Why The Dialectic?

One of the most well-known ideas introduced by Plato is "truth is justified true belief". This appears in Theaetetus as the third theory of what knowledge is which is associated with belonging to Plato. 

What is true must be known by the subject, they must believe it. The Sophists appeared to agree with that, and so would relativists today. "Man is the measure of all things" Protagoras is supposed to have said. The Sophists instead of dialectic taught rhetoric, to win the argument through appearances to change the mind of opponent, not to discover the truth or continue the discussion. They did this often for payment, seeing knowledge's value as instrumental.

But belief isn't enough says Socrates. Belief must have external support. The English word truth derives from treowth which means something like good faith. What does good mean, if it isn't just having faith? It is external. But more than that; what is external must somehow also be linked to what is good.

In The Republic book I, Socrates gets Thrasymachus the critic of the utility of justice to accept that the good for any person requires knowledge. A good doctor must have knowledge of medicine and of the human body to be a good doctor. Anything that exists has a nature to it. Living to its full potential is what defines its own good. If one hand does not move, it is not a good watch as it cannot tell accurate time which is what a watch is supposed to do. The good of something entails knowledge of what that thing is. 

For something to be good it must serve some end. The good of a watch for me is that it can prevent me from being late to work among other things. In general the end of anything, the highest good, is happiness. It must be that for the "soul" or mind that it has its own nature that defines its own good which is our highest good. The soul or mind's nature is that which superintends our own actions. All of our actions have the end of our happiness. The good of the soul is to command our actions to the fulfillment of our happiness according to the nature of what we happen to be commanding for that purpose. Thus it is that knowledge requires belief of what is true, of the nature of what we hold beliefs of. (This is essentialism, that the essence of something is the criterion of true statements). This is Plato's specific view of what makes something true. Even if one does not accept essentialism, knowledge still can scrutinize the patterns of our own thinking and the biases within.

To have knowledge is to have belief which is also justified by what is true. What is justification? It is to have a reason for a belief.

The Apology lays ground for why knowledge must be justified. Socrates tells the story of a friend who asked the Oracle of Delphi who is the wisest person. The Oracle answered that it was Socrates. Socrates was puzzled by this as surely other people know more than he does on plenty of things. But there is something that he knows that most others do not. That is he knows he knows nothing. Most people think they know something, where they really just have an opinion or prejudice. Socrates is the wisest because he admits he does not think he knows anything, which is the source of hubris.

Elsewhere in Plato's dialgogues such as Meno is the paradoxical idea that one already has to know something in order to know it. That is have the potential or capacity for knowledge. The task of philosophy is to discern whether one really does in fact already know what they assume to know. 

This need for justification is where the dialectic comes from. A belief is presented, assumed to be true. Then another proposed truth which is acknowledged to be believed by both sides. Then the principle of non-contradiction, over whether it is possible to believe these different things to be true according some common non-conflicting notion of truth. This cross examination begins with the belief and does not end until the belief stands up to asserted criticisms or is denied or changed. 

Just as with Plato's tripartite definition of knowledge as true justified belief, the dialectic asserts belief, demands justification, and ends with the truth contained within this belief which may be naught. 

My Secret Doctrine

We humans don't live in the real world. We are trapped in our conceptions of space and time, and much of the content of our lives has been manipulated from its original meaning by language.

The real world is what comes to us via perception. Being as being. All things belonging together. Anything that can ever be "known", that is divided into the familiar categories of subject and object, is and can have as its basis only what is perception. Exempt from causal thinking, from space, time and all judgement.

Most of this is not subject to conscious thought. Self consciousness attributes to "the world" essentially what is beyond its control, its will. And yet always this self has some sort of notion of what these objects are. In reality, self-consciousness divides itself. For this knowing subject exists in a knowing relation with these objects, and itself takes an object for its existence to be real (the meaning of the cogito).

If this is true, that at all times we stand in relation to everything and in some way distance ourselves from everything, then why don't we think this way more often?

The answer is that we don't live in the real world. The self emerged from the nothingness produced by the vicissitudes of the struggle for life.

For the perpetuation of existence in its myriad animal modes, the transient individual is in a constant struggle with the world by its very nature. Being individuated in space and time, realizing this as the species gains conscious awareness, and gaining recollection of the past through memory, the individual's realization is only possible because of their impending death. This is because the individual separates from the world by its own praxis, preserving itself from a return to its undifferentiated state or a transformation into something else. This is what is common all animal life, the instinct to live.

Yet even this is not enough. Thought eventually develops to the realization of its estrangement from the world and transience. The only escape, while continuing to live, is to somehow end this alienation from the world. By either transforming it, or subverting to its "will". In either case, motivated by a desire to see itself in the world.

It is quite hard and in the end futile for the individual to transform the world in their image, so the other route is more common. To submit to the will of another (more like an-other). This necessitates on the part of who submits to identity with the master, otherwise it would pointless and death would be a more definite way of ending the alienation of individuated existence.

Thus begin the lies which inform the content of our lives. To convince ourselves and each other that our individual station in life relates to the world in a meaningful way. Using words, we can make the lesser appear the stronger and vice versa.

Philosophy can free us from the lies, but can't in my opinion give us anything positive. That is the problem. Thought takes us away from the real world of direct perception. That is the point.

The developed individual self-conscious cannot forever resist the return.

This is the real world: pain, pleasure, and the will.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
General Remarks Transcendental Doctrine of Elements II.

"In confirmation of this theory of the ideality of the external as well as internal sense, consequently of all objects of sense, as mere phenomena, we may especially remark, that all in our cognition that belongs to intuition contains nothing more than relations. The feelings of pain and pleasure, and the will, which are not cognitions, are excepted"

The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Arthur told us to read this as the introduction to The World as Will and Representation, and boy was he right. Schopenhauer explains his treatment of Kant's philosophy so succinctly that WWR is really an exposition of what is written here. The strangest thing about Schopenhauer to me when i first approached him was his fixation on causality. You don't find a lot of thinkers so fascinated with the principle of sufficient reason. It is usually taken as a given. But it does form the basis of his whole system, which is why this is the proper introduction to his thought. 

Before reading this, it is necessary to have some familiarity with Plato and Kant, as Schopenhauer also told us in the introduction to WWR. The two things that one must approach this work which are found in Plato and Kant are 1) there is a difference between how the world appears to us and how it really is (Plato) & 2) we cannot go from this appearance to the thing in itself; the division of subject and object is fundamental (Kant). 

Given these two insights, the purpose of this work is to explore what Schopenhauer thinks is the general rule governing what we can know, which manifests itself in any attempt to understand "the world". It is also helpful to read Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's philosophy to understand how Schopenhauer's treatment of the division of subject and object differs from that of Kant. The difference is that Arthur took the idealism associated with George Berkeley seriously. That is, an object is known by a subject and cannot be considered as just "out there". Without the subject the world as object disappears. The "external" world is in some way connected to us, as we are to it. It goes both ways. 

Most importantly, it is downright foolish and misleading to say that objects "cause" our representations. For causality is something that our knowing mind projects onto reality. Again without the knowing subject this world as object disappears, and so we cannot say these objects cause our sensations. Rather they are responsible for them, we attribute to these objects a reason. But if we try that, we must then explain how it is they are responsible for these effects, and so we discover that the principle of sufficient reason is fundamental to understanding and cannot be invoked to explain "the world" or "the thing in itself". It is imparted by our own consciousness. 

What the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason does is to ground sufficient reason as an explanation for various things we know, but not to invoke an explanation for it. That would require going to this noumenal world (which is dealt with in WWR). 

Sufficient reason is just that something is only explained with reference to something else. This being based on the fundamental division of subject and object. Both have no meaning without the other. It is owing to the basic relation between different things that a reason is to be provided for something, which only is in relation to what else is. 

The four classes are becoming (law of causality), knowing (reason), being (space & time), and motives (action or will). These can be thought to correspond to what are called the classical laws of thought. Schopenhauer acknowledges the four:

1) a subject is equal to the sum total of its predicates. Law of identity, a=a

2) no predicate can be attributed and denied to a subject at the same time. Law of non-contradiction, a=-a=0. 

3) one of two opposite, contradictory predicates must belong to every subject. Law of the excluded middle. A is not A and B

4) truth is the reference of a judgement to something outside of it, as its sufficient reason. 

The class of becoming corresponds to identity as like things can only be explained by like things, which shall always demand explanation. The effect is known by its cause and can contain only that. 

The class of knowing corresponds to non-contradiction. Among our representations, they may only follow from those of their type.

The class of being corresponds to excluded middle. Space and time allow for multiplicity and coexistence (space) and succession (time), thus a relation between the two as well as a difference. 

The class of motives corresponds to sufficient reason. This is because it is through the immediate object of the inner sense (time) alone that we come to know the principle of causality at first through the law of causality and then its other groundings. 

This conflation of the four laws of thought with the four roots is largely mine, though Schopenhauer does list the four laws in this way, as what he calls metalogical truths, governing the second class (of reason). I hope this conflation is accurate. If it is, then it is a splendidly easy way to understand this work. Together, the four laws of thought and the four roots explain everything. That i think Schopenhauer would assent to, even if I matched them incorrectly. 

The big point to all this is that the principle of sufficient reason and therefore all we can know is a result of the division of world into subject and object. It is that simple. Without this division, things wouldn't follow one after another, they would just be. But they could not "be" in a meaningful way without this division. 

The relevant part for his more popular ethical and aesthetic writings is the fourth class. This immediate motive power as will be shown in the World as Will and Representation is our direct access away from representation to the thing in itself.

If Schopenhauer is right about the principle of sufficient reason being "sufficient" to explain the different classes of knowing, then Kant's Procrustean table of judgements is reduced from twelve categories to one; causality. The end result of this is that it is possible to have intuitions without concepts. And thereby have access to the mysterious thing-in-itself. The route to this is the inner sense of time, where we experience an endless chain of causation where one thing becomes another, and an individual thing means nothing outside of its relation to other things. Just as the future makes no sense without a present or a past. 

We can perhaps escape our own individuated existence and learn the true nature of things. Which cannot be God, whose existence is reasoned to misapplying the principle of sufficient reason (cosmological and ontological arguments) outside of human consciousness to the universe itself. The underlying nature of reality is itself unconscious. It is not rational. Yet it is intimately connected to our conscious life. Not as a cause, but as one in the same as the world as it appears to us. 

Der Wille.

Thoughts on Civilization (and Its Discontents)

Freud is remarkably consistent in his worldview throughout psychology, religion, and politics. Here he takes his grand theory of everything to its latest manifestation, civilization. Civilization is a thing actively created. The original German title called it kultur, which derives from Latin cultus, to cultivate. Civilization is defined as what isn't natural, yet unlike a kingdom of God or a supernatural realm it is imperfect as we work on what is given under conditions not of our choosing.

For Freud civilization is the most difficult thing to achieve, what ultimately sets us apart from the animals. He starts out the book discussing what happiness is. He claims rightfully so that we can never be happy for more than a short time as satisfying one desire opens up others, and that satisfaction given the world of scarcity comes at something else's expense and is done at excess of too much or too little.

 "Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures."

Freud's comprehensive worldview begins with the law of conservation of energy. In our closed system the amount of energy stays the same or decreases with every use. Nothing is free. Organisms are the matter complexes which resist entropy, homogeneity with the environment, reproducing themselves and evolving to more complex forms which can overcome the environment. This is done with a major expense of energy from the organism to convert other living things, plants and animals, to energy. The activity of living drains the life force of the organism. Only by growing more sophisticated means of energy conversion like eating and eventually tool making can the organism escape death, a return to the original unorganized form of matter it emerged from at great cost.

Reproduction allows the individual organism to cheat death by passing on its genes. Offspring come from the organism and especially in mammals are cared for as one cares for one self. But the care come to take on a new meaning because younglings are the ticket to immortality. Of course simple creatures aren't conscious of this, but their basic drive to live evolves pleasure organs to facilitate reproduction, and it's genes would select a kind of altruism of the individual organism towards its children (using Neo-Darwinian theory here, which parallels many of Freud's theories.)

So then comes human beings who are aware of their death and gain a transcendental value to being loved by others, and having that love outlast them by the products of their copulation, the animal act. Our happiness becomes dependent on others. The ego emerges from this awareness of self and seeks immediate gratification from the world around it. When it fails and becomes disheartened, it seeks to destroy this world of desires and return to the original simple form. This death wish is manifested through aggression to others.

So there is an inherent struggle within human nature, between the pursuit of happiness and the difficulty of attaining it, especially from others. Freud mentions communism, the utopia of his day, as a false solution to this struggle not economically, which he doesn't think is impossible, but in terms of abandoning aggression which he argues has a metaphysical basis rather than being the result of property. We must love one another to live, but are frustrated when it is not returned.

So far nothing terribly new except for the thermodynamic metaphors. But here is Freud's innovative view civilization: we have to get people to thwart their own desires. We must limit our desires, like the desire to rape and abuse, to have social harmony which is at the same time can be antithetical to our desires. The ego will only do this by being inflicted with punishment, as the life force can't be alienated. For Freud political order follows social order which follows individual order. When no one is looking, we won't obey the taboos. What society must do is internalize that social pressure, making it feel as if there is always a parental figure watching us. This for Freud is the origin of religious experience as a return to the desired primordial state of oneness with the mother, the oceanic feeling, corresponding with a human face we crave. Religion makes it so we can see the father in the universe as well, providing order.

Freud established this earlier in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 1922.  "In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent, and so from the very first Individual Psychology is at the same time Social Psychology as well." The superego internalizes social authority through a reconnection of nature as something like us. We anthromorphize nature to make it feel as the eye of others is everywhere. The purpose of this is to keep the pain of guilt with us at all times. We restrain ourselves out a desire to serve a lover which will never leave us and is greater than anyone.

The pain of living in society which limits the ego's satisfaction of the id is transferred towards ourselves. This is why most religions and moral codes are altruistic, which means putting putting others ahead of yourself. Altruism is not really egalitarian; the individual is often the loser. Freud followed Nietzsche in Moses and Monotheism 1939 arguing that the Jews took this to an extreme with a fundamental belief in human wickedness with salvation only for a certain group who practices strict self-denial. Something future Abrahamic Faith's like Christianity and Islam as well as modern Western society adopted in their own unique forms.

The lesson for politics is that individual repression, not oppression, is the basis of social control. By oppression I mean blunt force from an external ruler. If this was the case no one would follow the law except in public when the police were around. Repression is force by yourself. You want to be controlled, not by another person but an abstract ideal lover, be it your parental ideal, God or "the people." The ruling class's power comes from taboos already being internalized into the people who are able to be ruled over.

Oppression is external rule and repression is internal rule. However it seems much more desirable to have a society in which individuals repress themselves than one in which people must be forced to do what is socially agreeable. It is also better to have repressing agents such as religion be separate from the state, to have civil society in addition to political society. Economic progress is also something that relies on self-denial, which is based on an anal character learned early in life during potty training, a time when parents and not government are the most important. Martin Luther from whom the Protestant work ethic eventually comes from thought of the doctrine of "solo fide", faith alone, while on the toilet. And so family values early in life and not government contributes more to developing the capitalist spirit, so government interference in the market should also take a backseat to family in cultivating virtue. That would be the "ideal" society; the late Victorianism, Gilded Age, Fin de Siecle that Freud lived in.

Another take from Civilization and its Discontents is that even though the motives for vice can't be eliminated, they can be repressed into more socially useful forms, called sublimation. This is why I think drugs even if always with us shouldn't be encouraged. But they reflect the basic driving force of life, pleasure, their continued use can be put into more positive things like funding education or supplementing the tax burden. Vice unlike evil can be shaped into better behavior, which is why we are amazed by the skills criminals have and how better life would be if they were put to different use. This jars with the repression aspect; if vice can be good then why should restrictions be tolerated? We must be rational, that's why. Follow the reality principle; that satisfaction of some of our desires must either be delayed due to immediate external circumstances or will be harmful in the future. Just like nature imposes objective demands on us which makes us delay satisfaction, so does society which is Freud's thesis here.

I think what Freud wanted to do was to give social morality a basis in the naturalist/scientific worldview as he felt that religion was losing its grip. While Freud thought the decline of religious belief was a good thing, there is the possibility of throwing out the good and the bad. Guilt, repression, sublimation, and altruism are necessary for society to ultimately limit aggression and channel pleasure to socially useful channels. So Freud, as accused by Richard Webster, was actually trying to justify Judeo-Christian morals and Victorian-liberal social values using thermodynamic and Darwinian theories from his late 19th century education of Herman Helmholtz and Ernst Haeckel. I think he was, and there's nothing wrong about it.

"Freud genuinely believed that, by invoking evolutionary biology in the manner that he did, he was using science to sweep away superstition and introduce a new view of human nature. His real achievement in creating psychoanalysis, however, was to hide superstition beneath the rhetoric of reason, and by doing this succeed in reintroducing a very old view of human nature. By portraying the unconscious or the ‘id’ as a seething mass of unclean impulses, and seeing men and women as driven by dark sexual and sadistic impulses and a secret love of excrement which was associated with a compulsion to hoard money, Freud in effect recreated Swift’s Christian vision of “unregenerate man” as a Yahoo. By casting his intense moral vision in an ostensibly technical form he had, it would seem, succeeded in reinventing for a modern scientific age the traditional Christian doctrine of Original Sin." Richard Webster Why Freud Was Wrong 1995

The Ego and the Id

The ego and the id describes the structural model that is now common knowledge; the id, ego, and superego. Prior to this, Freud used the topographical model of unconscious, pre-conscious, and conscious. The notion of the unconscious having explanatory power over conscious life is the essence of psychoanalysis. The essay begins with this, and then proceeds to lay out the limitations of the topographical model. The question is how does the unconscious get into the pre-conscious. There must be a censor of some sort which part of it which censors the unconscious is itself unconscious. But how would this fit into the topographical model, a mechanism which straddles the conscious and unconscious? Here comes the structural model of id, ego, and superego. The ego operates according to the reality principle, restraining the pleasure principle of the id. The ego can therefore be conscious and unconscious so long as it operates to both fulfill the demands of the id and the limits of the external world. Because of the ego, we can sustain long periods of unease so long as there is an opportunity to find pleasure down the road.

Freud's concept of pleasure and pain described in the prior essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a pessimistic one. Happiness is a sort of equilibrium, stability. It is pain that is a motivator to act. "Any given process originates in an unpleasant state of tension, i.e. with avoidance of pain or the production of pleasure". The pursuit of happiness is conservative, about conserving energy. Action doesn't reach toward any final goal, it is motivated by a quantitative disturbance. Pain and pleasure are only relevant according to this disturbance in the investment of energy. This energy "psychophysics" is beyond this book, but it does give insight into how nuanced Freud's argument is. This is the paradox of psychoanalysis, sometimes it appears to fit in with natural science. But then psychoanalysis posits unobservable explanations for naturalistic phenomena. However these unobservable explanations aren't supernatural. The job of the ego is to manage the expenditure of energy (called cathexis: the investing of energy into an object) to meet the competing demands of reality and the pleasure of the id. It may not be observable or measurable like the "physical" world but it is limited by it.

The ego is epiphenomenal. It rides atop the objective world described by physics and the unconscious realm of the id. Freud gives the metaphor of a man riding a horse, whose success entails satisfying the needs of the horse. He gets his power from the horse, his job is to direct the horse for his own needs as a conscious director working according to his foresight of environmental challenges (has a map I guess? I'm going a bit behind Freud's metaphor). But there is another demand on the poor ego, the superego. The superego is more complicated than I thought it was. Apparently it also gets its power from the unconscious despite being abstract. The superego is social morality. Although it seems abstract and universal like religion, it is inherently social. It emerges from the Oedipal desire to kill the father and love the mother. As this is not possible for the child, the child identifies with the father and seeks another woman to love. The female can also identify with the father apparently, but this isn't explained too much in this book. What happens is that the destructive desire of repressing the Oedipal desire becomes an ideal-self for the ego to achieve. The ego cannot fulfill its desire for the mother and hate for the father and must identify with them, and so the achievement of this is spurned by a negative emotion; guilt. This is explained in depth in other writings like Totem and Taboo, but the point is that the superego is an ideal ego which gets its power from repressed unconscious desire which internalizes social restriction.

With this tripartite model, conscious life seems very strained and weak. Freud says in Civilization and Its Discontents that "life as we find it is too hard for us". There are so many competing demands for the conscious self. The instincts, the external world, social obligations, and morality. But this is the cost of being a complex organism. Freud mentions that the long period of dependence on the parents from our Mammalian nature is responsible for this feeling of helplessness. We require so much to go right for us because of the complexity of our energy management and the limits of our budget. So we need to recognize the shortcuts that unconscious forces give us.

At the end of the Interpretation of Dreams Freud consoles us by saying we should not be held responsible for the seemingly immoral desires of the unconscious life.

"I think that the Roman emperor was wrong when he had one of his subjects executed because he had dreamt of murdering the emperor...would it not be right to bear in mind Plato's dictum that the virtuous man is content to dream what a wicked man really does? I think it best, therefore, to acquit dreams."

At the end of Ego and Id, he assured us that the id is neither moral or immoral. The superego of conscious is what provides morality. But we should not pretend that civilization can rid us of these undesirable feelings. These instincts in a controlled way make society and morality possible, and sure do take a load off of us. Surely the ego is at least strong enough to allow us to manage the instincts, fulfilling their needs.

Sensuous Animals and the Birth of Misery

Animals confront their own emptiness in the form of nature, external to its will, as a sensuous object. The sensuous object is an immediate object to consciousness, but it's continuation in existence forces the animal to confront its independence of the animals will. Those objects favorable and unfavorable to the animal will, the expression of its being outside the object, share an alien nature which must be overcome. The emptiness of animal life necessitates this domination of nature. The animal negates nature by the act of consuming it, destroying its alien-ness and adapting it to what is favorable to the animal will.

¨In this respect, what one can say to those who make assertions about the truth and reality of sensuous objects is that they should be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, namely, to the old Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus and that they have yet to learn the mystery of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. This is so because the person who has been initiated into these secrets not merely comes to doubt the being of sensuous things. Rather, he is brought to despair (Verzweiflung) of them; in part he brings about their nothingness, and in part he sees them do it to themselves. Nor are the animals excluded from this wisdom. To an even greater degree, they prove themselves to be the most deeply initiated in such wisdom, for they do not stand still in the face of sensuous things, as if those things existed in themselves. Despairing of the reality of those things and in the total certainty of the nullity of those things, they, without any further ado, simply help themselves to them and devour them. Just like the animals, all of nature celebrates these revealed mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.¨ Hegel-Phenomenology of Spirit

The act of negation is brought on by the despair of animal life. Animal existence is perpetuated by need, a lack of something. The lack of an object which belongs to consciousness. The being of sense certainty disappears with the separate will of nature. The vicissitudes of change, comprehended by the category of causality in the understanding undergirded by space and time, are what give power to the objects of consciousness. To have power of its own, consciousness must itself identify with sensuous objects. But it cannot be an identical relation.

Need results from the reality of nothingness. Only humans have the fear of death as animal life only fears deprivation of what is.

"The only good things he knows in the universe are food, a female and repose, and the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain and not death, because an animal will never know what it is to die; and knowledge of death and its terrors being one of the first acquisitions which man gains on leaving the animal condition." Jean Jacques Rousseau

Accordingly only humans or those animals approaching human consciousness have the capacity of self-improvement, which requires foresight. The foresight humans have, which undergirds reason, can be explained in physiological terms. But the impetus to greater intelligence is not a directive of nature. The overwhelming majority of life discovered so far is rather unintelligent or it is of a crude nature serving only survival. To contemplate ones existence is to remove the self from understanding the sensuous objects and their vicissitudes and understand them according to how one understands one self.

"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die." Friedrich Nietzsche-On Truth and Lie

We understand things according to our own empty nature, imaging that nature has teleology. That there is a purpose to the course of natural events.

Yes consciousness is empty. When we consider what can be said of sensuous objects that remains essential to them, it is the intuitions of space and time. But this reality is colorless, tasteless, soundless, odorless, and numb. To give content to consciousness is to engage with the sensuous objects

The truth is that the necessity of thought lies only in thought. It is by consciousness' own rules, its own necessity. Continually striving to identity with nature through unity, consciousness does impart necessity through its own actions but only to itself.

This loneliness that accompanies even the achievement of power over nature is where the need of recognition from another self-consciousness derives. Another consciousness makes the order and unity which thought provides to nature, through its relations, objective. We are not alone. Yet the existence of another consciousness limits the power of consciousness into self-consciousness. Moving beyond sense-certainty is self-certainty

Self-conscious self-certainty is also empty. Its needs derive from a lack of connection to nature rather than a lack of power over nature. To say I is I means almost nothing. It is in relation to something else that consciousness has any meaning.

The highest of our needs becomes embodied in social relations emptied of their sensual content, in the form of abstract ideas which retain the force of an alien will. This is the monotheist's God, which gives ethical demands but is not knowable to the senses. It is defined by its abstract power; omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent. The Gods of the pagans were closer to humans, but differed in the scope of their powers.

It is fitting that many of the philosophical arguments for God give the necessity of logical reasoning causal powers, which belong to the physical world. If I can conceive of the greatest possible being, then that entails its actual existence outside of thought. Unlike the emptiness of logical abstraction, God gets its appeal because being conscious itself it in some way is not limited by nature the way we are. Being all powerful, God is in the monotheist tradition usually the creator of the entire universe while being so powerful as to exist apart from it. The argument goes that if God made the universe then it follows whatever laws it wants. They need no justification, and the principle of sufficient reason is suspended. Sui Causa, self causation. Self explained. God is the thing in itself of sorts. God has power over nature, consciousness that isn't empty.

We thus see that man did not develop in isolation. Belief in God is a sign of the evolution of self-conscience. 

Empty Space, and Me

"Life itself is only a vision. A dream. Nothing is real except empty space, and you. And you are but a thought."

"It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, there's a monster at the end of it."

The Market and Care

The idea behind commerce is that I do something for you not because I care about you, but because I can get something else from you. There is something impersonal and inauthentic about it. It takes many people to make a single pencil, but they don't even know each other or care about each other.

Adam Smith the father of free market economics summed up the operation of the market likewise: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest"

What kind of society can be held together without benevolence? Without love? We can get our meals, but will subsist in a world foreign to our own humanity. Our world separated from ourselves. Others having only instrumental value in our lives.

They are strangers, but they are involved in our lives in an intimate way. We depend on these people for our material subsistence. And yet we don't care about them. We do need them. We are more dependent than ever on others thanks to the market. The market is an intensely social relationship. But an impersonal, cold relationship. Imagine a family running like that.

Market exchange values individuals only extrinsically, not intrinsically. As means to an end and not an end in themselves. When we do something because it makes us happy, the value of the activity or thing is intrinsically rewarding. It ceases to be a thing foreign, in opposition to ourselves. When we do something in order to get something else, we see no inherent value in the activity or thing and are willing to dispose of or cease using when it doesn't procure what else we want.

Why not care for those whom we depend for our daily bread? As opposed to the absurdity of the atomic isolated individual dependent on the labor of others.

Nobody prefers the impersonal with people they care about. Nobody wants to be inauthentic with things they care about. Why not apply this thinking to society?

This is why I say a market economy yes, but a market society no!

Theaetetus by Plato

"If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else"

Yogi Berra

Plato's dialogue Theaetetus takes on what we call today epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Socrates, Theaetetus, and Theodorus attempt to answer the question "what is knowledge?."

Put forward first is the doctrine that perception is knowledge. This is what the sophist Protagoras taught, that "man is the measure of all things." What is true for me is true for me, and what is true for you is true for you. If you feel cold and I feel hot, we are both right because we feel so. I may have a fever and you do not. In our own situations, we are both correct about the states we are individually in. 

This is rejected as a basis of knowledge because it is contradictory that we are both right. It is true that what everyone says is true? Then how can anything be wrong? If nothing is wrong, then that doesn't give us a meaningful definition of what knowledge is. People have contradictory opinions which cannot be reconciled. God exists and doesn't exist? You may believe God doesn't exist and I do. But we both cannot both right. We are in this case talking about the same thing which cannot both be and not be. 

171a " In saying that everyone believes what is the case, he is conceding the truth of beliefs which oppose his own; in other words, he is conceding the truth of the opinion that he is wrong"

The dialogue also takes on the Heraclitean philosophy that everything is in flux, and things can both be and not be. Everything is becoming, not being or not being. Everything becomes its opposite and is defined by its opposite. Hot things become cold and living things die. This we perceive all around us. What is true at one time is not true another moment. Today this doctrine is called moral relativism. Just look at how slavery used to be acceptable 150 years ago, and is still practiced in certain parts of the world. There is a right and wrong, but this is always changing. It is different for every culture and time period. The Heraclitean philosophy accounted for opposites like truth and falsehood, but argued that opposites were co-dependent and therefore constantly changing. 

The problem with this doctrine is that if everything is changing, it is not perceived. For how can we perceive what not is? The "negation" of something is relative and requires some basis of what either is or was. It isn't perception if not of something. 

182e "So if everything is changing in all respects, we shouldn't talk of seeing something rather than not seeing it, and any other perception is no more perception than not perception

But perception is not knowledge either as said before. Rather it is reason which distinguishes what something from what it isn't. It is true that things change, but also that we have an idea of what something is even if it has changed. If not, how could we come to know change? Also, memory stores knowledge of a past perception of something which as the Heracliteans would say is no more. Yet we still have a notion of this thing which no longer is what it was. 

186d "Therefore knowledge is not located in immediate experience, but in reasoning about it, since the latter ,apparently, but not the former, makes it possible to grasp being and truth."

Now the conversation turns to a new definition of knowledge: true belief. What we hold in the mind about being reflects what the thing we think about actually is. Belief is an internal affirmation about something which exists. A statement about ourselves, related to something existing. A true belief corresponds to its object. This definition of knowledge admits truth and falsehood which corresponds to something independently existing.

The issue here is how to distinguish between true and false belief. It isn't as if the person who has a false belief knows they are wrong. Otherwise it wouldn't be false to that person. It is either that said person knows what is true and false and confuses them, or they know neither. But how could someone confuse what is true and false, without already knowing what is true and false? How could they personally believe in what they know to be wrong? I'm speaking consciously here. This obviously is absurd.

199d "although knowledge is present, it is possible for the mind to know nothing and be ignorant of everything"

The final attempt to provide a definition of knowledge is justified true belief or true belief with an account. What is true surely has defining features to it. A whole is not more than its parts. So if we can determine the "markers" of something, we have knowledge of it. Yet, 203b "how can one say what the elements are?" If something is what it is, as a single thing, then how can any one thing be an indicator of it, unless it is the thing we're looking for? Can one know the elements without already knowing what they belong to? And if they belong exclusively to that, then do we already know what we're looking for? 204a "Because where there are parts, the whole is identical to the parts." 

The answer to this dilemma is that one can only know to be true and false what one already knows to be true and false. There needs to prior knowledge in the mind, which has as its source something actually existing. For the idea to be true about the external world must have some objective basis in this real world. 

209d "we still need correct belief about the uniqueness of things whose uniqueness we already have correct belief about!"

209e "we require something we already have, in order to get know what we believe."

This is why according to Plato we need a innate ideas. That always have their basis in reality. In that they derive from a prior experience with the object, or are built into our minds from birth. Or that our minds have access to a non-sensual world of forms which allows us to recognize their transient forms in the ever-changing universe described by Heraclitus. 

Saint-Simonian Conservatism

Suppose I'm a Saint-Simonian. I've always liked to see the state divided into sovereign and administrative sides. I see the great challenge of politics as bringing together enough competing important interests to support a state or prevent independent centers of power. Like church or aristocracy. It is best to incorporate them into the state. In that way I'm a pluralist. Society is not composed of abstract individuals, but social groups. I don't see things in terms of class only, but more in terms of equal dignity to the class without property and largest in number. The harmony of class interests is what I'm into. Politics as I see it evolves more and more into a struggle for identity. Of the recognition of unique interests in the state. A successful state should reflect the people. Not atomically, but in moral terms. Though I am a fan of strong leadership and a strong state above these interests. United by common morality, and able to subdue independent power sources, mass discontent, insurgency, and foreign invasion.

Once we figure that out, we can put society on an incline as Louis Blanc said. That is the "easier" side of politics in terms of figuring out what we want. It is course difficult to make it work. I do think that at points of history there comes a settled consensus of what a civilization should be.

Above all, I believe in the market economy but not the market society. Moral and social concerns should trump economic concerns. I don't pretend like socialists do that capitalism is fundamentally flawed or doomed. It works well for what it does. But like Irving Kristol I don't give it the third cheer because it can override social and moral concerns. And the other cheer for personal freedom I'm not always sure is warranted. Freedom is not a universal right.

I suppose I'm a modernist conservative.
Reject historical materialism: Morality matters.
Reject radical individualism and egalitarianism: Which go hand in hand.
Embrace the strong state.
A limited pluralism
Market capitalism, division of labor, specialization good
Civil religion

Rousseauian Influence

"Man" in the objective sense is just another physical being. Desiring only the satisfaction of desires (or preferences) in accordance with his abilities which themselves would limit what man desires .

Self-preservation would only require knowledge of the immediate sensory world and by interaction with it what the individual can obtain.

Only the most rudimentary ideas would develop. By association of different experiences connected by memory. The only consideration of others outside an immediate interaction would be when an experience bring them to mind and what feelings are associated with them. A snapping of a branch may signify a predator, following my movements and not wanting to be discovered.

Yet, humans are not like this at all. We desire more than we can achieve on our own with what we can procure from nature. Self-consciousness is intermingled with other-consciousness.

Self-consciousness by itself rather empty.

Humans do not live in the objective world. The arrival of self-consciousness which defines human nature accompanies and is given purpose by social interaction. The lives of others cannot be directly experienced, either as an object or introspectively.

Review: Descartes' Principles of Philosophy

I'd give this five stars, but both editions I've come across, Barnes & Noble and a digital reprint from Amazon, do not contain the whole Principles of Philosophy. Much of the science is missing like a description of Descartes' laws of motion and his vortex theory of planetary motion. This is unfortunate because that is the main reason to read this today, as part of the history of scientific thought. What we get is the entire first book which summarizes the arguments in the Meditations, and moves onto a deeper elaboration of his ontology. This is the most interesting part of the book and is very important to understanding how Descartes relates to the Scholastic tradition. 

            

Basically, instead of ten categories like Aristotle had, we have three or four depending on how you look at it. There are substances, principle attributes, modes, and maybe accidents. Or substance, quality, quantity, and affection (maybe). Gone are relation, action, passivity, place, time, and position. Using the famous method of doubt, Descartes denies or severely scrutinizes Hylomorphism (that every form has a corresponding material object) by arguing that what we think corresponds to something actually existing could only be a fiction of the mind. Real as thought, but not objectively. Given that, formal reality is different from objective reality. Fire does not have its own form, but has both an ideational content (color, smell, heat) and objective material content (motion in space). Position is just how something is situated among other object. Time is the duration of something in existence, but not something in of itself (without space). 

For Aristotle a substance is an individual thing. For Descartes substance is a distinct thing, known conceptually. His new standard for ontology is how doubtable it is as something existing independently. And so substances are designated by innate ideas. What always accompanies my perception of material objects is what reflects their true and distinct nature, which is spatial extension. Whatever I can doubt about the reality of my thoughts, there is always thinking and its modes willing, feeling, affirming, denying. Only those objects of either these two substances, matter and mind, exist.

This was intended to a be a textbook to replace the Aristotelean/Scholastic curriculum in schools. The very way it was written shows. It is written in a fairly subjective way almost without reference to anybody else except the thoughts and musings of the author. Everything in the book is quite parsimonious, following from what is said in the first half of Book I. He even says in Book IV that "there is no phenomenon of nature whose explanation has been omitted in this treatise." A bold claim. I think he is right, if you accept his foundational presuppositions. Overall it reads like a synthesis of Scholastic/Medieval philosophy and materialism. He acknowledges that he "made no use of any principle which was not received and approved by Aristotle." And to today's readers I think he is right. The language he used seems archaic today. Offering a proof of God and talking about substance for instance. He briefly mentions Democritus, mostly to deny more influence from him than anybody else. He was probably talking like this to avoid conflict with Catholicism and avoid charges of atheism because he is in retrospect key to the materialist, mechanistic conception of the universe. Nonetheless I see a synthesis between the old and emerging "corpuscular" or atomistic views of the universe which reigned until around the 20th century.

The Categories of Existence: My Ontology Part 2

(Please read part one of my ontology first. Then look at the square at the bottom to understand where I'm leading to)

Now to the categories of what can exist. There are four:

(1) A substance is that being which is self-explanatory. Substance exists independent of anything else, and its nature is contained in itself (all predicates are in the subject). What can be said about it belongs to it alone both clearly and distinctly, although other things may reflect its properties. Substance has the most reality of what exists in its clarity and distinctness. Substance has four distinctions; infinite and finite, and pure and impure.

-An Infinite substance is that which all its modes are defining attributes, which it has a greater number than anything else. An infinite substance's essence entails its existence, for if anything can be known to exist at all it describes the infinite substance.

-A finite substance has a single essence defining attributes, and so only exists objectively if this particular attribute exists (ideationally).

-A pure substance has no parts other than itself as a whole. If broken down into smaller parts it loses its nature. If it can be divided further, it is not pure. 

-An impure substance can be divided into smaller parts while retaining its nature. 

Infinite substance has more objective reality than finite substance, and pure substance has more clarity than impure substance. An infinite pure substance is more real than a finite pure substance, while a finite pure substance has more reality than an infinite impure substance. There is not a pure, impure, infinite, or finite substance by themselves just as there is nothing which is true ideationally alone (C or p) or objectively alone (N or c). 

(2) An attribute is what belongs to a single substance and not another. They are distinct thoughts that are clear in what they represent. These are all innate modes. Also can be called quality, essence or defining mode. There are three attributes; perfection, thought, and extension. 

-Perfection. What is called perfect contains everything that can be said about it, and there is nothing else which is like it to be greater or lesser than. The concept of a square having four equal sides or a circle's points all being of equal distance from the origin. 

-Thought. Thought is what occurs with everything we do even in the absence of any objects of sense. This includes willing, doubting, judging, affirming, denying etc. Deprived of all senses, if we still think there is something to think about, ourselves, which has an objective existence. Thus we can think of ourselves and only ourselves. The activities which occur in regard to only ourselves and accompany anything we do. 

-Extension. What is extended takes up space, in more than one dimension, and can be divided into smaller parts. Whenever we imagine an object, we cannot conceive of it without being extended in space. We can imagine something without color or smell, but not without spatial extension. An extended thing can be divided further and further and be what it is, otherwise it is not extended. 

(3) Modes are ideas which themselves exist in regard to something they represent. Modes are intentional thoughts, they are about something. Also called quantity. Some modes however refer to consciousness, thought itself, and are not intentional in the same way. Modes are the different ways a substance can exist in thought, all having reality because they are thought and represent something. There are two kinds of modes; innate modes and caused modes. 

-Innate modes are those that are present to consciousness itself regardless of what is thought about, as if they inhere to mind substance. Yet they are not essential to mind substance, and so can belong to other things. 

-Caused modes arise from without consciousness and so are not as clear, yet they are intentional and so belong to something objective. 

(4) Accidents are ideas prior to any determination, present in thought yet not known to belong to anything outside of thought, even mind substance. Also referred to as affection or being affected. Accidents are neither clear nor distinct. Accidents are not essential to substances and their relation to the powers a substance has is unknown. There are two kinds of accidents; passions and the unconscious.

-A passion is present in thought, yet does not give us a clear idea of what the cause is nor whether it is essential to anything.

-The unconscious refers to a cause of ideas which is not a body or mind as we know them, and yet is not out of consideration. There is no clear notion of what the unconscious is, nor is it necessary to explain what we know. But it is not impossible. 

There are three substances which are determined by three attributes (essences, or defining modes) and by whether they are pure, impure, infinite, or finite. 

(1) Mind-pure,finite-thought

(2) Body-impure,finite-extension

(3) God-pure,infinite-perfection

There are two kinds of modes

(1) Innate Modes

(2) Caused Modes

And two kinds of accidents

(1) Passions

(2) The Unconscious

All together, we get:

Clarity	Distinctness
Substance	Pure>Impure, Infinite>Finite
Attribute ^	Perfection>Thought>Spatial Extension
Mode ^	Innate>Caused
Accident ^	Passion>unconscious

We have ten subcategories when we differentiate distinctiveness and clarity to the four general categories, in an ordinal rank.

1) Sfp= Mind Substance. Cc.

2) Sfi= Body Substance. Cc.

3) Sip= God Substance. NC. 

4) Ap= Perfection Attribute. NC. 

5) At= Thought Attribute. NC. 

6) Ae= Extension Attribute. NC. 

7) Mi= Innate Mode. Cc.

8) Mc= Caused Mode. Np. 

9) Ap= Passions Accident. pc.

10) Au= Unconscious Accident. pc.

All substances are clear. My existence as mind is clear, though it is contingent. The existence of bodies is clear, both empirically and as a concept, yet it could be that there are no bodies, at least as conceived. I can still think and have a mind (exist) without a body as mind is its own substance. God  is clear as being infinite, anything which exists describes this being, and God is necessary as nothing else is needed to explain what is said to be God, being perfect. 

(The c below N is lowercase c; the C above p is uppercase). 

Nicholas' Ontology: A Beginning

There are two ways something can be real. 

(1) As being thought, and (2) representing something objective (or thought about). 

(1) The first kind of reality, in thought, differs in degrees from the certain to the possible. 

(2) Representational or objective reality differs in degrees between the necessary to the contingent. 

Something can be, with these distinctions, more or less real. Something must have both ideational and objective reality, in addition to having either ideational or objective reality, to be real. Having an idea of something must refer to at least the objective reality of what has the idea, just as the reality of something objective is accompanied by an idea of it, otherwise it is not known at all. There is not something with only one kind of reality alone. Whatever is clear or possible is at least contingent, and whatever is necessary or contingent is at least possible. Though things can differ in degrees over how ideationally and objectively real they are. 

There are two reasons for the distinctions of ideational and representational reality. 

1) Subjectivity of knowledge. Being is established by perception, prior to any determination of what it is. What is present to me as an idea is more real than what I don't have an idea of. 
2) Parsimony of being is preferable (Occam's Razor). There is less room to go wrong (fewer assumptions to account for) and more reliance on what I perceive. The simplest explanation is more distinct in what its conditions for being right and wrong are, and so has a greater reference to reality. 

Both types of reality give us what is clear (ideational) and what is distinct (representational). The following divisions of knowledge follow from the two types of reality, each differing between degrees of clarity and distinctness. These are the clear and the possible (ideational reality), and the necessary and the contingent (representational reality). 

What is certain is not subject to doubt and does not require the explanation of something else existing.

The possible is known to exist in thought, as in subjectively by a knower, but it is not known whether the possible actually exists in itself or exists because of something else which I already know.

The possible refers to the existence of something I do not have a conception of (in relation to what I already know), yet still exists by virtue of having an idea of it.

The clear is that which I can account for in terms of what else I know. 

The clear and the possible are not opposites but degrees of the reality thought has in itself. With its own objective reality.  

Examples: It is certain that I exist, for whatever I know of is thought and nothing else has these thoughts besides myself. It is possible that a Sasquatch exists, but I do not know if it is wholly imaginary (explained by myself) or representative of what exists outside of thought (as a representation).

Of what can be said about what exists, there is what is necessary and what is contingent. These determine what is distinct by degrees. 

What is said to be necessary is what we cannot conceive of as not-existing without contradiction. The necessary is always true, because of what it is, and what it is not. The ground for this distinction is between being and nothing. Given that nothing will not give rise to existence, what we have before us either must exist by its own nature or owes its existence to what existed prior ad infinitum eventually requiring a necessary being. Something also cannot exist in the same way and the same time as something else if they really are different things (Identity of Indiscernibles).

It is from necessity that we get the great laws of thought:

1) Law of Identity. A is A.

2) Law of Non-contradiction. A is not ~A.

3) Law of the Excluded Middle. A is not A and ~A.

4) Principle of Sufficient Reason. If A is an effect, the cause is not ~A. 

The contingent is what can be conceived as not existing without contradiction. These are empirical truths. Seeing is believing, but not enough to establish what something is other than it has objective reality. An inductive truth only stands contingently, on further experience. That it rained all this week will not tell us for certain that it will rain tomorrow. We cannot know that it will rain until it happens, as rain is not inherent to there being a tommorow. With different things, there is no necessary relationship, but a contingent one. 

The contingent will not give us a distinct idea of something either. That ice is cold does not give us its nature, what makes it what it is. Neither does the sensation of cold explain how it got that way. Still, experience is of something, which means some objective reality. 

-The necessary/contingent distinction is based on how we reason, with logic & language. The predicate is either contained in the subject or it is contained in another subject. When we speak about something, we assume that it refers to something that does exist. What is necessary owes to nothing else an explanation, and we can discern what it is solely in terms of itself and what it isn't. The contingent is objective, but not as objective as the necessary. 

Examples: A dog is a mammal is a necessary truth because saying a dog is a reptile or not a mammal is contradictory. That a dog has black fur is contingent as something can be a dog with yellow or brown fur.

What I perceive clearly (certainly) and distinctly (necessarily) is better than what I perceive vaguely (possibly) and confusedly (contingently). This respects the limits of what we can know which condition what we can reason about as well as the subjective basis of knowledge. 

Going forward I have labeled these distinctions as Cp and Nc.

Epistemologically, what is clear or possible has precedence over what is necessary or owes itself to the necessary as I might not have a notion at all of what it is, even if it would make sense. 

So, Cp>Nc

Nevertheless if I have any idea of something, it will conform to either N or c. And so something can be CN as well as Cp. And it can be pN and pc. 

Thus there are four determinants of what exists

CN	Np
Cc	cp

The Clear and Necessary. The highest in ideational & objective reality. The most clear & distinct. 

The Clear and contingent. The highest in ideational reality, not objective reality, but being clear it is preferred above what follows. 

The Necessary and the possible. High in objective reality, but not clear. 

The contingent and the possible. Still real ideationally and objectively, but not clear and distinct. 

The clear is preferred over the distinct, but because thinking has an objective reality in the ego (Cogito Ergo Sum) the clear is never alone, objectively. The objective reality of the self is contingent, even as its existence is clear, without doubt. Something which has objective reality but no ideational reality cannot be known, and so it is not a suitable grounds for existence (subjectivity and parsimony). No C, p, N, or c alone. 

Our goal is to ascertain what Descartes called the clear and distinct, but what I call the clear and necessary. 

What we have here is a sort of synthesis of Descartes' cogito with Aristotle's Hylomorphism. The experience of something has with it it's reality as idea telling us what it is and its objective reality telling us what it is "made of" or caused by. The idea of something is not disconnected from the reality of what it is, as with Hylomorphism there is a unity of what something is with what it consists of. 

But what something is is a determination of thought, so there is a difference between the qualities something produces in the mind and what actually can be said about the object. This is because thought, the subjective, has its own reality and with which it has to have an idea of something to determine if it exists. 

Thus an object like a body is not the same as the qualities it brings to the mind. What we describe an object as having must be certain to belong to it, making the object distinct. We say ice is cold and hard, but these could just be purely mental qualities. We must respect the subjectivity of knowledge. We must also be parsimonious with what we admit to existing in itself as a substance and what is essential to something. For we could be mistaken in our determinations of what it objectively exists in.