Philosophy

What kind of moral life is possible depends on what the world is like. The view educated men in the modern West take seriously is that what exists is (1) the world described by modern physics, and (2) sensation and desire. Those things are somehow just there, and no one understands or agrees on their relationship. Given such a view, there’s no basis for an organized understanding of what’s good that’s authoritative and applies regardless of what someone’s particular thoughts and desires happen to be. There are just things various people want from time to time.

In such a setting no coherent reason can be given for doing anything other than wanting to do it. On the other hand, wanting to do something is accepted as a reason for doing it. So there’s a sort of relativistic definition of the good &mdash if it rings your bell go for it &mdash but that definition is thought objectively correct. Moral intolerance is therefore extremely offensive to the modern mind. Nonetheless, modern ontology leaves several distinct moral possibilities open. Which of them is realized depends on:

We live in a time in which an abstract and basic question like that is relevant to practical political life. Judges today, for example, feel free to overthrow the established definition of marriage on the grounds that the universal understanding of a fundamental social institution is simply irrational. What is accepted as “reasonable” has evidently changed. Such developments, along with others such as the radicalization of equality, the rise of political correctness, and the proliferation of ever-more universal and comprehensive human rights standards, suggest that a determining feature of modern politics is the attempt to enforce an abstract philosophical perspective.

Important thinkers responsible for liberalism and political modernism generally include Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche. The succession of their views set forth the self-destruction of the liberal and modern tradition. That tradition started by rejecting the transcendent and accepting sole concern for the things of this world for the sake of securing power and other material goods. It ended with the unknowability of this world and the pure exertion of will as the sole principle of whatever can be real for us.

Modernity is based on a system of knowledge that starts with logic and clear and unquestionable truths and out of those things claims to construct all we can know. Such an approach to knowledge severely limits what we can recognize as real, and thus profoundly affects our view of what there is and what we should do.

Return to Philosophy, by Thomas Molnar, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996. 113 pp.95.

IN THIS, HIS MOST RECENT BOOK, Thomas Molnar calls for a “return to philosophy” that would broaden its scope and simplify its discourse. Narrowness and complexity have ruined much of philosophy, he stresses, and a restoration is needed. The issues he raises are therefore quite basic: What is philosophy? What does it deal with and how?

Where have we strayed, that a return is needed? And why does it matter? Such questions call for grandness of perspective. In little more than a hundred pages the author traces the main themes and phases of philosophy since its emergence among the Greeks, its relation to religious, traditional and non-Western strains of thought, the turns that have led to the present situation, and the response to that situation he thinks appropriate. While the perspectives and concerns are continuous with those in Professor Molnar’s previous writings, they are presented here with broader sympathy for a variety of positions, a greater sense of freedom to follow insights and arguments where they lead, and a lesser inclination to marshall materials to prove a thesis. Now more than ever, the author views philosophy as free inquiry, always new and never completed, and the philosopher as the man with his own view of things, who “does not know on awakening to what extent he will have to modify his world-picture before he goes to bed that night.”

A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Modern Age.

Emerson tells us that truth is “such a flyaway, such a slyboots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light.”[1] However things may be with truth, it is so with Emerson’s thought. What he says is often wise or inspiring, but he has no coherent theory, and his commitment to what he writes is uncertain. He tells us what currently appears true to him, in penetrating, compressed and sometimes shocking language, but his indifference to consistency makes his writings imply everything and nothing. What do we make of him, and why has he been so important to the life of the mind in America?

A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in the Fall 1995 issue of Modern Age. The essay is also available in Dutch.

Introduction

How rational is morality? Are fact and value separate affairs, with modern natural science final authority for one and personal choice for the other? Or are they inseparable aspects of a single complex world that must be understood as such?

Modern understandings of man, the world, politics and morality tend to separate fact and value, a tendency with enormous consequences for human life. The traditionalist view, represented on the Web by sites such as On to Restoration! and the Conservatism FAQ, is radically different and reflects an understanding of rationality different from the one now dominant. The purpose of this page is to make that difference explicit and so develop the philosophical background of the traditionalist critique of modern society. To that end we have prepared a discussion and links to resources.

John Dewey

A correspondent with a scientific turn of mind wanted to pursue a question raised here a a week or two ago, why the Derrida and similar viruses are such a plague now when earlier they weren’t a problem.

My comments (slightly edited):

It seems that most “why now” explanations emphasize features of modern life that are hard to fix, and that most people wouldn’t want to fix—complexity, abundant instant communication, extensive formalized training and education, a certain adventurousness, and so on. All these things make it easy to spread superficially appealing novelties that have the appeal of expert authority but little substantive content.

Memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus discusses the reliability of people’s beliefs about their own experiences. Her research suggests—and I think it’s borne out by daily experience—that they’re often not reliable at all. Further, notorious cases involving “recovered memories of abuse,” which she also discusses, demonstrate that expert intervention tends to make things worse. Experts are human like other people, and when they claim to bring memories back they are more likely constructing and implanting them.

It’s hard to keep people from believing what they want to believe. That’s especially true if the people are experts. After all, expert opinion defines what is true, that opinion is “expert” because of certain formal procedures and qualifications and coherence with the opinions of other experts, and a well-placed group can manipulate those things to achieve whatever result they want. The consequence is that if those who dominate a field of expertise want something to be true they can make it true, at least for purposes of public discussion. I’ve touched on the problem before in connection with architecture. It also comes up in connection with history. In Australia, for example, the dominant “black armband” school of historians isn’t

Philosophical pragmatism is mostly the habit of changing the subject if a line of thought makes one uncomfortable. It’s the collapse of the coherence theory of truth into a comfort theory of truth. Such a view can have the appearance of great reasonableness, of not wanting to take things too far. A consequence of the view though is that the
status quo becomes impregnable, because the comfort of the well-positioned becomes the criterion of reality. Rather than explore reality pragmatism has thinkers explore how they feel about things. If they don’t like them, they can then maneuver (with the aid of media people, publicists, and professional organizations) to make the positions that cause them discomfort impossible to assert.

A basic issue for many arguments in favor of Christianity is whether our words and thoughts somehow catch hold of reality. If they do, then the arguments for Christianity start looking very strong. If they don’t, then we’re nowhere in more ways than one.

On the face of it, the issue is silly. If what we think and say is not about the world, then what is it about? The problem, though, is how to understand the connection between thought and object once the issue has been raised. That has been a philosophically acute problem in the West for centuries, at least since Descartes asked what grounds he had for believing in any connection whatever between his thought and something outside itself.

“Outside the Church there is no reality.” What could such a statement possibly mean?

It’s hard to view the world we know as real unless it has an intrinsic connection to our thoughts and intentions. If it doesn’t, then we can’t grasp it in thought, and it seems to become an unknowable whatever that somehow provokes our experiences and beliefs but has nothing in common with them. Something of the sort seems to have been Kant’s view, and an odd view it was. But it’s hard to think of the world as intrinsically connected to thought and intention unless it was planned and intended—that is, created.

What is knowledge? The question has been supremely important in modern times. Before we could know about the world, it seemed to Bacon, Descartes and others, we should criticize our ways of knowing. Our investigations should free themselves of the things that lead to error. They should be exact and impersonal, based on logic and on observations that anyone could repeat with the proper training, equipment and care. They should be, in the modern sense, scientific.

Those aspirations have been borne out by success. By building on them modern natural science has vastly extended man’s knowledge and control of things. It hasn’t been all gain, however, because scientific standards are not as neutral as they look. By rigorously limiting what qualifies as knowledge they limit what can be known and therefore what can be viewed as real. To accept scientific standards as final is to prejudge the nature of the world. It is to permit only those things to exist that we can measure, manipulate, and know without regard to personal qualities or commitments.

The function of Catholic dogma is mostly the description of a world in which Christian morality is the natural way of acting. So conversion has its theoretical side. The world should look different. A couple of random thoughts on what that might mean:

• Putting God—an objective reality radically other than oneself—at the center of things, and the assumption that in the end things are in his hands, should give one a greater concern for truth. Since God made the world you don’t have to force anything to be other than what it is. You should try to know them as they are. Some say that the consequence has been the self-demolition of Christianity as new truths overthrew old dogmas. Still, it seems to me that the demolition of Christianity has been a result not of concern for truth but of an attempt to make man as the standard, which has led to a refusal to recognize as truth anything we can not fully possess.