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Post by jb on Jul 23, 2019 9:05:49 GMT -8
I forget how many years, I had exhausted my interest in philosophy, which had been an avocational & autodidactical pursuit of a decade or more. I decided to turn to theology and ordered a dozen books written by the late Jesuit, Don Gelpi, SJ, whose systematic theology was grounded, architectonically, in the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce. That excursion of mine into Gelpi's approach reimmersed me in philosophy, specifically, CSP's epistemology & phenomenology, delaying my avocational retirement from philosophy by more than a decade. My excitement with CSP might only have been rivaled, previously, by my discovery of Kurt Godel. There are so many ways to introduce others to CSP and to recommend his approach. Today, I'm offering Tom Short's above-titled essay via some excerpts and a url, below. I'm not a thoroughgoing Peircean (he covers too much ground to allow my total agreement is all), but I am wholly on board with Tom Short's approach to conservatism, whether he properly interprets CSP or not (above my paygrade). Do you resonate with any of this? Would you challenge any part? Some excerpts from citation, below: 1) The thrust of Peirce’s theory is to invert the purpose of epistemology, from assuring us that all henceforth will be plain-sailing, to exposing the greatness of our ignorance and our deep dependence on faith. For all of its stupendous achievements, modern science casts but little light on its own grounds, its own prospects and limitations. It is like a candle set adrift in the dark on a vast sea: it reveals very little of what supports it. Peirce’s theory of knowledge teaches humility. 2) It may seem paradoxical that the same philosophy that describes the individual as the locus of ignorance and error also makes that individual to be the end for the sake of which a society exists. It may seem paradoxical that the same philosophy that attributes moral and epistemological authority to society also holds that the proper use of that authority is to free the individual to act on his own and to think for himself. But those are the sorts of paradoxes that have always put conservatism somewhat beyond the ken of radical thinkers. 3) Scientific reasoning requires a type of abstraction that is exactly wrong when addressing issues of vital importance. 4) Strategies that make sense when the aim is advancing knowledge in the long run—the price of which is error in the short run—are not justified for making vital decisions. For those decisions must be made for the short run. The short run is where we live. 5) The man who would allow his religious life to be wounded by any sudden acceptance of a philosophy of religion . . . is a man whom we should consider unwise. True conservatism, I say, means not trusting to reasonings about questions of vital importance but rather to hereditary instincts and traditional sentiments. The opinion prevalent among radicals that conservatives, and sentimentalists generally, are fools is only a cropping-out of the tendency of men to conceited exaggeration of their reasoning powers. 6) Like Aristotle and Burke before him, Peirce distinguished theory from practice and argued that the intellectual attitude appropriate to theoretical inquiry is disastrous if applied to practical questions, or at least to great issues of vital importance. The one requires radical thinking and reliance on one’s own powers of ratiocination, the other best relies on instinct, sentiment, and tradition, or, in short, the accumulated experience of countless generations. Citation The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce, Modern Age 43:4 , Fall 2001 isi.org/modern-age/the-conservative-pragmatism-of-charles-peirce/THOMAS SHORT is Chairman of the Board of Advisors to the Peirce Edition Project, which is producing a new, 30 volume edition of the writings of Charles Peirce. Tom Short Bibliography: sites.google.com/site/cspmem/t-l-short-bibliography |
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 23, 2019 20:20:24 GMT -8
Before reading any of it, I’ll give you my fair opinion without bias, acrimony, wishful thinking, cynicism, or sometimes I feel like a nut, sometimes I don’t.
That is a profoundly great point by CSP. I’ve been very much saying the same thing around here lately.
Reagan said he was for the maximum amount of freedom consistent with public order. That’s the inherent nature of the thing, balancing those two elements. Neither anarchy nor totalitarianism are good, but somewhere in the middle is about right. But such things are (or ought to be) measured in terms of how good or bad they are for individual people (usually families) acting with productive vigor, self-responsibility, and general good will. (A slave state is optimal for those who want others to run their lives, for instance. An aggressive military state is ideal for those who want to be a soldier and live off of plunder.)
I don’t see anything paradoxical about this. It just depends whether one wishes to try to raise oneself up by becoming a cog in the state (the socialist/Communist/Leftist model) or grasp the reality of one’s unique and god-given life and live that life for something other than obsequiousness to a leader and/or plunder of those underneath you.
I think even more important is the context of the decision-making process. Who is making the decisions? Why? What’s the plan? There are many things (such as home mortgages) that require long-range decisions. Others (such as what’s for lunch) require shorter ones. Political plans have a different dynamic to them, often exploitive of citizens’ short-term plans (or interests) to feed the long-term plans of the Kleptocrats.
I’m not sure I’ve challenged any part. But I think it was Russell Kirk who said something like “Any philosophy that attempts to encompass the totality of life will be a failure.” So any all-inclusive statements don’t require being pedantic to bring them down. They bring themselves down.
But so we aren’t blown around like grains of sand in the wind, we need solid and good philosophies as a general guide. And any philosophy is only a philosophy so far as there has been some careful thinking put into it, otherwise it is likely just a habit picked up from culture, fueled more likely by going along to get along or just plain pragmatism.
There are a million ways to be stupid or act foolishly. Our good ideas (religious or otherwise) act like guardrails so that if we do crash, it will be a mere fender-bender.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 23, 2019 20:57:09 GMT -8
I think we're getting back to the Star Trek episode "Amok Time" (which we discussed years ago in ST). Logic is valuable, but much depends on your assumptions (as one of my college professors showed once), especially the moral ones. So T'Pring very logically relied on a viciously cold morality, as do some of those in examples such as the militarist or slave society.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 24, 2019 8:10:40 GMT -8
Oh, indeed. There are many good lessons that can be drawn from Star Trek. One of my favorites is treating politicians with contempt and fooling them for a greater good (which is what they did with T’Pau, played splendidly by Celia Lovsky, who also has a small but good part in Soylent Green).
So faking the death of a Starship captain at a sacred Vulcan ceremony in front of a major political figure was A-Ok with the Vulcans (who must have eventually learned that Kirk was still alive). Hopefully someone has written a canonical Star Trek novel that covers some of that. Kirk is a bit like Donald Trump. He does impulsive things wherever he goes (perhaps often the right things) and someone follows behind cleaning things up. We can imagine a diplomatic ruckus in the wake of this event.
We also learn that despite the fact the Star Trek was in the Utopian phase of earth, that did not include any kind of #MeToo movement and PC stuff such as that. Kirk was free to ogle Yeoman Rand. And had there been any penalty for “creating a hostile work environment,” Bones would have been shown to the PC gulags a long time ago for his repeated harassment of Spock.
But back then, sticks-and-stones was obviously the Utopian ethic, not Snowflakeness. Spock’s stoicism and biting (and oh so logical) rejoinders were the way to deal with an often hostile Doctor McCoy.
In that novel, we hope to find out what happened between T’Pring and Stonn. There are a number of logical scenarios. Me thinks Stonn tossed the conniving T’Pring aside for a more maternal type. He lived happily ever after and T’Pring became yet another woman who made dissatisfaction her religion.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 24, 2019 8:23:24 GMT -8
Maybe JB will link to a couple books he recommends by Charles Sanders Peirce. Here’s a listing of his books at Amazon. I find it difficult to deal with political philosophy these days because it’s usually a realm that has little meaning. We can parse all day long the various shades, but how does one fall on the issue of abortion? Of unenforced borders and the acceptance of illegal immigration? Of the national debt? Of grievance politics? Of Islam? Of environmental overkill? Of the various naive and destructive Utopian goals many people share now? It’s one thing to say “Government ought to do only what the individual cannot do for himself” and wrap a nice little bow around a condensed (and pretty good) definition of conservatism. It’s another to actually oppose paying people not to work. What I learned firsthand at StubbornThings was that, in theory, people were against a whole lot of stuff. But, in practice, no one wanted to stick their necks out. Most people went along to get along. And thus I think most of the ranting online stems from a feeling of powerlessness, grievance, and shame at having given in to the very things that one supposedly opposes. In any conversation with my learned friend, JB, that’s the backdrop I must make known or else it can turn into a situation where we are discussing the complexities of fluid dynamics while our rowboat is slowly sinking. |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 24, 2019 12:02:46 GMT -8
That is a good question about how the Vulcans responded when they found out Kirk's death was faked. Of course, in this case the responsible party was McCoy, who gave him the injection. I don't recall seeing any indication that they plotted it out beforehand (until T'Pring chose Kirk as her champion, no one would have expected to need it).
Perhaps there was something left out in syndication -- originally the show was 56 minutes long, and a lot has had to be cut. (Rod Serling was irate at seeing what they did to episodes of The Twilight Zone when they syndicated it. In one case -- the hour-long episode "Jess-Belle" -- I noticed this myself when they took out a rather neat scene that I recalled. Oddly enough, that was probably itself in syndication, but maybe before they took out so many minutes. Or maybe they cut out something else at the time.)
And I love your idea of the ending. If a conservative were writing the episode today, that's exactly what would happen in the end. As a Vulcan, Stonn could hardly be stupid enough to prefer T'Pring as a mate.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 24, 2019 21:11:30 GMT -8
When I’m out on the trail huffing and puffing, as I was tonight, the trail often feels like the way to Damascus. My head is full of all kinds of inspirations — but no ball of light thus far. I was watching a show on Amazon Prime called Rescue Me. I’m watching it occasionally with someone who is a retired firefighter so I’m sort of stuck with it at times. There are no redeeming characters in this. Everyone is vulgar, dishonest, and/or narcissistic. You watch it and you know for sure there are at least two species of human beings. There are people who like this sort of stuff and people who are deeply repulsed by it. I’m in the latter company (not ladder company). It would be arrogant and presumptuous to suppose that God intended all men to be like Mister Rogers. Good, humble, thoughtful, kind, helpful, trustworthy, instructive. There are just too many people who are vulgar or common. And such an orientation is not the result of any trauma or abuse. It’s not the result of being from a bad home. It’s not the result of being poor. It’s just that some (a whole lot, actually) are that way. The either don’t know they are degraded or just loving steeping themselves in it. And that’s fine. The last thing I want to to is make an appeal to elitism. That’s not my thing. But when we do ask the big questions (and not all people do with any enthusiasm), I think it comes down to a couple dynamics: + Do you want to forever be the wounded animal or do you want to be a human being? + Do you want to forever be a ball of psychosis or do you want to be a human being? + Do you want to forever live mindlessly or do you want to be a human being? + Do you want to forever live as a child or do you want to be a human being? One of the biggest heresies today is a type of Gnosticism. It’s the idea that if you believe a few sound-byte points, this essentially establishes you on a higher plane. This is one of the prime difficulties of discussing philosophy, religion, and even politics. It’s not so much the ideas, per se. It’s how those ideas, by holding them, elevate one to a higher moral and mental plane whether one acts on those beliefs or not or even actually believes them. It’s superficial. A veneer. Virtue-via-association. None of my four points above are overtly about holding a certain set of political or social beliefs (although they will certainly be conversant with some and not others). Nor is any of that about the second widespread heresy, and that is if being a wolf is bad, pulling out one’s teeth sets one on a higher moral plane. But the reality is, we need teeth and claws. To not protect the innocent or act in a just way, we let injustice and even violence overcome us. “Pacifism” is a common name for this heresy. The prime question is: Are we going to live life as an animal or are we going to assume there is a higher purpose to our lives than scratching every itch? All four of those points above, for them to be meaningful, assume that we are meant for more than stuffing our faces with food, being entertained 24/7, and living a life like one big, long belch. We’re talking not about “civilized” man, per se (who have all kinds of crimes to answer for). Nor are we talking about neutered man (ditto). Take Mr. Rogers, St. Francis, Jesus, Moses, Mother Teresa, and velcro (so useful, so good, so simple) and you have a model for a different type of human being. One of the things to watch for is whether or not one is engaging in vulgarity or degradation as a way to normalize one’s own rough edges. I’m quite sure a TV series such as Rescue Me is a great way to normalize vulgarity and degradation. It’s a great way to smother the conscience as well. But I’m watching that and my conscience (thankfully) was alive and well. I knew this was a degrading show. And I had no desire to watch it try to normalize a habitual sense of degradation. Any good philosophy or religion is going to deal with those four points. Shall we wear our wounds as a license to be terrors to other people or do we transform our wounds into the best part of us? Do we indulge in being a bit crazy because we enjoy stirring things up, and/or chafe at any desire for self-control or restraint? Or do we assume, quite rightly, that to be a human being means managing our impulses? Do we live as instinctual beasts, sating every desire and scratching every itch as it comes along? Or do we see life’s purpose as something more than this? Do we remain petulant, spoiled children or do we grow up, with the maturity and wisdom to retain the best parts of childhood such as having wonder over simple things and enjoying learning and discovery? One of the things that fascinate me is that there are very few forces in society feeding the Mr. Rogers side of things. I’d say 99.5” is pulling people to our more animal, vulgar natures. Being selective is crucial to living a worthy life. Thus, for instance, I had to put a stake through the heart of StubbornThings and move onto something else. I’m still searching. I’m still trying. |
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Post by jb on Jul 25, 2019 11:10:30 GMT -8
I'm no CSP scholar, such that I've engaged his thought through primary sources. I've mostly (mis)appropriated his stuff via secondary sources. This is the gateway, though: www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/By way of some clarification, regarding CSP’s distinction between the sciences and vital concerns, for my part, I apply a distinction between the methods of the highly speculative theoretical sciences, descriptively & interpretively (sometimes much akin to metaphysics), and those methods regarding our ultimate concerns, axiologically, which pertain to our general dispositions, evaluatively, and our general precepts, normatively. Otherwise, regarding specific concrete norms, both morally & practically, I would even insist that they be informed, evidentially, by our probabilistic, empirical sciences (de-ontologically). Now, that's a dense, wordy parsing that might require unpacking but it's critical. I suppose the unpacking would look like this: There are distinctly different probes of reality requiring distinctly different methods because they are asking distinctly different questions, which often may variously yield more than a single answer (since we're fallible, not because we've tossed out the principle of noncontradiction). So, we can certainly ask "What's that?" and "What's that to us?" and "What's the best way to acquire or avoid that? and "What's that all about, Alfie?" and "Who are you? but we certainly can't expect either science or culture or philosophy or religion or society or economics or politics to have all of those answers. Perhaps, in one sense, CSP is simply saying we must avoid category errors. Then, in another sense, he's suggesting --- not an inviolable absolute precept, ideologically, but --- a default bias, practically. Tradition, then, isn't an infallible vehicle but, all things being equal, when in doubt regarding humanity's ultimate concerns, the safer course, the more sure path toward value-realizations, i.e. over against novel, bold conjectures, especially those that resist falsification & probabilistic empirical methods. So, tradition is, like subsidiarity, --- not an ideological bedrock, but --- a default bias: all things being equal, each value-realization should employ a method that's within control by that level closest to the individual as is sustainable, e.g. fed shouldn't do what state can do, and likewise re county, municipality, civic, social, family & individual. These practical default biases are integrally related, though, to absolute principles: humanist, personalist, agapic, etc I think this is all very consonant with the takes y'all expressed above, which were inspired and enjoyable reflections. |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 25, 2019 11:38:53 GMT -8
IUPUI is the joint campus of Indiana and Purdue Universities in Indianapolis. As a Purdue grad who spent a lot of time visiting friends at IU, I appreciate the reference even though I've never been to the IUPUI campus.
Perhaps I know it best for a vicious incident some years back when a white student got in some trouble for reading a book about the Klan visiting Notre Dame in the '20s and learning why they're called the Fighting Irish. But the book naturally showed some Klan aspect on the cover, and a black student who saw him reading it assumed the book was a racist pro-Klan book. The fact that the black was blatantly wrong was of course irrelevant as long as he felt aggrieved. |
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 12:34:01 GMT -8
One could also say “What does knowing the precise charge of the electron tell us about the issue of abortion? Knowing there are billions of galaxies in the universe, how much debt should the government carry? Given that gravity can be thought of as the curving of space, should we invest in nuclear power or solar?”
There is, of course, social, ego, or power issues inserted into these issues. You have the attempted cross-over prestige of “science” that says “Because we can measure how many parts per million of arsenic is in drinking water, we can tell you if or what kind of socialized medicine we should have.”
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 12:35:48 GMT -8
JB, there's a little note that your last message was posted via mobile. I assume that is automated by the forum software. But I just noticed that.
Also, if you don't mind saying, was it easy to use on your mobile device? And may I ask if your mobile device is a phone or a tablet, iOS or Android?
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Post by jb on Jul 25, 2019 12:44:49 GMT -8
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Post by jb on Jul 25, 2019 12:52:46 GMT -8
JB, there's a little note that your last message was posted via mobile. I assume that is automated by the forum software. But I just noticed that. Also, if you don't mind saying, was it easy to use on your mobile device? And may I ask if your mobile device is a phone or a tablet, iOS or Android? Android. The mobile interface suffices for quick give & take, ease of navigation, etc However, I force my phone's various browsers into desktop mode when I need to utilize your forum's rich editing features, which I see no way of otherwise utilizing. Is that the case? Any identifying or dox-ing info is NEVER done purposefully by me. That I'm on mobile was an automated tidbit, either on your end or inadvertently on mine  |
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 13:04:53 GMT -8
I see what you mean. From iPhone 6 Plus.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 13:06:56 GMT -8
Thanks for the feedback. An official source says “In short, themes are not currently compatible with the mobile version of ProBoards.” That is, there is no theme I can switch to that will enhance the feature set available to the mobile version of the forum interface, nor are there (I just looked) any special settings behind the scenes that I can adjust. The mobile theme that is built-in seems to be a one-size-fits-all thing at the moment. Folks, we’re going to solve this problem. If they can put a man on the moon, we can buy JB an iPad mini. If he has particularly large jacket pockets, that might work. |
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 13:10:22 GMT -8
Test. Posted from iPhone 6 Plus using desktop version of site.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 13:21:43 GMT -8
So....the deep philosophical point is that even if you post to these forums using a mobile device (aka, a phone), you will not be considered by the forum software to be using a mobile device if you use the desktop theme option on your mobile device.
At this point you are in a metaphysical quandary or what JB might call one of those category errors. Does your phone change its quantum state, if only momentarily, to a desktop device? Or is the phone still a mobile device (even when using the desktop option) but the software sees you as a desktop device?
Then we enter some kind of state where Schrodinger's cat enters the picture. Is your device in an indeterminate state until the forum software (by observing your device) collapses it then into either a mobile or desktop device (perhaps even quicker than you can notice, for your phone is likely going to continue to look like a phone)?
Any thoughts on this?
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Post by timothylane on Jul 25, 2019 14:02:57 GMT -8
I'll ask my friend Grant McCormick if he can look into it. We go to him for all our computer questions.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 14:11:08 GMT -8
Sounds good. And no fudging the question by Grant. If he can answer it in an understandable way, I'll know he's just dodging it.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 25, 2019 16:22:44 GMT -8
He looked at it and wasn't sure exactly what the matter was. I thanked him for trying.
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