[MD] Reason, Tradition, Absolute Truth

[Michael Hamilton]

Matt,

> Reason and Tradition
> ---------------------------------
> The Reason/Tradition distinction arose in the Enlightenment to account for
> the seperation of science from the Church.  We can call "tradition" all
> those things we learn from other people, by authority and socialization and
> stuff.  "Reason" is the activity of our minds to determine truth.
> Enlightenment philosophers thought that Reason could correct our beliefs by
> rejecting everything that was held merely because your parents held it.
> Descartes is the first and paradigmatic example when he set out to doubt
> everything to see what was really indubitable in his mind, and thus be able
> to construct knowledge, "clear and distinct ideas" that were totally
> independent of what they teach you in school.
>
> This distinction was born out in many different ways (scientism,
> transcendentalism, etc.), but considering this arose in a discussion of
> Mill, I'll concentrate on Enlightenment liberalism and how the distinction
> breaks down there.  Enlightenment philosophers roughly argued that
> liberalism was the politics of reason, that if you follow the principles of
> reason, and ignore the taint of traditions, you'll come up with liberal,
> secular democracy.  The problem is that when a secularist argues with a
> traditionalist (say, of a religious background) about their core values,
> they beg the question over the traditionalist.  That's a violation of
> reason's rules.
>
> Another angle is to ask Rawls (the greatest contemporary Enlightenment-style
> secularist), after he says that a liberal society is the kind of society in
> which each citizen has the freedom to have their own "conception of the
> good," if his "justice as fairness" principle that governs liberal society
> is not just one of these conceptions.  If it is (which it is), then a
> contradiction appears.  Its what happens when public schools say that they
> don't teach values at school, and religionists respond that the "secular
> humanism" they teach is a set of values.  And us Pirsigians concur: what
> else could things be?
>
> The argument is that secularist liberals can't get their arguments off the
> ground any more than the traditionalists without an inculcated, socialized,
> educated set of core values.  Logic doesn't work without assumptions to play
> with, and you can't argue with assumptions.  The Enlightenment philosophical
> project created the Reason/Tradition distinction in the hopes that they
> would be able to find assumptions that were self-justified--and then build
> the best society from those.  They haven't found them yet, and without them
> they've produced what critics call the "contradiction of liberal discourse."
>   "They say they're guiding the kids by the light of Reason, but they're
> really brainwashing the children just as much as we admit we're doing."
>
> The solution is to dump the Enlightenment project of self-grounding and
> simply admit that our values are as inculcated as anybody else's.  Doing
> this would be to say that Reason, the activity of our minds, only functions
> _within_ Traditions, bodies of evolving belief that we learn from school and
> our parents, not over and against Tradition.
>
> That's one version of the story of why the social/intellectual distinction
> doesn't work if it is shaped like the Enlightenment's Tradition/Reason
> distinction.  I'm not saying there aren't distinctions to be made between
> social and intellectual or reason and tradition.  But I don't think this one
> panned out.

Right! Great stuff. This is the argument for ditching the absolute
distinction between tradition and a 'value-free' brand of reason. We
need to "admit that our values are as inculcated as anybody else" - at
least, some of the important ones are. We do have this value that
people shouldn't have all their values inculcated for them, in other
words, that people should be able to decide (some of) their values for
themselves. As you explain, this liberal value is, paradoxically, an
inculcated value. We indoctrinate people into not always being
indoctrinated. This leads me to suggest that there is something
different about the social patterns (i.e. the inculcated values) of
liberalism, when compared with most social patterns.

Let's look at another one of the patterns of value that Western
society inculcates through the generations - inanimate matter or
substance. Just as the societies of our ancestors were defined and
held together by a shared belief in nature-spirits, our society
inculcates a shared belief in inanimate substance. In one sense, it's
just another myth. However, it's a myth that bestows on us a radically
different view of life. A society that believes that the world around
them is filled with all kinds of intelligence and spirit will not feel
consciousness to be a purely subjective thing that is somehow crammed
inside the brain-boxes of humans and the higher primates. They don't
experience 'proprietary awareness' at all. Awareness is, to them, the
nature of the world.

Because of the unique myth of inanimate matter, most Westerners feel
conscious awareness to be an inner, subjective thing. Barfield:
-------------------
The meaning which "inspiration" possessed up to the seventeenth or
eighteenth centuries carries us right back to the old mythical outlook
in Greece and elsewhere, where poets and prophets were understood as
the direct mouthpieces of superior beings - beings such as the Muses,
who inspired or 'breathed into' them the divine afflatus. Through
Plato and Aristotle this conception came to England at the Renaissance
and lasted as an element of aesthetic theory well on into the
eighteenth century, if it can be said to have died out altogether even
now. But, like so many other words, this one began to suffer that
process which we have called "internalization". Hobbes poured
eymologically apposite scorn on the senseless convention 'by which a
man, enabled to speak wisely from the principles of Nature and his own
meditation, loves rather to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a
Bagpipe'. And we may suppose that about this time "inspiration"...
began to lose its old literal meaning and acquire its modern and
metaphorical one. Like "instinct", it was now felt, whatever its real
nature, to be something arising from within the human being rather
than something installed from without.
------------------- (A History In English Words, p207-8)

Barfield goes on to give another example of a word shifting from a
mythological to an inner meaning: "genius", "which in Roman mythology
meant a person's tutelary spirit, or special angel attending him
everywhere and influencing his thoughts and actions. Its early meaning
in English... signified an ability implanted in a man by God at his
birth. But from about the seventeenth century this meaning began to
ferment and expand in an extraordinary way...".

It's no coincidence that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also
saw the spread of the myth of inanimate substance. Another century
later, Mill argued that we should inculate the social pattern that
individuals should be given a degree of free reign to use their
proprietary genius and inspiration, unfettered by society.

So, there's 'something different' about some of these Western values and myths.

Regards,
Mike

Disclaimer: There was no political intent in that conclusion whatsoever.