Subject: BHA: Primacy of practice, sophistry, and other fun stuff
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 14:47:21 -0500


Hi Mervyn, James and Phil--

Shoot, you've given me some interesting but hard nuts to crack, and at the
moment I have neither time nor tongs nor tongue to open them further.  But
I'll give it a valiant effort as briefly as I can (and I promise not to go
on another alliterative binge -- fun as it was, it also took lots of work!).

I think I'll start with Phil's points (hey, Phil, that choice of "Pragma"
and "Metaphysic" was a kick!).  I'm afraid I can't give a strong reply to
your comments on Hegel, who I haven't read and probably never will, being
little more than an educated dog myself (sorry, I'm alluding to a joke that
perhaps only Howard will remember, though come to think of it, it should
also bring a wry smile to anyone who knows the history of the word "cynic").
In any case, I agree that reason is crucial to the improvement of human
affairs, although as that annoying Mr Marx once said, thinking about the
world is ducky but you also gotta change it.  I'll also agree that Marx
sometimes slid toward a pragmatic view of truth.  My point however lies
elsewhere: and that is, reason doesn't come out of nowhere, ex nihilo (but
Mervyn, I'll get to your question about nihilo vs novo).  Reason *emerges*
from practical (bodily) engagements with the world, starting with our most
basic interactions like crawling from point A to point B, putting things
into boxes and pulling them out again, and playing peek-a-boo.  I have to
both agree and disagree with your argument that cooking involves theories.
Our embodied interactions with the material world lead us to *develop*
categories (cats are distinguishable from mats), which involve theories
(cats are more like rats than they are like mats in that they're both
*alive*).  However, on the one hand, I don't believe categories exist
outside semiosis, or if you like, outside consciousness (that would be the
epistemic fallacy -- powers, relationships and events do, but not
categories).  And on the other hand, beyond categorization I'm skeptical
that noticing phenomena (e.g., fermentation or antibiosis) or asking a
question ("I wonder what'll happens if I mix an egg into the flour?")
demands a theory or even a hypothesis; on the contrary, they both depend on
a *lack* of prior knowledge or theory.  So it's from those two perspectives
(embodied activity and the absence of knowledge) that I maintain the primacy
of practice.  In fact, for embodied activity to yield knowledge it must
start from ignorance and error, so ultimately it depends on absences too.

I hope it's clear that the primacy of practice thesis does not -- or at
least need not -- devolve into simple pragmatism.  As for Peirce, he
objected to William James's verson of pragmatism (and in response renamed
his own view the intentionally ugly "pragmaticism").  His eventual concept
of truth was a type of consensus theory, but with a crucial qualification:
truth is what the community of minds determines it to be over the entire
course of history, *including the future*.  In other words, the
understanding of reality which we've attained in the present is always
fallible and subject to later correction.

To respond quickly to Mervyn's inquiry about my view of "de novo" vs "ex
nihilo," my answer is "Yes."  Put less flippantly, my understanding of
emergence (including intrastructural emergence) is that it depends upon
pre-existing materials and conditions, and so in that sense is not "ex
nihilo."  However, since the emergent power or relationship is contingent
and cannot be directly derived from or reduced to the level from which it
arose, it is both new _and_ "from nothing/nowhere."  I think this view
coheres with my comment about the dependence of knowledge upon absences.
(Re RB, I think *From East to West* is a mess, but I haven't gotten to any
subsequent works yet.  I intend to, however.)

Mervyn, I wish I were as confident as you that James's statement was not
anthropocentric.  But he can speak for himself.

Be that as it may, I think both you and James oversimplify the Sophists a
bit -- there was quite a variety among them, and Plato had an axe to grind
when he vilified them in contrast to his hero.  Not all Sophists were
market-oriented, and some were politically subversive.  Some were anthropic,
but some were naturalistic.  And some were of a scientific bent.  But
evidently what both of you really have in mind are the rhetoricians.  Let me
quote James:

> The Sophists [...] did not teach logic or science, but
> rhetoric, the art of persuasion, i.e. demagoguery and sales technique,
> which Gorgias said was superior to science; the physician could tell
> you what would cure you, but could not make you take it, whereas the
> rhetorician, although ignorant of medicine, could.

I don't identify with or endorse the rhetorician Sophists, but I don't
simply condemn them either.  Clearly, if the patient won't take the
medicine, you'll have one very sick and possibly dead patient.  We'd be
fools not to acknowledge that.  But this is not to say that persuasion is
"superior" to science, only that it has its role, and an important one.  I'm
sure it'll surprise no-one that I'm deeply interested in language and
representation (and delight in them as well), and that I'm convinced of
their cultural, social and political power.  However, precisely because
they're powerful, I see them as having a crucial ethical aspect.  (At the
risk of re-opening the argument, this is a key reason why I complain about
RB's writing: I think there's an ethical dimension to *everyone's* use of
language, and that RB undercuts the social power of his ideas by not
communicating them well.)

But ethics is a complicated matter.  For example, sometimes lying is the
right thing to do.  Consider politeness: it is really necessary to tell
sweet aged Aunt Betsy that her coffee makes you gag?  So even if we prize
truth and truthfulness, here's a situation in which the worser argument, the
one for the merits of lying, is (and I think should be) the stronger.  I
suspect that some of you are a little shocked by this argument -- and by the
fact that you know it's true!  But lying can be good because it can sustain
a deeper truth, one concerning our humanity: sustaining the bonds of
sociability, friendship and love is generally more vital to us as people
than is an absolute allegiance to honesty.  In short, virtually all of
civility requires accepting the situational propriety of lying.  (Let me
emphasize *situational*, since I'm not at all advocating lying as a
universal good -- far from it.)

The ethics of language is complex in another direction as well.  Here's
James again:

> Faith for Kierkegaard meant something like "trust" -- Abraham is his
> model. Faith is akin to hope, but not hope for something finite. It is
> more like what is expressed in the phrase "Everything has a reason".
> Reason after all is the highest and defining human faculty.

James plays on words in order to advance his argument: he first uses the
term "reason" in the sense of "cause," and then uses it in the sense of
"reasoning."  Now, I disagree with him when he connects the two senses this
way -- reasons are (or can be) causes, but not all causes come from
reasoning, unless one presupposes a God directing everything's existence.
Nevertheless I don't think playing on words this way is necessarily
unethical.  On the contrary, it can be vital to the imagination and creative
thinking.  Consequently, if we strictly obeyed distinctions in meaning, we
would gravely impoverish our ability to wonder about the world; and that, I
think, *would* be woefully unethical.

Cripes, I've spent way more time than I meant to, so I'm going to split.

Thanks,

T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce



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