Philosophy

I don’t know much about the topic in its specific sense as a theory opposed to Darwinism. Some ideas associated with it do seem to make sense. It seems to me, for example, that mathematical analysis and basic physics and chemistry ought to set outer bounds on what random variation and natural selection can do, and so cast light on their plausibility as explanations for how life has developed. Whether much light has yet been cast I really have no idea.

A recent philosophy grad asks about the Euthyphro Dilemma (so called from the Platonic dialogue), and whether it shows that religion and morality are unrelated:

There’s no special reason a scientist should have anything very comprehensive or profound to say about knowledge and reality, any more than a lawyer as such is likely to have deep thoughts on the nature of social order. A working professional needs an implicit theory that puts his work in a setting that enables him to make sense of it, but the simpler the setting and the less effort it takes to understand it the better from the standpoint of his normal activities.

Frequent commenter MD has posted an interesting account of the views of Jacques Lyotard, a prominent postmodernist, on knowledge in postindustrial society. It’s an interesting situation Lyotard describes, one that seems to me more hyper- than post- modern and industrial. The basic idea, I suppose, is that man is rational and social. It follows that society operates in accordance with the way knowledge is formed and conversely.

As my previous entry suggests, liberal and libertarian thought is oddly rigid and one-dimensional. Everything is what it is, without regard to anything else, Many things follow from that atomizing view of reality. In the ethical realm, for example, it follows that wills are either coincident or opposed, and the only way to deal with the opposition of wills is the dominance of one will over another.

Liberals and libertarians respond to that situation by attempting to establish rules that make the active conflict of wills impossible or at least illegitimate. Thus, liberal PC and “tolerance” forbid us to pursue desires that conflict with the (tolerant) desires of others. In the alternative, the property rights libertarians prefer attempt to assign all decisions to the arbitrary choice of some private party, thus preventing conflicts in which each of the opposing parties has a legitimate claim.

Last weekend I attended commencement exercises at a very prestigious Northeastern liberal arts college distinguished by its selectiveness, its commitment to social progress, and its extraordinarily beautiful and lavishly funded campus. I was struck by the unity of view of all the speakers. Here’s the gist of what I heard:

• The “scriptural reading” opening the commencement ceremony: a quotation from Learned Hand to the effect that the spirit of liberty is necessary for liberty, and the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is never too sure it is right.
• The student speaker at commencement, a religion studies major and amateur improv comedian: he gave a riff on the college experience as Exodus—the escape from oppression (home and local community), getting over your head in a lot of water and confusion as you cross the sea of learning, and then glorious emergence at graduation followed by attacks on all the walled cities (gated communities?) so all the walls can be destroyed.

To think and act we have to trust things that go beyond what we can perceive or demonstrate. Our knowledge cannot be a mere summary of the evidence but must rest on something further—at a minimum, on a belief that future evidence will validate it. It is a system of coherent belief, and like any other cannot exist without tradition and thus faith. In the end, there are no skeptics. None of us can abandon faith without abandoning thought and life.

Reason and experience depend on an everyday kind of faith. We need that faith to tell us that our memories can be relied on, that the experience of others is like our own, even that things exist independently of us and our thoughts. Reason is not self-sustaining. It cannot demonstrate the conditions of its functioning: the validity of first principles, the coherence of memory, the trustworthiness of perception, or the reliability of the linguistic and cultural setting it needs to operate. To trust reason we must trust those things, and to trust experience we must trust both our perceptions and the thoughts that enable us to sort them out and come to grips with them. We understand tradition, the accumulated thought and experience of our people, much more by accepting it than by weighing and judging it from outside. We treat it as something that comes to us with an authority that goes beyond anything we can fully explain. Our confidence is based on faith that it is not random or arbitrary but revelatory, that through it the bits, pieces and glimmerings that are immediately available to us have grown into attitudes, practices, beliefs and symbols that show how things are and make truths available to us we could not attain directly.

Hegelian-sounding aphorism of the day:

Leftism asserts the negation; liberalism negates the assertion.

Thus, the Left wants to destroy the heritage of the past, and so assert that the past must be negated. Liberals, on the other hand, simply deny that the heritage of the past should be asserted. (If you want an example, liberal anti-anti-communism is an obvious one.)

I don’t really understand the to-do between Cardinal Schönborn and his critics over evolution. [If you look lower down on the linked page you’ll find his original NYT op-ed piece, together with the paper’s commentary.]

As I understand the Cardinal’s and Church’s point (I think His Eminence presented it in an overly partisan and combative way) he’s denying that random variation and natural selection fully explain why we have just these species with just these characteristics rather than other species with other characteristics. The considerations that lead him to believe God exists and does particular things also lead him to believe that among the things God has done through particular action is to bring about human life with its special qualities (e.g., the capacity for theoretical knowledge and for moral thought and action). Accordingly, the most reasonable total explanation for life in the form it has specifically taken, he believes, would include the proposition that God brought it about and it didn’t happen just by chance. If part of that explanation does not constitute a scientific theory, then that just shows that modern natural science is not the total explanation for everything. But what’s so shocking about that?

A problem with expertise as now understood is that it makes standards of objective rigor substitute for common sense, and it can’t nail down enough things to deal with the world or even most practical situations in a way that comes up to those standards. The result is that what’s proposed for our belief are presumptions based on the needs of expertise as a project rather than either rigorous knowledge or common sense:

• The expert view of traditional standards and customs, sexual distinctions say, is that they’re irrational and unjust. That’s just another way of complaining that they pretend to authority even though they’re not put together by experts in accordance with professional standards. From the expert standpoint their justification becomes invisible because it’s based on other principles, so when they’re questioned it turns out there’s no acceptable argument for them.

I just finished reading Rene Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times. It’s an interesting display, by the French Traditionalist metaphysician (and mathematician), of what can be done through systematic application of simple concepts.

Not a book everyone would find useful or interesting, but I’m getting something out of it: Ride the Tiger, by Julius Evola.

The author calls the book “a survival manual for the aristocrats of the soul,” although in concrete fact I’m not sure there is such a thing in his sense. Still, it’s hard to think about things without referring to ideal forms, and his qualities as a writer—clear, to the point, unpretentious—may reflect the circumstance that he actually was an aristocrat (as it happened, a Sicilian baron).