At 6:13 PM -0800 2/7/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
....
>Not the least of those reasons, however, is that philosophy is where an
>enormous amount of *science* comes from, sooner or later. Quite literally,
>"new stuff"; reality, ab initio.
I just don't believe this. I've been reading philosophy (and science, and
physics, and math, etc.) for over 35 years, and I took a bunch of classes
in Wittgenstein, philosophy of science, etc. at university. In the past 50
or 70 years, _very little_ science has come out of, or been inspired by,
philosophy. There are many plausible reasons for this, but the facts are
clear. Researchers and thinkers and suchlike are simply _not_ getting their
ideas or their inspirations from James or Jaspers or even modernists like
Rorty.
(Quite the reverse is true, I daresay.)
>In the same way that nobody can explain why mathematics describes the
>universe, when people abandon thinking about their own science at its
>boundry layer, derisively saying things like "but that's a problem for
>philosophers", they're missing the point, because that's where things get
>interesting. As Kuhn(?) observes, when scientists start talking philosophy,
>that's when the world changes. Saying that what's down a black hole doesn't
>"exist" because we can never *know* it, is to me, at least, a great kind of
>problem to think about, to sharpen one's wits on, even though it will
>certainly fall to a scientist, probably dabbling philosophical, to
>eventually answer it.
There's a lot of junk philosophy coming out of science. A lot of the
"relativism" that you so correctly decry came, in fact, out of the cultural
supernova that was Einstein's relativity. "Relativity" is, ironically, a
very poor word for describing either or both of Einstein's main theories,
the 1905 Special version (mostly the stuff about trains moving near the
speed of light, Lorentz contractions, and the equivalence of mass and
energy) and the 1915 General version (gravity as the warping of spacetime).
But be that as it may, this poorly-chosen name for a basic theory of the
universe was taken by sociologists, politicians, and cultural
anthropologists as its own. Just like entropy, chaos, fractals, and
catastrophe theory have been in recent decades.
And the junk philosophy which came out of quantum mechanics...mama mia!
>Someone said that philosophy is the study of the most *general*, and that's
>certainly true of my approach to life. It doesn't make you rich, certainly,
>(well, so far... :-))
Nothing "makes" one rich, save for the usual bits about working, saving,
taking risks, etc. I have no idea whether studying philosophy correlates
with career success.
(I do strongly believe, and would be surprised if studies did not back this
up, that there's a very high correlation between total amount of reading
done before age 20, for example, and success in academic or scientific
fields. Those who read voraciously as kids will carry the habit forward.
Not to mention the effects the reading has on forming association links,
triggering thinking, improving writing abilities, and all those obvious
things. And those who read voraciously will likely have encountered
philosophy at an early age. Hence the correlations are secondary and
tertiary, at the least.)
>So, to me, it is this very creation of reality out of whole cloth that is
>*exactly* why I absolutely resent the relativist turn philosophy has taken
>this past century. Relativist *and* collectivist.
>
>Relativist, and collectivist, *and*, dammit, French. (oh, my?) :-).
>
>Anyway, philosophy can do better than that. So can the French. :-).
French philosophy is a minor tributary, even today. The French are very
vocal about applying philosophy to _culture_. Not surprising, given that
they even had a Minister of Culture (Jack Lang being the prototype). Hence
the role of Derrida, Foucault, Robbe-Grillet, and numerous one-book wonders
who write about culture, imperialism, technology, and the badness of things
Americain.
But these are not serious schools of philosophy qua philosophy. Big in
litcrit circles, and in HistCon (History of Consciousness, the popular
major here at UC Santa Cruz), and of course in Feminist Dialectical
Critiques of Patriarchal Technorepression.
>Finally, I do understand that, while it makes considerable apparent sense
>to assume that there is no "point" to the universe, it seems to me that
>there *is* morality -- not religion and superstition, not some mythical
>bearded old guy in the sky saying "you die, you don't, you die, you don't",
>because, frankly, the older I get the less of the devine I believe -- but
>actual morals, just as most people commonly, intuitively, understand them.
There have been analyses of whether such morals exist, where they might
come from, and how they are related to animal behaviors, territorial
compromises (pace Schelling points), and so on.
This is in fact what Nietzsche was talking about, to wit: now that we have
pretty good evidence that there ain't some bearded Sky Father telling his
chilluns what he'll let them do and what he'll send them to Hell for, does
this mean humans are free to behave as they wish at all times? What are the
consequences? (Kant answered this with his categorical imperative, and
Rawls reinterpreted this in a Possible Worlds semantics...perhaps showing
the influence of science fiction and modern science on philosophy. But I
digress.)
>I don't think that Nietzsche abandoned that idea, even when he's considered
>most uncharitably, as most modern leftist idologues are wont to do.
This is an overbroad statement. Most modern leftists cite Nietzsche when it
is convenient for them to do so. (One can find what one wishes in him.)
There is no longer any particular ideological taint to Nietzsche; he was,
after all, dead a good 30 years before the Nazis came to power, and last
did any serious writing in 1889. Walter Kauffman did a good job in the
1950s of showing that the one-dimensional portrayal of Nietzsche as an
anti-Semitic, anti-woman, pro-statist, supporter of racial eugenics
programs was false in almost all ways. Yeah, one can find Nietzsche
insulting Jews in his writings. One can also find him calling anti-Jewish
sentiments moronic. And so on for the other points. His views on man and
superman, slave moralities, and the role of culture are far too nuanced for
me to get into here. As I said, sample some of his stuff in his own words.
Or at least in the English translations...his German is much better than
that of the English translations, but his words generally speak for
themselves. Nietzsche is one of those rare thinkers one can read directly,
without intermediaries.
>And, yes, it may even turn out that, at bottom, our perception of morality
>is all biochemistry. I'm practically convinced of it now, not only for
>obvious personal reasons, but certainly before there's physical proof of
>the assertion.
You need to read further, then. Your "is all biochemistry" betrays your
bias toward easy solutions. The world is not easy; there is no reason to
expect complex evolved behavior emerged out of just biochemistry.
Determinism at the biochemical level is not the main place mores come from.
Hints: emergent behavior, cooperation, evolutionary game theory, Schelling
points, and even Coase's Theorem. Certainly biochemistry plays an important
role.
> But, even that kind of morality still has, for the purpose
>of evolutionary survival, a *value* of some kind -- value being another
>thing that philosophy tries to think about, and that most "post-moderns"
>and "extistensialists" only laugh at, like so many modern-day sophists.
Nonsense. I count myself an existentialist, and yet I don't "laugh at"
values. Nor do any existentialists I know laugh at values.
I believe you are falling into the trap of using comic book caricatures:
"sophists," "existentialists," "French philosophers," and "liberals" in
general. Your arguments are often made not by critiquing the underlying
points but by dismissing them as "post-modern" or as "French."
Some self-styled postmodernists are buffoons. Some are even hypocrites of
the first magnitude. (Like the Frenchman who came to the U.S. after the war
and became a noted postmodernist author and editor. It recently came to
light that he'd been a Nazi sympathizer who actually wrote articles about
the inferiority of Jews and the need to cleanse the world of them. I don't
recall his name at this moment, but it was quite an academic scandal half a
dozen years ago.)
>That's why I deride it as literature, and not science, just like I deride
>Freudian "psychonalytics" as the same. In fact, calling it "literature" is
>a disservice to actual literature; Shakespeare, for instance. :-).
You've been doing a relatively good job of writing directly, without
overuse of smileys. I urge you to restrain yourself...or hire an editor.
Overuse of smileys and other editorial voice asides undercuts points made
in writing. Those who use smileys promiscuously are in effect saying "I'm
so unsure about what I'm saying that I'm telling you to disregard what I
say, to not take it all seriously. :). Wink. Nudge. :)) Or something like
that. I haven't haven't had this much fun since I tossed my baby brother
into the hog pen and milk shot out my nose. Wink, nudge, :)."
Nietzsche didn't need smileys. Neither did Marx.
--Tim May
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
