Stories & Soliloquies

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  • Tag: Metaphysics

    • Brief Thoughts On Scientism

      Posted at 4:01 pm by Michelle Joelle, on August 18, 2014

      I’ve made my thoughts on scientism pretty clear in pretty much everything I’ve posted about metaphysics. I generally use the term to describe the belief that only quantifiable or measurable data has meaning, that only science can provide useful knowledge, and that science can provide utterly comprehensive knowledge of all things that exist.

      While I love science – truly, I love science, philosophy of science, and history of science and if I could have several lives to live, I’d devote my next to physics – I do think that there are experiences and ideas that lie outside of the scope of science per se. Poetry. Happiness. Defining the scientific method itself. Math. Why people find some colors more pleasing than others. How to deal with regret. How to make the most moral decision, even when you think you know what that is.

      I could go on.

      While we may be to able scientifically parse aspects of these, I think there are limits to the level of comprehensiveness that human knowledge can achieve. Thus, I believe in science, but not scientism. I think there will always be more to know, and I can’t confidently say that our current scientific method is going to be able to handle it all.

      But perhaps I’m taking too narrow an approach to the word. Last Friday, the blog Planet Pailly posted an entry on the term as part of its ongoing series “Sciency Words” (which is all around awesome and highly varied). The entry gives a few different interpretations on the term:

      Advocacy of science education or funding of scientific research.

      The belief that taking a scientific approach to other fields of study (history, politics, etc) can improve those fields.

      The belief that science is the best or only source of truth.

      The belief that the only true knowledge is quantified knowledge (i.e.things we can measure). This can be extended to mean that if we can’t measure something, it must not exist.

      The improper use of science, either by making broad claims based upon limited empirical evidence or by misapplying scientific knowledge to unrelated topics.

      This is perfect timing, because it also just so happens to be Scientism Week over at Scientia Salon. Part One has gone up today, and it really digs into the various ways of thinking about the term. It’s also a nice primer on the debates surrounding the use and acceptance of scientism as a concept, and while I’m still convinced that there are metaphysical properties and questions that extend beyond even the milder Descriptive Scientism author Robert Nola comes to in the end, it’s a thought provoking piece, fully worth a careful read. I’m excited for the rest of the series, though I have a suspicion I’ll be on the opposite side of a good portion of the upcoming claims.

      But it’s always fun to be challenged.

      Posted in The Waste Book | 17 Comments | Tagged Metaphysics, planet pailly, scientia salon, scientism, words
    • Philosopher Fridays: Rousseau, Part One

      Posted at 11:30 am by Michelle Joelle, on April 18, 2014

      Philosopher Fridays are back! This is a weekly series where I take a brief look at philosophers who inspire me. These posts are not meant to be comprehensive in any fashion, but are instead meant to focus on what I find to be thought-provoking, compelling, and occasionally even haunting. This edition will be done in two parts, because Rousseau’s work is laden with intriguing paradoxes and erudite observations.

      ROUSSEAU: Genevan writer and composer Jean Jaques Rousseau (1712-1178) is probably best known for the influence of his political theory. He first became famous for winning an essay context in 1750 with his Discourse on the Science and the Arts, which argued that we ought not have such faith that “progress” is really taking us somewhere ideal, and that luxury does not, as we assume, make our lives better; instead, he says, it breeds vice and leads to our downfall. He takes these ideas a few steps further in 1753 for another contest. His entry, The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, didn’t win, but he published it independently the following year. There are a lot of wonderful things in this text (and others by Rousseau), including paradoxes of freedom, a biting wit, not to mention the seeds of the French Revolution. For a thorough look at Rousseau, and at this text in particular, I recommend the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry.

      While it’s easy to take Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality as his treatise on the state of nature, what he actually delivers in the text is a scathing critique of metaphysical philosophy. The first thing he says about it is that it never existed. Anyone who thinks they understand human nature is, he argues, just making something up. Most other philosophers of his imagined natural man as a savage in the wilderness, but none of his contemporaries (Hobbes and Locke, for instance) have any scientific justifications for their ideas, nor historical, or even biblical ones at that. He decides then that in the absence of true knowledge, he too can craft a fiction that would serve his intellectual explorations. He says:

      Let us therefore begin by putting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on the question.

      But he doesn’t guess wildly; instead, he looks to the difficulties facing the question for his inspiration. The main challenge is that we have no clear point of origin, and we don’t change in clearly defined stages. Rather, we are constantly in flux, which makes knowing ourselves, either as individuals or as human beings in general, a nearly impossible task. We can never then concretize our nature and look at it as though it were an object, for the act of looking at it involves some kind of intellectual motion.

      To rephrase: every time we reflect, we are changing as we add new knowledge or reconsider previous knowledge, and to so when we reflect upon ourselves and our nature, even in its most immediate state, we are in a process of changing the thing we’re trying to understand:

      Thus, in a sense, it is by dint of studying man that we rendered ourselves incapable of knowing him.

      Since we cannot divine the true core of original man, what we have to do instead is look at the changes that have occurred in our move away from the most natural state, assuming it ever existed. To this end, he attempts to identify what traits we see change over time, but which don’t ever appear to be invented, even if they change and wither and grow as humanity progresses. In addition to our changeableness, we are marked by the intensity of our “well being and self preservation” and “a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, especially our fellow man, perish or suffer.” He rejects the popular notion that reason is at all important to the identity of a human being. Says he, in one of my favorite quotes:

      It is not necessary to make a man a philosopher before making him a man.

      From there, he starts to build an image of natural man that is our opposite, and stresses that we have not merely built upon that starting point, but have taken things away. Our development is like that of a statue dropped to the bottom of the ocean for many years, he says, in that we have not simply covered ourselves with barnacles and growth, but have also suffered erosion, destruction, and decay.

      And so he posits a natural man that is strong where we are now weak, and weak where we are now strong. What it comes to, for Rousseau, is a tradeoff between the body and the mind; as we rely ever more heavily on our mind, our bodies grow weak from lack of use, and so the natural man must be one who is strong in body, yet weak in mind. He would be non-verbal, nomadic, operating according to instinct, and unfettered by social attachments. Rousseau romanticizes his fictional savage, an animal immune to diseases, hardy against environmental forces, and strong enough to break tree branches with his bare hands. He compares this ideal with his contemporaries who eat and drink themselves into diseases and use tools to avoid developing skills and muscles for survival.

      The rationality of the civilized man, Rousseau argues, leads him to fight natural evolution, find ways around true growth and strength, and essentially devolve into a weak shadow of his former self. What we’ve done, and continue to do, he claims, is supplant our natural instincts with an artificial order – one that will inevitably lead to our downfall.

      Here’s how it works on a macro-level:

      In the state of nature, we have those two main instinctive impulses: self-preservation and pity. Occasionally, these impulses will be at odds with each other; to work for your own survival, you may have to harm another, at the very least by neglect, and to work for the survival of another might require some self-sacrifice. Most animals would merely listen to whichever impulse was strongest in the moment, but humans, in their reflexive changeableness, have the capacity for self-perfection, and for finding alternative solutions.

      In this example, we’d have the unique ability to break out of the conflicting pull of our main instincts, respond to that initial cry, and find a way around the conflict, and this, for Rousseau, is the moment we enter into community and create language. Instead of the stronger person letter the weaker person die, or else sacrificing himself for the other person, the two come together and share in order to ensure the survival of both.

      It its thus we begin to deprecate our bodies in two ways. Firstly, we ignore our natural instincts in favor of an artificial (meaning made by humans) process of decision making. Second, instead of the strongest surviving, a stronger person will share with a weaker one, both ensuring the survival of the weaker, and the weakening of the stronger. In supposing ourselves to be free agents, we effectively water down both our physical prowess and our connection to the natural impulses which made us strong in the first place.

      From this moment we are able to grow and change in ways that simultaneously move us forward and coddle every manner of weakness, protecting our inadequacies even as we try to overcome them. Every new solution we come up with to fix our problems actually creates new problems. When we form a community to cover our individual weaknesses, we create social problems. As we solve social problems, we create economic ones. As we solve economic problems, we create health problems. And each grows in degree and scope, with every new advance unwittingly creating a host of new needs and vulnerabilities.

      Simultaneously, we leave behind our isolationism and enter into society, we begin to exercise our free agency and give birth to human reason, and possibly more damning of all for Rousseau, this is also the moment we start to create language.

      Once we start to think in words, we also begin to replace our physical strength with tools, our resistance to illness with medicine, and our natural physical brilliance with idiocy and reflective despair. The development of our minds through language, for Rousseau, means the active suppression of the body and its instincts – including those of self-preservation and empathy. The more we attempt to rise above our limitations through, the more willing we become to make bad decisions under the guise of prioritizing “mind over matter”. And in the end, all we have left is weakness. The ties holding us together will break, and we will be returned to the isolation of nature – but without the strength we need to survive in it.

      Rousseau

      I think that’s a good place to pause, for now. Check back in next Friday to find out more about how this happens, why Rousseau thinks its inevitable, the role of language, and a look at why this is such a scathing critique of metaphysical philosophy.

      Posted in Series | 0 Comments | Tagged Metaphysics, philosopher fridays, philosophy, Rousseau, state of nature
    • Philosopher Fridays: Arendt, Part One

      Posted at 11:00 am by Michelle Joelle, on March 7, 2014

      Welcome to the second installment of a new series I’m starting called “Philosopher Fridays“. The purpose of this series is not to give a comprehensive overview of any particular thinker, but rather to explain what I find compelling in the work of each, particularly as it informs my view of narrative, language, images, storytelling, and reason. Last week, I covered Averroes. This week and next, I’ll be covering Hannah Arendt in two parts. In Part One I’ll lay out a general background, and then in Part Two, I will offer my commentary.

      ARENDT: Hannah Arendt, a German-American political philosopher, lived from 1906-1975. After studying Augustinian thought (among other topics), Arendt fled from Germany to Paris in 1933 to work with Jewish refugee organizations, and then in 1941 emigrated to the United States. Her problematic relationship with Heidegger and her highly polarizing work Eichmann in Jerusalem aside, her philosophical thought is clear, systematic, and incredibly astute. For a thorough summary of her work, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is excellent. For a brief glimpse at what I find most compelling about her work, stick around here.

      What stands out most to me is her work in The Human Condition.  It presents not only a way to understand human behavior, but also provides an antidote to the Western philosophical world’s hyper focus on death and, more than that, our desire for deathlessness. Instead of contemplating our mortality, Arendt suggests we focus on natality – on the fact that we have been born as new beings in individual bodies with utterly unique personalities.

      That’s why she speaks of the human condition, rather than human nature. Unlike most animals, humans are not slaves to our instincts. According to Arendt, we can change ourselves and be changed by our conditions in a way that renders it impossible for us to discern a clear starting natural essence, if one in fact does exist as anything more than a capacity. Human beings, she says, are utterly unique individuals in a way that other animals are not. Our natural essence is, essentially, that  we have no essence.

      And because of this, says Arendt, we are also uniquely mortal. When other animals, those who live by natural instinct, die, another one of the same species will come along and do the exact same thing, lending the species in general a sort of cyclical immortality. In contrast, every single human could potentially leave a lasting impact. Humans chart a rectilinear course with a start and an end, and as such carry a unique capacity to die. Humans, unlike other animal species, are properly mortal.

      And so humans have a unique reason to leave a lasting impression. The causality here is a little difficult to parse, but it’s somewhat reciprocal – because we are able to leave a lasting impression, we have a desire to do so. We create things by changing natural objects into semi-permanent artifacts. We don’t stop at just maintaining our species, we grow. As the captain of the space ship in Wall-E says: “I don’t want to survive, I want to live!”

      Beyond the creation of artifacts, we engage in politics, art, and philosophy. We introduce ideas into the world that change it, by conquering other nations, doing heroic things, making mathematical discoveries, and more. For Arendt, this breaks into three levels of activity: labor, work, and action.

      Labor activities are those which keeps us alive: eating, fetching water, gathering food, cleaning, birthing, nurturing, and raising children. These are ubiquitous activities that everyone must do (or have done for them in some way), including all animals. These are the activities that keep a species going cyclically, and so need to repeated infinitely. Labor is the lowest common denominator – everyone needs food and shelter to survive. Every species needs to reproduce.

      Work is what sets human apart. Arendt says it is “an unnatural” thing to do, because it takes materials from nature and actively changes them so that they create a lasting product. A lot of these products exist to facilitate easier labor, but the impact is that through work, humans are able to create things that have existence beyond their makers. It’s a way to extend influence and be, however slightly, closer to immortality.

      Action is the highest level of human activity. It is predicated upon a plurality that is only possible for humans in our individuality. Action happens in the polus when we do things that set us apart from the crowd and making real change in the world. It’s the realm of fame and infamy wherein we earn earthly immortality. It is through action that the exploits of Achilles and the words of Shakespeare and the travels of Amerigo Vespucci live on in our memory, for good or ill. It is the highest level of human activity, the only activity through which our earthly lives might attain some kind of permanence.

      But action is, in some ways, the most fragile of the three levels. It requires someone to do some work in order for people to remember. Someone needs to record the history or a build a monument. No one would remember the words of Socrates without the work of Plato. Beyond that, it requires that labor needs are met. What these three levels show, for Arendt, is the importance of our bodies and our lived experience. If we only chase the glory of Action, we might end up neglecting or devaluing labor. The highest politicians are dependent upon their constituents, and so the power of action is not what it seems, as it has no meaning without the lower activities.

      According to Arendt, this fragility lead thinkers to look beyond Action, and beyond the activities of life. In search of freedom, philosophers and theologians looked instead to the Contemplative realm for freedom from human mortality.

      In next week’s post, I’ll continue to work with Arendt, returning to the concepts of Contemplation, Natality, and Mortality, and I’ll also explain why these concepts are so important to me, both as a person, and as a writer. Until then!

      Posted in Series | 6 Comments | Tagged arendt, Metaphysics, natality, philosopher fridays, vita contempliva
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