• Philosophy is for questioning religion
    I actually do have an e-copy, I've read sections of it, but must find the time to give it a more thorough reading. I had encountered his criticism of the malign effects of Darwinism on philosophy on another site, that is what caught my eye (but only as a critic of scientific materialism, *not* as an ID sympathizer.) — Wayfarer

    I was not quite happy with his criticism of Darwinism, because he often fails to distinguish Darwinism and popular Darwinism, the latter including Social Darwinism.

    Otherwise, I found the sections about positivism, pragmatism, and Thomism a bit tedious, partly because they are very much of their time and not fit for purpose--regarding the first two--in a critique of contemporary analytic philosophy or pragmatism.

    When I was studying comparative religion, I had a theory that the kind of enlightenment prized in yoga and Buddhism - not Enlightenment in the European sense! - was similar to what the early gnostic schools had been based around. And that the victory of what came to be Catholic orthodoxy was because it was much more politically expedient to organise belief, than the esoteric knowledge represented by gnosticism. I found a scholar by the name of Elaine Pagels, whose book Beyond Belief affirmed a similar thesis. It concerns exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic text that was found in Egypt in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi Library discovery. Through analysis of the sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas, Pagels demonstrates its themes of self-discovery, spiritual enlightenment, and the pursuit of a direct connection with the divine. She reveals the influence of Gnosticism on the Gospel of Thomas and examines its contrasts with orthodox Christianity and the political and theological tensions that led to the suppression and exclusion of Gnostic texts from the canon of the New Testament. She explores the power struggles within early Christianity and how the emerging orthodoxy based on the Gospel of John sought (successfully) to define and control the faith. And as always, history is written by the victors.

    At the time I was doing this reading, I had the view that this was a watershed in the history of Western culture, and that had more of the gnostic elements been admitted, it would have resulted in a much more practice-oriented and 'eastern' form of spirituality. The fact that these exotic forms of religion have had such a huge impact in Western culture the last few centuries is because that approach was suppressed in, and absent from, its own indigenous religious culture. That's what made it 'weak'.     — Wayfarer

    Interesting. I'm happy enough to agree that "the victory of what came to be Catholic orthodoxy was because it was much more politically expedient to organise belief, than the esoteric knowledge represented by gnosticism," but since my conception of history is much more materialist (in the Marxian sense) than yours, I don't accept your emphasis on the primacy of ideas. That's not to say, by the way, that I believe in a crude economic determinism or the one-way causal power of the mode of production, but it was no accident that the gnostic element wasn't admitted, and therefore I think that such a counterfactual history doesn't tell us much.

    Unless, maybe, we ask, "what would society have had to be like to allow gnosticism to take hold?". But then, gnosticism is what it is owing to its heretical, outsider status, and how much of that character would have been preserved in its institutionalization? Think of how much the words of Jesus, as accepted in Catholic orthodoxy, were performatively contradicted in medieval Europe.

    There is no way of distentangling religious thought and social reality or of preserving the purity of a set of ideas, unless they have become museum pieces. And even then, we interpret them.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪Wayfarer
    There’s an interesting tension in it. On the one hand he doesn’t openly lament the loss of the old manifestations of objective reason, motivated no doubt by the hope that some sort of Marxist humanism is the right kind of objective reason for the twentieth century; but on the other hand the tone is often one of lament, nostalgia, and pessimism.

    EDIT: It might also be worth noting that in his later years he became even more pessimistic, and more sympathetic to religion.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪Wayfarer


    Yes, Horkheimer's account is pretty much in line with yours, but there are three things to note here.

    First, with the Greeks, subjective and objective were not separate, logos being originally subjective--"I say"; so subjective reason is not new. Second, logos as the animating principle of the universe was just one manifestation of objective reason, another being the reason of the bourgeois Enlightenment. Thirdly and most importantly, he does not lament the loss of past manifestations of objective reason and does not see objective reason as necessarily transcendent.

    He discusses some attempts to bring back objective reason:

    Today there is a general tendency to revive past theories of objective reason in order to give some philosophical foundation to the rapidly disintegrating hierarchy of generally accepted values. Along with pseudo-religious or half-scientific mind cures, spiritualism, astrology, cheap brands of past philosophies such as Yoga, Buddhism, or mysticism, and popular adaptations of classical objectivistic philosophies, medieval ontologies are recommended for modern use.

    But the transition from objective to subjective reason was not an accident, and the process of development of ideas cannot arbitrarily at any given moment be reversed. If subjective reason in the form of enlightenment has dissolved the philosophical basis of beliefs that have been an essential part of Western culture, it has been able to do so because this basis proved to be too weak. Their revival, therefore, is completely artificial: it serves the purpose of filling a gap.     — Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason

    Then he launches a critique of modern Thomism.
  • The Most Dangerous Superstition
    ↪unenlightened
    :up:

    I’ll add the associated superstition that workers are free and equal parties to their employment contracts, rather than coerced by and subordinate to those who own and control private property.
  • The Post Linguistic Turn
    ↪universeness
    Impressive.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    I've been sort of following some of the debates in this thread. On the one hand I agree with @Wayfarer's and @Metaphysician Undercover's criticisms of @Christoffer's individualistic, idealist, and ahistorical arguments for unbiased thinking--which is revealed to be quite biased itself (not to say that it's a bad bias, necessarily). On the other hand I heartily agree with @Banno's criticism of @Wayfarer's support for esotericism and denigration of philosophy's democratic openness. I’m also slightly vexed by @Wayfarer’s use of secular humanist Horkheimer as a weapon in his battle against secular humanism, although it’s fair to do so.

    I was going to write a grand summary at this point but I’ve got nothing.
  • The Post Linguistic Turn
    The 'original' Husserlian phenomenology in fact w a s concerned with language. Husserl's Logical Investigations was mostly about the difference between signification and intuition i.e. meanings or expressions vs. intuitive-perceptual comprehension or 'fulfillment' of the sense. — waarala

    Good point, although in the same book he does say that he wants to get away from “mere words” and “back to the things themselves.” That’s not to say that getting away from “mere words” is to get away from language as such, or that the things themselves are necessarily pre-linguistic, but maybe it does show that his concerns were wider than just language.
  • The Post Linguistic Turn
    I was disappointed that it didn't actually describe any “post-linguistic turn,” didn't elaborate on the statement in the subheading that “new questions have arisen”--except to very briefly mention environmental issues and virtual reality--and didn't say anything about the basis on which the linguistic turn is being overcome. I was hoping it would go into the return of metaphysics in both analytic and continental philosophy.

    Also, note that it ignores phenomenology, existentialism, and critical theory, which were concerned much more with experience, life, and society than with language. On the other hand, I guess maybe that by 1967, post-structuralism had become dominant, and represented a rejection of those philosophies.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    What I think is this is an excellent, coherent and articulate analysis and summary of the role of philosophy to humanity. It clearly has a rightful place in tying together all human disciplines, and steadying them, moderating their dominance over one another, and thus danger to one another. Philosophy does this by being innately flexible and applicable.

    The "art of thought" can approach any field of study.
    As nothing can be mastered without thought other than pure ignorance.     — Benj96

    Thanks Benj. Your view is shared by several people in this discussion. I think, though, that I wanted to emphasize something else: not just philosophy's innate flexibility but its innate subversiveness. Plainly it's flexible, applicable to anything, and one can use the tools of philosophy not only to question religion but to support it. However, I'm saying two things. First, even to philosophize in support of religion (or other prevailing beliefs and institutions) is to bring it into question, which makes philosophy innately subversive. Second, to do this knowingly, that is, in a biased fashion to criticize prevailing beliefs, is more in line with this innate subversiveness and thereby more philosophical (or is at least better philosophy).
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    One way of flipping things around is to notice that the heuristics of philosophy, the cutlery, might be considered as ritual. That seems the thrust of Jamal's critique: that in invoking tools one is reducing philosophy to a religion. — Banno

    That's certainly an interesting flip-around, but I don't think it's the thrust of my critique. I think I was just saying that alongside the development of the cutlery there is also its biased application in criticizing prevailing beliefs (though also at the same time its biased application to shore up those beliefs), and that reducing philosophy to cutlery is to miss out on one of the things that makes it good. I tried to support this with the observation that philosophy cannot be neutral anyway.

    To take your notion seriously in the light of what I've just said, we might say that philosophy as ritual merely reflects prevailing beliefs, such as religious beliefs, and thereby stands as yet another theology.

    Philosophy as a neutral toolbox also suspiciously parallels the thesis that in the modern and especially the industrial era, reason became instrumental, with no thought to ends. If there is such a parallel, I don't think it's a coincidence.
  • Currently Reading
    The insectuous relationship didn't do it for me though and so I dropped it. — Baden

    We all draw a line somewhere.
  • Currently Reading
    More lectures by Adorno: An Introduction to Dialectics — Jamal

    Finished it. Tremendously enjoyable and stimulating, but because the lectures are improvised it’s definitely not a “Dialectics for Dummies” or a useful introduction to Hegel. It’s more like a rambling demonstration of how to think dialectically, how that differs from other modes of thought, and the problems with doing so. One thing about it that does make it useful in approaching Hegel is that he gives concrete examples. Another highlight is when, over several lectures, he goes through the four rules of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method to show how dialectical thinking differs from it.

    Next:

    Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson
    Beyond Good & Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche
  • Currently Reading
    ↪Noble Dust
    Yes, I’m pretty sure I thought it was great but it’s fallen through a memory hole.
  • Currently Reading
    ↪Noble Dust
    I can recommend all three of the books set in the same world: Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. Haven’t enjoyed his others as much.

    I won’t say more until Manuel is finished.
  • Currently Reading
    Perdido Street Station by China Miéville — Manuel

    I read it 15-20 years ago and was amazed. What do you think?
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    I don't know about this; Kant's categories at least seem to ring true and space and time as the pure forms of intuition too. Are they no longer viable? Aristotle's categories? Goethe said “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” "The poverty of historicism" says Popper. — Janus

    I just wrote an elaborate refutation of the transcendental deduction of the categories, but the dog ate it. So I'll just say that I don't think I'm an unqualified historicist; as I say, I'm confused about the issue. I think Kant and Aristotle were great, but I also think their philosophies suffer from a lack of historical and social awareness (although it occurs to me that it's precisely because they ignored all that that they achieved what they did, rather than despite it).

    It's more difficult to see in their theoretical philosophy than in their ethics and politics: Aristotle defended slavery philosophically without considering that his defence was a result of his class and his society, and Kant's emphasis on autonomous reason in retrospect clearly reflects his Enlightenment bourgeois milieu.

    Right, though in saying "monolithic" I wasn't thinking of the dichotomy between fixed and dynamic, I was thinking more of the 'monistic/ pluralistic' dichotomy: meaning that I don't think historical moments have just one "zeitgeist" but are rather boiling cauldrons in which many geists grapple with one another for supremacy. From where I stand "the state" looks like a kind of monstrous fiction. — Janus

    I see what you mean. Interesting point. I don't know what Hegel would say to that.
  • What are you listening to right now?
    ↪Changeling
    interesting. It has the power to take me back through time to the early nineties. It’s as if it was the soundtrack to my life at the time and I didn’t even know it.

    It has dated very badly. Is that the music’s fault or the way the music seeped through the culture? I don’t know, but I didn’t even like it at the time anyway.
  • How much knowledge is there?
    We could assign points to a piece of knowledge based on how many other pieces of knowledge depend on it, which is the same as how many facts would lose their factual status if that piece were either disproved or forgotten.

    The trouble with that is, knowing you live on planet Earth would have more knowledge points than knowing that there are 12 stars with planets in the Pegasus constellation, even though the latter contributes to knowledge much more than the former, which is trivial and obvious.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    Now that would be an "anemic" response, as in lacking substance — Ciceronianus

    Fair.

    But don’t take it personally and don’t get me wrong. I’m not recommending the Will to Power, elan vital, macho glamorous clamour, or anything like that, and I think my posts show that I don’t do that kind of philosophy and that I’m not a fascist. I just felt that philosophy defined so generally or neutrally, and without the critical aspect (in the sense of social critique), was somewhat anemic.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪Ciceronianus
    That’s the spirit!
  • Bannings
    I banned @invicta for persistently low quality posts even after multiple warnings and a one-week suspension.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪Wayfarer
    I don’t disagree with your description of medieval thinking, but it’s significant that Horkheimer does not identify the loss of objective reason with the Enlightenment’s rejection of medieval philosophy and religion:

    This [subjective] relegation of reason to a subordinate position is in sharp contrast to the ideas of the pioneers of bourgeois civilization, the spiritual and political representatives of the rising middle class, who were unanimous in declaring that reason plays a leading role in human behavior, perhaps even the predominant role. They defined a wise legislature as one whose laws conform to reason; national and international policies were judged according to whether they followed the lines of reason. Reason was supposed to regulate our preferences and our relations with other human beings and with nature. It was thought of as an entity, a spiritual power living in each man. This power was held to be the supreme arbiter—nay, more, the creative force behind the ideas and things to which we should devote our lives. — Horkheimer

    So for Horkheimer it’s not only traditional societies that had objective reason. In the Enlightenment, reason was still supposed to help us determine the right ends and not merely the means. The change comes with industrialization.

    Of course he does also say that the Enlightenment was a step towards subjective and instrumental reason.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    That's a good summary of the Pinkerian arguments for progress, but I'm not going to get into it here, since that would take things way off-topic. All I will say is that when progressive Enlightenment leads to the transformation, in just a few years, of a country of high culture and learning into a racist war machine that goes on to kill millions, there is something very wrong which cannot be dismissed with your statistics (which have in any case been heavily criticized) or even with the claim that "oh, that was just an unfortunate backward step".

    I said I wasn't going to get into it and then I kind of got into it. Never mind.
  • Adventures in Metaphysics 1: Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology
    ↪schopenhauer1
    I'm afraid I haven't read anything except After Finitude, and that's not even object-oriented ontology.

    ↪Wayfarer
    I found an interesting blog post that partly answers your objection:

    Like correlationism, object-oriented philosophy begins with an affirmation of the epistemological limit: we can never know the reality of the objects we encounter. Like speculative materialism, object-oriented philosophy then radicalises the correlationist position, but where speculative materialism pushes finitude into a positive epistemological premise, object-oriented philosophy simply extends finitude beyond the bounds of the human to bestow it democratically upon everything. — Ontology for Ontology’s Sake
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    Right. I probably haven't read the thread thoroughly enough. — Janus

    You are forgiven.

    I've since watched the video — Janus

    Incidentally, did you notice that he mentioned woke politics? That's possibly a clue to his motivation: he sees "wokeism" as a civil religion, and since he questions it, he's questioning religion and is therefore a great philosopher.

    I have to say I'm a bit skeptical about Hegel's notion of thinking one's time, as though historical moments are monolithic and pure. In any case it needn't be a self-conscious thinking of the times if it is true that our thinking is inevitably constrained by the historical "moment" we find ourselves in. — Janus

    I find this topic difficult so I won't get deep into it. I will say that if it's true that philosophers cannot start from a neutral transcendent foundation, that their thinking is conditioned by their time, then it might help to be aware of it. Those philosophers who were not aware of it imagined they were building up from an eternally valid ground and producing knowledge applicable for all time, and they produced systems that were fundamentally in error partly for this reason. Kant, for instance, though self-consciously critical and non-dogmatic, in some ways did not take his attack on metaphysics far enough, and ended up with his own elaborate system, dogmatically rationalist in its own way (not to mention quintessentially Enlightenment and bourgeois).

    Ever since then, philosophers have been acutely aware of human finitude, our inability to transcend our time, culture, point of view, and so on. This would include phenomenology, post-structuralism, Wittgenstein and much else. Incidentally, this century some philosophers got fed up with all that and started doing what has been called speculative realism, which says, among other things, that we can get access to things in themselves after all.

    I doubt that Hegel's notion of thinking one's time entails a view of historical moments as monolithic and pure, since the whole point of his philosophy is to see things in their dynamic, historical, conflictual context, rather than as fixed.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    The critical aspect of philosophy in regard to religion, and in general, has been helpful but to what end? I think ancient philosophies had a more general purpose- to live well. I'm reminded of Hadot's What Is Ancient Philosophy? The idea that the primary function of philosophy is its function to critique is an anemic one. But I do think much contemporary philosophy works under that assumption. At least, critique is part and parcel of the refining of arguments that is so much of the literature (in the analytic branch, at any rate). If the primary function of philosophy is not to help us live well, then it should be. Critics are a dime a dozen. How many of them know how to live? — public hermit

    It’s curious that both you and @Banno associate critique with analytic philosophy, because until now (and probably still, not sure yet) I’ve been thinking of other kinds of philosophy as critical, and analytic much less so.

    We might be using the word differently. What I mean by “critical” has more in common with ancient philosophy than it does with the anemic approach. In fact, I almost used the word “anemic” in reply to @Ciceronianus, the sensible no-nonsense pragmatist, but decided it was too rude.

    Critique and the philosophy of living well are bound together in Socrates and Plato, also I would argue in Nietzsche and Marx. To ask how best we should live is to criticize how we do live, which in turn is to question beliefs that usually go unquestioned.

    Last night I happened upon this comment from a lecture by Adorno. It seems relevant to the (anemic) philosophy-as-toolkit idea:

    I might point out here that the widespread positivist notion of a neutral form of thought, in contrast to one supposedly based on more or less arbitrary value systems and particular standpoints, is itself an illusion, that there is no such thing as so-called neutral thought, that generally speaking this alleged neutrality of thought with regard to its subject matter tends to perform an apologetic function for the existent precisely through its mere formality, through the form of its unified, method­ological and systematic nature, and thus possesses an intrinsically apologetic or - if you like - an inherently conservative character. It is therefore just as necessary, I would say, to submit the concept of the absolute neutrality of thought to thorough critical reflection […] — Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics

    EDIT: I think what it comes down to is that I’ve often been talking about social critique, whereas others are talking about the critique of the philosophical concepts, systems, and arguments of other philosophers. I think I want to bring both of these under my idea of critique, as part of the same pre-eminent function of philosophy. (Although I don’t really like the word “function” here)
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪Banno
    They’re the same thing.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    Quick one-liner, or so…..what did you get out of The Eclipse of Reason? What is it the author wants to say, bottom line kinda thing? — Mww

    The bottom line is that reason can become merely instrumental, such that rationality leads to outcomes that are irrational when viewed under a richer notion of reason. For example, it was instrumentally rational for the US and the USSR to each create nuclear weapons, but irrational in terms of the interests of human beings in general.

    Reason as the mere domination of nature entails the domination of people by other people.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    If doing philosophy is like plumbing, then it probably should avoid any pretensions of making discoveries. — Banno

    Family resemblances, language games, alienation, positive and negative freedom, sense and reference. These concepts are at least useful. I happen to think they allow us to make discoveries too.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    Industrialism puts pressure even upon the philosophers to conceive their work in terms of the processes of producing standardized cutlery. — Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    That might just be my bias, which is towards critique rather than making shit up — Banno

    By “making shit up” I’m guessing you don’t mean anything like the “coining of concepts” proposed by Moeller in the video as one of the things philosophy is for?
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    Did you notice The Philosophical Toolkit? There was a bit of discussion around it. Several tools are listed.

    I suspect that the (self-conscious?) use of such heuristics is more common amongst the failed mathematicians than amongst the failed writers. That might just be my bias, which is towards critique rather than making shit up.     — Banno

    I just read it. Fell asleep. I doubt those heuristics are self-consciously used by either. Continentals might say they’re trivial and obvious at best, rigid and constraining at worst.

    What I think philosophers do self-consciously use are concepts such as those described in a nice little book called Philosophical Devices: Proofs, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Sets by David Papineau.

    Part I: Sets and Numbers
    1. Naive Sets and Russell's Paradox
    2. Infinite Sets
    3. Orders of Infinity

    Part II: Analyticity, a prioricity, and necessity
    4. Kinds of Truths
    5. Possible Worlds
    6. Naming and Necessity

    Part III: The Nature and Uses of Probability
    7. Kinds of Probability
    8. Constraints on Credence
    9. Correlations and Causes

    Part IV: Logics and Theories
    10. Syntax and Semantics
    11. Soundness and Completeness
    12. Theories and Godel's Theorem     — Table of Contents
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    Interesting...I'd broaden the 'questioning' part to questioning tradition and established values — Janus

    Yes, that’s what I did in the OP and have been doing in the discussion since. The video made me think, and the resulting thoughts diverged from anything in the video.

    I'm familiar with the 'creating new concepts' idea from Deleuze (see What is Philosophy co-authored with Guattari). — Janus

    I thought about that too, but in the video Moeller mentions Hegel rather than Deleuze.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    Great post, thanks. I agree.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪Christoffer
    I've read the whole of your post and that's what I'm responding to, but I'll just quote this bit and go from there:

    Since the dawn of writing, has not the pen been developed to be a better pen? A tool is constantly being improved upon and philosophy has undergone iterations of improvements to sharpen its ability to help conceptualize. And just like a pen or any tool for writing, it has the shape of the time it is used in. — Christoffer

    Philosophers who are critical of the idea of progress in history point out that while humanity’s ability to control nature or achieve freedom from nature, and to make the tools that make that possible (technology), has indeed improved steadily, the same cannot be said for anything else humans do. In living memory there were genocides and famines, and despite having a really cool philosophical toolbox, humanity is as stupid as ever (QAnon, white supremacy, nationalism, and so on and on).

    If philosophy is such a great mental technology, as you imply, wouldn’t we expect society to have become more rational over time, just as it has become more technological? Why hasn’t that happened?

    The view I'm sympathetic to, from Adorno & Horkheimer, is that societies have become more rational, but only instrumentally so; the very concept of reason has been impoverished. You echo this state of affairs in describing philosophy as an instrument.

    So we have the instrumental reason in science and technology that leads to vaccines, dentistry, washing machines, Zyklon B and weapons of mass descruction. This is based on the use of tools from out of the philosophical toolbox that you describe. So philosophy is there to "guide thoughts and ideas through a forest of confusion" towards ... genocide?

    To me it follows that philosophy, as eminently critical, has to step in and say wait a minute, do we really want to be doing that? Philosophy often doesn't do that, I realize. I guess I'm emphasizing and celebrating the times when it does, thereby saying it ought to do more of it. This amounts to an attempt to form a richer notion of rationality than the one we have.

    All of that's not so much a rejection of your position as an addition to it.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪unenlightened
    :ok:
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪unenlightened
    I’m not so sure they can be so neatly separated.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪unenlightened
    But that’s too neutral and aloof for my taste and I want more.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    Any time one has a use for philosophy, one is not doing philosophy, but rhetoric. The tool-maker makes the tools he uses to make tools, but he is never using the tool he is making while he is making it. — unenlightened

    I’m very sympathetic to this. The instinct to identify a use or function might be associated with the instinct to commodify, to put a price on it. Philosophy is attractive partly because its usefulness is at the very least non-obvious.

    Even so, I don’t think it’s contradictory to look at some period in history and say that philosophers were important in particular ways that led to good outcomes, or that the philosophical thought of the period sets an example of how to think independently and critically.
  • Philosophy is for questioning religion
    ↪Janus
    Ok, I’ll go along with that. In the video, Moeller actually identifies three things that philosophy is for: questioning religion, coining concepts, and giving jobs to failed poets (continental philosophers) and failed mathematicians (analytic philosophers).
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