“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.
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Discord Invitation
The Dialectic of Love and Revulsion
Two Ways to History.—We arrive at knowledge through discipline or through love, though each also has its characteristic perversion that betrays the epistemic impulse. Discipline yields knowledge without sympathy, remaining blind to the motive behind it all. Love yields understanding without distance, and so it can distort its object to conform to our desires. In the attempt to study our own history and our own civilization, we have grasped them through love and imagined that our understanding was a function of rationality, when it was, in fact, an expression of affinity. Because it is ours, we cannot be dispassionate in its presence, any more than we can be indifferent about our own identity. But other histories and other civilizations, alien to us as not being our own, we can study with the same disciplined rigor we bring to studying an exotic microorganism, or even a fascinating pathology. We can be repulsed, and yet pursue dispassionate scientific inquiry; we could even count the revulsion as a valuable ally in science, as it allows us to maintain our distance from an object of knowledge, the better to remain disinterested in the constitution of the knowledge so occasioned. This, however, is a later achievement of science, which must first develop its methods in the absence of any such revulsion. Discipline must be won through effort, increasing its capacity through repeated engagement. Once the method and the discipline have been developed, they can be directed to any object, but first they must be won through love. The dialectic within science is to study a beloved object and an indifferent or repulsive object with precisely the same methodology, so that what we learn from the one can be applied to the other. In this way, love can supplement discipline, and discipline love. Thus the beloved and the indifferent object of knowledge, both grasped through the same effort of the mind, become mutually intelligible if the methodology of love is mirrored in the methodology of discipline and vice versa.
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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Beard on Historical Relativism and the Objectivity Question
Wednesday 27 November 2024 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles A. Beard (27 November 1874 – 01 September1948), who was born in Knightstown, Indiana, on this date in 1874.
Beard is often presented as one of the great figures of the Progressive Era in American history, and his works are taken to embody progressivism. He is also remembered, like Carl Becker, for his relativism, but exactly what he meant by historical relativism is not always what others meant by the same term.
Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/beard-on-historical-relativism-and
Video: https://youtu.be/1-8BzHu8mhM
The longue durée of mentalities
The Institution of the Mind.—The strangeness of visiting foreign places is the lingering strangeness of another civilization just beneath the superficial trappings of modernity, which any culture can adopt without being threatened in its essence, because its essence is untouched by the ephemeral borrowed achievements of technology and industry. This strangeness has as its counterpart the familiarity of even distant and elusive manifestations of the civilization from which we ourselves have descended. What the Annalistes called mentalities have a longue durée of their own, and these mentalities runs so deep that we have more of an affinity for the distant past of our own civilization than for the present iteration of some other civilization. Clive Bell made this argument in his Civilization: An Essay, when explaining his choice of paragons, all taken from the history of Western civilization. He was right to do so. Bell’s exemplars—“Fifth and fourth century Athens, then, Renaissance Italy, and France from Fronde to Revolution”—are all distant and unrecoverable for us, but they have left a permanent imprint on the world the we Westerners today accept as our own. Historians tell us how incomprehensible we today would find the world of ancient Greece, and they are right, but, for all its strangeness, it would not be as alien as India or China today, which one could visit, even immerse oneself in, but without comprehension beyond the most rudimentary activities that we would share with peoples before civilization, and even with other species. Our own history is intelligible to us, or can be made intelligible, but another tradition can, at best, be studied as one might study the structure of a flower—beautiful, fascinating in its own way, but not a part of ourselves.
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Buckle as the Father of Scientific History
Sunday 24 November 2024 is the 203rd anniversary of the birth of Henry Thomas Buckle (24 November 1821 – 29 May 1862), who was born in London on this date in 1821. Buckle died at only forty years of age in Damascus, Syria.
Buckle is sometimes called the “Father of Scientific History,” and he formulated a method for scientific history that he presented in his History of Civilization in England, a large work left unfinished upon his early death. I take Buckle as a point of departure for considering the scientific status of history.
Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/buckle-as-the-father-of-scientific
Video: https://youtu.be/nmWClZ3fk6g
Our Chemically-Addled World
Psychiatric Soteriology.—Freud famously said that the goal of psychotherapy was to liberate the patient from neurotic misery, so as to deliver them into ordinary human unhappiness. This is apt to strike the uninitiated as anticlimactic, though for anyone who has suffered from neurotic misery, being released from neurotic misery into ordinary human unhappiness is a kind of salvation. Today we are better prepared to appreciate that ordinary human unhappiness is, in fact, a golden mean—ordinary human unhappiness is the golden mean between neurotic misery and medicated bliss. Since the advent of scientific medicine, mood altering drugs have become common in ways never available throughout the greater part of human history, and, given the economic imperatives of mass medical care for mass man, it is far less expensive to distribute drugs than to provide human comfort. Our chemically-addled world is a recent phenomenon. Throughout human history, psychotropic substances have been administered in ritual contexts—as, for example, the Eleusinian Mysteries or a peyote ceremony—which meant that their use was constrained by social structures and involved in an ancient tradition. The presence of social structure and tradition limits the use and abuse of psychotropic substances, even if it does not entirely eliminate all problems associated with them. The great exception has been alcohol, and alcohol has ruined countless lives of those seeking medicated bliss as an escape from the rigors of ordinary human happiness. But now the exception is close to overtaking the rule, as drugs for every conceivable mood disorder circulate en masse, cheaply and readily available, encouraging the idea that life can be a painless affair and every twinge of discomfort removed by the appropriate medicinal cocktail. Like every failure of the golden mean, this is a moral hazard that leads to disaster.
My paper, “Heroic Virtues in Space Exploration: Everydayness and Supererogation on Earth and Beyond,” is now available from the journal Heroism Science.
Nielsen, John N. (2024) “Heroic Virtues in Space Exploration: Everydayness and Supererogation on Earth and Beyond,” Heroism Science: Vol. 9: Iss. 1, Article 11.
DOI: 10.26736/hs.2024.01.12
This paper resulted from my participation in the Heroism Science Conference last year, though the paper goes considerably farther than my presentation. I developed an argument in this paper according to which the theological virtues (or, rather, what I call naturalistic parallels of the theological virtues) are implicated in the foundations of civilization. This is an argument that I will probably build on in further work.
Assimilating the World to a Logical Paradigm
The Procrustean Bed of Logic.—Since the bulk of the problem of logic is not in the process of deduction itself, but rather lies in the formalization of the problem that precedes deduction, almost any deductive framework will serve equally well. Whether we employ Aristotelian syllogisms, Stoic propositional logic, medieval terminist logic, or contemporary mathematical logic, is largely indifferent. While our modern logic is more advanced in virtue of having incorporated into itself the logical discoveries of the past twenty-five hundred years, it is not the be-all and end-all of logic. The formalization of a problem to the point at which it can be made to fit the Procrustean bed of logic is instead where we should seek the embodiment of human reason, but that would be formalization seemingly unmoored to logic, and that would deliver us over to a kind of rational vertigo—a disequilibrium of the reason, apparently without a handhold to steady ourselves. But not quite. We formalize a body of knowledge with an eye to how exactly it can be funneled into the strictures of logic, so our choice of logic for our deduction is not indifferent in this sense. The logic we employ governs the formalization we employ, so it is our choice of logic that ought to be attended by a rational vertigo, but here we have the spirit of seriousness to guide us, which, in the case of logic, is not the self-deception of ready-made values, but rather the self-deception of ready-made calculi. Given the calculus, our problem has been preemptively defined for us, as has its formalization; we have already surrendered our logical autonomy in our implied consent to the mode of formalization entailed by our chosen logic.
Friday 22 November 2024
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 316
Permutations of Devolved Industrial Production
…in which I discuss a taxonomy of technologies, the electromechanical era, the replacement thesis, retrograde replacement, gunsmithing, reverse engineering, roundabout production, the ENIAC in your future, and hope for the future in technological complexity…
Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/permutations-of-devolved-industrial
Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/permutations-of-devolved-industrial-production-b43485423a08
The EEA of Cognitive Evolution
Transcendent Thought.—That a state of affairs is incomprehensible is for us no objection to it. The human imagination is not a metric by which to distinguish reality from appearance, the true from the false, the sacred from the profane—with degree of reality presumptively corresponding proportionally to degree of comprehension. We can determine clearly enough the conditions under which the human imagination took shape—the environment of our evolutionary adaptedness, which, in the case of cognitive evolution no less than biological evolution, is ongoing. As with transitional forms of life, all forms of thought are transitional with the exception of the final form, which is the penultimate form of extinction. The incomprehensible is our spur to thought that transcends familiar categories of understanding, and so it places all previous thought in a more comprehensive perspective—with perfect irony, the incomprehensible is a necessary condition to attaining comprehension of a higher order. On occasion, the higher order of comprehension is revealed to us in an intuitive breakthrough in which a novel conception suddenly opens a new perspective on our familiar understanding of the world. Perhaps more often, it is our slow, incremental reconciliation with the counterintuitive, forced upon us through repetition with increasing clarity, that gradually extends our ability to conceptualize the incomprehensible, bringing that formerly beyond our scope within the purview of the human mind. The strangeness of the world forces itself upon us, and we must respond with equally strange forms of thought and understanding.
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Dilthey and Our Lived Experience of the Past
Tuesday 19 November 2024 is the 191st anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm Dilthey (19 November 1833 – 01 October 1911), who was born in Wiesbaden-Biebrich on this date in 1833.
Dilthey has been highly influential in the philosophy of history, but mostly as a critic. His thought it difficult to pigeonhole. Robert C. Scharff has called Dilthey’s work, “non-analytical, unspeculative philosophy of History,” which distances him from the familiar distinction between analytical and speculative philosophies of history. In this episode I focus on Dilthey’s conception of lived experience in relation to time and history.
Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/dilthey-on-our-lived-experience-of
Video: https://youtu.be/1t6WMm6RK9g
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