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