• Archive of "Philosophy" Category

    Theories of Change

    May 29, 2010 // No Comments »

    David Brooks wrote a nice piece on the legacy of the British Enlightenment in today’s NY Times. Unlike their French counterparts, British Enlightenment thinkers didn’t just extol reason’s capacities, they underscored its limits. There is no greater example of the this tradition than Edmund Burke, who rejected the radical approach to social change advocated by the French.

    Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.

    Burke was horrified at the thought that individuals would use abstract reason to sweep away arrangements that had stood the test of time. He believed in continual reform, but reform is not novelty. You don’t try to change the fundamental substance of an institution. You try to modify from within, keeping the good parts and adjusting the parts that aren’t working.

    If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch.

    Brooks sees this tension between radical and more traditional Enlightenment perspectives as playing out in our politics today:

    We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one.

    Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics.

    No surprise where Brooks comes down.

    Posted in Culture, Modernity, Philosophy, Politics

    Does Natural Law Exist?

    May 15, 2010 // No Comments »

    Peter Leithart posted a great review of J. Budziszewski’s The Line Through The Heart, a new work on natural law theory. Leithart is quite complementary in his review which concludes with the suggestion that natural law, even with all of Budziszewski’s qualifications, can’t achieve what many of its enthusiastic supporters think it can:

    Paul says all know God and His requirements from creation, but J. Bud is right that we suppress, evade, rationalize, pretend, and can do that for so long that we virtually forget we’re evading.  However that law is woven into our minds and hearts, it is woven differently from the way language, thought, creativity, and many other human qualities are woven.  Somehow, it is possible to unravel knowledge of God and remain human, which must mean that it is woven differently…Let me make that point stronger, in a Hauerwasian direction. The universe has, I agree, a grain, a design given it by the Triune Creator, and we are to live in accord with that grain.  But we discern that grain not from “unaided reason” (J. Bud hedges with “so-called unaided reason”) but in the light of Christ, by the Spirit, through the spectacles of Scripture.  When we have the mind of Christ, we see how the world is to be, and how humans are to live, and we learn in turn that the world is not as it should be.   To put it more strongly, provocatively: There is nothing bigger, more basic, more universal than Christ the Lord, the One by whom all things were made, the One in whom all things cohere.   Christ must be given epistemological priority, and natural law theories, even of the best varieties, don’t honor that priority…This circles back to the practical point.  If this argument is true, then the persuasiveness of natural law of J. Bud’s variety requires just as radical a conversion as the fundamentalist demands.  It requires the same conversion.

    Posted in Philosophy, theology

    Enough With The New Atheists Already

    May 6, 2010 // 1 Comment »

    David B. Hart’s assessment of the New Atheism is a must read for believers and non-believers alike. If one has an exceedingly low tolerance for feisty rhetoric, then this piece will be tough to slug through, though still well worth the effort. For example:

    The principal source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infidels lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel…But how long can any soul delight in victories of that sort? And how long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral “truths,” their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about “religion” in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for?…I am not—honestly, I am not—simply being dismissive here. The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe.

    It’s not as though Hart has no appreciation for atheism. On the contrary, he recognizes that

    …Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture—some great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic expressions of belief and unbelief alike. Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions, and even the most fervent of believers should acknowledge that both are often inspired by a profound moral alarm at evil and suffering, at the corruption of religious institutions, at psychological terrorism, at injustices either prompted or abetted by religious doctrines, at arid dogmatisms and inane fideisms, and at worldly power wielded in the name of otherworldly goods. In the best kinds of unbelief, there is something of the moral grandeur of the prophets—a deep and admirable abhorrence of those vicious idolatries that enslave minds and justify our worst cruelties.

    What I enjoyed most about Hart’s reflection was the marked appreciation for Nietzsche, who comes off as a figure who (rightly in my opinion) deserves our admiration and gratitude:

    Above all, Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right. Just as the Christian revolution created a new sensibility by inverting many of the highest values of the pagan past, so the decline of Christianity, Nietzsche knew, portends another, perhaps equally catastrophic shift in moral and cultural consciousness. His famous fable in The Gay Science of the madman who announces God’s death is anything but a hymn of atheist triumphalism. In fact, the madman despairs of the mere atheists—those who merely do not believe—to whom he addresses his terrible proclamation. In their moral contentment, their ease of conscience, he sees an essential oafishness; they do not dread the death of God because they do not grasp that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation has sponged away the horizon, torn down the heavens, left us with only the uncertain resources of our will with which to combat the infinity of meaninglessness that the universe now threatens to become…Because he understood the nature of what had happened when Christianity entered history with the annunciation of the death of God on the cross, and the elevation of a Jewish peasant above all gods, Nietzsche understood also that the passing of Christian faith permits no return to pagan naivete, and he knew that this monstrous inversion of values created within us a conscience that the older order could never have incubated. He understood also that the death of God beyond us is the death of the human as such within us. If we are, after all, nothing but the fortuitous effects of physical causes, then the will is bound to no rational measure but itself, and who can imagine what sort of world will spring up from so unprecedented and so vertiginously uncertain a vision of reality?…For Nietzsche, therefore, the future that lies before us must be decided, and decided between only two possible paths: a final nihilism, which aspires to nothing beyond the momentary consolations of material contentment, or some great feat of creative will, inspired by a new and truly worldly mythos powerful enough to replace the old and discredited mythos of the Christian revolution (for him, of course, this meant the myth of the Übermensch).

    Posted in Atheism, Culture, Modernity, Philosophy, Religion

    Vehemence, Oy Vey!

    October 27, 2009 // No Comments »

    I’m currently slowly working through Philip Fisher’s The Vehement Passions. Fisher begins by asking if there are any pair of words that seem as natural together as “dispassionate knowledge.” But the passions in at least one instance have always been seen as inextricably connected with the quest for knowledge: the case of wonder. Descartes considered wonder to be an impassioned state that makes learning possible at all. “In wonder we notice the background of a lawful and familiar world something that strikes us by its novelty and by the pleasure that this surprising new fact brings to us.” We all at every stage of life have a “distinct but provisional horizon” that separates the familiar from the unfamiliar and the unknown. Wonder lets us know where this horizon is at any given moment.

    If it is only scientific knowledge that we are considering, then anger or grief would seem to “preclude clear thought”, that is “the pursuit of a continuous chain of thought and experiment, and the preservation of the calm atmosphere in which order and rationality make possible long and arduous projects.” But Fisher thinks that “vehement passions” like anger, grief, shame and fear have a significant role to play in the quest for knowledge. Wonder is no mere exception to the rule. The vehement passions design for us “an intelligible world” doing so by means “of a horizon lines that we can come to know only in experiences that begin with impassioned or vehement states within ourselves.” For instance, just as wonder plays an important part in scientific thought, so anger plays a significant role where the discovery and delineating of injustice is concerned. The fact that we are surprised by wonder or anger is a clue that something new really is disclosed in “states of vehemence.”

    Posted in Philosophy

    How Do We Know Anything?

    October 23, 2009 // No Comments »

    I’m re-reading T.S. Eliot’s doctoral dissertation which was on F.H. Bradley’s understanding of knowledge and experience. It’s incredibly elegant and profound prose.

    When we use terms like “experience” and “feeling” we need to be careful suggests Eliot. Eliot here is explicating what the terms mean to Bradley, but he’s certainly a sympathetic interpreter. He thinks it’s important to resist the temptation to identify experience with consciousness, or to make experience and adjective that modifies a subject. Nor should experience be confused with immediate sensation, like “a panorama passing before a reviewer.” Likewise it’s not the content or substance of a mind.

    Feeling is just as complicated to nail down. It’s not the feeling describe by psychologists, though it is related to what they describe and “continuous with psychological feeling”. Eliot thinks it’s important to note that while Bradley describes feeling as “the immediate unity of a finite psychological centre”, it’s not merely the feeling of a mind or consciousness. For Bradley feeling is the “the general condition before distinctions and relations have been developed, and where as yet neither any subject nor any object exists.” Feeling is anything that is “only present and simply is”. This means that everything actual must be felt, but that we only call something “feeling” in so far as we take it “as failing to be more.”

    Experience then for Bradley, in contrast to most of his philosophical contemporaries, is not at “any stage of consciousness merely a presentation which can be isolated from other elements also present or subsequent in consciousness.” It isn’t “sense-data” or “sensations”, nor is it a stream of feeling that “as merely felt, is an attribute of the subject side only and must in some way be “related” to an external world. It’s also not more purely or immediately felt in the animal or infant mind than in the mind of an adult engaged in critical inquiry. Bradley is doubtful that there is such a thing as “immediate experience”. Eliot thinks Bradley understates matters, claiming that there certainly is no immediate experience at all.

    If we’re going to develop a theory of knowledge, we have to postulate some given upon which knowledge is built. We’re then forced to take this construction as something which develops in time. We think of things presented to our notice at any or all given moments, and “of the whole situation in knowing as a complex with this datum as one of the constituents.” We also tend to consider the development of consciousness “in biological evolution as a development of knowledge”. If there is indeed a “problem” of knowledge so to speak then neither of these perspectives is irrelevant. But there’s a tendency to confuse the two and herein lies the issue. From the genetic point of view, all of the so called “stages” are actualities, “whereas the various steps of knowing in the mind of an adult…are abstractions, not known as separate objects of attention.” They all exist for us simultaneously without priority. In any stage of human development we don’t find feeling without thought, or presentation without reflection. Even at primitive levels of consciousness we find what we call feeling and thought, presentation, redintegration and abstraction, all at a lower stage. This calls into question the study of primitive consciousness because we find in our own knowing all the same constituents, if only in a clearer and thus more readily apprehensible form.

    All that being said, if all the same constituents were present to us in every instance of knowing, “if none were omitted in error, or if none had any temporal precedence over another, all analyses of knowing would be equally tenable.” There wouldn’t be any real difference. Where there are no bones “anybody can carve a goose.” If we didn’t think that at some points in time our consciousness is nearer to “pure experience” than at others, if we didn’t at some points think of “sense-datum” as prior to “object”, or feel that “act” or “content”, or “immanent” and “transcendent” object were not in some sense independent from one another, and capable of “entering into different contexts as table and chair, the fact of their difference would be a perfect example of useless knowledge.” In Bradley Eliot finds this difficulty in an “aggravated form”, but not one that is more fatal than in any of his contemporaries.

    We talk about immediate experience and contrast it with ideal construction. This immediate experience is prior in time to ideal construction. But no actual experience can be merely immediate, for if it were “we should certainly know nothing about it.” We also can’t clearly draw the line between the experienced, the given and the constructed. Difference only “holds good” in a relative and fluctuating perspective. “Experience alone is real, but everything can be experienced.” There is no absolute point of view where real and ideal can be ultimately distinguished and labeled. “All of our terms turn out to be unreal abstractions; but we can defend them, and give them a kind of reality and validity (the only validity which they can posses or can need) by showing that they express the theory of knowledge which is implicit in all our practical activity.”

    Although we really aren’t acquainted with any element of experience that we can truly identify as immediate, nor can we know immediate experience directly as an object, “we can yet arrive at it by inference, and even conclude that it is the starting point of our knowing, since it is only in immediate experience that knowledge and its object are one.” The fact that we can make this reifying move and to some extent make our immediate experience an abstract inferred object, but not an object “among others”, nor a term which “can be in relation to anything else” is an embarrassing problem. We’re forced to further abstraction, handling this “object” as if it were an adjective of either a subject or an object, as our experience or as the experienced world. But whether we choose to say “the world is my experience” or that experience is constituted by “that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not, we have been in either case guilty of importing meanings which hold good only within experience.” We can only discuss experience from various sides in an effort to correct the descriptions from other sides which are always partial and abstracted.

    Posted in Philosophy, Uncategorized

    When Doubt Gets Dogmatic

    September 2, 2009 // No Comments »

    The Enlightenment conferred great authority upon its tribunal of criticism. The principle of sufficient reason suffered no exceptions; all beliefs had to submit to its requirements. Nothing was sacred before the criticism of reason, not even the state in its majesty nor religion in its holiness.. Nothing, that is, except of course the tribunal of critique itself, which was somehow sacred, holy and sublime.

    But such a conspicuous and dubious exception only created suspicions about the Enlightenment faith in criticism. Some philosophers began to recognize that an unqualified demand for criticism is self-reflexive, applying to reason itself. If it is the duty of reason to criticize all our beliefs, then ipso facto it must criticize itself; for reason has its own beliefs about itself, and these cannot escape criticism. To refuse to examine these beliefs is to sanction ‘dogmatism’, the demand that we accept beliefs on trust. But dogmatism, which refuses to give reasons, is clearly the chief enemy of criticism, which demands that we give reasons. So, unless criticism is to betray itself, it must become, in the end, meta-criticism, the critical examination of criticism itself.

    Yet if the meta-criticism of reason is necessary, is it not also dangerous? If reason must criticize itself, then it must ask the question, ‘How do I know this?’ or ‘What reason do I have to believe this?’ But then we seem to face a very disturbing dilemma. Either we must ask this question ad infinitum, and embrace skepticism, or we must refuse to answer it, and lapse into dogmatism.- Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, page 6.

    Posted in Philosophy

    Nietzschean Self Love

    November 22, 2008 // No Comments »

    One of my undergraduate students asked me how is it was possible for me, a Christian, to call Nietzsche, an atheist, my favorite philosopher. Like most good questions it stopped me in my tracks. My admiration for Nietzsche runs so deep and is so complex that it sometimes resists precise articulation. I suppose this is the case for all of our deep loves, whether the objects of such affection are things or persons.

    I thought about the student’s question the entire day, and wound up going back to my favorite of Nietzsche’s works, The Gay Science. The following passage gave me pause (as much of Nietzche tends to do):

    One thing is needful. To “give style” to one’s charactera great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added, there a piece of original nature has been removed:both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed, there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views:it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small: whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose,if only it was a single taste! It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relents in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature; even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom. Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned: they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spiritsand they may be of the first rankare always out to shape and interpret their environment as free naturewild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising. And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves! For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himselfwhether it be by means of this or that poetry and art: only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold! Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge: and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

    I imagine that Nietzche use of the phrase “one thing is needful” might allude to Luke 10:42. But whether or not that’s the case, it does put an interesting spin on self-love, something that arguably is at the heart of the Gospel. This is different than self-absorbtion, which I think actually comes about through discomfort with and loathing of the self.

    For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himselfwhether it be by means of this or that poetry and art: only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold! Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge: and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.

    During a particularly dark and depressed period of life a friend called everyday and left the same voicmail: “Remember, you’re a project worth working on…”. To see ourselves as a project with eternal significance, this may be the one needful thing. Now whether or not we have the resources within ourselves to attain this goal is another matter. The friend always concluded the same voicemail with an exhortative reminder: “Greater is he that is within you than he that is within the world.” Nietzsche sees the one who is unable to become bridled as the one who will never be able to attain true self-love. Nietzsche diagnoses the problem with acute precision. The question is whether he has the commensurate cure. Perhaps what is necessary is a law or yoke, but not our own, but one far easier and lighter (Mt 11:28-30)…

    Posted in Philosophy