Future, Present, & Past:



Speculative
~~ Giving itself latitude and leisure to take any premise or inquiry to its furthest associative conclusion.
Critical~~ Ready to apply, to itself and its object, the canons of reason, evidence, style, and ethics, up to their limits.
Traditional~~ At home and at large in the ecosystem of practice and memory that radically nourishes the whole person.

Oυδεὶς άμουσος εἰσίτω

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Ismpressionistic self-portrait


There is a strong meta-philosophical flavor in many of my posts. This has its reasons--I am constantly asking myself what it is I am doing here (what is this thing called philosophy?)--but I decided to sketch an outline of those first-order positions I find most congenial, partly because people sometimes ask, so, dude, what is it you believe? and partly because it's good to touch base with one's commitments. I won't be arguing for any of these positions here, let alone spelling out the details; I won't even argue that they are all mutually consistent. It's more or less a list of -isms, and perhaps not all that enlightening, though I try to provide some glosses-- mostly these are the from-the-hip variety, so it's possible that in refining them I will have to seriously revise.

Philosophically:
in method, I am
eclectic (My working assumption is that the intuitions at the root of any position are valid even if the articulation is problematic);
generalist (Philosophy seeks to understand everything--which means in practice it is committed to incompletion);
traditionalist (I am always interested in what the precedents of a position are, and this interest goes deeper than the historical);
skeptical (I always think a good question is "how do you know?" and I cultivate not-having-an-opinion, which is not the same as indifference);
and
irenic (I am less interested in making anyone agree with me, than in how we can both get along).

In doctrine, I am an
ontological realist (the world exists whether or not I am there to look at it). This does not mean that mind is not part of this world, or that mind does not exist necessarily! Ontological realism in the sense I espouse it is consistent with certain kinds of idealism. It simply means that there are constraints upon what we can truly say.
Also as regards ontology, I am a
personalist (to be is to experience, and the conatus of experience is towards personhood);
and tend to be
relationalist (entities, and certainly persons, are, at least in time--in terms of their coming-to-be and passing-away--constituted by their relations).

I am also a moral realist (judgments about whether something is right or wrong have sense outside of who is making the claim). When one says that X is good, one is making a stronger claim than that one approves of X or that X is "good for me."

On the question of science and religion, I am an accomodationist (there is no necessary conflict between scientific and religious stances). I take this so for granted that I do not really consider it a deep philosophical issue--it's almost a more matter of current affairs--but it's worth mentioning.

In political economy:
In my aims I am anarchist (the more distant the relationship, the more intolerable coercion--because the less resistible--is within it);
in my loyalties, conservative (existing goods tend to trump hypothetical alternative goods);
in my reactions, cynical (the question cui bono? always comes to mind);
in practice, localist (the closer the relationship, the less reason within it for coercion).
(This last especially is very from-the-hip.)

I am more swayed by Marx than almost any other thinker politically: the relevant sociological category is always class.

In art: I am both a dada classicist and a romantic modernist. (Huh?) I believe with Warhol that art is what you can get away with; I maintain, with Tarkovsky, Goethe, Bach, Leonardo, and Confucius, that some things are waaay more worth getting away with than others.

In theology: I am a rational fideist (the structure of our experience is aporetic and does require a (Jacobian, Kierkegaardian) leap; but the disposition for this leap can be rationally cultivated and its consequences rationally discussed);
and at the end of the day an apophaticist (God is wholly beyond the pertinence of any created concept).

The more I reflect the more convinced I am that the best preparation for philosophy is listening to and playing music--as many kinds of music as possible.

6 comments:

  1. Skoliast,

    "I am a rational fideist (the structure of our experience is aporetic and does require a (Jacobian, Kierkegaardian) leap..."

    As a scientist, I have difficulty understanding how those in the humanities approach Christianity (I hope you don't mind if I count you in this category). If it weren't for my spouse, whose thinking about religion is vaguely similar to your own, I would probably be somewhat sympathetic to Dawkins et al. on this subject. I follow blogs like this for a variety of reasons beyond simply trying to understand my spouse, one of them being that I'm curious to know if there is some position that is recognizably Christian which is open to me.

    I'd like to know more about the "leap" you refer to. To my scientific sensibilities, an important subset of beliefs (X, from here on) that a religious person wants to leap onto are simple factual statements about historical events like "Jesus rose from the dead." Yet, from my experience, X tends to be an uninteresting subset of beliefs for those of your philosophical and theological disposition (If I'm wrong here, please correct me). If X is uninteresting, and those subsets of beliefs consisting of higher order concepts (e.g. "God is love" or even "Jesus is God") are merely "created concept[s]" that God is "beyond", then as a Christian what are you leaping onto?

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  2. Grad,

    I was curious to see which -ism would get the first bite, and rather speculated this one would be it. Partly, this was because I recognized my presentation was a bit hasty. I'm referring here to a decision to regard life as meaningful in a deep sense-- beyond the horizons of mortality and historicity but impinging upon or immanent within what happens within that horizon.

    I am not sure I follow you when you describe your X as "an uninteresting subset of beliefs for those of your philosophical and theological disposition." But I am with Lessing, who acknowledged that no empirical set of facts could bear the weight of "ultimate concern" (you will note I am paraphrasing / translating between different philosophical vocabularies).

    I have a little more I could say but I don't want to bog it down with too much commentary if I am not being pertinent to your question. If I take your meaning, you hold that something like "God is love" is too weak to be the real object of a leap like I advocate; and a historical claim ("Jesus rose" is too... well, I'm not sure ). But I'm not confident I read you right.

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  3. Hi Skholiast,
    I wrote this to Elisa Freschi just now about fideism. Do I dare to call it rational fideism?
    Elisa,
    That debate about natural theology is a continuing one. Being of a slightly fideist disposition I hold on the one hand that trust, assurance, faith, sraddha is built up as a gradual thing, not a sudden plunge. On the other hand this very trust enhances understanding (credo ut intelligam) and brings insights that might not be accessible to the 'raw' intellect. Meditation precedes understanding very often in that we get below the body of cliché that has to be surpassed. This is the triad of sravana, manana and nididhyasana (forgive the transliteration ye scholars).

    Skh:
    Your palette is a sturdily non-conformist one, we're all protestants now.

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  4. Om., aside driving home from the pressing need to brush up on my Sanskrit, your paragraph looks recognizable from my point of view.

    Re. non-conformism, I hasten to add that these isms by themselves do not add up to a philosophy unless I can show how they mutually entail each other or at least support each other. As a list of positions, all they are is a kind of personal ad. But I wanted to get it all down, or as much as I could, without confronting the devil in the details.

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  5. "My working assumption is that the intuitions at the root of any position are valid even if the articulation is problematic."

    How do you identify these intuitions without articulating them?

    How can the "intuitions" of blatantly contradictory positions be equally valid?

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  6. Thill, a very brief example of what I mean is the so-called pre-critical or pre-Kantian situation in western philosophy. For my purposes here I am just going to accept the standard 101 textbook history that lays out rationalism (Descartes-Malebranche-Leibniz-Spinoza) and empiricism (Bacon-Hobbes-Locke-Reid). You don't have to follow Kant all the way to see that both positions are grounded in what I was calling intuitions-- if you prefer, let's call the dispositions-- a tendency to look first for an explanation in the structure of thinking, or in sensual experience-- and neither must you accept Kant's solution, to want, like him, to preserve each of these without throwing the other one out.

    I'd say that Kant found the articulations of both rationalism and empiricism unacceptable, and strove to re-articulate them in a different context that gave them their due. Of course partisans of one or the other approaches were free to insists that Kant had misconstrued their starting intuition, or had ruined it in the course of his re-articulation.

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