Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 8:24 am
The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century: An Essay On Late Modernity by Chantal Delsol, a french contemporary philosopher seems like a very interesting book. Ms Delsol self describes herself as a neo-liberal. This book came up in a search of book in the “Library of Modern Thinkers” series which summarizes the currents of thought of (mostly conservative and libertarian) important political, economic and philosophical figures. This book is very much different in that it is a (striking it seems) essay by one of these figures and not another author or expert summarizing and putting their works in perspective. Over the next few weeks (months?) I’m going to examine, hopefully chapter by chapter, the topics and ideas presented in this book.
In the introduction (chapter 1) Ms Delsol poses following, “Imagine and heir who has just been informed that his inheritance consists of a trunk full of serpents.” This is how she presents our present inheritance from the turbulent 20th century. The 20th century began with hope and a looking for great promise of the future and is ending with shame over totalitarian excesses. Ours is an age which is rejecting hope.
She also suggests why this age might be termed “late modernity” in particular to call to mind particular parallels with late antiquity. Like (Western) Rome of late antiquity, our society shows similar signs of aging in its arts. Late antiquity had “an affirmation of art without meaning, literature which was simultaneously pretentious and trivial, and a dwindling population.” Hmm. Sound familiar?
There is yet, one idea which had sprung forth in late antiquity which still remains, perhaps wounded and ailing today, that offers promise. The idea of the dignity of individual man remains. This idea had come under assault in the 20th century, notably in the totalitarian regimes but in other venues as well. Ms Delsol offers in what follows a clarion cry for the necessity of preserving this core principal.
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Recently I had noted earlier, following my reading of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, that between the Galilean/Copernican period and Newton’s Principia no new scientific data (no facts) arose to distinguish between these two theories. Yet by the time of Newton’s writing of the Principia the dispute was settled. This was settled not by facts but by a process that has more in common with religious conversion than than the popular notions of what is comprised by scientific method.
Physics has seen three major revolutions. Following the development or conception of what we in this “late modernity” [aside: more on that later] period call Physics by the Greeks the overriding principles underpinning reality were driven by a belief that the world and cosmic bodies followed geometric and numeric patterns. Observation and insight were interpreted within this framework. During the period noted above, a conversion began to occur. A mechanical constraint arithmetic model replaced the old. This held until the latter part of the 19th to the early 20th century when it too was replaced. Currently the view of how to best understand the universe is one driven by mathematical invariances (symmetries). Data and experiment are not and have not been the driving force in moving persons and communities from one to another underlying model for how to perceive nature. Passion and persuasion and conversion are better descriptions of what occurred.
Yesterday I began to unwind what Polanyi was driving at with his attack on the mechanistic view of nature. He principally objected to the idea that that the all kinds of experience can be understood in terms of atomic data. This is more than just a rejection of reductionist methods of scientific advancement. And it is not something which today is abandoned with the discovery of quantum uncertainty, i.e., the free willed electron. Scientific metaphors have a way of becoming dominant metaphors applied outside of their realm of application. Consider how uncertainty, relativity, and evolution are examples of scientific ideas have been abused when used as metaphor in the social arenas. The scientific community using those ideas has given a strange credence to their application in other arenas. So too has the notion that man and his society is ultimately are just collections of clockwork apparatus. It is the dangers related to those, essentially abuses, of the conception of a comprehensible, mechanistic, deterministic universe applied to social studies (econ and politics) and life sciences that the chief dangers lie.
Consider the following abbreviated example, which I hope to elaborate on later. Man when viewed in a mechanistic way enables one to set aside models of human dignity in favor of man as a consumer. Hedonistic consumerism can replace a more, well, frankly human (and realistic) view of man in society.
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Back when Mr Bush was nominating people for President, I made what I felt was a strong argument that the Senate should have readily nominated his appointees. I stand by this argument now that the other party is now in the White House. I based this argument on Mr Hamilton’s Federalist Paper #76. Mr Hamilton notes:
To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.
He also notes just prior, mentioning consequences of what might occur if the Senate took too active a role in vetting and selecting nominees.
Hence, in every exercise of the power of appointing to offices, by an assembly of men, we must expect to see a full display of all the private and party likings and dislikes, partialities and antipathies, attachments and animosities, which are felt by those who compose the assembly. The choice which may at any time happen to be made under such circumstances, will of course be the result either of a victory gained by one party over the other, or of a compromise between the parties. In either case, the intrinsic merit of the candidate will be too often out of sight. In the first, the qualifications best adapted to uniting the suffrages of the party, will be more considered than those which fit the person for the station. […] And it will rarely happen that the advancement of the public service will be the primary object either of party victories or of party negotiations. [emphasis mine]
In view of the last two decades of despicable SCOTUS and other similar interviews, Mr Biden and his parties behavior during the Thomas hearings comes to mind, a rejoinder to Mr Hamilton might be, “D’ya think? They might put considerations of party before who might be fit for the station.”
Mr Hamilton suggests the Senatorial advise/consent be exercised to insure the nominee free from “unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.” If Ms Sotomayor is free from these issues, my view would be to approve her to the position.
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Laplace, some years ago, came up with a notion. This idea was that if one could determine the position and momenta of all the particles in the universe at a given time, then the time evolution of the universe would fix all future events of the universe. This notion is one which persists as some level today. The notion that the all kinds of experience can be understood in terms of atomic data. This is an impossible scenario, yet it persists.
Polanyi writes (pg 141) in his book Personal Knowledge:
Yet the spell of the Laplacian delusion remains unbroken to this day. The ideal of strictly objective knowledge, paradigmatically formulated by Laplace, continues to sustain a universal tendency to enhance the observational accuracy and systematic precision of science, at the expense of its bearing on its subject matter. […] I mention it here only as an intermediate stage in a wider intellectual disorder: namely the menace to all cultural values including those of science, by an acceptance of a conception of man derived from a Laplacian ideal of knowledge and by the conduct of human affairs in the light of such a conception.
There are two threats Polanyi envision to such a notion. One would be a systematic sweeping cultural rejection of science as a perversion of truth. Polanyi wrote this in the 50s, today these currents are becoming perhaps more relevant. The root cause of the modern rejections of science are due to the corruption of science itself by the errant (and dominant) Laplacian error. The second threat is the peril to science from the very acceptance of a scientific outlook based on Laplacian fallacy being used to guide human affairs.
I’d planned to get further on this today … but it’s after ten and I have to turn the pedals some more today. I’ll get back to this.
Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 8:47 am
The pseudonymous Larry Niven blogging as the <a target=”_blank” href=”http://rustbeltphilosophy.blogspot.com/”>Rust Belt Philosopher</a> often attacks various defenses of the theodicy problem. I haven’t been reading his blog for much more than a month but it seems possibly he locates the best and most potent objections to Christian belief in the failure, in his view, to solve the theodicy problem adequately. On one former post I had commenting his comments on theodicy he remarked that I’d “offered nothing new.” Well here is something, perhaps, new.
Theodicy centers on the question of why does the Christian God who has been declared to have significant power in the universe and who is claimed to be Good then allow evil and unearned suffering to be subjected to the innocent. I will now attempt to present what might be considered a narrative defense of this question.
Why is Dicken’s Tiny Tim allowed to suffer, Dickens is writing stories and we will, for now, assume that the story has in mind the furtherance of good and furthermore as author commands complete control over his story. Why does any number of good characters in narratives by any number of authors allow minor characters to suffer undeserved evil? Dickens is not unique. Any number of minor (and major) characters undeserved suffering in novels in which the end of the author was to expose and explore truth and beauty. The crux of the narrative theodicy response that the suffering of the underserved is justified by the demands of the larger narrative. Yet at the same time, unlike in a writers narrative, the protagonists have free will. They can make moral choices and as a result can fail to rise to fulfill the role to which they were fit.
In the book about the life of <i><a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881411809?ie=UTF8&tag=pseudopolym05-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=0881411809″ id=”static_txt_preview”>Father Arseny, 1893-1973</a></i> toward the end of the book (which contains fragmented stories from people whose lives where touched by Fr Arseny) there is a report of a particular saintly woman, Mother Maria of whom Fr Arseny hears her final confession. The person recounting this story fragment is confused as to why Fr Arseny was so affected by her confession and life’s story for to him here story seemed mundane and ordinary. Fr Arseny explains that at this point in his life, as his own mortality was near, he was so very thankful that God gave to him the chance to hear her story and her example, which was a continual narrative of her putting her own concerns and desires aside for the sake others linked at the same time with a continual turning towards God. My suggestion here is that the suffering of those around her (whom she helped) provided grist for her life’s story <i>for the benefit</i> of Fr Arseny and his story, which being shared helps the rest of us.
Modern materialism rejects the notion that there is purpose in the unfolding of our lives and in history. Dame fortuna for the materialist reigns supreme. So the question of a narrative theodicy requires some justification for rejecting dumb luck as the only meaning for our lives. The question is not to test the narrative model against the materialist model per se (at least to begin) but first to examine if the narrative model is internally consistent.
Judeo-Christian tenents from Genesis and other writings offer that we are both made in God’s image <i>and </i>suggest that narrative is a key feature of both God’s plan and our nature. The notion of God’s unfolding narrative with Israel is not foreign to the text or the interpretative tradition. In the narrative of the man born blind in the Gospel of John the answer to why he might have suffered for decades as a blind man was answered in effect that it was so because he was to take part in <i>this narrative </i>unfolding today, i.e., so that Jesus might heal him. The justification for his being blind was his role in the narrative of Jesus life. Charles Taylor in <i>the Secular Age</i> recounts many of the reasons and mechanisms that arose through the previous four or five centuries that meaning has been leached from our view of history and the world around us.
This is all I have time for tonight, so at this point discussion may be fruitful. Hopefully there may be enough here to chew on.
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
The Galileo/Copernican and the Ptolemaic views of the solar system lay in dispute for the 150 years between Galileo and Newton (specifically between the dates of the publication of Copernicus De Revolutionibus and Newton’s Principia). In the period of time between these events, with the possible admission of Kepler’s third law) there were no facts to distinguish these theories. In fact, glancing far to the future, the negative results of the Michelson-Morley experiment demonstrating that the Earth was at rest would have been a point to the Ptolemaic not Copernican view. The scientific (heuristic) passions of the proponents of the Copernican view is what drove the outlook of astronomers to the point where at the publishing of the Principia the Copernican viewpoint was dominant. Attached to the prologue of Galileo’s thesis was a forward by Osiander expressing the point that this view was not necessarily “true” but instead was a “fruitful” way of approaching astronomy. This is a red herring. Ptolemaic astronomy was a fruitful source of inquiry for thousands of years. Astrology has been fruitful employment for 2500 years, Marixism was (and remains alas)
a fruitful mechanism for obtaining political power. Fruitful by itself is not sufficient. Theories are fruitful in that they are believed to be fruitful mechanisms for getting to the truth of reality.
In 1914 TW Richards was awarded the Nobel prize for an extremely accurate measurement of atomic weights. Fifteen years this result was completely scorned as useless, for as that measurement made no allowance for isotopic ratios those painstaking measurements were rendered useless. This was a measurement, of high accuracy, of a value that was discovered to have no correspondence to any features of nature. Accuracy qua accuracy is of no value. One misconception about science is that it is experiment that drives progress. Yet it is theory that is required before experiments to provide the basis for how experimental data is interpreted and in fact for what experimental data is deemed to have any value at all.
New visions and insights drive theoretical breakthroughs. Yet the history of science is littered with far more failures than success. This is not limited to “lesser scientists”. Einstein’s vision following Mach imagined Relativity and against Mach solved Brownian motion. Yet Einstein same said vision rejected quantum randomness. Major theoretical breakthroughs in science require a major reworking of our view of nature, a replacing of an older view with a newer one. Proponents of the new, driven by their heuristic passionate belief in the correctness of their vision, must pursuade on the basis of future intimations of fruitfulness in the search for truth of their vision. In doing so, they also must invalidate the older vision. This process of invalidation is often rancorous and ugly. This “feature” is common and perhaps not easily escapable.
This then suggests some striking things about the scientific process. Theory preceded and both validates and interprets experiment. Major theoretical breakthroughs require persuasion. The passion of scientific discovery must be transformed and moved to the passion of persuasion that the new vision of the truth has intimations that it might be fruitful for further deepening of our understanding of nature. Yet a problem remains. Is there anything left? What differentiates the project of chasing the structure of matter at CERN and Fermilab from astrology? Why was it right for the Copernican view to supplant the Ptolmaic in the period between Copernicus and Galileo and before Newton? There are good answers to these questions but that will have to wait until a later essay.
The first parts of this essay draw heavily on Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge which is an epistemological inquiry looking toward a “post-critical reality” epistemic framework. It might also be noted, this book predated Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Critical reality is the idea that our physical theories accurately represent reality. This is in contrast to the Positivist (which is not as far as I can tell the same as Logical Positivism). This view espoused for example by Stephen Hawking suggests that the question of whether the underlying matches the theory is irrelevant and that physics (or theory in general) merely is a mechanism for predicting experimental results.
Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 9:16 am
I’ve begun reading John Behr’s (so far) two volume series (three are reported as planned) subtitled Formation of Christian Theology. The first volume, in soft cover from SVS Press, is entitled The Way to Nicaea. This books covers aspects of the formation of Christian theology, focusing on the development of the answer to Jesus query to the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Volume 2 is split into two books and covers in some detail the controversies surrounding the two councils which developed the Nicene creed.
The first chapter of this book begins with a look at how the Scriptural canon for the Christian church developed and was set. There were a lot of alternative canonical choices at the end of the second century when the canon was set. But the result, to summarize Behr, was that two key criteria were used to select what books and epistles were included in the New Testament canon. They are that the books chosen were “according the the Scriptures” and that the cross (the passion) was central. The phrase “according the the Scriptures” meant specifically that the acts and narrative account in the selected book connected these actions with the accounts and prophecies of the Old Testament. This meant that books like the Gospel of Thomas and other gnostic works were excluded. Behr defends his interpretation of this development of canon by examining the methods and arguments used by St. Irenaeus in discussing various heresies of his day at the close of the 2nd century.
David Schraub blogging at the Debate Link, dislikes the term “Judeo-Christian”. This term admittedly can be misused. The above historical notes demonstrate how this term is at the same time correct and how the traditions diverged. For certainly in the context of investigating first and second century theological currents and ideas that term is relevant. Throughout the first century the majority of Christians were Jews who felt that Jesus was in fact the awaited Messianic figure, the fulfillment of Scriptural promise. At the same time, there is here a key difference which will form the basis possibly for the contention that this term does not make sense. Christians over the centuries following embarked on a program to reinterpret the Jewish Scriptural canon through the “lens of the cross”, i.e., via the life and passion of Jesus. That is they re-examined and reinterpreted, often as “type”, events and prophecies of Scripture to be interpreted specifically in the context of Jesus message, and his crucifixion and resurrection. Christian theology at the end of the second century defined itself and its theological methods in the light of Jewish writing. At the same time however, it was beginning to highlight the differences by beginning a program of returning to and examining that same canon in a radically different way (although it might be noted that “different” way was himself a 1st century Jew).
