Month: July 2024

Philosophy 101: C.S. Lewis, The Recovery of Reason

From The Abolition of Man

Lewis gave us a way out. The crisis of the West that started with Bacon said that nature was a quantity versus a quality. Man has reduced nature to a mere quantity so we can control it. We lose quality and the human self in this; the full understanding of reality emerges in quality. We need a new natural philosophy.

Lewis spoke of “men without chests”:
1. Man cuts out imagination.
2. Emotion is left easy to manipulate when it is cut out. No emotional training.
3. The right defense is just sentiments. Appetite and the spirit are mediated by the chest. Emotion must be trained for the middle way of the chest.

Some things can just not be proven, they are self-evident. Lewis suggest that “the Tao” or “the Way” functions as a universal natural law, a doctrine of objective value that cannot be denied. Emotions can correspond to reality or not. Education is required to make someone fully human. He warns that dialectical arguments can have the high cost of objecting to objective arguments.

Man can see a way out by stepping into the Tao. Put on spiritual goggles / glasses to see a richly elaborated life in the Tao.

Philosophy 101: Nietsche

RE: The emergence of postmodernism

Nietzsche thought there is no meaning out there, nothing outside Plato’s cave. The crisis of the “death of God” – we killed God. Meaning has no support and romanticism was presented as an alternative to scientific disenchantment with nature and the world. Art and creativity were placed against science. But the romantic became jaded.

The “Over (new) man” or “last man”: Existentialism, deconstructionism, and pragmatism emerged from the ruins. The crisis was that reason no longer exists. Nietzche was interested in philology and culture.

From “Beyond Good and Evil”

This work is aphoristic and poetic, not systematic, but colorful.

1. – The will to truth and the will to untruth.
Why do we want truth? We live by falsifying the world. Man creates fictions. Fictions can have good consequences, such as generated in great architecture.
– The will to truth and the will to power.
The philosopher tells a story and wants to persuade others by it. To Nietzsche, Plato has the “most dangerous” purveyor of errors and inventions. The world of Plato distracts. Instead we have nihilism, nothing. Christianity is Platonism for the people. Heaven does not exist and desire is what we are left with. There is a complex interplay with “how do we live in this world?”

2. Naturalism / autonomy.
Freud described our basic thoughts. Nietsche made reality. He believed the ultimate philosophical activity is the creation of values. All morality is a fight against reality.
The poet takes language and through controlled form creates a sonnet. He unleashes beauty and power. We are autonomous value creators. Value of the Good is something out there outside of us.

3. Subjective values and firm value judgements.
The Master morality seeks suffering and a natural awareness of death; a man who creates new values.
The Slave morality involves fear of suffering and growth. Dogs don’t worry. You too can escape and prevent suffering and never worry about death by becoming animals. The “Last man” has only basic biology needs.

4. The misanthrope and the humanist.
Nietzsche “defended humanity” against mediocre and sickly Europeans. It was a warning to them. (See WWII.)

Philosophy 101: Kant

From The Grand Modern Synthesis

Empiricism and rationality came from Bacon
In the 1780s/90s Truth, Goodness, and Beauty were still sublime. Hume undermined science and morality. Nature became only matter in motion as described in science. There is no true freedom.

Kant gave an alternate view:
1. An account of reality that preserved the scientific view.
2. An account of morality that preserved freedom.

The “Copernican turn” in epistemology said that minds don’t conform to reality. Everything we see is in time (put on our science glasses). Phenomena just have an appearance to us.

The “noumena” is the way things are. We can believe the world is free and we can make choices (put on our morality glasses). Reality conforms to the mind, but it is bifurcated:
1. Science is phenomena as experienced, including emotions, matter., and appearance.
2. Morality and trust in the noumenal world equals freedom.

Persons are not things. Morality has nothing to do with emotions or consequences, it is the Good. Duty is compared against inclination and is a moral law in itself. Where is the moral law?

-The Categorical Imperative is a maxim about universalizing-
1. Can you put a law into nature?
2. Morals are anything that can function as a limit to the will and people are things in themselves versus appearances.
3. Out autonomy can lead us to be self legislators.

Did Kant fail, thereby leading to Nietsche?

Philosophy 101: Hume

From Treatise of Human Nature:

Experiment is experience and observation. Current philosophy was in trouble.
Going from Thales to Socrates, science moved from natural science to moral science.
From Bacon to Hume, a new natural philosophy to a philosophy of human nature.

Like John Locke, the founder of empiricism, Hume wrote on an epistemology that is based on how we interact with the world and information. This new epistemology distinguished between impressions and ideas, their difference being in vividness. Ideas originate in impressions:
1. Complex ideas should be reducible to (basic) impressions. How can you relate colors? Comparisons that help the blind reduce ideas to simple impressions.
2. Principles of association – different kinds of association.

Hume’s Fork (Philosophic Relations)
1. Scientific relations are necessary and invariable. Certitude in simple math versus impressions/facts, which are variable and contingent.
2. Customary relations are matter of fact.

Priority -> Contingency -> Constant conjunction -> Future will be like the past (customary and probable).

The Self is a series of impressions, in flux and moving. But reason can never be the source of a moral action rooted in passion. Not all morals originate in selfishness and passions are just sentiments. There is pleasure in seeing certain kinds of disinterested moral sentiments.

Philosophy 101: Descartes

From First Meditation:

Descartes’ tried to apply doubt and rationalism to knowing.

Primary Qualities are shape, size, geometry – all quantifiable and more susceptible to measurement.
Secondary Qualities are observer relative – things like smell, color, taste, sound.
Corporeal nature can be deceptive; an evil being could be deceiving us. Basic math cannot deceive.

From Second Meditation:

Like Archimedes, Descartes wanted a fixed point. I think…I know nothing, therefore I am. I must exist to be deceived. I am in error.
Cogito. He grounded philosophy on the ego. Thinking must exist, my essence must exist. How do I know I am a thinking thing? Does logic hold? Does logical inference hold? These are clear and distinct ideas.

From Third Meditation:

Clear and distinct do not get us back to the real world. The flow is in us, not God. Senses exist for corporeal things / substance is measurable. Substance is dualistic. The body is a mechanism, like a clock, determined. Our spiritual substance is free.
1. Arguments for doubting material realm/embodiment.
2. Purely rational; ego is incorporeal.
3. Doubts are contingent things.
4. Composite picture of reality/dualism: Immaterial self and mechanical body. Body is measured and manipulated by our thinking substance.

Philosophy 101: Bacon

From “The Great Instauration”

Bacon broke ground with the emergence of the Enlightenment. The tenets are:

1. Severe criticism of the previous philosophic tradition.
2. The consequent need for a new philosophic foundation.
3. The new foundation seeks to command nature through production and science. Bacon was a father of scientific technology and his philosophy aimed at relief from want and suffering. His idea of the “New Atlantis” represented a foundation that could not be overcome.
4. Bacon also promoted a new way of knowing, a turn in epistemology. He philosophy was severely critical of natural knowing.

The Novum Organum
1. The end of philosophy will be different; it will command nature.
2. The order of demonstrations reject demonstration by syllogism. Instead, induction will be based on actual observation of nature.
The scholastic flew from observation to general propositions. But the new, scientific philosopher needs to stay close to observation that leads to facts.
3. A new form of induction:
a. Analyze experience by analyzing a whole that is greater than its parts. It takes things down to their constituent pieces.
b. We cannot base common knowledge on trust. We must establish all knowledge scientifically.
c. Information of the senses deceives. True sense is undermined.
d. We need experiments to establish knowledge.
i. Bacon was called a priest of the senses.
ii. We must be aware of the cost of vanity and idols.
iii. Sound science is without fables. Medicines, technology, and epistemology itself must be established through the criticisms of the senses.

Philosophy 101: Aquinas

RE: Exitous in Summa Article I

Continuing on Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas spoke of the Good being desirable and its privation as evil. Blindness is an example of a material evil. But non-material evil is parasitical.

A ruler’s law is base on his reason, while divine reason is an eternal direction for us.

Aquinas wrote of the Natural Law: free will and reason is juxtaposed with instinct. As rational creatures, we are participants in God’s governance of the natural order. We understand and cooperate in this order. Through Human Law, humans are authorities and creators.

Aquinas also saw Divine Law as coming from divine revelation. This law is opposite grace — which gives us faith, hope, and charity. God made us for a supernatural purpose. Divine law can take us beyond our nature and beyond nature itself.

However, Aquinas also asserted that we can’t know everything without a written law, like the 10 commandments. Humans disagree about natural law, and human law only directs external actions. It cannot punish all evil; that is the domain of God.

In Article II, Aquinas writes of Natural Law as Practical versus Speculative; these are self-evident. We are rational and self-governing (ex nihilo neo fit, nothing new comes from nothing). With Speculative Reason, the first precedent is Being. With Practical Reason, the first precedent is the Good. All human action is toward achieving goods, the things we seek after. Man’s “thou shalt nots” protect the Good. We identify rules secondarily to nature, but responsible freedom and will preserve them.

Philosophy 101: Plato and Aristotle

The Philosopher King, the poet, tells us about the true form of beauty, that is, the Good. In this world, light and the sun are examples of this good. We learn about the three divisions of philosophy:
1) Ontology – the principles of the nature of reality.
2) Epistemology – the principles of the nature of knowing.
3) Metaphysics – the first principles that cannot be proven but are self-evident, like the law of noncontradiction.

Sufficient reason is the reason for everything, which states that from nothing nothing comes. These are how we understand:
1) Inductive reasoning – probability versus universal reasoning/truth of being a bridge to reality.
2) Deductive reasoning – for example, the argument (syllogism) shows that if a major premise is true, and the minor premise is true, then its conclusion is true (an immediate inference). For example:
a) God is the greatest that can be conceived.
b) Existence is greater than non-existence.
c) Existing God must be greater than non-existing God.
3) Dialectical reasoning is not based on proofs, and must be intelligible (look at it this way).
4) Informal fallacies. For example:
a) Ad hominem
b) Straw man
c) Correlation -> causation

How to handle disputations:
Pose a question -> State your objections -> Then state the contrary -> Then give your reasons -> And then reply to objections.

In the well-known parable of the cave, Plato represents those famous prisoners in the cave being subject to the imagemakers behind them.
The Good:
a) The useful
b) The pleasurable
c) The beautiful

The rational soul is a living entity, a directing process for understanding reality. As we ingest food and make it part of us, through intellect we can understand what is outside of us and make it part of us as knowledge, which is spiritual. Using logic we can get to right reasoning.

The ultimate good of Happiness comes from the complete way of a full life. Virtue arises from the practice of perfecting one’s character. Through excellence, we can grasp the good and create the moral life, which is beauty. The moral life is the mean between excess and deficiency; God-like contemplation–or magnanimity–is the most important thing.

The prime mover is the final cause. It elicits love and exists for itself. (From nothing, nothing comes.) But beyond being just the prime mover, God is the Creator with interest in creation. The providential, personal God is being in itself: the IAM, the judge, Providence and nature’s God. This law of nature gives us the moral law.

Administrative Problems

The scandal of the Secret Service’s ineptitude (or worse) is a sign of a creeping administrative state that is unelected and accountable. It’s been said lately that part of that problem is the hiring practices of the diversity crowd. I don’t want to go into depth on DEI. Plenty of other people have said enough.

I have a dream of a new liberalism that stresses a new citizenship, unity over diversity, and civilization-building over inward-looking self-destruction. Family, friendship, and commonalities over superficial physical features.

The New Values
– Education focused on how to think not what
– Production from the supply chain to the citizen that is secure and optimized for less waste
– Energy policy that sensibly leverages fossil fuels while being forward-looking with nuclear
– Technology that serves the individual and provides communitarian tools
– Agriculture as the bread basket to the world
– Wealth and opportunity for all

The meritocratic corporation can be an answer.

NATO warns China

China has been warned by NATO leaders that its strategic economic and industrial partnership with Russia cannot continue without consequences:

“The PRC cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation.” (NATO on China the enabler)

This support of Russia probably has some reciprocity in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. While one war is on Biden’s watch, another may start because of a lack of response.

Xi and Putin don’t care who’s woke.

Deaf and afraid

“Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.”
– Isaiah 1:2-3

“When the great moment came and the Beasts spoke, he missed the
whole point; for a rather interesting reason. When the Lion had first
begun singing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he had realised
that the noise was a song. And he had disliked the song very much. It
made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel. Then,
when the sun rose and he saw that the singer was a lion (“only a lion,”
as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make believe that it
wasn’t singing and never had been singing — only roaring as any lion
might in a zoo in our own world. “Of course it can’t really have been
singing,” he thought, “I must have imagined it. I’ve been letting my
nerves get out of order. Who ever heard of a lion singing?” And the
longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew
tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring.
Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really
are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did
hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard
anything else even if he had wanted to. And when at last the Lion
spoke and said, “Narnia awake,” he didn’t hear any words: he heard
only a snarl. And when the Beasts spoke in answer, he heard only
barkings, growlings, bayings, and howlings. And when they laughed
— well, you can imagine. That was worse for Uncle Andrew than
anything that had happened yet. Such a horrid, bloodthirsty din of
hungry and angry brutes he had never heard in his life.”
– The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis