Free - Connected
Context independent - Context dependent
Present-at-hand - Ready-to-hand
Conscious - Unconscious
Conscious - Unconscious
Abstract - Concrete
State - Process
Rational - Non-rational
Fact - Opinion
Is - Ought
The 'free' or 'neutral' space of modernity is nothing other than the vacuum left by tradition, in which competing interests engage in an on-going civil war.
Truth in Native science is of a very different order. Truths are not value-free but depend upon tradition and social and spiritual sanctions.
Dreams and visions are systems of validation. Truth is contained within origin and migration stories, songs and ceremonies. And the source of truth is found in nature and in the direct experience of individuals through dreams and visions; conversations with rocks, trees, and animals; and patient observation of the world around them.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.264
Present-at-hand
With the present-at-hand one has (in contrast to "ready-to-hand") an attitude like that of a scientist or theorist, of merely looking at or observing something.
The 'free' or 'neutral' space of modernity is nothing other than the vacuum left by tradition, in which competing interests engage in an on-going civil war.
Truth in Native science is of a very different order. Truths are not value-free but depend upon tradition and social and spiritual sanctions.
Dreams and visions are systems of validation. Truth is contained within origin and migration stories, songs and ceremonies. And the source of truth is found in nature and in the direct experience of individuals through dreams and visions; conversations with rocks, trees, and animals; and patient observation of the world around them.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.264
Present-at-hand
With the present-at-hand one has (in contrast to "ready-to-hand") an attitude like that of a scientist or theorist, of merely looking at or observing something.
In seeing an entity as present-at-hand, the beholder is concerned only with the bare facts of a thing or a concept, as they are present and in order to theorize about it. This way of seeing is disinterested in the concern it may hold for Dasein, its history or usefulness. This attitude is often described as existing in neutral space without any particular mood or subjectivity. However, for Heidegger, it is not completely disinterested or neutral. It has a mood, and is part of the metaphysics of presence that tends to level all things down. Through his writings, Heidegger sets out to accomplish the Destruktion (see above) of this metaphysics of presence.
Present-at-hand is not the way things in the world are usually encountered, and it is only revealed as a deficient or secondary mode, e.g., when a hammer breaks it loses its usefulness and appears as merely there, present-at-hand. When a thing is revealed as present-at-hand, it stands apart from any useful set of equipment but soon loses this mode of being present-at-hand and becomes something, for example, that must be repaired or replaced.
Heidegger, who in Being and Time claimed that the theoretical attitude of pure presence is parasitical upon a more originary involvement with the world in concepts such as the ready-to-hand and being-with.
'Heideggerian terminology' and 'Metaphysics of presence', Wikipedia
The realm of number, the crystalline mathematic of Apollonian purity, was invented early on by western man as a refuge from the soggy emotionalism and bristling disorder of woman and nature.
Women who excel in mathematics do so in a system devised by men for the mastery of nature. Number is the most imposing and least creaturely of pacifiers, man’s yearning hope for objectivity. It is to number that he —and now she—withdraws to escape from the chthonian mire of love, hate, and family romance.
Emotion is chaos. Every benign emotion has a flip side of negativity. Thus the flight from emotion to number is another crucial strategy of the Apollonian west in its long struggle with Dionysus.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.18
It is in this capacity of the self to evade any necessary identification with any particular contingent state of affairs that some modern philosophers, both analytical and existentialist, have seen the essence of moral agency.
To be a moral agent is, on this view, precisely to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached from all social particularity.
Anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in social roles or practices that moral agency has to be located.
This democratized self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.36-7
For liberal individualism a community is simply an arena in which individuals each pursue their own self-chosen conception of the good life, and political institutions exist to provide that degree of order which makes such self-determined activity possible.
Government and law are, or ought to be, neutral between rival conceptions of the good life for man, and hence, although it is the task of government to promote law-abidingness, it is on the liberal view no part of the legitimate function of government to inculcate anyone moral outlook.
By contrast, on the particular ancient and medieval view which I have sketched political community not only requires the exercise of the virtues for its own sustenance, but it is one of the tasks of parental authority to make children grow up so as to be virtuous adults.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.227
In the conceptual melange of moral thought and practice today fragments from the tradition - virtue concepts for the most part - are still found alongside characteristically modern and individualist concepts such as those of rights or utility.
[...] the need to enter into public debate enforces participation in the cultural melange in the search for a common stock of concepts and norms which all may employ and to which all may appeal.
Moral philosophy, as it is dominantly understood, reflects the debates and disagreements of the culture so faithfully that its controversies turn out to be unsettlable in just the way that the political and moral debates themselves are.
It follows that our society cannot hope to achieve moral consensus. Marx was fundamentally right in seeing conflict and not consensus at the heart of modern social structure.
It is not just that we live too much by a variety and multiplicity of fragmented concepts; it is that these are used at one and the same time to express rival and incompatible social ideals and policies and to furnish us with a pluralist political rhetoric whose function is to conceal the depth of our conflicts.
What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means [...]
The truth on this matter was set out by Adam Ferguson: 'We are not to expect that the laws of any country are to be framed as so many lessons of morality ... Laws, whether civil or political, are expedients of policy to adjust the pretensions of parties, and to secure the peace of society [...] '
The nature of any society therefore is not to be deciphered from its laws alone, but from those understood as an index of its conflicts. What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.
In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear.
[...] the tradition of the virtues is at variance with central features of the modern economic order and more especially its individualism, its acquisitiveness and its elevation of the values of the market to a central social place. It now becomes clear that it also involves a rejection of the modern political order.
Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.292-5
John Rawls is an extension of Parsons’ and Bellah’s liberation theology, if somewhat secularized.
His famous “original position”—where one is asked what world he would want if he had no idea where or to whom or with what qualities he would be born—is simply the logical conclusion of Locke’s blank slate, where man is utterly shorn of all background and context, freed from the “accident” of birth, as though it’s an accident that you are your father’s son.
This “accident” is theologically significant. In separating the self from the particularities of birth, Rawls simply continues the separation of body from soul begun millennia ago, but in secularized form.
[Imperium Press]
'Communism a Fortiori: A Response to BAP’s GNC', Imperium Press, Substack
It’s worth finding out what we can about the likely effectiveness of a given policy proposal before we drift off into battles guided only by our personal opinion and biases, expressing our opinions about other opinions.
Opinion-based battles rather than fact-based ones: That’s the direction in which I fear this country is headed.
[James A. Thomson]
Colorado ACLU Speech, 1 October 2005
Related posts:
Perspectivism
Present-at-hand is not the way things in the world are usually encountered, and it is only revealed as a deficient or secondary mode, e.g., when a hammer breaks it loses its usefulness and appears as merely there, present-at-hand. When a thing is revealed as present-at-hand, it stands apart from any useful set of equipment but soon loses this mode of being present-at-hand and becomes something, for example, that must be repaired or replaced.
Heidegger, who in Being and Time claimed that the theoretical attitude of pure presence is parasitical upon a more originary involvement with the world in concepts such as the ready-to-hand and being-with.
'Heideggerian terminology' and 'Metaphysics of presence', Wikipedia
The realm of number, the crystalline mathematic of Apollonian purity, was invented early on by western man as a refuge from the soggy emotionalism and bristling disorder of woman and nature.
Women who excel in mathematics do so in a system devised by men for the mastery of nature. Number is the most imposing and least creaturely of pacifiers, man’s yearning hope for objectivity. It is to number that he —and now she—withdraws to escape from the chthonian mire of love, hate, and family romance.
Emotion is chaos. Every benign emotion has a flip side of negativity. Thus the flight from emotion to number is another crucial strategy of the Apollonian west in its long struggle with Dionysus.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.18
It is in this capacity of the self to evade any necessary identification with any particular contingent state of affairs that some modern philosophers, both analytical and existentialist, have seen the essence of moral agency.
To be a moral agent is, on this view, precisely to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached from all social particularity.
Anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in social roles or practices that moral agency has to be located.
This democratized self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.36-7
For liberal individualism a community is simply an arena in which individuals each pursue their own self-chosen conception of the good life, and political institutions exist to provide that degree of order which makes such self-determined activity possible.
Government and law are, or ought to be, neutral between rival conceptions of the good life for man, and hence, although it is the task of government to promote law-abidingness, it is on the liberal view no part of the legitimate function of government to inculcate anyone moral outlook.
By contrast, on the particular ancient and medieval view which I have sketched political community not only requires the exercise of the virtues for its own sustenance, but it is one of the tasks of parental authority to make children grow up so as to be virtuous adults.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.227
In the conceptual melange of moral thought and practice today fragments from the tradition - virtue concepts for the most part - are still found alongside characteristically modern and individualist concepts such as those of rights or utility.
[...] the need to enter into public debate enforces participation in the cultural melange in the search for a common stock of concepts and norms which all may employ and to which all may appeal.
Moral philosophy, as it is dominantly understood, reflects the debates and disagreements of the culture so faithfully that its controversies turn out to be unsettlable in just the way that the political and moral debates themselves are.
It follows that our society cannot hope to achieve moral consensus. Marx was fundamentally right in seeing conflict and not consensus at the heart of modern social structure.
It is not just that we live too much by a variety and multiplicity of fragmented concepts; it is that these are used at one and the same time to express rival and incompatible social ideals and policies and to furnish us with a pluralist political rhetoric whose function is to conceal the depth of our conflicts.
What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means [...]
The truth on this matter was set out by Adam Ferguson: 'We are not to expect that the laws of any country are to be framed as so many lessons of morality ... Laws, whether civil or political, are expedients of policy to adjust the pretensions of parties, and to secure the peace of society [...] '
The nature of any society therefore is not to be deciphered from its laws alone, but from those understood as an index of its conflicts. What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.
In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear.
[...] the tradition of the virtues is at variance with central features of the modern economic order and more especially its individualism, its acquisitiveness and its elevation of the values of the market to a central social place. It now becomes clear that it also involves a rejection of the modern political order.
Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.292-5
John Rawls is an extension of Parsons’ and Bellah’s liberation theology, if somewhat secularized.
His famous “original position”—where one is asked what world he would want if he had no idea where or to whom or with what qualities he would be born—is simply the logical conclusion of Locke’s blank slate, where man is utterly shorn of all background and context, freed from the “accident” of birth, as though it’s an accident that you are your father’s son.
This “accident” is theologically significant. In separating the self from the particularities of birth, Rawls simply continues the separation of body from soul begun millennia ago, but in secularized form.
[Imperium Press]
'Communism a Fortiori: A Response to BAP’s GNC', Imperium Press, Substack
It’s worth finding out what we can about the likely effectiveness of a given policy proposal before we drift off into battles guided only by our personal opinion and biases, expressing our opinions about other opinions.
Opinion-based battles rather than fact-based ones: That’s the direction in which I fear this country is headed.
[James A. Thomson]
Colorado ACLU Speech, 1 October 2005
Related posts:
Perspectivism
