Wouldn't the counter to Collingwood's statement be an example that is uncaused or self-causing?

The statement is not afterall that: "all causes are discrete," or: "all causes are easily known." The idea that the temporal ordering of mechanistic causes stretches back to the "beginning" and that it isn't discrete is arguably a point in favor of something like PSR, rather than an argument against it. Or, at least I'll lay out why we might think that.

If one defaults on PSR and reduces causes to classical mechanism, it's possible to justify something like the old-school mechanistic view where every last line of Hamlet is as it is ultimately because the arbitrary laws and initial conditions of the universe "just happened, for no reason at all." Everything reduces to a brute fact. And even on a view of an eternal universe, the answer to the question: "why are things one way and not any other," will be "it just is."

This sort of issue comes up in cosmology all the time. The "brute fact" explanation is only ever held to when no other good explanation exists. So, for instance, you get claims like: "the incredibly low entropy of the early universe needs no explanation because we have a sample size of one and so we cannot say that it was "unlikely." It just happened and that's all there is to it." There are similar answers to the Fine Tuning Problem. But if people accepted such answers we'd never have developed the theory of the Big Bang or Cosmic Inflation, because odd properties of the universe that don't seem to suggest an arbitrary process would have simply been written off as: "it just is." Plus, if we had a theory that explained the universe's low entropy that was a compelling as Cosmic Inflation no one would resort to: "it just is."

Now, might causes as mere mechanism be ultimately such a thin notion that it boils down to nothing more than correlation? I think that's a pretty good point; causation becomes arbitrary in the early modern mechanistic paradigm (that was, in fact, the generally the point they were striving towards, because any thick/secondary causality would be an affront to the divine will, which orders all things). If "cause" just refers to some sort of regularity in observations, it is itself arbitrary as an explanation. More recent work on causation often goes the pancomputationalism route though, and this reintroduces a sort of formal causality (granted, often in very reductionist terms).

I think that might suggest a problem with a particular view of causality as opposed to causality per se though. As a rule of thumb, I would say that if we find ourselves needing to eliminate, radically deflate, or pragmatism/voluntarize core concepts like truth, part/whole relations, goodness, beings (plural), knowledge, etc., that should give us pause. Hume's critique of causality, for instance, flows from certain epistemic assumptions. But if we're left with an seemingly arbitrary notion of causality, that might be more an indictment of the starting assumptions, since presumably epistemology is all about causes, reasons, that in virtue of which, etc.

Let me give a more down to earth example than cosmology. Suppose you find a corpse in the woods. Now maybe the hiker died of a heart attack, or maybe he was eaten by a bear, or got lost and froze to death, or maybe he was murdered by a skin walker. Lots of possibilities. But absolutely no detective is going to get by with: "it just happened." That doesn't mean there will be a clear cause of death, nor that looking for the cause of death will turn up anything "useful." It might not be useful in any particular case to try to figure out how a badly decomposed corpse ended up as it is. It is, however, a useful principle that people don't die for no reason at all. They might have relatively spontaneous, "natural deaths," but they don't just cease living. And so too for crop circles, odd rock formations, recessions, etc. That doesn't mean the causes will be simple or accessible. The simplicity of causes is an artifact of mathematical modeling. The philosophy of causation generally always had them as very complex, with every action always involving interaction, both patient and receipient, and the dictum that "everything is received in the manner of the receiver."

Personally, I like Proclus and the Book of Causes here, not so much as a perfect explanation, but as a radically different view to see how much of "causality" is paired away in linear mechanism (I wouldn't even call this "efficient cause" because efficient causes only make sense in the context of the other causes, and the primary view would be of vertical, hierarchical contemporaneous efficient causes, not accidental temporal orderings, e.g., for a chandelier to hang from a ceiling, the ceiling must be present at every interval).

Right, some versions of pragmatism are merely pragmatic. I was speaking only to the metaphysical thesis.

So Peirce, a realist (metaphysically and morally), has no such issue because truth as: "the opinion fated to be agreed upon [eventually] by all who investigate [faithfully]," doesn't run into the same sorts of problems.

Wouldn't you say that the collapse of superstitions, smoking, and other harmful practices has followed just such a process? — Tom Storm

This is leaving out the metaphysical part of the thesis, the idea that there is no such thing as truth outside of practice. I don't agree that "it was not true that smoking causes lung diseases back when no one agreed that it did" and that it then became true once current practice began to affirm that it is so. Rather, I'd maintain that it was true from the very beginning that smoking causes lung disease, and that current practice came to affirm this truth because it was already true.

Now, if it was true that smoking still caused lung disease back when no one thought it did (back when no human practice affirmed this truth) it can hardly be the case that things are true only in virtue of what human practice affirms.

Wouldn’t we say instead that, rather than being about right or wrong, communities develop methods, approaches, and beliefs that work for a time and then no longer work, or no longer meet needs? — Tom Storm

How are "success" and "works" defined here? Isn't it just what current practice and sentiment affirms? Or is there a fact about what actually promotes human flourishing outside of current practice and sentiment?

You’re trying to run all these concepts through a propositional logic wringer, which, as I said before, presupposes that the terms we are comparing do not alter their sense in the very act of comparison. Without its dependence on the fixity of its terms, logic can’t produce its laws, and you’re clinging to these laws as the ground for your attempt to refute certain philosophical approaches as self-contradictory. If you start from a ground of identiy and then explain difference as emerging from or dependent on identity, then you will always be able to use propositional logic to ‘refute’ philosophies which claim to ground identity in difference.

If I have this right, it's: "I am not contradicting myself because I am equiovcating." I am not sure if that's much better though. If someone wants to advance a theory that radically changes notions of truth, then it seems like a commitment to basic logical consistency would be valuable for convincing the skeptic. No doubt, if one is allowed to contradict oneself and equivocate, one can justify anything at all.

But doesn't this assume a metaphysical standard of usefulness that a pragmatist wouldn't recognise? In reality, actions always produce consequences, and “success” is judged relative to the goals and expectations of the community. There's no call for a separate idea of what is “truly useful”. What current practice affirms as useful is what matters, because usefulness is determined by how practices function and coordinate behaviour. The claim that “what is truly useful cannot be whatever current practice affirms” is imposing an external measure that pragmatism wouldn't recognize. — Tom Storm

Sure, so how can your community ever be wrong about what is useful? It seems to me it can only be wrong just in case it happens to decide it has been wrong later. You're collapsing any distinction between appearances and reality here. That's the very thing I've been trying to point out.

"Not anything goes because only the useful goes," but also "what is useful is what the community judges to be useful." It would follow that "putting lead in drinking water is useful just so long as the community thinks it is useful." When it decides this wasn't useful, it ceases to be. We can hardly appeal to any other standard or facts about human biology and lead that hold outside of what is currently deemed "useful." But this seems absurd. More to the point, "pragmatism" that isn't ordered to an end isn't even "pragmatism." It's an abuse of the term. "Sheer voluntarism" would be the appropriate label when what is sought is wholly indeterminate outside the act of seeking (willing) itself.

I would note that other historicist, constructivist theories, such as those inspired by Hegel, do not face this difficulty because they leave themselves grounds for the assertion that practice will be attracted to certain affirmations in the long run (whether or not this is overly "providential" is another question). However, I can see no grounds for such a position if truth (and so presumably reality) is itself just a dependent function of community affirmation, except by preformative contradiction or equivocation.

And this is besides the problem of self-refutation. It's still unclear to me how what Rorty says about truth can be true when the community rejects it.

"I know that I know ..." is pure pleonasm — Ludwig V

Upon reflection, I think you might be right (at least in the JTB context that isn't committed to fallibalism). We can "know that we know" just by believing that we know, and it being true that we know.

However, if we pair JTB with a sort of fallibalism that denies any certitude to beliefs, or at least most beliefs, which seems to be a position that JTB lends itself to, then I do think it follows that we can never know that we truly know anything, as opposed to merely believing it. Another way to say this is that, if we believe our own belief might be wrong, we don't seem to believe that we know it, since knowledge is necessarily true, and we can hardly believe that something that is true might also be false.



I see. I think JTB is flawed but figuring out just how is tricky. JTB seems very thin and portable, but I think an investigation of the metaphysical context in which it was developed is helpful for diagnosing it.

One solution here, that I'm sure no one will like, is to simply do what analytic philosophers have done for "evaluative" knowledge claims. We could suppose that statements of knowledge and statements of fact should simply be reinterpreted the way evaluative statements are, such that:

"P" is "hurrah for asserting P!" or "I believe P," or "from my perspective, P."

And then, if we don't like this solution, it's on us to show why we think there needs to be something of the sort where "P is *really* true," and that we must be able to assert that this is so, or even "know" it, and how exactly that is supposed to work, since it seems one could function "pragmatically" whilst only speaking to one's own beliefs without "knowing" that any other beliefs exist. After all, others' first-person experiences and beliefs are generally accepted to be ineluctably private, so prima facie there can be no empirical support for them, whereas there can be no empirical support for anything outside of such experiences for us. And so in the end, what difference could it make that would warrant rejecting the suggested translation here? One can, and in fact must, constantly be making pragmatic decisions without knowledge, and so it seems superfluous.

That's an interesting question. If everything we cognize is counted as "physical", then would not metaphysics, thought of being what is beyond the scope of physics, or any other science, be thus taken to be dealing with the non-cognitive? — Janus

Well, physicalism is a metaphysical position, so we could quibble that the label here is a bit biased. I see no reason why a strict empiricism should be positing anything like physicalism or "the physical," which would be metaphysical speculation. For instance, causes, of which "other minds" would simply be a special type, are a sort of additional metaphysical posit above and beyond regularities in experience.

So, is the idea that we can possess knowledge (i.e., possess beliefs that are justified and true) but we can never know that we possess knowledge (unless perhaps the object of knowledge is our own beliefs or experiences)?

If so, I suppose the idea that the act of understanding involves knowing that one knows what is understood would have to be abandoned. Presumably though, belief is still reflexive in this way. If one believes x, then one believes that one believes this.

Here is a wrinkle perhaps: if Macbeth cannot be certain about the (seemingly external) truth of what a knife is, how can he be certain that he sees a knife (regardless of if it is a hallucination or not)? If he cannot know that he knows what a knife is, then he can, at best, merely know that he believes he is experiencing a knife.

I see this on the John Oliver show all the time, crude, sexual jokes about Reagan and such. It bothers me too.

I just read "Rebel Sell" by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, 2004, but still immensely valuable today. They identify opposition to 'conformity to a totalizing system' as the rebel 'stance' taken by much of the left since the 60s.

They note not just how silly much of that thinking was, but also how it came to valorize rejecting social norms of all kinds, social norms that have much more value than they ills that are supposedly reputed by 'sticking it to the man' and being rude. — Jeremy Murray

Attacks on custom have been a big part of liberal ideology for a long time. Obviously, one sees it more often in progressive liberalism than conservative liberalism because the latter has a sort of contradictory preference for the very customs and institutions that liberalism and capitalism erode.

I have two quotes I really like on this which I'll just link to:

The first if from Patrick Deneen's "Why Liberalism Failed" on Mill and the centrality of attacks on custom to liberal thought, and how they are meant to promote the interests of the "exceptional individual."

The second is from the author David Foster Wallace on the tyranny of irony in the post-modern period.

The far-right makes plenty of hay out of this when figures on the left want to advocate for moral anti-realism and take a sledgehammer to culture, particularly religion and patriotic symbols, but are thrown into fits by even joking references to racism or sexism. Actually though, this makes perfect sense from within the context of the ideology, even though it seems hypocritical at first glance. Progressive liberalism tends to focus on race and sex precisely because people do not "choose" to be members of these categories. Hence, discrimination based on these categories is a barrier to the freedom of individuals to individuate.

By contrast, the modern tend to pay far less attention to the identifiers the right wants to focus on: ethnicity, religion, class (ironically*), regionalism, etc. Why? Because the enlightened liberal presumably transcends these categories. They are personally responsible for ditching their religion or finding an appropriately modern/progressive variant, reducing ethnic customs down to an acceptable limit, "moving out of fly-over country," etc. Ethnicity, regionalism, and even religion might be thought to be more tied to place, and the ideal liberal citizen has transcended place, while each place itself also becomes every other place.

Sexual orientation and gender are interesting here. There is an intense focus on presenting these as immutable, inborn characteristics, precisely because then they would fit the same criteria as sex and race. Hence the backlash about the idea of people being "transracial," or against research that suggested a degree of social contagion in gender dysphoria. It is important that people are "born this way" for the paradigm.

Although, prima facie there is no reason why discrimination should be "more acceptable" because it is based on a "choice."

* Before anyone says anything, I am not suggesting that the left doesn't pay attention redistributive economics aimed at the lower end of the income distribution. I am pointing out that they no longer focus on class as an identity, nor particularly on "class discrimination." It's the right now that seems to more often appeal to "elitism."

as a paradox to be reduced to its correct monistic answer — apokrisis

It's a dialectical synthesis, not a reduction.

But then place that in a context where it is being shaped by a communal telos. One knows whether one is fitting in or striking out as the distinction becomes very clear in one’s mind. To compete or to cooperate becomes a choice one has to own and so a power to spend wisely. — apokrisis

What communal telos? One knows if one is corresponding to what is "said to be good by others," yet this is not the same thing as knowledge of what is truly best. It would be a strange answer to say that Socrates deserves to be killed because justice is just the will of the many, as expressed as a system of outputs, for instance.

Freedom is the power to act. Constraint is the collective rational good. — apokrisis

First, how is this not a monadic view of freedom?

And that's precisely the idea I was arguing against (and which Hegel takes on). Freedom as sheer power collapses into contradiction. If such "freedom" isn't aimed at any prior end then it is sheer arbitrariness, but sheer arbitrariness is the opposite of freedom. The muscle spasms is not the paradigm of free action.

Moreover, to do or think anything determinant is to have made a choice that rules out other choices (any determinacy and so any choice is a move away from sheer power/potency). Hence, any choice at all represents a limit of absolute freedom, a reduction in freedom. Yet the idea that choice is a limit on freedom is contradictory, hence freedom collapses into its opposite.

But the next level of the dialectical (for Hegel at least) isn't "the community," it is a reflexive freedom, freedom over the self and the positive movement towards determinacy as an end. Yet such a freedom will also turn out to be arbitrary if it has arbitrary ends. Hence, freedom as the self-determining capacity to actualize the good must already have an end or nature in view (although we haven't attained it at this stage).

Modern Hegelians (e.g. Honneth) sometimes squeeze authenticity in here, since it's obvious that people with a great deal of self-control and self-discipline sometimes possess this in a way that is bent back against itself.

Then we get social freedom because the individual possessing of reflexive freedom, still having no clear end, can obviously move to deprive others of their liberties. There is at least the potential for the Hobbesian struggle of "all against all." Moreover, man as the "political animal" in unfree to fulfill his political nature without real communion.

However, something like A Brave New World is a great example of how social freedom is of itself inadequate. Institutions objectify morality, but they can do so in a stunted form. Even if citizens social welfare functions align, they and their society can fail to be fully virtuous, and so fully self-determining.

This progression can be described in evolutionary or systems terms, but not reduced to them. If it is reduced to them, we risk a slide to a sort of speculative providential teleology that isn't empirically justified, or a slide towards the arbitrariness of a values anti-realism.

Of course, ceteris paribus, the virtues are good for survival. Being prerequisites for true self-determination, they are also prerequisites for an organic whole that is (relatively) less and less dependent on "good fortune." But survival isn't the measure of virtue. A mountain may last aeons, but it isn't virtuous or self-determining, nor even much of a true whole.

The later moments in the dialectical sublate the earlier ones, they do not refute them. As Hegel puts it in the preface to PhS, "the truth is the whole." The flower does not refute the bud. The problem for Hegel though is that his providential teleology seems like wishful thinking. It's Hegel's naturalism and his desire to domesticate the divine by wrapping it in the immanence of history that leads to the good deflating into a monadic attractor.

Fukuyama is good at giving a structuralist account of how every society in history has had a similar set of ingredients, but balanced somewhat differently due to historical and geographic circumstance. And through examining that evolutionary variety, a general systematic trend can be observed. — apokrisis

I agree. Arguably, he slips into selecting on the dependent variable, but to be honest that problem is endemic to the type of work he does. His two volume opus on state development is magisterial. I am just not sold on his defense of liberalism as an ideal political theory. His response to Deneen, Taylor, MacIntyre is particularly weak. He acknowledges they have strong points and then just defaults to "if you don't like liberalism you can leave," a funny comment from a defender of a globally hegemonic ideology that insists on inserting itself into every culture, by coercion or force if need be.

So how exactly is the supposed to respond to the charge of self-refutation (and the ancillary issue of affirming contradictions)?

If the idea is that self-refutation and contradiction are avoided because what is meant by terms like: truth, correctness, constraints, etc. is always changing, and so always equivocal, then it doesn't seem that it can be saying anything at all. Every point in the discourse would be guilty of the fallacy of equivocation.

They acknowledge the necessity of periods of stable cultural norms, but take delight in their deconstruction. One could say that betterment for them is tied to the most accelerative cycling between stability and radical change we can manage. — Joshs

In virtue of what is this "better?"

It is not a question of a conformity between this overarching schema and some reality outside of it. The schema directly expresses a real world in a way that is as real as it gets, via patterns of pragmatic use. — Joshs

Well, it seems there was a time during which life did not exist, just as there was a time during which we each individually did not exist. During that time period, it seems that the Earth did exist. Is it not possible for the Earth to have existed or to have a determinant shape, etc. prior to the advent of life and its schemas? No doubt, the empiricist-analytic view of a "view from nowhere" is flawed, but it doesn't seem to me to follow that, if that view is flawed, then truth and intelligibility are dependent upon man and his practices (or life and its practices).

It does not follow, for instance, that because the view from nowhere is flawed, and because one needs language to say "the Earth was round before life existed on it," and a mind to know this, that Earth could have no shape prior to the "schemas" etc. that allow for this to be known by us.

Additional premises are needed for this, so too for claims that intelligibility is "created" by metaphysics. Intelligibility is arguably a prerequisite for understanding, not a product of understanding. But even if intelligibility is a product of understanding and will (pragmatic striving), I can think of no reason to think that it is a product of our act of understanding and willing (either individually or collectively) nor a product of the understanding and willing of life on Earth more generally.

Earlier notions of truth and intelligibility avoided the problem of the empiricist view because they did not posit a "mind-independent being" since knowledge and understanding were themselves simply thought's grasp of being, and truth being qua knowable (which obviously make no sense outside the context of thought and knowing). The divine was the anchor of intelligibility. Modernity lopped off the divine and was left with an incoherent notion of truth. Yet it's not clear to me that elevating man (or life generally, or a sort of panpsychic will, or primordial will-to-power) into the place of God resolves the problem. We are contingent, and what you end up with is intelligibility springing from sheer potency, which is ultimately arbitrary.

A sort of Euthyphro dilemma seems to hold here. Is what is willed (pragmatically striven for) willed because it is good, or is it good because it is what is willed? If it's the former, then what is striven for must already be intelligible as desirable (good) prior to the act of willing. If it's the latter, we have a sort of inchoate voluntarism where the direction of the will (the pragmatic drive) is ultimately arbitrary in that it is grounded in no prior intelligibility, and is itself contingent. A pragmatism that is not oriented towards some end is not so much pragmatism, as a sort of sheer willing that generates its own end.

This seems to assume that for constraints to matter, they must exist independently of the practices they describe.

No, it assumes that, for constraints to constrain, the truth of their reality cannot be dependent on current belief and practice affirming that they truly exist. Presumably, current belief and practice might not affirm this, and yet you seem to be claiming that what you say about "constraints" will be true regardless of what current practice affirms throughout this post.

Consider:

P1. Truth just is whatever is affirmed by current belief and practice.

P2. It is possible that current belief and practice might not affirm the truth or existence of constraints in the way that has been specified.

C: Therefore, it is possible for it to be untrue that constraints exist and function in this way.

But if it was untrue that constraints function in this way, how exactly would they be constraining?

It seems like you need additional premises like:

A. What I assert about constraints is true of all practices regardless of what they themselves affirm.

Temporary denial or disagreement doesn’t undermine them, practices that fail to work or coordinate with reality naturally fall away, regardless of belief. — Tom Storm

Is this statement you've made always true of practices, or is it only true just in case this claim is affirmed by current belief and practice?

Either it is always true, in which case truth isn't just what current belief and practice affirms, or else it might cease to be true if current belief and practice don't affirm it.

I think there is an issue of equivocation here. It would be one thing to advance this theory as a description of how beliefs emerge. This sort of descriptive work is arguably what Wittgenstein limits himself to. Objections could be made here, but they are less obvious. But the claim that truth itself just is a function of belief and practice is a gnostic metaphysical claim. Rorty, for instance, doesn't limit himself to description in his comments on Wittgenstein, but thinks Wittgenstein's work supports a positive gnostic metaphysical claim about truth.

Now, if we say truth just is what practice affirms, then what you say about constraints simply cannot be true unless practice happens to affirm it. That's a consequence of the positive metaphysical claim about what truth essentially is. So too for questions as to the shape of the Earth. If truth itself is simply a function of practice (dependent upon it) then prior to the existence of man and his practices it follows that the Earth had no shape, or that it "had a shape" but that "it wasn't true that it had a shape." The absurdity of the latter shows how "truth" is simply being equivocated on here. It would be more straightforward to say: "there is no truth, but here is this other thing we tend towards, call it 'pragmatic affirmation.'"

Even if no one explicitly believes a constraint will operate, it manifests through the success or failure of practices in practice. — Tom Storm

The same issue turns up here. Is what you're saying always true of all practices, regardless of what those practices themselves affirm?

Note that "success" and "failure" require an end that is sought by which they can be judged as such (presumably one judged "useful."). All action reliably results in some consequences. For us to be wrong about what constitutes failure or success, or wrong about what is useful, presupposes that what is "truly useful" isn't simply what is believed to be useful. But if that's the case, I think it is obvious that "what is truly useful," cannot be "whatever current practice has come to affirm as useful."

Right, but Fukuyama's Hegel is very much Kojeve's deflated, liberal Hegel. Actually, I'd argue that Fukuyama fundamentally misunderstands Hegel in seeing the Last Man problem he diagnoses so presciently as a sort of "paradox at the end of history," instead of what it rightly should be in Hegel's theory, a contradiction that will power a move to a new stage in history, a new challenge that must be sublated by liberalism or else destroy it. I have written on this at length in the past.

Hegel has a very classical idea of freedom as "the self-determining capacity to actualize (and communicate) the Good." He is at odds with the dominant modern view (which dominates both liberalism and the post-modernism it spawned), which defines freedom primarily in terms of power and potency (the ability to "choose anything"), instead of actuality (this itself being a shift that comes from late-medieval nominalism, fideism, and volanturism, which is then entrenched during the Reformation; it's a theology that still grounds—although as an unexamined remnant—much athiest philosophy). At the opening of the Philosophy of Right Hegel explicitly challenges this vision of freedom as bottoming out in arbitrariness, and so contradiction (since arbitrariness is the opposite of freedom).

Hegel sees human freedom progressing through several contradictions it must sublate to become freedom. For example, he can allow that authenticity is an important part of freedom, but only if it is essentially oriented towards a telos and grounded in reflexive freedom, oriented towards a Good, as opposed to being a sort of groundless procedural freedom. This is very different from a theory grounded in the abstract "choosing agent" of Kantian liberalism. The highest stage of freedom involves a sort of moral freedom, where a civilization's institutions come to positively objectify a morality it knows as good (the "free will willing itself," of PR).

Suffice to say, I don't see this in Fukuyama. He has adopted the "Hegel made safe for liberalism (and empiricism)" of 20th century commentators, and in doing so lost some of Hegel's most important insights. When Fukuyama makes a rare move to discuss virtue and vice it seems that virtue is largely "what benefits the health of the liberal state," and this is desirable precisely in that the liberal state promotes "freedom" of the modern liberal variety.

But of course, the promotion of virtue in this context is actually a limit on freedom if freedom is defined in the liberal fashion, since it makes us "less free" to be a "good time Charlie" or bon vivant. Fukuyama elevates liberal virtue to the life of action/honor/service (thymotic life) but not to the life of logos (which remains instrumentalized). But if it is the rational appetites that allow us to transcend current beliefs and desires, and so our own finitude (the transcendent function of logos in the classical tradition) then one can not have true rational freedom and self-determination without logos leading (which is a view Hegel ultimately keeps fairly close to, but his liberal commentators dispense with).

This can be seen in his latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, where epithumia and thymos come into view, but never logos. Hegel, by contrast, has logos on top, as in reality, the engine of history. The need for people to see their society as "truly best," and not only to have this opinion, but to know it, is essential.

That, and he also adopts one of the regrettable elements of Hegel, in the idea of a providential unfolding of teleology, the march of man towards an Earthly Paradise in history. It's this that made his "End of History" thesis overstep, and he has been pairing it back ever since, and this is also what makes him tend towards "Whig history" and a justification of liberalism in rhetorically weak terms focused on adaptation and natural selection. But I think Dante and Solovyov see clearer here. Man's freedom is such that we are not on an inevitable march to utopia, and indeed Hegel's project only makes sense in the end because the Absolute as an end, while encompassing and suffusing history, is not reducible to it nor contained in it. History is ordered to something higher, giving it a telos, but also allowing for real failure.

but I think Hobbes' is the most central, coherent, and enduring philosophical basis of liberalism — Leontiskos

I agree. To be sure, a lot of liberals get away from his particularly dire anthropology, but even if they pivot to a more Kantian, abstract "choosing agent," they still end up with something very similar (i.e., an atomized utility seeker). Others try to layer in that man is an essentially social animal, but they still ultimately end up falling back on a combination of contract theory and utility maximization/satisfaction for their justification of the political system (Mill, Smith, Rawls, etc.).

Personally, I think Hume, and more broadly empiricism and skepticism, are key here. Hume's grounding of morality (and so the foundations of law and justice) in sentiment seems to naturally privatize and atomize the citizen. Empiricism also has a sort of atomized knower built in to it from the get-go (sense data being private), and so judgements about the good will have to be privatized as well, particularly if they are grounded in sentiment rather than the extended/quantifiable. The metaphysics that have tended to go along with empiricism and naturalism have generally placed all goodness and beauty (presumably the ground for organizing society) within our individual skulls (even in realist theories). Goodness is locked in private, individually accessible experiences. Skepticism about human nature (or any natures) springing from this metaphysics is important too, since it cuts out any foundation for a bridge across this gap. The later move towards an "anti-metaphysical stance" (IMO, just another metaphysical position), with its tendency towards unresolvable pluralisms also suggests a procedural contract theory.

All these factors make it very hard to escape the privatization of values, which in turn makes it very hard to escape an atomized anthropology. Atomization in turn lends itself to contract theory. As an aside, it's funny just how much of this stuff Plato considers (particularly in the Republic) and rejects, because he doesn't have these starting points.

In terms of the genealogy of these ideas, I think theology is very relevant here, as guys like John Milbank and Brad Gregory have shown. That's one of the ironies of liberalism, the source of its anthropology comes, at least in its origins, from one of the "forbidden sources" of justification.

In terms of what could come next, it's very hard for me to see because I don't see the presuppositions that lead towards liberalism being significantly challenged any time soon. We may be in a "metaphysical turn" in analytic/scientific thought, but it's a fairly weak one. Liberalism is literally built into many scientific disciplines (e.g., its essentially a dogmatic presupposition of political economy, in the same way Marxism was for Soviet bloc political economy, and it has deep roots in psychology). Any change would be "revolutionary" in the same way the Enlightenment was.

Thank you; I really, really like that idea. I have read some of Nguyen's stuff before and liked it; thanks for reminding me about him. If anyone is interested, here is the article.

I am not sure if you're familiar with Byung Chul Han, but he makes a somewhat similar (although also in other ways quite different)

For Han pornographization describes a trend in late-modern culture whereby a loss of distance, eroticism (the ancient and medieval view of knowledge as both a sort of ecstasis and transformation —a "knowing by becoming"), and any negativity in favor of immediacy (and immediate gratification), the subsumption of the other into the self through consumption, and transparency.


In the Agony of Eros, the main theme is about the loss of the Other, leading to everything becoming a form of consumption in "the Inferno of the Same." There is an excess of visibility, whereby everything is stripped bare and flattened into surfaces without depth. I cannot help but see some similarity between this and forms of "anti-metaphysics."

Anyhow, they're similar framings in seeing a loss of depth and claims on us. Han's view is more expansive, although less detailed.

For example, one might use bite-sized quotes from great thinkers to feel the immediate rush of sophistication without much care for what the quotes are really about. — GazingGecko

Yes, I think that's the most obvious example. But I think this would also apply in some ways to the distanced, ironic approach to philosophy, as well. It's a way to engage that makes no claims on a person. This might be particularly true when it comes to engagement with those areas of philosophy that claim that praxis is essential, although I can see it applying more generally. The same might be said of the tendency to "retreat" into the analytic stance so as to ascend above good and evil.

That's difficult of course, because some would probably argue that ironic detachment is the height of wisdom.

It reminds me a bit of what David Foster Wallace said about irony:

Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

However, I'm not sure it is necessarily always bad to engage with wisdom porn. It might be a gateway to more genuine forms of engagement. One might learn important things as a side-effect. The question is, if one removed the immediate gratification, facing the difficulties of philosophy, would one still engage? — GazingGecko

Right, the problem might not be such engagement in itself, but it becoming more the sole mode of engagement.

In terms of the more strenuous praxis of much Eastern thought, the Pagan traditions as originally practiced, Sufism, traditional Christianity, etc. there is also a similar phenomenon where one frequently sees contemplation and meditation (which are of course situated in a way of life and long-term cultivation) compared as almost equivalent with short-term experimentation with psychedelic drugs. Perhaps this comes from the undue focus on "peak experiences" in James and others (as William Harmless points out, many of the most famous Western mystics report no such experiences, or make them ancillary, or report experiences extremely unlike short term intoxication, such as the prophet Ezekiel being immobilized for months on end). I think this is an unhelpful conflation, but it also points to a focus on the short term and consumable, and as a refutation of the need for praxis it's a bit tragic. (Mark Vernon's commentary on the Divine Comedy, which I quite liked overall, was guilty of this repeatedly for instance).

Rorty doesn't claim it is always true outside the context of human beliefs and practices; the constraints are descriptive of tendencies in those practices, not eternal laws. — Tom Storm

I didn't say he did though. I said the appeal to constraints points outside current beliefs and practices. It seems to me that it has to, because it is prima facie possible that current belief and practice might deny what is being said about constraints. But presumably, constraints don't only restrain "what goes" just in case people currently believe that they do (otherwise, I'm not sure why it isn't "anything goes" so long as we believe that anything goes).

Even if beliefs shift, practices that fail to work or coordinate with the world will disappear, while useful practices will persist. — Tom Storm

What "fails to work" and what is "useful" is defined in terms of current beliefs, desires, and opinions, no? So, if "not anything goes" because only "useful" practices survive, but "useful practices" are just whatever practices just so happen to be affirmed as useful, I am not sure what sort of limit this is supposed to generate. What is (truly) "useful" is itself a function of current beliefs, right?

Not only does this undermine the ability for "usefulness" to function as a sort of constraint on truth, I think it clashes with our intuitions. It seems possible for everyone to be wrong about what is useful. But for it to be possible for everyone to be wrong about what is useful at some time, it cannot be the case that the truth about what is useful is posterior (dependent upon) whatever current practice and belief affirms as useful. There has to be a distinction between reality and appearances/beliefs.

Plus, the statement above still seems like a statement about what is true of all practices regardless of current beliefs. But if no one believed that "constraints" worked in this way, it hardly seems that it could still be "true" that they work this way (for all practice and opinion would deny it is so).

Nor does the conditional nature of these tendencies mean “anything goes.” — Tom Storm

With the above in mind, why not?

A metaphysics IS a boundary, setting up criteria for correctness, and more importantly, for intelligiblity. — Joshs

Yet this is itself a metaphysical position about the nature of intelligibility. If it is affirmed over competing understandings of intelligibility without argument, obviously that would be a sort of question begging. But to merely affirm it "alongside" other understandings without argument would still essentially do the same thing. Just because the position allows contrary positions to be "equally correct" doesn't mean it isn't contradicting them, for the opposing positions might themselves deny that both understandings are "equally correct" (because they deny this understanding of the grounding of intelligibility). Even the Protagorean relativist who asserts that "whatever anyone believes is true (for that person)" ends up making a claim that has implications for truth tout court.

Plus, it would seem to me that this particular metaphysical position should want to assert itself as "more correct" than others. Otherwise, wouldn't it fall victim to the criticism in the Theaetetus that, if it is impossible to be wrong, the sophist (as a profession, not a derogatory term) is the most useless sort of person, since teaching never improves our grasp of the truth?

(Note, that if the rebuttal is that we cannot each individually always be correct, because intelligibility is constructed communally, or in language games, or something to that effect, this would once again be another claim about the metaphysics of intelligiblity/truth/language. And I think the same dilemma appears. Either it has to be asserted over the contrary theory, or else the self-refuting relativism remains).

If this is an equivocal use of truth and knowledge, then it also prevents either of these terms from being rooted in an essence — Joshs

I'm sorry, I don't think I followed this part. Why would this be so?

But we can’t choose to inhabit all stances at once , or observe them all from a sideways on or god’s eye perspective from nowhere. — Joshs

Isn't this an assertion that contradicts (rebuts) some prior understandings of knowledge, intelligibility, and truth?

Sorry, I must have missed that.

Doesn't this objection misunderstands what Rorty means by truth? He is not saying that popularity or peer approval automatically makes something true; rather, truth emerges through ongoing practices, dialogue, and testing. Criticism of his ideas does not make them false, this is part of the very process through which we evaluate and refine our beliefs. It's the Conversation. In this sense, the theory is not self-refuting; it simply describes how truth is negotiated and maintained within human communities. The fact that Rorty often said snide things doesn't mean these should stand for his entire philosophy. — Tom Storm

Sure, you can't reduce his theory down to his slogan: "truth is what our peers let us get away with," without losing a bunch. But I'm not sure how the added nuance changes the basic problem of self-refutation. It remains the fact that it isn't a widely embraced theory. It isn't what ongoing practices, dialogue, and testing have led to people tending to affirm, so in what sense is it true according to its own standards?

It seems like the claim should indicate that it is what we ought to affirm, or what we shall (if we keep to good epistemic and philosophical practices) end up affirming in the future (and indeed, this is how Rorty reads to me). However, such an "ought" claim, or such a prediction, would seem to require the notion that the theory is somehow "really true" in some sense. It "ought" to be affirmed because truth is better than falsity, or that it will end up being affirmed, because practice invariably leads towards its affirmation (presumably because it is truly the case). But these sorts of explanations assume a sort of "added truth dimension" outside the pragmatic.

Anyhow, I think the dilemma mentioned under point 1 is the more serious challenge, and it is relevant here:

1. You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: "constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop. Is that a fair characterization?

Now either the italicized statement is true outside the context current human belief and practice (i.e., it is always true of all practices, regardless of what they currently affirm) or else it is only conditionally true, i.e., it is true just in case current belief and practice affirms this statement.

Here are the two horns of the dilemma. If the statement is always true of all beliefs and practices, then it is true regardless of (or outside the context of) current beliefs and practices. But this contradicts the claim that truth is just what is affirmed by current beliefs and practices.

If we grab the other horn and say that the statement is itself only conditionally true, then it is true just so long as current belief and practice affirms it. This means it can "become" false if belief and practice change such that it is no longer affirmed. Thus, the assertion we are relying on to prevent "anything" goes, turns out to be overturned just in case we all stop believing it, in which case it seems that "anything goes." — Count Timothy von Icarus

If 1 can be dealt with, maybe there is some way to affirm that "constraints" will invariably lead towards the recognition of something like the idea that such a theory of truth ought to be affirmed, or will be affirmed by good practice in the long run. But 1 introduces a sort of self-refutation by contradiction in another register.

It may be hard to see how this amounts to anything more than ‘making stuff up’ while ignoring the real world, and it may be equally hard to see how any sort of stable understanding can be achieved such that scientific-technological and ethico-political progress is possible. — Joshs

It's more that it's hard to see how this answers the 1 or 2. And if the answer is just that "constraint" means something completely equivocal in every instance, that only seems to avoid the contradiction in 1 by making the the very "constraints" being invoked to prevent "anything goes" wholly arbitrary, since what is meant by "constraint" apparently changes in each instance.

Note however that univocal predication doesn't require that things be identical in every instance. When man is predicated of Socrates we need not suppose that all men are exactly the same or that Socrates is exactly at every moment. If all predication were to become equivocal in virtue such change than we essentially slip towards the Many pole of the Problem of the One and the Many and it is impossible to say anything about anything. Whereas, if some stability and unity is affirmed, that is simply the vehicle for univocal (and analogical) predication, e.g., that in virtue of which Socrates, Achilles, and Leonidas are all "men," such that "if all men are mortal," they are each mortal.

I think it misses the point to treat postmodern hermeneutics and phenomenology as making arguments designed to ‘refute’ or dismiss the opposition. — Joshs

Well, @Constance referred to alternative views as "disastrous," which I took to imply something like a refutation. But you are quite right, the aim normally isn't refutation, but that isn't my objection. My objection was to what seems like question begging and a self-contradiction absolutization, where criticisms are rebuffed by simply assuming the theory is true.

It is perfectly correct and true, as far as it goes and within the bounds it sets for itself. — Joshs

But most metaphysics do not set any boundaries for themselves. They speak to being qua being. So if they are all equally correct in their own domain (which is "everything") how is this not the affirmation of contradiction? More to the point maybe, if everything is "correct in its own context," how does this avoid pointing towards "anything goes?" And if some of these theories are right (their claims are affirmed) then the post-modern metaphysics of language and difference is wrong.

But this gets to point 3. "Truth" and "knowledge" seem to be being used equivocally here.

I say something simple, like, There is a sign post by the road. If anything is free of contradiction in ordinary affairs, I think it would be something like this. And in the situation where sign posts and sides of roads are taken for what they are unproblematically, agreement is enough: I see it, you see it, it's there by the road, and no issues emerge. But let's say I was being metaphorical, and I meant the sign post to be an augur of future events and the road meant to be the road of progressive living events. Or perhaps I was being ironic, referring to some blunder I made about sign posts earlier. The point is, for every meaning we can assign, we can imagine alternative ways the language can be taken, and in being taken differenly, the question of what it IS, has no final context, if you will, as if God were to declare once and for all that sign posts are just "this and only this". This "in and out" of identity undermines any thought of determinacy in what is being said. In the sentence, "There is a sign post by the road," I am now not referring to any actual sign post at all, but it is just the object language to my metalinguistic talk about the variability of language.
I am saying ALL language is like this. If contradictions are the gainsaying of what something IS, then contradictions are always already implicitly in the margins of whatever is said. They too, rise and fall, come and go. This is why nothing is sacrosanct, for the moment it is said, — Constance

Ok, but I pointed out that Rorty's theory is self-refuting in a quite specific way directly related to the very thing it is trying to explain. I am not sure how this makes such a self-refutation unproblematic.

Not absolutizing. Rather, Hermeneuticizing. Contradictions are confined to where they turn up.

They are just saying essentially two things: One, whatever is affirmed is spoken, written, gestured or otherwise affirmed in language. So it is a philosophically responsibility to give language analysis for the way meaning is handled. And two, the assumption that the world is received in some kind of mirror of nature of perception is, IF this assumption is grounded in naturalism or physicalism, demonstrably false. Brain's are not mirrors. But if this assumption is grounded in the phenomenon, the simple givenness of the what appears, then the "distance" between the perceiver and the perceived is already closed, and epistemology becomes a very different problem. — Constance

This seems to me like the same thing. It's simply affirming post-modern hermeneutics above all competitors as a sort of default, i.e., absolutizing it, and going from there. It seems to me that this is often done with phenomenology as well. A phenomenology that supports a metaphysics of sheer giveness and difference is affirmed, and alternative phenomenology (e g., Plotinus, the Scholastics from whence modern phenomenology gets its terminology, Hegel, and contemporary Catholic phenomenologists, etc.) are dismissed. Now, I won't claim that something like Hegel's argument that sheer giveness is actually contentless and that it is the higher levels of understanding (Absolute Knowing) that should be affirmed (rather than dismissed as "reification") is air tight against later "post-modern" phenomenology, but neither does it seem like the alternative has a decisive refutation of it. If anything, the issue seems undecidable, and metaphysics (acknowledged or not), aesthetics, and a commitment to certain notions of freedom seem to be driving the choice between the two.

I don't disagree with you about the "mirror of nature," but this seems to be another sort of argument of the form:

A or B
Not-A
Therefore B.

But there are many alternatives to the "mirror of nature" that don't involve Rorty's radical deflation of truth.

True in science, yes. But this truth is irrelevant in dry cleaning of knitting of bowling. A physicist can give a rigorous analysis using equations and specific language involved of knitting, perhaps, but this would require moving into another framework discussion. — Constance

Again, this just seems to presuppose the idea that truth is itself domain limited, the "hermetically sealed magisterium" (actually, such an idea is very old and was called Latin-Averrosim in the Middle Ages). But if truth is just whatever is popularly affirmed, such a view of truth as isolated by field is itself false.

Obviously, if we assume a view like Rorty's is true, we can justify it as true. Why should we accept it as true when it refutes itself though? Why should we accept it as true when most don't, given what it says about truth?

Perhaps herein lies the main metaphysical kernel of liberalism:
it is power without the master.
Not because the master no longer exists, but because he has become invisible, elusive, inaccessible to reproach.
He no longer commands — he regulates. He does not care — he provides platforms. He does not answer — he disconnects.

This reminds me of Byung Chul Han's theory of autoexploitation in the "achievement society." I wrote about this before:

Say we have a privileged, wealthy guy with a "good family" who cares for him. He has lots of opportunities. And he follows the middle to upper class dictum: "get good grades and wrack up accomplishments so you can go to a good college, and do the same there so you can get a good job, and then you can get a good job and do what you want."

He does this. No extraordinary evil befalls him. He has no extraordinary vices. Maybe he drinks or smokes pot a bit too much, or plays too many video games, or has a porn habit, or cannot get a girlfriend, or cannot keep to just one. Maybe not. Nothing out of the ordinary.

And he's miserable. He's prime bait for radical ideologies of one sort of another precisely because he "did everything he was told," and is miserable. This isn't an uncommon phenomena. That's sort of the recruiting mantra of radicals on the right and left, although it certainly helps if people struggle in the labor market or are "overeducated." We could imagine this sort of thing playing out across many gradations. It can even happen to the ultra wealthy (perhaps particularly to the ultra wealthy).

Here is Han's point: in the autoexploitative context of modern liberalism, this man's unhappiness is a personal failure. The self is a project, and it's happiness is a goal that has to be achieved as an accomplishment.

And there are lots of men and women who have encountered this sort of "personal failure." Millions it would seem. So the question is, at what point do we stop thinking this is an aggregate of millions of personal, individual failures and begin to say it is a systematic, social failure or a philosophical failure?

As Han himself describes part of it:

Depression is a narcissistic malady. It derives from overwrought, pathologically distorted self-reference. The narcissistic-depressive subject has exhausted itself and worn itself down. Without a world to inhabit, it has been abandoned by the Other. Eros and depression are opposites. Eros pulls the subject out of itself, toward the Other. Depression, in contrast, plunges the subject into itself. Today’s narcissistic “achievement-subject” seeks out success above all. Finding success validates the One through the Other. Thereby, the Other is robbed of otherness and degrades into a mirror of the One — a mirror affirming the latter’s image. This logic of recognition ensnares the narcissistic achievement-subject more deeply in the ego. The corollary is success-induced depression: the depressive achievement-subject sinks into, and suffocates in, itself. Eros, in contrast, makes possible experience of the Other’s otherness, which leads the One out of a narcissistic inferno. It sets into motion freely willed self-renunciation, freely willed self-evacuation. A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love — which, however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength. This feeling is not the achievement of the One, but the gift of the Other.

Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama — only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative. Yet it is precisely such negativity that constitutes love: “Love is not a possibility, is not due to our initiative, is without reason; it invades and wounds us.” Achievement society —which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project— has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.


- "The Agony of Eros," Byung-Chul Han

So balances can be “good” or “bad”. And the difference? One in some quantifiable sense works and the other doesn’t. A typical way to quantify this would be survival. The good balance has the further fact that it lasts. It persists. It is successful in perpetuating a state of homeostatic identity even in the face of environmental perturbation, etc. — apokrisis

Everything "works" at producing some outcome.

The societies of both 1984 and A Brave New World are both presented as being extremely stable, and in a way that is at least plausible. Would they be good societies in virtue of this stability? That seems like too weak of a criteria because they are widely accepted as obviously dystopian (and for reasons that I think are obvious). So either we need another standard for rejecting A Brave New World and 1984, or we bite the bullet and pronounce them "good" because they are stable over long timescales and able to adapt to challenges. But if we bite the bullet, it hardly seems like we need ethics anymore. This is more of an eliminativism to my mind than an ethics.

And yet presumably we still want to appeal to "good evidence," "good reasoning," and "good argument," as more than just: "the types of argument and reasoning that reproduce effectively and survive." For instance, if "good" is just whatever persists, then I surely should not turn towards agreeing with you, for, if I believe my own beliefs to be good, than holding on to them, come what may (and striving to reproduce them in others), is my surest path towards proving their merit. Afterall, they won't survive and reproduce if I abandon them, so I should stick to them, and sticking to them in turn proves their merit.

No doubt, openly stating such a strategy is probably "maladaptive" precisely because most people don't accept this standard for the "goodness of ideas," and would see my strategy as a sort of absurd sophistry on my part.

Actually though, social critics have made just this sort of point re secular educated urban liberals' inability to maintain birth rates that would even allow their population to only fall by half each generation. It would seem to be an ideology that must rely heavily on conversion versus organic growth. I would think this says nothing about the choiceworthyness of such a view, but on a "natural selection of ideas/ideologies" account, it seems to be a major flaw, akin to some sort of mutation that tanks fertility in organisms.



I'm familiar with the terms and fields, but suffice to say, the idea that complexity studies and systems theory can decisively explain ethics and politics, or wisdom, virtue, etc. (or that it has settled the ultimate fate of the universe re cosmology, or has resolved the "Hard Problem," etc.) are idiosyncratic claims. Certainly, they might usefully inform these areas, although people take them in widely different directions. I don't find the approach here convincing for the reasons stated above and in the other thread. The idea that having studied these topics would make this useage clear does not seem to be the case to me.

I think that identifies a very common thread in modern culture, but I think it oversells its reach. Surely, plenty of people do think they have reached a sort of "radical innocence," where as Yeats put it: "its own sweet will is Heaven's will." This seems to be the case in various hedonistic pop culture subcultures, and there is also the harsher example of the Manosphere I mentioned in the OP. There is the promise of edenic hedonist polyamory in various social scenes, enhanced by a growing cornicopia of pharmacological innovations, or else the worship of sheer power and self-assertion one finds in others (and sometimes the two are mixed together in various subcultures). It seems to me that is largely the upper class, and what remains of the "striving middle class" that suffers from this residue of guilt, probably because their literature (a dying art) sells hedonism and the pursuit of power as a sort of specifically moral act that must still somehow be justified, whereas the popular culture versions just celebrate themselves reflexively (showing there was never much of a gap between Nietzsche's "master morality" and his "last men.")

So, I can certainly see the phenomena the article speaks to, and it is very potent, but it also seems more absent in some wide areas.

It makes a great point:

Indeed, it is impossible to exaggerate how many of the deeds of individual men and women can be traced back to the powerful and inextinguishable need of human beings to feel morally justified, to feel themselves to be “right with the world.” One would be right to expect that such a powerful need, nearly as powerful as the merely physical ones, would continue to find ways to manifest itself, even if it had to do so in odd and perverse ways.

Not "nearly as powerful," I would say. The appetites of logos are more easily crowded out and disordered by epithumia and thymos (more easily disordered because they demand to rule and order the lower appetites) but they are also stronger. From monks renouncing status, wealth, and sex, to martyrs, to revolutionaries, etc., the appetites of logos routinely show themselves to be capable of wholly overwhelming the desires for physical comfort, or even life itself, and those for honor and regard.

Liberalism could arguably defend itself in terms of giving individual man, and civilization collectively, a better structure for embracing these appetites than any past system through its open-endedness and promotion of technologies of information and discourse (as well as education). But, since it tends to make such appetites wholly privatized, skirting them in education and governance, as well as ethics and political theory, it can make no such claim. Instead, merit has to be banished from political theory because it cannot be justified without an ordering telos. We can have "meritocracy" as a sort of procedural sorting, but never merit. Perhaps that's one source of guilt. Those most invested in gaming the "meritocratic" system are the one's most aware of how it is more of a procedural game than anything else, designed to ruthlessly sort winners from losers not based on any criteria of virtue, but with an eye to procedural efficiency.




Which liberal theorists did you have in mind here? I was thinking of Rawls, Fukuyama, Nozick, or further back Mill, Locke, Hobbes. They tend to ground politics in contractual, procedural terms. For Rawls, a procedural justice must be elevated above the good because the human good is irreducibly plural and private. A person might, for instance, find the pinnacle of the human good in meticulously counting the blades of grass in a field and there would be no reason not to affirm this (Rawls' example).

There is a very strange interlude in Fukuyama's latest book, a defense of liberalism, where he attacks this element of liberal theory with an example. There is the layabout wealthy young man who doesn't work, lives off his parents, is completely unengaged with politics, and spends his time consuming video games, drugs, alcohol, pornography, and other forms of digital media while remaining wholly self-interested. The contrast case is a dutiful young women from a poor family who supports her sick mother while pursuing an education, and is as engaged in politics as she can be. Fukuyama claims that we can condemn the former and praise the latter because the two don't come down to racial, sexual, ethnic, or religious identity. However, it's totally unclear if he has actually left himself any grounds for doing this in his liberalism. Indeed, he constantly refers any "ultimate question" about human flourishing to the Thirty Years War, as if answering these in any concrete form can only participate apocalyptic violence.

So why are stable relationships better than pornography or prostitution? Why is one supposed to help one's parents rather than pursue one's dreams (even if those dreams are largely hedonistic)? In virtue of what is one deserving of merit and the other blame?

I've read all of Fukuyama's books so I can say pretty safely that his only option is to justify his ideal case with an appeal to what "makes society work best," which will of course, in his terms, be an appeal to greater consumption, more safety, and the "reasonableness" of prioritizing epithumia.

I think the idea that our only problem is that some sociopathic bad apples spoil the batch re liberalism is over optimistic. Certainly, it has been argued though. But even if this was so, it would suggest that liberalism has a profound tendency to elevate the sociopathic few to leadership positions across society, from corporate board rooms to senior government posts and many places in-between.

Whereas, I would say that it's hardly surprising that an elite who was raised on the axioms of moral anti-realism, the "(contained) greed is good" of Ayn Rand and much contemporary economic theory, a relentless focus on success (climbing the "meritocratic ladder"), and power and the satisfaction of current appetites as freedom turn out to be a recalcitrant leadership class when they come of age.

It seems that a true philosopher should reject all physical and practical aspects, and focus solely on rational reasoning. — Astorre

Well, this is certainly not the view that dominates in pre-modern philosophy, in either the West or the East. Eastern philosophy has a heavy focus on praxis and asceticism, as did the major schools of Western pagan philosophy, and certainly Christian philosophy as well. The idea that anyone can just slip into a state of pure, dispassioned rationality without any cultivation of virtue is an Enlightenment idea. Whereas, if the nous is clouded and most men suffer from disordered appetites, serious praxis must be undertaken, and praxis is central to the intellectual virtues.

Pierre Hadot's stuff is pretty good on the huge gap between ancient (mostly Pagan) "philosophy as a way of life," where the paradigmatic philosopher is a sage and holy man, and the Enlightenment ideal of sheer procedural reason.

However, where better than in harmony with nature to experience one's own physicality and connection to the world and others? — Astorre

Right, and with outdoor education, it's also recognized as a good environment for avoiding distraction and cultivating virtue and character. People are outside their comfort zones, which allows for progressive challenges, and there is also much more immediate, natural feedback when one acts unwisely. It also helps with community because the small group cannot turn outwards, while the basic nature of the skills being practiced tend to mean that everyone can contribute meaningfully to collective success.

There are large differences between the practices but they share some core similarities that are interesting.

but when it comes to liberalism - here the majority of the precondition - "liberalism is holy". — Astorre

Well, just because liberalism is founded on skepticism and preaches a certain sort of quarantined pluralism doesn't mean it isn't an evangelical ideology, or any different from Marxism in that respect. From the beginning it spread itself through violence. During the French Revolution, the clergy were seen as a threat, due to being an outside source of moral authority and wellspring of an alternative sort of philosophy. When the guillotine proved inadequate for the pace required for massacring them, they turned to constructing sinkable barges so boatloads could be drown together at once. The activities of the Infernal Columns in the Vendee served a similar "liberating" raison d'être.

More recently, from the opening of Japan to US trace at gun point, to Cold War coups, to the post-Cold War era of unchallenged neoliberal hegemony that has seen interventions by liberal states across the globe, that order hasn't shied away from using coercion or even violence to spread its system. This isn't inconsistent with early liberal theory. Both Locke and Mill adopt a similar position that it might be acceptable to enslave backwards people to "free them from indolence" and so lead them to economic prosperity (a key pillar of freedom in liberalism). There is likewise also a long tradition of justifying the use of coercion to dissolve cultural institutions and norms that cut against the grain of liberal pluralism, or to safely quarantine them.

For instance, what makes the religious right so objectionable to progressive liberals is not that they are religious, which is of course a perfectly fine private choice, but that they bring their religiously informed notions of politics into the public sphere. "Religious freedom" is more ideally "the freedom for religion to become publicly irrelevant." But conservative liberals are not actually all that different here with how they defend the "free market" (even as capitalism dissolves all the cultural institutions they want to conserve; if anything, conservative liberalism is even more obviously self-undermining).

Of course, progressive liberalism faces the same sorts of contradictions in that the dissolution of norms and customs, the marketization of all facets of human life, the procedural meritocracy, etc. all tend to promote the interests of the exceptional individual over the median citizen (and indeed, they were originally advocated for on just these grounds by Mill, Nietzsche, etc.). Norms of constraint and duty are, almost by definition, most binding on those with the wealth, talents, and power to not be otherwise bound by other forms of constraint.

Deneen's "Why Liberalism Failed" is quite good on these paradoxes. Or for a more Continental approach, Byung Chul Han's "The Agony of Eros" and "The Burnout Society."

So, does Bertrand Russell's famous turkey, who knows from a whole lifetime of experience that every morning—without fail—the nice man comes to feed him, also know that it is about to be fed when it sees the nice man coming to his pen on Thanksgiving morning?

Yes, this is a point Reiff makes in The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. I have found that book to be extremely prescient and well written, although somewhat polemical in a way only a book written as far back as 1966 could be, since so much it diagnoses has become hegemonic in academia and sociology in particular.

In particular, his comments about literature dying and culture being dominated by perspectivist psychodramas in the form of video media have been prescient and comments about the need for constant stimulus seem perfectly predictive of the era of the smartphone and "video game addiction" as a serious medical issue.

Just a few quotes:

To raise again the question of nihilism, as sociologists since Auguste Comte have done, demonstrates a major change in tone: the note of apprehension has gone out of the asking. We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses — except the sense of the past — as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden. Comte would have substituted a religion of humanity for its enfeebled predecessor; Max Weber proposed no substitute religion. Matthew Arnold could still listen for distant echoes of the sea of faith; Yeats knew there was a desert where once that sea might have been. To raise up faith from its stony sleep encourages the possibility of living through again the nightmare history of the last half century. Yeats did not hope for either restoration or parody of the established faiths. Rather, he prayed for a very modern sort of Second Coming, in which men would recover their innocence, [4|5] chiefly by accepting the fact that it is self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting — "and that its own sweet will is Heaven's will." In our recovered innocence, to be entertained would become the highest good and boredom the most common evil.

...

So long as a culture maintains its vitality, whatever must be renounced disappears and is given back bettered; Freud called this process sublimation... Now our renunciations have failed us; less and less is given back bettered. For this reason, chiefly, I think, this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke's panther, forever looking out from one cage into another. Because the modern sense of identity seems outraged by imprisonment in either old church or new cage, it is the obligation of sociologists, so far as they remain interested in assessing the quality of our corporate life, to analyze doctrinal as well as organizational profiles of the rage to be free of the inherited morality, the better to see how these differ from what is being raged against. I shall attend to a few of the exemplarily [5|6] enraged, and to the sense in which it may be said that they express general sentiments...

During the nineteenth century, when sociology helped in a major way to construct the central experience of deconversion toward an anti-creedal analytic attitude, that discipline suffered frum a vast over confidence both about its own advance and about the progress of the culture, which it understood as undergoing varieties of such deconversions. "Progress," wrote Spencer,4 "is not an accident, but a necessity. Surely must evil and immorality disappear; surely must men become perfect." A basic transformation of culture appeared both inevitable and desirable...

In fact, evil and immorality are disappearing, as Spencer assumed they would, mainly because our culture is changing its definition of human perfection. No longer the Saint, but the instinctual Everyman, twisting his neck uncomfortably inside the starched collar of culture, is the communal ideal, to whom men offer tacit prayers for deliverance from their inherited renunciations. Freud sought only to soften the collar; others, using bits and pieces of his genius, would like to take it off.

Of course, that last paragraph applied better in 1966 when the book was written. Since then we have oscillated between this and the "detached reason" of the "effective altruist," crowd who would have us reach utopia through a series of technocratically perfected incentives and nudges paired with ever more effective therapies born of neuroscience, pharmacology, and new digital technologies, and of course ever better data collection and cycles of "continuous improvement." It's not so much a brave new world as a continued oscillation between Enlightenment optimism and Romantic Dionysian pessimism. The former crowd has ascended above morality (while nonetheless still practicing a moralizing ideology, as the ideological tenor of the replication crisis in social psychology and sociology attests), while the other either dispenses with it or "creates" it as an aesthetic project. Hence, it isn't only the liberal theorists who have cut out logos, and the champions of "dispassioned reason" have cut out thymos too.

One of the more prescient parts:

By this time men may have gone too far, beyond the old deception of good and evil, to specialize at last, wittingly, in techniques that areto be called in the present volume, ''therapeutic ," with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being.8 This is the unreligion of the age, and its master science. What the ignorant have always felt, the knowing now know, after millennial distractions by stratagems that did not heighten the more immediate pleasures. The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized, now not in the West only but, more slowly, in the non-West. The Orient and Africa are thus being acculturated in a dynamism that has already grown substantial enough to torment its progenitors with nightmares of revenge for having so unsettled the world...

Our cultural revolution does not aim, like its predecessors, at victory tor some rival commitment, but rather at a way of using all commitments, which amounts to loyalty toward none. By psychologizing about themselves interminably, Western men are learning to use their internality against the primacy of any particular organization of personality. If this re-structuring of the Western imagination succeeds in establishing itself, complete with institutional regimens, then human autonomy from the compulsions of culture may follow the freedoms already won from the compulsions... Psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends to therapeutic use...

...I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays, with patient-analysts acting out their inner lives, after which they could extemporize the final act as interpretation. We shall even institutionalize in the hospital-theater the Verfremdungseffekt, with the therapeutic triumphantly enacting his own discovered will.

The wisdom of the next social order, as I imagine it, would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men, who must be found, but rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life. Thus, once again, culture will give back what it has taken away. All governments will be just, so long as they secure that consoling plenitude of option in which modern satisfaction really consists. In this way the emergent culture could drive the value problem clean out of the social system and, limiting it to a form of philosophical entertainment in lieu of edifying preachment, could successfully conclude the exercise for which politics is the name. Problems of democracy need no longer prove so difficult as they have been. Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy economy of abundance...

Culture as therapy becomes realizable in part because of the increasing automaticity of the productive system.But without the discipline ot work, a vast re-ritualization of social life will probably occur, to contain aggression in a steady state and maintain necessary levels of attention to activity.The rules of health indicate activity; psychological man can exploit older cultural precepts, ritual struggle no less than play therapy, in order to maintain the dynamism of his culture.Of course, the newest Adam cannot be expected to limit himself to the use of old constraints.If ''immoral" materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are therapeutically effective, enhancing somebody’s sense of well-being, then they are useful. The end goal is to keep going. Americans, as JF. Scott Fitzgerald concluded, believe in the green light.

Of course it's dour, but in some ways maybe a bit optimistic. "Plenitude" probably isn't enough, but "growth in plentitude." That seems to have run out though.

I disagree. I see no reason to think that ethics could not be taught to children without incorporating the threat of divine punishment and promise of divine reward. — Janus

Sure, I have no real disagreement there. But liberalism says questions of the human good are, for the most part, private matters. Public ethics must be built around liberal dogmas re pluralism and the unknowability of the human good. Hence, if you try to teach ethics, what you get is different parties raging about how it is not the state's place to make any comment on the human good, because this must remain private. Religious people revolt unless their particular theology is on the syllabus, and likewise "secular humanists" decry not only a particularly Christian ethics being taught, but even a Platonism or Aristotelianism that hasn't been sufficiently deflated to fit the presuppositions of "exclusive humanism."

You seem to be doing that black and white thinking. I haven't said that exclusive or even primary focus on accumulating wealth would be a good thing. It wouldn't because it leads to egregious exploitation of other humans, animals and environments. — Janus

That post was written in response to your comment about practical philosophies that were "all about" the acquisition of wealth, hence my response.

There will always be a tension between individual preferences and societal desiderata. It seems obvious that in any community harmony is more desirable than conflict. Right there is the pragmatic basis for ethics. — Janus

More desirable for whom? Certainly not for people who want to radically reshape the society, or for those who profit from or enjoy conflict. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's Why Nations Fail might rightly get called "Selecting on the Dependent Variable: The Book," but it was well received because the basic phenomena it is analyzing makes sense and has been supported elsewhere. The "case studies" were just window dressing. Their main point is that elites, particularly dictators and their inner circle, often have strong incentives to do things that they know will make their countries poorer, less technologically advanced, and militarily weaker overall.

Why? Because the same reforms that will lead to a better median standard of living, greater political liberty, faster technological progress, a stronger economy, and a stronger military also threaten their control of power and their own impunity. Not only are people like Gaddafi able to control much more wealth than a Musk or a Bill Gates, but they have vastly more power and impunity within their own social sphere. Russia is a fine example of this. Norvell De Atkine's classic study "Why Arabs Lose Wars" is a perfect example of the sorts of incentives at play in the war with Ukraine. You cannot have people who are too competent and charismatic racking up victories because they represent a potential challenge to you (something seen clearly when Putin had to flee his capital as a low-level criminal turned catering chef led his private army on it). But this same sort of issue of "perverse incentives" plays out everywhere, from local government, to corporate boardrooms, to staff lounges, etc.

Man as the political animal cuts both ways. Man might be naturally social and compassionate, but man also has a strong tendency towards overwrought thymotic passions. It seems fairly obvious that man hasn't tended towards a sort of default benevolence. As Gibbon put it: "History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Many of these disasters stem from meglothymos, the desire for honor, domination, and excellence. The idea that "cooperation is best for comfort and security, so people will naturally tend towards it," not only seems falsified by history, but it's also far too weak of a pitch to motivate people to the sort of heroism needed to maintain civilizations.

How can you not see that this kind of attitude is relatively modern? In more traditional times, it was more likely to provoke laughter, amusement and excitement. Bull fighting and fox hunting are still respectable public spectacles in civilised parts of the world. — apokrisis

This response just seems to beg the question that good and bad are only just whatever people happen to currently say they are. But prima facie, it is bad for a bear to get its leg mangled in a trap regardless of "what people currently say," just as its bad for a person to drink mercury regardless of if their society currently thinks it's a panacea for all sorts of ills.

This framing does nicely illustrate the way anti-realism collapses any appearance/reality distinction vis-a-vis values though.

Natural selection needs random variety so it can continue to optimise a living and mindful structure of habit. — apokrisis

"Optimize" how? This is a value-laden term, just like your earlier invocation of "Darwinian success." Now if there is no end being sought, and whatever is "adaptive" is just whatever just so happens to end up happening, all these value terms are simply equivocations. Indeed, "pragmatism" is itself an equivocation if there is no real end involved.

So ‘ God’ is just the gift of difference that repeats itself in the contextually relative becoming of experience from
moment to moment? And the intelligibility of understanding arises from the pragmatic enactment of new sense in discursive engagement? Or is there some element external to the utter contingency of contextual becoming, but essential to the Logos we participate in, and essential to god? — Joshs

No, because God is not just contextual becoming, nor is intelligibility a pragmatic construction. God is the infinite plentitude from which difference flows as gift. God is the ground that makes difference and intelligibility possible. As Hart puts it: "All difference is difference in the light of infinite beauty, and so is secured in its truth by that light, rather than left to drift as sheer indeterminacy."

I really liked your idea of outdoor activities. I've been thinking about this for a few days. May I ask you to reveal a little more about how an outdoor philosophy class (or philosophizing) can be linked today? — Astorre

I was mostly thinking about my own experiences with Outdoor Adventure Education (OAE), which I then found reflected in a lot of the literature. The field has long had a heavy focus on "developing character" or even "education in virtue." It generally focuses on progressive challenges for participants, community work, self-governance, opportunities for leadership, and often a focus on environmental ethics. There is an ascetic component as well though. Expeditions are hard work, and on top of this diets are normally quite plain.

The "solo," several hours, a day, or a few days spent alone in the woods, is a fairly common practice (this was a common practice in pre-modern philosophy too). While fasting is less of a focus, it is still not uncommon in OAE for adults, on a choice basis. I also worked for a program where students helped construct a sweat lodge over a week and then had a Native America ceremony led for them inside. Journaling, writing letters to yourself, and group discussions are also common elements one finds in the ancient tradition and modern OAE (although in antiquity they often wrote monologues as other people as an exercise, particularly Biblical characters). I haven't seen as much "close reading" in OAE though. It doesn't tend to leave a ton of time for reading.

So, there is a rough similarity in methods and aims. However, one thing I noticed, that is confirmed in the literature, is that this focus on "character" has been challenged and has eroded over time, while programs like the YMCA and Outward Bound also underwent a "secularization" process that not only removed Christianity from the programs, but also much of the connection to pre-modern thought more generally, and notions of virtue or character in particular. The latter gets replaced by "therapy," which focuses more on coping, comfort, adjustment, and self-acceptance, and the smooth flow of enjoyment for the individual (and the group as a function of promoting individual enjoyment). One way I've seen it framed is the difference between:

"becoming what you are made to be" (older tradition) and;
"becoming what you want to be." (therapeutic)

To quote Gothe on the early stages of this sort of shift: "humanity will win in the long run; I am only afraid that at the same time the world will have turned into one huge hospital where everybody is everybody else’s humane nurse"

Or as the Catholic Encyclopedia of Social Theory puts it surprisingly polemically:

Freud himself was of a stoical disposition and urged those with the requisite strength and maturity to resign themselves to the meaninglessness of things without despair. Consolation for him, such as it was, came from his faith in reason and science. For those not capable of this, there is therapy. “Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.” Meaning ceases to be a matter of truth and becomes whatever the individual finds soothing. This continues to be a definitive part of the therapeutic mentality, and Freud intended it as a prescription for the weak. But as writers such as Philip Rieff and Christopher Lasch have shown, the other side of this is the pursuit of unlimited self-creation. Rieff argues that the result has been a radical reconfiguration of society and its institutions to place them at the service of the individual’s “manipulatable sense of well-being.” Self-creation is of course a Nietzschean concept, and it is one of the ironies of history that Nietzsche’s grand idea, elaborated with some bombast, should in reality come to mean little more than a higher form of therapy. This is, however, small consolation for the world the therapeutic mentality makes possible and has helped bring into being. Characterized by the increasingly brutal assertion of the self against others, this world is justified by recourse to an argot of psychological and often (in its New Age formulations) “spiritual” elements affirming the supposedly unique and intrepid qualities of a life lived in mediocre selfishness. The therapeutic mentality plays an essential part in sustaining the self in its lonely supremacy and in maintaining modernity’s resistance to the call to transcendence. The viability of the secular project today would not be possible without it.

That might be stronger than many critics would put it, but you get the idea.

For instance, one paper I read noted how some YMCA programs still call their nighttime discussion questions "vespers" after the canonical Christian prayer of the hours, but Christianity was first removed from these, then notions of virtue, and old questions were replaced with one's that tended to focus on individual self-realization in a pluralist framing.

Philip Rieff's book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic is the classic study of this new "therapeutic" paradigm (Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism all have some similar elements in terms of broadly influential studies). They mostly focus on culture writ large, or philosophy and related fields, but the books I mentioned in the OP show how this has trickled down into the self-help industry and related areas.

The OAE literature (which is smaller) grapples with this same phenomenon. Character and virtue have been attacked from a post-modern and situationist angle (although the replication crisis in social psychology and charges of ideological bias have seemingly taken some of the wind out of the drive to fully erase character talk). It's also been attacked as not being sufficiently pluralistic, or precisely because "character" presumes that there is any one better way to be. On this topic, I found a number of papers circling around the fear that OAE was simply degenerating into adventure tourism with the loss of this background.

What kind of open-air practice is suitable for academic philosophy classes? — Astorre

I'm not sure. I would think a camp/farm environment would be fine. I imagine that just having a small group, no distractions from nightlife, networking, etc., and no internet would be a huge boon for engagement. You would get students who self-select for serious study and avoid the tidal forces of digital distractions. But structured time for silence and group labor seem to be time honored/tested practices in both philosophy and outdoor programs. Plus, rustic accommodations and diets are cheap, and having participants work or gardening and repairs can make it cheaper.

Labor wasn't really a thing for the Pagan philosophers, at least in late-antiquity, because of a stigma against menial labor, but the early Christians differed on this dramatically. They thought it was essential for community building, fostering humility, being able to provide aid to the needy, and as a form of meditative practice. Their structured production is what allowed them to take on people from all classes, not just the wealthy, and become sources of aid/food for others in times of need (although it is also what slowly lead to them becoming wealthy and prosperous, which eventually undercut their mission in some places). Ascetic communities, because of their organization, tended to produce a surplus, and this actually led to its own problems because now there was wealth to covet.

Re the understanding of ideas, there is this prescient part of C.S. Lewis' lectures in medieval and renaissance literature where he sort of summarizes the broad outlines of Kuhn's point re paradigms (what Lewis calls a "backcloth"). He even lays out the notion of "saving appearances" and underdetermination—the way observation is fit into a paradigm until it is abandoned.

This understanding of how beliefs fit together and are constructed from culture springs organically from a comparison of the ancient, medieval, and early-modern ways of crafting literature more than anything else, and at the very least this source of the insight furnished him with all sorts of interesting, palpable examples to make his case.

He also makes an interesting point about the idea that the medieval cosmological model wasn't always taken "scientifically" but more symbolically. Scientists speculated about it, but it was primarily used in literature. Theologians and philosophers largely ignored it (or decried parts, like astrology), or used it as mere metaphor. This is in some ways the reverse of how the relationship works today, which is an interesting twist.

I find it more bizarre to see an Italian who doesn't include Virgil and the Commedia. It's like leaving out Shakespeare and Milton in English.

The idea of a “universally agreed upon” classic novel is probably seen as a bit outdated these days. Literary value is filtered through culture, history, and personal taste. What one society or cultural group elevates as timeless genius, another may find tedious, strange, or irrelevant. Hemingway has come in and out of fashion over the past decades, hailed in some quarters for his economical style, but dismissed elsewhere as arid. I find the novels of his I've read arid and dull. Some revere Dostoyevsky for psychological depth, yet to others he is verbose, repetitive and overwrought. I dislike most of Dostoyevsky I have read, except for his mercifully concise The Gambler - an astonishing account of addiction. You can't get away from individual taste. — Tom Storm

Well, the idea of a canon was never that it would universally appeal to everyone's tastes, but that they were works of great merit and influence that were a prerequisite for understanding the tradition and culture. Also, they were necessary for enjoying and understanding other parts of the canon; one would miss a lot in Milton or Spenser if all the allusions simply passed over our heads (footnotes help of course, but they can only do so much for dense works like Milton or Dante where the notes are longer than the text itself).

Someone raised on the finely crafted addictive media of Tik Tok, etc. might prefer AI slop or a movie poster over the Mona Lisa or the Pietà, but unless we have already gone down the path of assuming that no art is better than any other, but as Hamlet says, "thinking makes it so," we don't need to allow that both reactions are equally appropriate or ideal. We might say the same thing about a sort of phobia for, or inability to appreciate, natural beauty (e.g., if someone prefers a Walmart parking lot to a Patagonian landscape).

It's not unlike the distinction that is made between prioritizing and preferring gluttony, the physical sexual act, or even sadism, and the good of "being a good" citizen, husband, mother, leader, deacon, doctor, sister, soldier, etc. The idea that there are higher goods that are ultimately more fulfilling doesn't require that everyone currently desire such goods over sadism, gluttony, etc. All that is needed is a distinction between the reality and appearances of desire (or beauty), the potential for individuals to be wrong.

Plus, if one hasn't read long form verse, it will almost certainly be difficult at first. Yet we could easily liken it to learning a new language, learning to ride a bike, etc. It can be painful and require motivation, yet it might be worth doing, or even positively educating.

But I'd argue that there is a pragmatic, philosophical element to the canon as well. It isn't just their literary merit that is championed but their ability to:

A. Help us understand where our current ideas come from (I think that it's quite ironic that in an age where historicism and social constructivism are so dominant we are arguably more historically myopic than ever vis-á-vis the history of our own ideas. To not understand the origins of one's ideas is to be ruled over by past. Simply being unaware of an influence doesn't free one from it. Anscombe on the relationship between Reformation theology and secular (or even athiest) ethics is a fine example here.)

B. Create a common language that helps support civilization, including the arts. A total balkanization of culture makes the sort of allusions that are so central to much literature (and philosophy) impossible. It's a sort of Tower of Babel type scenario. Sharing a functional "language" is arguably not enough to support culture.

But if there is no God and we know “the good” to be a necessary organising idea that is always socially constructed, then that puts moral philosophy on a quite different basis. — apokrisis

I don't see how that follows. Presumably, it is bad for a bear to have its leg mangled in a trap, yet I'm not sure how this would be "socially constructed." Likewise, ceteris paribus, it is bad for man to be lit on fire, and I'm not sure how this would be "socially constructed" in any strong sense. Certainly, our notions of the good are always filtered through culture, because man is a social animal. The human good is inextricable from social constructions. But it also seems obvious to me that the human good is affected by principles that lie prior to any particular society, just as human nature is prior to human culture, in that the latter cannot exist without the former and is always shaped by it.

That the Good is an organizing principle I can get on board with, but as a prerequisite for intentionality and goal-directedness, it's a much broader principle than simply a principle of psychology or political science. This would make it posterior to biology. Not to go off-topic, but from a metaphysical lens, it's the Good, as "that to which all things strive," that makes anything any thing at all, in that true organic wholes emerge (are unified) by being oriented towards an end (i.e., organisms). Hence, it would seem to me to play a central role in resolving the Problem of the One and the Many.

That said, I don't really disagree with you in that I'd allow that politics/political science would indeed be the architectonic science of practical reason, in that it has the furthest reach (for man) and deals with the most common of goods. I don't see why an understanding of the Good as a metaphysical principle would be at odds with this.

One rooted in naturalistic metaphysics rather than transcendental beliefs. — apokrisis

The problem I have with "naturalism" is that it is equivocated on so broadly that I can never be quite sure how to respond to it (not a dig at you mind you; it's just become a real problem. When everyone is a naturalist it doesn't really tell you much!). What is naturalism here? The idea that everything that exists is changing? The idea that everything is mechanistic?

Solutions to problems are to be uncovered by better social science rather than getting closer to God. — apokrisis

I don't think the human good can be reduced to social (or physical) science. For one, philosophical value judgements are prior to all the normative areas of the sciences.



Au contraire, God is not a seiendes (being); a claim Heidegger would have seen repeated explicitly over and over by the Patristics if he had made it further back than the nominalists (e.g., the opening of Eriugena's Periphyseon). You cannot plop the Trinity on a Porphyrean tree alongside the world. Ipsum esse subsistens, not ens supremum, i.e., act not thing. God as an in-itself is a category error. Teleology doesn't come from above, but from within, through participation in infinite plentitude.

Likewise, knowledge is not the imposition of the "in-itself," but participation in the Logos. To speak of the "in-itself" at all often gets written off as a capitulation to modern univocity. It is God "in which we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28; repeated at every liturgy). The groundedness of ethics here is not an external in-itself, but being as intelligible, given, and above all gift. This isn't violence against difference, but the very gift and sustainment of its intelligibility (the "virtual" being a secularized paradoy of participation in critiques), which is grounded in the relational love of three persons (not a static in-itself).

I am sure there is something to take issue with there, I hardly expect it to be convincing, but the two (the traditional theology and modernity) cannot be lumped together. The latter is (originally at least) a self-conscious rejection of the former. In general, the people who write on this stuff tend to have analytics and empiricists as their primary targets.

Also, while the issues identified might stem from elements of liberalism, I should probably do a better job precisely identifying which elements. A program like Americorps is obviously very grounded in liberalism (being a US government program) and yet I would say it has fewer of these deficits. It is certainly community oriented. I think a key difference there might be that it doesn't have to operate as a business, or to necessarily "sell itself" in the way other avenues of praxis might.

You argue that modern liberalism, in the guises of personal
improvement, self-help and wellness programs, gives preference to the desires of the individual over the community — Joshs

I think this is probably true to some degree, particularly in some specific areas of the self-help space (the Manosphere being a hyperbolic example). However, I think this is somewhat ancillary. Sometimes, there is a big focus on community mixed in, outdoor adventure education being a prime example. IMHO, the larger issue is the collapse of the distinction between apparent/current individual desires and what is truly desirable. It's normally not an "anti-realism" about the human good, but rather a sort of bracketing/privatizing move that justifies this. But you can't have praxis grounded in ends that lie outside current desire (a telos) without that distinction.

The reason that advocates of. personal improvement beleive that bettering the self by attending to one’s needs and wants ( Maslow, Rogers) is the route to bettering society is that they put their faith in a natural or innate disposition toward the good, a biological or spiritual compass that guides development in a way that melds the ethical and the personally desired — Joshs

I don't think they're entirely in the wrong here either, insomuch as virtue is desirable. But it strikes me as quite optimistic. We might believe that the attainment of virtue fulfills desire, even the deepest desires, and still believe that misordered desires can lead inexorably away from virtue. At the limit, the notion that fulfilling current desires (whatever they happen to be) always leads towards virtue (the enjoyment of right action) and freedom would essentially be the denial that vice exists, i.e., that no one can become habituated to bad action.

Now, I can see a case for the idea that no one flourishes in a state of vice, and so there is always an impetus for change, but the whole idea of "disordered desires" is that that impetus can become ignored for prolonged periods.

The second approach is more interesting. It's in line with many of the critiques of instrumentalized mindfulness, which write off that deconstruction phase. The metaphysics underwriting that move also aren't embraced, because no clear metaphysics is; that's sort of the idea of making the praxis portable and instrumentalizing it, but also the risk.

The above was what I had in mind. What could knowledge of "(spiritual) truth, goodness and the divine" be but "esoteric knowledge" if not merely a matter of understanding ordinary truth and goodness as commonly conceived? — Janus

The world "spiritual" is not in the original quote. Aristotle, Plato, the Stoics, and their successors broadly orient their ethics and grounding of the human good in this way. Does their ethics require "esoteric knowledge" to practice? I don't think so. They certainly refer to such ends, particularly Plato, Plotinus, etc., but the whole point of dialogues such as the Charmides, I take it, is about the ability to make progress and refine understanding without such an end "in hand." Likewise, Aristotle's ethics provides a robust account of the human good and the development of virtue, while still pointing to contemplation as its highest point (Book X of the Ethics) and climaxing in Book XII of the Metaphysics.

By contrast, the ethics of liberalism has tended to remain firmly wed to the Reformation (particularly Protestant) vision of ethics as a sort of divine command, only now with God lopped out. The focus on law and obligation, highlighted by Anscombe in "Modern Moral Theory," or Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, etc., dominates utilitarianism and deontological ethics. It also leads to the very thin anthropology I was speaking to, since the entire idea is that ethics must necessarily be about rules, and since divine revelation is ruled out, and paired with the general skepticism of empiricism, we get a foundation of "rules all 'rational agents' will agree to." Or, because this is unconvincing, you get anti-realism and an ethics of sentiment that collapses any distinction between what is currently desired and what is truly desirable.

This is precisely what absolutizes individual preference and privatizes any deeper notions of teleology.

Self-help teachings and practices, if they are effective, should help people to live better lives. Of course I realize some of them are all about how to achieve financial success, but is that really such a bad aim for someone if it doesn't degenerate into acquisitive greed, especially if they aspire to be a householder and parent? — Janus

A focus on wealth (or career success as a proxy for status) as a primary aim seems to be a paradigmatic example of "putting second things first," no? Sure, wealth is useful. There are plenty of miserable wealthy people though. Wealth is only useful in parting with it; it's a proximate aim at best.

"What we ought to do" is of course important too. In Australia, several years ago there was a move to teach ethics in school, but the kibosh was put on that idea when religious organizations objected that ethics could not be effectively taught without God. — Janus

Exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. The "privatization" part of secularization makes it essentially impossible to have any public teaching of ethics per se. Of course, ethics is still taught, just not directly and reflectively.

The reduction in religious circles of ethics to religion is another consequence of the focus of obligations and rules, and the crowding out of any focus on the human good form a teleological perspective. The origin point for this sort of outlook is the same as it is some forms of liberal athiesm ironically.

But of course, fundamentalists find their own theories of praxis and various popular luminaries to be "helpful." If what is helpful is just what individuals find to be helpful, then the ideology motivating this sort of rejection of ethical education will itself be unimpeachable.

When I was hanging around New Age and Theosophy circles it was extraordinary how much of the activity was narcissistic and virtue signalling- “I’m more aware/developed/higher than you.” — Tom Storm

:up: this was largely my experience as well. I think there is something quite similar that could be said about modern reinventions of esoterica by figures such as Crowley, Evola, Peter Carol, where they essentially take the language and external symbols of a tradition and cut out all the teleological grounding actually.

But I also cannot but agree with ↪apokrisis: how do we know in which direction it is "correct" to philosophize? It follows that for any statement, some starting axiom is needed, which can be different for everyone.

That's the fundamental question of ethics, no? @apokrisis is essentially advancing his own answer to that question here and in the recent thread on wisdom I would take it. Likewise, it's not like liberalism doesn't answer this question. You cannot have any sort of large organization, let alone a state, without answering key ethical considerations and making judgements about the human good, even if only by default. I'd argue that everyone answers these questions (re method, truth, and values) one way or another, either reflectively or non-reflectively.

My point here was that the problem of "philosophical praxis as consumer product," combined with the general separation of theory and practice leads to a practice with shallow answers to this sort of question. Or, there isn't any real questioning at all, but rather a default to the (neo)liberal preference for skepticism and abstract "choice" (which, IMO, is not always "informed choice"). Or, if there has been such questioning, as in Kurt Hahn's case, cultural and market forces tend towards stripping out any firm answer and instead prioritize individual choice (as liberalism tends to conceive of it, in economic terms) as the ultimate good, so that a structured focus on any other good has to take a back seat.

Now, people can certainly object to any single answer on values, but it hardly follows from this that values can be ignored. If one raises up "pragmatism" or "choice," as a solution to the values question, this is just to have recommended the prioritization of a different sort of value. If one says that "spiritual" questions are ridiculous distractions, and the good life focuses on the pragmatic pursuit of worldly pleasures/goods (Charles Taylor's"exclusive humanism,") that isn't a non-answer on this question either. The problem I was hoping to identify is a sort of praxis that tries to go with a "non-answer" and so ends up simply affirming whatever we already happen to believe (a non-answer is still an answer, it affirms instrumentalizing praxis).

I guess this is sort of a larger issue. Skepticism about philosophy and values leads doesn't negate the imperative to answer such questions. They still get answered.

What is the “original anthropology” that supported these practices? — NOS4A2

Obviously, this varies from tradition to tradition. But, for instance, I would say the Stoic, Platonist, Peripatetic, and then much of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition have a lot in common in how the view the nature of man and the human good. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy is probably the paradigmatic idea of the late-antique synthesis here.

Obviously, Eastern sources have a different tradition (although there are some similarities). I just meant to contrast this with the rather thin anthropologies that have been very influential in folks like Nozick and Rawls, which don't leave much room for virtue (excellences vis-á-vis what it is to be man) but instead focus on a sort of abstract choosing agent. Here the right is elevated above the good (and so the human good).

I think the creep of the language of economics and the corporate world into wellness/mindfulness literature, or the Manosphere, is a good, if extreme example. Obviously, Homo oecononimicus, the atomized, self-interested utility maximizer is about as thin of an anthropology as you can get. You have a black box of preferences, and then the abstract game theoretic chooser.

Do you believe pre-modern philosophers were acting without self-interest, and that their philosophical activity had no telos towards their own self-development, but towards something else? — NOS4A2

Absolutely not. I am not a big fan of modern ethical theories in general, and the separation of "moral good" from "what appears good (desirable)." Aristotle focuses on the good as "being qua desirable," and this is carried on in other traditions.

The questions of "what sort of life is best for man?" or "how does one live a good life and become an excellent person?" are obviously going to have relevance for the self, right?

When I mention what I see as a corrosive focus on the self this meant to suggest the idea that ethics must be uninterested in the self (a sort of Kantian turn). It's rather rejecting the idea that the self, in its current form, with its current desires, is the measure of what is good and truly desirable. It's the collapse of a reality/appearance distinction in terms of what is most desirable/fulfilling that I find troubling in a sort of "consumerist" context.

Ok, so then it wasn't supposed to be relevant to what I wrote? I didn't write anything about "esoteric knowledge," nor any necessary preference for the older over the newer for that matter.

There is a sort of "managerial" outlook here, where praxis reduced to a sort of tool. In a similar vein, I have seen the critique that modern therapy/self-help largely focuses on helping us "get what we want," but not so much on "what we ought to do" or the question of if "what we want" is what will ultimately lead to flourishing and happiness. That is not seen as the purpose of therapy or self-help. That might be fair enough, but then it also not seen as the purpose of education either. So, what does fulfill that function? It seems to me that nothing does, except for perhaps wholly voluntary associations that one must "choose" (where such a choice is necessarily without much guidance). Aside from "self-development," this seems problematic for collective self-rule and social cohesion. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm sorry, but I don't see how your post addresses the dilemma I pointed out. I am aware of how these thinkers frame truth. I pointed out why I think it contradicts itself. Your answer seems to be: "everything contradicts itself?" I just don't think that's true. Lots of philosophy avoids refuting itself in this sort of way.

At any rate, isn't the sort of defense you are giving simply absolutizing a particular metaphysics of language and philosophy of science? That is, "there is no absolute context, regardless of the context, practices, or beliefs," (which is, or course, itself an absolute, gnostic claim, and one that seems to contradict itself).

I can think of plenty of philosophers who would contradict some of those claims. So in virtue of what is this sort of take presumably "true" and the others false? Why are the "sociology all the way down," folks right about science, but the traditional realists and hard-nosed physicalists wrong? If truth is just about what is dominant in a culture, it would seem that realism still rules the roost amongst scientists and the general public, so wouldn't that make it "true?"

Truth traditionally understood is untenable, for traditionally, the object is conceived apart from the perceptual act, and this is impossible. One would literally have to stand outside of experience to affirm it. — Constance

I don't think that's an accurate description. Truth in the Western tradition is "the mind's adequacy to being," or "thought's grasp of being." That's as true across scholasticism as it is for Platonism, and the Indian philosophy I am familiar with is not that different in this regard. The idea that truth requires something like "stepping outside of experience" is largely a modern one, one that I don't even think came into its own until the early analytic period (and honestly, it's more of a caricature if expressed in those stark terms).

That's a theme in post-modern arguments though. The argument often looks something like:

A or B
Not-A
Therefore B

But this doesn't work if the first premise is a false dichotomy. The "mirror of nature" in modern, empiricist thought is not the "microcosm" of someone like Saint Bonaventure. You're not going to see being set over and against thought in Plotinus. Parmenides' "the same is for thinking as for being" holds for a great deal of thought before the modern era.

It's a pet peeve of mine because it seems like early analytic thought (or modern empiricism more broadly) often gets backwards projected onto the whole of Western philosophy, so that "all past thought" can be dismissed, which is a shame.

Wellness retreats, access to outdoor education, etc. all skew towards the high end of the income distribution, so I'm not really sure what you're talking about. There aren't a lot of yoga studios or mindfulness retreats in depressed inner cities and rural areas. The self-help literature I had in mind tends to be rather explicitly oriented at "yuppies" and the like.

A lot of people within the Manosphere give testimonials about how it awakened them to the true (transactional/power-centric) nature of human relations (and the "real nature of women"). They say it radically improved their lives. Is it thus beyond criticism?

The Manosphere is actually a space that probably does draw more from the lower class, or at least downwardly mobile.

There is a Taoist monastic tradition; the lifestyle is similar to Buddhist monks in broad outline, obviously with a different set of traditions. They embrace celibacy, etc. Hermetic life is also part of the tradition, obviously with Lao Tzu himself.

The role of the daoshi priests would be "esoteric practice" though, no?

Some are like that, although the "life-hacking" stuff tends to lean more "cutting edge." Then there was the Human Potential Movement too, and things of that nature.

I didn't mention the military, but that's still a strong allure. Everyone I knew before they enlisted primarily enlisted because of the self-development, community, challenge, purpose elements. I assume that's common because they lean very hard into that in their advertising.

Likewise, the "elite school" motif is popular enough that it's basically it's own sub-genre in fantasy and sci-fi, and particularly in fiction aimed at young adults.

That's an interesting article. I had been reading Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche's book on Lojong practice, and I recall thinking that the key "preliminaries" to practice had some elements that I didn't think would sail in contemporary mindfulness.

I don't think there is anything wrong in syncretism per se, or borrowing practices. Actually, because disparate practices that seem to have evolved in relative isolation are so similar, I think it suggests some elements being more universal (e.g., Orthodox breathing practices and "dwelling on death," seem quite similar to some Eastern practices, along with the repetition of mantras being akin to the "Jesus prayer" or other repeated prayers). But I do think there is differences between good and bad philosophy, or a robust versus "thin" anthropology. There might be many adequate ways to describe man, useful for different purposes, but some seem clearly to be inadequate for a sort of broader "philosophical praxis."

I would say the irony is more that the right to bear arms only secures liberty if those bearing arms are (at least somewhat) virtuous and capable of self-governance (collectively and individually). Even if one grants it great importance, it still seems that it will be, at best, a right oriented towards a secondary good.

With "the ballot" the same issue occurs as with "the bullet." Simply having elections does not produce good governance nor "progress," nor justice, nor liberty. There are plenty of examples of extremely dysfunctional nations that nonetheless host relatively free and fair elections. There are important prerequisites for self-determination; many I'd argue are more important than democracy (and indeed, they can be eroded by democracy or liberalism/consumerism in some cases). Republican government might crown the achievement of self-governance, and it might even be a means towards it (although by no means a foolproof one), since it creates a system where poor leadership is punished (of course, in dysfunctional democracies, good leadership is often punished and demagoguery rewarded). But people who cannot govern themselves as individuals can hardly be expected to collectively each other. It's the same way worker's collectives could create great workplaces, but often didn't.

Too often I think we tend to think of democracy as a good in itself. Perhaps it is, or at least can be. It can lead to people taking a strong ownership over the common good. It hardly seems to today though. Likewise with the right to bear arms. But it seems obvious that places like the Republic of Korea and Singapore have provided for not only a better life, but even a better commonwealth and form of citizenship without full democracy than places like Afghanistan and Iraq had despite having free and fair elections. So too, there are plenty of places that are awash with weapons with little by way of liberty or a common wealth; the Central African Republic is a fine example.

If it is pragmatically efficacious, then it has status as "truth"; and Rorty may be right, mostly). But what ARE these about essentially? This is the question. And god does endure this scrutiny, if in a qualified and reduced way. — Constance

As noted above, I think Rorty's view is self-refuting (in multiple ways). It also would seem to make "usefulness" into a sort of volanturist metaphysical primitive (something like Calvinism with man in God's place). Plus, either there is a truth about what is actually useful or there isn't. If there isn't, and what is "useful" is just whatever is currently believed to be useful, I don't see how we avoid slipping into Protagorean relativism. The move to fix this by democratizing truth does not seem to me to fix the essential issue, and it itself seems arbitrary and ad hoc. Why not, "true is just whatever we currently believe to be useful, the community be damned?" Indeed, if a community came to affirm this, wouldn't it be true even under the democratic version of the theory?

But Plato's response to this same theory in the Theaetetus seems to still cut just as well as it did millennia ago. If we can never be wrong (either as a civilization, or as individuals) the philosophers and teachers (and philosophy itself) are the most useless sorts of things. Yet, to allow that we can be wrong about things—wrong about what is truly "useful"—seems to presuppose a truth of the matter that is prior, not posterior, to our beliefs about usefulness. And at any rate, the ubiquitous experience of regret seems to show that we can certainly be wrong about what is useful.

Sure, let me lay out the three main objections here:

1. You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: "constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop. Is that a fair characterization?

Now either the italicized statement is true outside current human belief and practice (i.e., it is always true of all practices, regardless of what they currently affirm) or else it is only conditionally true, i.e., it is true just in case current belief and practice affirms this statement.

Here are the two horns of the dilemma. If the statement is always true of all beliefs and practices, then it is true regardless of (or outside the context of) current beliefs and practices. But this contradicts the claim that truth is just what is affirmed by current beliefs and practices.

If we grab the other horn and say that the statement is itself only conditionally true, then it is true just so long as current belief and practice affirms it. This means it can "become" false if belief and practice change such that it is no longer affirmed. Thus, the assertion we are relying on to prevent "anything" goes, turns out to be overturned just in case we all stop believing it, in which case it seems that "anything goes."

2. It is self-refuting. It is not a theory of truth that is currently widely accepted. Hence, if truth just is what is widely accepted vis-á-vis common practices, then the theory is false by its own definition. If we affirm the theory as true, we are forced to affirm that it is false, and so we contradict ourselves. To use Rorty's framing, if truth is "what our peers let us get away with," then Rorty's theory is false because it was harshly criticized from a number of different directions. His peers didn't let him get away with saying this, therefore his theory is false.

It leads to: "if A, then not-A" while asserting A essentially (the same problem with 1).

3. It seems to equivocate on common understandings of truth. It uses the word "truth" but then seems to describe something quite different. That is, it seems to deny that truth as traditionally understood, or anything like it, exists. Arguably then, this is epistemic nihilism that is papered over by the equivocation.

I will allow though that the force of 3 is probably significantly lessened if the second horn of 1 can somehow be overcome, or if we grab the first horn of the dilemma in 1. But if we grab the first horn, we seem to be either contradicting ourselves or defaulting on the claim that truth is always posterior to current practices and beliefs.

Like I said, I am sympathetic to the criticism of the analytic "view-from nowhere," "objectivity approaches truth at the limit" schema that this sort of view emerged to correct. Yet this solution seems to me to have even greater difficulties. More broadly, I think the impetus for such a view stems from failing to reject some of the bad epistemic axioms of empiricism, and from a particular metaphysics of language and the reality/appearance distinction that I would reject, but that's a whole different can of worms.

I suppose a final option is to refuse to grab the dilemma by the horns and to simply be gored by it, allowing that the theory is both true and false, and that it itself implies contradictions, and so this is no worry. But I think that's exactly the sort of thing that is generally meant by "anything goes relativism."

Jesus was a moral nihilist. — frank

:meh:

Compassion comes from suspending judgment — frank

Compassion is value-laden, it comes from judging a person against what is truly good for them. If there is no better or worse way for a person to be then there is nothing to feel pity about and no need for mercy.

The people who can't see that are the ones who need to throw the stone. They lust to see the sinner in pain. — frank

You are conflating a recognition of sin with a desire to personally extract justice, as if the two were inseparable. In fact, forgiveness presupposes judgement that there be anything that is recognized as warranting forgiveness. Forgiveness is not apathy either. The point is proper authority. "Vengeance is mine, I shall repay" ( Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19).

These people are locked in a cycle that Jesus encouraged people to find their way out of. The way out is through forgiveness — frank

If nihilism is true then there is no sin to forgive and if "nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so," then throwing the rock can hardly be bad if one thinks it good.

For instance, if you think about the most aggressive, toxic person in your life, consider that angry, aggressive people usually feel weak and afraid. People who try to manipulate others feel like they have no control. People are contradictory. People who are in pain sometimes lash out to cause others pain. Plus causing pain can be a form of self medication because it feels good to stomp downward. It makes you feel powerful, and a dopamine burst is apt to accompany it, producing a feeling of accomplishment. In other words, the question ethics doesn't spend much time on is: why does the abuse exist? Step away from ethics into nihilism, and you can see how so many people are trapped in a web of grief and rage, most born into that web. Instead of lamenting it, see the way this web shapes identities and grand dramas that play out over generations.

IDK, terms like "aggressive," "weak," "afraid," "pain," "toxic," "grief," "rage," "powerful," etc. all seem to be value-laden in a way that would make it quite difficult to approach them sans value. Without a particular end in mind, nothing can be labeled "toxic" or "maladaptive."

Wouldn't the very idea that the one can understand best when suspending all evaluative judgements itself presuppose that the truth of human activity and happiness doesn't need to be understood in terms of values and ends? I'd also question whether such a state of dispassioned reason ever exists (if it is even desirable), and even if it does exist it isn't clear that it is easily achievable without practice. I don't think the problem of "bad judgement" and of one's own propensity for error, or lack of epistemic virtues, is necessarily fixed by simply suspending judgement.

For instance, the question of why abuse and toxic behavior exists is one of the foundational questions of ethics. It is clear that what it apparently good (what people seek) isn't what is truly best, hence the need for a study of ends in the first place. It is analogous to the question of error in epistemology. To be sure, some sorts of modern ethics focuses solely on deducing "rules" and "laws," but they do this precisely because they have assumed that "dispassioned description" is superior to judgement (generally in a desire to ape the sciences). But the problem there is more a lack of judgement than a surplus. The quest for "rules all rational agents should agree to in virtue of rationality," itself presupposes a certain view of rationality and agents that makes error mysterious.

Are you saying that if truth only depends on us, then we should already know all truths, but since we don’t, truth must exist independently of human practices? — Tom Storm

Sure, that would seem to be one consequence of the idea that truth only exists (is created by/dependent upon) human practices and language. How could an unspoken, unacknowledged truth exist?

All I’m suggesting is that we interact with our environment and build stories, models and conversations to explain things. What we call truth emerges for a process. This is in constant flux and never reaches capital-T Truth. But many different models will be useful for certain purposes. — Tom Storm

Might I suggest that this seems to be conflating two different things? One idea is fallibilism, the idea that we never know everything, or know something exhaustively. To know something exhaustively is, in a sense, to understand all its causes and its entire context, which is arguably to know everything. Nonetheless, this is not normally taken to mean that one must know absolutely everything to know anything at all.

But the other idea is that truth is actually generated by and dependent on "stories and conversations," which are themselves driven by "usefulness" (and so too, apparently any truth about usefulness itself) . It's this latter thesis that I am objecting to. The former has a long pedigree. The latter only seems to show up as a position for Plato to make jokes about and then millennia later as an "ironic" post-modern position.

Saying the world was flat made sense in the context of what we knew at the time. Now it makes sense to say it is a sphere. Today most of us obviously prefer the latter, and it's more justifiable. But where will we be in 1000 years? Will we still think of the world as a material entity, or might we come to see it as a product of consciousness, rather than a physical object? I note also that there is an emerging community of flat earthers and globe deniers. Is Trump one of these? :wink: — Tom Storm

Well, my confusion is that "makes sense in the context of," is not normally taken to be a synonym for "is true." Is the idea that these are the same thing? Perhaps it "made sense" to sacrifice people to make sure the sun didn't disappear in the context of Aztec civilization, but surely it wasn't true that the continued shining of the sun was dependent on cutting victims' hearts out on an alter.

Yet the idea that our conversations and practices and generative of all truths would suggest just this. That "makes sense to" is synonymous with "is true."

It’s not that anything could be true just because we say it is. Things in the world still constrain what we can do. Our conversations and practices are built around those constraints. We find some statements “useful” precisely because they help us navigate reality as it seems to behave. — Tom Storm

Ok, did reality truly behave this way before we found it useful to say it is so? Either it did, and there was a truth about these "constraints" that lies prior to, and is, in fact, the true cause of, human practices (i.e., these constraints were actually, really the case, that is, truly the case) or else it was our own sense of "usefulness" that made the constraints truly exist in the first place. Or, did these constraints which shape practice and conversations actually exist, but it wasn't true that they existed (which is an odd thing to say)?

If practices are necessary for truth you cannot posit constraints that lie prior to practices as the cause of those practices without denying the truth of those constraints it would seem. For they only become truly existent when declared so in practice.

And as noted earlier, there are the two other difficulties:

A. If there is no fact about what is truly useful, then "usefulness" is just whatever appears useful. Cutting out the hearts of sacrificial victims once seemed useful, and so apparently it was,.for instance. But since usefulness determines truth, truth is simply determined by appearances.

B. Since such a position isn't popular, it is false on its own terms.