a bunch of inborn genetic, biological, neurological, mental, and psychological processes, structures, capacities, drives, and instincts which are modified during development and by experience and socialization. — T Clark

Hey T Clark, thanks for the welcome. I did read your posts, and found myself in agreement with your components of 'human nature', although I was wondering how you would define 'mental'?

I think of this sort of knowledge as an 'act of faith', ultimately. To say that we can define human nature seems impossible to me, given that our understanding of what that means is inevitably evolving.

But just because you have to 'choose' to believe, the act of faith itself being a choice, does not mean you are wrong. Your concept of this might be perfect, somehow, or it could be the best possible given what we know, in this moment, etc. There are many ways this could be the best way to think without it being objectively true.

Hence my use of 'aspirational'. A professor once told me that to be ethical in the face of modern uncertainty was to be 'whole-hearted and half-sure', and that stay stays with me today. I don't know much about the ancient Greeks, but the premise of 'virtue ethics' is, to my understanding, a project of maximizing your potential for good.

To me, we can't 'know' what human nature is, what the right thing to do is, but we can conclude that we are made better by having these 'ideals' to aspire towards, and then acting.

Your Chuang Tzu quote expresses a very similar premise, I believe. It's feels a 'process' philosophy. I find Buddhism similar, and personally appealing, having lived in Japan for a few years and traveled the region in the summers. Visiting all those temples and shrines in Tokyo, and in Thailand, Vietnam, etc, heck, even the churches of England when I was still calling myself a backpacker - all of those experiences helped me to ground my understanding of those religions in physical terms, and it was always the Buddhist temples I was most attracted to.

I struggle with deontological or utilitarian ethics simply due to the impossibility of objectivity, and my being an atheist. There is no 'leap of faith' for me to take. Only philosophically-informed choices to make. (or so I hope!)

But I am all for people, such as yourself, making a thoughtful decision to be relativistic, for a variety of possible reasons. It's only the default relativists I worry about, because it can lead to some collective problems with narcissism and rudderlessness. It's easy to be a lousy relativist. It's hard to be a good one?

"Your open minded and sympathetic attitude about religion is not a popular one here on the forum, which has a record of knee-jerk religious bigotry".

Thanks. Being educated in philosophy outside of the academy, I just looked at the history of philosophy (that I was supposed to be able to deliver to 17 year-olds in one semester), and saw so much done in historical contexts that necessitated an exchange between philosophy and religion that it was impossible for me to imagine disentangling them? I had super diverse classes here in downtown Toronto, including many Muslim students, Orthodox Greeks, etc., given my neighbourhood, and found this a great way to engage them.

I enjoyed thinking about your post.

Hey T Clark, thanks for the welcome. I did read your posts, and found myself in agreement with your components of 'human nature', although I was wondering how you would define 'mental'? — Jeremy Murray

I'll give a couple of examples. One of the most prominent is the capacity for language. Another important one is the capacity for what Konrad Lorenz calls "extended consciousness" that most other animals don't have. Over the past year I read two documents by him - A paper called "Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology" and "Behind the Mirror which deal with the subject and related subjects. Here is a link to the paper if you are interested.

https://archive.org/details/KantsDoctrineOfTheAPrioriInTheLightOfContemporaryBiologyKonradLorenz

To say that we can define human nature seems impossible to me, given that our understanding of what that means is inevitably evolving. — Jeremy Murray

Clearly I don't agree with that given I did provide a definition. I'm not a cognitive scientist so my take is a amateur's and, as I noted, others disagree. I've read a few articles, but I can't lay out their arguments. Since the idea of human nature is so important to me, I need to read more people who are critical of the idea.

I think of this sort of knowledge as an 'act of faith', ultimately...

But just because you have to 'choose' to believe, the act of faith itself being a choice, does not mean you are wrong. Your concept of this might be perfect, somehow, or it could be the best possible given what we know, in this moment, etc. There are many ways this could be the best way to think without it being objectively true...

...To me, we can't 'know' what human nature is, what the right thing to do is, but we can conclude that we are made better by having these 'ideals' to aspire towards, and then acting. — Jeremy Murray

Based on what I've written here, it should be clear I disagree with this.

Your Chuang Tzu quote expresses a very similar premise, — Jeremy Murray

I don't see that. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu write about our "Te," what Ziporyn translates as "intrinsic virtuosities" and sometimes "inborn nature."

I struggle with deontological or utilitarian ethics simply due to the impossibility of objectivity, and my being an atheist. There is no 'leap of faith' for me to take. Only philosophically-informed choices to make. (or so I hope!) — Jeremy Murray

For me, and I think Taoist principles, at least expressed in the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu, there is no leap of faith or philosophically informed choices. It's something I am aware of. As I understand it, Taoism is about self-awareness.

But I am all for people, such as yourself, making a thoughtful decision to be relativistic, for a variety of possible reasons. — Jeremy Murray

I would not call myself a relativist, although I can see why you would.

A moral system is always equal to a legal system. Certainly, law is subjected to perpetual changes. We cannot intend legality as something that is detached from morality.

Logic itself is objective. Only one universal reasoning could inquire into whether ‘logic is objective or not’, and any conclusion from that inquiry would be built using only logic; basically, you can only use logic to prove whether logic is objective or not, and so you prove ‘you can only use logic to prove’ as an objective experience of things. Some things we experience are universal, and that is an objective truth. — Fire Ologist

Logic is objective because logic depends on an already constituted set of assumptions concerning what an object is. Therefore, logic can’t be used as a means to reveal the psychological genesis of those assumptions, as writers like Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger argued. Derrida summarizes Husserl’s opposition to Frege on this point:

“… only "composed" logical notions can be defined without referring to psychological genesis; these notions are mediate and hence insufficient. They are already constituted, and their originary sense escapes us. They suppose elementary concepts like "quality," "intensity," "place," “time," and so on, whose definition cannot, in Husserl's eyes, remain specifically logical. These concepts are correlative to the act of a subject. The concepts of equality, identity, of whole and of part, of plurality and of unity are not understood., in the last analysis, through terms of formal logic. If these concepts were a priori pure ideal forms, they would not lend themselves to any definition; every definition supposes in fact a concrete determination.

This determination cannot be provided except by the act of actual constitution of this formal logic. Thus, we must turn toward concrete psychological life, toward perception, starting from which, abstraction and formalization take place. An already constituted logical form cannot be rigorously defined without unveiling the whole intentional history of its constitution. If such a history is not implied by all the logical concepts, these become unintelligible in themselves and unusable in concrete operations. Thus, Husserl maintains against Frege that one has no right to reproach a mathematician with describing the historical and psychological journey that leads to the concept of number, One cannot “begin" with a logical definition of number. The very act of this definition and its possibility would be inexplicable. (The Problem of Genesis)

Hello Mr. Murray,
(16 years of Catholic school and that’s the only way I can address high school teachers — Fire Ologist

Hi Fire Ologist, thanks for the welcome, and that's funny - I still have students who call me Mr. Murray, despite my promising them they can call me what they want when they graduate. Families, careers, and they still call me Mr. ...

I appreciate the respect shown teachers though, and I am happy you had that inspiring experience in English class. Not everybody has those.

what would be the point of the whole discussion if we could not distill how to act and how not to act towards each other in some form that we can all share and look to — Fire Ologist

Well said. I think my attraction back to philosophy has come from precisely this .... it seems to me that so much of what passes as morality is simply an 'act of faith', which is fine if we acknowledge it to be incomplete, a work in progress, and that all we aspire towards is synthetic, in a sense. 'Many paths, one truth'.

This synthesizing project is relational, based on reason, responsibility and a striving towards objectivity - in keeping with your model. I always saw my role as a high school teacher, welcoming students from seemingly everywhere, as working towards this synthesis.

But to aspire towards this, one has to remain 'whole-hearted and half-sure'.

To be specific, I have major problems with 'wokeness', which is often presented as a completed project, one that has come to absolutely dominate our educational institutions in a remarkably short time. The 'woke' have set out to 'dismantle' objectivity as white supremacist, which, per your 'required playing pieces', undermines the entire project. The woke prioritize 'lived experience' - anecdote - above all else, but only the lived experience of the 'marginalized'.

I find this dangerous, the moving target of 'marginalization', the refusal to play with the pieces we've played with, as human beings, since we first started thinking about morality. It seems to me that the response to this is synthetic - to identify shared values in religion, philosophy, cultural tradition, science, storytelling, etc and to bring the best of the various means of thinking into conversations with each other.

And I worry about a belief system that appears to be more religious than scholarly, but has managed to claim a scholarly standing that derives from it's own 'inherent' virtuousness.

This is true of all sorts of belief systems, it's just this new one, 'wokeness', that has me wondering what our shared language for moral discussion is / should be.

I spent some time thinking about your post and how to reply, and still find myself on shaky ground. The only conclusion I can come up with is that it is the act of pursuing an 'objective' morality, in free dialogue with others, seems essentially, necessarily 'human', even though the end goal is almost certainly unattainable.

That's my best practice, currently.

What would you recommend for dialogue with people who seem to be playing checkers with a chess set?

What would you recommend for dialogue with people who seem to be playing checkers with a chess set? — Jeremy Murray

Ignore them. They are not playing hte game. And they know it. That's why the 'woke' don't actually get much truck. You'll never see a screaming blue-haired, chain-wearing trans woman(purposefully inflammatory, to paint a picture, to be sure) having a serious ethical discussion with heads of state, or anything of the kind. People will real interests in unity and getting along don't behave those ways, and we don't allow them to. We allow concessions, the way we do with children. Yes, i'm being sanguine, but i don't think too far from reality.

one has to remain 'whole-hearted and half-sure'. — Jeremy Murray

The fact that people keep making inquiry of morality, to me, is a reasonable basis for a hope all of these same people who even ask “yeah, but is it good?” might one day make a morality that is not futile. But, to me, if all is only relative, or we reduce the responsible agent to neurons and prior forces, we are not talking morality anymore. So we have to address relativity in the face of objectivity.

If we want to be more scientific/analytic about this, I have to show you where I’m coming from. I see three ways the specter of futility creeps into the conversation.

First, if all metaphysics is futile, as an unfalsifiable exercise in the logic of tilting at angels dancing on the head of a windmill, there is no such thing as any “system” and so all moral systems are futile attempts to merely describe a fabricated windmill. Morality merely adds the concept “good” to the parallel question “are all systems futile?” which they may be, if we are honest.

(At this threshold spot where we see the futility of identifying any “system”, you find a similar but different threshold futility due to our reliance on language alone to point out all of these musings and figures of speech like “moral system”.…. This is also where epistemological problems lie, where how we know anything is questionable, so how is knowing about morality knowing anything “true” about morality and not simply about my own construction of something? There is a lot of potential futility to any philosophy before we even get started on morality.)

A second layer of futility arises, if we somehow address the problems with systematizing human experience, and come to agree that metaphysics and moral system-making is as concrete as any science, that we can use reason to agree on universal moral laws and a means to adjudicate our own and others’ actions - we still have to come up with those laws and reasonably apply those laws to situations. What is a moral system and whether it can even exist, becomes, what action reflects the moral law? Making universal laws seems just as futile as making a system, even if we have solved the threshold metaphysical/epistemological problems, given how opposed people are to each other in life. In a practical sense, in today’s climate of distrust, and just stubborn ignorance, no one wants to even listen to each other, let alone devise together a law that will equally tell all parties what to do and what not to do. We face the futility that we will never actually be able to agree on one “system” and so we will never actually create the metaphysical “system” we assumed was possible before but now can’t agree on, and moral systematizing remains a futile attempt. The “law” part of the “moral system” is still cloudy and dubious for us even if we agree the type “law” is clearly possible.

But third, even if we worked out all of the metaphysical questions, and we built an entire system of just, moral laws that the entire world’s citizenry agreed was best for one and best for all, threw a party like New Year’s Eve to celebrate because everyone is happy, together if only for a night - now we each still live in time, and the party ends, and we have to go separate ways, and in future moments we have to pit morality against opposing desires, but protect and keep this morality by being moral, daily, being as good as we can. Seems to me, even if we are certain about metaphysical absolute objective truth, and certain we have found it in the moral code we consent to with our whole hearts, we are still able to render this moral system futile.

But then, is it futile build a moral system in attempt to resist or temper these human passions and reasonings of thought and body, anyway?

Wasn’t it myself I was really trying to regulate with morality in the first place, or, can’t I live according to my morality despite the futility of it?

Can I learn to do better, next time? Is there a “better” I can make in the future that guides my actions in the present and makes them better now as I act?

Is there a moral system that I would create out of my own actions despite anyone else, even myself?

Even though moral systems seem futile and I fail my morality every time, is it still better, and so, good, to be moral?

“Good to be moral” - that’s seems either self-perpetuating, or empty tautology.

I think this is the space the existentialists carved out from which to sit on the question of morality. It’s before good and evil, not beyond it - it’s the understanding that we never got there, because we can never get there. So not beyond anywhere.

But here, for some reason, we can still “be moral”, we just have to be moral, anyway. It’s just that now, morality is a creative act merely among persons.

My sense is this was always the case - we learned to speak, we shared communications, and morality was born all simultaneously.

Making a moral system is self-defining act at the same time. So the universal (system) is the particular (self-defining). So maybe making a moral system simply means making myself better. I still have the problems of defining what’s “worse” from the “better” and identifying what is responsible, and how to codify it in law, but I’m doing all of these things looking at the law as a sculpting of my very soul itself.

We define ourselves when we define our morality and, also when we, ourselves, act according to our morality. The moral sense of things, the sense of “good” agreed upon with another, is tied up with what human beings are. Making morals, universalizing, is tied up with being a person, which is tied up with speaking to other speakers, because being a person is tied up with other human beings being people with you. We each define ourselves, together, with the others. Separate, but with each other. This is what morality is, or comes from, or makes. Being moral is an act as much as it is a law that could be acted upon or a system that could teach us how to live best.

We dont need to equate the law with oppression and stagnant resistance to change. The law is just as necessary for us to rejoin as “us”, as is the lawless relativity necessary for us to be apart in our lawless, silent separate subjectivity.

If I saw nothing objective about our existential condition, and left all things relative to forces of undoing and remaking, then what would be the point of speaking at all? Speaking itself can be futile, even thinking logically if thinking about something that isn’t there. Without objectivity, nothing else is there with us, each, a lonely, cut-off subject.

There are a lot of holes in the above. But hopefully something to chew on in between those holes.