Geopolitics and the Philosophy of History

This weekend I started (and finished) George Friedman's engaging book, 'The Next 100 Years', in which he attempts to forecast the geopolitical trends of this century. He makes many claims that, on their face, seem entirely surprising and nonsensical — for example:

• Russia will collapse and fragment within the next two decades, without being able to expand to its former (Soviet Union) borders
• China will recede into de facto three separate nations within thirty years
• The dominant world powers in a half-century will be the United States, Japan, Turkey, and Poland
• Towards the end of the century, the United States will have a tense, (probably) violent confrontation with Mexico

Friedman defends his method against his more skeptical readers by showing us how it works: demography, geography, and economy combining into a single analysis.

His primary axiom is stated foremost: that human beings, and consequently human nations, are fundamentally rational; that they will always act from their own self-interest; and that they will always act with imperfect knowledge. The freedom of the will is circumscribed within those limits essential to human life - e.g., the desire for an assured food supply.

Now one question that arises: what does this science (if it is a science) do for a Philosophy of History?

Is History rational? Is it predetermined? Does it have an End (or, if you will, an "attractor basin")?

Environmentalism: two fundamental stances

One stance: Fundamentally one of humulity. Staring out at the world, self-forgetful, asorbed in contemplation of beauty. You might call this "conservation" -- a practical stance, interested in conserving what already exists. Another stance: One that sees the world, as it were, "objectively" -- as an object, especially an object of manipulation. You never place yourself within the context of the world you see -- you always remain "other", even, or especially, from other men.

Partus Primus: definitiones

"environmentalism", n.

#2. advocacy of the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment; especially : the movement to control pollution [source]

"Environmentalism" connotes many things; but chiefly we can say that an "environmental" person is one that wishes to see "Nature" preserved and protected against perilously premature putrefaction by other people.

"nature", n.

the physical world and everything in it (such as plants, animals, mountains, oceans, stars, etc.) that is not made by people [source]

We shall take "Environmentalism", then, to mean "That which seeks to preserve Things-That-Are-Not-People against the meddlings of People".

Partus Secundus: distinctiones

What follows here is not originally deduced from a priori principles. Rather, it is sensed or intuited experientially; and only later justified by reason.

At the root of every human occupation there is a choice, which in turn informs how you engage in the occupation. This choice is between one of Humility and Pride. So it is with Environmentalism: one may engage in Environmental activities from one of these two perspectives. This is not to deny that both may be at work within the same individual, at different levels; but one will always be his radical motivation.

Consider: that man is humble who looks primarily to other things. His "locus of attention" is primarily on the Outside; he is in a permanent state of self-forgetfulness. What is most important to him is that Things Are. He desires to "get his head into the heavens".

Contrast with this the proud man. He desires to be important — that is, to be isolated. He himself is the only Subject; all others are Objects to him. His primary self-regard causes him to keep things at "arms length"; he avoids entanglements.

Partus Tertius: explorationes

The Humble Environmentalist looks out upon a world of Beauty. He sees things everywhere — trees, mountains, gophers, zooplankton — as worthwhile, valuable, important in themselves. He sees himself in the context of this world; more to the point, he sees other human beings in this world.

The Proud Environmentalist is not immune to the beauty of natural things - he would hardly self-identify as such otherwise! But his failing is precisely this: that he, in some way, stands aloof from the world he sees. He relates to things as objects of manipulation - and especially other human beings.

the Failure of Introspection - or, Mixed-up Messy Brains

" ... The surest means of disarming an anger or lust was to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction. "

— C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Introspection, as Lewis goes on to point out, is actually rather misleading. The very act of turning our attention from a beautiful thing to the experience of beauty itself promptly causes that experience to stop; and we are led to believe that "beauty" itself consists in no more than remembered words, images, childhood memories, or associations with emotion. Thinking about the thing is never identical with the thing itself.

As above, he frames this by-the-bye as a bit of advice: that you can make your own experience of emotions more "rational" (i.e., less strong, less unruly) by taking better care to examine them. And it would be awfully useful if this were unreservedly true.

the Experience of Inertia

But this technique is not absolutely perfect — at best, it is only mostly reliable. The truth is that our minds are far more entangled with our bodies than we are quick to suppose.

Experience itself tells us that our emotions may not so easily killed as all that. They can have a life of their own, continuing on without the support of our thoughts and even against our mightiest efforts to subdue them by mental discipline.

Closet Platonists

We forget this — possibly because we are, by default, "closet Platonists". We unconsciously make sharp distinctions between "myself" and "my body" — "it's my body and I'll do what I want with it", etc. etc. etc. We find ourselves suggesting that, after all, morality is a thing entirely "spiritual" (whatever that means) and so can have no influence on what we happen to like doing with our bodies (which are, after all, something quite different).

We see this vague bias at work in various scientific theories, too. Often some eminent biologist, or more likely some enthusiastic hobbyist, will hold up some study on brain chemistry to prove that, after all, thoughts are only chemicals, or electrical potentials, or what you will. They will claim that all human thoughts are entirely determined by brain structure; and that, if only you could put a man down inside a X-ray CT machine, you could read his thoughts like a book.

By a curious mental accident, they always seem to leave themselves out of their own system; they may describe everyone else all right, but their own system cannot explain how they themselves arrive at their conclusions, nor give any assurance that their conclusions are necessarily true. (For if thoughts are only chemicals mixing or charges accumulating, if all our concepts of "truth" or "beauty" or "goodness" are purely fictitious and might very easily have been other — then our thoughts can have no meaning.)

Anyway: we quickly find that we are not so neat a division between "mind" and "body" as we are quick to suppose. We are not completely "mind", remaining — like Queen Victoria — unamused because unaffected. But neither are we chemical automata, completely dependent on our surroundings.

Instead, we are some sort of messy combination of both.

Messy Brains

We have a daily experience of our minds as minds: thinking, judging, analyzing. We reason logically and validly. We discover truth and uncover falsehood. We recognize beauty when it appears to us. We not only know, but know that we know. We not only experience time, but stand sufficiently outside time to see it flow past.

Yet we are embodied — physically, carnally, dirtily. We are held hostage to our senses. Our thoughts are driven in tumult before sudden storms of emotion. Spells of irritation or stress can render our powers of judgement and discernment helpless. We are really quite inconveniently messy.

Reflect, again, on the first test of all metaphysics everywhere: "does it meet the test of our experience?" To put it in other words, our philosphizing must be about fact, not about theory. We reason from what the world really is, not from what we should happen to think most rational or agreeable or comforting. This is yet another reason why Philosophy will always be a valid pursuit — why it will always remain a Science in its own right.

Metaphysical Health

(this is, among other things, a first stab at blogging via my smartphone; hence a probable paucity of prettiness or fine formatting)

"... Certainly there is no true Christianity without the contemptus saeculi; but contempt for the world is not the same thing as hatred of being - quite the contrary, it is hatred of non-being. ..."
        -- Etienne Gilson

From inside Christianity this meaning is clear: that while the Christian must needs renounce the world and, in one way or another, turn his back on it, this renunciation has none of the character of a Manichean or an Over-Populationist; it is much more like a child turning away from a present to the mother who gave it to her.

The Christian does not turn his back on the world because he loathes it so much, but because he loves something else so much more. He looks excitedly from one thing of great importance and beauty, to another of incomparably greater worth.

Notice how this attitude is inevitably one of attention - almost of startlement. The really healthy religious attitude is of a rapt attention to Being Himself - so the really healthy philosophical attitude is one of rapt attention to things.

Attention to things, not to sensations. Our scientific successes have taught us all sorts of bad lessons; and one of the worst is the notion that qualia, after all, are only "subjective" and therefore unreal. "Redness", we assume, is only a name; the real thing is the frequency of reflected light.

And yet, this is profoundly untrue. And "metaphysical health" consists in habitually shaking off this vague atmosphere of Reductionism, in order to live, not in a ghost-town of accumulations atoms, but in a gloriously-variegated world of things.

On Saint Patrick's Day

All Irishmen on earth today
  Are surely merry and glad and gay,
Yet through it all, I staunch shall say,
  "I do not keep Saint Patrick's Day."

Ev'ry lubber's son of middling birth
  Is quick to don a copied mirth,
And claim a special kinship dear
  ("I have no Irish blood, I fear")

And all my peeps in Ch'cagoland
  Wear green, for such is the command,
And all get quite assuredly drunk —
  "Saint Patrick's Day is a load of bunk."

Saint Patrick is now in Heav'n's bliss,
  And looks on all with love, i'wis —
And since his Church mine own I call,
  I shall this day keep after all.

Being: Act vs. Repose - or, the Inadequacy of Science as a Metaphysic

"... For [the medievals] the verb to be was essentially an active verb signifying the very act of existing; to affirm their own actual existence was much more to them than to affirm their present existence, it was an affirmation of the actuality, that is to say the very energy, by which their being existed. If, then, we should arrive at an exact understanding of the medieval conception of causality we must ascend to this very act of existence, for it is clear that if being is act, the causal act must necessarily be rooted in very being of the cause."

— Etienne Gilson, Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, ch.5: "Analogy, Causality, and Finality"

How different is this understanding of being than the modern! informed as it is by physical science, which must necessarily take the existence of its objects for granted.

We apprehend a little more of that final blaze with which the 'Divine Comedy' ends:

L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle.
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

— Divina Commedia - Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, line 145

Postscript

I hope it is obvious that I do not mean to disparage physical science itself. In its proper sphere (taking such things as existence and causality for granted) it is one of those things that really are "essentially" human — i.e., that it is an obvious, appropriate, and entirely necessary thing to do.

What I take aim at is a casual transplant of scientific methods from the physical into the metaphysical — a move which results in something entirely inadequate. Because science originally takes certain things for granted, it cannot then explore or even explain these things; this is the reason why science cannot give us a metaphysic.

Analogy - or Cosmos vs. Universe

Here are just a few thoughts lacking even the defense of being finished:

• Analogy: to observe that two things are related, neither univocally nor equivocally.
  • "That dessert was sweet", "Her manner was sweet".
  • Obviously, the two uses of the term "sweetness" are not univocal; the sweetness of a dessert is not the same kind of sweetness as of a kindly woman's manner.
  • But neither are the two terms equivocal; we intuit that there is some correspondence between the two terms that cannot be ascribed to mere colloquialism; or, rather, that the colloquialism itself arises out of the intuition of correspondence.
• The Principle of Analogy: to say that Analogical Reasoning is valid because Analogy is a real, not mental, correspondence.
  • That "sweetness of dessert" and "sweetness of manner" are related is not a product of our own minds. If it were, we could not reason reliably using that relation.
  • We are not Kantians. We do not create "Reality" around us by virtue of some innate ideas, imperceptible because omnipresent. Our senses really perceive reality, not inherently-unmeaning phenomena.
• So, Analogy "works" because Analogy exists. There is an order relating different things, both within the same species and in totally-different genera.
• But this means that Reality itself is somehow highly ordered and highly structured. We might call this "κόσμος" ("kosmos", Cosmos).
  • One possible interpretation of the physical sciences — perhaps the most popular — is a kind of Materialistic Reductionism
    • "All that exists is material bodies. These bodies behave in apparently-reliable patterns, which we can express mathematically."
    • The universe is governed by unalterable mathematical relationships. Matter behaves as a universal "glob" within this universe.
    • (This was powerfully expressed, in embryo, by Lucretius.)
  • But this understanding of physical science is contradicted by this understanding of Analogy.
    • This Reductionism does not recognize things qua things. All "things" are nominal only; reality consists only in matter smashing together temporarily and (in the philosophical sense) "accidentally".
    • But Analogy requires that things really are things, both in their internal unity as themselves, and in their natural relation to everything else.
  • So which understanding do we accept as true? (If, indeed, there is no third option?)
  • Materialistic Reductionism is itself a fundamental metaphysic; i.e., it is an object of belief, because it is an axiom; and an axiom can only be the starting point of a system (and not be proved by the system itself).
  • But the Principle of Analogy (as here expressed) is itself a direct result of a fundamental metaphysic, "Dogmatic Empiricism" — or, if you will, "Common Sense" — which must itself also be an object of belief.

So it seems that one may be a Reductionist and have a Universe; or one may be an "Empiricist" and have a Cosmos. (Assuming that there is no third option in this respect. What would that be — Platonism?)

Aristo-Thomist Evolution - a tribute

... that is to say, the Aristotelian-Thomistic framework of the Four Causes -- Formal, Final, Efficient, Material -- is the best way to approach a really comprehensive understanding of evolution.

This is all courtesy of TOF the Inimitable: retired statistical process controller, working sci-fi author, enthusiast of the philosophy of science.

A Few Nuggets ...

While clarifying a few points ...

Theories are stories or narratives in the context of which a specified body of facts "makes sense," and from which the mathematical laws may be deduced. (And Feynman pointed out that a physicist always has more than one theory in mind, each of them predicting the same body of facts, but differing in their ability to inspire new ideas.)

Hence,

• Falling Bodies and Evolutions are Facts.
• Gravitation and Natural Selection are Theories.

An aside to the reader ...

"endangered species" is a term of art meaning "Gosh, we don't see a lot of these suckers around." [...]

On the failings of a mechanistic model of life ...

There may be very little genetic distance between humans and chimps. There is no distance at all between grasshoppers and locusts. The latter are just grasshoppers that have "gone Hulk." If we didn't know up front that they were the self-same critters, we'd be tempted to classify them as separate species. The same genome is used by both. The difference is that what the genome does depends on environmental cues within which it does it. That is, the end of the genome is not determined to any one thing, but to a suite of potencies, and which one is actualized depends on "epigenetic factors."

In addition to writing a thoroughly-entertaining rag when the fit takes him, TOF has produced some very strong S/F novels. My personal favorite is The January Dancer, although he's received high praise for his Eifelheim — medieval Germans meet dimension-hopping space aliens; hilarities ensue, including the Black Death.

Life as Mechanism, pt. 3 - Having a Beautiful Cow

Now it may be admitted that there is nothing inconceivably difficult with this plan; that animals may be mechanized as well as rocks and trees. But is it good?

Good Luck with That

Understand that I use the word "good" in a somewhat-inflated sense. I mean, not merely what is "morally" good. Indeed, to the modern mind, "good" in this sense must seem to represent everything that is essentially arbitrary and authoritarian — "good because I said so" and all that. What I have in mind is something rather different.

I use "good" to indicate what is "true" — or, in other words, what is "truthful" or "true to the reality of itself". A tree that fulfills its "tree-ness" is a "good" tree; a "very-cowlike" cow is a "good" cow. So far as we can tell, Man alone experiences difficulty in being "humane" — but that is another post. Suffice to say that, insofar as anything succeeds in "living up to" its nature, then it is truly itself; then we say it is "good".

In the Eye of the Beholder

Of course, when a thing truly is itself, when it is "good", it is also "beautiful". A person who does something well, does it beautifully: a hunter drawing a bow, or an artist drawing a landscape. So, too, anything which is "good" is simultaneously beautiful.

Now notice the consequence: that what is "true" is also "good", and is also "beautiful". See how these three qualities are actually only different sides of one — call it "fitting-ness". And this inherent coherence, between truth, goodness, and beauty, is essential to what I now have to say.

A Good Fit

Earlier I observed that there were two ways of adjusting a clock: first, by cooperating with its nature; second, by dominating its nature. The first is always more difficult, more roundabout, more subtle; the second, more direct, more practical, more visible. Yet the first is the "right" way — that is, it is the way to adjust the clock while keeping the clock intact. You are dealing with the clock by seeking to preserve the clock's "truth" or essence while attaining your own end.

So, too, is the best way to deal with living things: by manipulation, not domination. We must act so that the things we use remain themselves while giving us what we want. We take milk from a cow; we do not cut off the cow's udders and use them independently — nor, even, treat the cow as nothing but a pair of udders with a cow attached. Manipulation may be unpleasant; domination is always ugly.

So what does any of this have to do with Genetically-Modified Organisms?

Nothing specifically; but that is due more to my own ignorance of genetic-engineering techniques. I know that these techniques all harness the natural powers of the organism to manipulate its DNA. I cannot say whether they do it by manipulation or by domination, by "nudging" or by "forcing".

Let me say that I am inclined to suspect the former: that GMOs are not the product of the "domination" of grain, maize, or rice — although this is, perhaps, more a consequence of powerlessness and a lack of understanding than of definite choice.

Humanity is still so little acquainted with the marvelous intricacies of even the most "basic" cellular life. Perhaps the cell is ultimately safe from that sort of "breaking", by virtue of its own complexity and the maddening interdependence of its components. I certainly don't know.

Life as Mechanism, pt. 2 - Udders with a Cow Attached

Notice the change in emphasis as we pass from Unintentional to Intentional evolution. In the former, entire herds and flocks are affected; in the latter, only this or that creature. Our center-of-gravity shifts, from the "community" to the "individual".

Whatever our opinions on the subject of animal self-consciousness, we must admit that in so isolating one or two creatures for improvement, we deprive them of something — call it "context". If we want to remove his wildness, we must make the wild dog "less" of a wild dog by keeping him out of the society of his peers.

Whether the creature in question is thereby deprived seems obvious. Whether this deprivation is of something really essential is less so. You may take away the "wild" from a wild dog, by stealing him away from the pack; but you do not thereby necessarily take away the "dog". His "community" is compromised, but not his essential unity, his "dogness".

Manipulation vs. Domination

However, this is not quite so obvious when we move still deeper, into genetic engineering — or what I happen to call "Intra-creature fiddling." Here we attempt exercise still greater command over Nature, i.e. over living creatures; and consequently the possibility of destroying those creatures qua creatures grows greater.

To make the illustration more vivid, make it simpler. Suppose that you had a clock that, for the moment, was set to the wrong time. You want it to show the correct time. You would have two different ways of approaching the subject:

1. You could adjust the clock's mechanism so as to produce the time you wanted — say, by winding a knob
2. You could take hold of and force the clock's hands to the position you wanted

Obviously, the second has many virtues to recommend it. It is more direct, more practical, easier. It gives us a WYSIWYG interface. It gives us more direct and certain control. And it is precisely the wrong way to deal with a clock.

For, in forcibly rotating the most visible and obvious parts of the clock (the hands), you would almost certainly break something deep within the clock itself. A cog would be driven the wrong way and jam, or a spring would be permanently bent too far. By taking the most obvious path, you short-circuited the clock itself — i.e., you destroyed its unity as a clock by treating it as something other than a clock.

An Automat that goes "Moo"

Obviously it's somewhat harder to replicate this experience with animals. If you treat a cow like an automatic vending machine, the cow will react by turning up dead. You can treat a dog like a doormat, but not if you expect to go on receiving such feudal obedience for long. To destroy a living creature's essential unity requires more sophisticated techniques.

You can, for instance, treat a cow like a vending machine with "special needs" — as a set of udders with a cow attached. You may feed it just enough, water it just enough for your purposes; and you may get gallons of milk and meat before it hands in its dinner pail. You may treat your cow like a finicky, troublesome, necessary piece of machinery; and in so doing you will no longer own a cow.

To be continued ...

Life as Mechanism, pt.1

Given that this image tells an important truth — that we cannot with consistency both praise selective breeding as "completely natural" and revile GMOs as "offenses against Nature" — what distinctions can we yet make? For, obviously, there are distinctions to make; else so many people would not feel compelled to make them (nor so stridently).

A Taxonomy of Control

What is the most obvious distinction to be made along this spectrum?

1. Natural evolution
2. Artificial evolution
   1. Unintentional — e.g., drug resistance
   2. Intentional — e.g., selective breeding
3. Intra-creature fiddling
   1. Endogenous
   2. Exogenous

I think the answer is the extent to which the technique we happen to employ dominates rather than directs Nature. Or, in other words, the difference lies in how exogenous the technique is to the existing vital processes.

Natural Evolution is entirely uncontrolled by human beings. It is the description we give to the habit we see in other creatures: of species undergoing change, some frequently, others less so. Species come into existence at times, and at other times pass into extinction. Species acquire traits, adapt to changing environments, and generally change so as to occupy some special niche in their environment.

Ecce Homo

We can say precisely where Natural becomes Artificial evolution: where there is Man to observe it. He, simply by being what he is, no sooner encounters his environment than he straightaway begins to modify it. He clears land to build a house; he fishes or hunts for meat; he plows and plants and harvests for grain. The birds of the air learn to steal his seed-corn. The beasts of the field learn his scent. The fish of the sea learn to avoid lures. In a more modern age, bacteria learn to resist his antibiotics. These changes are all "by-products" of his own growing mastery of his environment.

He takes a more active and obvious hand by selectively breeding. Here, his influence is not on vast and vague flocks or herds, but on this cow or that horse. His influence, being more focused, may therefore be both more immediate and more intentional — but also more limited. If by selective breeding he produces a milk-cow, he does not thereby change every wild ox hiding in the woods. That a man has a pet dog does not make all the wolves his best friends.

To be continued ...

"Dogmatic Empiricism" pt. 3 - Breakup

No-one, I think, is completely homogenous. We cannot be described, as Descartes thought, simply as free-floating minds — "the body is the tomb of the soul", "the ghost in the machine", and all that. Rather, we are inconveniently-complicated composites of body and soul, reason and emotion, self-conscious will and involuntary reflex.

The part of me that rebelled against the Cartesian prison also made me escape; if it did not hand me the key to the door, it impelled me to make a door of my own. A vital part of me — call it the "heart", if you will — was as certain as anything of what I was hesitant: the real solidity of things, the intrinsic truthfulness of the senses. Or, if you like, I "knew" that reality was reliable; I just needed a logical path to lay my morbidity to rest.

"By faith I know but ne'er can tell ..."

The answer, or the justification for the answer, gradually took definite form: that we must begin all our dealings with the world with a fundamental act of faith. This notion did not so much fall from heaven ready-made as "coalesce" out of more vague notion — first slowly, then more rapidly as a murky supposition hardened into clear conviction.

I took this to heart with all the desperation of a drowning man reaching for a lifeline. I began each day with a sort of credo: "I believe that my senses will not deceive me. I believe that that cloud of green and brown really is a tree. I believe that that combination of eyes and amiability really is a roommate." And so on.

The Road Back

The road back from my own morbidity was initially rather rough; and is responsible for giving me such strong emotions on the subject of skepticism wherever it appears: whether in the silliness of "The Matrix" and its spin-offs, or in the more subtle poison of that reductionistic materialism we all inhabit (about which more will have to be said later).

This is why I cannot but regard with contempt the irresponsible person who airily suggests that all this world we perceive might be merely a dream, or a computer simulation, or something nobody knows what. I have felt the despair of that philosophy all too keenly; I share Romeo's feelings in saying "He jests at scars who never felt a wound".

And I cannot quite get out of my head another quotation (and if sacrilegiously applied, not at my intention): "Blest are those who have not seen and yet believed."

"Dogmatic Empiricism" pt. 2 - the Pit of Despair

No Exit

So Descartes' method of universal doubt backfires, and how. Rather than the foundation for the new, reliably scientific philosophy, it seems to me the worst of intellectual prisons. It leaves the intellect suspended in a clamorous void: unable to go forward (for fear of building on a lie), unable to return (for who can recreate the innocence before suspicion), and — what is perhaps the worst of all — bombarded with constant noise that it cannot silence.

Like this, only spikier.

A Hibernating Termite

Enter yours truly — a grubby-fisted 19-year-old just finished with his 3rd undergraduate year. I'd been embroiled in my school's "Honors Program" — not so much an honorary award as a Great Books Program. You know the thing I mean: a group of college kids sitting in a circle, most of them desperately intuiting something intelligent to say from the few who actually read the day's text.

Anyway: one of the texts that we read towards the end of my junior year was Descartes' Discourse on Method — i.e., the little book in which he sets out his method of universal doubt. It had no practical effect on me at the time; after all, life was far too busy to stop and think. But it remained in the background, dormant but alive, like a termite niggling away inside a wall.

With one thing and another, I left to spend my summer in a scientific internship at N.I.S.T. in Maryland. And there, with leisure to think (and other changes), the niggling idea came fully and horribly awake.

The Pit of Despair

The idea of universal doubt kept coming back into my thoughts that summer, probably because (try as I might) I could not see any solution to it. In humility I assumed that the defect must lie on my part; that surely a Mind such as Descartes wouldn't have written irrational hogwash; and that, if I wrangled with the idea long enough, it would give up its secret.

But my difficulty wasn't simply with an idea — that is, with what the Post-Modern feels to be "irrelevant". Everybody, I think, has experienced being "out of it": where your Common Sense feels sluggish, where your mind fails to completely make sense of what your senses report, where perceptions seem to swarm and rush past you before you can properly notice them. We deal with this, usually, by rallying ourselves to "deal with it", to leave off introspection and renew our attention to the objects the senses have never stopped telling us about.

Now, the precise moment when universal skepticism became a horrible thing was when it deprived me of any justification for "rallying myself". Suddenly, I could not be sure that there was anything to rally "to". What if this sense of being "out of it" was actually a moment of "seeing through" the smokescreen of sensual make-believe?

"Breakdown"

The consequence of this was immediately apparent: my thought process froze, suspended in hesitation (because unwilling to commit to objects that might not actually exist). Emotionally, "deadness" alternated wildly with a feeling of desperation; whether because I "could not get out" of the suffocating silence of my mind, or because the outside world "would not shut up", I could not say.

I must rush to say that, so far as I know, none of this was visible. Exteriorly, I muddled along normally, by reflex: small-talk with friends, eating meals, watching TV. I am by nature introverted and somewhat reserved, so it was natural for this crisis to manifest itself purely in my inner life. But through all this the "deadness" remained. Work alone gave me some relief, giving me something to think about besides the awful situation I found myself in.

To be continued ...

"Dogmatic Empiricism" pt.1

In this first series of posts I will try to define what I mean by "Dogmatic Empiricism". I will try to explain how I came by this philosophy, and how it helped save me from a neurotic breakdown. I will not try to defend it as being what I think it is: the best working philosophy for daily life and the way of discerning truth most suited to human beings.

What is it?

• This philosophy is Empiricist -- all human knowledge begins in the senses. All the data for our intellect must come from outside that intellect.
• This philosophy is Dogmatic -- one of the necessary acts of the human intellect is an act of faith. The human intellect must always begin with believing in the senses and believing in Reason.

What I call "Dogmatic Empiricism" is no product of "scholarliness". I would love to call myself an Aristotelian or a Thomist, but for that I have never seriously studied either Aristotle or Aquinas. I have only a passing familiarity with either, and claim no serious knowledge of the history of philosophy. Rather, this philosophy represents a kind of frantic self-defense against that radical skepticism that Descartes preached.

Cartesian Skepticism

Never trust a man whose hair is prettier than your mother's.

Descartes came into a world wracked by theological and philosophical wars. Admirably (or naively?), he set about trying to stop these fights once and for all. He would remake philosophy entirely, by scrapping the old and modeling the new on that other, much less disputed science, Mathematics.

The new philosophy, Descartes said, would use as few axioms possible, accept only logical deductions from them, and so escape all those never-ending disputes in metaphysics, epistemology, and theology.

He chose as his starting point a radical skepticism. He began with universal doubt: all propositions, ideas, thoughts were guilty until proven innocent; even the senses were suspect. "After all," Descartes' thought ran, "could not an evil spirit so confuse me as to make me believe that I am sitting at a table, or eating a meal, or walking down a road?"

Descartes claimed to have discovered the logical argument, unfolding all of philosophy, theology, and science from his famous cogito ergo sum -- from the self knowing itself, to the self's innate knowledge of God, to the knowledge of the external world.

No Exit

Unfortunately, Descartes' escape fails. By virtue of his method, he is forced to rely only on his "naked intellect" to find his way back to the world. But, also by virtue of his method, he denies his intellect anything to work with.

• You think with objects -- ideas, images, thoughts.
• These objects always arise out of outside stimuli -- i.e., every thought is either "Hey, that X is cool" or "That X made me feel Y".
• But Descartes denies the intellect these outside stimuli, by dismissing them as potentially untrustworthy.
• Therefore, Descartes' naked intellect has nothing to think about (except his method) and so cannot think (except about the method).

In other words: there is no logical escape from Descartes' skepticism. The intellect exists forever alone, tormented by phantasms, impotent either to make them shut up or to get out into the free air.
To be continued ...