From Core to Infinity

From Core to Infinity - On Disclosure vs Imposure

Here is a lively exchange I had on mathematics, foundations, philosophy and praxis. I'm noting it down to give me something to refer back to and keep me on the straight and narrow. Montaigne had a fly-away mind. He'd hear the cock crowing, and would go away and wonder what it is that makes the cock know when to crow. I will wonder off in the same way. It makes for some curious musings. But I need to get back on track with Being and Place.

Here is where I tap the brains of language and mathematics professors and respond as best I can.

Disclosure vs Imposure – the rational universe

Hélène Domon

“I just spent a couple hours explaining to Martial about your work. To see where he stands on disclosure vs imposure etc.

Expectedly, he doesn't believe there's "truth" out there. I asked him if he thought the Melenchon program was better than other programs.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

If we consider one program to be better than another, we need to state the grounds of that evaluation. Class relation and social position and vested interests? OK, but that’s a mere power struggle decided by might. If there are standards outside of that – if one position is offer as the right one – then that presumes a standard of the true and the good.

I'll tell you what I'd be interested to hear from a mathematician - whether the idea of a 'rational order' and harmony is a myth, a human invention, a rationalist projection (imposure) as with Kant or objectively true (the pre-ordained harmony of Leibniz pointing to disclosure). Is Plato’s ‘well-tempered harmony’ an objective property of the world with which we need to get in tune with? Or is it a rationalist projection, a standard we set ourselves? (which begs the question – according to what standard do we set that standard …? Or do we go with the unfolding of our human nature in time and place and act in accordance with what seems right and harmonious at that juncture in history?) Is this well-tempered harmony some pure timeless ideal intelligible to reason, or is it related to social and cultural evolution in time and place?

I was reading last night about Karl Loewenstein, who met Max Weber and was treated by Weber to a thumbnail sociology of music, including the revelation that Bach's Well-tempered Clavichord, among other things, could be traced to identifiable 'rational and social foundations'. (Karl Loewenstein, Max Weber's Political Ideas in the Perspective of Our Time (Boston, 1966), p. 93).

Now then, I need to know clearly – what could those ‘rational and social foundations’ be?

I fear buying into a myth of an objective mathematical truth that doesn't exist. I fear presenting a social ethic that has no grounds other than self-legislating reason which supplies its own grounds (and therefore has none). How does reason relate to society, if at all? Is this reason a rationality that is unfolded in time and space through specific social relations.

Where does value lie? Where does truth lie? Is it objective, something inhering in the world? Is it subjective, something inhering in us as the human valuers?

I argue against subjectivism. But that doesn’t necessarily imply objectivism. How about intelligibility that avoids the false antithesis of knower and known, subject and object? That would be my view. A positive between and beyond the dualism of subject and object, something interactive and creative that generates ‘reality checks’ and knowledge from within the world. Which begs the question of the transcendent standard I argue for, which is outside of time and place, the standard by which we judge and orient actions of time and place.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“He started mumbling something about the program being the one he preferred, but not necessarily a form of "truth". I asked by which standards he found it better. I noticed the usual fear attached to the word "truth" in our society.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

That would lead to something like the pragmatism I outlined in Being at One - and then pulled back from. Because even that pragmatism seemed to require at least second order truths. And I do argue for “truth”, without inverted commas. Truth matters, as morality matters. The scepticism over “truth” – and the search for foundations - is a big sticking point for me. Because even choosing between rival pragmatisms implies some kind of grounds for our preferring one over the other - hence there has to be some kind of first order argument by which to judge and guide our actions. Unless it all reduces to social interests and power and money. That’s sophistry. That’s what I argue against.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

I think he knows it's better, but doesn't want to admit. Now by rational order, what would one mean?

PETER CRITCHLEY

I’m interested in this ‘knowing’ that something is better than another thing. In the very least, that sounds like St. Thomas Aquinas’ “implicit philosophy”, and that implicit knowing, ingrained in our being, is something I like and argue for. In other words, I am concerned to avoid defining “truths” as some abstract edifice and imposing it upon people and society from the outside. We work within. But that was not the end of the matter for St Thomas. Because we do need to elaborate these truths. And that does imply a transcendent standard, pointing to an order which holds that there are certain timeless properties, certain constants and universals, a truth that is more than praxis-based. That’s a rational order – that standard which gives us concepts such as “justice”, and to which we refer in order to demand justice in our laws and forms of governance and social behaviour.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

I'm asking him and I get a very long silence in return. He's scratching his head.

PETER CRITCHLEY

I'll put it very simply - I have this feeling that certain mathematicians who want certainty and order are actually giving us a substitute - and fake - God and are inviting us into a cult. When Wittgenstein stumped Russell with the assertion maths is "made up" – i.e. there are no objective grounds (and Russell never found them, no matter how hard he looked) I see this as taking me right back into two things I love:

as against a search for an ontology of the good we come to

a) Marx, for whom "Nature", "God", "Humanity", "Reason" etc are all abstractions that cannot be defined and cannot be known independently of social relations, structures and practices; and

b) natural law/virtue ethics, which places the emphasis on forms of the common life, the things we do in order to realize reflective and substantive human goods.

Now these are things which belong to the world of 'practical reason', that is, politics and ethics. Important indeed, but very much the 'secondary' world involving human will consciousness, beliefs, ideas. What about the 'primary' world - 'reality.' Let's call this the world of 'theoretical reason', the world which deals with the 'objective' world and our knowledge of it. And let's say that this division between the primary world of theoretical reason and the secondary world of practical reason is a division between the 'logical' and the 'ideological'. And let's say that questions in the former are settled by logic, empirical fact, and science, whereas questions in the latter are 'political' and involve divisions over social interests, values etc, and are therefore endlessly contestable. That division is the basis of my query. And what I am looking for are the implications of truths concerning the primary world for the practices and arrangements of the secondary world and what the bridge enabling a transition from the former to the latter is.

I'll phrase the question very simply – what grounds, if any, does mathematics offer for establishing a standpoint or a viewpoint, what practical social implications does it have with respect to a way of life? That is, what is the relation – if any – between a rational appreciation of the mathematically ordered universe on the one hand and the field of practical reason (politics and ethics) on the other?

Here is the argument:

Mathematics is the realm of first order statements, they are necessary arguments in that you can only say "yes" to them. That world is the "logical" world. The world of politics and ethics is the "ideological" world, a world of second order statements, and that is a world of endlessly contestable and irresolvable "yes/no" arguments which are based on no more than value judgements, social positions, economic interests, power relations.

So the former is the stronger argument - if we want to transcend the endless debates of the latter world, we need to buttress that world with arguments drawn from the former world.

When we argue in the “ideological” world, what standard do we employ? Because we do not argue in terms of assertions of self or sectional interest, we argue in terms of right and wrong, good and bad. That may very well be ideological, in the sense of rationalisation, using ideas to make claims to be offering a good argument based on principles but, really, to be doing no more than advancing self-interest and defending a vested interest. But, if we are to do better than rationalisation, if we are to be true to our claims to be right and good, then that implies a standard based on a first-order argument. Which? Where does this standard come from?

I want an argument that possesses an affective power, in the sense that it goes to the motivational economy of human being and life. A foundation that can give us the mathematical properties of the physical universe is fine, but it neither persuades nor moves people. Such mathematical order and "logic" would be a good "ideology" for philosopher kings. I’m not interested in philosopher-kings using mathematics as an ideology of power. I am interested in mathematicians who can envisage the role that mathematics can play in moving people beyond ideological divisions. I am interested in mathematicians who can point to that role, or who deny that such a thing is possible.

I'm preparing to publish my book on Dante. Numbers run through his argument for harmony. His work very much rests on what might be called the musical model. I am very much in favour of the idea. At the same time, if what I am arguing is a matter of value, belief and faith, then I want to say so openly, and not make false claims to rational objectivity that are open to any number of familiar philosophical objections. I know enough about Kant and about the projectionist fallacy to tread warily. I'm not afraid of a religious argument at all. But I don't want to get drawn into a maths cult that isn't maths at all, but a mere cult of harmony. I can argue for harmony on many grounds. What I don’t want is to get tied up in arguments over the Golden Ratio. Some see it everywhere, some see it as a cheat, or, more benignly, as a belief. I see the belief in this Ratio as being everywhere as being a good one. We saw the architecture of Le Corbusier over in France. His work was very much based on the Golden Ratio. In terms of the test effect of an idea in practice, I think there is plenty to commend the Golden Ratio. Reality is whatever we have confidence to act upon, said Herbert Blumer. That gives us a wide scope indeed.

My query concerns whether we are dealing with an art or a science here - I see both. I see a rationalism that is in touch with mysticism, and nothing to do with the objectivist search for foundations. A creativity and constructivism in which certain axioms - however few, even indefinable - are sufficient to build a rational social order on.

It would be easier for me if maths is utterly without a compelling logic, because it brings the question back to practical reason - my field of politics, ethics and economics – although it still begs an ontology of the good and of transcendent standards ... back comes Kant and his projection of reason... imposure over disclosure, the projectionist fallacy, hence the debate. I shall have to find those notes I have on Chinese philosophy, which avoids putting imposure and disclosure in antithetical relation, seeing the ideal not as static and outside of human agency but as dynamic and as requiring a creative unfolding involving human action. In other words, there is a bridge between theoretical and practical reason, one which sees knowledge as generating from within the creative universe, something very different from a model which sees the truths of the primary world being passively relayed to the practices of the secondary world.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“He says he sees no relation between maths, divinity, and social practices.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

To say that there is 'no relation' really ends speculation here and now.

I have to challenge that, though. We know that maths, putting it crudely, 'works.' We get airplanes into the sky and keep them there because somebody somewhere gets their sums right - and because there are indeed sums that are right. That's the way the world works. Galileo argued that mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe. I see no reason to disagree with that - other than to say that if the language of the universe is written in mathematics, then we don't need God. I say there is more to human life that knowledge of the external world. Hence the split between Elokim - the God of physical creation - and Hashem - the God of love and ethics and human relations, the split between the impersonal and the personal, that I look to bridge.

What I'm driving at is that this is not merely an attempt to balance objectivity and subjectivity, but an attempt to see these very things as intermeshed from the very first. In other words, there is no stark separation between the logical and the ideological. There is a grammar at the heart of the universe, which is also an ecology, that is not merely 'objective' in the sense of being external and inanimate, but is intimate, dynamic and creative. That mathematics is a language whose meaning becomes apparent in use and creation, in being spoken - it is an art, and it delivers not objective truth that we must bow down before but an aesthetic feeling of harmony that is profoundly satisfying, sublime. And that is proof enough of its reality and its truth. At the same time, the subjective world of human beings is an intersubjective world, a world of relations between persons and persons, persons and their creations, persons and things, persons and the world - and those relations generate a reality that is objective in the sense of being outside of the individual subject.

That's the world we live in - and that's why I see a relation between mathematics as language and art, divinity as the inherent quality, value and worth of the world, and social practices that are in tune with that 'reality.'

So when I ask for the relation, I mean not some objective truth or rational order in the world in some static sense, but in the sense of a grammar, a 'something' that is there, innate and universal, that reveals its potential in being activated and lived.

It's the connection between music and maths, Plato’s well-tempered harmony and Bach’s well-tempered clavier. I know the philosophical objections to that connection. I know well that Keats' statement that beauty is truth and truth is beauty is dismissed as a romantic poetic fancy. Read Why Truth Matters by Benson and Stangroom - they take the idea apart. That doesn't make them right, though, and I have made notes which criticize them at length. I very much affirm the connection between music and maths.

What I want clarification on in the precise nature of this connection. If there is no 'objective' connection according to scientific evidence and philosophical reason, then either we rule out speculation in this area, or seek to establish that connection on other grounds - pragmatic/social constructivism/aesthetic/religious. Frankly, Dante's poetry, the medieval cathedrals and Bach's music 'work'; they are, in fact, sublime. And I could supply a million other examples. I just want to be clear how to make the argument. I'm not interested in a false objectivism that a philosopher can demolish in no time. That doesn't make philosophical reason right, of course. Hegel wrote well on how philosophy undercuts its own foundations. My view is that we are entering a world which lies outside of reason and its limitations, as Dante well knew. That's the way I define the internal music to his Comedy.

I was reading Max Weber last night, who pointed to ‘rational and social foundations’ for ideas such as Bach's well-tempered clavier. That points to a relation. But if there is ‘no relation’ between the principles of mathematical order in the universe, notions of the good, ethics and social practices, then that brings us right back to my focus on ethics and politics - and very contestable arguments in a world constituted by power relations and social relations.

I'm interested in right order. That could be dismissed as a conservative delusion and dangerous fantasy popular with people who can't cope with pluralism and diversity, the contingent nature of truth and the conventional nature of justice. OK. I have made the pragmatic case in Being at One. I didn't like the argument, and showed that it still presupposed some kind of first order truth.

The point is important. As part of the environmental movement, I see an emphasis on science-based policy, with the field I deal with somewhat dismissed as of secondary importance, as "ideological" – constituted by irresolvable arguments based on value judgments and social interests. My counter to that would be to bring the worlds of fact and value (scientific knowledge of reality, politics and ethics) back together again, giving us a rational science of social order and human good. I can understand the importance of mathematics here. But, for the life of me, I don't see how "numbers" resolves the issues at all – you can state the numbers all you like, that’s not how people respond. If a professor of mathematics is telling me this, then I am somewhat freed up to return to my own field and abandon notions of objective foundations in maths. But I don't think I formulated the question clearly enough in the first place.

What about the relation between maths and music? The idea of a musical model of harmony

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

"Musicians are inventors. Does music exist prealably?" "Math start with "almost nothing." Yet if you take away that "almost nothing" there's nothing left. But from that "almost nothing" we can invent so much. So the divine thing is at the beginning. It opens up to infinity." (I'm translating)

PETER CRITCHLEY

Hm.. music and maths, then, are creative, like I said. This invention on the part of creative human agency is a form of imposure, but one which also discloses a certain truth about the universe. Because that “almost nothing” is still very much a “something”. To say that there is a “divine thing” at the beginning is highly significant, and to say it opens up to infinity does, rather, point to the relations I was suggesting. There is, then, a rational order, just not a static and objective one, but a dynamic and creative one, and one which involves creative human agency - humans as musicians, artists, and inventors.

That's not modern mechanistic science, and affirms a view which is very much opposed to the 'disenchantment of the world' - the emptying of the world of its value, meaning and purpose. What is it? Science/philosophy/religion as mere rational and ethical tools concerned more with their own conceptualisation of the world, but whose concepts are inevitably outside of the world being conceived, and hence always falling short. With the musical model, we are in the world and participating in its truth as a song and dance.

I’m reminded of Wittgenstein, for whom religion is like tightrope walking. There isn’t an awful lot to walk upon, no more than a thin strip, but we walk all the same, and we get somewhere in the end. The idea of invention – the “almost nothing” that opens up to infinity, does imply the existence of a creative universe in which we are co-creators. That takes us to a praxis-based philosophy, away from the contemplative-disclosure approach. Actually, it takes us to the integration of both, once we stop imposed false philosophical dualisms upon reality. It's the moon that matters, not which finger we use to point at it.

But the fact that we start out from an “almost nothing”, that thin strip of something, brings us back to a foundation. Leibniz the mathematician-philosopher believed in pre-ordained harmony, which we then disclose.

As I wrote in a previous post:

‘The controversy? Even Leibniz, who affirms the idea of a preordained order and harmony, and who therefore would seem to argue for disclosure over imposure (coming to recognise the truth of the world’s order rather than project truth upon that world through praxis), holds that the propositions of the natural law possess only a conditional character. Such a view implies the conventional nature of truth, a view that goes back to the sophists. It is for this reason that Kant devoted so much attention to the categorical imperative as distinct from imperatives which are merely hypothetical. Which is an awful lot of hard work to take us back to something we already had – the rules of traditional natural law were themselves categorical imperatives, and were understood as such.’

As Hannah Arendt argued:

‘Kant discovered “the scandal of reason,” that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.’

If actions become conditional, then what is the condition we act upon? Thus Kant had to define the categorical imperative as against the hypothetical. He didn’t just want to rest moral action on “iffy” arguments. As Roger Whittaker sang, “I don’t believe in “If” anymore, if’s an illusion.”

Roger Whittaker - I Dont Believe in if Anymore

That's 'iffy' in terms of the limitations of reason. But the limits of reason and the extent of the universe are two different things. If mathematics is creativity - more of an art than a science - then we are leaving the limitations of reason, and hence the objections of philosophical reason, behind. We really are living into mystery.

Let's underline this about Plato - for him, Beauty is the supreme political category on account of the way that it unites reason and emotion and thus lights the way to the world for the heart to follow.

No science and no philosophical reason searching for 'objective foundations' can give us what Plato gives us here.

I just need to be clear that when I focus hard on politics and ethics - on practical reason - then this is not merely secondary field compared to some big objective truth that maths gives us about the primary world - but is the real experiential and phenomenological field of human existence. My view is that the two worlds are connected, and not in the sense of the primacy of the one over the other.

I read Rousseau trying to base an argument on maths and, apparently, it was so childlike as to be laughable. And very wrong. Except that Rousseau’s moral point was the right one. It just lacked this objective first order mathematical foundation that he sought to give it. Which isn’t to say that it lacked a first order rational foundation – it’s just that that foundation, as with Kant, had a clear moral component built into it as a human projection. I don't want to make the error of grounding something on nothing - a typical rationalist error. I think transcendent truths can be set up rationally in a philosophical and moral sense - and in that sense as ‘inventions’ or projections, but an imposure that is based upon universal and objective notions.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

He thinks that's a question of "littéraires" (literature people) who think God is replaced by science. He finds it ridiculous that Gagarin went to the moon and said "I went there and I saw that there is no God." (go figure)

PETER CRITCHLEY

That opening up to infinity surely invites human agency in as creative within a participatory unfolding - which is my idea.

Yes to that religion vs science, science as substitute God/religion – it is a nonsense.

It was Kruschev I think who said that, though, rather than Gagarin who, I am sure, was a religious sort of person who never made the crass error of seeing science replacing religion.

I've avoided the religion vs science debate - it's more whether either has any kind of "transcendent" basis in offering objective standards or criteria with reference to "reality" by which we organise and orient our affairs.

If none, then it is down to human praxis, invention, imposure. The problem is this, if it is down to human praxis, it is praxis within power relations - then we enter the sophistry of might is right. If not, then the question is begged again: what is the basis of right – what is "reality" and how do we the “truth” about this reality? And how, then, do we translate this first order knowledge into the second order world of ethics and politics? What is the bridge? Is there a bridge? If there isn’t a transition from theoretical reason to practical reason, then we are free in the human world to do as we like – which, as we see with the transgression of planetary boundaries is not very liberatory at all. There is, after all, a “reality”, and a “truth” about that reality which we must, in the field of practical reason, come to recognise and act in light of.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

He's not understanding this phrase "secondary field to some big objective truth that maths has got"--doesn't think there is any field of truth there. There is a "construction".

PETER CRITCHLEY

The “primary field” refers to maths as a first order truth or statement = it is "logical" in the sense that you can only say "yes" to such a statement. It is true – there is no debating the question.

The “secondary field” is the field of practical reason – referring to politics/ethics as second order truth = this is the "ideological" world of interests and values, where you can say "yes/no" endlessly according to social positions and subjective preferences, with no objective standard by which to resolve the issues debated.

That begs the question of whether and how we can relate the objective standards of the primary world to the conflicts and affairs of the second order world.

His idea of 'construction' very much confirms the view of human creative agency at work within a ceaselessly creative universe. That's the view of theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman in Reinventing the Sacred (2008). But remember, Kauffman openly states in that book that Plato points is in the right direction when he argues that humans seek the true, the good and the beautiful together. In other words, this is a question of all our faculties working in harmony in appreciation and revelation of the harmony of the universe. Let's say that should humans come to live like this, they will do so as musicians composing in the language of mathematics. Activating the universal grammar. That sounds like connection between maths, divinity and social practices to me.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“Now he's saying monks also construct things that bring a feeling of beauty that is very moving.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

Heavens above. That sounds lovely. My dad constructed the cooling towers at Fiddlers Ferry. Not very beautiful, but it makes him feel good the way he gets misty eyed reminiscing.

I told him, one of the towers blew down in a storm in the early 1980s, so he didn't build it so well

That 'feeling of beauty that is very moving' is significant. That is precisely the affective quality I was seeking, what Dante refers to in terms of being turned.

To interpret - mathematical/musical creativity/construction on the basis of "almost nothing"/the "divine" element present at the beginning brings a "feeling of beauty" that moves us ... Philosophically, of course, that feeling of beauty does not prove the objective existence of beauty in the world. All the same, if we feel it, see it, hear it, live it - it certainly exists. Why does it elicit such a reaction in us? I know what the theologians argue - God made the world and made us in such a way as to be intelligible to intelligent beings - and such feelings of beauty - or longing for and satisfaction in God - are planted in us to cause us to seek the beauty in the world - and reunion with God.

It's not an argument that will satisfy scientific reason or can be resolved by philosophical reason. But does it offer a plausible account of the richness and depth of human experience? I say yes.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“And he says you do the same in your work, probably, only better related to everyday life, so you may feel more useful.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

Lovely! Very possibly. It’s good to feel more than useless, even if somewhat less than useful. But practical reason is my field, ethics and politics and the way human beings choose to order and organise their affairs. I'd just like to know on what basis the ordering and organising should proceed on - something more than social interests, subjective preferences and power, I would hope.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“hold on, I'm still reading on Rousseau right now, translating and all.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

That was aeons ago! Keep up!

You know something, Montaigne and Rousseau keep that belly-to-earth good sense that keeps us grounded against high flown rationalist notions. After years of searching, I do think that that's my best line to take. Rather than mither these questions to death and sail over the heads of people with truths that in all probability don't exist. If we are going to invent truths, at least invent ones that are useful and "better related to everyday life." I think that is the best approach – one linked to communities of practice, the things people do. In other words, people will work out the relation to reality from the inside, and not by being told by some philosopher king. That's my instinct - that said, it still begs the notion of what's right - as against mere custom, habit, prejudice.

HÉLÈNE DOMON

"mathematics will NOT orient or organize anything in our affairs; they bring an aesthetic pleasure to those who decide to enter that field--but will never be a model for life--- and neither is music. Just makes us feel good, but will not revolutionize the human condition."

PETER CRITCHLEY

Now that would appear to be pretty conclusive coming from a mathematics professor. That’s an emphatic NO! And that would free me to do some serious work in ethics and politics, with the use of reason with its moral component in place - which is my subject. That’s where I was for years and years, completely innocent of mathematics and science. Neither scientific naturalism nor mathematical rationalism can supply foundations - that's a handy conclusion for me. I'm neither a mathematician nor a musician, although I am indeed a wonderful singer who sang “Homeward Bound” with St Helens’ Male Voices. I see these arguments a lot and I can't check whether they are true or not.

But I can only repeat here - pressing my query - the idea that mathematics and music "bring an aesthetic pleasure" and "makes us feel good" I would suggest, strongly, does have implications with respect to orienting and organizing human affairs. They move us within, in our very depths, and therefore possess an affective power and truth. That, I say, can indeed "revolutionize the human condition," in the sense of pointing to a creative human agency - humans as musicians/artists - seeking harmony and order in human affairs. Why else do we seek revolution? The mere victory of one class over another in a power struggle? The redistribution of wealth? I take it to be significant that these political struggles over the character of the social order are conducted in terms of transcendent norms and values - "justice", "equality", "truth." I take these claims to be based on something deeper than ideological rationalisation, the attempt to present particular interests as the general interest.

It appeals to me because it has beauty and contains the promise of harmony. But if the argument is aesthetically pleasing, does it lose its necessary basis? I say not. That "aesthetic pleasure" is based on a deep truth. This goes back to an old argument of mine about combining aesthetics and ethics – AesthEthics as someone named it. That’s quite a mouthful. But in 1929, Wittgenstein argued for some such thing when he said that aesthetics and ethics are ‘one and the same.’ Come to think of it, I argued the same thing myself, and got quoted to that effect in a thesis: ‘Peter Critchley and Noel Carroll also express a concern that “ethics should be reunited with aesthetics”, as neglecting the relation between those two disciplines “has resulted in a gap between theory and practice that is no longer sustainable” (Critchley 6; Carroll 350). I’m with Wittgenstein. Yeah! Although watch old Ludwig, the same questions crop up with him – and the objective foundations become a grammar of life. There’s something within that we activate and act upon.

I can't make the argument on maths and the musical model, being neither a mathematician and musician - but that doesn't make it wrong. I just need to be confident I can sail past this promise of supplying rational foundations for harmony - and put it on another basis. I see the worlds of theoretical and practical reason not as hierarchically ordered as primary and secondary fields but as in integral relation. The problems come when they are divorced, and we end up mired in debates over the assertion of one over the other. (Plato's One over the Many argument is one I support, but it is an argument that assumes unity rather than dualism). Platonic ideal forms? The true, the good and the beautiful, for Kant, were projections of human reason. I made the argument once, then backtracked towards objective standards, then back to Kant again, and then back to transcendence, and then … here … and then, to where?

As I said yesterday on maths "we are standing with our feet firmly planted in mid-air." Except that “almost nothing” is still very much “something”. And a “something” which opens creativity up to infinity is, actually, an awful lot.

HÉLÈNE DOMON

"But I can see [still quoting Martial] that maths start from a small hard core and then can go up to infinity, which can be fascinating because you feel you enter something that exists, with gates and all, and you are a discoverer. But it's only one reality because you can't do anything you want. I'm translating but I can't make sense of it all. Too much for me.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

That would indeed point to the very thing I was asking for - a "small hard core" that can take us to "infinity." That's all we need. But ... are we still in the world of maths here? Mathematicians building worlds out of worlds? I'm interested in the transition into the "ideological" world. Maths is at work in the social world, we know it is. Take away maths, and the social world is all at sea. So there is a relation. Certainly in the infrastructure. How do we make it bigger?

The interesting thing about this statement is that it combines an objective statement, the reference to the “small hard core”, (what I would call a bedrock truth,) with a subjective statement concerning the feeling that we are part of a bigger picture. That’s entirely compatible with ideas of harmony and attunement. This comes back to something that phenomenologist Herbert Blumer said, that reality is ‘that in which one has sufficient confidence to base an action.’

Now that is foundation enough, it is reality enough and it may almost be 'God enough' – that is the phenomenology of intersubjective experience – we act on something (“almost nothing” but something strong and substantial enough to open the door to infinity) and in acting we come to know reality from the inside and give each other a reality check as we go, organising and orienting our praxis as we go.

What I don't want to do is write an argument that is grounded on something that is a myth and a cult - I'd rather rest it on a true God than make a false god of maths and numbers. I don’t want to open the doors to the elitism of philosopher-kings. But I think the musical model, seeing humans as musicians participating in what Dante calls the 'sweet symphony of Paradise', takes us beyond that.

I am seeing that between disclosure and imposure there is no choice – in that it is neither but both. It's the choice between contemplation and action that haunts the western philosophical mind, but splits us between false options. I need to get back into the heart of Being and Place which really had a dynamic and participatory core, and avoided those choices.

it's in the movement, and it is in the movement that the reality check comes.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

‘What you demonstrate is "true" and always more "true" but it's still based on a very small core or axiom that can't be demonstrated and that remains arbitrary and defines one geometry --basic axiom is that if you take one point and one line there is necessarily another line parallel to the first one that goes through this point. If you remove this first (constructed) axiom, you have another kind of geometry.

(I'm still quoting, or trying to)’

PETER CRITCHLEY

Now that takes me back to the view that we are standing with our feet firmly planted in mid-air. It is true, there are truths built upon truths, and the magical thing is that it all works – it is real, it sings and it dances, and so do we if we attune our actions to this reality. But it remains based on a “very small core or axiom that can’t be demonstrated.”

As attempts to define the indefinable – God – I couldn’t do better. I don’t know about arbitrary. Mick Smith writes of an “anarchic excess” that reason can never enclose. He doesn’t call it anything, it’s an antinomian ethic. It may be surplus to our reason, but it is actually “core.” I don’t suppose it matters much what we call it. We could call it Laurel and Hardy. We are really referring to something that evades all our attempts to name and frame, and enclose rationally. I’m remembering something John O’Donohue wrote here:

"As time remains free of all that it frames,

May your mind stay clear of all it names."

I've been totally bogged down on this philosophical and methodological issue and I can't resolve it - maybe because it is the wrong question and wrong premise to start from in the first place.

This is my understanding of Godel. Yet still maintained universal truths and objective standards. There have been attempts to read him as some kind of postmodernist against “truths”, but this utterly misreads Godel.

But I see this as very different from an "arbitrary" starting point that cannot be demonstrated. To put it that way implies that creation proceeds ex nihilo. Why choose one constructed axiom and not another? And does such a choice take place? I'm thinking back, here, to conventionalist arguments in ethics - Don Cupitt for one, who says that there is no pre-given morality, before proceeding to arguing that we must create morality. That argument contradicts itself.

I think we are entering mystical territory here.

We proceed from "a very small core or axiom" that is arbitrary and can't be demonstrated - but we can build one truth after another on this. Remove this constructed/chosen axiom, or choose another axiom, and we have another kind of geometry, and we proceed to build one truth after another on this.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

"There are many possible constructions. The question becomes how many basic things you can remove until you reach "non-decidable" core things."

PETER CRITCHLEY

Many possible constructions puts us firmly in a ceaselessly creative universe, a small core of axioms taking us to infinity.

HÉLÈNE DOMON

"On the other hand, if you admit this small thing, you can keep going up toward infinity, and discover more and more truths, which gives a feeling of being in front of something divine. I cried when I found something on p-adic numbers, as if I had a visitation from a divinity. But it brings nothing to social progress."

"As if Cézanne found something on colors"

PETER CRITCHLEY

I'm remembering how Dante towards the end of the Comedy comes to the failure to square the circle - the limits of geometry is how it is read (or a misreading of geometry is how geometers would put it). But Dante's musical model (and his numerology combined with theology) took him face-to-face with God - to the sublime and it exceeded his powers of language and reason. He describes the feeling well. And he described the affective quality of being turned. I cannot see how that that cannot have implications with respect to the way humans see the world and relate to it and to each other.

As with the Blumer quote above. That feeling is enough. It may be as slim as a tightrope, but it is enough to carry us across the biggest of chasms. The question is this, then, does maths come with ANY social implications, any bearing upon social practices. I think gives us a reality. And I think it gives us a reality whose truth we prove in practice – by taking the universe up on the invitation up to infinity.

Marx treats all such questions in the abstract as "scholastic" - there are no truths about "God", "Nature", "Humanity" or "Reason" that we ask or answer apart from our exchange with our environment.

That seems right to me. Other than this, I do argue that Marx presupposes a truth that is more than historically and culturally relative to social relations. He is ethically committed to a certain kind of society (although the conditions for its realisation are immanent in the historical process rather than transcendent.)

I just don't want to spend years and end up offering foundations that are no more an age old rationalist delusion - which is pretty much what I came to denounced it as at the end of the Dante piece. Pretty elitist and exclusivist too. You really don’t want to live in the Danteum. Poor me, I ended up praising the worth and dignity of poetic creation and religious awe. I think those things do bring something to social progress. It's culture that mediates between humans and the world.

My way of thinking is this - natures and essences and their unfolding and flourishing - as with Aristotle - who had no trouble taking the Pythagoreans apart for their logical flaws. But the world is more than the logic of philosophic reason. This is why I love Dante on this.

Maths is not my area, I don’t want to get drawn into it and make claims that have no grounds just because of ignorance on my part. Marx's notebooks are also full of maths, as if he had a crisis of confidence and was trying to prove the truth of his case. He should have held his nerve and stuck to his arguments. They were strong enough. Like I should. I don't need maths, and I just need to be wary of this notion of a harmonious universe. Here’s the point – however “logical” first order statements may be, however much they may be true about objective reality, they may well still come to be refused in the “ideological” world of “yes/no” arguments. They will not resolve the practical issues which concern human values, positions and interests. There is no way of evading that social nature of reality and construction of truth. Rather than evade it by defining a beautiful rational order of truth, I would prefer to go into the heart of this social and political world and thrash out the relation of the logical and the ideological.

I like my original idea of a knowledge generated from within a ceaselessly creative and participatory universe.

It would set me free from brain-breaking hard arguments, and allow me to enter into elaborating forms of governance and economic exchange. This will give people the infrastructure they need in order to act well. That would be the way to break the impasse, rather than establishing premises that merely carry on begging the question - just bury the metaphysics and embed the ontology and presume an implicit philosophy – work with an "invisible magic" that I don't need to state. Quite occult really.

Rousseau has a way of breaking off at these points, saying what he believes, saying it can't be proved one way or the other, and it's not important anyway. Then he gets back into the meat of his argument. That seems the way to go, rather than search for implications that aren't there.

HÉLÈNE DOMON

“I think you're right. I've always thought that there's no preceding rationality to the universe, no previous harmony. However I (Helene) feel that harmony is built in us as a set of physical reactions. The same reaction, I think, may result from social harmony and musical or mathematical harmony. I think that's what Martial is saying with that "divine" feeling. But the fact we react "with" harmony shows harmony is within us as reactive principle, not outside, but that certain conditions will provoke that feeling of harmony.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

Now that “feeling of harmony” is most certainly real. It is a divine feeling. And, of course, St Augustine and St Anselm and other such theologians argue that this feeling is a cosmic longing for meaning and for return and reunion with the divine source – we have been made to yearn for God – that’s the source of the reactive feeling according to the theologians – the filling of that God-shaped hole we have been made with. Trying to prove that rationally will take some metaphysics, but the feeling remains true.

HÉLÈNE DOMON

“Martial wants to add something: "During Rousseau’s and Leibniz’s time, they were trying to prove God mathematically--which is ridiculous--because mathematics were still immature and foundations were not solid, the reversed movement toward the "core" was not formalized, nor the way we demonstrate things--lots of shadowy areas."

He finds it interesting that in maths the teacher is at the same level as his student.

PETER CRITCHLEY

because a) don't have the knowledge to establish those grounds and b) it goes against what I do suspect to be the case - hence my philosophers are praxis-based - it's that 'built in' notion within us "as if" we were made for harmony that allows so much back in - Kant's rationalist projection, marx's praxis, human nature/essences and its unfolding, even the cosmic quest for meaning - that the simple equation of maths as harmony, reality and truth leaves out or renders "secondary" and ideological.

I know Bertrand Russell spent ten years searching for the proofs of mathematics and found none. And Godel showed why. and what about Godel? his uncertainty principle has been taken to mean universal or objective standards do not exist - but that was not Godel's view.

but I like that "same level" thing - back to the idea of "co-ministry" in religion and Marx's praxis as interaction.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“He says physics is another thing though.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

ooer

HÉLÈNE DOMON

"But physics is very "floating" as well--a vision that progresses to understand reality."

PETER CRITCHLEY

I know I had a look at physics last year - very disappointing when it comes to foundations. But that is as a result of approaching physics with completely the wrong kind of question (as if searching to prove God or find a surrogate God). I keep having the idea that these areas can offer some grounding - and they really don't. It's a sensitive subject. If you hang around environmentalism for any length of time, you will find the scientists being very sneering and snotty towards politics, philosophy and ethics - and literature and poetry - but I have a feeling that they don't have the grasp of reality they think they have, only a part of it, the easy part concerning ‘things.’

HÉLÈNE DOMON

"lots of probabilities and statistics that make no sense at all and fail"

PETER CRITCHLEY

yes. John Polkinghorne is good on this in relation to quantum physics. He is a physicist at Cambridge, top professor there. But he is also a Catholic and believer in God - and in passing he comments how Aquinas' metaphysics deal not with subject vs object but with "intelligibility" - which strikes me as right, and which is in line with Quantum physics. So he says.

It seems to me that I don't need to spent aeons wrestling with this question and should move straight into politics/ethics and relate them to social relations, practices, forms of governance, economic systems - and make any "metaphysics" implicit, dynamic, interactive, at work.

Oddly, the world is relational rather than architectonic - much as I love building, it's all about relating. It’s all about networks, connections, not "things" but the relations between them (which sounds like mathematics to me, mind).

HÉLÈNE DOMON

“EXACTLY what Simon my stepson (a physicist-engineer) was telling me about modern physics. All relations.

Dynamics. Including in matter.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

ah - ace!!

that's what I was after. So I can sprint past these incredibly tortuous issues that have plagued the western mind from the start (as Heidegger told us) and stop being overly impressed by people who give me maths and science all the damned time. My instinct - don't forget I may be prejudiced as a non-scientist - is that these things are part of the answer but far from the whole answer.

I should copy all this down and put in my "to do" essay on my blog.

I need to keep materials tight to a thesis, and not wonder off into wonderfully interesting questions that lead me up a gum tree.

Somewhere before I got bogged down in the controversy between disclosure/imposure, the theme of Being and Place was relational and dynamic, generating knowledge from within a participatory and creative universe of emergent properties (including human culture).

HÉLÈNE DOMON

“Yes.

I always worried about you being a "rationalist philosopher."

PETER CRITCHLEY

I'll paste it in my blog, so I know where it is - that's my little hard guide to myself to keep on the straight and narrow and no deviations

HÉLÈNE DOMON

“Yes, generating etc. That's the way you should go. Forget these worshippers.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

Even in my thesis it went from rational freedom to relational freedom - but the academics cut it out. I had a chapter on feminist philosophers that did this - and they made me cut it!! Outrage!

When you are rubbish at science and maths, it is easy to get intimidated into thinking you are missing something. I don't think I am

phew!

that was a high quality exchange, I think

Lots of the Dante stuff I did this year was very much on this maths/music model, but halfway through I even wrote I feel like I am party to a cult - and that Dante's ethic doesn't need any of this edifice - it's not only made-up, it's an invitation to hierarchy and elitism, then I explore links to fascism. I have a better approach than that. I'll still put it out though, just to confuse people/make them think/put them to sleep.

HÉLÈNE DOMON

“I stick with this mystery train: the way we experience harmony emotionally serves as a guide for our "unfolding". Therefore there must exist some kind of "absolute" correlation between inside and outside, though it is not a fixed correlation: always in movement, in progress, in the works.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

Yes, that's my instinct too - hence "invisible magic" that I don't even need to state. Write as though there is magic in the world, and there will indeed be magic in the world. Magic!

those obsessions ... hm ... clinging to things out of need for certainty - let it go, let it flow

HÉLÈNE DOMON

“Yes, that's the message.

At some point Martial seemed to imply that harmony is given, and we only "frown" when disharmony comes in, like two notes separated by only one half-tone.

So I would say the capitalist society is this rubbing of notes against natural harmony.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

oh – “given!” Yes, as in Leibniz's "pre-ordained harmony" = disclosure as against imposure – I think that is how I interpreted that “almost nothing” – as a most definite and substantial something, however thin as a tightrope it may be, it is something we may walk upon, something that may even take us to eternity – so long as we add and invent bits as we go. Tolkien writes of a sub-creation under a divine creative imagination that takes us to a Secondary World that is still related to the primary real world …

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

But I don't want to restart a debate!

PETER CRITCHLEY

That’s probably very wise.

HÉLÈNE DOMON

I like your idea of magic.

PETER CRITCHLEY

There’s magic in the garden. Yes, hence my search into this area -

(Marx kept it implicit, it is there - maybe that's the way to do it - as with God - just don't name and frame it - go with it)

magic! yeah!

an enchanted world

no need to spell it out and fall under the spell of words and names and things defined.

HÉLÈNE DOMON

For Spengler, magic (or magian) refers to revelation... as opposed to Apolinian (individualism) and something nordic, I forgot what. Oh, faustian.

PETER CRITCHLEY

The world is good and we only notice when it becomes corrupted is how I put it on my football blog - oh I like Goethe's Faust

HÉLÈNE DOMON

“Magic comes from the East--Jewish, Gospels, sanskrit, Iranian, Arabic.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

Like Elvis, magic is everywhere.

HÉLÈNE DOMON

Magic in diaspora.

HÉLÈNE DOMON

“Magic is based on collective identity. You'd like that.

PETER CRITCHLEY

Magicians conjure out of nothing - or so it seems only to outsiders

so Tolkien writes, it's just that magicians work with intimate knowledge of nature and their surroundings.

To people who want external tools, it looks like magic, to those on the inside, it is working with the grain of things. I shall put my Tolkien piece out this week, see what people make of it.

Overnight thoughts:

This “almost nothing” interests me. An axiom that cannot be demonstrated but upon which we may build, invent, create all the way up to infinity, giving us a feeling of harmony.

Why would we want to build? Because the feeling is good. It feels good to see ourselves as part of a bigger picture.

Kant argued for teleology. But he did so in a way that turned teleological thinking on its head. Purpose is not something that is ‘out there’ and ‘in’ the things of nature, but is something that human beings write into nature, and then proceed to live in accordance with. The true, the good and the beautiful are rational projections of universal standards, which we then live in accordance with, rather than objective standards that exist independently of us.

But why, then, would we want to do that? What impels us to set these ‘objective’ standards? It makes us feel good to do so. OK. Why? Evolution? Biologically, we have evolved to satisfy certain desires and feelings, and shun those things that offend them.

The case for transcendence still stands, though. There is no pre-given morality, therefore we must create one is an argument that contradicts itself. We can remove the ‘must’ here and say merely that we may create morality, should we so desire. But why would we? To answer that question would be to advance a moral argument before we have actually created morality.

I am saying this “almost nothing” is actually quite a something, and it offers a certain givenness with respect to purpose, meaning, morality and harmony.

I have this argument with people who abuse religion and say God is ‘made-up’ – even supposed radicals who will say that there is no purpose in the universe, and human beings merely make it up because they can’t handle the horrible truth. This is crude drivel. Even if purpose is ‘made up’, that gives us Kant’s position, by which he sought to construct a universal morality that enhanced the freedom of each and all. No bad thing. After all, there seems little point on relying on ontological nature, if it really is empty of meaning, purpose and goodness. I address this point continually. In Max Weber’s argument, the advance of modern science has ‘disenchanted’ the world, emptied it of value and purpose. The source of value lies in human valuers. The world itself is objectively valueless. Therefore, it is the human valuers who invested the world with value. That seems simple enough, until we come to the source of these values. Modern morality has no problem in ‘inventing’ moral theories and values. The only problem is that it cannot offer good reasons for taking these theories and values seriously. The result is that morality dissolves into a series of value judgments, merely subjective preferences and opinions, with no objective standard or criterion by which to decide between them. That is a world of the sophists, a world in which there can be no first-order arguments based on transcendent norms, truths, universal or objective standards, only the “yes/no” second-order arguments of the “ideological” world. And that world is a political world constituted by power relations. Victory in this world will go with power, not ethics, with might, not with right.

As I argued elsewhere, the problem with the split between fact and value that characterises the modern world is that morality comes to lose its rational foundation. Morality is dissolved into a series of value judgments. So what, ask those who argue for science-based truth? Well, we have seen how fact and evidence is not an ethic. When Donald Trump enters office and flagrantly acts in the face of scientific evidence, the scientists take to the streets and march in defence of science. All well and good. But here’s my point – the scientists are marching in defence of the value of science, that is, they are affirming the value of truth-seeking. And here’s the problem – in light of the fact-value dualism constituting the ‘disenchanted’ modern world, the value of anything can only be defended on non-rational grounds. To put that in the terms of the argument above, it means that the first-order truths that are presented as incontrovertible, “logical”, as so strong that we can only say “yes” to them, still have to be defended with an ethic. I have no doubt that Donald Trump and all who support his assault on science do so for “ideological” reasons. In other words, the “no” to the “logical” truth they offer is an “ideological” “no” and therefore wrong. The character of first-order statements remains intact – here is a necessary truth that … we must/ought to recognise. The point is that that ‘must/ought’ is a moral imperative. If we don’t place the affairs of the “ideological” world on a rational basis, then the first-order truths of the “logical” world can always be trumped by the interests, concerns and machinations of the second-order world. I have no doubt that Trump and his kind are wrong when it comes to scientific fact and truth. I do know that to enter the ideological world with only logic on your side is to be politically and ethically disarmed. I’m interested in political and ethical armament, and that means seeking to defend moral positions on a rational basis – as a rational science of the human (and ecological) good.

Which is why I am interested in this “almost nothing” that exists as an axiom which cannot be demonstrated but upon which all else depends in the ascent to infinity.

I’m certainly interested in the new biology and physics which points to the existence of purpose in an animate universe. But I am clear that these are my beliefs in the first place. There are plenty of scientists who will simply say there is no evidence for the anthropic principle, that intelligent design is merely the old religion smuggled back into the picture, and that the universe is indeed objectively valueless. In which case I don’t need intelligent design or any kind of scientific backing for a purpose that, as in Kant, is one we write into nature. Why would we want to do that? Because we can, because we are co-creators of the world we live in, because it makes us feel good, because it feels right, because it gives us freedom in the sense of living in accordance with ends we have set ourselves and defined as right. And so on.

But there’s more. The fact that we would go to so much trouble, that we are driven to so create, expresses a deep cosmic longing for unity, purpose and harmony that points to a good God creating a good world, a goodness we are enjoined to live up to.

That’s one heck of a leap, will come the objection.

Mathematics – we are standing with our feet firmly planted in mid-air. We are creating our way to infinity on the basis of “almost nothing”, an axiom that is hardly there and cannot be demonstrated, but is the basis for all these truths that simply “work.”

As with St Thomas Aquinas, we proceed from the basis of an irreducible self-evident truth and act accordingly, and it works.

The question gets bogged down into taking sides between disclosure and imposure, of having to determine where value lies, and the nature of and the relation between the valued and the valuer. Is value and truth something imposed or projected by the human subject? Here we have Kant and the universal standards we judge our lives by and live in accordance with as rational projections. I love Kant. There’s no way of going round the man. Every time I come to this subject and seek a way past that involves evidence and proof rather than faith and belief, I have no option but to return to Kant. If reason were enough … Kant showed the limitations of reason, hence he made space for faith. For the likes of Michel Onfray, Kant wimped out here, and should have gone the whole hog and extirpated the religious undercurrent of his ethics. I think Kant knew better. He saw the problem and he made his decision – to extinguish that religious underpinning would be to remove the spring of moral action. I think that is Rousseau’s view too. And I think Rousseau and Kant are correct here. They have identified a psychic truth that evades any simple or positivist (which is simple and crude) notion of reason, evidence and proof. If truth and value are things which are imposed by the human subject as projections upon an objectively meaningless world, then we enter a world in which justice is merely conventional. As a general statement, that can sound liberatory. ‘Humanity’ now takes morality into its own hands and lives up to standards and ideals it sets itself. We are creators of our own self-made world. Except that, in the “ideological” world of politics and social interests, there is no ‘humanity’, and there is no ‘we’, only specific individuals, groups and classes within asymmetrical power relations. The result is that some have much more power of imposure and projection of truth and value than others. In these conditions, justice is merely what the dominant class says it is. That’s the sophistic view of Thrasymachus against Plato – that justice is the interests of the strongest. If we protest that this is an injustice, and if we challenge asymmetrical social relations as iniquitous, then we are clearly affirming a standard of evaluation that stands outside of time and place, which we use to criticize existing institutions and laws ... I take it that protests against the rule of the overweening power of the mighty are actually based on a thirst for justice, and are more than mere assertions of the power of one’s own group against the power of one’s class enemy. Marx’s emphasis on class struggle has been understood as a sophistic power struggle. And I take that to be a misreading. Marx is affirming a standard of justice that stands outside of power relations, which demands that human relations be put on a just and equitable basis. That’s my reading of Marx, and that’s the Marx I support.

For all those reasons and more, I have come to qualify the ‘rationalist’ philosophical positions I had spent a lifetime developing in favour of a transcendent conception. That is, I rejected the notion of a world created by a self-legislating reason. Self-legislating reason is insufficient. You can't have your cake and eat it too; once it's eaten, it's gone, and you are in the realm of made-up standards, conventions, power struggles - the sophistry of Thrasymachus, who asserted that justice is merely the interests of the strongest.

Quite an exchange. Which has somewhat confirmed what I feel - this idea of scientific disenchantment = an "objectively valueless" world – which begs the question of where value lies?

My natural law/rational freedom tradition is ethically strong - I don't want to ditch it for promises of harmony that rest on some very contestable premises. The promise of harmony I like. But if I am reading harmony into nature, I’d prefer to do it explicitly through reason with its ethical component in place, connected to forms of the common life and communities of practice. I’m not interested in esoteric cults. I am far from sure that certain kinds of rationalism prove anything like the things they are claimed to prove.

I think the hard work should be done by ethics.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“Well, he thinks it's all nonsense. He thinks, of course, that we are submitted to some laws, but that whether there's an order between music, maths, ethics etc is a myth. Of course we'll find the same numbers here and there (pi for example) but it doesn't mean the world is closed on itself.”

Peter Critchley

Ah, now then ... that frees me to go back into my own field with complete confidence. Instead of seeking to prove a ground for unity and harmony 'out there' – which takes me into mathematics and the natural sciences, none of which is in my area of expertise - you work for that ground in the field of practical reason.

The connection between mathematics and music is an ancient belief. That doesn’t make it ‘right’ in any “logical” or scientific sense, mind. But that musical model of politics is one I refer to a lot in terms of attunement. Here is my query – rather than offer an objective standard that somehow is ‘out there’ outside of human creation and invention, am I not better off being honest about this standard as being created and invented? I think so. The big problem, then, though, is that that begs the question as to what that creation and invention is based on – why this or that creation and invention and not another? There remains a standard – I can’t see how there can’t be, if we are to avoid conventionalism and sophistry. But rather than seek some fictional rational foundations for attunement in a musical model of politics, my best bet is to have the field of practical reason doing the hard work. In other words, instead of having a theoretical reason dictating truth about reality to a passive practical reason, a first-order dictation to a second-order world, the logical having priority over the ideological, the world of politics/ethics/economics, in which we organise our interchange with reality and with others is the world which does the active work on reason and reality. Anything created and invented – including the regulative ideal we live in accordance with – is explicitly presented as a creation and invention, and remains subject to reason and hence open to challenge and modification. That is to offer a rational order that human agents have had a hand in making, rather than an ersatz rational order which a handful of philosopher-kings present as objective and independent.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“What Nietzsche calls "hyperbolic naïveté". My favorite phrase, but I don't know if he really used it.

PETER CRITCHLEY:

My route is politics/ethics/practical reason - which is easily denigrated as secondary compared to the scientific investigations of reality – mere second order truths that are ‘made-up,’ ‘ideological,’ and endlessly contestable, in a way that logical and factual statements are not (it is claimed). My hunch - and the area of my specialist expertise - is that it is the field of practical reason that is the one that counts when it comes to persuading and moving people.

With respect “hyperbolic naïveté,” I think I have Nietzsche saying some such thing on the post on “scientific and moral truth.” I which I come out strongly for an objective rational order. But it does all depend on how we define that … and that does point to a creative role of human rational self-constitution …

What am I getting at? I’m getting at the idea of how utterly mistaken it is to seek the certainty we once found in God in reality through science and reason. It’s a chimera. It’s as made-up as any religion – but has a deceitful character in claiming objectivity. I take this to be Nietzsche’s argument (as presented in the post above. http://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/single-post/2017/05/08/Scientific-and-Moral-Truth )

That leaves us with other options to explore. I will still argue for transcendent norms, truths and values that involve objective standards beyond subjective preference and projection. But how to locate that transcendent ethic is the problem ..

I do think that this "almost nothing" remains a very big something - an axiom that cannot be demonstrated is remarkably like Aquinas' irreducible self-evident truth = God.

What I don't need is a big "rationalist" foundation that postulates a big objective universal truth that is what Kant said it was - a projection, or a projectionist fallacy even.

And is every bit as empty as Nietzsche said it was. This puts the play right back into my own hands, given that natural law/rational freedom have this practical core - reason is linked to communities of practice

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

"Once we adopt active nihilism we can start to move away from ‘perspectivism’ through creative destruction. “Perspectivism” is the “hyperbolic naivete of man:” making him the meaning and measure of all value which we project into the essence of things (WP 12). Nietzsche’s critique of this is encapsulated by the notion that the “way of knowing and of knowledge is itself already part of the conditions of existence.” We thus confuse cause and effect. The conclusion—that there is no other kind of thinking or intelligibility than the moralistic instinct of a unified subject—is actually the premise. (WP 496). Perhaps, Nietszche suggests, it is rather that we have a subject as multiplicity, an ‘aristocracy’ of equal cells whose struggle and will to power is the genesis of our though and consciousness (WP 490). Nietzsche locates this potential commanding power fundamentally in the sense, valuation, and perspective form of the body contra that of the “belief in the soul” (WP 491). The body and physiology are the starting point because it is where we can develop sense perceptions and valuations of affirmation as a result of an inner “assimilation and equalization in regard to all the past in us” (eternal return) rather than a negative reactionary valuation of projection to an outside (WP 500). It is from here that we can gain the “correct idea of our subject-unity” as a transitory, fluctuating, communality ruled by an aristocracy of regents dependent on the hierarchy as the “conditions that make possible the whole and its parts” (WP 492). The question of the body, or subject-as-multiplicity, throws into question the notion of Truth and valuation. If our sense and organs of knowledge are developed merely as effects to the conditions of “preservation and growth,” it proves not their truth, but simply their utility in fashioning a “real” world of being. Because we have resisted thinking the world as change and becoming, “we have projected the conditions of our preservation as predicates of being in general” (WP 507)."

PETER CRITCHLEY:

Now then, I always understood Nietzsche as a perspectivist. He is criticising a view there – man as measure of all things who projects a value on the world – that I criticise as Nietzsche’s own view.

I’d need to know who is arguing this. For me, Nietzsche saw clearly the disastrous direction we were heading in as a result of a the fact and value split, with false claims of objectivism and neutrality on the one side and a reduction of morality to mere value judgement on the other. I consider Nietzsche to be a key figure in that respect. He begs the questions we are still having to answer. What I want to avoid is a situation that puts morality back on a rational basis but only by presenting another form of false objectivism – it’s wrong and it won’t do the job required anyway. I do indeed attempt to avoid the “hyperbolic naivete of man:” which makes humans the meaning and measure of all value which we project into the essence of things (WP 12). Man may be the measures of all things, but he is not the measure of all things.

Here is what Nietzsche argues:

“No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives... He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain to an 'ideal of man' or an 'ideal of happiness' or 'an ideal of morality' — it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality purpose is lacking. (Twilight of the Idols, 1889, quoted in J Kent, The End of the Line?, p. vii

It is no step from there to denying the existence of right and wrong, good and bad, these things are mere subjective states and preferences, likes and dislikes – there is no objective standard in the world (J L Mackie, in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). That’s a view I have criticised at length in many places over the years.

I can answer Nietzsche via MacIntyre, Finnis, Aristotelian and Thomist traditions - I believe Nietzsche is right about the empty rationalisms out there - but MacIntyre has demonstrated at length why he is wrong. In fact, Hume is the much more substantial target to criticise.

In the end, I have to refuse this denial that truth or value is ‘out there.’ I see truth and value as both ‘out there’ and ‘in here.’ I reject objectivism in the sense of a value-neutral presentation of facts. That is a world impossible to live in. Truth and value are always about something. But there is moral and scientific truth, truth matters, morality matters. That leaves us having to be clear how and in what way.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“an axiom that cannot be demonstrated: not exactly. An axiom that is put together to start something. Martial was saying we could start with another axiom, but then we'd have another geometry. However, the logical process is itself perfectly "true", based on this neither true-nor-false axiom.”

So it's a little different from the idea of rubbing everything off to find a basic truth, as in tabula rasa.

http://futurematt.blogspot.fr/2011/03/nietzsches-will-to-power-short.html

Nietzsche's Will to Power: Three short questions with three short answers

1. What does Nietzsche mean by 'perspectivism'? ‘Persepectivism,’ for Nietzsche, is the term he uses to explain his genealogical-epi...

futurematt.blogspot.com

PETER CRITCHLEY:

Right - any axiom/god/dream will do – but on what basis do we choose any one over any other?

Nietzsche I know is a cul-de-sac. I refuse the invitation to join in Nietzsche’s Dance (Stauth and Turner). Superbly honest and sharp critic of the emptiness of modern morality – but he leaves us short.

That much I am sure about. I should really write this natural law/rational freedom/Rousseau book to make that plain. John Finnis is a heavyweight on this, glad to see him getting some recognition - the likes of him and MacIntyre show why Nietzsche is not the way to go. I am sure of that. Nietzsche is good at showing the vacuous nature of modern morality (and even ancient rationalism). These are bogus claims. But Nietzsche leaves us adrift.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“I just think he analyzes well the flaws of our thought. But that leaves me very hungry.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

I agree very much.

As for Finnis, he is a natural law theorist who shows that the modern assertion of rights is based on something more than self-assertion. This is why I keep coming back from imposure and invention to creation with something and out of something. Finnis is natural law, therefore the livelier minds presume he is as antiquated as natural law. Anything but.

I just needed to be sure I can stay clear of this ancient rationalism of numbers and harmony - it seems a decent promise - but nowhere near as meaty as Marx et al

The virtue of Nietzsche is that he called time on modern morality - it is lacking. The question then is for us, what next. MacIntyre made his name here by showing that Nietszche's criticisms apply to the moderns but don't do that much harm to the older natural law tradition, so long as we understand it as it should be understood - not as an intellectualised system detached from practices, but as a very practical ethics.

I like a bit of taming - the ability to set limits

That's really the foundation I should look at - Rousseau's legitimate constraint, Kant's co-legislation etc etc - very sophisticated, pertinent and my subject, practical reason. The principle of self-limitation and how we come to set it ourselves as a rational restraint .

Those are the philosophical foundations I should set in place.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

Martial laughed at himself scratching his head.

PETER CRITCHLEY

what about "mumbling about" 😀

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“And was amazed at reading your text--the speed of it all! And it made much more sense to him today, what you were aiming at, and how he may have helped you with his relatively brusk answers.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

Scratching and mumbling … indicates deep thought at work!

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“Yes, he saw the mumbling too. 😀”

PETER CRITCHLEY

Yes, I know what I probe for - even if it doesn't make any obvious sense.

I like harmony - but that is my belief; it has no proof, and I wouldn’t want to put myself in a position of hyperbolic naivete in which I am concealing a belief behind an assertion of objective truth.

I suspect that connection of maths and music is a belief that could easily become an exclusive cult that puts people off. I am trying to develop an inclusive ethic that persuades and moves people.

I'd rather be open and rest it on ethics - and be clear of making a space for God or "anarchic excess" - rather than rest it on a fallacious rationalism that a critic can easily dismantle and expose as ideological projection.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“I tend to stay away from those debates. Same as body/soul dichotomy. Just don't create a dichotomy in the first place.

God or "anarchic excess"

PETER CRITCHLEY

that is core, an ‘excess’ in the sense that it evades enclosure, capture, reason - we apply it and it works and we create to infinity with it.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“Now that's a definition of God in itself that I find exciting.

and the dualisms and need for proofs fade away as irrelevant

I worked a lot on "excess" and "remainders", "cendres" (cinters? ashes)

PETER CRITCHLEY

that's really what I believe, although it doesn't look like it because I keep talking about it. Invisible magic - as in Wittgenstein's silence

I got it from Mick Smith, who is really attacking the enclosing claims of totalising reason - he is something that will always evade human reason. He doesn't mention God at all.

but it fits what I am after very nicely

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“We want to build. So we build. Then we think the world was built, a little bit like our houses. But then we realize there's always something that escapes the enclosure. There is something beyond meaning taken as enclosure, which opens the enclosure again. So the important thing is the act ("our" act) of closing and opening again. That's properly the act of writing. That gives us direction. Harmony is probably the feeling we get when we're neither too closed nor too open, perfectly "there" on the brink, in movement, suspended, moving on, yet aware of our past, building toward the future yet having built already and knowing a few things about building--which together becomes an "unfolding" of harmonious living.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

I did actually enjoy getting some sharp answers at what may look like odd questions from me. It does somewhat irk me that my field is dismissed as "ideological" - mere preferences and opinions - compared to the "logic" of the sciences, which have the stronger arguments. I don't think things are anything like as simple and that politics/ethics/economics is actually the more difficult, more important terrain. I mean, when Trump says a big "no" to scientific truth what happens? We get the appeal to the value of truth seeking and politics - my field.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“Originally though, I'd say we want to build. Like animals, we have that urge to build a dwelling, something deep, a den, something high, a nest, something ephemeral, a season, or something eternal, a cave.

PETER CRITCHLEY

there's no avoiding the political world is what I'm saying, no "God" or "Reason" or "Number" we can appeal to and to which everyone must submit to with a "yes".

to be is to build - I'm sure I pinched that off Heidegger somewhere

buan - is that German?

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“bauen, but I think you had the old German.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

possibly – I am going off memory.

I swear I found it in Heidegger - it appealed to an old building family.

I liked that he went living with the peasants in the Black Forest. Interesting man was Heidegger.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“Yes, eventually you should go back to him.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

I was never really with him. But whenever I lurk in his company, I like what I understand.

(he loses me on language I'm afraid)

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“He's impenetrables at times.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

I know in the methodological and philosophical foundations materials, among masses on harmony and reason, he is in there, much less of him, but maybe that's what I should look at.

He needs a vulgarizer. I remember a poet quoting the work I did on Heidegger’s “dwelling in the fourfold.”

Fourfold: Space and Creativity

(PS, you know there are mathematicians like Francis Collins or Conway Morris who write big long complicated books showing how the universe is harmonious and gives evidence of an order that demonstrates the existence of intelligent design or, stronger than that, outright theism. I have lots of materials on this. I could easily write a book claiming that mathematics shows the existence of God. I don't know. It is pleasing to me. But I am a non-mathematician. It's like looking at Michelangelo. Aesthetically very pleasing. But is that feeling proof? I see it as a belief which picks arguments and evidence to fit – and hence pointing to a need to be explicit about belief, ethics, values positions. What I need to know is this - do I steer well clear of this area? It's all very interesting, but I am likely to choose sides according to preference/prejudice rather than strong argument. Am I safe in ignoring this entire area? And hence free to focus on my own expert area?

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“Yes, steer well clear of this area.”

PETER CRITCHLEY

Same in the piece I did on God and physics last year - utterly inconclusive and a waste of time, every claim is contentious, and resolves nothing.

HÉLÈNE DOMON:

“You need to narrow down to your own thought and direction.”

Lean and logical is the plan.

As to the theism/atheism ‘debate’, it bores me rigid. It’s the idle world of people who like to pose as critical thinkers but who merely reinforce their own prejudices. 'Religion is all about brainwashing and control …' which comes with the implication that we the critics are such free-thinkers who have seen through it all and you who argue back are poor deluded fools under the thumb of priests and prejudices. You’ve seen through nothing. You don’t see the issue at all. You are still paddling at the kiddie end of the pool. There’s nothing critical being ‘debated’ here, mere assertions based on prejudices.

Here’s something that crops up time and again respect to ‘debates’ concerning the existence or non-existence of God – a complete inability to distinguish ‘proof’ from ‘evidence’, a confusion as if these refer to the same thing. When I see someone asking for 'proof' in relation to empirical questions, I know they haven't got the first idea of how to handle philosophical and methodological questions - and no real intellectual curiosity to find out. They are asserting their own prejudices. And are not worth a minute of time, no matter how irritating they are.

Proof is the province of self-contained systems of propositions - logic and mathematics, certainly, also metaphysics. Science is concerned with empirical statements with respect to nature. The primary criterion and standard of evaluation of scientific theory is evidence, not proof. You can, with logical positivism, dispense with metaphysics as ‘nonsense.’ I don’t. But to demand proof of God and religion does require a knowledge of and respect for metaphysics. If you are a logical positivist, then, fine, it is nonsense. But check Wittgenstein on this. The logical positivists claimed Wittgenstein as one of their own. But Wittgenstein distinguished himself clearly from them. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 7) The logical positivists took this ‘silence’ to denote ‘nonsense’. Wittgenstein took it to be the most important thing of all. (I’ve written more on this in work I have ready to publish, it spells out why we live into mystery …)

Unfortunately, in these theism/atheism debates, it becomes clear that when many demand ‘proof’ of God’s existence, they are not asking for metaphysics. They are really demanding ‘evidence.’ But to demand proof, in the sense of demanding empirical evidence of the existence of a non-empirical being, is philosophically illiterate and methodologically incompetent. Frankly, it reveals anyone peddling this prejudice masquerading as free and critical thinking as indulging mere assertion, not constructing valid arguments.

If I understand the arguments offered above - I think I'd be right in saying that mathematics 'works', it builds truths on truths to infinity, but it is based on a small core or axiom that is constructed and can't be demonstrated. And that's enough to move swiftly past 'debates' over theism and atheism which demand 'proof' of God's existence.

That explains why I never get involved in those particular spats – it is, however, irritating to read philosophical no-nothings with axes to grind busy grinding those axes over the heads of all and sundry, causing all manner of harm and upset, spreading division where there need be none, and resolving nothing of any consequence at all.

As for the idea that religious believers are stupid, unthinking people who are being controlled, you could do yourselves a favour and disabuse yourself of that notion quickly - I know many people who combine a religious faith with being professors, doctors of medicine, engineers, architects. As anyone with any acquaintance with, say, Aquinas (there’s nothing in the mind that wasn’t in the senses first) knows, there is no opposition between faith and religion. Way too many speak out of bigotry on this, and that shows precisely why we need a transcendent standard to hold each and all to account. Try the work of Roger Trigg, who makes the point clear. I had the privilege of seeing Tony Benn many times over the years - he was smart enough to see the fine distinctions, and see what was at stake. I normally leave this kind of thing alone. It's a non-debate, frankly, just grubby little fingers pointing at the moon. And we can do without the aggressive and assertive tone. I’ve just come across someone castigating religious belief systems as being ‘written by illiterate people.’ Honestly! Don’t you just love those free-thinkers who have escaped brainwashing and mind control?

Enough. A take-home from the above:

“Almost nothing” is something, and something substantial enough to build creative activity and invention to infinity upon.

An irreducible, self-evident truth that cannot be demonstrated but which, since it ‘works’, stands in no need of demonstration.

An “anarchic excess” that escapes naming and framing – a core.

Co-creation within a creative universe.

And justice as something more than conventional points to transcendent norms, truths and values.