The Endless Argument

Just an elderly post properly edited & embalmed and now more or less fit for sendoff to eternity: 

Breaking News from Genesis 3, i.e., Here Comes Everyday:

The conflict between passion and reason makes up a major portion of the drama of [man's] existence on earth; and when the struggle is over, passion very often emerges the victor. This is the sad epic of humanity from the beginning (Brennan).

You don't say. The ancient struggle between Cain & Abel, common sense & progressivism, philosophy and sophistry, Shem & Shaun?

Earwicker [AKA Here Comes Everybody] and his wife have two sons, called in their symbolic aspect Shem and Shaun.... They are the carriers of a great Brother Battle theme that throbs through the entire work [of Finnegans Wake]....

Opposing traits, which in their father were strangely and ambiguously combined, in these sons are isolated and separately embodied....

The energy generated by their conflict is but a reflex of the original energy generated by the father's fall (Campbell & Robinson). 

Today the great Brother Battle is being played out by the opposed forces of Make America Great Again and Make America Go Away.

It is not so much that men change their ideas, as that the ideas change their disguises. In the discourse of the centuries, the same voices are in dialogue.

Of course, thanks to ideology, a tightly wound reason can mess things up just as badly as can unhinged passion. For as Chesterton famously remarked, "A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason." One can go off the shallow end just as easily as the deep end.

The problem is that reason, in order to get off the ground, must begin with an appeal to self-evidence. However, most people hide the evidence and proceed with the reason anyway.

What is self-evident, and for whom?  

An example of this occurred the other day. As you know, we homeschool our son -- not just because of the China virus but because of the far more dangerous and deadly progressive virus that has devastated California. Because of this pandemic of leftist pandemonia, it isn't safe to have contact with any state-run institution.

Anyway, he was watching some kind of science video that happened to be narrated by planetarium director Neil Dyson. I reassured him that what Dyson says about science per se is probably sound, even though he errs when he strays from his lane and opines on anything unrelated to whatever it is he actually knows about. He is as banal or as wrongheaded as one would expect of someone whom the MSM has anointed pundit.

I don't actually know that much about him, only that he is a figure of fun amongst people I respect. So I consulted with Prof. Wiki, who confirms that Dyson regards philosophy as "useless" and is "unconvinced by any claims anyone has ever made about the existence or the power of a divine force operating in the universe." Consultation with his twitter feed confirms that he is an anti-intellectual tool of the first rank. 

Now, why would anyone care what a science popularizer believes about anything unrelated to his role of ratifying the Conventional Wisdom? No doubt because he is an effective apostle of the left's naive religiosity and simplistic ideology, plus he's a Scientist of Color, so there are bonus points for virtue signaling. 

In short, like a Bill Nye or Carl Sagan, his opinions pose no threat to the progressive clowncar. He can be trusted not to go near the science of IQ, or the absence of science of transgenderism, nor point out the wild inaccuracy of the global warming models. He's safe. He won't poke his head out of the Matrix.

Timeout for timelessness:

Scientific ideas allow themselves to be easily depraved by coarse minds.

Nothing is more alarming than science in the ignorant.  

Nothing proves more the limits of science than the scientist's opinions about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession (Dávila).

The following paragraph describes what the philosophistry of the flatlander excludes, nor it does this expanded view limit science one iota -- rather, it places it in the context of a far grander vision, one worthy of the human station:

[W]ith the advent of the thinking process, a completely new world is opened up to us: a universe of ideas and volitions, an immaterial expanse of creativeness, a region liberated from the palpabilities of sense.... 

Because it can overreach the restrictions of matter and rid itself of all time-space dimensions, it is truly infinite in its potentialities of understanding, a microcosmos which, by its ability to know and become the universe, is actually the universe (Brennan).

IS the universe -- not in the manner of the perception-is-reality crowd, but rather, because to exist is to be intelligible. And

The highest type of living activity consists in the intellectual grasping of reality. This penetrative power of mind presupposes that what is real is by that very fact intelligible, otherwise it has no title to reality (ibid.).

This paragraph adverts to one of our first principles, but it is hardly arbitrary or indefensible, rather self-evident. For either the mind can penetrate beneath the ever shifting surface of things to the intelligible reality beneath, or it can't. And if it can't, then objective scientific knowledge isn't possible, let alone anything that transcends or grounds the scientific enterprise.

Without knowledge of essences and universals, we would be like animals, confined to sensory data about our surface contact with matter. "Knowledge," such as it is, would be reduced to prescientific rumors, gossip, anecdotes, and single instances. Generalization and induction would not exist because they could not exist. Nor could deduction exist, because there would be no timeless principles or axioms from which to deduce consequences and entailments. 

This would be a subhuman world, precisely, with no possibility of escape or inscape.

It is quite obvious that the senses do not capture the inner meaning of things. They are in surface contact, so to speak, with their objects; and the best they can do is to register the accidental or phenomenal qualities of matter (ibid., emphasis mine).

Nor could they ever know these qualities as accidental or phenomenal, because these latter can only be understood in contrast to the necessary and noumenal. As freedom is knowledge of necessity, reality is understanding of appearances (because they can only be understood as appearances from the perspective of a higher or deeper view). The intellect

plunges beneath the surface and grasps the very thing which holds all phenomenal qualities together. The senses exist in a sort of perpetual twilight.... Intellect, by contrast, moves in the clear atmosphere of immaterial knowledge (ibid.).

A man who is only a man isn't even that, for

Man alone, of all earthly creatures, exhibits a complete emergence from the conditions of subjectivism that make the animal's knowledge concrete and particular and restricted to the tangible realities of sense (ibid.).

Bottom line: man is the animal that may know reality. If he Kan't, then what are we debating? Whose delusion is more powerful? We'll leave off with some aphorisms to chew on:

Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.

Without philosophy, the sciences do not know what they know.

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing but a stupid way to kill time.

We'll pick up this theme of the Brother Battle and the Invulnerable Philosophical Propositions in the next installment. 

Gemini images for this text: