The Problem: Freedom in Nature

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The Problem: Freedom in Nature

Dewey’s Pragmatism is a modern elaboration of Kant’s Critique.

Kant’s philosophy informs us that wo/man is a creature immersed in a transcendent nature. This immersion leads to a limitation of knowledge. Wo/man cannot ‘know’ nature in itself. Humans are forever isolated from an epistemology that can comprehend the natural world.

Wo/man can only know that part of nature that nature has empowered the creature to know. Truth shall forever elude the mind of men and women. The world that we think is ‘real’ is only a small part of Reality and Reality we will never ever know.

Hobbes informs us that we humans are fated to live in a nasty and brutish manner within a nature that cannot care how we live. Wo/man is limited by its nature as a creature seeking only to satisfy his or her own appetites.

Kant, followed by Dewey and others, saw a different fate than that which Hobbes defined; the fact is that wo/man is not totally an atom drifting in a mechanistic world that is determined by Newtonian laws. Rather, humans are not just atoms but are self-energized creatures who can mold there own destiny by becoming partners with the natural environment and not mere passive slaves.

The question upon which we must focus is ‘how can wo/man find freedom that is distinctly human in this natural world’? The answer to this question is that men and women must create a new reality of its own and to continue to create and expand it.

Dewey restated Kant’s conclusion with the observation “cosmos examined by a speck of cosmos”; Dewey declared that “truth is two-faced”. He concluded that it is reality “as discovered by man” and is not reality “in-itself”. Truth is the result of human groping and knowing; “it is always on the make”.

Pragmatic wo/man judges truth in only the practical manner, if the knowledge is meaningful and useful to men and women in their voyage then it is true (until proven to be false). Pragmatism points out that there are geometrical, mathematical, and logical truths but these are arrived at within a closed system unrelated to action. Such truths are absolute by definition within their closed domain and are not arrived at in the scope of human action. Such truths are not matters of fact and human search is for matters of fact upon which to base human action. Action itself is the main determining factor for truth in practical matters.

Rather, humans are not just atoms but are self-energized creatures who can mold there own destiny by becoming partners with the natural environment and not mere passive slaves. This seems to me to be the heart of the matter to which Becker is drawing our attention. Becker finds that wo/man is entirely too passive in accepting what appears on the surface of reality. We fail to mold our destiny in light of our nature and thereby we too easily accept what is formed for us by those who use us for their interest. We are the bull constantly focusing upon the cape rather than the reality behind the moving cape. We must find a means to energize our self sufficiently to take control of our destiny.

Ideas and quotes from “Beyond Alienation” by Ernest Becker

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Hi Chuck,

It seems Becker has presented another problem with no solution. In “The big problem: unity of knowledge” you said that Becker “laid out a rational for action but no action toward accomplishing this has been undertaken”. I offered this solution. (link)

Now in this thread you say:

Here I suggest that “to take control of our destiny” we must focus on the cape and not what’s behind it. The cape is our fabric of existence. (link) “Behind the moving cape” is “the reality” of the void. (link) To sooth the savage beast humanity, we must remove the cape’s color, make it clear.

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DEB

Here is part of a view of where Becker is going.

Alienation

We see only what we are prepared to see. If we could comprehend our present circumstance we could create a far better society than we now have; a far better society that would be in tune with our present knowledge. Our first task is to illuminate our present circumstance.

We have created a culture of alienation. Alienation fragments human nature.

As a definition of ‘alienation’ the dictionary uses such similes as “strange”, “different”, “incongruous”, “owing different allegiances”, and “properly therefore belonging to another”, “not of our type”. There are two forms of alienation: there is the type of alienation, which we all tacitly agree is dehumanizing and there is the more sinister and crippling alienation that few citizens perceive. It is this second unperceived alienation mode that proves to be the most debilitating; if we cannot perceive it, ipso facto we cannot combat it.

We cannot perceive it because our society frames the matters upon which Tom and Jane ponder in their daily lives such that these alienating factors are hidden from easy public perception. Frames are conceptual structures, often expressed as metaphors, which shape the way we see the world. A frame only allows you to accept facts that fit within it. Thus, speaking rhetorically, who succeeds in framing an issue, will be difficult to beat in subsequent debate.

Language is, as Edward T. Hall put it, “a system for organizing information and releasing thoughts and responses in other organisms,” not for implanting thoughts or transferring meaning from one brain to another. In other words, “the meaning contained within metaphors is already in us, just awaiting the words to call it forth.”

“When you think you lack words, what you really lack are ideas. Ideas come in the form of frames. When the frames are there, the words come readily… A conservative on TV uses two words, like tax relief. And the progressive has to go into a paragraph-long discussion of his own view. The conservative can appeal to an established frame, that taxation is an affliction or burden, which allows for the two-word phrase, tax relief. But there is not established frame on the other side. You can talk about it, but it takes some doing because there is no established frame, no fixed idea already out there."
—Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff

Our society leads us into wallowing about in a toxic and alienating culture because the culture we create is not in harmony with human nature; humans feel that disharmony but humans are unable to deal with it because our unconscious metaphors do not provide us with the metaphors and subsequent frames, which might allow us to comprehend the source of our discontent.

Theory of Alienation

To facilitate our comprehension of the present mess we need a theory of alienation. Such a theory provides an explanation “for the evil in the world that is caused by manmade arrangements; and as such it points out those evils which could be ameliorated by human effort.”

A theory of alienation provides the backbone of an argument that is intended to lead to the description of a program of education that will prepare women and men to constantly monitor their respective performance in light of comparing that accomplishment to an ideal.

The purpose for creating a curriculum of alienation is to enlighten all sapiens to recognize how our present social structure leads us to behave in the manner that we now do. When we examine history we see what appears to be a human behavior that, as Hobbes said, is brutal and destructive. We have in the past placed the blame for this upon the assumption that human nature leaves us with a propensity for greed and destruction. Our accumulated scientific knowledge denies the validity of this argument.

Sciences of wo/man

Science has discovered that our natural propensities are neutral to a nature of greed, destruction, and killing. It is the social structure that we have created that makes us do the things we do. Society makes us do it not our innate nature. The society that we have created is our problem. Our genetic nature does not lead us into promoting wars but our disoriented search for meaning sends us down paths that are dysfunctional to our nature.

Self-reliance

When I speak of alienation I am speaking about wo/man’s alienation from his or her nature. I am speaking of the fragmentation of the individual. I am speaking of the fact that part of what we are is being defiled and rejected by the manner in which we live in our society.

A general theory of alienation would be a body of knowledge about how human freedom and responsible choice is constricted. Evil is that which makes it impossible for sapiens to realizing their potential; this knowledge would be an expression of what are responsible human powers and how society limits the expression of those powers.

Emerson, considered by many as the top moralist in American history, understood these facts when he stated the important challenge to all wo/men to be self-reliance. He felt that self-reliance was the “keynote of American democracy”. Whatever should limit human self-reliance works against the nature of wo/man. The great challenge to education was to develop a comprehensive theory of the limitations of self-reliance and to teach this to all Americans.

To achieve such a goal demanded that science comprehend what all humans strive for. Emerson was convinced that sapiens strived after meaning and the creation of meaning. The crux of self-reliance then was how to advance the self-creation of human meaning.

Science informs us that greed and destructive behavior are not in our DNA but in the society we create. Evil is created by our natural propensities to use our fellow sapiens to satisfy our search for meaning. Human evil is often proportional to human weakness.

“Weakness for man means shallow and narrow meanings, and lack of critical awareness of who one is, and what he is striving for…By developing his critical reason, man can free himself from a large measure of the evil that exists in his social world…It results from the fear of free choice, from the inability to assume responsibility for unique actions and meanings. On the individual level this means that the weak man is the empty man, the manipulated one, and the manipulator of others—the masochist and the sadist. On the social level it means the frightened scapegoat, the warmonger. On both levels it means clumsy, shallow, uncritical, rigid aesthetics, destructive ways of satisfying one’s striving, ways that take a toll on one’s fellow men.”