| | Jeanine,
On Existentialist Philosophers
Heidegger is considered an existentialist. I guess that like any philosophical school, even existentialists must have their differences in style, temperament and specific positions on a variety of issues. I've thought about reading Ortega y Gassett too, partly because I hear that he might have influenced Rand. But of the existentialists that I have read, Nietzche is OK, but I ultimately dislike his style of writing when it is applied to philosophy. Kierkgaard, I cannot stand.
On Russell
He is a fine writer, and while there might also have been political reasons for the Nobel committee's selection, one cannot argue with his volume and the skill with which he communicated difficult ideas to the public. Do a search for quotes from his works if you seriously doubt his wit.
On Fiery Passions In Philosophy
I like philosophy written in a style that doesn't ride roughshod over fine distinctions. I think a philosopher should be a combination of the best kind of lawyer and the best kind of judge in a court case, dealing fairly with the opposing positions, their distinctions, the necessary arguments and the evidence that supports them.
The kind of philosophy that tends to impose its will on the issue being discussed, as opposed to following the argument where it leads, is not my cup of tea. It is the philosophy of passion, the kind of philosophy that tries to enforce its sentiments on the world. It creates enemies before even seeing whether friendship is possible, because it can only see opponents in one dimension. It can be enlightening, because a genius is a genius, and a passionate genius can say enlightening things.. But ultimately, the flaws of such writing become all too clear when you are on the receiving end of such criticism. You are ultimately convinced that you are right, and you cannot see anything similar to the position you hold in your opponent's arguments, so you cannot take him seriously because you see that he doesn't understand you.
I do not think that philosophy should be devoid of passion. I think that good arguments with strong evidence do excite me, and I also think that if the best possible arguments (or something decent at least - don't take the word "best" too literally, but some effort must be made) have being laid out in support of one's position and the opponent's, and the opponent has been found thoroughly wanting, it is moral to pass stern judgment on nonsense. I also think that ad hominem attacks are justified after the logical arguments have been made out.
I think that the problem with some practitioners of analytic philosophy was the way they conceived their subject matter - the linguistic and positivist schools were bad, but they are mostly dead in modern philosophy. Today, there are many analytic philosophers who deal with the traditional issues well. But that is a partially subjective judgment based on my acceptance of science (and I defend it as ultimately objective as well).
On the Examined Life
With your sentiments, I generally concur - the devil is in the details.
I like your use of the term "weird" (perhaps adjusted to: 'wyrd'?); this courtesan and Pagan shall adopt it.
LOL. The word "combination" is missing.
On Deference to Traditional Philosophy
I think this gives far too much deference to traditional accounts of what positions are compatible with what- I very frequently think that traditional authors made implicit or purely linguistic assumptions when laying out their fundamental insights, which further tradition then codified as "common wisdom" of what positions should be package-dealed.
I disagree, for the simple reason that traditional accounts of what positions are compatible with other positions are the result of years of CRITICAL debate in philosophy. If you want to know whether a person is a serious philosopher, amateur or professional, find out if he has read a collection of works from a variety of authors on a single philosophical issue.
The compatibility of positions isn't framed by the proponent of a philosophy; it is framed by critics and centuries of philosophical development. So if you know the historical objections to your position, then it is a good idea to meet them. However, it is an academic imperative that you search for them. If you omit things honestly, you might be forgiven. But if you parade your position as the truth, the last word, and nothing but the truth, you had better show that you are aware of traditional objections to your position.
Determinism, Indeterminism, Libertarianism, Self-Determinism, Free Will, Soft Determinism, Hard Determinism, Compatibilism, etc.
Your association of my indeterminism as incompatible with learning or misjudging past experiences is a perfect example. In this case the assumption is where I believe the locus of volition to be. Actually, like Rand, I hold volition to be very strict singular and narrow, to what Rand called "focus" (I would use 'will' in other contexts). Unlike Rand, I think this implies that in moral judgement, one can only truly make an "evil" call in cases of evasive focus; the transmission belt of causality from ideas to emotions, ideas to action, etc., is blameless, which leads me to a much less "judgemental" socio-ethical approach... though I am not a total nonjudgementalist (i.e., when I believe I can work back to focus and any evasion), and I'm too easily tempted to judgementalism in the rare cases I share the hegemonic values... mea culpa.
You see, what a debate with Objectivists can mask is my understanding of the issues, my sympathy with the different positions, and the reasons why I am a compatibilist ( a person who thinks that we have free will, rather volition, but that whatever your view of free will or volition is, it must be one that can be reconciled with a scientifically motivated determinism about human nature). Some conceptions of choice are compatible with determinism, some are not.
The truth is this: most people who defend indeterminism with respect to volition (which is the claim that multiple futures are logically consistent with a unique past) are simply people who cannot make sense of moral judgment "if human beings cannot choose to do something other than what they did". They think that this is the biggest reason why a person should fight determinism. Their view of determinism is that it undermines moral responsibility, since the whole basis of their view of moral responsibility is choice. I think that these arguments are not as strong as their proponents think they are, but they are serious concerns, if only because people *think* they are. My position on the issues is mostly that which Dennett develops in Freedom Evolves.
It seems that most people forget that every other aspect of Objectivism is incompatible with indeterminism. In fact, on every issue except human volition, Objectivism takes the position of hard determinism. If you do not smell something fishy here, for now, I will rest on the ad hominem that you have no nose. "Focus" is defined in away to insulate it from empirical criticism. However, it is, when push comes to shove, no different from a "voluntary action" which is "an action a person can perform when asked", according Daniel Wegner. That we have different repertoires of voluntary actions is not in doubt. But if you claim that your decision to perform any voluntary action is uncaused, or is caused by you in an irreducible way, I will just smile, because that is all I can do to people speaking about an article of faith. Specify how your idea would be disproved, and we can talk.
There are many arguments I can make against the Objectivist view that I haven't because I select the kinds of arguments I make against a position based on what I think the source of my opponent's opposition is. However, I am not in the mood to make them. A worldview is not going to be seriously challenged in a few posts. But I will note the tabula rasa view of man at birth as another issue.
Otherwise, I might surprise you that while I am totally against theories that posit "interference" with free will by genes, hormones, irrational passion, etc. (such as sociobiology)... I do believe that "social determinist" theories ofttimes contain much wisdom, if not ultimate metaphysical truth, and I am open to positions of logical or cosmological determinism which somehow integrate with free will. I honestly wish I could think of a good way those two positions could be reconciled (I'm not impressed with stoicism, Spinoza, Liebniz, Ryle, etc. on this issue... don't know Blandshard), because I have my own reasons to start really wondering, to my own astonishment, whether there is some "clockwork" including human volition in the larger picture after all. Actually, I believe I come to this conclusion precisely according to the influences (not theory) of the Stoa that led them to similar conclusions. Enough said.
Life is full of paradox. I do not know any kind of inquiry that has better resolved the paradoxes inherent in life than science. But I think that I was where you were once. What is interesting is that social determinism is compatible with the tabula rasa view of human nature. I think that is why you can accept it more easily.
The main reason why I gave indeterminism plausibility when I was younger was because I didn't have a good explanation for why, in very similar situations, people made different choices, given the tabula rasa viewpoint. After genetics and biology revealed that variations in human physiology could explain these different choices to a large degree, I became a determinist. Because I think that we do have volition, and it is an important part of our make up, I am a compatibilist - I think that free will and determinism can be reconciled. Anyways, the truth is more important than anything else.
I suppose my position could be termed less "direct realism" than "transcendental realism". I just made up that term, but I think it agree with the vague concept of "transcendentalism" qua Emerson, which isn't so surprising, as it was reflection on the continental post-Kantian line of philosophy that got me to this position, and I do thinking about it end up agreeing with the transcendentalists (to the degree I understand them) in just about every branch of philosophy. (Incidentally, my 'Pagan' philosophical conclusions in all but name ocurred prior to any sympathy with Paganism beyond the artistic and unserious speculations). Well, I am still a scientific empiricist. In fact, it was the amount of speculation in philosophy that drove me towards scientific empiricism. It seemed that too many people thought that they could figure out the world in their heads without testing any ideas. So it is only to the degree that an idea has a means of verification that I take it seriously. When we decide what that would be, we can then assess the idea and see what effects it would have on the world, whether it is testable etc.
On Mystical Experience
I know the varieties of mystical experience that you speak of and my scientific empiricism leads me to regard them the same way - as things we can analyze reductively. The main reason I do not militantly fight the interpretations by the mystic having them (that border on or exemplify what Rand might term "irrationality") too strenuously is that people I consider to have considerable intelligence sometimes defend them strongly, and I am not open to the simple rejoinder that they are insane for intellectually satisfactory reasons (practical reasons are another story). I'm more interested in why the experiences happen.
In some cases, the wiring of the human brain might be the cause. There is a mental phenomenon that has a person experiencing colors when seeing numbers. It is being studied in detail by the eminent neuroscientist, Ramachandran.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecture4.shtml
However, I know how insulting I might sound to people who feel the full force of their mystical experiences and ascribe them to something inexplicable in rational terms. I will have to leave my nuanced view of that issue for another time, but I do have my prejudices.
On Hallucinations and Dualism
Many people erroneously think that dualism of all kinds, including epistemological and representational dualism, started with religion. That is partly because of the fact that religion relied on a mind-body dualism to defend spirituality and free will.
Far from it - epistemological and representational dualism both started with external realism. It was the fact that people could be wrong about their epistemological claims because they were in error, hallucinating, dreaming etc. that led them to consider an objective reality apart from themselves and to some degree independent of their ideas.
Therefore, while many philosophers who have scientific world views fought against epistemological dualism in the 20h century, thinking that they could supplant it with some form of direct realism, they all failed. There is no way to maintain an objective external reality without epistemological dualism, unless you want to redefine the terminology.
To be fair to these philosophers, their direct realism was partly a response to the idealism that commanded the world in the 19th century, but even that idealism, in its most objective forms, admitted epistemological dualism. It was the explanation for the external world ("the mind of God") that modern science has called into doubt. But some scientists still believe that they are studying the mind of God. However, semantic quibbles are not my forte. As long as you admit there is an external objective world, call it the mind of God, Nature or reality, as long as you are not trying to claim that you have mystical insight into it, but are ready to subject your claims to rational and empirically motivated criticism, we are all in agreement.
It is paradoxical that "The Primacy of Existence" defies defence by the argument that we are directly in contact with existence. But paradox is always confused with irrationality only by those who never consider the hard issues.
But my original point was that the separation of you from your ideas on the basis of the claim that you directly perceive external objects cannot be supported if you believe in an objective external reality. Otherwise, all your errors and hallucinations in judging physical phenomena would be part of the external world. So would every perspective from which you viewed a desk - they would not be one entity, but many disparate entities.
On Entertainment and Literary Style in Philosophy
I have no doubt that one can be entertained by even pedantic philosophy, but my point is that I would prefer that the author be boring, as long as he treated the philosophical issues with the right reasoning approach, as opposed to his being witting and exciting, and riding over all the empathetic and rational distinctions and arguments that constitute my ideal of good philosophic writing.
I respect reasonableness. I guess that is, if I am permitted to psychologize, partly because I am more conservative than you are. I do not try to argue against society as much as I try to understand it.
I am still an elitist of sorts, but that is because I think that reality objectively created certain sorts of people with better endowments for doing one thing than the other. This is an empirical issue, and should not be construed as some a priori defense of whatever calls itself elitist on this or that point.
Analytic philosophy tries to ally itself with science while keeping tradition alive, and since science has improved material existence the most amongst all major methodologies claiming to find the truth, I guess I am far more willing to you to live with the "dryness" of analytical philosophy IF that is the source and consequence of the dryness. I'm not sure that the alternative would be much better, given that traditional philosophy was often rationalistic. In reality, a choice often excludes others, so I think philosophy is doing well supporting science. Self-help books and ancient texts have filled enough shelves!
Cheers :).
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