Q: In our last conversation, you said that there is no such thing as an uninterpreted fact. Are you saying that there is no objective ‘something’ that we have to measure the accuracy of our perceptions and knowledge against?
A: No. But we have to frame the way we understand the relationship between the knower and the known differently in a Post-Positivist world. Within the Positivist frame, separation of subject and object was assumed and even celebrated. The goal was to get one’s ‘subjectivity’ out of the picture so that one could see the ‘object’ with “objectivity”. This is impossible.
Q: What do you mean by impossible? It’s kinda possible, right? Shouldn’t we strive to remove our biases and projections from distorting our perception and understanding of what’s there? Maybe it’s not 100% possible, but isn't it worth striving for?
A: Yes, but in a way that is unencumbered by Positivist baggage and epistemological naiveté. A Post Phenomenological epistemology assumes that we are deeply connected and enmeshed with the world around us and so knowing becomes more relational. Once you accept that, then it becomes clear that the better the quality of the relationship, the better the quality of one’s knowing. The goal isn’t about being objective so much as it is about learning what it means to be in a healthy relationship.
Q: That really makes no sense to me. Isn’t it just obvious that we need objectivity to see the truth as clearly as we can see it?
A: I would frame it a little differently. The key to seeing the truth more clearly has to do with the quality of our intentionally, and that’s something that is connected to one’s growth in moral maturity, which connects us back to the virtues conversation.
Q: Are you saying a first-class scientist has to be first-class as a good human being?
A: Ideally, yes. It’s not true now—it’s not even desirable now—and that’s part of the reason we’re in such a mess. The ‘intentionality’ of scientists is deeply distorted by a whole range of motivations that have little to do with seeing what’s there. The questions they are asking, even just starting with the problems they choose to work on, are deeply agenda-laden.
Q: What do you mean by ‘intentionality’.
A: Intentionality is the word Phenomenologist use to describe how our consciousness in any given moment is “about” something, usually one thing at a time. We humans find ourselves thrown into a world. We can’t deal with everything that is there all at once, so we have to filter out most of what’s there in order to focus on what’s important to us in a given moment. To do this we need to negate or filter out everything else. So it’s obviously important to understand what motivates what we pay attention to and how that in turn leads to filtering other stuff out. What if we’re filtering out important stuff because we’re paying attention to the wrong things?
Q: Do we have any control over what we pay attention to?
A: Yes and no. To the degree that we control the projects we work on, we largely control where our attention goes. Let’s say we’re walking along in the rainforest, looking for a particular tree frog, and the roar of a big cat snaps us to attention regarding an unanticipated threat. Everything else is irrelevant, including our tree frog quest.
So, unless some distraction or threat intrudes, most productively intentional people make choices about projects they want to work on, and that usually brings with it a chain of purposeful thoughts about what’s required to bring it to completion. We make choices about the goals we set for ourselves, and when we do, getting to the goal is the main objective, and that filters out what’s irrelevant.
Let’s say you’re in the shop preoccupied with repairing a piece of furniture. We’re surrounded by an array of tools most of which are invisible to us until we need one. These tools all exist in themselves, but the only ones that matter are those that I need to accomplish my goal. Things flow along until—Where did that glue bottle go? Ah. There it is on the other side of the room. I had ‘disappeared’ it as soon as I didn’t need it where I used it yesterday on another project, and forgot it ‘existed’ and where I had put it. It exists, but it doesn’t exist ‘for me’ until I have a need for it.
Intentionality is the ‘for-me-ness’ of the world around us, and so it follows that the quality of what we want has a deep correlation with the quality of what we see. And so where I want to go with this is that our knowledge of the world is directly related to the level or our virtue—our ability, for instance, to be poised in our fear, to be constant in our commitments, and to be well-cultivated in the quality of our desires.
Q: Ok. Courage in the face of fear I understand. There have been lots of times I’ve done stupid things out of fear. I just reacted rather than thought through what my best response should have been. But I don’t understand what you mean by quality of our desires. Doesn’t the heart want what the heart wants? What control do we have over that?
A: There’s a huge difference between what that phrase means to Woody Allen and what it meant to Emily Dickinson. I refer you to our discussion of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. What the heart wants in the the Pre Conventional stage of moral development is completely different from what it wants in the Post-Conventional. It’s the difference between what a middle-schooler like Donald Trump wants and what the morally mature hearts of people like Dorothy Day or Mother Cabrini wanted.
Q: Ok. But most people aren’t saints.
A: Kierkegaard wrote a book the title of which, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, points to what I’m trying to get at. Everything depends on the quality of our intentionality, what we choose to pay attention to or to ignore. None of us is completely pure hearted—not even prodigies of goodness like Day and Cabrini—but wouldn’t it be nice to live in a society where that was broadly understood as something to aspire to? The purer the heart, the less it projects. And to be truly pure hearted is to be warm hearted, to be a mensch. It’s the opposite of the hard-hearted fanaticism associated with the head-trippy, ideological purity of the Left or Right. Ideological virtue is almost always a form of viciousness. Robespierre and Torquemada were exemplars of ideological virtue.
Q: Ok. But what has this to do with science?
A: In my imagined future utopia, the quality of the science one does will correlate with the purity of the scientist’s heart, because the clearer the heart, the less the projection of its hidden agendas, and so the clearer the perception of what’s actually there, not just what useful for his agenda. Why? Because the deeper and richer the relationship between the knower and the known, the lover and the beloved, the more the beloved is likely to open up an to ‘disclose’ its secrets. That’s the meaning of truth as ‘aletheia’.
This is the opposite of the Positivist understanding about knowing, and good riddance to it.
If we lived in a healthy culture, we would see the education of our children as the education or cultivation of their desires. That’s completely different program from the current ethos of ‘if it feels good do it so long as you don’t hurt anybody’. That ethos gets people like Trump elected president, people who then ask: “Why shouldn’t I hurt people if that’s what my heart truly wants? I’ve gotta be me, and besides, who’s gonna stop me?”
Q: I don’t know. Sounds pretty unrealistically idealistic to me. How do we get from where we are now to something that even remotely approximates what you’re talking about? I don’t know many people who qualify as mensches, including you. How do you make something out of nothing.
A: I don't have a short-term plan, but I'll say this. The mental frame, what I’ve been calling the metaphysical imaginary, that structures the TCM creates a suffocating environment inhospitable to the growth and nurture of menschiness. We’re all retarded by the TCM. We all suffer from it. We’re all diminished by it. Some manage life within it better than others. But nobody can live the best kind of human life within it. Healthy societies produce healthy people; unhealthy societies produce unhealthy people. We’re all far more unhealthy than we should be.
In the long term, however, I think the three-stage process I described in our last conversation—or something like it—is a possible way to something healthier.
Q: Remind me. What were those stages again?
A: The first stage was largely completed among the intelligentsia by the end of the 20th century. This was the Nietzschean/Heideggerian deconstruction of the Positivist framework. That deconstruction is mostly accepted within philosophy and much of the humanities' intelligentsia, but Positivism lingers like an old habit because if feels 'truthy', and nobody has presented a truly "positive" alternative to it. Techno-Capitalism crudely combines what’s worst about Positivist materialism with what’s worst about Postmodern deconstructionist nihilism. The movie Mountainheadcaptures that very nicely.
So we’re at the beginning of the second stage, to provide a truly positive alternative. And my argument is that such an alternative requires a retrieval of the classical tradition with its Neoplatonic participative metaphysics and epistemology, which, from what I wrote above about Phenomenological ‘relational knowing’ becomes imaginable in a way it wasn’t within the Positivist framework. The classical tradition provides the metaphysical and ethical dimensions that the Heideggerian wing of Phenomenology so obviously lacked.
Q: How do you see that happening?
A: It’s impossible to predict, but It seems at least plausible to me that in a way similar to how the Positivist framework was negated and gradually de-constructed in the 20th century, a new Non-Positivist positive framework could be constructed in the 21st. As thinkers like William James, Heidegger, the existentialists, and the post-structuralists–constituted a vanguard that deconstructed Positivism, so will a constructionist vanguard emerge in coming decades to build something new.
Q: Be honest: What do you think are the chances that something like this might happen?
A: I can’t think like that. If you want to play the odds, the smart money is on the reactionaries and the techno-capitalists getting the future they want. And that’s all the more likely so long as no other desirable alternative is on the table. Nevertheless, it makes sense to me that something along the lines of what I’m describing is plausible because it’s so much more desirable. I sincerely believe that the classical tradition, once it is translated into something that makes sense for the 21st century, provides a framework that opens things up, and will make it possible for religion and art and science to develop and cross-fertilize one another in a way that they just can’t now within the TCM. We’re so used to things not working that we just assume that nothing else is possible.
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