@jfmaquine
I might frame your thesis a bit more generally, but it’s correct. Although I would like to answer the core question of just why anyone pays attention at all to german philosophy, and instead, why not pay attention to what germans actually do, and discover why they do it – because codifying the latter, just as the anglos codified theirs in the american constitution (albeit insufficiently) would be a net asset for mankind. Germans and Japanese, despite their differences in culture, do both prioritize the commons and produce high trust commons of lower conflict than other states, and do so without lying (as much) about it.
Because I’m a product of Hayek and Popper myself, I especially liked this paragraph:
–“Note: Popper explained that since Scholasticism, the University has adopted Essentialism and explained why ”the development of thought has remained in an arrested state of empty verbiage”.
He also explained that there is a hidden truth in the foundation of the university that both methods of reading reality must cohabit but this [leads] to a constant conflict [within the university] that needs to be resolved. [So] He advocated that science [empiricism, neutrality, commensurability, testifiability] take over the university with the nominalist method.
The opposite of his wish happened, and the humanities have taken over the university, [using] the essentialist method to read reality.
This is the non-spoken part of the causes of the Student revolution in the 1960s and the rise of Post-modernism.
he peace was broken much sooner if we read Julien Benda’s ”The Treason of the intellectuals” which he put around 1870, at least.
The treason is the end of impartiality that was required to keep the peace in the university and among intellectuals.”–
But reading that bit reminds me of a topic conversation I share with my friend Rudyard Lynch @whatifalthist fairly regularly. And that is that most of us attempt to explain history from the point of view of some observer with some desire born of the observations and judgement’s he’s made of the world.
From my point of view, (science, economics, law, government, group strategy) I take the position of aristocracy – ultimate responsibility for outcomes over time – while Rudyard that of the clerisy – responsibility for the experience of the people in time. These are both historical and necessary points of view, the study of any conflict between, explains to us more about human nature and condition than either does alone.
So a third position is that of the observer the people who write vs the people who work, the people who manage them, and the people who rule – and the natural conflict between the sexes and classes given the vast differences in instinct and intuition between the sexes and the more vast differences in ability between the classes. And I think that is the position you’re communicating from. And that’s because in the debate between the idealists (plato) and realists (aristotle) philosophy is more accessible and satisfying than empiricism science economics and law.
As such comparative POV within a civilization is more useful than any singular POV within a civilization. Just as popper was only partly right with epistemology: darwinian falsification is in fact half of the epistemoc process, and yes, all logic is falsificationary not justificationary – we only know survival. As such the only solution to epistemology is the satisfaction of both empiricism (falsification) and construction (falsification) – a catastrophe of philosophical failure in the 19th to early 20th as babbage failed to systematize his thoughts, computation (operationalism) failed to displace mathematics (verbalism), followed by the failure of the intuitionists, operationalists, and operationsists left open the door for pseudoscience of cantor(infinities), bohr (just calculate), and even einstein (spacetime), which spread to all fields. And was only incrementally rescued by Turing and the computational revolution, Watson-Crick, the Cognitive Scientists, and the present demonstrations of the AI community at the same time as the admission of seventy years of failure by the Physicists. We are just less aware of the similar failures of pseudoscience in law (Rez, Kelsen, Dworkin, Rawls) for the same reasons. (Which is the pseudoscience I work to overcome).
–“Overall, an understanding of the ancients – their philosophy, their quarrel, and the problems they tried to solve – is of the utmost importance.”–
Well, I would say that comparative civilization better answers that question, because starting with the premise that the conflict is a problem rather than an equilibrium that causes continuous discovery and innovation might be a mistake. Instead we might think of everyone in each civilization struggling to perform some sort of evolutionary computation of ‘better than this’ given the physical, social, institutional, economic, and cognitive resources available to them. This POV leads us to view our history as discovery within premises for which we can only approach an optimum instead of a battle between truth and error.
And secondly, comparative civ helps us discover the limits within which we are all struggling:
There are only three choices of human interaction: cooperation(Trade), Parasitism(conflict), Avoidance(boycott).
There are only three tools of human influence: Cooperation(Trade/Boycott), Force(Defense/Offense), Seduction (Inclusion/Exclusion).
There are only three primary institutions of coercion: Law (Trade), State (Force), Faith(seduction).
The order of the development of those institutions produces a path dependency where the first is strongest, the second less so and the third is weak or fails.
The First institution determines the velocity of innovation and adaptation of your population: Law (Fast), State (Slow), Faith (Slowest).
And worse, every civilization, given it’s territory, resources, competitors, demographics, and relationship between warriors and peasants, develops an unconscious set of metaphysical presumptions that are internally consistent even if not externally correspondent – so that they can cooperate on large scales with in a civilization.
This set of premises if sufficiently survival evolves into a group evolutionary strategy that the group is unconscious of. Cultures, religions, states, traditions, and values are produced incrementally on top of those presumptions, further rigidifying them.
Ergo, all people work within a framework they are unconscious of. And within institutions and habits and traditions populated by those with incentives to persist those institutions, habits ,and traditions, who resist all possible change at all possible times, causing incremental calcification until some crisis forces a change despite all the established interests of those people.
So, just as christianity destroyed the western ancient world, and islam destroyed the ancient civilizations (seven of them), the new wave of ‘religions’ is attempting once again to destroy the present world – and succeeding wholeheartedly might I add.
So my question is, again, why the interst in Kant and Hegel? Or for goodness sake Heidegger? What is the difference between the open debate and discourse of the anglo empirical and the closed internal piety of the german phenomenological?
I mean, I’m not suggesting we burn their books, but other than studying philosophy and theology as largely a history of failures by middle and lower classes, then what is the point of it at all?
The uncomfortable conclusion of a study of history is that the progressives were not all wrong, and that the fundamental problem for mankind is the asymmetry of biological vs cognitive, scientific and technological evolution, and the tendency to regress toward the mean during periods of prosperity – a process which leads to collapse.
Looking forward to more of your prose. 😉
CD
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