Saturday, December 20, 2014

Talk Naturally

Metaphysics for Aristotle was the study of being qua being.  For Aristotle, categories of language reflected fundamental structures, not so much in the world (for what can be in the world can also not be) but composing the world.  Today, most people speak of ontology, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines as the study "of what there is".  This definition is deceptive, because ontology is not really empirical (much as people want to claim it is), because it is not an empirical question as to whether abstract entities like the soul or numbers exist.  In fact, the question of what is an empirical question is not actually an empirical question itself, it is a question about the meaning of the concept "empirical", and the boundaries of this concept.

In so much as we seek a definition, we seek to draw a limit on a concept.  Divination is an empirical process:  you say the question, you say the invocation, you throw the coconuts or the tarot cards or whatever, and you interpret the answer.  But, of course, most people who insist on a strict definition of what is an empirical answer (which is bound up with what is an empirical question) are interested in excluding divination.  I do not point this out because I have any burning interest in including divination within the purview of what is an empirical answer, but to point out the vagueness in our use of the concept of empirical.  It is not that the results of divination are not empirically manifest, but rather that methods of divination are not based on an empirical method.

What are we doing when we say these methods are empirical and these methods are not empirical?  We are establishing a difference, in language, between two methods, and in so doing, we are giving the concept of empirical a meaning.  One can only speak of empirical methods, like experimental physics, because there are other methods, like tarot readings, which are not empirical methods.  Moreover, this process of creating identity and difference is not really an exercise in pure taxonomy.  For example, if we had a discussion about defining the identity of the master race, and distinguishing that race from the inferior races, this would not be merely creating a taxonomy of the human species.  Differences in language reflect differences in values.  We seek to make a distinction between empirical methods and non-empirical methods because we want to establish a hierarchy between empirical methods and non-empirical methods.  Moreover, this differentiation does not add to our knowledge of the empirical world, because it is not about empirical discovery, learning new facts about the world, it is about empirical classification--not the discovery of facts, but the ordering of facts.  Moreover, these classifications are not being made for personal edification, they are chiefly concerned with the creation of a political order, a system of power.  For example, one could imagine a government allocating money to fund empirical methods, and arguments being made about whether a method is or is not empirical by various interested parties.  So what is ontology, if not an political endeavor, an attempt to police language, with the end of reinforcing and/or undermining various social institutions, customs, and modes of speech.

I used the master race example for a reason, because it highlights the nakedly political aspect of ontology.  An ontology reflects not a description of "what there is", but a political vision of what should be.  Aristotle and Plato came to philosophy in large part based on their concerns about the management of the Greek city-state.  Aquinas's philosophy was rooted in a vision of the hegemony of the Catholic Church.  Rousseau's philosophy is rooted in the emergence of the nation-state.  Heidegger's work was in part about legitimating an ethno-nationalist state.  Contemporary philosophy, in Anglo-English countries, primarily concerns itself with the creation of a post-human, post-democratic order ruled by technocrats.  The problem of philosophy of mind concerns itself with suppressing alternative anthropologies to the view of human beings as biochemical machines.  Because matter can only act on other matter, whereas a being with a soul can act on itself (it is animated), materialism is ultimately an attack on democratic institutions and respect for individual rights.  After all, if an easily manipulated voting machine casts a ballot for a particular candidate, who cares?  It is simply following its program, and if it votes the wrong way, it simply needs to be re-programmed to vote correctly, or recycled if it can't be fixed.  Why respect the rights of so-called individuals, when individuals are nothing more than complex things, emerged from the primal slime?  Why not round up and shoot the defectors from the new scientific order in the name of Progress, the way we would wipe out an infectious disease?  

With materialism, matter acting on matter, and Darwinism, morphological and behavioral differences ultimately attributable to genetics, or the influence of environmental chemicals on gene expressions,  we end up with one solution to behavioral and political and cultural differences:  elimination of the inferior organisms.  The destruction or enslavement of the weak by the powerful.  After all, you are only your genes or your brain, or whatever material substrate you claim the real you consists in, and if you are a defective thing, it is only sentiment and religious superstition that prevents society from having you exterminated.  This can be accomplished through an extreme form of a capitalism, where the weaker organisms are given the means and the ability to kill themselves off, or through more direct, authoritarian means, like Nazi Germany.  If we retain materialism, but reject reductionism, we can embrace dialectical materialism, that systems or configurations of matter give rise to forms of life.  Here, the behavior of organisms do not reflect individual choices (something made up by Christians to provide ideological cover for capitalism) but rather economic configurations.  In this view, power flows from the unequal distribution of resources, and, therefore, if you concentrate power in the hands of an absolute dictatorship which then equally distributes the resources, power and hierarchy will naturally disappear and create a stateless society.  (In contrast, if the unequal distribution of material resources flows from an invisible ordering power, it would require increasing concentrations of worldly power to suppress the natural order of things in accordance with your strict egalitarian vision.)  Because configurations of matter determine spirit, changes in matter result in changes in spirit.  Although we never saw the complete withering away of the State in the Soviet Union, this is undoubtedly the fault of the perfidious capitalist counter-revolutionary forces (and not a corrupt metaphysical inversion leading to a failed social order).

The chief objection I have to materialism, whether in a reductive version (as expressed in the German National Socialist movement) or a holistic version (as expressed by Communism), is political.  I want a political system that acknowledges the dignity and worth of individual human beings, and a political system that acknowledges the value of human achievement in collective cooperation and sacrifice.  That is to say, in my ontology, I give primacy to the principle of soul, and view the body as the manifestation of the soul, and I give primacy to the principle of spirit, and view empirical configurations of political economy as the effects of a collective spirit.  This leads to a location problem for these invisible souls and spirits, which is to say that these souls and spirits must all be located in God, the source and creator of all things visible and invisible.  I say these things because I value Liberty and National Sovereignty, and I understand that Liberty and National Sovereignty cannot be conceptually disentangled from Soul and Spirit, and if Soul and Spirit are the causes, not the effects of matter, then for conceptual clarity, we need to understand Soul and Spirit as the effects of something greater, beyond the limit of intelligibility but the source of intelligibility (thus, the nature of the ultimate source of all things cannot be put into words).  My main method is the method of ordinary language, because our existing political order, which approximates a system of Liberty and National Sovereignty, is based on the ordinary forms of our language, our folkways and folk psychology, which manifest our national culture.    

On the other hand, I am greatly pessimistic about the future of both Liberty and National Sovereignty, because I understand that "scientific ontology" is displacing traditional metaphysics and theology in favor of forms of language that can only manifest in the form of a totalitarian state.  The only thing that gives me hope is that the people who are selling this "scientific ontology" do not seem to understand the logical and political consequences of what they are selling.  For example, the shift in our national discourse from the criminal prohibition of sodomy, a voluntary action, to the creation of a class of people with a status, homosexuality, which is now supposedly a genetic condition.  The gay rights debate has now been framed about the status of a collective group, constituted by an essential biological characteristic, and whether we as a society choose to be political friends or enemies with this group.  I believe that some folks on the Left see this as a positive social development, because they believe that it may be possible to have a political order which "friends" everyone, or that society can reach some political equilibrium where historically marginalized groups share equal power.  Of course, this is impossible, because political groups have adverse political interests, and aiding one group is always harming another.  Societies are always hierarchical (although absolute concentration of power, e.g. extreme power hierarchies, can create conditions of relative economic equality) and the drive to oppress is a universal characteristic of humanity, based on fear of the Other.  The Left, if they succeed, will simply put historically marginalized groups in charge, who are just as likely to abuse their power as their predecessors--one can merely look to the mixed results of decolonization in the world.  Will we get Zimbabwe or South Africa?  Is this a more worthy political objective than the historical goal of governing on behalf of the common good of of all?   

The cultural Left today does not disagree with the Nazi party regarding the existence of homosexuals, only on what to do with them.  What has been achieved is the creation of a political identity, membership in a political group, by virtue of an essential, biological characteristic, instead of merely being an individual who happens to engage in certain kinds of behavior.  Although I do not want to see sodomy laws re-instated, I would like to witness a deconstruction of the homosexual in my lifetime.  After all, while some people clearly have a strong behavioral predisposition to engage in homosexual acts (just as 90% of alcohol is consumed by 10% of drinkers), this behavioral predisposition does not line up in any absolute way with the behavior, given the numbers of bisexuals, and the number of people who switch from heterosexual relationships to homosexual relationships and the reverse.  Once society makes the transition from deviant acts to deviant identities, the ground is paved for either preferential treatment ("friends") or political repression ("enemies").  Since we are now friends as a society with homosexuals, we are increasingly gearing up to battle with religious traditionalists, our new domestic enemies, with long-term cultural and political consequences for the future political direction of our country.  One could even say that we now have a perfect political rationale for the State to conduct a kulterkampf against elements of our civil society that insist on independence from the new political order.

We can see this process in reverse in the case of pedophilia, in which society no longer condemns morally abhorrent acts, but morally abhorrent people, who by virtue of their identity status, some kind of behavioral propensity rooted in biology, can be subjected to indefinite civil commitment, e.g. lifetime incarceration in a special mental institution.  At least, so says our Supreme Court.  On the other hand, given the ways in which we have taken religious identity, racial identity, ethnic identity, and gender identity off the table, perhaps it is inevitable that we manufacture new forms of political identity, and create new political hierarchies based on the dolling out on one hand collective rewards, and on another hand, collective punishment.  I suspect these battles will justify the use of state power against those independent elements of civil society that insist on preserving traditional forms of culture and customs, instead of merely acting as mirrors of the ruling state ideology.  Rather than a system of Liberty based on the traditional virtues with a Sovereign Nation, we are moving to a system of Freedom based on politically validated modes of consumerism within a transnational system of capitalism.  Things defined by their consumption of other things and managed by technocrats, which our new ontology defines as naturally just "what there is".

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