I’ll react to Silhouette ASAP. The fall semester is nearing.
I think to view me in either camp is to presume that I accept most of their premises. I don’t. Or at least I don’t accept enough of their premises to warrant being on either side. I do, however, find them to be two of the more admirable German philosophers.
Firstly, isn’t this a Bible argument? That is, “The Bible is right because the Bible says it is?”
Secondly, you’ve kept the argument of the superman within the realm of aesthetics, which, as opposed to metaphysics, is exactly where I thought it should be placed.
This is an accurate observation in principle. The gulf between who I’ve more and less isn’t much though.
Certainly this is a topic for another debate. I agree that one ought not to attribute an ideology as directly causal to say, the Khmer Rouge, but there have been some pretty silly arguments coming from the far Left since 1990 that basically hide behind the statement, “Yeah, but that wasn’t the REAL Marxism.”
I did a search of my earlier posts; none mention “state” (except for homonyms) or even “government.”
I recently read a Wikipedia article about social capitalism. That seems to sum my politico-economics up nicely. I also fancy communitarianism.
Socialism still doesn’t work. Marxian premises for socialism are fallacious because the labor theory of value is wrong, because human nature isn’t as flexible as assumed, and because of the knowledge problem (also known as the calculation problem). Since we can’t jump ship from the processes that comprise us, we can’t understand the finest details of ourselves. A constant dialog is good to help us come to agreement on general understandings of social goods and how they ought to be justly exchanged (e.g., money shouldn’t buy you political power, good looks shouldn’t buy you exclusive procreational rights, etc.). But details are more efficiently sifted through by a price mechanism and other processes that imitate natural selection.
Single payer models of health care work well in Europe (especially Scandinavia) because they are ethnically, politically, and culturally homogeneous communities. Social capital there is quite high. So they are capable of agreeing on what “health” is and what it ought to be. There’s a lot of tacit understanding that does’t require an incessant dialog, which thereby makes the system more efficient. The social democrats and democratic socialists there have split from Marxism by and large. “Sure, our communities can come to a consensual understanding of social goods very easily, but we don’t know how or why, we have no scientifically proven model of visceral human nature to expose the underpinnings of this common understanding, nor can we possibly apply such a non-existent model to the rest of the economy so as to enumerate the communally understood value of every detail. We as Leftists simply fight to keep social capital high.” I agree with this entirely.
However, I’m from America, which means that our politics are swamped in historical individualism, our economy is staunchly “unfettered” (a laughable claim considering corporate welfare), and our culture extremely divided into tinier subcultures with conflicting interests. Social capital is through the floor. While we can ride nicely on the premise that everybody ought to have access to health care, every superficial detail that follows is argued vehemently from a litany of perspectives. That’s why, even though I agree that any system of government administering health care is superior to the system we dealt with not but a year ago, I think the Singaporean method is most compatible with our politics, economy, and culture, as opposed to single payer. I would embrace single payer if I trusted our culture more.
A lot of Leftists are beginning to agree that complex equality is better than simple equality. See Michael Walzer and Alasdair MacIntyre.
The free spirit implies that an individual is supposed to take the reigns of her destiny and do justice to herself. My question is how? I can see the basic gist of this concept and its merits but there is an assumption that an individual can do all of these things and do them well. I’m arguing that it is theoretically impossible to focus all of the self’s/society’s energies into a singularity through consciousness. Both inevitably end up adhocracies.
In principle, Freud was right to compare the mind to an iceberg. But instead of a good sized chunk of ice above the surface, it should be a tiny snowball.
I disagree. I’m mostly using Popper and Hayek’s arguments against historicism and scientific socialism. Ethical socialism (or, as Marx called it, “utopian socialism”) has really been the current trend in the Left. Rawls is to blame for that. Marx’s dialectical materialism and the “inevitable result of the class struggle” really carry no substance for today’s ears. What I’m saying is that this can’t be argued exclusive of ethical discourse. Equality is necessary (to some degree), yes. But the logic from whence this necessity arises is an ethical sphere – not a physical sphere – of logic.
Let’s consider a dichotomy: transcendental versus immanent criticism. Hayek defines immanent criticism nicely: “When we say that all criticism of rules must be immanent criticism, we mean that the test by which we can judge the appropriateness of a particular rule will always be some other rule which for the purpose in hand we regard as unquestioned. The great body of rules which in this sense is tacitly accepted determines the aim which the rules being questioned must also support; and this aim, as we have seen, is not any particular event but the maintenance or restoration of an order of actions which the rules tend to bring about more or less successfully…” Transcendental criticism was really a step backward for philosophy pioneered by Kant. Proofs could articulate the proper standpoint of abstraction from whence we may judge subordinate spheres of understanding. Many a convoluted case was put forth to land on this transcendental bedrock.
Nietzsche didn’t have the luxury of Wittgenstein. Behind every sign with an arrow pointing towards town, and an observer understanding what it means, there is an infinite dimension of rule-following in the background. No amount of nihilistic criticism will penetrate that spontaneous order. We’re sort of stuck with meaning, believe it or not. The world isn’t meaningless because there’s no way it could be.
I never knew this practice was common, let alone infamous. I just made it up. Can you point me to who else has used it? I’m interested.
That’s like saying that she who follows an arrow without recognizing at every instant that the very meaning of that arrow was made in her head is a cow. That’s transcendental criticism. Where the more useful criticism lay (the immanent criticism) is whether or not the town the arrow points to is where she wants to go.
I blame this tendency of German philosophers to interrupt “Yeah, but the human mind has organized this information in such and such a way” all on Kant. Yes, very nice, but what’s the point? It’s as though the Germans saw this fact as a shiny, ripe fruit and pounced upon it in a whole congeries of ways to “hack” into this process.
Nietzsche lands on a will-to-power metaphysic to author what this type of man is exactly, and how it ought to come about. That metaphysic is a bit too “magical” for my tastes – too much of this “expending energy” business. It seems escapist to think that we have the rational powers to pull ourselves out the spontaneous order by the hair. I can understand the idealization of the “noble savage” as much as Rousseau did, but like Rousseau, I find that simply an aesthetic sentiment – indeed, a romantic sentiment. It’s existentially helpful, but what else?
According to what standards, Fred? And don’t go down that postmodernist BS route either. Be immanently critical, dammit. You know you’re good at it when you point out the hypocrisy of things.
Erm… no? I don’t think I mentioned anything about being ‘right’. Nietzsche isn’t about right or wrong, he rejects the assumption of objective bases from which to divide things into objective rights and wrongs. All I did was highlight an important aesthetic distinction between Nietzsche’s Superman, and your interpretation of his Superman.
I do agree it’s all aesthetic, rather than metaphysical - that’s fairly central to Nietzsche too. But aesthetic doesn’t imply admiration.
Why is that a silly argument? Stalinism, Maoism etc., they all had a State. Marxist Communism does not. A pretty basic distinction among many others. It is irrelevant that you didn’t mention the word “state”: when you talk of the atrocities of the 20th and 19th centuries that have been done in the name of Marxism, you are referring to Statism, which is not Marxist Communism.
Why is the labor theory of value wrong? Not because “human nature isn’t as flexible as assumed” at least, because there is no such thing as human nature. Certainly there are similarities in behaviours and attitudes under the current socio-economic conditions, but under all possible socio-economic conditions, these similarities melt away considerably. It was a huge oversight on the part of classical liberals to assume that the current nature of humans was always the nature of humans - and always will be. Historical examinations of things like this only started to take place much more recently. Humans have always banded together to reproduce their conditions for living - the fact that they seem much more individual now is simply a reflection of the scale of modern production and distribution. We are completely alienated from our work because different stages take place all over the world, under very different conditions that we have little idea about. This does not mean that we are fundamentally individuals. The word “individual” itself was rather ironically arrived at through collective communication and language - a social emergence, not an individual one.
As for the knowledge problem, the liberal “price mechanism” just does things the other way around to Statist Socialism. It is centred around the consumer, whose wants are translated into what the workers are required to produce for them, according to what is bought and for what price - where under Statist Socialism, you get what you are given according to what the workers can produce and where they ‘should’ be distributed. But it is ridiculous to centre production and distribution around either ONLY the consumer or ONLY the worker, as they are one and the same!
I do not advocate the State allocating resources only around the worker, but I do advocate Socialist discussion of how to take into account the worker as more than just a servant to the whims of the consumer as though they were separate peoples - a slave to oneself as though oneself was different… Socialism is the discussion of how to improve conditions - Socialist governments are just manifestations of attempts at making conditions better. They are tested and then refined in an ongoing process. Socialism isn’t over as soon as a Socialist government gets in!
“Like a rider on a charging steed we let fall the reins before the infinite, we modern men, like semi-barbarians - and attain our state of bliss only when we are most - in danger.” - BG&E 224
So we are to assume most of the mind is this metaphysical unconsciousness that lies below the surface. I thought we were talking aesthetics?
To say that we “must be immanently critical” is an ethical demand. That is to say, optional. His highly held demand for immanent criticism illustrates immanent criticism, but the logic from whence this necessity arises is an ethical sphere – not a physical sphere – of logic. I am not entirely sure what a physical sphere of logic is, but I assume you mean the supposed physical inevitability of Marx’s class struggle - but I already rejected that on the grounds that it requires an objective “way” that the world just “is”, pre-interpretation.
Wittgenstein would appear to also be assuming a “way” that the world just “is” with his talk of an “infinite dimension of rule-following in the background”. This is simply the subjective meaning that he has attributed to the world, because it seems to make things seem more coherent. This is not the same as something we’re stuck with. However, the practice of doing this in myriad different ways seems to proliferate in any human who thinks about anything. But its common use does not make it inevitable. This is not to say I favour transcendental criticism against a “proper standpoint of abstraction”, because I don’t believe there to be one that is “there” in the world, that just “is”.
Neither did Nietzsche with his “will to power” - as is illustrated by the fact that in Beyond Good and Evil, he precedes his argument for the “will to power” with a good sound criticism of the notion of “will” at all. It is not a metaphysic, it’s just a proposed truth that seems to hold better than Schopenhauer’s version, but likewise is not THE truth. And at that, it is more of an expression than something useful - again, consistent with his philosophy.
Scientists and Mathematicians do nothing but this. Any analyst in general does. The law courts enjoy it, and any other institution that likes to handle things ‘precisely’ by looking at discrete instances in particular. It’s everywhere. Philosophy does it all the time when it analyses man, or himself, in order to say something about him, or himself.
But again, you are arguing in favor of Nietzsche with ad hoc reasoning; “the REAL meaning of the superman was a, b, and c. You aren’t interpreting it correctly because you don’t WANT to interpret it correctly.” Okay, but where’s the manual to read Nietzsche? And then the manual to read that manual? If Nietzsche, who was an intellectual publishing works of philosophy, wasn’t responsible enough to take into consideration the “background rule-following” (which is the margin at any given time) of his readers, he might as well be popular simply for being popular, and not for being poignant or enlightening (which I think is the case). If you require your readership to follow you into an oblivion of defying the spontaneous order that comprises them (down to biological “rule-following” itself), you’re eventually going to have to ad hoc a concept like the “will-to-power” so as incentive them into pursuing some sort of realm of “authenticity” that lies so precariously beyond all the murky rule-following – just like the concept of Communism proper.
You see how that’s just ad hoc? I can say that about anything. “You’re not the REAL Silhouette; you’re just some impostor who happens to harbor every distinctive characteristic of the REAL Silhouette.” How can you argue with that? It’s a hijacking of logic.
Communism, for all intents and purposes, is both theoretically impossible and, to my standards, quite undesirable. We can’t hack into the computer of reality and rewire all the rules, because that very hacking occurs within such a computer of reality. We’d be fooling ourselves to think that we’ve overridden reality’s underlying features to our will, at any given time; to recapitulate, it would be an adhocracy. Such thinking is called a category mistake. It’s a cross-wiring of thought modalities – thinking of one object within the terms used for another set of objects in another sphere of thought.
For one thing, most Marxists today no longer consider it to be true. See Analytical Marxists, e.g., Cohen, Elster, Roemer, etc. (These guys fashioned themselves the “No Bullshit Marxists” since Marxism has been notoriously interpreted as being just that these days.)
As for a quick disproving of the theory:
An argument saying that value SHOULD be determined by labor input alone can be levied, but that’s an ethical proclamation and runs entirely contra to LTV’s nature, which is to describe how economic values arise.
Few economists take Marx seriously. If they do, it’s only a distant admiration of his influence. Marginal utility has since usurped LTV. That’s why most discussions of egalitarianism have moved to the political philosophy and ethics departments. I think this is where they belong, as I am far from a staunch libertarian.
Why? That sounds to me like the rhetoric so often employed by contrarians who think claiming that a semi-abstract concept doesn’t exist (e.g., society doesn’t exist, reality doesn’t exist, I don’t exist, etc.) somehow gives their opinions greater authority, even though words like “human nature” are used meaningfully everyday. Obliterating the premises, which you and a fellow interlocutor must engage with to come to any agreement, doesn’t win you an argument. It’s like the postmodernists who “deconstruct” the order of rational thought and argumentation into meaninglessness, despite using rational, argumentative tools to reach that conclusion.
If you’re going to say that human individuals are too transient and unique in their components to warrant the concept of “human nature,” fine, but then why conceptualize at all? You’d be right in pointing out the transcendental nature of reality and its perpetual inclination to escape our words, but that doesn’t make “human nature” meaningless; the standard for what is meaningful would be infinitely out of reach, which would make meaning meaningless. Nihilists are nihilists because they have unrealistic standards. Concepts are useful approximations of reality that can be pretty damn accurate when put through a critical process.
I agree with this insofar as you criticize classical liberals, but the agreement stops after that. See above.
What’s your standard for individuals? Again, this seems like holier than thou intellectualism. You’re logic licenses you to ad hoc your way out of any proof I try to provide that individuals exists (like pointing to myself and saying, “This is an individual”). It’s unfalsifiable.
The price mechanism puts things where they “should” go too; as I’ve said, no amount of political dialog can cut through the tacit order of understanding of every detail of an economy.
If the economy centers around ONLY the consumer, then it does the same for workers as well, right? Unless you’re jumping ship to convey two separate senses of consumer and worker, but subjecting them to the same logical operators used for only one of those senses, which is just a sleight of hand.
To think that consumerism doesn’t occur in micro instances of supply-side production is naive. If I hire Person A to dig a hole for me, her marginal utility to me is almost infinite since no hole would be dug without her. Hiring Person B to help her ratchets that person’s marginal utility down a notch. This would go on for each subsequent hiring, even though each worker would be putting in roughly the same amount of labor. After awhile, the hole would just get too crowded and it would be absurd to hire anymore. This is the principle of diminishing marginal utility.
I agree wholeheartedly. Although I would be quick to state that this discussion needs to happen democratically and rigorously (as I’m sure you’d agree) and that there is no higher appeal to meanings in the body politic than the communal understandings of social goods (not a Marxian or Rawlsian abstraction of social goods). I think much of alienation, while an accurate diagnosis, is treated wrongly. Social capital, as I’ve said, is very important to communities. Wal-Mart encroaching upon small communities and putting local businesses out of business is as much an alienation of the community as wage labor is supposedly an alienation of laborers. But neither of these is immune to debate.
I’d be quite interested to analyze how atheistic and religious folks both deal with alienation. It seems like the less religious people are more socialistic, communitarian, socially tolerant, and stress the importance of hip, tightly knit communities a la Portland, Oregon. (I fall in this camp.) Religious people (usually Christians), however, tend to be more suburban, family-structured free marketeers who fall back on the church for social capital. This is at least an American illustration. I know Catholics especially can be very socialistic. Canada’s Medicare was brought about by a Catholic priest.
We’re talking about both, but we’re trying to pin down in which of these two realms the superman requires exclusive residence. I say aesthetics only; I hear you saying more, although I’m not sure how accurate that is. Maybe you could elaborate on your views of the superman. I’m especially interested in the fact that you seem to be somewhat of a Marxist as well as a Nietzscheite; wouldn’t/didn’t Nietzsche view Marxism as a slave-morality? How do you think these two figures get along? I’m quite interested. They seem to me mutually incompatible.
I suppose there’s a tacit qualifier to “one should immanently criticize” that I assumed was obvious: “… or else one won’t be taken seriously.” Saying that slavery is wrong because white condiments are gross is lexically an argument, but a pretty absurd one. I’m equating Marxism and some of Nietzsche’s ideas with such fallacious methodologies. Ethical statements necessarily preclude qualifies, else fall into some sort of naturalistic fallacy.
If you’re going to get anywhere, then yes it does. Coherent, good. Incoherent, bad. Such is the logic of rational discourse. We’re stuck with logic insofar as we are logical. Any attempt to arbitrarily find hypocrisy for the convenience of a given conclusion is preposterous. With a certain standard of “hypocrisy” the whole universe is hypocritical. This reasoning is a mishandling of language and ideas. It’s easy and ignoble. It smuggles concepts in and out of their respective spheres and hijacks whole categories; it’s a downright corruption of actual, critical thought.
But consistent with reality? If I had the motivation (or the syphilis) I could probably conjure myself a whole reality that is mechanically self-consistent and resistant to all outside innovations if I wanted. All it takes is the indolence to not remain perpetually adaptive and critical.
I can play pundit with you if you’d like; I’ll argue that the sky really isn’t blue. All I have to do is split the right hairs and BAM, instant unfalsifiable, ad hoc proof.
That’s a very smart and interesting way of looking at it. Of course, I think these are all for the better.
You see how that’s just ad hoc? I can say that about anything. Ad hoc, good. Logical, bad. There’s no fundamental logical reason to accept either version - the preference of coherence, and “getting somewhere” is just an ad hoc preference. Any version makes sense if you accept certain ends and/or means, and the acceptance of these ends and/or means is ad hoc. A simple way of illustrating this within rational discourse is by pointing out that you can always ask “why?” one more time about your accepted bases towards “getting anywhere” or otherwise.
To say that this is using something resembling logic to defy logic, and therefore I’m accepting logic in my methods and therefore I’m stuck with it, is naive. If I were to beat down a man asserting a rational argument with physical violence, he wouldn’t feel his rationality to have been disproven - even if it did result in him never using it again. Rational argument only accepts rational argument as a valid criticism - so within the rules it sets for itself, anything said for or against reason, if it uses reason, favours reason. So they can’t lose. To criticise reason, you need reason in order to undermine it, and then to undermine the absurdity of accepting that “if you use reason, you favour it” is definitely, fundamentally and always the case.
Nietzsche talks of the strong will using the current power structures towards one’s own ends. In modern times such as these, using reason is one of these power structures. The above paragraph explains that this is the only way to operate successfully towards your own means in practice. I use reason to combat reason because otherwise I would be jousting with opponents jousting in another location entirely - it wouldn’t exactly be much of a competition, and victory or loss would never be recognisable unless you charged against each other on the same level.
This is why I favour aesthetics, because I see reason and metaphysics as groundless - leaving only the surface. There is no fundamental reason for me to favour the surface just because I find going in circles below the surface to be futile - this would be consistent and I am not accepting that consistency is always preferable. I’ve just made a decision that is embedded in bits of reason, and bits of ad hoc, in no particular order or degree.
The above is what I see to be consistent with Nietzsche, although he is not the reason I operate in this ‘way’. Aesthetically, it just makes sense that in order to treat a world of consistencies and contradictions, one must not resolve to only use ONLY either consistency or contradiction. The net effect of me doing this CAN be summed up as “will to power”, because it seems like I do so towards my own ends that increase my power. However, as I believe was intended and as I briefly explained, Nietzsche didn’t mean “will to power” to be an everlasting fundamental truth. The book “will to power” wasn’t released by him when he was alive, I don’t trust it.
Marx is extremely different - he accepts some very fundamental truths about reality. What I see in him, despite his differences, are his similarities. He did use the power structures in place, such as his education and logical argument. What he came up with was a proposition - albeit, yes, inspired by slave morality - which I believe could facilitate more Nietzschean action.
The decadence in the current ruling classes is sickening.
It’s no wonder that a slave revolt such as Marx’s happened, and got somewhere. If it is pushed further, then a situation could emerge where a new breed of rulers could emerge. Obviously there is no State in Marxist Communism, but there is management. In a democratic fashion - not what Nietzsche spoke favourably of - able managers would be elected. They would be approved of by those who elected them, and new channels to refine new masters would open up, having to rule-make and create ways to operate in such a way that they would consistently be elected in these new conditions - to the point where decent rulers might emerge again.
Currently, there’s so much distaste towards rulership, because the rulers are so atrocious and unworthy. I do not advocate anarchy as a solution because I do not advocate headless chickens with no central co-ordination - which is needed to run societies of the size we have today. We just need people who are able to do so. I think we might have to go through things like workers councils to achieve this.
I disagree with the criticism of LTV. Premise 2 is true. Labour, or work, is transformation of one thing into another thing - even eating is labour. Not exactly hard labour for the regular healthy human, I’m sure you’ll agree. But a process of change is constantly going on to turn even unprivatised naturally growing food into the valuable quenching of hunger and continuation of survival. To say “the food grows naturally” is to turn food into a fetish, whereby it is valued just for being food - whether or not it is eaten.
The current economy centres around ONLY the consumer, and not the worker, because the advantage to the consumer ending up paying off for the worker doesn’t treat the worker like the person that they are - it just treats the consumer as one. If consumer A wants B, worker A is obliged to provide B in exchange for wages - and is treated as though this is the only factor. The “price mechanism” doesn’t take into account how the worker feels about working, it just wants B to be provided so that it makes the best financial sense. This is an extremely narrow expectation, especially considering the innate antagonism between employer and employee, where both have to compromise for the benefit of the peoples’ wants as though they were only ever consumers. The supply and demand graph that liberals worship, of labour, shows the two classes in direct opposition almost as though this was just “human nature”.
The term “human nature” is used as meaningful because of the belief that all humans have certain things in common. If there are situations where humans would cease to act in these ways, then “human nature” would somewhat be challenged, don’t you agree? It’s not worthless to say “at the moment, there are definite similarities in human behaviour and seeing similarities is useful”, but to say “this will always be the case and always has been” is simply wrong. Even now there are entire cultures who defy even life itself: most religions. You can’t even say that it’s human nature to stay alive when there have been martyrs who’ve died for something beyond life. There are already contradictions to a consistent “human nature” with every human even now - nevermind in an unseen future. To say “some humans are the same in this nature” is fine, but to call it “human nature” has a misleading all-inclusion that just encourages the ignorant use of the term as though it was more meaningful than it is.
There has not yet been a REAL Communism; there’ve just been imposter Communisms who happen to harbour ‘enough’ distinctive characteristics of the REAL Communism to be mistaken for it.
Again, you’re killing the meaning of ad hoc if you’re going to apply it to everything. You’re acting as though you have a choice in accepting all ends and/or means. You have a fraction of a fraction of choice in such matters; most of it is already there. Like I said, you’re stuck with meaning no matter how you want to canvass it. You have no choice but to “get somewhere” just as you have no choice but to have eyeballs. That’s your nature.
My arguments aren’t ad hoc insofar as time and space are ad hoc. What I’m asking you to do is illustrate a world where Marxism isn’t true. Yes, yes, I need to illustrate for you a world where logic isn’t necessary also, right? But I’m not denying that logic and time are contingencies – they are; they’re just contingent upon much older factors, dating back to the first developments of sensory ordering in primordial brains. Our species wouldn’t exist without organizing info into such “categories” (not to get too Kantian). So just because the premises aren’t divinely favored or ontologically absolute doesn’t mean that nobody takes these things as givens. If you belong to the species Homo sapien, you’ve no choice but to have a tacit understanding of space, time, and logic (not logic proper).
Marxism, however, is made of those “faculties” that Nietzsche said every student of Kant explored shrubs in search for. Unlike space and time, Marxism is a truth we just haven’t been consciously familiar with until Marx himself “discovered” it. The fallacy starts by thinking of space and time, for instance, as categories that are specially immutable (meaning immutable for every human being) in the sense that things we later discover can also become specially immutable – i.e., the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments. Of course these categories of space, time, and logic aren’t immutable in that sense; they’re just contingent upon stronger, and more successful genealogies of reasoning (if we are to think of the selection process as “quasi-reasoning”). Ones we later discover belong to weaker ancestries, and are therefore not specially immutable, despite being relatively immutable within their respective spheres. Marxism cuts corners by seeing itself as on par with basic conceptions (not concepts, mind you) of space and time, and thus specially immutable. A Marxist will appeal to whatever higher premises of reason he can at a given time. The moment Marxism viewed itself as a conception instead of a concept, it was doomed to fail.
However, this is a thread about Nietzsche. So let’s reorient. Ever since Hegel, we’ve had a mass rejection of the fact-value distinction, Nietzsche being the great flag-bearer. They were right. We can’t really say that there is a fundamental difference between facts and the meaning we impose upon them.
But at the same time the backlash against this idea went too far; it simply did away with the idea of fact and gave value ultimate precedence. To me this was a bit lazy. Sure, an ontological fact-value distinction is wrong (yet popular thanks to Descartes), but a pragmatic distinction is, well, pragmatic.
First, antifoundationalists slipped into a category mistake: They took their successes against ontology to cover everything outside of ontology.
Second, they figured that they had usurped the authority of any methodological claims to knowledge. For most of them, sociological factors are all that determine these things. Everything is a language game or metanarrative. Richard Rorty himself accepts this view and calls for a replacement of a “representationalist model of knowledge” with a “conversationalist model of knowledge.” Even science is subject to metadiscussion. However, meaning is not a purely linguistic phenomenon. If you’re all by yourself in the desert, water means survival. That’s fact. No narrative necessary. This means that hard, natural sciences and their respective theories are able to survive critical environments (such as being stranded on a boat and having to use astronomical knowledge to navigate home). Same goes for social sciences; drop me from a plane into the middle of an isolated but friendly tribe in Papua New Guinea and the most basic knowledge of psychology and sociology will help. The best theories work. So “fact” is not a useless word. It may have no ontological differences with “value,” but, hell, you can abstract anything to such a point of indifference.
Third, how would such discussions ever take place? They require themselves to account for the infinite details of all matters. But Hume said reason is inert; this constant discourse would be exhausting and we would all turn into freaks like Derrida and Deleuze. We haven’t the luxury to question meaning wholesale in a pragmatic sense; just questioning some meanings at some points in our endeavors works. (See immanent criticism.)
Nietzsche called for individuals to draft their own metanarratives in the face of nihilism. But I question:
(1) how we are supposed to create individual tables of values from scratch when
a) there’s no convincing case against cultures drafting such tables themselves, without the handy concept of will-to-power, and
b) no individual can successfully undertake such a feat due to the calculation problems as harangued about above, without falling into a solipsistic adhocracy; and
(2) how much of a threat nihilism actually is.
That’s like saying that it’s naive for me to expect you to be an English speaker, even though you’re speaking English, or that you are a human, even though you’re speaking a language – something only humans can do. You make it seem like possessing hands with which to pick up a Guinness is one of many methods you have at your disposal for doing just that.
I don’t see how this relates to what you say next.
That’s like saying that the only way to stop playing baseball is by playing it so poorly that the game falls apart. Why not just stop playing baseball? You won’t, because you can’t; in this case the game and its rules aren’t optional.
I hear you admitting that you question reason with reason simply to be a sophist – so you can feel right all the time. I pretty sure I’m wrong.
This is a really good point that I’m going to have to think about more.
Can you elaborate on this more, please? It’s quite interesting.
Yes, I do see where you’re coming from. But you’re talking to a pragmatist. To me, spreading any notion as a blanket of absolute truth can go wrong. However, it doesn’t go wrong where actors are humble, namely scientists. They do stretch notions into “laws” and “necessary truths” for the sake of convenience. So I don’t think it necessarily goes wrong. See the bad reasons fallacy.