Overnight I received the following note about the definition of apriorism to be found in my philosophical dictionary:
I think the content of the square brackets below make the definition of apriorism more truthful.
apriorism ... The view (opposed to empiricism) that some or all knowledge can be gained without reference to [personal] experience.
Well there are deep philosophical questions wrapped up in that one little word, aren't there? :) Such as: is there any experience outside the experience of individuals? I have long tended to methodological or epistemological individualism, so in the past I have doubted that there is such a thing as societal experience. But my immersion in the study of history and science makes me doubt my doubts. In a sense, science (in the broadest sense) is accumulated knowledge and a kind of societal experience. Yet in the end, it is an individual mind that must come to grasp any given piece of knowledge (there is no societal mind). And in any case I don't think we use the term "apriorism" to refer to science as accumulated knowledge, but to that individual grasp of something before one has had experience of the realities from which the relevant knowledge has been abstracted (yes, I also tend to epistemological abstractionism). So while perhaps the definition is made clearer by adding the word "personal", I also happen to think it's redundant.
The other day I received my complimentary copy of Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion from Ashgate Press, containing my essay "Friendship in Atlas Shrugged" and a large collection of papers by a wide range of scholars in philosophy, economics, politics, and literature. Order your copy today! ;-)
Last month I posted about the views of both Alexander Nehamas and José Ortega y Gasset on beauty. Recently I revisited several essays by Jacob Bronowski on the same topic. Here are some quotes that interested me from his essay "The Shape of Things":
I do no regard aesthetics as a remote and abstract interest. My approach to aesthetics is not contemplative but active. I do not ask, "What is beauty?" or even, "How do we judge what is beautiful?" I ask as simply as I can, "What prompts men to make something which seem beautiful, to them or to others?"
This is a rational question and it deserves a rational answer. We must not retreat from it into vague intuitions, or sidestep it with hymns of praise to the mystical nature of beauty. I am not talking about mystics: I am talking about human beings who make things to use and to see. A rational aesthetic must start from the conviction that art (and science too) is a normal activity of human life.
And:
To my mind, the cave painting as much as the chipped flint tool is an attempt to control the absent environment, and both are created in the same temper; they are exercises in freeing man from the mechanical drives of nature.
In these words, I have put the central concept of my aesthetic: evolution has had, for man, the direction of liberty. Of course men do at times act from necessity, as animals do. But we know them to be men when their actions have an untroubled liberty -- when children play, when the young find pleasure in abstract thought, when we weigh and choose between two ambitions. These are the human acts, and they are beautiful as a painting or an invention is beautiful, because the mind in them is free and exuberant. And you will now see why I framed my opening question so oddly; for it is not the thing done or made which is beautiful, but the doing. If we appreciate the thing, it is because we relive the heady freedom of making it. Beauty is the by-product of interest and pleasure in the choice of action.
Elsewhere, Bronowski discusses the status of art-works as artifacts and the fact that all artifacts have a double aspect: we experience what they are but also how and why they were made. So we can ask two questions about any artifact: what was its creator trying to do, and why did he do it quite that way? The answers to these questions usually fall under the headings "content" and "style", but Bronowski emphasizes that content and style are separable only in analysis, not in reality. By trying to answer these questions about an artifact or more particularly a work of art, you can "relive the heady freedom of making it" and thus experience aesthetics from the producer's point of view. And after all, we wouldn't have art-works if creative individuals didn't produce such works in the first place.
Yes, today seems to be José Ortega y Gasset day at one small voice. Here's another passage I found in Phenomenology and Art, from his essay "Esthetics on the Streetcar", in which Ortega updates and sublimates Nietzsche's dictum "become what you are":
It is love that makes me speak... love for the multiplicity of life, which even the best of us, against our will, have helped to belittle. Because, just as the Greeks held that all Being is One and reduced beauty to a norm or general model, so Kant found Goodness and Moral Perfection in a generic, abstract imperative.
No, no; duty is not the same for all. Each of us carries within his own exclusive and inalienable duty. To guide my conduct Kant offers me a criterion: that I wish always for what another might wish for. But this empties the ideal. It makes it a judicial mask, a mask with the features of no one. I can only fully want what I want with my whole individual being....
We saw earlier that the individual face is as once a design for itself as well as a more of less complete realization. And so it is with morals, for I imagine I see how each person who goes by is contained in a moral outline of himself: this profile shows how this individual would be at his most perfect. Some people completely fill the contours of their possibilities with their actions; more often we fall short of this fullness through some defect, some lack, some excess....
Therefore, let us measure people in terms of themselves: what each is in reality against what he potentially is. "Become what you are." Here is a just imperative. But what usually happens is what Mallarmé suggests so marvelously, so mysteriously, when he calls Hamlet "the latent gentleman who cannot manage to be."
This idea of finding the sublime matrix of ideals, norms, and perfection in reality's unlimited capacity for innovation can be fruitful everywhere.
A fine expression of a sophisticated individualism.
Recently I discussed the views of Alexander Nehamas on beauty. I decided to look around more broadly and picked up a book of essays entitled Phenomenology and Art by José Ortega y Gasset (translated from the Spanish by Philip W. Silver in 1975). I like the following passage from the first section of "An Essay in Esthetics":
Reading poetry is not something I do very often. Generally speaking, I cannot conceive that reading poetry could be anyone's regular occupation. Just as we demand a certain seriousness for creating poetry, we should also demand a certain seriousness for reading it. Not a seriousness that is all show, but rather that feeling of inner awe that invades our hearts at very special times. Contemporary pedagogy is beginning to have a deplorable influence in the cultural realm of esthetics by making art a usual, normal, regulated thing. This way we lose the feeling of distance; we lose our respect for and our fear of art; we approach it at any time in the dress and mood we happen to be in, and grow accustomed to not understanding it. The real emotion to which we refer when we speak of esthetic pleasuure these days is -- if we truly wish to own up to it -- a pale delight, lacking in vigor and depth, produced in us by the merest brush with the work of art.
One of the men who has most dismally affected our view of beauty is probably Ruskin.... Ruskin manages to give an interpretation of art that takes from art only what can easily be converted to everyday experience. His gospel is art as usefulness and convenience. Naturally, such a view can only recommend to the intellect those arts that, to be exact, are not really art: the industrial or decorative arts.... I am not saying that the decorative or industrial arts are entirely without beauty; I am only saying that their beauty is not solely beauty -- it is utility varnished with beauty, touched with beauty: water with a touch of Dionysian flavoring in it. As it happens, contemporary man has grown accustomed to not asking of art deeper emotions than those born of the decorative arts. If he were sincere he would admit that his esthetic pleasure is no different from the pleasure that derives from things when they are well tended and put in their proper order.
It would be wisdom to free the sword of beauty from that decorative sheath in which it has been kept for so long and let it flash dangerously again in the sunlight.
To me, Ortega captures more of the essence of aesthetic experience than does a self-confessed aestheticist like Nehamas, because he realizes its sharp edge of dangerous passion, the inner awe that is evoked within one's heart when encountering a work or act or person of great beauty. (And no I don't refer to mere surface beauty, to things or acts or people that merely appear beautiful in the conventional or popular sense of the term.)
In my copious spare time recently I've been reading some works by Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy at Princeton, expert on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, and author of several books on aesthetics and the good life. His most recent book is Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. A good summary of his thesis can be found in an essay he wrote in 2000 for The Threepenny Review. To my mind, the key paragraph is this:
I want to turn our common picture around. The judgment of beauty is not the result of a mysterious inference on the basis of features of a work which we already know. It is a guess, a suspicion, a dim awareness that there is more in the work that it would be valuable to learn. To find something beautiful is to believe that making it a larger part of our life is worthwhile, that our life will be better if we spend part of it with that work. But a guess is just that: unlike a conclusion, it obeys no principles; it is not governed by concepts. It goes beyond all the evidence, which cannot therefore justify it, and points to the future. Beauty, just as Stendhal said, is a promise of happiness. We love, as Plato saw, what we do not possess. Aesthetic pleasure is the pleasure of anticipation, and therefore of imagination, not of accomplishment. The judgment of taste is prospective, not retrospective; the beginning, the middle, but never the end of criticism. If you really feel you have exhausted a work, you are bound to be disappointed. A piece that has no more surprises left -- a piece you really feel you know "inside and out" -- has no more claim on you. You may still call it beautiful because it once gave you the pleasure of its promise or because you think that it may have something to give to someone else. But it will have lost its hold on you. Beauty beckons.
Even though I like some of the specific things Nehamas says on the topic of beauty, I disagree with his central claim: that beauty is only a promise of happiness.
First, I distrust any claim that X is only Y. Are you sure? Where is your proof? Is there no remainder? Can your thesis account for all the phenomena?
Second, it seems that Nehamas removes any basis in reality for saying that a work of art is beautiful, since the judgment of beauty is not based on the features of a work. He phrases it more carefully than that -- "features of a work which we already know" -- but as far as I can see the import is the same: there are no beautiful things or beautiful features thereof, only judgments of beauty. (Elsewhere he says that you can't argue for your judgment of beauty based on a specific feature, instead the judgment is based on a holistic appreciation for the individuality of the work and the way that all its features combine and work together and are integrated for the sake of the whole, which makes more sense; but as far as I can see, that's not what he's arguing for here.)
Third, I detect a strong whiff of Plato's old error that pleasure is driven by a lack and that pleasure disappears once a desire has been satisfied. The desires Nehamas talks about are more ethereal, but pleasures nonetheless. Yet he says the pleasure is the result only of anticipation and imagination, and that the pleasure is gone once you have come to know in fullness that which inspired your aesthetic pleasure -- just as, for Plato, the pleasure of eating is caused by the elimination of hunger: there are no positive pleasures, all pleasure is in some way negative (the removal of pain).
Fourth, Nehamas concentrates overly much on objects of art and gives short shrift to beautiful persons and experiences and activities. These are connected with the creation of beauty, not just the appreciation of beauty. And in my experience creation -- whether individual creation of art or co-creation of beautiful experiences in a personal relationship -- matters more than mere appreciation of something that has been created by someone else, because what's important is living rather than observing or making judgments.
But all I have done here is make judgments about what Nehamas has written. So one of these days I'll have to write something more positive, eh?
As discussed yesterday, I am of a skeptical frame of mind, in the sense that I think it is important to carefully consider alternatives, hesitate in accepting theories, and question self-appointed intellectual authorities (the word skepticism derives from the Greek σκεψις, meaning "looking around, considering, or inquiring into, especially in a careful manner"). Coincidentally, on the flight back from Brussels yesterday I found the following passage about the value of skepticism in the essay "Landscape with a Deer in the Background" by José Ortega y Gasset (translated by Tony Talbot):
The skeptic is the man with the fullest, richest, most complete life. Some foolish idea leads us to suppose that the skeptic does not believe in anything. Quite the contrary! The skeptic differs from the dogmatic in that the latter believes in only one thing and the former in many, in almost everything. And this multitude of beliefs, acting as mutual restraints, make the mind flexible and prolific.
Heraclitus of Ephesus (flourished circa 500 BCE) is commonly known only for having said that "you cannot step into the same river twice" or even that "you cannot step into the same river even once". The latter statement was uttered not by Heraclitus but by the sophist Cratylus; as quoted in Aristotle's Metaphysics (Book 4, Chapter 5, 1010a13), "Cratylus ... criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is not possible to step into the same river twice -- for he thought not even once". The quote about stepping into the same river twice is from Plato's dialogue Cratylus (echoed in Aristotle) and Plato may have been quoting only Cratylus, who may or may not have been properly characterizing Heraclitus himself. The existing fragments of Heraclitus state only that "different and different waters flow upon those who step into the same rivers" (Fr. 12). (According to my copy of The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk and Raven, the original Greek is: ποταμοισι τοισιν αυτοισιν εμβαινουσιν ετερα και ετερα υδατα επιρρει -- quite different, I might note, from what you find at the Wikipedia page.)
Did Heraclitus extend that insight to "all things" (as Plato, or Plato quoting Cratylus, would have you believe)? I have my doubts, since if Heraclitus said something so pithy as "you can't step into the same river twice" and applied that analogy to all things, then I figure someone would have quoted the exact text. Furthermore, Heraclitus said "I prefer things of which there is seeing and hearing and perception" (fragment 61). This indicates to me that he valued the evidence of the senses and would not violate that evidence in order to expound a doctrine that flies in the face of the fact that certain things are more stable than others (indeed his statement about rivers can be understood as merely an observation about things that can be seen, in this case the flowing of waters down a channel to the sea). Perhaps he held that seemingly stable things are imperceptibly changing as well (the fragments of his writings yield no evidence one way or the other), but that does not imply that he thought that everything is in constant flux and that there are no stable or semi-stable identities (a position sometimes described as a "Heraclitean view of the universe"). At least, that's how I read the Greek.
As to psychology and ethics, here are fragments 119 and 101 from Heraclitus, which are quite in line with the Greek tradition:
ηθος ανθρωπω δαιμων ("A person's character is their daemon / genius / animating spirit." -- or however you prefer to translate the untranslatable term "daimon".)
εδιζησαμην εμεωυτον ("I sought out myself" or "I sought the meaning of myself" or "I inquired into myself" -- a kind of restatement of the Delphic saying γνωθι σεαυτον or "know thyself".)
Regarding the language of religion (see parts one and two), the following paragraphs from my essay Objectivism: Who Needs It? seem apropos (despite the fact that quoting oneself is in poor taste):
In her book The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels concentrates on gnostic Christians, but it is possible that gnosticism pre-dates Christianity or that gnostic Christians represented a merging of a separate gnostic tradition (perhaps within Judaism, perhaps not) with the then-new Christian phenomenon. Be that as it may, gnostic Christianity was opposed to the claims of the catholic church that it was the true orthodox (right-thinking) branch of the Christian community. The gnostics did not accept the authority claimed by the clergy, nor did they accept the books codified into the New Testament as the true teachings of Jesus. The catholics asserted that "outside the church there is no salvation", whereas the gnostics held that salvation comes not through an institution but through the cultivation of personal wisdom. For the gnostics, Jesus was a teacher of wisdom (not the cleanser of sins) and divinity was found naturally within the individual (not something utterly foreign to human experience). The gnostic is an often-solitary seeker after insight (in Greek, a monachos, from which term come "monk" and "monastic"). Yet the gnostic is not a hermit, but a member of a community of fellow-seekers. However, according to the gnostics the true religious community is measured not by obeisance to clerical authority or by recitation of a certain creed, but by the extent of the knowledge and wisdom gained by its members. What matters is not expiation of some original sin, but an ascent from ignorance to insight that is captured in the phrase spiritual maturity.
And that spiritual maturity is reached through the search for self-knowledge. The gnostics held that far from requiring a church or divine revelation, the human individual possesses a full capacity for liberation from ignorance and unconsciousness -- a liberation found in gnosis: knowledge, insight, awareness, discernment, true perception. One experiences internal resistance in the search for that enlightenment, but that resistance can be overcome. And it is necessary to overcome that resistance in order to "become what you are"; the choice is liberation or destruction, light or darkness: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth with destroy you." (A saying attributed to Jesus in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas.) And also: "There is a light within a man of light, and it lights up the whole world. If he does not shine, he is darkness." (ibid.) What is this light within that one must cultivate? "The lamp of the body is the mind", according to a saying of Jesus in the Dialogue of the Savior. The gnostic searcher is exhorted to "light the lamp within you" and to "knock upon yourself as upon a door and walk upon yourself as on a straight road" (Silvanus). "Whoever has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known himself has at the same time already achieved knowledge about the depths of all things" (Book of Thomas the Contender). The "Kingdom of God" is a state, not of history, but of transformed awareness.
Thus self-knowledge is the key to understanding the divine. Indeed, according to at least some gnostics (especially followers of Valentinus), human beings created the language of divinity -- even created god in their own image! Religious language is not literal, since it does not refer to separate objects or entities out there in the world; instead, it is a "language of internal transformation" in which "you see yourself, and what you see you shall become" (p. 134). The Jesus of the gnostic gospels directs his disciples inward. For example, in the Dialogue of the Savior, Matthew asks Jesus to show him the "place of life" which is "pure light", and Jesus answers: "Every one of you who has known himself has seen it." The disciple -- any disciple -- who seeks the truth is also the one who reveals the truth; for the truth is within.
One implication of finding truth within is that external authorities such as the church or even the reports of the students of Jesus (the apostles, in the terms of the catholic church) are no longer necessary -- the true disciple discovers that his own mind "is the father of the truth" and thus "maintains his own independence of anyone else's authority" (p.132). Even Jesus himself presented not a closed system of ideas, but a spur to one's own search for wisdom. "No one else can tell another which way to go, what to do, how to act" (p.145). Such an attitude was unpopular with those who would set themselves up, through the doctrine of apostolic succession, as the only authorities in matters of the spirit.
It comes as no surprise, then, that a gnostic approach to Christian thought did not survive: it stood as a direct challenge to the emerging orthodoxy. Yet in a sense gnosticism, however individualistic and true, contained within itself the seeds for its own supression. Why? For the very reason that it was individualistic and true. It strikes me that a tradition stressing spiritual maturity is by its nature elitist in some fashion: it is an approach for the few. Further, Pagels argues that gnostics emphasized the divinity of human nature to such a degree that, as Plotinus said, they thought "very well of themselves, and very ill of the universe". Though I take anything Plotinus says with a large grain of salt, I can see some truth here: the gnostics tended to pursue a fairly solitary life of contemplation, sometimes to the detriment or exclusion of all engagement with the world through marriage, parenthood, work, and community involvement. The human individual is what the anthropologists call a "social solitary", and the gnostics perhaps did not do full justice to the social side of that equation. It seems that they tended to totalism -- to saying that it is only the solitary life of the individal that truly matters, and thus did not seek or find a greater integration between the solitary and the social. But these are nits; the deep individualism of the gnostics has long provided a shining example for later thinkers, and can still do so today.
In part one of my series on the language of religion, I talked about the secular etymology of most terms we use to describe religious concepts and experience. In sum, those terms cluster around the phenomena of love, admiration, honor, respect, devotion, passion, joy, emotion, elevation, and a capacity to deeply experience and appreciate life. I know that conventionally religious people experience those phenomena in relation to their own conceptions of a higher god, and I respect that in ways I didn't respect when I was a sophomoric know-it-all. But those belief-systems are not mine -- and I think that the phenomena can be experienced in relation to life in the here-and-now, not only in relation to the above or the hereafter (as I put it in my song Pre-Emptive Strike, "your only life, there's none above / it's here that you must show your love").
Indeed, I think that the essence of spirituality is not belief, it is enthusiasm in the original Greek sense of depth of feeling, of inspiration, of being infused with a kind of shining divine presence. But since I don't think there are any specifically divine beings outside or above physical reality, I would account for that personally divine aspect in a more naturalistic manner -- as the interior and exterior manifestation of the cluster of qualities I mention above.
I don't think this is far-fetched (though it is difficult to talk about clearly). After all, we humans differ endlessly. Some are smarter than others, some are more practical, some are more organized, some are more socially adept, some are more athletic, some are more graceful, some are more stable, some are more serene. And some have a greater capacity for love, admiration, honor, respect, devotion, passion, joy, emotion, elevation, and deep experience and appreciation of life. The latter are more inclined to spirituality and to experiencing the divine aspects of human life. That doesn't make them better or higher than other people. It only makes them more spiritual or religious.
To my mind, belief is too easy. Anyone can believe. That's good if you care about being inclusive, since it seems that few people have a great capacity for spirituality. Don't get me wrong, I think that many people have glimmers of appreciation for the spiritual aspects of life, but after experiencing such glimmers they pick themselves up and walk off as if nothing profound had happened.
Naturally, it may not necessarily be healthy to have continual and deep spiritual experiences. After all, we're physical creatures who need to work, eat, procreate, and otherwise exist in the here-and-now. The challenge as with everything else in life is to achieve balance and integration, which can take a lifetime of passion, reflection, enculturation, appreciation for beauty, openness to experience, and active wisdom. A relatively few people devote themselves to that kind of quest, which is why I think true spirituality is hard-won (and exclusive in a way that professed belief is not).
Not that I think I have achieved that kind of true spirituality in my own life, mind you. I've learned enough humility to keep from being that presumptuous. But at least I can aspire...
At this time of year it's hard to escape spirituality (it's also hard to escape materialism, but that's another matter, as it were). O holy night, the son of god, come let us adore him, glory to god in the highest, and all the rest. I became a non-believer at the age of nine, and when I was younger the language of religion made me uncomfortable. After a while it made me resentful -- why did the believers get to hold a monopoly on the words expressing deep emotion? Then it made me curious about finding a secular meaning for those terms. Can't those of us who don't believe in a higher realm outside or above our human reality also revere, worship, venerate, and adore real-life people and this-worldly values that are holy, hallowed, divine, sacred, and glorious, thus leading to experiences of exaltation, transport, rapture, ecstasy, and bliss?
Fifteen years ago I wrote a youthful essay on the topic, and I'm still thinking about it. It's a difficult area to explore without becoming ungrounded. One possible ground is etymology. Consider:
Nothing here says that the object of these actions and emotions must exist in a realm outside or above this-worldly human experience. But few people are comfortable applying these terms to their friends or family or companions -- or especially to themselves (it's considered awfully impudent to think that you're glorious or divine or holy!). Interestingly, some of these words are acceptable when applied to one's spouse or lover -- "he really worships his wife", "I adore you", "our marriage is blissful", etc. Others are sometimes applied in the realm of the arts (such as Glenn Gould's notion of "ecstasy as the only proper quest for the artist"). But most of them are used primarily in the special, walled-off realm of religion. One of these days I'll write an essay about the phenomenon, because I find it endlessly fascinating...
Recently while reading an essay by Ross Emmett, I came across the following quote from Thomas Malthus:
The beautiful fabric of imagination vanishes at the severe touch of truth.
A useful antidote to utopianism and idealization of any kind.
In yesterday's post Five Years On, I extolled the values of freedom and enlightenment. But what is freedom, and what is enlightenment? These are big concepts and they are not always well defined. Perhaps over time I'll work to explain them (or at least explain my understanding of them). Let us begin with enlightenment. One of the classic statements of the nature of enlightenment comes from Immanuel Kant's essay Was Ist Aufklärung? (translation), written on September 30, 1784:
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's intelligence without direction from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of intelligence, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere Aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence! That is the motto of enlightenment.
A few points to note:
By 'intelligence' here is not meant raw smarts, but your reason, i.e., your native intellectual powers however strong they may be. You don't have to be a genius to be intellectually curious or to seek a deeper understanding of yourself and the world. (At least that's how I see it, and I think this use of the word 'intelligence' is consistent with the German Verstand in Kant's essay.)
The Latin motto sapere aude comes originally from Epistle I.ii of the Roman poet Horace, in which Horace urged his interlocutor to seek out the wisdom of philosophical study. Although sapere aude is often catchily translated as "dare to know", at root the Latin verb sapio means to have taste or discernment, to be wise, not merely to have dry knowledge of facts (I see a connection here to "la gaya scienza" of Nietzsche). So yes, venture forth in search of knowledge, but while you're at it don't neglect the pursuit of wisdom.
In the midst of a lengthy screed of the sort that only academics, bureaucrats, the idle rich, and the unemployed have time to write (the rest of us are too busy working to create the wealth that makes such leisure possible), Diana Hsieh makes the following remarkable assertion (previously posted at her blog) regarding the importance of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand:
The serious study of Ayn Rand's work -- in and out of academia -- is only in its nascent stages. If stillborn, our culture is doomed. (So the stakes are high, to say the least!) Whether Ayn Rand's ideas take hold in academia and the wider culture or not will largely will largely depend upon the work produced in the next few decades. That work will consist of a relatively small number of influential publications produced by a relatively small number of scholars and intellectuals. So at this point, and for many years to come, even a few pseudo-scholars pose a grave danger, as do those who tolerate them. After all, today's intellectuals would love nothing more than to be able to dismiss Objectivism by means of strawmen erected by its supposed defenders. (Oh, what a sad time that would be!) Such is why promoting the highest standards of objectivity in scholarship on Ayn Rand and Objectivism is not just important, but of particular pressing importance at present. It's not just some academic game: it's literally life and death.
My word. Our culture (presumably American or Western culture, and by extension the future of civilization) is doomed if Ayn Rand's philosophy does not take hold in academia and the wider culture; Ayn Rand's philosophy will not take hold unless a small number of scholars and intellectuals publish a small number of influential publications (presumably articles and books); that small number of scholars and intellectuals cannot be successful if dangerous pseudo-scholars and supposed defenders of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism are allowed to erect their strawmen and are tolerated by those who do not uphold the highest standards of objectivity; and this crisis, this matter of literally life and death, will be in force for the next few decades.
There are many questionable assumptions here:
That Ayn Rand's writings are not powerful enough to stand on their own and can be successful only if a select handful of highly objective scholars are able to write a relatively small number of influential publications over the next few decades. To which I counter: the last time I checked, Ayn Rand's novels and non-fiction works, which provide a much more compelling introduction to her ideas than anything published since, had sold millions of copies and were still selling hundreds of thousands of copies each year.
That the highly objective work of real scholars will be drowned out by the dangerous hack work of pseudo-scholars and supposed defenders of Objectivism if the latter are tolerated even for a second. To which I counter: Rand herself was the subject of much more vicious attacks than the supposed hack work invoked by Diana Hsieh, and the fear that the hacks will overwhelm the scholars evinces a distinct lack of confidence in the reasoning powers of the average human being.
That the very fate of civilization is bound up with the wordly success of Ayn Rand's ideas and that American or Western culture is doomed if Ayn Rand's philosophy does not take hold in academia and the wider culture. To which I counter: a thorough study of history reveals that philosophy is important but by no means all-important -- and further that, as the traditional realms of philosophy are steadily taken over by the sciences and as the pace of technological progress rapidly accelerates, philosophy will become less and less important over time.
My conclusions:
Ayn Rand's ideas are doing just fine on their own and don't especially need the valiant assistance of a handful of highly objective scholars in order to survive.
Logic may be slow yeast but it works incessantly (as Vermont Royster said in his Wall Street Journal review of Ludwig von Mises's magnum opus Human Action).
If Objectivists want to be truly influential, they need to deeply study history, get involved in scientific research (including extension of scientific methods to fields such as epistemology, psychology, and political economy), and create innovative technologies that will move civilization to the next level.
In line with Rand's cardinal virtue of productivity, I try to do as much of the latter as I possibly can in my limited time on this earth (although I am no longer an Objectivist, in many ways I still live like one). I respectfully suggest that others do the same rather than wasting their time on writing lengthy screeds about imagined intellectual dangers or getting involved in internecine conflicts that do nobody any good.
Over at The Speculist, fellow Denverite Phil Bowermaster speculates on the desirability of formulating what he calls Enlightenment 3.0 -- a renewed commitment to reason and law that will provide "a philosophical/legal/intellectual arsenal of unprecedented scope and corrective qualities". Following Robert Conquest, Phil distinguishes between the British Enlightenment and the Continental Enlightenment. In general, thinkers in Scotland and England valued something like reasonableness over French and German Reason (with a capital "R"), leading to an emphasis on particulars (whether in science or society) whereas the Continental Enlightenment led to uncontrolled generalization and abstract theorizing. One result was a fairly dogmatic, systematic socialism on the Continent and a more pragmatic, flexible capitalism in the Anglosphere, a point made briefly by Jim Bennett here and at length in his book.
Given my status as a recovered Randian, it's interesting to me that several commenters at Phil's post adduced Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism as the answer. Yet, as I've argued in my essay Ayn Rand and the Ascent of Man, it's not clear that Rand was an Enlightnement thinker (or, for that matter, that the Enlightenment as traditionally conceived is any kind of panacea):
The second phase of Western expansion (roughly from 1450 to 1650) was followed by another period of conflict (roughly from 1650 to 1750) as the system of commercial capitalism based on trade became corrupted into mercantilism and an early kind of state capitalism. During that period arose a loose intellectual movement called the Enlightenment or the "Age of Reason". Because of the latter name, followers of Ayn Rand are rather attached to the idea that Objectivism is a philosophy of the Enlightenment. For example, a communication from The Objectivist Center made the following claim:
We identified ... a single idea that conveys, simply and clearly, Objectivism's distinctive outlook to people not already familiar with the philosophy. That theme is the concept of an "Enlightenment culture" opposed to both the cultural Right and the cultural Left. [emphasis in original]
However, even superficially, Rand's philosophy is not exactly the Enlightenment revisited. For one thing, Enlightenment thinkers were generally anti-Aristotelian but also quite rationalistic. For another, Rand's Romantic literary heroes, especially Victor Hugo, were virulent enemies of the culture of the Enlightenment. They held strongly that Enlightenment culture was characterized by a desiccated vision of reason, an elevation of etiquette over emotion, and a focus on rules and duties in life and in art. It appears that Rand accepted much of this critique, for in her essay "What is Romanticism?" (Rand 1969) she derided the "classicists" of Enlightenment times, who set concrete-bound rules for literary production and thereby descended from artistic creation to artistic imitation.
Probably the most famous characterization of the Enlightenment can be found in Immanuel Kant's essay "What Is Enlightenment?". There, he claims that "The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!" Kant's catchphrase "Dare to know!" captures one significant theme of the Enlightenment: the pursuit of knowledge. However, the Enlightenment focus on knowledge tended toward a certain kind of intellectualism unconcerned with practical matters such as material production (a rebirth, perhaps, of the old classical ideal). Partly this was no fault of Enlightenment thinkers, since before 1790 the industrial revolution did not have enough strength even in the most advanced countries to appear as a new age that would prove the value of applying knowledge to the creation of wealth. Yet even outside the economic realm, the Enlightenment was not focused strongly on action. For example, while Enlightenment intellectuals showed a certain irreverence towards established authorities and a humanitarian opposition to arbitrary power, by no means were they revolutionaries; in fact for the most part they believed in social stability, "being reasonable", and the legitimate power of benevolent despots and aristocrats as opposed to revolutionary transformation or the messy processes of popular democracy.
The Enlightement belief in order extended beyond society to its vision of nature. That vision can be summed up in one word: Newton. Newton's discovery of a fixed order of laws behind the apparent chaos of natural phenomena held endless fascination during the Enlightenment, and was championed by Voltaire and the other major figures of the time. These thinkers had great faith in the power of Providence, and they believed that a higher power -- no longer quite the God of Christian tradition, but an organizing force in the universe -- was necessary for the existence of natural order. Without a god of the deistic variety, it was believed that the forces of blind mechanism would lead to chaos. The choice was stark: fixed order or total flux. And the Enlightenment came down on the side of order -- not just in the sciences, but also in morals, manners, art, and life in general. As Isaiah Berlin noted in The Roots of Romanticism (Berlin 1999, 105):
The Enlightenment supposed that there was a closed, perfect pattern of life....[t]here was some particular form of life and of art, and of feeling and of thought, which was correct, which was right, which was true and objective and could be taught to people if only we knew enough.
Rand and her followers seem to think that they have found the one particular form of life and of art that is correct, right, true, and objective: namely, Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, especially as presented in her novels (after all, art is the technology of the soul). I have my doubts, not least because the idea of the one true path is not consistent with respect for the identities of individual human beings and specific human societies. That doesn't mean reason and law go out the window, or that relativism is the only option. It does mean that ihe long-developing Anglosphere values of the British Enlightenment -- individualism, particularism, voluntary relations, economic flexibility, societal resilience, decentralization, entrepreneurship, scientific induction, technological progress, industrial (and now informational) production, free inquiry, common law, etc. -- trump the more artificial values of the Continental Enlightenment. In my experience, Randians seem to be quite enamored of the Continental model (let's deduce it all from axioms, let's spin out theories of everything, let's split hairs, let's not tolerate anyone who disagrees with us, let's ignore science if we can, let's not get our hands dirty with the messy facts of reality but instead opine about how things ought to be). In short, they are hedgehogs, not foxes. And as we've seen from the success of the Anglosphere, it's the flexible foxes who fomented the Industrial Revolution and who are at the forefront of the Singularity revolutions (GRIN technologies, space travel, the ever-quickening pace of life, and all the rest).
Rand's Objectivism does not provide a strong, sustainable basis for Enlightenment 3.0 (although it may provide some of the inspiration). Indeed, I would argue that in general philosophy is a result rather than a cause of historical experience (e.g., the mechanistic philosophies of Enlightenment 1.0 emerged only after centuries of experience with machines in the West, starting as early as the 10th century). So I would expect a new philosophy to emerge from the personal and intellectual reflections of those who experience the Singularity revolutions first-hand. What form that philosophy will take no one can say right now. But I'd bet it will take account of the core values of the Anglosophere as adumbrated above, because it's those core values, habits, and practices that will have produced the Singularity in the first place.
May you live in interesting times.
I've just posted an essay of mine entitled The Conceptual Nature of Art, which contains the fundamentals of my interpretation of Ayn Rand's philosophy of art. Although I originally submitted it to The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, I've decided to remove it from consideration since the anonymous reader's comments requested a thorough overhaul and I simply can no longer muster the energy and enthusiasm to work that hard on interpreting Ayn Rand. So I present it as-is, and in the public domain. Enjoy!
Finally! I've just launched www.ismbook.com, a dedicated domain for the dictionary of philosophy I first wrote in 1990. Since placing it on the web in 1996 I've hardly touched it, but over time the site has become the source of some embarrassment to me because the definitions have left a lot to be desired. Over the past six months I've rewritten the entire site, put it into modern XML, written some fun little XSL transformations and generation scripts, explicitly licensed it as in the public domain, and now launched it at ismbook.com rather than as one musty corner of saint-andre.com. In the past few weeks I've also decided to broaden the scope to include terminology from intellectual disciplines other than philosophy (politics, religion, science, the arts and humanities, etc.), but it will take me some time to realize the vision of a more generalized "field guide" to intellectual matters, so I've decided to launch the site now and update it continuously. Enjoy!
I just completed my first pass through a total revision of The Ism Book, the dictionary of philosophy I first wrote in 1990. I still need to fix up the XSLT transformations a bit and read the entire work again for accuracy and consistency, but it seems that I'll probably be posting version 4.0 in the very near future.
I've just posted the first draft of an essay entitled Objectivity Without Objectivism, the second-to-last essay I have planned for my collection of essays on Ayn Rand and Objectivism. At some point I'll probably describe in greater detail both Hao Wang's and E.O. Wilson's approaches to building objective knowledge, but the outline is fairly well set at this point.
Uche reacts to my previous post on Alexander Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics, specifically my questioning of the contributions of logic to human knowledge:
... I think a large proportion of scientific pursuits are not agonistic, and isn't theoretical science as important as experimental science? Applying logic, mathematical induction and yes, even philosophy to abstract models from the comfort of the armchair or bicycle, is, I think essential to efficient construction of experimentation.
In part I was reacting against Baumgarten, who (as Uche points out) is a bit too pat about the superiority of logic over aesthetic, things known conceptually over things known perceptually, philosophy over art, and so on. I yield to no one in a deep appreciation for the power of concepts -- they are what make us human, whether clothed in language, mathematics, music, visual art, or code. Yet Baumgarten (an arch-rationalist) claims that conceptual knowledge is purely the object of (deductive) logic, and gives short shrift to induction from perceptual experience and abstraction from particulars. By no means do I claim that logic has no place in the clarification of human experience -- but it is only part of the mix, not the "superior faculty" of rationalist myth. (And yes, perhaps I react too strongly to rationalist myth because I was once a rationalist myself.)
As to the agonistic nature of science, I do think that good scientists restlessly explore the frontiers of knowledge, recklessly slay the dragons of the unknown, and greedily stake their claims to intellectual gold. Those "animal spirits" are what move humankind forward. Cold deduction of the kind displayed by the likes of Alexander Baumgarten can be edifying, but when you come right down to it reality is messy and the pursuit of truth is a hot, passionate, even agonistic quest.
Thanks to my friend Leif over at pattern.com, I finally read the commencement address that Steve Jobs presented at Stanford University recently. It seems that Jobs was something of an unschooler. And it's fascinating that both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were college dropouts, is it not?
Although philosophers and critics are happy to use the term "aesthetics", few have read the short treatise in which that term was coined. The book is Alexander Baumgarten's Reflections on Poetry -- actually Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnulis ad Poema Pertinentibus, written in modern Latin and first published in 1735 (Baumgarten expanded upon the topic in his Aesthetica of 1750-8, which as far as I know has not yet been translated into any modern vernacular). In this book, Baumgarten, one of the later rationalists, asserted in quasi-Euclidean fashion a cumulative series of definitions and derivations about what he called "philosophical poetry". His definition of aesthetics comes in the antepenultimate and penultimate sections of the Reflections on Poetry, rendered as follows in the 1954 translation by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (University of California Press, pp. 77-78):
§115. Philosophical poetics is (by §9) the science guiding sensate discourse to perfection; and since in speaking we have those representations which we communicate, philosophical poetics presupposes in the poet a lower cognitive faculty. It would now be the task of logic in its broader sense to guide this faculty in the sensate cognition of things, but he who knows the state of our logic will not be unaware how uncultivated this field is. What then? If logic by its very definition should be restricted to the rather narrow limits to which it is as a matter of fact confined, would it not count as the science of knowing things philosophically, that is, as the science for the direction for the higher cognitive faculty in apprehending the truth? Well, then. Philosophers might still find occasion, not without ample reward, to inquire also into those devices by which they might improve the lower faculties of knowing, and sharpen them, and apply them more happily for the benefit of the whole world. Since psychology affords sound principles, we have no doubt that there could be available a science which might direct the lower cognitive faculty in knowing things sensately.
§116. As our definition is at hand, a precise designation can easily be devised. The Greek philosophers and the Church fathers have already carefully distinguished between things perceived [ αισθητα ] and things known [ νοητα ]. It is entirely evident that they did not equate things known with things of sense, since they honored with this name things also removed from sense (therefore, images). Therefore, things known are to be known by the superior faculty as the object of logic; things perceived are to be known by the inferior faculty, as the object of the science of perception, or aesthetic [ aestheticae ].
Baumgarten held that aesthetics is not primarily the philosophy of art, of the beautiful, or of the sublime; rather, it is a psychological science that would do as much to clarify perceptual knowledge as logic had done to clarify conceptual knowledge. Granted, it is arguable how much logic has truly contributed to the clarification of human concepts (personally I think we are more indebted to the agonistic pursuits of scientists than to the armchair theorizing of philosophers and logicians); but I find it interesting that Baumgarten strongly associated aesthetic with the task of "knowing things sensately" and thus granted it an epistemological stature and importance that is too often missing from analyses of the arts.
About fifteen years ago I wrote the first version of The Ism Book for a friend of mine. In 1996 I placed it online (it was tailor-made for hypertext) but I have not revised it since. Amazingly, people still use it as a reference, which scares me a bit because I now find the definitions embarrassingly biased in places. So I've decided to bite the bullet by updating the whole thing. In the last five days or so I've worked my way through the definitions under letters A and B, and I'm now up to "cognitivism". I hope to maintain the momentum and finish these changes in the next few months, but I won't post any of the changed definitions until I'm done since I've modified the XML format and there are numerous cross-references in the text. Stay tuned for updates!
I've just read two fascinating papers in evolutionary biology and psychology on the nature of friendship:
Trivers argues that there are situations in which reciprocal altruism (call it tit for tat, helping each other, even reciprocal benevolence if the word "altruism" scares you off) would be expected to evolve, especially among long-lived animals with long periods of parental care and low dispersal rates who exist in small, mutually-dependent, relatively stable social groups (this description well fits certain primates, especially humans). Tooby and Cosmides build on and extend Trivers's analysis by focusing on the overall system of reciprocal helping as well as the many psychological subtleties that one would expect to emerge in the context of such a system when the actors are highly intelligent, emotionally sensitive, and good communicators (humans yet again). Fascinating stuff. I'll try to blog more about these two essays once I've absorbed them more fully.
In his essay "Science Studies as Epistemography" (chapter 10 of The One Culture?), Peter Dear defines epistemography as follows:
The term "epistemography" is intended to bring some clarity to the discussion by proposing a loose grouping of the most central and characteristic kinds of work currently encompassed by the label "science studies." The grouping strategy relies on making explicit the following recognition: the field of science studies is driven by attempts to understand what science, as a human activity, actually is and has been. Epistemography is the endeavor that attempts to investigate science "in the field," as it were, asking questions such as these: What counts as scientific knowledge? How is that knowledge made and certified? In what ways is it used or valued? "Epistemography" as a term signals that descriptive focus, much like "biography" or "geography." [The suffix "-ography" should not be taken to indicate anything more specific than "description" in the widest sense; it need not imply spatial description (akin to "cartography"), for example, although it could well do so in particular cases.] It designates an enterprise centrally concerned with developing an empirical understanding of scientific knowledge, in contrast to epistemology, which is a prescriptive study of how knowledge can or should be made.
Dear's conception of epistemography provides a useful counterpoint to mine. Following Hao Wang, I am more interested in describing and mapping out what we know than in describing how we know it. Wang called the endeavor of describing what we know "phenomenography" (or, in his later writings, "phenography"), but that term has been in use within educational theory for the past thirty years or so, so we need a different term. Besides, "phenomenography" implies that we are describing appearances as opposed to realities, which betrays a kind of Platonic-Kantian distinction between appearance and reality. Perhaps the term "ontography" would be appropriate: the description of reality as opposed to the theory of being ("ontology"), but I think "epistemography" gets to the heart of what Wang intended because he was most interested in doing justice to what we know, with all that implies: what we know, what we know, and what we know.
Such a study would be broader than Dear's focus on science, since there exists much knowledge outside of the sciences (practical knowledge, social knowledge, moral knowledge, aesthetic knowledge, etc.). Such a study would also focus on mapping out and connecting what we know (similar to E.O. Wilson's concept of "consilience"), not describing sociologically, historically, or empirically how scientific endeavor functions. I don't think Dear's program is wrongheaded, I just think it's not ambitious enough. Let's aim high: nothing less than a map of everything we know about reality (including our human reality). Come to think of it, perhaps "ontography" is an even better term than "epistemography": a map of all reality (which, practically speaking, means everything we know about reality, but that is perhaps a methodological detail). Naturally the map would be drawn to a certain scale; no map provides infinite detail, else it would not be usable. The challenge is to find the right scale that will enhance our ability to navigate and explore realities both familiar and unknown, then to fill in the map with greater detail over time through an iterative process of improvement. Wang's proposal was to do this by describing certain higher-level principles that apply to multiple disciplines (e.g., "like implies like" or "equal until proven unequal", which overturns the hierarchical world of the ancients both physically and socially), but I think something akin to Wilson's program of consilience may be closer to the mark.
According to this article, philosopher-mathematician Frank Ramsey once expressed the following thought about the scale of the universe (quoted in Our Final Hour by Martin Rees):
I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does... My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model drawn to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings, and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.
I find Ramsey's thought congenial (Ramsey was a teacher of Jacob Bronowski, another thinker whose insights I appreciate). Coincidentally, today I received an email message from one Soren Sorenson, proprietor of a website called Spiritual Atheism (who presumably contacted me because on one of my web pages I call myself a spiritual atheist). Soren's site defines spiritual atheism as follows:
Spiritual Atheists reject the presentation of God as the LITERAL creator and ruler of the universe and, instead, recognize and understand God as the physical, psychological, and spiritual PERSONIFICATION of the eternal and infinite universe itself.
Well, I'm not that kind of spiritual atheist! To put it prosaically, I'm simply a nonbeliever who happens to appreciate the spiritual aspects of life.
It is difficult to talk about such matters (perhaps religion is an area in which I self-censor), but I'm going to try anyway. (My apologies to readers if these thoughts seem too poetic, flighty, or just plain crazy. I write this stuff for myself, not for you. ;-)
I agree with Ramsey that the universe is vast, but not divine. I think that if there is divinity, it is a spark that shines outward from within human beings, and does not come into human beings from outside (whether from the universe or from God as the creator of the universe or as a personification of the universe). Indeed, I tend more toward some thinkers in the gnostic tradition, who held that human beings created god in their own image.
I am a nonbeliever. (I don't usually call myself an atheist, since most atheists are quite militant, whereas I am not militant about my lack of belief.) I don't believe in a god, in any "person" (however defined) who in some sense created or represents the universe. I think there is a sense in which human beings -- the entities that most deeply instantiate the psychological, intellectual, mental, and spiritual potentiality of life, especially of conscious, sentient life -- are divine, can be divine, or at least have divine aspects. I think that early human beings were uncomfortable with this divine spark within themselves -- it is quite presumptuous to think that you are divine! -- and so they externalized the sense of their own divinity outward onto other entities (trees, rocks, mountains, etc. in the early form of theism called animism), then eventually focused that concept into monotheism and the personal god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Yet I don't believe in any such God. To me, the great challenge is talking about divinity and spirituality in a purely secular way. We have no experience with a secular language of divinity. When we use terms like "divine" and "worship" and "spiritual" and "godlike", we are familiar with them only in relation to something higher than humanity, even something higher than nature or reality. But I think there is nothing higher than reality, and that human beings are the highest things in reality. But as we say in English, "it's lonely at the top" so we created these things called gods (in more recent thought, a single God) to sit above us. Yet this "god" is an abstraction from the essence of what is divine in human beings, not something other than or apart from human beings.
There is nothing divine about the physical extent of the universe. Awesome, yes. Divine, no.
There is no psychological aspect to the physical universe itself -- it is not a conscious entity in any sense. There is a psychological aspect to many living things, and that is to be valued deeply as one of the precious aspects of life.
There is no spiritual aspect to the physical universe, and there is no spiritual aspect to lower life forms. Spirituality comes with language, concepts, communication, self-reflection. Human beings are spiritual beings. Spirituality can be seen as precisely the highest potential of the psychological aspect of living things. It is here that I would locate the divine. Not in gods, but in human beings.
So, radical as it may seem, I assert the exact inverse of the Christian idea that "God created man in His image" -- for I think that human beings created the idea of god in the image of their highest potential.
Untimely meditations, indeed.
I've started reading Edward O. Wilson's book Consilience. Wilson cites William Whewell as the thinker who coined the term "consilience", which literally means a "jumping together" of facts or inductions from different disciplines (according to J.S. Mill in his Utilitarianism, each result thus assists in "corroborating and verifying the other"). The OED quotes Whewell as follows (The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), II 230):
Accordingly the cases in which inductions from classes of facts altogether different have thus jumped together, belong only to the best established theories which the history of science contains. And, as I shall have occasion to refer to this particular feature in their evidence, I will take the liberty of describing it by a particular phrase; and I will term it the Consilience of Inductions.
Wilson further quotes Whewell as follows:
The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.
Wilson proposes an updated Enlightenment project of intellectual synthesis that would build the consilience of knowledge across disciplines (and not just the hard sciences, but the social sciences and humanities as well), along the lines of Francis Bacon's Instauratio Magna. And he writes as follows regarding the relationship between this project and the tradition of philosophical investigation:
Philosophy plays a vital role in intellectual synthesis, and it keeps us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries. It also peers into the future to give shape to the unknown -- and that has always been its vocation of choice. One of its most distinguished practitioners, Alexander Rosenberg, has recently argued that philosophy in fact addresses just two issues: the questions that the sciences -- physical, biological, and social -- cannot answer, and the reasons for that incapacity. "Now of course," he concludes, "there may not be any questions that the sciences cannot answer eventually, in the long run, when all the facts are in, but certainly there are questions that the sciences cannot answer yet." This assessment is admirably clear and honest and convincing. It neglects, however, the obvious fact that scientists are equally qualified to judge what remains to be discovered, and why. There has never been a better time for collaboration between scientists and philosophers, especially where they meet in the borderlands between biology, the social sciences, and the humanities. We are approaching a new age of synthesis, when the testing of consilience is the greatest of all intellectual challenges. Philosophy, the contemplation of the unknown, is a shrinking dominion. We have the common goal of turning as much philosophy as possible into science.
To which I say: Hear, Hear! I've been thinking along similar lines since 1998 (when Wilson's book was published -- I'm not sure why I haven't read it until now) and probably much earlier given that I was reading Hao Wang's work on phenography in 1987 or so. In all likelihood, the new way to philosophize will mean overcoming philosophy rather than extending its life.
I continue to gather my thoughts regarding what Hao Wang called "phenomenography" or "phenography" -- that is, philosophy as a map or picture of what we know (given that "phenomenography" is commonly used with a different meaning in educational theory and that I dislike the shortened form "phenography", I might even coin a new word for such an approach, e.g., "epistemography"). At a basic grammatical level, there are three aspects to Wang's conception: what we know (as opposed to how we know), what we know (as opposed to what gods could know, what humans knew in the past or might know in the future, etc.), and what we know (as opposed to what we believe, feel, etc.). One thing I like about Wang's approach is that it is intellectually honest: we attempt to do full justice to what we know, not to spin theories or craft ideologies.
I see a connection here to what is probably my favorite passage in the works of twentieth-century philosopher Robert Nozick. In the preface to Anarchy, State, and Utopia (pp. xii-xiii), he writes as follows:
My emphasis upon the conclusions which diverge from what most readers believe may mislead one into thinking this book is some sort of political tract. It is not; it is a philosophical exploration of issues, many fascinating in their own right, which arise and interconnect when we consider individual rights and the state. The word "exploration" is appropriately chosen. One view about how to write a philosophy book holds that an author should think through all the details of the view he presents, and its problems, polishing and refining his view to present to the world a finished, complete, and elegant whole. This is not my view. At any rate, I believe that there also is a place and a function in our ongoing intellectual life for a less complete work, containing unfinished presentations, conjectures, open questions and problems, leads, side connections, as well as a main line of argument. There is room for words on subjects other than last words.
Indeed, the usual manner of presenting philosophical work puzzles me. Works of philosophy are written as though their authors believe them to be the absolutely final word on their subject. But it's not, surely, that each philosopher thinks that he finally, thank God, has found the truth and built an impregnable fortress around it. We are all actually much more modest than that. For good reason. Having thought long and hard about the view he proposes, a philosopher has a reasonably good idea about its weak points; the places where great intellectual weight is placed upon something perhaps too fragile to bear it, the places where the unravelling of the view might begin, the unprobed assumptions he feels uneasy about.
One form of philosophical activity feels like pushing and shoving things to fit into some fixed perimeter of specified shape. All those things are lying out there, and they must be fit in. You push and shove the material into the rigid area getting it into the boundary on one side, and it bulges out on another. You run around and press in the protruding bulge, producing yet another in another place. So you push and shove and clip off corners from the things so they'll fit and you press in until finally almost everything sits unstably more or less in there; what doesn't gets heaved far away so that it won't be noticed. (Of course, it's not all that crude. There's also the coaxing and cajoling. And the body English.) Quickly, you find an angle from which it looks like an exact fit and take a snapshot; at a fast shutter speed before something else bulges out too noticeably. Then, back in the darkroom to touch up the rents, rips, and tears in the fabric of the perimeter. All that remains is to publish the photograph as a representation of exactly how things are, and to note how nothing fits properly into any other shape.
No philosopher says:
There's where I started, here's where I ended up; the major weakness in my work is that I went from there to here; in particular, here are the most notable distortions, pushings, shovings, maulings, gougings, stretchings, and chippings that I committed during the trip; not to mention the things thrown away and ignored, and all those avertings of the gaze.The reticence of philosophers about the weaknesses they perceive in their own views is not, I think, simply a question of philosophical honesty and integrity, though it is that or at least becomes that when brought to consciousness. The reticence is connected with philosophers' purposes in formulating views. Why do they strive to force everything into that one fixed perimeter? Why not another perimeter, or, more radically, why not leave things where they are? What does having everything within a perimeter do for us? Why do we want it so? (What does it shield us from?) From these deep (and frightening) questions, I hope not to be able to manage to avert my gaze in future work.
I am beginning to think that doing justice to what we know involves, in large measure, leaving things as and where they are. While fitting everything into a perimeter can result in a pretty picture, it is crucial to recognize that those boundaries are drawn just so for the sake of human convenience and understanding. Not that human convenience and understanding are unimportant -- after all, often we cannot in fact know something without the presence of a picture, model, or metaphor to give it human context. But we would do well to be able to separate the thing from the picture, the actual terrain from its representation on the map of our (current) knowledge. A hard task, but one worth pursuing, I think.
I've been enjoying the occasional series of letters that Will Wilkinson has been writing to his former self on what's wrong (and right) with the ideas of Ayn Rand. The first letter was on free will and determinism, the second letter on human sociality, and the third letter on ethics. If you never went through an Ayn Rand phase, the letters may not speak to you, but as a recovered Randian myself I find them fascinating (and I sure could have benefited from them when I was oh, about, 18 years old).
Will makes several key observations:
There are many important implications of these insights. One is that there is a lot of work to be done in fully understanding human nature. Hint: it's not all pretty (we humans are a crafty bunch!), and Randian claims such as "there are no conflicts of interest among rational men" are true only on an extraordinarily desiccated vision of what it means to be a rational human being. If old Aristotle were alive today you can be sure he'd be integrating the insights of anthropology and evolutionary psychology as fast as they were coming in. Those who would move forward with a philosophy for living on earth need to drop the ideology and get scientific in a humanistic way (Jacob Bronowski provided a good example of such an approach, I think, but science has come a long way since the 1960s, when Bronowski did most of his writing).
Another implication is that history matters. For a history major, Rand was often depressingly a-historical. The current context of human experience involves a great deal of hard-won knowledge that is embedded in institutions, laws, practices, organizations, technologies, habits of mind, and the like. Granted, also embedded in these phenomena are misconceptions, irrationalities, and outright falsehoods. Is the modern welfare-warfare state far from the ideal form of government? Are modern mega-corporations partially inimical to human flourishing? Well, yeah. Sorry, reality is messy and perfection is not an option. So we try to do the best with what we've got -- which is a lot. Modern gadgetry fulfills Clarke's third law of technology by bordering on magic, modern science has begun to reveal the secrets of biological nature, modern economics shows more and more the connection between prosperity and freedom, and so on.
The great challenge as I see it is to integrate all of the theoretical and practical knowledge that we as a species have been gaining, and gaining in a greatly accelerated fashion. Rand's followers exist in an ideological vacuum, even a kind of scientific deprivation experiment. They prattle on about metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics as if philosophy were some lordly queen of the sciences who needs only to legislate and never to listen. All the while, the sciences and practical arts have made incredible progress over the last 500 years, especially over the last 100 years, and amazingly so even in the last generation. In many ways, the world is practically a different place than it was when Rand effectively stopped writing 30 years ago. There is much to learn about the nature of the world from physics, chemistry, and biology. There is much to learn about epistemology (e.g., the processes of conceptualization) from cognitive psychology and the practical methods of sciences such as biological taxonomy. Ethics needs to be informed by anthropology, evolutionary psychology, biology, sociology, history, and related sciences. Politics is not a standalone discipline in which one can opine once and for all regarding the nature of societal interaction and the necessity for government, but instead must be pursued (I think) in an almost experimental manner, informed by history, economics, law, psychology, and business. Even in the traditionally autonomous realm of art we have come to see that art does not exist for art's sake but for the sake of human beings and in particular human groups: the work of Ellen Dissanayake has revealed deep connections between art and biology, psychology, ethology, and technology (what are the tools of the arts but technological artifacts such as the painter's paints and brushes, the sculptor's hammers, the musician's instruments?).
In a series of books written from the middle 1980s to early 1990s, Hao Wang adumbrated a vision of philosophy as what he called "phenomenography" -- a discipline that would map out what we have learned about material reality as well as our human selves and our social interactions. Wang held that rather than endlessly arguing about how we know, it would be much more productive to gain a clear picture of what we know. He focused mainly on the sciences, but I would extend his insights also to technology in the broadest sense: the practical techniques, tools, institutions, organizational forms, and instruments by which humans have gained such incredible power over nature.
Of course, such an effort ceased to be the job of one person around the time of Leibniz or perhaps Kant. Today we'd use databases, wikis, semantic web technologies, and the like to connect the dots, abstract from particular scientific results, and map out the achievements of both human knowledge and practical pursuits. A huge undertaking, to be sure. But a lot more important than the petty argumentation and analysis that have passed for philosophy over the last hundred years.
The other night I finished the first draft of an essay entitled "Friendship in Atlas Shrugged", which I've promised to Ed Younkins for a collection he's editing for publication in 2007 (the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand's magnum opus). The collection is tentatively entitled Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion and it appears that the good people at Ashgate Press have agreed to publish it. If you really want to read this essay and comment on it so that I can improve it before publication, do let me know.
Tomorrow is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Russian-American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand. In celebration I've posted an essay entitled Ayn Rand in Historical Perspective. Enjoy!
This evening I wrote the first draft of my essay The Mind on Strike: Atlas Shrugged as the Revolt of the Engineers. Another rung on the ladder...
Back in college a Classics professor of mine provided the following text to a class I was taking on Aristotle's Poetics, and I've just found a copy on the 'net, so herewith some pseudo-Aristotelitan wisdom:
Concerning Golf, and how many parts of it there are, and how we ought to play it, and as many things as belong to the same method, let us speak, beginning from the Tee according to the nature of the treatise. For there are some who begin not only after teeing the ball, but also immediately after breakfasting themselves: but this is not golf, but incontinence or even licentiousness.
Now it is possible to play in several ways: for perhaps they strike indeed, yet not as is necessary, nor where, nor when; as the man who played in the Parks and wounded the infant: for this was good for him, yet not absolutely, nor for the infant. Wherefore here as in other things we should aim at the mean between excess and defect. For the player in excess hits the ball too often, as they do in baseball; and the deficient man can not hit it at all, except by accident: as it is related of the man who kicked at his caddie as they do in soccer. For the beginning is to hit it: and the virtue of a good golfer is to hit well and according to reason and as the professional would hit. And to speak briefly, to play golf is either the part of a man of genius or a madman, as has been said in the Poetics.
And because it is better to hit a few times than many -- for the good is finite, but the man who goes round in three hundred strokes stretches out in the direction of the infinite -- some have said that here too we ought to remember the saying of Hesiod, "The half is better than the whole," thinking not rightly, according at least to my opinion: for in relation to your adversary it is much better to win the Hole than the Half. And Homer is a good master both in other respects and also here: for he alone has taught us how to lie as is necessary, both as to the hole, and otherwise.
Again, every art and every method, and likewise every action and intention aims at the good. Some, therefore, making a syllogism, aim at a Professor: for Professors, they say, are good (because dry things are good for men, as has been said in the Ethics), and this is a Professor: but perhaps they make a wrong use of the major premise. At any rate, having hit him, it is better to act in some such way as this, not, as a tragedian, seeking recognition; for this is most unpleasant, and perhaps leads to a catastrophe. It is doubted, whether the man who killed his tutor with a golf-ball, acted voluntarily or involuntarily; for on the one hand he did not do it deliberately, since no one deliberates about the result of chance, as, for instance, whether one will hit the ball this time at any rate or not: yet he wished to kill him, and was glad having done it: and probably on the whole it was a mixed action.
Are we then, to call no man happy till he has finished his round, and according to Solon, to look to the end? For it is possible to be fortunate for a long time and yet at last to fall into a ditch.
While chatting with Ted O'Connor yesterday via Jabber, we were reminiscing about the old days of the MDOP ("Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy") mailing list run back in 1993-1994 or so by our friend Jimbo Wales. Ted mentioned how it's cool that people from MDOP have "made good" (Jimbo with Wikipedia, me with Jabber, etc.). So I got to thinking about how fun it would be to hold an IRL conference of what I think of as "practical Objectivist achievers" -- people who have been influenced by Rand but who are decidedly not academic philosophers or graduates students or Objectivist groupies, but instead have achieved some real success in the world. Not only would it be a lot of fun, but it might result in some fascinating cross-pollination between people who are active and successful in a wide variety of careers -- technology, law, business, science, the arts, medicine, etc. I think of it as a "Gathering of Objectivist Achievers" (GOA). And maybe next year would be a good time to start such a tradition, since 2005 will be the Ayn Rand centenary. Perhaps I'll get busy on organizing this in my copious spare time. :-)