From, "yesterday/a few days a go."
I'm going to use this as a vehicle for expressing some of the points I'm bringing up in my dissertation that I really need to spend more, "serious" time actual authoring-- This will be somewhat disjointed. I'm a decent writer and a decent editor but never at the same time.
New developments in, "physics" (science) have created a new, "criterion of knowledge" this as suggested by Michael Sugrue causes changes in parts of culture namely, "what we consider actually or morally excellent." Occidental culture and the western expanse isn't precipitated on, "moral imperatives" "New Reason" or, "Science" but, "the careful and loving expansion of the human subjectivity. I would argue here that the father of western culture is uncontroversially Socrates- but the father of the technical sophistry which animates the concrete and plastic features of our society is actually the great Hippocrates. As we expand the tendency toward, "the preservation of life" systemically or holistically we see improvements in the quality of organized human where in contrast we've seen mixed results from the expansion of totalizing politics and technology- even technologies which improve our capacity to communicate or learn. It has been suggest recently by Alan Kay that technology needs a, "Hippocratic Oath." The author concurs.
Dynamical Systems Theory, the, "critical points" theories like those suggested by Mandelbrot and Sornette (Misbehavior of Markets, Slaying the Dragon King), self-similarity-- call into question whether or not, "exact experimental specificity" is actually a worthwhile criterion for, "facts or truth." Baconian science has, "real value" in, "Polanyic tacit knowledge systems" as a matter of critical irony. We might consider the pedagogies associated with architecture and musicianship. Both stem from forms of technical sophistication in engineering and instrument building but as a matter of practice are subjective, tacit enterprises guided by theoric insight. Scientific reproducability while having extreme value in a practical sense is no longer a gold standard of truth in contemporary discourses the way it seem to dominate in the 19th and first part of the 20th century. Ergodicity, attraction, tendency, sensitivity form an emergent vocabulary for an emergent, "post-Systems Systems Thinking" science which seeks, "not to understand what things are" but, "what things are doing and in what ways relative to our goals taking those goals and aspirations for granted." One example of this is in drug discovery which uses a need for therapies developed out of our of human need to be developed out of robust models and understandings of, "what nature is made of" which terminates in new drugs and therapies being developed.
Wittgenstein, Godel, Turing, Russell leading into the Pragmatic turn surrounding Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam calls into question whether or not questions like, "what is the ultimate foundational model for describing the qualitative features of the subjective experience of consciousness?" have answers beyond, "those found the poetry of Virgil, Dante, or Emerson." The epistemic horizon of, "what we actually experience" assumes the ground of discourse in such a way that, "totalizing" discourses about mind, consciousness, or language while at times being informative (consider the neurosurgeon) are motivated by a fundamentally misapprehension about, "the pursuit of knowledge" or, "knowledge about what we are" both by taking totalizing readings of Plato and Darwin to heart in their own respective pathologies of thought.
There's a harmony between, "later Chomsky" and the, "neopragmatists" (I dislike the term) in that the later Minimalist program allows for, "Enlightenment tells us we can know something" and, "contemporary discourses seem to inform us that certain aspects of attempting to have total understandings of almost any domain are fool-hardy. With that said we can come to know something of value that may be informed by what we stereotypically call, "hard science." We can come to know something about how brains produce language-- trying to use this as a vehicle to understand concepts like, "the ultimate nature of communication" or, "what meaning is" is to misapply a set of contexts' which are really-- if we dissect them attentively are ultimately what Rorty might typify as, "new priests attempting to revive the old religion in a new scientifically informed language."
Socio-Objective (a term I coining) stereotypes in culture on one hand related to, "rainbow flag waiving new Liberals" and on the other, "Adam Smith necktie wearing Conservative Liberal" (who are now Paleonormative Populists for some reason. Go figure) both misread not just Smith but the whole of the Enlightenment as being fundamentally fueled by an inner rediscovery of what Rorty might call, "Reason with a capital, "R."
The Neokantian takes, "Pure Reason's inability to give us real knowledge of the metaphysical nature of morals" and, "Darwin with a capital D" as creating a totalizing moral imperative where-in, "the new Reason" is the only means by which, "man the animal" can ever achieve, "status as something more than a collection of organs, atoms, organizational structures, and so on…" The New Reason of the Enlightenment, "takes away from ourselves and our ugly nature" as to give rise to, "actual praxis divorced from what we are as a natural, biological contrivance." It's in this way that ironically the Wilsonian idealist might assert the need for, "Leagues of Nations" or, "Universal Declarations of Rights" Knowing that, "the true universality" which comes from our , "actual" relationship with nature (Darwin) without the vital oar staff of, "the new Reason empowered by the new Newtonian-Baconian…" In this schema, "Man is not really Man until he has developed to the point of discovering that he is an animal and decided to tame himself…" On the other hand the right handed reading of, "what this thing called the Enlightenment actually was" which puts industrialization, Adam Smith's conception of, "Invisible hands" as being a realization of a moral order which can be understood through systemic science and organization. Both severely undermine that much of the expansion of human subjectivity following the change of the millennia relates not just to the development of new, "technical sciences" or, "improved understandings about nature…" but, "improvements in our ability to reflect on ourselves both critically and subjectively." It's worth noting that all together the Holocaust, Soviet Communism, and the neoliberal expanse have killed, injured, displaced, or made mentally ill more than a billion people over a period of decades-- a modern miracle of planning and organization we see the monsters these, "dated dichotomies" can actually create. The harm is far from conceptual and given the potential for what some critics have called, "Secondary Enclosure" there is ripe potential for abuse if these stereotypes can't be replaced with a, "superior kind of conversation."
Old Occitania and the Troubadours have fascinated western commentators for centuries not for the technical innovations demonstrated in their literatures but due to what they inspire in the popular imagination. The development of, "a superior human way of life" may be like this- this has been suggested by Rorty and others. This is also I think shared as a sentiment by artists and musicians-- there's a sense that we need, "a better conversation about ourselves" and not necessarily, "some heroic attempt to achieve a Platonic perspective but from the purview of, "atomic exceptionality." It is the greatest boon that Plato and the Greeks were revived in the west- it is our greatest honor and obligation to attempt to go beyond to where our immortal ancestor wanted us to go-- out of the cave. Out of the fly bottle into the free evening air to make sweet love with other flies.
