Vulcan's Mercy

AN EXCHANGE ON HUME, POSTMODERNISM, AND LOST KNOWLEDGE

A favorite correspondent of mine, Regi Firehammer of “The Autonomist”, began writing about how Hume wrecked philosophy in the 18th century and laid the foundation for postmodernism.  Firehammer is a student of Objectivism, the philosophy of novelist Ayn Rand, and has done considerable work of his own in ontology, epistemology, and ethics.  So Firehammer indicted Hume from a generally Objectivist perspective.  I found much to agree with in what he had to say about the woeful legacy of Hume on modern thought.  However, I had a key disagreement with Firehammer about Hume and postmodernism.

Firehammer views modernism as the unblinkered embrace of objective reality that the Enlightenment epitomizes.  Thus, the postmodernist rejects modernism by wading into a subjectivist swamp of whims, contradictions, and outright mendacity.  Hume blazed the trail for postmodernism by a queer rationalism in empirical disguise that undermined the certitude by which anyone can claim to know anything beyond the raw experience of the senses.  There is much to be said for this take on postmodernism and Hume.

But on my view postmodernism is not a rejection of modernism but the completion of it.  Modernism is a radical reductionism that pigeonholes all of reality as the effects of a single principle – i.e., nature, or in the extreme, matter.  The modernist project began with stripping Aristotelian formal and final causes (essence and purpose) from ontology, leaving only the material and efficient ones (matter and mechanics) to explain everything.  Postmodernism completes the project by reducing reality to whatever the individual makes of his subjective experience of the world.  Indeed, postmodernism is a black hole into which reality disappears.  Hume’s role in this radical reductionism was to formulate a skepticism of objective knowledge which is logically man’s epistemic limit in a universe devoid of essence and purpose.

Thus, in this edited series of exchanges over the past few weeks I responded to Firehammer’s critique of Hume …

THE LOST KNOWLEDGE OF THE MODERN AGE

[T]he hallmark of modernist thought is the primacy of the material and efficient causes over the formal and final ones.  Often that primacy is to the complete exclusion of the formal and final causes as real, thus physicalism.  Otherwise, it may be a subordination of those causes to the material and efficient ones, which results in a soft physicalism.  Or the formal and final causes may be an epistemological, rather than an ontological, issue for the modernist:  They may be real, but they are not knowable to man.

Therefore, what is common to all modernists is the belief that man cannot apprehend any fundamental order or purpose to existence.  That is because either the modernist, in a physicalist fashion, declares they are not real or he says, whether or not they are real, they cannot be known.  While this mode of thought does not greatly impair a deep understanding of what is physical, it cripples any understanding of the mental (broadly construed) realm of existence.  This is because matter and mechanics are insufficient for a sound grasp of human nature.

[Consequently] there is no foundation for modernist beliefs about man and the universe once the formal and final causes are denied, either ontologically or epistemologically, as objective knowledge of what is real. … As to the fundamental order of the universe (its formal cause), science offers no answer and cannot offer any answer.  That is because science must presume order to explain order, as I explained in this forum recently in my article "Argument from Order: God Exists".  I can also offer a non-theist argument that science is incompetent to explain the fundamental order of the universe.   To account for that order which brings forth all of the order we observe in the universe, a formal cause of the universe must be identified.  The formal cause is the principle of organization of each and every entity.  In the case of an organism, the principle of organization is specifically the principle of life.  However, the principle of organization is qualitative and not quantitative.  It is not subject to measurement and so identification other than through its effects upon matter.  Science by definition is restricted to knowledge that can be obtained through quantification and measurement, and so is restricted to that which is physical.  Because a thing can only be quantified or measured if it has order, science must presume its order to explain it.  For this reason science cannot account for the fundamental order of the universe.

Regarding the fundamental purpose of the universe (its final cause), I agree that requires the existence of a being responsible for the existence of the universe.  That being is God.  As we covered this territory before, including the definitions of "existence" and "universe" that are peculiar to Objectivism, I won't get into your objection regarding my use of the word "existence" other than to say I should have been more careful and wrote either "our existence" or the "existence of the universe".  I'll rely upon my previous statements in this forum to support my claim that a being requires extension -- i.e., physicality -- only if he exists within spacetime, which God as the creator of spacetime -- i.e., the universe -- does not.  But I will say that the denial of a fundamental purpose of the universe is a hallmark of modernist thought, which is evidenced by the frenzy of utopianism and nihilism that has plagued the modern era.

POSTMODERNISM COMPLETES MODERNISM

Hume's skepticism is the quintessence of these deficiencies of modernism.  The denial of the validity of formal causes means the denial of any genuine knowledge about nature.  The denial of the validity of final causes means the denial of any basis for an objective morality.  He made invincible ignorance about man and the universe respectable, and by the twentieth century we reaped the whirlwind filling the vacuum of that invincible ignorance with monstrous utopian schemes, the nihilistic assault upon objective morality by Neitzsche and his postmodernist progeny, and an Orwellian reduction of knowledge that denies most the vocabulary to comprehend the problem -- and so formulate solutions for recovery.

[So] I am persuaded that modern philosophy went off the rails when the final and formal causes (i.e., essence and purpose) were jettisoned from ontology.  I think this occurred primarily because the scientific method proved very successful in explicating the material and efficient causes of physical entities; indeed, so successful, that modernists came to think all things should be comprehensible by the same means.  Because knowledge of the formal and final causes cannot be obtained by the scientific method, modernists have rejected them as real, or at the very least as objectively knowable.  Thus, the modernist fallacy has been to let a particular means to knowledge determine all that can be knowledge – broadly speaking, scientism.

Hume’s skepticism is the product of taking the modernist rejection of the formal and final causes to its logical conclusion.  I agree with you that postmodernism is rooted in this skepticism.  However, I don’t see postmodernism as a falling away from modernism.  Rather it is a continuation of the corruption of philosophy that began with modernism, the first glimmer of which was Ockham’s nominalism.  And so over the past half-millennium the modern age has been in a way a dark age, because of the lost knowledge of essence and purpose in all things.  Without this knowledge, morality is loosed from its objective moorings and floats in the currents of those wielding power.  Little wonder then that the extraordinary scientific and technological advances of the modern age resulted in the means to corrupt, oppress, maim, and murder on scales unimaginable in prior “unenlightened” eras.

Also without knowledge of essence and purpose, reason is cut off from knowledge of God.  So if the modernist holds a belief in God, he does so through fideism.  Therefore, modernist epistemology is plagued with the rationalisms of scientism and fideism – and so the false dichotomy of reason and faith.  All this said, it is not my argument that an ontology that incorporates all four of the Aristotelian causes must lead to the conclusion that God exists.  As I have written before, an atheist can be a hylomorphist (in fact, I believe there are Randians who are).  What the loss of this knowledge of essence and purpose does entail is the severing of fact from value.  “Is” and “ought” are torn asunder, and morality is no longer grounded in what is real but rather in what is wished.  This is the breach in modernist thought that all of the intellectual pathologies of our age have swept in to fill.

THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE

Regi Firehammer a.k.a. The Autonomist: “Quite seriously, Bill, I do not see how believing in either final or formal causes makes any difference one way or the other to science.”

Because it doesn't.  We are all Baconians now when it comes to science.  Modern science by definition restricts itself to observation and explanation of the material and efficient causes of things -- i.e., matter and mechanics.  The formal and final causes -- i.e., essence and purpose -- are beyond the ken of science.

So when you ask, "Can you think of anything in science that has been discovered that required them?", the answer is no.  Similarly, I don't rely upon mathematics to spell words correctly.  The scientific method can only produce knowledge about matter and mechanics, because it restricts itself to the collection and analysis of physical properties.  Physical properties are the effects of an entity's extension in space and time -- e.g., size, duration, mass, structure, chemical composition, and interaction with other physical entities.  Those effects are what make an entity objectively identifiable because they are reducible to quantitative data such as measurement or enumeration.  This is what makes scientific knowledge so reliable and relatively indisputable.

So science is our best tool for understanding that which is physical.  Of course, there is more to what exists than the physical.  Therefore, it should be clear that science has its limits as a means to knowledge.  Yet, one of the great follies of our era is to believe that if something cannot be identified and understood through science, then it must not exist.  Like the man with a hammer who sees everything as a nail, the modern man of science sees everything in terms of matter and mechanics (material and efficient causes).  Thus, for him there is no need to account for the essence and purpose of things because such principles (formal and final causes) do not exist -- at least not in any manner that permits objective knowledge of them.

Metaphysically this error is scientific naturalism (physicalism or materialism in its extreme form) and epistemologically it is scientism.  It conflates a means to knowledge with knowledge itself.  As powerful a means to knowledge as science is, it is only a means and not the only one.  There is more to what exists than the physical, and we all know from our experience that we can have knowledge of the non-physical -- i.e., the mind.  So we should know that science is not the end-all of knowledge.  Indeed, a hallmark of the human mind is consciousness.  There is simply no scientific means by which I can objectively identify the consciousness of any other human being, yet I have no doubt that all other human beings are conscious.

Is my lack of doubt merely a matter of faith?  Or does it rest solely upon reason?  If the latter, then there must be a means of knowledge other than science by which I can know that the minds of others objectively exist.  That means is philosophy, through which I can identify and understand that which is not physical (in addition to employing science properly as a method of knowledge of the physical).

The problem that arises with a philosophical examination of the non-physical is that the mind, for example, is not reducible to quantitative data.  There is nothing to measure; there are no parts to analyze.  (To argue that the electro-chemical activity of the brain can be measured and analyzed, thus the mind is quantitatively reducible and so subject to science, begs the question.  That activity is the physical effect of the mind and not the mind itself.)  So the quantitative data that makes us confident of the objectivity of scientific knowledge is absent.  In other words, there is more room for dispute when it comes to the philosophy of mind because there are far fewer hard points of indisputable data.

That doesn't mean the truth about the mind is inaccessible, only that there is a much greater probability of (honest) error being made with the only means of knowledge of the mind -- i.e., philosophical inquiry.  As I have argued, one of the profound errors of the modern era has been to jettison the principles of essence and purpose (the formal and final causes) from ontology in favor of a scientistic view of the nature of existence.

Firehammer:  “No scientific description of any physical thing is ever complete.”

Indeed.  So what is it about a thing that science cannot describe?  The answer lies in its formal and final causes.

Also, a quick note on purpose ...

Firehammer:  “The only things to which purpose has meaning are beings capable of having goals and ends, that is rational beings, i.e., men.”

I agree except that I would have written, "The only things to which purpose has meaning are beings capable of having goals and ends, that is rational beings, e.g., men."  When I speak of a thing having a purpose in itself, I speak of its God-given purpose.  How can I discover what that is?  How do I learn of anything that I do not directly perceive?

Finally, a short comment about science ...

Firehammer:  “What science restricts itself to is what can be objectively observed, directly or indirectly, whatever it is. It excludes nothing. What else would you have a science that has the world that we are directly conscious of study?”

If you want to define science in the Quinean sense that encompasses all objective knowledge, that's fine.  That doesn't change the distinction I have been making between the physical and the non-physical -- i.e., the physical is reducible to quantitative data and the non-physical is not.  Moreover, if science is to be defined as objective knowledge, then science must be open to the study of both the natural and the supernatural.  To say that it cannot include the supernatural begs the question.  So again, Regi, I'm not sure how defining science as you do refutes my argument that the formal and final causes of an entity are as real as its material and efficient ones.

THE END RESULT:  SEVERING FACT FROM VALUE

Firehammer:  “I gave a very long explanation of what I meant by, 'no scientific description of any physical thing is ever complete,' and it had nothing to do with formal or final causes. I think your statement both ignores (no intention implied) my explanation and interjects what cannot be justified based on my argument. Scientific descriptions must be incomplete because science is open-ended, and however much we learn about anything there will always be more to learn. Science can only address the physical attributes conceptually and since concepts are by nature discrete, and physical reality is 'analog' (think continual verses continuous), no scientific description can ever be complete (for the same reason not digital image can ever capture everything, no matter how small the pixels are).”

Your last sentence puts it quite nicely.  You are making my point that science is inherently limited in what it can describe, just as a digital image can never fully capture analog reality, because it is a quantitative method of knowledge.  Oddly, you implicitly appear to agree with me on this, yet you have made explicit objections to my statement that the scientific method is quantitative.  Your objections have not been persuasive for a couple of reasons.

First, some of your refutations are in fact quantitative in nature.  One example you used was that the relationship between the hypoteneuse and legs of a right triangle is not quantitative.  Perhaps you are making a distinction between what is geometric and what is strictly numerical, but surely if that relationship were not quantifiable, there would be no Pythagorean Theorem to generalize it.

Second, your other refutations are not quantitative in nature, but then that's what makes their study art rather than science.  For example, you spoke of how a pharmacological researcher might use a subject's identification of his pain to evaluate the effectiveness of new drug.  There is no objective measurement of that pain, because only the subject of the test can be conscious of it.  His experience of pain is a mental not physical phenomenon, and it is precisely the irreducibility of the mind to quantity that defeats the study of mental phenomena by scientific means.

Now I have no argument with you, Regi, that we can study the mental as well as the physical by rational means, if not always by empirical means.  Objective and subjective observation of particulars allows us to form hypotheses to be tested, either empirically or logically; and if those hypotheses are validated, then they can function as general theories of how the world works.  If all of that goes under your label of "science", OK.  But that doesn't eliminate the fundamental distinction between the physical and the mental.

To wit:  The physical is matter and its effects, the defining characteristic of which is spatial and temporal extension.  Thus, at least in principle, the physical is objectively perceivable and ultimately quantifiable.  The mental is the mind and its effects, and though embodied in creatures, as opposed to God, is only subjectively perceivable and elusive of quantification.  The physical is manifested in our universe through the material and efficient causes, or matter and mechanics.  The mental is manifested through the formal and final causes, or essence and purpose, principles that only a mind can devise.  Whose mind is a key question.  Just as we have discussed the God-given purpose of entities, their essence is the design of their Creator.

Of course, what I have to say about the mental realm of reality probably isn't compelling to the adherents of metaphysical naturalism.  However, they can only account for what appears to be essence and purpose in things as either:  [1] purely human constructs, i.e., nominalism, or [2] epiphenomenal of nature's orderliness which must be accepted as a given without explanation.  As I have said elsewhere, I don't think these are necessarily intellectually disreputable conclusions to draw from one's experience of the world, but consistency with them does ruin to ethics; at least ethics predicated upon an objective relationship between fact and value.

[For the full text of this discussion, click here.]

THE LOST KNOWLEDGE OF THE MODERN AGE

I am a fan of Ed Feser's writing.  I've enjoyed his articles at Right Reason, Tech Central Station, and elsewhere on the web.  Once I broke my hard habit of scientific naturalism some years ago, I apprehended the incompleteness of the modern grasp of the world.  It has been the crisp and clear work of philosophers like Feser that put this incipient understanding into sharp focus.

After the end of the High Middle Ages we began to lose knowledge of two of the four Aristotelian causes, given fullness by Thomas Aquinas, of all that is real.  As Feser says in the introduction of his recent review of philosopher Daniel Dennett's contribution to the "new atheism", Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon:

"Aquinas, following Aristotle, held that a complete understanding of any natural phenomenon requires the identification of each of its four causes: its material cause, the stuff out of which it is made; its formal cause, the form or essence that stuff has taken on; its efficient cause, that which brought it into being; and its final cause, the end, purpose, or function it serves.  This doctrine was (and is) central to Scholastic philosophy and theology, but modern philosophy, inaugurated by the likes of Hobbes, Descartes, and Locke, is largely defined by it rejection of two of Aristotle’s four causes.  For the moderns, there are no formal or final causes, no fixed essences or purposes in nature.  The world is rather a gigantic machine, all the diverse phenomena it exhibits being entirely reducible to inherently meaningless causal interactions between material parts."

Whether inadvertantly, perversely, or deliberately, in the six centuries or so since the advent of the modern age, nominalism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and finally the scientific materialism of Marx, Darwin, and Freud discredited the truth that each and every thing that exists has a God-given essence and a purpose (the formal and final causes), leaving us only with matter and mechanics (the material and efficient causes) to explain who we are and the universe we inhabit.  And even when the inadequacies of this scientific naturalism had become apparent to us in the wreckage of the twin catastrophes of fascism and communism, so many of our best and brightest did not look for what was lost in the modern age, but instead took up the assault upon the last two respectable Aristotelian causes under the banner of post-modernism.

In his excellent review of Dennett's book, Feser exposes the feebleness of today's bein pensant intellect that is the result of the modern man's long decadent decline.

CLARIFYING A FEW DEFINITIONS

To make clear what I had to say in "Certainty and Objectivity" I posted "A Few Definitions".  Upon reflection I should say a little more to clarify the use of those definitions.  First, these definitions are the specific meanings of certainty, objectivity, and knowledge used in the first article.  I do not want to suggest that other uses of these words are invalid.  I simply wanted to be precise in this particular instance.  This precision helps to explain why I made no distinction in "Certainty and Objectivity" between, say, true knowledge and false knowledge.  My precise definition of knowledge therein made "true knowledge" redundant and "false knowledge" a contradiction.

Second, in "A Few Definitions" I could have done a better job of making the distinction between knowledge and belief.  What I had described as a fideistic error is a belief devoid of knowledge, although the way I put it appeared to label all beliefs as purely fideistic.  However, what I know I also believe.  Knowledge is belief even if not all belief is knowledge.  I sidewiped the fact that belief encompasses knowledge when I wrote, "[F]ew beliefs are entirely devoid of knowledge."  A bit more needed to said for the sake of clarity.  Hence today's post.  Of course, the subject of knowledge and belief merits much more attention, and so it will get it in the future.

A FEW DEFINITIONS

In the preceding article “Certainty and Objectivity” I used words that can be elastic in meaning, which isn’t helpful when precision is needed.  So let me nail down a few definitions.

Certainty:  Knowledge absent rational doubt.  Absolute certainty is not the ken of mere human beings, for it requires knowledge of every fact that touches upon the subject, which in turn requires knowledge of every fact that touches upon those facts, and so on.  In short, absolute certainty requires infinite knowledge, which is an impossibility for our finite minds.  However, we can know things with a certainty that makes anything to the contrary nonsense.  For example, I know that my mind is finite and that the universe objectively exists with such certainty.  (See below about “objectivity”.)  The term “virtual certainty” has been applied to this level of knowledge, and that strikes me as a useful epistemological term of art.  There are also scientific, mathematical, and logical certainties, such as the Earth revolves around the Sun and 2 + 2 = 4, most if not all of which are virtual certainties.

Objectivity:  The independence of existence from knowledge.  In other words, the universe and every object and occurrence within it exists whether or not I or anyone else knows it.  Bluntly, what is true is true, period.  Granted, some things occur that I cannot help but know.  For example, I have an idea.  However, the fact of that occurrence is not dependent upon anyone else’s knowledge of it, and it is still a fact that it occurred even if I later forget I ever had the idea.  Because I objectively exist, the effects of my existence also objectively exist.  So the truth is not, in any manner whatsoever, dependent upon knowledge of it.  Therefore, the objectivity of knowledge is not dependent upon its certainty.  Though it is possible to rationally doubt the knowledge of “X”, that lack of certainty does preclude the objectivity of “X”.  For example, I may lack the virtual certainty that God exists, but my knowledge that He does is no less objective.  God exists whether or not I know He does.  Conversely, certainty entails objectivity.  A certainty cannot be false.  Of course, I can be psychologically certain of a falsehood, but a false belief, no matter how dearly held, is not knowledge.  Knowledge, certain or not, is always true, and so always objective.

Knowledge:  Awareness of the truth.  We can have beliefs that are true, but they do not constitute knowledge if their foundation is fideistic rather than rational.  By rational, I mean the application of reason to the data of the senses, both internal and external.  Therefore, knowledge must be empirically grounded.  A belief is fideistic because it lacks this ground; it is the acceptance of a proposition “as-is”.  There is no awareness of the truth of the proposition.  There is only the desire that it be true.  For example, the knowledge that God exists is predicated upon observation of human nature, the human condition (i.e., the relationship of man to the universe), and the universe and the rational conclusions drawn from those facts.  A belief in God is no more than wanting Him to exist.  In this particular case, that want is wholesome.  It can drive firm belief, that psychological certainty noted above.  However, it is insufficient to produce an awareness of God.  That said, few beliefs are entirely devoid of knowledge.  For example, if I believe that God exists because my parents had told me He does, and it is my long experience that my parents have been correct in what they have taught me, then my reliance upon the authority of my parents is not without reason.  I can do better than that, but I do at least have a bit of knowledge of God.  So, when I have sound reason grounded in experience for accepting a true proposition, I have awareness of its truth however inadequate that reason and experience may be towards giving me certainty of it.  Certain or not, I have knowledge of it.

CERTAINTY AND OBJECTIVITY

I have often remarked upon our analytic penchant in the modern era to reduce things to basic elements.  We do so not without reason.  Breaking down physical objects, phenomena, and systems into their bits and pieces has yielded a great deal of knowledge about our world.  We begin to learn why the order we perceive in the universe is not illusion but real by busting matter into atoms, molecules, and cells.  With this method of reduction we have built the sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology.  This has been a boon.  We know fundamental truths about our world with a great deal more certainty than we did before the advent of modern science.

But not everything about our world is explicable through science.  Moreover, not everything in science is knowable through methods of reduction.  Even so, we are seduced by the scientific certainty that reductionism has brought forth where it has succeeded, and so we desire to use it everywhere in the quest for the truth.  Like the man with a hammer who sees everything as a nail, we of the Age of Science tend to see every problem as a subject whose components have been inadequately analyzed.  All we need to do is take that subject and break it down into its basic elements, and we will learn the solution to the problem.  That’s fine, so long as it is so reducible.

Not everything is.  The physical realm of our world – the stuff of matter and energy – is, but not the mental realm.  For instance, a person’s mind, consciousness, and will either exist or don't exist.  Either they are or aren't.  They cannot be broken down into basic bits of mentality.  They are indivisible.  They are characterized by simplicity.  Yes, they have properties, but not components.  Either they each exist as a whole or exist not at all.  Therefore, these things do not submit to reduction to obtain the certainty of analytical knowledge about them.  They are not even reducible to measurement.  There is nothing to count, weigh, or quantify.  They simply are and so knowable only in their elusive entirety.

Furthermore, the mind, consciousness, and will do not submit, as matter and energy do, to deterministic laws of nature.  In other words, even as wholes they are not reducible to their causes and effects with relationships that can be defined with the mathematical certainty of physical laws like Newton’s F = ma or Einstein’s E = mc^2.  That doesn’t mean in absence of such certainty we cannot know things about the mind from its effects, like ideas.  Indeed, what we can know, we know objectively if not certainly.  While the certain entails the objective, the converse is not true.  For this reason certainty is to be prized, but it is not always possible.  However, knowledge that is less than certain is no less objective.  In fact, even though certainty absolutely requires objectivity, objectivity is completely independent of certainty.  What is true is objectively true whether or not we are certain of it .

This is important to understand when we seek knowledge that inherently will not be certain – that is, scientifically or mathematically certain.  Only knowledge of the physical realm of our world can be so, yet the mental realm is just as fundamental to our existence.  From it flows the complex of moral principles that inform aesthetics, ethics, and politics and make possible human happiness.  No small thing in our lives.  So it is a serious error to dismiss knowledge of the mental realm as mere belief, opinion, or superstition – that is, unobjective – because that knowledge lacks the certainty of science.  We must not deny ourselves knowledge of the truth because it is uncertain.  Doing so takes us down the path to the subjectivist swamps of utilitarianism, skepticism, and post-modernism in which rots the fabric of tradition and custom that embody the objective principles of morality.  In that quagmire we are left with our naked self to either learn through hard experience to resist our base impulses by rediscovering those principles or drown in purposeless carnality and cant.

Likewise, it is a serious error to claim certainty of knowledge of the mental realm that is not possible.  This would seem obvious.  Nevertheless, we do it repeatedly with our modern enthusiasm for reductionism.  We inappropriately apply the analytical methods of studying the physical realm to the mental realm in the false belief that we can understand the whole from parts that do not exist.  We then proceed to build edifices of rationalism and ideology upon the fantasy foundations of those non-existent parts.  For example, Marx preached that the mind was reducible to economic calculations in the pursuit of material gain.  Upon that foundation he devised the political doctrine of communism to harness those supposed basic elements of the mind to direct people to establish a utopian society.  Of course, the mind is not just an economic calculator, which is why people did not naturally create the workers’ paradise when totalitarian dictators put communism into action.  Instead they died.

So it serves us well to not confuse certainty with objectivity and to value objectivity even when certainty is not possible.  Some may not care for the humility before the truth that this understanding of knowledge cultivates, but it is good to keep in mind the paradox of this humility.  Knowing that the human mind is finite and so what one can know with certainty is limited is itself a profound piece of certain knowledge that enables one to understand more.

DARWINIST DEAD ENDS

The Maverick Philosopher has a good critique of the primary argument that Richard Dawkins makes against theism in his new book The God Delusion.  Check it out here.  Meanwhile the Real Physicist reports back from a conference of the American Maritain Association at which such notable speakers as Father Edward Oakes and molecular biologist Michael Behe discussed whether or not Darwinist doctrine has been propounded to deny the existence of God.  Check that out here.  And today the Discovery Institute posted a "Human Events" article by John West about the academy's hostility to any challenge of Darwinist orthodoxy and the timidity of those who should be pressing for open scientific inquiry.  Click here for that.  As for the most recent thoughts of yours truly about Darwinism, go here.

REAL PHYSICS

Today I found Lawrence Gage's blog called "Real Physics".  (Hat tip to the folks at Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex.)  His introductory piece explains the title with an excellent short essay on the incompleteness of science to explain reality.  The Real Physicist notes how the scientific method has been a very successful means of gaining knowledge of those aspects of reality that are quantifiable.  He then explains that not all that is real is reducible to measurement.  Beyond quantity there is quality, and quality is as objectively real as quantity even if it cannot be comprehended with the same certainty.  By failing to understand the reality of quality, he warns how we risk stripping ourselves of our human dignity.  This idea, well expressed by the Real Physicist, is what I was stumbling around with recently in making the distinction between scientific and aesthetic knowledge.  So check out his blog.  Well worth the visit.

PULLING STRINGS

I nose around in philosophy because to answer the question "What should I do?", it is helpful to know the answers to "What is true?" and "How do I know that?"  It's no coincidence that the three great branches of philosophy -- ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology -- address these three questions.  So philosophy is important and is more than an avocation for me.

But it's not a vocation.  By trade I'm a machinist, not a philosopher, and so constraints upon my time limit what I can read about the science of wisdom.  So when I put two and two together and gain an insight by dint of my own reason, I don't doubt that others already know what I figured out.  I know there is plenty of writing on philosophy that I have not gotten to.  Nevertheless, I am pleasantly surprised, once I get around to reading some philosophy here or there, to learn of a similar perspective on what I had been pondering.

For instance, I have persuaded myself that there are basically two methods of objective knowledge:  Scientific and aesthetic.  Scientific knowledge is that gained through measurement.  By counting, specifying, and delimiting -- i.e., quantification -- we can say this is true, because if it weren't our yardstick would immediately and plainly tell us so.  In other words, scientific knowledge is that which is reducible to a verifiable or falsifiable statement.  For example, the mean diameter of the Earth is 7,918 miles.  That is a scientific fact.  So are the statements that dogs have four legs and France is in Europe.  By counting miles, specifying anatomy, and delimiting continents these scientific facts are subject to verification or falsification, and so we can have great confidence in them because our measures show they are true.

Yet, all that is true is not knowable scientifically.  I know that all of you who are reading this are conscious beings.  But there is no objective measure by which I can establish that any human being possesses consciousness.  I know that I am, because I experience it.  However, no one else can experience my consciousness and I can experience no one else's.  Yet the fact that all human beings are conscious is as true as the sky is blue on a clear day.  This truth is aesthetic knowledge.  Though it cannot be quantified, and so reduced to a scientifically verifiable or falsifiable statement, its explanatory power is in its qualities that are in harmony with all else we know to be true.  Its truth lies in its beauty.

Because beauty is objectively identifiable, aesthetic knowledge is as objective as scientific knowledge.  The identity of beauty is the proper form and purpose of a thing, and nothing exists without the qualities of form and purpose (or formal and final causes as the Aristotelian might put it).  In the case of consciousness, or the soul, it is the form of the matter that composes the human body.  Form and matter together are the substance that is a human being.  Without consciousness that substance cannot be, hence no human being.  Thus we know through the qualities of form and purpose, without any manner of measurement, all human beings are conscious.  That is an aesthetic fact.

But here's the rub about aesthetic knowledge.  It is as objective as scientific knowledge, because an aesthetic fact is true without regard to anyone's awareness of it.  But it is not necessarily as certain as scientific knowledge, because no attempt to quantify it will subject it to verification or falsification.  It's just not possible.  Thus our comprehension of an aesthetic fact will be restricted.  Indeed, we may at best only apprehend its truth, relying upon its harmony with all other knowledge to have sound reason to believe it is true.  Yet doubt, also for sound reason, may well persist.  (And so the need for the virtue of tolerance, another topic for another day.  In the meantime, I recommend this short essay by Bill Vallicella.)

Because doubt of an aesthetic fact is not just possible, but often reasonable, great controversy can arise over it.  The commonest example is the existence of God.  Another example, currently in hot debate, is string theory (well, the "string conjecture" would be more accurate), which is the idea that the basic constituents of matter and energy are not points but one-dimensional strings.  And here is where I finally get to my pleasant surprise of discovering that others have been propounding with eloquence what I recently stumbled over on my own.  What is beautiful leads us to what is true, as John Rose of First Things discusses today in regard to the great divide among physicists over the epistemological standing of string theory.  Rose's commentary gives a glimpse as to how the aesthetic method is gaining prominence with the practitioners of the scientific method.

I only hope that the scientists don't make as much a hash of it as they have science.

MADNESS OF THE MANDARINS

It's a commonplace to sneer at the ignorance and misconceptions of the great unwashed, yet the news during the past few weeks on a couple of topics reveals that the delusions of the elite in this country are deep.

One is the tsk-tsking over the release of the film United 93, the grim but heroic tale of the first Americans, ordinary Americans, to fight back against the jihadists on September 11th.  Five years later, we are ready for their story.  Indeed it's overdue.  But the mandarins of culture tell us that it's just too soon.  It will only rile us against the enemy.  Hmm, I remember Hollywood coming out with Wake Island only eight months after the fall of our base there to the Japanese.   Something has radically changed in this country when artistic appeals to patriotism in the midst of an existential war are deemed vulgar and hateful.

Today I'll focus upon a drier example of the mad mandarin contempt for us.  It is revealed in their response to the rise in gasoline prices.  It's true that the man in the street often holds beliefs about the most recent price hikes that are economic nonsense, yet the fact remains there is no popular unrest about $3 a gallon gas.  That tells me that John Q. Public doesn't place much confidence in whatever conspiracy theories he might entertain about collusion in fixing high prices for gas.  (Probably for the good reason that he remembers when prices spiked to three bucks after Hurricane Katrina, they dropped when supplies increased.)  Indeed, all the rabble-rousing about gas prices comes from our politicians and pundits who are quick to divine evil running amok in the companies that produce and supply gasoline.

Never do the plain facts spill out from the mandarin diatribe about price-gouging:  [1] A barrel of oil has skyrocketed because the Third World is industrializing faster than new oil fields have been put into production; [2] production of oil has been arbitrarily restricted in the U.S. by declaring off-limits large oil fields  in Alaska, the West Coast, the Florida Gulf Coast, and the Atlantic seaboard; [3] domestic consumption of oil is needlessly high because nuclear energy has been irrationally vilified in this country, although it is the only serious alternative to the use of fossil fuels to produce electricity; [4] gas supplies are subject to price hikes during periods of high demand because NIMBY politics and draconian environmental penalties have stopped the building of any new gasoline refineries in the U.S. for three decades now; [5] the refining capacity problem is further exacerbated by federally mandated special gasoline formulas for different sections of the country, which means that if oil companies don't forecast demand in every part of the country correctly, shortages can result in a gasoline of a particular formula; and [6] that bottled water you buy when you stop at the gas station costs you about eight bucks a gallon.  In regard to that last point:  For all that has to be done to find oil, pump it out of the ground, transport it to a refinery, refine it, pipeline it to your region, and then finally truck it to your gas station, a gallon of gas is remarkably cheap.  That's because competition in gasoline is intense.

These facts are not acknowledged by the ruling class, because Facts #2 through #5 show how they are at fault for high gas prices.  They'll never admit that.  To do so is to question their power to control these things, and they aren't about to give up that power.  Indeed, they want more.  Hence, they rabble-rouse about the evil of Big Oil to get you to acquiesce to that lust of theirs.  So, perhaps there is method in this particular madness of the mandarins.  But it's not to end that will do any of us good.

THREE QUESTIONS

When it comes right down to it, everything we can ask about anything boils down to three questions:  What?  Why?  How?

Perhaps I shouldn't be so stingy with my words.  More fully these questions are:  What exists?  Why does it exist?  How do we live our lives as a consequence?  Each of the six branches of knowledge, as I have summarized in the right-hand sidebar, addresses one of these questions.  Metaphysics and epistemology answer "what".  Theology and aesthetics answer "why".  Ethics and politics answer "how".

There's more to this than clever categorization.  It is the recognition that knowledge has more than one foundation and the proper identification of those foundations.  The knowledge needed to answer one question differs from the knowledge needed to answer the other questions.  For example, the answer to "what" constitutes scientific knowledge, in the broad sense of being falsiable.  In our modern era, we are enamored with scientific knowledge because of the great confidence we can have in it.  Yet, scientific knowledge can only answer the question "what" and no other.  We make the error of scientism if we argue that the questions "why" and "how" can be answered scientifically, or if we argue that these other questions are invalid because they cannot be answered scientifically.

The answer to "why" requires aesthetic knowledge, which are synthetic truths we have induced from the facts that answer "what" but cannot be expressed as a falsifiable statement as scientific knowledge can be.  Order and purpose exist in our universe, but comprehending the truth underlying them, God and beauty, is not reducible to science.  If we deny the validity of this knowledge because it is not scientific, we then deny ourselves an objective foundation for moral knowledge, the answer to "how".

This is because only aesthetic knowledge bridges the chasm of Hume's dilemma, the "is-ought" breach that divides fact ("what") and value ("how") into separate realms.  Moral knowledge requires the truths of aesthetic knowledge to set the objective premises from which we deduce the proper course of action to take in a given circumstance.  Without aesthetic knowledge, no particular end an individual may chose can be proscribed, because the scientific knowledge of "is" can provide no deontological foundation for "ought".  Hence, ethics and politics would be reduced to nothing but exercises in the most efficient means of achieving an individual's subjectively chosen end.

Thus, the answers to "what", "why", and "how" define the separate foundations of knowledge.  Each category has its own method to the truth, yet one depends upon the other for us to obtain the fullest knowledge we can about ourselves, our universe, and our relationship to it.