[MD] Concepts & Reality

[david buchanan]

Ron said to dmb:


...Right, they all oppose "vicious intellectualism". But my comments rest on HOW they oppose it. Fred (to me) tends to express that relativistic anti intellectual claim that to think, to understand, to conceptualize is to reify. The assertion of those that insist that intellect = SOM. Fred, in that quote is lumping together nouns and abstract nouns and rendering them as equivalent. Which begins to diverge from the meaning and aim of Bob and Will. 



dmb says:
You think that Nietzsche tends to express that relativistic anti-intellectual claim that to conceptualize is to reify? I don't think so. As I read the quote, Fred is making a distinction between conceptualization and reification. The latter is not just conceptualization, of course, but a certain kind of conceptual error. Here is the moment wherein Fred makes this distinction, I think:  He says, "the concept 'leaf' is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects". (This part distinguishes the clear and clean concept of a "leaf" from the all the concrete and particular leaves of actual experience - distinguishes between concepts and reality or between concepts and 'nature,' as Fred is puts it). So far, so good, but the very next sentence from Nietzsche says, "This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the 'leaf': the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model." Right there; that's the difference between concepts and reified concepts. The concept of a leaf, he says, "awakens the idea that ..there exists in nature the 'leaf': the original model" and that's the reified concept. When "leaf" is taken to be more real than all actual leaves, when it becomes the "original model" which all actual leaves are supposed to instantiate or copy, we are no longer talking about words, concepts or definitions but Essences, Forms, primary ontological realities, things-in-themselves beyond the phenomenal realm. These "original models" aren't just taken as abstractions, words, concepts or generalizations but as a primary realities, more primary than the actual experience from which they were abstracted in the first. That's what Plato did to concepts like Truth, Justice, Beauty and the Good. These were taken as fixed and eternal realities and were held to be more real than phenomenal reality, than empirical reality, as in the allegory of cave.

To believe, as Nietzsche puts it, "that the leaf is the cause of the leaves" is Platonism. To believe that "honesty" is an essence existing behind each instance of actual honesty is just another case of this Platonic reification. "We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called 'honesty,'" Nietzsche says, "but we do know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which we now designate as "honest" actions." It is we who formulate the name "honesty," Nietzsche says, "whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts" and "even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things". 


While Nietzsche is certainly darker and more bombastic in his style, I think we can see that James is saying very much the same thing.

"...Both theoretically and practically this power of framing abstract concepts is one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives. We come back into the concrete form our journey into these abstractions, with an increase both of vision and of power. It is no wonder that earlier thinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from the temporal flux, should have ended by treating them as a superior type of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in nature to the turbid, restless lower world. The latter then appears as but their corruption and falsification.    Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato taught that what a thing really is, is told us by its defintion. Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are known whenever we know their defintions. So first we identify the thing with a concept and then we identify the concept with a definition, and only then, inasmuch as the thing IS whatever the definition expresses, are we sure of apprehending the real essence of it or the full truth about it. S far no harm is done. The misuse of concepts begins with the habit of employing them privatively [to negate or exclude] as well as positively, using them not merely to assign properties to things, but to deny the very properties with which the things sensible present themselves. ...It is but the old story, of a useful practice first becoming a method, then a habit, and finally a tyranny that defeats the end it was used for. Concepts, first employed to make things intelligible, are clung to even when they make them unintelligible. Thus it comes that when once you have conceived things as 'independent,' you must proceed to deny the possibility of any connection whatever among them, because the notion of connection is not contained in the definition." (As if the definition of "horseman" could be invoked to prove that the man never goes on foot.) 


I have some disagreements with some of your "asides" about Socrates and the Sophists but I'll leave them alone for now, just for the sake of focus and clarity. Instead, I'll leave you with some additional thoughts from Pirsig about this thing called vicious intellectualism...

“His mind races on and on, through the permutations of the dialectic, on and on, hitting things, finding new branches and sub-branches, exploding with anger at each new discovery of the viciousness and meanness and lowness of this ‘art’ called dialectic. ... Phædrus’ mind races on and on and then on further, seeing now at last a kind of evil thing, an evil deeply entrenched in himself, which pretends to try and understand love and beauty and truth and wisdom but whose real purpose is never to understand them, whose real purpose is always to usurp them and enthrone itself. Dialectic - the usurper. That is what he sees. The parvenu, muscling in on all that is Good and seeking to contain it and control it."
"How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue. Lightning hits! Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine 'virtue.' But areté. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric."