John 8:32 …the truth shall make you free.
Following Peterson’s advice, I write below what I believe to be true.
Our existence provides us with the potential to become free spirits. Nature has taken us up to the point where we then become responsible for our future development as individuals.
Individual animals are constrained to follow the nature of the species to which they belong. Humans have moved beyond this restriction, over and above the species nature, we have formed tribes and societies which establish laws and custome designed to govern the behaviour of the individuals within. Modern societies make it possible for each person to express their individuality. They allow more freedom and give more rights to their individuals than are bestowed upon them by being members of the species.
Steiner spoke of a path towards ethical individualism
The standpoint of free morality, then, does not declare the free spirit to be the only form in which a man can exist. It sees in the free spirit only the last stage of man’s evolution. This is not to deny that conduct according to standards has its justification as one stage in evolution. Only we cannot acknowledge it as the absolute standpoint in morality. For the free spirit overcomes the standards in the sense that he does not just accept commandments as his motives but orders his action according to his own impulses (intuitions)
The future is in our hands. Evolution continues regardless.
walto,
A religious humanist, apparently. This is not a personal virtue scale, rather simply taking identity at face value. The people who run away from discussing religion, living religiously & thinking about religion are the outliers here (though at TSZ, that’s somewhat of a norm among ‘skeptics’). Religion is a cultural universal, yet there are outliers who wish that weren’t true and for whatever personal reasons, get angry, upset & aggressively critical about ‘religion’, which they turn into a straw man in order to try to knock down.
Kripke is & Putnam was religious. KN is an agnostic/atheist. walto is likewise anti- &/or un-religious, so it seems.
That is why it is almost pathetically funny to see KN lash out at Jordan Peterson as if he were an ‘intellectual fraud’ & ‘snake oil salesman.’ No, sorry, the plank is in KN’s eye. Peterson is both empowering & inspiring, while KN would have people cement themselves into unbelief & disenchantment as a sell-out option based on Sellars’ scientism. Not a difficult choice which path to take on that one!
Yep. Although I’m guessing I admire Tagore more than you do. And he wrote God love letters almost daily in spite of losing so many loved ones. And he never insulted those who disagreed with him. Your religion is much easier, I’m guessing.
So what?
Being empowering and inspiring is no indication of truth or goodness. Adolf Hitler was compelling and inspiring to millions of Germans. Jordan Peterson is empowering and inspiring to thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of disaffected, alienated, white men. He’s certainly not empowering and inspiring to the people who disagree with him on fundamental issues. And his behavior towards his critics is not that of someone who cares about intellectually honest debate, despite what he claims.
Of course (it must be said) the Sophists were empowering and inspiring — that’s part of what Plato has so concerned about their influence on Athenian youth, that they were so empowering and inspiring and yet had no concern for truth or goodness. Jordan Peterson is certainly a Sophist by Plato’s standards — and not just because he earns a lucrative income by charging for his services!
By the way, Sellars is not scientistic.
Kantian Naturalist,
Rule 8: “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” – Peterson
So, KN would turn the tables & accuse Peterson of lying? A bit of evidence for this loose accusation please.
Yeah, right, Sellars wasn’t scientistic & neither is Steven Pinker! ; )
The IDW is opening new spaces for “intellectually honest debate.” It’s radical leftists, anti-masculinists & Marxists like KN who are running for the exits, using language they can’t back up. The changed lives of not a few men and women who have read & listened to Peterson and re-discovered human dignity (without being forced to reject the notion that we are created in the image and likeness of God) is evidence enough to expose KN’s jealousy of an articulate, clinical, truth-oriented, and largely humble thinker.
I’m sympathetic to CharlieM for posting the comparison with Steiner, as Peterson is certainly non-conventional religiously; he is at least sensitive & thoughtful about religion. With religiously mangled self-degrading views like KN’s citing Hitler & promoting Marxism, naturalism & materialism, no such sympathy is attendant. I’m done here.
Well yes we can have the freedom to choose one particular course of action out of two or more, or to refrain from acting. And we are physically limited beings so there are also restrictions in that sense. But it should be noted that there are a variety of freedoms from physical freedom to ethical freedom. Reformed smokers or alcoholics have placed restrictions on themselves. So have they become more or less free? Well they are less free in what they can consume but they have freed themselves from the addiction to certain substances. I would say they have gained spiritual freedom at the expense of physical freedom.
walto,
The statement “walto is likewise anti- &/or un-religious, so it seems” was just meant as a check-in fact. If you took it as an insult rather than as a mere description, sorry to hear that.
I don’t think Peterson is lying. I think he is in bad faith — he’s self-deceived at a fundamental level of his existence.
This nicely sums up a rather shallow and misguided understanding of both Sellars and Pinker.
Wow, you’re really going full fascist here, aren’t you? At least now we can finally see your true colors.
You’re finally done here? Oh, thank God!
This coming from someone who lacks ANY faith & promotes dehumanizing largely atheistic ideologies as a hobby!? Please excuse that you don’t seem fit to judge.
Yup, that was expected. These radical leftist rascals mainly want to accuse & taunt. That just shows you’re in love with negative labelling & distortion. Nice Canadians don’t ‘go full fascist’. Sorry you’re so harmed by Peterson’s truth-telling & opening more people up to move beyond the atheist-closure they were facing & experiencing from many disenchanted professors in humanities & social sciences nowadays.
It makes complete sense that atheists push back against Peterson because he makes belief believable again, respecting natural science as he does along the way. Go a step further & you get Jonathan Pageau, who KN will also perhaps accuse of telling lies, simply because that’s the kind of thing that philosophistic ideologues do.
I didn’t take that as an insult. Sadly, though, that’s not the only thing you’ve ever posted. I mean, everybody can see how you’ve started teeing off on KN again. For some weird reason, known only to you and your deity, you’ve got a hard on for that guy. What happened–he get a job you wanted?
You come across as deliberately insulting people in almost every post you make. If you are not aware that you come across that way, then you have a problem.
Neil Rickert,
If a person reads my OPs, they know that claim is untrue.
This site, filled mostly with atheists, agnostics & skeptics (like walto, KN & Neil), brings down everyone here. There are no exceptions. Sure, I have posted things I’m not proud of here & should not have posted, but those are exceptions.
With good people, with sincere people who seek truth, share knowledge & ask questions beyond natural science & materialist or naturalist ideology, almost every time we get along well.
Filled with atheists, agnostics & skeptics, TSZ, which Neil all but demonstrates by his participation at PS, is & has always been, a disaster (mirroring UD). The only bright spots here are the caring, sometimes misguided ‘theists,’ among them Mung who was blatantly mistreated & ousted by Mods.
Gregory,
You know weed is now legal in Canada, right? Might help you chill out a bit. Just saying
He’s perfectly aware that he’s deliberately insulting in every post he makes. He just doesn’t care because he doesn’t think that atheists and agnostics deserve any respect at all — not even basic politeness and civil discourse.
Truth doesn’t need to ‘chill’ even when it’s calm & relaxed. It’s just truth, nuf said.
While I reject atheism, it doesn’t mean I necessarily reject atheists as people, thanks. Politeness & civil discourse are often possible with atheists & agnostics who are not anti-religious, anti-spiritual, close-minded materialists. TSZ just hasn’t many such discussants.
However, yes, I am going to speak openly, honestly & indeed critically about what Peterson calls PMNM because I find it as problematic and socially destructive as he does. That KN doesn’t find Marxism destructive, while pushing it as his ‘naturalistic’ ideology of choice simply reveals the philosophistry of KN, nothing more than that. Intellectual fraud & snake oil were the words that came out of his mouth, & those words seem to be fitting not for Peterson, but for KN. The atheists, agnostics & skeptics here of course won’t say that, as it goes against their worldview, but c’est la vie.
I’m still trying to figure out how PNNM works. Perhaps they have the slogan “Workers of the World, be obscure!”
Maybe I ran off with the love of his life. Who knows? It’s a mystery to all.
It’s actually funny to me that you insist that I don’t have any faith when I’ve been completely clear and consistent in all of my posts, here and at Uncommon Descent, that atheism is just as much a leap of faith as theism is. That’s not a new position on my part; that’s been my considered view since 2011, at least.
Relevant to some topics in this thread, lately I’ve been reading Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (reviews here and here). I’m intrigued by the contrast between “religious faith” and “secular faith”, as well as the contrast between “natural freedom” and “spiritual freedom”, though I think there are some pretty serious oversights with how Hägglund is setting up the problematic.
For one thing, it’s not clear to me that a yearning for transcendence is incompatible with an acceptance of finitude, as Hägglund makes it to be. I worry that by taking Augustine, C. S. Lewis, and Soren Kierkegaard as exemplars of “religious faith” (in his sense), he’s neglecting the possibility of this-life-enhancing religion. And that leads him to make some truly bizarre claims about Martin Luther King — on Hägglund’s reading, King was inconsistent in being a person of faith and a democratic socialist!
That said, I think the distinction between natural freedom and spiritual freedom is compelling, though it must be stressed that the “spiritual” for Hägglund is Hegelian Geist, and a resolutely non-metaphysical version of Geist at that. But there’s certainly an important distinction between the natural freedom that a lion or giraffe has — the freedom to move about where it wants to go — and the kind of freedom that’s involved in deciding what to do with one’s time, how one chooses to live, and according to what conception of the good.
&
Granted, Peterson is somewhat difficult to classify (politically, philosophically & religiously). He’s explained that he’s not a classical Abrahamic theist, yet atheists get upset because he represents a massive symbol for rejecting the ‘new atheist’ movement & their dirty (biologistic), simplistic reductionism. He surely doesn’t merit the label KN used, which was a mere ‘tee off’ opinion.
KN’s the best philosophist at TSZ (he teaches philosophy at a USAmerican university & obviously reads a lot). That’s why I’ve chosen to focus on him. Clearer?
Let me leave this thread with another side of me that atheists, agnostics & skeptics rarely see, in acknowledging the life recently passed (1928-2019) of an amazing man, which may be seen as in line with the spirit of this OP:
Jean Vanier was certainly not an ‘intellectual fraud’ & ‘snake oil salesman’ to his ‘audience.’ To suggest otherwise, would reveal someone simply rotten.
Helping people grow to become free takes a variety of forms. VJ Torley has tried in his own way to do this here at TSZ.
Hahaha. Excellent.
Maybe your mastery of English isn’t at the level you think it is?
(I dunno. Just trying to be charitable.)
OK, well, if we’re ranking, you’re the worst.
Yes. You should try to emulate him occasionally instead of non-stop trash-talking. It would be a nice change both for you and for this board.
Pure thinking is sense free thinking. We intuitively grasp the concept but it has no corresponding observable percept. (Percept in the sense that Steiner used the term to mean the object of perception). Examples would be the dimensionless point, the infinite plane, or Goethe’s urpflanze.
If you are motivated by your desires then you are concerned with what you can gain from the outcome and so it is not a free deed. It is the thought of the pleasure to come that prompts you to act. Although usually on a different level, it is the same compulsion as an addict has when looking for his or her next fix.
Free thinking does not exclude feeling and willing, it includes them. You carry out an action with love for the deed without any concern for the consequences. And I don’t mean love in the sense that it gives you a nice warm fuzzy feeling, I mean love in the outpouring, giving sense.
The vast majority of our actions do not reach this standard, but it is something to aim towards.
Thank you Gregory.
I hope you stick around in this thread. I can sit on the sidelines and read your exchanges. I find it interesting to observe the various reactions to see how much substance there is in the arguments. Your point of view gives more balance to the discussion.
Well his insults balance my mocking, if that’s good.
I hope we’re not going to get bogged down with an argument about the definitions of insulting and mocking 🙂
Abstractions? Abstract thinking opens the way to spiritual freedom?
Why are you aiming towards it, if you feel no desire to do so?
Or perhaps you do have a desire to reach this standard, and are un-free because of that? Sounds like a real Catch-22.
Stole the idea from Spinoza.
It’s a desire they’re evidently embarrassed about.
My faith is transcendent; yours is socially conventional; his is dirty.
after Sidney j Harris.
petrushka,
That’s about it.
“What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality?
The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there’s no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself — that evidence is necessary — holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there’s the deeper worldview — it’s a kind of dogma — that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It’s a deep faith commitment because there’s no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It’s a creed.” https://www.salon.com/2007/12/19/john_haught/
It depends on one’s philosophy and what one understands by “abstractions”.. A naive realist would see the objects of perception as real and the conceptions we hold as mere copies of this reality. While an objective idealist would see the concept as just as real and sometimes even more real than the perceived object. In this way Goethe saw the plant in front of him as a fleeting physical expression of the enduring archetype.
Philosophers have always argued about universals and particulars. If you are satisfied with the reality given by your senses then nothing I say is going to change your opinion. Likewise I’m not sure what would convince me that my concepts are just copies borrowed from the world of our senses, but you’re welcome to try.
The idea that we attain freedom through thought is (I believe) much older than Spinoza — one can find nice anticipations of it in Aristotle and in the Stoics. What’s elegant about Spinoza is how he transposes that ancient insight into a metaphysics based on modern science.
Well IMO I am very far from perfect. Looking back on my recent choices and actions I know that I have chosen easier or self-satisfying options over what I would consider to be the wiser course to take.
We don’t make progress by stifling our desires but of doing our utmost to understand our motives and being honest with ourselves.
CharlieM,
That’s almost right, but not quite.
Naive realists about perception aren’t committed to empiricism about concepts, i.e. a copy-theory in which a concept is a ‘copy’ of the perception. All that the naive realist believes is that veridical perception is perception of external objects in space and time: when I take myself to be seeing a cat, it is the cat itself that I see. Naive realism (or direct realism) contrasts with phenomenalism. While it is true historically that many phenomenalists about perception were also empiricists about concepts, they are separable positions.
The problem with concept empiricism is that it assimilates concepts to mental images, which doesn’t work for the reason that mental images have no logical structure: awareness of a mental image tells us nothing about formal and material inferential relations that constitute conceptual content. Concepts have logical form due to their role in assertions and inferences that a mental image can’t have.
(There’s also the problem of aphantasia: if concept empiricism were true then people with aphantasia could not acquire concepts. Yet obviously they can. QED.)
There are problems with naive realism, but they mostly turn on whether the naive realist can give an adequate account of hallucinations. For a long time I thought that something like Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology was the right approach here — perceptions are not veridical hallucinations because in perceiving the perceptual object is ‘geared into’ (his phrase) our possibilities of bodily movement. Or to use Gibson’s term, hallucinations do not have affordances. But I don’t know if that’s right.
Objective idealism is a slippery notion to pin down exactly and I won’t pretend to have an adequate grasp of it myself. But I take it that it involves the idea that the world in itself has a rational structure, and that our reason is capable of grasping the world in itself because there is no metaphysical gap between the world and our reason: the world’s own reason is at work in our reason because our reason is part of the world. There’s no room for an ontological gap between the world in itself and our experience of it. More precisely, to posit such a gap (as Kant does) is to be dogmatic about reason itself and thus fail to sustain a critical standpoint.
At least that’s how I understand (in very broad strokes) Hegel — and Hegel was deeply influenced by Goethe, for whatever that’s worth. (But Nietzsche was also deeply influenced by Goethe, and it’s hard to imagine a more non-Hegelian philosopher than Nietzsche!)
How does the immaterial/transcendent world justify those things?
Is this another of those silly “God-is-good” claims?
I think it’s more that theology provides us with a story about why our confidence in reason, truth, goodness, and beauty makes sense. It’s less about justification in the strict epistemological sense and more about conveying a coherent and attractive narrative. But that’s no objection to theology: at the end, narrative and story is all we have anyway, whether theists or not. We’re story-telling animals.
OK, but still, I’ve never heard a coherent and compelling narrative involving the “transcendental” that explains anything. All we ever get is endless question begging for some transcendental realm that is supposedly necessary to explain truth, morals or minds. Seems to me this is exactly what Haught does in the piece above:
What if it doesn’t?
KN,
Theology can also supply us with stories showing why we shouldn’t have confidence in those things. It’s pretty malleable that way.
Given the actual evidence, an untrustworthy, evil or indifferent God actually makes more sense as a hypothesis.
The Haught interview is worth a thread of its own. I’ve submitted an OP which is now (pointlessly) waiting for moderator approval.
A pessimist may look at all the suffering, cruelty, violence, and evil in the world and either refuse to believe in a benevolent God or affirm a belief in a cruel or indifferent God.
An optimist may look at all the kindness, compassion, beauty, and goodness in the world and either affirm a benevolent God or at least refuse to believe in any God who would increase the amount or intensity of suffering in the world.
That is, what “the actual evidence” says about the likelihood of any conception of God existing or not existing depends very much on the priors of the person assessing that evidence, and those priors are shaped as much by temperament, socialization, affect, personality, culture, etc as by anything that might be called reasoning.
To the pessimist, the world looks bleak and dark; to the optimist, the world looks hopeful and inviting. It is not the world that differs; it is them. This not a difference of rationality; the pessimist is not more rational than the optimist, or conversely. They appraise the evidence differently and apply different selective filters that are both perceptual and affective. (Thus an optimist might not take notice of gratuitous cruelty or she may be less inclined to say that the world is a bad place on account of it.)
It’s a well-known problem in philosophy of science that we can’t even choose between competing scientific theories on the basis of evidence alone. And if we can’t do that for theories, we certainly won’t be able to do that for world-views either.
KN,
Sure. Other things count too, such as parsimony, but that hardly means that the evidence doesn’t matter. It’s hugely important. Heliocentrism is a better solar system theory than geocentrism, and that’s because of the way it fits the evidence. General relativity is a better theory than Newtonian mechanics, and that too is because of its fit to the evidence. It’s rational to prefer heliocentrism to geocentrism, and it’s rational to prefer Einsteinian relativity to Newtonian mechanics.
Likewise, the hypothesis of an untrustworthy, evil, or indifferent God fits the evidence better than the tri-omni God of traditional Christianity. So does atheism.
Believers in a tri-omni God do so in spite of the evidence, not because of it.
Uh, yeah, that’s exactly the point. Thanks! = P
Philosophical nuances aside, I think I understand what you mean by pure thought now. Thanks.
Nothing wrong in itself with pursuing your desires. Comes with the “being human” package, just like your lofty ratio. I just thought it was odd that you experience that as somehow restricting your spiritual freedom.
Along with Shakespeare and Linnaeus Spinoza was actually a big influence on Goethe.
Maybe you believe that Newton would have been more honest if he had said, “We steal the ideas of giants”.
Your comment highlights a difference in our thinking. You seem to consider ideas and concepts to be personal property. I believe the same idea or concept can be discovered by many people and thus belong to everyone. The relationship between the sides of a right angled triangle is not something we have stolen from Pythagoras and which he may have stolen from others.
Our passions and desires define us as members of the species homo sapiens, our thinking defines us as individuals.
Thank you for your precision and for giving me something to think about. I’ll need to take more time to look at what you have written here.
Not at all. As Dali said when he was accused of copying Ingres, “He who imitates nobody is nothing.”
You couldn’t have read many of my posts here and think that about me. I’ve written a book about a hero of mine (from whom I’ve taken almost every sensible thought I’ve ever had), and did my dissertation on Spinoza. I said Goethe stole that from Spinoza, because he did.
You’re just, you know, wrong about pretty much everything you write. Even this kind of personal thing. Like Alan, you should think and read more (and better), and post less.
Not nearly enough, I’m guessing. Your prime goal will be, as always, to integrate whatever you read with Steiner. The idea that he could be wrong on any important matter is verboten with you.