And hark what discord follows.
Each thing meets In mere oppugnancy [loud opposition over the merest trifles].
“Definition is crucial to logic. For a definition tells us what a thing is; and if we do not know what a thing is, by the first act of the mind, we cannot know what to predicate of it in the second act of the mind, and thus we have no premises for our reasoning (the third act of the mind).”It's worth taking notice that very few skeptics or relativists would dare doubt the self-evident injury and pain that your punching them in the nose would cause them to truly experience, yet they'll loudly demand that you fill the rest of your thoughts with doubts about every other self-evident reality you might experience.
What such skeptics, relativists, and out & out liars all depend upon, is being able to slip some detail past us within the abstract, to involve us in positions that contradict some aspect of reality, identity, consciousness, which a more careful attention to the metaphysical details can help spare us from, if we pay attention to what it is that they are saying.
What the meaning of the word 'IS' is, in the phrase 'What is Truth?', is what we'll get into in the next post.
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Sunday, April 16, 2023
'IS' demonstrates that what is objectively true, is where the action is - 'What is Truth' pt4
So having established a couple basic metaphysical principles in the previous posts (here, here, and here): that Reality exists, and is intelligible, and Truth is our words in conformance with Reality, we now come to the central word in the trio of 'What is Truth' - where between defining 'What' our words refer to, and 'Truth' being what should be the point of using them, 'is', is the active focal point of where our words and reality are either meeting - 'it is raining', or where we hope and/or expect that they will meet 'what is happening here?', or the means of separating you from both ("...ye shall be as gods..."). 'Is', is that point where an inattentiveness to metaphysics, enables the worst of us to 'untune that string', and leaves the rest of us watching on in amazement and able to do little more than '...hark what discord follows'.
Clinton of course wasn't carefully pointing out an important nuance of detail that the court had somehow not noticed was true, he was utilizing a post-modernist blend of technicalities & equivocations to lie by omission while also using his own lawyer and others as proxies to spread the lie and conceal the fact that he'd engaged in inappropriately intimate behavior with a young intern under his power. His words expertly exploited the assumptions of 'those who know best' in his fellow college educated judge, lawyers, and media, not to mention similarly muddled thought throughout society on matters of politics, party, and justice itself, which left enough people unable or unwilling to apply the principle of non-contradiction to his actions, in either a court of law or in the court of public opinion.
The effect of our president legitimizing a sordid lie by blatantly misusing and distorting the common understanding of our words, spread the seeds of a disdainful metaphysical blindness into every aspect of our society. From that point on, it seems to me, that those who'd already been visibly flinching at the mere mention of objective or self-evident truths, were emboldened to come out of their post-modern closets and openly treat those concepts and those still using them, with laughter and derision, as everyone else seemed to (shamefully) sigh and turn away as from a battle not worth fighting. Ideas have consequences, and the consequences of either torturing or turning a blind eye to the meaning of our words, was that meaningful discussions were that much less possible to engage in, and so people began looking no further than tribe and party for where to stand in every conflict that has since followed.
Word games and obfuscations aside, behind the verbiage there is always a 'What' that is being referred to, and the truth is that that is either real and so true, or it's nothing more than words, and that goes for objects and actions, and concepts as well - at some point they must connect with reality in order to be seen to be objectively true, or... not. It is essential for each person to understand that all of the intricately complicated and abstract ideals which civilized life requires and depends upon, from civility to principles of law, are ultimately traceable down to their rock hard foundations in reality, and without which its loftiest structures sway perilously in every tremor and breeze that comes along.
Every person who has a concern for what is real and true should also recognize that those who attempt to obscure or sew unwarranted doubts about those foundations, or to deny them outright, or even the possibility of them, are making a vicious attack upon the ability of every person within that society to live a life worth living. Such people as those who want to get away with the unreal, need you to not notice the lack of substance that underlies the webs that their words are spinning, and that requires distraction and misdirection on their part, and the more popular modernist and post-modernist means of doing that, is to involve you in attempting to argue how best to 'go further' than what can be demonstrated as being self-evidently true.
There are two very good reasons for you to not engage with their project:
1) As with the Turtle Lady and Bill Clinton, the argument they propose isn't intended to widen your knowledge, or to reveal nuances, but only to rattle your foundations and separate you from what is real and true.
2) You can't - not if you have any regard for logic and the issue in question.
If you allow yourself to be drawn into attempting to 'justify' or 'prove' their doubts about what is self-evident in the three Acts of the Mind, you'll find yourself stumbling into contributing to some form of a '... it's turtles all the way down!' argument yourself. There is no truth to be found in obfuscation and no logic to be found in circularity, and no value gained from giving the impression that greater understanding can be had by demanding 'more' than what is easily observed and intelligible for all reasonably healthy humans to understand - it already is -- wait for it -- objectively true.
It's also worth noting that in our society today we are far more likely to be directed away from making that observation ('What is a woman? Sorry, I'm not a scientist...'), than towards it, because so much of what we're intended to assume and accept, depends upon our not noticing that an obvious lie has some convoluted verbiage that 'justifies' it is 'true' (hello antiracism, men can be women, etc.).
At root, a self-evident truth is recognizably true, because it either denotes a perceptible fact that is apprehendable to the First Act of the Mind, from,
, or an observation from facts to a judgment that is self-evident to the Second Act of the Mind,
- this is a chandelier;
- what is real and true is intelligible;
- actions produce reactions;
, or that as a result of a number of observations and judgments available to all, we engage in the Third Act of the Mind and reason from them to a conclusion which is also possible to be self-evidently true:
- a chandelier is intended to be hung
- what is true, is true, no matter who perceives it;
- ideas have consequences
Important Note: What is Self-Evidently True at the level of observation, judgment, or reasoning, is not a claim to infallibility, but a recognition of what is self-evident within the context of the observations that have been made. A challenge to that certainty may rightly come from further observations that reveal more information, not less, or none, which will bring still more certainty to what is self-evidently true. What is evidently three oranges, at 50 paces, becomes apparent at 5 paces to be 2 oranges and an orange tennis ball, but that is not a repudiation of the earlier judgment, or a denial of your ability to make any such judgments, it is a clarification of both observation and judgment as a result of having more information, which provides you the means of making a better judgement.
- a chandelier is designed to bring light to a dark room;
- all men are mortal;
- each person is responsible for their chosen actions;
- what results from your choices, materials, and actions, establishes your claim upon it, AKA: Property;
Someone with an honest question or misunderstanding about a matter of observation, judgement, or reasoning, may have reasonable doubts or questions about those, which further explanations might enlighten them (or perhaps you) about, but that is a very different thing from the person who doubts or denies whether or not the chandelier in your hand is a chandelier, or that or that it is designed to be hung, or that having done so its purpose is to bring more light to the room than darkness. For the person that hurls comments such as 'you just think that, but you can't really know it, no one can know anything for certain!', what is there to argue with such a person about?
Any 'argument' that is focused only upon denying or pretending an unnatural and arbitrary doubt ('well it could be!'), can serve nothing other than the eradication of your ability to argue for what is true. To doubt or deny the self-evident truth that the chandelier in your hands is in fact a chandelier, or that it is to be hung to provide light, is no different than their doubting or denying the self-evident truth of mortality, or responsibility, or property, or anything else that is true. The doubts of such philosophical conmen are not meant to bring understanding, their purpose is to degrade your understanding and return you to the darkness they take cover in ('it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is', is' ).
But while you can't and shouldn't attempt to prove what actually is self-evidently true, you can, and should, demonstrate that their denials violate what is true. One means of doing so is through a method which was pioneered by Socrates, and perfected by Aristotle, and Aquinas, and has been employed down to our day by everyone from the Jesuits, to Ayn Rand, called 'Retortion', or sometimes 'Retorsion'. It derives its effectiveness through a metaphysical attention to the abstract defaults which hasty rhetoric tends to leave unexamined, empty, or even deliberately concealed, and by drawing attention to the fact that their claims depend upon what isn't actually there, or that they depend upon what is true in order to deny it, it uses the skeptic's and relativist's own words, to reveal what they'd left unsaid.
For instance, for the skeptic or relativist (same coin, different side) who claims (and I've actually had several people insist this to me) that:
"You can't prove that reality exists!", every word they used in saying that: 'You', 'can't', 'prove', 'that', 'reality', 'exists', presumes that reality does exist, and that something about it is communicated by those words within it, to someone else who exists in the same reality as they do, and such full-on self-contradiction invites the retort:
"Why would I need to prove what you just demonstrated?"And for those who'd say that, they might follow it up with another gem like:
"You can't know what's real and true for me!", which invites a retort of:
"How do you know what's true for me?"And if they retreat into:
"No one person can know that their judgment is true!", fully deserves a retort of:
"Is that true in your judgment?", and of course their replying with either a 'Yes' or a 'No', or simply glaring silently at you, is a use of their judgment, which again contradicts and invalidates their own claim. Call them on that, and they'll likely retreat again into non-sense (which is their ideal), claiming that:
"Truth is relative and your truth is not my truth!", which fully deserves a retort of:
"So you're saying that 'your truth is not my truth' is true for everyone?", which might bring out their big guns:
'No one can be certain of anything!', which is easily disarmed with:
"Are you certain of that?"It's like doing philosophy with Henny Youngman. And if they persist in attempting to confuse logic with reasoning by doing logic in an illogical manner, claiming that:
'Nothing can be proven!', as their own statement presumes the existence of logic and the high value which even they place on proof, which presumes and admits both, you need only ask:
"How certain are you that you can prove that?"How embarrassing. It's really not rocket science, it's barely philosophical, and requires no expertise in logic, only a smattering of ability to pay attention to the words and grammar being used for most people to do just fine (which is why both have been dropped from the curriculum).
Even attempting to deny your ability to know anything, is itself a claim to know something, reaffirming human nature once again with the opening line of Aristotle's metaphysics: 'All men by nature desire to know', and it brings the skeptic face to face with the self-refuting nature of their own positions. As Aristotle pointed out, for a skeptic to behave consistently with their 'ideals', they'd have to sit silently and motionlessly awaiting death to take them away, as taking such ideals seriously would permit nothing less, and that of course would be far too opposed to the nature of human nature, for anyone to do.
And for the skeptic and relativist who takes the bait and attempts to deny the reality of human nature, you can deliver the verbal beating they've been begging for by drawing their attention to the universal fact that everyone, everywhere, by nature, engages in the same three mental operations, all at once, in apprehending what exists, making judgments upon that, and reasoning what to do about it - even prior to the Three Acts of the Mind. Ask them to close their eyes, hold your hand up, and tell them to open their eyes and tell you what they see, and without going any further than that, they will have to admit that their mind engages in three inseparable operations, and by inseparable, I mean that you cannot even conceive of one of the three, without also engaging the other two, as with tweaking an observation of Ayn Rand's (as what she calls 'axiomatic concepts')
Note that these three points don't strike you in three sequential steps, all three - Reality, Identity, Awareness - are always simultaneously implicit in, and entangled with, every thought and observation we make. It is how we apprehend reality in any Act of the Mind, and outside of the biomechanical means of perception, which, though fascinating, add nothing to how we consciously understand what we do, there is nothing more that needs to be added to the matter, nothing further to analyze or demonstrate, and any attempt to do so, would involve an endless spiral of circular references, which would of course invalidate the effort of attempting to do so. If you doubt that, just try describing anything at all, without implicitly referencing all three.
- Reality exists. - You perceive that the hand before you exists (and yes Neo, even if it's only a computer simulation, the simulation, or a dream, in that context, it exists)
- Identity - What reality exists as, entails its identity - They don't see the reality of your hand as an undistinguished whole, they identify it - from non-contradiction this isn't that, runs from a silhouette to a molecular scan - through perceiving the elements of your palm, fingers, thumb, etc.
- Awareness - observing what Reality exists as, engages our awareness of our conscious selves - we become aware that there is a self that's observing the hand before them, and that they too exist within reality.
Luckily... wait, what's that? Oh, ok, I hear a couple of you out there, so you think you can affirm or deny one of those points without utilizing and confirming them all together? Ok, go for it, I'll wait... on second thought, long-form blogging isn't so interactive. I tell you what, I'll just go ahead and argue the matter for you. So, here we go: You'd argue that:
"You..",Ok, hold on, sorry, but I've gotta stop you right there - what or who do you mean by 'you'? "Well.. [you point at me]...". Ok, so you're pointing in my directions as if I'm really here?, [you nod in agreement], So... you're pointing at something "Here" that exists? [you reluctantly nod again], Meaning that you are identifying me, as a person who exists, and you are doing so because you are consciously aware that I am aware of you, just as you are aware of me? [you nervously clear your throat, nod again].
Ok, so summing up your tightly argued refutation against the fact that the three - Reality, Identity, Awareness - are implicit in the nature of every human being's observation, necessitated your pointing into the reality which exists and contains yourself and who you are pointing at, to identify me, as someone who you are consciously aware of, and who is aware of you.
Is that about right? [... you nod again]. And all of that was implied in your very first word? [c'mon man, nod again]. Nice... soOo... we're done here, right? Alrighty then. Moving on.
Luckily enough you don't need a formal grasp of logic for any of this, only need a rudimentary grasp of grammar - even my feeble grammatical skills will do just fine - and a willingness to pay attention to what is (and isn't) being said. Elaborate arguments and proofs aren't the point of, or a necessity for, anyone to be albe to live their life well, the point is only to not allow what 'is not', to appear to aquire substance and consequence in your life, and all that's truly needed for guarding against that, is to notice and point out contradictions where they exist. And that is afterall, the very first rule of logic - that if the premises are not true - meaning that they contradict reality - there is no logical method that can be performed with or upon them!
By deriving self-evident truths from observations, to judgments, to a reasoned understanding of matters, an observant and informed person who's also willing to further develop their understanding against those thoughts as might be found "...in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c...", is very likely to find themselves reasonably connecting the conceptual dots to reveal that higher understanding which forms the basis of Individual Rights,
, and other such thoughts as the West was formed from and upon, and which was more eloquently formulated at America's founding, with:
- "as the nature of being human comes by virtue of being human, rather than from circumstance of birth, it justifiably follows that living life well, requires respecting every other persons need to do so as well;"
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness..."For those who do honestly balk at what you can see is self-evidently true, the posing and pursuing of a few questions may eventually reveal their error to them (and yes, many honest people adhere to and peddle lies, because they once believed a liar who taught them that they were true), and while they may hesitate to acknowledge it, if they're asking and considering the questions, they're half way there. It might be worth reminding them - especially if they paid attention in our modern schools - that finding what is meaningful requires going beyond merely scanning for information, you must involve your active attention with the words you are reading, and consider them, to gain an understanding of them, in order for them, and you, to fully inhabit your life.
But, for those others who merely and obnoxiously deride and deny that '...Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness...' is self-evident, scoffing at everything from our ability to choose our own actions, to denying that anyone can know that anything is true, and for those who have no reply to those retortions that reveal the errors and dishonesty within such positions, who reply primarily with anger and/or deliberate defitional evasions - there truly is no reasoning with them. Such folk will likely soon resort to asserting that 'what everybody knows' as 'a people', is a more significant 'standpoint' than what any one individual can know is real and true (which is where 'systemic power' enters into the picture, but that's for the upcoming posts on Epistemology), and you're better off just letting them know that you've seen the emptiness behind their mask, and then simply move along.
Reality - what exists - is the fundamental Object of our thoughts, and our thoughts indicate our relation to it, as the subject which knows the object. It's not an issue of Objective vs. Subjective, it's more like the Objective and Subjective operating in concert, that enables our minds to work. Our judgments about reality can be true, and our perceiving that there's a relation between one judgment and another, can lead us to yet another judgment between that and another thing we've judged to be true, and so on, building up to the reasoning that is the Third Act of the Mind, and doing so should bring two very important points to mind - one obvious, and one that's soOooo obvious that it usually escapes our attention altogether:
1) The merely obvious point, is that the reasoning that we build our judgments upon can be impressive, can be eloquent, persuasive, and even stirring, and yet, even the most persuasive and stirring reasoning can be utterly and completely false. And conversely, as Socrates demonstrated to the point of being put to death for doing so, a thoroughly true and well-reasoned argument can be misunderstood, ignored, or flat out denied.
Obviously, that's a problem.
However impressively reasoned and logical an argument seems to be, if its premises are not true, and/or if those you're reasoning with do not realize (or care) that they are true, then all is for naught. Aristotle's first rule of logic - the one that is usually ignored today - is that we must first ensure that our premises are true, and then and only then, can you begin to say something logically worthwhile about it.
What Retortion is effective at doing, is dealing with the perceptible aspects of the abstractions in those too often unexamined premises, which are what both the honest error and the deliberate lie are built upon, and that's why the importance of being familiar with metaphysical concepts is so important. For as the abstract nature of 'chandelier' encompasses the various differences in style and materials of hundreds or even thousands of very physically different chandeliers, a concept such as 'is', which potentially encompasses all of existence and being in itself, it's vital that the appropriate levels of abstraction that could otherwise be smuggled past your awareness, be identified, within the context of the moment, because carelessly leaving those in the abstract, which is the habit that our schools have helped to instill in us, is the very thing that the unscrupulous count upon using to exploit us.
Those who persist in claims that minimize or ignore metaphysics, are not engaging in philosophy - the love of wisdom - but only a deliberate sham of avoiding and attacking it, aka: Sophistry [see the 'nothing new under the sun' nature of the pre-modern state of post-modernism's 'i. Nothing exists, ii. Even if existence exists, it cannot be known, iii. Even if it could be known, it cannot be communicated', as the IEP notes was being taught by the sophist who was confronted by Socrates in 'The Gorgias']. It should also be no surprise that those who exist in continual conflict with reality, and the continuous need to fake it, while attempting to hide it behind those words they fake it with, tend to be rather bitter and hostile - their own thoughts are actively alienating them from the real world that they actually do live in, no matter how much they might want to deny it. Having rejected Truth, they have only the illusion of power to appeal to, which endlessly depends upon your not noticing the ever-present reality that they must endlessly obscure and deny, through the force of their words alone. That has got to be exhausting.
Don't consent. Don't submit. Don't enable those who desire the power to play God with their own lives, to unleash chaos amongst ours.
Do recognize that to devalue or deny Knowledge and wisdom, is an attack upon every aspect of your ability to live a life worth living. Take the time to think through the placeholders to what is true. To identify and respect the nature of what is, enables your mind to integrate with what is real and true, and conversely, to ignore or deny what is, is to alienate your mind from existence, and from truth, and from yourself, imprisoning you in the same faked world as theirs. Truly, when we carelessly and negligently misuse metaphysical abstractions, we're heading into a whole world of trouble, stepping into a jail cell and locking the door behind us. Fortunately for us, the Truth will set you free - if you engage with it.
2) The too obvious point that I mentioned, is one that's rarely given the attention it deserves, is that we all place a value upon what we know is true - even Marxists listen to who knows the truth about how best to sell a lie - and we do so because it's an accurate reflection of some aspect of reality as it is. People are judged to be fools or wise, based upon how well their thoughts and actions corollate with and conform to what is objectively real and true. The wisdom of that bit of obviousness was apparent even in Aristotle's day, as he noted in his Metaphysics, book 1, chp 1,
"...that all men suppose what is called Wisdom to deal with the first causes and the principles of things; so that, as has been said before, the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any sense-perception whatever, the artist wiser than the men of experience, the masterworker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of Wisdom than the productive. Clearly then Wisdom is knowledge about certain principles and causes...", and the man with more experience in what they know to be true, is thought wiser than the one who knows nothing, or knows it only 2nd hand. IOW, we all know that Truth is objective, and that it's true because it conforms to what is; to existence, to being, which Is intelligible to all of us. We all routinely act upon that; it's only when we put ideology over wisdom, that we profess to doubt, deny, or devalue, what is objectively true, and for those who'd deny it, the truth of it burns... as it turns out that not only do ideas have consequences, they have causes.
How the causes of those ideas go about producing consequences in our lives, is what we'll look at next.
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Friday, July 07, 2023
A well rounded knowledge of the root causes - causality & its effects (a)
Ideally, as gone into in the previous posts (here, here, here, and here), what's worth knowing, tells us about 'What is Truth', and with the differing kinds of knowledge that can be known, he who knows their causes, will know them (and themselves) best. At the root of those causes that philosophy can tell us about, is the understanding that Aristotle opened his Metaphysics with, that:
"All men by nature desire to know"
Causality & its effects parts a-g
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
, but because some choose poorly, and do so repeatedly, even obstinately, we know that truth is not what all men desire to 'know', and we know that some men want what they want with little or no knowledge of what would cause those desires to become a reality and without regard for the consequences that might be caused by that. For the rest of us who care about truth and its consequences, what Metaphysics can reveal to us about Knowledge and Cause, can help us gain an understanding that'll help restore what was lost when we gave up the ideal of a 'well rounded education', and return to us a little more of the command that we seem to have lost over our lives, but we should not forget that some of us have no interest in learning that, and many of those would rather that you didn't hear about it either - and sadly we've put many of those in charge of our schools.
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
Philosophy has separate branches for going more in depth into these two key terms, with Epistemology clarifying what we mean by knowledge and how to verify that it is what it claims to be (which we'll get into in coming posts), and for the aspect of causation I'm most interested in, the Ethics clarifies how you should respond to Causes in your life (whether from external circumstances or what you internally come to understand), and while Aristotle goes into more depth on both in other books like his Nichomachean Ethics, Analytics, and even the Physics, in the Metaphysics he looks at their foundations, and as it's a safe bet that a better understanding of that can have a sizable impact on your day to day doings and possibly even the entire course of your life, it's worth taking a closer look at those basics, and we'll begin that in this post with Knowledge.
"...it is thought to be the mark of a prudent man to be able to deliberate rightly about what is good and advantageous…But nobody deliberates about things that are invariable...", highlights what is missed by not understanding how differently chance and uncertainty affect what we know and how to apply it, and failing to do so can result in our being harmed by, rather than benefiting from, the knowledge we acquire - truly: 'A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing'.
To illustrate, beginning with the extreme end which Aristotle includes the categories of mathematics and theology in, we know that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle in a Euclidean plane (an important caveat) will always be 180* - and that knowledge is as true today, as it will be true tomorrow, just as it has been from the beginning of time, and as it will be to the end of time. No chances of context or material configuration need to be allowed for in that invariable truth - there is nothing to deliberate about, no judgements to be considered and weighed - for once it is understood by observation, that knowledge only needs to be identified, to be known and applied, and we'd be rightly concerned about the person who continued to deliberate upon and 'fact check' the sum of degrees in every possible triangle (it's worth noting, because it is so often misused & abused, that Math & Geometry are not pure truths somehow existing apart form and unsullied with reality and experience - their is no concept of a line, or a number, except through experience and inferring from quantities of it. Dualism is false, even on that level).
OTOH, every other form of knowledge outside of mathematics and theology, contains some variability of chance and context to be considered and deliberated upon, so as to make a worthwhile judgement about it. How well your knowledge can serve the good you are aiming at, depends a great deal upon how well you recognize the nature and variations within it. With that in mind, let's take a look at how Knowledge can be generalized into three basic categories, varying in degree from that which requires the least judgment in attaining and applying that knowledge, to the most :
Those differences in the nature of knowledge, in how it is gathered, learned, and applied, can be glimpsed in the differences between knowing how to identify the molecular nature of water, knowing how best to package and convey, and/or sell water, and knowing to bring extra water when crossing a desert or to boil it when traveling. Being aware of those distinctions, and how best to form judgments from each of those perspectives, is what lays behind the now nearly forgotten ideal of getting a general and 'well rounded' education.
- Empeiría/Epistemé - often translated as only one word or the other, what we call Empirical, refers to the facts and data of experience, while Epistemé refers to the principled methods of Science;
- Tékhne - what we today call Technology, is the “art” or “technique” of putting the facts and data of experience to use;
- Sophía - Wisdom (Philosophy, philo-Sophia, being the love of wisdom) goes deeper and sees farther into how to turn the experiences and arts of living, towards having lives that are worth living
Those who lack (or ignore) that understanding, tend to embody the old joke about 'if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail' - or the equally appalling "You should only believe a truth that is scientifically verifiable". By having some depth and dimension to what you know about what you know, you are less likely to mistake what is appropriate with one form of knowledge, as also being appropriate to another - our knowledge of the molecular structure of water and how it interacts with what contains it, is not known in the same way as how best to convey that water, or whether or when water should be charged for or provided free of charge - and not knowing those distinctions, implicitly degrades the quality of all of what you do know, and what you might attempt to do with that knowledge.
That being said, it's worth poking just a little bit further into the essentials of the three basic categories of knowledge:
- Empirical/Science - these refer to two very different aspects of the knowledge being translated here. How we experience empirical knowledge typically begins with what we all have a casual and even accidental firsthand awareness of - that rocks are hard, water is wet, and fire is hot - it takes no judgment to apprehend such empirical facts, it simply is, and we perceive it. It's in observing and seeking to discover why those facts are the way they are, that leads the inquirer into discovering and identifying what makes them that way, but once those truths, principles, and laws are discovered to be behind that, they do not change and are thereafter there to be learned, and that methodical aspect of gathering and applying that knowledge - heavier on understanding than judgment - is what's usually translated as Episteme, and is more like what we recognize as Scientific knowledge today. By following Aristotle's lead and going further down paths which he only partially anticipated, we've developed that understanding into a more methodical means of applying the principle of non-contradiction to all that we know, subjecting our assumptions and biases to experimentation and verification for the purpose of better understanding the more eternal reasons for how and why it is that we experience a rock as being hard, and what it is about water that makes it feel wet, as well as how it is that the molecular composition of water can be decomposed into its explosively firey elements of Hydrogen and Oxygen, and so on, and the refinement of that process which has become the Scientific Method, has laid the foundations for the modern conveniences and marvels we enjoy today.
- Technique and Technology, bridges the unchanging and non-deliberative knowledge developed in the scientific fields of chemistry, geology, physics, etc., with the form of knowledge that requires a great deal of deliberating upon, in order to calculate how the various concerns in what we chance to bump into in everyday life, can be utilized in putting that knowledge to work, as with controling the flow of water to generate electricity, or seeing how the chemical structure of a problematic & oily substance found in the ground, could be refined into a new form that would power engines that could do work for us, and developing vehicles that can take us farther and faster on land, see, air, and even space, than was ever dreamt of prior to that understanding. The form of knowledge which scientists discover about the world we live in, the technician develops into different forms of knowledge in specialized techniques and new technologies, which commerce transforms into previously unimagined improvements to the circumstances of our lives.
The Scientific Method which has led us to understand that 'this molecule of water has two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen', involves a very different form of knowledge and judgment, than that which is involved in deliberating upon the means of conveying water to the people who need it via an aqueduct, water lines, or bottled water, which are all very different forms of knowledge, and involve different forms of judgement in applying them, than that which is involved in determining what does and doesn't justify such constructions or commercial distributions, and even laws governing access to it, and each is fostered by, and depends upon, our philosophical understanding of the nature and limits of what we can know, and how we know it, and what it is that we do, and don't know, in knowing it.
- Wisdom , specifically that part of wisdom, Phronesis, that's translated as Practical Wisdom or Prudence, looks more deeply into our available knowledge, and more broadly into our experiences, to see farther than either science or technology do or can, and is especially mindful of the degree of chance and choice that is always involved in acting on 'what we know' in our lives. The role of the wise, the (believe it or not) intellectuals, is to take note of what is common between our many experiences - the One in the Many - to discover and make known the principles behind that knowledge and how to effectively use them to better our lives. The Metaphysics notes that,
"Clearly then Wisdom is knowledge about certain principles and causes...", but the person who not only has the broader knowledge belonging to wisdom, but prudence as well, focuses not just on unchanging principles, but demonstrates a knack for calculating how best to apply that timeless knowledge and experience to the ever changing circumstances of daily life; in the Nicomachaen Ethics"...wisdom is a combination of both the virtue of science and the virtue of understanding...", the prudent person demonstrates a knack for intelligently combining a knowledge of fact and efficiency that comes from science, and from technology, with a knowledge of the timeless principles governing circumstances and personalities, to make the choices of calculated judgment regarding right and wrong, life and death, that are both accurate and principled, and effective at improving not only our apparent circumstances, but the quality of the lives we're able to live (which gives you a glimpse at what a failure the Intellectual Class of modernity, is).
The wise and prudent person understands that, contrary to popular (modern) belief, knowledge is not power, or it is at least not the obedient servant that we've been led to think of it as being, and knowledge severed from principled understanding and experience, is a blinding danger to all. Knowledge, when its variations are rightly understood, and when we are cognizant of how and why matters both large and seemingly small can lead to unexpected consequences in our lives - always mindful of the context of choice and chance - can be put to work which benefits all - but that requires the pursuit of understanding, rather than the pursuit of power.
However dazzling the improvements that the Scientific Method has brought to modernity, it's important to keep in mind that the judgments of those in science and technology, are typically concerned with much narrower calculations to improve measurable efficiencies for comfort and/or profit within their society - conveniently ignoring the fact that a society, a culture, are forms of knowledge that science and technology can neither conceive of, nor create, nor maintain - the scientific method, and the ability to apply it, is a very different thing from the weight of making judgments about immeasurable aspects of how best to live, or how best to respond in life or death contexts, and while each life is immeasurably improved by knowledge of what is wise, the wisest person cannot possibly know the manifold circumstances and context that each individual has to consider in the decisions they make every day in the living of their lives. All forms of knowledge are important, but it's even more important not to confuse one for the other.
The role of a well-rounded education is to impart how the essentials of science, technology, and the Humanities (arts, literature, history), fit into and form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, with the understanding that being able to see that whole through each part's perspective, helps to convey an appreciation of how those differences are all needed to form a solid and sound whole, and without which we are limited to seeing less of what there is to see - both in the form of better appreciating the whole, and what endangers it. Those with the interest and aptitude to delve into a particular field at greater depth, so with the larger picture in mind, as they pursued a more detailed knowledge of the part which interested them most, within the whole.
This is not to minimize or ignore the feats of ingenuity and even courage that may be involved in operating in any one of these fields, but to point out the importance of distinguishing between the varying forms of knowledge and judgement involved in scientific, technical, and intellectual fields, so as to have the depth to avoid being misled by seemingly 'obvious answers' that lead to long lasting harm. Especially today, as the ideal of a broad and well-rounded education has been displaced by a focus upon narrowly specialized skills, we too easily risk mistaking a person's abundant cleverness in their own field, as being equivalent to that wisdom they lack, and who - whether that be ourselves or the follies of the likes of a Neil deGrass Tyson that we began these posts with - see no issue with freely advising and advocating for using legislative power to order how others 'should' be made to live, because that's 'obviously' for the 'greater good', and the popular approval of that sort of thinking, spreads it, and endangers us all.
If it isn't clear to you what value is gained by making those distinctions within what you know and how you know it, which is what a well rounded education provides, the absence of that understanding is on full display in the bloody and destructive global history of the 20th Century for you to learn from (did you know that the ideal of a well rounded education was mostly gone by 1895?). There you'll find an abundance of lessons for learning hard truths from, with each one demonstrating that those paths forged for 'the greater good' of all, inevitably, invariably, have led and will lead to vast numbers of people experiencing lives rent by the greatest misery and destruction imaginable.
What drove those events, was that worst development of modernity, Ideology (conceived of in 1796 as a 'science of ideas'), which inherently targets the ideal of a 'well rounded education', preferring to reduce all knowledge to 'scientific' facts and skills, as well as in planning for, and applying them. Ideology despises chance, free will, choice, virtue, morality, art, wisdom, and all the other 'irrationalities' which make human life worth living well, ignoring and denying them in its drive to impose its certainty (of what?) upon society as a collective whole, with the presumption that individuals are little more than empirical factors to be scientifically managed through their theories.
There is nothing smart about proposals which measure all that's worth knowing by 'Science!', or that decide right and wrong by what 'Artificial Intelligence' tells us, or that justifies slighting or slandering the individual rights of any for 'the greater good!', and there is no 'progress' that can be found in going down such paths, only regress.
How science and technology get passed off as the highest of high judgment, overlooking what's essential to knowledge and the application of it, has a lot to do with how little we consider what causes us to think and do this or that, and the role of judgment involved in acting and reacting to those causes, which is what we'll look into next, with Causality.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
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Friday, July 07, 2023
The Causation of egg on our faces - causality & its effects (b)
By its very nature, Metaphysics is at the root of our every thought and action, but there's one of its features that is especially visible in seemingly separate fields of study, like Knowledge (Epistemology), and Ethics, and that's Causation. It warrants your attention not because it has been at the center of so many philosophical firestorms in modernity (most having more to do with the baseless speculations of modern philosophers, than with what they did or could know of any causes at all), but because it is so intertwined into all of our thoughts and actions, beliefs, and policies, that what you do or don't know about it, will fundamentally affect how you'll think about or respond to, nearly everything in your everyday life.
Causality & its effects parts a-g
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
How it became so consequential isn't immediately obvious as you start reading what philosophers have had to say about Causation, as they don't usually begin by wondering what causes us to take the actions we do, such as striking a match to light a candle, instead they begin with what knowledge we can have of the material nature of issues such as what causes the candle wick to catch fire, or what causes metal to melt, or causes the sun to rise, all of which are informed by observations of empirical and scientific understanding (AKA: Entry level Knowledge). Some theories of Causation begin to take on an ominous air, as their seemingly innocuous, sometimes even silly, notions about what causes metal to melt, or the sun to rise, move swiftly from empirical observations, to ethical judgments, and even demands for political action (as noted earlier of Neil deGrasse-Tyson using his authority on scientific knowledge to justify demanding political action be taken), and it's by a number of mis-integrations and even disintegrations of causal relations between different forms of knowledge, that our accepted ideas of Causation, can cause all too real social and political turmoil in our day-to-day lives.
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
 |
| Scientism—a Hallmark of the Dialectic, a Weapon of the Left (pg 14) |
The consequences of theories of causation gain in intensity through how they do or don't attend to the lowest and highest considerations of causation, as modernists tend to deliberately ignore and even ridicule those aspects that come closest to Identity (what Is) and Telos ( direction, intent) - which, ignored or not, aims and becomes the aim of their thoughts, which in a thousand different ways are insinuated into the popular opinions that we typically think with. That telos affects whether such patterns of thought will tend to lift you up into the broad light of day, or drive you down into the narrow darkness of an endless night of facts shorn from truth.
Pre-modern philosophers like Aristotle, began considering causation by observing the physical nature and effects of what was visible around them, and in a number of his works, including his physics (yes, still worth reading), he confined his observations, as Newton would do long after him with Gravity, to describing the effects of causality that he could see, without claiming to either fully understand or deny what he couldn't see in it. His ideas of Actuality and Potency, intuited principles of what was most likely happening just beyond the visible surface, from those particulars that could be observed occurring, which enabled something such as the hardened state that a metal like bronze holds as its normal Actuality, to also have the Potency - the potential - to change by melting into a liquid form under significantly high temperatures. The high level language he used to describe those features is still remarkably applicable to, or at least doesn't outright contradict, the very much more detailed molecular & chemical knowledge of today, which he lacked (though some modern physicists do think that ol' Aristotle's Act and Potency was more on target than he himself could've imagined).
Importantly, Aristotle didn't attempt to pass off either his ignorance or what doubts he might've had about what he couldn't be certain of as 'knowledge', that was suitable for guiding or declaring what else could be known, and the reason why was that the purpose of his philosophizing was to attempt to describe what was in fact True, rather than concocting a popular narrative that might be made socially or politically... useful.
The Sophists, OTOH, then as now, are primarily concerned with concocting narratives that ape philosophy's love of wisdom, by making a sensational use of a 'critical dialectic', which they pass off as being equivalent or superior to philosophy. Aristotle dismantled those sophistries elsewhere in his Metaphysics, but it was the nature of their imitation of appearances, that he remarked on here, as:
"...So too there are certain properties peculiar to being [Existence, Reality] as such, and it is about these that the philosopher has to investigate the truth.-An indication of this may be mentioned: dialecticians and sophists assume the same guise as the philosopher, for sophistic is Wisdom which exists only in semblance, and dialecticians embrace all things in their dialectic, and being is common to all things; but evidently their dialectic embraces these subjects because these are proper to philosophy.-For sophistic and dialectic turn on the same class of things as philosophy, but this differs from dialectic in the nature of the faculty required and from sophistic in respect of the purpose of the philosophic life. Dialectic is merely critical where philosophy claims to know, and sophistic is what appears to be philosophy but is not....."The Sophists 'critical dialectic' consists of raising arbitrary doubts out of thin air, with which they claim to have actually captured that Wisdom which philosophers more modestly pursue. From there, the Sophists sling their doubts wildly around until they're formed into supposed paradoxes for startling listeners into paying attention to their claims to know 'the truth' about issues, which could claim both that Change isn't possible, and just as easily that 'Change!' is all there is, without in either case ever actually explaining what they truly mean by any part of that.
Where philosophers seek first to know what IS, and from there pursue what they can intuit is truthfully compatible with that in order to enlarge understanding, the Sophists assert & sow doubts in order to deny what IS, so as to claim that anything could be, or could be anything other than what it is, in order to cause discord and encourage action, so as to, as Marx infamously declared that:
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it"Despite how absurd such claims (rightfully) appear to be to most sensible people, we need to resist the urge to brush their sophistries off as 'Eggheaded gibberish that's of no concern to me!', because the danger of these sophistries, and to the society they spread through, comes from thinking that they have and can have no impact on your life, as that is nearly as far from the truth as the sophistries themselves are.
For decades we've made the mistake of laughing off the absurdities that've been taught on our college campuses as merely pointy-headed foolishness, while ignoring the fact that generations of American youth have been taught to take those claims and ideals seriously, which has left us particularly vulnerable to being swept up in the downstream effects of these absurdities, as they've flipped our Corporate HR Dept's, and financial rating schemes, around to imposing those 'pointy headed absurdities' of DEI, through the exceedingly pointy end of dangerously powerful policies and laws which are maiming our children's lives in our schools, and across the workplace and society as a whole.
The Sophist's 'Critical Dialectic', whether in classical Greece, the opening of Modernity, or today's Post-Modern America, is to propose that we (uncritically) ingest whichever set of doubts they've proposed as being of value, while ignoring what their sum total actually amounts to: causeless doubts which have no substance. When they're successful at peddling such beliefs, their dialectic begins to function as a philosophical acid, dissolving whichever knowledge of the prevailing wisdom is being targeted by them, in order to carry out its primary purpose - transforming that meaning (especially that which aids you in conceiving of and living a good life), into meaning nothing to you. Of course where there is no meaning, no vision, '...the people perish', and many sophists see in that perishing the opportunity ('don't let a crisis go to waste') to pursue and capture the power which they intend to fully utilize for however long their '15 minutes' of infamy might be made to last.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Dialectic, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
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Friday, July 07, 2023
Of Cause and Causelessness - causality & its effects (c)
Whether the unfathomable outrage of the moment involves praising the burning down of cities as peaceful protests or ignoring those in order to spin up minor riots as horrific insurrections, or claiming that it takes a biologist to define what a woman is and yet any male from three years old on up can easily 'identify as' and become a woman and even become pregnant, you can be sure that some philosopher's thoughts on causation will be found to be at the 'root cause' of it. And of course 'Those who know best' are eager to assert those ideas as provable and even proven facts, to be passed on through media and wackademia as being the latest nuggets of wisdom that we're all supposed to accept as being beyond question, by people who believe they've captured the 'Wisdom' (the 'End of History') that 'uncritical' philosophers only pursue.
Causality & its effects parts a-g
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
That alone should be cause enough for you to be wary as to whether or not 'accepted truths' come to your ears from the lips of Sophia, or someone very different. In an earlier post I'd mentioned the Turtle Lady, as an example of a sophist who (sincerely or not) defends their unquestionable claims against reasonable questions, with some variation upon:
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
"... I know what you're doing, but it's no use, it's turtles all the way down!...", and it's in that format that is and always has been the trademark 'Tell' of sophistry - sincere or (more often) not - where, in lieu of knowledge we're offered only an endless regression of 'what ifs', whose only substantial purpose is to undermine people's confidence in what they know, so as to sway their audience towards whichever ideology it is that the sophist's 'critical commentary' is promoting as the real (usually hidden and 'smarter') 'truth' - which they never actually identify, or explain, but endlessly promise to deliver... eventually.
"Let me make you feel a little less comfortable. This ground is not solid..."
One popular form of these age-old sophisms today, is favored by the most deplorable of people (AKA: the Marxist inclined), who proclaim their paradoxes as materialistic revelations, such as that what we experience as solid ground, is 'akshually' riddled with fissures below, "Let me make you feel a little less comfortable. This ground is not solid...", or even that what we take as being a hard surface, is 'nothing but space on the atomic level', with the point being that since you can't really trust your senses when they tell you something appears to be solid, which is 'actually' mostly empty space, then 'logically' you must agree that you cannot be certain of anything at all, and any claim that 'They!' use to convince you that you can, is just a lie that serves the ruling class, the capitalists, etc., etc., etc.,
The truth about such 'paradoxes' though, is that they are dis-ordered truths which vanish once they're put in the proper order & context, in that the supposed 'empty space' is a necessary feature of how solidity is achieved - when molecules, atoms, and particles are arranged so as to form a solid object, they are configured in such a way that, taken out of context, can be portrayed as 'empty space', but that arrangement on the sub-atomic level, is what creates what we experience 'up here' as solidity on the human level! The fact is that we are better able to understand the world around us, by using all those philosophic principles of science, techne, and wisdom, so long as they are properly ordered and aligned, to establish sound knowledge of what is real and true. So far from their supposed 'paradox' being a cause for you to doubt what you know, it is a confirmation of our knowledge and ability to understand what is real and true, which should heighten your wariness of the dangers of accepting baseless doubts, as actual knowledge.
It is by artfully equivocating between very different forms of knowledge, again, as those like deGrasse-Tyson do, that the shallowest of observations are rhetorically transformed through a semblance of logical proofs, so that such unexamined sophistries that might have seemed foolish to those who knew better, are revealed to be a very practical means of nudging popular opinion along into accepting a set of assumptions based loosely upon physical causes and vague aspirations, which encourages one or two or both extremes of thinking, as:
'We need order, and as one thing is as meaningless as the next, we will impose our collective ideal upon all!', or,
'If nothing causes anything, then anything goes!', which cause dissension and unrest amongst society, and though they may appear different, they're no more different than two sides of the same sophistical coin: demanding order be imposed, requires believing that Right & Wrong are the weakest of illusions which must be replaced by those who're able to impose power, just as those who believe that since nothing can be known, there can be no right or wrong, only a series of material causes & effects that are popular with 'those who know best' - the only significant point they differ on is who is 'the best', you, or an 'expert' - which is a distinction without any fundamental difference.
Notice also that what both sides of that sophistical coin ignore, beginning and end, corresponds to Identity & Telos. In Aristotle's system, you begin at the beginning by identifying what you're dealing with, and following where that leads, much like 'character is destiny', sets the direction of your thinking, and without those two formulations of beginning and end, you can easily, not to mention carelessly, construe what you will with what remains between them. To escape this modernist muddle of materialistic Cause & Effect, requires recovering those discarded aspects of Causation - beginning and end, and much more of what lies in between - and with that interest in looking honestly at reality, we're brought back around to Aristotle and his conception of 'The Four Causes'.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
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Friday, July 07, 2023
Causation Squared - causality & its effects (d)
To gain a better understanding of what is happening around us, we need to make better distinctions about what underlies - causes - those events, in order to foresee where they are likely to be leading us. Doing so enables us to better understand, predict, and conform, to the reality of the world around and within us. Aristotle developed his Four Causes after long years of pointedly observing the world around him, seeking after and discovering the causes behind what would become our sciences, ethics, politics, literature, he found that by seeking to make more detailed distinctions regarding whatever it was he was considering, took him beyond the surface distractions of only material 'cause and effect', to penetrate deeper into what it was that he was observing, what brought it about, and so become able to see more clearly where that was leading to. He broke those distinctions down into these steps, the Four Causes:
Causality & its effects parts a-g
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
While I'll understand if you don't care much for what causes a bronze statue to be produced, by developing the habit of looking deeper into the nature of causation than only the shallowest of surface appearances, you'll be more aware of where you are in the world, more informed about what it is you are observing, and less mystified about what's going on around you - in short, an attention to causation, causes you to have a more thorough understanding of what truly does matter to you.
- the Material Cause: “that out of which”, e.g., bronze is what a statue is made out of.
- the Formal Cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue.
- the Efficient Cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.
- the Final Cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, or that health is the end that's being aimed at by walking, losing weight, medicine, and surgical tools; e.g., or that to enhance a park setting is why a bronze statue is commissioned for a place in it;
Properly considering the 'Four Causes' of something that is happening, or that you want to happen, is a fruitful means of not only gaining a better understanding of what has happened, or is happening, but the habit is excellent practice for how to 'reverse engineer' what you observe, better equipping you to plan for what you want to cause to occur, as the better you understand a single step, the better you'll understand the preceding and succeeding steps. Where the modernist approach would be a disintegrated 'the ends justify the means' approach, Aristotle's Four Causes leads you into a deeper understanding of what is being accomplished, and why, and how each step does, and should, relate to and follow from all of the others.
It's well worth noting that Thomas Aquinas added an additional level of depth to the four causes that Aristotle had identified, with a fifth cause:
5. the Exemplary Cause: a step beyond the Final Cause of action and Will, the Exemplary Cause is what guides the intellect - the idea that caused someone to decide that a statue was needed in the park, and so hired the sculptor,
The materialistic views which animate the modern views of scientism, focus almost exclusively on only surface aspects of the middle two of Aristotle's Four Causes, gathering primarily disintegrated facts, and (easily manipulated) observations of immediate stimulus/response, cause & effect, which not surprisingly tends to exclude metaphysics in general, and causality in particular, from popular consideration.
Consider how the two approaches might be applied to something as simple as what causes a duck to swim for breadcrumbs tossed onto a pond:
No further response follows, but presumably, if you'd like to see the duck swim more... toss more crumbs.
- Cause: Breadcrumbs stimulate a duck's eating reflex
- Effect: The duck moves to eat the breadcrumbs
Where the modernist materialistic approach has little interest in, or ability to, expand upon what's involved in feeding a duck, the four causes approach leads to a more thorough consideration of even simple events, and each of those causes could easily be expanded upon and pursued into further depths of biology, nutrition, ethics, and even a consideration of human nature and leisure.
- the Material Cause: a Duck, that which swims to the bread
- the Formal Cause: The features of the duck's body, such as it's webbed feet which enable the duck to swim.
- the Efficient Cause: Tossing breadcrumbs into the water, is where the duck is swimming to
- the Final Cause: Eating the Breadcrumbs - eating the breadcrumbs is the ducks goal, and yours, which is what the preceding causes lead up to
- the Exemplary Cause: The delight which you, or your child, takes in feeding the duck and the leisurely enjoyment & relaxation of the moment
It's not difficult to imagine how differently those two approaches might play out upon a more significant scenario, such as that of the woman who was recently beaten on her doorstep when a riot recently 'broke out' in Chicago. The modernist approach is all too familiar and frequently repeated in the news media:
, and as to the all too familiar response that might be expected to follow from such an understanding of causality:
- Cause: White Privilege
- Effect: Youths express their dissatisfaction to systemic racism
- Response: Additional DEI policies, teaching training, and outreach programs for disaffected youth
- the Material Cause: Youths who have little or no respect for strangers as fellow human beings
- the Formal Cause: Man's natural savagery had not been mitigated by being taught right from wrong, self respect, civility, or manners,
- the Efficient Cause: Schools and school boards promoting policies of restorative justice, rather than teaching what needs to be understood in order for youths to be intelligent and moral people who're capable of living a life worth living in peaceful society with others,
- the Final Cause: 'Education' which does not educate, but instead promotes anti-American & anti-Western ideology
- the Exemplary Cause: Colleges committed to teaching an ignorance of objective truth and the dangers of contradictory and disintegrated thinking, largely inspired by appealing to ideological ideals that "...Call into question the very foundations of the liberal order..." so as to bring about an end to America and the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West."
It's also worth pointing out that the modernist's 'Exemplary Cause', is what has been taught to generations of 'educators', and it thoroughly pervades the curriculum and administration of what is taught in our schools - public and private - to America's youth. Truly, causes - including an ignorance of them - do have effects, and ideas, especially bad ones, most definitely have consequences.
If you want to know how we've come to such a meaningless world, a central cause of that is our popular lack of understanding of what causes anything at all. Just how easily we're distracted by what isn't there, we'll see in the next part.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
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Friday, July 07, 2023
Distracting You With What Isn't Actually There - causality & its effects (e)
There are a few key 'Tell's that sophistical ploys typically announce themselves with, and they all more or less depend upon the listener's shallow understanding of causation, so as to more easily direct their attention away from what a deeper understanding might quickly identify as being but empty words:
- First: a sensational claim is made that's corrosive to what you believe to be true (amplified by the listener's ignorance of the nature of what's being considered);
- Second, the absence of any actual new knowledge being offered in exchange for what is to be disbelieved, only doubt upon still more arbitrary doubts, and
- Third, the assurance that accepting the Sophist's own belief in doubt, will lead you to an unspecified 'better' understanding of... something... or other... and solutions that urge you to 'support this'!
Causality & its effects parts a-g
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
Of course that could play out, as it has, in everything from the last six decades of "The world as we know it will end in a decade!", to the trans-gendering mutilationists:"No, we can't define what a woman is, but would you rather have a dead son, or a live daughter?", to any of the DEI of 'Addressing Systemic Racism requires employing racist AF policies!' (way to go Supreme Court!).
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
How we got to the point where such considerations would be easily, even routinely, disregarded, and have sophistries be seen as being 'legitimate', is worth looking into (a deep dive in coming posts on Epistemology), but it shouldn't be too surprising that the first step in that process began, as it had to, by discarding the pre-modern understanding of metaphysics, and its attention to identity and the necessity of making distinctions, which enables you to expose and discard contradictions from your thinking.
As with most of the absurdities of modernity, that process began taking shape with Rene Descartes (with an assist from Hobbes) and his blatantly arbitrary 'method of doubt', and along with that came his idea of mind/body dualism, which necessarily asserted that a human being is but a meat machine, which the mind 'somehow' causes to move about from within it. How it was that a substance-less thought of 'mind' was somehow able to cause your physical muscles to flex and strike a match to light a candle, was, according to Descartes, accomplished by the Pineal gland. How? Somehow. Why? Because reasons ("don't doubt him!" Ahem).
Of course, eventually those who followed after Descartes did begin to doubt that the Pineal gland could be 'the answer' for how immaterial thoughts could affect physical reality, but that was because its actual identity was never part of the equation, only what 'could be' arbitrarily doubted into consideration - this is a key point that's too often missed.
Accepting the advice to 'Doubt everything!', makes it as easy to arbitrarily doubt something both out of, as into, existence, as it requires no more substantive reasoning to claim that 'I doubt the Pineal gland does any of this stuff!', than to say 'I doubt that the Pineal gland isn't central to this stuff!', and the reality is that the reality of what the Pineal gland was, its Identity, was not the point of the exercise; what could be 'doubted' into the popular narrative, was, and is. The acceptance of causeless Doubt, surreptitiously elevates, legitimizes, and inserts the habit of arbitrariness into the essence of your thinking, and reduces the conception of a whole Truth, to a shard of splintered facts, and in doing so it forms and conveys an (irrational) illusion that your thoughts have power over reality itself.
It's worth noting that 'Arbitrary' means without basis, and without regard to what is true, or false, or completely contradictory (and fully opposed to Aristotle's 1st Law of Thought, the law of contradiction). Developing the habit of raising and accepting arbitrary doubts as key to your method of thinking, can just as easily lead people to skepticism, as to unfounded beliefs, precisely because that acceptance severs the habit of relating your thoughts to reality.
Once a person begins employing the sophistical 'Critical Dialectic', fully arbitrary justifications are offered as sufficient 'cause' for whenever and wherever the sophist feels the necessity of them, serving to further their purposes and further thwart whatever grip on reality that might still remain, as well as a forced pretense of certainty that they couldn't possibly be wrong. This is reflected in what I see as a signature distinction between the moderns and the pre-moderns, and we can see an example of it, in that where Issac Newton had affirmed his willingness to observe and measure the effects of Gravity, even though he didn't understand it, and he would not pretend to know what it was or how it operated, while in a full reversal of that, most moderns, such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Bentham, have stridently doubted and denied the existence of observable realities such as Free Will (despite every human being having a continuous first hand empirical knowledge & experience of), because they couldn't explain how it could operate, and so they therefore concluded, rather pridefully, that it did not in fact exist.
Another distinguishing feature which separates people of modern times, from the pre-moderns, is the rise of indecision, faithlessness, and anxiety at the core of the modern mind, which, IMHO, is an unsurprising reflection of continually feeling that what you see as being important information and beliefs, are continually subject to arbitrarily being revised, denied, and 'canceled'. And yet, oddly enough, it's common for modernists to presume that 'reality' is the problem, and not their conception of it - they will routinely assert that their ideas trump reality.
Thomas Henry Huxley (Darwin's bulldog, the grandfather of 'Brave New World's author, Aldous Huxley) asserted that our thoughts are less like motive powers, than like the whistle on a steam powered train, contributing nothing to it's power and motion, other than as noise added onto its exhaust. It should be no surprise that in such mechanistic and deterministic views, the role of govt and schools are expected to be used to form an environment around you that is suitable to how they need you to behave, and to keep you, useful little widget that you are, on track towards their idea of the 'greater good'.
What Nicolás Gómez Dávila said with "The permanent possibility of initiating causal series is what we call a person.", should be kept in mind with sophists whose dialectic is so focused upon denying that we can have knowledge of causality, and that Free Will is a dillusion, and even that the 'Self', is a delusion. If that's not clear enough, obfuscating or denying causality, is a means of eliminating the irritant to the state of 'individual rights', and a Constitution devised to uphold and protect them.
When the ploys of these dialectics come your way, whether it be the denial of Free Will, or that solid objects are only illusions, one question to ask yourself when their sensational statements cause you to pause and think, would the identity and telos of that direction they're intending to take your thinking in - are they informing, or deforming, your thoughts? And what would you need to already know, in order to know that (psst! That's Metaphysics)? Whether that which they are proposing to drive your thinking with from there on out, is rooted in sound causes (of what are real and true), or a fuzzy causelessness (everything from 'your truth may not be their truth' to 'a more diverse people and sustainable future'), is an extremely important distinction to make, as is knowing how, and how not, to make it.
Causality and the distorting of it
Do we understand Causation better today, than in Aristotle's day? Well, yes, and no, as we are able to understand more about causation today, than in Aristotle's day, afterall, even for all he knew of physics, biology, logic, rhetoric, ethics and politics, he had no understanding of individual rights in the sense that we do, and little of the idea of equality before the law, because the thought that all human beings are created equally human, and that no one is a lesser human because of the circumstance of birth, race, ethnicity, or wealth, was unknown to them. The idea that all men are created equal was unheard of in Aristotle's day, it took the Judeo-Christian half, to reveal that truth to the Greco-Roman half, of our Western world.
Similarly on the material side of causation, whereas what was known prior to modernity was only what could be observed on the surface, and they could only speculate about what lay beyond that, today we've developed a more detailed knowledge and scientific understanding of the chemical and molecular nature of the world around us, which penetrates past surface appearances to reveal the hidden structures of characteristics that make a thing like metal, metalic, while also explaining why both hardness and melting are fully consistent with the nature of being a metal.
And yet for all that, with the hierarchical understanding of the forms of knowledge they had (Empeiría/Epistemé, Tékhne, and Sophia), they had a better understanding on the whole, of the little that they knew, than most of us have today (especially the 'educated'), as knowledge itself has been collapsed by modernity, into a semi-empirical mush.
So while we are able to know and 'know thyself' more thoroughly than pre-moderns like Aristotle could, most of 'those who know best' in modernity, have actively evaded, denied, and even denigrated, what the pre-moderns understood about Metaphysics in general and about Identity and Causality in particular, without which a person cannot properly understand what they should. Fortunately, the only real power the moderns have over any of us, is our remaining ignorant of that understanding which they've discarded, and so while we today are still able to understand and penetrate deeper into the nature of the world around us, and into the Logos (a broader understanding of Reason, than the moderns ascribe to 'reason') within, than at any time in the past - we only need to be willing to see what there is to see, IOW, will you continue on with the causal Blue Pill you were fed in school, or choose to take the Red Pill?
To see how distorted our understanding of causality has become, we need to be clear on what causality does and does not entail, for despite surface appearances, it would be wrong to say that certainty is the measure of Casuality (though that is a common ploy for impugning our understanding of it), for while we can predict with certainty that applying sufficient heat to metal will cause it to melt, and with a lesser degree of certainty that stating that 'there are only two genders' will cause a Woke person to meltdown, we can only calculate the probability of being able to cause the result desired from the Quantum realm's waves and particles and Schrodinger's boxes seemingly full of cats that are both living and dead, even so, it would be wrong to say that our understanding of Causality is affected by those varying degrees of certainty, or to assume that those differences indicate that Casuality operates any differently in the material, human, or quantum, realms.
Casuality is not about making predictions, it is about recognizing the importance of identifying what you are considering, so as to properly integrate that within the forms of knowledge involved within a given context. It is of course true that with sound knowledge, we're often able to make a number of accurate predictions, but causality will not provide us with either the omniscience or absolute certainty, which have no part of the identity of being human. And yet as we'll see, it has been by treating Causality in modernity as if it could provide such abilities, or by presuming that lacking those abilities somehow invalidates or diminishes what we as human beings can know, which has played a large role in undermining our understanding of Causality, of Identity, of Metaphysics, Knowledge, and our ability to 'know thyself'.
Again and again in modernity, our ability to understand has been assaulted by denying or ignoring what can be understood, while dropping the relevant contexts, in order to evade what we should know, to plant false expectations of what we can know, and to dissuade us from looking for what is real and true, in order to 'legitimize' any number of heinous fictions that require treating human beings as deterministic meat puppets, into popular belief.
What we do not know, and what we cannot know, does not invalidate what we do know, within the context of what we can understand, and while further developments of our knowledge will likely reveal additional distinctions and contexts for us to consider and anticipate, it won't diminish what we already understand about the causes behind them, or how to apply that to our understanding here on the human level of reality, both materially, and immaterially.
Casuality reflects and confirms the identity and telos of what we are considering within a given context, affirming that Casuality is identity in action, and interaction, no matter whether what is being examined is animate, or inanimate.
Why all of this matters outside of lecture halls, is that there's no basis for understanding and respecting a person's ability and need to think and make choices, without a grounding in metaphysics in general and causality in particular, for without that a person has little basis for understanding and defending an individuals inalienable rights, or the importance of their society upholding and defending those for all.
The central drama in our regressing to the illiberal state of affairs we find ourselves in today, was formed from the notions that were proposed by the very modernist Enlightenment-age skeptic, David Hume, who believed, despite believing that nothing can be known, that he could confidently explain exactly how he knew that the cause of causation was all an illusion (a veritable harvest of contradictions are always sure to follow in the wake of skeptics who don't just question what is and can be known, but unironically claim to know that nothing can be known).
Those foundations of The West that Descartes began fracturing, Hume began the process of shaking them down to the ground (where we are nearly at today), by declaring that we don't and can't really know anything about Causality at all, that we don't actually know how and why the sun rises, or even what causes one billiard ball to roll when hit by another, and so on, worser & worser.
According to Hume, what we thought we knew, was nothing more than a matter of playing the odds from what preceded and followed the occurrence of something yesterday, would probably do so again tomorrow. IOW: Those events we know of as sunrise, noon, and sunset, are simply events that just happen to follow each after other, and have nothing to do with what we think we know of and about them, and although probability says they'll happen in the same order, we don't know that for certain, and they could easily happen in reverse, or entirely out of order. You see, our knowledge then, is but a scheme of statistics and odds making (of what, he doesn't say, as he cherry picks and discards which bits of understanding is convenient to the reality he just knows we don't know of), was what Hume declared to be 'Science!', and a great many in modernity agreed, and still agree, with that.
Hume of course took the implications of that further than our inability to know what causes the sun to rise, in that if we can't know what causes those appearances, what can we possibly know about what causes humans to behave as we do? And by reducing science to statistics, what isn't measurable and quantifiable, isn't science (you may recall that measurability is a necessary, though lesser part (Empeiría), of what Science (Epistemé) is), and if it isn't Science well then, it's of no cause or value at all (good news for Neil deGrasse Tyson, bad news for religion, art & music). The fulcrum of this notion, which he uses to pry our minds apart from reality, rests on the observation that a thing or event, is not the same as our evaluation of it - IOW 'identifying' that this liquid is poison, is a different thing from identifying this liquid as bad - and soOooo, if they aren't the same, how can two identifications refer to the same thing? He's serious about that. He goes on to say:
"...instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it's necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. ..."At this point I'll urge you to review the three types of knowledge in a previous post, for the fact that Hume is equivocating upon different forms of knowledge to reduce the entire hierarchy of knowledge, to its flattest factoid, and you can rest assured that by allowing the littlest bit of that to slip by you, it will eventually lead in a straight line from there to the chaotic avalanche that besets us today with the physical mutilation of children being excused as 'gender affirming care'.
Once you've allowed causation to be equivocated down to the flattest of facts, the fact that what 'ought' to result from a cause upon inanimate objects is all too easily ignored, and isn't determined in the same way that it is for animate objects, such as people. You might object that metal has no choice in responding to heat, while the human being most definitely does, but Hume had a way around that difference, as for you to be able to know anything at all about causality, you must be a you, and that too Hume denied, saying that:
"...I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement..."IOW, there is no 'you' to object to this, only a bundle of physical impressions, an illusion. And with no 'you' in mind to mind, how could a bundle of sensations possibly be able to convert sensory data, into the immaterial fictions of 'moral qualities'? This was what his infamous 'is-ought question demanded, asking:
'Does an IS, imply an Ought?'IOW, how can a material fact of what IS, a provocation for instance, imply an immaterial response that ought to happen? Well then, he 'reasoned', since a material thing can't be an immaterial 'ought', then clearly an IS cannot imply an Ought, and so there is no basis for reasoning about manners, civility, or ethics, as:
"reason is, and ought only to be the slave to the passions", 'proving' again that we don't really know anything about anything at all, and all of our supposed knowledge is but the result of passions and happenstance, and your saying that you know what will result from any cause, can be nothing more than a rolling of the dice and bookies playing the odds on what score they turn up.
Of course, although you might want to point out that his saying that 'You ought not say that an is implies an ought', is saying that an IS implies an Ought, but... if you've ceded the ability to say what IS, you certainly cannot say what ought to follow from that. Do you see how slippery this slope soon gets? All of metaphysics - identity, knowledge, causality - are eliminated through Hume's kill shot (if you accept and permit it). Once you allow the connection between truth and reality to be severed, or even frayed, you've let go of your ability to claim to know anything at all, or to claim any interest in or concern with truth or goodness, or beauty. Gone. Wfft. As with your credibility in saying that this, might lead to that, and therefore you ought not to permit it. All gone.
To come at the problem from another direction, the necessity of his denial of Free Will, is that his own is-ought issue is the wrong question; or rather it is a misdirection, which deliberately ignores the identity of a human being, and leads the listener away from grasping that the reality of human life, is that the question if asked at all, ought to be asked more like this:
'Does an IS, imply Oughts?', plural, and the answer to that is an unequivocal and hearty 'Yes!', but that can only be said if you know what is, and know how you know it, and what causes anything to occur in accordance with what you know of it.
Despite how Hume and modernity's attack our ability to know anything at all, with our inability to be free from error, it's not a failure for society or any individual in it to lack omniscient and unerring 'knowledge', rather recognizing that in us all, is a sign of having successfully identified ourselves as being human! While on the purely material level (which, you'll remember, is what science provides us the lowest level Knowledge of), an 'IS' does imply an 'Ought' - heating bronze to xDegrees ought to result in its melting, its material identity provides for only that reaction - but the possibilities of which 'Ought' to result from provoking a human being, whose very different identity and knowledge isn't constrained or determined in the same manner as metal is necessarily determined to respond to heat. Instead, based upon the knowledge and understanding of the person involved, and the context the provocation is posed within, there are some, sometimes many, responses that a person ought to make in response to an IS, and they might choose from those, or originate something entirely new and previously not considered, not as a result of happenstance, but from reasoning.
That is one of the consequences of being human, but Hume's skepticism had blinded himself to that identity, and that right there, between necessity and possibility, lies what the materialist hates and fears the most: Choice and Chance.
The modern materialist evades and abhors chance and choice, and however harmful it will be to their own selves, they will adamantly assert that for human beings 'an IS doesn't imply an Ought!', which is a half-truth (AKA: a full lie), whose abuse of truth has been highly causal in the philosophical disintegration, anxiety, and soph-destruction, we are drowning in today.
Denying and evading the full understanding of what the pre-moderns knew, which the modernist places safely out of mind, Hume advised::
"...If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion...", that this was an egregious act of sophistry kant be denied, and by awakening Immanuel Kant from his 'dogmatic slumbers' - less to disagree with Hume, than to obfuscate the implications of what he'd claimed (more on that later), Hume's ideas fanned the smoldering embers of modernity into breaking out into the philosophical firestorms that were soon to be ignited by Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx, and which we're still dealing with today.
When a society lacks a solid grasp of metaphysics in general, and identity, knowledge, and causality in particular, then skepticism (causeless doubt and/or denial of knowledge) rushes into the vacuum of popular imagination, and for those skeptics amongst them to preserve their skepticism (and oh will they ever fight to do that), they will evade, deny, denigrate, and claim the need to treat human beings as only a slightly higher form of inanimate matter, having no choice or rights that need to be respected, so that those who (somehow) see themselves as being those who *know* best, will be empowered to 'perfect' the lesser folk for 'the greater good'.
Ironically, to know anything of causality, or even to be able to deny such knowledge, requires making the choice to understand or evade it - Free Will must exist in order to deny the existence of Free Will - and yet most of modernity, especially the post-modernists, deny and evade it. It requires the deliberately chosen denial of Free Will, to successfully deny reality. And whether admitted or denied, we are able to understand, materially and philosophically, that causation is the result of the deepest identity of what something is, and that 'change' is what results from being in sufficient proximity with what something else is.
IOW, Causation is Identity in action (and interaction), and because we are human beings we are able to choose to understand that. But of course, we're also able to choose to evade and deny that, and for those who choose to seek power over their fellows, you need to deny and lie about what everyone can clearly see is true - which is easier than you might think.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Dialectic, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
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Friday, July 07, 2023
Facts are only as stubborn as you are - causality & its effects (f)
They say that 'Facts don't lie!', which may be 'true enough', but it ignores the fact that neither do facts tell the truth, and those liars who understand how little people suspect that facts can be used to tell lies, arrange their selected facts and the context they are presented within, to lie all day long for them - or maybe you haven't heard the phrase 'Lies, damn lies, and statistics'? What gives you the power to perceive and understand when facts are being used to lie to you, is metaphysics in general, and causality in particular, and when they aren't properly attended to, we fall under the power of what is being left out of or excluded from our mind.
Causality & its effects parts a-g
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
One thing that phrasing the is/ought question as Hume did (see previous) *accomplishes*, is to put your thoughts upon the path that the modernists now habitually travel, which is the means for getting away with asserting causeless causes, as they've done since following down the pathway of thinking that Descartes first put them on, and the effect that's had has been in reducing the pre-modern understanding of causation, down & away from the four open ended causes of Aristotle's approach, towards the two dead-ended materialistic 'answers', which are what make it exceedingly easier to fake facts, than it is to fake & violate principles.
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
However counter-intuitive that may seem, you can check it for yourself by borrowing one from the playbook of our sophistical college professors:
See what I mean? No?
- Is it easier to imagine flaming grass and ice that sinks, or married bachelors and four sided triangles?
I'm betting that you had no problem imagining the fake facts of the first items - like ice sinking - than attempting to fake a concept and principle (or did you somehow visualize a four-sided triangle?). And if you continue on down that path, as college professors have been teaching their students to for well over a century, you quickly and easily begin not only incorporating the ability to fake facts as needed into your thinking, but the person who's (unwittingly) practiced at it, will find it the simplest of things to go along with the faking of observable facts (or perhaps you missed the whole 'Masks are useless/You must wear masks!/No one forced anyone to wear masks' episode of the Covid years'?).
Well, without getting epistemologically ahead of ourselves (that's for future posts), what that question acquires its 'legitimacy' through, is the Analytic/Synthetic dichotomy (be very wary of it), and it's been used as a key tool of professional Sophists (AKA: College Professors) for at least a century now, to get students to question, doubt, and abandon, what had been their deepest convictions, as well as their ability to understand and reasonably support their beliefs. The first thing to point out about it, is that the pose, that there is a 'Analytic/Synthetic dichotomy', is itself a lie. There's no such thing. What that is, is a single concept or fact or principle, juxtaposed with a composite of numerous other concepts, facts, and/or principles, with one or more falsehoods embedded into them, with which they then equivocate upon as if it were simply another individual fact/concept/principle.
To be 'fair', the name and cursory description of 'Analytic/Synthetic' hints at that being what it is, the forming together of multiple concepts, facts, and/or principles, but that is admitted to only on the surface (surprise), and having cursorily said so, they go on to use the reference as a means of not only invalidating the composite concepts (which is what makes our ability to think so powerful), but as a means of separating you and your mind, from reality, and from that ultimate composite: Truth.
Make no mistake, if you were to isolate the essentials of the false concept of ice sinking under normal contexts, that would be every bit as unimaginable as a four-sided triangle or an married bachelor (another favorite example of theirs), but by artfully phrasing it as they do, they get away with epstimecide ( to turn one of their own terms against them: the murder of sound thinking), as easy as pie.
What a proper understanding and application of Aristotle's four causes would provide (and quickly expose and banish the Analytic/Synthetic dichotomy ploy), even with the more material matters, Ice, for instance, is a means of closely securing your conceptual understanding of a physical variable, to its identity, and how and why they behave as they do within a given context, and that attention to the relation between immaterial concept and physical reality to reveal the principles by which they are properly understood, which makes it logically difficult to arbitrarily treat them as ludicrous as imagining ice that sinks or a four-sided triangle. And when viewed in that light, the suggestion to use an invalid images, to guide legitimate reasoning, begins to reveal something disturbing in the request.
By simply neglecting and ignoring that pre-modern approach to understanding what you know, your knowledge and thinking quickly becomes conceptually anorexic and incapable of facing up to the rigors of reality, and the conceptual muddle you are left with to take notice of, becomes painfully easy to populate your 'imagination' with appearances only, as if thinking were nothing more than a process for scribbling out mental cartoons, where one shape labeled 'ice', is able to 'sink' into other shapes labeled 'water', and in your absence of awareness of those facts, concepts, and principles that are and should be every bit as impossible to 'imagine' as a four-sided triangle, you and your mind becomes separated from what is real, and true, and beautiful, and right.
Notice that this is not at all the same thing as engaging the imagination by asking listeners to imagine sinking ice or impossible geometry in the service of a story - not at all. That's not the case or the intent of the Sophist who'd request you to 'imagine' unimaginable falsehoods as legitimate standards and landmarks of an 'educated' mode of thinking; they do so as a means of destabilizing your ability to think coherently, with the intent to separate your understanding, from reality, so that the sophist can 'have their way' with you. By that means of drilling such an absence of true thinking into the thoughts in our modern minds, it becomes exceedingly easy to imagine even your own actions, as being the thoughtless reactions of a purely material body pinballing through the environment. In that scenario, your thinking is easily deformed into a manner where 'you' and your 'thoughts', become meaningless side-effects of that process, and in accepting that, modern minds find themselves easily taking the final step of denying what actually is materially causeless: Free Will, unaware that even the thought of 'you', has been taken from you.
FWIW, that's not a process of 'enlightenment', but one of endarkenment. See The News, for further reference.
If you aren't seeing how this issue of IS's & Oughts matters to your life, then consider how the modern and pre-modern views of human beings might affect your ability to live your life in society. Prior to modernity, the prudent person understood causation and the nature of being human well enough to seek to mitigate the volatility of choice & chance in society, through sound education, morality, and placing a high value on sound reasoning. OTOH, for the ideological person of modernity - of both the Left and Right - having philosophically removed 'Free Will' from the identity of human beings, it has become possible and appropriate for them to treat peoples as volatile substances whose reactive behaviors must be managed by 'those who know best', for 'the greater good'.
By willfully blurring or ignoring those differences and limitations that are involved in asking 'what causes that?', we're led to assume more (and less) than what can actually be known about both material and immaterial matters, which swerves us all further away from the company of Sophia, and into a more disreputable association with the Turtle Lady, and worse, those who prefer to pretend that their thoughts and doubts about how they think that reality should be, are more real and certain than what is in reality true.
Once we begin to allow, or ignore, such sophistries being gotten away with, ever more choices become just as easily explained by, and blamed upon, the environment, and as nothing is or can be truly known in such a world as that, no one can be held responsible for anything, and anything goes. That is the substance and root of our modern state of Demoralization (see Yuri Bezmenov's interviews on this), and there is no better way for those who desire power over a people, to attain it, than by having that people believe in what gives those who seek to impose their power upon them, a clear pathway to doing just that, and no clearer pathway is imaginable, than having those people believe that there is no right, no wrong, and no credible cause for believing that there is or should be such 'beliefs'.
By having been armed with such metaphysical views, including this corruption of causality, statements such as these from the guru of 'white fragility', Robin Diangelo, 'make sense' to those thinking their thoughts with those habits and beliefs:
One lesson that we can and should learn from this, is that the more we know about what the identity of something is - is that an orange billiard ball, or an orange, or an egg that's been dyed orange - the more we are able to know about how such objects will interact in relation to, or collision with, each other. But just as importantly, the more you realize what you don't actually know, the more likely it is that you will be better able to understand what you do know, and so won't end up with egg on your face when everyone else finds out that you didn't actually know, what you only thought you knew. What a familiarity with metaphysics promotes, is the mindset that what is, is real, and that what you imagine reality might be, should not be mistaken for being what it actually is."...
- All white people benefit from racism, regardless of intentions; intentions are irrelevant.
- No one here chose to be socialized into racism (so no one is “bad’). But no one is neutral – to not act against racism is to support racism.
- Racism must be continually identified, analyzed and challenged; no one is ever done
- The question is not ”did racism take place”? but rather “how did racism manifest in that situation?...
”
Given how this has developed in modernity, it's important to add that the knowledge we have of the nature and causes of such matters, goes deeper than those sequential occurrences which might 'cause' us to associate one event, with another, because they occurred in sequence (ala David Hume's assertions about and the sun rising in the day following night or billiard balls rolling after being struck).
For now, I'll close with a reminder that Metaphysics is about paying attention to what it is you are thinking about, and with, and noting distinctions that bring clarity to your thought and understanding, and there are dire and deadly consequences that are caused by habitually ignoring the nature of causation and the variety of causes in our lives, I've already gone into here. You don't need to become a scientist or a philosopher to study metaphysics, but if you want to have a better and more complete understanding of what is going on around you, or of what is sweeping you away through your ignorance of it, you should develop a basic understanding of the subject.
The human mind which you are graced with, is far too powerful for you to remain safely ignorant of its identity, causes, and effects, and after all, with great power comes great responsibility, right?
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
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Friday, July 07, 2023
The Logical consequences of either caring about or ignoring 'What Is Truth?' - causality & its effects (g)
Logic, which Aristotle developed upon his Metaphysics, and Analytics, guides us in how to use reason methodically in relation to what is real and true. The point is to methodically identify and eliminate contradictions from our assumptions and to show us where we need to flesh out the abstractions we haven't taken notice of. I won't attempt to go further into that here either, but keep in mind that being objective is not ignoring our subjective thoughts & feelings, it is grounding them in what is real and true. The substance of this, and of the preceding judgments, form the foundation of all Western thought, both Greco/Roman and Judeo/Christian (see especially Proverbs 8-14 for starters), which explicitly or implicitly rests upon them.
Causality & its effects parts a-g
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
pt a: A well rounded knowledge...
pt b: Causation of egg on our faces...
pt c: Cause and Causelessness...
pt d: Causation Squared...
pt e: Distracting you with...
pt f: Facts are only as stubborn as you...
pt g: Logical consequences of....
When we're able to understand that the subject of our thinking, conforms to that aspect of reality that is the object of our thoughts, we recognize that reality is intelligible to us and affirm our relation to what is real and true. That is so far from being a small thing. Metaphysics is the science of those first principles, and its role is not to play word games, but to put you in closer contact with and understanding of, what is real and true, and the life that recognizes, abides by, and resonates most with them, is a life that surer to be well worth living, than one who is ignorant of that.
The person that is surprised and confused by the events of 'one damn thing after another', is living in a very different world from the person who has an understanding of the principles behind the causes of those things, and their own role in them.
The conscious attention to that 'Why' will lead you into ethical considerations of what you should and should not do, all of which presupposes a link between the thoughts and questions you're thinking them within, and about - AKA: What Is Truth.
With that in mind, it's worth considering what telling or ignoring or living by lies, does to the very heart of yourself, and the life you are in reality living.
Those who are arrayed against reality, whether the Sophists of 2,500 years ago (see the Socratic dialog: Gorgias), or the Woke of today, begin and center their attacks upon metaphysics, in order to separate our thoughts from what is real and true. As Josef Pieper put it in his excellent 'Abuse of Power - Abuse of Language',
“..."The sophists’’, he says, “‘fabricate a fictitious reality.”’ That the existential realm of man could be taken over by pseudorealities whose fictitious nature threatens to become indiscernible is truly a depressing thought. And yet this Platonic nightmare, I hold, possesses an alarming contemporary relevance. For the general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth but also become unable even to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language..."Modernist propaganda aside, it's important to be mindful that the scientific method did not arise from Descartes' Method of Doubt - more often than not, once the clutter of doubt is brushed away from the journals of actual scientists, you find that it wasn't arrived at by faking arbitrary doubts (more often than not, those are what slowed them down), nor even from Francis Bacon's questionable effort to one-up Aristotle with his 'Great Instauration', but through the careful application of good honest questions, many of which Aristotle had asked long before them).
What actually led to the first scientific experiments in modern times, as I noted here some time ago, began centuries earlier, with two clergymen who were steeped in the philosophy and religion of Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian civilization. Beginning with Robert Grosseteste, followed later by Roger Bacon, between the 1100-1200's, who, believing that God's creation is good, and intelligible, and worth knowing, they judged that it would be worth the time to apply their metaphysical understanding of reality to the particulars of the world they found themselves within, both to further their understanding and appreciation of it, and in the belief that the practice would surely bring the types of benefits that predictably accompany a greater knowledge and understanding of what is real and true.
Those first principles of methodical reasoning in conjunction with careful action, and the examination of the results, are what these two clergymen were the first to put into practice as proto-scientists, and as their methods were grasped, it guided and improved our knowledge and experience in such a way as to become the general scientific method, which has been summed up as,
"...a repeating cycle of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and the need for independent verification. He recorded the manner in which he conducted his experiments in precise detail so that others could reproduce and independently test his results...", or for everyday use, methodically questioning and verifying the answers your questions logically lead you to. Rinse. Repeat.
But always the point is to learn what is in reality true, to the degree the context warrants, and to do so by respecting what is true. To sum up,
The reason for pointing all of this out, is that Modernity has been willfully attacking and denying every point - not by argument... at least not anymore, but instead by evasion and by force of lies, and that sequence has absolutely insinuated itself into every aspect of what is taught to our students in our schools today - and not just by the *Woke*. For that reason, we're going to chew up a good chunk of HTML in looking at how the floorboards of reality have been (pretended to be) torn up & out from under us, by the pharisees of modernity.
- Reality is intelligible and available to us all,
- What is in reality true, is true no matter who or how many wish to believe otherwise,
- Through methodical reasoning, we are better able to understand and uncover what is true, and what is false,
- Judgments can be shown to be objectively True, by how well they conform our subjective thoughts, to the object of reality, which enables them to be intelligibly communicated to others,
- Metaphysics precedes and guides our reasoning, the logical method, and scientific fact, are dependent upon, and do not contradict, metaphysical truths
Next up - Laundering the unreal through Epistemology.
Labels: Causality, causality & its effects, Knowledge, Metaphysics, What is Truth
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Saturday, October 28, 2023
Epistemology: You keep using that word - 1
In the movie the Princess Bride, in response to his Sicilian employer repeatedly blurting out the word 'unbelievable!', the character Inigo Montoya utters what has become an iconic and meme-tastic line:
"You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.", which makes it the perfect lead-in for discussing Epistemology. Why? Because too often its origins and official meaning, are at odds with its history & modern practices, which, given that the term is concerned with verifying the truth of what we know and how we know it, is deliciously ironic.
e·pis·te·mol·o·gyFair enough. However the 3rd and 4th lines of the Encyclopedia Britanica online, reveals something that's worth giving your attention to:
/əˌpistəˈmäləjē,eˌpistəˈmäləjē/
_noun_ PHILOSOPHY
1. the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion."he grappled with metaphysics and epistemology in his writings and sermons"
epistemology, the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. The term is derived from the Greek epistēmē (“knowledge”) and logos (“reason”), and accordingly the field is sometimes referred to as the theory of knowledge. Epistemology has a long history within Western philosophy, beginning with the ancient Greeks and continuing to the present. Along with metaphysics, logic, and ethics, it is one of the four main branches of philosophy, and nearly every great philosopher has contributed to it., which is more than a little bit, shall we say, 'misleading'. The site etymology online provides an important clue as to why I say that, with:
epistemology (n.) "theory of knowledge," 1856, coined by Scottish philosopher James F. Ferrier (1808-1864) from Greek episteme "knowledge, acquaintance with (something), skill, experience," from Ionic Greek epistasthai "know how to do, understand," literally "overstand," from epi "over, near" (see epi-) + histasthai "to stand," from PIE root *sta- "to stand, make or be firm."Do you notice a wee bit of discrepancy between the claim that 'Epistemology' traces its history as the '4th branch of philosophy' back to the classical era of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and the fact that the word was first coined by a Scotsman in 1856?!
How did a term coined by an obscure Scotsman, James F. Ferrier, become accepted in modernity as the name for their 'ancient' and oh-so important '4th branch of philosophy'? Possibly because the name for that part of the German idealism behind their new '4th branch's system for 'justified belief', 'Wissenschaftslehre', wasn't exactly a catchy term, and even though it was doing an impressive job of dividing knowledge from reality, it was far too cumbersome and thoroughly modern sounding of a term to be credibly associated with the 'great philosophers' of ancient Greece, who plainly could have had no knowledge of either it or their new '4th branch of philosophy'.
The word 'Epistemology', OTOH, coined from the Greek term 'Episteme', which Aristotle had used in his metaphysics for one of the forms of knowledge, looked and sounded the part, and it could easily be used to work modernism and the 'great philosophers' of ancient Greece, into the same breath. Taking a glance at an Engram viewer (which references the number of mentions of a term in the libraries of books that've been scanned), together with a helpfully misleading reference from, of all places, Wikipedia, illustrates that the new term had come into 'popular' usage in less than a century, which helped serve an additional purpose:
"Luciano Floridi considers that there was a "renaissance" of epistemology between the two world wars. He describes it as "a bridge between early modern and contemporary philosophy of knowledge."[13] ..."
And that's why I say that Inigo Montoya's "You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.", is the perfect meme for modern 'Epistemology'.
Epistemology: A method in need of its meaning
To be 'fair', my identifying 'Epistemology' as the '4th branch of Philosophy', is a matter of convenience, as a quick search will show you that modernity now refers to anywhere from three to ten or more 'branches', most of which differ even on which branch is first, let alone fourth, as well as multiple variations such as having Ethics paired with Esthetics as minor branches under Axiology as the 'major' branch for studing 'value', and so on.
Following after Socrates' time, when philosophy essentially consisted of one branch, the 'love of wisdom', somewhere between Aristotle (who saw Logic as a tool, not a branch) and the Stoics (who did view Logic as a branch), and began to be classify it along the lines of three major questions of 'First Philosophy':
The problem with the Modern's use of 'branches', is that by treating them as separate and distinct compartments, rather than integrated features of one philosophy, they are used to limit & control philosophical thought, creating and exploiting divisions within it.
For those with an interest in how Philosophy developed, this link gives a fascinating tour of that, some of which I agree with, much of which I do not (especially with the site's approval of Wittgenstein - gack!), but all of which is interestingly, and for the most part, fairly, presented.
The truth is, of course, that despite never having had use of the term 'Epistemology', a deep concern for the nature, meaning, and validation of knowledge, was something that philosophers from Socrates (who lost his life in that pursuit) to Aquinas were very much driven by. While Thales of Miletus is usually credited as having been the first philosopher, what he began wondering about was the physical world around us, it was Socrates who first began methodically wondering about what it is we do when thinking, and why, which his student Plato elaborated upon in his dialogs, and which Plato's student, Aristotle, reformulated into the first means for establishing an intelligible framework and systematic means for seeking, justifying, and conveying, our knowledge of what is real and true, and what to do about that.
Following after Socrates' time, when philosophy essentially consisted of one branch, the 'love of wisdom', somewhere between Aristotle (who saw Logic as a tool, not a branch) and the Stoics (who did view Logic as a branch), and began to be classify it along the lines of three major questions of 'First Philosophy':
1 - 'What is there to know?' (Metaphysics, physics, sciences, etc.),, which in time became referred to as the major and minor branches of philosophy.
2 - 'How do I know that?' - Logic, mathematics, etc.,
3 - 'What should I do about that?' Ethics, politics, economics, aesthetics (art), rhetoric, etc.,
The problem with the Modern's use of 'branches', is that by treating them as separate and distinct compartments, rather than integrated features of one philosophy, they are used to limit & control philosophical thought, creating and exploiting divisions within it.
For those with an interest in how Philosophy developed, this link gives a fascinating tour of that, some of which I agree with, much of which I do not (especially with the site's approval of Wittgenstein - gack!), but all of which is interestingly, and for the most part, fairly, presented.
How the ancients managed to do that without the use of modernism's shiny new '4th branch of Philosophy', was by not approaching philosophy as a conglomeration of compartmentalized 'branches', but by employing philosophy as a system whose features enabled us to examine and give guidance for your thinking, from "First Principles" (Metaphysics) that root your reasoning in experience, and identifying what is, and what truth is, through the three forms of knowledge we grasp all of that through, together with the analytics which uses logic to validate your knowledge (as a carpenter would use a tool), with ethics clarifying how to properly respond in light of what you know to be real and true, and how best to express that through the rhetoric and poetics. In short, in their view the purpose of philosophy - the love of wisdom - not only required your being able to meaningfully know what is real and true, and how to justify it, that was central to philosophy as a whole, rather than one of a number of compartmentalized branches that tend to produce incomprehensible answers bereft of meaning, as it tends to operate in our world today.
From classical times on up into the Renaissance, not only had philosophy provided the means for bringing method and clarity to how people thought, it also stressed the importance of exposing those shadowy notions which sophists are so adept at using to acquire the power to operate within and upon society. But of course, as what the modernists desire most is the power to reinvent reality in their own image, they needed those shadowy uncertainties to operate within, and so to one degree or another, they all - from Descartes through Hegel, and on down the line to today - gravitated towards ever more clever means to 'muddy the waters to make them appear deep'.
As it turned out, the Scotsman's new 'ancient term' of 'Epistemology' gave a useful appearance of legitimacy to the modernist's new '4th branch of philosophy', and ever since then, it (in actual practice, rather than its supposed meaning) has been the primary tool for moving the philosophical goal posts away from what can be known to be real and true, and over onto the turf of whichever ideology seems most suited to the moment for steering popular thought away from the clarity and wisdom of premodern philosophy, which had for over two thousand years made modernity's new tool and branch unnecessary.
And yet with all that having been said, I've often spoken of the importance of Epistemology... why? Because despite my hostility to how the term has been foisted upon us and to how it is routinely misused & abused, the fact is that Epistemology - its purported meaning, rather than its modern practice - entails the unified application of metaphysics, logic, and ethics, and anyone who takes the time to employ the term in accordance with its proper meaning, will regain the ability to safely navigate around the many booby-traps that modernity has positioned in our path, and every instance of doing so helps with putting the West back upon solid ground again.
We'll look at how to align what Epistemology does, with what the word means, over the next few posts.
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Sunday, October 29, 2023
Epistemology's meaning is meaningless without Reality - You keep using that word 2
In the previous post I pointed out that despite what the Textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and Wiki's, would have you believe, Epistemology is not an ancient term for an equally ancient '4th Branch of Philosophy' that 'all the greats of philosophy' have contributed to, but is instead a term coined by a Scotsmen in the mid 1800s, that aided in legitimizing that equally modern '4th branch' which there was no need for in premodern philosophy. Both term & branch have served as a useful means of injecting modernity's numerous mind-numbing innovations into the field of philosophy, while at the same time steering people away from the premodern view, which first and foremost saw philosophy as an intellectual means of looking at the world from a perspective that began with wonder:
"...It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too...", which also taught that how to avoid becoming lost in wonder, was by consciously grappling with identifying what they found to be real and true, in both theory and practice:
"It is right also to say that philosophy should be called knowledge of the truth. For the end of theoretical knowledge is truth, while that of practical knowledge is action..."Philosophizing for premoderns entailed using metaphysics, logic, and ethics, to identify and verify what you'd come to understand - whether that was that something that was timelessly true, or technologically effective - and how best to communicate to others that those beliefs were justifiable, and why, and what - if anything - should be done about that. IOW, for two thousand years 'doing philosophy' had included doing in practice at each step, what the modernists wouldn't coin the word 'epistemology' for, until the mid 1800s.
Modernists, OTOH, having begun by denying that we can know what is real and true, have used the meaning of the word as a deceptive cover, while the system behind it condemned 'philosophy' to being learned through textbooks, each securely wrapped up in the specialized technical jargon of various subfields, which typically rationalized whichever ideological positions of the moment - 'Standpoint Epistemology', 'Epistemology of Ignorance', 'Social Epistemology', etc., - seemed best suited to serving the greater good of that moment in time, without reference to what is 'real and true' across time.
The typical reaction of those who've only encountered what the modernists call 'philosophy' in school, is that they have no intention of bothering further with philosophy at all, but no matter how understandable that reaction is, that particular 'good intention' is one that's paved many a private road to Hell, as it immediately puts you at odds with the reality of what and who you are as a human being. Like it or not, no one has a choice about whether or not they will have a philosophy: you already have one! Whether you're a drug addict, a working stiff, student or professor, it is an inescapable part of the identity of being human. The only choice that is open to you, is whether you'll have a sound and coherent philosophy that orders and serves your life, or an unconscious mishmash of contradictory notions that is more likely to benefit those seeking to exercise power over you for their own ends.
Even those who have no burning interest in philosophy - and most don't - should still have a grasp of its basics and the common pitfalls to watch out for, just as those who have no burning interest in mathematics, should still be familiar with the basics of arithmetic, multiplication & division, and know some 'gotcha!'s like not to divide by zero, especially as the consequences of miscalculating your ability to pay your bills, is nowhere near as consequential as those philosophical errors that can easily hamper your ability to live your life well, gut your life of meaning, and even bring your society to ruin.
The good news is that it doesn't take a lot of effort to learn what you need to know, or to recognize the philosophical pitfalls & poisons lurking around us in the modern world today. In fact, even briefly hitting the highlights of what was recently covered here across several posts, would help with putting your own sense of wonder back on solid ground, as with just a little watering of attention to the essentials will take root and develop, if you only habituate yourself to consciously and actively asking and answering three simple questions:
It's of course not possible to detail all of metaphysics, let alone philosophy, in a single post, or even a series of them, but the greater point is that there's no need to, for anyone who honestly pursues those three questions towards what is real and true, is philosophizing, and is already 'doing' epistemology as it should be done, and anyone doing so will benefit from the confidence of knowing that they have some justification for what they believe - not just because they say 'I believe!', but because they've developed an understanding of what they know and how they know it, and how to respond accordingly, while progressively freeing their lives from the vagaries and falsehoods which have accreted over the West during the last four centuries of the modern era.
- 'What is this?', (metaphysics)
- 'How do I know that is real and true? (Logic)' ,
- 'What, if anything, should I do about that? (Ethics)
You could start on your own with those three questions and be far ahead of those who don't do even that, but there are a number of enticingly false trails that've ensnared and consumed the time of many truly great minds who've pursued those questions before you; or instead, giving your consideration to these highlights will reveal them and the ways they found around the more obvious detours, exits, traps and dead-ends, that lay in wait for you, and spare yourself the same trouble. Doing so will not only give you access to their wisdom & experience, it'll also reveal to you the enormous state of confusion, and the many mis-directions that the modernists have injected into the daily assumptions surrounding us in our world today, and so help you to disentangle your own thoughts from them.
To begin a 'quick' (well, quicker than seven posts) review of those highlights, we'll begin at the beginning with The Three Acts of the Mind:
First Act: Apprehend (Understand) - We open our eyes, and whether seeing something for the first time, or understand that we know it by name, a Rock for instance, we apprehend it, conceptualize, identify itWe're always performing these three acts of the mind, and no matter whether we do so well or poorly, the human mind, the 'difference engine' as it's sometimes been called, is constantly, naturally, observing and making distinctions between one thing and another, making a judgment about those differences and what to do about them. No matter what continent or age he's lived in, man has naturally been able to engage with and dominate his environment, by performing those Three Acts of the Mind - even though he mostly did so with no awareness of what that process was, or entailed.
Second Act: Judgment - The act of mind which combines or separates two terms by affirmation or denial. 'Rock is hard' is a judgment
Third Act: Reasoning - From our observations and judgments, we move towards further conclusions and applications of them. 'As rocks are hard, I should avoid striking my toe against them.'
The first to notably begin paying conscious attention to the process of reasoning were the Greeks, and the first of them to begin trying to methodically identify and clarify what our words referred to, and whether or not what they were leading us towards, was, or could be true, was Socrates. He famously put his Socratic method to use by publicly questioning the leading voices in Athens who claimed to know something of the reality behind the popular assumptions of his time - what was meant by Good, Virtue, Piety, Justice, Power - and revealed that all too often the primary concerns of those leaders were for how those assumptions could be used to their own social and political benefit while ensnaring their audiences through them, rather than communicating something real and true with them.
Despite Socrates being put to death for practicing it, his Socratic method of reasoning (what he called the 'Dialectic', is not like what goes by that name today) caught on and was spread by followers of his like Plato, and by Plato's own student, Aristotle, who further refined their methods into a system of requirements, rules, and common errors to be watched out for when doing so, which were applicable not only to questioning members of society, but also to examining the world around us through what would become the framework for biology, physics, the arts and more.
The fundamental principle that was at the root of the entire system, was what Aristotle called the first rule of thought:
- that a thing cannot both be, and not be, in the same manner and context;, and that understanding that contradictions cannot exist, was the cornerstone which Aristotle built his system upon, and it's been the distinction that truly has made the difference between what would become The West, and all of the rest - and is what Modernity has been targeting since its inception (that is what's being targeted by the nonsense of saying that a man can become a woman).
How to validate, communicate, study, and argue for what is true for all, within the reality we all share, begins with identifying the three different forms of knowledge which we come to know that through:
Lacking those distinctions implicitly degrades the depth & quality of what you know to a flat 'if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail' view of knowledge and what it might be useful for, whereas an awareness of those distinctions in what you know, allows depth and dimension to your understanding and inclines you towards a more 'well rounded' education.
- Empeiría/Epistemé - often translated as only one word or the other, what we call Empirical, refers to the facts and data of experience, while Epistemé refers to the principled methods of Science;
- Tékhne - what we today call Technology, is the “art” or “technique” of putting the facts and data of experience to use;
- Sophía - Wisdom (Philosophy, philo-Sophia, being the love of wisdom) goes deeper and sees farther into how to turn the experiences and arts of living, towards taking those actions that make lives worth living
The philosophical awareness that reality is the basis of what we're able to recognize as being true, and that truth is the measure of what is good, provides an ever-clearer sense of man's place within the world, and in practice reveals those otherwise unseen relationships which surround and incorporate us all within what is real and true.
Coincidentally (not!) that same philosophical awareness of reality is what the modernist's misosophy (hatred of wisdom) seeks to divorce you from. How? Think about what is happening within and to a person's thoughts when they advance any of the positions plucked from the bitter fruits of modernity, such as:
That may be your truth but it's not my truth, for while a person may have their own opinion, they cannot have their own Truth, yet in the act of expressing the idea that they can, a person is denying their own ability to share their thoughts and understanding with another person - and they with them - which is isolating 'their' realities from each other. If taken seriously, that'd mean that they'd be unable to discuss with anyone else what they meant by even their own statement's words of 'that', or 'my', let alone by 'truth' - how could they, if truth is not what we have or even can have, in common? If what is objectively true is not accessible to all, then any and every thought and statement of yours would be rendered fully and completely meaningless to others and to yourself, and could not be otherwise.
You might say "Well, but they don't really believe that", but that means that they've consciously advanced a lie at the center of their mind to achieve surreptitious ends, and how could that not accomplish the very same thing? Such modernisms disengage your sense of self from the world, and deprive you of being able to trust in your fellows - what can trust be without Truth?! - and puts you in opposition to what is real and true, separating each person's words and concepts from what they refer to, ultimately rendering the intelligible world, intelligence, and the logos, into little more than meaningless sounds to be parroted as verbal tricks. Those who've been taught such modernisms, have been cast adrift in their own private chaos (see Sartre who embraced that chaos as the ideals of existentialism).
Not only are all such beliefs necessarily chaotic, but their inconsistencies and contradictions are also almost comical to listen to, as "That may be your truth but it's not my truth" is itself declaring a universal truth while claiming that truth can't be universally known, just as the claim that "No one can know anything!", is itself a claim to know something! Or how about this oh-so Modernist gem:
'Reason can't be trusted!', oh... ok, so how and with what did you come to that conclusion? Yep, that's right! You used your REASON to conclude that 'reason can't be trusted', which means, 1st, you shouldn't trust yourself, and 2nd I'm not going to trust you either. Good lord. The attentive listener who's unwilling to be diverted from what they can observe to be real and true, shouldn't hesitate to show how embarrassingly self-refuting and at odds with reality such statements are (see Retortion).
Failings such as these were as obvious and applicable to the sophists of Aristotle's time, as they are to the skeptics of our own, and the reality is that they have no choice but to implicitly, and often explicitly, utilize every aspect of what they're so dramatically denying, in order to deny them! Not for no reason did Aristotle note that if a skeptic actually took their own positions seriously, they'd have to close their mouths, and sit down to await their deaths, motionlessly & silently, since,
"...But if all are alike both wrong and right, one who is in this condition will not be able either to speak or to say anything intelligible; for he says at the same time both 'yes' and 'no.' And if he makes no judgement but 'thinks' and 'does not think', indifferently, what difference will there be between him and a vegetable?..."The awareness that there is something to know, and that it cannot both be and not be at the same time and context, leads to noticing not only those distinctions between the forms of knowledge we can have of that, but also that there is a distinctive pattern to how we act upon our knowledge, which Aristotle illustrated as the Four Causes:
, by developing the habit of looking deeper into the nature of causation than only the shallowest of surface appearances, you'll be more aware of where you are in the world, more informed about what it is you are observing, and less mystified about what's going on around you - in short, an attention to causation, causes you to have a more thorough understanding of what you know matters to you.
- the Material Cause: “that out of which”, e.g., bronze is what a statue is made out of.
- the Formal Cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue.
- the Efficient Cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.
- the Final Cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, what the aim is of commissioning a bronze statue to enhance a park setting;
In matters of material causation, the same principle applies, in that the deeper understanding we have of the identity of what something is, the better we'll be able to understand how it changes with the circumstances of its present context which determines its Actuality and Potentiality to change (the example given previously, Baking Soda and Vinegar cause a very different reaction, than when Baking Soda is combined in a cake mix), in that 'change' is what results from being in sufficient proximity with what something else is - IOW, Causation is Identity in action (and interaction).
That attention to what is, how we know it, and what is caused by that, reveals that whatever the sophist and skeptic might say about how seriously they take their own positions and inconsistencies, if they acted on them consistently - from crossing the street without looking, to disregarding 'too rigid' warnings on powerful medications - they'd soon be dead, and yet their shadowy inconsistencies are effective at ensnaring popular opinion, and the power & influence which that leads to, is what they do take seriously. Likewise, then as now, while Sophists are unconcerned about the weaknesses of their claims, in having turned away from the pursuit of truth (a wrong turn which modernity's off-ramp of 'epistemology' has detoured generations of students with), they thrive on the confusion which naturally spreads out through mishandling concepts of identity, causation, and change, easily inflames popular passions through whatever it is that is the 'Irritant of the Day' - as has happened from the Persians of Socrates' day, to the 'economics' of Marx's, and down to the global warming of today - giving them easier access to the levers of power while further undermining popular norms, as sophists have excelled at doing since the time of Zeno's paradoxes (look up Achilles losing a race to a tortoise).
A fabricated doubt is a willfully arbitrary denial of reality which (if unchecked) progressively erodes ever larger swaths of your understanding, whereas a naturally arising doubt indicates a gap in your knowledge which prompts your asking questions to improve and enlarge your understanding.
It was through the indirect route of causation, that modernity's first skeptic of note, David Hume, launched his attacks upon our ability to know what is real and true, and with a big assist from Descartes' 'method', he struck through our only implicit understanding of Causation, by fabricating arbitrary doubts about our ability to know what causes anything at all to happen. His assertion was that what we mistakenly take for being knowledge of cause and effect, is really nothing more than our naively associating what we see happening in sequence - 'contiguously in time' - which is all just 'one damn thing after another'. Hume, who was a nominalist (believing that words are arbitrary labels which convey no real understanding) and an empiricist (only measurable facts matter), asked if anyone had actually ever seen a 'cause', or do we simply first see one billiard ball rolling into another, and then on seeing the 2nd billiard ball rolling away, we assume that the one caused the other...riiight?
Hume answered his own question, declaring that:
"I look for an object of 'causation' and I do not see it", and so following other such doubts concluded that if 'causation' is not a physically detectable feature like a fissure or a bump, then it doesn't 'exist'; there is 'no causation', only happenstance, and when we say that striking a billiard ball will cause it to roll, we don't actually know that striking it will cause that, we only say so because it's happened that way in the past, and we have no way of knowing that it'll ever happen that way again. Meaning that having no knowledge of identity (which was his real target), and so we can have no meaningful knowledge of what a billiard ball is, or what causes it to move when struck by another, let alone what might cause the sun to rise, or iron to rust - all we can know are memories (which are...?) of past facts (...how?), and though those are mysteriously useful in gambling on what'll happen in the future, that 'fact' can only be an uncertain guess, a probability, not a 'truth'.
Ironically, for an 'empiricist', such sentiments are only possible by evading the evidence of his own senses. That Hume willfully evaded seeing this, we can easily see from his own words which make plain that he is making use of his own ability to perceive and conceive of what is real and true, in order to deny his own ability to perceive and conceive of what is real and true. Right? What, after all, is a memory? What is a 'fact'? Is a fact a tangible 'thing' (no, it is our conception of a tangible thing, in the context of other facts) that exists, and if not, how are you speaking of it? How do empirical 'facts' get into memory? How are such things committed to and recalled from our mind, except by some form of causation that's necessarily formless in nature, and which in considering it, conveys what knowledge you have of it, knowledge that can be added to, examined, and verified? Sorry Hume, but you cannot deny metaphysics, causality, and knowledge, while making use of metaphysics, causality, and knowledge, in order to deny metaphysics, causality, and knowledge - not to mention doing so with the appearance of a logical argument when logic also depends upon all three (more on that in the next post).
Hume's ultimate target was not causation, but identity, and especially the responsibility that recognizing both entails, in that upon his asserting his conclusion that any metaphysical, moral, or ethical teachings, are but reckless conjectures which Hume advised readers to 'Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion', and why wouldn't he, since he claimed that on having gone in search of his 'self' he came up empty, and remarked:
"When I turn my reflection on myself, I never can perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive any thing but the perceptions", and Hume likewise denied the self, the soul, and Free Will, he took that act of willful blindness in the face of reality to 'the next level', feigning blindness to the fact that that 'me' which he described those 'concrete mental acts' being given to, was the very self he denied the existence of.
His necessarily meaningless assertions to the contrary, Causation, is not a mysterious force, and there is no need to look for a separate object of 'causality' (which would do what exactly?), nor is there some sort of causal pixie dust that somehow evaded Hume's observations, there is only reality as it is, which is open to all who don't refuse to see, and identify what we can see.
Perhaps the best reply to such willful blindness comes from the response that Aristotle gave in his Physics to the Sophists of his time, who, like Hume, preferred to spin up their own mental notions which they 'thought' were somehow more preferable to the reality which they refused to see:
"... That nature exists, it would be absurd to try to prove; for it is obvious that there are many things of this kind, and to prove what is obvious by what is not is the mark of a man who is unable to distinguish what is self-evident from what is not..." [emphasis mine], but of course saying so to someone who refuses to see and hear and who denies the choice he made to do so, it would almost certainly be pointless, as such answers as those which Hume declared he was unable to find, in everything from his 'self', to causality, to knowledge, were and are easily found in the premodern metaphysics which he'd so actively evaded, and opposed, which as we'll see in coming posts, what the spark that escalated modernity's ongoing assault upon the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West into open opposition to it.
When a child first sees the explosive reaction caused by adding baking soda to vinegar, he quickly grasps that something about adding the one to the other, causes that eruption - it doesn't just happen 'contiguously in time', no child would tolerate such a perverse evasion of causality.
And as innumerable ' volcano science projects' have demonstrated for more than a century, as the student's knowledge deepens into a more detailed understanding of the chemical identities of both substances involved, their earlier inference of being 'the cause' of the eruption, is contextually clarified, not invalidated, which is a process that will continue on down to their knowledge of what is happening at the subatomic level, where previous knowledge will be contextually sharpened, but not discarded.
Causation is Identity in action and interaction, and the better we understand the identity of something, the better we can predict what it might cause.
What we are able to know of the identity of what something is, tells us about how it will behave in action, and interaction, with its surroundings - what happens, happens because of the nature and substance of what it is, and in relation to what else is in its surroundings - subject and object exist in interaction and do not do so in isolation from each other, there is a causal relationship, and as our understanding of the nature of one identity improves, so does our understanding of what causes it to behave as it does in various contexts, with those of the planets orbiting around our sun, or of billiard balls striking each other, or of one substance changing into another as from iron to rust, or those detectable affects to our own disposition and character that are reliably caused by our own willingness or unwillingness to understand that what is real and true, matters.
And as innumerable ' volcano science projects' have demonstrated for more than a century, as the student's knowledge deepens into a more detailed understanding of the chemical identities of both substances involved, their earlier inference of being 'the cause' of the eruption, is contextually clarified, not invalidated, which is a process that will continue on down to their knowledge of what is happening at the subatomic level, where previous knowledge will be contextually sharpened, but not discarded.
Causation is Identity in action and interaction, and the better we understand the identity of something, the better we can predict what it might cause.
When you deny that, as Hume did, you soon lose the ability to even recognize yourself. His blindness to them was a choice, made through the free will which he denied that he or we have, and was likely the result of a long and habitual rebellion against reality - outside and in - to the point of his having divorced himself from reality, inside and out. Sad. And modern Epistemology, which Kant formed in reaction to Hume (more on that in coming posts) - not by trying to correct his claim's errors, but by accepting his claims and extending them into a system that begins by denying our ability to know what is real, should be a non-starter for anyone concerned with what is real and true, as the meaning of the word 'Epistemology' is necessarily meaningless, without reality.
Summing up: It is what it is
Socrates, when asked about his new system and his role in it, had the humility and self-awareness to realize that ultimate wisdom was beyond the reach of man, but what we could and should do, was recognize its priceless value and the need to pursue it, which he called Philosophy, the love of wisdom.
Premodern philosophy's love of wisdom necessarily entails the pursuit of knowledge of what is objectively real and true, while always being aware of the possibility of being wrong or lacking important context, and engaging in that pursuit in that way leads us into a deeper understanding of ourselves, the world, and our place in it. Armed with the understanding that reality not only exists, but is worth knowing, and that knowing it is good, a society leads itself towards a flourishing level of education, the practice of science, and the development of technology that is beneficial to human life.
Two thousand years after Socrates' time, Hegel had no such sense of humility or any suspicion that he could be wrong, and convinced as he was that he already knew all that needed to be known, he concluded that he needn't pursue the wisdom he was sure he already had (conveniently he also pooh-poohed Aristotle's concern over contradictions), and all that he felt was left for him to do was to teach his wisdom to those who weren't too stupid to grasp it (an attitude which has been a 'tell' of those following in his misosophical footsteps to this day).
To reload our bullet points, how we come to understand anything, is through The Three Acts of the Mind:
First Act: Apprehend (Understand) - We open our eyes, and whether seeing something for the first time, or understand that we know it by name, a Rock for instance, we apprehend it, conceptualize, identify it, and through conscious attention to how & what we think, we come to understand that:
Second Act: Judgment - The act of mind which combines or separates two terms by affirmation or denial. 'Rock is hard' is a judgment
Third Act: Reasoning - From our observations and judgments, we move towards further conclusions and applications of them. 'As rocks are hard, I should avoid striking my toe against them.'
, and the more conscious we become of what we think and how, we are led to Aristotle's first rule of thought:
- Reality exists
- What exists, exists as some thing, which is what it's Identity is derived from
- In becoming aware of what exists, we become aware of our selves.
, through which we come to grasp the three forms of knowledge (Episteme, Techne, Wisdom), and a realization of the reality that what is real and true, is objectively true for all, and from that realization, by making the distinctions we naturally do, in a methodical manner, we come to a better understanding of Causality - in the context of man's actions it entails the Four Causes (the Material, Formal, Efficient, and Final Causes), and with material causation's Actual and Potential to change being determined by the Identity of those materials within a given context, in which causation is essentially what results from Identity in action and interaction, over which our knowledge enables us to act upon and understand the world around us and our place within it.
- "...the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect..."
And one last point and peril to be aware of, is the crucial importance of recognizing the difference between a legitimate doubt that comes unbidden to your mind, and the artificial 'doubt' that modernity is intent upon your developing the conscious habit of inserting into your every thought.
These are the doubtful distinctions between a true doubt, and an arbitrarily fabricated 'doubt' of corrosive skepticism:
The hard reality is that no part of metaphysics can be denied, without utilizing all of its other 'parts' to do so, and every attempt to do so affirms every part in an embarrassingly self-refuting manner (remember Retortion). Fortunately for us, knowing even only that much about what you are up against, gives the advantage of awareness which enables you to take notice of and so step around the epistemological booby traps that the modernists' have laid for us all, and so logically proceed on more securely within a world that truly is meaningful... next post.
- A true doubt, comes upon us unbidden from an unconscious understanding, and leads us to ask those questions which initiates the desire to identify and to relate to what else you know - Aristotle's "All men my nature desire to know" - and helps to form or clarify our understanding. Such naturally occurring doubts as those are valid and entirely desirable, and are the very antithesis of an arbitrary and consciously fabricated doubt.
- An arbitrary doubt, is not a basis for thought, this Cartesian 'method' instead eradicates methodical thinking, and is erosive to reasoning, as it transforms what had been known, into further unknowable unknowns that unceasingly divides our knowledge and understanding, and straying down those paths will not lead a thinker to knowledge and wisdom, but only to their destruction - AKA: Critical Dialectic
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Monday, October 30, 2023
Logic: Observing and deactivating the boobytraps of modernity - You keep using that word 3
The previous post reviewed the highlights of Metaphysics and noted that everyone has a philosophy, even if they are unaware of it, and that the only choice open to us is whether yours will be a confused mishmash that'll be of greater benefit to those interested in using you for their own ends, or a sound one that serves what you think is best by respecting what is real and true. The latter option requires practicing what the term 'Epistemology' was coined to mean in the mid-1880s - 'distinguishes justified belief from opinion' - rather than how that '4th branch of philosophy' (which denies that you are able to know what is real and true) is typically thought of and practiced today.
In this post we'll look at that philosophical feature which mankind had been unaware of for most of human history (that we know of), which is that 3,000 year old manmade technology that quickly became the power-tool of the Western mind: Logic (see Aristotle's Organon). For the fact is that while reasoning comes naturally to all men, doing so methodically, and logically, does not, and until men began paying conscious attention to the process of what they did when reasoning, the key tool for doing that more effectively, and for verifying reason's results, remained undiscovered.
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| Guarding against Fallacies is important, but not enough! |
It would be especially hard for anyone interested in Epistemology to treat Logic as a separate and distinct system, as Logic cannot be 'done' without paying due attention to the metaphysics it is derived from, as identifying what is, what is true, what you know, and what follows from that, are the fundamental requirements that must be known before Logic can be used to test an argument's validity. Any exercise in 'logic' which ignores whether the terms or propositions it is built from reflect reality, is a waste of time and intellectual effort, as logically it cannot be interested in Logic. Yes, the rules of Logic's most visible feature, the Syllogism, are used to validate your argument, but that's just a means to an end, the actual point of logic is to detect inconsistencies, errors, and contradictions in your thinking and in what it is you think you are thinking about, and that requires clearly identifying the nature of your terms, noting how one term actually relates to another, and whether or not your premises are in fact true, and support - or invalidate - your argument.
That's why this primary prerequisite for Logic isn't just a formality, it's the whole point of the process:
, and there's no point applying any of the other rules of logic, if you haven't first ensured that your terms and premises are true, as what results cannot be logical.
- Ensure that your terms are clear and unequivocal, and that your premises are true
Disclaimer - I'm no expert on Logic, and I'm not intending to teach it here, but only to point out the too often neglected fundamentals, without which you can have no real ability to be logical. If you are interested in learning Logic properly and fully, I can suggest a comparatively brief, and very readable introduction to logical reasoning, in Peter Kreeft's 'Socratic logic: A Logic Text Using Socratic Method, Platonic Questions, and Aristotelian Principles (the first few pages are excerpted here). In that, Prof. Kreeft points out that the rules of logic are, perhaps surprisingly, rather simple, for instance, concerning the archetypal syllogism:
'Socrates is a man,, he points out the immediate understanding which we should take from that argument:
all men are mortal,
therefore Socrates is a mortal man'
What may not be immediately obvious in that, is that the form of the syllogism enables us to either relate and order that knowledge into a hierarchy of what we know and how it relates to reality, or it exposes the gaps and breaks and errors in our understanding, both of which enhances and reflects our grasp of Identity, Knowledge, and Causality. How it does so is through the terms, propositions, premises, and the conclusion which they argue towards. What's implicit in the working parts of the syllogism, is that its structure reveals three different aspects of the reality being taken into consideration:
- "What are we talking about? "Man"
- "What are we saying about it?","That man is mortal"
- "Why is it mortal?", "Because man is an animal, and all animals are mortal, therefore man is mortal."
Those terms, propositions, premises and arguments, are concerned with the metaphysics of what is, and what causally follows from that, is what Logic exposes, as well as expressing what should and should not follow from that, through Ethics. If you have eyes with which you permit yourself to see, you should be able to see that when Sophists' attack causality, they are indirectly attacking logic, identity, truth, and your ability to understand and respond accordingly to them, as we saw with the relativist's 'my truth' being an attack upon truth and reality as such. It is through the logical process, that we see how our knowledge is consciously validated from the grassroots of reality on up, and extended through to the highest of abstractions formed from them, into solid units of understanding.
- Terms reveal essences (What a thing is)
- Propositions reveal existence (whether it is)
- Arguments reveal causes (why it is)
Not surprisingly, in the modernist's treatment of logic, as with the supposedly 'mathematically rigorous' symbolic logic (Prof. Kreeft gives an excellent explanation of why that is of little value in reasoning), that fundamental rule is rarely even mentioned, and is more likely ignored or evaded, because modernism fundamentally ignores and evades identity, causality, and existence itself. Play your word games all you want, but don't pretend that dressing such games up in the operational rules of logic could make them any more logical, than dressing a man up in women's clothing would make him a woman.
Elementary my dear Watson
The practice of attempting to 'do logic' by the technical rules while ignoring its overall purpose, often leads to one of the common excuses or *criticisms* of syllogisms, such as: "That just deals with deductive logic!', meaning that it's too simple, and also that deductive logic is somehow more obviously and perceptually *true*, and then that inductive or inferential logic deals with conjectures that we cannot ever be ultimately 'certain' of. Before we open ourselves up to the Inigo Montoya treatment, let's get clear on what the meaning of the words we're using, are:
Ok... so how different is Deductive logic, from Inductive logic? Well, seemingly very different, and yet not so different after all. You see, making inferences isn't as mysterious as modernists would like you to infer, and those who do so would like you to forget (or better yet, never realize) that all deductions, are themselves derived from inferences!
- Deductive reasoning progresses from general ideas to specific conclusions.
- Inductive reasoning starts with specific observations and forms general conclusions about them.
Look again at the classic example of deductive logic:
'Socrates is a man,The three Propositions that the syllogism is made up of, each of which has two terms, and form a premise about reality, with each building upon the previous one, are leading to the argument's conclusion that is and must be true - if it agrees with experience, and that is the key.
all men are mortal,
therefore Socrates is a mortal man'
To be logical, your basic logical units, the Terms used, and the propositions formed from them, must be clear, and unambiguous, meaning that there can be no doubt about what is being referred to (Identity). The 1st particular concrete term, is identified as belonging to the 2nd general abstract term, and all within the 2nd general term are related to the particular attribute of the 3rd term, forming the conclusion which clearly follows by demonstrating that there is a relationship between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd terms. That integrated meaning causes the conclusions, and not the happenstance of a premise's position in an argument, or the surface rules it abided by, and modernity is fundamentally opposed to that understanding (more on that in coming posts).
One too common example that's given of inductive reasoning today, is this exceedingly poor example which was the very first result I received from a Bing search (from liveScience.com),
"The coin I pulled from the bag is a penny. That coin is a penny. A third coin from the bag is a penny. Therefore, all the coins in the bag are pennies."What this deliberately gives the impression of, is that induction is just a matter of happenstance and seemingly sensible conjecture of one thing that happens to follow another (Oh, Hello there Hume!), which is unreliable and easily invalidated by any unexpected 'black swan' event, such as the fourth coin coming out of the bag as a nickel - Oops! However the fact is that this is not a valid example of Inductive Reasoning, and is in fact only a hasty generalization (which is itself a logical fallacy - see #3 in '10 Commandments of Logic' pic above).
We can easily come up with a better and more appropriate example of inductive logic practically off the cuff, by looking at how the experience of different particulars, leads to a conclusion that relates to every particular instance, by way of a generalized abstraction of 'mortality':
"It's been observed that man requires food and drink in order to live and that he will die without them. In most climates, men require clothing and shelter to survive, and in too harsh conditions without them, even briefly, whether hot, cold, or excessively wet, will likely cause his death. Like other animals, man is subject to diseases which can cause his death, and man, as with other animals, becomes more frail and subject to disease by aging itself, which also eventually leads to his death. Man is also made vulnerable to death by any number of injuries and wounds that, whether sustained by accident or incident to his person, will cause his death. Seeing that there are numerous means for causing a man's death, and that death will eventually come to him even without obvious external cause, and that not only is there no evidence of any men ever having been impervious to fatality, all of the evidence gathered from every relevant direction, indicates that man cannot escape death, and so we infer that it is part of the identity of man that all men are mortal."Unlike the exceedingly weak example of the three pennies 'proving' that all coins in the bag are pennies by sequential happenstance, this example looks at what becomes an integrated whole through a variety of ways in which man experiences mortality, and inescapably leads to the conclusion that because of the nature of what we know man to be, we are able to infer that part of his identity is that all men are mortal.
The last words there, of "... all men are mortal", of course are what form the 2nd premise of the classic 'Socrates is...' example of deductive logic, and what you should infer from that, is that all such abstract terms are arrived at through the same inductive manner (soundly or unsoundly), which begin in experience, and rising up by abstraction to become accepted concepts - and inescapably lead to the conclusion that the premises used in Deductive logic, are derived from Inductive reasoning. The terms of a deductive syllogism are the answers at the end result of a process of inductive reasoning that created them, and while it can and does save time, it shouldn't be forgotten that it can and should be used as a means of making more plain any oversights or errors that might've been missed in the more detailed process of inductive reasoning.
To fully appreciate Logic and the benefits it reveals to us, we need to understand the nature of the reciprocal 'fact checking' role that is implicit in the complementary roles of deductive and inductive reasoning, which they'll perform for each other, if attended to diligently, in that - so long as you expect that to the best of your knowledge your premises & terms are true - if your deductions and inferences are technically valid, and yet the inescapable conclusion differs in some way from what experience actually shows, that's an indication that there are gaps or even errors in your assumptions and knowledge of the terms you're reasoning with.
For instance, the following example which abides by only the surface rules of the syllogism:
'Socrates is a Greek,, leads to a conclusion which does not agree with our experience which indicates that at least one of the premises are not fully sound and true, which should cause you to acknowledge that this argument inescapably 'proves' that something in 'what you know' is false.
All Greeks eat olives,
Therefore, Socrates eats olives.'
Discovering errors in your logical reasoning, by means of logical reasoning, is not a bug, that's a feature, and it means that there's more to learn in what you're thinking about, and it clearly shows you that your premises and possibly even your terms, need to be explored further, qualified, and possibly even entirely revised.
To ensure that our 'logically inescapable' conclusions don't become traps for us, we need to do our best to ensure that every step in our logic, and our understanding of its premises, and that its terms are clear and unambiguous, all fully comport with what is real and true. The rules for arranging terms and premises in a syllogism are an important part of the process of logical reasoning, but they do not substitute for the entire process which they too depend upon. That requires that you incline towards a wider view of your knowledge, and ensure that it is more than an arrangement of 'facts', and that there are good reasons to believe that the soundness of your knowledge, and the terms and premises derived from it, lead to, rather than are constricted by, the technical rules of the syllogism itself. By adhering to the primary rule, before, during, and after, we are able to learn from what we know.
Deductive Logic, and Inductive Logic, are two complementary and interdependent approaches to validating your reasoning, and you can bet that when people criticize logic as being 'too pat', or rationalistic, it's because they've allowed those terms to become divided from each other in their minds. It should come as no surprise that modernity was practically established upon pitting deductive and inductive reasoning against each other, they've a number of methods for confusing you into allowing them to do just that.
This issue came to the forefront with Hume, and then exploded in maximum density with Kant's reaction to him, but it is enough for now to know (we'll get into further details in later posts) that when you see the terms 'analytic vs synthetic', or in their more technically detailed form of 'a priori' vs 'a posterori', in either case you'd be wise to treat them as flashing red warning signs being used to divert you into taking the offramp of their '4th branch of philosophy', which is designed to lead you astray from what is, and what can be understood to be, real and true.
You should know that those lights are flashing red, whenever you see examples such as this:
'A Bachelor is an unmarried man' and 'Grass is green', and they're attempting to force you to exit onto modernity's epistemological offramp, through those 'analytic'/'synthetic', or 'a priori'/'a posterori' terms just mentioned, which they assert are only 'true' (scare quoted as this is the means of reducing Truth to small 't' truths') either by definition alone, or through empirical evidence.
Before looking closer, how they typically define these terms are, that Analytic or:
"A priori claims are those you can know independent of experience", or is 'contained by it' (as 'unmarried' is 'contained' by 'bachelor') while on the other apparent hand, a Synthetic or:
"a posteriori claims are justified based on experience"If something about those statements seems unsettling, congratulations, your internal B.S. detector is working well, and you can see the issue by asking 'What is this, How do I know it, What if anything should I do about that', yourself.
We can and should say that, and without advancing a materialist position, it is true that there is nothing that we can know of this world, independent of experience. The word 'Bachelor' was not magicked into our minds from somewhere beyond time or space, we know that a bachelor refers to an unmarried man, and because through experience we know what a man is, and we know what marriage is, and that 'Bachelor' is the word we use to identify a man that is not married - it is self-evident that the word, its terms, and its premise, are all derived from experience.
The same goes for their other favorite examples, that the sum of degrees in a triangle is always 180* is 'true in every universe', because we understand from experience the nature and properties of a triangle. Likewise with Number and numbering, as far from numbers being mysteriously ethereal concepts, they are what we arrived at after having abstracted the particulars being counted - apples, oranges, spears - away from the quantities being handled, we were able to give the names of 'one, two, three' to them, as a means of greatly simplifying the counting of them.
Yes, numbers show up in the darndest of places, but that's because quantities of this and that is all there is... everywhere! No part of 27÷9=3 exists outside of or prior to experience, and in case you've forgotten, learning that the answer to what 27 divided by 9 is, is devilishly difficult to get to - ask any 1st grader to verify that for you. It's only after you've understood what a number is, and what particular numbers refer to, and after you've experienced working through and counting it out a few times, that it gets easier. Yes, numbers, math, can be applied anywhere in place and time, and would apply whether or not people existed... by whichever intelligent creature existed that was able to learn the concept from experience. Don't fall for the 'a priori/a posterori' con, it is purely philosophical sleight of hand, and it is intended to take something from you - one of your most important handles on reality. Whatever example is waved in your face, don't buy into their conceptual Three Card Monty game - concepts are applicable in nearly every scenario we can imagine, but that does not mean that we came to know any of them through any means other than from experience.
Note: In recent years there've been attempts to dodge this, by objecting that "What makes something a priori is not the means by which it came to be first known, but the means by which it can be shown to be true or false" (Baggini), meaning that once it's been learned, we no longer need to refer to experience, to know what a triangle is, to which I give all the respect which is due that argument in my reply: B.S.! Someone who has somehow never seen or heard of a triangle, will not 'know' it by saying the word 'triangle', and until you ask them to imagine the shape made from three straight lines, laid end to end with the last connecting back to the first, they will then understand it, from having had that experience of imagining it, or you can show them a triangle and after having experienced seeing it, they'll recognize it... from that experience.
There are many technical differences between what I've lumped together here as being roughly equivalent between 'analytic vs synthetic', 'a priori' vs 'a posterori', but they are differences of degree, not kind, and the ugly fact is that people are working very hard to discredit your ability to apprehend reality, and they will try to confuse the issue of what is, and is not real, but their efforts are no more worthy of trust than those of the Three Card Monty dealer - don't fall for it. After cutting through all of the dense verbiage, what they're doing is attacking both Identity and Causality, and they're doing so in order to capture your mind - decline to accept their 'hypotheticals' - they're trying to bounce you right on out of the real world. I'd advise against accepting their invitation.
As we've already seen with the premise that 'man is mortal', when we examine our experiences, we don't simply infer a conclusion from a sequence of observations, as the lame example of taking coins from a bag asserted, rather, as we saw with 'man is mortal', we observe that in examining our experiences, when we find that the totality of our observations show the same results, which are also affirmed through all other conceivable variations, we are able to infer with certainty that within those contexts that conclusion is able to be understood to be true.
NOTE: Certainty does not require nor imply inerrant infallibility, and any attempt at claiming that, is also an attack, deliberate or not, upon reality, identity, truth, and everything in your world which depends upon them.
We are able to infer that there is a basis for being certain of our conclusion, within appropriate contexts, and one reason why we should not separate deductive from inferential reasoning, is that they are interdependent and self-correcting, when previously unconsidered evidence and contexts arise.
It's important to point out that the famous 'black swan' event, is not a valid case of inference or exception, relying as it does on nothing more than the feeble 'this coin was a nickel, and the next coin was a nickel, so all coins are nickels' mockery of inference, in that as we know that chemical processes which produce the coloring of a swans feathers, are fully capable of producing other colors, and there's no reason to suspect that a mutation would be unable to produce a single black swan or even a new breed of them. The fact that swans are most likely to be white, is valid as a general rule of thumb, but the existence of one or more black swans does nothing to invalidate inferential reasoning.
With that being said, we can move onto the other evasion of 'synthetic' or 'a posteriori' examples, which are typically positioned through common examples of:
"Grass is green" and "Man is mortal" and "There are no black swans", and one of the ways that students are intellectually assaulted with these terms, is by means of hypotheticals - NEVER allow someone to propose violating a fundamental principle such as identity or causality, in order to engage you in a hypothetical that begins with your agreeing to imagine something that conflicts with what you know to be real and true; their purpose is not to expand your thinking, but to puncture it, to sow doubts into your existing thoughts, and to disable your ability to think clearly from then on.
As we've seen, the premises that 'man is mortal' or 'bachelor is an unmarried man', are inferred from experience in just the same manner as 'grass is green' (in most varieties, not all), and the sum of degrees within a triangle is always 180*. It is only from experience that we are able to conceive of and conclude with certainty that all triangles in a flat plane (important point) sum up to 180*, because we can quickly see that there are no possible variations within a flat plane, that could result in more or less that 180* - it isn't possible. And while laying a triangular shape upon a convex or concave surface will produce more or less that 180*, that's no longer dealing with triangles in the context of a flat plane. And we don't validate our concepts through hypotheticals such as 'imagine grass that's red, or striped', because experience shows that hypotheticals that do not exist in reality, are not valid 'points of view' for considering reality from.
That man is mortal, is a result of inference. That all triangles contain 180* is the result of inference. That Red is a color, is a result of inference (and the fact that there are edge colors where its difficult to say are blue or green, does not invalidate either, and the fact that noticing there are fuzzy edges affirms, rather than calls into question, that solid ground can be identified). That a Bachelor is an unmarried man is no less an inference because it is defined to express the difference between men, and married men. Even 2+2=4 is an inference. The fact that some terms and premises take more or fewer instances to reliably infer a conclusion, has no effect on the validity of inference. BTW, the same applies in ethical conclusions, when an argument is made that:
'All people need food and shelter to survive,, they are counting upon your accepting their premises - and the ones they are ignoring - without question, and you can bet that they will fight against your checking their premises about 'people', 'need', 'good', and 'government'. Don't allow it. Ever.
some people lack food and shelter,
therefore government should ensure they are fed'
The supposed 'ideal' of inerrant and infallible certainty, which they hold up as an ideal, is a confession of their failure to understand and hostility to, mankind and man's means of understanding.
Are you Certain?
Stay on the road to reality, don't take the detours and offramps. The reason for the rules of logic that Aristotle formulated, and why we should follow them, checking and verifying that your thinking is either valid, or invalid, is to bring clarity to our understanding of what is real and true, and to bring order to our thinking. Logic is less about proving that something is true, than with clarifying whether your ideas of what is true, correspond to what actually is real and true, and reveals to you whether the fault is to be found within your argument, or with your premises, or even the terms, that you're using.
With all of that having been said, and reviewed here, there are a few other notable cautions and root fallacies noted in previous posts, to point out here, as an awareness of them helps in keeping your mind on track:
All of that and a great deal more (but always at least that), are basic to what was expanded upon in Aristotle's Metaphysics, and what's been known as The Organon, made up of his Categories, On Interpretation, the Prior Analytics, the Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and On Sophistical Refutations.
- An infinite regress does not lead to an explanation (in an evasion of both inductive and deductive logic), and engaging in such an effort is a giveaway that either an error, or a deception, is being concealed ("It's turtles all the way down!")
- The hypothetical assault - when a modernist asks you to consider an unreal or impossible hypothetical - "If we hypothetically, imagine ice that sinks, or grass that floats and burns, then it would it be logical to say...", but they aren't teaching you to think logically, they're actively steering you away from the fundamental rule for logically building upon what is real and true, to send you instead down modernity's epistemological offramp, performing computational rules of flowcharting, rather than engaging in logical reasoning.
What 'Epistemology' is defined as being, then - though rarely practiced as such - a system that 'distinguishes justified belief from opinion', is only able to see that it's justified, because it first identifies what is real and true, and so can be argued for logically, and be ethically justified.
That process is, and was, and should again be, understood to be one that utilizes metaphysics, logic, and ethics, in identifying what is, what follows, and what, if anything, should be done about that, by examining claims in a methodical, reasonable, and logical manner... and the Ethical portion of how we go about determining 'what, if anything, should be done about that', is what we'll look at next.
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Tuesday, October 31, 2023
The Ethics of Epistemology - Escaping the Inigo Montoya Trap - You keep using that word 4
We've looked at the misleading origins of the term 'Epistemology' in the mid 1800s, and at how the term purports to carry on the pursuit of 'meaning' that the premoderns were concerned with, even as the modernist's new '4th branch of philosophy' rejects the metaphysics and logic that any claim to meaning, is necessarily meaningless without. While modernity had been smoldering with skepticism & cynicism since at least the time of Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes, it didn't burst out into flame until it was ignited by David Hume's declaration that we could not know the causes of anything or anything else beyond an empirical fact and therefore the best (!) thing to do regarding any ethical & moral advice based upon that illusive 'knowledge', would be to:
'Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion'Claiming that Hume woke him up from his 'dogmatic slumbers', Immanuel Kant decided to oppose Hume by going even further with his systematic assertion that we can't ever really know the reality of the 'thing itself', and deeming earlier 'believable truths' to be outdated and 'uncritical', he led the moderns in systematically revising philosophy's role away from pursuing wisdom, and into providing convoluted sets of high-minded rules and rationalized 'truths' that they'd determined 'would be best' for society to treat as if they were 'realistic' and 'true'. And that system of German Idealism, is what the modernist's new '4th branch of philosophy' sprang from, and is what the word 'epistemology' was coined to obscure behind a facade of 'Greekness'.
For those who'd rather engage with ideas that actually help them to better understand themselves, the world, and how to live a life worth living within it, they'd do best to avoid the presumptions and practices of modern 'epistemology', and instead rediscover how premodern philosophy put what that word claims to mean - a theory of knowledge that distinguishes justified belief from opinion' - into action. The premoderns accomplished that through the only possible means of doing so, by establishing what is real and true, demonstrating how to soundly argue to affirm or refute claims about that, and by identifying what if anything should be done regarding that, which they did through the unified use of Metaphysics, Logic, and Ethics.
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| Knowledge without Wisdom is Monstrous |
In coming posts we'll look at the details of how the modernists did what they've done and the subsequent ill effects that's had on the lives we now lead, but first, to avoid falling into the Inigo Montoya trap which the moderns stumbled upon with 'epistemology' ("You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means"), we need to look at the meaning of the word Ethics, which is generally defined as:
"Ethics: Moral principles that govern a person's behavior and conduct", and perhaps the 1st thing to point out is that Ethics is more than merely rules of 'behavior and conduct', Ethics was traditionally the 3rd branch of philosophy, and contained the subjects of Politics, Law, Economics, and more, which matters a great deal to how philosophy 'distinguishes justified belief from opinion', and despite modern epistemology which concerns itself with that in name only, an ethical concern must be involved in any effort to understand what is real and true and how to respond to that, lest you reduce your own mind to that of an artificial intelligence like ChatGPT.
How do I mean that? Like this: it is not possible to meaningfully pursue the purported meaning of epistemology, without ethics - how would you justify - 'justify' being a term of ethics - belief, while having no belief in, interest in, or concern for, what is right and true? What can 'justified' possibly mean without a regard for what is real and true, and what, if anything, should - 'should' is also an ethical term - you do about that? Should you say anything if you notice an error in how something's been justified? What if that'd be inconvenient for you? Does it matter if you don't? Given its treatment of such stated concerns, it's not so surprising that modern philosophy has spawned a succession of evermore coldly antagonistic and brutal ideologies (utilitarianism, materialism, socialism, communism, pragmatism... etc.,), whose ideals are in constant competition to 'manage society', while agreeing only upon the belief that what is real and true, doesn't matter and can't be known by anyone anyway.
The truth is that it is not possible to be concerned with what we are told 'epistemology' means, without incorporating an Ethics that's more worthy of its name, than the '4th branch of philosophy' is of its name - the desire for knowledge without ethics, is a lust for power unburdened by wisdom. Or, to fit it to the season, knowledge without wisdom is monstrous.
Taking a different tact with the 3rd Branch of Philosophy - differences of degree, not kind
How we approach Ethics, necessarily has to differ from how we approached metaphysics and logic in the previous two posts (here, and here), and you can see why in the differences between the first two of the three philosophical questions, in relation to the third - they are again:
, in that the first two are concerned with what is, while the third is concerned with what should be done because of what we understand those to be. The principles of Metaphysics and Logic rest upon what Aristotle identified as being the first rule of thought, that a thing cannot both be and not be, at the same time and in the same manner and context, and as Logic is entirely derived from that and exists to root out any such contradictions in our thinking, both fields have remained essentially unchanged from Aristotle's day on down to ours, and rightly so, because they are concerned with the timeless First Principles of what is. But as Ethics is concerned with how to respond in respect to what knowledge we have of what is real and true, and as the scope and depth of our knowledge and understanding has expanded and deepened, what is understood to be ethical in relation to that knowledge, has necessarily changed as well.
- 'What is this?', (metaphysics),
- 'How do I know that? (Logic)',
- 'What, if anything, should I do about that? (Ethics)'
Put another way, imagine a scene viewed through a telescopic lens, where you see the ground of a yard with a house upon it and a nearby tree being the tallest figure within the scene - then as you zoom out, while the ground remains at ground level, the single house is seen to be one of many houses in a neighborhood, and the tree which had been the highest point visible has become dwarfed by the mountain which had been obscured behind it when zoomed in. Similarly, while the ground of metaphysics and logic remain solid and unchanged, as their ethical high ground had been raised upon standards that are now understood to be considerably lower from our perspective in time, so that what they saw as the high ground back then, we can now see as standing lower, overshadowed in places, and in some cases is now even seen as being disreputable, if not downright evil.
Because the fundamentals of what we accept as ethical behavior, are nearest to the timeless principles of metaphysics and logic which they are derived from, what we believe to be right and wrong in relation to those fundamentals (virtue, murder, theft, etc.,) change very little over time.
But. Since the breadth and depth of knowledge available to us has grown far beyond what was understood when the philosophical pursuit of wisdom was begun by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, that enables a difference in ethical perspective that's often glaring to our eyes today, which was unavailable in their own time. So that where on the surface there seems to be a common baseline understanding of what is ethical - murder was wrong in their time, as it is in ours - what was thought to be an ethical application of that knowledge can differ as much as its scope - i.e. the understanding of what does and does not constitute murder, has changed a great deal between their day and ours.
For instance, you've heard of the term 'decimated'? That comes from the Roman army's practice of discipling poor performance of the soldiers by lining up the troops and going down the line and killing every tenth soldier where they stood. In their eyes, that was not murder, that was simply maintaining discipline.
That's how much degree can vary within kind. And the more closely you look into the past, the more such differences of degree are revealed.
For instance, on the one hand, there were numerous positive developments over even the course of the 300 years from Socrates' time to Cicero's, where their knowledge and experience of the nature and purpose of the state (government and politics being a subset of Ethics), had further developed the idea of a Republic, into one that contained features of democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy (which was hugely influential on our founder's thinking). Also, the character and performance of the Roman's idea of a Republic depended greatly upon the character of their people, and especially upon the importance of the family unit. That also compelled them to seek out and admit more input from the people, and so they also began to see that The Law needed to be much more than an arena for verbal gamesmanship and rules for the rulers to rule their society through - which was the norm in Socrates' time - and instead needed to be based upon a principled understanding of right and wrong, which needed to be able to stand up to reasonable scrutiny, in order to be considered sound and acceptable as law (see especially Cicero's 'Republic' and 'The Laws').
On the other hand, while these were important and sound advances, advances that could be foreseen only dimly, if at all, from Socrates' position in time, from our perspective perched high atop of their shoulders, we're able to look back and down into their details, and see problems which they could not. For instance, as important as the family was believed to be by Romans to the Roman way of life, the near total power that the Roman Husband/Father, the Paterfamilias, had over the lives of his wife and children - he could put either to death if they had in some way (determined by him) dishonored the family - is something we're able to see today as being intolerably wrong and corrupting. And for all that they'd advanced in an understanding of the Law, and of Government, it was not uncommon for leading citizens and politicians, from Lucius Cornelius Sulla to Marc Antony and Octavian (later Augustus), to issue proscriptions for the good of the state, in which were listed the names of hundreds and even thousands of people who were to be hunted down and put to death, based solely upon the say so of whichever eminent figure had put their names onto that list - Cicero himself met his end in that way.
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| Death of Cicero |
Those differences in degree, follow from not just ignorance, but from the scope of knowledge and understanding that was available to them. In Aristotle's day at the opening of the philosophical pursuit of wisdom, the good of the polity, the state, marked the upper limit of known value and virtue, and that meant that the value of the individual was measured by their ability to serve the needs of society and the state. It was from that perspective that it was believed in Aristotle's time:
Our very different takes on those situations today come from our present vantage point (or at least one that was common to us in our Founders' time), which sees the purpose of the state to be to
- that the state 'should' direct the education of its youth,
- that some men were naturally slaves and so should serve their masters,
- it was considered perfectly acceptable for unwanted or disabled children to be 'exposed', tossed out on a hillside, where, unless retrieved by a stranger for some desperately specialized slavery, they would die of exposure to the elements or become food for the wild things and vultures.
The vantage point from which we see those situations so differently today, comes from the considerably expanded scope of knowledge and understanding of what a person is, and what a society should be, which was largely unknown and unavailable to them in their time - but we cannot forget that our vantage point is built upon the foundations which they laid.
- uphold and defend the rights and property of the individual within society,
- treating people as property is seen as an evil that is fundamentally opposed to the individual rights which it is the purpose of the state to safeguard,
- leaving infants for dead is seen as murder and an intolerable evil (*cough* abortion *cough*).
And yet, the differences are worth noting, if only to highlight the importance of understanding what is available for you to know, and the enormity of what can be missed through ignorance.
It's also important to point out that a vital part of what made our elevated perspective possible - even imaginable - to us today, are due to the major additions to knowledge and understanding that came from the Christian quarter of what was fast becoming the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West, and that raised the bar in ways that truly were inconceivable to Aristotle, and to Cicero as well.
In addition to the four Cardinal Virtues that had been known to them - Prudence, Justice, Courage, Temperance - were added three more virtues of Faith, Hope, Charity, which altered how the original four were understood to be applied. And so, in holding that violence was not only wrong, but that every person was made in the image of God, it was able to be understood that every person - child, mother, father - should be seen as equally human in the eyes of those whose own eyes had been opened to that. From that perspective it gradually became more and more difficult to not see the rich & powerful, as well as their humblest servants, as being equally human, and so equally deserving of the mutual respect and civility that should be extended to all as members of society.
The (very) Slow (then really fast) Progress of History
We today hardly notice how revolutionarily new these innovations were, and many today even cynically treat them as being outdated - not as a result of any new knowledge of ours, but out of a new ignorance of our old knowledge. What we miss, at the very least, is that these new ideas were such that within a remarkably short time they'd defeated the 'gods' of mighty Rome, within Rome! True, they couldn't stop the rot which centuries of corruption had already brought Republican Rome to ruin, and raised the Roman Empire up in its place, but Rome was able to continue on for another two centuries in the western half of the empire, before collapsing from opposing forces within and without at around the 400s. OTOH, the eastern half of the empire in Byzantium - which had never stopped thinking of itself as Rome - endured and prospered for another thousand years, before it too was finally defeated, though more by external forces than internal failures (though those last weren't lacking).
Centuries more passed by before Thomas Aquinas was able to bring that new Christian understanding, into Aristotle's philosophy, while the 'little people' continued to receive very little benefit or recognition of what we would understand today as 'individual rights', and even once violence, slavery, and immorality, had been brought into clearer disrepute, there were still few substantial barriers to stop the powerful from abusing the weak, as 'needed'. As the centuries passed, the ideas began to bubble up as with England's Charter of Liberties, and still centuries after that before monarchs began to be bound to respect the lives & property of their subordinates (barons, earls, etc.,) began to be codified into British law with the Magna Carta, and still several centuries more before people would begin to see that those same rights should be extended to the non-aristocratic population as well, and only then was the understanding expressed by Sir Edward Coke, able to begin to be infused into British Common Law with the idea that 'Every man's home is his castle', and the corollary realization that everyone's 'Castle' depended upon everyone recognizing that every person was due the equal protections of society's laws which were to be defended by the state, against all enemies, foreign & domestic.
With the solid foundation in fundamentals provided by the early Grecco/Roman half of the West, expanded and humanized by the Judeo/Christian half, and refined over the course of the developments of Europe and especially Britain over the course of two thousand years and more, their accumulated experience and discoveries and knowledge, eventually achieved such an elevated understanding as what began to be expressed with the idea of the English 'Bill of Rights'.
The ethical development of the 'Rights of Englishmen', was a tipping point, spanning as it did across Ethic's subsets of governance, law, economics, and societal norms, and became a new norm that America's Founding Fathers refused to relinquish it, even though England was clear across the ocean. They soon set about refining the idea further still, and then extended the theory of its applicability to mankind as a whole, with the understanding that not only did and should the choices of individuals have value and standing before the law, but that government must be barred from infringing upon those fundamental individual rights. With that understanding becoming widespread, a new soundness and prosperity of their entire society soon followed, and hard on the heels of that came the realization that it all depended upon the people having a moral and liberal education, because an uneducated people, as John Adams put it:
'...would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net...', and so it was seen to be necessary that each person's choices and rights & property, would be respected and defended against forcible interference, through the principled Rule of Law, which even the State and its officers were to be held accountable to.
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| John Adams: '... would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net...' |
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| What beliefs that are justified without reality, looks like |
Ethical understanding is developed from what we know, and that cannot be ignored in any attempt to identify a 'theory of knowledge for justified belief', and it is our ethical responsibility today to carry that on, which means that you cannot blindly accept the judgments of any time - theirs or ours - without giving reasonable consideration to what is right and wrong, if only to ensure that you understand what you're doing and why, rather than timidly obeying a set of rules that then can have no meaning to you.
Because we have abandoned our ethical responsibility in what we accept as a 'theory of knowledge for justified belief' from modern 'epistemology', we now thoughtlessly accept almost any rule that experts tell us is 'justified', and it has taken less than a century of that for our own people to become largely unable to see what had been seen as self-evident in our Founders' era.
We'll take a look at how the three branches of philosophy work together and are embedded in the ethical virtues that need to be recognized in order to defend against that, and the key epistemological method that was used to blind us to all of that, next.
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Wednesday, November 01, 2023
Would you recognize it if one of your beliefs was wrong? How? - You keep using that word 5
We've looked at how Metaphysics, Logic, and Ethics, support a proper 'theory of knowledge for justified belief', but what does it take to realize that what you believe is right, is actually wrong? For instance, we noted that it was once acceptable behavior in turbulent times for leading Romans to publish lists of people to be rounded up and killed for the good of the state (proscribed), whereas today those actions would not (we hope) be looked upon as examples of upstanding civic mindedness - why not?
Because they didn't know any better?
What do you mean by 'know'? Did they just lack the facts? If we could zoom a modern Civics textbook back in time to them, with key lines underlined and the a) b) c) quizzes marked with the answers which clearly demonstrate that killing selected people in the streets was unjustified and 'wrong' - do you think that would change their minds? And maybe history too? But of course, we don't need a time machine to test and debunk this theory of knowledge, as we only have to look at the current practices of any school district that's been utilizing the immediately refuted '1619 Project', to teach their students 'history' with. It didn't matter at all to those schools that its 'facts' have been refuted, they actively disregarded and excused the textbook as 'narrative history', and continued on with teaching it.
No, 'facts' do very little to change the beliefs of those who want to believe, what they want to believe.
Why not?
Those who're able to meaningfully recognize that the knowledge they've habitually acted upon as a 'justified belief', is wrong, are able to do so because they are already in the habit of cross-checking the facts they now know, with what is inarguably real and true, in order to see where their knowledge, understanding, and behavior, may need to be altered in light of that new information. They do so because they at least implicitly understand that failing to do so, would lead them or their people into living within an illusion of unjustifiable beliefs, falsehoods, and chaos, which would be at odds with what is real and true, and so of value to their lives.
In an irony that Plato would surely enjoy, modern 'philosophers' who use the term and branch of 'Epistemology' that was devised to deny and justify (!) our inability to know what is real and true, do so while knowing that their system has produced those ideologies of 'justified belief' that've darkened the modern world with illusions that most people are unwilling to acknowledge amidst their lives today. And of course they do so, confident that any 'fact checking' will reference only those facts that support the opinions that they've certified as being acceptable, and that by making themselves captive to those same beliefs, and safe in the knowledge that those they've taught to accept those facts and opinions in the educational systems that they dominate, will applaud them as being knowledgeable and correct.
What that means for you and me, is that if you'd like to be justifiably confident that your beliefs will help you to live a life worth living, then you first need to take the modernists at their word and ignore their literally ignorant advice, and look instead to the premoderns who actually cared about establishing what is real and true (Metaphysics), and about demonstrating how to soundly argue the merits of any claims about that (Logic), and understood that it was important to identify what if anything should be done in light of that (Ethics). Philosophers before the modern era did so, because unlike the modernist, they thought that wisdom was important, and valuable, in the pursuit of a life worth living.
Caring about what is true is the path to liberty and the pursuit of happiness
But getting back to answering our opening question, for a person to change what they believe and behave by, they first need to understand and believe that when we mistakenly believe something that is actually false, to be true, it is a consequential problem that truly matters to their life and ability to live it well, and to be in the habit of correcting themselves because of that. Those who don't believe that, are in the habit of dealing with errors and falsehoods, only when they present problems that interfere with their immediate plans and actions, and once those problems are 'resolved' into being out of sight, they are also out of mind.
Those who believe that gaps and errors in their understanding are consequential to their life and ability to live it well, are inclined by that towards developing those habits of mind across time that become 'second nature' to their character, which we recognize as the mark of a virtuous person - AKA: One who is up to the challenges of living a life worth living. For them, errors and falsehoods once discovered, can no longer be tolerated, no matter what comforting norms might have grown up around them, and it's those kinds of people who are able to come to see - no matter what popular opinion might say against them - that:
, and not coincidentally, it is that habit of mind of continually referencing back to what is timelessly true, that enables us to first see inconsistencies in what we had accepted as being solid knowledge, which indicates that it is incomplete or flat out false, which is what makes it possible to discover what is wrong and how to correct it. Those who develop that habit of mind and act in accordance with it, are most likely to live to see happiness within their reach, and - always aware of the role that chance plays in our lives - without also demanding that 'happiness' be guaranteed, before behaving in that way. That's the essence of the line from George Washington's favorite play, Addison's 'Cato', that:
- ... issuing proscriptions of people to be killed for the 'greater good', is an intolerable wrong;
- ... that enslaving fellow human beings, is an intolerable wrong;
- ... that an action that would be unjust to do to some, is 'somehow' just when done to others because of irrelevancies of race, creed, etc., is an intolerable wrong,
"Tis not in mortals to command success, But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it.", meaning that they understand that the ends do not justify the means, and understand instead that our means are intelligent reflections of the ends we aim at, more or less successfully, as our habits of mind guide us in ensuring that both means and ends, fit within what we know, understand, and act upon, because they are real, true, and right; AKA: Integrity.
At the foundation of ethics, are those fundamental virtues that 'fact-check' our behavior and keep us in accordance with first principles of knowledge and behavior, and a child's education should raise them up in those habits of thought and action, in knowledge and story. These habits of mind are what have been known since classical times as the Cardinal Virtues:
These virtues are foundational to ethical thinking in all quarters of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West, these virtues depends upon our seeing and seeking out what is real and true, and responding reasonably in accordance with what is - the thing itself. And central to that ability to understand, make sound judgments, and act to and carry them out appropriately, is the product of metaphysics, logic, and ethics, in thought and action.
- Prudence - 'the 'Mother of the Cardinal Virtues' - no one who's not prudent can be Just, or Courageous, or Temperate, as all depends upon perceiving and acting effectively upon what is true and good
- Justice - the habit of consistently rendering to others what is their due, as the rightful response to an earlier absent or wrongful action
- Courage - acting in the face of adversity to do what is right and just to do
- Temperance - desiring and acting in accordance with a prudent and just understanding of what is real and true
These virtues are foundational to the West, which upholds (upheld?) the importance of acting deliberately by choice at the level of the individual, their family, extended friendships, and community, which became a vital component in bringing about what is the truest wealth of the West. The Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West is not wealthy because of its resources - or resources taken from others - but because virtue, morality, and trustworthiness, became an expected norm in its communities, which made them as much or more inclined towards celebrating goodness, than power, and from that common sense, wealth and prosperity naturally followed in abundance.
The expectation of trust and accompanying trustworthiness, ushered in the circumstances which Adam Smith observed as the 'natural liberty' of each person, when they were, to the greatest extent possible, able to act as they saw fit without external interference. As Smith observed, those able to make their own decisions in regards to their affairs, on the basis of conditions & needs they had first-hand knowledge of, with little or no fear of being forcibly interfered with by either criminal or civic officials, that produced a market and pricing system that excelled at spreading the most reliable information of the value of products, supplies, and related concerns, throughout society, and it brought about an unheard of explosion of efficiency and prosperity not only for their immediate communities, but to society as a whole.
It's important to note that what was involved in those first stirrings of a Free Market, which they'd produced, involved far more than what the modern field of 'economics' concerns itself with, and is best addressed under the wider scope of Political Economy, which is what two of the last worthwhile Frenchmen, Jean Baptiste Say, and Frederick Bastiat operated within (with apologies to deTocqueville). Although Adam Smith essentially originated the field of Political Economy before them, both Say and Bastiat would make its principles even more clearly understood than Smith had (Thomas Jefferson explicitly recommended Say's clearer and far briefer study of 'Political Economy':
"...John Baptist Say has the merit of producing a very superior work on the subject of Political economy. his arrangement is luminous, ideas clear, style perspicuous, and the whole subject brought within half the volume of Smith’s work. add to this considerable advances in correctness and extension of principles...", over that of Adam Smith's).
All of which rests upon, and depends upon, a regard and respect for what is real and true, and without that understanding which Ethics insists upon, Western knowledge and understanding could not have reached as high as it did with Aristotle, and higher with Cicero, and higher still with the Christian era. Without that full foundation, the English Common Law could not have been developed, let alone what followed in our Founders' era with the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and the realization of their understanding of a Free Market (which is NOT what libertarians & establishment GOP present as being 'Free Trade'), which are what have made the better aspects of our current world possible.
All of which goes to say, that Epistemologically speaking, where Metaphysics tells us what is, and Logic demonstrates what is arguably true, Ethics extends those into telling us whether or not such and such a conclusion is justifiable, and what should or shouldn't be done about that, and no 'epistemology' worthy of the meaning given to that name, can legitimately be practiced without employing all three. More to the point, undermining either one is an attack upon all three, and upon your ability to act in accordance with what you know to be real and true. Further, eliminating the expectation of the possibility of truth, has the effect of concealing all lies as such - what significance can a lie have, to a people who have no particular regard for what is real and true? - the lie is neatly cloaked in the attire of 'whatever' and 'just my opinion, man', and its corruption spreads with ease.
The Modern cost of Epistemology without Metaphysics, Logic, and Ethics (Narrator: Everything)
At the vague beginnings of modernity, those who saw themselves as 'modern' began moving away from that understanding, perhaps first and most notably with Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote such things as that it would be advisable for a Prince to send in a brutal authority to discipline and even kill troublemakers in a region, and then once having brought them under control, to then make a show of killing that authority who'd been acting on the prince's orders
"...Under this pretence he took Ramiro, and one morning caused him to be executed and left on the piazza at Cesena with the block and a bloody knife at his side. The barbarity of this spectacle caused the people to be at once satisfied and dismayed...", to convince the people that he cared about 'justice' for them and so deserved their loyalty. Hobbes put forth a similar notion from a different perspective, that since no one could be trusted to be honest and true, to avoid living lives that were 'nasty, brutish, and short', a prince must be given the power to say what will be accepted as if it were 'right', and to enforce that upon all.
Both of them imagined that such plans somehow could be effective, and therefore would be justified (if you apply Aristotle's 1st rule to the logic preceding the 'therefore', you'll find it to be lacking), and Hobbes's Leviathan was subject to the same contradictions and falsehoods for 'the greater good', as Machiavelli's, so that neither forerunner of 'real politik' could establish a 'justified belief', and so neither could ever truly be either desirable, admirable, or effective. A reasonable understanding of ethics, which enables us to see into the wider context beyond the present moment, would show that no such actions could be justifiable, nor since they ignore the likelihood of unforeseen consequences of committing wrongs, could they be effective - by definition such actions taken in contradiction to what is real and true - and no such shortsighted effort could ever be 'practical' in the end, and could not be because they are wrong in their beginnings.
What the term Epistemology was coined to mean, was being practiced in premodern philosophy long before its modern name was coined. To consider something philosophically, began with what Metaphysics could tell you is, which Logic examined and showed how arguably it could be justified, which led into an ethical understanding which disclosed what should or shouldn't be done about that. Doing so was and is inseparable from practicing the virtues of Prudence (a sound judgement about what is true), Justice (seeing that wrongs are appropriately righted), Courage (prudently applying justice even in adversity), and Temperance (doing what is right, in right measure, neither excessively or neglectfully). Practicing epistemology in a manner that lives up to the meaning assigned to it - distinguishing between justified beliefs, and opinion - is vital to determining whether or not a conclusion is not only the 'right answer', but is ethically justifiable to believe, stand by, and act upon - it doesn't make you infallible or omniscient, but it does help you to behave in a manner that is reasonably in accordance with what is real and true.
Epistemology, according to what its modernist granddaddy, Immanuel Kant, taught, was and remains thoroughly opposed to that premodern meaning which epistemology was coined to give modernism cover from. His, and every modernist system since his radical 'Copernican Revolution', which he conceived of in reaction to David Hume, he fashioned a gimmick (the details of that I'll leave for latter posts) in his 'Critique of Pure Reason', which responds to Hume's skepticism, by accepting his conclusions, and uses them as a pretext for devising a way 'around them',
"... thus rendering the practical extension of pure reason impossible. I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the presumption that it is possible to advance in metaphysics without previous criticism, is the true source of the unbelief (always dogmatic) which militates against morality...", which, as he's attempting to use reason to 'fact check' reason, by discarding metaphysics, in order to 'improve' reason (in all his concocted varieties of it), is just about the most dogmatic thing ever stated (at least to that date). At any rate, Kant's convoluted cogitations are what birthed the modernist's '4th branch of philosophy', which rests upon the assertion that what is actually real and true cannot be known, and in our ignorance of what is real and true and how to respond to that, we must instead treat all 'facts' as isolated events which serve only to indicate which of Kant's 'Categorical Imperative's we are to treat as being more relevant to us than reality.
What is a 'Categorical Imperative'? They are statements which Kant and other 'experts' have rationalized - necessarily independent of 'real reality' - as being 'truths' that it is your duty to
"...act in accordance with a maxim of ends that it can be a universal law for everyone to have", IOW you are to act as if the ends do justify the means, and which we are expected to abide by in lieu of our inability to observe, judge, and respond to reality (or so he says), and these predigested judgements - made without reference to what is real and true in your context, but which the moderns think should be accepted as if they were 'real and true' - are what you (actually 'they', in the collective sense) are to accept as being your duty to abide by (without, of course, any reference to what is real and true), and so you are to act, not on your own judgement, but by what authorities have told you that you should - quite literally 'like a good German' - no matter what.
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| "...that most deformed cripple of ideas that has ever existed—the great Kant..." |
“declares an action to be objectively necessary of itself without reference to any purpose—that is, even without any further end", and by that he means that you must obey it no matter what your own judgment might tell you, meaning that you shouldn't follow it for any benefit it might bring, but in fact you must abide by it even if it would cause you or others real harm, up to and including your and their deaths.
If it's not yet entirely clear how vastly different the modernist's approach is from the premodern one, a scenario that should make matters clearer, is one that Kant gave as an example of his ideal, which is in radical opposition to the premodern view (and I'll bet yours too). So let's take a look at the scenario itself, and then at how differently it might be approached from the premodern, and then the modernist, points of view:
In the premodern view would consist of something like the following, informed by:
- Imagine a scenario of whether or not your daughter is at home, and what you should do about that when a murderer comes to your door armed with a knife to kill her with, and demands that you tell him whether or not she is at home.
Metaphysics (dealing with what is real and true) would inform you of the truth about whether or not your daughter is in your house, that the person with the knife is a threat, it would also implicitly inform you of who you are as her parent and what your role and responsibility towards her is, what your home and its purpose is, and every other relevant bit of knowledge and understanding.In the modernist view:
Logic would tell you that the threat of force invalidates any demand made to you, as well as what other options are available to you, and making an argument that she isn't home, and that he should leave.
Ethics would unify the knowledge of metaphysics and logic with virtue, morality, law, and cultural customs, not to mention common sense, and inform you that you're fully justified in not providing a knife-wielding would-be murderer with any facts or anything else in your possession, and that any means of eliminating that threat, from deception to the use of lethal force, is also fully justified.
And so, as Socrates pointed out 2,500 years ago, anyone threatening violence or is in any other way out of their head, can have no claim whatsoever to any truth, or anything else you might possess, and it would be unjust to give it to them even if it's their own property. Meaning that, especially as their stated intent is to harm your daughter, you are not only justified in refusing their request, it is your responsibility to resist it by any means possible, up to and including blowing the would-be murderer's head clean off if they attempted to force their way in.
Epistemology, as the system was formulated by Kant, tells you that you do not in fact have any knowledge of anything that is real and true, the only thing you can know is your duty to follow the rule of the Categorical Imperative, and 'therefore' (a term reduced to be logic in name only) your duty is to tell the armed murderer at the door that your daughter is at home, even though the harm he intends to cause her would be considered 'unethical'.Yes, Kant actually says that because the 'Categorical Imperative' is to always 'tell the truth' (about the reality that you can never really have knowledge of), and that it's not just that you should tell the murderer at the door that your daughter is home (which to Kant's mind already involves way too much thought and judgement on your part), it is your duty to tell the murderer at the door who is there to kill your daughter, that your daughter is home, no matter what obligations, responsibilities, and standards, that telling such a 'truth' would truly betray.
This should not be surprising, as modernism and all its children in highbrow pretenses, Marxism, pragmatism, post-modernism, wokeness, etc., all tell you that you cannot know what is real and true, and so 'logically' (by ignoring the fundamental rules of logic) you should (again, an ethical term) ignore the meaning of any and all terms and premises in favor of abiding by the Kantian Categorical Imperative to 'tell the truth' - if you cannot know 'the thing itself', then obviously your knowledge is not, should not, and cannot, be integrated or comprehensible, and so your only duty is to obey the rules of experts, and any judgment that'd violate those rules is wrong.
Remember, modern philosophy isn't about helping you to become wise, it's about what & who you should obey.
However many modernist experts have come and gone, and whichever ideological label, from Idealism, to Dialectical Materialism, to Pragmatism, and post-modernism they've operated under, and whichever political death-cult of socialism, communism, Marxism, Maoism, Pro-Regressivism, etc. that've brought in and out of favor, that fundamental 'truth' has remained a constant command - you kant know what's true, don't think for yourself, obey the experts.
You might recall from an earlier post on Fichte's influence in our school systems, that (Fichte was the first to lay out exactly what the meaning and consequences of this new '4th branch of philosophy' actually meant), advised upon reforming education in his 'Addresses to the German people', in order to eliminate the 'problem' of independent thought, and so make students more perfectly obedient to authorities (a message heard and transmitted into America by the likes of Horace Mann). If you ever wondered where the death camps of the fascists and communists came from, there's your answer - those are the ideas which those horrors originated from (and yes, they persist in the design of your current school systems), as does the modernist's reasons for using 'epistemology' to separate metaphysics, logic, and ethics, from your conscious consideration, comprehension, and judgement.
Whatever its claims, Modernist philosophy didn't fix the errors and weaknesses of premodern philosophy, it replaced their honest gaps and errors with deliberate falsehoods and fantasies. Modern Epistemology and the 'philosophy' it supports, makes a mockery of Philosophy - the love of and pursuit of Wisdom cannot be engaged in after first having denied everything in its foundations and goals that makes such a pursuit possible.
Beliefs are justified by what is real and true
What is real and true matters, and distinguishing between what is properly a 'justified belief', and 'opinion', can only be understood by those who care about and respect what is metaphysically true, logically arguable, and ethically understood. Those who deny what is real and true, can only follow rules and flow charts prepared and approved of by one expert or another, to achieve ideological ends which they expect you to have exchanged your ability to reason for (oh hi there 'Critical Thinking'), in order to obey what the experts tell you.
Outside of the vain pursuits of power, real power begins with a respect for truth, and having the humility to not only recognize the possibility of your being wrong, but the desire to discover that error, to treat people with respect, civility, kindness, and trust, comes naturally only to those who have a love of Truth. In that same soil is sure to be found a sound metaphysics, with a respect for logical reasoning, and an ethics which reflects and insists upon both, in liberty with their fellows in society, under heaven above.
One question worth asking after all of this, is that if philosophy and an epistemology of metaphysics, logic, and ethics is so important, and if the great majority of people have little or no interest in its pursuit, how is such a society to come about, let alone endure? A quick look at history will show us that it is not necessary that everyone be an academic - just as recent history will show how disastrous such an effort is - but a people can still develop a meaningful habit of epistemology in everyday practice, through an education that fundamentally values and transmits "the best that has been thought and said" through its culture's stories, arts, letters, and religion.
For a glimpse at how that once was done, and what had to be trivialized in order to dispense with it, we'll look at Grammar's role in implementing or abandoning an epistemology of metaphysics, logic, and ethics, next.
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Thursday, November 30, 2023
Enlightening the Dark Ages again: Grammar as an Epistemology worthy of the name - You keep using that word 6
1a: the study of the classes of words, their inflections (see INFLECTION sense 2), and their functions and relations in the sentence, inspiring, isn't it? What most people might not recognize as a definition of Grammar, is one that comes from a source that we'll get into below, which was a norm before Modernity got a hold of why and what we're taught today:
b: a study of what is to be preferred and what avoided in inflection
"...Grammar [which] is "the science of speaking and writing correctly - the starting point of all liberal studies." Grammar is the cradle of all philosophy, and in a manner of speaking, the nurse of the whole study of letters...", and if the idea of Grammar as the cradle of philosophy isn't how you were taught it, I'd suggest asking some questions about the 'education' you did get, and maybe ask a few more questions about why that might be.
Disclaimer: no, I'm no Grammarian and I still struggle with being grammatical - having only discovered its importance late in life, I'm but a bumbling admirer.
With that in mind, let's turn to the question asked at the end of the previous post, which was essentially that if having an epistemology of metaphysics, logic, and ethics is as important as I've argued it to be, and if most people aren't interested in even philosophy, let alone epistemology, what are we supposed to do about that? And the answer is that we don't need to teach any new subjects, we only need to teach a subject we're already teaching, but begin teaching it as we once did and are no longer doing: teach Grammar as a meaningful subject.
From the earliest years of schooling (hello: 'grammar school') grammar is the first subject taught, because like philosophy, which everyone has whether they are conscious of it or not, everyone will learn grammar in some form - the words we do or do not learn to refer to our world through, what we do or do not learn of prefixes and suffixes that help us in identifying a word's nature, and all of the other parts of speech which exist to help us to understand what is being spoken of, and why - and whether crude or polished, a person's grasp of grammar is what they'll be using to think with and communicate to others through.
And yet as necessary as grammar is to communication, that was understood as the minimum measure of it, as in its larger sense, grammar was to function as philosophy in miniature, as the ancient grammarian quoted above wrote: "Words admitted into our ears knock on and arouse our understanding", in pursuit of that clarity of expression that would bring both writer and reader nearer to a wisdom that could improve their ability to live their lives well.
That purpose is not served with 'grammar lessons' of "See Spot run. Run Spot; run fast.". What the *author* of this 1908 primer intended instead, was primarily to make lessons so easy and trouble-free for students being introduced to "...the struggle with word-forms..."(!), as to ensure that "...there must be no steep hills to climb..." in learning.
Well... mission accomplished. God help us.
Such treacherously easy 'grammar lessons', pointlessly teaching what isn't worth learning, has left more than a century of student's hearts and minds comfortably ignorant of what it takes to engage with beauty, truth, and goodness, and unaware that the dark age we live in today is even worse than the last one, whose people were at least aware that what was worth learning, had seemed to have been lost.
Grammar as the cradle of philosophy
From that form of Grammar School education, students gained a handle on the liberal arts, which:
"...are called "arts' [either] because they delimit [artant] by rules and precepts; or from virtue, in Greek known as ares, which strengthens minds to apprehend the ways of wisdom; or from reason, called arso by the Greeks, which the arts nourish and cause to grow. They are called "liberal," either because the ancients took care to have their children instructed in them; or because their object is to effect man's liberation, so that, freed from cares, he may devote himself to wisdom. More often than not, they liberate us from cares incompatible with wisdom. They often even free us from worry about [material] necessities, so that the mind may have still greater liberty to apply itself to philosophy., and in that he makes clear how the essence of what we call 'epistemology' (in name only) today, was effectively being practiced centuries before the Modern's term was ever coined, and it is no coincidence that that understanding, approach, and expectation, began to vanish soon after the Modern's 'new' 4th branch of philosophy became known under that term.
Chapter 13. Whence grammar gets its name.
Among all the liberal arts, the first is logic, and specifically that part of logic which gives initial instruction about words. As has already been explained, the word "logic" has a broad meaning, and is not restricted exclusively to the science of argumentative reasoning. [It includes] Grammar [which] is "the science of speaking and writing correctly - the starting point of all liberal studies." Grammar is the cradle of all philosophy, and in a manner of speaking, the nurse of the whole study of letters..."
It's important to point out that the ability to understand and communicate which came out of that Pre-Modern grammatical cradle, was once a normal expectation of a 'grammar school education' (as was having some ability to read and write Greek & Latin, up until the 20th Century). It was a normal expectation that when the grammarian taught students how to read, he wasn't just teaching how to sound out words from the letters on a page, but was teaching how to read, think, question and reason their way through the thoughts those words formed, and their own grasp of them, in an intelligible manner, with the goal of understanding what is real and true and what is not.
Learning the grammar of what words mean and what the parts of speech refer to in the process of thinking, from "the best that has been thought and said" - not textbooks as we know them - was in a very worthwhile sense, 'doing metaphysics'; as being able to understand and confirm the statements and conclusions of those works while also assessing how accurate and intelligible their claims are, is 'doing logic'; just as assuring that an idea is treated honestly and appropriately - neither inflated, minimized, or turned away from - is 'doing ethics'. And whether engaged in extracting a sound understanding from what you've read, or putting your own understanding into words that others could understand your meaning from, conveying both a belief, and identifying whether or not its meaning is justified, is in the most meaningful sense 'doing epistemology'.
If you'd like to see how utterly different our notions of an education are today - in every way - from that which formed our Founders, read "Education of The Founding Fathers of The Republic" by James J. Walsh (1936). Truly, America was founded at the last possible moment in history... even a decade later, it likely could not have been successfully carried out.
Students who were educated in that way, as were most in our Founders' era, were not only skillful in the use of language, but were in the habit of sounding thoughts out and following them to their furthest reaches, and so would see implications that were otherwise too easily missed. It's not too much to say that America would not exist, if its people had not been educated in the habits of mind that gave the deepest consideration to what were
"... the greatest of all reflections on human nature...", and yet today it's too often considered a 'successful education' when a student manages to graduate with the ability to 'decode' letters into words, as if having the ability to read, is the same thing as having learned how to read. For the student who's skilled at finding useful facts and picking out gotchas of 'i before e, except after c', but doesn't comprehend how language conveys meaning (or why it'd matter), what can they meaningfully get out of decoding the words of the 'great books'? They, as Daniel McCarthy noted in his review of Russel Kirk's "The Conservative Mind",
"...not infrequently have difficulty with works that must be read the way music is heard.", and what such students are able to receive from the greatest treasures of our Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture, will, at best, be taken in through a verbal straw, rather than the firehose that a good education would've provided, and the frustration of getting so little out of so much effort, too often turns them away from, and even against, the 'great books' they hadn't learned how to treasure.
Of course that realization is what those who desired a more easily controlled populace, figured out long ago.
Modernists on both sides of the Atlantic were fully aware of how essential it was to their 'new philosophy' (of old sophistries) and to the 'new man' they wanted to create with it, that people's minds not be furnished with the priceless treasures of the West, as those fostered the ability to spot the snares of ignorance which the unfurnished mind was more easily entrapped with. They quickly realized that in order to have a populace who'd be willing to accept what they were told they needed to know, without habitually questioning what they were told and who told it to them, it wasn't the publishers and booksellers they needed to gain control of, but the schoolhouse and what and how its students were taught within it. After all, there's little need to engage in the messy business of banning and burning books and authors, when the same results can be had by simply teaching students that grammar is nothing more than a number of arbitrary rules of where to place commas and apostrophes and to make sure you write 'i before e except after c... sometimes'... as teaching 'grammar' in that manner, is even more damaging to a student's ability and interest in reading, than not teaching grammar at all.
Learning the rules of Grammar is of course important and necessary, just as erecting a scaffolding is necessary and useful in constructing a building. But to focus upon the rules, as less a means, than your purpose, is like focusing only on constructing scaffolding, while ignoring the building that it was supposed to help with constructing. Through the use of ever more efficient modern textbooks of 'Grammar', which focused upon teaching students to memorize 'the rules of grammar', while neglecting the very best uses of language known to man which demonstrate the best use of those rules, in the language that could have helped their students to learn them by heart... without that, students' familiarity with those works soon began to fade from popular awareness. As people cheered the efficiency and usefulness of innovations like Noah Webster's exceedingly popular - and very useful -'Blue Back Speller's, few noticed what students were no longer learning to read from, and why.
It's of course easy to see how far 'See spot run!' has fallen away from the language used in Webster's spellers, but what's not as easily seen, is how far the efficient lessons of textbooks such as Webster's, had already fallen away from the language of Cicero & Shakespeare that had been used before them. Analogous to the pull of physical gravity, under which a falling object accelerates at the rate of 32' per second, per second', the downward pull of intellectual gravity's rate of acceleration, is measured through the absence of eloquence and wisdom which is typically only noticed by the parent, not the child, and the great-great-great grandparent's perspective never enters the picture. And unlike physical gravity, where acceleration is eventually stopped by impact with the ground, the impact of intellectual gravity is felt in an immediate and continuous endarkening of the mind, which is only indirectly noticed by the victim through increasing feelings of anxiety, confusion, and lack of self-control.
Those who shake their heads and fists at what's happening in our schools today, as if it's a recent result of negligence, error, and/or incompetence, would do better to spend less time looking for errors and incompetence, and give more consideration to how students receiving such an education as that might be of value to those who're insisting that you and your children receive it. If you start following where questions such as that might lead, they'll bring to your attention instances such as when Woodrow Wilson's speech on 'education' to the new 'High School' teachers, said the quiet part out loud, back in 1909:
"...We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks..."
In one of the rare bright spots of the modern world, more than at any other time in history, those works are available to anyone today than ever before, and those works that taught how to mine them for meaning, are as well, which can be done either in the privacy of their own home, or through a computer, tablet, or even apps on their phone, wherever else they might be (I've had a library in my pocket for a couple decades now. What... you thought I was just glad to see you? ;-) ).
If you ask your child's 'English Teacher' what the purpose of teaching grammar is, their answer should include at the very least, that its purpose is to bring clarity to what they read and write, in order to better understand and communicate those thoughts which they are being brought into contact with in their materials and lessons. If not, if its practice is indifferent to, or even at odds with how to use language to understand and communicate such ideas to others, what possible value can grammar (never mind philosophy and epistemology) have, and why should any student be subjected to wasting years of their life studying and memorizing intentionally meaningless rules?
Education for Life
The sort of education that's concerned primarily with transmitting 'useful skills', isn't one that can enrich your life and character. Frederick Douglass risked everything as a slave, to study the best of what had been thought and said, by illegally purchasing his treasured 'Columbian Orator', in order to escape the limitation of only being trained in useful skills. He described that kind of training in his essay on the "Blessings of Liberty and Education", as intending for students:
"... learning only those skills that were useful to their masters..."
Those who give their time and attention to "the best that has been thought and said" in our culture's stories, arts, letters, and religion, will benefit from the experience of reading from what is well written, engaging, and thought provoking, such as is found in the pages of Homer, the Greek Tragedians, The Bible, Shakespeare... Dostoevsky... J.R.R. Tolkien... even Agatha Christie. In doing so, a person enters into the landscapes and palaces of the West, and to the extent that they pause and ponder upon their surroundings, they're drinking from its philosophical well. But how deeply they'll be able to drink from the well of the West, will be limited by how familiar they are with the philosophy with which that well operates.
Of course, most people have little need or interest in studying philosophy, and likely especially not epistemology - but fortunately, they don't need to.
However wise it would be to familiarize ourselves more explicitly with both, a premodern education that intelligently teaches the grammatical basics through the words, concepts, and ideas of the best that has been thought and said on what actually matters in life, and how to convey your understanding of that, will be implicitly teaching the habit of epistemological thinking to students as they identify what is being referred to and how (metaphysics), learn how to judge the veracity of that (logic), and recognize what that understanding requires of them in thought and action (ethics). That, which at one time was the normal expectation of a 'Grammar School Education' through quality literature, would work just as well for us, as it did throughout our Founders' era, for them. If, that is, we also point out the dangers which we can see from our vantage point in time, that were not yet obvious to them, in their time.
The Modernists not only don't teach that, they ridicule and undermine that, and even when they are made to teach some part of it, they do so disjointedly and through a materialist, pragmatic, and utilitarian (to say nothing of Marxist) lens, which is more harmful than having learned nothing of such matters at all.
Similarly with philosophy itself, as I've been pointing out over the last several posts, instead of teaching the unity of its three branches (metaphysics, logic, and ethics) as you might identify the head, torso, and limbs of a person in order to better understand and appreciate the whole human body, the modernists approach the subject as a vivisectionist would, using their new '4th branch of philosophy' as a tool for severing one from the other.
The modernist does what they do because they believe that the world will be improved by remaking it (and you) in their own image... for 'the greater good', which necessarily requires abandoning the pursuit of truth and wisdom, in favor of seeking power over you (which is the only means they can experience their 'reality' through), and that requires that you think of such things as grammar and philosophy as being little more than arbitrary and meaningless rules. The power which that gives them over you, leaves you with little or no control over yourself - how could it be otherwise? In such a world as that, you don't get ahead by understanding what is real and true, but by studying meaninglessly useful facts in order to 'get good grades and get a good job!', which those schools had been designed to fit your life into, as a harmlessly useful cog in that world which, in their expert opinion, would best serve 'the greater good'.
For those inclined to say that 'We pick up grammar, even philosophy, through day to day experience and so there's no need to waste time on studying either!', I'd advise you to keep in mind something about the experience of experience: untutored experience is limited to the good and bad you have experienced so far, which is always one step behind the next hard knock you've not yet learned from experience to look out for. To say nothing of the common experience of those who don't know where to put their 'i's and 'e's and apostrophes, makes them the easy butt of jokes from those who take pride in their belief that those rules are the height of learning - learning by such painful experience is possible, but it is by no means preferable. In the end, experience shows that one very useful benefit of a good education, is that it enables you to learn from the invaluable - and often fatal - experiences of some of the best who've ever lived.
Learning grammar and literature as the premoderns taught it is not in any way opposed to benefits of Science & Technology that we enjoy in the world today, on the contrary, it's the best way to ensure that both continue to develop (and less likely that we'll kill ourselves with it). If your initial reaction to the mention of premodern society is to snicker & roll your eyes, you've probably internalized the modernists' deflection of temporal provincialism, which preserves our ignorance of what they understood, with an easily derisive laugh at the 'foolish' appearances of those not yet 'smart enough' to have our technology.
Escaping from the Dark Ages once again
If you look past the modernist blinders, you'll find that it was not the modernists that introduced us to the 'scientific method' - that began with English monks in the 1100s, who realized that if God said the world was 'good', it would be good to investigate how it worked. Neither was it the 'Age of Enlightenment' that introduced the logical method and 'ReasonTM' into our world - as you've seen from the Metalogicon, those were already central to the Liberal Arts that the premoderns educated students to know and understand. Despite what popular notions would have you believe, the leading lights of premodern thought, are the ones who carried the West through classical times, revived and rejuvenated them through Christian efforts during the middle ages (see Alcuin of York's influence under Charlemagne), and kept that wisdom alive and accessible through works like the Metalogicon and 'The Didascalicon' of Hugh of St. Victor in the 1100s, and on through St. Aquinas in the 1300s and beyond.
It was the premodern's focus on reality, logic, and reason, that made the Renaissance possible, and gave rise to that better aspects of thinking which we associate with the Enlightenment, and became the basis for the scientific developments we enjoy today. That same practice can get us through the dark ages we find ourselves in the midst of today - the absence of truth, beauty, and understanding, is the definition of a dark age - as learning well the ordering of and aims of language, will reveal to a reader what sound thinking is and is not, and will expose the follies lurking within what they'd previously assumed to be 'obviously true'.
As Frederick Douglass put it,
"...Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free. To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being...", and what it teaches is of real, practical, and timeless value, to your life. An education that springs from treating grammar as the 'cradle of philosophy', is one that will help develop an epistemology of metaphysics, logic, and ethics in a reader, and situate them in a world that is meaningful. That approach, even when begun upon the thinnest of fare, will incline the student towards concepts that are both higher and deeper, and disclose to them what is of value in living a life worth living, and reveal what is likely to hinder that.
For all of the shortcomings and errors that were present in premodern philosophy and the liberal arts, and there were many, their fundamental approach, including their honest errors in applying it, were and are far superior to the dishonest and malevolent approach that pervades modernist philosophy, the humanities, and wackademia in general. You needn't read much of modern misosophy to realize that clarity, understanding, and a respect for what is real and true, have been designated as enemy combatants by it. Sadly, those 'theories of knowledge' which modernist epistemology dominates our world through today, have attacked grammar and literature from the start, and have a lot to do with why 'the best that has been thought and said', a number of which Frederick Douglass's treasured 'Columbian Orator' enabled him to study, are now nowhere to be found in the materials which students are typically 'educated' with today.
Those promoting 'Ebonics', or who criticize paying attention to grammar as 'whiteness', or promising that students can each have 'their own truths', are not enlightening them, they are ensuring that their thinking will suffer from the absence of beauty, a lack of regard for truth, and little or no understanding of what is right and wrong, which are the hallmarks of our new dark age. The unfortunate 'good student' of such lessons as these, are led by them into a linguistic ghetto that's sure to be well populated both by those trained into their own 'activist' mindset, and those limited to comprehending only Woodrow Wilson's 'specific difficult manual tasks'... and of course, it's sure to keep them at a usefully safe distance from those 'who know best', who are those who did not '...forego the privileges of a liberal education...' (corrupted, though even that may be).
In the name of 'education reform!' especially across the 20th century, those materials that had been understood to be the most worth studying, have been removed from modern school systems. Such reforms have so savaged our students ability to read, that a sizable number of those who 'graduate' from school today, are unable to comprehend much beyond empirical step by step instructions, with the result that a horrifically large percentage of those who're able only to 'decode' words, see no purpose or pleasure in doing so - and so are becoming assimilated into the machinery themselves. Perhaps no better example of which, is the enthusiastic support by faculty and students for the murderous terrorists of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, over that of Israel and its people.
In the end, if grammar, logic, and reasoning, do not lead you to a better understanding of who you are, and what is real and true, and how to understand that yourself and communicate it to others, what possible value can such an 'education' have (to you)? Is the key to escaping a dark age more likely to lay in understanding the meaning that flows through the words which you understand your life with, or through the careless disregard of both their meaning and consequences?
Giving due consideration to those words which your mind is racing around in, putting your thoughts in order, verifying their soundness, and ensuring that the direction they're taking you in is justified and true, is what Grammar (and more formally, Epistemology) is meant to aid your mind in doing. Whatever tends to undermine, muddle, or otherwise degrade your ability to grasp and use such knowledge as you have, will tend to be harmful to your life and your ability to live it, and you should be on your guard against that (especially if it comes wrapped up in a diploma or degree).
And with that in mind, my next series of posts will start digging into how modernity has used its 'Epistemology' as the '4th Branch of Philosophy', to establish a new 'Social Epistemology', which gives the illusion of support to some of the most disastrous ideologies of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Socialism, Communism, Diversity-Equity-Inclusion, Social and Emotional Learning, etc., etc., etc.,..
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Thursday, February 29, 2024
Why are our Culture Wars focused upon winning battles instead of winning the war - where's our Gen. Sherman?!
“...all knowledge that is divorced from justice [must] be called cunning rather than wisdom...” — Cicero
That is not how strategy & tactics have progressed in our Culture Wars today. We're still using the 'good on paper' establishment strategies of textbooks, testing, and 'choice', that Pro-Regressives have been chewing up & spitting out The West with, for a decade of decades. And though the recent parents' revolt against CRT & SEL seemed for a moment to be an indication that we'd taken a Gen. Grant-like turn to at least start fighting, beyond a handful of parents and grassroots groups, few others are following their lead. Instead, most others attitude seems to be that given a choice between doing the work of identifying and burning down what sustains the Woke confederacy, or posturing about with ineffective strategies & tactics that bring popularity, clicks, and glory, most today choose clicks & glory.
Why? Maybe because they aren't as far to the right of the Pro-Regressives as they imagine themselves to be?
The main issue though, is that there's work to be done before we can begin burning down what sustains the Pro-Regressives, beginning with learning to identify what it is that needs to be burned down - not to mention separating ourselves from it. So, what is it that sustains the modern Pro-Regressives, is it Academia? Entertainment? Media? The Administrative State? Our school systems? Those are all important grounds that have been captured, no doubt about it, but what we need to begin publicly targeting and burning to the ground, IMHO, is what gave the illusion of legitimacy to those pro-regressive ideals and positions which enabled those grounds to be captured in the first place.
What it was that enabled the typical American to first begin accepting those positions as seemingly credible, is modern Epistemology; it is what provides the illusion of legitimacy and credibility to those ideas that fuel and sustain the Pro-Regressives' positions to this day. But as laying its falsehoods bare for all to see is even more lacking in glory than battling against agriculture ever was, glorious or not, it is the unexamined lie which lies within the heart of modern epistemology which sustains the legions of ideologies that they've swamped our culture with.
End that, and the Pro-Regressives' ability to project power over others - be they from the Left, Woke, Modernists, Establishment, or others - ends with it.
Doing that effectively will require our consistently subjecting their premises to an epistemology of metaphysics (what is), logic (what follows), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it), in order to expose their true nature to such widespread public ridicule, that they won't dare to speak openly of them again, and so bring the Culture Wars to an end.
Few have shown any interest in even bothering to identify what sustains the Pro-Regressives, and not a few are actively using and even unwittingly (?) promoting the opposition's strategies & tactics, which can only work against their own, and they do so without a care in the world.
Why?
Possibly because they either don't see its connection to what sustains those who see them as their enemies (details to follow), or they don't really think such things matter, and that's a big part of what sustains the Culture War they're waging against us. Unfortunately as the habits of modern epistemology have been engrained in us through 12-16 years of schooling, it escapes our attention how much time & energy we waste in furthering those strategies & tactics that were designed to waste our time and energy, and so most of us unwittingly end up giving aid and comfort to ideals & positions that are actively undermining the very ground we're trying to make our stand upon, while our side just stares in amazement as both the positions and grounds we'd been clinging to, are progressively lost.
What first brought this to mind was seeing another fruitless exchange several months ago from someone nominally on 'my side' doing just that, and then something recently that was unlooked for and out of the blue where several people of national and even worldwide prominence, casually employed a Sherman-like strategy that burned the positions of the person confronting them, to the ground, in front of their peers and the general public. They were glorious moments, that, unfortunately seem to have been brushed off as amusing 'hot takes' which no one else seems to see anything of significance in, and so I'll do what I can to bring the attention of as many people to them as I can.
First to the worst, with a moment of despair from a few months ago when in a comment thread that'd been highlighted in my newsfeed under a post against "people "deconstructing" their faith", an fb 'friend', JR, whose libertarianish positions have occasionally aligned with mine (though rarely deeper than a 'Yes' or 'No' on an issue), was making comments that were directly advancing the strategies & tactics of those who're opposed to his positions, and was succeeding in burning nothing to the ground but time.
The post itself was too focused upon sectarian issues for my tastes, but the thread of his that'd been highlighted in my feed drew a painful lol from me with his comment that:
"Deconstruction of one’s religious beliefs is simply critically examining what you believe.", apparently entirely unaware that he was using and promoting one of the primary ideological weapons of those opposed to his notions of 'liberty', which can only advance their positions & goals while undermining those he believes himself to support. What gave away the fact that JR had no idea what he was advising people to engage in, was signaled by a single word:
"...simply...", as it doesn't take much familiarity with the literature of the deconstructionists to realize that 'simply', simply does not apply to the methods of 'Deconstruction', which deliberately utilize the most difficult, convoluted, and opaque language possible, to make obscure points that are famously difficult to even identify, let alone 'understand'.
Why'd JR have no issue 'simply' using the term 'Deconstruction' without understanding what it means (a point he later unconcernedly admitted to)? My guess would be that he assumed it to be just one of many legitimate means for examining an issue to better understand it, possibly because of what he assumed he knew of 'Deconstructionism', had come from one of those 'humanities 101' courses that engineering and business students are required to take, which present their convoluted and confused ideas as being the height of modern intellectual engagement. If so, perhaps his good intentions and false assumptions about what it probably meant, outweighed any concerns being raised over the actual meaning of what it was he was advising other people to engage in.
Unfortunately, his assumption was at least as 'problematic' as it would be if he were to advocate for communist policies and statist controls to improve the Free Market with, on the basis of his intending such advice to be helpful. If a similar idea had been put to him in terms of Marxist economic theory, he'd doubtlessly have recognized it for what it was and spurned it right away, but because it comes from the 'soft' humanities, it apparently held no real meaning, importance, or concern for him (which is an epistemological legacy of the 'empirical' thinking he sadly prides himself on). The problem is that all such efforts give aid & comfort to the enemy of all that is worth valuing, and cannot avoid doing so, and our ignorance of this is one of many factors that have us continually shooting ourselves in the conceptual foot before any battle of ideas is even begun.
For those who do take the trouble to read beyond the required reading list and venture into the Deconstructionist's founding theories and how it's been practiced, they'll find that the intent of its authors (one of whom authored a paper arguing that there is no such thing as an Author), is to artfully employ equivocation and fractured logic to disassemble and destroy any and every Western ideal and concept (hello: de-construct), not for the purposes of developing a better understanding of them, but for bringing about an end to the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture of The West. That is their stated purpose (see below) and it should not be excused, ignored, or forgotten.
My problem with issues like these, is how do I condense a useful amount of the preceding into a comment that's brief enough to be read? And sadly, being the last one to look to for tips on brevity, I have no good answer to that. Still, with past interactions with JR in mind and not wanting to sidetracked either of us into a pointless skirmish that would have no winner, I still hoped that I could at least get him to give a bit more thought to what he was encouraging other people to get engaged in. For good or ill, I commented that:
"If you think that Deconstruction is or can be positive, or is in anyway equivalent to carefully examining a subject - any subject - in order to understand it better... you really need to turn your analytical skills to the term 'Deconstruction'."It's probably no great surprise that my comment was not well received by JR, but his reply to me provided a surprisingly good demonstration of the self-defeating nature inherent in battling with philosophical positions while epistemologically blind. How epistemologically blind a person is, can be guessed at by whether they treat the power of ideas seriously, or simply use them as ideological props to spar with - you can judge for yourself which one the three lines of his response most likely reflects:
I don't know that I could ask for a better demonstration of how failing to develop the habit of applying an epistemology of metaphysics (what is), logic (does it follow), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it), to the ideas you are thinking with in 'the real world', leaves a person unaware that their own thoughts have broken free from reality and are tripping up their pursuit of what it is that they claim to believe and value.
- "I am not interested in the semantics, so feel free to define that term as you see fit." - meaning that he believed that understanding the meaning of the term that he'd used and advised others to employ, wasn't meaningful to the discussion. Funnily enough, it's his misuse of the word 'semantics', that's typically meant by 'playing semantics'.
, which was followed by:
- "My interest is in the idea of critically examining ALL of one’s premises and where they came from and if you actually believe them and why." - IOW he's happy to doubt 'ALL' of your premises, but is unwilling or unable to question his own (which demonstrates what 'critically examining' has always meant in practice. More on that in coming posts)
, he then concluded with this punchline:
- "I think that is both positive and necessary to avoid the kind of cognitive dissonance that is obvious in so many people." - which takes a lack of philosophical self awareness to a new level.
It seemed likely that this was going nowhere fast, but keeping in mind that other people reading along might be persuaded to give the matter further consideration, I pointed out that:
"Semantics and philosophy are two very different things, and failing to recognize that will have you accepting and furthering premises that you never considered or thought to question. Your comment here is a fine case in point.", and as you can imagine, not only did the tone not improve or turn him towards examining the term he misused, but he also took my questioning of his premises as an indication that I was the one who feared examining their own core beliefs. JR then doubled down on his statement, repeating that:
"Defining the term “Deconstruction” is semantics, and I will leave that to you and others."Indeed. As noted, there is a problem with Semantics, but it doesn't come from paying too much attention to the meaning of words, it comes from ignoring their meaning and simply assuming that 'differences of semantics' are meaningless. That lackadaisical attitude is the very thing that is exploited through an especially effective and damaging tactic of post-modernists and deconstructionists, which has been identified as 'Semantic Deception' (also the lead post in my series on SEL & CRT), which means:
"Redefining terms to get agreement without understanding. Example: use of words that mean one thing to parents and another thing to change agents."Semantics indeed. Failing to pay attention to what words mean, and what is being promoted by the bad actors who utilize them, as JR blithely did, is a significant feature of the chaotic mess our world is in today. Post-Modernists and Deconstructionists have used the tool of semantic deception for decades - it is what's been at work when parents hear their school's promise to teach their kids about Liberty, and assume that they'll learn about Liberty in the American context, while what they'll be teaching them will be in the context of 'liberating' students through the Marxist lens of the Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire (Freire's subversive books have been the most popular text in teachers colleges for the last 40 yrs).
Worse still, blindly using words with double (and often malevolent) meanings, transforms those who imagine themselves to be neutral, or even opposed to what its concealed meaning serves (think 'diversity', 'equity', 'inclusion'), into the 'captured opposition' who unwittingly enable the solid ground that their position once held, to be infiltrated, undermined, and repurposed, into hostile ground (oh hi Harvard!).
JR, as blind to the irony of his own words as he was to the epistemology that formed them for him, had the gall to conclude by asking me:
"How do you define the term?"I was tempted to ask him how he defined 'define', but seeing no point in trading words with someone who finds no value in their meaning, I replied with a few of the points above for whoever else might be reading along, as well as a link to New Discourses which gave a deeper explanation of how 'Deconstruction' operates as "... a process of forcing the marriage of the truth to a lie...", and I noted that unless he showed an interest in that, I'd leave JR to continue the thread on his own. He continued on in much the same manner, adding a lengthy criticism of my not providing him with a 'definition' - seriously - and he pointedly refused to look at the page I'd linked to. Had he bothered to follow the link, he would've found the definitions he sought, as well as further explanations of it from deconstructionists themselves, followed by commentary which analyzed those to convey the actual meaning of the term, which the self-serving definition's of the deconstructionist's semantic deceptions, intentionally leave out.
The failed strategy of doubtful definitions
Brushing off the meaning of words as 'mere semantics', and expecting definitions to make arguments for you - which they are not and cannot be - is a failed strategy. A definition does not persuade or provide an argument, it only provides a high-level "...statement expressing the essential nature of something..." from someone presumed to have an authoritative knowledge of the subject, but what is accepted without questioning, is believed without understanding. Attempting to use a definition as an 'answer' to an argument that has not been made, is engaging in an 'argument from authority' fallacy, which not only hinders understanding, but is likely to become the proverbial 'answer that kills the question'.
Definitions can be used to raise a philosophical point, and they can, as I often do here, be used to indicate questions that need to be considered, but they can't make that philosophical point or pursue those questions for you, or install an understanding of its meaning in anyone's mind.
Checking back on the thread one last time, I saw that JR had actually gone to Wikipedia to find a definition of 'deconstruction' that was friendly to his assumptions, and from that he astoundingly concluded that:
“Deconstruction” and "deconstructing religious beliefs" was "something completely different, as Wikipedia explains here. Apparently the term was stolen and applied to Evangelistic Christianity.", which further demonstrates how the problem of arguing by definitions has been compounded, as many such terms in our dictionary definitions have been defined or redefined to glide upon the politically correct winds of the day (see 'antiracist' and 'racist'), with academia's semantic deceptions worded in a wholesome manner to appeal to the general audience, while masking a very different esoteric and activist meaning for 'those who know best'.
Bad as that and his interpretation of it was, even those who're wise enough to prefer dictionaries to Wikipedia, will typically find 'Deconstruction' being defined, as Webster's online does, as being just another philosophical term:
1: a philosophical or critical method which asserts that meanings, metaphysical constructs, and hierarchical oppositions (as between key terms in a philosophical or literary work) are always rendered unstable by their dependence on ultimately arbitrary signifiers, which presents it as the means of pursuing some deeper understanding which JR assumed it to be, and makes no mention of its having been designed to de-construct - destroy - your ability to understand and reason.
2: the analytic examination of something (such as a theory) often in order to reveal its inadequacy
"...The term deconstruction has thus come to designate a range of radical theoretical enterprises in such fields as law, architecture, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, ethics and political theory, in addition to philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary and cultural studies. Though diverse, these enterprises share a critical dismantling of the conceptual oppositions that had previously been regarded as fundamental to the disciplines."[emphasis mine]If any of that sounds innocuous to you, you might ask yourself what happens when you dismantle those 'conceptual oppositions', AKA: 'binary oppositions', such as True and False, Right and Wrong, and Male and Female (yup)... what understanding do you suppose you'll be able to retain, once the meaning they were meant to convey has been lost?
Derrida began his project of Deconstruction by exploiting issues he found in those philosophies that Post-Modernism evolved from, with Structuralism (language has less to do with meaning, than with functioning to signify differences in objects and societal structures), Existentialism (life is absurd and meaningless), and Phenomenology (metaphysics is rejected in favor of the belief that meaning comes from how our own attention shapes perceived experiences into structures of consciousness). He used criticism of them to target Platonic metaphysics (through a Kantian lens) with the intent of challenging even the status of the idea of a pure 'substance' of reality - the 'thing in itself' that Kant said we can never truly know - being higher than the words it dimly appears to us through (again, Kant). Derrida contended that the phenomena of being is not pure, as from the moment of experience it is 'contaminated' with memory and expectation, conditioned by time - past, present, and future - to form binary oppositions spiraling away from the instant being experienced, and the words we vainly attempt to capture it with.
To the extent that Derrida's ideas actually mean anything at all, this meant that as the instant being experienced by us is being fractured by a "violence, a rending of oneself, an incision" in the moment and is contaminated by memory and expectation, that gap between being and becoming:
"...consists in the small, 'infinitesimal difference' (see Of Grammatology, p. 234) between me and an other, even between me and an other in me... a 'différance'...", a gap which he calls "the worst" which affects not only our understanding of the world, but of ourselves as well, as those words we repeatedly use to signify each unrepeatable event, over time, come to signify something progressively different from what we intended them to mean in the context of that moment that's been lost to us.
To Derrida this 'means' that all 'true' meaning is lost to time, and that our words are therefore meaning-less to us, but as they are all we have, then all we can and must do, is to continually 'Deconstruct' the binaries of experience and our words for it, seeking to reveal at least some shade of what has been repressed in them, in an endlessly recursive and futile effort that justice nevertheless demands we relentlessly subject our every thought and action to.
This new plan of Deconstruction hit Kant's 'Copernican Revolution' with a revolutionary spin that not only flattened its hierarchy by reducing it to a binary of "essence and appearance", but then inverted it by concluding that since our words are all that we actually experience, they are more real and important to us than the Kantian experience of reality which only distantly gives rise to them.
In applying Deconstructionism to a few of the binaries he found, Derrida revealed that:
, and that is positively upbeat in comparison to his takes on responsibility and secrets, as is found in his 'Secrets of European responsibility'.
- in Friendship and Hospitality, as we must unconditionally share all we have with all friends and strangers even though we are unable to do so which shows how we betray our ideas even as they are betrayed by experience,
- in Justice, as the 'gap', the 'differance`' between the word of the law and administering it in action (contaminated by memory and expectation, dontcha know), dooms any and all efforts to deliver justice to injustice and does violence to all (so we must continue to criticize and deconstruct it, not to improve matters, but because we must and will necessarily make matters ever worse ('Social Justice', anyone?),
- and in religion, the 'differance`' caused him to equate God with Kant's 'radical evil', as described by the 'Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy' as,
"The worst violence occurs when the other to which one is related is completely appropriated to or completely in one’s self, when an address reaches its proper destination, when it reaches only its proper destination. Reaching only its proper destination, the address will exclude more, many more, and that “many more,” at the limit, amounts to all. It is this complete exclusion or this extermination of the most – there is no limit to this violence—that makes this violence the worst violence. The worst is a relation that makes of more than one simply one, that makes, out of a division, an indivisible sovereignty. We can see again that the worst resembles the “pure actuality” of Aristotle’s Prime Mover, the One God: the sphere, or better, the globe of thought thinking itself (Rogues, p. 15)." [emphasis mine]
Are you getting the picture? Does that sound like somehting you'd recommend to others as a mental template to help them get a better understanding their lives, premises, and religion? Would you gloss over the differences between that, and reasonable thinking, as merely an issue of 'semantics'? Even the 'Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy', which overall gives a fawning analysis of Derrida and Deconstruction, says that his thinking:
"...comes to be associated with a form of writing and thinking that is illogical and imprecise..."Ya think? Contrary to the advice JR had blithely given, Deconstruction is not intended to improve our understanding of what is real and true no, no, noOooo; instead Derrida uses the failures of modern philosophical systems to legitimize discarding what is real and true in favor of a verbal turbulence of meaninglessness. He justified that, by tracing his way back through preceding misosophers from Heidegger on back through to Descartes, as a means of "...deconstituting them...", and as "...the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside of philosophy...", to escape being "swallowed up in metaphysics" ('Structure, Sign, and Play' 1966).
Having done all of that, he concluded that the belief that words have meaning is an illusion, as are our ideas of right and wrong, and true and false, etc., and indeed that the relentless deconstruction of such binaries, which we must do, will take us ever further away from a better understanding of what is real and true.
Those who've followed after Derrida, have continued to operate (wherever it suits their purposes) on the assertion that since words as such are meaningless, then the only thing that is of any 'value' in the words we use, is the power found in their reactions to hearing the sound of them, and it's that power, and indeed Power in and of itself, that in practice (or praxis) is in the end all that matters (resist asking if they mean that - that's how their virus is spread).
These tools of Post-Modernist and Deconstructionist thought have been relentlessly used to strike at the heart of the West's thinking for quite some time now, and what Derrida intended them to do to that heart, was, as his translator puts it, the
"... project of critical thought whose task is to locate and "take apart" those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics...", and that metaphysics he's aiming at taking apart - de-constructing - is what every ideal and value you have, rests upon and depends upon - Science most definitely included - and, to put it bluntly, failing to grasp that suggests that your own metaphysical foundations are already in such a state of disrepair that you are senseless to any further damage being done to them (oh hi Neil deGrasse Tyson!). And yet the likes of JR are everywhere, whether consciously or witlessly, are recommending forms of them as a means to attaining a 'better understanding' of their religion, and as ways of "critically examining ALL of one’s premises" - how do you think that will turn out?
It's high time we realize that Derrida's 'illogical and imprecise' language, and that of his compatriots, is less a result of error or ineptness, than a deliberate effort to construct tools for accomplishing a very particular kind of job: Deconstructing the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West.
That strategic intent was perhaps most vividly illustrated by Audre Lorde, the Marxist, black, lesbian, feminist, activist (do you feel "the exasperated etc” in that listing?), who's infamous statement has become a rallying cry of what Deconstructionism is all about:
“the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”Get it?
- The Master's House that they want to dismantle (deconstruct) is the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West.
- The Masters Tools which they've realized are of no use to them - and which they want to keep out of other people's hands as well, are Reason and Logic and the culture which values them.
And when the tools at hand in the activist's tool-belt aren't up to handling the heavier demolition work that's often required, they'll reach into their toolbox for the 'academically respected' power-tools of Deconstructionism, Queer Theory, Intersectionality, and others, which they put to expert use - as often as not with our invaluable aid and unwitting assistance - in dismantling those fundamental ideals of Western Civilization, which our entire culture and understanding rest upon.
Consequently, when we reply - oh-so logically - with 'but I'm not racist!', or 'a boy can't menstruate!' to them, as if they had somehow made legitimate errors in an attempt to make an actual argument, we are not countering their statements in doing so, we're furthering them! By engaging directly or indirectly with such provocations, we give the impression that their 'arguments' have made a valid point to be argued with, when in fact they've only made an arbitrary (and absurd) point that isn't even up to the level of being wrong, and our engaging with them enables their statement to slide forward into our discussions as if they'd said something worthy of rational discussion, when they most definitely have not.
Not for nothing was it once commonly understood, that to keep conversatins rational and reasonable, you must be quick to:
"nip the arbitrary in the bud!"Unless we begin to actively call a halt to the train of their jumbled words, and learn to point out where they left the track of fact and principle, their assertions will continue rolling on down the track, derailing further discussions, as people directly or indirectly engage still other people in their comments, as if they were worthy of being considered on the merits of an argument, that was never even made.
When we allow their terms and statements to slip through our conversations without having been fully stopped and utterly rejected (which is not the same as disagreeing with them), it informs them that they've been successful at de-constructing at least one more small part of 'The Master's House' which your life and peace of mind represent. The foundations of that House become progressively undermined and de-constructed by way of the arbitrary and unreasonable confusions that they're allowed to sow into people's sensibilities of what is good, beautiful, and true, by way of their 'illogical and imprecise' language, operating upon us from within our own minds.
"The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution", meaning that whatever the issue is that's being raised, their point in raising it is to be a tool that's useful in dismantling 'the Master's House', and furthering their revolution against the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West.
Pardon me for repeating that - the issue is never the issue, the issue is always about furthering the revolution. When we engage with their deliberately confused and deconstructed language by arguing with their 'points', we're helping them to spread their weopanized language ever wider into our personal and societal conversations, like a virus, which is the nature of what Derrida and others consciously modeled their ideas upon: ideas which are sure to sicken all who engage with them.
The practice of being sure to doubt everything except what you believe (?!), didn't start with Derrida
What enables their arbitrary and unreasonable attacks to move forward, are a set of common assumptions that underlie the actions and priorities of people like JR, which are assumed to excuse their own stated intentions, such as his claim to be 'critically examining ALL of one’s premises', while never questioning his own. The manner of thinking behind that, goes all the way back to Rene Descartes and his 'Method of Doubt'.
That was where the advice was first given that in order to be certain of anything, we should methodically doubt everything we are certain of - not by reasonably questioning our way towards a deeper understanding of a matter, while honestly acknowledging & examining any discrepancies that might be found regarding it, but by causelessly and arbitrarily doubting everything ('relentlessly criticize all that exists!', is how Marx would re-apply it centuries later), and actively assuming everything to be false until you feel that something 'somehow' satisfies those doubts which you had no actual cause to feel in the first place.
And how do you know that these doubts have been satisfied well enough that you can now be certain of something? When you 'clearly and distinctly believe [it] to be true' - IOW what you feel no doubt about, is what you can be certain of!
That, ladies & gents, is not a method for carefully examining your own premises in order to discover what is real and true, it's a method for attacking everyone else's premises and defending what you wish was 'true'!
Not so surprisingly, the 'Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy' points out that:
"...we can get a general sense of what Derrida means with deconstruction by recalling Descartes’s First Meditation. There Descartes says that for a long time he has been making mistakes. The criticism of his former beliefs both mistaken and valid aims towards uncovering a “firm and permanent foundation.” The image of a foundation implies that the collection of his former beliefs resembles a building. In the First Meditation then, Descartes is in effect taking down this old building, “de-constructing” it. We have also seen how much Derrida is indebted to traditional transcendental philosophy which really starts here with Descartes’ search for a “firm and permanent foundation.” ..."In light of which it's especially worth considering the effects of Descartes' doubtful approach to certainty and life, by imagining the effects that allowing habitually and arbitrarily fabricated doubts, to form the foundations of your understanding. Far from helping you to build your ideas upon a firmer foundation, you're instead planting your feet upon grounds that will be continuously shifting beneath them, in an ever present & undefined state of anxiety, caused by the attempt to standing upon it.
One way to visualize that worldview, which might bring it more clearly home, is to imagine it through the judicial context of presuming all defendants to be 'Guilty as charged... until proven innocent', versus that of presuming each person to be 'Innocent until proven guilty' - which do you suppose tends more towards constraining those in power to the pursuit of justice, and which is more likely to entices them towards imposing a tyranny they find favorable? Imagine the self-satisfaction of being a 'good' prosecutor, who can be certain of what you most want to believe, and having the power to dismiss any quibbles about what you have no doubt about, as... mere semantics.
Given that Justice at the level of society, is a reflection of the sense of justice that is understood and practiced by its people, is it really so surprising that the state of justice in our world today is as it is, when this worldview is at the root of so much of what we say and do?
It's no coincidence that Descartes is who moderns of all stripes cite as the beginning of 'modern epistemology', and though others preceded him (Occam, for instance, the father of Nominalism), it was his works more than any other that succeeded at leading popular philosophical thinking away from pre-modern Metaphysics, and instigated the undermining of the foundations of Logic, and the separation of Ethics from both. That trend began to hit critical mass with Hume's skeptical 'empiricism', followed by the German idealists' reaction to that in the late 1700s, which took form in their '4th branch of philosophy', and fully kicked into gear under the label of 'Epistemology!' in the mid 1800s. From that point on, the Pro-Regressives (Left & Right) began explicitly operating outside of, and in opposition to, a sound and integrated understanding of Metaphysics, Logic, and Ethics (which is what Epistemology must be to live up to the name coined for it).
The problem for us today is that we've become deaf to traditional metaphysics, and so we easily become lost in the echoes of Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Dewey, while we're not even somewhat aware of how they've re-terraformed the logos out from under our feet, with most being unaware of how unsteady the mental ground that we stand upon, has become. Mistaking our shaky foundations for steady ones, leaves us tending to ignore those seemingly incomprehensible quibbles of 'social constructs' and 'mere semantics' that arise, and are too easily assumed to be of no real importance, and those assumptions leave us unable to identify, let alone burn down, what it is that sustains the Pro-Regressives strategies & tactics that are actively acting against us.
Remaining blind to those realities, means continuing to accept their illusory positions 'for the sake of argument', as if they were 'only fair' - effectively 'sowing the dragon's teeth' into the ground we're fighting over - a ground that's easily transforms into an army of strawmen who derive real power over us, through new societal norms derived from them. Rest assured, that as those doubts rise up around you, your own familiar 'binaries' (you know, True & False, innocent/guilty, Man & Woman) will be deconstructed by them, into the itty bitty pieces of logic defying narratives that post-modernists and deconstructionists glibly use, to become the new 'privileged' of our society with, and all without the need for or benefit of, having any 'useful merit'.
Should you object that their rules 'make no sense!', you'll soon see firsthand what the very real-world consequences of modern epistemology are. The responses you'll receive to any objection you might make to them, are sure to make Kant seem like a model of brevity and succinctness, and unless you strike them like a Gen. Sherman, rather than Gen. McClellan (or even Gen. Grant), they'll verbally pin you to the mental ground in the blink of an I, as surely as if they were Andre the Giant, rather than as the illusory wisp of nothingness that they actually are.
We need to become aware that the disintegration of our understanding, is what each and every instance of deconstructionist & post-modernist thinking is aimed at.
Those like JR who assume being 'smart' is even more valuable than knowing what they presume to talk about, see themselves as being the empirical voices of 'reason!' and 'science!', and do so precisely because their unconscious epistemology is derived from the modern claims that we cannot know what is real and true. They're also especially quick to take a dim view of those ideas and concepts that can't be reduced to measurable quantities (oh hi again Neil deGrasse Tyson!) of this or that accepted fact. Such nominalistic 'STEM' centric thinking, which is self-limited to having no more depth than an instruction manual, mistakes the machine-like logic of spreadsheets & flowcharts, for the due consideration and reflection required for honest Science and Reasoning, and lead to views that readily lend themselves to virtue signaling, and calling people to doubt any 'non-scientific' certainties that hinder the advancement of one utilitarian effort after another 'for the greater good!', epistemologically blinded as they are, to the fact that they are steadily distancing themselves ever further from being able to understand what is real and true.
Never forget that the Pro-Regressive's real focus is not on the issue that they've succeeded at getting you to fight them over, but on winning the war - "The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution"!
As such our Culture Wars cannot be won with tactics that are focused on engaging (enabling) and besting the Pro-Regressive on the grounds of whichever issue they've lured you into being outraged over once again, or by relying upon definitions - or redefinitions ('racist' for instance) - instead of insisting upon arguments that are epistemologically sound (adhering to metaphysics (what is), logic (does it follow), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it)), and every moment of pretended legitimacy that they gain by your battling them on the ground they prepared for that purpose, cedes that much more of your ground into their control.
If we want to stop losing ground, we've got to stop using the strategies & tactics which they've prepared that ground with so as to benefit them, in every battle waged against you upon it. The consequences of brushing their philosophical strategies and tactics off as 'simply' semantics, borders on a criminal level of intellectual negligence.
Look through Gen. Sherman's eyes: Identify & locate their 'intellectual homeland' and burn it to the ground
So that was what I'd despaired over a few months back. What brightened my outlook, OTOH, were a few choice media moments which showed that some are refusing to be suckered into the same old verbal battles of attrition that the Pro-Regressive confederacy wants and needs us to fight on, and did so in a very Gen. Shermanesque manner, that showed that we might actually have a chance of escaping from the long line of unlearned lessons of history that we need to stop repeating. If we do, the rickety foundation of lies that their whole pseudo-reality is built upon, will come tumbling down in flaming ruins.
The first thing they didn't do, was step into the Utilitarian and 'Pragmatic' pattern of 'being practical' which conservatives have been mistaking for 'common sense' for well over a century. Although such actions have the shallow appearance of practicality, what it actually entails is the rejection of thinking in principles, in favor of a narrow focus on the details of the moment, which necessarily rejects anything worth conserving. Semantic Deception at its 'finest'.
An excellent example from the recent past of how this works, was the question that lured conservatives into being chewed up and spat out in their opposition to 'Obamacare', with:
'30% of Americans are not covered by healthcare, what about them!', and the moment the conservative considered the question and offered up a 'more reasonable' percentage or policy detail, they'd unwittingly abandoned their own principled ground of individual rights and private property, which legitimized the activist's position and effectively lost the fight without saying a single 'intolerant' word. That proven strategy of defeat has led conservatives to lose one battle after another in every conservative effort of the last century, and has brought us to the point where entire states are now outlawing parents from preventing the 'educational/medical complex' from chemically mangling & surgically butchering their children's bodies, in the totalitarian name of tolerance.
The truth is that there is no compromising between principles, only the abandonment of them. That's not a knock against compromise, but against habitually using the pretense of compromise, as a cover for abandoning your principles. Compromise, when mutually struck within a larger principle, can be reasonable and even admirable. It is, for instance, very reasonable to compromise over price and terms for what someone has the right to sell to you - that is seeking a principled compromise by finding common ground. But dickering over price & terms of stolen property, is digging your own grave beneath the common ground which the more ruthless villain will soon be walking over.
We've become so conditioned to 'pragmatic' thinking, that we rarely even think to turn to first principles when facing a problem, and those that do, are too easily led to undermine them afterwards with pragmatic concerns over what's 'practical'.
What enables error and falsehood to appear to be 'common sense' is modern epistemology, which begins in the assertion that you cannot know what is real and true, and therefore we must settle for what others accept it to be. Even if you didn't realize that to be the case, nearly everyone you listen to and look to for advice, abides by that presumption, and if we don't soon recognize that for what it is, it will fully consume us. Truly, our Culture War is 'not against flesh and blood', but against principalities and powers, and any battle of ideas that doesn't insist upon starting with what is real and true, is begun in failure and can only continue to fail, as it has from the start of the 20th Century, on down to today.
It was with that almost unbroken pattern of failure in mind, that I was startled to see not one, or two, but three examples of, if not exactly the Gen. Sherman strategy I've had in mind, at least the spirt of it in action. And surprisingly - or not - they came from the 'fight world', two from the mixed-martial arts world with UFC fighter Shane Strickland, and a follow-up smackdown from UFC owner Dana White, and 1 1/2 from the political arena of Argentina's new president, Javier Milei. Milei's solid first strike knocked my socks off with his rebuke to a reporter who wanted to 'engage him' in a discussion about Leftist policies, which he delivered in a direct and fiery style that cut the 'engagement' off before it could begin :
"...You can’t give leftist pieces of shit even a millimeter because if you give them a millimeter they will use it to destroy you...", that refusal to treat the socialist/communist Left with any respect at all, while pointedly identifying their anti-human agenda, was the style he used to win the Presidency of Argentina (the 1/2 point coming from his confrontational, but polite, speech to the WEF).
And then came the press conference for Sean Strickland's fight. He refused to treat a reporter's 'trans' question as being worth answering, and instead went straight to the heart of the matter that the reporter was attempting to advance by baiting Strickland about his 'insensitivity'. Strickland knocked his question aside and then beat him down with the ridiculousness of it, showing the reporter to be the worthless and opportunistic ideological poser he was:
"...people like you have weasled your way in the world you are you are an infection you are the definition of weakness everything that is wrong with the world..."Later, the same (I assume?) reporter tried to engage Dana White in an apology for Strickland's 'insensitive' speech. White did not answer that, but instead went straight to the heart of the presumptions behind asking such a question of an MMA fighter, and batting aside the attempted 'followup' question that implied that White gave too long of 'a leash' to his fighters, White called his presumption out into the open and burned him down to the ground for the anti-free-speech thug he was:
...“I don’t give anyone a leash,” White said. “A leash? Free speech. Control what people say? You’re going to tell people what to believe? I don’t f*cking tell any other human being what to say, what to think. There are no leashes on anyone. It’s ridiculous to say that I give somebody a leash. Free speech, brother. People can say whatever they want and believe whatever they want.I've no doubt that I'd disagree with all three of these people on mucho-many issues, and much as I'd personally prefer straight talk without the F'bombs of Milei & White, to say nothing of the veritable carpet bombing of F'Bombs that Strickland does the job with... I'm happy to enjoy the win they achieved with them. If your ears aren't too tender, each exchange is well worth listening to, as they give an excellent demonstration of how to refuse being distracted into fighting on the Pro-Regressive's tactics of 'factual' attrition, while driving straight past their defenses to expose and fire-bomb their unstated assumptions, and so easily seizes a victory that sends their opponent to an embarrassing defeat.
“We had two gay women who fought in the co-main event. They sat on the stage with Sean Strickland (at the press conference). They could give a sh*t what Sean Strickland says or what his beliefs are or what his opinions are...”
While neither of these instances went as far as going for the epistemological root of the matter, they each struck low enough to the ground-level of their opponent's ideological positions, to identify and expose the pretended 'principles' within the questions being asked of them - which they identified and mocked, rather than swallowing and groveling before them. In each of these instances, the person being targeted by the interviewer pointedly refused the usual invitation to get bogged down in fighting a pointless battle on the pragmatic 'factual' grounds that'd been prepared for them to be defeated upon, and by doing so they successfully exposed their questioner's agenda and burned it to the ground! If that approach were to become anything of a norm, it would knock the pro-regressive Left & Right back on their heels, and they'd have to withdraw from the public ring for at least a while. Maybe even for years.
But. Without formally burning their epistemology to the ground, the Pro-Regressives would eventually be able to return, and I'd much prefer that they be utterly destroyed for both now, and for the foreseeable future.
Study these fighter's moves: notice how they look past the opponent's tactics to identify their motive 'principle' (which they hope to disarm you with) and burn that to the ground. Learn to see the latest outrage being waved in our faces as the latest pragmatic tool of anti-principled thinking that it is, identify its motive power that traces its roots down to modern Epistemology itself, and burn their entire intellectual plantation to the ground.
Imagine if a Ricky Gervais style of roasting Hollywood celebrities were to become the norm that the post-modernist & deconstructionist Woke-folk had to look forward to in their everyday conversations and public interviews! If it became the norm to identify the noxious ideological roots of every ridiculous proposal they throw at us, to be publicly exposed, mocked, and brushed aside, we'd be well on our way to taking back the grounds that've become the dark-heartland of Modernity during their 'long march through the institutions', and to putting an end to the Culture War as swiftly as Gen. Sherman's march to the sea had.
But doing so will absolutely require us to practice an epistemology of metaphysics (what is), logic (does it follow), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it), to burn out the sustenance of modern misosophy, burning it out at its roots and salting that ground, to finally bring this war against the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West to an end.
And then of course there's the fact that Gen. Sherman had an army to direct and execute his strategy - we don't - and we can't wait for such 'leaders' to come along and give us our marching orders.
SoOooo... what do we do?
What we have to do, is to become an army of Gen. Sherman's ourselves, with each of us having an understanding of the strategy to be practiced, and each willingly taking the lead ourselves, in our own corner of the war. Recruit your fellows to understand and take on Gen. Sherman's role themselves; each of us, one at a time, giving no more time to their skirmishes than is needed to march on and burn their epistemology to the ground, by understanding and exposing what it really is, we can deprive them of the ability to sustain themselves upon our lack of attention, which is what they always relied upon and expected from us.
It's true, there's no glory in learning to fight against our modern Pro-Regressive's epistemology, but it's the only path to defeating those who absolutely depend upon you accepting their positions as solid or respectable ground. And just as there seemed to be no glory in battling against crops and burning down plantations, learning to do so is the only thing that will save those like JR who blindly assume that they are fighting the 'good fight' and championing what is 'real and true', when in fact their actions are undermining everyone's ability to live a life worth living, in our still very real world. The culture wars won't end on our terms unless we begin cutting their legs out from underneath them, and doing so requires our exposing and destroying the epistemology which their every action is rooted in and dependent upon - that is what it will take to burn the modern Pro-Regressive (Left & Right) homeland to the ground.
With that in mind, what I've laid out in the previous posts, is the ground we need to map and hold as our home ground. What I'm going to turn to in the coming posts, is identifying and exposing the source of what enables the enemy's figments and lies to appear solid and formidable, both with what it draws from, and how it shapes them into an appearance of substance, which it can only do with our blind acceptance and participation. That should bring to mind once again, Solzhenitsyn's powerful and fundamental point:
Live not by lies, and don't participate in their spread.Hold to that, and victory is inevitable.
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