Power and authority are not purely (as opposed to practically) rational justifications but are tools of the biased.

So all government is the "tools of the biased"? And the authority of parents over their children? Or officers over their enlisted men, deans over their professors, or bishops over their priests and parishioners?

That seems pretty all-encompassing. Is anarchism the only way to escape "bias?"

They are obviously not demonstrable to the unbiased, not matter how much the biased might beleive them to be.

Or perhaps not to the biased.

Your reading skills are truly woeful if you are writing honestly here. I have said many time I hold some positions which are not demonstrable, just because they seem intuitively right to me. I have also said I think it is fine for others to do the same. I have also said that I see no reason to expect others to agree with me about my intuitively held beliefs.

Earlier you said non-demonstrable beliefs have absolutely no business in politics. So apparently anti-slavery beliefs should sit out of public life? Would it be inappropriate bias to object to slavery as a matter of law?

They all have their different interpretations, which rather supports my point

Does it? There are differing interpretations vis-á-vis everything. This seems like an appeal to consensus as truth. But I think it's fairly obvious that this is a poor measure of truth. If having many interpretations means there is no fact of the matter, then there can be no truth for indecisive murder cases either, since interpretations vary. So did no one in particular kill the victim? You virtually always have varying interpretations about the effects of economic policies before they have been implemented. Is there no truth of the matter about what their effects will be? Clearly, this applies as well to all manner of historical analysis and questions of history. And it would apply equally to the whole of ethics and aesthetics.

On the flip side of consensus, earlier you said racism was irrational. Yet there was previously scientific consensus about the superiority of different races in many respects. So too vis-á-vis sex, etc.

I am familiar with this passage. It's in one of the earlier books of Confessions.

That people used to often read aloud might also be a reason for the heavy preference of verse up until the modern era, the epic poem being for them what the novel is for us, and even scientific and political topics were covered with poetry. Another common hypothesis is that it is easier to remember text that is in rhyming meter and books were so expensive that memory was essential. Also, you can often do more emotionally and thematically with clever verse using less text, and when you have to kill a bunch of oxen to make a single book, economy is key.

Even gesturing at things is learned behavior.

Is it? I suppose in some sense it must be, because it requires some stimulus input, but it also seems about as innate as almost any behavior can be. Honey bee dances would seem to refer, but bees are not "taught," although they do have a "critical period" in development where lack of exposure to other dancers will hamper (but not remove) their dancing abilities. For humans, pointing seems similar, being fairly universal and innate (as much as anything can be).

Unrelated comment for the group:

Animal "reference" is an interesting example. Can dogs or dolphins refer? It seems they can in at least some basic sense. Dolphin pods send out scouts and use signals to direct the pod during attempts to catch fish, etc.

I'd question though whether it makes sense to talk about "bee's dances" or "dolphin clicks and whistles" doing the referring. The bees and dolphins refer, the dances and whistles are their means of doing this. Certainly, we can look at the means of communication in abstraction, but zoologists are pretty good about always trying to understand these in terms of the animals' particular biology. With philosophy of language, this focus is sometimes lost. Language itself does the referring in some views, rather than acting as a means. That's a crucial difference.

From an information theoretic perspective though, you can never ignore that data source. If a random text generator just happens to spit out a coherent English sentence, all it has really given you information about is the pseudo-random process underpinning the generation of the text. If it says: "Rome is burning," nothing about this ties back to Rome or fires, except wholly extrinsically.

Just a rambling thought about analysis. There is conventional meaning and intended meaning I guess.

There is a similar, maybe more influential issue where we tend to think that the unconscious processes undergirding empathy and language must work something like conscious inductive inference. Indeed, formal versions of induction are often called on to explain language, and "Bayesian Brain" theories certainly imply this sort of thing. But is it so? I don't see how any purely computational, formal inductive process can ever entail feeling or understanding (the old Hard Problem). Empathy seems to involve more than just induction, yet empathy also appears to be key to language acquisition and successful interspecies interactions.

There is no intentionality, emotion, and first-person experience in formal models of induction. I am not sure how there ever could be. Hence, using this as the starting point for philosophical analysis might be condemning our project to behaviorism (perhaps against our wishes). If the idea is that "what is empirically observable (and measurable)" is what fits in such models, then we might end up being forced to reevaluate this epistemic criteria.

So what of all the thinkers who took mysticism and/or God quite seriously? It's sort of a whose who list from East and West: Plato, Aristotle, Shankara, Plotinus, Augustine, Ghazzali, Aquinas, Proclus, Avicenna, Hegel, etc.

Were they all affected by bias and a lack of intellectual honesty?

"Things are as they are to us."

Right, which is dependent on how they are. "Things as they are for us" is, you might say, a slice of how they are (perhaps mixed in with error, i.e. how they aren't).

The idea is that "the rock" is a construct, a very useful and non-arbitrary and important one for us. But for all we know, God doesn't see it that way at all; perhaps God sees an astonishing interplay of quantum phenomena.

Constructed from what? Presumably how the rock actually is (its being), as it interacts with us, no? So the construction involves/expresses the actuality of the rock, what it is. Truth involves the degree to which the interpretation is adequate to what it is an interpretation of. "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver" is the old maxim, and this is as true for how salt interacts with water as for how we interact with rocks.

And sure, God would presumably be the measure of total knowledge. But the absolute is not the objective as set against appearances, but must include all appearances as well; otherwise it wouldn't be absolute. The way things appear is part of what they are (else they wouldn't be that things' appearances). Hence, total knowledge of a thing's being includes its appearances, which flow non-arbitrarily from its actuality.

I am just pushing back on the idea that one either knows everything or one knows only a simulacrum. The actuality (or form) of things must be present in the senses and intellect, else knowledge and interpretation would not be "of" anything prior (which is what makes them determinant, non-arbitrary).

Do you really believe you know "what things are"?

Sure, to some degree. What's the counterpoint. That we don't know what thing's are to any degree? That we are totally ignorant of what anything is and cannot ever know? How is that not epistemic nihilism? One need not know everything to know anything, or be infallible to be even partially correct. If we have any grasp on truth at all, then by definition, we have some grasp on being as it actually is.

Now, if one is fully committed to representationalism and is skeptical about the logic of priority (i.e. that representations are posterior to/caused by what they represent), then the epistemic difficulties are immense. Indeed, I hardly see how we could be justified in calling our representations "representations," in this case, since by our own admission, it is quite impossible to know if these "things" are related to anything they are "representations of" in any determinant way. Nor would we have justifications for positing "things to be represented in the first place."

That's why I call it "crude relativism," somewhat derisively, and contrast it with a relativism worth reading and thinking about. Yes, I suppose there are thinkers who don't mind contradiction, but if you've read any actual relativists, and especially people like Gadamer and Habermas and Bernstein who try find interpretive middle ground between totalizing critique and unworkable foundationalism, you see that the issue of contradiction is very much on their minds. The idea that relativism -- one of the most influential philosophical positions of the previous century -- was espoused by philosophers who "don't mind contradiction," just doesn't stand up under even a cursory reading of their work.

Every philosopher is a relativist, contextualist, and perspectivist to some degree. Some things obviously are culturally or historically relative. Opposition to relativism is normally opposition to epistemic or moral relativism in some robust sense, i.e. that goodness and truth (and not just their expressions or reception) are posterior to culture.

Yes, this is a difficulty with the application of game theory. It must assume "benefit" and pay-offs in ways that sometimes do not conform to life. Utility is sort of a black box in economics, and it is often assumed that people are simply appetite machines attached to calculators, which might sometimes be a useful simplifying assumption, but obscures much.

One might argue that justice demands confession and that justice is always preferable to injustice, thus confession should always be chosen. But that's not really the point of the model. We could exclude this problem by supposing that the players are actually innocent of the crime.

So, what you say about climate change is true. The prisoner's dilemma only highlights one tension in resolving issues like climate change, but it is not the full picture.

There is some interesting research on how economics classes make students at least temporarily more selfish in this regard.

It occurred to me that Cicero might be an example of an ethics grounded in an understanding of human nature and telos that is more "naturalistic."

I'm not really sure what you mean when you refer to "transcendence," though. Is this supposed to be God alone? These posts gave me the feeling that what is really at stake is nominalism, not "transcendence," i.e. whether or not goodness is merely a name.

That is, crude relativism would assert this without apparently noticing that it's contradictory.

Or they just don't mind contradiction.

Tell me, do you think Wittgenstein's thesis about hinge propositions is meant to apply universally, for all people, or does it only apply to those people whose existing hinge propositions allow Wittgenstein's arguments to succeed? It seems obvious to me that Wittgenstein's argument fails in the context of any philosophy that admits of a faculty of noesis, since if we have direct justifcatory knowledge of first principles due to the communication of form through the senses, then "hinge propositions" are not unjustified and have determinant truth values for all. So, is what he says about truth not true for people whose hinges include something like direct justifcatory knowledge of first principles?

Of course being is not contained in language. Being is not contained in anything, and neither is language a container. Hence any any attempt to step outside of all language to describe being “as such” is suspect.

This has "hence" so I assume the third claim follows from the other two. But does it?

P1: Being is not contained in anything (including language).
P2: Language is not a container.
Conclusion: Any attempt to step outside all language to describe being as such is suspect.

I don't see any connection here. And I don't know what to make of your prior statement that "the world is always already in a language" in this case. What does it mean for the world itself to (as opposed to say, human experience of the world) "be in a language" and how was this "always already" the case for the billions of years when no language could have existed?

I don't think human experience is "in a language" either, language is one element of human experience, but that at least seems to make more sense to me.

But this seems to be what you would do - supposing that there are ants prior to "There are ants" being true; and not temporally prior, but logically prior, as if it were not sentences that are true or false.

It isn't primarily sentences that are true or false. The intellect is not a database of sentences. Animals without language certainly appear to have beliefs that can be true or false as well, and this was so before man and his language. So too for infants and those with aphasia. Models can be true or false as well as sentences; artwork more or less "true to life," etc. The truth of sentences is parasitic on truth in the intellect; it is not that certain arrangements of scribbles or sound waves themselves hold a special property of relating to being of their own accord. Speech is a sign of truth in the intellect.

Anyhow, that seems besides the point. If the truth of "there are ants" is dependent on human language existing (even if "always already") then truth is posterior to language (the problems with this are addressed above).

We can't stand outside of the interpretation that claims there are ants, in order to say there are ants outside of that interpretation...

No standing outside is required, just acknowledgement that the thing that is being interpreted in an "interpretation" is prior to the interpretation, i.e. that its being is not dependent on the interpretation. This is ontological priority. You are conflating epistemic limitation with ontological limitation, which is why the issue of priority seems unresolvable to you. But as noted above, if truth is neither prior nor posterior to language, it can hardly be dependent on it in the way you are saying.

I think you're wrong about the epistemic limits, that they follow from a fundamentally misguided philosophy of language grounded in empiricist epistemic presupposition, but even if I agreed with the epistemic limits, they still wouldn't be ontological limits. Something has to exist before it can be interpreted. The truth of an interpretation is measured by what is interpreted.

We can't stand outside of the interpretation that claims there are ants, in order to say there are ants outside of that interpretation...

This just seems like the old Kantian dualism, only now couched in terms of language and interpretation, rather than the shaping influence of the mind. But if we have never, and can never know ants, but only interpretations of ants, then there would be no grounds for the appearance/reality (interpretation/reality) distinction at play in the first place. There would only be interpretation of interpretation, "nothing outside the text." The same sort of representationalism seems at play.

Now, if the truth of an interpretation is not dependent on the prior being of what is interpreted, then this is the same as saying that the truth of what we say about ants is not dependent on ants. But I'd maintain that botany texts are primarily about plants, not about interpretations. Linguistic interpretations are a means of knowing (and just one such means among many) not [/I]what[/I] is known.

I think it's a little more radical than that. Consider any physical object - the ever-useful rock example, let's say. But now wait a minute . . . what makes it a solid object for us? Is being the discrete, solid thing that it appears to us to be a feature of "things as they are", which we have only to note and make true statements about?

Rather, isn't it the case that our particular needs and capacities as humans allow us to perceive and group items in the world according to categories like "discrete" and "solid"? This has nothing to do with whether they "really are" this or that. Now I'm not a proponent of anti-realism. For our purposes, certainly they are, and atoms are real, etc etc. My point is that we don't approach the world as a collection of neutral phenomena which hold still for us as we go on to discover what is true about them. We have a large role to play in constituting the phenomena we then say true things about. Again, this doesn't mean we make them up or that they could be any which way, or that the things we say aren't true. It means that "things as they are" should probably be reserved for a particular reductive conception of physics, and even there viewed with some doubt.

This seems to rely on the same conflation of epistemic and ontic priority addressed above. Consider what you are taking umbrage with: "things are what they are."

What is the response then? Things aren't as they are? Things are as they aren't?

This post once again sets up a false dichotomy between a "view from nowhere" and agnosticism about ontological priority. Denying the former does not imply the latter though. That our understanding of a rock is shaped by the mind, language, etc. should not lead us to conclude that the rock is not actual (existing as it is) prior to our knowing it. Interpretations are interpretations of things that already are, that's what makes them "interpretations of something and not nothing in particular.

As you say yourself: "this doesn't mean we make them up or that they could be any which way." Yet what determines interpretations? Something must first be something determinant before it can determine anything else in any determinant way.

That things must be as they are does not require knowledge of "things-in-themselves," (which is itself a completely misguided standard of knowledge grounded in representationalism.)

Now either the way things are effects interpretation or it doesn't. Either we know things as they are, or we don't. Perhaps we know things as they aren't? But if this is so, in what sense can we even say that we know them? What we know is not thing "what they are" but something else "what they aren't."

Either what things are is communicated by interpretation (the being of things is known through interpretation) or it isn't. That things are known through interpretations doesn't necessitate that the interpretation is identical with the thing it interprets, but it does mean something must be identical between the two, else they are unrelated. If they are unrelated (if we know things as they aren't) I don't know what grounds we have for the initial interpretation/reality distinction in the first place. We should just say interpretation is reality; it's interpretation "all the way down."

I would put it this way. We know things as they interact with us (not exclusively through language). We also know them through a process of triangulation, by which we see how things interact with each other, through their interactions with us (e.g. experiment, scientific instruments, etc.). Interaction is not secondary to what a thing is though. To know how something interacts is to know what it is. Interaction is the only thing that makes anything epistemically accessible in the first place, and act follows on being. If act didn't follow from being, then appearance and reality would be arbitrarily related, and we might as well call appearances reality, since reality is irrelevant.

I could teach them how to add, ask them what the answer is to some new test cases and if they get the right answers, they show me they understand addition like I understand it. I know they get my idea of addition because they can add any new numbers up just like I would.

Are you sure you were teaching them addition and plus, not quaddition and quus? Or maybe it was laddition and luus?

Probably lol, I think you're right. Strictly empiricist starting positions seem to make for bizarre anthropology in general. "Understanding" seems problematic so it's probably better to just eliminate it! People don't understand, they behave! :grin:

I was going to present that standpoint. In this case, "understanding" just means producing appropriate behavioral outputs given certain behavioral inputs related to some topic, right?

I do think there is a problem here though. What determines what constitutes an "appropriate" output? Sure, this seems obvious in simple cases. If someone radically misrepresents quantum theory, then we might suppose they don't understand it. However, it's also possible that they are a genius theorist and are the only one who does understand it, and are on their way to becoming the next Einstein. Did they not understand QM until their work changed the standards of "appropriate" responses?

We could say that "appropriateness" is dictated by the community. This won't always work though. It will fail in cases where the individual understands better than the community.

As another option: maybe someone is acting appropriately and "understands" when they act according to their own interests vis-á-vis some thing. That is, they understand when they can best pursue their ends, and they understand their ends when they pursue ends that truly benefit them and do so appropriately. But then the eliminitive materialist will have difficulties with the question of ends here, because there are, strictly speaking, no "better" ends, just ends called "better" as behavioral outputs.

IDK, it seems hard to disentangle behavioral markers of understanding from goal-directedness.

Tricky, tricky.

Personally, I think that if we're talking telos, we're talking transcendence.

Do you think we need transcendence to speak of the goal-directedness of life?

I really think our previous conversations about ethics have gone into this thoroughly

Really? Certainly, I've responded to a lot of critique. I don't know what the corresponding positive formulation is supposed to look like at all though. Indeed, I am pretty sure I've asked what an "ethical good" is supposed to be before.

Apparently, a naturalistic approach to telos is flawed without it. And apparently my own view of the classical tradition is also flawed because it doesn't capture it adequately. But what is exactly is this "ethical good" and "ethical ought?"

Here's a false dilemma - that either there are truths prior (a loaded term) to humanity, or nothing was true until man's communities arose. Perhaps we can say truth is not invented by humans, but neither does it exist in some Platonic realm, independent of all interpretive conditions. Instead truths become available within human discourse—not arbitrarily, not as illusions, but as intelligible articulations of a world we are always already in relation with.

Prior and posterior are "loaded terms" now?

The bronze of a statue and the art of sculpting are prior, the finished statue is posterior. Parents are prior to their children, the children are posterior. What is posterior comes from, or is dependent on what is prior. Is truth neither prior nor posterior to language and interpretation?

If this were so then the truth of an interpretation would not be dependent on the being of whatever the interpretation is an interpretation of. Second, since language and interpretation are not prior to truth, truth can hardly be said to always depend upon them. At the same time, to say that truth is both prior and posterior to language is a contradiction.

Whereas, to say that truth is posterior to man and his language is to say that truth is somewhat like a statue. But perhaps the "raw material" of truth is prior to language, as the bronze exists before the statue? Perhaps we could say that truth exists potentially prior to man, yet is only actualized by his language and culture?

Here is the problem with this. Truth reflects the mind's grasp of being, the adequacy of thought to what already is. Truth is founded in the being of things, in re. But things must already be actual for them to act on our intellect, and for our knowledge to be determined by them.

Being is prior to knowledge. If it weren't, then knowing (or speaking) would make things what they are (which, aside from basic plausibility, would also make it difficult to explain error and a lack of correspondence between intellect and being). Further, if we know things potentially before we know them actually, then it would seem that our potential knowledge would have to be actualized by merely potential truth.

Another way to say this is that the measure of a duck is a duck. The measure of a riverbed is a riverbed. When we assess the truth of a model, we assess the degree to which it is adequate to what it measures. But this requires that the measure is not dependent on (posterior to) the measurement (though no doubt, measurement can influence the measure, e.g. quantum mechanics), e.g. that the coastline exist prior to the map whose truth is its correspondence to the coastline.

Nothing about this priority requires any claim about stepping outside of all interpretations. This is a non-sequitur as far as I can see. I agree wholeheartedly with Rorty on the impossibility and inadvisablity of the "view from nowhere" or of "knowledge of things in themselves." That isn't what is at issue though.

Our knowledge of the truth is indeed developed over time and influenced by culture; it is situated within practices and interpretation. The truth itself is grounded in being, and hence is already actual prior to any interpretation. This gets back to the idea that language and interpretations are means of knowing, not (primarily) the objects of knowledge.

I understand that virtue ethics collapses this difference

I don't think it does. There is a difference, it's just that the ethical good is not sui generis, and it is desirable. But at any rate, I was speaking to the view that doesn't acknowledge man as possessing rational appetites, but rather treats man like a clever rat or pigeon.

I don't think you can get to any robust "ethical good" from this presupposition. If you try, you get an "ethical good" that is desired by no one, except accidentally, and is to no one's benefit, except accidentally, which means there is no reason why anyone should care about it. Things are only good for man in the same way that they can be good for a rat or cow.

Rats don't have ethics, humans do.

What does it mean to "have ethics" here? Does man have an appetite for this ethical goodness, or some sort of duty vis-á-vis ethical goodness? What's the positive formulation?

You are critiquing a "naturalistic," purely immanent explanation of the human good for not including a dimension of ethical/moral goodness, yet you've also expressed disapproval for the notion of any values transcending man and his culture, no? So how is this ethical/moral goodness explained?

And nothing can be known about what is good for a rat and a fox either?

Right, and this is fairly obvious as regards statements that are straightforwardly self-undermining, if not fully self-refuting.

However, the tricky part here with various forms of "constructivist pluralism," for lack of a better term (and some other notions as well), is that the response will be: "but of course there is goodness, beauty, and truth, it just isn't what you think it is." So here, truth is no longer the adequacy of thought to being, but is variously:

- what follows from given hinges (groundless grounds, of which there are a plurality);

- "the end of inquiry," what satisfies our needs;

-consistency with other existing beliefs;

-defined wholly formally (leaving natural language truths too vague and equivocal for rigorous analysis);

etc. (with various combinations as well).

This isn't quite so straightforward. There is an equivocation at play between both parties. The question then must turn to the alternative notions of truth (or goodness, or beauty) and their appropriateness. This is likely to be fraught. However, one can look at the new definitions of truth and also see if the new definitions might themselves be self-undermining or self-refuting.

For instance, do they allow for violations of the principle of non-contradiction such that, by their own standards, they are both correct and not-correct? Do they fail to ground our most bedrock intuitions (perhaps not fatal, but certainly a difficulty)? Do they allow for conflicting truths, and in particular, conflicting truths about truth itself?

Of course, some views will claim that contradiction, of itself, is no problem. But it does seem to be a problem if a redefinition allows us to assert that the new definition (or the old for that matter) is both correct and not-correct, for then it hasn't really said anything at all.

We might also ask, given the momentous nature of the change, what presuppositions undergird the move. The move to dismiss truth as adequacy or correspondence, and to posit some particular replacement, relies on arguments. These don't tend to be presuppositionless arguments. Hence, we can ask, are these presuppositions beyond doubt? If arguments lead to radical conclusions, the first things to do are to check the validity of the argument and the truth of the premises.

I'm having trouble understanding how that "something" would not transcend humans. Is the idea that we could discover such a telos by only studying humans as a species, the way anthropologists do? Or understanding humans' role in relation to other species and to the planet as a whole?

Sure. I would argue that such a view ultimately runs into many other problems, but such a view of man's telos does not seem prima facie unreasonable, whereas a blanket denial does.

Now, the classical view would be that man, as a rational being, is always oriented towards Truth and the Good by the two faculties of the rational soul, intellect and will. This is the natural the desire to know what is really true and possess/attain to what is truly best (both, ultimately being a sort of union). It is these intellectual appetites by which man transcends his finitude and seeks his end in rational freedom.

But, supposing we deny that man is a rational being (at least in this sense) and instead claim he is something more like a very clever rat or fox, then it would still be the case that man has a nature that determines the human good (leaving aside the question of cosmic ends).

(Amity's dumbitdown version)

"individual identities" are what we are being sold, what we are told is important, and they are nothing else than the sum of the consumer choices we make. It follows that wealth is freedom. But consumer choices are not moral choices.

But it goes deeper: identities are not individual. Identities are necessarily external to the individual in origin and are interiorised by imposition or incorporation. To say that I am this or that, a philosopher or a buffoon, is to identify with a type, to join a club, and this, whether I say it or you do. Identification denies individuality. Race, gender, nationality, profession, football team, favourite shampoo, favourite philosopher, neurotype, there is nothing individual in any of it. Individuals are inexplicable, incomparable, unlimited, unique.

I agree to some extent with this sentiment, but I think identity can be an important, even essential element of particularity, as does situatedness in history. It's what makes the individual a meaningful individual. However, when these identities exist within a system where identity is simply consumed, where the bare agent, as consumer/worker, always comes first and can always abandon their duties "when they really want to," then they become pernicious, precarious shadows.

However, with Hegel and much of the classical tradition, I would argue that being a good father, doctor, scientist, teacher, citizen, city council member, deacon, etc. represents involvement in a common good that represents the higher fulfillment of man's telos (rather than merely a source of individual goods).

This would certainly seem to be the case in most pre-modern literature. There is no Aeneas without the Trojans; Dante remains a Florentine even exiled and under threat of execution; Boethius is a Roman even as he awaits death at the hands of the state he once managed. The individual is potentially infinite, if they recognize their true nature, but also reducible to a mere colocation of inchoate desires, assets, and human capital by the current system.


I'd say a difficulty of capitalism and liberalism is that it undermines these identities, and does so intentionally, as a means to empower people through this sort of pseudo-liberty. There is a sort of unbearable lightness to the being of man as capital and "project."

Well, because there is universal agreement on how to recognize and judge blue, and nothing similar in regard to beauty. But in any case, I see the context for the Hamlet quote, thanks.

There is also nothing similar in regards to truth or goodness.

But, at any rate, we're talking about dependence and priority, not agreement. If beauty is posterior to social "games," then it follows that nothing was beautiful before such games existed. Perhaps things were beautiful potentially, waiting for man to actualize that potential?

The problem I see for this answer is that it is hard to see how culture could form prior to the aesthetic (or moral and theoretical) sense. These would seem to be prerequisites for culture. More to the point, if beauty is "what pleases when known," then it would seem to already exist, in at least a primitive form vis-á-vis sensation, in lower animals that existed millions of years before the first man. If Beauty is the going out in appearances of Goodness, the "pleasingness of appearances," then I find it hard to see how life could evolve without it, since animals are presumably motivated by what pleases their senses.

Now, I'd agree that only man experiences Beauty as such, in a full sense, but this is also true of Truth. Yet the fact that Beauty (and Truth) are always filtered through and contextualized within culture for man does not require that they be posterior to culture. If they were posterior (dependent, as smoke generated by a fire) then nothing would have been true prior to the advent of man.

But note: we can still judge and reject them, but we do so from our own perspective, not from some objective, godlike viewpoint.

Right, but how does this amount to more than emotivism (or does it?)—more than "boo hoo for Hitler?" No doubt, no one denies that people can say "boo hoo for Hitler." Yet people can, and do, also say "hoorah for Hitler." If there is no human telos or values that transcend current sentiment then it seems only power relations can ultimately end up determining the question of which ought to prevail, no? That is, reason cannot judge between the life of the BTK killer and the life of a saint.

Note that the transcendence is question here is only of current norms and sentiments. Nothing "platonic" need he inferred.

But note: we can still judge and reject them, but we do so from our own perspective, not from some objective, godlike viewpoint.

We don't get access to some objective standpoint outside all human values.

"Godlike," "One True," etc., ...do pluralisms' detractors ever use this language? This language is only ever rolled to create a dichotomy to argue against, right? That might be an indication that it's a strawman.

The idea of a human telos doesn't require anything that transcends man. It merely requires something that transcends man's current sentiments, norms, and beliefs.

For example, it is bad for a bear to have its leg mangled in a bear trap because of what a bear is. Likewise, I'd argue that there are ways of living that are better and worse for man. No "Godlike" perspective is required to reach this judgement. This is observable through the senses. Being neglected is not good for children, being maimed is not good for human beings, education is conducive to human flourishing, etc.—at the very least, ceteris paribus. I would argue that these are facts about what man is that do not depend on current norms, yet neither do they depend on a god-like view, nor a view from nowhere.

But, even if you have the suspicion that my point must somehow reduce to an appeal to the "transcendent" (and I'm not sure how it does), I still think your argument has a weakness (to be fair, it's one that seems fairly endemic around these parts when it comes to arguing these sorts of things). It seems to follow the form:

Either A or B
Not A
Thus, B

That is:
Either we have access to a god-like, One True Perspective, or "view from nowhere," else man has no particular telos.

Similar arguments have been made in this thread re the status of beauty. Either we have the "god-like view," else beauty is posterior to custom and culture.

But the truth of the premise: "either A or B" is never addressed. A more convincing argument doesn't need to merely show that we lack a god-like, One True, etc. view, but rather that, if we lack this view, it entails that man lacks a telos (or, likewise in the case of beauty, that some sort of constructivist pluralism where beauty is posterior to culture and custom necessarily follows from the absence of a One True View).

That would be more convincing, particularly since I don't think I've suggested A in the first place. I've said many times on this forum that I would consider a strong challenge to a virtue ethics grounded in man's telos to be one which can demonstrate that, ceteris paribus (and not just in contrived counterexamples), it is, on average:

Not better to have fortitude, but rather better to have weakness of will.

Not better to be prudent, but rather better to be rash.

Not better to be courageous, but rather better to be reckless or cowardly.

Not better to be temperate, but rather better to be gluttonous and licentious.

Etc.

Or, barring that, that different cultures actually have wholly equivocal notions of the virtues. I think this will be an extremely hard challenge to meet though. So too for the idea of a human telos, e.g. that ceteris paribus, on average, things like lead poisoning, hunger, lack of education, lack of physical activity, etc. do not negatively impact human flourishing.

And the question becomes, external to what? If the world is always, and already, in a context and a language, then there is nothing "external" to the interpretation.

Well, here is a fundamental disagreement. I think that language is something within the world. Language is just one thing in the order of human experience, and human experience is just one thing in the order of being. The world is not "in a language." This is backwards, the former is what contains the latter. Likewise, it has not "always already been in a language" because language has not always existed.

The limits of language are not the limits of being. Being is not something contained in language. This is inflating a part into a whole, and leads to a misunderstanding of what language is and how it works. Likewise, the limits of reason are not the limits of existing languages, because reason is more than just discursive linkages between elements language or something akin to computation.

↪J So for Tim the world is already divided up. Whereas for me the division is something we do, and re-do, as our understanding progresses.

Right, what decides what an ant is has something to do with what we decide to count as an ant. I will just note that I find this implausible. The subject matter of biology is prior to our doing. Something like "how many chromosomes does a tiger have," is discovered (the uncovering of something prior). Which isn't to say science isn't bound up in culture, but rather that the facts science studies are not posterior to (dependent on) culture. Biology is not primarily the study of human distinctions, but of living organisms. Distinctions are secondary, related as means but not ends. So it is for theoretical reason, and so too for moral and aesthetic reason.

Again, this is a question of what is prior and posterior. The ant and tyrannosaurus are prior to human language. We might get them more or less correctly, but their preexistence is a key cause of our knowledge of them. There would be no reason for language to develop for these concepts if their existence wasn't prior.

And so I again throw the question back to Tim, why should we accept that your divisions are the absolute ones

You're going to run out of straw too early again friend, I cannot keep up.

Transcendent in what way? I am saying something about the things judged good/beautiful must be prior to the act of judging/thinking itself, else the objects themselves would only be arbitrarily related to the judgement. Anything could be judged any which way, because the properties of objects do not determine how they are judged. Note that the post you are quoting is the second one a chain in which Tom said that Beauty was an example of man creating something from nothing, which is what I was responding to.

This seems to be obviously false for something like color. That something is judged to be blue is dependent on the object judged. Why would it be different for beauty?

:up:

And indeed, there is an issue with feedback between educated/elite opinion and majority opinion, in that the two shape each other. What gets taught as a matter of a normal education also matters. Plus you also have the issue of earlier works affecting later works. Although, these are less of an issue with natural beauty.

I once saw someone argue that Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer were given undue praise because there are so many more people alive who can write in English today than in their epoch. Thus, "the Bayesian prior for them being truly elite writing talents would be quite low." This, to me, totally misses the close relationship between history, philosophy, culture, etc. and art, both art as received, and how it is produced.

I'm puzzled by this reply because the post says this follows from Hamlet's position, not from a lack of "transcendental or foundational basis."

The question of whether man's will and his various "games" (which are said above to ground aesthetic judgement) generate their own existence is a different question. I would maintain they do not, that they have causes that are prior to them. But this is not the same question as the ultimately arbitrary nature of aesthetic and moral judgement if Hamlet is correct and man wills values. IDK, perhaps Milton's Satan is the better example here: "evil be thou my good," through the act of the "unconquerable will."

It absolutely does follow that if there is nothing prior to man, his communities, and his "games" then there is no reason for them to be one way and not any other. If something "just is" ("always already") why is it one way and not any other? The "community" as a bare primitive has this problem.

I should note that the austere physicalist doesn't have this problem. They have an idea of what lies prior to man and his games. They might have a similar problem when it comes to "why is the universe one way rather than any other," though (it depends).

↪Count Timothy von Icarus The world is always, already interpreted. It shows up for us through our practices, our language, our forms of life. To suggest otherwise is to appeal to a view-from-nowhere—a fantasy of access to the world prior to interpretation

I think this is a false dichotomy. I mentioned Rorty above to head of exactly this sort of false dichotomy, whereby the later empiricst trots out the earlier empiricst's failed model, knocks it down, and then proclaims that "if not-a, then it is necessarily b." I don't think this follows, one could just as well turn around to attack the presuppositions made by both a Russell/early-Wittgenstein and a Rorty/late-Wittgenstein.

I already allowed that "a 'simple statements of fact' also involves: "an interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, form, and reception." But this is different from saying that there is no truth prior to "interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, and reception." To say that would be to say that nothing was true until man's communities arose. Yet the order of human discourse is not the order of being, the former is contained within the latter, not vice versa.

So I have to ask: aren’t you smuggling in a theological or metaphysical assumption, something like a First Cause or transcendent source? Why suppose that beauty must have a ground outside human life—outside history, culture, or shared understanding?

Why would notions of beauty be one way and not any other if beauty was not in any sense prior to human life?

You could ask the same sort of questions re truth. Why did disparate culture groups come to recognize ants and cockroaches as distinct species, and individual ants and cockroaches as individual organic wholes, animals? The most obvious answer is: these organisms already existed as species with individual members prior to the advent of man and his languages. So here, the truth is prior to its culturally bound representation. The priority which exists is not merely temporal, but also exist in terms of a hierarchy contemporaneous efficient causes, in the same way that a hanging chandelier depends on each link in the chain above it to be hanging rather than falling at any particular moment.

A First Cause, First Principle, and First Mover might follow from the idea that explanations need to be intelligible and do not bottom out in "it just is" and the spontaneous movement of potency to actuality—that's another question however.

Why does this need for an external “source” apply to aesthetic judgments in particular? Does language require a source beyond human life? Do games, rules, rituals, or cultural artefacts?

Certainly. They do not spring from the aether fully formed. Language has causes outside language. If language had no prior cause, there would be no reason to explain why it is one way and not any other.

This need to find beauty’s origin “elsewhere” seems to rest on an unexamined assumption: that what’s meaningful or real must come from outside us. But why believe that?

It comes from the assumption that our language and judgements have causes.

I'd say there is no proper orientation towards the world.

So, then Hitler, Stalin, and the BTK killer represent equally valid orientations towards being as anyone else?

I don't see how this follows. It feels like this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just because something doesn't have a transcendent source doesn't mean it's nothing or we can readily reverse perspectives at will.

Right, no need to bring up transcedence. It follows from the assertion that there is no proper orientation towards being. If there is no proper orientation towards the world then the orientation represented by the society of A Brave New World could hardly be improper, no?

I think some of those views can be pigheaded attempts at objectivist dictatorialism, but that's people, right?

People acting properly?

If beauty were created by man and his practices, I'd contend that there would be no proper orientation towards the world. And if there is no proper orientation to the world, then something like Huxley's A Brave New World has no aesthetic defects. The wilderness, sunsets, flowers, love, commitment, romance, justice, parenthood—these are hideous because society has said that they are so, and people have been conditioned accordingly. What is beautiful is mass produced consumer products, orgy porgy, utilitarian "pneumatic" relations of pleasure, etc.

But even Huxley has the problem of explaining how his miracle drug soma tends to make everything that is sensed more beautiful.

If Hamlet is right, if "nothing is good or bad (beautiful or ugly) but thinking makes it so," we are left with the question of why anything should be thought beautiful or ugly in the first place. Such notions should be uncaused, and thus random, but they do not seem to be. Pastural poetry from ancient Greece and Rome, or India, Persia, or China, is still quite accessible to people across the world millennia later, after vast social changes.

The notion that something can come from nothing is typically embraced by those invested in teleological arguments for transcendence.

By who? It seems to me that it is normally quite the opposite. For instance, the contention that there must be a being that is pure act to explain any move from potency to act. Or that there must be a first cause in a chain of efficient causes. Or that there must be a being that is necessary and subsistent, whose essence includes existence—all so that we don't have "something coming from nothing."

Right, we are embedded in the world, its beauty, truth, etc.—the world is not embedded in our communities, practices, and "language games." One is prior to, and the ground of the other.

And that's all? If one thing can come from nothing, why not anything more? Why just this one thing?

Goodness, and to a lesser extent, Truth are often offered up as other examples of things that man creates. I disagree. Ex nihilo nihil fit—out of nothing, nothing comes. Man does not act without causes, and does not create from nothing—if he did, we'd have no way to explain why he has created one thing and not any other. That's my contention.

Plus, I find it particularly strange that this sort of theory of man's creative powers is so often couched in terms of epistemic humility, since it is saying that all Goodness, Beauty, and Truth in the cosmos is the work of man's will—that man is essentially God, making things what they are, bestowing onto them their unity, goodness, purpose, and beauty.

Do you supose that that in order for beauty to be real, it must have a source, and that source must be outside human life? I don't agree. I'll throw the burden back to you to show that such a thing is needed.

Can man create something from nothing?

But it's a false dilemma. Aesthetic claims - that the roast lamb in the oven as we speak, slow cooked with six veg, to be served with greens - is better than a Big Mac, is not just an expressions of feeling nor statements of fact—but an interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, form, and reception. It arises as a triangulation of speaker, interpreter and dinner. It's not objective, but it's not relative, either. It is cultivated and critiqued, without requiring foundational aesthetic truths, because it is an integral part of a holistic web of taste that extends beyond the speaker and even beyond the interpreter into the world at large. Further, no such aesthetic scheme is incommensurable with other such schemes.

Wouldn't a "simple statements of fact" also involve: "an interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, form, and reception?"

I'd argue that it will. You could look to someone like Rorty here. Hence a workable definition of "objective" cannot allow the aforementioned to be disqualifying factors, else hardly anything would qualify as objective.

But, more to the point, I am not more inclined to think that man, with our without his institutions and "games," is the sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos (or goodness, or truth for that matter). Discourse on beauty is affected by the aforementioned factors, as light passes through tinted panes of glass, but beauty is not contained within, nor created by, these things. "There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard" (as Psalm 19:3 puts it).

As Plato has it:

And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

The idea is that beauty is prior to individual experiences of finite, contextual beauty. Or as more recent thinkers have put it:

Schindler first diagnoses why our modern condition is so poisonous. “[E]ncountering reality is a basic part of the meaning of human existence.” And, moreover, “there is something fundamentally good about this encounter with the world...."

In the transcendentals—beauty, goodness, and truth—man participates in and, in a real sense, “becomes what he knows.” Schindler maintains that rejecting the notion that the cosmos is true, good, and beautiful, “in its very being,” we are actually committing a gravely dehumanizing move. We are cutting ourselves off from the ability to experience reality at its deepest level. This means that the study and understanding of the transcendentals is not some abstraction, disconnected from everyday life. Rather, a proper understanding of the transcendentals allows one the deepest and most concrete access to the real...

Beauty

Schindler first tackles the transcendental of beauty. This is contrary to the order most frequently employed by the tradition. There are both philosophical and practical reasons for this, however. With respect to the latter, Schindler notes that if “our primary . . . access to reality comes through the windows or doors of our senses” this means that the “way we interpret beauty bears in a literally foundational way on our relationship to reality simply.”

Schindler rejects the notion that beauty is just in the eye of the beholder, that is has no connection to objective reality. Rather, “beauty is an encounter between the human soul and reality, which takes place in the ‘meeting ground,’ so to speak, of appearance.” And beauty is a privileged ground of encounter because it “involves our spirit and so our sense of transcendence, our sense of being elevated to something beyond ourselves—and at the very same time it appeals to our flesh, and so our most basic, natural instincts and drives.” By placing beauty first, one establishes the proper conditions for the “flourishing” of goodness and truth.

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2019/05/08/the-intelligibility-of-reality-and-the-priority-to-love/

Schiller and Goethe would be another counterpointhere.

Schiller takes on board the notion he finds in Shaftesbury and Kant, that our response to beauty is distinct from desire; it is, to use the common term of the time, “disinterested”; just as it is also distinct, as Kant said as well, from the moral imperative in us. But then Schiller argues that the highest mode of being comes where the moral and the appetitive are perfectly aligned in us, where our action for the good is over-determined; and the response which expresses this alignment is just the proper response to beauty, what Schiller calls “play” (Spiel). We might even say that it is beauty which aligns us.11

This doctrine had a tremendous impact on the thinkers of the time; on Goethe (who was in a sense, one of its co-producers, in intensive exchange with Schiller), and on those we consider “Romantics” in the generally accepted sense. Beauty as the fullest form of unity, which was also the highest form of being, offers the definition of the true end of life; it is this which calls us to go beyond moralism, on one side, or a mere pursuit of enlightened interest, on the other. The Plato of the Symposium returns, but without the dualism and the sublimation.

From the standpoint of this anthropology of fusion and beauty, we can understand one of the central criticisms that the Romantic age levelled at the disengaged,
disciplined, buffered self, and the world it had built. Beauty required the harmonious fusion of moral aspiration and desire, hence of reason and appetite. The accusation against the dominant conceptions of disciplined self and rational order was that they had divided these, that they had demanded that reason repress, deny feeling; or alternatively, that they had divided us, confined us in a desiccating reason which had alienated us from our deeper emotions.

Charles Taylor - A Secular Age

My point was merely that disagreement is poor evidence for a lack of objective aesthetic value/criteria. People disagree about virtually everything.

Now you've offered a supporting thesis, that science is objective, and aesthetic judgements not, because the former involves observations that are repeatable.

However, this poses another problem if it is the sole thesis. For the facts that historians, detectives and prosecutors, etc. deal in, and many practical judgements we make in life that we think involve facts (a "truly best choice"), are not repeatable in this way, even in theory.

One cannot, for example, run the American Revolution 100 times and discover that the Declaration of Independence is signed on 7/4/1776 in 99 of them.

But yes, I would agree that scientific facts are not the same as historical or aesthetic facts. Generally, the former are considered to involve something like necessity or universality, while history (and arguably beauty) is always particular.

I'm not sure I understand your point. My argument is that if artist A and B have conflicting opinions about what makes art good (say, maximalist vs minimalism), then that implies there isn't an objective correct answer.

I think this sort of disagreement only helps to support to the position that there is nothing objective to agree about if one has already presupposed that there is nothing objective to agree about (i.e. it is confirmation bias).

Consider that two scientists might disagree as to whether or not vaccines are a major factor in increasing autism rates. Does their disagreement demonstrate that there is no fact of the matter here? Or suppose a man is found murdered and detective A thinks the butler did it and detective B thinks it was the estranged heir. Does this imply that there is no fact about who killed the man?

Note that this applies equally with arguments from cultural relativity. For most of history, where you grew up and which culture you belonged to, determined what you thought about the shape of the Earth, the etiology of infectious diseases, etc. Beliefs re these issues have tended to be strongly dependent on time and place. Does this mean that the Earth has no shape, or that its shape varies by culture and historical epoch?

Most theories of objective beauty hardly deny that different things please different people. Aquinas' famous answer is that: "beauty is what pleases when seen," but in context this means more "beauty is what pleases when known." But knowing cannot be relativized, on pain of a thorough-going relativism about all sorts of things. A denial of aesthetic quality might very well lead to a denial of all qualities on the same grounds.

Hence, in these theories there is a healthy taste, a healthy response to and respect for things of beauty, and intelligible beauty is in some sense higher and fuller than sensible beauty. That some men are color blind does not imply that nothing is red or green, and that some men are blind does not imply that nothing "looks like anything." In the same way, some men are said to have healthy, educated tastes, versus unhealthy or defective tastes. Health is the standard, not illness, else blindness would be equally the measure of sight and deafness equally the measure of hearing. But note that the idea of sickness versus health, while common sense enough, requires some notion of human telos, a measure of human excellence/perfection, which much modern thought is likely to deny due to extreme nominalism.

Nonetheless, beauty is not a quantitative (dimensive quantity) univocal measure, and so we shouldn't expect everyone to agree. There are a number of reasons why people might disagree on aesthetic judgements even if there is a truth underlying such judgements (see below):

A. People might have negative associations with a particular object of aesthetic judgement that are accidental (e.g. finding out that a family member has died as one hears a song might lead one to dislike that song).

B. Too much familiarity - we tend to ignore things we see frequently, to “tune them out.” For instance, someone who grows up in the desert might have trouble recognizing its particular beauty.

C. Too little familiarity - this problem occurs when we have no context to place an aesthetic experience within. If we have heard very little music, we might find jazz or a symphony overwhelming on a first exposure.

D We might be comparing similar, but different species. The most obvious example of this is the great apes. Their features look so human-like that it is hard to appreciate their beauty. For, rather than seeing a “beautiful orangutan,” we end up judging the creature by the standard of “man,” and all orangutans, no matter how fine a specimen, look like ugly men.

E Similarly, we might judge one member of a species less beautiful simply because we are accustomed to more beautiful members. I sometimes have this experience with March Madness because, while college basketball can often be more exciting than pro-ball, it is also a good deal less polished.

F Because beauty deals with wholes, it will tend to include context. A strange context can make an otherwise beautiful object look less beautiful. For instance, a masterpiece painting might nonetheless lose something if it were surrounded by blinking lights and gaudy decorations.

G Beauty is experienced first by the senses. However, the senses rely on proper conditions for interaction with the ambient environment and the object sensed. Nothing looks beautiful in a pitch black room. Nothing sounds beautiful with earplugs in. From these extremes, we can also recognize other cases where our experience of beauty may be affected in this way, e.g. “not enough light,” or “looking at a work of art from too far away/too close,” etc.

H Likewise, malfunctioning sense organs, or more general feelings of pain, anxiety, or illness can rob us of our aesthetic enjoyment of beautiful objects.

I A lack of aesthetic distance, as when we judge our own children’s art, can also cause us to overvalue or undervalue something’s beauty.

J Maturity is another important factor. One would not expect a three-year-old to appreciate Hamlet, though they might appreciate a colorful painting. Part of this gets back to the idea that context is involved in aesthetic appreciation, and this involves intellectual context as well. The intellectual context proper to some art might not be accessible to immature audiences. Likewise, sometimes we come to appreciate some works of art more once we understand their intellectual context, their allusions, their history, etc.

I would add that this “context sensitivity” can apply even to natural, sensuous beauty. In the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks, there are a number of small alpine lakes. These are quite lovely, and at first glance their crystal clear water, perfectly reflecting the surrounding mountains, is very beautiful. However, I later learned that these lakes were not always clear in this way, but have only become so due to acid rain, which upset the delicate ecosystem and essentially wiped out most of the life in these small lakes. This knowledge certainly doesn’t make the lakes ugly, yet it takes away from their beauty in the wider context of the landscape (i.e. they now seem like a “tear” or “blemish”).

K. Finally, there are individual tastes. These vary because we are each unique, but also because we have unique experiences and a unique mix of knowledge that colors the “intellectual context” of our experience of beauty. Sometimes, this sort of difficulty is raised first in a consideration of aesthetic objectivity. For example: “if experts disagree over Bach versus Beethoven, how can there be any objectivity?”

I think we can dismiss this sort of objection on the grounds that one does not make a rule from the most difficult edge cases. Some music might sound better to some ears. Likewise, depending on our particular history, we might find some literature more beautiful or more edifying. However, this hardly means that we cannot decide between Bach and the noise of road construction, between Beethoven and a child banging on a piano, or between Dante and poorly written pulp fiction.

Indeed, "objective" is often taken as a synonym for "noumenal" rather than "without relevant bias." This is often grounds for equivocation. Someone says that "morality is not objective," and so it cannot enter into politics or education. But, upon investigation, we learn that by "objective" they mean "noumenal" and they end up agreeing that the whole of engineering, physics, and chemistry is also "subjective." Yet usually, they do not think engineering should be barred from having any influence on education, constructing aircraft, or bridge building due to its "subjectivity," and so the entire point about morality or taste failing to be "objective" ends up being wholly irrelevant.

Can you say more about why post-modern skepticism makes truth threatening?

There are several dimensions to this, so it's a tough question. I think it is part of a far larger tendency in modern thought, the move to define freedom in terms of power/potency (as opposed to the capacity to actualize the Good). Milton's Satan is a great emblem of this, and it's no surprise that he gets read as a hero by future generations after this trend accelerates. There is a certain (although, IMO counterfeit) freedom in Hamlet's remark that "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." This means we ultimately decide everything, through, in Satan's words, the "unconquerable will." D.C. Schindler's book "Freedom From Reality: The Diabolical Nature of Modern Liberty" is pretty good on this.

You can also see this tend in the idea that ontology might be oppressive if it is not creative. On the classical view, this makes no sense. Ignorance is a limit on freedom, and being creative in error just binds you in ignorance.

Next, Marxism had been fairly popular in the West, particularly in academia, for a long time. But by the late Cold War, the many infamies of Marxist regimes had come to light and they seemed more like the norm rather than the exception for that ideology. People had already argued that capitalism was bankrupt and couldn't turn back now. Yet their great alternative was revealed to be more akin to Hitlerism than utopia, and no new alternative was forthcoming. So there is a sort of reflexive shell shock militating against strong belief.

So that's the broad context, but then this is paired with a number of influential skeptical arguments of "skeptical solutions" to questions of knowledge. Wittgenstein, who has been interpreted in extremely diverse ways, is especially influential here. The linguistic turn and a tendency towards deflationism (or just bracketing out questions of truth) in logic also helps. I mentioned this in the thread on pragmatism.

Now if you will all excuse me a moment of embracing polemic... the move to "pragmatism all the way down," seems to come from two different angles:

On the one hand, you have Analytics who, burnt by incompleteness and undefinablity, decided that, since truth couldn't be defined to their satisfaction, it simply could not exist. The rules of their "games" were thus the ultimate measure of truth, and since they had very many games there must be very many truths, with no game to help them choose between them.

Elsewhere in the Analytic camp were those who became so committed to the idea of science as the "one true paradigm of knowledge," that they began to imagine that, if science couldn't explain consciousness, then consciousness (and thus conscience) must simply be done away with (i.e. eliminative materialism, which gets rid of the Good and the agent who might know it).

From the other side came Continentals who came to define freedom as pure potency and power, and so saw any definiteness as a threat to unlimited human liberty. On such a view, anything that stands outside man must always be a constriction on his freedom. Everything must be generated by the individual. Perhaps we can allow the world to "co-constitute" with us, but only if a sort of freedom and agency, which in the end is really "ours" anyhow, is given to the world.

The result is a sort of pincer move on the notions of Truth and Goodness (and we might add Beauty here too.) We might envisage the two armies of Isengaurd and Mordor. The first is motivated by belief that it cannot win. The second, by pure considerations of power, and so it assumes that everyone else must have the same motivations.

If all debate is actually just about power relations, then it's best to tamp down on commitment.

This opens the door for narratives that frame all great historical evils as resulting from dogmatism and overwrought belief. There are other factors here too, e.g. the rise of the managerial class/culture documented by MacIntyre and Taylor, etc. As noted before, the problem is:

A. This misses how heroic and good historical events (e.g. ending slavery) also involve strong conviction; and

B. That plenty of disastrous events, e.g. the fall of the Roman Republic and the later collapse of the Western Empire, stem more from a lack of conviction, not a surfeit of it. As Yeats put it:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Sounds familiar.

So IDK, I think it is partially historical accident, but I also think it fits into the broader pattern of connecting of liberty (and the Good) in terms of power. Truth is threatening because it gets associated with religion, Marxism, Nazism, etc.

Where could I find this in Plato? This is the sort of thing that I tend to think Simpson neglects in his critique of liberalism.

Republic, 442 b-c is one place (using the analogy of the city). I think Plato refers to the spirited part of the soul as the "natural ally" of the rational part when he first introduces the typology .. too, and maybe in a few other places. This comes out in the chariot image of the Phaedrus too.

On this point, C.S. Lewis (whose Abolition of Man focuses on just this question, particularly in the first chapter "Men Without Chests") also gives Alanus ab Insulis' De Planctu Naturae Prosa (iii) as an example, although I'm not familiar with that text.

I think you can find the same sentiment expressed at many points in the Philokalia though, for example by Saint Diadochos of Photiki, who, unlike many Pagans, does not see the irascible appetites, or anger in particular, as bad, but rather sees them as tools for rebuking the appetites, passions, and demons. He memorably advised that one fashion a whip from the name of Christ and drive out the demons from the soul as Christ drives out the merchants from the temple (the body itself being a temple to the Holy Spirit).

St. Thomas lays out a similar role for the irascible appetites in the first part of the second part of the Summa (roughly questions 20-30 IIRC), where he covers all the appetites (concupiscible then irascible) and discusses how none are evil of themselves, but are evil in their use (object, ordering to reason, or effect on habit).

So, while the idea is in Plato, it's often remarked that it is characteristically Christian to have a full-bodied redemption and endorsement of the lower (non-intellectual) appetites and the body in their "natural" (i.e. regenerated) state. Pagan thought tended to evolve to be more skeptical of the passions, appetites, and body. The Aeneid, for instance, seems to play with this tension quite a bit.

Simpson would add that Rawls himself admits that he is incapable of adjudicating in favor of Western values over any other value system. His project is a working out of the axioms of Western values without being in any way able to justify those values. This is similar to Keys' point

A deficiency that might be compounded if you did things like cut the cultural canon (Homer, Virgil, Milton, etc.) out of education due to concerns of "bias." Having removed all "bias," nothing supports one view over any other.

Both ancient and early-modern. Contemporary physicalism/materialism is sometimes very much an inheritor of this type of thinking though.

"Corpuscular/atomistic mechanism" might be more specific, but maybe too specific. You could consider Hobbes, Descartes (on the extended substance side of being), Gassendi, Boyle, Newton, Locke, etc.

That, or something very like it, is indeed the traditional argument for them. But, for many, what happened in Germany in the first half of the 20th century has more or less destroyed that argument. At the very least, we have to note that love of the humanities is not sufficient to prevent people going down some very wrong paths

Well, the irony here is that Germany is very often the primary example advocates of the classical education use to push their case (with at least some degree of plausibility IMHO). The modern research university is based on the German model that eschewed the liberal arts and the classical education structure and focused on technological progress and technical training instead. Germany was the poster child for a move towards rigidly technical education. Public debates in the US and UK specifically centered around the fear that this was giving them a leg up in economic and military competition as they rushed into their own reforms.

Nazism was also not particularly a project of the intelligentsia in the way communism was in Russia, so it seems harder to blame elite education.

This is a very strange debate. You seem to be arguing that the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of the dominance of liberalism. But I believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of the increasing dominance of illiberal forces, some of which call themselves neo-liberal. We agree about something! On the other hand, I'm not sure there has ever been a time when the world wasn't going to hell in a handbasket. Certainly, not in the last three hundred years.

Well, my claim is that contradictions and problems in modern liberalism are causing the rise of those illiberal forces. If it weren't for these internal dynamics, the external threats would be quite manageable. That is, liberalism in its current form is self-undermining. That's not saying that there is nothing good about liberalism, capitalism, modernity, or republican government. Quite the opposite. I find these trends particularly disturbing precisely because I see the benefits of republican government. Right now though, I think liberalism is destroying the future of republics, or at least putting them in jeopardy. At a certain point, an Augustus does become better for most people than rule by recalcitrant oligarchs. That was the reality of the death of the Roman Republic; it led to the best governance in a very long time.

Yes. It is certainly true that the successes of liberalism in, let us say the 19th and 20th century were the result of deep commitment and dogged determination. So it is odd that you think that people of that kind are "thumos-phobic" (if I've understood what you mean by that correctly). Their positions were based on rational argument, so it is also odd that you think that they were "logos-sceptical" (If I've understood what you mean by that correctly)

Right, I think you're missing what I've said about the timing. I said skepticism about thymos (always present to some degree) increases after the World Wars, and increases again in the post-modern/neo-liberal period after 1970. Logos-skepticism doesn't really enter the picture until that later period. As I pointed out, you can see quite the opposite attitude in the 40s and 50s. Now, truth and reason are seen as in someway inimical to democracy if they do not allow for a "bourgeoisie metaphysics" that allows for multiple, conflicting truth claims (pluralism). Previously, truth and reason were seen as supporting democracy, because people could be led towards the best path by reason and commitment to principles.

The erosion of culture by capitalism no doubt plays a role, because culture directs logos and thymos, but in our fractured environment culture lacks the capacity to act as a unifying force.

The problem with it, for Plato at least, is that it needs to be directed correctly.

Exactly. My claim is that today, we don't direct it so much as we just try to suppress it. It conflicts with "reasonableness" and a focus on safety.

In any case, it seems to me that the widespread condemnation of epithumia is wrong-headed. Our appetites include things that are not merely pleasurable but essential. The problem arises when they are pursued to excess or in the wrong way.

I agree 100%. There is nothing wrong with epithumia. What is problematic is when a society is led by epithumia, when it becomes epithumia-(appetite and safety)-centric. In our current case, this happens because of thymos-phobia and logos-skepticism (or even logos-phobia; I can't tell you how many times I have seen people argue for robust pluralism/relativism, including the wholesale violation of the principle of non-contradiction, because to do otherwise would court autocracy).

On the other hand, I'm not sure there has ever been a time when the world wasn't going to hell in a handbasket. Certainly, not in the last three hundred years.

Yes, but just because problems are perennial doesn't mean they don't get better or worse. The state of the West, or of the US specifically, is arguably more dismal that it has been in a long time, and the forces leading to this seem unlikely to abate or be mastered any time soon without significant change. Again, this is because the challenge to liberalism comes from within liberalism itself. If China and Russia fell into revolt tomorrow, the prospects for the West would not look particularly brighter. Indeed, the lack of external threats might accelerate the decline, the way it did for Rome after victory in the Second Punic War.

I don't see how it's a caricature. That's the view of the world that unites the Ionian materialists. As mentioned in the post, different thinkers did have their own "x factors" to add to the view (e.g. Anaxagoras' Nous). Corpuscular mechanism, and the idea of primary qualities, was also quite popular, although again, some models included different additional factors or forces (yet some didn't).

Even in later periods, someone like Bertrand Russell, who was well-versed in the science of his day, could write:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

It's, at the very least, the view of "how science says the world is," I grew up with, and one I've heard repeated back to me many times over the years.

Plus, a lot of popular philosophical problems are framed in these terms. For instance, the "Problem of the Many," tends to assume that it's fair to say things just are nothing but "clouds of particles." That's precisely why the problem emerges.

That's true. But the embrace of reasonableness was intended to avoid the necessity of storming beaches and resisting sieges, which were regarded as grossly uncivilized activities. Risks, by all means, but avoidance of barbarity as a priority.

Right, but the arc of the argument is that people who won't storm beaches or resist sieges (who lack thymos) also won't stand up to public corruption or resist the temptation to public corruption, and won't forgo current consumption for the sake of future goods (e.g. Europe's response to Russian aggression, the inability to moderately curtail consumption to address what appear to be unfolding environmental and fiscal disasters for future generations). So it isn't just about an ability to engage in war, but an ability to avoid war and crisis in the first place.

One reason for this is that the empiricist psychology undergirding liberalism tends to be fairly impoverished (in a number of ways). One way this manifests, in classical terms, is essentially the claim that man only has concupiscible appetites (i.e. an attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain), while ignoring the existence of irascible appetites (i.e. an attraction to the pursuit of arduous goods, where hope, not pleasure, is the key positive motivating force). Indeed, a lot of economics and political science is explicitly built on an anthropology that explicitly lumps all motivation into a concupiscible utility. And it is considered "reasonable" for man to be wholly concupiscible, a creature of epithumia, as is evident when people are chastised for voting "against their own economic interests," as if this, above all else, is what politics seeks to provide. Well, in liberal theory, that's perhaps true, the "common good" is just an aggregate of individual concupiscible goods, of consumption.

But Fukuyama's point, which seems to have been borne out quite well, is that human nature and the drive to meglothymos doesn't disappear just because one wants to banish it. Calling it "unreasonable" does little when the life of epithumia is itself not self-justifying, if it is ultimately "meaningless and purposeless," and the result of an irrational pleasure drive that reason can only do its best to satisfy. C.S. Lewis makes a similar but more nuanced point in the Abolition of Man, which is that, not only will thymos not disappear, but it will be destructive if it isn't oriented properly, and that orientation cannot be to epithumia, but must come from logos.

. They perceived that those narratives involved a great deal of irrational myth-making, which could not stand up to a rational critique

I think the voices that helped develop our current thymos-phobia and logos-skepticism were themselves plenty dogmatic and stuck living out their own myth, both the Russell-Stace-Camus types who declared the "obvious" meaninglessness and purposelessness of reality, and the later post-modern logos-skeptics, who themselves never challenge the empiricist presuppositions that led them towards skepticism.

That is certainly true. Are you suggesting that it is not a problem?

No, I think it's a huge problem. It ignores what the liberal arts are for. They are the ground, as you say, for making men capable of self-governance and self-rule (collectively and individually) as well as the ground for a common stock of ideas for political life, the pursuit of a common good. The move to make English all about "on the job communication," is atrocious in this regard.

I'd disagree about the value given to them in previous epochs. When Saint Augustine regularly cites Virgil, etc., he is drawing on a common culture and set of ideas as a vehicle for his thought. These played a quite large role in thought and politics, as the surviving texts themselves show. The liberal arts might be preparatory, but they are extremely important in this regard. You see this in John Milton being invited to essentially take on a role akin to Secretary of State in revolutionary England because of his learning for instance.

It was only in the 18th and 19th centuries that the status of the Humanities improved and became the mark of a civilized, cultivated person. This was a rational response to the improved market for an education for those who would never need to work.

They were considered essential for those entering public life from antiquity. This is why ancient political works and the works of the Church Fathers are full of literary references. I would also suppose it's why they tend to have good rhetorical style, that even comes out in old translations. You could give Origen or Augustine to a high schooler and expect them to come away with something fairly clear, without being bored to tears, which is certainly not true of a lot of philosophy or theology.

:up:

I don't think materialism as a whole is intuitive. However, the main intuition, that "what is most real is what is common to what I can see and touch" does have a certain deep appeal. I suppose it also has to do with what can be verified. What can be sensed can be verified, and what can be sensed with several senses (the common sensibles) is most secure.

But I tend to agree with you. There is this fairly common narrative where materialism was just humming along swimmingly in the 19th and early 20th century and then-BOOM-all the sudden quantum nonsense and other problems crop up, ruining it all, and this is why we need pragmatism, idealism, [insert your prefered ism here]. Maybe the narrative even as some truth to it. But materialism always had many problems (not just consciousness, but even the goal-directedness of plants, gravity, magnets, electricity, mathematics itself, etc.) and you can certainly find people who pointed these out throughout its entire history, Berkely probably being the funniest:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal.I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus."

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

Funny enough, that post originally included a paragraph about the old trope that: "no critic of post-modernism has ever understood it, and even if they have understood it, post-modernism has never actually effected anything" You know, the old "no true post-modernism," or "real post-modernism has never been tried." But I thought it was too long.

Well, it is a slippery term, not unlike "existentialist." But I do think it's a term we need because there is a real difference between early to mid-20th century liberalism, and the later "post-modern" "neoliberalism" (there might be "no true neoliberalism" either though). This difference accelerates with the decline of the USSR, and is exemplified by strong skepticism vis-á-vis grand narratives, an embrace of strongly relativistic theses, a heavy focus on debunking as opposed to positive argument (although this is already being identified in the 1950s), a heavy embrace of irony and desacralizarion , and I would say "logos-skepticism." By "logos-skepticism," I mean skepticism about the capacity of logos (reason, rationality) to be the organizing principle and asperation of society and individual life.

For instance, early Christian thought, particularly Origen and Clement of Alexandria, is extremely logo-centric in this way. Homer's Greeks are thymos-centric. They have an arete culture where "excellence" is the key pursuit of human life. Virgil would be a sort of mid-point, pivoting from arete to pietas, an alignment of honor to principles.

William Stace is a fine example because he thinks we face nihilism, but still has faith in logos, in principles. "To be genuinely civilized means to be able to walk straightly and live honorable" without "childish" props such as religion and teleology. There is a refreshing lack of irony in "Man Against Darkness."

Like I said, I think the biggest factor here is how the new outlook permeated the liberal arts, down to high school classrooms. Hanson and Heath's "Who Killed Homer?", now almost thirty years old, covers the effects on the discipline of classics for instance. There is the shift to focusing on "subverting," "decolonizing," "deconstructing," "constructing," "queering," etc. texts on the one hand, and then the tendency to begin cramming the latest scientific and mathematical jargon into humanities studies on the other, as well as a pivot to the abstruse (if not downright obscurantist).

There is a lot going on there, but one theory I like is that the reason the humanities latched on to this sort of style and thinking so readily is that the early-20th century focus on the primacy of science left the humanities as "a mere matter of opinion and taste." They weren't rigorous enough. They didn't produce "progress." They didn't fit in well with the now-dominant German conception of the "research university" as a place primarily concerned with publishing new technological findings. Aping the style of the sciences gives the humanities at least something of the atmosphere of the "legitimate fields," while being aligned towards "progress" gives them a claim to be doing something for society akin to what the natural sciences do through the development of new technologies.

Hence, the creation of analyses like:

This chapter is devoted to the narrative, situation of complex narrator-text or embedded focalization, NF1[F2Cx]. There is embedded (or secondary) focalization when the NF1 represents in the narrator-text the focalization of one of the characters. In other words, the NF1 temporarily hands over focalization (but not narration) to one of the characters, who functions as F2 and, thereby, takes a share in the presentation of the story. Recipient of the F2's focalization is a secondary focalizee (Fe2). (I. J. F. de Jong, Narrators and Focalizers. The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad [Amsterdam, 1987}, p. 101)

This is quite far from the "liberal arts" as the arts that "make men free" in terms of a capacity for individual self-governance and self-rule, although at least the less pessimistic, more Marxist thread in this shift still maintains something of this focus by still maintaining at least some idea about what exactly is being progressed towards.

For a range of thinkers, from Wittgenstein and Husserl to Deleuze and Heidegger, the critique of grand narratives involves anything but skepticism concerning truth. That is to say, for them it is the belief in foundational truth that courts skepticism, and the way beyond such skepticism requires the invocation of a groundless ground, a non-foundational yet determinate notion of truth.

I think this is debatable. Arguably there is an equivocation on what is meant by "truth" in play, but that's not what I meant by logos-skepticism at any rate.

What about literary theory? That's a bit like musicology I suppose.

There is an idea, and I'm not really sure how much I agree with it, that the humanities (which classically, would not tend to include philosophy) deals with "humanistic knowledge."

Humanistic knowledge, on these accounts, comes from our reflections on art, literature, and the human experience. It is an immediate knowledge of the human condition, including our emotional, social, intellectual, and sensory lives as we experience them. Of course, some literature addresses or even attempts to dramatize philosophy. This means that work in the humanities sometimes points towards universal and necessary truths (i.e. in theory, the type of truths that demarcate science). Epic poetry is a great example here, or the works of Dostoevsky, or Borges, etc.

One of my favorite “strange books” is William Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel. The book details the mathematics of Borges’s story. Bloch goes through many fields of mathematics to investigate the necessary principles at work in fathoming such a library. Borges, by contrast, shows how human experience interacts with these principles, e.g. the desperation of “librarians” as they search for a book that will contain their life story and vindicate all their acts, or the way meaning becomes divorced from language if there is no intentionality behind it.

The elements Borges brings to his engagement with the mathematical construct of the library involve a sort of connatural knowledge, an intuitive humanistic knowing that is not reducible to analysis and concepts. He doesn't need to bring in mathematical knowledge to explore the topic. Such knowledge is profound, but pre-conceptual. The story is partly a look at our emotional reaction to the (practically) infinite.

That's the idea at least. It makes some sense to me. Some elements of literary theory strike me as more scientific (although they are sometimes ill-advised in this). But work on literature proper seems fairly distinct to me. Actually, I think the drive to make the humanities more "scientific" has tended to be bad for the humanities, leading to obscurantism at times and unhelpful approaches. I think the liberal arts in particular have a no less important, but quite different role to play (in some ways, a more essential role for a functioning republic).

2) Again, pragmatism for me isn't about truth.

Right, but what do you mean by "there are no true ontological positions?" Maybe I have misunderstood. My assumption was that this meant there simply is no truth (or falsehood) as to positions about what really exists. For example, historical anti-realism. The position: "the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776" would be a position about what exist(s/ed), right? If there is no truth about this (an ontological position) but only measures vis-a-vis whether or not the methods we are pursuing are getting us the results we want, that seems to me to imply something like historical anti-realism, and a whole bunch of other anti-realisms.

But these sorts of anti-realisms bring up a host of issues. For instance, what is "justice" when facts (ontological positions) about the past (including murders, assaults, etc.) don't exist (cannot be true or false), but we are instead only interested in methods that produce the outcomes we seek? I feel like these are impossible to disentangle. Our desire for justice is bound up in questions of truth.

Maybe that's not how you meant it though?

1) As I see it, "what do I do next" is the fundamental question.

I'll be honest, I don't think I can fathom a psychology where this question isn't going to virtually always be massively informed by what someone thinks is true. I'm not sure how a method itself can be true, except analogously, by resulting in true judgements. Whereas, if "true method" just means "effective," then that starts to look to me a lot like "true = producing what I currently desire." Why? Because doesn't "effective" here just mean "producing the result we currently desire?"

Where am I going off the rails here?

I didn't say we should define truth in terms of usefulness. I don't remember bringing usefulness into this discussion at all. I said truth is a tool we use to help us decide how we should act.

See above. I may have misunderstood. The idea that "true methods" are those that get the results we want suggested to me that "true" here means "doing what we want," i.e. "useful towards some end."

Something else I didn't say.

Right, I just think it's something that follows from the denial of any truth/falsity for ontological positions. What exactly is episteme in if there are no true ontological positions?