Philosophy Now Forum

The Inglorious One wrote:Aw, what the hell. I know it will be waaaay over vegetablehead's head and most others, too, but here's part 1 of Chapter 1 (the content wasn't changed, but I had to do some editing):

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
BACKGROUND
CHAPTER I

The Rejection of Scholasticism

' " I perceive", said the Countess, "Philosophy is now become very Mechanical.'' "So mechanical”, said I, "that I fear we shall quickly become ashamed of it; they will have the World to be in great, what a watch is in little; which is very regular, & depends only upon the just disposing of the several parts of the movement. But pray tell me, Madam, had you not formerly a more sublime Idea of the Universe?" ' [Fontenelle, Plurality of Worlds, 1686.]

TO give a 'philosophical' account of matters which had formerly been explained 'unscientifically', 'popularly', or 'figuratively'—this, it would probably be agreed, has been the main intellectual concern of the last three hundred years. In a sense, no doubt, the separation of the 'true' from the 'false', the 'real' from the 'illusory', has been the task of thought at all times. But this winnowing process seems to have been carried on much more actively and consciously at certain times than at others. For us in the West two such periods are of especial importance, the period of Greek philosophy and the centuries following the Renaissance. It was in the seventeenth century that modern European thought seems first to have assumed, once more, that its appointed task was La Recherche de la Verite, the discovery and declaration, according to its lights, of the True Nature of Things. It is in that century that we meet once again the exhilaration which inspired Lucretius in his address to Epicurus—the sense of emancipation from inadequate notions, of new contact with reality. It was then, too, that the concepts of 'truth', 'reality', 'explanation' and the rest were being formed, which have moulded all subsequent thinking. There is some reason, then, for supposing that it may be worthwhile to watch these concepts in process of formation.

First it may be well to enquire, not with Pilate— 'What is Truth?' but what was felt to be 'truth' and 'explanation' under seventeenth century conditions. As T. E. Hulme and others have pointed out, it is almost insuperably difficult to become critically conscious of one's own habitual assumptions; 'doctrines felt as facts' can only be seen to be doctrines, and not facts, after great efforts of thought, and usually only with the aid of a first-rate metaphysician. It is, however, less difficult to detect the assumptions of an age distant from our own, especially when these have been subject to criticism. At this distance of time it should be possible, I think, to state fairly accurately what the seventeenth century felt as 'true', and what satisfied it as 'explanation'. In reading seventeenth century writers one feels that it was as 'explanation' that they chiefly valued the 'new philosophy', and it is for this reason that I wish first to enquire, briefly, what is 'explanation'?

Dictionary definitions will not help us much here. 'To explain', we learn, means to 'make clear', to 'render intelligible'. But wherein consists the clarity, the intelligibility? The clarity of an explanation seems to depend upon the degree of satisfaction that it affords. An explanation 'explains' best when it meets some need of our nature, some deep-seated demand for assurance. 'Explanation' may perhaps be roughly defined as a restatement of something—event, theory, doctrine, etc. in terms of the current interests and assumptions. It satisfies, as explanation, because it appeals to that particular set of assumptions, as superseding those of a past age or of a former state of mind. Thus it is necessary, if an explanation is to seem satisfactory, that its terms should seem ultimate, incapable of further analysis. Directly we allow ourselves to ask ' What, after all, does this explanation amount to? ' we have really demanded an explanation of the explanation, that is to say, we have seen that the terms of the first explanation are not ultimate, but can be analysed into other terms—which perhaps for the moment do seem to us to be ultimate. Thus, for example, we may choose to accept a psychological explanation of a metaphysical proposition, or we may prefer a metaphysical explanation of a psychological proposition. All depends upon our presuppositions, which in turn depend upon our training, whereby we have come to regard (or to feel) one set of terms as ultimate, the other not. An explanation commands our assent with immediate authority, when it presupposes the 'reality', the 'truth', of what seems to us most real, most true. One cannot, therefore, define 'explanation' absolutely; one can only say that it is a statement which satisfies the demands of a particular time or place.

A general demand for restatement or explanation seems to have arisen from time to time, perhaps never more vehemently than in the period we are considering. Such a demand presumably indicates a disharmony between traditional explanations and current needs. It does not necessarily imply the 'falsehood' of the older statement; it may merely mean that men now wish to live and to act according to a different formula. This is especially evident in our period whenever a 'scientific' explanation replaces a theological one. For example, the spots on the moon's surface might be due, theologically, to the fact that it was God's will they should be there; scientifically they might be 'explained' as the craters of extinct volcanoes. The newer explanation may be said, not so much to contain 'more' truth than the older, as to supply the kind of truth which was now demanded. An event was 'explained'—and this, of course, may be said as much of our own time as of the seventeenth century—when its history had been traced and described. A comet, for example, or an eclipse, was explained when instead of being a disastrous omen which 'with fear of change perplexes monarchs' it could be shown to be the 'necessary' result of a demonstrable chain of causes. No one, it need hardly be said, wishes to deny that this explanation had and still has a more 'satisfying' quality than the one it superseded. But why was it more satisfying? It was more satisfying, we may suppose, because now, instead of the kind of 'truth' which is consistent with authoritative teaching, men began to desire the kind which would enable them to measure, to weigh and to control the things around them; they desired, in Bacon's words, 'to extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man Interest was now directed to the how, the manner of causation, not its why, its final cause. For a scientific type of explanation to be satisfying, for it to convince us with a sense of its necessary truth, we must be in the condition of needing and desiring that type of explanation and no other.

The seventeenth century was the first of the modern centuries which, on the whole, have increasingly fulfilled these conditions. We have said that an explanation is acceptable when it satisfies certain needs and demands. What demands were met by the scientific movement in our period? To answer this question we may enquire a little into the general effects of explanation upon the minds of those who are being enlightened. Considered as a psychological event, an explanation may be described as a change in the quality of our response towards an object or an idea. An explanation invites and—if it is in accordance with our felt or unfelt needs—produces a new attitude towards its subject-matter. here we had formerly felt fear, pain, curiosity, dissatisfaction, anxiety or reverence, we now experience relief, and regard the object with easy familiarity and perhaps contempt. An explained thing, except for very resolute thinkers, is almost inevitably 'explained away'. Speaking generally, it may be said that the demand for explanation is due to the desire to be rid of mystery. Such a demand will be most insistent when the current mysteries have become unusually irksome, as seems to have been the case in the time of Epicurus, and again at the Renaissance. At those turning-points men wanted 'scientific' explanations because they no longer wished to feel as they had been taught to feel about the nature of things. To be rid of fear—fear of the unknown, fear of the gods, fear of the stars or of the devil—to be released from the necessity of reverencing what was not to be understood, these were amongst the most urgent demands of the modern as of the ancient world; and it was because it satisfied these demands that scientific explanation was received as the revelation of truth. Not immediately received by everybody, we should remind ourselves. There are always those like Donne for whom new philosophy 'puts all in doubt', for whom, in fact, new explanation explains nothing, but merely causes distress and confusion ; and those, like the Fathers of the Inquisition, for whom new philosophy is simply old error. But there is a deepening chorus of approval as the century wears on, and after the Restoration the unanimity is wonderful.

More was demanded than mere release from traditional hauntings. Men demanded also to feel at home in this brave new world which Columbus and Copernicus and Galileo had opened up to them, and to recognise it as 'controlled, sustained and agitated', by laws in some way akin to those of human reason. To be no longer at the mercy of nature, no longer to be encompassed by arbitrary mystery—these benefits were to be accompanied by the great new gift of power, power to control natural forces and to turn them, in Bacon's phrases, to the 'occasions and uses of life', and 'the relief of man's estate'. All this the new thought promised and indeed performed ; no wonder, then, that the types of explanation which it offered seemed the only 'true' ones. Were these promises the enticements of Mephistopheles to Faust? and has the Adversary, at any time since then, actually reappeared and demanded payment of his bond? This disturbing possibility is one which, at any rate, we shall not do ill to bear in mind as we pursue our enquiries.

We began, it will be remembered, by enquiring what was felt to be most true, most real, most explanatory,under seventeenth century conditions. Let us guard against any implied over-simplification ; no one thing answered to that description, then or at any time. Different kinds of truth were acknowledged (as we shall see later in more detail), for instance truths of faith and truths of reason; different orders of reality were recognised, and different kinds of explanation seen to be relevant in varying contexts. Nevertheless it may be said that if there was then any outstanding intellectual revolution in process of enactment, it was a general transference of interest from metaphysics to physics, from the contemplation of Being to the observation of Becoming. In Bacon's classification of the Sciences, final causes and Form are consigned to Metaphysics, while Physics deals with efficient causes and Matter. But although Metaphysics is thus given its status by the buccinator novi temporis, the main significance of the great instauration was to lie in the enormous extension of the field of physical or ' natural ' causation, the field of efficient causes and matter '. In the mighty ' exantlation of truth—of which Sir Thomas Browne lamented that he should not see the end, or more, indeed, than ' that obscured Virgin half out of the pit '—no event counted for more than the realisation that almost all the phenomena of the physical world could be ' explained ' by the laws of motion, as movements of particles of matter in space and time. As Glanvill says, the Aristotelian philosophy had prevailed, until the present age disinterred ' the more excellent Hypotheses of Democritus and Epicurus'. Although not all mysteries, by any means, had yet been reduced to mechanics, what is important for us is that now mechanico-materialistic explanations began to be 'felt as facts', felt, that is, as affording that picture of reality, of things-in-themselves, which alone would satisfy contemporary demands. It was only when you were interpreting any phenomenon—a colour, a movement, a condition, an attraction—in terms of the motion of atoms, their impingement on each other, their cohesion, collision or eddying, that you were giving an account of how things actually and really happened. The mechanical explanation was the 'philosophical' explanation; all others were, on the one hand, vulgar, superstitious, and superficial; or, on the other hand, they were 'Aristotelian' or 'scholastic'.

Vegetable Taxi wrote:Why are you religious fucks so threatened by, and hateful towards, anyone who doesn't believe in the childish bullshit you believe in? What the hell is it to you? I've never been able to work that out.

Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:

Vegetable Taxi wrote:Why are you religious fucks so threatened by, and hateful towards, anyone who doesn't believe in the childish bullshit you believe in? What the hell is it to you? I've never been able to work that out.

It is a loaded question to be sure! To answer it means that I have to accept those terms. I don't, myself. Not all of them in any case.

I would say that I am 'threatened', as we all are threatened, by certain dangerous, insane, potentially harmful, often out of control, mindless, and debasing trends and tendencies that we notice in culture at large. I think we all are on guard against and aware of the fact that we are often 'threatened'. We live in an age where threatening things occur. We need to contextualise this conversation as one occurring in the shadow of the Second World War and quite significant shifts occurring in this post-war era. Whether one is left-oriented or right-oriented each has ground for defining threat. That is simply a fair statement.

But allow me to ask you, as a ramp toward an answer to your C+ question (*clap clap*): Is there anything that is occurring or might occur in your society or culture that you would consider genuinely threatening? Do you consider 'being threatened' a valid category? If you can identify one threat that you feel is worthwhile feeling threatened by, you will at least have granted that there are things in life that deserve the threatened sense.

Now, you wish to say, though you don't in fact state it (you imply it though), that the loss of religiousness is not worth feeling threatened over. Am I right? For you it is not a category of threat. Nor is it - at least expressed in those crude terms - for me. What is threatening to me, to my sense of things, is the loss of connection to value. Religiousness per se is not of much interest to me, personally. What you will need to understand is that religiousness, and a whole range of definitions about value, have been the backbone of Occidental culture. Every positive value that I can think of has, in truth, been arrived at through those engaged in religious work of one sort or another. I am speaking historically. The foundation of 'Occidental values' has been built by men who had religious concerns shall we say. Now, I do not wish to debate this point. The point is quite undebatable. To be convinced all you'd have to do is to study the History of Ideas.

I am 'threatened by' the loss of the connection to the value-making or the value-realising core which is part-and-parcel of Occidentalism. But I would not use the word 'threat' or 'threatened', I would rather say 'concern'.

You make another assertion possibly because you cannot read well. There is very little in religious stories that I 'believe'. Quite close to nothing of the miracle-claims and I certainly do not believe that Mary was visited by God's angels prior to impregnation by God, and that just one among countless religious claims that have no relevance to me. What you do not understand is that theology has been through an historical ringer and has had much that is untenable expressed out of it. This is one of the large ideas that comes through Basil Willey's 'Christianty Then and Now' which I just got through. This is one of the first times that the essence of what it means, or what it could mean, to have religion or to be religious has actually been possible. I mean in a new sense. I have no interest in reclaiming or re-inhabiting the dead and rather empty structures of religion as they are known to all of us and present. I am in this sense, and some other senses too, a Nietzschean: we have to forge new values and new definitions, and we live in the shadow of a sort of corpse. Defining 'corpse' is quite interesting.

The question all stems, for me, on what is the correct attitude to take toward existence, and this to me is in essence a religious question. 'Religion' I carefully define as a man's total relationship to his self, his existence, the world he lives in, the tangible reality of daily life, and also higher, metaphysical concerns.

I will admit to having something akin to 'hate' but it is, of course, not really hate. But it is not in fact either for the religious or the areligious. If you indicate that you have actually read the words in this post, and toss up some indicator of having comprehended even 15% of it, I will elaborate on 'contempt' as it is a very good question.

I remind you of your recent C+ grade! Keep up the good work! If you feel you are on the verge of a relapse to typical forum shenanigans, just remember that I asked my wife to bake Christmas cookies for the good children here. There are indeed consequences to good, honest and sustained philosophical work!

Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:Question: How did you get the PDF to an editable format?

vegetariantaxidermy wrote:You have not said how others not sharing your particular beliefs is threatening to you. BTW, an 'atheistic regime' is NOT the same as atheism. A totalitarian dictatorship is just that, first and foremost, so don't bother throwing Stalin and Pol Pot in my face. They were self-worshipping, insane dictators. It wouldn't have mattered what they believed. I have to ask you which 'values' you have, as a religious nut-job, that non religious-nut-jobs can't share on account of their non religious-nutjobness.

I have to ask you which 'values' you have, as a religious nut-job, that non religious-nut-jobs can't share on account of their non religious-nutjobness.

• "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?"

vegetariantaxidermy wrote: How can I compete intellectually with someone who is so good at copy-pasting?

Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:

Sthita wrote:What does any of these stupid pages matter? What do I care what your Willey thinks about how belief came to be disbelief? Let me tell you ...

This is possibly the largest area of difference, not only between what informs our view, but our approach to the entire issue. You desire to make some declarations and to engage in asinine and childish fights and through these fights to end up, more or less, declaring your view the 'right' one. My approach is quite different, and to pursue that approach demands a very different methodology, a different stance taken, a different relationship to the problem, and a very different result. My main interest is in locating and highlighting the shift in predication that has produced very different relationships to being (existence, life) and to understand them not in a lower-level polemical sense, which actually pushes understanding, dialectic, and the possibility of learning and exchange out of the picture entirely, and to introduce a far higher level of criticism. Now, because you share none of this interest and intentionality it will be, evidently, quite easy for you to do away with the entire intellectual, literary, ethical, artistic, social, and cultural criticism that has been engaged in for the last 150 years more or less. There is no one, no interesting authority, no researcher, no thinker and thus no philosopher that you will need to engage in your childish project. And that is because all that you need for your argument is your declaration: Belief is 'psychological', it 'makes no sense to believe', is part of denial of reality, and every other element of your discourse. There it is. There is nothing more to be said about it. Now, with these armaments you have decided to launch yourself into a public sphere, and into a forum dedicated - or so they say - to 'philosophy'.

Your concerns, and your project in its entirety, is uninteresting to me because it is simply too shallow. You do not have an intellectual position here and yet you do have some crude ideas. You certainly have intentionality, and this I have always acknowledged, but at the core of your intentions there is little, or nothing at all, that is creative. This is a very important aspect of your project which must be understood. You can block, you can shoot down, you can repeat time and time again the only points you have - in the face of far more interesting and relevant discourse on the topic! - and you can do this in concert with others who base their position in simplicities, reductions, and polarised positions, and thus defeat a wider, more introspective, a more fair conversation from ever developing. With all this the conversation is always brought down to your level and this is I think one of the most important points: Your level is so low that it nearly has no relevance to the larger - and very important - issues into which all of this hinges.

This is why a philosopher and a critic like Willey (though Lovejoy, Tillyard, Ruth Anderson, Frank Kermode and numerous others, and of course so many classical philosophers!) are entirely relevant to this conversation. But Sthita: You have no relationship to these issues, not really, and no interest in them, and thus you are completely irrelevant. Please don't take it personal ...
___________________________________

You assert that religious philosophy, and the ethics defined in religious contexts, has no influence on either the individual man or the cultural forms. And if I have encapsulated you correctly here I can only tell you that you have a severe intellectual problem. Apparently, at least to engage with me, you will need to undertake a study whereby you come to grasp what is simply self-evident. It does not need to be talked about nor gone over, or one would do that in a class of 10 years-old who are literally just starting out.

Do you have any solid data, like maybe a high number of atheists in prison or something of that sort? Give me something. Some data ...

One problem here is that you think I am like you stuck in your established polarity. I prefer not to hang out there. In order to understand the places I prefer to hang out in, intellectually, I have submitted many pages, easily readable, by a man I admire who has done a good deal of work in the area, in this field. You think that I am here doing battle with Atheism. You think that I think it is not possible to live without an inner or a, let us say, theologically-defined relationship to life, to people, to culture. But this is not the case and I have not held (exactly) nor forwarded that opinion. What I have said and what I do say is that we are in a huge sea-change between one vast paradigm of explanation of Reality, and a new and different one, based on very different methods, extractions, and senses of value. These methods, what is extracted by perception ofor view and consideration (and valuation), and then the question of value itself: These are areas which you, as I have said, have no familiarity with, and were you to gain that familiarity your discourse would change and daresay improve. You have no business though, and no right, to side-step the efforts on my part to give this conversation some ground. Also, you should be writing complete and independent essays which are free-standing contributions to the position(s) that are of value to you. Instead you latch-on to mine and perform these cut-ups.

The 'data' that interests me is the 'data' in a whole range of study and philosophy essentially that has emerged in the last 150 years. Additionally, I may from time to time mention that I think that the abandonment of religious positions (say in the family, in a simple provincial setting, as Willey spoke of in at least one section that you read), and the loss of a received ethical platform which acts as a fence or a controlling influence, when lost or destroyed by ersatz influences, tends to destroy the ethical platform within communities of people, and that many other questionable interests then rush in to fill the void: yes, this is my view. And it is because I see it occurring around me. But that I see it and that it alarms me or concerns me, does not mean that I believe it possible to return to the decimated religious position, the group of stories or tales or fictions upon which a religious/spiritual understanding are often founded. My own position is more complex. Eighty-five percent of it you do not understand for the simple reason that you are 95% unprepared to engage in these important conversations.

Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:Sthita and others: I think it is time to begin a grading system for your low-level posts. The American system can work: A, B, C, D, E and F. In my own view anything below C- should be understood as failure. Your recent contributions Sthita are Ds all the way round. You definitely get a D- for 'independence of discourse' and the annoying cut-up habit. To get better marks you will have to improve in this area. Additionally, your formatting choices are poor, in my view. Whole sentences of capitals and whole underlined sentences are not working. Additionally, you need to cite sources. Who are you reading? What philosophers have you read on these topics that support your views? Because of these flat out errors I am forced to write in bold red: D- And you are right on the verge of failure. And you also get an unhappy face:

I don't even want to talk about Briancrc or Vegetable Taxi ...

Gustav Bjornstrand wrote: I may not have said that and yet I said a great deal and certainly made a valid effort to answer your question. You get a D- for lack of that consideration. I also wrote numerous things that you could have commented on and you have avoided thus everything that I did write. Another D-. Which really should be an F+. But I guess that is sort of an impossibility. Can one slightly not fail?

Now, I did not ever say that others not sharing my values was or is a problem for me, did I? Who do you think you are quoting? You must understand that a Bjornstrand is an adaptable, a resilient and self-determining creature. For example, I have determined that I will gain from these interactions even if you completely fail them. You may lose, you likely will, but I will gain. I give you no power over my gaining. This is the general attitude I take toward the present.

You would have to grasp what are my 'particular beliefs' to understand what and even if any particular thing is threatening to me.

It is true that an atheistic political regime is not the same as a simple, honest atheist, this is true. But in my view we have to consider the influence and effect of Marxian ideas in our own cultures. This moves the consideration of atheism into a more complex political, social and ideological area. There is a great deal to be considered when one begins to study the rise of modern atheism, or atheism as the best option in our present. You must understand that in very real senses I am a product of certain Marxian trends, insofar as it all impinged on me and, at a certain point, had affect. My whole spiritual endeavour, if I can call it that, in many ways rises out of a certain form of rebelliousness and anti-establishmentarianism. I know something of it. I refer to this influence as an 'acid' but I would not ever say that all acids are non-productive. So while it is in a sense unfair and bombardiering to haul in Stalin, it is not at all unfair or irrelevant to haul in Marx and Marxian influence in our cultures. One could refer to the so-called Frankfurt School and to a whole ideological thrust which is real and considerable. It is largely 'atheistic'. Yet I really have to say I do not like the words theist-atheist. They are used to polarise and I don't feel polarisation serves any decent function.


If I had to base it on the local crew, and you among them, I would say that whatever you are doing - intellectually, philosophically, and even in terms of something like basic humanness or friendliness - I'd have to say that (generally) y'all seem to have fallen into a reductionist trap. Y'all seem emblematic of what has been lost when a full picture of man, of history, of our reality, of the possibilities of perception, of understanding in a general and wide-ranging sense, or subtleties of meaning, of expression, of nuance and sensitivity, just get tossed out the door. They appear not to appear on the radar of your minds. How has this come about? I have asked. I have asked (along with Ginsberg):

• "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?"

That is a Blakean question. It is one of the exclamations that will come forward when one begins to ask what happens to a person when they can see only with and not through the eye. But with this, I am pretty sure, I have lost you. 'Whatever does this nutjob mean?' you will ask. 'What could seeing through the eye mean in distinction to seeing with the eye? The eye is just the eye' If you understood Blake's relationship to his era, which you could easily gain by a reading of Willey, you would begin to approach the puzzle and you'd understand more. The values I would speak about stem from this area, intangible though it is. And that is the point: I am speaking of intangibles. You have no way (apparently) to appreciate or even to understand intangibles. That is part of the loss.

This is upper-strata stuff though. On lower social and cultural levels, in my view, when people (speaking generally) lose a connection to a certain metaphysical principle, even when that is seen and grasped 'as through a glass darkly', something very hard to qualify is lost. Yes, that is my view. I am pretty sure of this but I have caveats even to my own view. I am concerned for the loss of a certain sort of mind-set or inner-orientation. I am sorry if this is an inadequate explanation. It feels inadequate to me. But you must remember that all that I am trying to do here is to use this as an opportunity to define my views vis-a-vis ustedes. My success will be measured as I gain that language and pull it off better.