History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
I was in Borders and saw a book on The Matrix, the film, wikipedia info, and rented the video, taking time out to watch it.
The book had all sorts of philosophic interpretations, including one related to Kant’s philosophy.
The film isn’t quite to my taste, but the idea is indeed unusual for a Hollywood film. Your move.
More commentary later perhaps.
James said,
April 21, 2009 at 2:45 pm
These discussions are mostly useless given that neither side can provide a coherent and adequate definition of the “natural world.”
Science defines the ‘natural world’ in such a way as to leave human psychological realities outside of nature, defining ‘methodological naturalism’ so as to apply to a kind of headless human hulk. And then religionists agree, calling what should be the natural aspect of man’s psychology supernatural.
It is a question that Samkhya, that ancient legacy of India, resolves in its own way with a more intelligent terminology.
Meanwhile, Nietzsche is a puzzle: why did he replace the solution to the problem in Schopenhauer with another round of the solved problem unsolved all over again?
Three cheers for ‘methodological Samkhya naturalism’
Visions of a Ghostseer
It is hard to believe that questions of self, soul, and human nature have been reduced to the status of questions to be answered by Darwinian biological theory. It is equally hard to believe that all other approaches to these paradoxical issues, explored by Kant so cogently, have been in effect banned from discourse (unless wrapped in a religious faith package).
An entire culture of science sees no problem here, remains blissfully in a state of ignorance that there could be anything wrong here, even as it moves to destroy all other rivals to this new form of domination.
How did this state of affairs come to pass?
Ironically a similar situation existed under the regimes of theocratic monotheism. So perhaps we have the answer to our question. This is a new theocracy in the making, using ‘scientific method’ instead of the Popes as the authoritarian absolute.
Here’s the idea: scientific mechanics can explain toasters using the principles of scientific method and causal analysis. Experts are mediators of this method. Since the method works so brilliantly for toasters, we are to conclude that everything else in the universe can be explained by the method, and that it should therefore also be referred to these experts.
The early Christians with a not dissimilar logic arrived at the domination of the Popes. Where will it end in the reign of scientism?
Please read the passage cited at the top of this post til you get to the part about Schopenhauer and ghosts.
Laws Of History And Popper On Historicism
One of the mysteries of current science culture is the way Karl Popper is taken as the methodological ‘take me to your leader’ guru.
His views, while of the greatest interest, do not square with the average sense in which science is taken. In fact, Popper appears rather uncomfortably in the series of critics of scientific methodologies, with Feyerbend and Lakatos at the start and Fuller a generation later.
Popper is famous for his critique of ‘historicism’, a term with a complex history, and this is really a critique of Marx. Now, everyone applauds this critique, but then fails to realize that Popper is essentially saying that a ‘science of history’ is highly problematical, and the next kid on the block in trouble is ‘evolution’.
In fact, Popper is ‘notorious’ for his initial swipe at Darwinism as unfalsifiable, a position he is said to have retracted, as his bio is airbrushed here.
In any case, Popper’s critique is one starting point for the eonic model, and the resolution in terms of a perspective on the antinomies of Kant is the right answer to the ‘historical inevitability’ argument against scientific determinism misapplied to social subjects, and we must suspect to biological subjects.
Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to think through the moral and political implications of Darwinian science.
Arnhart at least got this much right.
We have said this here many times, despite the clever way that Nietzsche hides the influence of Darwin.
The trail of Nietzsche’s thought is complex, but the result is horrifying, and systematically given deoderant by the fetish of academic Nietzscheanism.
Nietzsche’s thinking is in many ways destroyed by Darwinism: he jumps to al lthe wrong conclusions and ends up in a kind of genocidal eugenics that is nightmarish in some of its extremes. Yet academic scholars, in complete low key ignorance, wilful or not, of this situation start in on the profundity of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
If anyone else said the things that Nietzsche said, they would be ostracized at once. But with Nietzsche a kind of hypnosis takes over, and no response is possible.
In a way this is the way Nietzsche wished to subvert liberal civilization. Puzzling that he gets away with it.
Meanwhile, all the peans to Darwin forget this disastrous influence on Nietzsche, and the cult of eugenic genocide that Nietzsche laced through his writings.
That’s why we must always be on the alert with Darwinians. The idiots are cover for the real thugs who are waiting for their opportunity to use Darwin for mass murder.
Nota bene.
Debates and Darwin trials
The issue of methdological naturalism is one that I am wary of negating, but, without getting into spiritual/material debates which are non-productive, it must be said that naturalistic explanation fails, so far, on the subject of evolution, and a few other things, like reducing mind to neuroscience. Those are not fixed conclusions, to be sure, and the way to remedy the situation has been hopelessly entangled in false dualisms (science vs religion).
Our starting should remain naturalism: science has had uncommon success with naturalistic explanation. But we fail to note its failures.
Kant is good here: he accepts universal causality, and yet also looks at how causality fails, and attempts the remedy.
The resolution here, in part, is to see that ‘methdological naturalism’ fails to define ‘nature’, which is undiscovered country. The problem then is trying to restrict the term nature from its full meaning.
…Johnson also launches a campaign against scientific naturalism. In some sense, he is right. The much-heralded ‘naturalistic explanation’ remains almost an impostor, if its definition cannot state the limits of nature. This issue is almost irresolvable given the shifting foundations of physics, in the complexities of this ‘nature’, the gaps in our knowledge, and the tenacity of claims of the sacred against the secular. Between Spinoza, Kant, Hume, and Hegel, naturalistic explanation endured a shock treatment from which it has never recovered. But the ‘spiritual’ wasn’t the winner either. At one and the same time, a critical methodological naturalism remains a useful, almost inevitable, starting point, and this has consistently born fruit in the empirical discoveries of the facts of evolution. But as with a wistfully noted Gödelian short-circuit in the consistency/completeness of logical systems, this naturalism seems incomplete, and destined to inconsistency, requiring the evolution of its own definition by the extensions of its axioms confronted with empirical discoveries, perhaps of freedom facts. We can see that we must confront the prospect of methodological naturalism surviving nervous breakdown in the face of an inconsistent axiom for a science of freedom.
The previous post on philosophers points to the way that people become more and more confused by the post-Kantian aftermath, as philosophy starts going in circles.
The history of philosophy in the context of the eonic effect is a beautiful riddle: we see that the course of philosophy is bound up in the very process of universal history it wishes to describe.
6.3.2 Philosophy and Periodization: Kant’s Eerie Timing
One of the tales of Kant is his legendary clockwork timing. One of the eerie ‘coincidences’ of the eonic sequence is the precise appearance of philosophies of freedom just at the modern divide. A first application of our method will show us that the philosophy of history itself shows non-random patterning, something we have already seen in the emergence of science. We can do something very basic, simply to see the place of the philosophy of history first in the pattern of eonic data. We stumble thus on a strange fact, the macroevolution or eonic determination, or modulation of philosophy in the sequence mainline. We see the self-referential co-emergentism of system and idea, in perfectly timed concert. This ultra subtle point will dawn on the reader slowly. Read the rest of this entry »
A remarkable, and somewhat alarming poll on philosophers.
So who *is* the most important philosopher of the past 200 years?
Voices from Plato’s cave.
You know that real philosophy has died (killed off by scientism) when Kant isn’t even on the list (he lived, of course, more than two hundred years ago). Wittgenstein is a fascinating man with an exciting biography, that is a cultural celebrity, but he is hardly a great philosopher, and in any case most of his thinking is displaced Schopenhauer. He was quite cagey on this point.
Face it, Kant is the most significant philosopher of modernity, along with those starting with Descartes that lead up to him.
Comments on A Hidden Entrance To Transcendental Idealism
OUr culture forces us to strike out completely on the issues of transcendental idealism. I am not a member of the cult, only a student of the way that Kant and Newton work together in the drama of the Enlightenment.
The question is not hard:
if you accept universal causality then question of values, ethics, freedom, and the aesthetic are illusions, with no further place in human life in an age of science.
Kant saw this absurd consequence in the legacy of Newton and mapped out a way to deal with it.
I think I should requote the passage from yesterday, but acknowledge that it might not make sense at first. And in an atmosphere of Darwinian scientism on the one hand and religious literalism about the Bible on the other, a sense of hopelessness arises as a Kantian critique, and new approach to theory, encounters both Darwinism and Christianity. Darwin’s theory, and the Biblical Old Testament are suddenly challenged. Small wonder we suffer denial!
But the issues, and the eonic model, are relatively simple, and the conclusion we should consider is the Kantian perception that while ‘teleology’ is problematical in the extreme, it remains a factor in the realm biology, and thence history. That teleology might be a hidden noumenal aspect of what in the phenomenal realm appears as cyclical directionality is both sensible, once seen, and quite elegant. And the facts suggest it.
The Kantian perspective is confirmed by the perception of the eonic effect, in an unexpected way. It is not an inherently difficult insight, but the steps to it require a modest amount of study.
I would think twice about all those attempts to get beyond Kant. Mostly he remains misunderstood.
In any case, forget the issue of the words in the phrase ‘transcendental idealism’. We are not dealing in the transcendental or idealism, but looking at what the relation is between freedom and causality in basic science, and in the questions of history and evolution.
A noumenal mystery Our eonic model almost automatically produces a structure isomorphic to Kant’s distinction of noumenon and phenomenon, and it does so deftly using different concepts and without any of the complications that haunt the original. Isomorphic, but in a different context, large-scale history. Since this was serendipitous, and unasked for, we are left to wonder what this means. The problem is that history is all of a piece, phenomenon, including our eonic sequence. And yet this sequence stages the hard evidence of the ‘uncaused freedom emergence factor’ inside a temporal oscillation. All we can do is notice this isomorphism, and proceed on our own way with our self-sufficient model, which exploits a dualism of levels for purely practical system model reasons. So what is the relationship of our eonic sequence to this enigma of Kant? Since our transitions are phenomenon yet noumenally tuned, we must consider that in some fashion our eonic sequence oscillates near the limits of manifestation (a statement bordering on a kind of metaphysics we haven’t allowed), and at the limits of our representations we see the inexplicable appearance of the freedom generator. The long lost mediating factor between the phenomenon and the noumenon suddenly appears, where least expected, in history itself. We must suspect that the ‘teleological’ aspect is beyond the limits of our representations, noumenal, as all that we see is phenomenon, directionality, a stupendous oscillation in the degrees of freedom of the system execution.
James comment on Reinventing the sacred: debunking Kantian ethics??
James said,
March 10, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Did Kant ever satisfactorily defend himself from Tittel’s accusation of being a closet utilitarian:http://books.google.com/books?id=5ihJn9EKCl4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=beiser&lr=#PPA185,M1
This comment refers to Beiser’s well-known The Fate Of Reason, a semi-classic history of the early reactions to Kant’s critical system, in the 1780′s and 90′s. We forget many of these thinkers, and Kant survived all of them. But his critical system was a like a tank proceeding through a battlefield and took many hits, resulting in the critics all being forgotten and Kant becoming by reputation the greatest philosopher of the modern world.
Far more interesting than the issue of eudaemonism is the (surely false) charge that Kant or Kant’s generation had covertly created ‘nihilism’, a term invented not by Nietzsche, but in this generation of early critics. How was that??! The universe of this debate was complex.
These critics in many cases anticipated the classic standard criticisms of Kant.
I had forgotten Tittel, and I have scanned up the passage from Beiser (below the flap).
His attack is interesting, but Kant seems to survive on all points. As to eudaemonism: the point Kant is making is delicate, poised between the realization that desire is the basis of action, but that action according to reason cannot be based on desire. We wish to counsel desire, but not to destroy it, it would seem. So what is Tittel’s real point?
These issues have been discussed in hundreds of subsequent texts. It seems like Kant is a cat with nine lives: no criticism ever proves decisive, save to particular individuals who move on from Kant to–what? eudaemonic nine to fivers, couch potatoes, and all around slobs…Not a fair statement!!!…. So? Why is it so hard to criticize Kant decisively?
It helps to put the issue in perspective. Western thought is almost devoid of the distinction Kant introduces between duty and inclination like a lifebuoy tossed to men overboard. It appears in religion, but even there it is confused and partial. It is present in sufism and buddhism at all points, for example, and the basis of all forms of meditation and yogic self-observation. Its strange appearance in Kant in a context of religious ethics is confusing, but a gesture of great historic moment, like scaling the North Face.
Part of the problem is that Kant straddles two worlds, that of the secular/religious man, and that of the meditative or ascetic man (perhaps without realizing it). To realize Kant’s ethical system would be a mighty achievement!
The issue of eudaemonism is thus beside the point in one way. But it arises again in the issues of his rational theology where the question of virtue and happiness leads Kant to a perspective on the afterlife that many secular philosophers and students of Kant have found questionable. But I fail to see why. Nonetheless, the issue of ‘reward’ arises all over again after being originally banished in the earliest critiques.
It is a hard question to answer.
Is the universe a totally blind and amoral machine where the projects of virtue come to naught? Where development is pointless because one life is not enough time? Shall we simply abandon the whole effort for the eudaemonic pursuit of nihilism?
Since you are doomed to perish anyway, why bother with ethical self-development?
Kant suggests this is not the case, but the moment that ‘reward’ enters the equation, ethics regresses back to the state Kant rescued it from.
The real answer is that we live in a world where this question has no answer, since this appears to be a device for a test of our real interiority, our real motives.
Kant gives us a hint, perhaps, of what we may never know.
The rest of Tittel’s criticisms are also classic, but I think that the moment you start to bicker with Kant’s noumenon/phenomenon distinction you demonstrate incomprehension of what that distinction is. I have argued with Hegelians ad infinitum on this point.
Kant’s system is confusing because it is like a prophecy of the future intellect of man, as a question of evolution. All these standard ploys from the synthetic a priori onward seem artificial to some. But they serve as a mockup of a future form of thought, as yet unavailable. Thus you can tear down each step on the way, and yet the whole endures, if not as philosophy, then as a prophetic demonstration of something truly novel.
The transcendental deduction is one of the most confusing things imaginable, but in the final analysis its point is simple and elegant, and historically exciting. Even if it failed it would be a breathtaking attempt at something seemingly impossible, yet realized by a method supernally clever.
In any case, the real point is to ‘evolve’, test your mind against this apparition called Kant, whose methods were, and still are, so novel as to seem like something out of a science fiction novel.
From Beiser’s The Fate Of Reason:
6.6. Feder’s Circle: A. G. Tittel and A. Weishaupt
Feder’s most powerful ally in his battle against Kant was Gottlob August Tittel (1739-1816), professor of philosophy in Karlsruhe and then of theology in Jena.86 Read the rest of this entry »
In relation to the previous post on Kant, morality, and evolution, there is an older post here (many in fact) on Reinventing the Sacred, the title of Kauffman’s recent book: Reinventing the sacred? don’t count on it from scientism, selection below.
I was disconcerted by Kauffman’s book, because of his strange attack on Kantian morality, that is on the categorical imperative on the ‘lying’ question.
With no other discussion of Kant whatsover. Kauffman simply blows his foot off with such tactics. And leaves the reader in paranoia this is a closet Nietzschean stab at ‘nihilism’ as the reinvented ‘sacred’. Probably unfair, but there is a failure of clarity here.
This issue of Kantian morality has gone on a long time, but desperately few consult the long literature on this. The essay Kant wrote that got him in trouble was in relation to Benjamin Constant who defended the right to lie in politics.
Kant’s response did not refer to his moral system but to his views on right. Kant’s reply thus was to say that there can never be a right to lie. Whatever the status of Kant’s categorical imperative surely Kant is right here. If there was a right to lie, a clever lawyer could soon devise exceptions to legal contractual obligations, etc…. There would be no basis in law for mutual agreements on anything.
The strange part about Kant’s ethical theory is why he stopped short of the goal after the most brilliant beginning, in a tour de force of ethical reasoning: a number of Kantians thus have wondered why on earth Kant didn’t explore the nature of ethical conflicts in relation to the categorical imperative. A few simple extensions thus into applied ethics would have spared him two centuries of hotshots, from Nietzsche to Kauffman, using the ‘lying example’ to attack his ethics as contradictory.
In any case, Kauffman’s book proceeds from being a fascinating exploration of self-organization to an ambiguous and shadowy text whose after taste is, what lie is Kauffman trying to defend?
Call that a reason why I wouldn’t write a book by that title: great idea, but reinventing the sacred will backfire.
In general the powers that be detest Kant for this finicky attack on lying. Every politician thinks he must lie, and retreats to the justification given by Constant.
Finding the contradiction in his reasoning is a sophmoric rite of passage for amateur Nietzscheans, and Darwinists, no doubt…
In any case, I am not a defender as such of Kant’s ethical theories, but I think that he came closer than anyone to the gist of ethical action, save only that his system is no such thing, but a specialized Enlightenment brand (the rational ethics of the faculty of Reason approach) based on his brilliant insight into the noumenal/phenomenal distinction and its commentary on the will, as such, more than the ethical. And Kant’s thinking evolves over time, there are several versions of his ethical thinking. The real problem, at least for the student, if understanding the ambiguity of ‘will’ in relation to the phenomenal and noumenal self. How could there be a phenomenal will at all, and what is it? This of course leads many to proceed beyond ‘Kantian duality’ to other successors to Kant’s system. But basic issue raised by Kant won’t go away with a little Hegel, or Darwin.
It is worth noting that this was an attempt to do something declared in advance to be impossible.
The tantalizing way that he comes so close is remarkable.
In any case, we can’t really produce a theory of evolution for man. We can’t even describe what it is that evolved, as the basic ‘common ordinary moral understanding’ built into man.
It could hardly have evolved by natural selection!!!
Reading: Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (Hardcover)
by Stuart Kauffman (Author)Kauffman is one of the major critics of standard Darwinism, and this book (which I will comment on later) continues the saga of self-organization, which confronts the ID challenge head on, without finally settling its own question.
I note a few points: first, science isn’t going to reinvent the sacred any time soon, and ought to clean up its Darwin mess first. Of course, it won’t, and ‘reinventing the sacred’ would be license (not speaking of Kauffman, as such) for a pastiche of scientism, ideology, and economic propaganda. Give us a break.
As things stand now, anyone who even mentions Buddhism in close quarters is branded a kook. There isn’t any hope for scientists to reinvent the sacred, then, as far as I can see. They can’t even study the history of the subject.Kauffman’s book has a lot of good material, but I was disappointed to see a one-paragraph dismissal of Kant’s classic ethical theory. I am not a Kantian or a defender of Kant’s ethic system, but it is something I don’t dismiss lightly, as it is probably the closest we will ever come to penetrating the enigma of ethics and evolution.
That theory posits some counterintuitive ethical stances, and is often challenged for its position on such things as lying. But the critics often fail to study the subject in the fashion it deserves, and land on some distortions of Kant’s position. The question is not that Kant’s ethical critiques are successful or not, but that his experiment is the most brilliant in the history of ethical philosphy, and leaves one with a sense of wonder, and an enigma with a question, how could his limited breakthrough be completed, and repaired? The mystery is how such a simple tactic could have come so close, not that it suffers frayed edges due to some contradictory aspects.
7.3.4 Nietzsche among the Sans-culottes
One of the characteristic traps of so-called ‘modernism’ is the way in which Nietzsche, so strangely, is taken to represent it, and this as grounds for anti-modernism in many religious critics in the postmodern vein. This reaction is evident, for example, in the ID folks with their anti-modern gambits: cf. Dembski in his book Intelligent Design with its rejections of modernity.
Nietzsche is hardly a representative of modernity, if his general tenor is so anti-liberal, anti-democratic, the whole nine yards.
Looking at the dynamics of the eonic effect brings this home with a vengeance: the modern transition is long over by Nietzsche’s time, and he, as he clearly said, has chosen to become its enemy and to foment subversion against it. It is a quixotic, yet very dangerous project, one that, but for the influence of Darwin, so cleverly concealed behind critique, might have struck someone as intelligent as Nietzsche as doomed to fail.
Nietzsche is so strangely extreme. It is not hard to be a critic of Christianity, but the foaming wrath and pickiun quibbles against even the most minute Christian influence is almost bizarre in Nietzsche.
But more generally the influence of scientism/Darwinism has thrown Nietzsche off the mark, with his rejection of progress, and much else, along with the, once again rendered extreme, intimations of eugenics, to the point of genocide, all nicely wrapped up in the anti-ethics latent in the nihilism of scientism and hatred of Kant. Why such hatred of Kant? It is hard to be original after Kant, but many have finally managed it. Nietzsche cannot stand such a genius and must indulge in an adolescent second rate wrecker ball spree disguised as genius in order to assure his ‘originality’. That is visible in the seemingly deliberate trashing of the idea of ‘will’ with his ‘will to power’ lowball strategy. It is analogous in many ways to the magical gestures of the black magicians, the ‘black mass’ nonsense taken seriously, the reversal of symbolic archetypes.
You have to wonder, why?
And why does it strike so many as profundity?
The influence of Darwinism is one factor: this theory makes Social Darwinism a latent reality, ready to explode in the face of those in the very process of denying Darwin’s connection to it.
With all of this Nietzsche has become a fetish of the postmodernists, and, while one can certainly see two sides in Nietzsche and welcome scholarly efforts to correct many distortions of the record, it is very hard at this point to really rescue him from his own statements, in print and on the record.
He is one of the great casualties of Darwinism, a wasted genius in that regard, and a warning to those Darwinists like P.Z. Myers at al now current who find themselve such sugar-coated liberals that when the chips are down the thugs will execute this theory, in the same way that the Leninists suddenly took over the idealistic socialists of the left.
A word for the wise on Nietzsche. One can recommend a good dose of Schopenhauer (if not Kant!), the philosopher Nietzsche set out to undo, to see the beautiful and elegant system that Nietzsche wished so irrationally to destroy.
Strange world.
I don’t agree with the current resurgence of religious traditionalism, but if you look at the real influence of Nietzsche, so out of proportion, and so totally misunderstood by his liberal fans, you see why the ‘world system’ like a nervous nelly starts to hedge its culture bets to be wary of any more Nietzschean fiascos coming down the pike, just the kind of the thing Nietzsche said, at least, that he wished to foment to totally destroy modernity and replace it with his ubermensch sadists and eugenic squads of exterminators.
One of the pitfalls of twentieth century thought is the confusing influence of Nietzsche, evident in the references to the ‘last man’ in Fukuyama’s title. With Lange’s History of Materialism and in a play on the noumenal in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche proceeds to a Kantian decadence in an externalization of the will that is a poor continuation of a basic breakthrough. We can see already that Nietzsche’s views on history are wildly off the mark. If there is no direction to history, that is one thing. If we find there is, Nietzsche is plainly wrong, and might simply be a reactionary, the onset of the Rightist Terror, quite terrifying indeed, wherein he is a bit player, rapidly changing gears as his suspicions arise. Nietzsche is the first Darwin casualty, and strangely blind in his failure to see the place of equalization in world history. Nietzsche’s views are, of course, very complex, and it is also true he was a cogent critic of Darwinian natural selection. His challenge to Kantian foundationalism is ambiguous, and he triggers an immense subsequent confusion.
From Forbes, What We See When We Look In The Mirror
Lionel Tiger, 02.05.09, 06:00 PM EST
Humankind’s epic search for existential answers.
Face it, face, you’re just a blip in a very large and historically deep narrative.
If you had those kinds of mirrors they have in bad amusement parks, you could see virtually endless refractions of your present self in ever-receding reflections. Your significance to yourself and a couple of dozen other people or even a huge community may be great. But it’s implacably clear that significant in any larger sense you are not.
One of the main jobs religions do is try to ease the trauma of this realization by positing certain large ideas: eternal life; heavens; deities who encompass everything; and a sense that existence neither begins nor ends at a cliff’s edge.
The central paradox of religions is to offer the explanation that because every object, every process, every event, requires a cause, an eternal God is that cause. Yet of course God is himself a result of–what? What is the cause of the God that caused the effect that is the world we know?
The condescension of scientists toward religion is often striking. Since, apparently, they interact only with the most dogmatic, mechanical or fundamentalist religion, they tend to get stuck in this vein. But since they never interact with any other form of religion, it would seem they are in the same league.
Tiger’s analysis here deserves a shrug. The face in the mirror tells us very little about the self, or the context of the organism.
One of the most popular posts here at Darwiniana is:
Schopenhauer on death
It is entirely possible to consider the ‘face’, the representation, as a mere appearance, behind which lies a great mystery. This is the implicit view of the great Schopenhauer whose views were not ‘religious’ or bound up in the distinction of ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’.
Scientists, it seems, have joined the camp of Nietzsche, to tear down violently in the name of originality any sense of the distinction of representation and thing in itself, any basis for morality, to replace that with a sociobiological behaviorism of the most extreme kind.
And from this point of view to show such condescension for the humble religious believer.
Strange.
But not strange they provoke such opposition.
Discussion of Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing The Sacred, at The Gurdjieff Con
James said,
15.02.09 at 3:29 pm ·
I have been harsh towards Kauffman, but I think he deserves credit for trying to rescue the “God” concept from the Judeo-Christian baggage (for some reason Spinoza didn’t succeed here). Nobody would care if the non-anthropomorphic philosophical concept of the Greeks, Plotinus, etc. had won the day.
As I note at the linked post at The Gurdjieff Con the Spinozism latent in Kauffman’s book/formulation is almost as problematical. It is correct that Kauffman’s approach could resolve much of the confusion in Judeo-Christianity, but at a price.
The ‘flat’ reality proposed by science, and Spinoza, suffered its classic collision during the period of the German Enlightenment, witness the responses in Kant, then Hegel.
For me, the Kantian framework challenges this ‘flat’ nature in Spinoza, in a way that could in some higher system reconcile the two. And Hegel perhaps attempted to produce that higher system. But I think Kant hit the nail on the head, in many ways, with his preoccupation with freedom in the context of Newtonian physics.
Kauffman should acknowledge, at least, that science has stopped, and that this is philosophy, and not expect that Spinozism is going to be science and the dialectical wake of Spinoza is mere philosophy.
I am suspicious that self-organization is philosophy too, ideology in fact.
At one point we are dealing with molecules, the next moment we are dealing with Kauffman’s defense of ‘free markets’ with the same theory!!??
Kauffman’s approach has some highly attractive features, but everything you hope to accomplish with the ‘god’ concept will fail and generate its inexorable dialectic.
I am no Hegelian, not by a long shot, but here the ‘inexorable dialectic’, pace Hegel, itself becomes the object of consciousness, not the sterile god/no god dialectic prior to its ‘third’ aspect, in the progression of ideas as the history of philosophy. It is that history that replaces the dilemma of god/no god in the projected ‘sublation’ of the dialectical sequence in a higher unity. Thus spake Hegel.
His point is significant: to choose a spinozistic ‘god’ definition as a polarity with another view of divinity (e.g Judeo-Christian) simply ignites that dialectic, and the result is….
Still, Kauffman’s perspective has its uses, and interest.
But I think noone is going to listen to a scientist on the sacred.
The picture is too stripped of its crucial issues. What happened to freedom, self, soul, the occult, ….
Kauffman is more broad minded that the reductionists, but relative to the history of religion he has a weak hand.
This criticism is better directed toward the New Atheists, perhaps, who ignite this dialectic powerfully, and lose all their momentum in that.
Meanwhile, beside the abuse of theory for economics, Kauffman’s attack on Kantian ethics, with no explanation, or any citation of the literature, is egregious, and causes me at least to stand back in surprise, asking ‘who is this guy’? Not another Nietzschean down-slide via the anti-Kant route, please.
Kant’s ethical theory is distinct, yet connected, from his basic critique of metaphysics, and is in fact itself a kind of metaphysics. Its success or failure doesnt’ change the fact of the tremendous importance of the Kantian system for any reconsideration of religion.
Hucklebird comments on ‘Dover Documentary and the Iron Cage’:
Stephen P. Smith said,
February 10, 2009 at 10:28 pm
The problem with the so-called “naturalistic version of design,” is the word “naturalistic.” We keep coming back to the issue where reality finds itself divided into natural and supernatural realms, and that division is not science!
Science has to come to terms with something that is acausal in evolution. Nothing else need be said.
You are quite right: debating methodological naturalism is generally pointless, because we can’t say what the boundaries of nature are.
My use of ‘design’ is perhaps inappropriate: I mean ‘natural teleology’ in a kind of Kantian sense.
You pick a good Kantian consideration: there must be something acausal in nature. In Kant’s work the reality of freedom is paradoxical: by definition it must be acausal. Kant never quite says finally whether it is therefore supernatural. The issue shows the dilemma of scientific naturalism. Something as basic as freedom flunks the naturalism test (at least that of the reductionists).
Today’s post: Atheists and morality, on
Atheists have moral reflections too
by Sue Blackmore
Reposted from: Dawkins sitehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/04/religion-atheism-radio4-bbc
Blackmore raises some perfectly valid points, but some distinctions should be made here. We might distinguish
atheists in general
atheists who are Darwinists/Dawkins followers, and/or adopt Darwinian views of the evolution of ethics
[many other possibilities, e.g. atheists who are Nietzscheans, vs atheists who are Kantians, or Buddhists, or .....etc...]
A confusion in many religious traditionalists over the nature of ethics suggests a careful reading of Kant might be helpful. Kant, who is no atheist (and not a standard theist), makes it clear that morality demands autonomy, and theistic authoritarianism is actually taken to be completely antagonistic to ethics. So in one sense atheists have an edge here!
So atheists, considering the framework of Kant, have a very strong defense against the charge that atheists due to their lack of religion are somehow deprived of morality. It ain’t so. It is worth reading Kant’s Groundwork (or skim the work to start and read a commentary, Kant’s obscurity gets to be a problem), his first work on ethics, to note that Kant’s aim is to assist the ordinary man, and his common ordinary morality. Kant attempts, whether successfully or not, to evoke this inherent morality already present in man. This morality is something we observe in action, and sense, and can’t put our finger on. Whatever it is, it is present in atheists almost by definition, as members of the species homo sapiens. Kant’s effort is to try and elucidate this built in morality. It is a classic and profound effort, but one that many have rejected, offering nothing in its place (and, no, Nietzsche didn’t produce much insight here). But note that universal aggreement is elusive on this.
And my second point is that this ‘common ordinary morality’ can suffer confusions as we reflect on it (as if we reflect on language and get confused, although we can automatically speak perfect grammar in a native language, the analogy is not perfect) or for other reasons.
Here, I must say it, Darwinism and scientific reductionism has introduced just such a confusion, or a whole series of them. The Just So Stories of ethical evolution via kin/group selection scenarios are a set of fallacies, and they have, in any case, never defined or explicated, as Kant attempted, morality as we see it in action.
Scientists refuse to grant what Kant considers fundamental (and these issues are the real core of his thinking, more even than his oftern challenged categorical imperative), which is that the ethical actor has a will, that can decide between alternatives, and, more controversially, that he does so according to a rational set of decision procedures, called hypothetical or categorical imperatives.
Note that Kant strains to accept the causal framework of Newton, and then turns around and suggests how transcendental idealism can reconcile this with the action of free will.
Scientists who reduce ethics to causal mechanics, obstinately and compulsively, just don’t get it, and confuse the whole question of ethics.
In any case, an atheist who is not a Darwinist (whose case remains obscure), will usually show some clear variant of this common ordinary morality. The case of the Darwinist, to a close look, will not be an exception, save for the distortions created by his scientism.
It should be said that this is a shaky argument, in some ways. Do all men agree on this ordinary common morality? Clearly not! So what is its essence? How could we speak of it? Kant tried to suggest one approach. It has been attacked so many times, but still refloatates due to its cogency. (The latest attack seems to be Kauffman’s misguised critique in Reinventing The Sacred)
I think the question is the real challenge to ideas of evolution, what to say of philosophy. No known theory of evolution can really address this, and the current concealed nihilism of the trained scientist (competing with his built in common ordianary morality) constantly misses the point, and ends up in the reductionist pseudo-explanations of the type suggested by natural selection.
In a word, then, there is no reason why an atheist can’t be as moral as anyone else.
But atheists are being systematically coopted by the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens/New Atheist movement, which is strongly connected, unnecessarily, with Darwinism and scientism, and, one suspects some background reading in Nietzsche (who systematically trashes ethics, and transcendental idealism’s elucidation of the will, replacing ‘will’ with the most vulgar obscenity Nietzsche could think of, the ‘will to power’, what was this fellow thinking? ), and about all that can be said is that people who were atheists before, e.g. Buddhists, need to choose a new label for themselves, because they have no place in this new movement.
Some, it should be said, have always been suspicious Kant was a closet atheist who turned around and reinvented ‘god’ around ethics!
Hard to know who he was!
Scientists have to decide how long they wish to remain frozen in Kant’s classic antinomy: if they wish to do causal science, they will by definition fail to do ethics right. If they wish to do ethics right, they will cease to be scientists.
They can pretend otherwise with pseudo-sciences like Darwinism, but at the end of the game science itself will be discredited.
The Boston Review has an interesting article on the various proofs of the existence of god. I have a hard problem with this discourse, since to me the term ‘god’ can’t be predicated by ‘existence’, thus i am out of the game at the first step.
Since I have nothing to contribute to the subject, I must in fact change the subject by telling a funny story. I am out in the country and going through the decaying and spider-web infested tomes in an old cabin. What should appear to view but a truly ancient edition of a book on Hegel by ‘Stace’, in a dover edition. Like an apparition from an archaic age of Hegelstudien this text was subsequently found to be listed at Amazon, unavailable, not even second hand….
To enjoy the fruits of this archaeological expedition I began reading the text, which turned out to be highly interesting, even for a non-Hegelian, and I will offer the following passage on the Eleatics, distinguishing Being from Existence from the opening as an offering in substitution for those tying their heads in knots with the hoary old theistic proofs:
(scanned text)
Hegel claims that the substance of all previous philosophies is contained, preserved, and absorbed, in his own system. But there are two influences upon him which far outweigh in importance all the others. These are the idealism of the Greeks and the critical philosophy of Kant. The fundamental principles of Hegel are the fundamental principles of the Greeks and of Kant. And our object in this and the next chapter will be to extricate these principles from the earlier thinkers. It is not our intention to expound Plato, Aristotle, or Kant. We assume that the main outlines of their teachings are already known. Not what is stated by them expressly, but what is implicit in them, what Hegel discovered as the underlying substratum of them beneath the surface,-this it is our aim to set forth. We do not wish¬so far as it can be avoided-to state over again what can be found in any competent history of philosophy. We have no academic penchant for treating things historically. But it will be found that the fundamental philosophical basis of Hegel is the same as the historical basis. We shall try to inflict upon the reader as little as possible of the lumber of historical learning or the familiar gossip of the professorial class-room.
“What Hegel proposes to give,” says Wallace,” is no novel or special doctrine, but the universal philosophy which has passed on from age to age, here narrowed and there widened, but still essentially the same. It is conscious of its continuity and proud of its identity with the teachings of Plato and Aristotle.” 1 What, then, is this one universal philosophy? Evidently it is not simply the philosophy of Plato, nor yet simply the philosophy of Aristotle. The syst~ms of th.ese men are but special presentations of the one umversal phIlo¬sophy, special forms which it assumed in their hand.s, in the particular age and circumstances in which they. lIved. It is to be found in them as the inner essence of theIr thought. It is what they held in common, to which each added special points of view of his own. ThIS underlying substance will be the substance of Hegel also.
2. We shall begin, however, not with Plato and Aristotle, but with the Eleatics. Read the rest of this entry »
I am going to be in trouble for citing this book, discussed already tonight: Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism: The Cult of the Superman–Unveiling the Nazi Secret Doctrine (Paperback)
by ABIR TAHA
The Nietzsche stacks in university libraries are filled with a whole shelf of books dealing with the issue of Nietzsche and Nazism, and I doubt that Taha’s book will be admitted to the sacred club of Nietzsche veneration. There are various problems with her approach, but, finally, I am getting impatient here: this amateur outsider got something right.
If you were raised from adolescence on Walter Kauffman and never realized you were had, raise your hand.
But with a few corrections, or a slight reformulation, I think Taha’s argument stands, or at least has to be considered.
Not only that, but in one way it doesn’t matter, in the sense that this basic view has emerged in dozens of variants throughout the realm of New Age and occult histories, always trying to get to the bottom of Hitler and Nazism. So we put all such accounts on hold, including those of the academic scholars and Nietzsche worshippers, and take it all as ‘research in progress’, and difficult research it is because noone can get it quite straight.
A book can be of use via its ‘mistakes’ or partial understandings. A good example is the way she brings out the obvious way in which Nietzsche is looking to some putative ‘core’ Aryan ideology in Zarathustra, Dionysus, Manu, et al. (and not finding it). Thus Taha’s possible confusions point to something we would like to get straight (and academic Nietzscheans aren’t much help),
I say this because one could recommend reading this book, it has dozens of good leads, but only with discretion, as with all such books. But the point is that Nietzsche needs to be exposed in his strategy to undermine liberal modernity and freedom. A good example is the way that Nietzsche’s attitude toward Jews (and Wagner) undergoes a change, to say nothing of his rejection of the Reich barbarism. Taha actually answers this, or tries to, but this tricky side to Nietzsche is what has always rescued him in the eyes of the academic Nietzsche promoters.
As Taha shows, in any case, with so many direct quotes from Nietzsche’s books, his words speak against him, most disastrously.
How on earth did this fellow get so many unsuspecting fans?
Nietzsche strains for a complete break with the past, but the result fails, and his originality is completely misjudged by his fans.
The opinion of all these philosophers on the subject of Nietzsche is proof of nothing. Nietzsche’s rejection of the transcendental idealism that he found, and at first embraced, in Schopenhauer is the deeper issue. Current philosophy seems to have capitulated to scientism, but the insight and advance created by Kant, and followed up by Schopenhauer was a tremendous achievement, one that has stood the test of time. If you read Nietzsche’s case against this (via Schopenhauer) it is not profound at all, but puzzling, perhaps a sign he never really understood Kant’s Copenican revolution. It is a schoolboy’s saying ‘Fuck it, who cares?’ I always suspect his unconscious ambition to be original suddenly saw a false way to obviate the basic Kantian issue (that is plainly there in Birth Of Tragedy).
So it is not popular but entirely possible philosophically to question the strategy of Nietzsche, whose Birth Of Tragedy stilled echoed the perspective of Kant.
The sudden change of direction in Nietzsche was itself tragic.
None of this means I don’t find Nietzsche interesting or significant. But the effect of his writings is deeply problematical, and one has to ask, why? Why this concealed embrace of a destruction of simple ethics, the laborious attempt by Kant, still visible in Schopenhauer, to extricate human confusion from Newtonianism, and scientism. Nietzsche’s sudden embrace of the problem, rather than its solution looks to many like profound philosophy, but it reeks of something almost dark and malevolent. You complain of those who don’t read him. Have your read him? The whole gesture to step beyond ‘good and evil’ is misguided, and in the form he did that explicit in its embrace of evil.
It may not be all that simple, but the world of scientism, and Darwinism suggested to Nietzsche a kind of inevitability to that, but in fact the conclusion was false. One need not be a Christian to consider that his attack on Christianity is simplistic. There are many such issues. Take teleology. He is adamant about this, and yet one must ask why, if not the influence of Darwin.
He is wrong about such things.
So the recommendations of all these later philosophers counts a lot as to cultural interest, and as nothing as to any final philosophy.
You cite a figure such as Rorty who seems to have made Kant rejection respectable among those who dislike critics of metaphysics, or wish to embrace pragmatism, after the travails of Kantian ethical theory. But it is a weak position, and the achievement of Rorty remains dubious, and forgettable (and in any case it is clear Rorty simply can’t understand the ‘thing in itself’ question).
I suspect the same problem confronted Nietzsche as he smashed the Kantian corpus on just those grounds. But the gesture is futile, and as the opening passages of Schopenhauer’s work insist with their haunting melody the representation and the thing in itself is the most significant of distinctions.
Nietzsche might be a genius, but his genius did not apparently quite grasp the point, although in his early Birth of Tragedy the issue is there. Why the precipitous turning away from one of philosophy’s great insights?
I should remind you that Nietzsche can be dangerous. Make sure you have read him, as he embraces with strange intoxication the realm of great evils. It is not a question of cute philosophy styles at that point. He wishes to precipate a great tragedy, the more to see its aesthetic beauty.
In any case, the issue of Nietzsche and Nazism remains, and won’t go away just because of Walter Kauffman.
Comment from Hucklebird on the issue of nihilism
Stephen P. Smith said,
December 8, 2008 at 3:55 pm ·
I find Nietzsche, and his advocates, very confusing. Was Nietzsche a nihilist? The stange answer comes: yes, and no, depending on what you are reading, or who you are listening to. Was Nietzsche a Darwinist? The answer comes: yes, and no. Did Nietzsche say “God is dead?†The answer comes yes, but only to the extent that it is a caricature that is dead and not the thing in itself. It is only the “Christians†that are the nihilists that Nietzsche is being critical of, it is not that Nietzsche actually advocated the said nihilism, and it goes on arround in a big circle like this: providing the weakest example of something I would actually want to read.
I am led to believe that Nietzsche wanted it both ways: he wanted to be critical without carrying the burden of being critical. In the end, what he did was invite a sublime criticality upon his own positions without his knowledge. And this can be the only reason that Nietzsche is referred to as being a nihilist by so many, despite that fact that Nietzsche never said that he advocated nihilism.
I find Hegel an easier read than Nietzsche, which is why I have read very little by Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s advocate continue to provide me with little reason to read this man’s work, his two-faced nature is what is sold and it is a poor sale.
The question of nihilism is complicated. I hope I am not being simplistic in calling Nietzsche a nihilist. You can argue he wished to transcend it in some fashion that seems to me misguided.
Here, btw, is a good book on the subject:
Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Phoenix Poets) (Paperback)
by Michael Allen Gillespie
The sources of nihilism by many accounts lie in the Kant generation, as many of the first critics of Kant (Jacobi, who invented the term, I believe), were up in arms over Kant’s attack on metaphysics.
I was dumbfounded to see that I had already reviewed this book in 2003,
http://www.amazon.com/review/RJIW1ISPOC5U5/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
One of the great causalties of Darwin is the philosopher Nietzsche, who at least was open about what he thought were the implications of Darwin’s theory. With the passing of the natural selection obsession it is time to begin to pick up the pieces after Nietzche and get back to square one.
The irony is that the framework of space/time and the noumenal/phenomenal distinction we see in Kant and Schopenhauer is precisely the one that might help to resolve many of the confusions of evolutionary theory.
Nietzsche’s rejection of that framework has horrific consequences, and now we see how wrong Nietzsche was, and how he was misled by Darwinism.
Forget the issues Nietzsche obsessed over, from ‘god is dead’ to the confusions of theology. Nietzsche’s predecessors did a perfectly good job critiquing those things before Darwin, Kant and the atheist Schopenhauer among others.
Our well-behaved cadre of Darwinists have long repressed the truly dark consequences that Nietzsche egregiously drew from Darwin’s theory. Nietzsche was extreme, and in any case basically off the mark, but the sentimental views of Sunday School Darwinists have always been a ridiculous posture, and a horrendous century and a half of bad science propping up the kind of negative consequences Nietzsche exposed to light almost immediately.
(Meanwhile some of his insights into religion might remain)
It is a reminder to talented youth: don’t waste your gifts on a guttersnipe like Darwin. Look at what Nietzsche might have been. Instead this immense waste of genius trying to see the evil consequences of Darwin, and embrace that, pointlessly generated an immensely demonic fiasco in his wake (Darwin wasn’t responsible for all of Nietzsche’s faults).
Every scientist should be concerned not to burn genius again in that fashion.
From R. J. Hollindale’s Nietzsche: The Man And His Philosophy
Kant’s philosophy was an answer to the challenge of British nihilism-and so was Nietzsche’s. The adversary this time was Charles Darwin, in whose name the theory of evolution had become victorious. It is unnecessary to stress that Darwin did not invent that theory; but it is necessary to stress that before Darwin evolution was one of a number of theories concerning the genesis of the human race, while after Darwin it appeared to be the proved theory. The philosophical crisis produced by Darwin was essentially the crisis of evolution, which became a pressing ‘problem’ only after he had shown, by his hypothesis of natural selection, that there existed a mechanism through which it could actually have taken place. Nietzsche accepted the fundamental implication of Darwin’s hypothesis, namely that mankind had evolved in a purely naturalistic way through chance and accident: there appeared to be purpose in evolution, but Darwin had shown that the higher animals and man could have evolved in just the way they did entirely by fortuitous variations in individuals. Natural selection was for
Nietzsche essentially evolution freed from every metaphysical implication: before Darwin’s simple but fundamental discovery it had been difficult to deny that the world seemed to be following some course laid down by a directing agency; after it, the necessity for such a directing agency disappeared, and what seemed to be order could be explained as random change. ‘The total nature of the world,’ Nietzsche wrote in Die froliche Wissenschaft ‘is … to all eternity chaos’ (FW 109), and this thought, basic to his philosophy, arose directly from his interpretation of Darwin.Darwinism completed a view of reality that Nietzsche had been constructing in his mind during his youth. Firstly, he had lost his faith in revealed religion: the meaning of reality was now a mystery. He turned to Schopenhauer for an explanation, but at the same time he imbibed the antidote to Schopenhauer:
F. A. Lange. The metaphysical world had not been revealed to man; had it been revealed to Schopenhauer? No, because it was unrevealable. Whatever came into the mind was an ‘idea’; consequently the thing-in-itselfwas an idea, the will was an idea, the whole metaphysical world was an idea. This attitude Nietzsche accepted. The phenomenal world was the only world, people could not possibly ‘get in touch’ with a suprasensible reality. If the fact of evolution seemed to suggest the operation of an outside force upon the mundane world, Darwin had shown that here, too, the hypothesis of a directing agency was not needed to account for the observed phenomena.
A Response to John Hare’s Kantian Critique of Darwinian Natural Right
Such Gnostic dualism asserts that human nature is evil, and therefore that morality requires a transcendence of nature, so that morality demands a denial of all natural inclinations. For example, Kant says that people who do kind and benevolent deeds because they have a sympathetic nature that inclines them to take joy in the happiness of other people show “no true moral worth” at all. On the other hand, people who do kind and benevolent deeds for the sake of duty even though they have no sympathy at all for other people are truly moral.
The misunderstandings of Kant are manifold. He is not a proponent of ‘divine command ethics’ (!!!) which he explicitly rejects, and he is certainly not a gnostic.
The question of dualism is inexorable, and simple. A causal monism eliminates ethics. A dualism can attempt to match causality and freedom, as ideas.
The question of Kantianism (and ethics) is not about naturalism and supernaturalism, but the phenomenal and the noumenal, and the question of freedom, thence will, and its status as the prerequisite of ethics.
It is easy to reject Kant’s thinking, but then, sure enough, we find a ‘naturalistic ethics’ based on Darwinian evolutionary theory that isn’t an ethics at all, because it is part of a universal causal claim of reduction, that eliminates ‘will’, and therefore ethics.
Kant’s transcendental idealism is expressed as an adjunct to Newtonian mechanics, not a battle in the material/spiritual war.
James replies to Hucklebird comment on Is deep evolution beyond the limits of knowledge:
Stephen P. Smith said,
November 23, 2008 at 10:14 pm ·
It is only science that must face not having an answer.
Religion does not need to explain what becomes self evident, as religion is not about explaining. Science is about explaining. Spirituality has to do with feeling and self evdence, and religion grew out of spirituality.
Evolution cannot be explained independent of substance for the simple reason that explanation is abstract and substance is concrete. Substance can only be caricature, and when pressed the caricature fails. Darwin’s theory running on a computer will find itself disconnected from substance, and hence it won’t do what people say it can do.
I don’t think you are giving people like Wilber and Cohen enough credit in providing a workable aternative to what will take us beyond fundamentalism on both sides. The “New Age†caricature won’t work anymore.
Last night, the liberal PBS had a special program with Deepak Copra. And this is most remarkable for a secular media outlet to give air time to a spiritualist. It was not the first time I seen an example like this on PBS. A few months about there was a PBS special on Taoism and Wayne W. Dyer. This is the same contradicted PBS that pushes Darwinism. But what is not appreciated is that secularism is found being a breeding ground for spiritualists that hunger for meaning and spiritual significance.
The secularist first fool themselves into believing that Darwin’s evolution is consistent with Copra’s vitalism. But having accepted Copra’s vitalism the seeds that will deconstruct Darwin have been planted.
——————–
James said,
November 24, 2008 at 3:50 pm ·
“I don’t think you are giving people like Wilber and Cohen enough credit in providing a workable aternative to what will take us beyond fundamentalism on both sides. The “New Age†caricature won’t work anymore.â€
The problem is that Wilber, Cohen, and Chopra don’t exhibit any competence in either science or religion. In order to create a “workable alternative,†first, you have to know what you are talking about. Actually, they have some value as unintentional comedians as they lack the self-awareness to realize their own status as dilettantes.
In the final analysis you have to find out the hard way about who’s who and what’s what with spiritual teachers, so Hucklebird’s view is perfectly OK. And yet I tend to agree with James about the way in which shallow so-called spiritual teachings lead to very little. I should however say that there is a kind of sadness in the question. So many gurus since the seventies, Da Free John a fuckup, Cohen a kind of instant replacement, now a fuckup, books on spiritual psychology, one and another a bust, Mr. supersmart Wilbur enters to settle the question, his integral yoga another fuckup. All the ‘New Age’ activity is encountering a peculiar obstacle, one I have tried to point out.
There are many things to say here, but the obvious problem on one level is that people are too confused by 1. Christian theology 2. reductionist scientism 3. ‘New Age’ exploitations and deceptions 4. emnity from social conformist culture
to embark on a spiritual path. It didn’t use to be that way. After the field clears a bit, we will see.
As to Wilbur, whether New Age or not, I think I could write a better spiritual psychology that what he has produced.
Comment on Where are the public intellectuals?
James is right, the fumbling of the ball by those defending the terrain of scientism on issues of ethics is a notable symptom.
James said,
November 11, 2008 at 6:32 pm ·
“This is not some plea for theism, merely a wondering sense that atheism has discredited itself as a botched cult movement. Where, or what, is the real thing?â€Dunno, but the New Atheists are doing the best job of discrediting themselves. Take a look at Harris’ incoherent lecture on ethics:
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-candles-in-the-dark/sam-harris-1
CONSIDER THIS
Public Intellectual 2.0
The lament for ‘public intellectuals’ is misplaced. It is a genus that apparently has not yet come into eixstence. What is a public intellectual? Of those who claim the mantle where are those who can see through the reign of the Darwin propaganda machine? All we get is Mr. Hitchens, public intellectual and Dawkins groupie.
In a confusion of the left, and such biologists as S.J. Gould who subtly abdicated the critique of the theory he knew was flawed, the sphere of public discourse has been taken over by the subtitute for a public philosophy seen in the New Atheists and figures such as Dawkins. This is not some plea for theism, merely a wondering sense that atheism has discredited itself as a botched cult movement. Where, or what, is the real thing? Or perhaps the way is beyond theism or atheism.
What is needed, and what might properly be the realm of a public intellectual, is the complex terrain of public philosophy between the sciences and the humanities, and the deeper meaning of what that indicates for a secular age. C.P. Snow was right, the ‘humanities’ need science. But he failed to indicate that the scientists are in desperate need of a meta-scientific perspective, and a larger cultural dimension from the current prostrate embrace of rank scientism.
That is, a realization of the failure, or inability, of science (or religion) to define the ideological ground of modernism in a techocratic age.
And there is a larger dimension of world religion as this intersects with the discourse of public philosophy, not a simple question, for the heritage of Feuerbach. What is the fate of Buddhism, as we recall this blog discussing Hitchens drunk at the entrance to an Indian ashram? The last elected public intellectual, btw, was a Turkish sufi, if anyone recalls the amusing swamping of the vote by his fans. The scope of discourse has expanded beyond reasonable limits, to include the mysteries of an unstable mix of cultural history. Redefining secularism in that context is not a simple task.
Such a complex trajectory can hardly expect success if such a simple issue as the failure of Darwinism remains unacchievable.
A good starting point for the public intellectuals. Start with something simple, a paradigm shift beyond Darwinism. It doesn’t even require a Marxist slant (except to de-darwinize the ‘left’), or a scheme to plot against the government.
Just some public intellectual 2.0 mentations, in public.
Read the rest of this entry »
November 10, 2008 at 6:25 pm ·You shouldn’t be surprised. It seems like the idiots take over the zeitgeist somehow sooner or later. One gains an understanding of why Schopenhauer hated Hegel so much (apologies to Schopenhauer for using Hegel’s term).
The most pitiful thing here is the prostration to Darwinism at the Hegel list at yahoo. I was unsubbed for pointing out the blatant contradiction.
Hegel was at least a ‘mere’ philosopher, and his influence lasted for at most one generation. The reign of Darwinism has lasted for a century and a half. That is getting to be dangerous.
We could lose a whole civilization to this stupidity. And a lot of people, in part because of Darwinism, have concluded that this civilization is in fact finished, and can only be changed from the outside by violent methods. That’s their excuse, and I don’t condone it, but you would think a civilization committed to science could transcend itself sooner or later when stuck in a paradigm. At least with Hegel and a generation committed to dialectic a culture was able to transcend the mesmerizing influence of Hegel.
Thus the whole Darwin game is dangerous in the sense that it forces everyone to accept a view that is totally unrealistic, a choice that is impossible. Something has to give sooner or later.
note on Hegel: Actually, we don’t have to be so anti-Hegel anymore. He is an archaeological monument now, and a figure of the Romantic Age, one that first realized the implications of the coming of scientism.
Denise O’Leary has some links on the mind/brain debate. I will upgrade this comment to a post, tomorrow, but I should note that it is too easy for scientists to dismiss ‘spiritual psychologies’, which can be full of holes, but get one thing straight through simple negation. The Cartesian tradition, say what you will, arose at the same time as the Scientific Revolution (and Descartes was one of its founders), and has remained an invariant ever since.
I have studied more spiritual psychologies of all types than I can remember, and here is a link to a discussion of the Samkhya approach filtered through the philosopher J.G. Bennett, The Will and the will (it’s a bit murky, because it requires a lot of introductory material which is absent). Bennett’s systematics, in my view, is flawed, although his now out of print The Dramatic Universe is a brilliant book. Behind its New Age character lies a hybrid, among other things, of the ancient Classical Samkhya, and Schopenhauer.
But, whatever the case, he had an ingeniously different approach to Cartesian dualism, a kind of ‘triadism’ (?), with three root concepts, Function, Being, Will.
He redivided the pie in a completely different way, as ‘materialism’ disappeared into ‘being’, with the remainder shunted into ‘function’. The key was the ‘Will’ which straddles essence and existence in degrees of crystallization.
The result is a variant of the ‘triadism’ that sometimes arises in the west, that of body, soul, spirit, the latter three terms tending to provoke confusion. Body resembles function, although we take it as ‘material’, while soul, a very confused term, relates (not identical to) Being, while ‘spirit’, another lost cause of bad usage, relates to will, a term that should be used only with the kind of Schopenhaurian discipline, and certainly never confused with the term spirit. The point is that Bennett’s updated/modernized terminology is actually present in antiquity, even in some rare versions of Christian theology, soon corrupted with hopeless confusions.
Bennett’s work, sadly, ended in metaphysical swampland, and the clarity and consistency of Schopenhauer (or Kant ultimately) remains preferable, and unmatched.
The point of all this, which is a long study, is that scientists are likely to crap out in the end with their naive monism, as the ID folks now join the list of their tormentors.
Bennett’s distinction of ‘being’ and ‘existence’ evokes an ancient idea, and could certainly help discussions of divinity, the ‘existence’ of ‘god’ being quite contradictory as a concept, the resolution lying in the distinction given of being and existence. (In fact, in Bennett’s system, he regrettably though with daring cogency, reintroduces ‘god’ by definition as a factor in the reconciliation of the triad of will, a tactic that would reduce the confusions of ‘god talk’ by atheists and theists both to something at a lower noise level.
The point here is that with the notion of ‘being’ it becomes possible to distinguish real entities that don’t necessarily exist (essential will) (in relation to a greater sphere of being) but which are relevant to any discussion of the self.
The debate of the brain/mind cited by O’Leary references, for examples, the debate over OCD (obsesive compulsive disorder) and the relation of this to the power of attention.
In the scheme of Bennett/Samkhya, the attention is a power of the ‘will’ sector of the triad, although it is forever confused with function.
As any Zen Buddhist would note, ‘attention’ is the whole enchilada. That is the point of entry to the relationship of existence and essence (although doing philosophy on the subject won’t help!).
A second point for scientists, and everyone else, is to have a sense of the dangers of eliminative scientism which reduces the ‘whole man’ to a mechanical assembly. That gesture will in the end produce a ‘man’ in quotation marks totally divorced from the complex architecture of the self, which is object of millennia of tradition, however confused.
It is too easy to reject the ideas of ‘self’ as unscientific, and while confusions abound, there seems no alternative but to brave the shoals of metaphysics in search of man, as a species being, with his complex appartus of self-consciousness.
Alfred Wallace said as much.
Myers (citing another article we will look at later) asks, Where will you be after you’re dead?,
answer: not in space-time, so the ‘where’ part is answered with ‘nowhere’, which is probably not the end of the matter.
Ask the same question about an isoceles triangle. Where will it be after it is dead???? It was never alive, so could’t die, and doesn’t exist in space-time, but apparently exists somehow. Soul questions seem to be hybrids between body questions and silly-putty questions like those about ‘isoceles triangles’.
Schopenhauer on death, one of the favorite old posts on this blog, shows how your views on this issue can be on shaky grounds no matter what you believe.
So the answer to the question is, whatever is left over after you subtract the space-time part of ‘man’.
The language and imaginary myths of ‘soul’ given by religious believers have completely confused the issue, but refuting those beliefs doesn’t resolve the mystery.
There are lots of things to consider here, but consider Kant’s transcendental deduction in his famous critique (REALLY HARD, don’t worry if you don’t understand it, and the argument might fail), which is NOT an attempt to prove the existence of souls, but rather a proof about the categories of experience, and the way there arises a ‘something’, the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ that is ambiguously beyond experience, since it is the integrating factor in experience, not experience itself.
That ancient and elegant tho super arcane line of reasoning, which many ‘philosophers’ in later times have tried to throw out the window, breaks, it would seem, the space-time barrier, somehow, by definition. So we are confounded by some very simple considerations at the limits of experience, that is experience as we know is constructed via the categories of space time. But something ought to exist beyond that framework of existence.
But the main issue with Kant is the warning that ANYONE (scientists are no exception) who tries pontificate on issues of ‘god, soul, and free will’ has entered a terrain where standard understanding is likely to fail. That includes claims that ‘god, soul,and free will’ don’t exist, which doesn’t imply they do exist.
I just received a copy of Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (Paperback)
by John Bellamy Foster (Author), Brett Clark (Author), Richard York (Author)
I haven’t finished reading it, and will comment further later (it is not offcially out yet, so the Amazon review slot is not yet open). Here are some earlier comments here:
Earlier post on MR book on ID
An early reaction (this is from reading the first few chapters, and isn’t a judgment of the book): the book springs to the defense of ‘materialism’ against religious critics of evolution, a dangerous tactic. While I certainly support the foundational perspectives of modern science,including its ‘materialism’, these have become equivocal on the issue of ‘materialism’, a statement that should not be misunderstood. Read the rest of this entry »
Dialectics of Science
The piece of email from Science For The People sailed in today, and I posted it without comment, in part because it is one of the players in the current Darwin debate. Read the rest of this entry »
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