value wrote
It is the perception on philosophy in general that I intend to question.
The word philosophy is known to all and my argument is that in the past century, science has attempted to overcome philosophy by placing philosophy on a level comparable with religions.
Well, philosophy split into to warring camps, analytic and continental. The analytic types are clearly trying to maintain respect after so much time and ink on metaphysics. Then Moore and Russel and Wittgenstein and the positivists drew a line, saying there is nonsense and meaningful talk, and metaphysics is nonsense. And this reduces philosophical discussion to ordinary language, which is a futility at best. But at least, they tell us, they are being clear. Clarity over content, as I put it. Trouble is, the world is NOT clear like that at all at the level of basic questions.
Remove religion from philosophy? Better, remove bad metaphysics from philosophy, things like Plato's eternal Forms or the Christian trinity or Aquinas' proofs of God's existence, and so on. Continental philosophy takes metaphysics as a feature of our finitude, which makes for an interesting question: Follow inquiry to its end, where do you end up? Nonsense? On the other hand, dismissing this dimension of our existence is not simply irresponsible, it is abandoning the very "end" of philosophy. Here, it depends on who is asking the question, for some find in this nothing, while others find access of the most significant something. Heidegger brings us to this precipice, then can go no further. He cannot make that "leap" to affirm that all is, in the description of the being of beings, eternal.
But, and this is critical, this is not the kind of eternity of a sequence of numbers that trail off without end. Rather, this is a matter of what lies before you, in established understanding of what is "there". It is a fence post, and we can say a thousand things about fence posts, but when we ask about it ontologically and epistemologically (which are really the same thing), now its being a fence post is in question, that is, its very identity as a fence post. Take this inquiry all the way it can go, and you reach eternity, or a radical indeterminacy, and the fence post is now a "presence" only. This leads us to what separates, if you ask me, the pure intellectual from the intuitive intellectual. On the intuitive side, the word gelassenheit is used here: a letting the world be, and a yielding to what is there in the "presence".
There are those who hold that this is ground for a true religious encounter with the world, for, as Walt Wittman put it, all schools and creeds are in abeyance. But it is difficult to understand how this can be objectified, fit for a public knowledge claim, for the only way one can really arrive at this kind of "purity" of perception is either to become a serious Buddhist or read Kant through Derrida, and through post modern French onto-theology.
Serious Buddhism (not simply calming the mind for greater mental comfort) is, I hold, the most radical thing there is in the world.
"...and after science has, with the happiest results, resisted theology, whose “hand-maid” it had been too long, it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its turn to play the “master” – what am I saying! to play the PHILOSOPHER on its own account."
Keep in mind that Nietzsche died long before the analytic/continental divide. But he does presage it. This today is exactly what has happened, science, in its wantonness and indiscretion, presumes to philosophize. The trouble is, Nietzsche understood neither religion nor philosophy. He simply suspicious and cynical, which makes him a shoe-in for a scientific pov, which is uncompromising and rigorous. But then, not did he love the rising positivism, either. He did love the Greeks, not for Socrates, but for gladiatorial.
I have little use for him.
The consequence of the process in a century of time: science has attempted to fundamentally overcome philosophy within human culture.
The process has been gradual and one of the results has been a cultural belief in materialism.
The Big Bang theory is a (about to be...) relic of the movement and the idea that the mind is produced by the brain and the idea that psychiatry can become master of mind on behalf of science is another example.
Like I said, the matter needs to be left up to those with the technical knowledge. Re. the mind produced buy the brain, I don't think this is the case. But it has to be argued. This issue is for philosophy, not science.
My view is that in order for science to manifest a cultural influence in the world, it will need to do so based on a justifying belief, which is the dogmatic belief in uniformitarianism.
The dogmatic belief in uniformitarianism may have been grounded by Kant through his concept apodictical certainty (apodiktische Gewißheit) which is the belief in the intrinsic realness of space and time, and therewith a certain ground for causality.
Well, I can't argue against justified belief. Apodicticity is apriority, and this, along with causality and all of the categories of pure reason, are simply coercive to the understanding. Dostoevsky resisted, but he took it that one's freedom held one at a distance from apodicticity, but this doesn't mean you can willfully think against logic. It means that you can turn away from it.
And recall that Kant didn't hold a thesis of the intrinsic realness of space and time. These were "intuitions," that is, representations that, due to their apriority are clearly not of a world that is independent of mind.
Uniformitarianism? Don't know what this is in this context.
Within the idea of certainty there is no place for philosophy, so the described cultural effect - 'the cultural abolishment of philosophy' - is a natural and obvious effect when philosophy is to introduce a fundamental certainty in the world, a certainty that is to be accepted by all, which Kant has been able to do as being one of the most prominent philosophers that guided humanity's views on reality.
Besides the fundamental certainty dogma on the basis of which science has found a justification to overcome philosophy, there must also be a strong motivational factor to drive the shaping of human culture, which is the simple result of the idea that the facts of science are all that can be meaningful in the world (more simply said: that scientific facts exist without philosophy), which naturally results in the endorsement of the 'greater good of science' ideology, which is scientism philosophy.
With Kant, apriority only is about the form of judgment and experience, and as far as actual experiential content, he simply wanted to critique metaphysics by showing the radical finitude of our existence. He wanted to show how our everyday affairs of thinking, socializing, solving problems, and all the rest, "is rendered possible only by an ontological comprehension that precedes it and resides in the very structure of the knower." (Richardson) This preceding is not, of course, a temporal idea. It is that our regular affairs presuppose a deeper analysis, and this is ontology, and for Kant, a rational ontology about the structure of rational thought. Heidegger will come along and do a full ontology of human dasein, which is the Totality of what we ARE, not just reason. He rejects absolutes, for even though I am coerced by reason to accept modus ponens, this is something understood IN language, and language is contingent, historical. It doesn't change the coercive nature of the intuition of deductive reasoning, but it does tell us this "understanding' we have of this intuition is hermeneutical and contingent. As he famously put is, knowing there is a lamp on the desk is a matter of taking that "there"
AS a lamp. Outside of this "taking AS," and outside of the language that speaks this "lampness" into existence, it is nothing at all.
But yes, Kant did think, as you say, the facts of science are all that can be known about objects empirically. BUT: this is not to say philosophically science has any place here. Philosophers are not scientists. To think of Kant the way Heidegger did, stand there and behold your environment. Kant is saying all that you see before is saturated with metaphysics, for in the understanding ontology, there is the apriority of the implicit knowledge of seeing a tree as a tree, a lamp AS a lamp.
Besides the fundamental certainty dogma on the basis of which science has found a justification to overcome philosophy, there must also be a strong motivational factor to drive the shaping of human culture, which is the simple result of the idea that the facts of science are all that can be meaningful in the world (more simply said: that scientific facts exist without philosophy), which naturally results in the endorsement of the 'greater good of science' ideology, which is scientism philosophy.
The greater good of science ideology is an unspoken ideology and Atheists naturally endorse that ideology in the evident absence of a meaning beyond enjoyment.
But again, science is not philosophy nor is it religion. My view is that religion qua religion is grounded structurally in our existence. Meaning when you remove all of the incidentals of what popular religions say, you find phenomenology staring back at you in the direct confrontation with the world, and here you encounter metaphysics and in metaphysics you encounter metaethics and metaaesthetics and from here one can discover the grounding authority for the meaning in our lives.
As a "meta" pov, there is little to say, so there is no dogmatic moral insistence on cultural matters at all, beyond, simply, Do no harm! Encourage the "good"! (Wittgenstein). It is like saying, when we get down to something truly pure, much of our ethics is worn on the sleeve of the world, that is, is visible and unproblematic, not at all the way religions typically confuse and distort. This kind of thinking grounds our ethics metaphysically, but being without entanglements in the live-a-day world, it doesn't really solve problems...unless it does. I am suggesting that it is possible to establish an ontological hierarchy of value, which means that
there are some experiences that are inherently better than others.
This is a very unwelcome idea in a democratic system. Good thing I am not talking about systems of government and their assumptions.
Atheism campaign: God does not exist
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As usual, it depends on what one means by God. This is not an "ontic" question, but an ontological question, the attempt to ground the term's meaning in the world of presuppositional analysis.
What drives Atheists emotionally and passionately? That cannot merely be a revolting against religions. It is about something greater: a greater good in the form of the interests of science. Something to believe in. Something to be passionate about. A brighter future.
In the absence of a meaning beyond that what exists, it is science that holds the potential to master all quality and meaning in the world and therefore following science should be seen as the most ethical and moral form of human behaviour.
The dogmatic idea of certainty introduced by Kant is vitally the ground upon which Atheism and a greater good of science ideology are possible.
On the internet the cultural statement 'I believe in science' is often remarked.
Only a fool doesn't believe in science.
Well, Kant did say that we cannot make meaningful statements about noumena. But Kant is not the end of this issue. It moves on to other who work through Kant's position on to greater insight.
What you have called scientism is the attempt to make science's thematic commitments into philosophy, and you are right, this is happening everywhere as people fall away from religion and simply don't have the time to put into Heidegger or Kant or other meaningful philosophical response to religious issues. These are HARD to read, and alien to science. It is a sticky wicket, no? On the one hand I am glad to hear they are turning away from, well, just plain silliness (as is found, say, in Christian home schooling). But on the other hand, science just isn't philosophy. Reading Husserl is NOT at all like reading Science Magazine. But then, the philosophy of science IS like this, thatis, an extension of science into speculation.
What can I say, at least science is better than dangerous stupidity. My thinking is that once AI delivers us from drudgery, we will all have time to be philosophers.
What is philosophy in a world in which people are classified as either being pro-science or anti-science?
It is simply a false dichotomy. Those who are anti science are selectively so and it is hard to take them at all seriously. Those who are pro-science, as you mean it here, do not read any philosophy except the philosophy of science. Anglo American philosophy is fast becoming a nothing more than speculative science.
Don't forget Continental philosophy is very different from this. But it is also entirely inaccessible to science majors, making its popularity very limited.
Blindly (humble observerly) following the science in the absence of morality and values is the destiny of human existence. There is a greater good, but that good is to be followed. It is a good in the form of a scientific truth that is given to humanity deterministically all the way down from the exploding primordial atom in the Big Bang explosion where the world supposedly began.
I never thought determinism to be a threat. The threat lies with the fall of religion that offered a foundation to our ethical lives. Christianity did something very important, notwithstanding the many awful things that it produced; everything has this dark side. Christianity, on the popular front, gave western society a metaphysical conscience. Pragmatically a success, but it also gave cultural expression to the impossible, which is metaethics. (Why impossible? This comes from reading John Caputo, Derrida, especially his Metaphysics of Violence which is commentary on Levinas, and others. The radical confrontation we meet that enlightens and offends lies with existence. Complicated process to liberate oneself from "the they") I've always had respect for ancient cultures, and Bible stories like the one in Genesis. Not nearly so much distraction then, and when one rose up in reflective thinking, it was was clear that the world is radically wrong, that is, in the metaethical sense to be thrown into suffering and this thrownness empty of meaning. Hard to look at the world like this if you are busy, busy, busy. You "forget" this dimension of our existence (dasein) and Heidegger wants us to "remember". Kierkegaard says this is what original sin is REALLY all about: being so caught up in culture, which is historical and contingent, that one fails to understand who they Really are, fails to "posit spirit". Heidegger calls this ordinary place where one is immersed in the daily routines, our "ontic" world, which is preontological. That epiphanic event when one's thoughts rise above the ordinary and one becomes self aware, and something "forgotten" becomes evident, this is the authenticating move toward ontology. Again, Kant would do this with reason. Heidegger does this with the Totality of our existence.
It was Kierkegaard who came along and turned religion into existential philosophy. Then Husserl came along with an intellectual method. To me the quintessence of all this is lies with Buddhism. Husserl's epoche is a weak but proper beginning to understanding the Abhidhamma. The essence of this lies with understanding the error western philosophy makes with Kant and others where the focus is on "understanding" as a cognitive event. If one takes a given matter of knowing something is the case, we find an abstraction before us: this knowing is generally abstracted from the actual experience that constitutes the knowing event. A Real knowing affair is inherently aesthetic, affective, value-laden, and it is the value that gives the experience of knowing its, call it its
reality.But this becomes a "public" affair as an abstraction because the actuality of the knowing event cannot be told, for one cannot "speak" actuality. This is the fundamental flaw of occidental philosophy, its abstract construal of Truth as propositional. The Buddhists did not think like this. Truth with a capital "T" is not propositional (though it can be "put in" a proposition as all things can be simply spoken) but liberation from, and I will use Heidegger's terms, the attachments of an ontic or existen
tiell unreflective participation in culture; interesting to note that Kierkegaard, in rejecting the naive traditional notion of sin as some abomination in the eyes of God, as Luther put it, in the Smalcald Articles, Kierkegaard released religion from dogma.
One is to be humble in the face of scientific truth, which can feel like 'the most ethical state of being', and one is to close ones eyes for beliefs that span beyond that which can be said to 'exist', which implies a scope limited to that which is repeatable.
The fundamental error: the dogmatic belief in certainty that was introduced by Kant's concept apodictical certainty (apodiktische Gewißheit) through which Kant provided science with a philosophical ground to become its own master.
To re-cite Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (Chapter 6 - We Scholars):
"The objective man, who no longer curses and scolds like the pessimist, the IDEAL man of learning in whom the scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand complete and partial failures, is assuredly one of the most costly instruments that exist, but his place is in the hand of one who is more powerful. He is only an instrument, we may say, he is a MIRROR - he is no "purpose in himself
...he [scientific man] is no goal, not outgoing nor upgoing, no complementary man in whom the REST of existence justifies itself, no termination—and still less a commencement, an engendering, or primary cause, nothing hardy, powerful, self-centred, that wants to be master; but rather only a soft, inflated, delicate, movable potter's-form, that must wait for some kind of content and frame to "shape" itself thereto—for the most part a man without frame and content, a "selfless" man."
There is a sense of Foucault in this. Recall that he held systems of science and law, and everything else, really, was in essence a power structure of social control. Not that there is no such thing as objective truth, like the revealed truths of science, but that these belong to, are underwritten by, and are structurally embedded in, an invisible "collective" that is implicit in the knowledge claims of the institutions that do the studying, analyzing, educating, and so forth. Think of Bentham's panoptical prison system which Foucault takes as a kind of model for the way proper thinking and behaving is monitored and carried out, not by specifically designated policing, but by the implicit "policing" we do to each other in our nods of approval or condemnation, our conversations and the way beneath what is explicitly said there is the unspoken judgment that we always already there "watching" to guide speech and interaction. Society is self correcting, and when things go smoothly, the process is entirely implicit.
So science, being, call it, merely factual, is otherwise vacuous. This is very important to understand, as I see it. I am not interested in what science has to say when I think meditatively, philosophically; I am not just interested in facts qua facts. It is that they are embedded facts: to be a fact is to be objective and useful and plain to see and talka bout. But the actuality of a fact takes analysis to existence, and here we see the phenomenon of factuality as it REALLY IS, which is a living moment in an actual life, and, again, by far the most salient feature of this actuality is value andits ethics, aesthetics! This is essence of meaning when we leave the objective standard. A hard point to make clear to most since we are so accustomed to privileging reason and propositional knowledge.
Anyway, philosophy is supposed to be free of this collective conscience. Is this possible? Yes. But then, in making this move, one steps OUT of human dasein. This is my claim.
As the popular mainstream media concept anti-science has indicated, there is no place for questioning science in the modern world and one is increasingly expected to blindly follow science as a humble observer.
But there is nothing wrong at all with following science. The case here has to do with following the cultural energy that seems to encourage looking nowhere else. the trouble is philosophy is being ignored. But this has always been the case. But again, see Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology. There is some Neitzsche in this, as well as Kierekgaard.
To readdress the question: what IS philosophy in humanity?
Philosophy in the modern world is a form of heresy in the face of the greater good ideology of science and while religious types of persecution of ancient history may not be performed by today's science, science has many other tools to oppress views that are divergent of its core greater good ideology and considering anti-science a threat on par with terrorism and nuclear proliferation is a demand for profound measures.
Well, science as such is a fine thing. Clearly, there is Foucault behind this. But also think of thomas Kuhn and his Revolutions: Scientific paradigms are stubborn things as they challenge "normal science". It has always been like this, but when a true anomaly becomes apparent, science eventually has to address this. Always does.
"Anti science" is a misnomer. No one is this if they understand science at its analytical simplicty, the scientific method, which issues from the very structure of thought itself. Long story. See Dewey, Peirce, et al. Science is a forward looking process of discovery, inherently temporal, for experience is just this.
Resisting science is in another context of resistance. And as to the Big Bang, this is a technical issue. There may be some irrational resistance involved, but I again refer you to Kuhn, and not something conspiratorial. In the end, science will align its views the evidence, which here is pretty technical.
So that is what philosophy currently IS in the eye of humanity: heresy of science.
I don't think it is philosophy's job to investigate science's claims. Philosophy moves beneath, if you will, science's claims to understand the nature of science itself. Sounds more aligned with the "politics" of the science community which has a lot invested in certain theses surviving over others among the most prominent,
who need to publish. I think Foucault has a lot to say about this. And implicitly, Kuhn. But science itself is unimpugnable.
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