This Essay, like all the preceding ones, is written from a minority viewpoint. The content of the Essay is not the Establishment wisdom of AD 2008. The text which follows will help to make matters more clear.
(1) Historical:--
'Metaphysics' is the name given by scholars long ago to a particular set of writings of Aristotle. It's the name of a book; not an illuminating name, since it means merely 'Next to the Physics', another book by Aristotle. However, this is no bad thing -- and I suspect not an accident -- since the subject matter of Metaphysics is not easy to specify.
Aristotle died long ago; only specialist historians have the (considerable) time to read him extensively. The rest of us read him selectively, mainly for what he can teach us which is, surprisingly, still quite a lot.
For us, in the 21st Century, the word 'Metaphysics' is the name of a particular science. I am using the word 'science' -- herein, and often hereafter -- to refer to disciplined, organized thinking about a definite subject matter. Science is systematic knowledge, systematic cognition. This is what the word 'science' used to mean, in English and in other European languages, before it became a shorthand for 'Natural Science'. Since the shorthand suggests (without explicitly claiming) that Real Science is Natural Science -- that all the rest is bogus -- the resultant effect is a kind of ethnic cleansing within the World of Intellect. This shorthand, deriving as it does from Enlightenment dogma and propagandistic intent -- 'Metaphysics', for most Enlightenment thinkers and their latter-day descendants, is the name of a pseudo-science, to be consigned to the dustbin of history -- this restrictive use of the word 'Science' results in loss, not gain. It impoverishes and retrogrades thought by collapsing hard-won, valuable distinctions; and it makes thought servile by creating no-go areas. Political Correctness did not start in the 20th Century; nor was it invented by Vladimir Lenin, as many think; it is merely the contemporary name for a modern, more organized use of an age-old package of linguistic techniques of control and coercion by the Powers-That-Be.
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(2) Naming:--
Aristotle names metaphysics in three different ways: First Science; Wisdom; Theology. These are merely three different ways of looking at the same entity.
(a) First (Proto) Science. The Ur-Science.
Meaning: logically first, the science of that which is presupposed by all the other sciences. Even though you might study it last; or, more likely, never study it at all.
(b) Wisdom (Sophia).
Implying that this is what all scientists (philosophers, lovers of wisdom, in the terminology of his time) are ultimately seeking.
(c) Theology -- the science which expounds the nature of God.
All this seems far away and long ago. The Enlightened Ones have succeeded with their propaganda: Technical Reason rules, OK; and not only in the West. It's possible that occasionally, within the family, one of your children -- confronted with a more than usually fatuous or offensive Government initiative -- might in puzzlement look to you for insight into the presuppositions underlying the action. Or one of them, at a time of personal crisis, might come to you, hoping for a bit of wisdom -- might even go so far as to use that archaic word, God. Another one might, at a rare moment, ask you about the nature of the Deity. But outside the family, in what is often known as the Real World, a reputation for being concerned with these matters will not increase your social standing, and certainly not your likelihood of being gainfully employed.
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(3) Content:--
Metaphysics is the science of presuppositions.
Only the most fundamental presuppositions, the ultimate ones -- often called Absolute Presuppositions -- are of interest to Metaphysicians.
[Presuppositions are the foundations of all thought -- the Software, not the Hardware. And therefore any increase in understanding is worth aiming for. I have written about presuppositions in a previous Essay: History(14), and will do so again. This present analysis is not definitive, or exhaustive -- just something to go on with, a minimal but indispensable facilitator.]
We explicitly propose a proposition.
"This cat is a tabby cat."
We (pre)suppose a presupposition. And most likely it will be unstated, implicit.
"When did you stop drinking?"
[We presuppose (believe) that he was formerly a drinker.]
Not only will a presupposition typically be unstated; it will -- especially in England -- be bad form to bring it out into the open: "Thank you, but we don't do presuppositions." However, those days of comfortable stupidity, of living off the inheritance of our ancestors, those sleepy days of unstatement and understatement, are coming to an end. We are moving towards revolutionary times, and -- now that our Culture is under threat of annihilation by an alliance of home-grown Quislings and foreign hostiles -- it looks as if we'll have to painfully relearn how to use our brains, and once more begin to think about fundamentals.
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
These are the opening words of the Apostles' Creed. Two other well-known Creeds: Newton's Three Laws of Motion; the American Declaration of Independence.
These three Creeds articulate, consecutively, the Metaphysical Foundations of Christianity; of European Natural Science (from, say, 1650 AD to 1850 AD); of the US Political and Legal Order.
A set of Absolute Presuppositions (APs) -- as the above examples illustrate -- is usually succinct and abstract. It may also be opaque, may be hard to understand without a detailed attendant commentary.
Presuppositions are Beliefs. A system of Beliefs used to be called a Faith, although the word is less used nowadays. A Belief is what you hold to; you are committed to it, in thought and action. The Apostles' Creed is explicitly a system of Belief, a statement of Faith. 'I believe' is the preliminary rubric. The other two Systems of Absolute Presupposition don't have this explicit preliminary rubric, but it is implied: the commitment is there. Creed, System of Absolute Presuppositions, it's the same thing.
To return to Relative, Verifiable Presuppositions (RPs). Once upon a time, long ago, when I listened to the BBC I used to presuppose (believe) that the News gatherers and presenters had a commitment to truth, to the whole truth, and to impartiality. Not easy to check the integrity of the BBC; but not impossible, just a matter of patience, hard work, and a good memory.
Nowadays (2008 AD) the BBC fails to pass the test, of routine integrity. This is very sad.
Absolute Presuppositions are not propositions: they are not verifiable; they are not true or false, they just are. They constitute a particular logical kind, and are governed by their own characteristic constraints.
I'm repeating myself. Deliberately, since I think that the contrary view -- that there are no Absolute Presuppositions; that all meaningful statements are verifiable -- is a momentous philosophical mistake, a mistake damaging enough to bring a whole Culture to its knees.
In the case of the West the full extent and horrifying effects of this mistake took a couple of hundred years to manifest, as the poison gradually worked its way down through the social classes.
The mistake is lethal, since it destroys Faith; and Life is ultimately grounded in Faith, rather than in Reason. In a healthy psyche the two work in harmony. In the Modern World the medical term for both the fact and the effects of loss of Faith is Clinical Depression and, as everyone knows, this affliction is epidemic in the West.
This particular philosophical mistake -- everything verifiable -- was never made by the Mediaevals, grounded as they were in Christianity. It arose later; it was promulgated by many of the Enlightenment thinkers, and especially by the Enlightenment's most influential philosopher, David Hume.
As a matter of historical fact it has been used mainly to attack Religion, but ultimately it destroys (corrupts and degrades) Natural Science as well -- the latter resting, just as much as does Religion, on a System of Absolute Presupositions. The fallacy -- that all Presuppositions are Verifiable, Provable, that any Profession of Faith, any System of Absolute Presupositions, is mere superstition -- is the ground of the insider's arrogance of the typical modern Natural Scientist, especially if he is a Cosmologist or Evolutionary Biologist.
[If you don't believe me, about the arrogance, then read any non-technical book by Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, E. O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins. If you still don't agree, then we have nothing to say to each other.]
The fallacy -- that all is verifiable -- cries out for a name. I'll call it the Critical Fallacy, drawing attention ostensively to its logical nature (the emphasis on testing, debunking) and also to the characteristic style of its proponents.
We speak of CPs using different terms from those applying to APs. We speak of good (correct) manners -- not true manners. We speak of correct grammar. A notice, on a wall inside a University building, reads: 'Food and drink is not allowed in the Great Hall'. This is grammatically incorrect. Correctness means: according to an understood rule, or canon.
One can see Table Manners and Language as Systems of Presuppositions. But not Systems of Relative Presuppositions: you can't verify or invalidate them by testing them, using deeper Absolute Presuppositions to do so. They are Systems of Customary Presuppositions, of Conventions, with their own appropriate criteria of correctness. Logically they have some similarities with Absolute Presuppositions, but the pathways to their generation are different, as are also the connotations and nuances. Culture is centred on Persons, and Society. Natural Science is centred on Things, and Nature.
[In a previous Essay -- History (14) -- I have used the term 'Cultural Genome' to denominate the aggregate of Customary Presuppositions within a Culture.]
A Culture is binding; there is no argument. You are committed, having at some point been inducted into it.
Custom and concept are imprinted and enacted in Ritual. This is most obvious with the training of babies and the very young.
Pointing to Puss:-- 'Cat'. Say 'Cat' ... Good. Very good. Well done ... Again: 'Cat'.
At the table:-- Close your mouth when you eat ... Like this.
A conversation is a (symmetric) ritual exchange. As with all ritual there are fixed elements: the meanings of words, ensuring uniformity, mutual comprehension. There is also improvisation, and variation: the individual details of performance of the speakers, manifested in the construction of sentences, plus the idiosyncratic speech rhythms and pronunciations.
A musical performance is another clear example of an (asymmetric) ritual exchange -- between performer and audience.
Conversation and musical performance are built upon a framework consisting of a multiplicity of Customary Presuppositions.
A critically important domain of Culture is the Legal System. Innocent until proved guilty is not a Verifiable Presupposition. Nor is it compatible with what is nowadays called Multiculturalism, which is merely another name for a State-imposed social incoherence leading to Political and Cultural Annihilation / Suicide.
Multiculturalism is a peculiar mixture, of concepts and what could be called anti-concepts: thought-stoppers, mind-shredders. Although devised in essentials by Continental Marxists, it seems made to order for Britain. It's a Fabian, attritional variant of Genocide. In these off-shore islands we don't approve of those crude Continental and Asiatic techniques of Mass Murder. We Brits prefer more genteel, 'civilized' roads to Death and Suicide. .
Multiculturalism is, and is intended to be, purely destructive. It posits a radically incoherent, non-viable Cultural Genome. It negates a sine qua non: for a Society to be viable there has to be one, and only one, Central Culture which always takes precedence. It is too obvious to be worth discussing that, for example, a Western Legal System and Islamic Sharia are strictly incompatible.
a + b = b + a [add up in any order: the commutative rule for addition.]
a x b = b x a [multiply in any order: the commutative rule for multiplication.]
There exists a particular Mathematical Theory where the central elements are called Matrices, which are rectangular arrays of sub-elements. Quite often these sub-elements are ordinary numbers, like this:--
[33 41 68 29 84 21]. This is a 1 x 6 Matrix -- one row, six columns.
In Matrix Theory the axioms are not the same as those of ordinary arithmetic. For example, the commutative rule for multiplication does not hold. If A and B are matrices then, in most cases, A x B (is not equal to) B x A.
There is the AP: I believe in God almighty ...
Associated with this there is the observational Proposition: In the era of Western Christendom people subscribed to the Apostles' Creed. This is an Historical Proposition; one verifies it by a stint of historical research. A Metaphysician -- one who articulates and analyses hitherto unarticulated APs -- is, in one respect, an Historian of Ideas.
There is the CP: I believe that the word 'Gay' refers to a man who is predominantly Homosexual. [A subjective statement.]
The associated Proposition: In the year 2008 AD 'Gay' means 'Homosexual'. [An objective statement.]
The above two italicized statements are deceptively similar, but the distinction between them is important. The first statement, being a CP, is subjective and non-verifiable. The second one, being an objective Proposition, can be verified by listening to people talk, or by using a dictionary.
Although you would never know it by listening to Scientistic types -- especially Natural Scientists and Anglo-American Analytic Philosophers -- most of human life centres on belief (APs and CPs). This is because we -- alone amongst God's creatures -- are much more Cultural than Natural. This does not make human life irrational, as some would have it, but it does make it mainly, and irreducibly, subjective. A small set of APs -- many ot them implicit -- governs the deep structure of belief; the multitudinous set of CPs -- constituting the major part of the Cultural Genome -- articulates the detail of conventional belief and behaviour.
By contrast, RPs are objective and, although less ubiquitous -- they cover a smaller domain -- they can be critically important. They belong within the domain of the Artisan, the Engineer, the Technologist, the Practical Man; all the varieties of Applied Science. Driving on a motorway you are continually making Relative Presuppositions: that driver ahead is unpredictable, and therefore dangerous (give him some distance); my speedometer gives a correct indication of speed; my brakes are working adequately. You are, one hopes, constantly checking, verifying, these Relative Presuppositions. God help you, and the drivers nearby, if you are not.
Classification -- dividing a large set into several subsets, called classes -- is an aspect of Logic, first codified by Aristotle.
There is the Genus (the large, Universal set): Kitchen Utensils, say.
There are the Species (the subsets): Crockery, Cutlery, etc.
There are the Differentiae (discriminators), the properties which enable us to separate.
In the case of an item of the Species Cutlery the Differentiae are: it is a Tool used in eating (knife, fork); it is traditionally made of metal.
Crockery consists of Containers from which we eat (cups, plates). Items are traditionally made of baked clay.
Classification of most Material Entities (things and organisms) is usually not difficult. There are borderline cases: Is a small individual ovenware dish, from which one eats directly, an item of crockery? Or does it belong within the species of cooking utensils which includes pots and pans? The answer doesn't matter much, since the number of these outliers is small, and it is possible, by agreement, to make the species (the classes) mutually exclusive, non-overlapping.
Classification of Concepts (non-material entities) is less clear, much more equivocal than the classification of material entities (things and organisms). I have divided the Genus Presupposition into the three species of AP, RP, CP; and set out roughly the Differentiae. This classification is, I think, essential as an initial illuminator and can serve as a useful intellectual tool. But it doesn't always work: it's only a first stage analysis. Sometimes the Classes overlap, or tend to merge, in quite subtle ways. Consider the following Multicultural example:--
Gay replaces Homosexual.
She replaces He (as a generic term for Adult Human.)
Native American replaces Red Indian.
Mumbai replaces Bombay.
Beijing replaces Peking.
CE (Common Era) replaces AD (Anno Domini).
Kilogram plus gram replaces Pound plus Ounce.
Kilometre plus metre replaces Mile plus yard.
In various parts of the Anglosphere these linguistic substitutions -- along with many others -- have been decreed by Government, and have been sometimes sanctioned by penalties, and by compulsory attendance at re-education courses. (Especially within the heartlands of Multicult: the Bureaucracies and Academia). The new terms are unfamiliar -- hard to get used to. As is intended, since they are designed to humiliate the Indigenous, the Carriers of the Culture, to destroy confidence, to put one off balance, to make one hesitant, clumsy. These decrees are fiats, top-down edicts: an iron fist without even the proverbial velvet glove. It is an extreme violation of the spirit of the English language, which has evolved, quite slowly, and without control from above.
Collectively these linguistic replacements constitute a major change in the aggregate of Customary Presuppositions, an important revision of the Cultural Genome. As a further consequence -- beyond that of relentless humiliation of older people and the indigenous -- all texts written more than fifty years ago have become more awkward to read, more difficult to decipher; one has to translate. The cumulative result is an implicit but powerful devaluation of the importance of History. We are being instructed that the Present and the Future are what matter, that the Past can be ignored. There is, in effect, a shift in Absolute Presuppositions. As follows:--
In 1958 AD, say, we have the AP: History is important.
In 2008 CE we have the AP: History is more or less bunk.
[This last AP is the gist of a famous statement made by Henry Ford in 1916.]
So much for CPs and APs. It is also true that, in a small number of recondite cases, there is a kind of overlap between RPs and APs. Consider the following pair of APs:--
AP1: The Universe is eternal; it always was, and always will be.
AP2: The Universe came into existence at a particular time.
AP1 is the Universe according to Aristotle, and others. AP2 is the Universe according to the Christian Church Fathers and the Mediaevals.
However, some modern cosmologists -- notably the proponents of the Big Bang hypothesis -- maintain that these two statements are not APs, that they are RPs, since they can be tested in various ways. They maintain that the Universe began about 14 billion years ago, expanding thereafter at enormous speed from a point. They claim that the Universe contains present-day evidences which make this Big Bang hypothesis -- a more specific and refined version of AP2; also non-theistic -- highly plausible.
Warning! For the Christian, the statement AP2 is an Absolute Presupposition. For the Big Bang Cosmologist it is a Relative Presupposition. Either way, both groups are committed to the view that the Past is finite, that Space and Time came into existence at some definite particular point of time. Along with Space and Time came also the possibility of Language; but not before this. Which implies that, in fact, it is meaningless to talk of 'before this'.
Games and Mathematical Systems are alike in that the main criterion is consistency. In a Game the Rules are clear, and must not conflict; likewise for the Axioms of a Mathematical System. In case of confusion or dispute a recourse to the Rules will lead to an unequivocal decision.
Games and Mathematical Systems (both based on CPs) are, for the most part, non-committal; more precisely, there is temporary commitment. As an adult you are not compelled to play tennis; you don't have to be an expert in Mathematical Topology. Games and Mathematical Systems are only loosely linked to the fateful domain of Nature, and the equally fateful domain of Culture.
Nature and Culture are, overall, not like Games. You are tied in with Time and Fate: you cannot avoid living within the universal Gravitational field; you cannot not speak the Language of your Culture; you cannot opt out of the Legal System. It is this fact, of necessary and permanent commitment to a Culture (within a Society), which makes the modern interpretation of Multiculturalism into the sordid mixture of inanity, logical confusion, ugly hypocrisy, anarchy and sinister, calculated destructiveness which it is.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein developed the concept of a language-game. He describes it with care, but I think it is a term which is ill-chosen, essentially misleading. The use of a natural language, such as English, is for the most part not like play, not like any game -- even though you may be playful in the process of learning or using English. It's not like play because, as indicated above, you are committed; you have no choice; you are born into it. It is not like cricket where you can, usually, choose to play, or not to play -- or perhaps withdraw, if you change your mind.
The Relative Presuppositions (RPs) of the Practical World are fairly easy to articulate and to understand: Knives are sharp. Likewise for the Customary Presuppositions (CPs) of a Culture: It is good manners to close your mouth when you chew; When serving (in Tennis) stand back from the baseline; Matrix multiplication is not commutative.
By contrast the Absolute Presuppositions of Religion and Natural Science are not simple. They are inherently obscure, extremely difficult to reveal and to understand. Often they have to be painstakingly deduced from a multitude of Rituals and Customary Locutions. The first major effort of articulation -- by the Greek Philosophers between 600 BC and 300 BC -- was a colossal intellectual achievement.
For the time being I'll merely list a few aspects of Absolute Presuppositions (APs):--
APs are like CPs in that one is committed to them merely by living within a Society. If you don't subscribe to them -- subscription is usually implicit, unconscious -- you won't be understood, and you won't be able to use the Institutions.
An obvious problem: What if there are several competing sets of APs within the one Society?
Two clear responses to this problem.
(a) Enforce one set: Believe or else. Throughout recorded history this has been the usual solution. Coercion -- brute force and attrition/prohibition -- plus control of education are the methods used. This response was the rule in Europe up until the 18th Century.
(b) Toleration. A difficult and subtle policy. For example : What is the extent of Toleration; what are the reserved domains, the domains of non-compromise, the domains where toleration logically cannot apply -- e.g. the Legal System -- where toleration is merely another name for anarchy or cultural suicide? And what of the children, who will learn, when young, either one Cultural System (hard enough), or else -- as in a coercively Multicultural Society -- none at all.
Toleration requires a community which is highly disciplined and politically sophisticated. Of the major polities within European Christendom only the Nations of the Anglosphere (plus Holland) have come, at least sometimes, anywhere near to carrying out this policy of Toleration in practice. Those days appear to be over.
Modern Multiculturalists profess toleration, but the doctrine is really anti-toleration: the self-description is Newspeak, the opposite of the truth. Multiculturalism is quietly brutal and extremely rigorous. It constitutes an interim stage; it points towards a future monoculture -- bleak, mechanized, materially affluent but otherwise impoverished. Within England the destructive goals of Multiculturalism are clear: the use of State power to stifle, inhibit, forbid all elements of the older Culture -- i.e. the Culture of most people born in England and over the age of forty. Along with this the use of State apparatus to obliterate the Nation and to dilute and weaken this older Culture by demographic control: a tidal wave of immigrants, especially of non-Europeans and, most obtrusively, of Islamics, who come from an alien Culture which has been intransigently hostile to the West throughout its history.
So far this policy of destruction has been overtly successful. There has been no effective backlash, but this may be misleading. English Culture is a comparatively old and deeply rooted Culture. Also, it is the one that invented the modern world. To do that it must have been exceptionally creative, powerful and well-balanced -- multiple redundancies. It's hard to believe that it can so easily be wiped out by such a second-rate, careless, unintelligent and morally squalid Establishment as the one we have now. The signs of resistance are there, if you care to look. Ominously, the signs of a possible Civil War are also there, since the present Establishment is tenacious, well dug in.
[Two obvious questions. Firstly: Cui Bono? Who benefits from this systematic mayhem of a people? Secondly: after all the destruction, what then? How could the (putatively) successful Multiculturalists build upon a desolation? But all this is for later discussion.]
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(4) APs : Preliminary Notes.
Note 1: Terminology:--
'Faith', 'Creed', 'Presupposition' are not terms which are part of the comfortable received wisdom of the Modern (Anti-Metaphysical) West. They are not quite archaic, but they derive from a time when 'Western Christendom' was a meaningful expression. The domain which encompasses all of these notions is called nowadays, in the bland language of the Social Sciences, the domain of 'Values' and 'Norms'. The terms are ambiguous: connotations, status and weight varying greatly with the speaker; it would be tedious to summarize. Enough to say that variation depends mainly on whether or not you subscribe to what I have called the Critical Fallacy. This is the litmus test: Do you believe that 'Absolute Presupposition' is an unnecessary term, that all Presuppositions are either Customary (Conventional) or Verifiable?
Of course the question is never put directly -- as noted earlier, the English decided long ago that they don't do Metaphysics and Presuppositions -- but it lurks subliminally. Modern Received Wisdom says, or implies, Yes, in answer to the above question. However, a fallacy remains a fallacy, and most people -- being not continuously witless -- feel vaguely uncomfortable. Drinking, Drugs and Distraction are not always sufficient to befuddle the Mind and bypass all problems of the Spirit.
Note 2: Vestiges and Survivals :--
Anthropologists claim that Human Beings were Hunter / Gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years -- up until, say, fifteen thousand years ago, when Agriculture came on the scene. The claim is plausible. During that time the hunting and killing of animals (also fish) was routine. And this period was so very long that it's also plausible to assume that Culture and Biology would have evolved towards a stable interconnected system. I take it that such a system is still there, at least for some of us: it's in the genes, and easily activated. Pastoralism -- the domestication and killing of animals for food (meat and milk) -- came later, but would have easily harmonised with this earlier way of life. We can express the Hunter / Gatherer / Fisherman / Pastoralist vision as an Absolute Presupposition:--
AP: Hunting animals, killing them, and otherwise using them for food is right and good.
Within Western Culture this is explicit in the Book of Genesis.
I shall take for granted the continued existence of these Vestigial, but powerful, APs, and confine my attention to those APs which supervened later on in the historical experience of our species.
[Personal note: As a young man I subsisted for quite a while as a hunter: rabbits, hares, kangaroos ... I found it, as a way of life, easy to slip into, and far more natural than working on the assembly line of a mass-production factory.]
Note 3: Development.
A major shift in the APs of a Culture -- the evolutionary development of a new set of APs -- is never a minor matter, and it always takes some time. One example.
Modern Science begins in the High Middle Ages and not, as I was taught at school, with Galileo in the early 17th Century. (See Essay: History 9). However, there is some justification for the emphasis on Galileo. When Thomas Bradwardine and the Oxford Calculators, in the early 1300s AD, worked out a correct and detailed analysis of uniformly accelerated motion, they expressed themselves in ordinary language, not in the elegant notation of modern mathematics. (Such notation did not then exist.) The medium they used, ordinary language, was ill-suited to the promulgation of the message; very few people knew what they were on about.
Three developments were required before it was possible for Isaac Newton, in his Principia in 1687 AD, to formulate a convincing and operationally useful set of new APs for the description and investigation of Nature.
(i) The invention of mechanized printing (ca 1450 AD). This facilitated easy transmission -- thereby enlarging the pool of contributors -- and also led to a convenient standardization.
(ii) The invention of improved mathematical notation. This took place steadily over the next 300 years: ( + and - ) around 1526; (=) around 1557; (x) around 1631. And so on.
(iii) The invention of the methods of the Differential and Integral Calculus (Newton and Leibniz: between 1660 and 1680).
Note 4: Strands; Conflict and Dominance.
In the old days war was sometimes total and genocidal: the men and adolescent boys were killed by the victors, and the women and children were enslaved and/or assimilated within the victorious tribe. Culture wars -- wars of ideas -- are seldom like this: it's not easy to entirely extirpate a set of ideas and cultural practices, a set of APs and CPs. (In effect, to obliterate a Cultural Genome). For this and other reasons it's the rule for a large society to have many strands within the cultural weave, many of them competing, with some much more important than others. Usually, a strand destined to become dominant will be one which will have been present for a long time, but inconspicuously so, until circumstances change in its favour. Again I'll give one example.
Merchants and Capitalists have been with us for several thousands of years, since the invention of agriculture and the concomitant development of substantial surpluses of food. However, as a social class the Merchants have traditionally had a status much inferior to the Thugs (Warriors and Rulers: specialists in violence), and the Scribes (Priests and Clerks). The Market Place couldn't compete with Parade Ground and Temple. The clearest exposition of the APs and CPs articulating this kind of hierarchy is given in the Vedas, the sacred writings of the Hindus. Priests (Brahmins) and Warriors (Kshatriyas) are the two high Castes, and rank well above the Merchants (Vaisyas).
It was not until the late 18th Century AD that the Vaisyas first came into their own in a large polity, displacing the two upper castes. Not in India, but in England. In North Western Europe, and especially in England, the Vaisyas had come to constitute a permeable Class, rather than an impermeable Caste. English novels -- especially those of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope -- document the subtleties of these matters in minute detail.
The event symbolizing this shift in relative ranking -- across most of Europe -- was the defeat of the Warrior-Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte by Wellington, the military servant of the Civilian Government of the 'Nation of Shopkeepers'.
More than a hundred years later, in 1945, a similar thing happened in Japan. The local Militarists had been dominant but, having been defeated in World War II and thereby having lost face, they were summarily dismissed by the Allied Occupying Powers, to be replaced by the Merchants, who have been dominant ever since.
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(5) APs as the main line of History.
APs are discovered, by looking about you and thinking, very hard. The creative act is one of insight and articulation; it is the action of an historian of ideas.
APs can be characterized as the condensed wisdom -- sometimes unwisdom: people can make mistakes -- of a Culture, accumulated over a long period of time. Never decades; sometimes centuries; sometimes as long as millennia. APs change, although very slowly, for two reasons. They change because of new experience and understandings; they change because there will inevitably be strains amongst them, also errors and inadequacies, which will gradually work their effects. By its nature a chronicle of APs constitutes an important strand of a Culture's history. I'll illustrate with a selection of some of the main APs in the West, and in England. I'll stop before I get to the Enlightenment and the Modern Period. I'll continue the History of Western APs in the next Essay.
(a) AP: There is one God only.
[God rules Nature, as well as Society. And therefore one speaks the same scientific language in Syracuse as in Ephesus. As we do nowadays. Although most modern Natural Scientists, being philosophically illiterate, are unaware of the Monotheist foundations and provenance of their practices.
Ancient Greek Literature (e.g. Homer) is Polytheistic -- it is full of gods: Aphrodite, Athena, Hera, Zeus ... They are anthromorphic; they are charcterized as larger-than-life humans. The Philosophers were deliberately different. They were austere intellectual aristocrats. They wanted to establish a distance from the Bards, Myth makers and Priests; they refrained from any characterization. For them the word God (Theos) is a cryptic indicator -- no more than that. Rightly so: how can you stand outside and characterize this most Absolute of all Absolute Presuppositions?]
(b) God is not the Creator of Nature, of the World.
[In Aristotle's language this means that the existence of a regular, rational Nature is not a Presupposition but an observed fact, a verifiable claim. This is an intellectual mistake. Like the similar mistake (Critical Fallacy) of David Hume et al, a couple of thousands of years later, it is of momentous significance. I'll call it the Greek Fallacy.
If you think hard you can easily see it's a mistake.
There's a person sitting opposite you at breakfast, in the kitchen: your daughter. You know it's your daughter, the person who sat opposite you yesterday morning. But how do you know this, that it's the same person? You saw her twelve hours before; but how do you know she wasn't substituted overnight by an evil sorceress? (Fairy Tales contain a lot of implicit metaphysics; they are often profound.) Your confidence -- that you are sitting opposite the same person, your daughter -- is based on a large set of (unprovable) Presuppositions, which guarantee the regularity, stability and continuity of daily life.]
(c) Nature is a system of movements.
[Again, Aristotle puts this forward as an observable fact, not an AP. He was wrong; it's a further aspect of the Greek Fallacy. (How do you know it's the same object -- a cricket ball, say -- from one moment to the next?) The reasoning is the same as in (b), above.]
(d) AP: Things in Nature aim towards perfection by imitating God, who is perfect Being.
[In Aristotle's schema this is an AP. He needs this, in order to get a link between God and Nature.]
(e) AP: God is Mind (Nous). Nature, imitating God (Mind), strives towards perfection of movement, i.e. circular motion.
[In 1605 Johannes Kepler, using the observations of Tycho Brahe, concluded that the planets move in ellipses. Fairly round ellipses: almost circles, but not quite. An ellipse is not so simply perfect as a circle; it took a long time for people to get used to Kepler's idea.]
(f) The activity of Mind is rational (law-abiding) activity; therefore Nature -- the imitator -- also is rational, law-abiding.
[This explicit and emphatic certainty, of Rationality, is a distinguishing mark of the West. It is one of the tenets which ultimately made possible, although not inevitable, the invention of Industrial Society in late 18th Century England. This was the second -- Agricultural Society was the first -- of the two epochal grand inventions in the history of the human species.
Other Weltanschauungen -- China, India, and especially Islam: think of the arbitrary, random sequences of the Arabian Nights, as compared with the narratives of virtue rewarded in Grimm's Fairy Tales -- did not share this certainty, of Rationality.]
(a) AP:There is one God only.
[Same as the Philosophers. The Hebrews 'describe' God by using the phrase: I am that I am. They are trying, I guess, to convey the idea of utterly self-sufficient being.]
(b) AP: God created the World.
[The Hebrews did not make the mistake of the Greeks.]
(c) AP: God's activity is Rational. And therefore Nature, the World He made, is also Rational. And likewise Man, since God created man in his own image. (Gen 1: 27).
(d) AP: God is Person, rather than just Mind, and relates to Man accordingly.
[Two thousand years later Blaise Pascal (d. 1662 AD) expressed the difference in two famous statements:--
The Heart hath its reasons which Reason knoweth not.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob -- not the God of the Philosophers.
]
(e) AP: Yahweh (the God of Israel) is an exclusive God, a jealous God.
A Code of Law is a sub-system of a Culture. As such it is based on a number of fundamental Presuppositions, CPs. Just one example: in Roman Law a Contract is based on the Prespposition of free choice, plus mutual benefit: both parties must stand to gain. A Contract involves obligations, but it is not an instrument of coercion.
The Theology is obscure and difficult. But no more so than, say, Quantum Theory and Relativity Theory, which can be mastered by a moderately clever person after two or three years of hard study. And without such study these modern scientific theories are essentially opaque: popular science writings won't help much, since the core concepts are expressed in sophisticated mathematical language.
Some key points of the Catholic Faith:--
(a) In regard to Nature the Church Fathers follow the Hebrew Scribes rather than the Greek Philosophers. The regularity of Nature is an AP. It is not a provable claim.
(b) God is a personal God.
He encompasses Feeling as well as Thought: He is not identified with Mind (Nous) alone. He relates to all persons equally: He is indifferent to social status and individual talent. Christianity functions as a mass Religion; it is not just a doctrine for an élite of Aristocratic Rationalists.
(c) God is Love. This tenet is of ultimate significance.
For God so loved the world ... [John 3:16]
The Mediaevals took over the main tenets (APs) of the Church fathers. Of course there was controversy and argumentation -- plenty of it -- but most of the possible positions had already been articulated. In one area, however -- that of sensual and sexual life -- there was an important development.
Celibacy, for Priests and Nuns, gradually became a traditional part of Western (Roman Catholic) practice. Celibacy is in line with the life of both Christ and St. Paul. The canonical reference is from the writings of the latter:--
He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But he that is married careth for the things of the world, how he may please his wife ... The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit. But she that is married careth for the things of this world, how she may please her husband. [I Corinthians 7:32-34].
For the married, the second-class Citizens of the Spirit, Paul has this advice:--
For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, another after that. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows: It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn. [I Corinthians 7:7-9].
This is the practical Christian version of Platonism. For Plato Mind and Spirit were immeasurably superior to Body and Matter.
This version may be practical, but it is philosophically incoherent. How can some dimension of Life -- Body -- be both necessary, and yet immeasurably inferior to another dimension: Spirit? Surely a part which is necessary to the totality is, in some sense, equal in value to other parts.
It seems, from his reported words, that Christ believed that the End of the World really was Nigh. In such a situation, of an imminent Armageddon and Day of Judgement, celibacy -- entailing demographic suicide -- is no big deal. However, coming a bit later -- and the world still spinning regularly, as reliably solid and ongoing as ever -- Paul had to devise a doctrine to accommodate this continuance. The doctrine is not impressive: it is a patch job. As a two-tier solution it comes dangerously close to the Manichaean (and anti-Christian) doctrine of the radically evil nature of Matter, of the Body, enclosing (within each one of us) a radically pure and incorruptible fragment of Spirit.
The core of a Religion consists of Ritual plus Scripture. In Christianity the most conspicuous element of Ritual is the Mass (Eucharist, Holy Communion); the most conspicuous element of Scripture is the Sermon, usually a commentary on a text from the Bible.
Ritual and Scripture appeal to different strands of human temperament. Ritual emphasizes all that (larger) part of life which is not expressible in plain, analytic prose. It can sometimes be expressed, or at least indicated, in poetry or chant, especially when complemented by music, as in Gregorian Chant and the Mass of Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377 AD) and his many successors. Ritualists do not hesitate to use the word 'Mystery' in pointing to the inexpressible, whereas to the Scripturalist such a word is merely superstition or evasion.
A good modern example of a Scripturalist is the Computer Scientist Tim Berners-Lee (b. 1955 AD), usually credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He was brought up in the Church of England, but left it as a teenager because he could not "believe in unbelievable things." He is now a Unitarian, the most Rationalist of all the Christian Sects.
In modern literature the genre of Science Fiction is predominantly Scripturalist, whereas Fantasy is predominantly Ritualist.
In the personal life of the Christian there is the problem of the continual tension between Body and Soul, Flesh and Spirit, the Civitas Terrena and Civitas Dei of St. Augustine. In I Corinthians St. Paul gives a Scripturalist answer to this problem. Not much of an answer, as I have indicated, and I think that there are deep logical reasons why there never could be much of an answer in Scripturalist terms.
Nonetheless the Roman Catholic Church did come up with an answer, in the form of the Cult of the Virgin Mary. This is a Ritualist answer and, in my opinion, a magnificent one. The Protestant Scripturalists disagree. They describe the Cult of the Virgin contemptuously as Mariolatry; their language is often vitriolic. Not surprisingly, since the Cult symbolizes perfectly the divide between the intransigent Scripturalists and the Ritualists.
As the Middle Ages unfolded the Madonna and Child became, for several centuries -- in painting, sculpture, stained glass, illuminated missals, poetry, song -- a dominant icon of Western Christendom; as important as the Crucifixion. The Cult of the Virgin became -- somewhat confusingly -- a reconciliation of Flesh and Spirit, a Fertility Cult, an answer to incipient Feminism, and a Ritualist Theological Affirmation. It is the most original and creative act of the Mediaeval World. It does not come from the Bible: there is no effective warrant for it in orthodox Scripture. As one would expect, it remains to this day entirely unacceptable to many Protestants.
By the 13th Century AD the West had gone way beyond mere preservation, and had become an outstandingly creative culture. At that time the two most important centres of learning were the Universities of Paris and Oxford. Aquinas was a Theologian. He taught at Paris; it was there that he put together his two great theological treatises: Summa contra Gentiles (1264 AD) and Summa Theologica (1274 AD).
Oxford was noted for Natural Philosophy (Natural Science) which, in those days, was closely linked with Theology. The Church Fathers, about one thousand years before this, didn't do much in the field of Natural Science, even though they got the basics right. Developments in this field were left to the Mediaevals who, between 1100 AD and 1400 AD laid most of the articulate foundations of European Natural Science.
There were not just the theoretical physicists, experimenters and mathematicians -- Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Thomas Bradwardine, Jean Buridan, Nicholas Oresme et al. Also important were the logicians: Peter Abelard, Peter Lombard, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham. They were the ones who went beyond Aristotle and developed the language of suppositions.
The Philosophes of the 18th Century Enlightenment -- Voltaire, Diderot, etc. -- were much given to talking of the obscurity and silliness of the Mediaeval Scholastics. This is one of the great libels of all time. [Effective in the 18th Century. No one would check up on you. But nowadays, with the rise of the Internet, and Electronic Texts, the intelligent layman can easily examine these claims, and see them for the travesties which they are.] To give just one example. Robert Grosseteste was Bishop of Lincoln. He died in 1263 AD. To read just a single page of his treatise On Light is enough to show that one is in the presence of a thinker greater by far than any of the self-styled Enlightened Ones.
Human creativity derives from the ability to hold together opposing forces in a state of non-destructive tension -- dancing on a knife-edge. The items of creation are the way-stations: the intermittent results of a temporary resolution of forces.
Aquinas is an example. His forbears were Teutonic aristocrats -- specialists in thuggery, rapacity, organized violence. Unlike Modern Western Aristocrats and Sons of Privilege, he didn't indulge in sickly self-righteous masochism, didn't beat his breast and disown his ancestry, but he complemented it with the opposite: the Christian cult of Love, Poverty and Abnegation. Only a person who understood and accepted human aggression, as a necessary aspect of the human condition, could have been as courteous, fair and generous to opponents as Aquinas habitually was. And yet he never gave an inch in the rigour of his argumentation; he didn't fudge.
The other great Religious Genius of the Middle Ages, St. Francis of Assisi, was a more turbulent figure. He was a fanatic, somewhat unbalanced, but of immense personal force. Francis was Artist and Poet, and potential Natural Scientist. (Most of the major Mediaeval Natural Scientists were Franciscans). Francis had the artist's gift of minutely accurate observation. His capacity for empathy, identification with the other -- animals, birds, things -- was extraordinary. I don't think that, for him, human beings were privileged. Unlike Aquinas, I doubt that he had any understanding of Society or Politics. He was the greatest of the Hippies: half mad, only occasionally in touch wiith Social Reality. Francis was the son of a prosperous businessman. In some ways he was the typical bourgeois anti-bourgeois. Only, of course, immeasurably more gifted. Like Christ, he repudiated his family. Below, the great hymn of Reverence, Praise and Celebration: the Credo behind the largest and best part of subsequent European Art and Science.
Canticle of the Creatures :
Most high, all powerful, all good Lord! All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing. To you, alone, Most High, do they belong. No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name.
Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.
Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens you have made them, precious and beautiful.
Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, and clouds and storms, and all the weather, through which you give your creatures sustenance.
Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.
Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom you brighten the night. He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.
Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.
Be praised, my Lord, through those who forgive for love of you; through those who endure sickness and trial. Happy those who endure in peace, for by you, Most High, they will be crowned.
Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living person can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! Happy those she finds doing your most holy will. The second death can do no harm to them.
Praise and bless my Lord, and give thanks, and serve him with great humility.
[St. Francis of Assisi; 1224 AD]
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References:-
R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, OUP, (Oxford, 1940).
This is one of the very few good books on Metaphysics written in English in the last several hundred years. I have drawn substantially on it.
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