Little Errors and Big Consequences

I was first tipped off to the idea that I might have Thomistic-personalistic tendencies way before I ever consciously entertained the possibility. It was a couple of decades ago, upon reading a book called Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth, by the Catholic philosopher of science Stanley Jaki. 

Not only did the whole thing make sense to me, but it did so because it articulated ideas and principles I already believed (sometimes implicitly) and couldn't help believing. It revealed to me what I already thought way down deep.

I want to focus on a single idea: that the universe is personal, and that person is its ultimate, unifying category and principle. 

In other words, if you want to understand what's going on down here, just turn the cosmos right-side up, with personhood at the top. Otherwise, nothing will ever have any objective and enduring meaning. 

Sure, you can still make sense of things, but not really, because it will just be something of your own invention that you've projected onto the world, AKA a reality (or unreality) tunnel. It will be just a manmade ideology instead of a properly Godmode personology. 

I haven't picked up the book in a long time, but I see that the argument is summarized on back:

Every philosophy is a message. For conveying that message there has to be a tangible means, such as a book. Therefore, for the sake of a minimum of consistency, the philosopher's message or system should account in full for the reality of the means.

In yesterday's post we alluded to the miracles of free will and intentional movement. This argument goes beyond that, and involves the everyday miracle of conceiving a thought in our heads; formulating it in language; shooting air vibrations out of our mouths; the listener receiving those vibrations and reconverting them to speech; and finally transforming the words back into the original idea: in a word, communication.

The question is -- and it's the first question the philosopher must answer in order to engage in philosophy -- in what kind of cosmos is this possible? For it implies all sorts of conditions that must be present in order to engage in this thing called philosophy. 

Put it this way: philosophy is either possible or it is impossible. If it's the former, then you've got a lot of philosophizing to do in order to explain how it is possible. 

A priori -- i.e., in most hypothetical universes -- one would think it would be impossible. In other words, as we know, there is an ever-growing list of cosmic contingencies that must be present even for life to exist, let alone consciousness and self-consciousness. Change the parameters of just one of these contingencies, and persons are rendered impossible. No communication for you!, says the endless-loop Nazi.

But I'm not making any kind of "intelligent design" argument. More just intelligence full stop, and how this intelligence is transmitted from intellect to intellect. "Any neglect of this," writes Professor Bachphlap, will result "in philosophical sleights of hand that endlessly breed one another." 

Why bring up this subject? Because yesterday I read an article by Norris Clarke called Interpersonal Dialogue: Key to Realism. In it he proves that Kant got it all wrong in light of what amounts to the performative contradiction of doing something which would seem impossible if his philosophy is correct, which is to say, the communication of truth from one person to another. 

As we know, Kant claimed we could never actually know the great outdoors -- i.e., the extracranial world -- rather, only our own projected forms: the external world of the nonself provides only "the matter of our cognition," while we supply the form(s); forms aren't in things, rather, in us. 

This is a complete reversal of the moderate realism of Thomism, which says that of course we can abstract essences from data provided by the senses. It's what the intellect does, and it's what you're doing right now, as you decode these little black symbols before your eyes. Your eyes aren't reading anything, rather, your intellect is (trolls excepted). 

But for Kant there is an unbridgeable divide between "reality" -- whatever that is -- and persons -- whatever they are. We are forever confined to a world of appearances, while the Thing Itself -- the noumena -- must always elude us.  

This has a superficial plausibility, and I myself once accepted it as the way things are and must be. In fact, it's possible I accepted it until Jaki blew it out of the water and made me realize all the assumptions buried in this belief. Come to think of it, Jaki made me realize I never really believed it, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered publishing what would have amounted to incommunicable ideas about nothing.  

Which reminds me of an aphorism: "Vulgar nominalism does not explain even the most trivial event" -- nominalism being any philosophy that denies the objective existence of essences.

We're starting to run short on time, so let me just extract some Kant-Krushing passages from Clarke's paper. Here is the overall argument in three easy steps:

(1) we live in a human community of other real persons like ourselves; (2) we communicate meaningfully with them through language; and (3) we know with sufficient assurance that both the above assertions command our reasonable assent.  

Because, you know, since our lives consist of nonstop communication with other people who exist in their own right -- unless you are more or less insane. Therefore, 

The very fact that Kant himself wrote and had published his Critique of Pure Reason is evidence enough that he too accepted these data, at least implicitly, as suppositions which are taken for granted and existentially lived. 

From descriptions I've read of Kant's personality style, he strikes me as more than a little autistic, which would explain a lot. But just because he was a little schizoid, it doesn't mean we too must forever be sealed in autism, much less the whole cosmos!

Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike (Wiki).

Amazing how one weirdo can change the course of intellectual history. It wasn't the first time (that would be the events of Genesis 3), and it certainly wasn't the last time, or Maybe You Didn't Attend College. At any rate,

the implications of the interpersonal-dialogue situation open an irreparable breach in the fundamental Kantian principle that our minds cannot receive objective form from real things outside us but can only impose their own forms on the raw data furnished by the real but not-further-knowable-in-itself outside world (Clarke). 

In short, if you understand Kantianism, then it's not true. 

To paraphrase Thomas, a small mistake at the beginning results in BIG ones at the end, and suffice it to say that the postmodern world is in part a consequence of mistakes flowing from rationalism, e.g., subjectivism, relativism, "critical theory," and progressive anti-intellectualism more generally. It's how we got to this barren and antihuman place.

The good news is that we can turn this error around, if not on a wholesale basis, at least via one assoul at a time, because 

In each moment, each person is capable of possessing the truths that matter (Dávila).