Posted By BillHeise on November 22, 2009

I recently had a debate with someone on FB on the subject of Sarah Palin’s new book. He was saying that she was a hater (one of “them”) and that unfortunately some people (meaning me, I think) were like ostriches, who have their head in the sand and their asses in the air, and they don’t even know it.

I posted a note saying that I don’t do politics, and he posted a note saying that everything is political. I posted a note asking how he knew me better than I know myself. That question has a long history and philosophy, going back at least as far as philosophy itself. It is known as the skeptical question. I did not attempt to answer the question.

He told me that all I had to do was open my eyes and look around. But, again with what I thought was an enormous amount of tact, I asked him “How do I know I can trust my eyes?”

He ended up in essence taking his ball and going home, deleting all his comments from the thread. I was embarrassed, and I stopped posting. I wrote a note of apology to the host of the thread, and that was the end of it. At least on FB. But that is why I have a blog: to make clear my positions in an environment in which no one is paying attention.

The Blood Sport

This is why I don’t do politics. Politics in America is a blood sport. It’s not enough to win an argument. Your opponent must be, if not destroyed, completely subjugated to your point ov view. But the blood sport is covered up by the illusion of cooperation. This is precisely how Barack Obama got elected: he was going to be the post-racial president; he was going to extend his hand across the aisle; he was going to drag the country out of partisan politics to a more ideal world (if only those across the aisle would cooperate).

We’ve heard this before, of course. It was exactly the plan of George W. Bush, who came into office from the governorship of Texas where he had managed to extend his hand across the aisles. That he failed was not because he was being deceitful. He had fallen into the trap of national politics. Nor, I think, is Barack Obama being deceitful. The fact of the matter is that he quickly made a decision about what he wanted to do. The Republicans opposed him, so he shut them out of the negotiations and continued to work towards noble goals which no one but people with bad motives could doubt.

Ovid on Love and Power

In the Middle Ages, authors knew this about power. They drew their notion of power from the fall of Rome, which had placed power above love. Christ was the guy who taught them about unconditional love. But the pagand didn’t have access to Christ. The pagan drew their knowledge of love from the insidious source of Ovid. Ovidian love manifests itself in humbleness towards the desired object, but in the end it provides a cover for what in the mind of many feminists turns out to be an instance of outright rape. Ovid provides the best entrée into the power relations that accompany pure carnal sex.

The same thing happens in power relations today. One person must dominate another. Cooperation is lost in such an enviroment. Of course, in a power dynamic people offer you the hand of friendship. But if, in such an environment, you’re taken in by someone wielding rhetoric to mask their desire for power, that is the surest way to lose your power. That is why I don’t do politics.

Are You One of Those People?

If you are one of those who believe the Obama is right and the Republicans are wrong, (or vice versa) then the question you may need to ask yourself is this: How do you know? If you know based on instinct, then that’s okay. Instinct is one of those thing that people do rely upon to make decisions about the world. Instinct is one of those things that provide the basis for building up logical knowledge. But it it also on the basis of instinct that primitive men threw virgins into volcanoes to stop the rumbling of the gods.

Logic is the method of deciding about your perspective on the world. And if you are one of those people who know, then I have the right to ask you how you know. And you have the right to take your marbles and leave the game. But that doesn’t mean that I will quit asking.

Politics in the Language of Aristotle

In the language of Aristotle, instinct is a priori knowledge, knowledge that we bring to the table before we start  arguing our differences. On top of a priori knowledge, Aristotle recommends building up demonstrative proofs of things. This is known as a posteriori knowledge. This is the only knowledge that we consider logical today.

In my experience, politics is instinctual. It is based as much of your family experience as it is on your considered opinion in adulthood. My father was a Republican. Your father was a Democrat. Statistics show that, in most cases, you will follow in your parents’ wake.

Of course, our whole political system is based on individual choice, and not on the following blindly in your parents’ wake. So no one in my experience believes that their experience is not carefully reasoned. This goes as much for the academic intellectual as the stripper on on of those show featured on The Soup. Everyone has experience. Everyone believes that they have arrived at their opinion based on their use of logic and reason alone. Yet, the use of logic begs the question, as yet unanswered, of how you know when you are operating on instinct and when you are operating on logic?

The Historic Position of Art

Even if we could answer this question, everyone knows that reason and logic are not enough to guarantee your position in respect to the world. Aristotle had divided his universe into an absolute scale and a relative scale of individual, species, and genus. But there was no way to tell which were species and which were genuses. Aristotle devolved into a description of a relative universe.

Descartes thought that metaphysics had failed to provide a rational basis for the description of human nature, so he managed to give humankind a mathematical description of the universe. This lasted for a hundred years before people like Baumgarten began to realize that Descartes had not escaped the relative universe to the permanence of metaphysics, which has been the claim of art to a greater perfection. Baumgarten invented the discipline of aesthetics based on the presumption that art is the way of emotion, not logic. In other words, he had found that he was carrying forth the (seemingly permanent) skeptical condition in the face of Descartes confidence that he had finally overcome the problem of skepticism. He had overcome the skeptical condition by the use of emotion to make an end run around limited reason.

And, just as in Alexander Pope’s day everyone knew instinctively that art was the domain of reason and logic, everyone knows now instinctively that art is the domain of emotion and not of reason. How do they and we know?

The Fate of Logic

We can probably answer that question historically. The Romantics divided their metaphysical pretensions from logic and threw logic out of the aesthetic experience. They attempted to read all experience on the basis of aesthetic experience. “Allegory,” the condition that represented Kant’s determinant judgment—an incomplete relative scientific judgment— was for 200 years dismissed for a fuller and more satisfying “symbol.”

In the last 50 years, the symbolic experiences come under pressure of the question “How can we know?” In the face of this pressure, many literary critics in particular (and literary criticism is my field of study) have retreated back into the domain of philosophy of art (still known as aesthetics) and its attempt to Represent what is beyond language (see Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition), where we read:

Philosophy must restore unity to learning, which has been scattered into separate sciences in laboratories and in pre-university education; it can only achieve this in a language game that links the sciences together as moments in the becoming of spirit.

Godel Escher Bach’s Mu

We can see the modern logic of this position in one of the most important books I read when I was first starting to study philosophy: Godel Escher Bach. Godel Escher Bach adds a third answer to the scientist’s Yes or No in the truth tables: Mu. Mu simply unasks the question posed by the lowly and limited scientific questioner. But the fact that Douglas R. Hofstadter (the author of Godel, Escher, Bach) is clever enough to unasked question does not make the question go away. It simply makes him a particularly peevish participant in a conversation between two participants. If we really want to know the answer to the question, probably have to look somewhere else.

This does not mean that Hofstadter’s answers are not useful additions to the problem at hand. Mu replaces the scientific question with a metaphysical question. However, it does mean that Hofstadter’s Mu-position is not the only answer to the problem at hand. If we want to discover an answer in the relative universe of Aristotle, we need to use Aristotle’s limited-but-very-useful logic which relies on limited logic to place it in an albeit limited and changeable logical framework.

The Fate of Philosophy

As far as I know, no one in philosophy doubts philosophy itself has the power to resolve all of the emergent issues that arise from philosophy. Instead of facing the problem squarely, they have dismissed logic and science in their search for a whole and complete philosophy, they have missed many of the issues that arise from logic and science. But, as I said, just because you don’t deign to answer a question does not mean that the question isn’t valid. It just means that you don’t think it’s valid.

And how do you know?

The consequence of my argument is ultimately that we cannot have an answer to the problems of skepticism. It will, like the poor and unlike Jesus, always be with us. In the Dark Ages, this eventuated in the destruction of metaphysical philosophy, as itself a limited but ultimately unsatisfying perspective around which to organize our universe. And there were better perspectives to be had. One of these was provided by Augustine, who recognized the power of reason, but eventually decided that reason was not up to the task of bridging the gap between our human minds (which operated on limited reason) and the perspective of the Creator of the universe (which could grasp the entire universe in a go). The only way to bridge that gap was through faith.

In the world that we live in, therefore, there is no firm rational foundation upon which we can rest confidently. That doesn’t mean that by destroying reason and heading towards emotion that we can reach those foundations. That policy is one in which we follow in America today, but it is only (like all cultural forms) transient. Philosophy herself must be deposed as the final arbiter of thought. She can help us to illuminate the world which surrounds us, but her own metaphysical pretensions are out of her reach. She’s like Godel’s mathematician who proposes emergent problems that cannot be solved through reason alone. That doesn’t mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It does mean that the rational foundations of our thought are out of reach of our rational minds. We must start our scientific inquiry on the basis of our intuitive knowledge that the world exists. Can we prove it? Perhaps not. But this is the point: Whether we are Christian or atheists, we operate on the basis of faith. We build up on the basis of our faith those a posteriori arguments—weak though they are in comparison with God’s eternal knowledge—about the world we live in. Thus, IMHO, logic is the next best thing to true, eternal knowledge, and rather than throwing it away, we should try to know as much about everything as we possibly can and order it in a manner that reflects our knowledge, not as God created it, but as nature orders it.

And that is why I don’t do politics.

Categories: Personal, Philosophy
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