The Second Maxim

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end."

— Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals

On Love

The hallmark of love is the desire of the lover to sacrifice something they would otherwise want, for the benefit of the beloved, and to consider themselves better off on account of it.

On Being Human

It is the duty of every person to use their particular confluence of nature and nurture, for the benefit of themselves and of those around them, and to bring mercy and justice into the world, which only human beings can do.

On the Universal Rôle of Mythology

When we read Plato's stories of the life of Socrates, it is very easy for us to spot the mythology involved. Plato's Socrates is a pious devotee of Athena, the goddess of war and of wisdom. It is central to his understanding of what is ethical, and ultimately he chooses death as more acceptable than leaving Athens, Athena's city.



Greek Athena, a Copy Signed by ANTIOCHOS as she Appeared on the Acropolis

For us, it is self-evident that Socrates is being superstitious, that Athena is purely mythological—that is to say not real. We are inclined to say, "Why should Socrates die for such nonsense?" Yet, I can't help but wonder that if the tables were turned and Socrates were reading an account of one of our lives what he would spot, without hesitation, as mythological, and wonder at.

Look in a dictionary for a definition of mythology, and you will find something like:

mythology |məˈθäləjē|
noun ( pl. -gies)

1. a collection of myths, esp. one belonging to a particular religious or cultural tradition.
• a set of stories or beliefs about a particular person, institution, or situation, esp. when exaggerated or fictitious.

2. the study of myths.

I want to extend this definition to uncover the essential and universal rôle of mythology in every person's world view. I assert that each and every one of us has a mythology which is the very foundation of our understanding. It serves the purpose of allowing us to sift the infinite number of facts that bombard us each day. Without a mythology, ordinary thinking would be an infinite regress of questioning, practical decision-making would be impossible.

My definition of mythology is "a set of unquestioned and even unquestionable beliefs which form the foundation of practical reasoning about the world and are both influenced by and give rise to a set of stories which both evolve and bolster those self-evident truths."

That is, my mythology, and yours, and every single persons consists of those things which we do not question, and even things which we cannot question as they lie outside of our awareness while still influencing us. When someone says, "the facts speak for themselves", they are relying on a mythology to provide the framework. The facts never speak for themselves, they can't. Facts are not arguments, they must have a logical framework to provide the meaning that is so self-evident to the speaker.

People almost never realize that self-evident things are not proven. In their minds, self-evident things are given the same weight as the proofs which arise from the assumptions they make. That is to say, a valid logical inference is not necessarily "true". The logical inference: "all men have two brains, Plato was a man, therefore Plato had two brains" is valid but false. If we agreed that all men have two brains, and that Plato was a man, it would not only be valid but true. Logical inferences inherit they truthfulness from the assertions of fact of which they are composed.

In the case of "the facts speak for themselves", the person asserting this invites us to plug a fact into a preëxisting framework that provide the "all men have two brains" part. "Plato was a man, the fact speaks for itself, he had two brains." In this case, the speaker may or may not be aware that there is a question of the two-brainedness of men. She may well have no idea why the "facts speak for themselves". This is the nature of mythology. The other guy has the mythology, we have the Truth.

Mythologies, though, are not necessarily falsehoods. Their merit does not lie in the strict factuality of their construction but in the unspeakable (that is, beyond simple words) foundation which they provide for moral, ethical and epistemic reasoning. Mythologies offer a way to weave essential messages about the world into all of our thinking. They are complex and very large in extent. They are evolving (in most cases, or they die). They do not inherently suggest a particular ideological result, nor are differing mythologies necessarily mutually exclusive. However, when two people have different mythologies, communication is very difficult.

Mythology, being pervasive and essentially foundational, creates a vocabulary for its adherents. Words like: "ethical", "moral", "right", "freedom", "oppression" and countless others are tied intimately to the mythologies that give rise to them. The dictionary is no help in this case, since there is no authority except the mythology for the "meaning" of these words.

Mythology, then, is not a bad or false thing. The stories that make up a mythology are generally exempla, fables, allegories. They are intended to instruct and bolster a complex interleaving of ideas. They needn't be factual to be useful.

When people mistake exempla for factual reporting, and mistake mythologies for proven 'truths" we get various types of orthodoxies, and we get wars and prejudice and pointless hatred. I am willing to let my friend have a mythology that varies from my own. I want to learn from him about the hidden assumptions of my own mythology. He has an ability to see what I take as self-evident as possibly wrong and that is a precious thing.

What Does It All MEAN?

(Note: As a textual convention I will write terms I mean in a technical, narrow, non-portable sense in ALL CAPS. It is my intention to provide the entire meaning that I intend those words to have in my text. They don't necessarily have any relationship to the same words used in other contexts, though they might.)

MEANING is the product of CONTENT (facts) and CONTEXT (assumptions). MEANING is what we "get" from words and experiences that we can in turn communicate as words and experiences. MEANING is inherently contextual. It requires some set of assumptions, some axiomatic foundation upon which to rest, 0r, alternatively, to act as a filter for the infinite facts that one can collect about anything.

MEANING, then, is a matter of opinion. It is a matter of agreement on the facts of the case, and of the assumptions used to interpret them. When we attempt to determine what something MEANS, we set the facts in the context that we find self-evidently TRUE. What is TRUTH? TRUTH is simply agreement with some standard, and in the case of CONTEXT, TRUTH is self-evident. Not rational, not logical, not defensible except as being self-evident.

So, if MEANING requires, CONTEXT, and context requires TRUTH (of the self-evident variety) we find that MEANING is really a matter of opinion, with which one may legitimately agree or disagree, and which is also multifaceted. That is, we can disagree on meaning and both be "right".

MEANING then is not "objective" in any sense that people ordinarily MEAN when they use "objective" in discussing epistemology. It is subjective, it requires arbitrary choices of axiomatic principles. If this is the case, there can be no objective MEANING. To put it a different way, if there is something objective, it is MEANINGLESS.

MEANINGLESS but not worthless. MEANING it turns out, it is a chimera of language. We have a very strong belief that things must have MEANING to be important or accessible. It seems, though, that the experience of objectivity, if there is one, must lie outside language and its insoluble bond with MEANING.

Shuzan's Short Staff

Shuzan held out his short staff and said: "If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality.

If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?"

Mumon's comment:

If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality.

If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact.

It cannot be expressed with words

and it cannot be expressed without words.

Now say quickly what it is.

Holding out the short staff,

He gave an order of life or death.

Positive and negative interwoven,

Even Buddhas and patriarchs

cannot escape this attack.

Absolute Confusion

A fundamental error among people looking for Truth (with a big T) is to imagine that is is a nothing but a bigger version of "truth" (the little T kind). Small truths are simply things about which we agree. We say "that is true" to mean just that. "I agree with you" or, " you should agree with me" are equivalent and work everywhere "it is true" is used. Because the same word is used we take big Truth to be a bigger version of small truth.

The reality is that small truths don't actually resemble what people imagine big Truth to be. Small truths are descriptions of things that use words we understand from their context. The entire web of meaning that leads to small truths is based on a context of assumptions. People believe that Truth is "absolute" by which they mean there is no contextual component, but we can see that small truths are entirely dependent on the context in which the occur. So, what we call "truth" cannot be the same thing as the idea of big Truth.

If there is something like big Truth it must be something other then contextless small truth. Small truths are products of this big Truth, not a different sort of the same thing. There is no occult version of Truth in them. They are just what they are, no more. The confusion arises because they share a name.

The Saw of Science

Tools are inert. Every tool must be wielded by a person. People use tools to achieve goals. The result of wielding a tool is a product of the skill and intent of the wielder, and the suitability of the tool to the task. Consider a tree saw: it can be used to destroy a tree, to kill it, or it can be used to prune a tree, cutting away deadwood and diseased limbs to strengthen it. The way in which it is to be used is up to the person wielding it. Is either way "true", or "good", in some objective sense?


What happens next depends on you.

Consider science: it is also a tool which can be used to destroy or improve, not physical objects but ideas. A person can choose to destroy an idea by cutting it off, or improve it by pruning away the bad branches. You might reply: "Science depends on truth and so it can only cut away the bad. If it cuts down the idea, the idea was bad." This isn't honest. All ideas are subject to denial. All ideas depend on assumptions which can be shown to be suspect or "wrong" given the right context. The result of wielding the saw of science is very strongly dependent on the intent of the wielder. This intent is often an a priori attempt to disprove challenging ideas. This is a terrible way to use such a powerful tool.

It seems to me that a person interested in truth should turn science on their own ideas as a skeptic. One way to do this is by attempting to find the truth in those things that are challenging. If we do this we will find and fill the gaps in our own ideas. This goes beyond science to things about which science has nothing to say as well. In our lives, as we consider the ideas of other people we know to be sincere and intelligent, it damages us if we do not consider their ideas as seriously as we consider our own. The world is vague and as much as we want to have clear lines we cannot.

Clarity

Anything completely clear is wrong, or not very interesting.

 

The Two Sides of a Coin

Lately, I have been working on a heuristic for systematic thinking that I believe is very powerful. I'd like to share it with you. Maybe you can help me refine it. For a long time I have found myself alternately embracing opposing viewpoints. At first this bothered me. It seemed to be non-committal, indecisive and not useful for decision-making. However, I have come to see it as quite useful, indeed.


There's no such thing as a one-sided coin. It's a package deal.

Today I was listening to the Philosophy Bites podcast featuring Anthony Grayling, a prominent advocate of atheism. When asked about agnosticism he rejected it as a "wishy washy, fence sitting kind of view". He went on to attempt to draw a parallel between the belief in "faeries" with a belief in any supernatural phenomenon, and therefore to reject agnosticism on the basis that if faeries aren't real then it is silly to hold out for any view that isn't strictly naturalist. I mention this because it is what provoked into writing about this topic today.

When I have found some set of rules that nicely explains a given aspect of reality I also find myself invariably dissatisfied with them. There always seem to be things that I believe are correct, but that those rules cannot reach. This, I think, is related to the idea of incompleteness in mathematical logic. Kurt Gödel provided a rigorous proof that any system of formal logic, which sufficiently complex to be interesting, is incomplete. That is, there are true and false "statements" within its rules that the rules themselves cannot derive. (A note to mathematical logicians: I am not claiming this is a rigorous definition or application of Gödel, consider it loosely-coupled)

Similarly, the rules-based systems you and I use to make decisions about morality, politics, aesthetics and the like are also incomplete. There are things that we can feel are correct but cannot show as correct. This is what lead to my alternate embracing of first one idea, then the opposing one. Was that wrong?

Many of the greatest thinkers in history, particularly those with a "spiritual" bent are described as confusing the people around them by first embracing one idea, then its apparent opposite. This seems inconsistent and mysterious. Maybe it isn't. Let's take a very simplified example from politics. Our hypothetical left- and right-wingers are faced with a problem. The poor need to be fed. Excluding actual extremists, who might either suggest that everyone should be fed by the government (putative left) or that people who cannot feed themselves should be allowed to die (putative right) we are left with two sides that agree some people should be helped by the government and the some people should be completely on their own.

The difference between them is that on the left, expansion of the government program is the tendency or even goal, which on the right it is contraction of the program. Is one of these positions "correct" to the exclusion of the other? I don't think so. I also don't think that an artificial "middle" is correct, either. That is, the ideological "average" of the left and right is not an effective position. What then, can we make of this?

This is where the coin comes in. If we imagine the problem to be solved, which both sides agree upon, as the coin, we can see that the two sides of the coin can be analogous to the two positions. The coin itself is a good coin, We all like it. If we are on one face, though, we cannot see the other at all. It appears that the other face is mutually exclusive with our face. If we look at the coin, though, we see that both faces are required. So, it is my contention that when we find ourselves with what we consider a "good set of rules" we should immediately seek out the opposing view. That view is actually complementary to our own. It literally completes it. When we come to a conclusion with our own rules we then need to analyze with "their" rules and refine our conclusion.

Sometimes, it seems wise to actually adopt a opposition opinion where our own system seems deficient. Sometimes it is just a matter of polishing our own ideas. Eventually, we might stop thinking of our "side" as the "correct" one and instead embrace the entire coin. Then it becomes a matter of where to draw the line in tension between the two. In that idea I believe is the essence of how the world operates.

I will write more on that, later.