Onlythoughts

By the gods, I'm going to become a blogger. It's rather distasteful thinking about how good of an idea it sounds like right now.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so cynical.

Who am I anyway? The kind of question everyone either thinks they have an answer to or suffers anxiety over not having one. I daresay it'd be easy to come out of a philosophy degree more confused regarding this question than when one went in. Indeed, many of the big questions people look to philosophy for an answer to seem to wind up generating more questions. At least, if you find yourself unconvinced, that is.

Am I unconvinced? Certainly not. I'm a firm believer in stories, and my life is just another one being told at this very moment. The first element to writing any story is the blank page. You might be thinking I'm about to make an argument for something like Lockes Tabula Rosa, Descartes Cogito, or the Hindu Atman. You would be varying degrees of wrong on all accounts. For a blank page is merely the material on which a story is written, and no story is intelligible until that page has not been blank for some time. To adopt some analytic jargon, the page is a necessary condition of the self, but it is insufficient. It takes quite a bit of writing before the words on the page form a story of any kind.

So what does a story need? Surely, this is not a question that should strike up much difficulty. A story has a setting. It happens somewhere and at some time. A story has characters. People who interact and either grow or shrink from that interaction. A story has a plot. Events that transpire sequentially, unfolding as the characters act within the setting. And finally, perhaps the most important piece of all, a story has conflict. Without conflict, the plot lacks purpose, the characters lack fulfillment, and the setting lacks life.

Life isn't a story, some would say. Stories are authored. They have intent, they are told to convey a message, to explore a dynamic, to present a "what-if," to create an escape from reality that has all the colour, magic, and beauty that reality supposedly lacks. Yet I think these people miss that these stories are nothing without reality. That life doesn't appear to be a story is only because one life is often many stories, and we are co-authors at best. Life often lacks the coherence of a structured written narrative, but it has rules and moving action all the same.

Does introspecting on one's life impose a meaning that wasn't there before? Or does it uncover a meaning that was already there? This is starting to turn into an essay and an annoyingly long attempt at a personal introduction, I'm sure. However, where can one ramble if not on a blog? My point is perhaps that there is already meaning in life before we reflect on it. It is possible to impose false meaning. Indeed, discovering the true meaning in one's life is a virtue. I argue that those who can not find any meaning in their lives are likely unhealthy souls. Finding that meaning requires being able to define the episodes of your life, those self-contained subnarrarives within the larger autobiographical grand narrative, decipher them, and then place them in context with each other. Notably, that context is not always chronological. Distant episodes can be connected by their resonating impacts. Failure to do this is to conclude that one's own life is meaningless, and that is a grim prospect for most.

So who am I then? Am I to demonstrate in my answer an exemplar of the aforementioned virtue of deciphering one's own life story. No, I will not be doing that. This is in part because this task is too long to undertake here, in this already too long introductory post. I have already left too much unsaid as it is. However, I will also refrain from providing merely the list of titles so many do when answering this question.

I am an inheritor of a complex tradition whose history is long and disrupted in many places. I come from a lineage that has birthed me as the unwilling benefactor of imperialism. My family has moved into lands that were colonized, where space was made for us on the blood of a thousand cultures. I do not resent these grim realities. Instead, I acknowledge that they will forever define what is possible for me and how I relate to those others whose ancestors were killed and corralled (perhaps by some of mine) to create room for mine.

However, that same history that predates me in this bloody way also passed down to me the tools of intellect required to understand the horrors in full. I can speak with the ancients voices, and I can overcome the imposed limits of thinking that would try to blind me to the dark corners of the setting I inhabit. This history leaves me here today, a philosopher, an artist, a husband, a son, a brother, a grandson, a wage earner, a writer, and a man. Some of you might think me an enemy, and this is fair. Some of you might think me a friend, this too is fair. Some of you may find me a fool, also fair. Some of you may find a mentor in me, and I find this fair to.

Who I am to you is defined by how the conflicts of which we are a part direct us. We are, all of us, seeking some good, and we may disagree on what is good, or how something is good, or what is most good. Thus, you will not know who I am until you have tried me. But I pray even those among you who in time find yourselves deeply opposed still take the time to listen. If for no other reason than that these are

Only thoughts.

The God of Abraham (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is the sole master of all things. He is that he is, and with this necessary self-existence comes the classical vision of the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. Generally understood, this means God has no limits. However, is this the correct way to understand God?

Agnoiology, the sister science to epistemology, was named by James Frederick Ferrier in 1854. Epistemology is the well-known study of theories of knowledge. Agnoiology is the largely unknown study of theories of ignorance (ironic). Epistemology concerns itself with what can be known and how we can claim to know it successfully. Agnoiology concerns itself with what if means to be ignorant and what, ultimately, will always be unknowable. That agnoiology has been ignored by modern scholarship isn't surprising. We are, as a culture, primarily scientific positivists. Therefore, the idea that something could be genuinely unknowable is deeply unsettling to us.

So, what does agnoiology have to do with God? The answer is that if something really is ultimately, absolutely unknowable, it can be unknown to an all-knower without contradiction.

But to be omniscient is to know everything! Surely, nothing is unknowable to God! Wrong, even God doesn't know a triangle with 4 sides because such a thing must be unknowable because it is impossible. Impossible? Surely, that can not be because God is omnipotent. Nothing is impossible for him. Yet mutatis mutandis, if omniscience can not know the unknowable, omnipotence can not do the impossible.

To be all-knowing is to have all the knowledge, but there is no knowledge to be had of that which cannot be known. To be all-powerful is to have all the power, but power is limited by the impossible. And all-goodness ought to be incapable of willing evil for its own sake, yet what happens when goods conflict in a tragic dilemma?

Of course, an omniscient and omnipotent being would have limits well beyond anything we can do, but that is not to say there are none. As the goddess of the underworld said to Parmenides, "the only knowledge that can be had of non-being is non-knowledge." If there are such things as the unknowable and the impossible, only God, at the maximum of capabilities, can truly know what they are.

What makes something worthy of moral consideration? Or in simpler terms, who, or what, is morality for? When developing ethics, at some point, this question is going to rear its head. There have been many answers given. "Can it suffer?" Asks John Stuart Mill, for utilitarianism concerns the minimization of pain as the end of a moral action, and thus anything that is pained must be morally considerable. "Is it rational?" Asks Immanuel Kant, for his deontology requires a being capable of reasoning through the legislation and acceptance of moral laws. "Does it have a polis?" Asks Aristotle, for to be in an ethical system is to partake of a political community with a common end for which virtuous citizens are most excellent. Each attempt aspires to define what is an acceptable thing to concern oneself with and what isn't. Each attempt fails, specifically because of what is left out.

Any attempt at morality that defines some things as morally considerable and others as not morally considerable exposes itself to a category mistake. What if something one thought was unworthy is revealed to be worthy by later discoveries? The horror of this kind of realization permeates much of our discussion around imperialism. Colonial cultures saw indigenous peoples as less worthy. Therefore, they could take over their land and destroy their "inferior" cultures in the service of a "better" world.

Consider John Stuart Mill: the capacity for suffering is enough to bestow moral worth to something. It seems simple enough. Certainly, it must be fair. But suffering only makes something considerable, not sovereign. Whose suffering is most important? An animal is considerable for it suffers, but is its suffering worth more or less than a human? Does it apply to any and all kinds of suffering? The pain of a cut is different than that of a heartbreak. It ought to be that both are to be avoided, but the greatness of suffering is difficult, if not impossible, to measure between them. How much heartbreak is a paper cut worth? How much is a dismembered limb? Moreover, that which does not suffer is not morally considerable at all. However, when does something not suffer? Do plants suffer?

Consider Kant: If rationality is constitutive of personhood, anything non-rational is what Kant calls a thing. A thing lacks reason, it cannot decide on ends, and thus, it has no ends to protect. Consequently, a thing can be used as a means to any person's end. Person's, however, are rational. To be rational is to be able to choose your own ends and thus have something to protect. If another uses a person as a tool, they have detracted from that person's ends. Person's must be convinced that either their ends will be furthered by supporting another, or they must be persuaded that their ends are inappropriate by another. However, what does this make of animals? How rational is rational? Kants writings on race were made doubly horrific by the perspective of his ethics. In these writings, Kant all but argues that some ethnicities aren't persons. But if some human beings aren't persons, then humanity and personhood are not equivalent, and anyone could be declared "not a person."

Consider Aristotle: at a glance, this likely seemed the weakest. Suffering is a worldly constant and reason is a nigh universal characteristic of human beings. To have a polis or city-state/political community hardly makes sense in comparison. Yet that community constitutes a project, it has a goal, and the moral consideration of being part of that community comes with contributions to that goal. One is as morally worthy as they deserve to be based on the extent to which they excel as a member of their community. The goods accumulated in pursuit of the communal project often have universal moral worth, but they aspire only to worth within their context. However, what happens to one who is outside the community or can not contribute? In here comes Aristotle's belief that some people are "natural slaves." Barbarians are lesser because they lack a polis. Thus, they will be unable to contribute to one. A barbarian in a city-state is to be despotically reigned over, for they literally don't know "what is good for them." Yet how did people come to be in a polis then? This omission of the historical dimensions renders Aristotle's account incomplete, and indeed later writers, like Macintyre, find ways to fill these gaps. To fail ones community by not being good enough raises the question of whether such a person should be allowed to act autonomously. After all, left to their own devices, their contributions are harmful.

All of these attempts fail, I hope this is evident based on our current ecological predicament. Overhyped as it often is, fake it is not. The predicament is born of the mechanistic worldview we inherited from recent prior centuries. The world's resources are elements in a machine, material for our use, and perfection. However, it is perverse perfection indeed.

Opposed to the mechanistic worldview, where reality is an explicit machine, and much of it is permissibly exploitable, is an animistic worldview. Animism comes from the Latin Anima, which means soul. Animism is the cultural belief that all things are ensouled. It is to ascribe humanity to the inhuman. To breathe animation into the inanimate. To attribute life to everything and all things.

The natural world was not considered to be of any or comparable moral worth to our growth. The result is that we are currently crashing into an unsustainable condition. But if we had held onto an animistic worldview, one that the morphology of Plato or Aristotle (especially Plato) could've sustained, we would not be here. The mechanistic worldview is killing the world because ecosystems are alive. Animism is not susceptible to the same category mistake made by the theories above. That Aristotle named Pleonexia a vice is evidence to me that he knew acquisitiveness was a detriment to human societies. Although it appears he did not grasp the full extent.

For a long time, I would openly declare that I didn't believe in hope. Such an odd thing to say in hindsight, and yet I know why I was saying it. Hope to me at this time was little more than wishful thinking. To hope, as I would've said back then, is to believe that things are going to turn out for the better, that there's progress being made to a better tomorrow. On both accounts, I still think these attitudes are a bit defective. However, what I called hope back then is certainly not what I mean by hope now.

I thought hope was a fruitless emotion because I believed in the tragedy of the human condition. I still believe in the latter, but now I hold the former to be an integral part of what makes the latter what it is. Without hope, there is no tragedy, only cruelty and horror. I fear many people today are falling into a kind of pessimism resonant with the hopelessness that I've outgrown.

So what is hope? And why is it important? In the Middle Ages, hope was presented as one of the three theological virtues alongside faith and charity. Perhaps I will write more on them another time, but it is important to know that the theological virtues were integral to each other at the time. To have hope was to hold true to faith in salvation from a charitable God. This is not readily available to our culture anymore, although by no means is one required to discard it. However, as religion is no longer a bonding agent of our culture, we have cause to ask what to make of hope without it.

One thing about hope as a theological virtue that can be made more widely intelligible is that hope is a virtue. Therefore, to be a hopeful person is to have achieved an excellence of character. If hope is a virtue, it certainly has vices. One of deficiency, to have too little hope is called pessimism. And one of excess, to have too much hope, is called optimism. To consider the modern perspective of hope it will do us some good to consider a school of thought that believed itself hopeful, but was really just optimistic.

It was Alasdair Macintyre, may he rest in peace, whose work After Virtue has come to define my thoughts so strongly in recent times. The arguments of After Virtue are compelling, the history Macintyre painted shows so clearly to me where modernity is doomed to moral failure. Hope is one of modernity's greatest weak points. I mention Macintyre because at the end of After Virtue, he provides a damning moral critique of Marxism. Marxism, Macintyre reflects, is a deeply optimistic philosophy. Having read Marx myself before, I quickly realized what was being said. Dialectic materialism argues that in pursuit of profit, the capitalist will push for more and more efficient means of production until eventually he undoes himself by making production so efficient that he is rendered unnecessary. When this time comes, there will be nothing left to do but to take the capitalists' property by force and have everyone share im this new, readily available mode of production.

What is it about the story told by Marxs dialectic materialism that makes it optimistic? It's the belief that we will be able to make ethical and efficient use of this hypothetical means of production. Within capitalism, there is, according to Marx, all the necessary tools being amassed for a better and nobler world. However, capitalism, according to Marx, exploits the workers and alienates them from their labour and thus themselves. Is the man of tomorrow really going to be the exploited and alienated proletariat? What ethical tools does this person inherit from their liberal capitalistic order? The unfortunate reality is that capitalism does not provide the ethics of utopia. There is no better world waiting in the destruction of a corrupt one.

The assumption of dialectic materialism is that the death of capitalism will give rise to the communist society that is characterized by a universal brotherhood of true equals. However, if you pay close attention to the world today, what kind of equality and fraternity are coming about? It's no accident that Marx believed that capitalism would end in violence, for he had the optimism to believe that violent revolution against the bourgeoisie would destroy the only remaining barriers to true prosperity. However, if the fraternity and equality Marx promises are absent from the corrupt system that must come before the ideal one that is characterized by them, where do they come from?

I put it to you that Marxs critique of capitalism was not born from a pursuit of fraternity and equality, but from the recognition that these things were missing in the world he observed. He believed they had to be restored by any means necessary and overlooked that by the time it'd be possible, there'd be nothing to restore. This is what it means to exceed hope into the vice of optimism. Optimism is to hold that the future is destined to be better, regardless of the direction the present is clearly taking us. Sometimes, things really do have to get worse before they are better, but that is not a self-fulfilling goal.

What the optimism of Marx shows us about hope is that hope needs something viable to believe in. If the desire for a better tomorrow is not sensitive to the tragedies of today, it is not hope but optimism. For the Medievals, their hope was grounded in a belief that reality was crowned by a philanthropic God who meant the best for us. To accept the Christian ontology is to recognize that God is an immutable wellspring of goodness in the world. If Abrahamic Theism is justified, hope is unconditionally vindicated.

However, it is important to understand that there were conditions integral to the Medieval Christian worldview that made hope invaluable. What Christianity had that Marxism lacks is tragedy. The human condition was a fallen one from Adam and Eve onwards. The Christian person is corrupt in a way the Marxist person could never be. The Christian hope was in forgiveness for an ancient sin, Marxist optimism is in the belief that present suffering is but a prelude to future prosperity. As I said earlier, without hope there is no tragedy, this is also true vice versa.

Tragedy entails us being cut off from the ultimate good. Hope is the virtue of facing tragedy. To be in a tragic condition is to be unable to do everything one ought to do. Classic moral dilemmas like the trolley problem are tragic conditions. Either one kills one person to save five or leave five to their death to avoid killing. No matter what one does, they succeed at one thing they ought to do, saving lives or not killing. However, they also fail to do something they ought to do, saving lives or not killing. Hope involves facing the tragedy of such situations without succumbing to a kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't fatalism. For the medievals, hope intersects charity in these moments in that one hopes they will be forgiven by God for the tragedy of the world. On its own, hope entails not denouncing the tragedy of ones act. One is to acknowledge what they had to fail at by making the most of their success.

I have discovered in my exposure to modern discourse that many people are constantly accusing others of being afraid to debate.

For a long time, right and left wing thinkers both have accused one another of being unwilling to debate each other and frankly I find it fascinating that it somehow manages to look like they're both being honest. How does that make any sense? Well, firstly, they're not being honest, but with algorithm induced echo chambers having become the norm of social media, this truth becomes easy to avoid.

I want to draw attention to how this phenomenon in our culture indicates how accusations of cowardice have become a nigh universal characteristic of today's social, moral, and political discourse. The problem I have is that to make this phenomenon intelligible, two possible explanations appear. The first is that we are all cowards. Yet in the era of polarized politics, often turning to violence in shrill protests that feel off. The second, and I think, more likely explanation, is that everyone has been led to believe everyone else is a coward by those aforementioned echo chambers, and this has in turn cultivated recklessness in our culture.

But in what way do the shrill accusations of cowardice permeating public discourse prove we are victims not of a deficiency of courage but an excess? The answer is that we are constantly being fed confirmation bias instead of dialogue. Media on both sides picks and chooses what of the other side it is willing to display. I've seen left-leaning documentaries display right-wing crowds by picking out the obvious crazies. However, I've also seen right-wing influences show off their intellectual superiority, picking arguments with random students on university campuses. Combine this with social media only ever showing people what they want to see, and the result is that the only thing you see of your adversaries are radicals and fools.

But what happens if you never see your opposition at their best? If all you see of them are people whose views lack good reasons, should they have reasons at all, who seem to prefer imposing their will with violence or who vilified their opponents before arrival. The result is that one comes to think their position is obviously superior. Once one believes this much, any debate with their opponents becomes not only unnecessary but inappropriate. The other is either an imbecile or a lunatic. Arguing with them is like debating a seagull.

It is this attitude, one i discovered in myself, and now in people close to me,that I've come to be most afraid of in watching our politics unfold. And it is this attitude that i call reckless. How is it reckless? Because it has the effect of destroying reason. People don't avoid debates out of cowardice, like everyone wants you to believe about their adversaries but not themselves. Rather, debate is considered pointless. It is not feared but derided. To be willing to debate is to give the other side space to speak, and 'obviously', they're evil.

Aristotle argued that recklessness was the excessive vice that corresponds to the virtue of courage, or Andreia in Greek. For all Aristotles faults, his theory of virtues stands as one of his strongest contributions to philosophy. However, now I must critique Aristotle, for he argued recklessness was closer to courage than cowardice, the deficiency vice. Modern discourse shows that this is an untenable conclusion. It was likely Aristotles elitism, an attitude that cripples much of his thought, that led him to conclude what he did about recklessness. From an aristocratic standpoint, engaging conflict is always better than fleeing from it. However, the recklessness of modern democracy shows that it is not less distant to courage than cowardice.

Recklessness is present in modern discourse because the danger is no longer being observed but assumed. People lash out at Phantoms, to say anything at all is to invite attacks from those who are constantly on the defensive. We do not hear what each other says. We anticipate enemies. We do not debate because we believe there is no debate with the others. Their ideas are unconditionally dangerous, they can't be argued with, they simply must be fought. Modern discourse is civil war by, for now, less violent means.