What does your ‘field of truths’ look like? How would you set the limits to the area where you can discern truth value?
The general definition of truth is correspondence with reality. I don’t agree with this in one sense that reality is already there to be corresponded with. The problem is because of Meno’s Paradox.
However, from what I have learned the more appropriate definition of truth is,
data/knowledge of experience and possible experience in agreement with the object.
The perimeter and limits of truth value would emerge as follows;
- opinion = insufficient subjectivity and insufficient objectivity
- belief = sufficient subjectivity and insufficient objectivity
- knowledge (truth) = sufficient subjectivity and sufficient objectivity.
‘Subjectivity’ is based on the degree of conviction based on personal experience. For example, if a strong and convincing personal experience is highly subjective, but if it cannot be tested repeatedly, verified and justified independently [not objective], it is merely a belief, e.g. god and other supernatural things.
Objectivity is when an experience which can be tested repeatedly, verified and justified independently by any others. The degree of truth will depend on the degree of subjectivity and objectivity. Truth based on possible experience [extended from verified actual experience] would have a lesser degree of truth, e.g. theoretical truths.
Btw, the idea of God is at most a belief and never be objective knowledge or truth as such a idea is beyond the limit of objectivity, i.e. by default cannot be tested repeatedly, verified and justified independently.
Knowing truth is not a goal in itself. Doing truth is a goal in itself. We all know too much, much more than we can do, thus, truth and consciousness rise when we are disturbed in doing something.
In decadence always the best cultivate knowledge while the rest loses the deeds and thoughts of free men.
But both aren’t living and so both perish in the end.
What is necessary? The better and cultivated must declare war upon the decadents in order to start living their knowledge (again). Therefore Zarathustra and his “man must be raised for war”… better let’s say philosopher must be raised for war…
Hello Prismatic
Knowledge of God is as dependent upon subjectiveness as anything else. It is determined by definitions.
Correspondence with reality is a judgment rendered upon a set of neurological inputs. Even with the corroboration by instruments or other observers you will still be relying on the subjectiveness of others.
So what of God? Same damn thing. There is no escaping this fallible shell. We can create models with our reason however and still what these apply to remain an interpretation of the conceptual model.
The more abstract someone thinks of God the more “objective” the concept becomes. Spinoza’s God is close to the concept of Being. It’s so abstract that essentially it’s equal to no God. That is the dilemma that theology faces. Either God or a Shadow that passes rational muster and yet says nothing.
Kind of like an Etch a Sketch. lol It has to be first thought out, then drawn, looked at. If not real enough or acceptable enough, it has to be erasable.
At first glance, I wouldn’t set any limits - it would consist of a panoramic view, then slowly, erased as something was seen not to belong.
You’ll need to differentiate the ‘referencing’ and the ‘referent’.
The whole process of referencing on a God can be objective, but the referent ‘God,’ i.e. the object is not objective because it is not verifiable.
The idealization process of a God is objective as it is grounded on generic human attributes.
Analogically, the process of the illusion of a mirage in the desert is real and objective, but the mirage itself perceived as a real thing is not objective.
Spinoza’s God as an abstraction and an illusion is objective, but there is no real God-in-itself to be compared with such an abstraction.
That depends on any individual instance where its truth value must be ascertained…if it truly must. There is nothing generic about truth and any such overarching lamination would in fact be an infringement since there is no such perspective which can be applied.
Hello Prismatic
Referencing is what our language does. It “points” to items and concepts. The “referent” is what we hope is an actual object of reality or a concept that is well understood. However in each case the referent is us, it is neurological connections originated perhaps from without but all we acquire for an object is ourselves.
Perception is a cooperation between our senses. The senses simply create inputs, but, if we can use your example, the input from a mirage is the same as the input of an actual lake until the time comes when it is not. Either way we have only indirect access to reality. Reality is always “for” us. That is that reality is personal and subjective.
God could be an illusion but so could also be everything else we take as real.
Agree with the other points.
I would add that reality is inter-subjective and shareable.
IMO, reality is not precisely “for” us but rather it is an emergence and just 'is."
Once we say reality is ‘X’, then we have to qualify and justify ‘X’ the predicate.
Re the Maya concept of the Eastern religions, all phenomenal are illusory or empty.
According to Vedanta, what is really real is Brahman.
IMO, these views can be true in relation to their defined perspective, but I would not take those views to be absolutely absolute.
From the QM perspective, whatever is real could be paradoxically a wave or particle depending on the collapse function.
The question is brilliant and not trivial at all. But, as previous posts show, it comes after a long chain of questions, as indeed your formulation seems to imply.
The conditions that would enable to ‘discern truth value’ are a sort of classic topic, and I see no major reason for throwing in my opinion, as I don’t think I have really something to say in that respect (and, by the way, it can’t be a short answer). Instead there are a number of doubts that should be addressed before attempting an answer, doubts concerning what truth is.
Omar correctly points out that whether one adopts a correspondence theory of truth - that which by default is generally the case - one has ultimately to postulate the existence of a correspondent, of something outside the experiencing subject that triggers its experience. Let it be clear, there’s nothing necessarily wrong in postulating that, whether that is through some ‘Cartesian’ process or just for some pragmatic reason. Yet this existence is often challenged and cannot be postulated without some caution, not to say without a lot of caution. (That may become - actually often it does become - an excruciating problem). So ‘truth = what actually is the case’ is a common sense definition, but it has issues… Also defining truth as consistency presents problems, because ultimately consistency seem not to cover quite a number of cases where a truth value is needed. (I just don’t consider the case of 'truth = what works" because it seems to me to be only a trick).
So, with these doubts, I don’t feel like saying what truth is, consequently I can even less define a perimeter where I, or someone else, could discern truth values.
Now let’s assume that the question of truth reveals itself as very problematic for everybody (though probably that’s not the case), we maybe can focus on the question: why do we need truth?
Because if we agree that indeed we need truth, why is that? And this question should open a door to a perspective where truth it’s not really as simple a notion as many tend to think.
It seems to me that epistemologists (I refer mainly to Popper and Lakatos) have indeed advanced considerably in this respect, in a way that seems to favour truth as coherency, but leaving the ‘immediate’ acquisition of knowledge mysterious. These doctrines have a huge value and clearly answer very well to what need truth (a quite ‘ẃeak’ notion of truth) responds, because the use of derivations from an inconsistent set would be nil. Yet that leaves undecided the ‘truths’ that appear non-falsifiable… And that would make the question even stronger: why do we need truth then?
I guess that GS347 offers an interesting point of view about that.
Attano - yes, this is the sort of thing I had in mind myself. I am always struck by the relation between coherence and attraction. What tells truth-value to man in the first glance, is appeal. Now this appeal may be by it being a cruel and horrible fact, that matters not - what matters is that it is not instinctively rejected as trivial, uninteresting, peripheral, arbitrary, etc. What matters is that it is pulled into the epistemic core, which is a churning, a consuming, a life.
Truths do not attach themselves to passive standards. There has never been a scientist who was indifferent about the base on which he be built his een and narrow observations. Objectivity is an accomplishment - a form of focus. It is never a given standard from which the world is poured into ‘the honest observer’ who has ‘cleaned his temple to receive’ — unless we regard this cleaning the temple as a preparing the temple, in which case, it is exactly that – if the mind is prepared for a certain type of truth-value, it is likely to be flooded by it. So my perimeter of truth value is simply my self-valuing – I can only decide if something is positively true or not if I relate to it strongly. This is ‘unfortunately’ the truth of my truthfulness - the most truthful thing I can do is accept and affirm this.And if I do, I already know that whatever it is that is perceived to be true is so in correspondence with my overall value-grid, with my world-model, which I accept to have ‘created’ by being an entity with a consciousness of itself as standing within a greater half-known. I understand that this entity has to be, in the final instance, the criterium. This is my ultimate ‘faith’ (GS) - it is the least intrusive and selective faith that I can muster - the faith in my own positive existence as standard. If I lose this faith, I lose sight of my own role in my judgments, and the question of knowledge becomes an arbitrary broken thing on the side of the road.
Now as for the use of truth; I think that we need to look deeper at what ‘use’ is - what kind of value.
“What is the perimeter of truths use-value?”
This is a narrower circle, as to a reasonably fortunately constituted homo sapiens, or other existentially abundant complex mammal, more is of value than is of use, and yet a less tight one. Less is of use than of value, and yet much information-forms may be of use that are no of truth-value. A known lie can often have more use than a know truth. Therefore use value is a very weak criterium for truth value.
What interests e very much here is the implied rejection of the means of acquisition as a criterium. As in fact these means become a criterium only when the method (e.g. scientific method, but also liturgic method) is taken to be the truth itself, the coherence itself. There is much to be said for this, especially in the case of science, but much against it as well.
In the last instance the merit of science is that it grants power. This has always been the functional, factual criterium for truth – and that a truth is powerful has always been the criterium of its rejection as well, in the case of those with insufficiently powerful epistemic cohesiveness regarding such truths; a powerful truth can disintegrate a less powerful vessel.
I think it is fair to conclude that pain, or more generally discomfort, or more specifically, the manifest sensation of being powerless before and/or defeated by an idea, is an important criterium of truth-value when we decide to look at objectivity. Certainly not the only one, as the discovery of truth is usually accompanied by immense bliss.
These are also criteria to consider; whether a potential truth is being received in communication, or personally unearthed.
Hello attano
I like the question you present. Indeed why do we need “truths”? Nietzsche puts the need for belief as a measure of strenght. The strong relish the challenge and the doubt. But where do these challenges and doubts come from? Well, in my opinion these rely on other beliefs even stronger than those they challenge. In a way our way to strength reveals yet another submission another weakness that we have over-“powered”—As if!
The need for belief I think is a natural disposition irrational or better yet pre-rational if there is such a thing. Whether we interpret this disposition as a testament to our weakness or our will it is at the bottom just interpretations that fancy our taste. As Tiziano Ferro sang “E la attenzione cade sulle cose belle”.
Hello Jakob
Although your response was addressed to attano, I could not resist adding a couple of ideas myself.
— What matters is that it is pulled into the epistemic core, which is a churning, a consuming, a life.
O- I agree completely. I actually think you did not go far enough to describe the biological, and even social aspect of human epistemology.
— Truths do not attach themselves to passive standards. There has never been a scientist who was indifferent about the base on which he be built his een and narrow observations. Objectivity is an accomplishment - a form of focus.
O- A sort of self-negation taken for the sake of self-empowerment.
— So my perimeter of truth value is simply my self-valuing – I can only decide if something is positively true or not if I relate to it strongly.
O- Hmmmm. What about what others close to you think? We don’t just relate to “it” but to others who believe “it”, so that often rather than the self-value as a judge it is the social/herd instinct that attracts someone towards “it”.
— whatever it is that is perceived to be true is so in correspondence with my overall value-grid, with my world-model, which I accept to have ‘created’ by being an entity with a consciousness of itself as standing within a greater half-known.
O- I think this is a philosopher’s declaration and probably not something generally held, even unconsciously. The power of truth lies precisely in being truth in spite of what I feel, or what others feel. If a truth was nothing beyond my choice, then I would invite a radical relativism that would render truth simply a sweet name for a compelling opinion. That is not how most feel about their truths. When people are debating whether the evidence suggest that global warming is real or not, they are conveying a truth they have not chosen, or so they think.
— Now as for the use of truth; I think that we need to look deeper at what ‘use’ is - what kind of value.
“What is the perimeter of truths use-value?”
O- Use? Knowledge and knowledge as power. But power does not come from choice. It comes from something independent of my or anyone’s choice–ideally. What I am pointing towards is “truth” as it exists in the popular mind. To study the question about the use of truth, it is important to take an anthropological approach and take “truth” not as we explain it to be, but how it is perceived by others.
— A known lie can often have more use than a know truth. Therefore use value is a very weak criterium for truth value.
O- That objectivity you spoke of before tries to avoid the use of an observation as the criteria for determining whether it was truth. The power of a lie lies precisely on being taken as a known truth. Otherwise everyone will pursue truth rather than falsehood even if it leads them towards their own destruction.
— Scientific truth is thoroughly subjective, culturally determined, and highlights only certain aspects of reality, which it then labels as “the true world”. A logical non-sequitur, but no matter, it results in power, even if this power turns out to be of a deeply problematic nature.
O- I think that the ingredients you list for scientific truth belie that it is thoroughly subjective. If it was then it would not be culturally determined, for culture lies outside of the subject and sets limits to the subject. By the way, I agree with your list. I only think that because of the drive, the desire for objectivity, that science truths are not thoroughly subjective. They may retain subjectivity, but it is not the wild fantasy of mito-poetic thought. (And even that was conditioned, limited by the cultural background that fueled it).
— I think it is fair to conclude that pain, or more generally discomfort, or more specifically, the manifest sensation of being powerless before and/or defeated by an idea, is an important criterium of truth-value when we decide to look at objectivity. Certainly not the only one, as the discovery of truth is usually accompanied by immense bliss.
O- I agree. This is why scientific “truths” are not “thoroughly subjective”. It is not simply: “It is truth because I say it is.”, but a judgment that follows from something from without that determines us, pains us, and even pleases us, because even the cruelest cut is worth is gladly suffered to better oneself. The process of self-negation found in objectivity conditions this reaction of pleasure when indeed the “truth” goes against our desires. It provides simply another opportunity for self-negation.
— These are also criteria to consider; whether a potential truth is being received in communication, or personally unearthed.
O- Ahh, that too, indeed.
Well, Jakob… thank-you.
I forewarn that probably I am going to be slightly unfair with you, I am going to ascribe you one or more positions that in fact need not to be exactly yours. You can blame that both on my less than thorough understanding of your post and on compounding in you a number of things that I happen to see frequently.
Besides, please believe that if my wording sounds a bit harsh, that is because I want to stress differences between the view I may incorrectly think it’s your and mine. In fact, when reading your post - and other posts of yours - I have a sensation not unlike looking at a postcard of some place where I have been. It’s not my picture, but I can well recognize the place and the objects in it. So my views often overlap yours, yet they are not the same.
This could be a good example of us looking at the same thing but not exactly in the same way.
Here it seems to me that you are saying that ‘true’ does not mean ‘complying with a standard’, but the application of “means”. But it’s not thoroughly clear what these means are. However the means are related or embody an ‘epistemic core’ which is the center of gravity around which one’s knowledge revolves. Not only the epistemic core organises knowledge, but it also selects its elements by assigning truth values that are functional to “a life”.
If that is so, I maybe could say something similar and yet I cannot share it as you put it. It also seems to me that you imply a theory of knowledge and agency that is not mine.
In a large ‘system’ there have to be a core, which acts as a sort of center of gravity but that it also key for the expansion of itself (actually one may rephrase and say ‘for the expansion of the self’, with no ‘it-’). It may be viewed as the characterizing elements of the whole system, what makes it different from the rest and possibly unique. All that can be easily agreed upon.
The question (to me) becomes what is the ‘system’ made of. All that boils down to a series of questions, but possibly one only: what is knowledge exactly? Which is to say, what do we want to mean by knowledge?
Clearly it is possible to provide a static perspective and answer that knowledge is a ‘group’ made of basic constituents as perceptions (assuming that perceptions are necessarily always ‘basic’ and unadulteralted, of course…), notions and methods, in a sort of algebraic approach. This scheme has its use, but it is flawed. It misrepresents dynamics elements - we do not think that this dynamic elements can be formally represented (i.e. men are not turing machines) - and, you would say, it pretends that there’s not a constant – or frequent – bias acting on notions, on their relations, dependencies, order, so that eventually everything bends around an ‘epistemic core’, and that can’t be different because without that ‘core’ we can’t properly speak of knowledge, which has to rely at least on this belief: it’s ‘me’ on top of ‘my’ knowledge. Here is where I would start my objections.
In my view, the ‘honest observer’ model is (also) inherently flawed because it fails to grasp the diversity and synergies or conflicts of the agents battling for knowledge. My assumption (well… not really mine) here is that the unity of the knowing subject is pure fiction. The different agents are not to be understood as perception, Gestalt, mind, whatever… (these may be viewed as resources), I mean that knowledge is an effect produced from a competition, a tension, a struggle between forces, different ‘souls’, concealed by what we used to believe is a unique agent, a subject. Rephrased more rhetorically, the epistemic core is a battle field and the idea of being in control is a bit far-fetched.
To be honest, something equivalent is acknowledged, but trivialized, by adopting some dynamic psychological outlook, where it is posited that knowledge is the outcome of a conscious activity that may be influenced by different layers of the self. Clearly I would criticize this approach too. I don’t mean that there can’t be this self and its layers, but this sort of dynamics implies that the maker of knowledge is the conscious self, and there can’t be knowledge without it. It hints to a hierarchy where conscience would be on top and it would reduce these forces to mere pulsions, incapable of processing any information, only to distort it. Instead I maintain that the subject (the conscience) is not substantial, it’s just some function (possibly the equivalent of a shell in an OS, which is no part of the system’s kernel), and seeing the forces as pulsions, drives, leanings… it does not grasp my view. Unlike what most people seem to assume whenever I see this topic discussed, knowing is not entirely conscious and maybe we can even say that no real knowledge is really conscious, after all. What is normally referred to as mind, what processes and builds knowledge, is not contained in consciousness, and maybe does not overlap it at all. Sensations need not to enter consciousness either.
So I am quite with you as for the ‘churning’, the internal stirring that may orient knowing, the reject of the kantian model - a subject imbued of sensations and neutrally processing them according to its structure, including the hieratic ‘moral law’ - as defective, non-plausible (and hypocrite). And I can agree on objectivity as an ‘achievement’– but subjectivity is not really any more ‘authentic’ than that…
Given my hypothesis that knowledge does not depend on consciousness and that the subject isn’t anything of substantial, I find the ‘ipsissimosity’ governing your discernment of values, ultimately, delusional. On one hand, I see it as problematic, on the other, it doesn’t do the job, it doesn’t explain much.
And ideological post-modernistic criticism of science doesn’t do the job either. Inasmuch it reflects the idea that knowledge will always be helplessly biased, even if in subliminal degrees, I would accept it. But it undermines itself by lapsing into a sort of conspiracy theory. This alleged claim of the practicing scientist to hold ‘the real truth’ - and to attain ‘the real world’ - seems unfounded, unless it is referred to the XIX century (and even then…). Moreover, it blames scientific practice on a moral ground for surreptitiously promoting the absence of values, claiming what exactly? A right for other “valid directions” to become “true science” regardless the epistemological status of their thesis, because they are ‘edifying’? Maybe not, as you set ‘pain’ as a marker of truth, yet… what’s not ‘painful’ in the proposed depiction of science?
If the scientific truth is wholly subjective - which, by the way, does not mean ‘arbitrary’ in this case - it remains that it can’t enjoy the status of dogma (regardless dogmatic attitudes of its supporters) and it is always open to challenge, as it has happened time and again.
It seems to me that here positivism is mistaken for science, while positivism (which lives on in contemporary philosophy as “physics envy”) is not science. And, yes, science is might: that’s why attempts to ‘debunk’ science are futile.
Anyway, what’s wrong with subjectivity? Actually subjectivity can be many things but, with respect to knowledge, I guess that taking oneself as the yardstick of the whole world is seriously misplaced. Regardless the high esteem one may hold oneself in, it’s not really clear to me what one thinks to be able to achieve with such a principle. OK, maybe the scientist can hardly be indifferent to himself, yet, if the observations are narrow, why should they be propped by an even more narrow base? Oblivious of himself or not, normally he is trying to look at a bigger picture, else he would not even start observing.
Putting that in a different way - which is what I often find written here and there, and it sometimes goes by the name ‘hermeneutics’ - it is posited that there is something like objectivity, yet - alas - with a deeply christian attitude, it is acknowledged that it’s a perfect/godly state of mind that men can’t possibly reach. Hence, as God is dead anyway, we just don’t have to bother and we believe, i.e. we hold as truths, whatever we fancy, and of course we can even call that philosophy. No, I am sorry, it does not work that way. If God is dead, it’s your premise that is ‘full of God’ and that’s where you should get started. If knowledge can’t be the congruent representation of being, it does not mean that it can’t be knowledge at all.
Besides, inasmuch subjectivity means ‘opinion’, that is basically ignorance, judgements based on lack of knowledge that sometimes are necessary lacking other options, but by no means they are always the only option. (Clearly I am not implying that there are judgements that are only opinions and judgements that are not opinions at all, I focus on the attitude).
I can understand that from your point of view the self-denial that scientific inquiry seemingly requires, the systematic silencing of one’s motives, expectations, etc. is seen as leading to a form of slow death, of euthanasia of personality. Even worse, there has been this lie circulating that at the end of the day this personality is not needed, that it is even a nuisance for the ‘honest observer’. Yes, you are right about that, but then your allegations can’t target that body of knowledge that is properly labelled ‘science’, which per se contains no prescriptions of this kind. And this self-denial is not part any agenda, it’s the inheritance of centuries of Platonism. (Actually, I even think that we should cherish this impersonal-ism displayed by the workers of science, their hypocrite modesty. It’s the remainder of lives consumed approaching a distant horizon demanding to part from the world, to confine oneself somewhere else).
Your position becomes problematic when you assert that personality must be preserved against ‘truth’. Affirming is not denial. OK, truth is deadly - or at least it is poisonous and, yes, it may crush the delicate ‘vessels’. Yet, eventually, these are going to be crushed anyway (maybe without even being aware of that). At least before the end they had a glimpse of understanding, that is not at hand for everyone of us.
Truth is a challenge a philosopher is obliged to take up (then one may talk about ‘personality’), one must take it and may not leave it. Subjectivity is not the answer: it’s not expansion, it’s not daring, it’s not the work of ‘devilish virtues’ (BGE227): it is retreat, it is delusion. Nor it is balance or control. One relies on something that one accepts to be oneself, while that is far from being established - the ‘oneself’ is far from being established. God knows how much things that are behind and beneath us, how much family, friends, teachers, nation and state, propaganda and ideology, history and "air du temps” bloat our ‘faiths’. The epistemic core is a not godsend, as you say it requires ‘means’ and the acquisition of them: honest, fearless, unsatiable and cruel engagement - and toil.
‘Pain’ also means that the catalog of irreducible subjectivities and the uniqueness of petty existences (“man and the world”) have to perish.
Instead, what’s good in science? Well, probably exactly what you don’t like.
It takes a mindset aimed at objectivity in order to acknowledge that objectivity can’t be, else the issue would have never risen. If objectivity is not attainable - and not even desirable - striving to think objectively has its upsides. The fact that it is fictitious does not imply that it is wrong, unless one is looking at the question from a moral point of view (GS344). Whether one is willing to go beyond morality, beyond good and evil, then objectivity becomes cleansing from morality, cleansing from other sources of pollution and noise (as oneself), enabling to embrace a larger horizon, a larger ‘economy’ (“everything counts in large amounts”). The discipline of testing that it demands, the systematic suspicion of divine intuitions and whims, the training that leads to the embodiment of methods in the knowledge seeker, in order to become colder, deeper, sharper, harder - devilish maybe. These may well be the preconditions for affirming.
(«A sort of self-negation taken for the sake of self-empowerment» seems a good one…).
Hi Omar.
In Nietzsche’s wording it is not the strong who relishes the challenge and doubt, it’s the free spirit, a specific kind of man of knowledge. It seems to me that Nietzsche here is not pointing to strength but to a form of joyful (intellectual) recklessness. It’s the free spirit ‘the strong’? Well some relationship can be reasonably presumed, it’s clear that the free spirit is stronger than other men of knowledge, yet I do not see Nietzsche focusing on that. It’s more weakness in GS347 that is scrutinized, the religiöse Wesen and knowledge after the death of God.
Yes there are ultimately stronger beliefs against those promoted by weakness. Which beliefs? The death of god: that there is no order, no classical categories governing the world, nothing supra-natural or divine reflecting in «this world with which we are concerned», etc., etc. Ultimately, a big negative. So, yes, this strength would reveal itself as submission - from a Nietzschean point of view it can’t be different (BGE226 and here one may easily refer to the book I of BGE too). Whether this submission is ‘submission to weakness’ it’s debatable (BGE 224 and ff.). As the free spirit willingly (an adverb that need to be understood in a Nietzschean acception) puts himself in danger, that does not seem ‘weakness’ to me.
Thanks for the clarification.
In willingly taking upon a reckless intellectual position I thi of a person that delights in decorating their apartment.
Ideas are like pieces of furniture that we bring into the apartment and use them until we are no longer aware of hoe our freedom to move about the apartment is conditioned by our furniture. In a way, the free of spirit are similar to a skeptic in that they recognize the power of ideas, but whereas the skeptic aims for a room filled with only a piece of furniture, the free spirit buys new furniture to replace the old self conscious of the arbitrariness of his selections. He imposes his style, his taste upon the room upon his own world of ideas.
That’s what I thought about when I read your answer.
Science holds more truths than philosophy, philosophy is only guesswork and can’t reveal any truths that way.
Hello Attano, I will warn you up front, the representation against which you argue has, as you feared, little to no relation to my position.
The central assumption you’ve made to cause a rhetorical phantom into being, is the assumption that values are a property of consciousness.
A quick observation of nature - and indeed of your own observations below - reveals that consciousness is rather a rare, specific and peculiar form of valuing, than that valuing is a form of consciousness.
Valuing has no requirement of consciousness. Consciousness relies wholly on valuing.
Nietzsche saw this to the extent that he playfully predicted that consciousness would die out, as life progressed into more efficiency.
I will address your erring with a light touch, to unveil the agreement that is behind it.
It would be good to call to mind Relativity at this point. This law reveals to us that there is no possibility of knowledge-gathering, or more fundamentally of data gathering and measuring, without holding the perspective of measurement as a standard.
Control has little to do with it. What matter is the “lens”, the place where the forces converge and for an impression, which is the ‘self’. I call this the ‘self-valuing’ - the self-sustaining standard of interpretation, which only in rare instances is as complex to result in the phenomenon of consciousness.
I think we can agree now that this is all made of straw.
I admit to having made my hands dirty in attempting to formulate a notion of a standard to type-continuous valuing, that speaks to the consistency of operating systems, rather than a total anarchy of drives, which would mean chaos, or nothingness, which would follow from your rudimentary model of ‘centerless war of drives’.
The point is that there is always a victor among the drives. The victor is not permanent and certainly not a-priori in the Kantian sense. But it is rather a logical causal proposition. If there is no victor, then there is no hierarchy, then there is no form, then there is no being.
None of what I say has anything to do with the the conscious being, let alone with the self-consciousness.
Any conscious self and any conscious will is wholly dependent on its subconscious valuing, which is the organism itself, down to the subatomic powerstruggles that form its fibers. Where you would be wrong is in assuming that there is no entity because there is struggle. That is to misunderstood the necessary reciprocity between power and context, which in terms of quantities is wholly explicated by Relativity, but already perfectly demonstrated by Newton.
There is no such thing as an absolute standard, or an objective standard. The standard of any events progression is first the relative strength and cohesion of the competing terms, and second the contingencies arising in the qualitative reciprocities between these terms.
In somewhat Nietzschean terms:
- Integrity/strength, 2. “Cleverness”/subtlety
Of course I do not mean “cleverness” as a quality of consciousness here.
Where a consciousness is clever, the consciousness is rather a produce of this cleverness, than vice versa.
This is mainly straw, as well.
Science is a method.
What it gathers is the type of knowledge that yields control.
Note: scientific method is the first type of self-valuing that properly requires consciousness.
It values both man and the world in terms of itself, thereby producing what man nows as his consciousness – as the consistency within its being-conscious.
This is why human consciousness is subservient to science.
I know of only one perspective of consciousness that is even more powerful (consistent) than the scientific method, and it is this perspective from which I write. The fact that the scientific method represents a perspective does not mean it is arbitrary. The fact that Napoleon represented a perspective did not make him arbitrary either. What matters is the power of this perspective – not only its requirements, but the consequences of following it through.
The opposite. Science is pure motive, and the scientist values himself in terms of this motive, this is his happiness, his consciousness, his humanity - his power and his self. There is no self beyond the methods one employs to sustain this self. That is why the ends never justify the means.
I would ask that you do not put words in my mouth. The object of your rhetoric touches on all positions but mine, it seems.
Or we may decide that man is to be that “honest, fearless, unsatiable and cruel engagement” - but that would make us – and that would make most “men” …
It would be at first good for the philosopher to actually understand the sciences of the early 20th century. Once he has managed this, he can attain to an understanding of power as perspetive, and he can begin to aspire to proper hardness and consistency of mind - proper power, proper perspective, “superhuman” –
Let us not put the blame on Plato. The ‘scxientism’ has been around a long time, and the divergence started with Aristotle. So, it is not if like saying, perspectivism is a new development, it has been around in a kernel form, but Platonism was more attractive, more with a sense of center. The epistologic has sharply diverged from this stance for obvious reasons of attrations, and disclaimed early on, even the thought of such a center.
But to argue once preference over the other is like saying apples are more preferable than oranges, is missing the derivative, of the idea, that science is post the facto,of an inherent process, which has precedence over this unfolding between the two forms. Now, the appearance of this process is likened to the verbatum call for a unification between ontology and epistomology, an inherence into the idea, that maybe this divergence was the product of little understanding in the beginning between the two, creating exaggerated models of substantiation.
When these models are being threatend enthropically, epistomological panic sets in, and the solution is suggested of a complete replcement of one over the other. This is anathma, and long after all science will be gone, ontologycal formalism, cognitive patterns will again take over.
An intesting point, Orb. Let’s do this – science versus cognitive pattern-ontology.
Let us first discern what science really is, where it started to become something else than formalized cognitive patterns – where it became properly synthetic.
I will, for the sake of the argument, maintain until convinced otherwise, that it started with Archimedes, with the isolation of quantities, and the thereby enabled conception of physical causation.
To hold this, all logics and mathematics that were developed before it, must be categorized as proto-science, as formalism of cognitive patterns.
The relation of Archimedes and Newton is airtight, and these two men are enough to stand as a representation of what science is.
The relation of science to Aristotle and Plato is, to me, virtually non existent. Maybe someone can explain that there is an actual relation. I do not know of any idea by either one of them that turned out to be crucial to a scientific theorem.