The End of Rationalism: An Interview with John Ralston Saul (2001)
scottlondon.com
scottlondon.com
The message isn't to be innocent of scientific knowledge -- it's to be innocent of evil. And that evil is immediately made manifest not just in Eve blaming the snake, but perhaps more heinously by Adam blaming not only Eve but God: "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate". Adam and Eve demonstrate a renunciation of self responsiblity and ultimately, of the gift of free will that they have been given, for the sake of trying to falsely appear blameless. Contrast this with the new Adam, Christ, who takes the blame of others upon Himself (even though He is blameless) demonstrating not just His divinity but _what humanity truly is_.
So we see that the message of the fall, once fully illumined by Christ, is really that we ought to love one another by covering one another's sins (isn't this forgiveness?) It is in this that we become God-like: not by simply eating of the tree. And if we use only our rational minds we might not ever arrive at this point, because to make oneself responsible for things one isn't responsible for -- whether it is problems others face or the outright wrong things other people have done -- is beyond rationality and is instead both truly human and divine.
> because to make oneself responsible for things one isn't responsible for -- whether it is problems others face or the outright wrong things other people have done -- is beyond rationality and is instead both truly human and divine.
Actuall, covering for other people's sins is perfectly rational if it makes others likely to cover for your sins as well. Cooperation is hard to ensure, but it usually has better payoffs than minding only your own interest. C.f. iterated prisoner's dilemma, etc.
Christ says that one of the greatest expressions of love is to die for a friend. But who is it that dies for one's enemy? Yet this is what Christ does for humanity, forgiving them even while hanging upon the cross, and it is what He calls all Christians to offer to their enemies.
One way I think of this is that there is one mode of living, which I'll call economic, where we do things in order to receive things. That's what you've described in "if it makes others likely to cover for your sins as well". But what the Christian tries to live, what St. Silouan the Athonite would term theanthropic living, is that of humility: of loving even when there is no chance of receiving a reward. One might argue that in this other mode of life, one is awaiting some kind of heavenly reward. But I don't think that is the case because as one approaches God closer, one sees just how _unlike_ God one is; as a saint has said "none of the saints have counted themselves worthy of Heaven."
What I mean is that in approaching God we become aware in the depths of our heart of our fundamental wrongness towards others and toward God, and the great darkness that lies within ourselves. This isn't some kind of masochistic pleasure in self-hatred. It's an awareness that penetrates one's entire being. And _balancing this recognition_ is that God Himself loves us even unto death. Despite this incredible self-awareness, we are indeed not lost. Even more than that, we are empowered to become like God (theosis). The result of this is the joyful sadness of the theanthropic life: one accounts only oneself as deserving of death, while one sees all others as worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven. And really, this is what Christ Himself did in His life, His death, and His descent into Hades. But Hades could not contain God, and St. Silouan says that death also cannot contain any truly theanthropic person, for they become blameless. This is how death becomes the gateway to divine life.
Perhaps there is a rational way to justify suffering and even dying at the hands of one's enemy. I'd honestly be interested in hearing such an argument!
Yes, it's called "wanting to do so".
In speaking of being "innocent of evil" you also imply being "innocent of good" and so can good truly manifest itself, in the light of self-responsibility, in the face of innocence from it?
Further, you want to speak of "scientific knowledge" as separate from the knowledge of "good and evil", but Saul's identification of six qualities (common sense, creativity, ethics, intuition, memory, and reason) are all in some sense well-springs of knowledge: they guide our action, the way we exercise our agency, and so they way in which we conceive our self-responsibility.
I feel in no way, in bringing up the tree of knowledge, is Saul attacking Judeo-Christianity. He is articulating, instead, the manipulation of scripture, in its narrow interpretation, to the meet the ends of the elite.
In fact, there is something inexorable about eating from the tree, as I argue it is what enables good, but dualities abound, and so with it comes evil, but to only see one side of it is deception.
It is not only "the fall" of man, but also "the ascent."
That being said, the initial "job" of Adam and Eve, and the way in which they demonstrated their goodness, was in loving and delighting in God, one another, and all of creation. However, the ramifications of Adam and Eve's actions reverberated throughout the cosmos, and now we all share in the result.
The things described in the six qualities were created and given to us by God in order to help know God, one another, and creation. As such they are indeed good in their essence, but sometimes they are used in a disordered way that fragments creation, that separates us from God and our neighbor. We can use creativity to make music, or we can use it to hatch a plot to hurt someone else.
I didn't mean to imply that Saul is attacking Judeo-Christianity. But in basing his argument upon the wrong name of the tree, I think he ended up mixing these things that have "inherent difficulty" with his main argument, and that might only result in more confusion rather than illumination.
So no matter how you look at this it doesn't make humans look particularly good let alone divine. And the very idea of original sin, which makes Christ's existence and death necessary, is immoral. The actions of others has absolutely zero rational transference to children. It's an allegory for why all humans are so wicked. It's a nasty story.
In the Orthodox Church, "original sin" isn't some sort of inherited guilt. Adam and Eve bear the guilt for their actions; the _ramification_ of their actions resulted in the disordering of all the cosmos, which is what all of humanity has sadly inherited. The Catholic (or perhaps more specifically Augustinian) idea that all share in the guilt of Adam is what leads to ideas like Christ needing to be a propitiatory sacrifice to appease an angry God. This idea is inconceivable in the Orthodox church. Nor does Christ exist only to reconcile original sin; He has always existed, and Orthodox theologians have said that if the fall had not occurred He still would have taken on flesh for the sake of uniting Himself with humanity.
It is this union in the Incarnation that makes humans "divine": Christ is fully God and fully man; as St. Ignatius said, "God became man so that man might become like God." If the intent was only to "get people to heaven," meaning to put them in some specific place after death, then there were certainly easier ways to accomplish this. But God has in His eyes the beautification of His beloved.
Christ's life is a perfect illustration not only of God's love but of the way in which all who follow Christ are empowered to walk. What we see in the Incarnation, Transfiguration, and Resurrection is what humanity is truly capable of: a love so powerful that it can annihilate death.
Rational != selfless, and also, rational != emotionless.
"Rationality", as in the rational way of making decisions and taking actions, is only defined up to a specific set of values, goals, or preferences (however you want to phrase things) -- those goals are a free parameter.
Hence you completely misunderstood, again, continuously making the assumption that "rationality" entails acting something like a banker, seeking some sort of personal profit in everything and caring for nothing else. Again, this just isn't true. If we take the Christ-character in the New Testament as speaking sincerely, for instance, he was acting rationally for his goals.
So again, the issue is not that one has to discard rational thought in order to take a "leap of divinity", but instead that you are assigning "more divinity" to certain goals, and therefore certain actions, than to others -- this all being contingent on your belief in the Scripture.
I think Eli and I are caught in what Wittgenstein might call a "language game." We seem to be using the same word but we're really meaning two different things. It'd be like if I thought basketball was a game involving kicking a ball into a net (soccer) and Eli thought it was a game involving throwing a ball into a net (basketball). While in that case we do have one objective definition of basketball, we don't necessarily have one universally accepted definition for "rationality."
I'm kind of reaching my limit here in terms of knowledge of philosophy; I've perhaps confused things by framing my descriptions using two contradictory definitions of rationality: that of the Enlightenment idea of rational (which I critique) vs St. Maximos the Confessor's idea of rational (which I advocate). I think that Eli is arguing from a Kantian sense, in terms of actions being rational up to a subjective idea of an ultimate good. Luckily for us, I've found a paper that discusses these three topics and will hopefully clear up the miscommunication we've had: http://www.academia.edu/10973797/A_Byzantine_Critique_of_Enl...
Edit: I initially said that Eli and I are perhaps in agreement, but assuming he's arguing from the Kantian sense then we aren't.
Well certainly. But by that standard, we really have no need for "divine irrationality", nor any need to insult the everyday rationality of real people.
This guy is a bit like a confused version of Noam Chomsky.
That kind of argument seems to me like, "Nobody [unless there's a God] rationally constructed the theory of gravity, or the complexity of fluid dynamics, therefore there's more to gravity or fluid dynamics than can be understood through rationality and science."
Similarly, a good fragrance could easily be a bad fragrance to an alien. Maybe, because good fragrances are associated with eatables, our mind categorised it to be a "good" fragrance.
Emotion is a mechanism developed by the brain to not spend energy reasoning things out every time. We understand this today and hence decide that emotion is a bias in the scientific method, but since we are humans and emotional by evolution/definition, we prove that bias did not occur by providing data for the experiment to be reproducible.
However, the evolutionary reason for the development of a particular emotion might not exist anymore. We now know that urine is sterile and no longer need to be disgusted. There are many tribes that have learned this and although the natural emotion of disgust might kick in, they still use it for its antiseptic properties to heal wounds. Many hindus drink cow urine.
He traces the evolution of manners through etiquette books (a remarkably enduring genre going back many centuries), and shows how things that evoke a strong digust response in us today were actually slow-evolving social norms that have been internalized and turned into habitus (or a super-ego), and he even mentions urine, which for a long while hadn't evoked the same reaction as today. For example, some centuries ago in Europe, urinating under the staircase indoors was actually quite acceptable, and blowing your nose into the tablecloth was considered good manners.
This, of course, doesn't mean that the capacity for disgust isn't evolutionary, but that its particular triggers are social, even though we perceive them to be natural.
The debate is whether emotion is independent of reason, and both are pretext under consiousness, so you are sidetracking.
Your argument is presupposes your conclusion that this kind of thinking is not knowledge. That said, even if it is isn't knowledge, so what? Does not mean it is not valuable. With questioning the primacy of reason we can also question the primacy of conventional modes of knowledge.
You understand that that is a pure value judgement.
At their heart, love of freedom over slavery, compassion over apathy and wisdom over ignorance are value judgements. I know them to be true, but I cannot prove them rationally.
The fact that something is an artifact of something else doesn't mean that it can be meaningfully reduced to it (or even tractably reduced to it at all). Suppose we discovered the most basic of physical laws, and suppose that somehow computational power made a simulation of them tractable. Is our ability to simulate the universe the same as understanding every aspect of it?
On a more basic level, running software is an artifact of hardware (yet the software can simulate a computer with different semantics than the computer it's running on). So is the study of hardware the only relevant knowledge of the running software? And if you say that the software exists independently of the hardware, you'll find yourself with an idealist philosophy that, according to you, is at odds with your materialistic view.
And how can you know that what you call rationality is also not an artifact of neurology? In fact, Gödel proved that if you don't doubt your own rationality, you are in fact being irrational.
I think science is cheapened by this sort of blind faith. The defining characteristic of the scientific attitude is doubt, not certainty.
That is not at all what Goedel's theorems actually say.
>We lived in a philosophy-starved culture. Too much social media, not enough deep thought.
No, we live in a culture that loves to engage in cheap, shoddy philosophizing by generalizing incorrectly from facts.
An informal description of his second incompleteness theorem (from the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"):
"For any consistent system F within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out, the consistency of F cannot be proved in F itself."
One example of a sufficient "certain amount of arithmetic" for this to apply to a system is the use of the integer numbers, addition and multiplication. Such a system can no longer prove its own consistency.
If you think that this does not apply to human efforts at rationality, I would like you to explain why.
Debate becomes cheap and shoddy not when someone is wrong (I could be), but when you resort to name-calling instead of pointing out where you think the mistakes are.
Human beings aren't proof systems. We don't operate under conditions of certainty via deductive reasoning. We're inductive (or rather, abductive) reasoners from the get-go.
What Gödel tells us is that, as long as you have a sufficiently powerful formal system, you cannot prove the consistency of the system itself. Modal logics are no exception.
If you are a computationalist (that is to say, you believe that the human mind can be emulated by a Turing machine), then you might want to take a look at Gödel, Escher, Bach, where Hofstadter discusses how the second incompleteness theorem applies to Turing machines.
You might also enjoy "Forever Undecided" by Smullyan. It uses puzzles to guide you to an intuition about what the incompleteness theorems means to human knowledge and its limitations. In the worst case it's a fun read.
Peace!
No, it can't. Abductive reasoning is probabilistic modelling, and notably, there's a line of research by Cristian Calude showing that you can soundly, non-paradoxically place probabilities on Halting questions.
(Computational tractability is still an obstacle with his current approach, but it has been shown not to generate paradoxes, which is already a major step forward.)
>you might want to take a look at Gödel, Escher, Bach, where Hofstadter discusses how the second incompleteness theorem applies to Turing machines.
This is backwards: halting problems and Kolmogorov complexity for Turing machines give us the two Incompleteness Theorems for proof systems, via Chaitin's Incompleteness Theorem.
Which also neatly gives a way around the Second Incompleteness Theorem: a hierarchical-probabilistic reasoner can create an abstract, compressed model of themselves which consists of small-enough amounts of information that they can reason about its behavior without becoming subject to Chaitin Incompleteness.
Yes, but only for a very specific definition of "understanding". See my other comment about universal computation and phenomenology. There are other, no less valid, forms of understanding. I believe that the idea of universal computation reconciles materialism with idealism, putting them both on equal footing. The workings of the software cannot be tractably (and certainly not meaningfully, by any common sense of "meaning") reduced to the material existence of the computer.
It does seem dated, though. The point about experts not being really free to express themselves is well taken, but the idea that knowledge is being hoarded makes no sense in the Youtube era.
In the last month I've watched videos on how to grind your own optics, make a vacuum chamber to aluminize them, etc. etc. We're in the middle of a creative explosion.
This inseparable connection is a source of more modern views on the relationship between science and knowledge, like phenomenology[2]. If you want to translate these views back to scientific, or mathematical terms, you can see the essential problem a brain — i.e. a computer — introduces into the universe. Due to universal computation, a universe may contain a material approximation (that it is just a finite approximation matters little) that is more general than the containing universe itself (as it can contain any universe), and thus more general than the laws of nature, which are particular to the “host” universe. This makes subjective experience, namely the inner workings of the computer, not secondary to objective experience, namely the laws of the host universe. The mechanical construction of the computer bears little relevance to the to the computation -- or simulation -- the software is carrying out. Truth, therefore, can mean different things depending on which universe you are talking about, and neither can be said to be secondary to the other.
The scientific method has, obviously, been extremely useful in uncovering certain types of truths, and extremely unhelpful in uncovering others, that cannot be said to be of less import. Since we live in a world constructed by our software, it makes little sense to say that it is the laws of the host universe that matter more (except in the sense that they can kill us, or interfere with the software, but that only makes them important -- not supremely important).
[0]: Although the modern reincarnation justifies itself through utility rather than a deeper philosophical justification, namely, science is useful in the physical world, hence science is the "best" form of knowledge (accepting the supremacy of the physical world as either an axiom, or a materialist belief that smooths over definitions of reduction). You can call this "utilitarian epistemology", namely the view that 'what we know is what we can use'.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)
He claims it can, but I agree with you. Empathy is an emotional quality, while common sense, creativity, ethics, intuition, memory, and reason are not.
"CALM: A state of emotion which is overrated except in religious retreats.. The Captain of the Titanic was no doubt pleased that his male passengers in first class remained calm as they waited to drown. Had they been less controlled, they might have gained some small satisfaction in passing their time by throwing him overboard.
CROISSANT: Islamic symbol of paradise in the shape of a quarter moon. As an act of religious denigration during the Turkish invasion of Europe, Austrian bakers reduced the croissant to a breakfast bun.
DENIAL: Characteristic reflex of a technocrat. Since actions are the result of solutions arrived at by experts, there can be no error. Error is replaced by a linear succession of right answers. This requires the systematic denial of error when each preceding answer fails to do the job in spite of being right.
ECONOMICS: The romance of truth through measurement.
"FREE SPEECH ... is afflicted by two widely held, contradictory opinions. The first is that we have it; the second is that it is a luxury.
How can you have something which exists only as an existential act? ... freedom of speech is only maintained at sufficiently high levels through constant use. The exhausting effort which this requires involves a willingness to listen combined with a desire to be heard. Listening means taking into account, not simply hearing what people have to say. And being heard means being exposed to criticism, even ridicule.
.. A new method of limitation involves arguing that free speech, having been won in the absolute, can now be treated as a luxury. What people need above all, the argument runs, is prosperity. With the physical well-being and stability that brings, people have the time and energy to engage in free speech. It follows, sotto voce, that the more unsuccessful those in responsible positions are at running the economy of a country, the less the citizenry should use their free speech."
Comparatively speaking, English is an extremely logical language and it does enforce a level of active reasoning on the speaker[0]. Combined with the emphasis on individuality and the value of self, both being highly western values, we have ample examples of what John calls the bastardization of reason and aggressive common sense. It's everywhere... politics, pseudo-science, non-science, and even simple everyday conversations are full of reasons that actually are immaterial, which makes them illusionary, but that are encouraged by the culture and the language we use to express ourselves. Worse yet, feeding off our obsession and trust of science (and in many cases celebrity), communicators repeatedly abuse reason to accomplish their motives, be it commercial or personal. Donald Trump exemplifies the bastardization of reason and aggressive common sense. He's betting his campaign on it, and it's working because these observations of western culture are true.
Beyond that point, regarding "6 qualities" John is easier to challenge on the merits. But if one subscribes to scientific models instead of axioms [1], then it is but another model which is worth analysis and pursuing for all of it's bases and applications. In terms of the physics of this, the other elements (common sense, creativity, ethics, intuition, memory) would be the input (hopefully evidence but not to be confused) and reasoning would be the logic (hopefully mathematically accurate but not to be without checks and balances).
Anecdotally, as evidence of hollow reasons there is the excuse. We are all trained to make good excuses growing up, but what are they really? They are simple statements used to shift blame, and are backed first and foremost by a motive (not science). Hence the smarter we are the more excuses we can generate, and the better they will be. Most of them may even be true. But the point is, given the circumstances and our intelligence, we can pretty much reason ourselves and others to think anything when trusted. When we start twisting the facts and deceiving even ourselves, we have confabulation, and this too is a real and serious problem [2].
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[0] Wish I had a quick reference, but by being the Lingua Franca of science English has been pushed to be easier to reason with. Japanese for example, does not have plurals and no subject-object distinction. It is harder to do math and science when the language doesn't care how many or what is objective.
[1] "The semantic view of theories, which identifies scientific theories with models rather than propositions, has replaced the received view as the dominant position in theory formulation in the philosophy of science." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory#About_theori... )