Great post... I very much agree with trying to retain epistemic humility. We are limited, finite beings and our grasp of the bigger picture will always be partial. Sometimes I catch myself with thoughts of egoism, and I try consciously to put them to the side -- it's not always easy. There are a couple of Substack authors who I think have great ideas but also big egos, and I think they do a disservice to their message by not consciously reigning in that part of themselves. Maybe it's an age thing, when life beats you over the head enough times humility becomes somewhat easier to incorporate...
Yes, age plays a role, or perhaps more precisely where we are at on our journey. As you say, if you have repeatedly fallen into the trap of taking a certain angle, theory, or your own ideas as absolute, and you act on it, reality has a way of setting you straight. Perhaps it's easier in the virtual world to evade that feedback. But there is a great danger in prolonging that overconfident and self-centered phase too long. The darkness might eventually engulf you completely if you don't evolve...
L.P. Koch - that is why sometimes we all need to just take our shoes off and our socks maybe and walk barefoot in the woods.
Now the "Forest Passage" talks of the voter who was the "odd man out" but the man was still a voter I guess.....for me, I gave up voting a long time ago because I know that my vote would be meaningless.
Good post. I agree with pretty much all your points. However, I will do the exact same thing you mentioned in your post. And that is mention something you might have left out. Yes, the human experience is infinitely deep, and can't be summarized in a sentence or a paragraph or an entire book. However, I do suppose that if there exist an order to the universe, that that order can be understood. If that order can be understood, then there must be some derived truths we can presuppose as we continue exploring everything else. In our current day and age we have to continue reminding ourselves that mathematical truths are real, that there are historical truths, ect. And only from those starting point can we further investigate, or else everything is relative.
That's a good example of what I was talking about, and I agree with your qualifiers. The intelligibility of the universe is probably the best axiomatic starting point we have.
Nice comment. Here is an absolute presupposition consider irrefutable.
Time moves on in one direction only - the future.
Moreover, what has happened has happened and there is no way the past can be "changed" other than in the minds of those in the future, but if it is in their minds only, then it may not actually be what happened in the past, and what happened in the past is set in the stonework of time moving on at a fixed rate endlessly.
I dunno. My life seems to keep receding into the past.
Consciousness goes to the future, thoughts go to the past.
Given the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it, as cause becomes effect, the past is constantly being rewritten, as the strands of what was woven are constantly being pulled apart and rewoven.
Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
I think the challenge with many people who read philosophy and theory in general, is that they are only reading through one of the transcendentals, aka the true, especially true in the modernist expression, aka "correspondence theory of truth," does the theory accurately map over to reality.
The challenge with this is twofold. The first one is what David Chalmers calls "verbal disputes," we all have different definitions, and one cannot define every word they use, or honor every defintions in existence. The other challenge is "guarding premises," aka making one's argument harder to dispute by actually weakening it's truth claims, from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in Think Again: How to Reason and Argue: "To change the premise from “all” to “many” (or “most”) or “some” or from “definitely” to “possibly” or “significant chance” (or “probably” or “likely”) is to guard the premise. Other ways to guard premises include self-description, as in “I believe” (or think or suspect or fear)..."
You cannot guard every premise, but if you do not guard a premise, you may trigger people who lack the principle in charity, have poor reasoning comprehension, and low in emotional integration (aka get triggered easily.
I think ALL three transcendentals need to be present when writing theory, the good and the beautiful. I am not going to be interested in a theory (a "map of reality" if you will) if it does not have some beauty. If there is no beauty, it will not move me. Beautiful maps create beautiful worlds. I argued for this more robustly here: https://lessfoolish.substack.com/p/i-am-not-writing-to-the-world-a-guide
Excellent points, thank you Peter. I used to do a lot of "premise guarding", but at some point I realized it's way better to just state what you want to say matter-of-factly, which, interestingly, can produce sort of a switch in the reader's mind where he just considers the points made, possible qualifiers be damned.
As for definitions, while they obviously can be useful, I don't think that language works like that. We want to express ourselves as best as possible so that "meaning rings from the pages", so to speak, and the reader gets it.
I have a post in mind I'm working on about the transcendentals - their history is rather fascinating! There is a great paper about it: John Levi Martin, The Birth of the True, The Good, and The Beautiful: Toward an Investigation of the Structures of Social Thought, 2016.
Another thing I find about guarding premises less is that it triggers the right people away from your work.
Regarding defintions, I agree that the meaning conveyed through words is the main event, but I am becoming more bullish on "owning your words," with a practice for redefining them when needed. Most people do not know what they are talking about when they use words that are at the base of their philosophy, outsourcing it to a vague feeling or the status that comes from an impressive thinker.
Indeed. A tactic I find useful is to shamelessly switch around different terms so that it (hopefully) becomes clearer what I mean instead of using certain canonized terms consistently, which often only gives the illusion of clarity.
Anyhow, I think it was sort of funny and it is easy to disagree and disagreements will always be, but sometimes there is need for consensus in the day and age we live I reckon.
Yeah, I agreed with all of it. I think your reply only complicates. How you took what he wrote and pushed it over to “nefarious entities” seems clumsy. And one could debate anything at all, including the direction of the movement of time. I thought it was a great piece.
Tricky. I’ve never been accused of it, in fact, sometimes quite the opposite. I suppose light-heartedness had to follow the morning I had. Call it writer’s recovery.
Well I hope you recover....myself, I'm just here to learn and basically I agree with this article - have you read the "Forest Passage" by Ernst Jünger by chance?
I think my comments have elucidated my sentiment and I basically agree with the article and so what is the point of saying you disagree and then only later come back here and say it was a ruse?
One could add that there are other ways to move through the forest, not involving an axe. Or even language. Many of the more beautiful movements only need observation, listening, imitation, sensing to gain a deep understanding of the activity. No words involved. I am no philosopher, but I like to think. Is there such a thing as speechless philosophy? Reaching clarity on something can involve large chunks of confusion, detours and unfamiliar words and languages. Making mistakes, getting lost in the slums are not removable parts, true learning has no shortcuts and it can’t be measured. That’s the reason there simply is no one path or even one goal. While it is nice to have these bright headlights on your moving vehicle, the same light is blinding at the other end. Devastating even for the other kinds of forest dwellers.
Thanks for reminding me. I am in awe of the sharpness of your words....
Btw might you be in France too? As I am in the Morvan....
I think in our realm at least, language plays a decisive role as a bridge between our world and the world of pure(r) thought or consciousness. This relationship is a bit of a conundrum though, I often think about it but don't have the answers. (And yes to your last question, but more in the South-West.)
Excellent post, and coincides with some ideas I've been thinking about over the last few days that relate to the genetic connection that humans have to the information field, and how we all seem to have individual qualities of connection to different yet overlapping areas of the field. Your metaphor of the "thoughtscape" and "clearing the forest" matches up perfectly.
Perhaps we might say that our immediate thoughtscape terrain forms the 'morphogenetic field' that influences our gene expression epigenetically, and by consciously aligning with the more beautiful parts of the thoughtscape that form a sort of 'teleological attractor', we thus can modulate our own protein expression in such a way as to both optimise our health and potentially unlock latent abilities to perceive the world in new ways?
And could networking facilitate this sort of alignment by expanding our connection to those portions of the thoughtscape yet inaccessible to ourselves, but accessible to others? In a sense, converging our 'forest clearings' into a larger grassy meadow that forms one edge of a sun-lit golden field and the vast plains of paradise beyond? There's a role here for faith, I think, too.
Who would have thought that philosophy could have such direct implications for human experience? 😉
This doesn't just apply in philosophy, but in all communication. For instance, this is something that is missed in Healthcare all too often. When studying interventions, including certain types of advice, advice that makes a neurotic better will make a reckless worse. Seems so obvious once you understand, but hubris has a way of hiding such truths that ought to be self evident. Thank you for the path clearing Luc, it is always enlightening and helpful!
I think technocracy and abstraction go hand in hand: the dream is to create protocols, techniques, and concepts entirely devoid of context. But reality doesn't work that way.
Why part of me always recoils when I hear the term "best practices." Best for who? The best we can do in bureaucracy is place highly competent subject matter experts into positions where they have direct experience with the outcomes they are meant to effect, and give them more or less unilateral authority to execute their purpose as they see fit. Unfortunately since all of our institutions have been feminized and are therefore dominated by a cloud of pervasive neuroticism, the trust to fully implement this strategy is absent never to return without some kind of dramatic paradigm shift.
I love your distinction between philosophical truth and falsehood. It is a brilliant way to cut through the verbiage and see where someone's statement will be taking you.
Thank you, Douglas. My hunch is that a lot of confusion around the concept of truth stems from our using this word naturally in different contexts, but once we switch on the analytic mind, we lose this natural meaning and talk ourselves into all kinds of conundrums in the desperate attempt to abstract the meaning from one context and generalize it over all others.
If you think about it, it should be obvious that "truth" means different things whether we talk about a direct, common sense observation of reality ("the grass here is green"), abstract concepts "materialism implies reductionism", formal mathematical/logical truth, truth in fiction and poetry, value judgements etc. Which makes it rather pointless to look for the one definition of truth and then wondering why the results are so puzzling.
🗨 British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, for example, noted that modern science was based on "faith that at the base of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery".
I would even go further and say everyday observations and descriptions of reality are good enough for me in terms of a baseline for "absolute truth". No need to deconstruct such things in my book, whereas what we mean by "truth" when talking about abstract concepts seems to work rather differently. The status of mathematical "laws" corresponding to physical reality is whole other can of worms...
Why not check out these four very interesting philosophers whose work is never ever mentioned in the tower-of-babel/babble world of left-brained academic philosophy.
http://www.merrell-wolff.org Franklin Merrell-Wolff author of The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, and Pathways Through to Space
You *never* ask that question in polite society :-) The picture is from a local "vide grenier" who, among many other things, sells random books in questionable condition.
I'm still reading the "Forest Passage" - I'm about halfway through and I appreciate your thoughts and ideas and thanks to you and Harrison and the other folks who spoke at length regarding the book.
Flux is in the air for sure, always has been and always will be, but I ascribe to the idea that to a degree "sentient beings" (such as human presumably) can add to the flux needlessly or learn how to live in a world with flux naturally.
Today - in today's world....flux seems to be "over the top" and this is being done on purpose by nefarious entities who seem to care less about humanity as a whole.
Being able to share and communicate with others is critical with respect to putting up defenses against the few pushing this needless flux upon all of us peasants who are NOT cattle for eff sake. So, when the elitist pushing these harmful agendas cross certain lines, then I suspect they will have put themselves into a corner of their own making and I hope the peasants essentially eliminate their flawed ideology.
Great post... I very much agree with trying to retain epistemic humility. We are limited, finite beings and our grasp of the bigger picture will always be partial. Sometimes I catch myself with thoughts of egoism, and I try consciously to put them to the side -- it's not always easy. There are a couple of Substack authors who I think have great ideas but also big egos, and I think they do a disservice to their message by not consciously reigning in that part of themselves. Maybe it's an age thing, when life beats you over the head enough times humility becomes somewhat easier to incorporate...
Yes, age plays a role, or perhaps more precisely where we are at on our journey. As you say, if you have repeatedly fallen into the trap of taking a certain angle, theory, or your own ideas as absolute, and you act on it, reality has a way of setting you straight. Perhaps it's easier in the virtual world to evade that feedback. But there is a great danger in prolonging that overconfident and self-centered phase too long. The darkness might eventually engulf you completely if you don't evolve...
L.P. Koch - that is why sometimes we all need to just take our shoes off and our socks maybe and walk barefoot in the woods.
Now the "Forest Passage" talks of the voter who was the "odd man out" but the man was still a voter I guess.....for me, I gave up voting a long time ago because I know that my vote would be meaningless.
Good post. I agree with pretty much all your points. However, I will do the exact same thing you mentioned in your post. And that is mention something you might have left out. Yes, the human experience is infinitely deep, and can't be summarized in a sentence or a paragraph or an entire book. However, I do suppose that if there exist an order to the universe, that that order can be understood. If that order can be understood, then there must be some derived truths we can presuppose as we continue exploring everything else. In our current day and age we have to continue reminding ourselves that mathematical truths are real, that there are historical truths, ect. And only from those starting point can we further investigate, or else everything is relative.
That's a good example of what I was talking about, and I agree with your qualifiers. The intelligibility of the universe is probably the best axiomatic starting point we have.
Exactly. I think axioms are crucial to acknowledge. We arrive at certain insights based on our axioms.
When you understand to completion the order of the universe, please write a book. I’ll buy a copy, just for the enlightenment.
LOL. Good one my friend. That is hilarious. What I tried to shed some light to was our presuppositions.
Understood. I’d like to understand, <i>everything.</i>
Nice comment. Here is an absolute presupposition consider irrefutable.
Time moves on in one direction only - the future.
Moreover, what has happened has happened and there is no way the past can be "changed" other than in the minds of those in the future, but if it is in their minds only, then it may not actually be what happened in the past, and what happened in the past is set in the stonework of time moving on at a fixed rate endlessly.
I dunno. My life seems to keep receding into the past.
Consciousness goes to the future, thoughts go to the past.
Given the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it, as cause becomes effect, the past is constantly being rewritten, as the strands of what was woven are constantly being pulled apart and rewoven.
Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
Agreed with the movement premise.
I think the challenge with many people who read philosophy and theory in general, is that they are only reading through one of the transcendentals, aka the true, especially true in the modernist expression, aka "correspondence theory of truth," does the theory accurately map over to reality.
The challenge with this is twofold. The first one is what David Chalmers calls "verbal disputes," we all have different definitions, and one cannot define every word they use, or honor every defintions in existence. The other challenge is "guarding premises," aka making one's argument harder to dispute by actually weakening it's truth claims, from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in Think Again: How to Reason and Argue: "To change the premise from “all” to “many” (or “most”) or “some” or from “definitely” to “possibly” or “significant chance” (or “probably” or “likely”) is to guard the premise. Other ways to guard premises include self-description, as in “I believe” (or think or suspect or fear)..."
You cannot guard every premise, but if you do not guard a premise, you may trigger people who lack the principle in charity, have poor reasoning comprehension, and low in emotional integration (aka get triggered easily.
I think ALL three transcendentals need to be present when writing theory, the good and the beautiful. I am not going to be interested in a theory (a "map of reality" if you will) if it does not have some beauty. If there is no beauty, it will not move me. Beautiful maps create beautiful worlds. I argued for this more robustly here: https://lessfoolish.substack.com/p/i-am-not-writing-to-the-world-a-guide
Excellent points, thank you Peter. I used to do a lot of "premise guarding", but at some point I realized it's way better to just state what you want to say matter-of-factly, which, interestingly, can produce sort of a switch in the reader's mind where he just considers the points made, possible qualifiers be damned.
As for definitions, while they obviously can be useful, I don't think that language works like that. We want to express ourselves as best as possible so that "meaning rings from the pages", so to speak, and the reader gets it.
I have a post in mind I'm working on about the transcendentals - their history is rather fascinating! There is a great paper about it: John Levi Martin, The Birth of the True, The Good, and The Beautiful: Toward an Investigation of the Structures of Social Thought, 2016.
Another thing I find about guarding premises less is that it triggers the right people away from your work.
Regarding defintions, I agree that the meaning conveyed through words is the main event, but I am becoming more bullish on "owning your words," with a practice for redefining them when needed. Most people do not know what they are talking about when they use words that are at the base of their philosophy, outsourcing it to a vague feeling or the status that comes from an impressive thinker.
Indeed. A tactic I find useful is to shamelessly switch around different terms so that it (hopefully) becomes clearer what I mean instead of using certain canonized terms consistently, which often only gives the illusion of clarity.
I disagree 😄
Hehe, what I outlined above leaves plenty room for that!
Just kidding
Were you really kidding Ken?
I mean Ken do you know?
Anyhow, I think it was sort of funny and it is easy to disagree and disagreements will always be, but sometimes there is need for consensus in the day and age we live I reckon.
Yeah, I agreed with all of it. I think your reply only complicates. How you took what he wrote and pushed it over to “nefarious entities” seems clumsy. And one could debate anything at all, including the direction of the movement of time. I thought it was a great piece.
If you agreed with all of it, then why did you type what you did?
Are you just trying to be tricky Ken?
Tricky. I’ve never been accused of it, in fact, sometimes quite the opposite. I suppose light-heartedness had to follow the morning I had. Call it writer’s recovery.
Well I hope you recover....myself, I'm just here to learn and basically I agree with this article - have you read the "Forest Passage" by Ernst Jünger by chance?
Do you doubt nefarious entities - or is it all some sort of philosophical play land in your mind?
I think my comments have elucidated my sentiment and I basically agree with the article and so what is the point of saying you disagree and then only later come back here and say it was a ruse?
Holy crap dude. Lighten up.
Lighten up what?
I hope you feel better soon
One could add that there are other ways to move through the forest, not involving an axe. Or even language. Many of the more beautiful movements only need observation, listening, imitation, sensing to gain a deep understanding of the activity. No words involved. I am no philosopher, but I like to think. Is there such a thing as speechless philosophy? Reaching clarity on something can involve large chunks of confusion, detours and unfamiliar words and languages. Making mistakes, getting lost in the slums are not removable parts, true learning has no shortcuts and it can’t be measured. That’s the reason there simply is no one path or even one goal. While it is nice to have these bright headlights on your moving vehicle, the same light is blinding at the other end. Devastating even for the other kinds of forest dwellers.
Thanks for reminding me. I am in awe of the sharpness of your words....
Btw might you be in France too? As I am in the Morvan....
I think in our realm at least, language plays a decisive role as a bridge between our world and the world of pure(r) thought or consciousness. This relationship is a bit of a conundrum though, I often think about it but don't have the answers. (And yes to your last question, but more in the South-West.)
Excellent post, and coincides with some ideas I've been thinking about over the last few days that relate to the genetic connection that humans have to the information field, and how we all seem to have individual qualities of connection to different yet overlapping areas of the field. Your metaphor of the "thoughtscape" and "clearing the forest" matches up perfectly.
Perhaps we might say that our immediate thoughtscape terrain forms the 'morphogenetic field' that influences our gene expression epigenetically, and by consciously aligning with the more beautiful parts of the thoughtscape that form a sort of 'teleological attractor', we thus can modulate our own protein expression in such a way as to both optimise our health and potentially unlock latent abilities to perceive the world in new ways?
And could networking facilitate this sort of alignment by expanding our connection to those portions of the thoughtscape yet inaccessible to ourselves, but accessible to others? In a sense, converging our 'forest clearings' into a larger grassy meadow that forms one edge of a sun-lit golden field and the vast plains of paradise beyond? There's a role here for faith, I think, too.
Who would have thought that philosophy could have such direct implications for human experience? 😉
This doesn't just apply in philosophy, but in all communication. For instance, this is something that is missed in Healthcare all too often. When studying interventions, including certain types of advice, advice that makes a neurotic better will make a reckless worse. Seems so obvious once you understand, but hubris has a way of hiding such truths that ought to be self evident. Thank you for the path clearing Luc, it is always enlightening and helpful!
I think technocracy and abstraction go hand in hand: the dream is to create protocols, techniques, and concepts entirely devoid of context. But reality doesn't work that way.
Why part of me always recoils when I hear the term "best practices." Best for who? The best we can do in bureaucracy is place highly competent subject matter experts into positions where they have direct experience with the outcomes they are meant to effect, and give them more or less unilateral authority to execute their purpose as they see fit. Unfortunately since all of our institutions have been feminized and are therefore dominated by a cloud of pervasive neuroticism, the trust to fully implement this strategy is absent never to return without some kind of dramatic paradigm shift.
I love your distinction between philosophical truth and falsehood. It is a brilliant way to cut through the verbiage and see where someone's statement will be taking you.
Thank you, Douglas. My hunch is that a lot of confusion around the concept of truth stems from our using this word naturally in different contexts, but once we switch on the analytic mind, we lose this natural meaning and talk ourselves into all kinds of conundrums in the desperate attempt to abstract the meaning from one context and generalize it over all others.
If you think about it, it should be obvious that "truth" means different things whether we talk about a direct, common sense observation of reality ("the grass here is green"), abstract concepts "materialism implies reductionism", formal mathematical/logical truth, truth in fiction and poetry, value judgements etc. Which makes it rather pointless to look for the one definition of truth and then wondering why the results are so puzzling.
Absolutely. It disturbs me that "truth" is so often ideologically defined.
Then again, life is finding all this stuff out. Curiosity is the appetite of the mind.
The corollary of the old saying, "The more you know, the more you don't know." must be that the smartest we will ever be, is the day we are born.
The trick is to understand there are a lot of rabbit holes out there, so chose carefully which we go down.
💬 and where’s Whitehead when you need him
Why, here he is, albeit vicariously 😇
🗨 British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, for example, noted that modern science was based on "faith that at the base of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery".
These were very helpful word pictures in this post, pointing to fundamentally important but difficult to articulate insights! Great job!
I think physics has your back on the concept of no absolute "truth", at least insofar as we perceive it!
I would even go further and say everyday observations and descriptions of reality are good enough for me in terms of a baseline for "absolute truth". No need to deconstruct such things in my book, whereas what we mean by "truth" when talking about abstract concepts seems to work rather differently. The status of mathematical "laws" corresponding to physical reality is whole other can of worms...
Truth is an ideal, while absolute is elemental.
There are no qualifiers to absolute, so the notion of truth is meaningless in that context.
For example, if morality were an absolute, it would be impossible to transgress it, but it is an ideal. The behaviors required of a healthy society.
Immorality is social pathologies.
Why not check out these four very interesting philosophers whose work is never ever mentioned in the tower-of-babel/babble world of left-brained academic philosophy.
http://www.merrell-wolff.org Franklin Merrell-Wolff author of The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, and Pathways Through to Space
http://thelaszloinstitute.com Irwin Laszlo author of Quantum Shift in the Global Brain
http://tillerfoundation.org William Tiller author of Psychoenergetic Science
Two books by Samuel Avery Transcending the Western Mind, and The Buddha & the Quantum
Have you read all those books on the shelves?
Holy Moly.
(smile)
You *never* ask that question in polite society :-) The picture is from a local "vide grenier" who, among many other things, sells random books in questionable condition.
ha, ha.
sorry if I'm a bit unrefined on occasion, but I'm learning more and more about you all philosophers as each day goes by!
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/french-english/vide-grenier
By the way - I bet you there are a few gems on the shelves.
I'm still reading the "Forest Passage" - I'm about halfway through and I appreciate your thoughts and ideas and thanks to you and Harrison and the other folks who spoke at length regarding the book.
Flux is in the air for sure, always has been and always will be, but I ascribe to the idea that to a degree "sentient beings" (such as human presumably) can add to the flux needlessly or learn how to live in a world with flux naturally.
Today - in today's world....flux seems to be "over the top" and this is being done on purpose by nefarious entities who seem to care less about humanity as a whole.
Being able to share and communicate with others is critical with respect to putting up defenses against the few pushing this needless flux upon all of us peasants who are NOT cattle for eff sake. So, when the elitist pushing these harmful agendas cross certain lines, then I suspect they will have put themselves into a corner of their own making and I hope the peasants essentially eliminate their flawed ideology.
Regards,
BK