Rehashing Objectivism

Arthur Herman has written a lengthy book, The Cave and the Light, about the history of western civilization, based upon the idea that ... well, I will let his subtitle do the work of summary: "Plato versus Aristotle, and the struggle for the Soul of Western civilization."

I've skimmed the book -- it really isn't worthwhile reading this sort of thing -- and I can report that it is a tedious rehash of the mashing-up of the history of philosophy accomplished by Ayn Rand and her followers in the 1960s. Rand read somebody else's summaries of major philosophers and persuaded herself that she was an expert.

I'll give credit where it is due, Herman's title, The Cave and the Light, does capture succinctly one aspect of Platonic philosophy. Yes, inside the cave of the natural world there is (in Plato's famous image) only the false flickering light of candles, and by that artificial light we see only shadows on stone. Our goal should be to get to the real light, the light of the sun, outside the cave, and see realities.

But the whole Plato/Aristotle contrast is overdone -- by Herman, by the Objectivist cadre, as well as by others there's no need to mention here. A better way of defining the contrasting views at the extremes of classical Athenian philosophy would be: Plato versus Democritus. The view that only the ideal is truly real is in stark opposition to the view that only atoms and their movements through the void are truly real. Plato's candlelit shadows were Democritus' daylight realities and vice versus. THAT might be a fit subject for a book on "the struggle for the soul of western civilization." In that book, Aristotle would be one in a long line of ,moderates.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has reviewed Herman's book for COMMENTARY. His review starts out favorable, because Gobry likes the conservative political tone of it. He says for example that Herman's "account of the rise of the global market economy, and its positive influence not just on living standards but on morality, is impeccable."

But Gobry seems a better historical scholar than Herman. I mean by "historical scholar" not someone who will project a Grand Theory of History (the hacks of history do that all the time!): a true scholar in the field is someone who will use facts as needles to poke holes in the Grand Theory balloons that the hacks keep parading for us. And Gobry does this to Herman's Grand Theory with increasing zest as he goes along,

For example, Herman's grand theory requires that he hail Aristotle as the "father of modern science." Actually ... no. Galileo's famous work on the motions of heavy and light objects was shocking to Aristoteleans not because Galileo was reverting to Platonism, but because Galileo was striking at Aristotelean ideas from the other direction, from Democritus' direction.

Many of the enlightenment figures introduced ideas that were as Gobry says "genuinely novel," that is, that don't fit into Herman's rubric at all. Kant is an obvious example -- which is why Rand condemned him so stridently and perhaps also why Herman gives him merely a "cursory and partial overview" as Gobry says.

Return to Herman's title for a second, and the metaphor of a cave. What was Kant saying? It was in a word this: we of necessity must stay within the cave. There is a world outside, but our nature, the means by which knowledge is possible to us, makes it impossible for us ever to get outside the cave and we should not try. Knowledge is possible only in the phenomenal here-and-now. That was as far from Plato as one can get while accepting the two-worlds premise. And it was a rejection of Plato that goes nowhere near Aristotle (or Democritus) either.

And this novelty didn't come about because Kant was anti-science. Kant was a better scientist than many who make that charge. [Ever heard of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of the formation of the solar system?]

I am not a Kantian (as readers of this blog surely know) and I have no idea whether Gobry is a Kantian. But he does invoke Kant's example to indicate, accurately, that "the Enlightenment really did go beyond Greece."

Good going Gobry.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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