Thoughts 15 Jan. 2022

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[T]here are philosophers of the humanities who think that there is no such thing as reality, since it’s all Made Up Miraculously By Ourselves (MUMBO): naïve idealism. Such people, by the way, never behave as though there was no reality. Nor of course, by its own logic, can they claim any truth for their position. 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

But just because we participate in reality doesn’t mean we invent it out of nowhere, or solipsistically project it on some inner mental screen; much less does it mean that the very idea of reality is thereby invalidated.

Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

The understanding that experiential states are excitations of the will is very useful for grasping how Schopenhauer integrates Plato’s ‘eternal Ideas’—the archetypes or primary templates of which, according to Plato, everything we perceive in the world is merely a distorted copy—in his metaphysics. Indeed, one of Schopenhauer’s most nuanced metaphysical points is the relationship he draws between the eternal Ideas and the world-in-itself. Both always are but never become and never pass away. No plurality belongs to them; for each by its nature is only one, since it is the archetype itself, of which all the particular, transitory things of the same kind and name are copies or shadows. (W1: 171, original emphasis)

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In explaining the level of Mind, or the Ideas, Plotinus employs something like a transformation doctrine with hints of difference/nondifference. Each of the Ideas in Mind is one with the One, yet they are also described as outflows from the One. Plotinus expresses the transformation in much the same ways Vedantin thinkers expressed it. The Brahma- S-tra, for example, compares the One to a source of light and the Many to its rays or illumination (I.1.24, I.3.40, III.2.15 and 25), and Bhaskara, in about 1000 A.D., used the image of the sun and its rays for the One and the Many.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

If the essence of power is the effectiveness of command, then there is no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun, and it would be difficult to say in “which way the order given by a policeman is different from that given by a gunman.”

Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?

Richard J. Bernstein

“The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them”

Last Best Hope

George Packer

Smart America never adopted the normal anti-Americanism of the post-sixties left. It doesn’t hate America, which has been so good to the meritocrats. Smart Americans believe in institutions, and they support American leadership of military alliances and international organizations. In some cases they’ve endorsed smart wars fought with smart bombs, especially with a humanitarian purpose.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

Pareto’s theories, properly understood, do not depend upon any special psychological doctrine. Even if psychology says that men do not have any permanent instincts, it may still be true that there are certain permanent, or at least relatively constant, types of social activity.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Ingenuity includes not only truly new ideas—often called “innovation”—but also ideas that though not fundamentally novel are nonetheless useful.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

The modern economic modeling that attempts to forecast unemployment, interest rates, and so on without any commitment to grand economic theories is a continuation of Descartes’ project.More relevant to Descartes’ own time is the problem of the truth of the atomic hypothesis: it could, more or less, explain appearances, but is that a good reason for believing it true, in the absence of any more direct evidence?

Thoughts 15 Jan. 2022

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Some scientists, whether they put it this way or not when they are asked to reflect, still carry on as if there just exists a Reality Out There (ROT), the nature of which is independent of any consciousness of it: naïve realism. These are usually biologists; you won’t find many physicists who would think that.

(Location 278)

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

We desperately need what science can tell us, and postmodern attempts to undermine it should be vigorously resisted. Two important truths, then: science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold. Any attempt to suppress science (I distinguish science sharply from technology), for whatever reason, is dangerous and wrong.

(Location 282)

The Square and the Tower

Niall Ferguson

“Many historians still tend to assume that the spread of an idea or an ideology is a function of its inherent content in relation to some vaguely specified context. We must now acknowledge, however, that some ideas go viral because of structural features of the network through which they spread. They are least likely to do so in a hierarchical, top-down network, where horizontal peer-to-peer links are prohibited.”

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

According to this conventional account—from the Enlightenment through Comte and Mill to Hempel—the aim of the social sciences is to explain specifically social phenomena by supplying law-like generalizations which do not differ in their logical form from those applicable to natural phenomena in general, precisely the kind of law-like generalizations to which the managerial expert would have to appeal.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

A truly value-free openness toward ideas does not, and cannot, exist in the academy, for several reasons. One of them is theoretical: certain ideas cannot be entertained, at least not seriously, because they would of their nature “close the market.” Totalist systems, therefore—revealed religions, philosophies that proclaim an absolute truth, political systems (whether fascist or communist) that proscribe certain kinds of opinion—cannot in theory be advocated at public schools. These are not, notice, excluded because they are false but because they are exclusionary. Their fault is a methodological one, and can be detected and condemned on grounds of procedure, without value-prejudice. The only things that can be excluded are things that would exclude—things that reveal the evil of system. This value-free code of teaching—the concentration on processes for reaching a conclusion, with the taboo against actually reaching conclusions . . . . [F]acts and knowledge of the facts are handed on; the only conclusions allowed are those forced on one by the facts, the teacher having no responsibility for such conclusions. The teacher cannot even teach (only “dissect”), when it is a matter of political, social, or “sectarian” movements (the very term “religion” is too value-laden to pass the committee’s pure lips).

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The end of a revolution is a new code of laws—or counter-revolution. The terror finds its end when the opposition is destroyed, when nobody dares lift a finger, or when the revolution has exhausted all reserves of strength.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories, as we have known them from their beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it. Historically speaking, what actually has broken down is the Roman trinity that for thousands of years united religion, authority, and tradition. The loss of this trinity does not destroy the past, and the dismantling process itself is not destructive; it only draws conclusions from a loss which is a fact and as such no longer a part of the “history of ideas” but of our political history, the history of our world.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

In this clash between joint, participating action, without which, after all, the events to be judged would never have come into being, and reflecting, observing judgment, there is no doubt for Kant as to which should have the last word. Assuming that history is nothing but the miserable story of mankind’s eternal ups and downs, the spectacle of sound and fury “may perhaps be moving for a while; but the curtain must eventually descend. For in the long run, it becomes a farce. And even if the actors do not tire of it—for they are fools—the spectator does, for any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will be of eternal sameness”

Thoughts 13 Jan. 2022

 

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

At times we see an obsession with denying any pre-eminence to the human person; more zeal is shown in protecting other species than in defending the dignity which all human beings share in equal measure. Certainly, we should be concerned lest other living beings be treated irresponsibly. But we should be particularly indignant at the enormous inequalities in our midst, whereby we continue to tolerate some considering themselves more worthy than others. We fail to see that some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty, with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea of what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off their supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet. In practice, we continue to tolerate that some consider themselves more human than others, as if they had been born with greater rights.

Priority for people, especially the human & poor.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

My aim is to show the reader the magnitude of the error [in our over-reliance on "the emissary" (L-brain) and concurrent under-appreciation of "the master" (R-brain], and its consequences. I say ‘show’, because I cannot, any more than anyone else, prove anything finally and irrefutably – the material with which we are dealing makes that impossible; but rather I wish to take my reader by degrees to a new vantage point, one built upon science and philosophy, from which, in all likelihood, the view will appear at the same time unfamiliar, and yet in no way alien – indeed rather the opposite. More like a home-coming. From there the reader must, of course, make up his mind for himself.

(Location 193)

Applies to almost all inquiries, doesn't it, other than simple math and logical tautologies?

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

On the matter of God, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it rather clearly: To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

We have vainly and foolishly tried to be civilized in opposition to nature—not only to the natural world that is the matrix of human life but also to our own savage nature within. We must therefore create a civilization that transcends savagery without opposing it.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

An even greater obstacle to understanding derives from the fact that we have a powerful non-logical impulse to make our own and other human actions seem logical.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Liberals, to schematize, embraced capitalist modernity. Conservatives responded by opposing the liberal embrace.

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

Thus it would generally be a decisive refutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its own account of the matter could never be socially embodied; and it also follows that we have not yet fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be.

Thoughts 12 January 2022

 

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Ever since a Supreme Court ruling in 1976, Buckley v. Valeo, the United States has adhered to the view that spending money is an act of free speech and thus cannot be regulated in any serious way. This view of speech, later affirmed and expanded in the notorious Citizens United decision of 2010, is held in no other advanced democracy on the planet, most of which routinely regulate how politicians raise and spend money—with no adverse effects on the quality of their free speech or democracy. As a result, at the heart of American government, there is a ceaseless series of quid pro quos—money raised for favors bestowed. The American tax code is one of the world’s longest for a reason. The thousands of amendments to it are what politicians sell when they raise campaign money.

Precisely.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

And with the reductionist outlook goes determinism, the belief that if we knew enough about the position and momentum of every particle in the universe we could predict everything that happens from here on in, including your every thought, desire and belief. . . . Even if contemporary physics did not demonstrate that this is an impossibility, there is a problem with this kind of argument. Reductionists and determinists unerringly fail to take account of the fact that their own arguments apply to themselves. If my beliefs are ‘nothing but’ the mechanical products of a blind system, so are all views, including those of the reductionist. If everything is already determined, the determinist’s tendency to embrace determinism is also merely determined, and we have no reason to take it seriously (since we are all determined either to believe it or not already).

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Creativity is the God problem. We have to come to terms, Bloom tells me, with these “material miracles” that are present at every stage of the evolution of the universe. For Bloom, science is best served when our sense of awe, wonder, and astonishment at the workings of nature is heightened.

Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation

Frank R. Ankersmit

Historical research refers to the historian’s analysis of the evidence the past has left us. It deals with the selection, interpretation, and analysis of historical sources and with how this analysis may help us explain causally (or otherwise) what the evidence has taught us about the past.

Historians & lawyers (trial lawyers, anyway) have a lot in common.

Civilization

Niall Ferguson

We should not delude ourselves into thinking that our historical narratives, as commonly constructed, are anything more than retro-fits. To contemporaries, as we shall see, the outcome of Western dominance did not seem the most probable of the futures they could imagine; the scenario of disastrous defeat often loomed larger in the mind of the historical actor than the happy ending vouchsafed to the modern reader.

An outcome can look deceptively certain in hindsight.

The Future of History

John Lukacs

How is it—for example—that most American “conservatives” who proclaim their opposition to Big Government favor all kinds of military spending, and support the sending of more and more American troops into the midst of peoples and countries of which they know nothing?

Great questions.

The Future of History

John Lukacs

Look at the dates of their—still revered and considered “seminal”—works: Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, 1948; Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 1950; Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, 1953; Potter, People of Plenty, 1954; Hartz, The American Liberal Tradition, 1955. Consider but the titles of their books. There is one thesis in all of them: that, unlike in Europe or elsewhere, in the United States there is only one intellectual tradition, a perennially liberal one. Now these books, with their general ideas and theses sweeping across the history of the American mental and political and intellectual and ideological landscape, appeared at the very time, 1948–55, when in the United States a popular antiliberal movement arose that began to name itself as “conservative.”

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

But in America, too, it is still conceivable that the universities will be destroyed, for the whole disturbance coincides with a crisis in the sciences, in belief in science, and in belief in progress, that is, with an internal, not simply a political, crisis of the universities.

Written c. 1970.

Breath

James Nestor

Of the 5,400 different species of mammals on the planet, humans are now the only ones to routinely have misaligned jaws, overbites, underbites, and snaggled teeth, a condition formally called malocclusion.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

People think processed food is food, because it’s calories and macronutrients, but in fact processed food gets in and poisons those pathways instead.

Principles

Ray Dalio

“What was most important wasn't knowing the future—it was knowing how to react appropriately to the information available at each point in time.”

Thoughts 11 Jan 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Total independence is an imaginary construct, the limit case of interdependence, which is universal. And the whole is shot through with purpose (a notion, by the way, that has nothing to do with some sort of engineering God), and endlessly creative, not pointless and passive. This cosmos is one from which we are never separate, but out of which we arise, in which we dwell, and to which, finally, we return.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

My ultimate aim is to contribute a new perspective from which to look at the fundamental ‘building blocks’, as we think of them, of the cosmos: time, space, depth, motion, matter, consciousness, uniqueness, beauty, goodness, truth, purpose and the very idea of the existence or otherwise of a God. . . . Of course, these are vast topics, ones that have been grappled with by the ablest human minds for millennia; naturally I don’t presume to try to settle the disputes that have arisen. Moreover, I am very far from being the first person to argue that the prevailing view is badly mistaken. But I do believe that the [brain] hemisphere hypothesis casts a very revealing new light on those disputes and strongly suggests that the view that has prevailed – a view heavily indebted to a belief in reductionism – very seriously distorts the evidence of the nature of reality that is before our eyes if only we would attend to it fully. It provides a genuinely new and compelling context in which to revisit these issues, one that may encourage us toward very different conclusions.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself,” Friedman wrote. “A free market” was “a system of economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom.”

This equation of the "free market" and "economic freedom" as a "necessary condition for political freedom" bamboozled a lot of people. In short: it isn't. This isn't to say that markets aren't often useful (they are) or that decentralized economic decision-making implied by markets isn't efficient (it can be), but to equate economic decision-making with political decision-making is a category mistake.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Zeno, or possibly Chrysippus, introduced yet another distinction within the “indifferent” class, that of appropriate and inappropriate actions (making, finally, seven categories of actions: virtuous, preferred, appropriate, indifferent, inappropriate, avoided, vicious). The distinction between appropriate and inappropriate actions is again one which the Cynics rejected. It was primarily a concession to social stability, a concern of the Stoics which the Cynics did not share.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Indeed, anyone who had lost patience with traditional politics and was looking for a new direction was a potential Nazi. They were the “catchall party of protest,” calling for people to put aside social divisions and class differences for the sake of a larger ideal, the nation, the Volk. The message had enormous appeal to any unaffiliated (and non-Jewish) voter, and to students and the young, who provided the party with its bustling energy, it was a political elixir.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Coming from a country [Germany] where “the people” had overridden all legal processes for the sake of what was viewed as the common good, she [Hannah Arendt] was highly sensitive to maintaining the role of law in society. And that role, pace [Sidney] Hook, was definitely not to enforce some notion of morality, which was a private matter and which she knew—obviously with Nietzsche whispering in her ear—could be defined any which way, depending on the momentary mood of the public. Hook’s government-enforced morality was a path on the way to the thought police and the midnight knock at the door. Against the vicissitudes of popular opinion, the law, developed through reason, persuasion, and judgment, provided stability and protection for the individual. The critics never really did understand her distinction between state and society. “Metaphysical mumbo jumbo,” one of them contemptuously called it. But then he had never experienced—or couldn’t even imagine—the damage that a tyranny of the majority could wreak (and he received an even more contemptuous flick of the wrist from Arendt in response).

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Where is this unconscious today? Where do the roots suffer? Where are the sparks of Sophia buried in our present world’s darkness? Attention to them is Jung’s therapy of culture.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

Contrary to popular belief, Chesterton did not say, “When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything.” The nearest thing is in his short story “The Miracle of Moon Crescent”: “You hard-shelled materialists [are] all balanced on the very edge of belief—of belief in almost anything.”