The Awful, Terrible, Horrible World-View of Anglo-Saxon Common Sense

 

        Now that my click-bait title has gotten your attention let me say that I’m an admirer of most things English even though in this essay I am going to have to puncture a deep, indeed stupefying complacency about the world that seems to afflict that otherwise admirable nation AND its colonial epigones in the U.S. (especially!), Canada and elsewhere. This is a complacency that, like all such complacencies, presents itself to itself as sublime and simple sense. There are, I am sure, French and German versions of complacent ‘common sense’ but I will let the French and Germans comment on those.  Before saying WHAT this world-view is, however, I should probably say WHERE it is: ASCS (Anglo-Saxon common sense) is so pervasive that it is a bit challenging to say exactly where it is emanating from. I will make a few preliminary observations here. As proponents of it will tirelessly complain it is NOT by and large the arts/social science section of the academy, which most people afflicted with Anglo-Saxon common sense will tell you has gone to the dogs. Of course the answer to where this disease strikes is primarily social media though that is not saying much for all things cultural now transpire there.  Speaking roughly, I identify five main vectors of ASCS in particular. The first vector consists of STEM specialists in fields like computing and engineering. These individuals fall back on ASCS when commenting on fields outside their technical specialty like history, gender, politics or religion. This is because they have nothing else to fall back on when commenting outside their areas of competence. The second vector is a bit harder to identify but I think it consists in general of technocrats who have not had much general education outside business or medicine or management or whatever it is they do. Such people do not know much of what has happened in universities since last they were there but assume that whatever it is must be some bogus iteration of ‘wokeness’ perversely and irrationally opposed to ‘science, logic and reason’. They think ASCS is the worldview of ‘smart people’ like Bill Nye or Neil DeGrasse Tyson or perhaps, if they are old enough, James Randi. They also think it is the world view of the persecuted ‘heroes of reason’ who battle the dreaded SJW hordes. Further, they identify ASCS with something vaguely called ‘the enlightenment’ which they have learned from Steven Pinker was a good thing. There are other, perhaps smaller, subcultures here (for ASCS IS very much a sub-cultural discourse). One consists of a certain number of academics overly (and arrogantly) specialized in fields like evolutionary psychology or neuro-science. Since these subjects are ‘hard’ their practitioners have total license to comment on subjects that are ‘soft’ and don’t require much by way of raw brain power. These are the people folks outside the academy think of as stereotypically ‘smart’. There are also those unfortunate souls who grew up in closeted, oppressive fundamentalist communities for whom ASCS is now a kind of life-line.  Finally, for reasons not easy to fathom, ASCS has a currency in the world of stand-up comedy.^[1] In the form I most frequently encounter it ASCS is culturally and sometimes politically reactionary. Indeed, it is a nostalgia cult focused on the heroic days of Anglo-male dominance. There are also strains of progressive discourse that ape at least some of the scientistic rhetoric of ASCS but I will discuss that below.  My main focus in this piece will be with ASCS as a vector for cultural reaction which can take a hard right twist in some individuals though a man like Dawkins can still, innocently, boast that he votes labor. More typical perhaps is Steven Pinker and his defense of a rather white and over all creepily male ‘enlightenment’.

The thing to note about ASCS is who it defines as the enemy. ASCS has two enemies in particular. The first is religion. This primarily means Christianity and Islam. These are the only two religions that matter to ASCS and for this reason the only two religions it recognizes or claims to know about. You will not get a word out of ASCS about Therevada Buddhism or Shintoism. You will, from time to time, hear about indigenous religions but only in the context of decolonizing; a thing to which ASCS is generally quite opposed because, after all, ‘science’ ‘progress’ etc. The second enemy is ‘wokeness’. This is not hard to grasp for wokeness (code here for a certain kind of anti-colonialist, anti-racist or anti-capitalist activist I suppose)  challenges the assumed hegemony of ‘science’, ‘technology’, ‘free speech,’ ‘masculinity’, ‘facts’, ‘evidence’ and all the other sacred cows that make Anglo-Saxons Anglo-Saxons and underwrite their world historical greatness. The thing to note (and we will see why this is so as we go along) is that ASCS does not regard these words as complex or contested. Like all words they have a simple, direct, natural, univocal meaning which is being falsely sophisticated by Marxists and other crazies. This is because ASCS has a theory about words which is that they correspond to things preferably one word to one thing. Thus, if a person happens to be a ‘race realist’ the word ‘black’ refers to an underlying natural kind because what else would it refer to? It does NOT refer to a historically conditioned, shifting concept because as we shall see, ASCS does not believe in history except in the emptiest and most purely positive sense, the sense in which we speak of ‘historical facts’ as simple ‘objects’ of apprehension. Plus, these words have auras about them that are either positive or negative. ‘Science’ has a good aura, say, and ‘religion’ a bad one. A word is defined by its simple referent AND the uncomplicated aura that radiates from it. Thus, abstractions like ‘science’ and ‘religion’ do things in the absence of any and all specification or difference. For someone so concrete the Anglo-Saxon has quite a fondness for abstraction though, as Hegel reminds us, it is the man of common sense who is most mired in abstraction. Finally, I should note that for ASCS the Anglo-Saxon has ‘reality’ immediate and unvarnished while everyone else sees the world through the lens of a ‘culture or ‘tradition’. ASCS is not regional or tensed in any way but is simply the universal view from nowhere. When proponents speak of ‘reason’ they mean ASCS directly and without remainder. ASCS IS reason in all its modes and reason IS ASCS. Critics of ASCS are, therefore, also enemies of reason. The blessed proponents of ASCS, however, tell the story that is not just a story and occupy the neutral point outside all mere positions and ideologies. As we shall see below I am no enemy of ‘reason’ except in the restrictive and in fact empty sense in which ASCS defines it. ASCS is a rationalism that knows not a thing about reason and a scientism that knows not a thing about science.  

As for ASCS itself it has four main features we will label realism, evidentialism, literalism, and a-historicism. These positions are directly identical with ‘reason’, ‘logic’ and ‘science’.[2] Now one does not need to talk very long to the ASCS proponent before one realizes that these four features are often un-thematic or simply assumed. ASCS does not actually deny the historicity of knowledge, say, but has simply never heard of it and feigns incomprehension if anyone brings it up. Nor does ASCS ever THINK about what words like ‘science, ’reason’, ‘fact’ or ‘evidence’ might actually mean. Their self-evident meaning is simply assumed. All their appeals to these concepts are rhetorical and one rarely senses that these proponents of ‘logic’ could produce one syllogism in the form of Barbara. This hardly matters as ASCS generally employs these words polemically and largely for their emotional resonance rather than their precise meaning. Indeed, they are often mere coping words. The proponent of ‘science’ and ‘reason’ is far more concerned with what these terms exclude than with what they include. Especially, they are concerned with WHO is excluded by these terms which includes Muslims and Christians, certainly, but can also include indigenous people, people of color, trans people and women depending on how far to the right our proponent of ASCS has veered and how deeply he has racialized and gendered the concept of ‘reason’ (and this, naturally, varies from individual to individual). In general, ASCS corresponds to a scientistic brand of irreligion. There is, of course, a left leaning emancipatory or liberationist form of irreligion. These two may be confused in particular individuals but increasingly they are at loggerheads and will soon radically diverge if they have not already. One reason is that for scientistic atheism Islamophobia is a core principle while for emancipatory atheism Islamophobia is anathema as representing a form of discrimination braided with negative attitudes to immigrants.  More basically they diverge because one is an epistemological stance on the true and the other a moral idealism about the good and these two stances can and do conflict on issues like race, intelligence or genetics.  Or rather, I should say, the RHETORIC of truth clashes with the rhetoric of justice on these issues as where these questions are concerned ASCS shows a surprising weakness for junk science. This should remind us that it is not a simple given that rhetorical gestures towards truth, justice and freedom dovetail without the possibility of clash and the necessity of decision. On the finite plane basic values may conflict. If one says, as certain people do, that ‘truth’ must be chosen over ‘social justice’ one has not uttered an obvious proposition.         

         Now historically ASCS dovetails with the general attitude of Anglo-/American philosophy though its relation to analytic thought is rather like the relation of Thomism or Scotism to popular Catholicism.[3] Without the empirical tradition of English and Scottish philosophy ASCS would not exist though few professional philosophers would sink to anything as crude as what one daily reads on Twitter. This essay is NOT an attack on the tradition of Locke or Hume or Reid but rather a diagnosis of what their philosophies can sink to if not leavened by intelligence, education or judgment (and to be fair this can be just as much a problem for Marxism or Thomism or any other philosophy). Let’s start with the first feature. ASCS is a form (a very simplified form) of realism. By this I mean that it understands the world as consisting of determinate fixed facts of which the mind is a passive register. Knowledge happens when we see or otherwise sense ‘facts’. Truth is the correspondence between mental states and physical states.[4] Thus, a core principle of ASCS is that feelings and beliefs are one thing and facts another. Further, there is an order between them. Facts OUGHT to cause beliefs and not vice versa. The enemy of the ‘fact’ is, especially, feeling. There is a noble heroism in bowing to fact and it is, indeed, a gendered heroism, for it is males who paradigmatically recognize facts while women bow to feelings because they are more emotive and less rational. A fact is, to put it bluntly, male. This is why Sam Harris muses about the rationality of women and ‘blacks’ (for a fact is also white- facts are for white men because feminine emotions and the low IQ of Africans interfere with seeing them). It is also why Ricky Gervais describes our cultural malaise as ‘putting feelings before facts’.[5] Truth is separate from feeling and doesn’t care about feeling and is moreover impervious to the state or condition of the subject. Thus, we are assured by Neil DeGrasse Tyson that ‘science’ is true whether anyone believes it or not. “Science’ was true even millennia ago when no one thought scientifically. Science is true in complete abstraction from any thinking, feeling, or otherwise situated subject. It simply IS apart from any given mind or even mind taken absolutely. Facts are radically mind independent. Minds change but facts do not and it is the duty of any mind to conform to the fact because otherwise reason is slain and the enlightenment destroyed. In a curious bit of iconography I often see on social media the face of James Randi (an old white man with a beard aka God!) pasted over the assertion that ‘beliefs’ do not create facts.

Thus we have the core principle of the enlightenment and indeed the voice of reason as such. It takes very little reflection to demolish this picture of the world which is generally just assumed non-thematically as it crumbles on the simplest reflection. Beliefs and attitudes absolutely create or color facts. Mind interacts causally with the world and this is not just an arcane bit of quantum physics but ordinary experience. Every salesman knows that a belief can create a fact very well thank you very much. William James the pragmatist pointed this out well over a century ago. Mind is not just a passive register but also an agent and constitutive principle of a ‘fact’. Imagine an Amazonian tribe who had a rule that they would eat anyone who asserted or were suspected of thinking they were cannibals. The belief of the anthropologist visiting this tribe would directly determine the ‘fact’ of what was for dinner that evening. Moreover, every fact there is comes with a significance or coloring that determines the nature of that fact: there is no seeing that that is not seeing as or seeing within. This does not come from the fact but from the mind apprehending and contextualizing it. Mind is essential to ‘meaningful’ fact and if the underlying structure of nature is not limitlessly malleable (beliefs do not create facts ex nihillo) attitudes, cultures and languages interact seamlessly with it. Nature is a dance between mind and matter of which both are constitutive principles. Nor can we draw a simple or direct line between them. They constitute a two way circulating process of great complexity and, frankly, wonder. This is why it is absurd to say that science is true regardless of whether there are scientists (unless you want to posit the objective knower God). Without minds to know it nature is only the empty formal potential to be known (unless, again, we want to say that nature knows itself). Truth lies in the process of actualizing that potential so, of course, nothing is true if it is not known as such.

Nor is the act of knowledge reducible to the simple acquisition of a ‘fact’. For one thing, there are no ‘facts’ such as this view requires. This sounds like a radical claim but I assure you it is beyond ordinary. For instance, as Hegel pointed out, it is known to every cow. In nature the ‘fact’ is a simple abstraction from organic, chemical or physical process. The cow does not bow to the idol of the fact. Faced with grass it simply eats it.[6] The cow takes the fact of the grass and alters it to another fact, dung. This conversion happens not by the mediation of ‘fact’ but by a living process. The medium is the disposition or appetite of the cow in action. Organic process in action supervenes over mere fact. Life itself is the constant struggle against the givenness of fact. Life is the ceaseless negation of the given. It does not bow to simple dead objectivity but supervenes over it. The cow may indeed have to bow to death as a ‘fact’ but even this is only contingently so for the cow is a sexual animal. It simply copies itself. For Hegel, and I agree with him here, this supervention of process over the simply given goes all the way down. As Heraclitus saw all is logos in process, pattern, system and form in motion. This is a self-sufficient principle of its own activity and does not depend on any dead, material ‘husk’ underlying it on which it is supposed to be based. If there were such a thing it would not even be knowable as such having no form or pattern to know. It would be a concept with no earthly use as Hegel complained of Kant’s ‘thing in itself’. At any rate, if one is so concerned with the manipulation of ‘facts’ by liars and madmen (something that happens within the structure of our social world which our science fixes with a certain stability) one might consider how easy a problem this is for someone like Bishop Berkeley. God, the supreme perceiver, the perceiver without determination or limit, guarantees the order and fixed sequence of our perceptions and wills them in such a way that the operations of our intellect are conformed to the patterns they disclose. This has never seemed a bad solution to me though it may be a steep price for others to pay to fix the objectivity of fact. Then too, there is the more traditional version of this claim which is that God wills order mediated by the Logos and the divine ideas. Nature is intelligible because it is fixed in the stability of the divine nature. Newton, one suspects, was not much troubled by problems of induction precisely because he was looking at the changeless thoughts of God. He was SEEING the universal in action. Absent these options I think we are indeed left with the legacy of Hume’s skepticism: we cannot build our image of nature from the ground up from ‘observations’ and ‘generalizations’.[7]

Whatever is the case with that (I leave it up to the reader) the external husk of ‘fact’ has fared no better since Hegel’s cow chowed down on a clump of grass. Latour has asked the question, unthinkable for ASCS, of whether microbes existed before Pasteur. The answer of course is no and this is grounded on a simple recognition of the fact that scientific objects circulate in social and institutional processes  and networks and are not encountered separately from them. Facts, in other words, are holistic and not atomic: they are part of networks where they enact their role along with a host of other factors. A fact circulates in a social milieu as a sign that unites various orders of activity and production. Its objectivity is as an ‘object’ or ‘substance’ within such a process. Latour uses the notion of the microbe to denote such an object. We might consider the humble potato to see that this view has merit. Is a potato ‘in itself’ a natural object? In one sense yes, the potato has its own materiality if you like and its own organic process. This, however, hardly sums up what it means to be a potato. A potato is a moment in a process and its natural existence is now an abstraction from that fact. The potato is an object but this object acts as the supposed purpose of a system uniting the industrial bases of horticulture, agriculture and transportation. Its application within and through the practices of knowledge production and political economy broadens indefinitely. The biological potato is just one aspect of the potato recognizably abstracted from such a system. It is far more than a circulating object in its material sense and pervades a social system as a sign. The sign is then understood to be circulating in and within a system where the potato, the root vegetable, is then the potato as it maintains patterns of growth and seasonal sprouting and provides the basis for bulk and retail sales. In other words, the potato, the raw material, becomes the sign which unifies the horticultural practices and the theory of life cycle, root vegetation, and seasonal plant growth. It is the sign that signifies the next moment in the process as well as its totality. It unifies the industries of agricultural production, transportation, and sales, agribusiness and wholesale, and so on, along with technological applications as diverse as deep-fryers and vertical-growth farm systems. It unites the questions regarding the dissemination of knowledge within and through these various applications and thus transmits its raw materiality from the root vegetable into a sign circulating in a sign system. It may sound odd to think so holistically of a mere tuber as to imply it signifies the whole global economic system but that is how we, as consumers, know it and even the farmer who grows the ‘natural potato’ (here decoupled from the actuality of the potato) really knows it in no other form than as a unit of potential income. The abstract sign of ‘value’ is for him the real thing (to say nothing of how the potato might function even in the human social ritual called dinner where it acts the part of a side dish). This is the same sense in which a worker is actually a cipher for a potential unit of labor output or, as we like to say euphemistically, a ‘human resource’.[8]  At any rate if this seems too odd one might think of the fact that a natural ‘cow’ can no longer survive without a milking machine and hence is a sign that circulates through the power grid and the extraction processes that sustain it. The long and the short of this is that, on any reasonably sophisticated understanding of capitalism facts, as ASCS understands them, have been abolished and replaced with signs (such that we might in fact want ‘nature’ back though that is another question- we might wonder whether the enframing of the potato as standing reserve in a system of circulation and exchange alienates us from something more vital about it).

I once encountered on twitter a lady who told what she thought was a hilarious story. Apparently her sister once met a ‘post-modern professor’ who insisted that the moon did not exist apart from the word moon. This tale was obviously meant to puncture the absurdity not only of post-modern professors but of universities as such. Alas, there are interesting ways in which the crazy post-modern professor is exactly right. The facts, as ASCS defines them, are not only mind interdependent, socio-economic-system interdependent, they are also linguistically interdependent. Facts are abstractions from mind, abstractions from society and abstractions from language. They are as real or unreal as any other abstraction is. The word ‘moon’ is a sign in a linguistic system. Actually, it is a different sign in different systems. The moon is not mediated to us apart from linguistic and cultural constructs like ‘satellite’ or ‘goddess’. There is, of course, the patch of light though properly speaking a patch is affixed to an article of clothing. As for the light we have it mediated to us by two contrary words; particle and wave. What is the moon in abstraction from these types of signs? This is challenging for some facts (as we shall see below) are framework or system specific. The moon however DOES seem to be a framework independent fact to the extent that it seems to operate in all known frameworks. But, of course, this fact is not a truth per se because the second part of a fact is its meaning. As I said the moon does not appear as itself but as a satellite, goddess or hunk of rock. Even a hunk of rock is either a group of atoms and molecules or a compound of four elements. As I said before there is no seeing that without seeing as.[9] There is indeed a moon but there is no moon unmediated by a sign in linguistic and cultural systems of signs and concepts. If desperate, one can reduce the moon to some basic sensation like the pressure the lunar surface exerts on an astronaut’s boot. The problem is that this represents not a scintilla of what we mean by the moon and things lunar. 

What does this mean for ‘facts’ in the ordinary sense? Well there is nothing wrong with them per se unless there is something wrong with abstraction per se which there isn’t because it is often necessary to abstract. This is fine so long as one doesn’t reify the abstracted object and make an idol of it. I simply assert that the ‘fact’ is not the really real or the basis on which reality rests. The fact is an abstraction as the cow knows when it eats the grass instead of bowing to it as true being. The grass is a sign in a system- a real node but not a simple being let alone the reality on which everything else rests. Still there is no problem, say, in distinguishing facts from fictions or signifiers from signifieds within the horizon of a foundational fiction or within a determinate sign or symbol system. We make such distinctions within the historical horizons in which we live and do so validly. Of course here is where I collide with ASCS on a fundamental level. I do not think the Whig history of progress that puts Anglo-Saxon liberalism and technocracy at its center is the foundational fiction that supervenes over all others. There are figurations of order within which one can make other decisions or inhabit other natures. Moreover, ASCS has, by a certain historical fatality, under-written the grossest crimes against people who have tried to live in alternate frameworks. This in itself seems a reason to question and probe its limits and to diagnose its vices while admitting its virtues (and I may in another essay talk about THOSE).

        The devotee of ASCS is not just concerned with ‘facts’, he is also concerned with ‘evidence’. Again, there is no discussion to be had about evidence; evidence is nothing more than evidence. To quote a former prime minister of Canada, when you have a proof and it’s a good proof then you have a good proof. Again, though, ASCS has simplified things to the point of incoherence. For ASCS ALL true or justified assertions are produced evidentially and ‘evidence’ is produced by a formal procedure like hyothetico-deductive method (where it is not, say, directly visual or aural). This emphasis on formal evidential procedures is backed by the claim that an essential part of evidence is ‘peer review’. The gold standard of truth is ‘peer reviewed research’. This is, frankly, a belief one can hold ONLY outside the university. Every person IN the academy knows that reviewer two determines what research gets published for what are often the pettiest and most arbitrary reasons. Peer review is a LOTTERY as every single professor can tell you after a few pints. Moreover it introduces as many errors as it catches or corrects. However, this position collapses as readily as the belief that the object of knowledge is ‘fact’. Knowledge simply cannot be reduced to ‘facts’ produced evidentially by ‘scientific method’. If one thinks about it the evidentialist is making a remarkable claim.  The naive evidentialist, at least, seems to claim two things which to me seem problematic. First is the claim that all our beliefs OUGHT to be produced evidentially. The second is that all our reasonable beliefs CAN be produced evidentially. Both of these claims are simply false. The evidentialist holds that there is some evidence gathering procedure so comprehensive that it produces evidentially not only ordinary knowledge but the principles of evidence gathering itself in a non-circular fashion. Even the ancient sceptics, such as Sextus Empiricus, understood that there was no discursive way out of this kind of circle. The most obvious example of this problem is the impossibility of producing the principle of induction by means of induction. More generally there are a host of crucially important beliefs which we hold, and legitimately hold, long before we can reasonably be said to have ‘evidence’ for them. Who waits for a solid refutation of solipsism before believing in other minds? Who waits for a D.N.A test before forming a belief as to who their parents are? Who takes a detour into physics before believing in the irreversibility of time and causality? These are all ordinary, justifiable beliefs that have no relation practically to any ‘arguments’ or ‘evidence’ we might offer for them. This is because they are pragmatic necessities LONG before they are rational ones. Further, they NEVER become rational necessities for the overwhelming majority of people. This would not be such an issue except that ASCS moralizes incessantly  about the immorality of believing what one cannot prove which means that the vast majority of people are immoral for believing the most ordinary and unquestioned things. This, surely, is moralism gone mad. Further, the evidentialist clearly shares these basic and foundational beliefs for which arguments of an evidential sort cannot be produced. Every naive evidentialist is, therefore, a hypocrite if he believes in induction, linear time, other minds or that space will not turn into an empty void if he turns around a corner for I assure you he cannot produce a scrap of evidence for any of these beliefs.

This is as much as to say that basic structural assumptions about the world presumed in evidence gathering (like the priority of cause to effect) are not themselves evidential in character. Evidence assumes the truth of intuitions, basic intuitions, which are not evidential though they CAN be uncovered and described transcendentally and even justified, in a way, by processes like retorsion.[10] Here, alas, we come across one of the most annoying, and perhaps destructive, fetishes of ASCS which is ‘critical thinking’. There is no mantra ASCS repeats more than the necessity for ‘critical thinking’ yet there is no subject on which ASCS comes up emptier than what, if anything, makes thinking critical. For ASCS critical thinking is a list of rules and fallacies the indiscriminate application of which will produce truth and, far more importantly than truth, victory in any argument. This is ASCS at its most cringe inducing and naïve. Formal lists of fallacies are offered as if memorizing them and applying them willy-nilly to any discussion were thinking as such. Worse, canons of reasoning contextual in their application are offered as simple universal truths. Thus, ASCS trots out Occam’s razor, Popper’s falsification principle, or the law of the excluded middle without the least sense of how and when these ‘rules’ should be employed and when they should be qualified or abandoned. ASCS thus produces not ‘reason’ but a sad parody of it. This is because thinking has been identified with a simple list of rules when much of our best thinking lies in the informal application of tact and prudential judgment.   Life is not a matter of rules and this holds too for the life of the mind: spirit as it attains to consciousness of itself transcends the simple determinations it has made because it is, itself, the life and meaning of them. The law is made for the growth and dynamism of spirit not spirit for the sake of the law.   

The philosopher J.N. Findlay once said of the laws of identity and non-contradiction that they were the last refuge of all bad philosophy. It seems to me he was entirely correct. No philosophy committed dogmatically to the principle of A=A could ever understand a pigeon let alone humans or the divine. There are a number of ways in which this commitment can be shown to be problematic but let me begin with reminding everyone of what Aristotle, the man who identified these principles as such, actually had to say about them. Aristotle formulated the laws of identity and non-contradiction in relation to the Sophists who sought to destabilize all discourse and produce every statement from its opposite. This undermined the possibility of determinate discourse. In opposition to this Aristotle produced the law of non-contradiction directly as a condition of legein or speaking. The laws of logic order the expression of our thoughts and allow us to assert and make a determinate statement that is not immediately its opposite. One might ask though whether the conditions of finite discourse and investigation really dictate to being by a purely formal, alien or external law. After all, change difference and contradiction are as essential to nature as identity. Negation is as essential as positivity. Heraclitus, Hegel and Marx belong to a tradition that pursues a logic that admits contradiction into its own foundations. So do the discourses of the so called ‘negative theology’ as practiced by figure like Dionysius or Nicholas of Cusa as do, in their own way, certain deconstructive discourses of the 20^th Century.

For ASCS of course contradiction is the holy grail of argument and when the proponent of ASCS thinks he has found a contradiction in a statement he does a victory dance. This makes a complete hash of sacred or poetic text and removes the foundations of any sane or rational hermeneutic. Listening to ASCS on texts like the Hebrew Bible is to hear univocity gone mad. One is glad that for ASCS literary studies are frilly and useless for one is then spared the observation that The Brothers Karamazov contains two sentences that formally contradict each other. This is about as intelligent as refuting the doctrine of the Trinity on the ground that, considered on the purely dianoetic level, one and three formally differ. This leads to a useful reflection however. As we shall see in the concluding section stupidity about text and hermeneutics entails stupidity in most other domains. Mistakes about God have the same knock on effect. When ASCS gets a bit more sophisticated it does something called ‘philosophy of religion’ which is the application of what Hegel calls the ‘logic of the understanding’ to claims about God. That this is a questionable venture is clear enough to me though I will admit that many honest and bright people do work in this realm and I don’t want to dismiss them out of hand. They do their work and I do mine. Still, pursued without tact or judgment, this activity of submitting the divine nature and the highest causes to the lower orders of discursive reason produces monsters of tedium and inanity. Hegel’s problem (and mine) with reducing theology to the constraints of formal, discursive reasoning is that the form is not adequate to the content. Abstract binary concepts do not convey what it is to be a bumblebee let alone what it is to be God. When form falls away from content abstract conceptualism is the result. Ideas become empty forms mediating arbitrary empirical content. Pure formalism turns even the ideas into particulars that are not developed systematically (or historically) but simply posited as empty, atomized noetic content, a notion of the forms rightly critiqued in Plato’s Sophist. Relations of ideas become simple tautologies and reason a simple given that may just as well be naturalized by biologists and chemists or historicized by social scientists. If A is never anything but A, if a thing is never anything but itself, thinking is abolished for all thinking concerns the integration and inter-relation of ideas.

From this standpoint the meaning of things like the so-called ‘ontological argument’ become impossible to grasp. The speculative point of Anselm’s discourse is that a logic of simple concepts and their fixed, binary opposition is inadequate to the divine and is overcome in the intuition of the good. Subsequently, he develops this intuition into the revelation of the one or good as triadic mediation which has the structure of self-revealing personhood. ASCS is perhaps right to harp on notions like the trinity for of course this doctrine is the worm in the apple of pure ‘reason’. There is no logic of simple identity which allows for the subsistent relations of the Trinity and their speculative development in medieval and modern tradition. If self-revealing or self-manifesting order is a process of triadic inter-relation then we need a subtler logic to account for it. Otherwise we just spin the same discursive hamster wheels over and over in the hope that we will finally prove or disprove God if we just do formal logic hard enough. However, from my standpoint discussions, say, of whether the divine attributes or predicates are ‘logically consistent’ are beside the point. The divine nature is the unity, indeed the system of all contraries. As Dionysius showed every discourse about God balances A is A with A is A and not A and that is the special ‘negative’ discourse we use about God. NOR do we simply discuss God as an inert object as we do ordinary objects. The discourse of negative theology is above all a discourse of praise and communion and not just the simple ratiocination of lower soul. The ‘laws of thought’, then, are transcendental conditions of language about ordinary objects in the world. They are NOT an adequate condition of discourse about God.

We get a similar result when we consider the law of the excluded middle, a principle which, if applied too rigorously, makes nonsense of nature, culture and history. The law of excluded middle applies only to what is incommunicable in a particular, finite substance. An apple is not at the same time and in the exact same respect an orange. It has within a moment irreducible distinctness.[11] This ‘law’ obviously does not apply to change and process which would be incomprehensible if it were applied too strictly. Thankfully, history, particularly the history of culture, stomps all over this supposed law of thinking. This is because history stomps all over the pure atomism of ‘positions’. We might use ‘religion’ as an example. For ASCS, it is almost an axiom that all religious assertions in one tradition exclude all religious assertions in another. If one religion is true all the others are false. This is often followed by the high school debating level inference that if all religions but one are false, one might as well abandon that last one too. This is what happens when one does ‘pure reason’ in an ahistorical vacuum. If one were instead to look at the history of religion (gasp!) one would find a very different story. All the ancient Gods, for instance, are poetic intuitions of basic principles of order. When Platonism or Christianity posit a monistic absolute those principles don’t disappear but are taken up in a new synthesis. It is simply false that all these entities are distinct and contradictory objects of belief such that the law of excluded middle entails believing in one means denying all truth to the other. This ignores the glaring fact known to all students of history that ideas and cultures overlap, assimilate and synthesize as well as select. Binaries constructed by formal logic play little role here except superficially. This is why there is no articulation of Christian belief that does not subsume a great deal of classical Pagan culture. It is also why early Christian texts have significant overlap with those from India.[12]

Here especially is where STEM people who think in ones and zeroes and assume that knowledge in other domains does the same need to step aside. History is NOT a simple process of swapping one error for another truth. C.S. Pierce, for example, had the theory that truth was that on which all thinking converged. Whatever is the case with this the idea has some definite application here. So, if life is the concept we are trying to grasp then even the Aztecs were trying to grasp that in their cruelest sacrifices. They were trying to understand the nature and circulatory flow of vitality in their images of the sun god and his need for constant replenishment by sacrifice. The early Christians were also concerned with the nature of vitality in their image of the Holy Spirit. So is a modern biologist or a philosopher like Henri Bergson. ALL these people are trying to converge on a common perception and that is why one religion can build on another or why philosophy can take insights from religion or vice versa. This process is synthetic not analytic. One god does not just replace another nor do philosophical insights into the absolute (such as those in the Vedanta) replace the images of the Gods.

Proponents of ASCS have heard of something called ‘Popper’s falsifiability principle’ which like other canons of ‘scientific method’, can be applied like a meat cleaver to magically win any argument. We might have an interesting discussion of where and when Popper’s principle might be useful but alas we have to have another discussion about how it is not a magic formula for attacking any belief I don’t happen to like. I will be blunt, the more foundational a belief is the more immune it is the falsification. Yet, unless we are to banish ALL beliefs above a certain threshold of generality (including belief in the principle itself) we must admit that some beliefs are legitimate or even necessary whether or not they can be falsified empirically. Those interested in why this is so may read Quine but for now I will keep the discussion simpler. Some things can be falsified. If I say there is a cat in the closet you can open the closet and see if there is a cat there so long as that cat does not belong to Schrödinger. However, metaphysical propositions cannot because they apply (or not) to literally any state of affairs. The existence of God, for instance, cannot be falsified for the simple reason that the creative power of God is assumed in the constitution of literally any state of affairs. If what a principle causes is existence as such then no state of affairs involving existence can falsify the existence of that principle. This is because existence is presupposed in any and all states of affairs. For this reason the question of God’s existence or non-existence is a metaphysical one not a scientific one. Of course if one REALLY loves Popper’s principle then one can banish all metaphysical claims as un-falsifiable. This one might do EXCEPT that Popper’s principle is really just a rule of thumb even in science. The more fundamental a scientific theory is the more immune it is to falsification as we see with string theory. This means that one could EITHER say that Popper’s principle banishes metaphysics, theology and the more speculative reaches of science OR that it is a proximate principle only valid in certain domains of explanation. One can claim, then, that IT is itself falsified by its in-applicability in certain domains. Or, one could dismiss all the falsifying instances and stick with the principle. The state of the case underdetermines what you decide!  At the beginning of an inquiry at least there is no evading pre-judgment and in some sense choice.[13]  

But, it seems to me, that it is simply false to say that ‘reason’ as such depends on such a principle since there are OTHER ways to validate or invalidate a theory which don’t depend on it. This is the case with what we might call worldviews. The Aztec world view is presupposed in any observation an Aztec makes and to that degree cannot be falsified by any particular observation even of a ‘black swan’ sort like the arrival of the Spanish. Falsification does not apply to deep holistic claims as we said above. Does this mean belief in the Aztec world view is arbitrary and not subject to rational consideration? Not at all. Things like world views or religions can be assessed as totalities. For ASCS of course there can be no rational discussion of any indigenous religion for it is all woo-woo with no thread, coherence or meaning. Where non-western religions are concerned proponents of ASCS are like people who think that everyone actually speaks English and that French is mere babble put on for foreigners. We have, however, at very least the SCIENCE of anthropology to tell us this is not so. Examined CRITICALLY, and in accordance with ACTUAL critical thinking, things like the Aztec religion can be shown to be dense (even over dense) with meaning.  The evidence for a world view is not piecemeal observation but the overall theoretical and practical satisfaction one finds therein. One judges its overall adequacy in relation to another possible world view and makes a decision of some kind such as a conversion or move to syncretism. Thus a true world view would be one which balanced and centered the self, say, in relation to society, ecology and so on. ‘Religious truth’ is the harmony established in the web of relations in which a person finds themselves; a framework with which things mesh smoothly if you like.  To the judgment of an individual one tradition might do this better or worse than another.[14]

Let me sum up in a way that will lead into the next section where we shall consider the problem of history. What we have seen throughout is that ASCS struggles mightily with one basic problem: how to appropriate internally purely external material facts. Subject and object do not develop together and in tandem. Rather, one must somehow mediate a sheer distinction between the two: facts are one thing by themselves and the mind another thing by itself and we must glue them together. One way to do this is to make mind purely passive and submissive to ‘the facts’. This runs afoul of the fact that mind plays an active role in constructing its objects. Another way of solving this problem is to mediate between the two by means of some principle or canon like Occam’s razor (does reality decide between parsimony and plentitude?) or by appealing to method. The problem with THIS is what we have seen: such principles are contextual and domain specific and cannot be universalized without being undermined by exceptions and caveats. This is problematic enough before we even get to the problem of how such principles retain their universal and normative character after being either naturalized by hard core materialists or historicized (and possibly relativized) by social scientists or historians of ideas. I said above that ASCS had its virtues along with its vices and one of the virtues is that, indeed, it is a valid model in certain closely defined contexts. ASCS plays the referential language game. It is perfectly reasonable to play this game in a chemistry department or a research lab. In such a context it is acceptable, even necessary, to frame knowledge as a confrontation of subjective space with an opposed ‘object’ framed as an external ‘fact’. It is entirely legitimate to speak about ‘submitting to the facts’ in the domains that construct our relationship to objects that way. In these contexts we might grant that a dose of ASCS is quite salutary. However, the one thing ASCS can NEVER be is an assumed metaphysic. This is for all the reasons I have indicated. When rendered thematic the relationship between consciousness and reality is fuzzier than this model accounts for. 

This means that we need to get used to operating in multiple frameworks at the same time. In our society, science gate keeps entities accepting some (dark matter) and rejecting others (Bigfoot). It does so legitimately insofar as our relationship to those entities is referential. However, there are other relationships one can have besides referential ones. Thus, if I were to bring up fairies (and fairies, for some reason, are a great bugbear for ASCS) in a biology class I would be on the hook for producing them evidentially according to paradigms of good biology. I would be raising the question of whether there were an x such that x was a fairy. I would be saying that there were fairies if and only there were fairies. Outside this context, however, I might well be asserting something else. Even in science concepts can be useful without their referent being exactly clear. Some of what we once meant by phlogiston overlaps with what we now mean by oxygen: so is oxygen ‘out there’ or phlogiston or do both refer to some third thing? With other things, like fairies, reference in the ‘out there’ sense may not be at play at all. In Iceland (yes secular progressive Iceland) fairies are recognized and are even subject to certain legal protections. Fairies are narrative objects embedded in folklore. They are nodes around which questions of identity, landscape, memory and ecology cluster. A world with fairies in it is a world one inhabits in a certain mode not a world one projects from oneself as a representational object to be assimilated to a subject by the mediation of methodical inquiry. In Iceland, it seems, representational and narrative modes co-exist. One can think of entities belonging to different frames of reference or occupying parallel steams. One might even think of ‘belief’ in such entities as occupying various points on a continuum of intensity depending on situation and conversational context: sometimes stories about Bigfoot or elves are light-hearted and sometimes not. This may be untidy if these two streams should ever conflict but it is also richer and, even more importantly, fairer to those people whose narrative worlds have been crushed by the imperial boot of official ‘scientific’ culture.[15]  Here, as a culture, we need to pause and reflect. The sciences are one important way of describing the world. However, as Heidegger points out, science determines beings in advance to the form of ‘object-ness’ as the determining grasp of what it is to be. This form of ‘object-ness’ excludes relational and affective stances to the natural in a way we can now see is disastrous. More than ever, we need to see nature in terms of multiple valid frameworks which include the sciences but include other modes as well.  ASCS will howl at this but in this instance we must truly stop our ears.   

        ASCS is both anti-historical and anti-hermeneutic. In this section we will deal with the first issue. I need, however, to stop and make some terminological distinctions. By anti-historical I not mean to refer to the empirical study of history. I mean by anti-historical the denial of the proposition that historicity is our fundamental mode of being in the world. The research procedures and programs of modern academic history are themselves historical in this reflexive sense; they belong to a time and a place that determines their overall character. Perhaps I should say instead of ‘anti-historical’ anti-historicist which would be the claim that historicity and knowledge are only accidentally related and that we now know the world as it has always been and will ever be. By a historicist, then I would mean someone who held that historical position is a constitutive moment of whatever world we inhabit. Plus, we have no ‘things’ or ‘facts’ apart from the worlds constituted by our historical positions. The odd thing is that ASCS already accepts this about all other cultures except itself. ASCS is the position that is not a position and the culture that is not a culture. ASCS is the view from nowhere, the Archimedean standpoint from which one gazes at cold, brutal reality exactly as it is. It is the magical place from which one sees ‘the facts’ just as they are without the distorting lens of myth, tradition or custom. On my view this could scarcely be correct. This is because you cannot just list what the pure facts are and then decide on the correct world view accordingly. Facts all come with points of view said The Talking Heads but this is not quite radical enough. This is to say that a point of view is necessary to have a fact. Points of view determine which facts you see and indeed make you able to SEE facts. This is because it is impossible to register all facts at once and that to perceive is to select and your point of view is what enables you to select. Also, a point of view allows for meaningful facts and if a fact has no meaning then it is nothing at all beyond what an amoeba can experience (if that is even fair to amoebas).

Of course the historicity of entities follows from the fact a. that there are no facts without points of view that make them facts and b. points of view shift and alter over time. This seems to me to entail that different historical eras may validly accept or reject different entities. They can gate keep entities on different principles rejecting some and accepting others. There seems to me no necessity in any two time periods or any two current cultures having the exact same list of entities though of course there will be significant overlap. As noted above all frames of reference seem to have the moon in some sense or configuration (though possibly with radically different significance). One might say the same of a cassowary bird. Cassowary birds exist in the framework of Western biology. They also exist in the frameworks of the indigenous people of New Guinea. Here they exist with added ideas of taboo and potential impurity. Of Course for ASCS the biologist sees the cassowary bird as it actually is whereas the indigenous Papuan sees it through a filter. If, however, there is something called ‘what it is like to be a cassowary bird’ then presumably BOTH are looking through a filter for this would fall formally outside the scope of any science. I suppose though, we can let biologists, Papuans and cassowaries argue the matter as they each see fit. The assumption is that a. humans have a common set of entities b. they disagree over the significance and nature of these entities and c. the entities remain what they are in themselves regardless of these disagreements. We might add to this the claim that d. the entities being what they are in themselves is the ‘objective world’ as it actually is. As for WHO this objective world is ‘for’ we might say ‘God’ who sees each thing under the formality of its objective idea or we might just throw up our hands and call the thing in itself an inaccessible mystery (as Kant did).[16] We might even label the stubborn, recalcitrant ‘somethingness’ of things that impinges on our wishes ‘necessity’ as Simone Weil does following Plato and which corresponds to Freud’s reality principle.

There are reasons to question all of these things. If you are panpsychist for instance even atoms and quarks are a ‘point of view’ and the self-perception of a quark may have many inherent limits where knowledge of quarks is concerned! We do not need to evoke anything so esoteric here however. There is no actual reason that every framework for viewing the world has to include to exclude the exact same list of entities. Entities can be framework specific. Since all frameworks are historical it follows that entities can be historical too. Above I mentioned folkloric/narrative entities which don’t seem to fit comfortably as x’s or y’s in existential propositions. The people who believe in such entities probably do not regard them as having this sort of referential, propositional kind of status. Ask an indigenous person from the west coast about Sasquatch and you will get a story or even a joke more often then you get a straight yes and no answer. I have long puzzled over what the status of such entities might be and have come to the conclusion that a landscape lives in a narrative and a narrative has characters. In narrative framings there are things like sasquatches or fairies. They fill gaps in experience and stand for what is contingent, strange and perhaps frightening. What we might call a psychotic break may elsewhere be framed as being taken by the fairies.  WE of course have such entities which we affirm in quasi scientific terms. We speak of cryptids, or aliens or of the ‘paranormal’ though the use of such terms does not win them any official status and on the principles WE use to gate keep entities probably shouldn’t. These entities cross boundaries but not comfortably. We might also consider something like an angel. Angels were accepted as beings in the Middle Ages both because they are depicted in The Bible and because they were a part of the Neo-Platonic hierarchy of pure intelligences. These two notions fit well together. So well that Aquinas could judge the existence of angels a rational certainty on the exact same principle many of us use to justify the existence of aliens; that of plentitude. If there are no angels for us that is because this background framing largely (but not totally!) disappeared in the modern period. It did so both in science and in theology. When the world changes new entities pop in and old ones pop out. If you lived in the 17^th Century you had many good reasons to believe in witches. Plus, the people who disbelieved in witches did so for reasons we would now consider wrong: people who thought they were witches suffered from an imbalance of humors![17] The entire question was posed and answered in terms which we would not now employ though we still think the question has a ‘right’ answer. I think the upshot of all this is that if for God, say, there is a stable list of objective entities free from historical determination there is probably no such thing for us and indeed, some of our entities like dark matter, neutrinos or strings may go the way of aether, ghosts, humors or phlogiston. This is because these ‘things’ are actually links that connect one observed state of affairs to another and one can always take a link out and put a new one in (though you have to careful not to unravel the entire sweater!). One can take out fairies and put in ‘mental illnesses’ though we seem quite in the dark about what, if anything, the latter are (beyond being patterns of behavior not adaptive in our social environment though they may be in another). Since this is so I tend to think that a pluralistic society should have no issue with recognizing non-standard entities if social peace and justice demand it.[18]    

At any rate ASCS shares a curious feature with the ‘wokeness’ it professes to despise. The activist views all time and space from the simple now of moral judgment. Bad=Bad whether we are talking up to the minute politics or the Greeks of the bronze-age. Indeed the activist takes a special glee in denouncing the bronze-age Greeks just because we can, from the safe distance of 2000 years, enjoy their poems and pots and see what is human and vital in them (and distance of some sort is essential for that insight). Spontaneous enjoyment of anything must be critiqued and neutralized for life is not about joy or pleasure. It is about the unsullied purity and conviction of our moral stances which have to be purer and more unsullied than the next guy’s. If in an unguarded moment HE enjoys a bit of pottery WE have to make a special point of NOT enjoying it. For the ‘woke’ activist there is no time or evolution or cultural development. There is only moral badness in an eternal now. This and the unearned moral luck that places the activist in the current phase of achieved cultural discourse (which is NOT to say he never has a point, he often does but that is for another essay).[19] ASCS is similar in that it too is a moralizing stance. The proponent is on a crusade against bullshit, dishonesty and the denial of the simple facts available to anyone with common sense. Plus, bullshit and dishonesty, along with ignorance and stupidity, are a hallmark of and indeed define all past phases of culture. ASCS has a peculiar story it likes to tell. Back in the day people looked at the world through a haze of cultures, religions and philosophies. Then, in the 17 century European humanity, particularly in its English/Scottish branch, woke up and looked at objective reality. They SAW what had always been there and always will be there. They SAW what others had simply failed to see. This was because an apple fell on Newton’s head. Humanity then entered the world of simple, timeless knowledge and slew the dragon of superstition. For ASCS we live in the simple now of facts just as the ‘woke’ activist lives in the simple now of moral judgment. This is what has been called Whig history. Whig history has been heavily criticized on the discursive level. Still, it is even today the implicit, non-thematic framing of much discourse about the past. We assume the past simply failed to see things that are simple and obvious like the evils of slavery or that stones don’t desire to fall to the surface of the earth. The truth is, however, that what emerged in the 17^th Century, both in terms of the explosion of scientific culture and the initial development of a robust culture of freedom, was a product of a long process of historical mediation without which it would not have occurred. A long history of seeing things as lay behind supposedly simple acts of seeing that. Plus, and this is more to the point, any historical dispensation has both its greatness and its limits. The former are evident in the first flush of confidence the latter only evident at a moment of civilizational crisis. The 17^th century way of seeing seems to be at one of these moments when we see something new needs to happen (i.e. new ways of seeing as) but are not sure we can articulate what this new thing is.

One of the reasons for this a-historicism is surely a false conception of philosophy put forward by people like Bertrand Russell. Plato said that philosophy ENDED with the presuppositionless not that it BEGAN there. No philosophy (least of all Russell’s) begins with a view from nowhere, an un-hypothetical stance of pure reason.  Philosophy begins where you are and that is different for different people and different for different historical periods. The framing of a question anticipates the answer. Russell dismissed Aquinas, say, on the grounds that as a medieval Christian he presupposed the answers to all important questions. In a sense this is true but only in a sense. Aquinas began from the world he was in historically and culturally and engaged in the questions put to him by that world. This is just what Plato and Aristotle did as well. They took their point of departure not from some abstract pure reason but from reason immanent in the world. Aquinas began with the given of Christian revelation and philosophic tradition. Plato and Aristotle began from the religion of the poets and the ethical life of the Greek polis. This is why their philosophy is so much more than a sterile exercise in ‘pure reason’ moving ‘without biases’ in a simple void. Philosophy is about interpreting the world and for this reason is not reducible to sterile armchair reflection. All philosophy begins somewhere specific for the light hits different facets of the jewel. The question then is not where philosophy begins, it begins here and now with the problems you face, but where it ends. It may be interesting that both Plato and Aquinas seem to end in a kind of apophaticism though that is for another essay.           

One final point on this: the conservative evangelical to atheism pipeline does a real disservice here. Presentism is the besetting sin of the American evangelical as it is, by and large, the besetting sin of the American. This means that there is no world drama of which I, in the now, am not the center. I, right now, am the center of storm. I am the node around which history turns and there is no effective past outside my most direct untutored imaginings. This is a combination of the navel gazing of an imperial culture with a highly personalized view of religion. This attitude is even stronger in EX evangelicals. All of Christianity is encapsulated in what Pastor Bill on You Tube said last Wednesday.  This is true whether you liked what he said or didn’t. There are, of course, virtues to this but I am here concerned with the vice it embodies. Evangelical conversion stories are the last (and indeed the first) word on everything and the exact same is true with evangelical deconversion stories. A deconversion story is, in fact, a conversion story run backward. Thus, I am forced to conclude that the simple counter-position of ex- evangelicals recapitulates everything false and limited in the original position. It is a case of being so entangled with a certain enemy that you fail to see how much you actually ARE that enemy. That, of course, is nothing but common human failing and fallibility. As I said above, we need better evangelicals and until we have those we will not have better atheists as everyone, by an iron law of dialectic, sinks to the level of their chosen opponent.        

Finally we have to deal with the question of hermeneutics, of which the proponent of ASCS has none. Further, he has none on principle. Of all things that are fake, pretentious bullshit none are so fake and none so pretentious as the close reading and careful interpretation of text. For ASCS ALL exegesis is eisegesis, thank you very much, for a text means nothing more and nothing less than what it says. All explanation or explication is rationalization. All symbolic or anagogic reading is a pale compensation for lost literalism. This is of a piece with everything we have seen above. Just as the fact is an out there bit of knowledge so is the meaning of a text. Like the fact, meaning is out there sitting in the words of the book which has only to be looked at. If ASCS is a bit more sophisticated it might also add that the ‘out there thing’ is the ‘intention of the author’ which determines what the text means. If it is even more sophisticated it might add that the ‘intention of the author’ is determined by a reconstruction of the author’s historical milieu. What the text means is what the author intended it to mean in the context of where and when he wrote it. ASCS rarely gets this far however. Stories, ESPECIALLY stories in the Hebrew Bible have no symbolic or mythic logic but only a direct, simple narrative logic. This is put forward as ‘objective’ ‘unbiased’ reading (the opposite of bullshit) even though when viewing the ‘facts’ of the biblical text the responses of the ASCS reader are childlike in their arbitrariness and undisciplined subjectivity. This, though, is always the fate of the ‘just the facts’ crowd. Facts need a framework of meaning and THAT is supplied here by the most immediate and untutored responses which stand as the ‘plain meaning of the text’.

Plus, since facts can’t contradict each other, a text cannot contradict itself. All contradictions are sloppy contradictions and a sign that the ancient Hebrews and Greeks were truly dim-wits. Blake held that without contraries there is no progression and others have held that contradiction is the engine of history. Contradiction in the sense of polysemy, ambiguity, aporiae and sometimes outright contradiction are essential to the development of meaning for they force us to acts of synthesis that overcome the simple immediacy of the text and lead us to its inner core. This seems to be true in the sciences as well. As Imre Lakatos pointed out every theory is born falsified for without problems and anomalies a theory has no spur for development. In other words hermeneutics escapes the simple determinations of the ‘logic of the understanding’. Here the proponent of ASCS needs to listen to what a very English poet Robert Graves said in his poem “The Devil’s Advice to Story Tellers”: “Nice contradiction between fact and fact/ will make the whole read human and exact.” This is why, besides formal logic, there is poetic logic, mythic logic, or the logic of symbols. Anyone who wants to read Homer or The Bible beyond a 14 year old level has to understand this basic point. There may, per accidens, have been an ark and a flood or an actual Achilles but this is inessential to appropriating the story. The meaning of the text is NOT some putative world OUTSIDE the text in which Cain needs a wife or the same hero can’t die twice. After all, speculation about the world outside the text is in principle limitless as was brought home to me by a determined student who insisted that Cain may have been justified in killing Abel on the grounds that the latter was an alien invader! If the text is about something outside the text this student might well ask why we should be bound by the text. From this, though, we can see that what ASCS proposes is the end of all reading.

And for ASCS this is how it should be for reading, the necessity of reading, is a flaw in being and a mistake of God. ASCS is deeply puzzled by the concept of a poetic revelation whether Greek or Hebrew. This is because it can’t grasp the nature of a sign. A sign, above all things, should be obvious especially if it comes from God who is the king of all obviousness. Thus we get the twitter arguments over why the existence of God isn’t more obvious, indeed so obvious that no one would be free to deny it. We get the assertion that a revelation must be simple, clear and propositional such that no one could possibly mistake its meaning. Further, we get the assertion that if a revelation does not contain true proposition x, y or z it cannot be a revelation. I consider such statements to be teaching moments. The sign, alas and alack, is mediated communication. For this reason it is inherently temporal. It can only mean over time and through a process of mediation. A sign must be read, structurally and constitutionally. The signified, if it to be revealed in the sign, can only be hidden. This means the truth is to be worked out by each of us by our own process and in our own time frame. Humans actualize meaning by their efforts. They energize intellectually over time and this entails effort, will, inquiry, even failure. It is entails HISTORY and here the anti-historicism described above meets the refusal of hermeneutics and the demand that the sign only ever reveal and never veil. A SIGN never reveals tautological identity and simple, univocal self-evidence and CAN’T do so and still be a sign. The question of God actually helps us see this. Why doesn’t God give us a sign of his existence so obvious that we could not deny it? Well I suppose he does give us such a ‘sign’ in the beatific vision though in that context the idea of a sign (in that sense) no longer really applies (or perhaps it does if you are John Scotus Eriugena?). One might question why beatific vision is not universal and instantaneous for all I suppose but that is really asking why time should exist which I’m sure is above my pay grade (on that subject I suggest you read Plotinus not me). But, in the context of space and time, at least, there is no sign that would reveal God that would not simultaneously hide him. This is why, as Pascal says, the will must appropriate the sign before the intellect does. God could write ‘I exist’ in giant red letters in the sky or place a booming voice in our heads saying “believe in me” over and over and we could STILL regard that as a delusion because anything mediated sensibly can be a delusion.[20] At any rate, any argument can be resisted on some grounds by anyone sufficiently motivated as we can see with creationists and anti-vaxxers. This is true, at very least, psychologically.  

All of this is to say that nature is as much a book as The Bible which is something medieval Europeans used to know. Literary studies are a simple necessity here (with apologies to engineers) for there we see how the secondary creators operate and can form some surmise about how a primary creator might go about things. After all, The Bible is a book and if you have no idea how a book works you can have literally no idea how The Bible might work. A book embodies itself in signs read sequentially. A sequence unfolds in time. No part of a text is a simple revelation of the whole which no reader possesses or can possess all at one. This is especially true if a text extends its life in an interpretive tradition which all successful texts ultimately do. This, say, is why cherry picking the rebarbative bits of the Old Testament is not a reading of the Christian scriptures.[21] A revelation that enters time, place and contingency subjects itself to time, place and contingency and thus not only can but must submit itself to ‘rebarbative bits’. This is true also for the Jewish reading of the Tenach as far as I can tell not being Jewish. At any rate, one clear victim of ‘literal reading’ is subversive reading such as has been employed by many critics from the ancient Gnostics to modern abolitionists. Creative play with text can have a revolutionary function (as in Blake) by which the supposedly ‘obvious’ official reading is questioned and overturned. Creative play is also, by the way, what poets do with texts and if it is a question of text and what one can do with text I will take a poet over an engineer any day of the week; exactly, by the way, as I will take an engineer over a poet when a bridge needs to be built not between a reader and a text but between two banks of a river.   

At any rate, the upshot of all this is that reading is a complex process of assimilation of signs that hide what they reveal and reveal what they hide. The meaning of a Platonic dialogue, say, is not a determinate object sitting in a physical text that I can isolate and passively register. The meaning is what can wisely and beautifully be brought forth from it while respecting the constraints of wording and grammar. This meaning is inescapably plural or, if you want to phrase that positively, inexhaustibly rich. This can be illustrated using Bergson’s concept of duree or the extended continuum of temporality. The temporality of a text extends its life in an interpretive tradition. The unique moment or duree of the reader adds something novel to the meaning of the text which thus ramifies, alters and develops over time. This means that fantasies of univocity, such as fundamentalist or counter-fundamentalist literalism, are fundamentally false to the nature of reading. The light hits different readers from different points. Every reading occupies its own moment historically and even personally and, though patient application of good reading practices can eliminate BAD reading it cannot eliminate all readings but one (the presumed ‘original’ or ‘real’ reading).  Even attempts to ‘return to the sources’ add a new voice to the tradition for the past is never recuperated exactly as it was but is transfigured in the return. The call to go back to the sources is a valid move in a current discussion and always issues in a fresh look at the text.[22]  All of this is to say, of course, the text, the meaning of the text, is not and cannot be a ‘fact’ as ASCS understands it. Signs play with the world and with each other in a different way than putative ‘facts’ do.           

Of course the problem is reading will never be popular among those impatient of truth especially if by truth one means ‘winning an argument’. Reading does not give you a quick, potted view of the world with which to pummel your opponents with memes. Here we have to note that there are aspects of academic philosophy which do play into ASCS as a mode of popular consciousness. One is the overemphasis on eristics and especially on formal, as opposed to informal, argumentation. I have nothing against lively debate or even formal argumentation when that is appropriate or helpful. However, neither is a guarantee of truth or anything even like truth. Victory in argument is not a mode of discovery and one can validly formalize the most meretricious philosophical material. This is brought home to me daily by an oddly obsessed fellow on Twitter who publishes a new syllogism daily disproving the existence of God! It is actually useful to pause and consider the limits of this kind of armchair philosophizing.[23] Formal logic is quite useless without a richly stocked mind to give it matter to work on. Where inquiring into God is concerned an armchair and a bit of logic memorized from a critical thinking textbook are woefully inadequate. One needs, of course, to be conversant with philosophic tradition. One needs to be conversant with Plato and Kant and not Smith on Jones on Barnes on Plato and Kant. One CANNOT get trapped in the loop of parasitic secondary discussions that wander miles away from the sources and blind us to what they contain. One also needs to be familiar with basic hermeneutics and poetics for much of the supposed ‘data’ is mediated in that form. One needs a historical sense and indeed a sense of the historicity of supposedly ‘pure’ concepts as well as some knowledge of the social sciences. All of these are patient requirements internalized slowly by long practice. They are not suited to quick victory and indeed they produce no victory in the public arena for no one will listen to your long, patient qualifications. One needs to make a fundamental decision as to whether you want truth or to win arguments for you can’t do both.

And here we must confront the elephant in the room. ASCS believes only in the facts but it takes a surprising amount of bluster and bullying to fix a fact.  It takes a surprising amount of testosterone. As I said above a ‘fact’ is male. This is because intelligence is ‘male’ (and please note I am using scare quotes here) which by the way seems apparent from the role the hero worship of male ‘intellects’ plays in academic rape culture. This takes some unpacking. ASCS (when it is not displaying its anti-intellectualism against pedants and academics who over-explain the supposedly simple and obvious) also fetishes intelligence, particularly quantified intelligence. ASCS is the world view of people with ‘high IQ’s’. This makes IQ very important as a measure not only of intelligence but of the real. The world is what high IQ sees it as. Of course IQ and other systems of quantifying intelligence have a sketchy history. I have noticed, however, that when I express skepticism on this subject only one type of person gets angry. This person is white, male and middle aged. I also suspect this person has done well on IQ tests though I can’t prove it (their rage may reflect their aspirations rather than their reality). If somebody reifies their intelligence as a test score of course this score becomes essential to their sense of self. Plus, there are insufferable organizations like MENSA that feed on this reification. This implicit elitism has a number of knock on effects. Intelligence, of course is rare. It belongs to a rare and special cadre of people. Intelligence is not for the great unwashed. Keeping the circle of this rare gift small softens the mind for other kinds of exclusion. This is how IQ gets racialized and gendered among a shocking number of its devotees. Black people and women only view the world with their interests and passions in mind.[24] They don’t play devil’s advocate or ask probing questions. They don’t think objectively about the state of things according to reason, logic and science. ASCS, by the way, is very proud of its sanity and robust mental health. It is one of the last discourses in which it is legitimate to stigmatize mental illness and use ‘mentally ill’ as an insult. Personally, I suspect proponents of ASCS take exactly as many anti-depressants as the rest of us and that this discourse, too, is compensatory.

Of course, not many people really belong in the cutting edge world of top research labs or haunt the halls of power. Not many people are attached to universities though these have been taken over by post-modern whackos anyway. Not many people have really tremendous IQ’s. There is, however, a vicarious way to attach yourself to this world and that is by is being a consumer of the public rhetoric of science and reason. One way to do this is to adopt the ‘style’ of ‘public reason’ as modeled by people like Pinker or Harris say. This style is the style of those who have the truth already and are not looking for it. This is the style of those who apply ‘logic’ to ‘the facts’ and it is as pleasant as you are no doubt imagining. Thus, one finds in the ASCS crowd a shocking number of people with a massive, and unearned, superiority complex (one of the functions of ASCS IS compensatory). Here ASCS is an exercise in boundary policing. Boundary policing places a hedge around what can be said and not said in a certain domain. To some degree it is inevitable and to that extent there is no sense complaining about it. However, since ASCS views itself as under threat from various ‘others’ its form of policing takes on a particularly unpleasant tone. To be brutally colloquial, ASCS loses its shit when challenged. The styles of philosophy ASCS is remotely modeled on are already over-saturated with eristic and verbal sparring as a mode of establishing conversational dominance (equated here with discovering the truth in contradiction to everything Plato said on the matter). Translated into social media, this attitude balloons into almost manic levels of verbal aggression in which all opponents or critics are evil, insane or liars. In this medium the discourse of ASCS is reduced to taunts, jibes and the odd new practice of arguing with pictures. Slogans, tags and talking points are the order of the day as in current politics. All of this comes, sadly enough, from people who claim to represent reason, evidence and argument. Some even claim to represent ‘the enlightenment’ as in the Steven Pinker enlightenment not the actual, historical one.   

At any rate I think a core issue of philosophy concerns its relation to that activity we call poetry. I mean this on as fundamental a level as possible. This problem circles around the production of the sign. One way of broaching this is to think of the problem of transubstantiation! Can the sign and the signified ever be one? Derrida, the Jewish atheist (or negative theologian in spite of himself?) tells us no. God never comes into discourse but is always the unsaid or about to be said. God is the always already never spoken of.  The signified (and that at the end of the day is God) forever eludes the sign that reaches for it. The originary difference that makes for language never appears in language. Thus, language never comes to mean in any but a conditional, shifting sense.  In the Christian dispensation things differ if you will pardon the pun. In Christianity the Father is the arch-sign, the first sign as Bonaventure hints; the original poetic act of the one Godhead. The intellect or word is born of this act in love and is the first appropriation and unfolding of the sign in interpretation; the life of the Trinity is a self- explicating, circulating triadic system of signs and traces of which the Father is the productive depth or first moment, the Son is the adequate image and the Spirit the life of giving and return. The Son reads the Father in the Spirit. In the doctrine of the Trinity poetic projection or act is unified with intellection and love. Poetry becomes philosophy and vice versa for the son intelligizes as begotten in a creative or poetic act. Nous is grounded in poesis as Coleridge indicated in his account of the primary imagination. Reading is the foundational act of ontology or, to put it another way, it is all hermeneutics all the way down. This, of course, is in tension with those accounts of poetry and philosophy which sharply differentiate the two for the reasons Plato gave; there is something adventitious and deceptive in the constitution of the sign. The sign has an externality that can be abstracted and reified, even fetishized. Plato’s warning here is the same as the Hebrew prohibition of idolatry. However this is far from Plato’s last word on the matter. Poesis is core to the argument of the Symposium for we ascend to the absolute good by begetting images of the beautiful in Eros.

For this reason I tend to the view that the determinacy of the proposition, though fine in its place, is not the form of truth. Truth manifests in the indeterminacy and openness of the sign. The image does not arrive where it would go in the sense of a finite teleology or simple determinateness. Everything that strives, strives only approximately for its own telos. In truth it strives for the distant finality of God as Aristotle shows us (this is what it means to speak of a ‘first mover’). To attain itself the sign surpasses itself in an ecstatic excess towards the infinite. This infinity is, as Proclus tells us, its innermost secret place, its hidden heart. There are modern ways of figuring this proleptically into the openness of the future as in Bergson. Others like Maurice Blondel conceive of the infinite as immediately given and in principle fully apprehended in the all or nothing, the either/or of judgment posited in action. This, I suppose, is the difference between endless creation and endless unfolding of what already is. Whatever is the case with this, we can see there is no escaping the stance of the reader and no escaping the complexity of the sign into some Eden of pure univocity and simple propositional knowledge. There is no escaping history for the same reason for meaning is distended in time and is always on the way to determining itself. The sign, whatever sign, is read in history and read historically. There is no way but forward for the reader and for us.

That said I don’t quite understand the historical the way Heidegger does as under the sway some obscure, inscrutable destining of temporalized Being. For one thing history is illumined by charity and indeed redeemed by charity. Giving of course is a central concept for Heidegger as for the Platonists (a debt and relation by the way that he covers up with his mistaken, or perhaps mendacious, reduction of Platonism to the ‘idea’). This giving, though, is not named eros or love as it is in Dionysius or agape as it is in the gospels (and NO these two names are NOT opposed) . Nor is it Plato’s ‘absence of envy’ or self-diffusion of the Good as Good. I suppose I might on a good day commit myself to saying that even history is illumined by the transcendentals: unum, bonum, pulchrum and verum and so on. The unity of the transcendentals is manifest by the unintelligibility and evil in which we fall when we falsely abstract them from each other as I learned above all from Greek tragedy. This conceptual disorder is the spring of much history as science, art, politics, and religion divide and unite across the ages in a desperate battle for power instead of equilibrium, or, to put it more exactly, seek the equilibrium of death by way of spurious dominance. Thus truth, goodness, beauty and power vie with each other to their own destruction as, say, a science that excludes the good and the beautiful falls into skepticism or an aestheticism that excludes the true and the good falls into preciousness. I might say especially that an account of the good, moralism, which excludes the beautiful falls into priggish fanaticism that makes the good, the most beautiful of all things, ugly and repugnant to others. This is, I suppose, a negative demonstration of the unity of the transcendentals in the divine; a very direct and practical proof of the reality of God.

Now proofs of God are not something I am much into though many seem obsessed with them positively or negatively. I view God or the Good as the apex of all striving and not as a bit of interesting conceptual content one can certify and fix in order to put it in your back pocket. Still, when musing on the matter, as I sometimes do in spite of myself, I do think something like the following may well hold. Knowing and willing transpire in us against the limitless horizon of the unconditional in which all questions and all desire culminate. It is God that answers to this horizon as its ground; the question, the hope, the longing or eros all transcend their limited finalities into the depth of the infinite. God, if you like, sustains that infinite striving which is a striving for the infinite, or, to put it more Platonically, a striving to beget the beautiful in the infinite. This will do for me when proofs are needed for it seems to be to be just what I experience in the world as the modality of my existence. In this, though, I speak for no one but myself as I am not an apologist and I do not do confessional polemics beyond what I think is strictly necessary. Especially, I do not do conversions or seek disciples as I am a teacher and teaching is incompatible with that kind of willed persuasion. Still, one might take the Neo-Platonists as a touchstone here. Our minds and hearts are not, at their core, divided from the higher causes. Only a false kind of discursive thinking makes of the super-abounding goodness of the divine reality an ‘object’ to be certified by some extrinsic ‘method’. We do not need to seek for in a radical sense we are already there. This vital motion and spontaneous receptivity to the leading of the gods is a kind of’ supernatural’ light that irradiates the soul and Iamblichus and Proclus are not afraid to call it faith. If though, in light of this, we unfold the bonds of analogy between the art, spirituality, politics and science of various global cultures we might once again, from our current morass of skepticism and over assertive dogmatism, come to speak of truth and even certainty.  We might, to use a medieval phrase, not replace faith with understanding but fulfill faith in understanding. One might then say that at the apex of its powers the mind is more directly in contact with what it thinks about and is thus capable of a kind of pure attention where it thinks the good in what is good or the true in what is true (whatever images of the good or true it happens to contemplate). One may find, in fact, that moment of rigorous impersonality in which we see things as they are.

As said above I suppose I could write another piece on the VIRTUES of ASCS. This would acknowledge the fact that as annoying as ASCS can be in certain discourses there are deeper depths to which one can sink (as in conspiratorial discourses un-tethered from reality). A bit of ASCS may well save you from those depths! This is the kind of ambiguity any responsible polemic should always keep in mind though that goes very much against the grain of the polemicist. ASCS is in fact fine when it stays in its lane and does not try to puff itself up into a comprehensive metaphysic or moral outlook. ASCS is inconsistent with historical thinking and reading. ASCS can make nothing intelligent of core human concerns like religion, folklore or art. ASCS is a pox on any attempt to see the human condition in the round. If it saves one from certain species of lunacy in some areas it is at the cost of stupefying dullness in others. Of course, as an academic, I am not in a position to affect public taste and attitudes in this matter. People are going to think what they are going to think. This I suppose is an argument for universities for in a university class of the right sort ASCS is gone within a day along with other popular but wrong stances. This is why right leaning ASCS folk are now all about attacking schools and universities. They may even be successful in this in which case we will be performing the interesting new experiment of a civilization with no knowledge outside the professional or technical, a world of which technocrats and economists have long dreamed. I don’t even think the pure sciences will survive this universal philistinism though I suppose we shall see. Or perhaps YOU shall see for I will be cultivating my garden happily retired among my books and the other accouterments of my library.          

 

 

 

 

                                                    

                                                                                                

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[1] The comedian is a heroic male truth teller who speaks truth to power and tells it ‘like it is’. If this stance is to work there must be easy and ready access to ‘how things are’ and that, I suppose, is what ASCS must supply. By saying this I do not deny that some progressive proponents of emancipatory discourses do not over-correct, grift in a careerist sense, or engage in hubristic, self-righteous bullying. These vexing phenomena come with ANY profound social change. The phenomenon is complex and has yet to work its limits out. At the same time anyone who remembers the 80’s now blushes at the routine and casual put downs of homosexuals, the disabled and other marginalized peoples. I should also note that every public, activist form of atheism/secularism I have encountered is wedded at the hip to ASCS. This is unfortunate for it is so unnecessary; some Nietzsche would do many of these people good. I think this may be a function of so many of these types being ex-evangelical fundamentalists. Evangelical fundamentalism is simply the expression of ASCS in the sphere of religion and that is why these ‘deconstructions’ involve no real change in underlying attitude. All their basic convictions and thought patterns are simply recapitulated in another discourse. Once an evangelical, always an evangelical. This is why I believe we need better evangelicals.        

[2] One assumption here is that things like logic and science dovetail seamlessly. Sadly, in logic the moon can be made of green cheese. The statement ‘If the earth is flat the moon is made of green cheese’ is true by material implication. Clearly the empty formality of these statements does not correspond in any simple way to what ASCS calls ‘reality’. Logic and facts can go their own separate ways happily.    

 [3] There is an interesting question here. Analytic philosophy is the hegemonic mode of philosophy in North America and the UK and, by sheer institutional inertia, may remain so for centuries. Like Catholic scholasticism, it has found a space to reproduce itself, the liberal capitalist research university, and may do so endlessly. However, other modes like idealism, phenomenology or deconstruction persist. Indeed, they must persist. The hegemon typically assumes the outsider has only one option: to translate its claims into terms comprehensible and acceptable to itself to receive certification from ‘real professional philosophers’. However, the outsider has another option; to simply insist that its terms are adequate in themselves and that it is not subject to the standards of an alien discourse. I can play the game by your rules or simply refuse your rules. This is the problem of the commensurability of standards. Derrida can’t be translated into modal logic? So much the worse for modal logic! Here the hegemon is forced into apologetics. The ‘other’ is fundamentally irresponsible for analytic philosophy represents the ‘really important work’ with which we are all required to engage if we want to be responsible philosophers. It refers to the blunt fact of its institutional dominance to justify its continued institutional dominance! This, alas, is just what medieval scholasticism could have said of itself or British Hegelianism for that matter. Hobbes did not engage scrupulously or fairly with Suarez any more than Russell did with Hegel. Revolutions in philosophy are NEVER fair and NEVER professional or scrupulous. A philosophical revolution is blitzkrieg warfare. One does not attack the enemy at his strongpoints. One bypasses and isolates them. Suarez is not ‘refuted’ but ignored and ridiculed. British Hegelians are not refuted but simply not hired or promoted and are replaced as the editors of key journals. Careerists, the vast majority of academics in ANY discipline, learn to speak the new lingo. I have no idea if this will happen in academic philosophy or if in 10, 000 years we will still be publishing the kind of papers we do now and teaching the same curriculum. If something like a philosophical revolution happens I suspect it will center on the problem of gender as so many male heroes of analytic thought turn out to be rapey old pervs.      

 [4] A mental state alas, is not a physical state or, if it is a physical state, it is not the physical state represented in a proposition. This means that at the heart of correspondence lies a difference, indeed a fundamental structural differentiation. There is a gap between observer and observed, sign and signified. This gap is a structured opposition that unites two things. The difference is a moment in the relation, a constitutive element of the posited unity. This is why you can't say a proposition simply is what it refers too and why naïve realism has to be wrong. All truths are mediated and this mediation is never direct and transparent. Language is the world but only by not being the world and for that reason can’t be a transparent, univocal mirror. Historically, the real age for correspondence theories was the medieval one for thinkers like Aquinas understood the act of knowledge to be the unity of an immaterial agent intellect with the intelligible form of an object. Immaterial realities are inter-penetrable to each other, though our own corporeality still puts limits on our ability to intelligize objects.  

 [5] One does not have to be a rabid feminist to ask why exactly it is that feelings, desires and emotions have girl cooties on them. There is no sane development of the intellectual life that does not proceed in tandem with the growth of emotional maturity. Facts and logic without educated feelings produce not knowledge but a grotesque parody of it. Reason without feeling produces monsters of irrationality and cruelty. This means that there is no opposition of ‘fact and feeling’ such as this popular meme implies except in carefully circumscribed situations where certain feelings can ‘get the better of us’. The relation of reason and feeling is a dance not a divorce.    

[6] Figuring out exactly what a fact is and what proponents of ASCS mean by the word is something I find challenging. If facts are ‘given states of affairs’ then these are embedded in theories, models, laws and representations such as maps, graphs or charts which serve to fix their web of necessity. Are laws, say, facts? Are they simple external givens? Well laws insofar as they are quantitative are relations formed in the mind of the calculator. You will not find a single mathematical formula written in nature on a rock or a tree. As far as I can tell what we have in nature is constant process within a set of basic constraints which can be expressed mathematically. Wittgenstein said that the world is everything which is the case which Adorno called the most unphilosophical statement ever. It is also the most unscientific statement ever as nature is constantly busy NOT being the case. I mentioned cows above but even plants know this. They transmute the given fact of light into food. They very much put their feelings above the facts! Like cows they are not objectivists in the least. The fact, in this situation, seems not to be the ‘really real’ or the foundation of being but the element that is in a constant flux of shifting states and relations.            

[7] One might also say, with Hegel, that spirit brings the necessity of nature out of itself as its own necessity externalized. Kant, in his way, also saw this. Otherwise one is left with ultimate contingency. Like Popper we are stuck with ‘so far unfalsified propositions’ and then, after Quine/Duhem, not even those.  

[8] I once heard a fisherman on a radio talk show complain that a cut to the shrimp quota was ‘waste’. I have never heard a better illustration of what Heidegger calls ‘standing reserve’. Indeed, I once heard a premier of NL claim that if a certain hydro project were not developed all the water flowing into the ocean from a certain river would be ‘wasted’. I am doubly impressed by these statements given that neither the fisherman nor the premier are likely to have read “The Question Concerning Technology”. Of course what is happening here is a kind of reversal. We think of money as a sign of the value of the uncaught shrimp. Actually the natural thing, the shrimp, is a sign of the money to be made from it. It is the symbol and the cash the reality and that is why it is gross ignorance, even idolatry in the Biblical sense, to reverse this polarity and sacrifice the real (cash value) to the merely symbolic (the shrimp). I thought once that this contempt for nature might be a feature of the culture of my home province but recently I read in The Guardian that trillions of tons of fish in the ocean’s abyss were being ‘under-exploited’. This is a fancy word for ‘waste’ and I, for one, deeply resent the tragedy of under-exploitation in this instance.     

[9] Note for example the vexing question of color concepts. Do people in other cultures see colors the way we do? In one sense the answer seems to be yes. Biology and physiology indicate that an ancient Greek should have the same raw perceptual experiences we do. However, past infancy we don’t really have raw perceptual experiences. We have perceptual experiences shaped by language and culture. In other words we see a color, say, as an instance of a type, yet, as a type of what? There are, in fact, many ways of dividing up the spectrum into different shades or classifying colors on other principles like intensity. This means that there are two senses in which an ancient Greek saw blue one of which he or she shares with us and one which he or she does not. What I mean by the latter is that if you see a color and do not have the universal ‘blue’ to put that color under then you do not see ‘blue’. You see a shade of green, say, or a shade of purple. The same raw visual data is plugged into a different classificatory scheme thus becoming a different experience.       

[10]   There are any number of beliefs that are justified but not evidentially if by ‘evidence giving’ one means producing an inference by some inductive or deductive process external to phenomenon so justified. I think that the basic given-ness of consciousness might be taken to be one of these. It seems to me that at the beginning of any evidential chain (whether inductive or deductive) is a self-certifying assertion like A=A or 'I feel pain now'. I call these self-certifying because no process of deduction or induction mediates them to us or is required to mediate them to us. If one removes the concept of 'self-evidence' one faces the problem of having to deny or bracket all kinds of beliefs that are direct pragmatic necessities until one has ‘justified’ them. Sensations, say, are a marker for consciousness but how do you show you have sensations if the given fact of sensing is not self-evident? Descartes himself faced this problem and that why he altered his formulation of the cogito from’ I think therefore I am’ to I am a thing that thinks. He did not want to imply that our consciousness of ourselves was mediated by an inference as then we could question the validity of the inference. Of course, the cogito itself does, for Descartes, require constitution by the idea of divine perfection which may make of God the only thing purely ‘given’ and, if I may use the word here, the only ‘fact’ that stands on its own. This means the given of consciousness is, ultimately, is a kind of mediated truth in as sense rather hard to articulate. This, however, is a complexity we need not explore here for we are concerned not with metaphysics but with the direct pragmatics of belief (where we assume things like ‘I am awake now’ as pragmatic givens we do not need to test). Here I tend to prefer the broader classification of justification and prefer to reserve the word evidence for those beliefs which need to be mediated by an inferential procedure. This is because there is in such claims no evidence outside of the fact itself as is implied in other claims and, more importantly, none required.

[11] One might perhaps put it this way: among the web of relations they occupy and by which they are, in a real sense, defined individual things are also nodes of individuation. Thus they are not fully reducible to their relations but exist in dialectical tension with them. This applies, for instance, to the cogito or ‘I think’. Subjectivity embodies a paradox. The I possesses a moment of reflexivity not given for the other which is a fancy way of explaining why you can’t read my mind. At the same time in a tragically real sense I receive myself from the recognition of others. The attitude of others to me is an essential moment in my own self-appropriation.    

 [12] Not only religion but art and science violate the law of excluded middle and the binary opposition of T and F. This is because they do not articulate simple propositional truth but truth in representation. The model, the image, the structural metaphor are at once truth and non-truth. They veil as they reveal and reveal as they veil. In other words, they mediate by signs and symbols which differ from the signified and symbolized. Fiction, for instance, only reflects on life by means of a sharp abstraction from it. A history of WW2 must leave out virtually everything that happened in it to produce a coherent narrative. Science often deals in measures that are approximate not exact. For theology the Bible is a set of signs in which the hidden is revealed yet in that revealing subject to the conditions, even limitations of textuality. The Bible, then, would be true in the sense that if all the meaning it contained were actualized one would possess the divine mind or, as Aquinas says, God’s science of himself. This science saturates even the human mind of Christ though his human intellect could not express all of this even to itself except discursively or even imagistically. This is why Christianity is only a religion of the book in a qualified sense. At its heart is a person, a living book or living symbol not simply the textual word. It is Christ who can say ‘this is my body’ and mean it for he is the signified that saturates fully the sign. This why I think that as far as mere books go what I said above about the Bible can just as well be said of Homer or Hesiod.

  

[13] At any rate such ‘principles of pure reason’ are historical; they are used differently to different ends in different time periods. Occam’s razor might be taken as a case in point. The original point of the razor was to eliminate forms or essences from nature in order to submit things more radically to the power of God. This had the result refocusing the mind on the particulars of observation as now there were no universals to know. There was only the immediate will of God manifested in individual events. The order of these events was not grounded in necessary reason but in power or will. This is why it could only be observed. Appealing to the direct will of God in this way simplifies our conception of things by reducing everything to one direct (though inscrutable) cause. Of course now Occam’s principle is used for precisely the opposite purpose: it is a bulwark of naturalism! In other words, the razor implies that behind every event is a multitude, a vast multitude, of intersecting causal variables of a physical nature. It makes room for multiplicity by removing God’s will from the picture! At best we can reduce these variables to a limited set of forces, particles and laws but we cannot so far, like Occam, reduce them to one. Whatever the razor is, it is now longer just about simplicity or parsimony itself for its use subsequent to medieval philosophy has been in defense of kind of pluralism. Or perhaps we might say that it is parsimony or simplicity which are historicized concepts for they are different values that do different work in different epochs. The application of the rule depends on the cultural context in which it is being applied. In different ages people look for different kinds of simplicity in different places. A Thomist, I suppose, might say that God takes the simplest route to the effects he wants to produce but wants to produce far more effects than we can conceive making the principle of parsimony of uncertain application ad nos. God, for instance, wants to share with creatures the dignity of causality which means more creatures and indeed more rational or intellectual creatures not the minimum number required for creation.  

[14] Life is frustrating for the evidentialist. The objective employment of reason is supposed to produce truths evident to all rational minds as such. An argument or proof that is valid and sound should fix and finalize the fact of the matter forever. This leaves the evidentialist constantly baffled at the stupidity and perverse stubbornness of the other. The fact of the matter is, alas, that people do not hold single beliefs they can swap out for other single beliefs the instant a valid syllogism demands it. Beliefs come with a subjective coloring and are for that reason too highly individuated for ‘reason and evidence’ to act as advertised. By this I mean that any proposition received by a subject is received into a web of beliefs, experiences, influences or attitudes with which is meshes or jars. No argument by itself can re-arrange these complexes simply on the basis of being ‘adequately formulated’. This is to say that no argument taken in isolation ends a discussion which all of us have surely observed if we have been paying any attention at all to how arguments transpire. Beliefs are undetermined by arguments. The surplus or excess that makes for belief as opposed to rejection is the tonality and attunement of the subject. All thought, no matter how rigorous and objective, passes through this moment of simple individuality. If you like, subjects approach subjects they do not simply vanquish them. This is why the naïve realist and evidentialist frequently ends the discussion by calling you a liar or implying you are mentally ill.        

[15] As has been the case, say, with indigenous people in Canada and the U.S. Indigenous world views seem to me a paradigm case of different ways of seeing. These world views are NOT grounded in failure to observe the world correctly or lack of method or failure to understand Occam’s razor or whatever. They are grounded in a certain backdrop or representational scheme that determines how they understand what they see. This might roughly be described as ‘animism’ which I suppose aligns with what we now call ‘panpsychism’. For such a view all things are ensouled. There is a soul or ‘mana’ in things which equates with a spontaneous, self-acting power (dynamis) that manifests in personal, quasi-personal or sometimes impersonal (whatever that term may be taken to mean) force. This monistic force is operative in micro/macro cosmic relations as the bond of identity between the two. It is also operative in magical and ritual actions where the symbolized suffuses and binds the symbol to itself and finally in shamanic transformations from one world to the next or one form to the next. This is grounded in the fact that the encompassing one self-activity of nature deploys itself the modes of sympathy and correspondence. All this will sound familiar to students of the Renaissance for indigenous world views are recapitulated in the Platonism and esotericism of that era as we may see, say, in Henry More’s ‘plastic spirit of nature’.           

[16] Of course if process theologians are right then even God has a ‘perspective’ he’s developed based on his past history of interactions with the cosmos. This is a shade too onto-theological for me but it is out there as a creditable position. I suppose in this case there would be nothing absolute not even divine knowledge which could alter and grow in relation to other centers of activity or consciousness (though it cannot, for some reason I have not worked out, shrink). If, however there is no divine knower or perceiver I suppose Blake would be right. As the organ of perception alters so does the object perceived. If a knower is a constitutive principle of a known changing the knowers would change the known. 

[17] This is a somewhat complicated question. People like Weyer (the famous witch sceptic) denied the existence of witches based on the medieval theory of humors. For him unforced confessions of witchcraft were the result of humoral imbalance; an excess of black bile causing melancholy. This is wrong according to us. Humors don’t exist so unforced confessions of witchcraft must have been caused by something else. However, if unforced confessions of witchcraft were a symptom of mental illness, a product of brain chemistry, then in a sense Weyer is right. In medieval medical discourse the theory of humors was structurally analogous to our current notions of brain chemistry. It was what brain chemistry is when expressed in their framework; a physical system whose imbalance caused mental illness. One can swap entities for other entities and still maintain roughly the same world view. As I said above history stomps all over the law of excluded middle for Weyer was both wrong and right for he was analogously right which means for us he was also in some sense wrong. Of course, we do not even need to get historical here. Is an approximate measure within a certain margin of error accurate or not? If strict correspondence to an external state of affairs is at issue it would seem not. If use is at issue of course it is.     

 [18] And I think they do in a number of instances. Consider the problem this way. In the last century we had what might be called a ‘liberal consensus’. This consisted of two things. Firstly, we had determinations about the ‘right’, formal determinations of courts based on varying iterations of the ‘social contract’ binding on all rational citizens and possibly on all rational agents as such. These defined the formal rights of citizens, protecting traditional civic liberties, the rights of minorities (in theory but not practice), and the property rights of corporations and the capital owning class. I am old enough to remember when this consensus was considered permanent and all but unassailable. The second leg of this concerned not right but ‘truth’. Truth was a product of scientific consensus and had no relation to any sacred, ritual, mythic or communal dimension. This guaranteed its universality and public objectivity. Human and corporate rights as defined by bourgeois liberal courts (such as the sainted Ruth Bader Ginsburg) determined the right and top research labs in elite universities defined the true. This consensus could not, of course, last for it could not answer the question of why corporations should recognize the true when their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders dictated that they promote the false. Of course, to the people outside of this consensus none of this looked like objective, universal reason and the end of history as we were constantly and often bullyingly assured. To the outside the end of history looked like a simple assertion of personal and class interest steeped in cultural and regional prejudice which for good or ill it more or less was. History came roaring back with Bin Laden and the war on terror when the universality and objectivity of the bourgeois liberal order came to rest on waterboarding, black sites, and killing brown skinned children who happened to speak Pashtun or Arabic. Underneath the façade of procedural reason lay brute power. It remains to be seen if humanity recovers from this revelation.          

 [19] The moralizer operates on the assumption that moral facts are simply there to be looked at. This means that, transplanted into the past, he would see the same moral facts he sees now and behave differently than his benighted ancestors. Personally, I shudder at the hubris and folly of this claim. It does, though, correspond exactly to the claim that had Aristotle just looked at nature correctly he would have seen what Newton saw. I tend to agree with Heidegger, however, that Aristotle was not looking at what Newton looked at and so could not have seen what Newton saw. Looking, whether at the moral or natural world, has a history and this history is not and cannot be the cumulative refinement of one, natural, given point of view. Now the moralizer in our day is a bit more sophisticated than his ASCS counterpart. He has a theory, which is sometimes is a good enough theory, that religions and philosophies are ciphers for underlying relations of power and material factors of production. Thus it can, like ASCS, point to an underlying something which everything else rests upon, the bottom turtle in the pile if you like. Power then functions like fact as the really real on which the less real things rest as their foundation. Frankly, this is not skeptical enough for my taste. There is no signified under the signifiers like Locke’s ‘I know not what’. You cannot ground anything on a simple empirical given. The interaction between the material and the symbolic realm of culture is circulatory not unidirectional, linear or mono-causal. Symbolic superstructure and material base mutually condition each other in a circular process which means, for instance, that we can have revolutionary leaps in imagination and fundamental re-descriptions of the material.            

[20] Frankly all this seems to confirm Pascal’s blunt assessment that there is enough light for those who long for God and enough shade for those who don’t (knowledge does not act in abstraction from will). The implication of the ‘divine hiddenness argument’ is that over and above, say, the order of nature or the brute fact of finite being and unity there is some kind of evidence that would (and should) necessitate belief in God, compelling assent by ineluctable necessity. What might his be? As far as I can see it would have to be some kind of miracle. This, however, immediately lands us in trouble for if theistic arguments as they currently exist are insufficient it is difficult to see why rainbows exploding in the sky would be any better or stronger evidence. In fact they would surely be weaker evidence. Suppose the word ‘god’ appeared in rainbow colors in the sky. With Hume I could say that it was more parsimonious to question my faculties than accept something so extraordinary. The exact same would hold if I heard testimony to that effect. It would be more parsimonious to question the testimony or assume the operation of a hitherto unknown law of nature. It is hard not to conclude that no such miracle could reveal God any more than the miracles we have already heard of such as the resurrection. It certainly could not reveal God any more than the fact of creation does already. Further, it is hard to see how universal and constant miracle is even a coherent concept. As Lewis pointed out miracle assumes a regular order of creation to be perceived as such. Miracles so constant and universal as to leave us (supposedly) unable to deny the existence of God would erase the created order as created. This would be to erase BETTER evidence in favor of WORSE evidence. Indeed it would erase the evidential force of any possible miracle. Miracles NEED to be rare and if they are rare we can always doubt them as anomalies. All of this means that where ‘evidence for God’ is in the only place it can be structurally and constitutionally.             

 [21] As ASCS does not investigate the history of anything before aggressively commenting on it I have to point out that in the traditional Christian reading of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures the old law is a shadow or type of the new covenant whose external prescriptions are thus intensified or abrogated based on the new logic of the Kingdom. As Christ explicitly says the old law makes concessions to the hardness of human hearts. The old law written on stone is thus not the law of the new kingdom of love though it retains its value, indeed authority, as a type. Judaism also makes allowance for an evolving moral consciousness embodied in the Torah though it is not my place to comment on that.      

[22] This is because the meaning of a Platonic dialogue is not some occluded ‘intent’ in the mind of an empirical Plato. What Plato meant is the dialectic that reproduces itself in the mind of the reader. This is just as true of the Hebrew Bible which in its meaning is quite close to Plato. This would be true even if these texts were produced by automatons for we could still read them exactly as we do now. The reader, of course, is also in a time and place that is not Plato’s and this adds a coloring to what is appropriated from the text and what is not. Part of this coloring is the history of the text’s reception from which the text itself can no longer be abstracted even as a physical object reproduced in a certain format. Nobody reads Plato on scrolls without modern punctuation. Reading hermeneutic tradition out of a text does not give you the original back but something over-determinate by exclusion. Above this there is the standpoint of the reader with its built in pre-judgments which will always give us different Platos and indeed different Bibles.       

 [23] Actual critical thinking, I dare say, involves not only the ability to identify fallacies or formalize arguments but also the tact to know when your formalizations are adequate to the complexity of the content. That is a matter of judgment unfortunately and cannot be taught, only shown. This I discovered ages ago when I wrote my master’s thesis on Plato. The dialectical shape of discussion that formed the theme and content of Plato’s dialogues was the very thing that disappeared in the many (and many useless) formalizations of Plato’s ‘arguments’.  Hegel was right to this extent at least; dialectical logic is NOT the formal logic of the understanding but another kind of logic.

[24] This is not just wokeness on MY part for Quillette makes just this claim at least where women are concerned https://quillette.com/2022/10/08/sex-and-the-academy/). Thus, we read: “The overall theme of these differences is that men are more committed than women to the pursuit of truth as the raison d’être of science, while women are more committed to various moral goals, such as equity, inclusion, and the protection of vulnerable groups. Consequently, men are more tolerant of controversial and potentially offensive scientific findings being pursued, disseminated, and discussed, and women are more willing to obstruct or suppress science perceived to be potentially harmful or offensive. Put more simply, men are relatively more interested in advancing what is empirically correct, and women are relatively more interested in advancing what is morally desirable.”