Know Your History!

Everything happens in a time and place.
Everything happens in a context.
Everything happens for a reason (whether we argue there is an "ultimate meaning" for the world, it seems to be the case that the law of cause and effect applies. I would argue there are relatively few things that happen "for no reason." There are things that happen for no apparent reason, but everything happens for a reason. The question of whether or not we can rightly ascertain the reasons that things happen is an open question which I am making no attempt to address here.)

The world didn't begin yesterday. All of us have been staked to a heritage (however you want to describe it.) This heritage effects the way we think, the things we enjoy and the conventions of social life. In other words, history matters. What happened yesterday has a bearing on what happens today, and what happens tomorrow. All of us, whether we like it or not, is grounded in something bigger than ourselves.

There is something unfolding. Some would argue that this unfolding is the process of humanity learning to perfect itself. Some would argue that this unfolding is the progressive revelation of the plan of a deity (or deities). Still others would argue that though the law of cause and effect applies, there is no explicit or implicit goal of any kind in the unfolding. Through all of these explanations, there is still an unfolding. One thing happens. Something happens after that which reflects, reacts, responds or otherwise handles the thing previous.

I would go further. I would argue that history is a complex system of action and reaction--that no occurance is totally disconnected from what precedes it or what follows it. If this view is true (and because it's my blog I'm going to assume for the moment that it is, whatever the underlying reason for why it is so), then history is very important because it gives insight into the way things have gone and what a period of time is staked to in terms of heritage. Especially in the realm of ideas, systems interact and respond to one another. The reaction against a system of ideas creates a countermovement. The reaction for a system often leads to an even more strenuous version of the system, where the presuppositions and activities of that system are carried all the way to their logical end. Often times, this hyperapplication of an idea system leads to a messy end, at which time those present for the meltdown of the system salvage what they can from the disaster and start again. Humanity has been in this system of action and reaction, the system of reformulating the same ideas over and over again in the laboratory we call the world, for a very long time. If we want to claim to know anything about the world we live in, therefore, we MUST know something about how we've arrived where we are now.

There will be entries on the nature of history in specific areas added to the end of this entry as they become necessary.

Concepts and Definitions.

If you look around the ideosphere right now, there isn't much clarity or disclosure in the way that people describe and explain the way they think. As such, there's lots of confusion. Different worldviews (idea systems) use the same term different ways. As just one example, I'd like to offer up the word 'tolerance.' Without going into a long diatribe about the newer ways in which the word is being employed, it will suffice to say that in many cases now people don't mean what the dictionary says when they use the word 'tolerance.' No matter what you think of that development, asking someone to define their terms (or asking good questions that will give you a hint about how they're using it) is a fundamental part of any serious discussion.

This might sound like a waste of time. To others it might sound like a sort of arcane pursuit, totally removed from useful conversation. If everyone used the same words the same way, both of these criticisms would be exactly true. But the way things are now, those who don't ask careful questions are setting themselves up for trouble.

In addition, many current philosophical/theological positions make assumptions from previous schools and then carefully relabel an old idea with a newer, hipper name. If we can get down to the ideas that comprise a view and compare them to older ideas with a longer history, that can also be a helpful pursuit. This blog is going to explore the kinds of definitions and concepts which are prevalent in these types of discussion in an effort to provide some kind of basic grounds on which to build.

Here's a partial list of some of the ideas and concepts (building blocks) which will need to be tackled:

Three Pursuits of Philosophy:

1. Metaphysics
2. Ethics
3. Epistemology

Philosophical Systems: (aka the "-isms")

• Rationalism
• Empiricism
• Utilitarianism
• Pragmatism
• Skepticism
• Stoicism
• Deism
• Theism
• Existentialism
• Nihilism
• Logical Positivism
• Monism
• Dualism
• Hedonism

Philosophical Concepts & Laws

• a priori
• reductio ad absurdum
• ad hoc
• ad hominem
• Law of Identity
• Law of the Excluded Middle (Bivalence)
• Law of Contradiction (a.k.a Law of Non-Contradiction)

Challenges.

The search for answers has lots of problems. But there is no greater threat to the search than the current wave of anti-intellectualism rolling over much of the West. Beyond simple ambivalence to knowledge, ignorance is now touted on the street corners as the new knowledge.

Certainly philosophy has not helped itself in this regard. Simply thinking about issues like the ones I'll be suggesting does not, in itself, provide any meaningful service to society or the individual. Action must come from right thought if right thought is to have any value. The ancients sought after "the good life"- the right way to live, to think, to be. Our society seems to have redefined the good life as simply having lots of material possessions and our fill of pleasures, and right thought as simply ignoring things which do not please us. Still, right thinking without right activity is empty.

It is no more empty however, than acting without thinking. Anti-intellectualism minimizes the role of thought and then cultivates disdain for the thought process itself by painting it as inherently unuseful in itself. Take for example the latest commercials from IBM. My favorite involves a man walking in on a room full of people laying flat on their backs "ideating." When asked what they are doing, the people let the man know that they are rethinking everything, attempting to innovate their world. The man then asks the logical question of how they plan to accomplish this, and the response from the mob is, "We haven't ideated that yet." The point of the commercial is plain: simply laying around thinking doesn't get the job done. On the other hand, I would argue that simply doing things without thought for how or why or what is equally silly, and just as destructive.

If we are to be serious about this pursuit, we must take both a desire to find answers and, just as importantly, a deep desire to implement the answers find once we have found them. Nothing else will do and integrity requires nothing less.

...Nothing Comes.

One of the most basic premises the ancients adopted in their first thoughts about the question of ultimate origins can be expressed through the latin phrase "ex nihilo, nihil fit," or put alternately, "from nothing, nothing comes." In other words, everything comes from someplace. If something exists, it has an origin.

That seems simple enough, and in many of the senses that matter, it is. Everything comes from something. But that begs a question when we apply it to ultimate origin. Is there a point somewhere/sometime/someplace where there was nothing? If so, there is a profound problem that must be addressed. If nothing comes from nothing, forever and ever, and now there is something, either we must say that there has always been something or we must say that there was some kind of violation of that primary law of ex nihilo. I think most (though certainly not all) will acknowledge readily that we exist (whatever that means) and that the world in which we live is in some sense real and binding on those of us who live in/on it.

At first glance, this would appear to suggest that this universe has always existed. But science indicates this is likely not the case. The universe has a beginning. If we are to trust the astro-physicists (something I will do blindly at this point to avoid the tangential questions which have nothing to do with the point I'm attempting to make), we must believe that there was an explosion that marked the beginning of things as we know them, called, creatively, the point of expansion. At this point, all the matter that is currently in our universe filled an area that was just millimeters across, and later exploded to produce everything we now see.

Again, at first glance, this seems to solve our problem. Where did everything come from? Simple. There was an explosion, and the material that participated in the explosion later mingled/bonded/interacted in such a way as to produce the world we now see. But again, there's a problem. That doesn't answer the question of origin. If we posit that there was material as the beginning, we still haven't handled the question of where that material came from. It certainly didn't come from nowhere, as that is clearly impossible.

So, we find ourselves at an impasse. We must either accept that the material which comprised that explosion always existed, has always existed, and will always exist (think about the law of conservation of mass, etc on this), or we must accept that at some point in the timeline, there was nothing, and then there was something, an obvious violation. How are we to decide which option we prefer?

As a Christian theist, I have elected to select the option of violation--of miraculous intervention in the nothing--to explain everything we now see. Later, as issues of meaning approach, this option will be shown to be superior to the other options. It also should be noted that it does not necessarily find itself inferior to the other option, so long as we can marshal evidence that in fact some kind of miraculous intervention is either possible or likely. It need not remove the validity of other options to be worthy of consideration, it need only bear the scrutiny of the strongest competition.

From Nothing...

After several abortive attempts at trying to lay the foundations for a rationalist blog that could approach a myriad of social, religious and ideological issues, I've discovered a problem common to nearly all who attempt these types of idea-based pursuits: the impossible question of where to begin.

Any beginning will be based on the principles of the one making the start, by definition. The system by which that beginning is made is subject to judgment on its own merit, but no system worth taking seriously is baseless.

Therefore, the most fundamental question that must be asked (and answered) is the question of what principles we will use, and what kind of beginning they leave us to induce.

This question is one of the primary reasons I find empiricism somewhat unsatisfactory. If we are to take a hard-line empirical view of the beginning, what we discover is humanity, and its own sensory capabilities. There can be nothing where there is no one to know it. The great strength of empiricism is that in the present tense, it is existentially viable. The vast majority of us know what we see and hear and experience, and that collected experience transmitted and archived, provides a database of information by which we can evaluate what we see. Those same strengths are, however, something of an obstacle anytime we attempt to describe solely through empirical means things which no human being has experienced personally. Unfortunately for empiricism, that leaves its adherents without a substantive answer to the question of ultimate origins.

That is not to say that rationalism is bulletproof on this matter either. The only advantage I see in it in distinction to empiricism here is that it does not require a human being to present to observe it to be valid. In the interest of full disclosure, I am not only a rationalist, I am also a Christian theist. As might be expected, I have a somewhat predictable view of the beginnings of everything that can be known.

Nevertheless, it is critically important that we do not miss the forest for the trees. If we are going to be honest, we need to come to grips with the most profound problem we as human beings have. We are attempting to explain our existence and the existence of a universe, and we are doing it with far less information than would be necessary for definitive empirical proof for any solution we might tender. Luckily for us, we have other means at our disposal, and the call of rationalism beckons. I look forward to making another attempt at this. As it stands, I hope to spend some time laying a foundation and then trying to handle contemporary issues.