Showing posts with label Gray. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gray. Show all posts
Homo economicus
"Capitalism is what humans do when they are left alone": In other words, when they are alienated from a meaningful context, of customs and traditions.
The statecraft which constructed the free market in England turned to its purposes the effects of a centuries-long development. In the course of this historical movement, market forces had come to be a dominant force in social life.
Market exchange there had always been, and in England a market economy had existed for several hundred years; but it was at this juncture in history that the truly free market came into being, thereby creating a market society.
Karl Polanyi notes that, ‘Ultimately … the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organisation of society; it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.’
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.11-12
As some economists have recognised, the pursuit of economic efficiency without regard to social costs is itself unreasonable and in effect ranks the demands of the economy over the needs of society.
That is precisely what drives competition in a global free market. The neglect of social costs which is a professional deformation of economists, has become an imperative of the entire system.
[…] the economic argument for unregulated global free trade involves a wild abstraction from social realities. It is true that restraints on global free trade will not enhance productivity; but maximal productivity achieved at the cost of social desolation and human misery is an anomalous and dangerous social ideal.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.83
The spread of new technologies throughout the world is not working to advance human freedom. Instead it has resulted in the emancipation of market forces from social and political control.
By allowing that freedom to world markets we ensure that the age of globalisation will be remembered as another turn in the history of servitude.
Jospeh Schumpeter understood capitalism better than any other twentieth century economist. He saw that it did not work to preserve the cohesion of society. Left to itself it could well destroy liberal civilisation.
That is why he accepted that capitalism must be tamed. Government intervention was needed to reconcile the dynamism of capitalism with social stability.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.208, 210
The laissez-faire policies which produced the Great Transformation in nineteenth-century England were based on the theory that market freedoms are natural and political restraints on markets are artificial.
The truth is that free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression.
[…] The parliamentarians who passed Factory Acts in the 1860s and 1870s were not reconstructing society or the economy according to a plan. They were responding to problems of working life - danger, squalor, inefficiencies - as they become aware of them. Laissez-faire withered away as the unintended consequence of a multitude of such uncoordinated responses.
[…] The market is not, as New Right thinkers have imagined or claimed, a gift of social evolution. It is an end-product of social engineering and unyielding political will. It was feasible in nineteenth-century England only because, and for so long as, functioning democratic institutions were lacking.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p17
In a capitalist world, violent debates about truth—whether they concern questions of religion and virtue or questions about the nature of humanity— interfere with the productive conduct of commerce. It is therefore best for such questions to be eliminated or obscured.
“Capitalism,” concludes Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, “is simply what humans do when they are left alone.”
[Peter Thiel]
‘The Straussian Moment’
Paine's writings were in no special sense aimed at the working people, as distinct from farmers, tradesmen and professional men. His was a doctrine suited to agitation among "members unlimited"; but he did not challenge the property rights of the rich nor the doctrines of laissez faire.
[…] they were aimed at the great landed aristocracy, where the hereditary principle involved in the custom of primogeniture gave him offence. In terms of political democracy he wished to level all inherited distinctions and privileges; but he gave no countenance to economic levelling.
In political society every man must have equal rights as a citizen: in economic society he must naturally remain employer or employed, and the State should not interfere with the capital of the one or the wages of the other.
The aristocracy were the main target; their property might be threatened - even as far as Land Nationalisation or Henry George's Single Tax - and their rents regarded as a feudal exaction dating from "a French bastard" and his "armed banditti"; but - however hard trade unionists might fight against their employers - industrial capital was assumed to be the fruit of enterprise and beyond reach of political intrusion.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.104-5
[…] the final years of the 18th century saw a last desperate effort by the people to reimpose the older moral economy as against the economy of the free market.
The classic exploitative relationship of the Industrial Revolution is depersonalised, in the sense that no lingering obligation of mutuality - of paternalism or deference, or of the interests of ‘the Trade’ - are admitted.
There is no whisper of the ‘just’ price, or of a wage justified in relation to social or moral sanctions, as opposed to the operation of free market forces.
Antagonism is accepted as intrinsic to the relations of production. Managerial or supervisory functions demand the repression of all attributes except those which further the expropriation of the maximum surplus value from labour. This is the political economy which Marx anatomised in Das Kapital. The worker has become an "instrument", or an entry among other items of cost.
[…] in the overstocked outwork industries, where there was always a sufficiency of unorganised "hands" competing for employment, these considerations did not operate. Here, as old customs were eroded, and old paternalism was set aside, the exploitive relationship emerged supreme.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.73, 222-3
[…] what was ‘perfectly proper’ in terms of capitalist property-relations involved, none the less, a rupture of the traditional integument of village custom and of right: and the social violence of enclosure consisted precisely in the drastic, total imposition upon the village of capitalist property definitions.
Copyhold and even vaguer customary family tenancies (which carried common rights) might prove to be invalid at law although they were endorsed by the collective memory of the community.
Enclosure, indeed, was the culmination of a long secular process by which men’s customary relations to the agrarian means of production were undermined. It was of profound social consequence because it illuminates, both backwards and forwards, the destruction of the traditional elements in English peasant society.
[…] one finds a dense cluster of claims and usages, which stretch from the common to the market-place and which, taken together, made up the economic and cultural universe of the rural poor.
[…] But whereas it fitted the conditions of the Industrial Revolution like a glove, in agriculture it contested (at best) with older paternalist traditions (the squire's duty to his labourers) and with the tradition of earnings based on need (the older customs of differentials according to age, marital status, children, etc., which were perpetuated under the Speenhamland system of poor relief) […]
The doctrine that labour discovers its own "natural" price, according to the laws of supply and demand, had long been ousting the notion of the "just" wage.
[…] the perpetuation of Speenhamland and "rounds man" systems, in all their variety, was ensured by the demand of the larger farmers - in an industry which has exceptional requirements for occasional or casual labour - for a permanent cheap labour reserve.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.238-9, 244
Related posts:
American Modernity
Americans believe their ideas are universal - the supremacy of the individual and free, unfettered expression. But they are not - never were.
[Lee Kuan Yew]
Any attempt to impose one’s own will or values upon others or to unify the world under a certain model of ‘civilisation’ will definitely fail … No one economic system is good for all countries. Each must follow its own path, as China has.
[Qiao She (Chinese Politician)]
The Enlightenment idea of a universal civilisation is nowhere stranger than in the United States, where it is identified with the universal acceptance of western - that is to say, American - values and institutions.
The idea that the United States is a universal model has long been a feature of American civilisation. During the eighties, the Right was able to co-opt this idea of a national mission in the service of free market ideology. Today the worldwide reach of American corporate power and the ideal of a universal civilisation have become indistinguishable in American public discourse.
Market utopianism has succeeded in appropriating the American faith that it is a unique country, the model for a universal civilisation which all societies are fated to emulate.
According to the ‘Washington consensus’ [the] manifold economic cultures and systems that the world has always contained will be redundant. They will be merged into a single universal free market […] The ultimate explanation of the power of the free market cannot be found in any economic theory. It is in the recurring utopianism of western civilisation […] A global free market is the Enlightenment project of a universal civilisation, sponsored by the world’s last great Enlightenment regime […] That is what explains its popularity - especially in the United States.
Most European countries have been partly shaped by Enlightenment thinking, but all are now post-Enlightenment cultures […] Only in the United States is the Enlightenment project of a global civilisation still a living political faith.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.2,100-1, 104, 216, 234
All of the world’s empires - such as the Roman, Chinese, Ottoman, Romanov, British and Hapsburg empires - encompassed a copious diversity of cultures.
Each had a dominant culture, and at times some had universalist goals; but none of them ever consistently attempted to convert their subjects to a single way of life or set of beliefs.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.127
The contemporary American faith that it is a universal nation implies that all humans are born American, and become anything else by accident - or error. According to this faith American values are, or will soon be, shared by all humankind.
Of course such messianic fancies are commonplace. In the nineteenth century the claim to be a universal nation was made by France, Russia and England. Now, even more than in the past, it is a perilous conceit.
[…] Singapore rejected the universality of western values. It spurned America’s intervention and the doctrines of human rights that the United States was propagating throughout East Asia. It affirmed its own values against the liberal model of human rights and the economic culture of market individualism that the United States sought to implant throughout the world.
It pointed to its achievements as a post-liberal city-state - stable, cohesive, highly educated and fast-growing - as proof that its model of modernisation and development was superior to anything ‘the West’ had to offer.
[…] Implicitly, and in more recent times explicitly, Japan’s policy-makers rejected the view that modernisation means convergence on the same western institutions and values […] they made clear their ‘rejection of the so-called convergence hypothesis, which states that there is a universal logic to industrialism and that the social relationships found in the First Nations to industrialise (individualism, a free labour market, and so on) must inevitably develop elsewhere.’
In their dealings with their employees and the rest of society Japanese market institutions rely on networks of trust rather than upon a culture of contract.
Each version of capitalism articulates the particular culture in which it remains embedded. This is true of the free market, which expresses local American values of individualism.
The deep differences between Asia’s capitalisms and those in western countries […] reflect differences not only in the family structures but also in the religious life of the cultures in which these diverse capitalisms are rooted. The greatest sociologist of capitalism, Max Weber, was right to link the development of capitalism in north-western Europe with Protestantism.
In our time, capitalism in post-communist countries whose religious traditions are Orthodox will be unlike that in any ‘western’, Protestant or Catholic, country: neither the institutions of secular civil society, nor the limited state of such western countries, has developed in any Orthdox culture.
Both the supporters and the critics of capitalism have fastened on individualism as one of its central features. But the connections between capitalism and individualism are neither necessary not universal: they are historical accidents.
The early theorists of capitalism - Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Karl Marx, Max Weber and John Stuart Mill - mistook them for universal laws because the evidence on which they based their theories was for the most part limited to a few western countries.
To accept that countries can achieve modernity without revering the folkways of individualism, bowing to the cult of human rights or sharing the Enlightenment superstition of progress towards a world civilisation, is to admit that America’s civil religion has been falsified.
For most Americans such a perception is intolerable. Instead, evidence of the superior economic growth, savings rates, educational standards and family stability of countries that have repudiated the American model will be repressed, denied and resisted indefatigably. To admit this evidence would be to confront the social costs of the American free market.
The discovery that America’s path is a singularity that in no sense plots the course of universal history in the modern world will be a catalyst for large cultural changes. Its effect must be to strip the United States of its self-image as the paradigm of modernity.
The United States has built the illusions and superstitions of the Enlightenment into its view of itself. In other times this might matter less. Today it threatens to render intractable the most difficult task of the age - that of contriving terms of peaceful and productive coexistence among peoples and regimes that will always be different.
By seeking to impose a single economic civilisation on all of humankind America’s support for the Washington consensus risks turning manageable differences between states into intractable conflicts.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.131-2, 127, 167, 169-70, 191-2, 205
[…] like many other late modern social movements [feminism and multiculturalism] are - in their most radical and sectarian manifestations - peculiarly American phenomena. If such radical social movements do not belong to ‘American civilisation,’ nothing does.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.127
The American intervention in Bosnia was prompted by the belief that intractable political and military conflict can be resolved by the imposition of a cleverly contrived constitution.
It expressed the Dayton illusion: that a short-lived American intervention can extend to other regimes and cultures American values and procedures - a legalist culture of rights and a model of negotiation between states and communities that derives from the practice of corporate law - whose authority is strictly local.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.128
Related posts:
Mobility
Fixed - Mobile
Regulated - Free
Professional associations, local authorities, mutual societies and stable families were impediments to the mobility and individualism that are required by unfettered markets.
They limit the power of markets over people. In a late modern context re-engineering the free market cannot avoid weakening or destroying such intermediary structures, and such was their fate in Britain.
It is odd that there are still those who find the association of free markets with social disorder anomalous. Even if it could itself be rendered stable the free market is bound to be destructive of other institutions through which social cohesion is preserved.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.36
Even for those whose incomes have risen personal economic risk has increased perceptibly.
Most Americans dread a mid-life economic dislocation from which - they suspect - they may never recover. Few think now in terms of a lifelong vocation. Many expect, not without reason, that their incomes may fall in future.
These are not circumstances which nurture a culture of contentment.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.111
Like social democracy, protectionism belongs to a world that cannot be revived.
Sovereign states will continue to shelter industries they regard as strategically vital; but the classical policies of trade protection, as applied across entire economies, are unworkable or counter-productive.
When companies can split up their operations and locate them practically anywhere in the world, services can be contracted out to remote countries throughout the use of information technologies, financial assets are traded in cyberspace, and protectionist policies are a dead end.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.204
[…] it is only in a closed economy that egalitarian principles can be enforced. In open economies they will be rendered unworkable by the freedom of capital - including ‘human capital’ - to migrate.
[…] The classic solution to the problems of financing the provision of public goods is mutually agreed coercion […] This classic solution breaks down when taxation is not enforceable on mobile capital and corporations. If sources of revenue - capital, enterprises and people - are free to migrate to low-tax regimes, mutually agreed coercion does not work as a means of paying for public goods.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.89
Related posts:
The Enlightenment Project
Mono - Poly
Rational - Non-rational
Both Marxism-Leninism and free-market economic rationalism adopt a Promethean attitude to nature and exhibit scant sympathy for the casualties of economic progress. Both are variants of the Enlightenment project of supplanting the historic diversity of human cultures with a single, universal civilisation.
A global free market is that Enlightenment project in its latest - perhaps last - form.
[…] Each was convinced that human progress must have a single civilisation as its goal. Each denied that a modern economy can come in many varieties. Each was ready to impose its single vision on the world. Each has run aground on vital human needs.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.215, 235
It’s a process of abstracting value - from complex value to abstract value - and then extracting and accumulating it. Capitalism does that, but socialism and communism have other versions of doing [- they] were really only subsets of this kind of resource concentration system.
That’s the core, that’s the ring of power that has to be broken: abstraction of value, and specifically a reductive abstraction; extraction, so you remove the content form its context; and accumulation.
[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'46: Daniel Schmachtenberger - Phase Shifting Humanity', The Future Thinkers Podcast
Both socialism and capitalism are products of the European Enlightenment and are thus modernizing and anti-traditional forces. In contrast, distributism seeks to subordinate economic activity to human life as a whole, to our spiritual life, our intellectual life, our family life.
[Thomas Storck]
'Capitalism and Distributism: two systems at war', Beyond Capitalism & Socialism, p. 75
But it is the image of world-history as it is conceived in the Faustian style.
It begins to be true and consistent with the beginning of the Western Culture and ceases with its ceasing; and Socialism in the highest sense is logically the crown of it, the form of its conclusive state that has been implicit in it from Gothic onwards.
[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p.363
Our commitment to a radical reconstruction is directly relevant here because it insists there can be no dealings not only with every variety of Marxist and socialist ideology, but likewise with what in general can be called the hallucination, or the demonic possession by the economy.
We are dealing here with the idea that in both the individual and collective life, the economic factor is the important, real, and decisive one; that the concentration of every value and interest upon the field of economics and production is not the unprecedented aberration of modern Western man, but on the contrary something normal; not something that is, possibly, an ugly necessity, but rather something that should be desired and exalted.
Both capitalism and Marxism are trapped in this closed and dark circle. We need to break this circle wide open.
[Julius Evola]
‘Orientations’, VI
Related posts:
Constant Conflict
Stasis - Change
Security - Insecurity
Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder.
Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again — the fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse. They cling to the realm, or the gods, or love ... illusions. Only the ladder is real, the climb is all there is.
['Littlefinger']
Dialogue from Game of Thrones
We have entered an age of constant conflict. Information is at once our core commodity and the most destabilizing factor of our time.
For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life is “nasty, brutish . . . and short-circuited.” The general pace of change is overwhelming, and information is both the motor and signifier of change.
Those humans, in every country and region, who cannot understand the new world, or who cannot profit from its uncertainties, or who cannot reconcile themselves to its dynamics, will become the violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and ultimately of the United States.
We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent.
[…] States will struggle for advantage or revenge as their societies boil. Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the “lesser” conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it.
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe.
Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.
The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of it violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but we will fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline.
[Ralph Peters]
‘Constant Conflict’, Parameters, Summer 1997, 4-14
Whatever the horrors of war in the nineteenth century it had limited goals and could be terminated by the states that waged it. That was the kind of war classically theorised by Clausewitz.
[…] As the control of war has slipped in some measure from sovereign states the world has not thereby become more peaceful; it has become less governable and yet more unsafe.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.75
Much of the workforce now lacks even the economic security that went with wage-labour. It exists in the world of part-time and contract work and portfolio employment in which there is no stable relationship with a single identifiable employer.
[…] In this new orthodoxy the role of national governments in overseeing their domestic economies through policies of macroeconomic management has been reduced to devising and implementing microeconomic policies, promoting yet greater flexibility in labour and production.
The corrosion of bourgeois life through increased job insecurity is at the heart of disorder capitalism. Today the social organisation of work is in a nearly continuous flux. It mutates incessantly under the impact of technological innovation and regulated market competition.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.71
The most clear-sighted and candid of the New Right’s thinkers defined progress as ‘movement for movement’s sake’.
Any genuine conservative must regard this as a prescription for purposeless change - in other words, as an expression of nihilism.
In its more concrete uses, which are doubtless the ones that matter to neoliberals, ‘progress’ denotes the incessant social change forced on people by the imperatives of free markets.
[…] The permanent revolution of the free market denies any authority to the past. It nullifies precedent, it snaps the threads of memory and scatters local knowledge. By privileging individual choice over any common good it tends to make relationships revocable and provisional.
[…] As Joseph Schumpeter, who saw this aspect of capitalism with unsurpassed clarity, wrote: ‘The opening up of new markets, foreign and domestic, and the organisational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as US Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation - if I may use that biological term - that incessantly revolutionises the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.
This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.’
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.36-7, 195
Related posts:
The Rise of the Managers
Simple - Complex
The aspiration to value-neutrality often hides a claim to manipulative power. Beneath bureaucratic forms and lofty idealism are often to be found Nietzschean premises.
As “good determinists,” liberals knew that history always marches forward. “The human race never turns back to an old order.”
The best hope lay in an orderly “transition to that which Dewey and Beard have called a ‘technological-rationalist society.’” even if the “more valid equality” it promised meant the “inevitable sacrifice” of individual liberties.
“There is something ponderously fatal about such a transition,” Josephson mused, “but if it results in order, enthusiasm, harmony, we will be content with our sacrifice.”
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.363
"The public interest in a problem," Lippmann argued, "is limited to this: that there shall be rules. ...The public is interested in law, not in the laws; in the method of law, not in the substance." Questions of substance should be left to experts, whose access to scientific knowledge immunized them against the emotional "symbols" and "stereotypes" that dominated public debate.
Lippmann […] rejected the "mystical fallacy of democracy" and the "usual appeal to education as the remedy for the incompetence of democracy." Democratic theory presupposed an "omnicompetent citizen," a "jack of all trades" who could be found only in a "simple self-contained community." In the "wide and unpredictable environment" of the modern world, the old ideal of citizenship was obsolete.
In a complex industrial society, government had to be carried on by officials who were expected to "conceive a common interest." In their attempt to stretch their minds beyond the limits of immediate experience," these officials would be guided either by public opinion or by expert knowledge. There was no escape from this choice.
Public opinion was unreliable, according to Lippmann, because it could be united only by an appeal to slogans and “symbolic pictures.” In a society ruled by public opinion, government became the art of "manipulation" - the "manufacture of consent." "Where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses. ... Everything is on the plane of assertion and propaganda."
At best, public debate was a disagreeable necessity - not the very essence of democracy, as Brownson or Bourne would have argued, but its "primary defect," which arose only because "exact knowledge," unfortunately, was in limited supply. Ideally public debate would not take place at all; decisions would be based on scientific "standards of measurement" alone. Science cut through "entangling stereotypes and slogans," the "threads of memory and emotion" that kept the "responsible administrator" tied up in knots.
Like Edmund Burke, Lippmann distrusted memory as an important source of conflict and disagreement. He proposed to counter its influence, however, not with custom but with “organized intelligence."
An earlier theory of democracy had considered ordinary citizens at least competent to manage their own affairs, if not consistently capable of self-denial and sacrifice. Their opinions were held to command respect, as Lippman saw it, because the business of government did not greatly exceed their experience. But it was “not possible to assume that a world, carried on by division of labor and distribution of authority, can be governed by universal opinions in the whole population.”
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.366
The "practical comfort of the moment" outweighed the "great moral issues of the future.” The question of how to provide practical comfort" was a technical question, not something that could be settled by an appeal to first principles. It was a question for "experts," not for "orators.”
As a lawyer, Arnold might have been expected to recognize the intractability of conflicting interests and to doubt the possibility of making politics an exact science. His faith in expertise, however, exceeded even that of many social scientists.
He measured intellectual progress precisely by the absence of debate.
Doctors, he argued, no longer engaged in pointless controversies about the rival claims of homeopathic and allopathic schools of medicine. The medical profession had been "taken over by men of skill rather than men of principle," with the result that there was "little left in medicine for thinking men to debate.”
Whereas medical learning had become "technical rather than philosophical,” however, economic and legal learning remained “predominantly philosophical” - a sure sign of cultural lag.
He too dismissed as "irrational" the notion that "the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy." "Public argument never convinces the other side," he wrote; its only function was to rally the true believers. The "noise of competing theories" drowned out the voice of the expert. To submit social questions to the "feeble judgment of the common herd" was the height of folly.
Arnold did not have to engage in this kind of self-deception, since he held no brief for democracy in the first place. Insofar as the idea of democracy had any substance, it was simply another name for “humanitarian imperialism,” in his view. It meant the universalisation of material well-being, engineered by “fact-minded persons” and “competent diagnosticians.”
A democratic regime, to be sure, had to “carry its people along with it emotionally”; but that did not imply that the people should take an active part in governing themselves. As long as the governing classes grasped the nature and importance of political symbolism, they could satisfy the public demand for inspiring slogans and “ceremonials” without allowing public “ritual” to interfere with production and distribution.
When the public came to value “practical results” more highly than “preconceived principles,” a “competent, practical, opportunistic governing class” would find it possible to get on with the serious work of making people comfortable, without having to inspire and amuse them as well.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.432, 434-6
[…] from ancient Rome to medieval England, there were bureaucracies also in the pre-modern world.
With industrialisation and the emergence of mass society, however, the bureaucratic apparatus has expanded to the point that a quantitative difference has become a qualitative one. In their scale, complexity, and their power, modern bureaucracies are like nothing the world has ever seen before, and they cause states to behave in new and incomprehensible ways.
Above all, power has been steadily diffused downwards, through the ranks of countless even mid-level functionaries, and government policies are subject to enormous inertia.
Those who doubt this, should look at the military. This is one sector of the bureaucracy, which for operational reasons has tried to avoid the unmanageable diffusion of powers and prerogatives. They have gone to extreme lengths to establish clear lines of command, ensure obedience to orders, and avoid excessive consensus-based decision making.
Without this overt command discipline, it is impossible for any single person to direct bureaucratic structures, or for the bureaucrats themselves to shift strategies, absorb new information, or take up fresh initiatives quickly.
The one thing I want to convey here, more than anything else, is the complexity and extent of modern western governments. These are unbelievably elaborate systems, and they are not easily controlled or understood by individuals or confined groups.
[eugyppius]
‘Stupid and Evil in Equal Measure: II - Mass containment as conspiracy and as emergent phenomenon’ and 'Spontaneous Order in Complex Systems', eugyppius: a plague chronicle
The civil servant has as his nineteenth-century counterpart and opposite the social reformer: Saint Simonians, Comtians, utilitarians, English ameliorists such as Charles Booth, the early Fabian socialists. Their characteristic lament is: if only government could learn to be scientific!
[...] in his insistence that the rationality of adjusting means to ends in the most economical and efficient way is the central task of the bureaucrat and that therefore the appropriate mode of justification of his activity by the bureaucrat lies in the appeal to his (or later her) ability to deploy a body of scientific and above all social scientific knowledge, organized in terms of and understood as comprising a set of universal lawlike generalizations, Weber provided the key to much of the modern age.
The manager's claim to moral neutrality, which is itself an important part of the way the manager presents himself and functions in the social and moral world, is thus parallel to the claims to moral neutrality made by many physical scientists.
So we can now see in bare skeletal outline a progress first from the Enlightenment's ideal for a social science to the aspirations of social reformers, next from the aspirations of social reformers to the ideals of practice and justification of civil servants and managers, then from the practices of management to the theoretical codification of these practices and of the norms governing them by sociologists and organization theorists and finally from the employment of the textbooks written by those theorists in schools of management and business schools to the theoretically informed managerial practice of the contemporary technocratic expert.
But in every case the rise of managerial expertise would have to be the same central theme, and such expertise, as we have already seen, has two sides to it: there is the aspiration to value neutrality and the claim to manipulative power.
Both of these, we can now perceive, derive from the history of the way in which the realm of fact and the realm of value were distinguished by the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Twentieth-century social life turns out in key part to be the concrete and dramatic re-enactment of eighteenth-century philosophy.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.92, 100-1
[...] Nietzsche's prophetic irrationalism - irrationalism because Nietzsche's problems remain unsolved and his solutions defy reason - remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture.
Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.133
RAND’s rational choice is an argument that denies the obvious - cooperation, self-sacrifice, and abnegation do exist, people do love each other and don’t always think of themselves first, elections are won fairly and agreed to by all contestants, elected officials do act on the public interest, marriages and institutions do last.
Rational choice has given birth to a world shaped by decisions made in the dark, outside the realm of public debate - justified by false objectivity (change the parameters if you don’t like the results) and biased scientific bases that denigrate collective responsibility (much like the corporate battle cry of “it’s all for the shareholders,” discarding as demote previous social commitments of companies to employees, government, and community).
Moreover, deliberately or not, rational choice theory has become a handy rhetorical weapon for groups whose political and financial aims are to reconstruct the social system of the United States - returning the country to pre-New Deal days, while making billions in the process. These changes have resulted in a society where, for instance, the top 5 percent of the population controls 60 percent of the wealth and where corporate executive pay is 400 times greater than that of the average worker.
The final irony of rational choice theory is that it is not rational. It fails to comprehend the world as it is (in academic terms, it is normative but not empirical), positing a make-believe structure where only one kind of rationality is extant.
[Alex Abella]
Soldiers of Reason, p.308-9
The real essence of industrialism was to be found in the application of nonhuman energy, such as that from coal, oil, or waterpower, to production. This process increased man’s ability to make goods, and did so to an amazing degree.
But mass production could exist only if it were followed by mass consumption and rising standards of living. Moreover, it must lead, in the long run, to a decreasing demand for hand labor and an increasing demand for highly trained technicians who are managers rather than laborers.
And, in the longer run, this process would give rise to a productive system of such a high level of technical complexity that it could no longer be run by the owners but would have to be run by technically trained managers.
[...] The ultimate nature of that new system of economic and social life is not yet clear, but we might call it the “pluralist economy,” and characterize its social structure as one which provides prestige, rewards, and power to managerial groups of experts whose contributions to the system are derived from their expertise and “know-how.”
These managers and experts, who clearly are a minority in any society, are recruited from the society as a whole, can be selected only by a process of “careers open to talent” on a trial-and-error basis, and require freedom of assembly, discussion, and decision in order to produce the innovations needed for the future success, or even the survival, of the system in which they function.
Thus the pluralist economy and the managerial society, from the early 1940’s, have forced the growth of a new kind of economic organization which will be totally unlike the four types of pre-1939 (American laissez faire, Stalinist Communism, authoritarian Fascism, and underdeveloped areas).
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, p.241, 348
Regardless of the outcome of the situation, it is increasingly clear that, in the twentieth century, the expert will replace the industrial tycoon in control of the democratic voter in control of the political system.
This is because planning will inevitably replace laissez faire in the relationships between the two systems. This planning may not be single or unified, but it will be planning, in which the main framework and operational forces of the system will be established and limited by the experts on the economic system even as he will replace the governmental side; then the experts within the big units on the economic side will do their planning within these established limitations.
Hopefully, the elements of choice and freedom may survive for the ordinary individual in that he may be free to make a choice between two opposing political groups (even if these groups have little policy choice within the parameters of policy established by the experts) and he may have the choice to switch his economic support from one large unit to another.
But, in general, his freedom and choice will be controlled within very narrow alternatives by the fact that he will be numbered from birth and followed, as a number, through his educational training, his required military or other public service, his tax contributions, his health and medical requirements, and his final retirement and death benefits.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The New Age,’ p.548
Both the Soviet system and the free market are experiments in economic rationalism.
Free marketeers tell us that the unprecedented productivity of a rational economic system will remove the causes of social conflict and war. Soviet Marxists used to assure us that socialist planning would make scarcity a thing of the past. Both tell us that rising productivity will of itself solve most social problems, both exalt economic growth over all other goals and values.
Like the Bolsheviks, the shock troops of the free market are resolutely hostile to any tradition that stands in the way of what they view as economic progress. If their goals demand the sacrifice of a few cultures on the way, it is a price which free marketeers do not shrink from paying.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.141
Related posts:
Whereas medical learning had become "technical rather than philosophical,” however, economic and legal learning remained “predominantly philosophical” - a sure sign of cultural lag.
He too dismissed as "irrational" the notion that "the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy." "Public argument never convinces the other side," he wrote; its only function was to rally the true believers. The "noise of competing theories" drowned out the voice of the expert. To submit social questions to the "feeble judgment of the common herd" was the height of folly.
Arnold did not have to engage in this kind of self-deception, since he held no brief for democracy in the first place. Insofar as the idea of democracy had any substance, it was simply another name for “humanitarian imperialism,” in his view. It meant the universalisation of material well-being, engineered by “fact-minded persons” and “competent diagnosticians.”
A democratic regime, to be sure, had to “carry its people along with it emotionally”; but that did not imply that the people should take an active part in governing themselves. As long as the governing classes grasped the nature and importance of political symbolism, they could satisfy the public demand for inspiring slogans and “ceremonials” without allowing public “ritual” to interfere with production and distribution.
When the public came to value “practical results” more highly than “preconceived principles,” a “competent, practical, opportunistic governing class” would find it possible to get on with the serious work of making people comfortable, without having to inspire and amuse them as well.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.432, 434-6
[…] from ancient Rome to medieval England, there were bureaucracies also in the pre-modern world.
With industrialisation and the emergence of mass society, however, the bureaucratic apparatus has expanded to the point that a quantitative difference has become a qualitative one. In their scale, complexity, and their power, modern bureaucracies are like nothing the world has ever seen before, and they cause states to behave in new and incomprehensible ways.
Above all, power has been steadily diffused downwards, through the ranks of countless even mid-level functionaries, and government policies are subject to enormous inertia.
Those who doubt this, should look at the military. This is one sector of the bureaucracy, which for operational reasons has tried to avoid the unmanageable diffusion of powers and prerogatives. They have gone to extreme lengths to establish clear lines of command, ensure obedience to orders, and avoid excessive consensus-based decision making.
Without this overt command discipline, it is impossible for any single person to direct bureaucratic structures, or for the bureaucrats themselves to shift strategies, absorb new information, or take up fresh initiatives quickly.
The one thing I want to convey here, more than anything else, is the complexity and extent of modern western governments. These are unbelievably elaborate systems, and they are not easily controlled or understood by individuals or confined groups.
[eugyppius]
‘Stupid and Evil in Equal Measure: II - Mass containment as conspiracy and as emergent phenomenon’ and 'Spontaneous Order in Complex Systems', eugyppius: a plague chronicle
The civil servant has as his nineteenth-century counterpart and opposite the social reformer: Saint Simonians, Comtians, utilitarians, English ameliorists such as Charles Booth, the early Fabian socialists. Their characteristic lament is: if only government could learn to be scientific!
[...] in his insistence that the rationality of adjusting means to ends in the most economical and efficient way is the central task of the bureaucrat and that therefore the appropriate mode of justification of his activity by the bureaucrat lies in the appeal to his (or later her) ability to deploy a body of scientific and above all social scientific knowledge, organized in terms of and understood as comprising a set of universal lawlike generalizations, Weber provided the key to much of the modern age.
The manager's claim to moral neutrality, which is itself an important part of the way the manager presents himself and functions in the social and moral world, is thus parallel to the claims to moral neutrality made by many physical scientists.
So we can now see in bare skeletal outline a progress first from the Enlightenment's ideal for a social science to the aspirations of social reformers, next from the aspirations of social reformers to the ideals of practice and justification of civil servants and managers, then from the practices of management to the theoretical codification of these practices and of the norms governing them by sociologists and organization theorists and finally from the employment of the textbooks written by those theorists in schools of management and business schools to the theoretically informed managerial practice of the contemporary technocratic expert.
But in every case the rise of managerial expertise would have to be the same central theme, and such expertise, as we have already seen, has two sides to it: there is the aspiration to value neutrality and the claim to manipulative power.
Both of these, we can now perceive, derive from the history of the way in which the realm of fact and the realm of value were distinguished by the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Twentieth-century social life turns out in key part to be the concrete and dramatic re-enactment of eighteenth-century philosophy.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.92, 100-1
[...] Nietzsche's prophetic irrationalism - irrationalism because Nietzsche's problems remain unsolved and his solutions defy reason - remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture.
Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.133
RAND’s rational choice is an argument that denies the obvious - cooperation, self-sacrifice, and abnegation do exist, people do love each other and don’t always think of themselves first, elections are won fairly and agreed to by all contestants, elected officials do act on the public interest, marriages and institutions do last.
Rational choice has given birth to a world shaped by decisions made in the dark, outside the realm of public debate - justified by false objectivity (change the parameters if you don’t like the results) and biased scientific bases that denigrate collective responsibility (much like the corporate battle cry of “it’s all for the shareholders,” discarding as demote previous social commitments of companies to employees, government, and community).
Moreover, deliberately or not, rational choice theory has become a handy rhetorical weapon for groups whose political and financial aims are to reconstruct the social system of the United States - returning the country to pre-New Deal days, while making billions in the process. These changes have resulted in a society where, for instance, the top 5 percent of the population controls 60 percent of the wealth and where corporate executive pay is 400 times greater than that of the average worker.
The final irony of rational choice theory is that it is not rational. It fails to comprehend the world as it is (in academic terms, it is normative but not empirical), positing a make-believe structure where only one kind of rationality is extant.
[Alex Abella]
Soldiers of Reason, p.308-9
The real essence of industrialism was to be found in the application of nonhuman energy, such as that from coal, oil, or waterpower, to production. This process increased man’s ability to make goods, and did so to an amazing degree.
But mass production could exist only if it were followed by mass consumption and rising standards of living. Moreover, it must lead, in the long run, to a decreasing demand for hand labor and an increasing demand for highly trained technicians who are managers rather than laborers.
And, in the longer run, this process would give rise to a productive system of such a high level of technical complexity that it could no longer be run by the owners but would have to be run by technically trained managers.
[...] The ultimate nature of that new system of economic and social life is not yet clear, but we might call it the “pluralist economy,” and characterize its social structure as one which provides prestige, rewards, and power to managerial groups of experts whose contributions to the system are derived from their expertise and “know-how.”
These managers and experts, who clearly are a minority in any society, are recruited from the society as a whole, can be selected only by a process of “careers open to talent” on a trial-and-error basis, and require freedom of assembly, discussion, and decision in order to produce the innovations needed for the future success, or even the survival, of the system in which they function.
Thus the pluralist economy and the managerial society, from the early 1940’s, have forced the growth of a new kind of economic organization which will be totally unlike the four types of pre-1939 (American laissez faire, Stalinist Communism, authoritarian Fascism, and underdeveloped areas).
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, p.241, 348
Regardless of the outcome of the situation, it is increasingly clear that, in the twentieth century, the expert will replace the industrial tycoon in control of the democratic voter in control of the political system.
This is because planning will inevitably replace laissez faire in the relationships between the two systems. This planning may not be single or unified, but it will be planning, in which the main framework and operational forces of the system will be established and limited by the experts on the economic system even as he will replace the governmental side; then the experts within the big units on the economic side will do their planning within these established limitations.
Hopefully, the elements of choice and freedom may survive for the ordinary individual in that he may be free to make a choice between two opposing political groups (even if these groups have little policy choice within the parameters of policy established by the experts) and he may have the choice to switch his economic support from one large unit to another.
But, in general, his freedom and choice will be controlled within very narrow alternatives by the fact that he will be numbered from birth and followed, as a number, through his educational training, his required military or other public service, his tax contributions, his health and medical requirements, and his final retirement and death benefits.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The New Age,’ p.548
Both the Soviet system and the free market are experiments in economic rationalism.
Free marketeers tell us that the unprecedented productivity of a rational economic system will remove the causes of social conflict and war. Soviet Marxists used to assure us that socialist planning would make scarcity a thing of the past. Both tell us that rising productivity will of itself solve most social problems, both exalt economic growth over all other goals and values.
Like the Bolsheviks, the shock troops of the free market are resolutely hostile to any tradition that stands in the way of what they view as economic progress. If their goals demand the sacrifice of a few cultures on the way, it is a price which free marketeers do not shrink from paying.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.141
Related posts:
One True Path
Reason - Nature
One - Many
Global - Local
Context independent - Context dependent
Christians opened to door to infinity; rationalists walked through it.
Pre-modern rationalism was contained within a (religious) tradition. Modern rationalism is uncontained. The problem is not rationality per se, but 'rationality without a cause'.
Clear - Complex
Closed - Open
Predetermined - Free
Transcendent - Immanent
Christians opened to door to infinity; rationalists walked through it.
Pre-modern rationalism was contained within a (religious) tradition. Modern rationalism is uncontained. The problem is not rationality per se, but 'rationality without a cause'.
The progressive, focused on a dream of universal consensus, attempts "to escape the agonistics of the network." Argumentation, confusion, conflict, and error disappear in a higher synthesis.
The global vision can be reductionist or pluralist. The former attempts to unify under a "single privileged vocabulary" (e.g. physics or maths) whereas the latter attempts to synthesise all vocabularies and levels of description into an "integral" vision.
The Kantian transcendental project, like all transcendental theologies, aims to give grounds for settling all moral disputes.
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbbd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
[Alfred, Lord Tennyson]
'Locksley Hall'
Niebuhr found another example of this misguided search for unity - for an "absolute perspective which transcends the conflict” between competing loyalties - in Dewey's little book on religion, A Common Faith (1934).
Niebuhr considered Dewey's plea for a "religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race" as an attempt to “eliminate conflict and unite men of good will everywhere by stripping their spiritual life of historic, traditional, and supposedly anachronistic accretions." Dewey's position exemplified the "faith of modern rationalism in the ability of reason to transcend the partial perspectives of the natural world in which reason is rooted."
Liberals like Dewey mistakenly put their faith in moral suasion, education, and the scientific method. They imagined that “with a little more time, a little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence, our social problems will approach solution."
Dewey did not understand that competing loyalties were rooted in "something more vital and immediate than anachronistic religious traditions.” The fervor they evoked could not be modified or resolved, as Dewey seemed to think, by a "small group of intellectuals" who enjoyed the "comparative neutrality and security of the intellectual life."
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.370, 375
Niebuhr distinguished prophetic religion not only from scientific rationality, which cannot justify hope, but from mystical religion, which cannot justify it either, except by turning its back on the "facts of incoherence.”
If science dismissed the existence of moral order and coherence in history as an illusion, mysticism dismissed the natural world itself as an illusion, together with the whole course of human history. For the mystic, reality dwelled in the timeless realm of pure essence, the contemplation of which, undistracted by unruly historical facts, became the goal of religious aspiration.
Mysticism, according to Niebuhr, was rationalism's mirror image. It carried the “rational passion for unity and coherence to the point where the eye turns from the outward scene, with its recalcitrant facts and stubborn variety, to the inner world of spirit."
The prophetic tradition found moral significance in history (since history is under God's judgment) without denying the reality of incoherence and evil. The achievement of the “prophetic movement in Hebraic religion," Niebuhr wrote, lay in its ability “to purge its religion of the parochial and puerile weaknesses of its childhood without rationalizing it and thus destroying the virtue of its myth."
His reference to the “virtue” of the prophetic myth, when we recall the rich associations and multiple meanings of the term, provides the clearest indication of the meaning of mythology, as Niebuhr understood it.
In the prophetic tradition, virtue is the truth that breaks the cycle of excessive optimism and disillusionment. It asserts the goodness of life without denying the evidence that would justify despair. Thus "Hebrew spirituality," Niebuhr argued, "was never corrupted by either the optimism which conceived the world as possessing unqualified sanctity and goodness or the pessimism which relegated historic existence to a realm of meaningless cycles.”
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.372
In policy evaluation, “there is never a point at which the thinking, research, and action is 'objective' or 'unbiased’. It is partisan through and through, as are all human activities, in the sense that the expectations and priorities of those commissioning and doing the analysis shape it, and in the sense that those using the information shape its interpretation and application.”
The top-down models of policy evaluation and formulation do not suggest that elites never disagree about public policy. Elites may share a consensus about goals and values yet disagree on how to achieve them [...] Foundations sometimes fund studies that make conflicting policy recommendations, and think tanks compete with one another for preeminence in policymaking [...] And it is unlikely that there ever was a society in which elites did not compete among themselves for power and preeminence.
But interelite conflict and competition takes place within a broader consensus on the goals of public policy, especially economic growth, global expansion, and the protection of corporate enterprise [...] Disagreement occurs over the means rather than the ends of public policy.
It is the shared consensus among elites over the fundamental values of American society that allows public policy to be guided by “the intelligence of democracy." Political scientist Charles E. Lindblom explains the intelligence of democracy: “Strategic analysis and mutual adjustment among political participants, then, are the underlying processes by which democratic systems achieve the level of intelligent action that they do."
"The staid and dignified policy-formation process is very different from the helter-skelter special-interest process. ... It appears as disinterested and fairminded as the special-interest process seems self-seeking and biased."
The foundations, think tanks, and policy planning organizations generally try to remain above partisan politics. Their tax-exempt status under Section 501C3 of the Internal Revenue Code requires that they remain nonpartisan, that they do not endorse political candidates, and that their policy recommendations be presented as “civic and educational” activities.
They describe themselves as “independent,” “nonpartisan,” “objective,” “problem-solving,” and “public-spirited.”
But strategic analysis and mutual adjustment - the keys to intelligent policymaking - cannot develop in the absence of agreement on fundamental values.
[Thomas R. Dye]
Top Down Policymaking, p.63-4, 174
Science's goal of ultimate law and ultimate level also reflects the prevailing notion in the West of a single, unified deity.
Rather than seeking a single, most fundamental ground, the Native mind prefers to dance among the ever-changing movements of a living, subtle nature. Harmony and balance must accommodate change and the activities of the trickster.
[…] Native science works with a multiplicity of symbols, images, and stories. There is no single, unique reading to a story, but rather many enfolded and interpenetrating levels, none of which needs be thought of as being more fundamental than any other. Understanding comes from a direct experience of the dance between these levels of meaning.
In this sense, understanding within Indigenous science has something in common with Niels Bohr's notion of complementarity. Bohr's complementarity states that a single consistent description will never exhaust the meaning of what is happening at the quantum level. Rather, what is required are a number of complementary, mutually contradictory descriptions.
An electron is described as being both delocalized and wavelike, but also localized and particlelike. Likewise, the meaning of a traditional story depends upon a variety of contexts and can be unfolded in a variety of ways.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.262, 264
[...] what Wilber is presenting in his theory of evolutionary stages is perhaps the most detailed and consistent attempt yet to shoehorn mystical spirituality into the modern belief in progress.
[John Michael Greer]
'Against Enchantment I: Ken Wilber', Ecosophia
The traditional (or modern) way of confronting complexity was to find a secure point of reference that could serve as foundation, a passe-partout, a master key from which everything else could be derived.
Whatever that point of reference might be - a transcendental world of perfect ideas, the radically sceptic mind, the phenomenological subject - my claim is that following such a strategy constitutes an avoidance of complexity.
The obsession to find one essential truth blinds us to the relationary nature of complexity, and especially to the continuous shifting of those relationships. Any acknowledgement of complexity will have to incorporate these shifts and changes, not as epiphenomena, but as constitutive of complex systems.
[…] the suggestion will be that the postmodern approach is inherently sensitive to complexity, that it acknowledges the importance of self-organisation whilst denying a conventional theory of representation.
Scientific knowledge […] habitually legitimates itself by appealing to a coherent metadiscourse that performs a general unifying function. Should such a metadiscourse be found, it will be possible to incorporate all forms of knowledge into one grand narrative. This is the dream of modernism. Postmodernism is consequently defined as 'incredulity towards metanarratives' […]
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.112-4
The postmodern denial of single meta-narratives, and its emphasis on the importance of difference and opposition, is not normally formulated in terms of 'population thinking' (to use the biological expression for the kind of systems thinking referred to here), but the similarities are undeniable.
Although strains of thought that value the importance of relationships - and look for patterns rather than essences - can be found throughout the intellectual history of the West, they have usually been trampled over by more macho theories claiming to have found the Truth: Platonic idealism, rationalism, Marxism, positivism.
In our analysis of complex systems (like the brain and language) we must avoid the trap of trying to find master keys. Because of the mechanisms by which complex systems structure themselves, single principles provide inadequate descriptions.
We should rather be sensitive to complex and self-organising interactions and appreciate the play of patterns that perpetually transforms the system itself as well as the environment in which it operates.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.107
Lyotard's insistence on dissension and destabilising forces, as opposed to consensus - notions which also form the core of Lyotard's critique of Habermas - has serious implications for philosophy in general, and specifically for the philosophy of science.
The role of science has traditionally been understood as one that has to fix knowledge in a permanent grid. Experimental evidence was used to verify theories. Sufficient verification would ensure a permanent place in the grid. It soon became clear, however, that the conditions for objective verification were problematic, that experimental evidence could support a theory, but not prove it.
The experimental process cannot include all the factors that could possibly be involved, nor can it predict how new knowledge would change the interpretation of experimental results. Since one could still disprove theories, the process of verification was replaced by one of falsification. If one could not add to the grid, one could at least disqualify unwanted members.
This strategy of 'throwing away' has the result of making the body of knowledge qualifying as 'scientific' leaner and leaner. Everything too complex or containing uncertainties or unpredictability is, for the time being at least, left aside.
Consequently, large parts of the totality of human knowledge are disregarded as unscientific - most of the arts, most of psychology (for many scientists Freud remains the paradigm of a scientific charlatan), and often, human sciences in general. Working with a narrow understanding of what science should be, even the life sciences (biology) and the empirical sciences (engineering) become suspect.
Pushed to its limits, the theory of falsification implies that only abstract, a priori truths are really scientific.
Lyotard's suggestion is that we discard the idea of consensus since it is impoverishing. To proliferate knowledge, we have to proliferate discourses without trying to fix them into a permanent grid.
This position has some affinity with the position of Paul Feyerabend (1975). Feyerabend insists on a scientific anarchy' in which all the marginalised voices should participate. There should be no immutable 'method' that determines what forms part of the canon and what does not. Instead of throwing away everything that does not fit into the scheme, one should try to find meaningful relationships among the different discourses.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.118
The question that should be posed at this point is the following: can behaviour in accordance with an abstract, universal set of rules be called ‘ethical’ at all? What is at stake here is the very meaning of the word ‘ethics’.
It was part of the dream of modernism to establish a universal set of rules that would be able to regulate our behaviour in every circumstance. Taken by itself, this is a noble ideal, but if we wish to argue that human beings are constituted by their ethical behaviour, we run into problems. Following a universal set of rules (assuming such rules exist) does not involve decision or dilemma, it merely asks for calculation. Given the circumstances, what do the rules decree my behaviour should be? Can this be called ‘ethical’? What kind of human being would act like this? Clearly some kind of automaton, itself constituted by rational, rule-based principles. Modernist ethics, and an understanding of language and the mind in terms of rule-based systems, fit together perfectly.
This concurs with Zygmunt Bauman’s (1992, 1993) analysis of modern and postmodern ethics. For him, modernism’s attempt to structure our existence leads to nothing less than our imprisonment.
A postmodern attitude sets us free, not to do as we like, but to behave ethically. He acknowledges that this involves a paradox: ‘it restores to agents the fullness of moral choice and responsibility while simultaneously depriving them of the comfort of the universal guidance that that modern self-confidence once promised…. Moral responsibility comes with the loneliness of moral choice’ (Bauman 1992: xxii).
Actually this is just another formulation of the principle that has become a leitmotiv of this chapter: you cannot escape the agonistics of the network.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.137-8
In his criticism of Kant’s abstract idealism, Hegel realises that we are constituted within the social system, but for him it is a system that will ultimately be perfectly organised. Everybody will have their specified place.
Although Hegel realised that the (dialectical) process of organisation is still in progress, his view is, in the end, still a conservative one. At some stage there will be no further need for transformation.
Adorno argues that there are differences among human beings that remain irreducible to a totalising system. He thus reminds us of the importance of differences, not as something that prevents us from finding a comfortable place in the system, but as that which constitutes our humanity.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.138
[…] Rouse rejects the idea of the unity of science ‘which postulates as an epistemic ideal the unification of scientific representations of the world into a single all-inclusive and coherent picture.’
He motivates this rejection by denying that the goal of science is the ‘accumulation of a body of representations abstracted from the activity of research.’ The advance of science is centrifugal rather than centripetal, and in this process established results are often left by the wayside.
The concerns of science are practical rather than representational, and insofar as there is a concern for coherence, it is only local, more local even than the level of the applicable discipline, let alone that of the whole of science.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.132
This projected goal of a coherent world-picture has its reductionist versions, in which the coherence comes from explaining everything in a single privileged theoretical vocabulary (typically that of physics).
It also has pluralist versions, in which the results of different fields fit together as different levels of description appropriate for different levels of organization or complexity in the world.
[Joseph Rouse]
‘The Narrative Reconstruction of Science’
Construed in its traditional way, the unity of science is predicated upon a representationalist view of scientific knowledge, and postulates as an epistemic ideal the unification of scientific representations of the world into a single all-inclusive and coherent picture.
There are three respects in which I reject this construal of the unification of scientific knowledge. Most fundamentally, I do not believe that the accumulation of a body of representations abstracted from the activity of research is a goal of science at all.
Second, I am arguing that, far from inclusively bringing together all or most established scientific results into a single picture, the ongoing narrative reconstruction of scientific practices regularly excises established results from the background knowledge of a field, in order to focus its subsequent development. The coherence achieved through scientific research is thus practical rather than representational.
Third, the advance of scientific research seems centrifugal rather than centripetal.
New fields continually spin off with their own interests, methods, and interpretations. Their practitioners show little concern for how retrospectively to reconcile their interests and results with those of their progenitor disciplines. They will more typically consolidate their own results toward a new advance, perhaps in a still more divergent direction, than look back and try to see how it fits together with its origins.
Scientists' concern for coherence, at least in what they choose to investigate, is usually situated more locally than even the level of the discipline, let alone that of the whole of science.
What we get is not a single coherent picture of the world, but an ever more complex network of interconnections binding together various scientific endeavors. Achievements from one field get reworked and reinterpreted in order to serve the interests of another which may be at cross-purposes.
The loss in coherence is often happily compensated by the creation of new possibilities to explore, and new capabilities for doing that.
[Joseph Rouse]
‘The Narrative Reconstruction of Science’
Vervaeke: […] what myth is always doing - and Levi Strauss had sort of a sense of this with structuralism - is pointing you to opponent processing.
Here's this myth, with this opponent processing; and here’s this myth with this opponent processing - but what's the through line? […] you're trying to find the multi-dimensional nexus …
Peterson: - the meta-through-line -
Vervaeke: … of all the opponent processing.
This is Nicholas Of Cusa with his open sense of infinity. In the ancient Greek world infinity is a bad thing, it's chaos. But with Cusa, and then the whole neoplatonic tradition, it opens up into a positive thing. If I could get all of the opposites, I would see that in infinity they all coincide, and that would be the culmination or summation - not in any entity - of what our cognition is about.
I would have found the source of intelligibility, because I would have moved to the deepest grammar of cognition […]
Peterson: […] and that's the resolution of all opposing conflicts in some sense.
[Jordan B. Peterson & John Vervaeke]
‘A Conversation So Intense It Might Transcend Time and Space | John Vervaeke | EP 321, YouTube
And that's the third and I think, therefore, best vision of Cognitive Science. That's the vision of Cognitive Science as Synoptic Integration.
Synoptic Integration is not saying that all the disciplines are saying the same thing. But it's not simple eclecticism of “well, they're all saying different things, but let's get them all to be friendly and like each other, and they can have some sort of peripheral influence on each other”.
Synoptic integration is saying, “no, we need to build something right between the disciplines that addresses the equivocation, deals with the fragmentation and fills in the ignorance - tells us about how the levels are actually causally interacting and constraining each other. That's Synoptic Integration.
So what you want to do is you need to say, “They're not saying the same thing, but they're not just saying different things either!”. You have to create this bridging vocabulary that integrates across the disciplines.
So I'm trying to create constructs with multi-aptness. They get this balance between identity and difference that affords and provokes insightful transformation of the theorising from one discipline to another. And I start to create an overarching integration.
[John Vervaeke]
‘Ep. 26 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Cognitive Science’, John Vervaeke, YouTube
The structure of Plato’s philosophy meets all the requirements of the Apollonian Logos. At the top of his theory is the One, surrounded by eternal ideas. This is the peak of the divine, celestial world, illuminated by timeless light. The highest principle is the Good, which exudes its abundance firstly upon the world of ideas (paradigms) and then, through the good Creator-Demiurge, on the created cosmos.
Plato described all three of these world zones in his Timaeus, in particular distinguishing the realm of paradigms (the observatory point of the gods, the Father), the realm of models, or “copies” and “icons” (the Son), and the mysterious khora (χώρα), the space or country which Plato likened to the Nurse or Mother.
In describing the khora (which was later identified by the Neoplatonists with the mother), Plato’s dialogue loses its crystal clarity, thus lending towards the strange assumption that this element can be comprehended only by means of a “special Logos”, which Plato called “bastard” or “illegitimate” (νόθος λόγος).
The vision of the celestial god thus reaches the surface of the earth, the lower limits of the world of copies, but here is confronted with its limits, as it can no longer see anything amenable to clear Apollonian discernment. At the border of the day, the realm of night-dreaming flickers. Timaeus (Plato) restricts himself to only a few suggestions and postulates the khora (space) to be a flat intermediary, beyond which there is nothing, and which is impossible to understand, insofar as there is nothing to properly understand in it.
In the solar Platonic vision, we can obtain only an external, “celestial” view, which sees as its bottom the khora (Χώρα), the space of the subtle film of the chaotic movement of scattered particles not yet formed by the ordering demiurge. Χώρα comes from the same root as mythological “chaos”, χάος, meaning “yawning”, or literally “opening the jaws”, “freeing the empty space.”
Instead of the voluminous “chaos” that creates the three-dimensionality of unordered void, Timaeus sees a film that resists comprehension by the classical Apollonian logos and whose comprehension demands falling into slumber, losing clarity and rigor, and degeneration […] This khora is the view of the back of the Great Mother, a limit unreachable by the Apollonian, where hell begins.
In a certain sense, Platonism is eternal, and has continued in both Christian theology by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, John of Damascus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Michael Psellos, John Italus, and Gemistus Plethon in the East, and by Boethius and John Scotus Eriugena in the West), as well as in the Renaissance and even amidst modern philosophy.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
[...] what Kant presented as the universal and necessary principles of the human mind turned out in fact to be principles specific to particular times, places and stages of human activity and enquiry.
Just as what Kant took to be the principles and presuppositions of natural science as such turned out after all to be the principles and presuppositions specific to Newtonian physics, so what Kant took to be the principles and presuppositions of morality as such turned out to be the principles and presuppositions of one highly specific morality, a secularized version of Protestantism which furnished modern liberal individualism with one of its founding charters. Thus the claim to universality foundered.
For what the progress of analytic philosophy has succeeded in establishing is that there are no grounds for belief in universal necessary principles outside purely formal enquiries - except relative to some set of assumptions.
[...] analytic philosophers [...] seem to be determined to go on considering arguments as objects of investigation in abstraction from the social and historical contexts of activity and enquiry in which they are or were at home and from which they characteristically derive their particular import.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.309-11
[...] there are no general timeless standards.
It is in the ability of one particular moral-philosophy-articulating-the-claims-of-a-particular-morality to identify and to transcend the limitations of its rival or rivals, limitations which can be - although they may not in fact have been - identified by the rational standards to which the protagonists of the rival morality are committed by their allegiance to it, that the rational superiority of that particular moral philosophy and that particular morality emerges.
The history of morality-and-moral-philosophy is the history of successive challenges to some preexisting moral order, a history in which the question of which party defeated the other in rational argument is always to be distinguished from the question of which party retained or gained social and political hegemony.
I hold not only that historical enquiry is required in order to establish what a particular point of view is, but also that it is in its historical encounter that any given point of view establishes or fails to establish its rational superiority relative to its particular rivals in some specific contexts.
[...] our situation in respect of theories about what makes one theory rationally superior to another is no different from our situation in regard to scientific theories or to moralities-and-moral-philosophies. In the former as in the latter case what we have to aspire to is not a perfect theory, one necessarily to be assented to by any rational being, because invulnerable or almost invulnerable to objections, but rather the best theory to emerge so far in the history of this class of theories.
It follows that the writing of this kind of philosophical history can never be brought to completion. The possibility has always to be left open that in any particular field, whether the natural sciences or morality-and-moral-philosophy, or the theory of theory, some new challenge to the established best theory so far will appear and will displace it.
Hence this kind of historicism, unlike Hegel's, involves a form of fallibilism; it is a kind of historicism which excludes all claims to absolute knowledge.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.305
[...] in much of the ancient and medieval worlds, as in many other premodern societies, the individual is identified and constituted in and through certain of his or her roles, those roles which bind the individual to the communities in and through which alone specifically human goods are to be attained; I confront the world as a member of this family, this household, this clan, this tribe, this city, this nation, this kingdom. There is no 'I' apart from these.
For the Platonist, as later for the Cartesian, the soul, preceding all bodily and social existence, must [...] possess an identity prior to all social roles; but for the Catholic Christian, as earlier for the Aristotelian, the body and the soul are not two linked substances. I am my body and my body is social, born to those parents in this community with a specific social identity.
What does make a difference for the Catholic Christian is that I, whatever earthly community I may belong to, am also held to be a member of a heavenly, eternal community in which I also have a role, a community represented on earth by the church.
Of course I can be expelled from, defect from or otherwise lose my place in any of these forms of community. I can become an exile, a stranger, a wanderer. These too are assigned social roles, recognized within ancient and medieval communities. But it is always as part of an ordered community that I have to seek the human good, and in this sense of community the solitary anchorite or the shepherd on the remote mountainside is as much a member of a community as is a dweller in cities.
Hence solitariness is no longer what it was for Philoctetes. The individual carries his communal roles with him as part of the definition of his self, even into his isolation.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.201-2
[...] nothing that I have said goes any way to show that a situation could not arise in which it proved possible to discover no rational way to settle the disagreements between two rival moral and epistemological traditions, so that positive grounds for a relativistic thesis would emerge.
[...] there are no successful a priori arguments which will guarantee in advance that such a situation could not occur. Indeed nothing could provide us with such a guarantee which did not involve the successful resuscitation of the Kantian transcendental project.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.322
Recognition of the complex multicultural structure of human societies leads to differentialism and the complete rejection of hierarchy. Moreover, the reduction to the individual, which is the basis of the egalitarian morality of postmodernism, destroys cultural ensembles instead of protecting and strengthening them.
Differentialist anti-racism, on the contrary, merely postulates differences between societies, without attempting to evaluate them with the help of a general 'transcendental' criterion (which in principle cannot exist and any candidate for such status would only be a projection of one of the societies), nor to destroy them.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
'ALTERNATIVE POSTMODERNISM: AN UNNAMED PHENOMENON'
The basic attitude of the Western tradition had grown toward diversity and toleration, based on the belief that every aspect of life and of human experience and every individual has some place in the complex structure of reality if that place can only be found and that, accordingly, unity of the whole of life can be reached by way of diversity rather than by any compulsory uniformity.
This idea was entirely foreign to the Russian mind. Any Russian thinker, and hordes of other Russians with no capacity for thought, were driven by an insatiable thirst to find the “key” to life and to truth. Once this “key” has been found, all other aspects of human experience must be rejected as evil, and all men must be compelled to accept that key as the whole of life in a dreadful unity of uniformity.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Russian Empire to 1917,’ p.65
The inexorable growth of a world market does not advance a universal civilisation. It makes the interpenetration of cultures an irreversible global condition.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.193
Liberalism—and proto-liberalisms such as Christianity, Platonism, Vedanta, and so forth—do not see will at the bottom of the ethical proposition. They see only true.
For them, good is a species of true. For the folkish thinker, true is a species of good, and good is a matter of will. And so, under these proto-liberalisms, the will—whether it be your own will, or that of the king—is always and everywhere governed by propositions. This is the ultimate source of Schmitt’s “forever-deferred decision” of the sovereign.
When will is subordinated to proposition, willing is impossible. Where will is impossible, ethics is impossible, hence the devolution into individualism.
Folkishness, by seeing ethics as second-order commands, reintroduces will into the world. Specifically, this takes the form of the will of the founder. In our terms, this is the Odinic—the great man.
[Imperium Press]
‘Who’s the Boss — Folk or Elite?’, Imperium Press, Substack
[…] we have to have some idea about how we come towards ideas that are truer than others. And I’m not suggesting that there is one simple truth, but we wouldn’t be able to do anything or say anything unless we believe that certain things were truer than others. So how do we get that?
[…] there’s a difference between the left hemisphere’s idea of truth and the right hemisphere idea of truth.
[…] correspondence truth is the idea that the propositions that we make or have the thoughts, beliefs that we have a kind of version of the world, they reflect the world so that we’ve got a model to be able to work on. Whereas, coherence theory says it’s not about correspondence in a one-to-one way, it’s more about do these various aspects of what we believe to be true make a coherent whole?
I don’t think that either of these is right and I quote Anthony Quinton saying that probably truth will turn out to be an amalgam of these points of view.
But I think we can also, using the hemisphere approach, see a certain difference, which is that the left hemisphere is again viewing the world, the cosmos, as made of things, of stuff, bits here and there, whereas the right hemisphere is likely to prioritize relationships. This is what it is always seeing in both the human and the non-human world. And so it’s interested in the relationships that come and go between the observer and the thing that’s observed.
And the idea of this is not truth as a thing or correctness - which lies in a way behind all the left hemisphere versions of how we get at truth, including the coherence theory and the correspondence theory - it’s not so much like that, as a clearing a way of error.
So it’s working apophatically, in the way that science actually works, which is to clear away mistakes. Science never says this is true, it just says, this doesn’t look true on the basis of what we know now. And that leaves you with something else that you can work with.
[…] truth [is] as a process […] a never ending journey of a reverberative kind in which our consciousness and the consciousness of what is around us come into alignment. And this doesn’t really have the same features as a world of things that are in principle knowable, even if we can’t actually know them too well.
I oppose to that, the idea of truth as unconcealing, in other words, clearing away so that we see the picture ever more clearly, rather as a sculptor makes a statue, not by putting together an arm, a leg ahead, and a torso, but by actually clearing away the stone, that makes the thing stand out.
[Iain McGilchrist]
The Jim Rutt Show - ‘EP 154 Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things’, ‘EP 155 Iain McGilchrist Part 2: The Matter With Things’
[...] if Schopenhauer is led to deny the will it is primarily because he believes in the unity of willing.
Because the will, according to Schopenhauer, is essentially unitary, the executioner comes to understand that he is one with his own victim. The consciousness of the identity of the will in all its manifestations leads the will to deny itself, to suppress itself in pity, morality and ascetism.
Nietzsche discovers what seems to him the authentically Schopenhauerian mystification; when we posit the unity, the identity, of the will we must necessarily repudiate the will itself.
When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.7
It is well known that in fact man rarely seeks after truth: our interests and also our stupidity separate us from truth even more than our errors do.
The concept of truth describes a "truthful" world. Even in science the truth of phenomena forms a "world" distinct from that of phenomena themselves. But a truthful world presupposes a truthful man as its centre. – Who is this truthful man, what does he want?
First hypothesis: He wants not to be deceived, not to let himself be deceived, because it is "harmful, dangerous and inauspicious to be deceived". But this hypothesis presupposes the truthfulness of the world itself. For, in a radically false world it is the will to not let oneself be deceived that becomes inauspicious, dangerous and harmful.
In fact, the will to truth had to be formed "in spite of the danger and the uselessness of the truth at any price".
There remains another hypothesis: I want the truth means I do not want to deceive, and "I do not want to be deceived comprises, as a special case, I do not want to deceive myself. - If someone wills the truth it is not in the name of what the world is but in the name of what the world is not.
It is understood that "life aims to mislead, to dupe, to dissimilate, to dazzle, to blind". But he who wills the truth always wants to depreciate this high power of the false: he makes life an "error" and this world an "appearance". He therefore opposes knowledge to life and to the world he opposes another world, a world-beyond, the truthful world.
"Life against life". He wants life to become virtuous, to correct itself and to correct appearance, for it to serve as the way to the other world. He wants life to repudiate itself and to turn against itself [...]
The one who repudiates life is also the one who wants a diminished life, the conservation of his type and moreover its power and triumph, the triumph and contagion of reactive forces.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.95-6
Related posts:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbbd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
[Alfred, Lord Tennyson]
'Locksley Hall'
Niebuhr found another example of this misguided search for unity - for an "absolute perspective which transcends the conflict” between competing loyalties - in Dewey's little book on religion, A Common Faith (1934).
Niebuhr considered Dewey's plea for a "religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race" as an attempt to “eliminate conflict and unite men of good will everywhere by stripping their spiritual life of historic, traditional, and supposedly anachronistic accretions." Dewey's position exemplified the "faith of modern rationalism in the ability of reason to transcend the partial perspectives of the natural world in which reason is rooted."
Liberals like Dewey mistakenly put their faith in moral suasion, education, and the scientific method. They imagined that “with a little more time, a little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence, our social problems will approach solution."
Dewey did not understand that competing loyalties were rooted in "something more vital and immediate than anachronistic religious traditions.” The fervor they evoked could not be modified or resolved, as Dewey seemed to think, by a "small group of intellectuals" who enjoyed the "comparative neutrality and security of the intellectual life."
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.370, 375
Niebuhr distinguished prophetic religion not only from scientific rationality, which cannot justify hope, but from mystical religion, which cannot justify it either, except by turning its back on the "facts of incoherence.”
If science dismissed the existence of moral order and coherence in history as an illusion, mysticism dismissed the natural world itself as an illusion, together with the whole course of human history. For the mystic, reality dwelled in the timeless realm of pure essence, the contemplation of which, undistracted by unruly historical facts, became the goal of religious aspiration.
Mysticism, according to Niebuhr, was rationalism's mirror image. It carried the “rational passion for unity and coherence to the point where the eye turns from the outward scene, with its recalcitrant facts and stubborn variety, to the inner world of spirit."
The prophetic tradition found moral significance in history (since history is under God's judgment) without denying the reality of incoherence and evil. The achievement of the “prophetic movement in Hebraic religion," Niebuhr wrote, lay in its ability “to purge its religion of the parochial and puerile weaknesses of its childhood without rationalizing it and thus destroying the virtue of its myth."
His reference to the “virtue” of the prophetic myth, when we recall the rich associations and multiple meanings of the term, provides the clearest indication of the meaning of mythology, as Niebuhr understood it.
In the prophetic tradition, virtue is the truth that breaks the cycle of excessive optimism and disillusionment. It asserts the goodness of life without denying the evidence that would justify despair. Thus "Hebrew spirituality," Niebuhr argued, "was never corrupted by either the optimism which conceived the world as possessing unqualified sanctity and goodness or the pessimism which relegated historic existence to a realm of meaningless cycles.”
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.372
In policy evaluation, “there is never a point at which the thinking, research, and action is 'objective' or 'unbiased’. It is partisan through and through, as are all human activities, in the sense that the expectations and priorities of those commissioning and doing the analysis shape it, and in the sense that those using the information shape its interpretation and application.”
The top-down models of policy evaluation and formulation do not suggest that elites never disagree about public policy. Elites may share a consensus about goals and values yet disagree on how to achieve them [...] Foundations sometimes fund studies that make conflicting policy recommendations, and think tanks compete with one another for preeminence in policymaking [...] And it is unlikely that there ever was a society in which elites did not compete among themselves for power and preeminence.
But interelite conflict and competition takes place within a broader consensus on the goals of public policy, especially economic growth, global expansion, and the protection of corporate enterprise [...] Disagreement occurs over the means rather than the ends of public policy.
It is the shared consensus among elites over the fundamental values of American society that allows public policy to be guided by “the intelligence of democracy." Political scientist Charles E. Lindblom explains the intelligence of democracy: “Strategic analysis and mutual adjustment among political participants, then, are the underlying processes by which democratic systems achieve the level of intelligent action that they do."
"The staid and dignified policy-formation process is very different from the helter-skelter special-interest process. ... It appears as disinterested and fairminded as the special-interest process seems self-seeking and biased."
The foundations, think tanks, and policy planning organizations generally try to remain above partisan politics. Their tax-exempt status under Section 501C3 of the Internal Revenue Code requires that they remain nonpartisan, that they do not endorse political candidates, and that their policy recommendations be presented as “civic and educational” activities.
They describe themselves as “independent,” “nonpartisan,” “objective,” “problem-solving,” and “public-spirited.”
But strategic analysis and mutual adjustment - the keys to intelligent policymaking - cannot develop in the absence of agreement on fundamental values.
[Thomas R. Dye]
Top Down Policymaking, p.63-4, 174
Science's goal of ultimate law and ultimate level also reflects the prevailing notion in the West of a single, unified deity.
Rather than seeking a single, most fundamental ground, the Native mind prefers to dance among the ever-changing movements of a living, subtle nature. Harmony and balance must accommodate change and the activities of the trickster.
[…] Native science works with a multiplicity of symbols, images, and stories. There is no single, unique reading to a story, but rather many enfolded and interpenetrating levels, none of which needs be thought of as being more fundamental than any other. Understanding comes from a direct experience of the dance between these levels of meaning.
In this sense, understanding within Indigenous science has something in common with Niels Bohr's notion of complementarity. Bohr's complementarity states that a single consistent description will never exhaust the meaning of what is happening at the quantum level. Rather, what is required are a number of complementary, mutually contradictory descriptions.
An electron is described as being both delocalized and wavelike, but also localized and particlelike. Likewise, the meaning of a traditional story depends upon a variety of contexts and can be unfolded in a variety of ways.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.262, 264
[...] what Wilber is presenting in his theory of evolutionary stages is perhaps the most detailed and consistent attempt yet to shoehorn mystical spirituality into the modern belief in progress.
[John Michael Greer]
'Against Enchantment I: Ken Wilber', Ecosophia
The traditional (or modern) way of confronting complexity was to find a secure point of reference that could serve as foundation, a passe-partout, a master key from which everything else could be derived.
Whatever that point of reference might be - a transcendental world of perfect ideas, the radically sceptic mind, the phenomenological subject - my claim is that following such a strategy constitutes an avoidance of complexity.
The obsession to find one essential truth blinds us to the relationary nature of complexity, and especially to the continuous shifting of those relationships. Any acknowledgement of complexity will have to incorporate these shifts and changes, not as epiphenomena, but as constitutive of complex systems.
[…] the suggestion will be that the postmodern approach is inherently sensitive to complexity, that it acknowledges the importance of self-organisation whilst denying a conventional theory of representation.
Scientific knowledge […] habitually legitimates itself by appealing to a coherent metadiscourse that performs a general unifying function. Should such a metadiscourse be found, it will be possible to incorporate all forms of knowledge into one grand narrative. This is the dream of modernism. Postmodernism is consequently defined as 'incredulity towards metanarratives' […]
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.112-4
The postmodern denial of single meta-narratives, and its emphasis on the importance of difference and opposition, is not normally formulated in terms of 'population thinking' (to use the biological expression for the kind of systems thinking referred to here), but the similarities are undeniable.
Although strains of thought that value the importance of relationships - and look for patterns rather than essences - can be found throughout the intellectual history of the West, they have usually been trampled over by more macho theories claiming to have found the Truth: Platonic idealism, rationalism, Marxism, positivism.
In our analysis of complex systems (like the brain and language) we must avoid the trap of trying to find master keys. Because of the mechanisms by which complex systems structure themselves, single principles provide inadequate descriptions.
We should rather be sensitive to complex and self-organising interactions and appreciate the play of patterns that perpetually transforms the system itself as well as the environment in which it operates.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.107
Lyotard's insistence on dissension and destabilising forces, as opposed to consensus - notions which also form the core of Lyotard's critique of Habermas - has serious implications for philosophy in general, and specifically for the philosophy of science.
The role of science has traditionally been understood as one that has to fix knowledge in a permanent grid. Experimental evidence was used to verify theories. Sufficient verification would ensure a permanent place in the grid. It soon became clear, however, that the conditions for objective verification were problematic, that experimental evidence could support a theory, but not prove it.
The experimental process cannot include all the factors that could possibly be involved, nor can it predict how new knowledge would change the interpretation of experimental results. Since one could still disprove theories, the process of verification was replaced by one of falsification. If one could not add to the grid, one could at least disqualify unwanted members.
This strategy of 'throwing away' has the result of making the body of knowledge qualifying as 'scientific' leaner and leaner. Everything too complex or containing uncertainties or unpredictability is, for the time being at least, left aside.
Consequently, large parts of the totality of human knowledge are disregarded as unscientific - most of the arts, most of psychology (for many scientists Freud remains the paradigm of a scientific charlatan), and often, human sciences in general. Working with a narrow understanding of what science should be, even the life sciences (biology) and the empirical sciences (engineering) become suspect.
Pushed to its limits, the theory of falsification implies that only abstract, a priori truths are really scientific.
Lyotard's suggestion is that we discard the idea of consensus since it is impoverishing. To proliferate knowledge, we have to proliferate discourses without trying to fix them into a permanent grid.
This position has some affinity with the position of Paul Feyerabend (1975). Feyerabend insists on a scientific anarchy' in which all the marginalised voices should participate. There should be no immutable 'method' that determines what forms part of the canon and what does not. Instead of throwing away everything that does not fit into the scheme, one should try to find meaningful relationships among the different discourses.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.118
The question that should be posed at this point is the following: can behaviour in accordance with an abstract, universal set of rules be called ‘ethical’ at all? What is at stake here is the very meaning of the word ‘ethics’.
It was part of the dream of modernism to establish a universal set of rules that would be able to regulate our behaviour in every circumstance. Taken by itself, this is a noble ideal, but if we wish to argue that human beings are constituted by their ethical behaviour, we run into problems. Following a universal set of rules (assuming such rules exist) does not involve decision or dilemma, it merely asks for calculation. Given the circumstances, what do the rules decree my behaviour should be? Can this be called ‘ethical’? What kind of human being would act like this? Clearly some kind of automaton, itself constituted by rational, rule-based principles. Modernist ethics, and an understanding of language and the mind in terms of rule-based systems, fit together perfectly.
This concurs with Zygmunt Bauman’s (1992, 1993) analysis of modern and postmodern ethics. For him, modernism’s attempt to structure our existence leads to nothing less than our imprisonment.
A postmodern attitude sets us free, not to do as we like, but to behave ethically. He acknowledges that this involves a paradox: ‘it restores to agents the fullness of moral choice and responsibility while simultaneously depriving them of the comfort of the universal guidance that that modern self-confidence once promised…. Moral responsibility comes with the loneliness of moral choice’ (Bauman 1992: xxii).
Actually this is just another formulation of the principle that has become a leitmotiv of this chapter: you cannot escape the agonistics of the network.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.137-8
In his criticism of Kant’s abstract idealism, Hegel realises that we are constituted within the social system, but for him it is a system that will ultimately be perfectly organised. Everybody will have their specified place.
Although Hegel realised that the (dialectical) process of organisation is still in progress, his view is, in the end, still a conservative one. At some stage there will be no further need for transformation.
Adorno argues that there are differences among human beings that remain irreducible to a totalising system. He thus reminds us of the importance of differences, not as something that prevents us from finding a comfortable place in the system, but as that which constitutes our humanity.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.138
[…] Rouse rejects the idea of the unity of science ‘which postulates as an epistemic ideal the unification of scientific representations of the world into a single all-inclusive and coherent picture.’
He motivates this rejection by denying that the goal of science is the ‘accumulation of a body of representations abstracted from the activity of research.’ The advance of science is centrifugal rather than centripetal, and in this process established results are often left by the wayside.
The concerns of science are practical rather than representational, and insofar as there is a concern for coherence, it is only local, more local even than the level of the applicable discipline, let alone that of the whole of science.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.132
This projected goal of a coherent world-picture has its reductionist versions, in which the coherence comes from explaining everything in a single privileged theoretical vocabulary (typically that of physics).
It also has pluralist versions, in which the results of different fields fit together as different levels of description appropriate for different levels of organization or complexity in the world.
[Joseph Rouse]
‘The Narrative Reconstruction of Science’
Construed in its traditional way, the unity of science is predicated upon a representationalist view of scientific knowledge, and postulates as an epistemic ideal the unification of scientific representations of the world into a single all-inclusive and coherent picture.
There are three respects in which I reject this construal of the unification of scientific knowledge. Most fundamentally, I do not believe that the accumulation of a body of representations abstracted from the activity of research is a goal of science at all.
Second, I am arguing that, far from inclusively bringing together all or most established scientific results into a single picture, the ongoing narrative reconstruction of scientific practices regularly excises established results from the background knowledge of a field, in order to focus its subsequent development. The coherence achieved through scientific research is thus practical rather than representational.
Third, the advance of scientific research seems centrifugal rather than centripetal.
New fields continually spin off with their own interests, methods, and interpretations. Their practitioners show little concern for how retrospectively to reconcile their interests and results with those of their progenitor disciplines. They will more typically consolidate their own results toward a new advance, perhaps in a still more divergent direction, than look back and try to see how it fits together with its origins.
Scientists' concern for coherence, at least in what they choose to investigate, is usually situated more locally than even the level of the discipline, let alone that of the whole of science.
What we get is not a single coherent picture of the world, but an ever more complex network of interconnections binding together various scientific endeavors. Achievements from one field get reworked and reinterpreted in order to serve the interests of another which may be at cross-purposes.
The loss in coherence is often happily compensated by the creation of new possibilities to explore, and new capabilities for doing that.
[Joseph Rouse]
‘The Narrative Reconstruction of Science’
Vervaeke: […] what myth is always doing - and Levi Strauss had sort of a sense of this with structuralism - is pointing you to opponent processing.
Here's this myth, with this opponent processing; and here’s this myth with this opponent processing - but what's the through line? […] you're trying to find the multi-dimensional nexus …
Peterson: - the meta-through-line -
Vervaeke: … of all the opponent processing.
This is Nicholas Of Cusa with his open sense of infinity. In the ancient Greek world infinity is a bad thing, it's chaos. But with Cusa, and then the whole neoplatonic tradition, it opens up into a positive thing. If I could get all of the opposites, I would see that in infinity they all coincide, and that would be the culmination or summation - not in any entity - of what our cognition is about.
I would have found the source of intelligibility, because I would have moved to the deepest grammar of cognition […]
Peterson: […] and that's the resolution of all opposing conflicts in some sense.
[Jordan B. Peterson & John Vervaeke]
‘A Conversation So Intense It Might Transcend Time and Space | John Vervaeke | EP 321, YouTube
And that's the third and I think, therefore, best vision of Cognitive Science. That's the vision of Cognitive Science as Synoptic Integration.
Synoptic Integration is not saying that all the disciplines are saying the same thing. But it's not simple eclecticism of “well, they're all saying different things, but let's get them all to be friendly and like each other, and they can have some sort of peripheral influence on each other”.
Synoptic integration is saying, “no, we need to build something right between the disciplines that addresses the equivocation, deals with the fragmentation and fills in the ignorance - tells us about how the levels are actually causally interacting and constraining each other. That's Synoptic Integration.
So what you want to do is you need to say, “They're not saying the same thing, but they're not just saying different things either!”. You have to create this bridging vocabulary that integrates across the disciplines.
So I'm trying to create constructs with multi-aptness. They get this balance between identity and difference that affords and provokes insightful transformation of the theorising from one discipline to another. And I start to create an overarching integration.
[John Vervaeke]
‘Ep. 26 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Cognitive Science’, John Vervaeke, YouTube
The structure of Plato’s philosophy meets all the requirements of the Apollonian Logos. At the top of his theory is the One, surrounded by eternal ideas. This is the peak of the divine, celestial world, illuminated by timeless light. The highest principle is the Good, which exudes its abundance firstly upon the world of ideas (paradigms) and then, through the good Creator-Demiurge, on the created cosmos.
Plato described all three of these world zones in his Timaeus, in particular distinguishing the realm of paradigms (the observatory point of the gods, the Father), the realm of models, or “copies” and “icons” (the Son), and the mysterious khora (χώρα), the space or country which Plato likened to the Nurse or Mother.
In describing the khora (which was later identified by the Neoplatonists with the mother), Plato’s dialogue loses its crystal clarity, thus lending towards the strange assumption that this element can be comprehended only by means of a “special Logos”, which Plato called “bastard” or “illegitimate” (νόθος λόγος).
The vision of the celestial god thus reaches the surface of the earth, the lower limits of the world of copies, but here is confronted with its limits, as it can no longer see anything amenable to clear Apollonian discernment. At the border of the day, the realm of night-dreaming flickers. Timaeus (Plato) restricts himself to only a few suggestions and postulates the khora (space) to be a flat intermediary, beyond which there is nothing, and which is impossible to understand, insofar as there is nothing to properly understand in it.
In the solar Platonic vision, we can obtain only an external, “celestial” view, which sees as its bottom the khora (Χώρα), the space of the subtle film of the chaotic movement of scattered particles not yet formed by the ordering demiurge. Χώρα comes from the same root as mythological “chaos”, χάος, meaning “yawning”, or literally “opening the jaws”, “freeing the empty space.”
Instead of the voluminous “chaos” that creates the three-dimensionality of unordered void, Timaeus sees a film that resists comprehension by the classical Apollonian logos and whose comprehension demands falling into slumber, losing clarity and rigor, and degeneration […] This khora is the view of the back of the Great Mother, a limit unreachable by the Apollonian, where hell begins.
In a certain sense, Platonism is eternal, and has continued in both Christian theology by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, John of Damascus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Michael Psellos, John Italus, and Gemistus Plethon in the East, and by Boethius and John Scotus Eriugena in the West), as well as in the Renaissance and even amidst modern philosophy.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
[...] what Kant presented as the universal and necessary principles of the human mind turned out in fact to be principles specific to particular times, places and stages of human activity and enquiry.
Just as what Kant took to be the principles and presuppositions of natural science as such turned out after all to be the principles and presuppositions specific to Newtonian physics, so what Kant took to be the principles and presuppositions of morality as such turned out to be the principles and presuppositions of one highly specific morality, a secularized version of Protestantism which furnished modern liberal individualism with one of its founding charters. Thus the claim to universality foundered.
For what the progress of analytic philosophy has succeeded in establishing is that there are no grounds for belief in universal necessary principles outside purely formal enquiries - except relative to some set of assumptions.
[...] analytic philosophers [...] seem to be determined to go on considering arguments as objects of investigation in abstraction from the social and historical contexts of activity and enquiry in which they are or were at home and from which they characteristically derive their particular import.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.309-11
[...] there are no general timeless standards.
It is in the ability of one particular moral-philosophy-articulating-the-claims-of-a-particular-morality to identify and to transcend the limitations of its rival or rivals, limitations which can be - although they may not in fact have been - identified by the rational standards to which the protagonists of the rival morality are committed by their allegiance to it, that the rational superiority of that particular moral philosophy and that particular morality emerges.
The history of morality-and-moral-philosophy is the history of successive challenges to some preexisting moral order, a history in which the question of which party defeated the other in rational argument is always to be distinguished from the question of which party retained or gained social and political hegemony.
I hold not only that historical enquiry is required in order to establish what a particular point of view is, but also that it is in its historical encounter that any given point of view establishes or fails to establish its rational superiority relative to its particular rivals in some specific contexts.
[...] our situation in respect of theories about what makes one theory rationally superior to another is no different from our situation in regard to scientific theories or to moralities-and-moral-philosophies. In the former as in the latter case what we have to aspire to is not a perfect theory, one necessarily to be assented to by any rational being, because invulnerable or almost invulnerable to objections, but rather the best theory to emerge so far in the history of this class of theories.
It follows that the writing of this kind of philosophical history can never be brought to completion. The possibility has always to be left open that in any particular field, whether the natural sciences or morality-and-moral-philosophy, or the theory of theory, some new challenge to the established best theory so far will appear and will displace it.
Hence this kind of historicism, unlike Hegel's, involves a form of fallibilism; it is a kind of historicism which excludes all claims to absolute knowledge.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.305
[...] in much of the ancient and medieval worlds, as in many other premodern societies, the individual is identified and constituted in and through certain of his or her roles, those roles which bind the individual to the communities in and through which alone specifically human goods are to be attained; I confront the world as a member of this family, this household, this clan, this tribe, this city, this nation, this kingdom. There is no 'I' apart from these.
For the Platonist, as later for the Cartesian, the soul, preceding all bodily and social existence, must [...] possess an identity prior to all social roles; but for the Catholic Christian, as earlier for the Aristotelian, the body and the soul are not two linked substances. I am my body and my body is social, born to those parents in this community with a specific social identity.
What does make a difference for the Catholic Christian is that I, whatever earthly community I may belong to, am also held to be a member of a heavenly, eternal community in which I also have a role, a community represented on earth by the church.
Of course I can be expelled from, defect from or otherwise lose my place in any of these forms of community. I can become an exile, a stranger, a wanderer. These too are assigned social roles, recognized within ancient and medieval communities. But it is always as part of an ordered community that I have to seek the human good, and in this sense of community the solitary anchorite or the shepherd on the remote mountainside is as much a member of a community as is a dweller in cities.
Hence solitariness is no longer what it was for Philoctetes. The individual carries his communal roles with him as part of the definition of his self, even into his isolation.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.201-2
[...] nothing that I have said goes any way to show that a situation could not arise in which it proved possible to discover no rational way to settle the disagreements between two rival moral and epistemological traditions, so that positive grounds for a relativistic thesis would emerge.
[...] there are no successful a priori arguments which will guarantee in advance that such a situation could not occur. Indeed nothing could provide us with such a guarantee which did not involve the successful resuscitation of the Kantian transcendental project.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.322
Recognition of the complex multicultural structure of human societies leads to differentialism and the complete rejection of hierarchy. Moreover, the reduction to the individual, which is the basis of the egalitarian morality of postmodernism, destroys cultural ensembles instead of protecting and strengthening them.
Differentialist anti-racism, on the contrary, merely postulates differences between societies, without attempting to evaluate them with the help of a general 'transcendental' criterion (which in principle cannot exist and any candidate for such status would only be a projection of one of the societies), nor to destroy them.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
'ALTERNATIVE POSTMODERNISM: AN UNNAMED PHENOMENON'
The basic attitude of the Western tradition had grown toward diversity and toleration, based on the belief that every aspect of life and of human experience and every individual has some place in the complex structure of reality if that place can only be found and that, accordingly, unity of the whole of life can be reached by way of diversity rather than by any compulsory uniformity.
This idea was entirely foreign to the Russian mind. Any Russian thinker, and hordes of other Russians with no capacity for thought, were driven by an insatiable thirst to find the “key” to life and to truth. Once this “key” has been found, all other aspects of human experience must be rejected as evil, and all men must be compelled to accept that key as the whole of life in a dreadful unity of uniformity.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Russian Empire to 1917,’ p.65
The inexorable growth of a world market does not advance a universal civilisation. It makes the interpenetration of cultures an irreversible global condition.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.193
Liberalism—and proto-liberalisms such as Christianity, Platonism, Vedanta, and so forth—do not see will at the bottom of the ethical proposition. They see only true.
For them, good is a species of true. For the folkish thinker, true is a species of good, and good is a matter of will. And so, under these proto-liberalisms, the will—whether it be your own will, or that of the king—is always and everywhere governed by propositions. This is the ultimate source of Schmitt’s “forever-deferred decision” of the sovereign.
When will is subordinated to proposition, willing is impossible. Where will is impossible, ethics is impossible, hence the devolution into individualism.
Folkishness, by seeing ethics as second-order commands, reintroduces will into the world. Specifically, this takes the form of the will of the founder. In our terms, this is the Odinic—the great man.
[Imperium Press]
‘Who’s the Boss — Folk or Elite?’, Imperium Press, Substack
[…] we have to have some idea about how we come towards ideas that are truer than others. And I’m not suggesting that there is one simple truth, but we wouldn’t be able to do anything or say anything unless we believe that certain things were truer than others. So how do we get that?
[…] there’s a difference between the left hemisphere’s idea of truth and the right hemisphere idea of truth.
[…] correspondence truth is the idea that the propositions that we make or have the thoughts, beliefs that we have a kind of version of the world, they reflect the world so that we’ve got a model to be able to work on. Whereas, coherence theory says it’s not about correspondence in a one-to-one way, it’s more about do these various aspects of what we believe to be true make a coherent whole?
I don’t think that either of these is right and I quote Anthony Quinton saying that probably truth will turn out to be an amalgam of these points of view.
But I think we can also, using the hemisphere approach, see a certain difference, which is that the left hemisphere is again viewing the world, the cosmos, as made of things, of stuff, bits here and there, whereas the right hemisphere is likely to prioritize relationships. This is what it is always seeing in both the human and the non-human world. And so it’s interested in the relationships that come and go between the observer and the thing that’s observed.
And the idea of this is not truth as a thing or correctness - which lies in a way behind all the left hemisphere versions of how we get at truth, including the coherence theory and the correspondence theory - it’s not so much like that, as a clearing a way of error.
So it’s working apophatically, in the way that science actually works, which is to clear away mistakes. Science never says this is true, it just says, this doesn’t look true on the basis of what we know now. And that leaves you with something else that you can work with.
[…] truth [is] as a process […] a never ending journey of a reverberative kind in which our consciousness and the consciousness of what is around us come into alignment. And this doesn’t really have the same features as a world of things that are in principle knowable, even if we can’t actually know them too well.
I oppose to that, the idea of truth as unconcealing, in other words, clearing away so that we see the picture ever more clearly, rather as a sculptor makes a statue, not by putting together an arm, a leg ahead, and a torso, but by actually clearing away the stone, that makes the thing stand out.
[Iain McGilchrist]
The Jim Rutt Show - ‘EP 154 Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things’, ‘EP 155 Iain McGilchrist Part 2: The Matter With Things’
[...] if Schopenhauer is led to deny the will it is primarily because he believes in the unity of willing.
Because the will, according to Schopenhauer, is essentially unitary, the executioner comes to understand that he is one with his own victim. The consciousness of the identity of the will in all its manifestations leads the will to deny itself, to suppress itself in pity, morality and ascetism.
Nietzsche discovers what seems to him the authentically Schopenhauerian mystification; when we posit the unity, the identity, of the will we must necessarily repudiate the will itself.
When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.7
It is well known that in fact man rarely seeks after truth: our interests and also our stupidity separate us from truth even more than our errors do.
The concept of truth describes a "truthful" world. Even in science the truth of phenomena forms a "world" distinct from that of phenomena themselves. But a truthful world presupposes a truthful man as its centre. – Who is this truthful man, what does he want?
First hypothesis: He wants not to be deceived, not to let himself be deceived, because it is "harmful, dangerous and inauspicious to be deceived". But this hypothesis presupposes the truthfulness of the world itself. For, in a radically false world it is the will to not let oneself be deceived that becomes inauspicious, dangerous and harmful.
In fact, the will to truth had to be formed "in spite of the danger and the uselessness of the truth at any price".
There remains another hypothesis: I want the truth means I do not want to deceive, and "I do not want to be deceived comprises, as a special case, I do not want to deceive myself. - If someone wills the truth it is not in the name of what the world is but in the name of what the world is not.
It is understood that "life aims to mislead, to dupe, to dissimilate, to dazzle, to blind". But he who wills the truth always wants to depreciate this high power of the false: he makes life an "error" and this world an "appearance". He therefore opposes knowledge to life and to the world he opposes another world, a world-beyond, the truthful world.
"Life against life". He wants life to become virtuous, to correct itself and to correct appearance, for it to serve as the way to the other world. He wants life to repudiate itself and to turn against itself [...]
The one who repudiates life is also the one who wants a diminished life, the conservation of his type and moreover its power and triumph, the triumph and contagion of reactive forces.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.95-6
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