Posted By BillHeise on November 1, 2009

The Lost Generation with Curmudgeonly Response

This is clever. More than that, it is heartwarming. But….there are other opinions, like this:

Cynical people exist, and a cynical person wrote the second video. The idealists among us probably feel that the person who wrote the second video is curmudgeonly. That’s because they are. But having curmudgeonly feelings doesn’t make people wrong. It just makes them curmudgeons.

My question is how can we decide between these two positions? I may feel that the “The Lost Generation” video is better than “The Lost Generation Sucks” video (this is my position, by the way). But people’s feelings are not probative. We use reason and logic to probe and to resolve questions insofar as this is possible.

The Appeal to Logic

From the position of reason and logic, we can see that the use of emotional appeals to bolster support for positions held already are known as a priori positions in logic. The problem here is that, as Plato and Aristotle also realized long ago, that we need some building over our assumptions and logic would fail to prove anything. Instead it would be a petitio principii, a petition to what is already known rather than to something new. In logic these are known as a posteriori positions.

Logic is built on a posteriori positions. Without them, the world collapses back into its principles.

Derrida

This is the weapon used by skeptics like Derrida to flip principles around. They don’t believe that Aristotle solved the problems of logic (he didn’t). This means that, on metaphysical scale, Derrida can reverse what appear to be arbitrary a posteriori conventions. You know the drill: What’s old is new; what’s suppressed is raised. There’s a lot of truth in that, and that’s why academics have embraced deconstruction.

There is no end of the deconstructive cycle: what’s suppressed is raised; then suppressed; then raised in an infinite and arbitrary cycle. But the deferral of meaning implied in Derrida’s non-logocentric universe can only be carried so far. Nothing in the modern world is so suppressed as fascism. Is it a good idea to revive facism? This is where the system of the arch-skeptics falls to the ground. Either Derrida must give up his right to pronounce on moral matters or he (or someone) must decide which things can be raised up from their suppressed state and which things must (or ought to) remain suppressed. Is it only a matter for the guy with the biggest muscles in the room to decide?

This “powerful-to-strongest-guy” goes against Derrida’s Marxist foundations. So even in the metaphysical world of Derrida, someone must choose or we fall back into the chaos of the strongest man in the room, not the best. Who chooses in such a universe?

The Problem with Derrida

The problem is Derrida is looking to complete the hermeneutic circle. He does so by abandoning logic as an a posteriori affair with no permanent power to decide our fate. He gives “Being” with an X through it, which he suggests represents “the play of the trace,” the ability of language to suggest and take away its suggestion at the same time. That seems fair from a metaphysical point of view. Logic proposes, but it also disposes.

The problem is the same as I find in classical literature. In order to save philosophy from the hermeneutic break introduced by logic we need to abandon logic altogether and travel to the metaphysical level. Thus Plato attacked Aristotle’s introduction of logic in the Parmenides, reducing Aristotle to that his logical system could not answer all the questions that it presupposed. The problem was that, although Aristotle had objected to the Theory of Forms as a “poetic metaphor,” he had not decided the question for all time.

Is Metaphysics a Dead End?

But are we better off in the modern day to follow Plato, who abandoned the limited realm of logic for an unlimited realm that can only be guaranteed in fiction?  Or has metaphysics reached a dead end?

On the one hand, it would appear that is has. After all, in order to save the integrity of philosophy, metaphysicians like Derrida have decentered the individual and replaced individual effort with the larger culture. At first this makes sense from the philosophical point of view, until we ask about the integrity of the cultural sphere, which stands up no better than the individual to philosophical scrutiny.

On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense if you are an individual in the world. Nor does it make much sense to believe this in the face of the founding document United States of America presented by Thomas Jefferson. In the Declaration of Independence he proposed that we should be guaranteed the prospect of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as a priori principles given to us by God.

But perhaps the ascendancy of the individual was not as complete as Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, and the other Enlightenment philosophers thought it was. We may want to feel good about the ascendancy of our individual selves and of our individual minds, but people like Derrida seem to be telling us it makes no difference whether we think highly of ourselves or not. We are simply fools to believe in anything (except what the intellectual elites tell us we can still believe).

Aristotle’s Limited Logic

Perhaps we shouldn’t have abandoned Aristotle’s limited logic so readily. After all, though logic only represents an a posteriori position which rests on prior positions, it is only here that we can decide between two or more positions. Being + X leaves us without an answer, and destroys even our individual integrity for (suspect) cultural integrity which replaces it.

The Division of Philosophy

In the Middle Ages, they were gradually coming to terms with the difference between metaphysics, which was complete, and logic and science, which were radically incomplete. They decided they wanted to embrace the Creative God above, and not the suspect and limited sciences. So they, too, abandoned the individual as a center for a decentered (from the point of view of the individual) God.

The scholastic position was gradually overtaken by a philosophy that recentered the mind on the user of the mind (the individual) and away from the (collective) mind of the Church. This change happened during the Middle Ages itself. People in the 12th century thought they had rediscovered logic as a means to build a bridge between the realm of the limited individual mind and the larger and more complete universe of God. Over time, and very gradually, they realized that reason is closer at hand than God. Eventually (by the 18th century) , they decided they didn’t need God anymore and they turned to empirical reason alone.

In the Middle Ages, science was not equivalent to metaphysics. Metaphysics, of course, had the reputation of being complete; but as thinkers had to face the limits of their own reason, they realize that their own reason could not grasp the metaphysical propositions that the Church was enforcing. Such a system was destined to break.

It took time, but this is exactly what happened.

Science and Metaphysics

The Age of Science replaced the Age of Metaphysics (at least for a while). Bacon replaced dedctive scholastic method with inductively-generated science. Descartes replaced Scholastic metaphysics with coordinate geometry. Newton further his work by replacing the Ptolemaic universe with a universe that didn’t need metaphysics, running only on the physical laws of gravity.

Kant rescued metaphysics by taking it out of the hands of God and placing it in the hands of the perceiving human being. We were on the path to metaphysics again. But the difference between science and metaphysics was not replaced. Science always had a teleology attached to it, a direction. It was always supposed to be limited. And more important, science relies on a scale of insecure relative value rather than a scale of secure metaphysical values.

The Rise of Capitalism

Capitalism was the only thing that came along with science, and what use use was capitalism? After all, it put wealth in the hands of a few, rather than the many. It became the principle of the worst that science had to offer. It was not anymore permanent place than any other ideology. In fact by most measures it was worse. People like Gramsci and Malatesta went looking for a better system.

Capitalism may be in ideology in the academic’s theoretical mind, but in practice it is a scale which decides value in a world without any permanent set of metaphysical values. If you know more about the plumbing that I do (this is a sure thing, by the way), I will pay you to come to my house and fix the pipes rather than me having to learn about fixing pipes on my own. Yes, I could do it, but I would take me a lot of time. It’s easier, and more cost-effective, to pay you, while I pursue my heart’s desire.

Where the Idealists Are Most Wrong

The idealists among us (Michael Moore, are you listening?) want to do away with capitalism as one of many “ideologies” (and not a particular good one that).

This is where the idealists are most wrong. It is true that people turn money into an end unto itself, but this is not the only way—and I would say not even the most common way—of looking at money. No liberal thinks that they are pursuing money as its own end. They feel that money is pursued as a means of exchange. It is “the other” who is pursuing money for its own sake, and not for the common good. This is a source of liberal pride. They may not be perfect, but at least they’re not as bad as those greedy capitalists who are not even enlightened enough to know what’s in their own best interests.

People create jobs who have an interior vision that they want to express, and they find they need others to help them create value collectively which they could not create if they were forced to rely on their own individual effort.

So in a sense the metaphysician is correct. We are not just a species of individuals. We are a species that collectively works together to create value. The problem with the idealist’s version of the propositions is that he thinks that someone somewehere knows the truths and can guarantee them if the individual cannot do so him or herself.

But the fact of  the matter is that we do so in a relative environment of value, rather than a metaphysical environment which can guarantee us that the price we pay is the correct price. In the capitalist system, we don’t need arbiters to set an arbitrary price. We arrive at the correct price through bargaining.

There will always be fraud in a relative pricing system. Always. There will also always be leaders, as well as followers. The more complicated social structure we get, the more layers will get in our specialist economy. The way out of this is assuredly not to go backwards in time to a more primitive economy in which we make all our own cookware out of riverbank mud rather than hurrying down to the store in our new Volvo.

What is more, there is no guarantee that we can do better by going back and starting over with a new metaphysics which does a more complete job of effacing the forms of logic than our current metaphysical system. That’s just more metaphysics, which effaces the relativistic view of truth based in logic for a more permanent metaphysical truth without any more guarantees of success than we had in the Middle Ages.

We are stuck with capitalism, whether we like it or not. Even if we did give up capitalism, other people would come along and do it better. This is what happened with China and Russia. China decided to embrace capitalism and are doing well; Russia decided to stand opposed to capitalism in an us-or-them/master-slave Hegelian position and they have not built a diverse economy (they are propped up by oil, which will run out eventually).

Back to “The Lost Generation”

So I applaud the marketing savvy of the purveyors of “The Lost Generation” but I need more than a clever marketing campaign to convince me of the truth of their a priori position. They have to elide over the truth with a carefully-chosen “other” who believes that money will make them happy. If there is such a person they have been listening to the hoeard of marketing messages that say exactly that. It is worth asking whether they are setting up the stupid, rather than the committed capitalist, as the object of their attack. And why would anybody want to attack stupid people. They’re too stupid to know any better. (“Pick on somebody your own size, if not for the sake of your own decentered identity, then for God’s sake,” said the voice of reason to the bully with the biggest arms in the room).

Without reason and logic, this (and any) position is subject to revision by the person with the biggest arms in the room or (even worse) by the state.

My truths may not be as stable as metaphysical truths, but it turns out that metaphysical truths cannot be had except by the dishonesty of ascribing to others things which we would never ascribe to ourselves. And even then, they are nor stable. They simply hide their flaws behind a screen propped up only as long as there are “others” to take up the slack in their own arguments. We are better off having logical arguments on logical grounds. We are better off embracing scientific ideas, which are the second best ideas available to us but which have the attribute of being verifiable in ways that metaphysical truths have not been and never will be.

Categories: Economics, Philosophy
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