In wisdom traditions wisdom usually involves letting go of desire.

At least in the Western context, it's generally letting go of bad/evil/unworthy/less fulfilling desires, and thus being free and able to fulfill good/worthy/truly fulfilling desires. So the goal is ultimately the fulfillment of a greater desire, and the ascent to a greater freedom. Not a "will to nothing" but to will the Good, where with greater knowledge and conformity, comes ever greater love and satisfaction.

The Platonists have the erotic ascent, the Peripatetics have properly educated appetites, etc. Desire is normally central, and deepens with ascetic practice. For instance, we get this vision in the Symposium:

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.

Or St. Augustine in the Confessions:

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

Dante at the climax of the Heaven of the Sun (wisdom) in the Paradiso is even more sensual:


Then, as the tower-clock calls us to come
at the hour when God's Bride is roused from bed
to woo with matin song her Bridegroom's love,

with one part pulling thrusting in the other,
chiming, ting-ting, music so sweet the soul,
ready for love, swells with anticipation

And in general, this does not lead to a denigration of the love of finite things, but rather its increase (as in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux's "Ladder of Love). Wisdom, by revealing creatures' ultimate context, reveals their true beauty. And so too for Rumi and the Sufi tradition:

Always at night returns the Beloved: do not eat opium to-night;
Close your mouth against food, that you may taste the sweetness of the mouth.
Lo, the cup-bearer is no tyrant, and in his assembly there is a circle:
Come into the circle, be seated; how long will you regard the revolution of Time?

Why, when God's earth is so wide, have you fallen asleep in a prison?
Avoid entangled thoughts, that you may see the explanation of Paradise.
Refrain from speaking, that you may win speech hereafter.
Abandon life and the world, that you may behold the Life of the world.



Even the Stoics generally distinguish that it is irrational desire that must be overcome (although they come closer to fetishizing total dispassion). The Orthodox, while more focused on asceticism, speak of transfiguring, not removing the appetites (including those of the body; likewise, Dante has the appetites of the body educated, not destroyed in the Purgatorio). My exposure to Hindu thought has generally suggested something similar. There might be exceptions, but for the West at least I think Saint Maximus the Confessor's words generally hold:

Nothing created by God is evil. It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not glory but vainglory. It is only the misuse of things that is evil, not the things themselves.

Or for another pithy summary, Saint Isaac of Nineveh:

The world" is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honor which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancor and resentment, and physical fear.

Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead…. Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.

The passions then are only unworthy desires. The goal is rather a perfection of freedom, to: "Turn my impulses into rigging for the ship of repentance, so that in it I may exult as I travel the world's sea to the haven of Thy hope."

There's an entire thread in this, isn't there?

Oh surely. Just the names on that list is enough. "How did Michel Foucault become the most assigned person in all of academia and by such a huge margin?" could be its own thread (and what happened to poor Boethius and Virgil, the two most copied authors for a millennia! In general the Romans seem to have faired worse than the Greeks.)

I'll just mention two influential traditions. In the Jewish tradition, human wisdom (chokmah) is thought to be a participation in divine wisdom (e.g., in the divine Logos in Philo of Alexandria). It is, in that sense, a gift, although people can be more or less receptive to it. It has practical, ethical, and mystical elements (in part tied to the degree of possession).

Key passages would be:

The praise of wisdom in the Wisdom of Solomon: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Wisdom%206%3A22-11%3A1&version=NABRE

The poetic interlude on wisdom in Job 28: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2028&version=KJV

The opening of Proverbs: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%201&version=KJV

And then there are also the significantly more dour references throughout Ecclesiastes. A particularly relevant one for today is the attack on a "live for today" hedonism presented instead Wisdom 2.

Then, in the Greek tradition, sophia is related to a deeper knowledge of metaphysical truths; consider Plato's divided line. The way this often varies from episteme (sciencia) is that it relates finite phenomena to the whole of existence, the creature to all creation and Creator, or involves an understanding of things through a direct noetic grasp of their principles (as opposed to say, quia demonstrations from effects, e.g., inductive pattern recognition).


Aristotle makes a distinction between phronesis, a virtue of practical understanding (excellence in making choices), i.e. the application of reason to right action (with virtues sort of serving as the "universals" of practical reason) and sophia, a theoretical understanding of things through their principles.

These two become fused in the later Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, where wisdom is often a participation in divine wisdom through which deeper knowledge is achieved. The knowledge the wise are said to possess of created things is almost more of an aesthetic sort, in that it is not instrumental knowledge, but rather a deeper understanding (hence the common pairing of pihilosophy with philokalia, "the love of beauty"). Wisdom tends to relate to the "big picture" and ultimate ends, which makes it distinct from any particular techne or science, which one might master without the perfection of the virtues. Wisdom is generally the crowning achievement of virtue (something like Plato's idea that the whole person must be unified and turned towards the Good for true knowledge of it to be possible).

Hence, praxis tends to be a focal point in that tradition, e.g., ascetic labors and particular "spiritual exercises." This is as true for the Pagan philosophers as the desert monastics. As Robert Finn and Pierre Hadot put it almost identically: "the (ancient) philosopher is a holy man or saint." For instance, when the philosophers go out to visit the desert monks in Saint Palladius' Sayings of the Desert Fathers, they remark on their similar practices, although the Christians tended to put a much greater focus on labor as a means of meditation, fostering humility (late-antique culture had a stigma against menial labor) and as a means of rendering hospitality and aid. This was partly practical; philosophers tended to be independently wealthy while Christian monks were often drawn from the lower class, and at any rate wealthy ones ideally parted with their wealth. This doesn't require that those possessing wisdom be monastics though; the Sayings for instance are full of examples of struggling monks being shown up and illumined by graceful ascetics who live in urban settings, or even within marriage, but are beyond the temptations of the world.

The Christian element adds a focus on "discernment," which can be seen in a lot the answers here.

A key idea is that wisdom (and thus virtue) is sought for its own sake, being not mainly about making "good choices" in a pragmatic sense (as the goal of wisdom anyhow), but about an intellectual joy that is achieved through contemplation that itself makes one a "good (just) person," but which also leads to a good (happy) life, to joyous action (as opposed to the suffering brought on by vice). Whereas if wisdom is primarily about making good pragmatic choices, then it really is more of a means than an end.

Hence, there is a way in which skepticism, particularly skepticism vis-á-vis ultimate ends, virtue, and "the big picture," seems to invert these notions of wisdom, while still appearing fairly similar on the surface. If wisdom is not an ultimate end, it becomes instrumental. If "wisdom is recognizing that one must take a pragmatic approach to everything, seeking a balanced (short versus long term) enjoyment, since one is always in the absence of (the older) 'wisdom,' (i.e., a grasp of ultimate ends in their principles)" that actually makes "wisdom" quite a bit different. If the wise are "wise" in virtue of making "good choices," we might ask then, in virtue of what are "good choices" themselves called "good?"

How important do we think wisdom is in our lives, and do we agree with contemporary thinkers like John Vervaeke that we “suffer a wisdom famine in the West”?

I would imagine this is a quite common sentiment amongst perennialists or fans of particular Eastern or historic Western wisdom traditions. And this makes a certain sort of sense since, if one considers them important (or the sort of classical liberal arts education) then the fact that they are not generally taught will be something in need of change.

For instance, looking at college syllabi it would seem that very little of the Eastern tradition gets taught, and pre-modern Western thinkers don't fair that much better. Aristotle and Plato are the key exceptions there. Yet if you look for the big Stoics, Neoplatonists, or basically anything from later antiquity to the end of the middle ages, it's very sparse. This holds for a good deal of the "literary canon" too, at least in comparison to contemporary social theorists (e.g. Virgil versus bell hooks or Adorno). The drive for diversity has not tended to mean teaching other historical traditions either (e.g., the big Islamic philosophers). For philosophy and broader social theory, the post-moderns, liberals, and to lesser extent the Marxists, really dominate. But, for most perrenialists (and I do think they are right here), these are in key respects much more similar to each other than they are to any of the older traditions. So, even for people not committed to any particular tradition, there appears to be a missing diversity element that allows for unchallenged assumptions or a sort of conceptual blindness. This need not even be in alarmist terms. It's simply "hard to get" without any sort of grounding, and that grounding is missing.

Yes, I think so. I've been attempting to get AI to find instances of reference to "degrees of wisdom", without much success - using terms such as "greater wisdom," "much wisdom," "little wisdom". I'm looking for some sort of evidence, rather than just making shit up. My hypothesis is that if one is wise in some area, that's an end to it; there's no more or less involved. So absence of evidence confirms my hypothesis... :grimace:

It's not uncommon in ancient and medieval thought to speak of greater or lesser wisdom. This is basically in line with any of the virtues, which could be more or less perfected.

For example: 29 And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore, 30 so that Solomon's wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. 31 For he was wiser than all other men, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol, and his fame was in all the surrounding nations. (I Kings 4)

Note, for this comparison to work, the "people of the East" and those named need to be wise of course. Hagiography is full of this sort of thing though.

In terms of contemporary usage, I don't see appeals to wisdom (as a specific concept) in general that often.

Do you mean in analytic philosophy of mind in particular (where that exact term tends to be used), or more generally?

Because of the exclusion problem and related problems, pretty much all the discussion of mental to mental causality in that space that I have seen actually centers around mental to physical causation (generally on the idea that, if a mental state m1 brings about another, m2, such a change is thought to also necessarily involve a physical state transition from p1 to p2). There might be other areas of focus but I have not come across them.

More broadly speaking, the Stoics talk a lot about the flow of thoughts from phantasiai (impressions) to thoughts (logismoi). Another big early influence is Aristotle's De Memoria et Reminiscentia, which spawned many commentaries by the Islamics and Scholastics. This stuff develops into a more semiotic theory that relies a lot on the causality specific to signs. John of St. Thomas is normally given as the final culmination of this tradition before it is picked up again in different ways by C.S Peirce and Brentano (phenomenology). But since none of these are super accessible, John Deely is a better place to start even if I think there are some flaws in his treatment. His "Dialogue With a Realist" and Red Book are short and accessible. A key idea is that physical phenomena can act as signs but there are also formal signs (internal, like concepts or species intelligibiles) that generate interpretants, so mental causality isn't necessarily distinct from the physical.

Now if you're focused more on discourse and demonstration, that's a whole different can of worms but there is a lot of interesting stuff there.

In more of the Stoic mode (loosely speaking), there is a ton of detailed stuff from Byzantium and the larger "East" (Christian and Islamic) but it tends to be far more focused on practice, so for the theoretical portions you have to wade through a lot of other material, and the modern overviews I have found are all still written with spiritual practice in mind over theory.

Edit: Deely's Four Ages of Understanding is longer but a neat historical look at how understandings of mental causality evolved and eventually led to the turn to "epistemology as first philosophy" and empiricism/physicalism versus idealism as a defining struggle within modern thought.

I think you're right and bring up some good points. My point would be that other maladaptive thymotic outlets are not so straightforwardly corrosive for politics and civic virtue.

For instance, two things I've noted before:

This phenomena [the maladaptive search for thymos] isn't unique to the far-right. I think it explains many trends across our culture, e.g., the widespread popularity of post-apocalyptic media. The basic idea there is: "if everything falls apart I can actually become a hero, actually have a meaningful life, rather than living a meaningless life where I have been reduced to a bovine consumer," or even "war or crisis will help make me into something more heroic." [Note: whether he is read correctly or not, I think this phenomena explains something of the enduring appeal of Nietzsche in our era]. And this also helps explain other changes in patterns of consumption (e.g. "tactical" everything flying off the shelves, people driving off-road vehicles for their suburban commutes, etc.).

The effects of this sort of thinking are particularly strong in the sphere of gender politics because sex is one of the last elements of human life not to be wholly commodified. Hence, sex remains a strong source of validation, a source of self-worth. And yet, as de Beauvoir points out, Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic ends up playing out between men and woman here, because the misogynist, having denigrated woman, can no longer receive meaningful recognition from her.

Now, the political gap between the genders and the follow phenomena like the "Manosphere" and equally "economic" dating advice for women (e.g., "sexual marketplace" lingo) certainly do have follow on effects for politics, but not in the same way that direct calls for activism do. The two are not unrelated though of course.

In this sense, the aesthetic dimension of activism may reflect a deeper transformation of subjectivity under capitalist conditions, where novel forms of expression and recognition are constantly negotiated. So, the sense of identity is no longer a fixed essence but becomes something performatively achieved and continually redefined.

Right, and also identity is less fixed because it is less attached to more static sources such as a particular denomination, ethnicity, or even class (class identity has dissolved in some ways even as economic mobility plunges). Patrick Deneen is pretty good on how liberalism (both conservative and progressive) tends to positively drive the destruction of these more static forms of identity in its quest to transform man into homo oecononimicus (or in more positive terms, into enlightened—perhaps Rawlsian or Nozickite—properly atomized rational, reasonable utility maximizers; "properly atomized" here being "holding to just those relations the liberal individual positively consents to").

I find Charles Taylor to be quite good on the appeal of the New Age movement in this context. But, because liberal, capitalist culture tends to be quite politicized and focused on competition (and nowadays, very conspiratorial, and also soaked in the language of market competition) these efforts, some of which might be very positive for some groups, can often derail into toxic "culture war" activism. For instance, I saw a paper once that identified a solid path between organic food, meditation, and wellness spaces (all positive I would say) and anti-vaccine activism, which for some broadens out into participation in "culture war" identities.

@Joshs

Having read further, I now agree that as the chapter wears on Landa seems to have difficulty with conflating the philosopher and the broader cultural phenomenon that shares some similarities (and influence, Pulp Fiction is covered and IIRC Tarantino claims direct influence). I get using a name as a sort of adjective, in that there isn't really a better word to use, but he is at the very least being ambiguous, and at times I think explicitly conflating to get his Marxist view hammered down. The funny thing is that I don't think the polemical part of his analysis even needs this. Indeed, it's weakened by it. Isn't one of the indictments of mass culture that it butchers all subtle thought?

Also, the Marxist theses seem to wear particularly thin during the commentary on Pulp Fiction. I guess I'll complain about that in a few days when I have time to summarize it lol.

Let's get the story straight with Nietzsche, the only Hero to Nietzsche was the tragic hero.

The "Nietzschean Hero" isn't a "hero as per Nietzsche," it's a fictional hero inspired by Nietzsche. And we might suppose that pop culture versions will tend to stray from the original vision. "Inspired by" does not need to entail "slavishly dependent upon" either, just as a "Byronic hero" need not be a hero Lord Byron himself would have written (or even liked; Batman is sometimes an example here and Byron might have found him silly).

To see Landa's point, it's worth considering why Max Stirner's more audaciously egoistic view wouldn't be as widely attractive to artists and audiences. It's unlikely to suit many in the same way that the image of the criminal as a sort of lion trapped inside a cruel zoo is:

What [the criminal] lacks is the wilderness, a certain freer and more perilous nature and form of existence in which all that is attack and defence in the instinct of the strong human being comes into its own. His virtues have been excommunicated by society . . . It is society, our tame, mediocre, gelded society, in which a human being raised in nature, who comes from the mountains or from adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal.

Forget crime for a moment, I feel like this definitely is a strain of romanticism heavily present in post-apocalyptic media (and increasingly, collective fantasies). The person contained by norms and customs (morality, but also the whole bourgeois environment, including its distractions) is in a sense liberated to become something more (and more "real").

Now cynically, we might chalk this up to "bourgeois boredom" (and I even think there is a good case to be made that Nietzschean suffered from this, one symptom being his paeans to historical greatness). But I would say the problem is broader than how dismissive that phrase might sound. I suppose it's a sort of nihilism that is being grappled with.

I don't know if it has to suppose that neoliberalism is "complete," just that it is hegemonic.

First, that neoliberalism is a completed project with no real internal challengers.

Well, Fukuyama's End of History thesis, despite often being misread, has held up remarkably well over 30+ years. There is no challenger with any significant following. Even the authoritarians within the liberal order describe themselves primarily as the saviors of that same order. The policy solution for the failures of liberalism are still virtually always "more liberalism" (just "more" of variously its conservative or progressive varieties). Even the biggest external critics of the global order keep "legislatures" and hold titles like "president" instead of "king" or "caliph." When they want to attack the neoliberal order, they almost always do so in its own terms, by claiming it fails to live up to democracy, providing liberal freedoms, etc. They don't attack it with any sort of coherent parallel vision. Radical Islam is the closest thing to a real challenger, and it necessarily has limited appeal.

The term "internal" makes things a bit more difficult though. I'd say that neoliberalism does have one significant challenger, and that is its own positive feedback loops. But if neoliberal states like the US become less democratic, and more authoritarian, I don't think that necessarily means much for neoliberalism. It has proven if can exist alongside more oligarchic or authoritarian settings.

Second, that both the ‘Woke’ and the ‘Alt-Right’ are united in their rejection of liberalism, driven by its perceived spiritual or moral emptiness.

That might put to fine a point on it. The lack of any sort of thymotic outlet leads to activism for activism's sake. That is not the same thing as a self-conscious rejection of liberalism per se, nor even a recognition of its spiritual and moral emptiness. All it requires is that activism becomes a sort of performative outlet for the desire for recognition that is otherwise frustrated in a society of atomized "worker/consumers."

That's an interesting thought. But what do you think then about the fact that a lot of this stuff springs organically from economically marginal communities as mentioned above:

I am not wild about the "Marxist" framing either. The part that originally grabbed my eye when skimming it on Hannibal Lecter didn't fall into this as much. I don't think it's entirely wrong, but I think it causes Landa to miss some pretty obvious counter examples. For one, the spiritual, artistic, and economic home of gangster rap is America's urban ghettos, just as the home of the cult of prohibition gangsters was low-income working-class neighborhoods. Likewise, the fetishization of evil (or at least its outward, macabre symbols) in the horror movie scene, and groups like Korn, or Rob Zombie (who crosses over into film) issues more from the trailer parks of economically marginal areas in the South, Appalachia, and the Midwest than from bourgeois suburbs (so too for the hardcore punk stream of horror fetishization, which comes from working class urban neighborhoods. Hence Dickies and Carhart work clothes being an enduring part of that style; it's what young mechanics and factory workers showed up in to shows after work).

For instance, Jack Kerouac didn't write On the Road to convince a generation of impressionable Baby Boomers that freedom and authenticity lay in a sort of expressive hedonism, he did it because he believed in and loved it (even as it led down a pretty sad road). Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is likewise trying to capture the excitement of a particular moment. The corporate world absolutely tries to commercialize this sort of thing, to cash in on it, but they don't drive it (even though the media itself is sort of exactly the sort of media Aldous Huxley predicts totalitarian states will try to create in his 1946 forward to A Brave New World; he particularly mentions sexual liberty as a sop to counter declines in other forms of liberty).

So, on the one hand we might have an explanation for why the larger system countenances and helps to promote the phenomenon, but I don't think this explains its organic development and appeal, particularly because any remaining "elite" is largely digesting and embracing the same exact popular culture in the Neoliberal era, and buys into it as much as anyone else (e.g., for someone like Musk, such media hardly seems to be a tool of influence, but rather it is what influences him—many billionaires seem to desire to become "e-celebs" as much today's tweens).

He calls it madness because passion is juxtaposed to being reasonable, to being concerned with utility (The conscious mind reasoning with language, is using concepts that are common to the group in origin, and therefor often concerned with utility for the group). The passionate man is mad or unreasonable in the sense that he isn't concerned with utility.... he spends himself in pursuit of that passion, often to the detriment of himself.

:up:

And this is precisely how Landa frames why Hannibal is attractive and the other killers that surround him in the narrative are pathetic or somehow sick/weak.

But note, this is far from nihilistic, or some kind of random disordered madness, It is directed at achieving what he is passionate about. That ruling passion serves as an ordering principle of his instincts, whereas a villain like the Joker would be more of an example of someone where anarchy in the instincts rules, a degenerate in Nietzsches view.

Yeah, I suppose I should have been more specific here since the Joker is very different across different portrayals. I was thinking largely of The Dark Night and even more so related portrayals in less popular media. In The Joker, Joker is more of a classic socialist victim-turned-criminal. In others, he is purely anarchic. But in The Dark Night, he has a particular aesthetic ethos. He is shining a light on Gotham's internal corruption, but not to because he believes it should be made to reflect some sort of moral absolute, or principle of civil virtue, but because he thinks it is false, shallow and hollow. Gotham deserves a "better class of criminal," the sort who does it for the fun of it, for the artistry. The way they did Bane was sort of similar here too; Nolan didn't show a ton of range in motivation.

And Landa's idea (which I agree with) is not that the criminal is some sort of Nietzschean ideal. The Joker doesn't need to be the Ubermensch or a hero to aspire to. The point is rather than there is something laudable and worth glorifying. Hence is point early on about the criminal representing a sort of half step towards the ideal. But this is still a step beyond the herd. Hannibal though, represents a better sort of icon, because I agree, there is a sort of uncontrolled anarchy in most Joker depictions.

What I think might be happening here with this sympathizing with these villains in Western culture is on the one hand a sense that we want to fantasize about setting free some of these impulses that have been suppressed in a Christian culture. But in doing so we still end up using these exaggerated distorted Christian tropes because that is what we are familiar with... because Good and Evil is the distorting binary we are used to thinking in.

That makes sense to me. Especially since such norms are increasingly unanchored in a largely secular popular culture and imagination. And even within the realm of religion, there was a huge movement in popular theology towards making morality either merely the result of divine command (sheer "thou shalt" because it says so) or making morality entirely an emotional/affective drive. On either view, there is ultimately nothing to understand. One obeys or one doesn't (and there is an extrinsic punishment or reward or there isn't), or else one feels the morality or one doesn't. If one doesn't fear the punishment or feel the "proper" feelings, what else is there to say? All that's left is oppressive social forces to force us in line.

Anyhow, Nietzsche believed all of this is more or less inevitable, because reason is a dissolvent for myth and faith, and so a civilization based on that will eventually eat its own tail. Realizing this, he felt compelled to become sort of an accelerationist, wanting to clear the old to make space for the new.

Yes, so to bring this back down to the criminal, this is part of what they do that is laudatory. They might be unsavory or even evil in some respects, but they are tearing down something that has to go.

But on the bolded part, I would simply disagree with this. It's correct in the context of the 19th century, where notions of causation, reason, etc. have already been drastically deflated. I would go as far as to say that notions of the Good, reduced from limitless fecundity, a presence is all that even appears desirable, to "universal maxims" or a "moral calculus," already amount to a conceptual castration of the Good. Reason too loses all its erotic elements and become wholly discursive and calculative, lacking all appetite, and is thus disqualified from any sort of leadership role except as a sort of "hired executive," acting in the service of the appetites.

Against this though, even if one accepts the thesis that a broader view starts with Plato (and I think this is false, you can see threads in Homer, in the Hebrew wisdom literature, etc.), it became the dominant thread in Pagan and Christian thought by late antiquity and survived over a thousand years, finding ample space to flourish in Judaism and Islam. It was the Reformation, an upswell of fideism and the efforts of figures who were decidedly critical of reason and who wanted to invert the old narrative that unseated it. Not until the Enlightenment, when all the terms of the narrative have already radically changed, does reason start to eat itself (and I'd say this is because it loses its erotic elements, but that's a bit off topic). Things like Plato's Socrates exploding into ecstatic dithyrambs on love have essentially been excluded from the deflated "logos" of the Enlightenment; it is closer in some ways to the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, although it is more a union of the two.

Not all is political, I agree. Universally there is this divide between the urban and the rural, but in the US it's especially nasty. The hostility especially against the poor is very telling, as if it's OK and not bigoted for white people to talk in a derogatory manner especially about poor whites. How hillbillies, crackers or white trash are talked about even publicly is quite astonishing.

It's also shrunken some differences. For instance, I've heard the sentiment expressed, and even seen it in op-eds, where bourgeois Americans (or Europeans) claim they have more in common with and feel closer to (more kinship with) other bourgeois from Dubai to Hong Kong then with their fellow citizens outside their socio-economic context.

Yet why shouldn't this be. One of the great benefits (or deficits) of (neo)liberalism is that it makes "everywhere everywhere else." This helps liberate individuals from custom and culture, and facilitates the free flow of labor, ideas, and capital. But it also means that the biggest differences to cause tensions no longer exist between nations (indeed, national identity is dissolved) but between those areas that have entered this space and everywhere else.

Now, when people actually say this out loud, they will almost always frame it as: "I don't feel kinship with my fellow citizens in the hinterlands," but I think there is also a way in which this applies to those within their own urban contexts who sit outside their socio-class space.

The dissolution of custom and culture brings with it its own tensions, since there is no longer a "binding together" of ends and identity. To some extent, this is papered over by making pluralism and the destruction of custom its own goal. But this cannot go on forever. Eventually there isn't much left to transgress or destroy except for liberalism and pluralism itself. I think that's pretty much the stage we have gotten to. Once that sort of "call to activism in service to liberalism" is no longer an option (because neoliberalism has won) only the pleasures of epithumia—i.e., sensible pleasures, wealth, and safety—are left to support liberalism. Hence, those seeking thymos (honor, recognition) or any higher logos (as against the emptiness or "decadence" of an epithumia culture) will end up turning against liberalism. I think you can see this in "Woke" and the "Alt-Right."




It's an interesting comparison, since the Nazis also produced a lot of strong pronouncements of relativism and anti-realism paired with prophetic, absolutist rhetoric. I am not sure if this was a particularly common combination in Nazis though, or if these sort of pronouncements just tend to be selected by historians because they are interesting and tend to be made by more intellectual writers (the same could be said of Woke to be fair). I just know I have seen a lot of them. For instance, a sort of amoral "historical Darwinism" was at least common and accepted enough to make it into some official orders of the day I've seen from the Eastern Front. But these orders are also always in apocalyptic, Manichean tones. In fact, "mercy and morality must be left behind" precisely because "the clash of the races is our final struggle" is a common theme.

The point I think Nietzsche is trying to make here is simply that reason or conscious thought is often only rationalisation or justification after the fact (and thus falsification) of things we just want to do out of some instinctual or a-rational drive.

Right, and I can see where @Joshs is coming from because I think Landa's thesis is somewhat obscured here because we are starting with Chapter 6. The earlier parts of the book are all on Nietzschean heros. This section is specifically on villain characters who are nonetheless embraced in some sense. The thesis is not that Nietzsche supports villains above heroes, but rather his relationship to a certain sort of response to a certain sort of villain that has evolved in Western culture.

I think, to your point, this insight, a sort of self-knowledge and self-respect vis-á-vis one's own (and the world's) arationality and amorality underscores the admiration for a sort of villain: the "insane" villain who is merely being honest about the greater insanity of their own context, and is thus in a sense performing an act of self-mastery and yes-saying, affirming the world-that-is and not the imagined moral world-that-ought-to-be that is ultimately mere delusion. The Joker is a sort of paradigmatic case here.

Stace's famous 1948 "Man Against Darkness" is basically taken a step further. For Stace there is no God or transcendence for man, so he must stand "against the darkness" and must form a moral order of kindness, truth, and justice. For the Joker-type hero, Stace is still clinging to delusion. Such a villain isn't admirable because they do evil, but precisely because they recognize Stace's remaining delusion for what it is, slavery to old ideas. The violence isn't the point. It's that the violence is used creatively to transcend the old order and to create a Miltonian creative whole out of the inchoate chaos, overthrowing the shadowy corpses of the old gods.

Contrast this with earlier visions of the good life and self-mastery, where logos (reason) must order the lower appetites and passions. Logos has authority here precisely because it is:

A. Capable of knowing and desiring the Good.
B. Is itself a participation in a sort of greater Logos that perfuses and goes beyond the world.

In later modern narratives, there is first suspicion and the a denial that human logos can actually perform this function. This makes the old sort of narrative a sort of delusion and slavery that the villain exposes and transcends. The violence can be seen as destructive creation in this context.

but Im not particularly interested in another discussion of fascism among the unwashed and their superficial readings of great philosophers.

Sure, but I don't think that's a particularly fair classification of Landa's work.

Same with:

Landa links Nietzsche to Sade, arguing that his philosophy is essentially sadistic, advocating the infliction of pain for the pleasure of mastery. It uses the figure of Hannibal Lecter as an exemplar of this Nietzschean sadism. This is a moralistic and psychological reduction. Nietzsche's interest in hardness, suffering, and cruelty is ethical, not psychological. It is about the conditions for artistic and spiritual creation. The "cruelty" Nietzsche speaks of is first and foremost directed at oneself: it is the cruelty of the sculptor who breaks the stone to create the statue. It is the active, affirmative force that destroys the reactive within us (the "herd" mentality, the internalized "slave morality").
The "Joy of the Knife" is not the joy of hurting others but the aesthetic joy of a force achieving its maximum expression.

Your counterpoint to Landa is, in fact, exactly what he himself argues. For Landa, what you have said is precisely the reason why Hannibal is "great" and the other killers in the novels/films are not. If sadism was the point, the other killers would be Hannibal's equal instead of being pathetic.

Re fascism, Landa cites Primo Levi:

Nietzsche’s message is profoundly repugnant to me; . . . yet it seems that a desire for the sufferings of others cannot be found it. Indifference, yes, almost on every page, but never Schadenfreude, the joy in your neighbour’s misfortune and even less the joy of deliberately inflicting suffering.The pain of the hoi polloi, of the Ungestalten, the shapeless, the not-born-noble, is a price that must be paid for the advent of the reign of the elect; it is a minor evil, but still an evil; it is not in itself desirable. Hitlerian doctrine and practice were much different.

Levi’s argument is significant for our purposes since, precisely by implying that Nietzsche did not relish cruelty as such, the social functionality of his brand of sadism is highlighted. It suggests that its ultimate rationale was not a mere psychological condition or aesthetical predilection, but rather a hardened recognIf the essentially gentle hearted Nietzsche had to embrace sadism, in a sense against his own psychological and emotional inclinations, this attests all the more the structural, objective necessity to inflict pain which Nietzsche acknowledged and which, however reluctantly, he was bound to affirm and uphold.ition of the social necessity of inflicting suffering. It also stands to reason that, actually to enact such sadism as a social practice as opposed to merely commend it as a necessary evil, would require the agency of natures far less squeamish than Nietzsche’s.

Landa's point is not that Nietzsche is offering an apologia for the excesses of capital per se, but rather that this same strand can be coopted for such an apologia fairly easily.

Notice that this way of talking assumes there’s a subject sitting inside a body, and this subject continues to be itself as it decides what it wants and needs to fulfill its desires. Now compare this to the language Nietzsche uses in the following quotes, where he says there is no ‘egoism’ and no ‘individual’.

But for the existentialists it doesn't imply this. They don't ignore the sorts of passages you quoted, but build on this idea of the self in flux to construct a particular sort of framework for "self-mastery" to live up to Nietzsche's admonition to: "Become who you are. Do what only you can do. Be the master and the sculptor of yourself."

So, a specific view of the self as a sort of artistic project that is always in via emerges from passages such as:

Thus, in the ideal of the philosopher it is precisely the strength of will, the hardness and ability to make long-range decisions that must be part of the idea "greatness"...

By contrast, today, when the herd animal in Europe is the only one who attains and distributes honours, when "equality of rights" all too easily can get turned around into equality of wrongs - what I mean is into a common war against everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative fullness of power and mastery - these days the sense of being noble, of willing to be for oneself, of being able to be different, of standing alone, and of having to live by one's own initiative - these are part of the idea "greatness," and the philosopher will reveal something of his own ideal if he proposes "The man who is to be the greatest is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a man lavishly endowed with will - this is simply what greatness is to be called: capable of being as much a totality as something multifaceted, as wide as it is full." And to ask the question again: today - is greatness possible?

Beyond Good and Evil - 212

One thing is needful. -- To "give style" to one’s character-- a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed -- both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!

It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relaxes in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.

The Gay Science - 290

But this "self-creation" doesn't ignore the denial of any static or metaphysical subject, it rather uses this fact as the ground for the notion of "being an artist of oneself." Just as existentialists like Solomon don't ignore Nietzsche's fatalism but instead make it part of their existentialist project. The "self" here isn't the liberal given individual, and this is precisely why these readings are often hostile to liberalism, socialism, and democracy in the way Nietzsche was.

I bring this up because I think these readings of Nietzsche have tended to be more influential on popular culture, and particularly the area we are discussing.

Edit: on a side note, one difficulty here is the tendency to view the unconscious as a primitive "lizard brain." It is often described as appetitive and perhaps emotional, but lacking in structured content and logos. This is perhaps the legacy of Freud, or Freud over Jung. But, I had written before about how the unconscious could be considered much more broadly, and as much more "capable." But it is also conditioned by the conscious mind in this respect. "Self-artistry" is, in part, made possible through this conditioning; just as Aristotle sees a path to greater freedom despite our inability to achieve constant, complete mindfulness, through our intentional choice of habits.

So, for the sake of clarity, the Boltzmann brain comes in because our experiences and memories are consistent with both our living in the world we think we do and with our being Boltzmann brains that might dissolve at any moment. The evidence we have doesn't determine our embracing one theory over the other.

Actually, given some multiverse formulations, it seems that we are vastly more likely to be Boltzmann-like (there are many similar variants) brains than citizens in a lawful universe. Or, even if we are in a seemingly lawful universe, it would be vastly more likely that we are in one that has just randomly happened to behave lawfully by sheer coincidence for a few billion years, and will turn chaotic in the coming moments. In which case, while the case is underdetermined, we might conclude that our being Boltzmann like is vastly more likely.

Now, if we are hardcore Bayesian brainers, what exactly is the wholly predictive mind supposed to do when available data forces it to conclude that prediction is hopeless? It's in a pickle!

(This flaw in multiverse theories that fail to place any real restrictions on the "multiverse production mechanism" (e.g. Max Tegmark's view that all mathematical objects exist) is, IMHO, completely fatal to attempts to offer up the multiverse as a solution to the Fine Tuning Problem, but that's a whole different can of worms.)

The point on divine freedom: freedom of indifference versus freedom of excellence, is an important one. I would just add there that "freedom of indifference" collapses into contradiction at the limit. At the limit, it assumes that absolute freedom is absolute arbitrariness, which is of course the opposite of any sort of conscious choice. For it implies that any truly free choice must be determined by nothing at all, and so must be random. More importantly, if the ability to "do anything" is a sort of maximal freedom, then actually choosing anything is a limit on freedom because to have chosen anything is to have made a determinate choice, but to have made any determinant choice necessarily rules out other choices (such as not choosing). Hence, maximal freedom requires never making any choices, but not being able to make choices is the definition of being unfree, a contradiction.

Hegel tackles this early in the Philosophy of Right. I think you can actually trace a dialectical move from this contradiction up to a sort of "freedom of excellence" through several stages.

On the demonstration of the Trinity, one issue I thought of is that the distinction between God's will and God's intellect is generally considered to be merely conceptual. It is a distinction that appears for us, but it isn't a real distinction (else God would not be simple). It's the same way "good" and "true" apply to being generally, but don't add anything to being; they are being as considered from some perspective. But then it would seem that the distinction would have to be real if it is generating subsistent relations, no?

I hadn't, but I think it's a good example of the sort of left-ward glorification of crime. Now, in one sense, that case simply represents the enduring (and ancient) appeal of the outlaw who challenges unjust power structures. That isn't particularly "Nietzschean," but it is a "glorification of crime." The two are sometimes paired in pop culture though. Often, the traditional outlaw role is used to justify a more Nietzschean character to the audience (e.g. Batman's Joker in many variants).

But I do think there is a Nietzschean(or ish) dimension in hyper-partisan, conspiratorial circles' view of revolutionary crime. Generally, though, it is the adversary who is lauded in Nietzschean terms. That is, the adversary (e.g., the "Wall Street CEO") has gone beyond good in evil in service to their pursuit of powers, and is in some sense admirable in this way.

For example, Immortal Technique's "Rich Man's World" a sort of gangster rap parody of the "real gangsters" (the "CEOs") can be read in an almost laudatory light. It is these masters of capital who are, in fact, the true masters of self-assertion.

And sometimes (of course not always) this plays out as: "but we, the 'good guys,' are hamstrung by a commitment to a defunct morality and lack of realism." This isn't just on the left of course, you see it in antisemitism all the time. I also saw it in some of the younger Egyptians I taught, who had a sort of respect for Mossad that seemed to cross over into a fetishization ("at least they keep their eye on the ball and pursue power effectively").

This is normally paired with ascriptions of power to the adversary that require a bit of imagination, e.g., Mossad or the CIA running all of world history, everything being a plot dreamed up in some Wall Street boardroom, etc. The conspiratorialness isn't the point here of course, but rather a sort of admiration for the rival as in some way a clarified example of a pursuit of desirable power, which could be contrasted with views that tend to see the adversary, temporally powerful in some ways as they might be, as essentially a flawed and miserable figure (e.g. Saint Augustine's "the wicked man, though a king, is a slave, and what is worse, he is a slave to as many masters as he has vices."), or one who is simply deserving of straight condemnation (e.g. Sauron in The Lord of the Rings).

I haven't made it through the whole thing yet. I agree in part; I am not wild about the "Marxist" framing either. The part that originally grabbed my eye when skimming it on Hannibal Lecter didn't fall into this as much. I don't think it's entirely wrong, but I think it causes Landa to miss some pretty obvious counter examples. For one, the spiritual, artistic, and economic home of gangster rap is America's urban ghettos, just as the home of the cult of prohibition gangsters was low-income working-class neighborhoods. Likewise, the fetishization of evil (or at least its outward, macabre symbols) in the horror movie scene, and groups like Korn, or Rob Zombie (who crosses over into film) issues more from the trailer parks of economically marginal areas in the South, Appalachia, and the Midwest than from bourgeois suburbs (so too for the hardcore punk stream of horror fetishization, which comes from working class urban neighborhoods. Hence Dickies and Carhart work clothes being an enduring part of that style; it's what young mechanics and factory workers showed up in to shows after work).

Now, to be fair, not all of this is necessarily "Nietzschean" in its "glorification," so perhaps it doesn't fit his target. However, some of it certainly is. The fetishization of serial killers he describes is at least equally shared by the working class as the bourgeoisie. Arguably, it's almost "classist" to assume that the "proletariat" cannot get the appeal in the same way :smile: .

However, the thread he follows does seem quite relevant to me. Whether the reading of Nietzsche as aligned with a certain form of capitalism (or more accurately, a certain form of life within the context of capitalism) is the "correct reading of Nietzsche" is less interesting to me than that elements of such a view have clearly been a very popular and influential reading of Nietzsche. For instance, I've seen Nietzsche invoked by Hollywood filmmakers, hip hop stars, and some rock stars (e.g., David Bowie and Iggy Pop) in this sort of way.

This isn't an explicit justification of capitalism (which I don't think is what Landa is saying from what I've read). Rather, capitalism is what it is, and there is a certain sort of way to live in it and take advantage of it. It is only "justified" or "preferable" in that it leaves open the path to go beyond it as a sort of Dionysian overcomer. Capitalism is a useful expedient because it clears away the "tyranny of the herd" (socialism or progressive liberalism) as well as the calcified rule of old ideas/traditions/norms and their protectors, the old aristocracy (e.g., forms of conservative liberalism). The part on the Loeb and Leopold Trial did not suggest to me: "Nietzsche is advocating for the interests of the bourgeoisie," but rather that the latter has a certain strong affinity for elements of Nietzsche's thought. There is a difference between making Nietzsche a prophet of capitalism and making him a useful thinker for certain strains within the culture that emerges from capitalism.

In some respects, I think Nietzsche actually does align with many influential liberals quite well though. Consider Mill's distain for custom as a limit on the exceptional individual, or the strain in liberalism that abhors the influence of tradition and religion in politics.

This is a fundamental misreading. Nietzsche is the philosopher of **immanence**, not transcendence. The will to power is not a metaphysical entity "inside" us (a ghost in a machine); it is the genetic and differential principle of forces in the world itself. The body is not a vessel for a spirit; it is a complex, dynamic arrangement of forces.

I didn't read "material" as implying "immanent" here. Rather, the material motivation for crime is in a sense the "petty;" it is crime committed for economic (material) motives. It is thus, in a sense, denigrating as "the pursuit of economic labor/capital investment by other means." This is the framing in the Leopold case as well. So, when he says that Hannibal rises above the "material" what he means is that he has moved beyond a brute response to his appetites, or a ressentiment related to status, to a higher, aesthetic form of violence that represents a purer expression of power, not that he is oriented towards transcendence (quite the opposite, his power is his own end). I'll save that section for later, but I think it is an excellent example of the way Calvinism has had a profound effect on this thread in modern culture.

The "cruelty" Nietzsche speaks of is first and foremost directed at oneself: it is the cruelty of the sculptor who breaks the stone to create the statue. It is the active, affirmative force that destroys the reactive within us (the "herd" mentality, the internalized "slave morality").
The "Joy of the Knife" is not the joy of hurting others but the aesthetic joy of a force achieving its maximum expression. It is the feeling of a force being equal to its concept. It is the feeling of the artist wielding the chisel, the philosopher wielding the concept, the warrior wielding the sword perfectly. To reduce this to a psycho-pathology of "bloodlust" is to completely miss its aesthetic and ontological dimension.

Isn't Landa's point precisely that it is aesthetic? That seemed to be the point he is driving home with the Leopold Trial and Hannibal. At any rate, he seems to keep separate Nietzsche's actual philosophy and the bourgeoise appropriation of it, e.g., "I have so far maintained that bourgeois laudation of crime should not be understood literally, as an approbation of actual transgression, but rather metaphorically, as a social fantasy, supplying the unique individual with the (imaginary) passport out of the herd’s territory." Landa sees class antagonism driving this. Maybe that's a factor, but I think Flaubert's bourgeoise boredom (e.g., Emma Bovary), which affects the working class just as much, is the bigger culprit. What Flaubert gets is the bourgeoise's own self-loathing. So, when we get to American Psycho, that might be something Landa misses.

Anyhow, I am familiar of readings of all of Nietzsche's more "brutal" passages as a sort of allegory for peaceful self-development. I don't really buy it though. For instance:

What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.

What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.

What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.

What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity....

There is the reading of this as "the weak and botched will perish because they will all be made strong." This seems unsupported by the context though. But anyhow, when Nietzsche does speak in more concrete terms about particular public policies, the welfare state, socialism, and democracy, it is clear that he has a sort of profound revulsion for progressivism. And it is at least this particular thread in Nietzsche that can and has been mobilized in defense of a particular view of capitalism and life within capitalism. So too, progressivism gives the herd grounds to resist the strong (they can comfortably say "no"), which acts counter to the ability of the higher man to act as "law giver."

Anyhow, I think this is a point of significant tension for Nietzschean fiction and specifically for Nietzschean heroes. The triumph of the strong over the weak ("the weak should fear the strong") is, for many audiences at least, not appealing. Yet fiction generally can't attain to the same level of distance, abstraction, and ambiguity as Nietzsche's aphoristic and bombastic style. Any victory of the strong over the herd will necessarily be more concrete and visceral. Hence, there is a crossroads for authors where either the Nietzschean hero will fail to be truly Nietzschean or else risks becoming repugnant.

The way this tends to play out in explicitly Nietzschean fiction is that the author feels compelled to make the antagonists of the Nietzschean hero grotesquely, almost comically evil and disgusting, or else the "herd" that is overcome is abstracted and anonymized (e.g., we never see the victims of the random acts of violence in Fight Club). Kentaro Miura's Berserk is a fine and influential example of the latter path. R. Scott Bakker resorts to a similar framing for his Overman. The irony with this second solution is that a sort of implicit utilitarianism that runs counter to the point of the hero ends up coming to the fore; the hero gets justified merely as the "lesser of two evils."



Probably, although this might have more to do with the fact that:

A. He seems to be the most widely read philosopher, judging from bookstore shelves.

B. His philosophy touches on key cultural fault lines, such that different camps have reason to try to lay claim to the "true Nietzsche." This sort of thing happens with Hegel, but I think it's become less relevant to politics, and so less aggressive, since the fall of the USSR.

Personally, I think it's because there are also real, unresolved conflicts in Nietzsche.

Have you ever reflected on Nietzsche’s initial identification of Wagner as a kind of “great hope,” followed later by his disillusionment and condemnation? You can almost see the need for an Übermensch as a kind of antidote for the sorts of transformative cultural heroes who promise renewal but will eventually will let you down.

Yes, and there is also the love triangle with Cosima, a sort of psychological witch's brew there. But I think Nietzsche's relationship with Wagner reflects a more general pattern that is evident in the psychology of our time. In alt-right circles heavily populated by disgruntled young men, as well as the "Manosphere/incel" space, there is a similar sort of phenomena. There is a fetishization of the "alpha male" or "Chad" as a sort of higher man in the ideal, and then an estrangement from this figure when its concrete instantiations instead tend towards boorishness and a parochial chauvinism and moralism.

Hence, these scenes progressed beyond the "alpha male" to an obsession with the mythical "sigma male" who is aggressive, successful, and assertive like the "alpha" but who sits outside the social hierarchy and openly defies it. I think it's a desire for a sort of idealized masculine hero who will nonetheless identify with the "outsider." But such a figure is contradictory to the extent that the ideal is in part defined by being successful, having a high degree of status, being desired by women, admired by other men, etc., which itself seems to preclude being fully "outside."

I think that's part of it. I am interested to see where Landa takes it. I think another factor is a sort of perspectivism that justifies just about anything, which then leads to a sort of artistic/aesthetic preference for the transgressive simply because it is exciting but also no longer beyond the pale. So, the good old fashioned bourgeois boredom Flaubert captures in Madame Bovary and that Tolstoy picks up in Anns Karenina is a factor.

And then there is also Mark Fisher's suggestion of the role of capitalism in generating a dominant anthropology where "keeping it real," i.e., being most authentic, most oneself, is necessarily to adopt the role of the egoistic utility maximizer. Fisher looks at pop culture a lot and one of his comparisons is the old time, "brotherhood/community ' oriented classic mafia stories, and the transition to fully neoliberal era heist movies where everyone is a wholly atomized self-seeker (e.g. The Godfather of Goodfellas versus Heat or Baby Driver). The evolution of the Fast and the Furious might parallel this.

Now I'll go this far: If underdetermination, as a theory, leads us to be unable to differentiate between science and pseudo-science, and we believe there is such a thing as pseudo-science (I do), then we're in a pickle.

But like you have a theory which takes care of underdetermination, within realist parameters I'd be able to defend our ability to spot pseudo-science on the social model of the sciences -- i.e. it's not just me, but all the scientists that say what science is. "Jewish Science" wasn't even as clear as phrenology; it was definitely a racist category for expelling Jewish scientists from the academy. That it resulted in expelling people who we still consider scientists -- like Bohr -- is an indication that it's not a science even if "Jewish Science" happened to get the aims desired after.

What's the argument here: "There is no problem with identifying pseudoscience because in these examples scientists came around to calling out the pseudoscience?"

Why exactly will science always tend towards correctly identifying pseudoscience? Will this always happen? What's the mechanism?

Anyhow, on some anti-realist views, legitimate science just is whatever current scientists say it is. Science has not always been quick to identify pseudoscience. Lysenkoism wasn't considered pseudoscience within the Soviet bloc. Scientists said it was legitimate. Millions of people died before it was rejected. Arguably, all simply pointing to some infamous cases where pseudoscience was eventually identified does is show the norms of science change.

Some ideas identified as pseudoscience (largely for being wholly unfalsifiable and dogmatic) were in wide currency for lifetimes (e.g. aspects of Marxist political economy, aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis, and even aspects of liberal capitalist political-economy have been accused as such, while graphology is another long lived example with less import). Hence, I am skeptical of the idea that scientists will just know without some sort of notion of how they would know.

The 19th century was rife with pseudoscience, and I think developments in scientific methods and the philosophy of science played a significant role in curbing this.



I think it is a pretty dismal view. So too for the Nietzschean idea that the desire truth is "just one among all the others." But underdetermination of scientific theory is only ancillary related here. Arguments for a more widespread skepticism or relativism I am familiar with tend to instead rely on a more global underdetermination of things like all rules/rule-following, all causal/inductive reasoning, or the underdetermination of any sort of solid concept/meaning that would constitute the possession of knowledge, which is a step up (or down) from simple scientific underdetermination.

And the medievals are the ones who have a better solution to underdetermination and realism, yes? Is the outline that I gave of @Count Timothy von Icarus 's argument entirely wrong, just unrelated whatsoever?

Well, it's not actually my main point. Only the last third or so is about a particular solution. I would summarize it this way.

Arguments from underdetermination is extremely influential in contemporary philosophy.

They have led to many radical, and seemingly skeptical theses.

These theses are perhaps more radical than we today recognize, when seen from the perspective of Enlightenment and pre-modern prevailing opinion.

These types of arguments were not unknown in the past, and were indeed often used to produce skeptical arguments.

The tradition most associated with these arguments, ancient Empiricism, sought skepticism on purpose, as a way to attain ataraxia.

Thus, we should not be surprised that borrowing their epistemology leads to skeptical conclusions.

Hence, if we do not like the skeptical conclusions, we should take a look at the epistemic starting points that lead to them.

Indeed, if an epistemology leads to skepticism, that might be a good indication it is inadequate.

The Thomistic response is given as one example of how these arguments used to be put to bed. I use it because I am familiar with it and because the Neoplatonist solution is quite similar. (But the Stoics also had their response, etc.).

I do think that solution is better, but the point isn't to highlight that specific solution, but rather the genealogy of the "problem" and how it arises as a means of elucidating ways it might be resolved or else simply understanding it better.

---

Had I more space, I might suggest some Indian thinkers here. They have the idea that the sensible world is indeed, in an important sense, illusory (maya). However, they do not see this as barring access to the knowledge that really matters, which grounds our approach to happiness and ethics, or even to a sort of first principle. Likewise, the "arbitrary world" is able to be eliminated. This also has to do with their starting points, which are in some ways quite similar to the Neoplatonists. So skepticism also loses its bite in these contexts.

C. Therefore, Underdetermination is false

Yes, but just to clarify, and I realize the OP didn't do this very well because I thought it had gotten to long, the point isn't that underdetermination doesn't ever exist. It clearly does. If we do the Monte Hall problem, the evidence we get from seeing one goat doesn't determine that switching will get us to the prize (although it does determine that it is more likely to).

It's the global sorts of underdetermination that result from excluding the act of understanding as a valid datum of epistemology that are resolved, which then includes a denial of our having any real grasp of principles, such that all demonstrations are necessarily either merely from effects (and so open to underdetermination) or only hypothetical (and thus also underdetermined).

I think we'd have to look at each individual case to see if it is resolved unfortunately, but it seems to me to affect many of those listed. For instance, consider the argument that there is no fact of the matter about what rules we are following because all our past actions are consistent with an infinite number of possible rules. This would also imply that there is never a fact of the matter about which rules nature is "following" (or which would describe how it behaves). For example, "gravity has always worked like x," is also consistent with "gravity spontaneously changes after a given time." If any sort of formal causality is axiomatically barred, then there is no way to deal with this.

Obviously, these sorts of conclusions have a follow-on effect for science. It isn't just that "language is not meaningful because of metaphysical facts, but only on account of shared behavioral regularities related to social norms and public agreement," but this also holds for science (and of course, for any language science is expressed in). I think it's easy to see how such conclusions help lend weight to the parallel arguments from underdetermination that are used to argue for a redefinition of truth, one which, in its more deflationary forms, seems to me to come close to epistemic nihilism.

So, we don't "resolve underdetermination tout court," rather, we resolve some specifically pernicious instances of its application. And then, when it comes to scientific theories, the problem of underdetermination is less concerning because our knowledge isn't just a sort of statistical model, which if radically altered, has "remade the world." When we shift paradigms, it isn't that the old world of trees, fire, stars, and sound is revealed to be illusory, and a new socially constructed world has taken its place. We are still dealing with the same actualities as apprehended through new conceptual means. And crucially, while there might be many ways to correctly describe something, these will be isomorphic. When underdetermination becomes more pernicious is when it denies this isomorphism, such that scientific findings become "sociology all the way down" or "power struggles (will to power) all the way down."

Basically my thought is that if anti-realism is true that has no effect on the value of science. It'd be like saying because dancing is not really a thing dancing is not valuable: no, the value question is separate from the descriptive question. If science doesn't "reveal reality", but rather makes us aware of which parts we are interested in manipulating it will still chug along regardless of the philosophical interpretation of the science.

I think you're misunderstanding by "extreme forms" here. I don't mean anti-realism, but rather those sorts of "Boltzmann brain" type arguments that conclude that it is more likely, or just as likely, that the world will dissolve at any moment or radically alter its behavior, as to maintain in its reliable form. This implies that science isn't even likely to be predictive or "useful" on any consistent timescale, and I don't see how that doesn't make it a waste of time.

If science doesn't "reveal reality", but rather makes us aware of which parts we are interested in manipulating it will still chug along regardless of the philosophical interpretation of the science.

IDK, my reading would be that denials of any knowable human good ("moral/practical anti-realism," which is often aided by other forms of anti-realism) have tended to be destructive to politics, applied science, and ethics. That a key concern of contemporary politics, and a constantly recurring motif in our media is that our technology will drive our species extinct or result in some sort of apocalypse or dystopia because it is "out of anyone's control," suggests to me a fundamental problem with the "Baconian mastery of nature" when combined with anti-realism about human ends and the ends of science. If the aim of science is to improve our casual powers, but then we are also driven towards a place where we are largely silent on ends, that seems like a recipe for disaster, the sort of situation where you get things like predictable ecological disasters that will affect generations of future people but which are nonetheless driven on largely by unrestrained and ultimately unfulfilling appetites.

Mkay. Then I suppose I'd just say that if it's been used by both sides so has the "realist" side been mis-utilized by the same actors.

Phrenology was discredited because it was thought to be false. But if "true" and "false" are themselves just social endorsements, then truth cannot arbitrate between racist, sexist, etc. scientific theories. So, sure, both forms are open to abuse, but only one can claim that abuse isn't actually abuse, and that all science is about power struggles anyhow. If science is really just about power or usefulness, then there is strictly speaking nothing wrong about declaring sui generis fields like "Jewish physics" just so long as it suits your aims and gets you what you want.

This is a really interesting objection. Is an IBE underdetermined? Remember that the conclusion is not, "X is the explanation," but rather, "X is the best explanation." I actually don't see why underdetermination would need to attend IBEs.

I think it depends on how far underdetermination is allowed to roll. If you pair these arguments, their reach is far greater than scientific theories. The term is most associated with the underdetermination of scientific theories, but as noted in the OP is has been used for substantially broader effect.

If some of these arguments go through, then the "best" explanation is not "the most likely to be true (as in, corresponding to reality)," but rather "the explanation I most prefer," or "the explanation society most prefers, given its customs."

An inference to the best explanation normally relies on the security of some prior ideas. But what if causes are underdetermined? What if induction is out? What if theories cannot even be "explanations" in the conventional sense? Underdetermination of scientific theories seems to me like the most benign of these.

I think this is a mistake to draw these philosophies towards some sort of anti-scientific agenda. At least, not when I speak on them they're not -- more like I'm very interested in the truth of how science actually works, and I don't want the cartoon version but to really understand what's going on (and, in that pursuit, noting how the goal is itself almost infinite, if not fruitless, in that we never really finish philosophizing about science where we finally have The Answer, but it still provides insight)

I didn't say they must lead that way, or even that they are designed to. I said that, historically, they absolutely have been used on both the right and the left to push such agendas. And yes, this is normally in a sort of corrupted, naive form, but some propagandists, radicals, and conspiracy theorists have a very good grasp on this stuff and have become quite adept at molding it to their causes. On the left, it's tended to be used more for things like casting doubt on all findings related to sex differences, or often the entire field of behavioral genetics.

This is a wonderful essay, eminently relevant. Its work in clearing away canards cannot be overestimated. Its research and accuracy are commendable. It is long yet worthwhile and readable.

Thanks! :up:

There is a good exchange on this point between Robert Pasnau

So, I think Pasnau is right that the identity doctrine has, at least vis-á-vis Aquinas in particular, more often been used more to deal with representationalism and subjective idealism. However, it is used explicitly to counter empiricist skepticism by a number of the Neoplatonists. Gerson has a good article on this appropriately titled: "Neoplatonic Epistemology." That empiricism and academic skepticism died out, in part perhaps because of these arguments, is why St. Thomas doesn't have them as major contenders to rebut in his epoch.

I am not sure about the rhetorical strategy of continually expressing perplexity about the doctrine you are expounding on or its use by people you are criticizing. I think though that in this case it actually suggests a real confusion it probably doesn't mean to imply. The argument for why form in the intellect (the intellect's move from potency to actuality) cannot be unrelated to its causes comes from the idea that: a. every move from potency to act has a cause in some prior actuality; b. causes cannot be wholly unrelated (i.e. arbitrarily related) to their effects (completely equivocal agents) or else they wouldn't be causes in the first place and what we'd actually have is a spontaneous move from potency to act. Form is just that which makes anything actual to effect anything at all, so form is, in one sense, always present in all causes (granted there are analogical agents). Arguing for this doesn't require question begging and presupposing the doctrine, it requires upstream premises (I see now that Klima appears to have hit on this in more detail).

I would want to add that the realism quandary is also internal to "predictionism." The one who predicts is attempting to predict ad unum (towards the one, actual, future outcome). Without that future-oriented determinacy—whether actual or theoretical—the "predictionist" cannot function.

Yeah, that's true. Even seemingly very abstract and deflationary, formalistic approaches that make everything Bayesian have a sort of unresolved kernel of volanturism in that the agent has some sort of purpose for predicting, or else they just collapse into mechanism.

For myself I don't feel a deep need to argue for underdetermination because to me it explains why we go through all the hoops we do in making scientific inferences -- we don't just see the object as it is, we frequently make mistakes, and go about looking for reasons to justify our first beliefs while discounting possibilities not on the basis of evidence, but because they do not fit. This is inescapable for any productive thought at all -- but it has the result that we only have a tentative grasp of the whole.

I hope this is not what you take the earlier approach to underdetermination to be because that's certainly not what I was trying to convey. As noted earlier, underdetermination was acknowledged, rather, it is some of the more radical theses that flow from it that are contained. For instance, the move where"x is true" becomes merely "hooray for asserting x," seems fairly destructive to ethics and epistemology. Hence the point about "dressed up nihilism."

The basic idea is that deception is always parasitic on reality (actuality) because what determines thought must always correspond to some prior actuality.

So, consider the point about the apple. It's not denying that we can be fooled by fake apples or that some sort of sci-fi technology might be able to use EM stimulation to get us to experience seeing an apple. It's that both the fake apple and the stimulus contain the form of the apple. The "brain in the vat/evil demon" argument is generally trying to show that we have absolutely no (sure) veridical perceptions/knowledge and thus no grounds for actually saying how likely it is that we are so deceived. But the point here is that this absolute prohibition on meaningful knowledge doesn't hold up given some fairly straightforward assumptions about things not happening for no reason at all. Even the illusion must derive from something actual. The deceiver’s manipulation has to carry intelligible structure (form) from somewhere.

Nonetheless, in theory, if we were brains in vats then all the biological species and weather phenomena, elements, etc. we know could be false creations that don't really exist outside some sort of "simulation." (I would just point out here that this is basically magic, not sci-fi , and magic tends to do damage to philosophy, that's sort of the point). The things we know could be compositions and divisions of other real natures that exist in the "real world" but not our "fake world." And this still seems to leave open a very extreme sort of skepticism. Yet it's not the totalizing skepticism of the original demon experiment, where there is no ground on which to stand to argue that this is implausible.

Here, there is a related argument about the teleology of the rational faculties. The intellect seems to be oriented towards truth. If it weren't, then there would be no reason to believe anything, including the brain in the vat argument.

Likewise, a common argument in early 20th century empiricism was that we cannot be sure that the universe wasn't created seconds ago along with all our memories (also from underdetermination). But this also rests on the assumption of either a spontaneous move from potency to actuality or else a volanturist God who does arbitrary things (i.e., not the God of natural theology, but a sort of genie).

Basically we don't need Hume's rendition of causation to point out that underdetermination is part and parcel to scientific practice: hence all the methodological hurdles one must overcome to be justified in saying "this is a scientific conclusion"; if it were something we could conclude without underdetermination then the scientists would be wasting their time, to my view.

Well, if extreme forms of underdetermination are successful, the scientist is wasting their time. They cannot even know if they have actually run any of their experiments or what the real results are, because an infinite number of possibilities/experiences are consistent with their thinking the results are one thing when they really aren't. The Academics use phenomenological underdetermination to motivate a sort of nihilism.

Isn’t that utterly simple? Going back to the original post: the contention is, simply, that “the world” (object, thing) is not simply given but is constructed by the mind/brain. That’s what the brain does! In humans, the brain is an enormously complex organ which absorbs a very large proportion of the organism's metabolic energy. What’s it doing with all that power? Why, it’s creating a world! A very different world to that of cheetahs, otters, butterflies and divas, but a world nonetheless

This is Kant’s basic point - not that Kant has the last word on all the implications, not that Kant is correct in every detail. But his ‘Copernican revolution in philosophy’ is the factor which was a fundamental turning point in modern philosophy. It was arguably the origin of all such later developments as phenomenology and constructivism, and why Kant has been (rightly) designated the ‘godfather of cognitive science’. Hence also the amount of content devoted to cognitive science in the original post and the implied convergence of Pinter's 'gestalts' with the 'ideas' of classical philosophy.

I am not sure if it works to simply claim that appearances are of something, and that this relation is wholly simple and cannot be further explicated. It seems like simply rejecting phenomenalism by fiat. But from whence this unimpeachable knowledge? It would appear to be an absolutely simple and unimpeachable knowledge of things-in-themseleves at least in their relation to "everything we experience." Yet no mechanism can explain such knowledge because "causes" etc. are said not to apply

Certainly, Kant was very influential here, and he is often invoked in these sorts of contexts, but I think this the ascription to Kant of the title "godfather of cognitive science" actually runs quite counter to Kant's own philosophy. To use the empirical sciences—phenomena—to say things about the noumenal nature of things is simply off-limits. Kant certainly might serve as an indirect inspiration for those who try to explain the contours of appearances in terms of cognitive science, neuroscience, natural selection, physics, information theory, etc., but in the end all these efforts fall afoul of Kant's epistemology. They are, in reality, far closer to the earlier forms of thinking on this subject that Kant dismisses as "twaddle" because they are not properly "critical."

For, it was hardly a novel thought that the properties of the mind and of man's senses/body affect how the world appears. "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver," wasn't an obscure insight, but a sort of core dictum, and there was a vast literature on the "way of knowing proper to man as a physical being, and a particular sort of physical being, as against 'angelic knowledge'" that one could trace as far back as Plato, and certainly to De Anima. Kant's novelty lies more in absolutizing this doctrine such that the Peripatetic Axiom that: "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses" (i.e., received by the body through the environment) becomes radically altered, as does the parallel axiom that "what is known best to us (concrete particulars) is not what is known best in itself (intelligible principles)." These aren't exactly negated, but they are very much changed.

The Copernician Revolution then is more about epistemology becoming "first philosophy" then the introduction of the idea that the mind shapes experience and the act of knowing. Hence, contemporary introductions on metaphysics (e.g. Routledge's) have to specify that they are focused on "traditional" or "not post-Kantian" metaphysics, because they don't put epistemic concerns first. You see this all the time in contemporary metaphysics where the conditions for being known (by man)—or later, "spoken of"—are considered to be synonymous with the conditions for existing at all. Many arguments from underdetermination rest on this assumption.

On this point, I think Pryzwarra has a good answer in Analogia Entis. He says that first philosophy must always deal with both the metaontic and the metanoetic, because some sense of being is required to say anything about anything, and yet how we know anything is always an question with great priority. Hence, first philosophy involves a sort of instability, a passing back and forth between being and knowing (mirroring creaturely instability where essence is not existence). It's like Plotinus says, thinking and being are two sides of the same coin, but only unified in the One. Their bifurcation in creatures causes heartburn, the need to overcome duality (non-dualism; Kant, by contrast, seems to absolutize dualism). Nonetheless, the metaontic has to have a sort of priority, because an "act of knowing" still presupposes something about "act," and existence, being. I think one can see this in how Kant is forced to still appeal to terms such as grund (ground, cause) and wirklichkeit (actuality) even in places where he wants to deny their applicability.

But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.

Yet then what of throwing free will into the noumenal realm? At any rate, I think this might lead towards the parallel charge of Kant as leading towards skepticism, that his world bottoms out in nothing. I suppose there is a greater similarity to Nagārjuna here. Personally, of the bit I know, I find Huayan Buddhism and later Mahayana to be more compelling on this point, with the idea of luminous awareness as the flip side of emptiness, since it appears to be more in line with the idea that the contingent and finite must "boil over" (Eckhart) from the "infinite."

This charge of solipsism is often levelled at the kind of phenomenological idealism I'm advocating - but the response is, we are members of the same species language, and culture.

Sure, and that works in many philosophies. I think Kant specifically may have barred himself from making such appeals though. The "cause/origin" of appearances is what they are appearances of. So phenomenal experience "comes from" something we can know nothing about. To appeal to culture and biology, phenomena, as an explanation of what produces that which can receive appearances would be off-limits.

Thomist critics like Maritain would say that Kant misses the “intuition of being” — a direct grasp of existence itself that grounds metaphysics. Without that, they argue, Kant seals us off from reality - something other critics also point out. There’s force in that critique. But even granting it, Kant’s basic insight remains: theworld of experience is constituted through the mind’s forms and categories, not simply received as a mirror of things-in-themselves.

Yes, but they generally also attack the deflated notion of causality he inherits, which is partly what results in the "bridge" being cut off. But without the bridge, consciousness appears to be one way and not any other "for no reason at all." After all, it cannot have "causes" if causes are imposed by the mind. But then the question remains: "from whence these categories?" Appeals to physics, natural selection, or even the seemingly basic structures of information theory and semiotics are off-limits.

And then I think the bolded would just be rejected as a strawman of much prior philosophy. No knowledge of "things-in-themseleves" is assumed because the category itself is rejected. The only "thing-in-itself" analog would be God, whose essence is unknowable. This is an area of some agreement the , but as noted before, apophatic methods work here with God because the transcendent is not absent from what it transcends, whereas Kant allows himself no such purchase.

Here, I think Berkeley's instincts are generally better, even if he hasn't been received as well, or Fichte.

Your ameliorating factor ameliorates some doubts, but what if I think that Hume, Quine, Wittgenstein, Feyerabend, et al. , have a point? Do I just need to read more Thomas Aquinas to see the errors in my ways?

Well, I pointed out that many advocates prefer these results, just as the ancient skeptics thought skepticism was a preferable outcome. But, for the many who find them deeply troubling (e.g. Russell on Hume), it might be helpful to consider past approaches. For instance, Russell moves to eliminate causation (a move that was quite unsuccessful), and yet from other traditions there are some strong solutions to the Problem of Induction that rely precisely upon rejecting Hume's deflated notion of causality (indeed, they generally agree with Russell that causes serve no real function when they have been deflated to this degree). Likewise, there are a lot of people who bemoan how scientific anti-realism and arguments for science coming down to sociology and power relations has been used to pernicious effect on public debates on vaccine safety, global warming, GMO crops, etc., and are looking for solutions to underdetermination here.

That is, there are many who see these primarily as problems to be overcome, hence, old solutions should be interesting.

I also think insights into the difference would be just as useful for empiricists who want to defend such views (although presumably not all of them, because some of the skeptical solutions contradict one another). It would allow them to give a better explanation of why both common sense and long standing ideas in Eastern and Western thought needed to be rethought—which assumptions need to be defended (there is a potential circularity here worth noting too, because the phenomenon of understanding is often itself removed as a proper datum of epistemology because it is said to be underdetermined!).

This seems useful to me because sometimes you see this sort of thing dealt with using simple appeals to "old is worse, new is better," which doesn't seem like a particularly good heuristic in philosophy, particularly when very old ideas are often recycled and become the new cutting edge.

For instance, I would think one option would be to say: "yes, epistemology should be properly the study of prediction or error. The experience and possibility of "knowledge," whatever it might be, should be a topic of psychology and phenomenology, not epistemology and philosophy of science. Indeed, this is sort of what some views do, reducing learning and knowledge to statistics.

Reminds me of a passage:

“This is why you c-call the God-of-Gods …”

He sees …

“Call Him … ‘It’?”

He understands.

Admission was all that remained.

~~~

It.

The name of all things inhuman.

When applied to the inanimate world, it meant nothing. No whinge of significance accompanied its utterance. But when applied to animate things, it became ever more peculiar, ever more fraught with moral intimation. And when used to single out apparently human things, it roared with a life all its own.

It festered.

Call a man “it” and you were saying that crime can no more be committed against him as against a stone. Ajencis had called Man “onraxia”, the being that judged beings. The Law, the Great Kyranean claimed, belonged to his very essence. To call a man “it” was to kill him with words, and so to oil the actions that would murder him in fact.

And the God? What did it mean for the God of Gods to be called an “it”?

R. Scott Bakker - The Great Ordeal

Of course, Bakker can make up whatever sort of connotations he wants for his presumably unique fantasy languages, but in English this seems only partially true. "It" is used for the person of the Holy Spirit (and for Christ as Logos) by some writers and the capitalization seems to be enough to avoid this connotation, although it is true that the neuter pronoun does carry a certain connotation of lacking experience or at least intellect. Hence the creation of "xe," "ze," "xir," etc. rather than people uncomfortable with "he" or "she" advocating to be referred to as "it." If "it" is disrespectful for men, how much more so for God?

My guess is that "He" only seems strange to us now because of the quite rapid move to gender neutral language in the past half century. "Man" was long a possible synonym for "human," and "they" a plural pronoun only used in the singular when it was supposing for an anonymous referent that thus included a plurality of possible referents (e.g., "I don't trust someone that says that they never lie.") Hence, "he" is a sort default (plus the cumbersome "he or she" doesn't work for a definite referent).

I have seen mixed opinions on this, both that "It" makes God seem to foreign and inanimate, but also that it ought to be preferred because it avoids anthropomorphizing God, with "he" being reserved for the Incarnation or specific person of the Father (obviously, in the Christian contexts). Or some even use "she" to signify feminine aspects but this is rare, although "she" is often used for God's Wisdom, Sophia, who in some traditions is read as Christ the Logos, resulting in he, she, and it being applied to the Son/Word depending on context.

It also reminds me, maybe it isn't the love of Beauty (philokalia) that is the problem, but the misapprehension of beauty and the prizing of the lesser over the greater beauties?

And oldie but goodie:


O love,
O heart,
Find the way to heaven.

Set your sights on a place
Higher than your eyes can see.
For it was the higher aim
That brought you here
In the first place.

Now be silent.
Let the One who creates the words speak.
He made the door.
He made the lock.
He also made the key.

How many men have found tragic ends
Running after beauty?
Why don’t they look for you? -
The heart and spirit of all beauty.

~ Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi

And Plato in the Symposium:

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.

I want to nitpick these examples on the basis that they're underdetermined -- or, the flip side of "underdetermination" is confirmation bias. There's some reason for the selection of examples, and that selection of examples may justify what you're saying as "this is where I'm coming from", but how are we to know that these are good examples of underdetermination such that Aquinas or Aristotle or the pre-modern mind had answers to these questions if we just dropped the questions and read Aquinas, Aristotle, and the ancients only?

I see what you're saying, The reason that I picked these is because they are influential and fit the basic idea, and because they generate theses that are fairly radical (and so relevant and interesting). Basic underdetermination of theory is considered by medieval writers (and 19th century guys) but it isn't that exciting because its consequences are contained (generally, only affecting weaker quia demonstrations "from effects", but I didn't want to get into that). There were arguments from underdetermination in the ancient world and the Middle Ages though. I am pretty sure Epicurus appeals to the underdetermination of theory by data re astronomical models in one of his surviving letters, and Aquinas mentions the same issue vis-a-vis astronomy in the Summa. Islamic occasionalists also argued from underdetermination, etc. It's just that the scope of under determination for certain sorts of things was limited by the assumptions.

For example:

Reply to Objection 2. Reason may be employed in two ways to establish a point: firstly, for the purpose of furnishing sufficient proof of some principle, as in natural science, where sufficient proof can be brought to show that the movement of the heavens is always of uniform velocity. Reason is employed in another way, not as furnishing a sufficient proof of a principle, but as confirming an already established principle, by showing the congruity of its results, as in astrology the theory of eccentrics and epicycles is considered as established, because thereby the sensible appearances of the heavenly movements can be explained; not, however, as if this proof were sufficient, forasmuch as some other theory might explain them.

Summa Theologiae, I, q.32, a.1, ad 2

IIRC the Commentary on On the Heavens has more on this. The idea that one might "save appearances" by tweaking a theory, a big idea for guys like Quine and Kuhn, was known to the medievals and considered problematic, but only so problematic because it would only affect a certain sort of model that tries to reason from observed (generally distant) effects back to principles. Empiricism (speaking very broadly of course) sort of had the effect of making all knowledge come to be affected by this difficulty, because now all knowing fits this sort of pattern recognition/internal model building structure. That's partly why I don't think it's impossible to go across the eras here; it's the same problem, expanded to new areas because of a change in upstream positions.

This is something I thought while reading MacIntyre. Yes, I see what you're saying, but like Heidegger you're sort of inventing a whole mindset that is "pre-modern", and justifying it with many quotes -- but at the end of the day if you haven't spoken to people from the pre-modern era then, my brother in christ, you cannot make claims about how pre-modern people think no matter how many texts you read from that era.

Sure, it's a real limitation. But wouldn't this apply, to a lesser degree (and perhaps not even that much lesser) to talking to people from different backgrounds across a language/culture gap today? In many ways, because of the historical lineage, we might have more in common with a pre-modern Western thinker than someone extremely steeped in some parallel tradition of thought. And then the same issue could be said to apply to greater or lesser degrees across a whole range of contexts, e.g., for even saying what we ourselves would have thought about something years ago, or for generalizing about what "Americans" or "Chinese" think today, let alone in 1980 or 1890.

Nevertheless, I still think plenty can be said with careful analysis. And note, the topic is not super broad. We can have a quite good idea about how people thought about arithmetic in the past because they both wrote about it in detail and it's not a super broad subject.

I think another ameliorating factor is that there has been an unbroken, and fairly robust/large Thomistic and Neoscholastic tradition dating all the way back to that era. And so, even if we cannot say what the medievals would have thought, we can say what people steeped in their texts have generally thought, and it has generally been that underdetermination, while interesting and relevant in some areas, shouldn't support the radical theses that have been laid on it.

I was going to say, this seems like a rather strange statement. Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Mitch McConnell, etc., along with most of the "Big Billionaires" are not remotely young. America currently has a gerontocracy by almost any historical standard. I've written about this before in other contexts:

Broadly speaking, [the Baby Boomers] have held the White House since 1993, when they were in their late 20s to mid 40s (Millennials' age today). They will have held it for at least 36 years. They became a majority in Congress in 1998, when the midpoint for the generation was 42 years old, and became a super majority shortly after, which they have retained to this day. By contrast, Congress had just five Millennials through 2019, at which time the oldest in that cohort reached 38 years of age. This was 0.2% representation for 29% of the adult population. Today, the House has 31 Millennial or Gen Z members, the Senate just 1. Congress still has more members aged 78-90 than 18-45. If you make the logical assumption that the vast majority of children belong to households headed by younger adults (i.e. under 45 or 50) you get a slim % of total representation allocated for over half the nation's population.

Cabinet posts aren't any different. They also average at or above retirement age in recent administrations. This is a change from prior decades, but also a huge change from most of human history when the prime of life was considered to be about 25-50. Obviously, part of this has to do with improved lifespans and healthspans on the upper end, but on the lower end it would seem to be an effect of cultural and economic changes (including a prolonged adolescence that lasts for many now into the late-20s).

Obviously, that's more "economics/politics," however it feels to me like "youth culture" has gotten significantly less influential and dominant since the peak from the 1950s - 1990s. I don't have any sort of stat to back that up. It's just that in the 60s-80s in particular, youth culture dominated the zeitgeist. Now, it's sort of crammed online. The kids don't even dominate the nightlife scene anymore.

The preference for looking young seems to be more of a thing for women. Hollywood is full of older male leads. They often look younger than they are, but they're unlikely to be mistaken for people in their 20s. Actually, I'd say the extremely widespread use of anabolic steroids and the growing size of movie stars has actually made romantic/action male leads look a good deal older than prior decades.

I do think there is a shift though in which the archetypes associated with advanced age are pushed out, and a sort of permanent youth is strived for. We have a lot of politicians above 70, but most aren't trying to project "elder statesman vibes."



:up: Right, I've heard it is very popular in East Asia and Brazil. And East Asia's general obsession with not getting tan (and skin-lightening products) seems to go even beyond the West's obsession with getting tan at times.

When Kant says “there must be something corresponding to sensibility as receptivity,” he isn’t smuggling in a cause; he’s pointing out that appearances can’t be appearances of nothing — but beyond that, no determinate claim is possible.

But that's precisely what critics say he is doing, and I think they have a point. If an appearance is not caused by what it is an appearance of, if it bears absolutely no intelligible relationship (even a hidden one) to what it is an appearance of, then in virtue of what is it appearance an "of" anything? Even if Kant isn't strictly speaking denying any intelligible relationship between noumenal reality and appearances (a point of contention) that this relationship is wholly unknowable would itself imply that Kant has absolutely no grounds for claiming that appearances are appearances of anything prior to them (particularly since he seems to deny that appearances are posterior to noumena in any coherent way). In virtue of what then does he claim positively know that appearances are appearances and not realities themselves? To simply say, "well to be appearances, they must be appearances of something," is simply begging the question here. What is the evidence that supports that they are appearances?

This is precisely Hegel's charge in the Logic, that Kant is a dogmatist who has dogmatically presupposed that phenomena are "appearances of" noumena. On Hegel's analysis, when Kant dismisses the whole of past metaphysics as "twaddle" he appears to be a very charred pot pointing out that a kettle is black.

But this is also problematic in that Kant does appeal to the noumena for many things. He hides free will in there for instance. But if this freedom has never, will never, and can never relate to experience as cause, it's completely meaningless. Indeed, I find it questionable to posit an existence at all and then to claim that, strictly speaking, it bears no clear relationship to anything that is conceivable. Which of course, Kant doesn't do. Instead, he oscillates on this (I am pretty sure that "cause" in the prior passage is "grund," or "ground"). A more charitable reading is that he is engaged in something like apophatic theology, but this doesn't hold up. Apophatic theology works because the transcendent isn't absent from what it transcends. The super rational is not arational. But Kant has denied himself the understanding by which apophatic theology is anything more than simple contradiction.

What Kant is pointing to are the universal structures that make a shared, law-governed world possible in the first place — space, time, and the categories of the understanding

Ok, and how does he support that this is true for all minds? "Kant says it is thus," is not a particularly convincing rejoinder to the accusation of solipsism. Kant, by his own admission, knows absolutely nothing about other people in-themselves. Any appeal to shared biology or culture is an appeal to the phenomenal to explain a noumenal connection by which discrete phenomenal perspectives are the same. You said earlier that other species might have different minds. But I don't think Kant can say this. "Other species," and "species," or even "individuals" which can have different minds, all exist only in the phenomenal world, or at the very least are only ever known as phenomenal, which says nothing about the noumenal. Indeed, as critics have often pointed out, Kant has no grounds for supposing noumena, plural (the application of quantity and measure) in the first place. Of course he says, "but thus it is so,' but the criticism is that his epistemology has cut away any warrant for claiming that other minds exist or must be the same as his mind. He can only know the appearances of other minds (or apparent other minds). Other mind's experiences are private, and so the fact that they are "phenomenal" does nothing to resolve this problem. All that can be known is that other minds appear to exist and that they appear to work similarly to ours. But when the solipsist says, "it does not appear so to me," what counter argument is left open?

The other difficulty is the idea of "knowledge of things-in-themseleves," as a sort of epistemic standard in the first place. Pace Kant, this is not what past metaphysicians thought they had. The category is itself modern. To hold that sort of knowledge up as a standard is to say something like: "things are most fully known when known without any mind," which is analogous to "what things truly look like is how they appear when seen without any eyes." This has to presuppose that we deny the premise: "the same is for thinking as for being" or that truth is the adequacy of thought to being (or else, there is being that is not truly being). I think the charge here would be that the "things-in-themseleves," are just an inappropriate reification of being, and that even if they were coherent, they would be, by definition, epistemically irrelevant.


Of course, some readings of Kant resolve these issues. I've even seen Kant read as Shankara or Nagarjuna. But these seem like a stretch to me. Doctrines like emptiness would suggest that the things-in-themselves are simply a sort of error (but of course, readings of Kant do dispense with noumena, I just don't think he does).

Useless trivia here aside, should I have found something in your response that shows I misunderstood Clark’s statement?

Well, in the book (which is the only of his I've read) he only mentions Kant a few times. But I would gather given his general outlook that when he is speaking of things-in-themseleves and how they "act on" our senses, he just means this sort of limiting relation. "Act on" for him might have a Scholastic connotation of merely "has a prior actuality." But given what I recall him saying, and what he says here, I am pretty sure he means this in a fairly conventional way in Kant scholarship, where this relationship is merely that "representation" and appearances are "of something." The fact that sensation and understanding never contain anything of the things-in-themseleves is precisely what he is arguing against here. So he isn't denying the limits that Kant places on knowledge but rather that those limits make sense.

And on the Thomistic account, if you accept some of the other premises, I do think this critique is strong. Appearances cannot be arbitrarily related to what they are appearances of or else they wouldn't be appearances of those things (no wholly equivocal agents). The actuality in the mind is received according to what man is, but it has to be the same actuality/form that is in what is perceived (i.e., the actuality that moves potential experience to actual experience). If you start with Kant's assumptions, then his conclusions make more sense. So one has to consider the starting point.

Just from a genealogical standpoint though, the epistemic presuppositions that Kant inherits through Hume and others is based on a program that, in its original ancient form, is explicitly designed to terminate in skepticism so as to achieve dispassion. That a program designed with a goal of skepticism produced skepticism is in a way not that surprising.

If you then go on to say that there is no space and time absent perception an argument is required, and that is just what is not to be found. It doesn't follow deductively that if space and time are forms of intuition they therefore cannot exist outside of that context. It also doesn't follow inductively, because all our science tells us there must have been space and time prior to humans or even percipients in general.

I agree. And we have the question: "from whence these structures?" You cannot make an appeal to natural selection, or human biology, or physics, because these all only relate to the phenomenal.

I think the culprit here is the deflated notions of causality Kant is working with, particularly Hume's influence on him. On such a view, causes are indeed mere phenomenal constant conjunction. But in the broader sense of causality, to say that the noumena have no cause is to say they occur for no reason at all, and are in a sense not intelligible or actual.

The appeal to transcendental argument doesn't decide things here because the arguments for the prior actuality of what is in the senses and received by the intellect is of the same basic type, and its only real assumption is that the world is intelligible and not arbitrary (and thus appearances cannot be arbitrarily related to what they are "appearances of" without ceasing to be appearances of anything, and merely being sui generis actualities that occur of themselves, a violation of the premise of intelligibility and the idea that things don't spontaneously move themselves from potency to act "for no reason"). I'd argue that Kant actually oscillates between accepting these premises to make some points and then denying them for others.

You can see this tension throughout the First Critique, where Kant seems compelled to write things like:

The non-sensible cause of these representations is entirely unknown to us, and therefore we cannot intuit it as an object; for such an object would have to be represented neither in space nor in time (as mere conditions of our sensible representation), without which conditions we cannot think any intuition. Meanwhile we can call the merely intelligible cause of appearances in general the transcendental object,' merely so that we may have something corresponding to sensibility as a receptivity.

A494

This comes a few sections after denying that causality applies here. And he is here speaking about what he knows about the "unknowable." In the Transcendental Aesthetic he is acutely aware that appearances must be appearances of something, but I am not so sure he secures that his are.

Nevertheless, Kant's starting point and problems are still very popular in modern empirical philosophy, so he at least functions as a solid diagnostician for where certain assumptions lead.

Yet this does not imply a solipsistic dream-world: the structures through which the phenomenal world is constituted are the same for every human being, which is why the world of appearances is shared, lawful, and communicable. This pertains to every human being, although not necessarily to other kinds of beings.

According to Kant's assertions. But from the initial response by his peers there has been the question of if he actually leaves himself any grounds for claiming this, or if his system implies the opposite. Kant's letters show he was acutely aware of a "subjective idealism problem."

You were talking about definitions as if the definition is the words used, and the essence is what the definition refers to. That's garbled. A definition is the content of uttered sentences. The definition is what the words in the definition mean, which is, what they refer to.

Ah, I see the disconnect. I should have clarified, I mean "definition" in the sense Aquinas or the later Neoplatonists/Scholastics tend to use it. So, there is a proper definition that signifies the essence of a thing, it's quiddity (exclusive of accidents), generally through the convention of specifying its genus and species specific difference. Whereas the practice of dictionaries today is that the definition is simply a function of how the word is used.

That's not really an Aquinas thing though, it comes through Aristotle, but I am pretty sure it is somewhat common by late antiquity.

It's like all the debates over the meaning of terms in Plato. The point isn't that people cannot communicate because they lack the proper definition of terms such as "piety" or "justice," but rather that they don't understand them, and so they fail to achieve/desire justice, etc. They can still engage in dialectic though. Guys like Euphyphro and Thrasymachus do have their own "definitions" of these terms.

That's a very interesting post.

If a determinist wants to avoid being charged with being ontologically commited to Berkeley's Spirits in another guise, then he certainly cannot appeal to a standard game-semantic interpretation of the quantifiers. But then what other options are available to him? Platonism?

By "Platonism," do you mean the idea of natural laws as a sort of eternal, active "shaping" of causal interactions? That would be, in a sense, formally very similar, although it avoids the volanturist texture that I think many moderns find distasteful (although, it replaces them with apparent contingencies that seem to exist "for no reason at all," so it still has a volanturist feel).

I would think another option would be the causal theories of "Neoplatonism" in the broad sense that includes the Golden Age Islamic thinkers, late Patristics, and Scholastics. That avoids the lack of real, efficacious secondary causality tied to natures and the seeming volanturism that I find distasteful in Berkeley (I remember thinking he is more towards Malebranche’s occasionalism in some way).

The Book of Causes (which I think is now thought to be a product of Iberian Jewish Neoplatonism now, but the Scholastics loved it too) is a good comparison case here.

Well, that's a thorny area in Kant scholarship, right? I have read many contradictory takes on the exact relation (or "negative" or "limiting" relation) between appearances and things-in-themseleves. Because Kant also makes it clear that appearances are of things, and is cognizant of the fact that if appearances bear absolutely no relationship to what they are appearances of, they would simply be free standing, sui generis entities (e.g. in the Transcendental Aesthetic). Although I know there are also more "subjective idealist" readings of Kant.

The things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being [yet they are the "things we intuitive"]. Nor do their relations in themselves have the character that they appear to us as having. And if we annul ourselves as subject, or even annul only the subjective character of the senses generally, then this entire character of objects and all their relations in space and time-indeed, even space and time themselves would vanish; being appearances, they cannot exist in-themselves, but can exist only in us. What may be the case regarding objects in themselves and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains to us entirely unknown. All we know is the way in which we perceive them.

A-42/B-59 (emphasis mine)

Also in the section you quoted:

hence what is in them (appearances) are not something in itself, but mere representations, which if they are not given in us (in perception) are encountered nowhere at all.

But representations are still representation, not sui generis free standing actualities with absolutely no relation to what is being represented.

In the section after the one your referred to:

The non-sensible cause of these representations is entirely unknown to us, and therefore we cannot intuit it as an object; for such an object would have to be represented neither in space nor in time (as mere conditions of our sensible representation), without which conditions we cannot think any intuition. Meanwhile we can call the merely intelligible cause of appearances in general the transcendental object,' merely so that we may have something corresponding to sensibility as a receptivity.

(Emphasis mine)

What is meant by "unknown" exactly seems to be the cause of some controversy. Kant is obviously speaking about them at least. Obviously, this is not "cause" as in the categories, because he denies this in prior sections. In English I have seen "affectations" used as a placeholder word here so as to not confuse it with empirical causes. But I think the Scholastic objection would probably rest here on the generally deflated sense of causes as well.



Anyhow, by "action," (a poor word choice perhaps) I think it is clear that Clarke doesn't mean the knowable causal relation, or else he would have no qualms with Kant because Kant would merely be following the old Scholastic dictum that "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," and the old Aristotleian view that sensation is of interaction. But the Neoscholastic opposition to Kant is generally that he absolutizes and totalizes this old dictum.

Anyhow, what translation are you using? And is that the First Critique? I couldn't find that line. The closest rendering in that section I could find is in here:

in themselves, appearances, as mere representations, are real only in perception, which in fact is nothing but the reality of an empirical representation, i.e., appearance. To call an appearance a real thing prior to perception means either that in the continuation of experience we must encounter such a perception, or it has no meaning at all. For that it should exist in itself without relation to our senses and possible experience, could of course be said if we were talking about a thing in itself. But what we are talking about is merely an appearance in space and time, neither of which is a determination of things in themselves, but only of our sensibility; hence what is in them (appearances) are not something in itself, but mere representations, which if they are not given in us (in perception) are encountered nowhere at all.

These are the Cambridge one.

The other thread reminded me of another contributor here. There was also an explosion in logical work in the late middle ages. Partly, this is because the univocity of being allows logic to "do more" because there is not this supposition that in the context proper to metaphysics we are generally speaking of analogy (in the one being realized analogously in the many, or "analogous agents" causation). Nominalism also does some things to make it seem like logic is more central. No longer can natures explain divine action. God can "make a dog to be a frog" rather than "replacing a dog with a frog" or some sort of accidental change ("making a dog look like a frog"). Wholly (logically) formal contradiction becomes the limits of possibility. This is also when the embryo of possible worlds with Buridan starts, rather than modality being defined in terms of potentiality.

All this makes logic more central, and then logical solutions come to drive metaphysics. So, Ockham has the idea that problems with identity substitution related to the context of belief can be resolved by claiming that references in belief statements suppose for the believer's "mental concept" or a thing rather than the thing simpliciter (restriction). But this neat logical move is then taken as prescriptive for metaphysics and epistemology, and you get "logic says we only ever know our own mental concepts," (representationalism).

This is all compounded by the context of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, because the focus on logic to adjudicate arguments becomes even more intense.

Guys like Pasnau and Klima put it this way, logic comes to colonize metaphysics.

You can also see this in the primary/secondary properties distinction. Originally, it is quantity, magnitude, i.e., the common sensibles, which are secondary. And they are merely "secondary" in terms of not being the primary formal object of any one sense. But this gets flipped, so that mathematics (obviously univocal in this context) becomes primary, and the secondary also becomes in a sense illusory, a sort of projection.

Off the top of my head, this seems to hold for Ezra or Maccabees. I have seen this trend remarked upon as well. God goes from being a direct parent figure (a "helicopter parent") who speaks to individuals, to speaking through prophets to a corporate people, to (in the Christian Scriptures) speaking to man as man, to a direct indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the putting on of the "Mind of Christ." This can be put in developmental terms, i.e., as man moves from "childhood towards adulthood," we see the need for the internalization of external teaching, with the teaching becoming more and more hands-off as man matures (and man is allowed to fail more often and more severely). It can also be put in terms of an "exitus et reditus," a fall from the presence of the divine, and a parallel ascent and return.

Anyhow, in support of such a reading of Samuel, Samuel doesn't seem particularly concerned with being a strict documentary (if it was, we shouldn't expect ambiguity). In I Samuel 16 we get the first David origin story, with David being selected to play the lyre to calm Saul who is afflicted by an evil spirit. In I Samuel 17, we get the parallel story of David killing Goliath. But in I Samuel 17, we Saul and Abner seem to have no idea who David is, whereas, in I Samuel 16 he has already become Saul's beloved armor bearer who goes everywhere with him. Some commentators have tried to explain the disconnect as amnesia brought on by the evil spirit (and Abner is just humoring Saul), but this seems like a stretch. Or we could assume that Samuel 17 comes first, but then we have the same sort of problem where Saul should know David.

Often this is explained as two parallel takes on David, where by Biblical convention a character's first words and appearance define them. In this first, God is central, and David is a sort of conduit, whereas in the second, God is absent and David is a worldly military leader. We get the two sides of David.

In terms of the text giving guidance itself, such a disconnect (if one takes the point of the text as being primarily documentary) could hardly have been lost on the writer or any redactor. It's like that for a reason. There are a number of cases like this in the Bible, right from Genesis 1 vs Genesis 2. And I think this at least suggests a close reading.

But how is it inerrant if the author's are untrustworthy and give false information?

It wouldn't be false in that reading, it simply reports what Samuel says. But see the point above about the parallel David introduction stories. One can take the text as divinely inspired and not take its purpose as being primarily a straight documentary. If it was, it is, at the very least, quite confused.

That's an interesting thought.

Relation is one of the categories in the Categories though. It isn't a "thing." That would be substance. This is quite explicit. The logic was developed with the metaphysics in view.

However, what you have described might be responsible for the later calcification of essences. I've seen that thesis expressed before. But one doesn't find such a reification in the Patristics or early-high Scholastics. Everything exists in a "web of relations" as Deely puts it. It's a very relation heavy ontology. The calcification and reification is more of a post-nominalism thing. Commentators have supposed that it has something to do with the limitations of logic at that point, but this is also combined with a particular (new) view of what logic is/does and a particular metaphysics of univocity. Whereas, in the earlier metaphysics, metaphysics always deals in analogy.

I think this would be more a question about universals in general though.

So what I'm arguing is that it wasn't Kant who 'blew up the bridge', but the developments in the early modern period to which Kant was responding.

That's probably a more fair genealogical take. Clarke isn't really clear on which "version of Kant" he is referring to, and there are many. The reference is not followed up on in detail.

Most of the genealogies I've read, like Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation, D.C. Schindler's work, John Milbank's work, Amos Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century all place the shift in the late middle ages, with Scotus and Ockham being the big figures, but also some German fideists who I can't recall the names of, as well as a somewhat gnostic strain in some forms of Franciscian spirituality. And the initial shifts are almost wholly theologically motivated, as opposed to relating to science or epistemology. The Reformation really poured gas on the process. The "New Science" comes later in a context that is already radically altered.

I've said before that Berkeley strikes me as a sort of damaged, fun house mirror scholasticism in a way. The analogy I would use is this. A big cathedral had collapsed. People had started building with the wreckage. They built their new foundation out of badly mangled and structurally impaired crossbeams from the old structure (e.g. "substance" and "matter"). Berkeley is pointing out to them that the materials they are using are badly damaged, but he also doesn't seem totally sure what they originally looked like before the collapse. (Now, a question of considerable controversy in this analogy is whether the cathedral collapsed because it was poorly built or because radical fundementalists dynamited it).

On a side note: I've also seen the argument that we are today largely the inheritors of a sort of "whig history" of science, that tells a story about how changes in philosophy (primarily metaphysics and epistemology, but also ethics) are responsible for the explosion in technological and economic growth that took place during the "Great Divergence," where Europe pulled rapidly ahead of China and India. A key argument for materialism is "that it works," and that it "gave us our technology." But arguably it might have retarded some advances. Some pretty important theories were originally attacked on philosophical grounds related to mechanism for instance.





Also, the timing is off. What you have is a fairly stable trend before and after the new science diffuses and then an explosion in growth with industrialization. The explosive growth actually coincides with the dominance of idealism, the sort of high water mark following Kant and Hegel. But I think it's probably fairer to say that the type of iterative experimentation driven development of industrialization was not that dependent on metaphysics. But this is relevant inasmuch materialism is still today (although less so) justified in terms of it being synonymous with science.

Given your affinity for neoplatonism, I'm quite surprised it doesn't at least make some sort of sense. In its broadest sense, the general idea is quite flexible.

Anyhow, for another topic of conversation related to my confusing example: we might question whether we can really avoid a solution more like Ockham's so easily. Can opacity vis-á-vis belief wholly semantic and logical?


Consider a book, rather than a believer. A book says something like: "Superman can fly" or "Mark Twain is a best seller." Does the book also say that Clark Kent can fly and that Samuel Clemens is a best seller? Does identity substitution work here? Now, on one view, we could ask what the writer intended. If the writer intended to express their beliefs and has no idea that Mark Twain = Samuel Clemens, and the text is taken as an expression of belief, then it seems that we cannot substitute? Whereas, on a "death of the author view" it would seem to be the reader who determines in substitution holds in ambiguous situations.

But, if we want to keep to a view where opacity is purely a function of language/contexts itself, what of ambiguous statements in the context of something like an anonymous text, a p-zombie, random text generator, or AI?

I just brought that one up because it is an example that seems like obvious equivocation that is not actually equivocation (or false) depending on how the first premise is meant (the first premise can also be true or false depending on how it is meant). And my thoughts were that the same might be true for a person / persona distinction.

But, it's also the case that if "ice is water (any phase)" is meant as identity, but then "water (makes for a good bridge," is meant as "liquid water makes for a good bridge" then we have a fallacy of four terms, having introduced "liquid water" for the very first time in the conclusion.

So, there is a valid and true version, an undistributed middle, or four terms. The way you switch between them despite an identical natural language rendering could be described under supposition theory. Supposition theory was also used for referential opacity in the past. That's how Ockham covers belief, in belief statements the term for the object supposes for the knower's mental conception of the known (an unfortunate move that contributed to representationalism). There are similar moves around modality with the idea that terms suppose differently (are ampilated by the modal context).

I thought of it because Ockham's solution is similar to Quine's in some ways, but works using a theory that explains some types of "equivocation." So, there is a sort of similarity.