Rawls might be another example. In grounding social morality in the desired of the abstract "rational agent," debates become interminable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not a Rawlsian all down the line, but I do think you're being unfair here. — J

Some months ago I was reading Peter L. P. Simpson.* His view is that Rawls' thought leads inevitably to cultural relativism, and that when this charge was brought against Rawls (by Hare), Rawls simply claimed that none of his work was ever intended to overcome cultural relativism. Simpson holds that it is quite possible to read Rawls' early work in this way, but that it was interpreted and received as being intended (or at least capable) of overcoming cultural relativism. Such an interpretation remains to this day.

For Simpson the proximate problem was not the desires of the "rational agent" (this was an ongoing problem beginning as early as Machiavelli, which Rawls inherited). The problem is that Rawls' starting point is intuition, and the intuitions with which he begins happen to be cultural intuitions. So for a culture which adheres to the intuitions that Rawls develops, his moral system is appealing, but because Rawls' approach is not aimed at universality, many cultures do not so adhere.

* See, for example, "A Century of Anglo-American Moral Theory," by Peter L. P. Simpson

I think this is partly an accident. There are still a large number of Catholic universities with large philosophy programs, and that's where a lot of this sort of work gets done and where it is more popular/not met with disapproval. So you get a system where Catholics are introduced to it more and where non-Catholics go to Catholic settings to work in the area and become Catholic. Either process tends to make the the area of study more dominated by Catholics. Given trends in Orthodoxy, and podcast guests I've heard, I would imagine we would see a not dissimilar phenomena in Eastern European/Middle Eastern Christian-university scholarship but for the fact that they publish in a plethora of different languages and so end up more divided. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'll back up @Wayfarer on this. It's no accident that Catholic universities tend to have large philosophy programs, nor that these philosophy programs tend to be Platonic or Aristotelian in nature. Indeed, Catholic clergy are required to have what is the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and this education leans into Platonism and Aristotelianism. You won't find this at all in Protestantism. Orthodox are warmer towards philosophy than Protestants, but they don't come near Catholics. There was a point in the Medieval period when the Orthodox Church turned a corner, rejecting Barlaam and opting for Palamas, and that decision cemented a distrust in philosophy and eclecticism. For my money the two most philosophically robust religions are Catholicism and Hinduism.

---

Once reason is made "a slave of the passions," it can no longer get round the passions and appetites to decide moral issues. Aristotle's idea of the virtues as a habit or skill that can be trained (to some degree) or educated has the weight of common sense and empirical experience behind it. We might have a talent for some virtues, but we also can build on those talents. But if passion comes first, then the idea of discourse in the "good human life," or "the political ideal," loses purchase on its ability to dictate which virtues we should like to develop. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Okay, this makes good sense to me.

The separation of reason from the will, and the adoption of Hume's bundle of drives ("congress of souls" in BG&E) makes it unclear exactly who or what is being freed, and how this avoids being just another sort of tyranny... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right. Still, I would maintain that Hume and Nietzsche are more consistent than the undergraduate, and therefore the misology problem and the consistency problem come apart.

The identity movements of the recent epoch run into similar problems. I recall a textbook on psychology that claimed that a focus on quantitative methodology represented "male dominance," and that the sciences as a whole must be more open to qualitative, "female oriented," methods as an equally valid way of knowing. The problem here is not that a greater focus on qualitative methods might not be warranted, it's the grounding of the argument in identity as opposed to reason. For it seems to imply that if we are men, or if the field is dominated by men, that there is in fact no reason to shift to qualitative methods, because each sex has their preferred methodology grounded solely in identity, making both equally valid. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree.

Rawls might be another example. In grounding social morality in the desired of the abstract "rational agent," debates become interminable. We might try to imagine ourselves "behind the viel of ignorance," but we can't actually place ourselves there. Thus, we all come to it with different desires, and since desires determine justice, we still end up with many "justices." The debate then, becomes unending, since reason is only a tool, and everything must circle back to conflicting desires. Argumentation becomes, at best, a power move to try to corral others' desires to our position. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As noted above, I think Rawlsianism only works if Rawls' cultural intuitions are granted as premises. So I wouldn't lump him into the same camp as Nietzsche. Hume could arguably fall into this Rawlsian mold. I think Hume has more respect for cultural intuitions than is sometimes recognized.

I should have posted the youtube link right away , since I think it is relevant to the OP that Schindler’s arguments are supposed to represent a bulwark against dogmatism, and yet he presumes as fact the appearance of god in the world, and presumes the manner of his appearance. I don’t understand how that isn’t dogmatic.

How can you tell if it's dogmatic or not? It's a brief conversation that is starting "in the middle." Does he "presuppose" the appearance of God in the world as an absolute or does he think that there is reasonable evidence for it? Certainly we can start out in the "middle" and say "flat-Earthers are ridiculous because they ignore all the evidence that the Earth is round," without having our assertion that the Earth is round rest on unquestioned dogma.

Bad argument and bad judgement isn't dogma. When it comes to religion, I find there is a bad tendency to presume dogmatism simply because religious belief often is dogmatic. But consider the case where I am convinced in the reality of the Incarnation for this reason:

Each night for a month, an angle came to me and took me on a tour of the heavens, and I was as awake and aware as I saw the wonders there as I ever am in my everyday life.

Further, my wife, and some reputable friends I had over heard me talking in my sleep and claim on their lives that they saw me glowing and levitating of the bed. Additionally, the angle who proclaimed God's revelation to me told me about the future, which I wrote down, and all that was said came to pass.

I would argue that doubt in this case would be more the dogmatic position. For it would be saying that seemingly no amount of evidence can shake me from my preexisting conviction that the Incarnation did not occur. But this is precisely what makes the epistemology of religion such a dicey business, for my justification is difficult to share, although this doesn't make it fail to be good justification.



Well, Hume and Nietzsche would be forerunners of the attack on reason. Schindler's argument, which seems credible, is that this has expanded from individual thinkers and lines of critique to whole areas of discourse where reason is secondary.

I did find the image I was thinking of:



Some of the bullets, particularly the last, would seem to make identity trump reason. Of course, there is also a difference between "all past discourse and attempts to produce rational evidence is corrupted by power relations, identity, etc." and "reason cannot adjudicate these issues, even in an ideal setting." Yet it's easy to see how one bleeds into the other, or how the former, if it makes the conditions where reason is valid utopian and forever out of reach, essentially becomes the latter for all practical purposes.

I'll back up @Wayfarer on this. It's no accident that Catholic universities tend to have large philosophy programs, nor that these philosophy programs tend to be Platonic or Aristotelian in nature. Indeed, Catholic clergy are required to have what is the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and this education leans into Platonism and Aristotelianism. You won't find this at all in Protestantism. Orthodox are warmer towards philosophy than Protestants, but they don't come near Catholics. There was a point in the Medieval period when the Orthodox Church turned a corner, rejecting Barlaam and opting for Palamas, and that decision cemented a distrust in philosophy and eclecticism. For my money the two most philosophically robust religions are Catholicism and Hinduism.

Agree 100%. I meant more that it's an accident that similar lines aren't popular in other places, that it doesn't seem like a necessarily Catholic set of ideas. But I agree that historically it has an extremely close relationship.

I don't think Popper even believed that. A criteria like "objectively measurable, verifiably repeatable evidence, that [is] capable of being falsified," would make it impossible to believe in historical events without being a dogmatist. How many times was the Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson and who was measuring him?

And I especially don't think you think that's a good way to define dogmatism, nor do I, nor do I think Schindler would either.

In liberal political theory, the individual conscience is the sole arbiter of value.
— Wayfarer

Hmm, I'm wondering who you have in mind here. — J

What I'm referring to is the centrality of individualism to liberalism and modernity, and the individual as the sole arbiter of value in Enlightenment philosophy. I would have thought that an uncontroversial claim. The underlying point is that with the rejection of the transcendent, we are inhabitants of Max Weber's 'disenchanted world'.

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

The Cartesian picture, by contrast, was a chimera, an ungainly and extrinsic alliance of antinomies. And reason abhors a dualism. Moreover, the sciences in their modern form aspire to universal explanation, ideally by way of the most comprehensive and parsimonious principles possible. So it was inevitable that what began as an imperfect method for studying concrete particulars would soon metastasize into a metaphysics of the whole of reality. The manifest image was soon demoted to sheer illusion, and the mind that perceived it to an emergent product of the real (which is to say, mindless) causal order. — David Bentley Hart, The Illusionist

How is one's conscience formed? — J

Isn't the Christian doctrine that 'Our conscience is a part of our God-given internal faculties, a critical inner awareness that bears witness to the norms and values we recognize'? I can see a line from Aristotle's 'nous' and Augustine's doctrine of 'divine illumination' to that conception. The point being, again, that severing the link between individual conscience and the larger sense of reason as an animating factor of the universe leaves the individual marooned in a meaningless universe, a stranger in a strange land.

The antipathy towards religion on this forum crosses a line at some point, impeding philosophical discourse. — Leontiskos

'Don't mention the war. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.' ~ Basil Fawlty, Fawlty Towers, Series 1, Episode 6, 'The Germans'.

nothing in Schindler's framing really seems to point towards political conservatism or necessarily just Roman Catholicism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My view is that Aquinas also is an exponent of the philosophia perennis, that he preserved and carried forward the insights of Platonist philosophy, integrated with Christian theology. The decline of scholastic realism and the ascendancy of nominalism and theological voluntarism was a major watershed in the history of ideas in Western culture.

All of those names you mention are arguably part of that broader stream, Thomas Merton in particular, as an early inter-faith pioneer.

Robert Wallace (at Cornell, a secular land-grant college) hits on some extremely similar themes but doesn't seem to identify with organized religion at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I encountered Robert Wallace through a back-page OP in Philosophy Now, Hegel's God. I found it quite congenial, but then, he's tending towards mystical interpretation of Hegel and the 'philosophia perennis', which is basically my home turf.

It seems to me that a major part of what’s going on in the world of “religion” and “spirituality,” in our time, is a sorting out of the issue of what is genuinely transcendent. Much conventional religion seems to be stuck in the habit of conceiving of God as a separate being, despite the fact that when it’s carefully examined, such a being would be finite and thus wouldn’t really transcend the world at all. — Robert Wallace

Vitally important point. That is the same issue behind John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. That Western culture has thrown the baby of spiritual awakening out with the bathwater of ecclesiastical dogmatism.

Yes, what you say about Simpson's criticism is similar to the points that Nussbaum and others have made. There is a claim to a sort of obviousness in Rawls' initial intuitions about what needs to be "veiled" in order for justice as fairness to emerge. Why these intuitions and not others? As for cultural relativism, I don't know what Rawls may have said about it to Hare or anyone else, but to me it's plain from reading A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism that Rawls was trying to craft a conception of justice that was in some important ways transcultural for democracies. I'm not sure if Rawls ever gave an argument as to why an autocracy, for instance, could in principle not be just. He was concerned with finding a firm basis for liberal democratic values as he understood them, and also (to quote his opening statements in Political Liberalism), "to develop an alternative systematic account of justice that is superior to utilitarianism." This shows his basic Kantian commitments, I think.

BTW, the only thing I thought was unfair about Count T's reference to Rawls was this: "We might try to imagine ourselves 'behind the veil of ignorance,' but we can't actually place ourselves there." I took this to mean that the thought experiment couldn't succeed, because we can't actually become ignorant in the right ways, and that Rawls was somehow overlooking this. But this may not have been Count T's meaning.

also see https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/does-reason-know-what-it-is-missing/

Let’s say that we take Popper’s model of good scientific method as our basis for determining non-dogmatic thinking. Applying this criterion, Schindler would have to base his claim for the truth of the resurrection on objectively measurable, verifiably repeatable evidence, that was capable of being falsified. And even after being validated by the consensus of a community, it found not be assumed to be true in any absolute sense, since for Popper we can only falsify. Something tells me Schindler would not accept such a criterion. — Joshs

I'd say this is actually the claim that any non-Scientistic methodology is dogmatism, which is a remarkable claim. Ironically, these varieties of Scientism are very often themselves forms of dogmatism.

I don't think Popper even believed that. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Me neither.

(@Wayfarer)

What I'm referring to is the centrality of individualism to liberalism and modernity, and the individual as the sole arbiter of value in Enlightenment philosophy. I would have thought that an uncontroversial claim. The underlying point is that with the rejection of the transcendent, we are inhabitants of Max Weber's 'disenchanted world'. — Wayfarer

OK, the world may be "disenchanted" in Weber's sense, but surely "the individual as the sole arbiter of value" isn't the only remaining alternative. Isn't there an vigorous, important strain of thought in the West that tries to find meaning and value in various forms of community, intersubjectivity, etc.? I'd argue that, in fact, this is the basis of scientific method and of Deweyan pragmatism; no single individual can assert what is valuable or not; reasoned, fallible consensus is required.

I'd say this is actually the claim that any non-Scientistic methodology is dogmatism, which is a remarkable claim. Also, is Joshs statement itself a form of dogmatism? Ironically, these forms of Scientism are very often themselves forms of dogmatism — Leontiskos

Oh, there are plenty of other ways of determining what is the case besides using Popper’s method. I’m not a Popperian, I’m a Kuhnian, so I don’t think science itself should proceed by the method of falsification. But perhaps you can explain to me what kind of non-dogmatic method of truth-making allows Schindler to assert that liberal politics is evil because it doesn’t accept the truth of the resurrection.

Yes, what you say about Simpson's criticism is similar to the points that Nussbaum and others have made. — J

Okay.

As for cultural relativism, I don't know what Rawls may have said about it to Hare or anyone else, but to me it's plain from reading A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism that Rawls was trying to craft a conception of justice that was in some important ways transcultural for democracies. I'm not sure if Rawls ever gave an argument as to why an autocracy, for instance, could in principle not be just. He was concerned with finding a firm basis for liberal democratic values as he understood them, and also (to quote his opening statements in Political Liberalism), "to develop an alternative systematic account of justice that is superior to utilitarianism." — J

This is a salutary correction. I was glossing Simpson, and would probably need to go back for a tighter critique, but I can't remember all of the sources. For Simpson Rawls' intuitions are related to modern liberal democracies, and systems derived from Rawls tend to be unable to adjudicate disputes involving cultures which do not adhere to those (cultural) intuitions. Simpson sees Aristotle, in his Politics, doing for a variety of regimes what Rawls did for modern democracy. The crucial difference is that after showing how to optimize (or corrupt) each kind of regime, Aristotle argues for a particular ranking of the various regimes. It is this final step that is required for a universal morality or political philosophy, and it is what Rawls never attempted.

BTW, the only thing I thought was unfair about Count T's reference to Rawls was this: "We might try to imagine ourselves 'behind the veil of ignorance,' but we can't actually place ourselves there." I took this to mean that the thought experiment couldn't succeed, because we can't actually become ignorant in the right ways, and that Rawls was somehow overlooking this. But this may not have been Count T's meaning. — J

Fair enough. :up:

Isn't the Christian doctrine that 'Our conscience is a part of our God-given internal faculties, a critical inner awareness that bears witness to the norms and values we recognize'? I can see a line from Aristotle's 'nous' and Augustine's doctrine of 'divine illumination' to that conception. The point being, again, that severing the link between individual conscience and the larger sense of reason as an animating factor of the universe leaves the individual marooned in a meaningless universe, a stranger in a strange land. — Wayfarer

Conscience is a notoriously ambiguous term, and there are different conceptions of conscience even within Christianity.

But to your point, today we are seeing a constriction of the idea of conscience due to the conditioning from individualism, such that "conscience rights" are potentially thought to exist independent of any appeal to religion, tradition, or reason. I think Catholics would see that as a corruption. ...But none of this adjudicates your difference with @J.

Each night for a month, an angle came to me and took me on a tour of the heavens, and I was as awake and aware as I saw the wonders there as I ever am in my everyday life.

Further, my wife, and some reputable friends I had over heard me talking in my sleep and claim on their lives that they saw me glowing and levitating of the bed. Additionally, the angle who proclaimed God's revelation to me told me about the future, which I wrote down, and all that was said came to pass — Count Timothy von Icarus

What’s missing here is definition. What do ‘angel’ and ‘heaven’ mean? It’s not a question of these concepts being wrong but of being so vaguely defined that they don’t give a basis for measurement, for agreement or disagreement. The question isn’t whether something happened, but what exactly it was, whether it can be repeated and predicted within some scheme of causality. Dogmatism is associated with an unwillingness to expose an experience to all possible forms of questioning. In Schindler’s paper on gender, he disagrees with gender theorists on the relation between difference and identity.
He wants to place differences within categories which unify from above, as the general ruling over the particular.
This transcendence of the general can be considered as a form of dogmatism, a flattening and totalizing of contextual variation that the later Wittgenstein saw as the central confusion of philosophy.

Isn't there an vigorous, important strain of thought in the West that tries to find meaning and value in various forms of community, intersubjectivity, etc.? — J

Well, yeah, but my intuition is, that there's still something missing. Hence that link I threw in at the last minute - it was an OP on the dialogue between then Cardinal Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, at the time when the Habermas sought to re-engage in the dialogue between religious and secular philosophy.

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

There are resonances with another philosopher of similar ilk, Theodor Adorno:

Adorno’s moral philosophy is similarly concerned with the effects of ‘enlightenment’ upon both the prospects of individuals leading a ‘morally good life’ and philosophers’ ability to identify what such a life may consist of. Adorno argues that the instrumentalization of reason has fundamentally undermined both. He argues that social life in modern societies no longer coheres around a set of widely espoused moral truths and that modern societies lack a moral basis. What has replaced morality as the integrating ‘cement’ of social life are instrumental reasoning and the exposure of everyone to the capitalist market. According to Adorno, modern, capitalist societies are fundamentally nihilistic, in character; opportunities for leading a morally good life and even philosophically identifying and defending the requisite conditions of a morally good life have been abandoned to instrumental reasoning and capitalism. Within a nihilistic world, moral beliefs and moral reasoning are held to have no ultimately rational authority: moral claims are conceived of as, at best, inherently subjective statements, expressing not an objective property of the world, but the individual’s own prejudices. Morality is presented as thereby lacking any objective, public basis. The espousal of specific moral beliefs is thus understood as an instrument for the assertion of one’s own, partial interests: morality has been subsumed by instrumental reasoning. Adorno attempts to critically analyse this condition. He is not a nihilist, but a critic of nihilism. — IEP

no single individual can assert what is valuable or not; reasoned, fallible consensus is required. — J

Inter-subjective agreement is essential when it comes to scientific hypotheses, but it's not realistic when it comes to one's own existence, unless you're part of a collective. So, paradoxically, in response to that, I will say that the individual conscience is supreme, that there are situations where you and you alone are required to make a call based on nothing other than your convictions. Sure, you might get it wrong, but that is part of the deal. Maybe that's why faith is required.

Oh, there are plenty of other ways of determining what is the case besides using Popper’s method. I’m not a Popperian, I’m a Kuhnian, so I don’t think science itself should proceed by the method of falsification. — Joshs

Okay.

But perhaps you can explain to me what kind of non-dogmatic method of truth-making allows Schindler to assert that liberal politics is evil because it doesn’t accept the truth of the resurrection. — Joshs

From earlier:

...The second prong is that liberalism as Schindler defines it requires a denial of the ontological impact of the Incarnation, and that this is objectively evil (as privation) regardless of any good intentions involved. The second prong requires Christian premises, namely that the Incarnation had an ontological effect, and Schindler is not unclear about this fact. — Leontiskos

For someone who believes that the Incarnation occurred and changed reality, a political philosophy which requires neutrality on the truth-value of the Incarnation is evil.* Similarly, for someone who believes that the Holocaust occurred and changed reality, a political philosophy which requires neutrality on the truth-value of the Holocaust is evil. Germany goes a step further and basically requires non-neutrality, prohibiting the denial of the Holocaust.

But I think did a good job underlining the problems with your understanding of "dogmatism."

* Note that Schindler specifically says that he is speaking of evil as privation, not as intentional moral evil.

the dialogue between then Cardinal Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas — Wayfarer

Habermas is exactly who I was thinking of as an exponent of this ongoing, rational, consensus-driven approach to knowledge and values!

Intersubjective agreement is essential when it comes to scientific hypotheses, but it's not realistic when it comes to one's own existence, unless you're part of a collective. — Wayfarer

This is complicated, but I understand what you mean. We don't want our values determined for us by consensus. But the alternative of stubbornly asserting one's own right to decide what matters based on nothing other than personal choice is surely a version of the inimical individualism you've been writing about. As usual, we're looking for reasonable middle grounds for compromise . . .

Well, Hume and Nietzsche would be forerunners of the attack on reason. Schindler's argument, which seems credible, is that this has expanded from individual thinkers and lines of critique to whole areas of discourse where reason is secondary. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think that's fair, so long as we are open to the various additional factors that exercise an influence.

Some of the bullets, particularly the last, would seem to make identity trump reason. Of course, there is also a difference between "all past discourse and attempts to produce rational evidence is corrupted by power relations, identity, etc." and "reason cannot adjudicate these issues, even in an ideal setting." Yet it's easy to see how one bleeds into the other, or how the former, if it makes the conditions where reason is valid utopian and forever out of reach, essentially becomes the latter for all practical purposes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, you're preaching to the choir. :smile:

Agree 100%. I meant more that it's an accident that similar lines aren't popular in other places, that it doesn't seem like a necessarily Catholic set of ideas. But I agree that historically it has an extremely close relationship. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, I don't think it's Catholic per se. I think it's important to be able to read a Catholic's book on Plato without reading all sorts of religious influences into the text. The emphasis on "power relations" has become so strong that many find it difficult to concentrate on or address an idea without constantly adverting to the religion of the person who thought it. This is related to your newer thread, where you make the point that reason must be allowed to transcend its conditions and environment, having authority in itself. Viz:

In a consequentialist era the notion that reason is per se authoritative is elusive. On a Platonic metaphysic of participation, acting reasonably flows from the inherent authority (ex-ousia) of reason... — Leontiskos

A Brave New World world might be a good inroad for the problem I see with Rawls. It's a society that does extremely well at fulfilling everyone's appetitive desires and passions. It maximizes utility as well as might be possible without hooking everyone up to some sort of chemical pleasure creche. Each class thinks their role is best. It has a very equal distribution of goods.

It has a high degree of freedom as defined in the Lockean/liberal "freedom as freedom from external constraint," sense. You can do as you desire. If you're a rare person who doesn't desire just orgy porgy, mass media entertainment, and soma binges, you can go off to an island of other misfits and pursue your scientific or artistic projects; your own Gault's Gulch. You're free so long as you don't mess with the system that makes most other people happy. It's the minimal amount of external constraint to maximize utility for all; the liberal ideal!

But the world is a horrific dystopia. How does our abstract observer express this without having to get into how a good human life "ought" to be? They can't complain about freedom to fulfill desires, utility, or equality. What makes ABNW a dystopia is all about what we ought to desire, not what we might come to/do desire.

To get at why the world of ABNW is bad though, it seems we have to go beyond and behind the preferences of the agent. Something like Hegel's "people must be forced to be free," and "the criminal deserves the right to be punished" because they aren't a dog to be trained.

But the alternative of stubbornly asserting one's own right to decide what matters based on nothing other than personal choice is surely a version of the inimical individualism you've been writing about. As usual, we're looking for reasonable middle grounds for compromise . . . — J

A middle way, perhaps. At issue, though, is the substance of wisdom, of what wisdom constitutes, how to discern it. I contend that post-Enlightenment philosophies tend, on the whole, to occlude that question, often because of their antagonism to religious ideas, which has already been noted several times in this thread. Not that I'm evangalising any particular religion in saying that. But I think classical philosophy has a religious side - where it differs from religion per se, is the insistence on subjecting religious ideas to reason. But pre-modern philosophy generally was open to the religious, it was a part of their Weltanschauung in a way it can't be for us.

The issue is that the definition of reason itself, per Adorno and Habermas, has changed in post-Enlightenment philosophy. To throw that into relief, consider the mainstream consensus of the essentially meaningless nature of the Universe. On the one hand, from a purely scientific point of view, it makes complete sense, as we're looking at it from a completely objective point of view. Science consciously excludes anything subjective in its reckonings. But when this becomes a belief about the 'the way things really are' that it opens up the chasm of nihislim. Because we don't actually live in the scientific universe, we dwell in the human condition. In the absence of a sense of the sacred, there is no pole star towards which we orient ourselves. Hence, again, awakening from the meaning crisis.

This is related to your newer thread, where you make the point that reason must be allowed to transcend its conditions and environment, having authority in itself — Leontiskos

The reason that anything appears reasonable is precisely because of the way that actual conditions, context and enviroment intertwine with background history to redefine what is at stake and at issue in the determination of the goals of reason. Trying to separate reason from the real contexts of its instantiation is a recipe for dogmatism. Understanding is enacted in pragmatic interactions, not transported from a transcendent authoritative realm to grace the present from the past. We’re not trying to enshrine eternal verities , but adapt to continually changing conditions by extracting from them anticipatable regularities.

In the absence of a sense of the sacred, there is no pole star towards which we orient ourselves. — Wayfarer

A few weeks ago on a road trip I listened to a conversation between Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke, originally given a much better title, "The Rebirth of the Sacred." I thought it was interesting, and I was actually impressed with Vervaeke. (Peterson is a bit exasperating in that interview - I wish he had handed the reins to Vervaeke.)

In that same interview Peterson talks about a book he is working on, which looks to be a psychological version of Peter Simpson's Political Illiberalism. From my understanding it is a critique of the liberal Enlightenment view which undergirds the idea that the individual can be morally or religiously neutral, as if one could approach such questions of value from a purely objective vantage point. I don't see that critique as controversial, but I am glad to see it being popularized.

I'm favourable towards Vervaeke but a bit wary of Peterson. He's hated by the left. And he's expressed support for Trump, which is a fatal turnoff in my books. I think many would benefit from knowing about Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, although overall there's a bit too much Vervaeke on Youtube now.

Further, in contrast to the presumptuous self-limitation of reason within modernity, Schindler avers that reason is ecstatic, that it is “always out beyond itself” and “always already with the whole.” The result of this ek-stasis is that reason is already intimately related to beings through the intelligibility of the whole; thus, reason is catholic.

I've just noticed that, re-reading the thread. I've been pondering this question, in respect of my readings of classical philosophy and the reverence for reason, modulated by Kant.

My tentative conclusion is that reason is not in principle 'ek-static' in the sense indicated in this quotation. I think that 'reason points beyond itself' - as Kant says, it has an ineluctable tendency to ask questions that it can't answer (hence the antinomies of reason.) Reason is not the be-all and end-all. In neo-Platonism, the 'unitive vision' is described thus:

For Plotinus, man "is in some sense divine, and the object of the philosophic life is to understand this divinity and restore its proper relationship with the divine All and, in that All, to come to union with its transcendent source, the One or Good" (Cambridge, 222). Plotinus's philosophy is difficult to elucidate, precisely because what it seeks to elucidate is a manner of thinking that precedes what one terms discursive thought. Discursive thought is the sort of thinking we do most often in a philosophical discussion or debate, when we seek to follow a series of premises and intermediate conclusions to a final conclusion. In such a thinking, our minds move from one point to the next, as if each point only can be true after we have known the truth of the point preceding it. The final point is true, only because we have already built up one by one a series of points preceding it logically that are also true. In the same way, the meaning of the sentence I am now speaking only builds itself up by the addition of each word, until coming to its conclusion it makes a certain sense built of the words from which it is constituted. Because discurive thinking is within ordinary time, it is not capable of thinking all its points or saying all its words in the very same moment.

But Plotinus wishes to speak of a thinking that is not discursive but intuitive, i.e. that it is knowing and what it is knowing are immediately evident to it. There is no gap then between thinking and what is thought--they come together in the same moment, which is no longer a moment among other consecutive moments, one following upon the other. Rather, the moment in which such a thinking takes place is immediately present and without difference from any other moment, i.e. its thought is no longer chronological but eternal. To even use names, words, to think about such a thinking is already to implicate oneself in a time of separated and consecutive moments (i.e. chronological) and to have already forgotten what it is one wishes to think, namely thinking and what is thought intuitively together. — Class Notes on Plotinus

Hence, reason 'pointing beyond itself', to the 'trans-rational' (which is, importantly, not simply irrational.) This is the basis of the frequent comparisons of Plotinus with e.g. Shankara and non-dualism. But all of that tends to be rejected under the catch-all of 'it's religion'.

The reason that anything appears reasonable is precisely because of the way that actual conditions, context and enviroment intertwine with background history to redefine what is at stake and at issue in the determination of the goals of reason. Trying to separate reason from the real contexts of its instantiation is a recipe for dogmatism. Understanding is enacted in pragmatic interactions, not transported from a transcendent authoritative realm to grace the present from the past. — Joshs

The world exists in a precarious balance of the coincidentia oppositorum. Environment conditions reason and reason shapes environment. To reject either is folly. And yet there comes a point when we must make a choice as to the hierarchy of—from a Platonic perspective—the various parts of the soul. This choice shapes us, and "immanentists" who favor environment and conditioning become immanent, ingrained into their environment and disagreeable to transcendence; while ""transcendentalists"" who hold fast to the idea that there is a part of the soul which transcends environment and conditioning end up transcending and transforming their environment. An immanentist balks at the OP not only because it is based on the work of a Catholic, but also because in bypassing pragmatism and relativism it stretches up towards the transcendent, thereby "making all things new."

The issue is that the definition of reason itself, per Adorno and Habermas, has changed in post-Enlightenment philosophy. To throw that into relief, consider the mainstream consensus of the essentially meaningless nature of the Universe. On the one hand, from a purely scientific point of view, it makes complete sense, as we're looking at it from a completely objective point of view. — Wayfarer

On a scientifically informed perspective, it would be naive to think that we're looking at anything from a completely objective point of view.

We are creatures that find things meaningful. Looking for meaning, beyond actually finding things meaningful in this life, might be a fool's errand.

Science consciously excludes anything subjective in its reckonings. — Wayfarer

That is clearly one of your favorite things to say. But it's simply not true. It strongly suggests you are ignorant of a whole lot of scientific thought.

But when this becomes a belief about the 'the way things really are' that it opens up the chasm of nihislim. — Wayfarer

Your bogeyman.

Because we don't actually live in the scientific universe, we dwell in the human condition. — Wayfarer

False dichotomy.

Misology is not best expressed in the radical skeptic, who questions the ability of reason to comprehend or explain anything. For in throwing up their arguments against reason they grant it an explicit sort of authority. Rather, misology is best exhibited in the demotion of reason to a lower sort of "tool," one that must be used with other, higher goals/metrics in mind. The radical skeptic leaves reason alone, abandons it. According to Schindler, the misolog "ruins reason." — Count Timothy von Icarus

This begs the question as to just what reason is or what it consists in. Do not those dogmatists and relativists give reasons for their stances? Surely the radical skeptics also have their reasons for being skeptical.

I'm favourable towards Vervaeke but a bit wary of Peterson. He's hated by the left. And he's expressed support for Trump, which is a fatal turnoff in my books. — Wayfarer

I won't belabor this, but I don't believe he has. The left has a consistent difficulty in distinguishing someone who doesn't oppose Trump from someone who endorses Trump. They assume that everyone who hasn't opposed Trump therefore endorses him. From what I have seen Peterson hasn't opposed Trump in this upcoming election, but neither has he endorsed him.

Well, if they are skeptical regarding reason itself, as a whole, they might have their reasons, but they certainly shouldn't put any stock in them. :rofl:

Phyrro of Elis allegedly had to have his disciples follow him around to make sure he didn't walk of cliffs or into fire, so strong was his conviction in the unreliability of reason. But alas, he was one day caught running away from a wild dog and was disgraced.

Are the Skeptics skeptical of reason itself or rather of the common stock of premises upon which reason elaborates?

The story about Pyrrho could well be apocryphal, and since he wrote nothing himself, what we today consider to be Pyrrhonism comes from later sources, one of the most notable being Sextus Empiricus.
This is from Wikipedia:

A summary of Pyrrho's philosophy was preserved by Eusebius, quoting Aristocles, quoting Timon, in what is known as the "Aristocles passage."[5] There are conflicting interpretations of the ideas presented in this passage, each of which leads to a different conclusion as to what Pyrrho meant:

'The things themselves are equally indifferent, and unstable, and indeterminate, and therefore neither our senses nor our opinions are either true or false. For this reason then we must not trust them, but be without opinions, and without bias, and without wavering, saying of every single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not.[12](Underlining mine).

In any case you failed to address the salient question: what do you think reason consists in?

With respect to the range of reason, surely one of the factors that underpinned traditional philosophy was the conviction that the Cosmos was itself rational in some foundational sense. I found a crib on the book being discussed in the OP (Plato's Critique of Impure Reason):

Chapter 2—“With Good Reason”: “the highest good is both good in itself and good in its effects. Our thesis is that this twofold characterization of the good as both absolute (good in itself) and relative (good for us) represents the interpretive key that unlocks the significance of the philosophical drama and prepares for the climax at the central part of the dialogue. To say that the good causes truth means that it establishes being in its nonrelativity, but also that it makes that nonrelativity accessible to the soul. The good, in other words, separates being from appearance, but it also bridges that separation, and thus makes truth and knowledge possible.”

Chapter 2 opens up a deep inquiry into the relationship between the relative (appearance) and the absolute (truth). Platonic goodness is shown to be both good in its appearances and good in truth. This paradoxical nature of the good harkens to its transcendent value. Although it may be tempting to conceive of the relative as diametrically opposed to the absolute, an argument is made that the absolute necessarily encompasses the relative, and therefore Platonic goodness is more of a transcendence through rather than a transcendence of the relative.

The point I'm trying to make about the transition to modernity, is the general rejection of there being reason in any sense aside from it being an evolved human capacity. Historically, this is because of the way that Platonism had become absorbed into Christian theology (in the form of Christian Platonism), which meams that it has largely been rejected by, or is as seen as in conflict with, naturalism (the 'conflict thesis'). And naturalism presumes no such cosmic reason or 'logos'. This is where the 'all-encompassing relativism' that the OP mentions comes from.