Expert Knowledge - Part 2 of 4

In the last post, I argued that even deductive systems of knowledge such as math are based on socialized systems of expert knowledge. Now, I will analyze ways in which we separate knowers from non-knowers.

If I am a math teacher, and some arrogant high school student claims to know more about math than I do, I am justified in dismissing their claims. It could always be the case that I have a Carl Friedrich Gauss in my classroom, and I am truly in the wrong. Or there are cases when I may be wrong in a given problem on the board and the student correctly points out my mistake, which was a temporary blip on my part and not a product of habitual ignorance. When it comes to substantial mathematical claims, though, assuming typical (and even precocious) students, I don't have any reason to listen to their concerns insofar as I am a mathematician. Insofar as I am a teacher, I should respond to their concerns, but even here, I am the knower communicating to the non-knowers.

So people may agree to this example; no one really likes math, so no one cares if they don't really know math. But what about medicine? People care about their health, and will follow any crazy diet or alternative source of medicine they can find to support themselves. The trained doctor, though, seems to have real knowledge on this score. If the patient disagrees with the doctor, the doctor, again, doesn't have to pay attention to any epistemological concerns that may arise; the doctor only has to pay attention insofar as it means that she has a stubborn patient that needs extra persuasion. This case is more difficult, since there is greater disagreement within the medical profession than within the mathematical. In addition, it is not as though traditional medicines of other cultures have been entirely non-empirical, and they could potentially bring something to the table that modern scientific medicine has ignored. But in most cases, the medical advice offered by average people who have not done the research is bogus. It doesn't matter that it impacts their lives more than math.

This is leading up to the touchy subject: ethics and religion. So it seems justified to have expert communities of knowledge; mathematicians really know math better (as demonstrated by near-unanimous agreement) and doctors really know medicine better (as demonstrated by empirical efficacy). And as seen with medicine, the fact that people care about the subject does not make them knowers. So why should the principles concerning how we live our lives be any different? The person who spends time familiarizing herself with long hours of study concerning how to live well, and who engages in constant dialogue with others doing the same, all the while paying attention to how the great experts in thinking and living in the past have done the same thing, therefore knows better how to live than the person on the street. The person investigating religious truths in what manner is appropriate to them, who spends long hours study the appropriate material and engaging in dialogue, etc., knows the religious life better in a way that entails that the average does not know the religious life as well.

I want to return to the latter point in discussing some points in the nature of religious faith and testimony. But a problem arises here: while it seems right to say that in some cases, we have the right to ignore opinions of those who do not know, this same attitude has in the past also been used to silence minority voices in order to preserve positions of privilege. So next, I will discuss how relations of power should also introduce a skeptical element into expert communities.

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Expert Knowledge - Part 1 of 4

When one gets right down to it, it seems that, at least from our standpoint, all knowledge comes down to expert knowledge. Practice within a field and a developed intimacy with the object of knowledge precedes any statements about logical certainty and deductive reasoning.

Let's take math, for example. Math is the most straightforwardly deductive and certain of all of our bodies of knowledge, and so if I can show that math is based on expert knowledge, then it would seem that all knowledge would be. As a math student, I had to be taught how to reason mathematically. I had to be inducted into the community of mathematicians and taught their methods of argument. When I started learning, the experienced certainty which I had of some wrong arguments was no different from the experienced certainty of many right arguments. My experience of certainty, then, was not on its own a sign of mathematical truth. I had to practice the field and learn how the mathematical community goes about doing things. Therefore, I had become an expert from the experts; it was not a bunch of reasoning which I could just show to any supposedly rational human being and have them come to the same conclusion.

Does this mean that that knowledge was just a human construction, or that there is nothing more than the agreement? Not at all! In math, the experts almost unanimously agree on the main part of the subject. In other fields, by contrast, there is a greater degree of disagreement, and so therefore the agreement does not appear to be the socialization in itself, since the practice of socialization is shared across the disciplines. It would seem that the greater the agreement is in the community of individuals looking at the object, the better our knowledge of that object is. If a bunch of people look at a visible object and agree in their description of it, it is likely that the object is what they see (more or less, subject to metaphysical and epistemological qualifications). If the people disagree, then they may not be looking at the same object, or they may not be equipped to see the object properly (perhaps it is dark). But their report of the object becomes suspect without agreement.

But if we don't have certain deductive knowledge to fall back on, since that arises out of expert knowledge and not vice versa, then the problem of competing viewpoints becomes difficult. And we cannot fall back onto deductive knowledge itself, until someone can provide a way in which I can have certainty which does not come through my own (fallible and socialized) feeling of certainty; even if they could offer anything other than a purely dogmatic assertion to the point, how would this non-perceived certainty be the certainty of my knowledge? But if we start from any system of knowledge which relies on consensus within the community, then Any time people disagree on a topic, we would seem to have reason to believe that they are not really apprehending the object of knowledge. But expert knowledge relies on stratified communities; that is, some people are included as knowers, others as non-knowers, with a range in between. It is this to which I will turn in my next post.

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Negative Platonism

How is it that we know that something is bad, or imperfect? What makes a bad argument such, or a bad society? It would seem that there can only be a bad if there is a good, and there can only be an imperfect if there is a perfect. But we do not seem to have any real examples of perfection. For something to be more or less beautiful, there must be some formal constitution of Beauty itself as Plato argues. But it does not appear that we need to know these Forms through their presence, as a legitimization of our own self-satisfied certainty. Rather, perhaps we know the Forms through their absence. This could be how they gain their existence from the supreme Form of the Good which is beyond being: the Forms are not present, and so "are" not, but they are what we strive after while making what is to be good. We are Eros, born of Poverty and Craft, pursuing Aphrodite whom we have not yet grasped. We notice that a law is bad through the absence, disorder, and impropriety which is the absence of a good law, and so, without knowing exactly what a good law on the topic is or having an existing good law, we press forward anyhow.

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Religious Dialogue and Dissertation Topics

I've been thinking over a couple of dissertation topics which my advisor has been throwing my way. The first one would give me a solid grounding in history of philosophy and experience in Greek, Latin, and Arabic. If you don't want the details, skip down to the next paragraph. It would be a study of secondary causation of God's knowledge through Proclus (5th century Neoplatonist, held that the One emanates out the world in a dizzying array of steps to account for multiplicity) and Dionysius (likely 5th-6th century Syrian monk heavily influenced by Neoplatonism; made God the direct cause of all the things Proclus split up), al-Kindi (9th century Arabian philosopher, instrumental in having works translated from Greek and Syriac, including a paraphrase of Plotinus which became known as "The Theology of Aristotle", and who held that God is the only literal agent), Ibn Sina/Avicenna (10th-11th century Persian philosopher, held that God only knows universals and that the world emanates from God in a set of stages), Ibn Rushd/Averroes (12th century Andalusian philosopher, held that God knows things as their cause), and finally the 13th century Christian philosopher and theologian Aquinas, who held that God knows everything directly as their act of being, and who seems to develop this view while working through Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. A possible conclusion would go on through to the 14th century with Scotus and Ockham, and where this focus on the individual might end up.

But I'm not sure that I'm going in that direction; it'll be a good stuff for papers, but the second idea grabbed my interest more: the epistemology of religious dialogue. It exciting me to think that I might be able to go back to doing some contemporary stuff. I can do the historical stuff well, and I always want to keep one foot in it since I still think that that is where some of the best philosophy has been done, but I want to create, to be active, to do more than sitting over texts. I don't have the attention span to be a full-time scholar, if nothing else.

So, what would be the basic problematic? On the one extreme, we have groups who engage in some sort of dialogue, but who refuse to budge. The lines have been drawn, the communities have been fixed, and now the task is to refine their own views and to figure out how to live with the either group in the political arena. For this reason, I consider this to be merely political dialogue; the religious issues would only be brought up insofar as they are relevant to how we live together without changing too much. There is a place for this too, but I do not think that it is genuine religious dialogue. I think that Plantinga' basic belief arguments would end up here, if there were to work at all.

The other extreme is pluralism. Religious pluralism might try to circumvent the issue, by saying (to put it simplistically) that we're already agreeing on the important aspects. But this is one view among others, not one view encapsulating others, and so must join the dialogue as an alternative religious vision. Pluralism still would make sense: it would still be a rejection of any overly particular claims to special revelation while an acknowledgment of a spiritual reality which has bee explored by thinkers across traditions. But that doesn't solve the problem of dialogue.

So, where does that leave us? Religious dialogue, it seems to me, must leave one open to the dialogue partner. One must be able to come to the partner expecting to hear something one does not yet understand. And this seems to me to mean that, in any genuine religious dialogue, the possibility for self-conversion must be present. This is not the necessity of conversion, or even the probability, but I must always leave it the possibility open that I may hear something new which could convince me. Otherwise, to have closed the possibility, is to have predetermined what I can hear from the partner.

But now we get to what is really tricky. Religious beliefs depend a great deal upon testimony, whether from divine revelations, the primordial sounds of the universe, or from enlightened humans who realized something we are not likely to catch on our own. If any of these form of revelation are true, it is likely that there are true things about the world for which I must really upon testimony. And so, in religious dialogue, there will be a tension: one the one hand, I must leave myself open to the possibility of self-conversion, or else it is not dialogue; one the other hand, both of us hold to a possible truth that transcends us and our ways of knowing, and for which we rely on the testimony and experience of others, which we do not give up simply because we here one thing that contradicts it. Given this tension, how does the epistemology of religious dialogue work?

If I were to go this route, I would like to spend most of my time in concrete studies. One direction I could take it would be an analysis of historical Muslim inter-religious contexts, in line with my interest in Arabic thought. There's Andalusia, with its mix of Christians, Jews, and Muslims; there's the Mughal empire in India and the different ways in which Muslims and Hindus interacted; then there's Muslim appropriations of Confucianism over in China. It's just a thought, right now, but it would be nice to get back into my interest in world religions through my graduate studies.

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Sin vs. Imperfection

I must confess that I just can't make any sense of the notion of (Christian) sin as a general concept applied to humanity any more. I would thus like to lay out in a dialectical format just what the problem is.

I imagine that there is already a chorus of voices saying, "Just look at the world! Look at the wars, at the poverty, at the injustice. How can you not believe in sin?" And if that were all that sin was, then sure; I can accept that. Sin is really messing things up. But then, it is hardly obvious that everyone is sinful. Some people, presumably unregenerate non-Christians in the eyes of some of my readers, seem to live perfectly upright, just, noble, loving lives. How are they sinful, if we pick out sin primarily by looking at the horrible events of the world?

"But even they aren't perfect. I bet they've told lies and cheated people at some point in their lives." But here is where I fundamentally disagree with the standpoint of sin. Sin assumes that people should start off perfect, and then they are penalized for not being such. It is not merely a comment on how people go wrong, but an expectation that it is perfectly reasonable that they should never have gone wrong in the first place. Rubbish. People start off with nothing and have to work their way up. When you learn math, you don't start by knowing math. Errors are a necessary part of the learning process; I bet that Jesus didn't start off by making perfect masterpiece cabinets. So why is it that suddenly in matters of character and social living, in the excruciatingly difficult process of bringing our desires into harmony with the world around us, errors are suddenly unforgivable, when they are taken for granted in calculus? People are imperfect; that is, incomplete, finite, continuing to grow, and given desires (perfectly natural ones) that conflict with the world around them; and this is often (if not always) all that is needed for explanation.

"Some people do what is right, even when it is difficult; therefore, we are all expected to do the same, even if it is hard." But how are we comparing people? If person A was given a good upbringing with a solid foundation of virtues and guidance, and person B had to make do in a horrible family environment where she had to put forward inhuman effort to not become total scum, then they are not comparable. You cannot, say, place both in the same temptation of cheating on their spouses, and then hold up A as a model for what B should have done. The present objection assumes an awful lot about what the power of human free will, which is not empirically borne out (and requires a ton of metaphysical work even for the dissidents). We are tremendously influenced (maybe even constituted) by our circumstances and even by pure moral luck, whether or not we are perfectly determined. It may be that no two cases of action are actually comparable, and so moral role models are merely models and not standards of judgment.

"But we still blame people for doing wrong, and this applies to everybody. That's what systems of justice are all about; everyone agrees that this is what justice is." That is what systems of law do, and how law may need to operate to practically govern society. Why should God be driven by the practical concerns of the polis? As for the assertion that "this is what everyone considers to be justice," I really have nothing to say other than this: get educated.

"But there is still some metaphysical principle of goodness in the world; those who follow it are rewarded, and those who don't are damned, regardless of anything else you want to consider." What is this metaphysical principle? Why is this the way things necessarily are, rather than some just-so story? Why can't God continue working on "sinful" souls until they do pursue the good? Why can't God annihilate those who are incorrigible?

"How about the Holocaust? Is that merely an 'imperfection'? How can you explain that?" At least as well as any Christian who takes the Old Testament literally. God commanded genocide, therefore genocide in itself is not evil. Hitler simply lacked the divine command, but there was nothing intrinsically evil about his actions. And whether or not one interprets the OT literally, God still knew that the Holocaust would happen and let it happen. Even that, then, cannot be an absolute evil (assuming such would make sense), but merely a relative evil for us petty human beings who can't realize our greater place in the universe. As a relative evil, it is an imperfection of some human beings, both the perpetrators and the victims. Any account of "sin" would be secondary to this and subject to the points above.

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On Astrology, Ptolemy, and the Four Elements: The Use of Bad Theories

I was finally getting around to reading the last book of the Hitchhiker's Guide pentology, and I find a quote in there on a topic for which I had already written down some notes order to write a blog post:

"I know that astrology isn't a science," said Gail. "Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or - what's that strange thing you British play?" "Er, cricket? Self-loathing?" "Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations."

So, what is the importance of theory, especially in philosophy?

It seems that I can look at theories that seem to be flawed, and still learn from them. I can read the Renaissance Platonist Ficino on astrology, and still make sense of what he is doing. His division of the world into spheres controlled by the different planets, each under the aspect of a god, a muse, and an aspect of Bacchus, can be insightful even when his reasons for the division have been thoroughly discredited. Similarly, personality theories can be helpful for understanding oneself. Myers-Briggs may lack rigorous scientific evidence, especially insofar as it posits specific explanations of how and why people act, and I may never fit completely into the INTP mold, but I still think that it is more useful for my own self-understanding than the scientifically developed Big Five test, which can group personality characteristics accurately but does not give anything underlying explanations.

Similarly, I can look at scientific achievements in the past which were grounded in bad theories. Astronomy was developed by and large within the Ptolemaic framework. And don't think that this was simply because everyone started with the theory: the data was explained rather well at first by the theory (we experience things rotating around the Earth, and most of the stars seem to stay in their places without big changes). People could continue to revise the theory to deal with the data, and even after people like Copernicus and Galileo, it took Newton and Kepler to establish why the Heliocentric model actually did explain the data better. A lot of astronomical data was accumulated in those Ptolemaic times. Would we have been able to understand as much as we did about the sky, without a wrong theory to organize our data and make it manageable?

Also, take medicine. Western medicine was by and large built on a four-element view of the world: things can be hot or cold, and they can be wet and dry, and different pairings give you the different elements. Makes sense, for a rough-and-ready view of the world. And you can read Galen or Avicenna or Maimonides using this theory in understanding medicine. They may not have been completely right, but they weren't completely wrong either; good doctors in any time or place generally leave their patients in better condition for the visit, or they get labeled as quacks. People notice if Doctor A's patients all die. So the empirical observations of these doctors were still a progress in knowledge, even though their theory was wrong: the four elements were not constituents of the world as building blocks for material mixtures. But this theory also let them be able to process complicated accounts of the human body; could there have been medicine without it?

One issue that has been coming up is that we seem able to advance in empirical knowledge in spite of, and even because of, wrong theories. But what about philosophical understanding? I hear it often said that, due to our increased knowledge of neurological processes, there is no place for dualism anymore. Hogwash. People have always known that if you get hit upside the head, your cognitive faculties will be impaired. We just know a bunch more ways to impair them, now. Avicenna had a rather dualistic account of the person, but again, he was a doctor. He knew about material interactions which interrelated with thought, and they were extensive. In general, medieval cognitional theory is pretty sophisticated and saves any sort of non-bodily cognition only for the highest and hardest cases involving pure intelligibles, which even then often still require some sort of material correlate. I fail to see how modern neuroscience changes the basic framework here, even if it can inspire utmost awe at the marvelous workings of our brains. It fills out the description, but leaves the general categories untouched.

So even within wrong theories, good philosophical categories may persist. And in addition, returning the the original quote, self- and humanistic-knowledge seems to arise clearly in some ways independently of theory. Is this part of the reason for Plato's fondness of myths?

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Standards of Evidence in Religion

Sorry to bog down the blog with another anti-apologetic posting. But I have been thinking about an issue which I think is serious, and I would like to hear some critical thought on the matter. Let's put down issues of the extent to which someone should doubt or be critical of what has been given them on any absolute scale. Let's have a relative standard of evidence: the evidence we ask from history should be comparable to the evidence we ask from our daily lives.

Ask yourself this: what would it take to convince you that someone was genuinely God incarnate, here and now? What would make you leave your religion, as people left their families and ways of life, and eventually Judaism or paganism to follow Jesus? Take this standard of evidence, and apply it to the historical record. If you had four texts claiming to be eyewitness accounts, and reports about people having seen someone rising from the dead, would you go and follow that person? If not, why do you accept the Biblical account?

Note that you cannot simply imagine yourself as someone who was an eyewitness, or receiving secondhand reports. This is not the relation we have to the historical data. It has been mediated to us; at very best, we may have some books of the NT written by eyewitnesses to a significant portion of Jesus' life, and that even is not indisputable. You can't go ask eyewitnesses yourself, because you cannot go ask ask the eyewitnesses whom Paul references. You would have the same distance from the evidence for the person here and now, as you currently have from the life of Jesus. Would you then believe the claims of the next religious leader?

Also, you must compare like cases with like. You can't say, "Well, the evidence claims that Jesus rose from the dead, but this other person only did significant miracles/got reincarnated/etc.", unless you can give a very strong reason why being resurrected is categorically different from the others. I'm not sure that it's even the oddest miracle out there; being both God and man seems to be infinitely greater, if it even makes sense, and I'm not sure what counts as good evidence for that in any time period. At any rate, miracles need to be judged insofar as they are miracles, religious claims need to be judged insofar as they are religious, and so on. If you can't accept some miracle-worker who claims to be a Boddhisattva, then would you really accept claims that some guy got resurrected, showed up to a few people, and alone was identical with the single, categorically-different-from-creation God? The former would seem to require much less evidence, even though its truth would at least be a significant problem for Christianity.

At this point some people may say, "But Scripture tells us to watch out for miracle workers and such," or "Scripture tells us that Christ was it. There is no new revelation." Or related things; fill them in as you like. But, you can't assume what you want to prove. We are weighing the evidence for Christianity here, and so we cannot assume that the Christian story/Scripture/our pastors are correct before looking at the evidence.

Finally, I have heard one concern a few times (worded almost eerily the same; maybe it's coming from some common source?), and it absolutely puzzles me. It goes along of the lines of this: "We don't have any more evidence to give, what do you expect? Why should non-Christians have paid attention to what was going on at the time of the Resurrection, in order to provide an alternative perspective?" But I don't see how this is relevant. I'm asking about whether the evidence we have is sufficient to establish truth, and that has nothing to do (or very little) with what evidence I can expect. Let's take the Riemann Hypothesis in mathematics. It has not yet been proven. Even if it could not be proven, this does not mean that I then can expect to get anywhere by picking the side that seems to have the most evidence. That evidence does not meet the standards for mathematical argument, and becomes completely null and void (unless, perhaps, I am a practiced mathematician with an excellent grasp on related issues, in which case I may have intuitions which would raise my opinion slightly above random guessing). Although history is more complicated and admits of degrees of evidence (as well as corresponding degrees of assent), even if we can't expect more evidence, this doesn't make the evidence we have any more conducive to a decision. Arguing merely from what we can expect, or from what is available, is simply fideism.

So, if you truly and honestly would go and follow some contemporary religious teacher under the same standards of evidence upon which you base your current faith, then I simply ask that you have that integrity. If not, then stop claiming any evidence for your faith: you are a fideist, or a pragmatist, but you do not have the support of rational argument.

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Blake on Infinite Desire

William Blake's "There is No Natural Religion (b)":

I. Man's perceptions are not bound by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover.
II. Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.
III. [This proposition is missing.]
IV. The bounded is loathed by its possessor. the same dull round, even of the universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.
V. If the many become the same as the few when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul; less than All cannot satisfy Man.
VI. If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.
VII. The desire of Man being infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.
Conclusion.
If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.
Application.
He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.

Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.

(For context, in (a), Blake argues that if we can only perceive what we have senses for; if you were to have no sight, you would not be able to even think of visual things. See http://www.newi.ac.uk/rdover/blake/nonatrel.htm.)

So if our desire is to have any chance at being satisfied, there must be a way of encountering the infinite here and now:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

(- "Auguries of Innocence")

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Programming Languages and Ontology

A rather whimsical idea struck me: are ontological systems reducible in some way to programming languages? In particular, there are four main types of programming languages: procedural, object-oriented, functional, and declarative. Each takes a different paradigm. And they are all Turing-equivalent.

A procedural language is pretty straightforward: just type in your commands in order. If you've programmed in C or Basic (including on your graphing calculator), you know what a procedural language is. Do x, do y, do z. This is like a narrative mode of accounting for the world, running straight through the information in a linear fashion.

An object-oriented language, like C++ or Java, focuses more on objects. One packages the structures which one is using in a particular way: there is a class with certain functions, and one instantiates objects of this class. This is a substance ontology, of an Aristotelian sort at that.

A functional language, like Lisp (the greatest language ever), by contrast focuses entirely on functions. This is a process ontology. Everything is a function (in good style), and functions simply call functions to get things done.

A declarative language, like Prolog, is relational. It is a logical system, concerning with the interrelations between the terms. It basically just is formal logic as a computer program.

But, in the end, all of these are Turing-equivalent. What does that mean? It means that they all do the same stuff, even though they go about it in different ways.

So what could be an implication of this? If ontologies are computable, if they cut up the world in ways similar to a computer program, then all of the wrestling back and forth over these particular options is over practicality and elegance, not over which one actually describes reality, since if one does then any does. This wouldn't mean that either reality or our minds are in themselves computable, but merely that once we introduce individuation and differentiation into the world, once we have started to cut it up, the world-pieces can be put together as narratival, as substantial, as processual, or as relational equally well.

But isn't starting from world-pieces (or bits of zeros and ones) already an ontology? Perhaps, but one imposed to have anything to say; this is our boot-straps by which we pull ourselves up. Communication requires some digitalization, which we hope approximates analogue reality. The pieces, though, do not come with relations already ingrained. We add those. But the pieces are amenable to the relations; the relations aren't merely imposed, but the pieces are potentially related in the various ways. Practical concerns aren't simply a construction of reality, but a revelation of it.

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An Imperfect Elitism

What's wrong with elitism? It seems to me that elitism is simply the statement that some people are better than others. Now, surely we take some people to be better than others on a relative level; person A is stronger than person B, B is more knowledgable with regard to medicine than A, and so on. And some ends we consider to be more important than others: it doesn't matter whether Charles Manson was really a great artist, he is still inferior as a human being to Gandhi. And if I had to choose between these two whose life was more valuable, I would not hesitate in my choice, so it seems odd to me to say that all humans have been created equal in value. For those who may bring God into the picture, saying that God holds everyone equal, I will point to those whom God has completely separated from all means of salvation as well as basic human needs; you may as well convince me of square Euclidean circles than that God loves people equally, perhaps barring some form of universalism. So I do not understand why we reject out of hand the idea that some people are simply better, other than from a misplaced democratic affection which wills that since we want everyone to be equal, they all are already.*

Now, I am not saying that this is the happiest situation, that we should embrace the fact that there is a human elite and rejoice in it. Feel free to wish that all people were equal, and work to make this true. Just do not mistake it for a present reality.

But that brings up a problem. Formerly, we would wish for the elite to have a prodominent voice in society, whether they be philosopher-kings, aristocratic gentlemen, academics, or whatnot. In turn, we have had similar situations in terms of cultures; culture A sees itself as superior to culture B, and proceeds to colonize. That has yet to work out. It seems to me that there are two fundamental problems. First, we don't know exactly who the elite are. In a society run by culture or education, others outside of power structures have been known to poke fun at those in charge, at their emptiness and book-knowledge. And how does one cull the best people for an aristocracy without lapsing into oligarchy? Concerning intercultural relations, we are still trying to get down the basics of understanding each others' cultures; how can we judge between them? What values are truly important, and who instantiates them? How do we avoid simply picking random differences and playing them as trumps, such as skin-color?

Second, even if we were to properly pick out the elite in the given situation, would they be elite enough? We can think of siblings playing, where the older sibling convinces the younger to do something really stupid. The older sibling most likely is truly more experienced, intelligent, etc. than the younger, but just enough so to get them in trouble. So just because one group is better than another, this does not automatically mean that the better group can legitimately lead the worse, let alone force their decisions.

So we appear to be stuck with an imperfect elite. If it were elite enough and recognizable enough, it could run things and this would be best for society. If there were no elite, then everyone could participate in everything equally in a true democracy. As things stand, there are many who really should be silent, but they should not be silenced. Not all voices are equal, but no one is meet to judge among them. To let everyone have a say leads to carnivals on urgent issues like health care, to fully blameworthy behavior on the part of truly ignorant oafs, but is this worse than Mao or Stalin? Is there a solution, other than doing our best to educate people that by default they should shut up on political matters until they have a worthwhile, studied opinion?

What would such a studied opinion be? There is a difference between opining that one is jobless (a claim I'd most likely accept), that one's community is mostly jobless (a claim I'd accept pending a search into how well this one represents her community), and that one knows how to solve the job situation (a claim at which I'd most likely be skeptical for most people having the problem, and at least without some significant insight into general structures of society). Everyone can attain the first, of their own personal experiences. Those of practical wisdom along with community involvement can attain the second. The third is for those with a more theoretical background. Both the second and third need the voices of the first for their data, but that is where the first ends; those who do not learn anything beyond their own situation have no right to politics. The voices of practical and of theoretical reason, in turn, never reduce to each other, since the practical person will does not, as practical, understand the broader relations outside of her context, and the theoretical person, as theoretical, does not know the lived, material conditions.

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* What if even saying that all people are of equal value is misleading, since there simply is no relation of measurement between people at all? What if people are to be accepted, not compared? I'm thinking mainly along more Daoist or Zen lines here, in particular, that our judgements of good and bad have created the problem. I'll have to think more on this one, but it does at least go against my basic suspicions (which come with no guarantee of truth); if nothing else, politics seems to me about relative problems of managing groups of people, and relative problems create relative standards of judgement applicable within the sphere of the problem.

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The Role of Creation in Art

About a week ago or so, I had mentioned that apologetics is more like art than like science: it is about applying one's ideas to a given matter, rather than trying to objectively interpret that matter itself. And as was brought up, this is not quite like how artists look at their work; artists can be just as surprised as anyone else by what they come up with. This seems to me to be a legitimate problem; so what is the difference between the scientist and the artist/apologist?

It seems that we cannot really separate out creation and discovery, subjectivity and objectivity. The pure "artist" would be entirely subjective, purely creating without any worry for the object matter. God is the only one who would fit here, and even then we would have to talk about the relation of essences and nature to God's creation. The pure scientist would be entirely objective, purely discovering what is in the world. It seems that this is a legitimate view of the ideal scientist, while the above is not necessarily the ideal artist; many artists want to explore their art and not purely create, it seems to me. Still, I don't have a better word coming to mind right now, so I will talk about the ideal scientist and the ideal artist.

It does seem that artists still fall closer to this ideal than to that of the scientist. Once one decides on a musical motif, or on a particular image or character for a literary work, the rest of the work may very well already be determined. A well-cohering work demands that things fit together in a certain way, after all; the good artist is feeling out the essential structure of such things (or if you don't like talk of essences, then simply "the way something is and its tendencies" or some such equivalent). But despite this determination of a work once certain elements have been chosen, the elements and a general notion of the work would seem to be necessary in the first place. This is applied to the matter in a work closer to that of creation than of discovery, even if everything after is closer to something discovered.

Of course, someone could point out that artists often just come up with their ideas. Some flash of insight arises, and they go to work, but they didn't plan out their insight. True, and perhaps this is moment of genius is what happens in most truly good art even. I at least know that works for which I had a sudden inspiration tend to work out better than ones which more fully plan out, although that is in part my own lack of skill. But even if this is still outside the control of the artist, it comes about in a different way than the application of the idea to the matter. Both may be more or less determined, but they are determined in different ways, and it is this difference between the more ideal/spiritual/mental/etc. arising of the idea, and the working out of its consequences in the matter, in which I am interested.

So, with that said, the artist (along with the apologist) is not merely creating, just as real scientists aren't merely discovering. But it stills seems that placing them at different points of the continuum is reasonable.

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Spiritual Exercises and Historical Analysis

We had a couple of really good talks here at Marquette last weekend. Last Friday, Michael Chase (among other things, translator into English of some works by Pierre Hadot) gave us quite the journey. He started with ancient skepticism, and talked about Hadot's views on how ancient philosophy (by which, I mean ancient Greco-Roman philosophy) was about spiritual exercises as much as anything else; it was about a way of life. Next, he talked about Nassim Taleb's modern-day skepticism, which takes the epistemological pieces but declaims the practices as being too hard for actual people.

The most cogent of Taleb's criticisms was that we are hardwired to make certain judgments about the world, and so the skeptic ideal of suspending judgment is illusory. Chase brought in modern accounts of brain plasticity and studies on how mindfulness meditation seems to make certain sections of the brain larger, which allows for increased ability to sit back and observe a situation without judging. Now, as he mentioned in the question-and-answer session, this can be seen to be simply part of the skeptic practice of arguing both sides of the problem. But it does seem to provide evidence for increased ability to suspend judgment after putting in the hard work, nevertheless. And even if perfect suspension of judgment is only an ideal, progress seems to be possible.

Next, Chase showed that there are some key features of modern mindfulness meditation (which is in turn taken largely from Buddhist sources, and generally without recognition of any Western roots). These same key features show up in ancient skepticism, and in ancient philosophy in general. True, people weren't sitting around counting breaths, but that is only a technique. The goal of apatheia, of objective and detached analysis of the world and of increased insight into one's own inner workings, are there (he went into a bit more detail, showing five core points that have been established in mindfulness meditation and identifying each one with practices in ancient philosophy). So ancient skeptical practices, insofar as they intending to advocate a lifestyle and not merely academic discussions, would seem to have had some effect on actual suspension of judgment.

It was nice to here of philosophy as something beyond academic disputations. But what interested me at least as much was that Dr. Chase had given a talk the day before, looking at a neglected commentary of the Neoplatonist Porphyry and digging up references which clarified Porphyry's views on cognition. The detailed historical analysis wasn't something other than what he was talking about in the more exciting talk; as he told me when I asked him afterward, the work of analysis and translation are also spiritual exercises, making him put away himself with his interests and concerns for the time. Interesting way to think of the work that I am doing.

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