World and the Individual: Nature, Man, and the Moral Order by Josiah Royce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Spirit Dwells Next Door

In the beginning of the 20th century the question of global significance was an ideological one: socialism (collectivism) or capitalism (individualism). At the beginning of the 21st century the question is one of sentiment rather than ideas: reactionary resentment (nostalgic, rural, religious collectivism) or meritocratic optimism (aspiring, urban, test-passing individualism). But the essential issue is the same: how can an individual lead a meaningful life in a world which he or she did not create and which appears simultaneously to overwhelm and nurture everything they try to accomplish? This is the point of departure for The World and the Individual, and it seems as relevant today as it was when it was written in 1901.

For Royce, all human experience is shared experience. Not in the sense that we all go through the same live-events but because “by ‘human experience’ we always mean more than the facts that are verifiable by individual men.” We all find it necessary to organise our experience; but how we do so is not the result of our own experience but of the experiences of others. We are taught what our experiences mean by the people with whom we come into contact - parents, teachers, friends, colleagues. Meaning is a distinct category from experience and is necessarily, like the language in which meaning must be expressed, social. It comes from elsewhere.

What we designate as our human freedom, our free will, presupposes meaning which is the foundation of our desires, aims, and ambitions. And meaning is not only the foundation for free will, it is also the environment in which its self-determining force works. This does not imply a reduction in freedom but it does imply a particular type of freedom: “Our rational purpose... is essentially the wanderer’s purpose... in the very search itself lies the partial embodiment of what we ourselves will.” What is common, therefore, for all human beings is this inevitable search for what it is we truly want.

This condition has several corollaries. First, being human implies living in a sort of Never Never Land of unavoidable doubt about what ‘the point’ is. That doubt is not a defect but the motivating force for the search in which we are engaged. When doubt ceases, so does real human life. Second, my free will cooperates in its own compulsion. I can’t avoid engaging in the search and remain part of the human community. This paradox has no logical resolution; it is the price we pay for our reflective ability.

It is this rather oddly formed thing called our will which expresses itself continuously by interpreting what it finds. Our will establishes ‘facts’, not because it causes these facts but because it determines what constitutes a fact in the first place. And the will does so on the basis of what it considers its purpose. If the will allows itself to do so, it may even learn about what constitutes a better or worse purpose. If not, it will likely become either frustrated and resentful about its inability to achieve its purpose, or it will become single-mindedly ruthless in pursuing its fixed purpose at any cost.

However, even at its most obstinate and self-promoting, the will is actually placing itself in a subservient position. Simply paying attention to those things which are relevant to pursuing the interests our will has chosen, “involves a typically objective self-surrendering, a submissive attitude of attention... [so that] the fact observed is the fulfilment of our intention to observe that kind of fact” and no other. In short, the more myopic we are about pursuing our interests, the less freedom we exercise and the less we are even aware of our reduced freedom. Yet another paradox, therefore, of the human condition.

Royce summarises what he calls the “fatal circle of our finitude”:

“We must submit in order to succeed and must be conscious of subordinating ourselves before we can hope to find ourselves expressed... We have to presuppose our facts in order to make concrete our purposes, while we can define our facts, if at all, only in terms of our purposes.”

With such an impossibly convoluted situation, is it any wonder that many of us find solace in either ideology or the comforts of shared mass sentimentality?

There is an implication of all this which may be difficult to bear psychologically. The ‘world’ is composed not of the autonomous self-expressions of other people, what Royce calls the World of Description, but the world of socially inter-related selves who are acting with aims and purposes of which they may be entirely unaware, or which are archaic and self-deadening simply because their expression has been ossified and has trapped the will which created them. This he calls the World of Values. It is this latter world with which we have to deal as reality. This world is neither orderly nor rational in any recognisable way. But it is not inimical.

This conclusion may appear trivial until one realises that it is quite contrary to our expectations of regularity, order, and predictability, not only in our daily lives but in formal scientific research which presumes that there is a formal comprehensible structure of the universe that is there to be found. The natural state of the World of Values is chaos, not merely because individuals have diverse interests, but because none of these interests are themselves inherently stable. The meaning of the world is quite literally changing constantly as our neighbours supply us with more or less continuous supplements to our own fragmentary meanings.

The world, as it were, blows where it will, as Royce might paraphrase the gospel of John:

“The wind blows wherever it will, and you hear the sound it makes, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

The allusion is not inappropriate. What Royce is in fact suggesting is something philosophically and theologically radical, namely that what we casually call the world is in fact identical to what has been historically referred to as the Spirit. As he says explicitly:

“Our models and our inspirations, the mysterious grace that saves us, and the visible social order that moulds us - these lie at first without the Self...the free gift of the world... The ethical teaching of Plato and the gospels of the Christian Church, have agreed in insisting that the higher self is a resultant if influences which belong to the external world, and which the individual man is himself powerless to initiate. The Divine Spirit enters a man in a way that it’s own wisdom pre-determines.“

Our very dependence upon this spirit of the world is our condition of freedom. We experience and engage the spirit continually. The more we try to escape it, the more it exerts its irrepressible force. The world and the individual are one. The choices offered, ideological or emotional, between collectivism and individualism are patently absurd.

Postscript: It strikes me that Marcel Proust adopted a similar philosophy to Royce’s and made it the central theme of the first part of his In Search 0f Lost Time. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Sources of Religious Insight by Josiah Royce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Taking Reason Religiously

When intuitions about spirit are transformed into doctrinal commands, religion is reduced to a matter of tribal identity. When these same intuitions are denied a social existence, religion is reduced to a travesty of mistaken identity. Allowing religion to be what it is without forcing it into polemical categories is the main purpose of The Sources of Religious Insight. It is not so much a philosophy of religion as it is a religious appreciation of reason.

‘Be reasonable’, is the frustrated plea of many a spouse, or friend, or work colleague when confronted by the apparent intransigence of a position we find problematic. ‘Reason’ is a standard we invoke in order to overcome all false views due to everything from prejudice to error. Reason, we think, solves problems. The fact that our exhortation is not just persistently ignored but also turned right round on us to ‘Be reasonable’ in return might suggest a somewhat fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of the term.

The fact is that no one knows what constitutes reason at any moment. It has no fixed definition in daily life. It might mean ‘Be logical’, but rarely do any of us know the subtleties of Aristotelian syllogism. Or it might mean ‘Be sensible’, meaning look to your own experience or that of others to confirm what needs to be done. But, of course, no situation is identical to any previous; there are always good reasons why ‘this time’ is different. Or it might mean ‘Be less selfish’, in other words, stop wanting whatever it us you do want so we can stop this argument. This response may work sometimes with children but even then only when accompanied by the threat of coercive power.

Perhaps science knows something about reason that the rest of us don’t. The problem here is that the way science is conducted in, say, astrophysics, is very different from the way it’s conducted in molecular biology. ‘Good scientific method’ is not something either scientists or philosophers of science agree on. And the history of science shows that differences in what competent scientists have done from one period to another are often dramatic. To further complicate the mix, many, perhaps a majority of, scientific advances in some disciplines are completely accidental, the result of fortunate mistakes rather than reasoned science.

Royce’s central point in The Sources of Religious Insight is that it is a natural and universal religious skill or instinct that is the key to what we mean by reason. In this light, the book is rather precisely mis-titled and might better have been called The Religious Sources of Reason. With his typical delicacy in thought, Royce makes a thought- inducing, not to say eminently reasonable, argument.

For Royce “Insight is knowledge that makes us aware of many facts in one whole...” Insight is neither a deduction from first principles; nor can it be generated from the repetitive events of experience. Insight is the ability as well as the result of perceiving a ‘form’. Insight allows us to notice that a myriad of mechanical parts in fact constitute something called an automobile. More abstractly, insight establishes the existence of something called ‘the economy’, and ‘the planetary system’, or ‘the family’. Insight even creates a recognition of things as distinct parts of larger wholes, like atoms, and quarks, and individual human beings.

Royce then goes on to specify the nature of a religious insight, or more particularly what he considers, plausibly, the central and universal insight of religion: the need for salvation. Salvation from or for what? Royce says from our infinite and infinitely destructive neediness, “from our insatiably changing desires.” The positive dimension of salvation is the achievement of harmony, a theme which Royce has consistently developed in all of his philosophical writing.

By harmony Royce does not mean the establishment of some abstract oneness with the universe in a state of mystical transcendence. Rather he means the conception of the precise and concrete conditions that would allow us, and our fellow-man, to achieve all our aspirations without qualification, compromise or diminishment. Obviously this is an ideal state, and not one that can be achieved factually. The point of harmony is to recognise the ideal to be worked toward, a teleological focus which is as relevant and meaningful to my neighbours, all of them, as it is to me.

The common term for religious insight is ‘revelation’. Revelation is a personal phenomenon despite its more or less universal occurrence. “We are prone,” Royce says, “to live many lives, seldom noting how ill-harmonised they are... based on mutually inconsistent plans... except during moments of insight.” These are moments of revelation in which are own lives can be seen as a whole, in which a form can be discerned, even if only in vague outline. And this form is constituted not just by the different elements of my own personality with its diverse, incompatible aims, but also our place in the diversity of social systems in which we participate - familial, social, political, economic, and religious.

These moments of “wider vision” have two vitally important consequences. In the first instance they provide the functional definition of reason in terms of both aims and the pattern of life that incorporate and facilitate the achievement of these aims. Secondly, this ‘ruling form’ takes on a compelling transcendent significance, a guide for one’s life, which may never rise above the level of the unconscious, but which nonetheless has substantial psychic and emotional force. In Jungian psychology, such a vision of order is called ‘integration’. The equivalent religious term is ‘God’s Will’.

That God’s Will should be the source of reason is therefore a very reasonable conclusion in Royce’s philosophy. It is also, among other things, an assurance that salvation, the resolution of infinitely conflicting desires, is possible. “The unreasonable person is the person who can see but one thing at a time... who can grasp but one idea when a synthesis is required. The reasonable man is capable of synthesis.” Synthesis is “the viewing of many facts, or principles, or relations in some sort of unity or wholeness.” In other words, reason is not opposed to intuition but to narrowness, the inability, or more likely unwillingness, to see the forest for the trees.

There is only one method that is effective in overcoming narrowness; that is the adoption of the point of view of another as completely as one adopts one’s own - not to the exclusion of one’s own, but in addition to one’s own. This is an exercise of reason, the ability to perceive many facts in their unity. It is also the method of salvation. Insight reveals that some super-personal existence is real. Even to deny the truth of thus insight is to presume its validity. One may choose to call this reality ’spiritual’ but this does not reduce the reality of what is designated.

That there is no such thing as a ‘final Insight’ should be obvious. Not only is insight multiplied by the point of view of every human being living or ever having lived, but since insight provokes insight, there is a potentially infinite ‘feedback loop’ that continues to expand human horizons without any limit. Insights will continue to proliferate until the end, if such a thing is possible, of the universe. As it does so, reason approximates more and more closely to God’s Will, or in more secular terminology, truth.

Reason is thus the source of religious insight, but equally, religious insight is the foundation of reason. “The insight of the reason not only points out a heaven that overarches us, but also reveals an influence that invariably transforms us.” Remarkably, Royce concludes with a most pointedly ethical observation and command as antidotes to much of the philosophical nihilism produced during the 20th century: Heaven, not Hell, is other people; and God is revealed in and through them.

So if you, like me, find Richard Dawkins and your Evangelical cousins from Alabama equally creepy, yet have closet religious tendencies, this may be something for you.

Postscript: These journalistic pieces were pointed out to me by Robin Friedman and suggest that there is mileage left in Royce’s philosophy yet:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/op...
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2...
https://eu.desertsun.com/story/opinio...

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The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 by Mary Carruthers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Real Glass Bead Game

Have you ever seen the party trick in which the trembling amateur magician sits down to run through a deck of cards and memorise their order instantly? Or two decks? Or four? He remembers them flawlessly. Must be a set-up, right? Turns out it’s a pretty straightforward technique, developed in, of all places, medieval monasteries. One of many ways the monks had for remembering everything from the details of the yearly round of liturgy to who owed what to whom among their monastic tenant-farmers. Simple really when you know how.

This is one of those cases in which the inspiration for developing such ability came directly from scripture, even though it was a misinterpretation. In the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians he mentions a “wise master-builder.” In the manner of these things, some cleric reckoned this provided authorization for reviving the ancient Roman idea of using architecture as a mnemonic tool - sticking factoids or sequences in the spaces of imaginary castles that could be recalled by ‘walking through’ at a later date.

The monks took to it, quite literally, on a monumental scale. Architecture became the dominant aesthetic for an entire monastic civilization. Also in typical fashion, the quote from Paul is clearly about inventive memory, but it is willfully misinterpreted by the monks to refer to storage memory. An early confusion then between RAM and the hard drive. Pretty handy skill set nevertheless, particularly if you were illiterate.

A good technology just begs for new applications. The monks started using architectural plans not just to help keep the details of their lives and histories orderly, but to do research into the connections among things that were occurring in the natural world. Very much in the manner described by Hermann Hesse in his book, The Glass Bead Game, the architectural mnemonic was used to suggest meaningful relationships - we call them hypotheses today - among various phenomena.

What was stored, for example, in the upstairs front bedroom might hold a clue about why all the red table clothes always seemed to end up in the basement cupboard. Or how the flaming pink of flamingoes might derive from the same source as the red flames in the hearth. Particularly large, elaborate and complicated buildings were use as a penance to discipline wayward monks - under the apparent presumption that these would not be used to store up more illicit desires. Memorizing these extensive plans must have made four decks of cards a snap.

Connections arrived at through the plans could even point to possibilities beyond the architectural plans as known, to hidden basements, secret passageways, or false ceilings for example - quite literally ‘out of the box’ thinking. Of course the discovery of such hidden gems required a sort of Kabbalistic faith that something was there to be discovered. But this was to be expected: all knowledge depended on such faith; and real knowledge didn’t just jump into the eye, it demanded strenuous effort to uncover. Wasn’t this the nature of all divine revelation after all?

What the technique of ‘architectural exegesis’ subtly but thoroughly taught was the “interdependence of aspects.” Nothing was entirely separate from anything else. Fantasy might generate numerous dead ends but occasionally an implausible shaft sunk into a random wing of an edifice would yield an intellectual bonanza in its “convergent totality”, particularly in the arcane poetic language of Christian metaphysics. By using complex building plans as a focus for meditative thought, even theology could be considered as an empirical discipline. And, since both the object of meditation as well as the timing of its exercise was the same for everyone in the community, meditation was not a solitary but a communal activity.*

Charles Peguy, the French essayist and poet, inherited from this monastic tradition an almost sacred idea of architectural space. “Prophecy means,” he says, “knowing how, from the standpoint of God, to assign to things and to human beings, to events and their configurations, their place in the overall pattern.” He goes on to explain the relevance of the moral order to space: “What is just is exactly placed in relation to the axis of what is truly important , and it is therefore the beautiful coincidence of heaven and earth, time and eternity, flesh and spirit, grace and achievement, contemplation and action.”

But a beautiful space is measurable; a just space is not. In the ancient writings of Plato it is clear that the notion specifying beauty is ‘measure’ or as he sometimes writes ‘inner measuredness’. That is, the aesthetical implies measurement just as does manifestation of an aesthetic in architecture implies dimensional plans. Aesthetics is the study, therefore, of the relation of measure to the measureless.

It is these three skills - meditation, the systematic arrangement of memory, and measurement - which are the principle components of the craft of medieval thought according to Carruthers. Using the unlikely focus of architectural drawings, plans, and models, these skills could be taught. Since they were skills independent of any particular knowledge but directed toward the acquisition of knowledge in general, they could rightly be called a philosophy. It was a benign and tolerant philosophy even though it was created within a religiously dogmatic environment.

The Craft of Thought is a remarkable achievement. To enter into the medieval world not as a tourist but a resident demands an ability to appreciate not only what is there, but what might be carried in to contaminate the experience. It’s a strange world but a not altogether unfamiliar one. I suspect that, if Carruthers was never influenced by Hesse’s fantasy, she certainly must share his artistic sensibilities.

*This correlates remarkably with E I Watkin’s social conception of ‘contemplation’. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning 
by 

Frank Burch Brown

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jan 27, 2018  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: philosophy-theology, aesthetics 

Escaping the Tyranny of the Beautiful

The title of this book is not a synonym for a sort of specialized theology. Religious aesthetics is not the same thing as theological aesthetics according to Brown’s analysis. Rather a religious aesthetic is distinctive, I interpret Brown as saying, in the precise sense that it is revelatory. Theology, on the other hand, may be explanatory or descriptive, or even directive, but it is not in itself an aspect of divine revelation.

This is a highly sophisticated point of view, and also a deeply radical one. It appears to me that it is the view of perhaps the most well-known and important of 20th century theologians, Karl Barth, who convincingly denied that even scripture, much less theological writing, constitutes the Word of God. Scripture may indeed have been conceived, written, and edited by people who had a definite religious aesthetic. But in a sense it is only the remnant and echo of that aesthetic in scripture which can properly be called the Word of God.

So for Brown, the aesthetical has nothing to do with the artistic, the iconic, the tasteful, or even the beautiful or the philosophical. It cannot be derived rationally or ethically. Nor is it the product of a ‘hermeneutic’ search pattern undertaken by the human mind. The religious aesthetic ‘arrives’, one might say, suddenly and with some emotional force from somewhere entirely outside of the recipient. And in a manner perhaps like that described by Barth, it takes up residence in the human mind and demands a response, to itself as well as to what it reveals about the world.

It strikes me that Brown’s is the polar opposite thought to that presented by existential philosophers, especially those of the school of Martin Heidegger, who insist on the self-creation of one’s own aesthetic as an essential symbol of the ‘authentic’ self.* The religious aesthetic is certainly no less demanding than its existential sibling, but its demands are for recognition not for compliance. It invites but has no compulsive force.

There are several important implications of the idea of the religious aesthetic. First, it frees the human mind from what Brown calls “the tyranny of the beautiful”, that is, precisely the kind of myopic obsession which befalls people like Heidegger who dig their own spiritual graves because they insistently believe in their own press. Second, human notions of aesthetic harmony are always limited by culture, personal experience and individual talents. So there is little reliability to be expected from the process of human “aesthesis” or thought about aesthetics.

One might make a counter-objection to the religious aesthetic: What is there to ensure that the revelatory aesthetic which grips the individual is neither delusional nor merely the influence of the demonic? Certainly the existence of a large number of religious fundamentalists around the world, justifiably provokes such a question.

Brown’s idea is that there is in fact a necessary conflict or dialectic between the religious and other aesthetics, including the theological. He considers the two to be mutually informative and transformative. Both (or presumably many) are to be applied in order to interpret the world. ‘Aesthetica’, that is, objects of aesthetical perception, in fact have multiple identities. Some objects may only be perceived in one or other aesthetic - a bit like the existence of two separate worlds in the same space in China Mieville’s The City & The City. 

In Mieville’s story the city in question is divided, sometimes on a house by house basis, into two parallel worlds. Although the worlds are intertwined physically with each other, the city’s inhabitants are taught to, quite literally, not see, hear, smell, or feel what happens to those in the companion world. Residents are permitted to commute, as it were, between one world and the other through a tunnel in the city centre. Once through the tunnel they are able to engage with the alternative world but are unable to perceive the world they have just left.

In my initial reading of The City & The City, my interpretation was that the book was a commentary on ghettoization - economic, social, and racial. I saw Mieville as presenting a problem to be solved. However I have since realized that Mieville, in a manner typical of most his writing, is playing with a much broader set of issues. Implicitly my response to his ideas was epistemological: I wonder what it would take to get the residents to accept knowledge about the alternative world? I now see that Mieville has raised exactly the same issue of aesthetics that Brown articulates.

Immanuel Kant asked: What are the qualities that capture our attention to cause delight or at least the need for interpretation? Neither he nor anyone else has come up with a satisfactory answer to this question. Brown suggests a response which indicates the futility of Kant’s question. If meaning of any kind depends on relationships among things - people, ideas, events, words - then something has meaning only for someone in particular and only in relation to something else. 

‘Nothing’ is not something else. Only someTHING else is something else. We need not perceive this something else in order for it to act as the existential foil for our interpretation of the world, but it is nevertheless necessary as a sort of potential, a place to go in order to get our bearings on the aesthetic which defines our usual world. 

I think there’s a good chance that Mieville and Brown converge productively on this very point. Brown’s religious aesthetic seems to me the universal alternative to whatever ‘secular’ aesthetic one happens to be using. The religious and the secular cannot, must not, be consolidated into some sort of composite. It is possible to move back and forth from one to the other but only by taking one’s mind and its perceptive categories through a somewhat dark transitional tunnel. Is it fanciful to suggest the toll for the passage is in a currency called by a traditional name: Grace?

*See for example https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript: Both Mieville and Brown present a situation that also prevails historically in the Christian Church. Almost since the time of its establishment, perhaps even at its establishment, the Church has been composed of two opposing factions: the episcopal church of hierarchy, dogma, and power vs. the monastic church of fraternity, spiritual sensitivity, and self-denial. When the tension between these two factions exists, the church as a whole seems most healthy. When either faction dominates, the church becomes merely a component of the world or a vague New Age tendency without any substance. I think this can be seen most clearly in the history of Christianity in England in which the dominant poles of York (founded by Irish monks) and Canterbury (founded by emissaries from Rome) have struggled against each other for a millennium. Episcopal Canterbury, led by Henry VIII, was motivated to overcome monastic York in the Reformation largely because of the overwhelming success of monasticism during the previous 500 years. The principle difference between the English and Continental Reformations is that the former was episcopal, the latter monastic. The idea of the religious vs. the theological aesthetic would fit the situation equally well.

 

The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics 
by 

Mark Lilla

 

The Obscenely Obsessive Aesthetics of Philosophers

Some weeks ago I criticised a book on scientific aesthetics by a well known scientist for its failure to adequately investigate the fundamental aesthetic drives of individual scientists and of the scientific profession.* If I had read The Reckless Mind first, I could have simply pointed to it as a model for how to carry out such an exercise. Lilla’s book is stuffed with a sensitive appreciation of what makes people who make a living with their minds tick. And his final theoretical speculations are outstandingly provocative.

The main difference in subject matter in the two books is that, while both are about famous intellectuals, Chandrasekhar’s scientists are less controversial than Lilla’s philosophers. The flaws of the latter may be more apparent; but I can’t see any plausible reason why that should make their criteria for living life substantially more visible. Lilla simply does a much better job of shifting through and filtering the mass of largely irrelevant biographical dross to reveal the likely kernel of these remarkable lives. My interpretation of Lilla’s interpretation of Heidegger in the book’s first vignette will, I hope, give a sense of the remarkable job he’s done

Heidegger was a protege of the German philosopher of phenomenology, Karl Jaspers. Heidegger and Jaspers shared an interest in so-called ‘limit situations’, those highly distressing states of severe anxiety and guilt that bring with them the possibility of an appreciation of existence itself. A psychological investigation of these men might presume that such an interest represents some kind of psychological disorder or trauma. But Lilla recognises this as an aesthetical not a psychological fact. It is a concern not originating in one’s history but one shaping one’s future. The concern is symptomatic of a positive, one might say ‘vocational’, stance to the world that hints at the aesthetic involved as an end in itself.

The growing emotional separation of Heidegger and Jaspers during the 1920’s reveals more detail about the aesthetics of each. For Heidegger a limit situation meant not one caused by any particular emotional or physical stress, but the more “primordial anxiety” of “being” itself, specifically the mode of being human. This aesthetic explicitly manifests itself in the gap between the two men when Heidegger writes a review of a book by Jaspers in 1923, and widens thereafter.

The differences between Jaspers and Heidegger were not in the first instance intellectual but aesthetic. Each had a distinctive perspective on the world. An aesthetic is not a rational theory but a filter which simultaneously screens what our experiences will be and guides our responses to them. An aesthetic is necessarily therefore ‘pre-theoretic’, although it may inspire subsequent conceptual development, which, in turn, makes the aesthetic more articulate.

Jaspers’s conception of the limit situation was one of a sort of pre- or anti-Kantian ‘thing-in-itselfness’ which focused his attention on the totality of possible expressions by the world to his consciousness. His phenomenology, however successful or unsuccessful it was, was an aesthetic of ‘sweeping in’ as many perspectives and experiences as possible. It eventually inspired some interesting variations of modern systems theory.

Heidegger’s aesthetic on the other hand accepted Kant’s dictum of the essential alienation of things, the world in general, from the human mind, including the human mind itself, and set about constructing an aesthetic strategy for dealing with this problem. For this, Heidegger created his own aesthetic: Dasein, presence, or the experience of simply being. Dasein as an aesthetic can be known because it is constructed; it does not exist unless one wills it. And it is solely what one wills it to be. Daseinis the aesthetic of one’s own self-creation. This is not a matter of playing God but of actually being divine.

Jaspers implicitly recognises that Dasein is an aesthetic not an intellectual concept, and that it is the principle source of Heudegger’s intellectual power. “He seems to notice what no one else saw,” Jaspers writes in his notebook. Indeed, the things Heidegger saw when he looked at the world were remarkable for their myopic concentration. For example, at one point Jaspers confronts him about Hitler, “How can such an uncultivated man like Adolf Hitler govern Germany?” To which Heidegger responds, “Culture doesn’t matter. Just look at his marvelous hands.” Quite a filter indeed!

The aesthetic of Dasein seeks out and responds to ‘authenticity’. For Heidegger this does not mean honesty, sincerity, ‘being true to oneself.’ Authenticity means taking a ‘stand’ in the world, that is, making a definite choice among innumerable possibilities about who one will be, dismissing as irrelevant those concerns of daily life which inhibit or obscure that stand. Dasein is therefore purposively obsessive. There is no room in its aesthetic for judgments of relative worth of virtue, morality, or constraints, much less for political awareness. And when Dasein’s radar comes across a similarly obsessive Dasein like Hitler, it can only respond as it did: “Just look at his marvelous hands.”

Heidegger was also passionate about what he saw through this filter. Like a sommelier with attitude, he insisted on his aesthetic until many others could taste the delicate balance of his ideas and see exactly how they fit the disparate pieces of the world with a special elegance. Enthusiasm is of course the first rule of sales. What Heidegger was selling so enthusiastically was not so much a complex vocabulary but a way to experience the world. 

This is precisely what his popularizers in programmers like EST and Landmark, and other variants of the Human Potential Movement, which are run by his commercial epigones, have capitalized on so successfully. They sell the experience of the aesthetic and then themselves, over and over again. Heidegger’s ideas are a sort of tribal vocabulary that one hears from time to time in public utterances by celebrities, university presidents, and politicians who have been through these programmes.

At some point, before 1933 in any case, Heidegger’s passionately promoted aesthetic consumed its inventor. Jaspers wrires in his autobiography that “It could sometimes seem that a demon had crept into him.”So successful in formulating and demonstrating the power of his aesthetic for interpreting the world, Heidegger apparently forgot that Dasein was an invention, not reality. Lilla reports a conversation in 1936 between Heidegger and the historian Karl Lowith, in which Heidegger explicitly refers to the source of his Nazi sympathy as his own writings. Believing his own academic press, he joined the Nazi Party and his name remains tainted ever since. 

One conclusion I draw for Lilla’s Heidegger is that an aesthetic can have great power. In general, the more articulate it is, the more powerful, not just in its ability to organize the world of experience in some more orderly way, but also by attracting others to share in its power. Even after the war, Jaspers, despite criticising Heidegger’s conceptual intellect as authoritarian and recommending to the French war crimes committee that he be prohibited from teaching, still found his aesthetic fascinating. In a letter to Hannah Arendt, Jaspers admits that Heidegger “has knowledge of something that hardly anyone notices these days.” Jaspers’s fascination was not with His friend’s intellect but with the fact “that he lives in depths and with a passion that one dies not easily forget.”

When such a powerful aesthetic escapes from the consciousness of those who use it; as soon as it slips gently into the instinctive, and indeed primordial, parts of the mind; as soon as it is no longer a choice but an involuntary response to the world, it becomes a danger to everyone who comes into contact with it. Jaspers quotes a remark by Heidegger which could be the operational slogan for the aesthetic of Dasein: “One must get involved.” Having made one’s commitment, there are no other significant choices to be made.

And the most startling thing about Heidegger is that he knew this to be a clear danger in purely intellectual terms. Language is, as it were, the ‘ground’ of the aesthetical. An aesthetic cannot stay bottled up as mere sensory perception, it must be expressed in order to exist. And language is the most articulate means for its expression. But language becomes invisible; it hides both itself and the things it denotes. It effectively washes it hands of what it promotes or implies by claiming neutrality or objectivity - what Richard Rorty called the Mirror of Reality. All of this is captured in one of Heidegger’s best known aphorisms: “Language,” he says, “speaks man.” Having forgotten we created it, language exerts a power which is God-like in its transcendence and universal presence. Yet Heidegger entirely de-railed his rational faculty in favour of his aesthetic commitment.

Heidegger’s life is an example of what happens when an aesthetic goes rogue. He didn’t so much join fascism as pursue his criterion of what counts in the world and how what counts fits together without reflection in an insidious trap he had built for himself. The central paradox of Heidegger’s philosophy is that the conscious choice of an aesthetic stand on the world can be even more debilitating and destructive than being manipulated by the world. At least the latter allows for learning and adaptive evolution. Heidegger didn’t recognise that any fixed aesthetic, no matter how it is arrived at, is deadly and so his philosophy never addresses the issue.

Instead of shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave, what Heidegger saw was his own cave paintings flickering in the fire light. It made him giddy, drunk on his home brew, and eventually hung over and claiming he had been a victim. It’s amazing what aesthetics can do to folk, particularly really clever ones.

*https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Theology of Money by Philip Goodchild
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Much More Than Mammon

The 2nd century apologist for Christianity, Tertullian, asked ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ His point was that it really wasn’t possible to get from Greek thinking to Christian (or for that matter Jewish) faith. In a time when scholarship, or even critical thought, is considered substantially less virtuous than wealth, the question today might more appropriately be ‘What does Wall Street have to do with Trinity Place?’ The two streets don’t intersect in the financial district of Manhattan. Yet they have had a connecting passageway through the venerable Trinity Church for the last 300 years, a sort of corpus collosum between the two halves of the modern cultural brain. Goodchild’s The Theology of Money provides just such an intellectual connection between the mammon of money, wealth and financial power and the maid of religion, faith, and spiritual being.

Goodchild considers theology to be “the most fundamental and radical form of inquiry.” By this he means not the derivation of economic truths from scriptural sources or ancient church authorities, but rather the investigation of our most central, and often most hidden, beliefs. Among these beliefs is that of the nature of “true wealth.” Since “The quest for wealth is the one practical activity that unites the diverse people of the contemporary globalized world” the issue is general and constantly pressing on all.

Although Goodchild’s argument is ‘non-sectarian’ as it were, his motivation is Christian. He perceives that “Jesus’s announcements raise the most fundamental of theological problems: What is the value of values.” Since this formulation is a bit elliptical, he also states the issue in operational terms: “Do our scales of evaluation express true value?” This is a crucial insight which immediately demonstrates the potential of theological analysis.

The issue is not one of accurately measuring value on any particular scale - market price, GDP, the Gini coefficient of income inequality, or an individual utility function - but of choosing which of these metrics, among an infinity of other possibilities, is the right one. The truth of whatever choice is made is “not itself objective [but] a subjective presupposition.” There is no such thing as a scientific, neutral, or disinterested metric of value, regardless of how standardized or widespread the use of the metric. The standardization of metrics itself may appear as a disciplinary advance; but it is in reality a way of removing such metrics from political debate about what constitutes value.*

Money, Goodchild recognises, is only one possible metric of value. But because it is so pervasively thought of, and taught, as the ultimate value that can acquire all other things of value, “money veils the source of the value of values.” He goes on go make the theological connection explicit: “Being transcendent to material and social reality, yet also being the pivot around which material and social value is continually reconstructed, financial value is essentially religious.” This may have the same import as the traditional idea ‘Mammon as God’, but it is at a considerably greater level of precision and operational significance that the traditional shibboleth.

Goodchild also takes takes into account (!) the social institutions that support and maintain the dominance of money as universal standard of value. Chief among these is accounting: “The paradox of accounting is that it directs attention to that which is counted rather than to that which matters.” He then makes the somewhat incongruous claim that “that which is truly valuable always escapes representation and counting.” This claim suggests a prejudice not a conclusion.

I think the prejudice regarding quantitative measurement arises, at least in part, because Goodchild doesn’t recognise the fundamental difference between financial accounting** and management accounting. In the later, that is within the corporate environment, the metric of money is routinely distorted - through transfer pricing, cost allocations, and physical production targets, for example - in order to encourage or deter economic behaviour. And such distortions may be altered more of less continually depending upon circumstances, particularly what corporate employees learn about value itself. That no one considers such distortion as anything but sensible and necessary suggests that we all retain some intuitive awareness of the inadequacy of the metric of money.

Democracy is another institution which contributes to the deification of the metric of money. ‘One man, one vote’ is mirrored in economics by the idea of ‘One man (or woman), one utility function,’ which ideologically has as much sovereignty as the electoral franchise. If this is accepted in social convention, and it generally is, then the only metric of social welfare possible is money. The fact that money then has the potential to undermine democracy itself through the purchase of influence is seen as an incidental by-product of an ideology rather than an inevitable consequence of the metric. As Goodchild summarises the situation: “the inevitable outcome of liberal democracy, lacking a determination of higher goals, is subjection to consumer desire.”

Goodchild therefore articulates what He calls “a crisis of representation” about value. The deification of the metric of money does not occur because it is singled out and worshipped as the supreme good. Although I’m sure there are such people, I certainly know no one who has the goal of accumulating as much money as they can for its own sake. Almost everyone, I think, would agree this would be psychotic.

The deification takes place by not even noticing the metric of money at all, particularly its source. The metric of money, like all metrics of value, is a social convention that has been incrementally defined over centuries. It is an abstraction that has taken on the character of the hyper-real, as something over which no one has any control or influence. In short, the metric of money is transcendent, omnipotent, and omnipresent, that is to say,.... God. Such a perception is neither scientifically irrational nor religiously delusional. It merely describes our reality.

The crisis for Goodchild is not that we are getting things wrong about money. Like all metaphysical concepts, the metric of money may not be correct, but it cannot be proven wrong. Philosophically speaking, value is its own representation. That is to say, one cannot compare one metric of value with another in order to determine if one ‘represents value better’. ‘Better’ would be the comparative for what? Some other metric perhaps, but then the problem simply escalates. It can’t be resolved by any rational means.

But there is a chance to resolve the representation of value politically. Goodchild notes that “money does not exist outside of accounts” Accounts, the records of mutual obligations, is not just the register of money, it is money tout court. As has been shown by the rise and bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, there is nothing beyond, underlying, or defining the metric of money other than these ledgers. This is why he is correct in saying that “accounting is an exercise in collective imagination” and simultaneously “the measure of that which is taken for granted” - a fundamental paradox of modern existence.

Therefore it is correct to say that “A revaluation of all values may begin with the practices of accounting.” But Goodchild bemoans the absence of any social or governmental institution that could initiate or sustain such a revaluation. In this he is being myopic, for this is precisely the role of the modern corporation in the 21st century. The corporation is an institution, regardless of its many unfortunate flaws, which has by law and organizational power, removed itself from the constraints of ‘the market’ and the market’s principle metric of value, money.

As indicated above, the corporate organization, because it has substituted agreement for contractual obligation within itself, has the power and the experience to displace the dominance of the metric of money. And through its ability to influence the behaviour of its customers, it also has substantial power to establish new metrics in society generally. ‘But DAZ because it makes clothes whiter’ and ‘Show how innovative you can be with Apple’ are not empty slogans. They are concerted attempts to establish the metrics of whiteness and innovativeness as the criteria that are used by consumers, with the recognition that superior value must be delivered on that very specific metric.

The corporate organization has the motivation necessary to undermine the metric of money. Having established a metric in the market, it can only deliver on that metric if its internal metrics are aligned with it - from the mailroom to the boardroom. And it can only facilitate this alignment if it understands and reconciles the various metrics that are already ‘in play’ by its experienced employees in Sales, Operations, IT, and especially in Finance and Accounting where metrics are hatched, authorized, and disseminated throughout the organization. Employees almost always have a far more precise idea about what constitutes value than any corporate CEO.

The fact that Goodchild has missed an important, perhaps the only real, possibility for realizing his aims of increasing awareness of metrics of value, as well as of creating an institutional mechanism for formulating and promulgating them, does not degrade his theory. His argument about the priority of scales or metrics over the acts necessary to establish a measurement on a metric are exactly right. His realization that metrics of value are both transcendent and political is a crucial insight. His understanding of the subtle institutional pressures that prevent the displacement of the metric of money is perceptive and correct.

My suggestion therefore is that Goodchild appreciate what is actually at hand to do exactly what he suggests doing.

*I find it instructive that in 2008, the year after the publication of The Theology of Money, Niall Ferguson published his Ascent of Money which traces the same patterns of thought. In his book Ferguson catalogues the various types of error in measurement that economists worry about. These include:
* Availability bias
* Hindsight bias
* The problem of induction
* The problem of the fallacy of composition
* The fallacy of conjunction
* Confirmation bias
* Contamination effects
* The problem of affect heuristics
* Scope effect
* Calibration overconfidence
* Bystander apathy
I’m sure there are many more potential sources of error in economic metrics that are studied intensely and worked on to mitigate or eliminate. However nowhere in economics is there even a term for the problem of having the wrong metric to begin with. A strange science indeed.

**The metaphysical issues of financial accounting - as in the distinction between investment and expense, the valuation of consolidated vs. unconsolidated assets, and the nature of accounting profit and book capital - are so standardized and fixed by the accounting profession that there seems little hope of ever achieving the kind of progress Goodchild is hoping for in this area.

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A Philosophy of Form by Edward Ingram Watkin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Contemplating the Truth Together

Don’t let anyone convince you that the old - ideas, things, people - are merely archaic. Most often they contain little gems - of insight, craftsmanship, and wisdom - that reward even the slightest effort to recover them. A Philosophy of Form is an example of the point.

E. I. Watkin was a polymath - a philosopher, an aesthetic theorist, a poet, and occasionally even a theologian, among other things. He was a Catholic convert so much of his writings contain modern interpretations of medieval scholastic philosophy, particularly that of Thomas Aquinas. I find such apologetic material more self-rationalizing than analytic. But his A Philosophy of Form contains some stimulating thinking about the social character of aesthetics and a general method of reconciling aesthetic differences. This review covers only these aspects of his theory.

To some extent A Philosophy of Form is a period piece. ‘Form’ was typical of how one talked about aesthetics in the 1930’s. This is especially so for theoreticians with a Platonist tendency since it was Plato’s ‘eternal forms’ that inspired much of their thought. And if nothing else, Watkin is a card-carrying Platonist. But although his language is a bit archaic, his insights are still novel.

For Watkin, Form is “the nature of things.” This includes characteristics like shape, colour, dimensions, and so forth; but also everything else that can be ascribed to any object, idea or event. Form, therefore constitutes a kind of potential even if some aspects are never observed or recorded. This is obviously meant as a reference to Platonic ontology. The Forms constitute ultimate reality and their ‘nature’ is what one investigates in order to appreciate examples of a Form as it is manifest in a concrete material object, an idea, or event, or even an emotion. “Forms as such cannot change.” They are always complete.

“Matter,” on the other hand, “is the potency of receiving Form.” Matter is never encountered except in its union with Form. Individual things occur through this union. Form exists independently of Matter only in God. Some Matter may be ‘dead’ in the sense that it does not have the potential to develop more fully into its proper Form. Or, what amounts to the same thing, “a Form whose material expression is not renewed or improved.” If all this sounds a bit antique, it’s because it is fairly standard ancient Greek metaphysics. But Watkin uses it in a new way.

The human mind desires to know, to find the truth; it drives towards an ultimate reality. This is realizable only through Form not Matter. And the human faculty which permits and executes this search is called Contemplation. Contemplation is the activity that allows us to assemble wholes from parts. It is the same capacity as that described by Wordsworth in his poem Prelude (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). The apprehension of Form achieved through Contemplation is the standard or ideal by which we can judge our knowledge which is always a subjective, and therefore partial, truth.

Contemplation then is the perception of Form. Since Form is the standard of truth, it is also the ultimate measure of value. In other words, value is a Form of the divine. Without a perception of this Form, no action, rational or not, can be undertaken. That is, without a contemplative sense of the Form of value, we are left in the position of Ballam’s ass in the biblical parable - unable to choose between two equally attractive sources of food, and therefore dying of hunger.

It is significant that Watkin feels that “Mathematical Forms of quantity are the most clearly apprehensible.” Quantitative measurement is not more difficult than other kinds of perception, but in fact easier. The reason is because human beings are closer to these Mathematical Forms than any others. In a sense they are jointly created by God and man and so can be perceived through Contemplation more clearly and directly than others. Quantification therefore is not an inhibition to assessment of truth, beauty, and goodness, but a method of facilitating such assessment.

Perhaps most important in Watkin’s metaphysics is the belief that Contemplation is not a personal, private activity, but a social, public process involving, in principle, the entire planet: “Only the total life of humanity as a whole can obtain a vision of truth adequate to the entire capacities of the human mind.” Put another way, we can all know what any of us knows but no more than that... and no less. The establishment of the standards of truth are necessarily, and radically inclusive. Any deviation from absolute inclusivity distorts these standards and therefore compromises the truth.*

Contemplation therefore is a union of Freedom and Unity. It provides a view of what truly is but only in concert with other human beings. We must not mistake the recognition of truth as an individual achievement:

“... the successful statesman, financier or general, usually regarded as so pre-eminently and exclusively practical, owes his success to the faculty of seeing the wood in the trees, the form which gives unity and significance to a host of details, chaotic to the less gifted observer. He owes it to the power of contemplation.”

Watkin’s ‘bottom line’ as far as my interests go is that there is a necessary ethos implied by Contemplation:

“The entire human race is alone adequate to the sum of human contemplation. Recognition of this fact must unite men in a sympathy with points of view they cannot themselves share in the understanding which such sympathy begets, and in a humble appreciation of whatever is valuable and true in the belief and practice of others.”

“Contemplation unites,” he says, “by discovering unity.” It therefore demands a commitment of faith that what will result through Contemplation is a discovery. Certainly if such faith in one’s fellows is lacking no discovery is possible. And there is no absolute guarantee that any community or group can maintain the necessary level of mutual faith long enough to make this discovery. Therefore effective Contemplation is a risky business. Nevertheless, Contemplation is the necessary and sufficient condition for reason to function and for society and its constituent individuals to strive toward real value.

The alternative of course is coercion with its inevitable suffering, expense, and ineffectualness. It certainly seems worth the risk to me. Then again, perhaps that’s just an old man being old.

*Mary Carruthers makes a similar suggestion in her study of medieval monastic thought. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Economic Philosophy by Joan Robinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Smoke and Mirrors

Joan Robinson was a Keynesian economist, a Communist, a defender of the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong and of the ‘economic miracle’ of 1950’s North Korea - so not all that prophetically gifted. She nonetheless in one of the few economists who had something interesting to say about the implicit philosophy underlying their discipline.

Robinson had a healthy non-philosopher’s understanding of philosophy. For her, philosophy is metaphysics, and “The hallmark of a metaphysical proposition is that it is not capable of being tested.” Scientistic types are likely to complain that this makes them useless in practice or as the focus of serious inquiry.

But Robinson recognises precisely why metaphysics is so important to all science but especially to social science. “Metaphysical statements,” she says, “are a guide to conduct... and a quarry from which hypotheses can be drawn.” That is, metaphysics consists of the fundamental, largely shared, presumptions which are critical for structured discussion in any scientific discipline. Mostly these presumptions are taken for granted ‘as the way the world really is’ and ignored as ‘too obvious’ to be questioned.

Metaphysics is an implicit set of rules which are typically condensed into an ideology. Ideology, she believes, is necessary to justify an economic system - capitalist, socialist, corporatist, or any other. Ideology is also necessary to guide the consciences of those who act within an economic system. It is the invisible glue that maintains order and integrity without the need for explicit laws or constraints except at the margins of the system.

Economics, therefore, is in a sense a branch of theology. Its metaphysics creates a world that is real only because people think it so. Robinson uses the example of economic capital to make her point. The term capital is used in the formulation of many doctrines of economics. But there was, and still is, no consensus on what economic capital might be - a store of potentially productive wealth? The equipment required to manufacture and distribute goods? The organizational skills and ‘implicit knowledge’ of a workforce? An accounting residue of the difference between assets and liabilities? None or all of these?

But as she says, “Economics is not only a branch of theology.” It does affect the consciences of individuals on a large scale, and it does take place in a sort of public ritual, a liturgy of work one might say. But it also, as such liturgy, affects the welfare, suffering, and physical state of its congregations. Economics is not just an evangelical religion, it is a political activity.

“One of the great metaphysical ideas” in economics, perhaps its core, is that of ‘value’. Value “does not mean usefulness - the good that goods do us. It does not mean market prices.” Robinson quotes the late 18th century economist David Ricardo as setting the enduring conception of economic value:

“The only quality necessary to make a measure of value a perfect one is that it should itself have value, and that value should itself be invariable, in the same manner as a perfect measure of length, the measure should have length and that length should be neither liable to be increased or not diminished, or in a measure of weight that it should have weight and that such weight should be constant.”

In short, value is a convention, the only necessary component of which is a reliable scale or metric. There are any number of reliable metrics. So value in economics has no definite meaning. Rather it depends solely on the choice of metric. And metrics of value, because they are metaphysical entities, cannot be proven or disproven; they can only be accepted or rejected. “A metaphysical belief, as in the law of value, cannot be wrong.”

This belief about value has always been problematic for the discipline. Ultimately it emerges as the concept of ‘utility’, essentially the personal, proprietary metric of value for each individual. As Robinson recognizes, this is somewhat of a dead end because, “Utility is a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities which makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy these commodities shows that they have utility.”

The central concept of classical economics therefore is grounded on a political objective that is made clear in its metaphysics: the justification of laissez-faire economics. Government involvement and interference in economic activity can only inhibit and impede the use of individual metrics of value and the exercise of personal utilities. That is, government is by its very nature economically coercive and freedom-reducing.*

Precisely the same arguments are used in the 21st century by today’s neo- liberals as by the advocates of laissez-faire in the early 19th century. By the standards of metaphysics, they might not be right, but they are certainly not wrong. Interestingly, however, neo-liberals today add a small but important codicil to the historical metaphysical legacy. The metric of value, they believe, is not only entirely personal, it is also secret, even to the individuals who employ it. It is also immune from outside influence, things like advertising, public opinion, fear or irrational rumour.

Consequently, the economic metaphysics of value, although intended to defend freedom of choice, in fact eliminates freedom by its insistence on a sort of succubus or demon of economic choice which directs human activity from a mysterious place in the Freudian Id.

Philosophically, economics has recreated a Leibnizian world of isolated monads who know nothing beyond their own existence and only have the illusion of voluntary interaction with fellow-monads. In fact they are being manipulated and coordinated, as Leibniz reckoned, by God. Hence it doesn’t appear too much of a stretch to conclude that economics is very much the religion that deifies illusion as its object of worship. To the extent economics is also more than this, it is dangerous.

*It is worthy of note, although economists don’t want to advertise the fact, that the problem of the individualistic and proprietary character of utility has been solved in financial economics by the convenient mechanism of ignoring utility theory altogether. In fact financial economics contradicts classical economics by proposing that, as far as investment is concerned, there are uniform rules of rational preference that apply rigidly to all investors. Utility theory plays no part in financial economics whatsoever. Financial Economics has a very different ideological interest than laissez-faire. It’s agenda, starting with the early 20th century American Robber Barons, has been the justification of corporate consolidations as in the public interest. Freedom for financial economics means not the freedom to follow one’s preferences, but the freedom to follow the dictates of financial theory unencumbered by governmental interference. It’s a strange old world.

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Critique of Judgment 
by 

Immanuel Kant, 

 

Werner S. Pluhar (Translator)

 

The Sublimity of Measurement

My recent interest is in the aesthetics of measurement, that is, in the criteria we use to chose a scale, or metric, when we make measurements of any kind, scientific or as part of everyday life. This choice of metric is the most important factor in measurement since mistakes in choosing an inappropriate metric are far more significant than any subsequent errors in using a metric. Mistakes in the choice of metric are also far more difficult to detect because they involve judgmental not technical lapses. Judgments about these criteria of importance and value tend to become ‘self-sealing’ by eliminating rival criteria as a matter of course.

Immanuel Kant wrote a great deal about aesthetics but almost all of what he wrote concerns the limited area of beauty in art. This is a subject treated with special depth in The Critique of Judgment. So, although there is unlikely to be much explicit about the broader considerations of aesthetics, I’m hopeful of some inspiration that can be useful in my own theory. 

As far as I am aware Kant unfortunately says nothing systematic about measurement. Nevertheless there are hints and suggestions about his views scattered in The Critique of Judgment. My intention is to investigate a few of these clues to his thinking, and to steal them if I can for my own purposes.

As part of his analysis, Kant assesses what he calls ‘teleological judgment’, that is the choices we make about ends, purposes and goals, rather than about the means to achieve these. This is where I shall focus my investigation since it most closely touches on the pivotal question in any measurement: Why? This is a question of value that is typically neglected in the discussion of measurement simply because measurement can appear to be purely instrumental. That it never is places it squarely in the realm of teleological judgment.

For Kant, judgment is a human ‘faculty’, a capability which has certain powers and limits. Judgment is “the capacity to subsume under rules, that is, to distinguish whether something falls under a given rule.” In my terminology this ‘rule’ is the practical name for an aesthetic. In choosing such a rule, we are taking a definite ‘stance’ regarding the world. The rule is both a filter and an ordering principle. The act of judgment presumes, I believe, that the rule is more or less articulate and therefore subject to conscious revision. In other words, we can learn about the rule.

Judgment has two functions therefore: determining and reflecting. Determining involves finding the right ‘universal’, that is concept or word for the situation at hand. Thus this function covers the choice of rule or aesthetic, that is, the metric of measurement. Reflective judgment is particularly relevant to the related activities of aesthetic choice and purposeful behaviour. It is the source of what Kant calls ‘empirical concepts’, that is, for my purposes, the range of aesthetic rules or metrics that one has at one’s disposal. 

An aesthetic judgment, Kant says, is based on a ‘feeling’, that is a sensory perception of satisfying ‘rightness’. Unlike subsequent 19th century philosophers and 20th century neo-liberals, Kant does not consider such a feeling fixed or isolated from social effects, so I have no objection to using feeling as the basis for aesthetic judgments in measurement. Once again, since this feeling is the emotional equivalent to a rule, it can be, indeed must be, made more or less explicit in language. 

Kant’s ideas about beauty, although stimulating for my purposes, are not directly relevant to the issues of measurement. But his concept of the Sublime is. “The experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of our own power of reason, as a supersensible faculty, over nature.” The specific category of the ‘mathematically sublime’ appears especially important for empirical measurement. 

The feeling of the mathematically sublime is not one of human arrogance but of a recognition that we can reason beyond that which we can imagine. For example, we can’t imagine what infinity is or looks like, but we can use the idea of infinity in our reasoning with little difficulty. The mathematically sublime, therefore, appears to me as a sort of power of transcendent imagination, what the 19th century American philosopher, C S Peirce would call ‘abduction’. Briefly, this power manifests itself as the ability to create, invent, discover novel hypotheses about the world. Such hypotheses can be neither inductively nor deductively derived. They appear more as intuitive but plausible guesses about what might fit best with our intentions.

My suggestion is that the mathematically sublime is the source of metrics, as both a range of alternatives and as a particular choice from among these. Metrics are not found in nature; they are imposed upon it. As far as we know, only human beings have this power of imposition. Things like numbers and metrics can’t be considered as anything other than ‘real’, but their reality is the consequence of human reasoning not natural evolution. Sublimity strictly speaking “is not contained in anything in nature, but only in our mind” 

Thus the mathematically sublime, or abduction, or any other description of this ability is a “faculty of the mind which surpasses every standard of sense.” In other words, the mathematically sublime goes beyond ‘mere’ feeling. It may have its roots in feeling but according to Kant, it then transcends feeling completely. This, I believe, is the pivotal link between aesthetics and measurement in his philosophy. Measurement imposes our purpose on whatever is being measured. This is a crucial recognition. The properties measured are not part of the object, they are the product of our intention. 

This recognition also raises the possibility of a ‘morality of measurement’. If we inevitably impose our purposes on things measured, we have at least two moral responsibilities: to consider those purposes explicitly and to recognise that measurement is not a morally neutral or objective activity of inquiry. The aesthetic judgments involved in measurement are arguably the most significant and profound of any in science.

Thank you, Immanuel, for your inspiring thought.

 

Science of Logic 
by 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 

 

A.V. Miller (translator)

 

Nothing So Practical As a Good Theory

I read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit almost a half-century ago. I can recall its poetic beauty but none of its content. I have never read The Science of Logic, a definite gap in my education but one I will have to live with, at least in part. My purpose in consulting The Science of Logic at this late date is only to understand Hegel’s conception of measurement. Since everything in Hegel’s work is intimately connected to everything else, I will undoubtedly make substantive interpretive errors. Nonetheless I hope my reading is adequate to establish if my own theory of measurement (see below) is compatible with his, and if not where it differs.

Like the Phenomenology, I take the Logic as a treatise about language and language-using more than about reasoning or science as it is or should be conducted. Hegel’s concern is inquiry in general not specific issues in any scientific discipline. Language, unavoidably, mediates all inquiry. So Hegel developed a somewhat complex language about language. And language about language always seems somewhat dense if not cramped and arbitrary. But since I am not attempting to re-establish Hegel’s language system, I feel entitled to ‘translate’ the terms relevant to my inquiry into terms which are in more or less everyday use. 

Hegel begins his discussion of measurement with the statement: “Abstractly expressed in measure, quality and quantity are united.” Quality and quantity do have technical categorical meaning in the Logic. But they seem to me to near enough in denotation to be used colloquially. I consider this statement therefore to be in my Propositions (1) & (2). That is, measurement requires the qualitative choice of a metric or scale, which is itself quantitative. Thus quality and quantity are indeed united in the establishment of a metric.

Hegel’s definitional argument then brings in his category of ‘mode’, a term to which there is no convenient colloquial term. Modes are forms of ‘productive expression’, in other words, of meaning. There are two modes, relative and absolute. A relative mode has an indeterminate meaning since there is no established link between possibility and necessity. In absolute mode there is no contingency, or more precisely, contingency and necessity are congruent because of what he calls the “initial conditions of productive expression.” “Mode,” he says, “has the specific meaning of measure.”

The modal character of a metric, I believe, corresponds to my Proposition (3). Metrics are defined, that is, their initial conditions are established, so that they are absolute in Hegel’s sense. There is no question, for example, that the choice of a linear numerical metric means that the number 1 is always less than the number 2, which is twice 1. This is not contingent but necessary as part of the metric.

After a digression into Spinoza’s (faulty) consideration of mode, he returns to his own theory, and says, “everything depends on the kind and manner of the mode; such an admission means that the mode itself is declared to belong essentially to the substantial nature of a thing.” Despite its degree of abstraction, which is absolute, a metric nevertheless exists. Metrics are, in other words, real objects even though their tires cannot be kicked nor their attributes described except in terms of a definition. This is implicit in my Propositions (2), (3), & (4), but probably should be made explicit.

Hegel then gets to the heart of his theory when he says, “Measure... is an external kind and manner of determinateness, a more or less, but at the same time it is equally reflected into itself, a determinateness which is not indifferent and external but intrinsic; it is thus the concrete truth of being. That is why mankind has revered measure as something inviolable and sacred.” Unpacking this a bit: measure, in my terms a metric, is ‘external’, that is to say it is not an attribute or a property of an object other than the metric itself. It is, in a sense, sovereign because of its existence as absolute mode.

This externality of the metric is explicit in my first two Propositions. Measurements are not properties of objects other than the metric. Rather objects become properties of the metric. They are assigned a specific place or space on a metric in the act of measurement. On the other hand, metrics are also intrinsic to themselves, that is, any part of the metric is representative of the whole, and is fundamentally unchanged by the assignment of extrinsic properties of the objects that are measured. To summarise: measured objects do not have the properties measured; measurements are properties only of the metric employed. 

This is why the metric is “reflected into itself... and has a determinateness which is intrinsic.” A measurement may be made at various degrees of precision, but at whatever degree it is made, it is determinate. This too is implicit in Proposition (3) but also needs to be made explicit. Among other things this determinateness of measurement solves a number of quasi-problems such as those of Chaos Theory in which very small measurement errors involve large systems changes. This will be discussed further in subsequent reviews.

Another way of speaking about the definiteness or modal character of a metric is to say that a metric is its own verification. Once a metric has been established it cannot be corrected or gainsaid by any other metric. It becomes its own standard of correctness. One can speak of error ‘on’ a metric but not error ‘of’ a metric in any meaningful quantitative way. As Hegel says, a metric is “the concrete truth of being.” There certainly may be other truths, but not within the truth of a metric which has been chosen for measuring. This is covered in my Proposition (5)

Hegel’s reference to the quasi-divine nature of measurement I interpret in two ways. In the first instance, numbers, from at least Ancient Greece onwards, have had a mystical connotation. In fact in several mystical traditions, Stoicism and Kabbalah for example, numbers themselves are considered divine. Since metrics are composed of numbers, they share in their transcendental character. Platonist philosophy considered them as Eternal Forms. But whatever terminology is employed, numbers and metrics have a distinctive ontology or mode of being.

Secondly, in philosophical terms “The absolute, God, is the measure of all things.” I take him to mean by this that God includes all possible metrics. In fact God is the reconciliation of all metrics, each of which is a sort of ‘spark’ of the divine. Within God alternative metrics are not contraries but ‘track’, as it were, consistently with one another. I think this is parallel to my Propositions (7) & (8) in which I attempt to articulate the possibility for ‘larger’ metrics. God is the largest, most encompassing metric of all. There is, I believe, a political implication, or at least a possibility, which arises from this, namely what I term below the Ethical And Political Principles of Propositions (7) & (8).

There is obviously much more to be said about metrics, numbers, aesthetic choice, and the politics of measurement from others parts of the Phenomenology and the Logic. But I think that I have made a sufficient argument that my outline theory can at least be interpreted as consistent with the Hegelian concept. Onward and upward.


An Outline Aesthetic Theory of Measurement

1. Measurement is not the quantification of the properties of an object, event or phenomenon. Nothing has the property of being, say, 1 yard square. Such a designation runs into all sorts of philosophical problems having to do with human sensory perceptions and the epistemological difficulties of determining the inherent properties of what Kant called “the thing in itself.”
2. Rather measurement is the establishment of the position of a thing, event or phenomenon, on a scale. The thing is a property of the scale, not vice versa. When we measure we are ordering things on a scale not determining the properties of a thing. This is the primary Ontological Principle of measurement
3. The scale used in measurement is called a metric, and can have a variety of properties. Metrics, unlike other things, can have properties because they are mathematically defined to have them. Metrics, like all numbers, have a unique mode of existence. We do not ‘find’ metrics in the natural world, we create them. They are both imaginary and incontrovertibly real at the same time. GDP is a metric, economic utility can be a metric if it is specified mathematically, price and costs are metrics. 
4. Metrics are expressed in terms of a numeraire, that is a unit of measurement like feet, dollars, utiles, but these should no be confused with the nature of the metric itself which is purely mathematical. For example, the metric of price is one of constant proportions: $2 is exactly twice $1 and half of $4. But $4 of income may not be twice as many utiles as $2. The metric of utility recognizes what economists call declining marginal utility.
5. A metric is what economists call an aesthetic, the more general term used for a criterion for judging value, worth, importance etc. GDP, for example, is an aesthetic that treats increases as beneficial. Unlike utility, benefit is directly proportionate to the ‘place’ an economy is placed on that metric. Such a metric is not required by any scientific or moral method, but it is an aesthetic choice, the most fundamental choice that all economists make. The choice of metric is a work of art.
6. The error in choosing an aesthetic is always greater than the error of measurement on or within an aesthetic. The aesthetic of GDP for example is not necessarily correlated with a metric of ‘National Happiness.’ As GDP increases, National Happiness could conceivably decrease due to pollution, and other environmental degradation. A 1% error in the measurement of GDP (that is enough to make it useless for policy-making purposes) would be far less significant than the error of choosing GDP over the National Happiness measure, for example.
7. An aesthetic itself has a value, that is, is better or worse, depending on how effective it is in expressing the experience of a population. To the degree that an aesthetic is accepted politically as such an expression, it is more or less verified for that population for the purposes of the issues at hand. This can be called the Ethical Principle of the aesthetic. The art of the economic aesthetic is, like all aesthetics, social. In a sense the aesthetic is ‘true’ to the degree it represents the sentiment of a population.
8. The Ethical Principle of the aesthetic implies that its choice can neither be objective nor subjective, only communal. Any attempt to restrict the politics of a community in its choice of aesthetic is the primary source of aesthetic error. The only way in which contrary aesthetics can be reconciled within any community is the the discovery of a synthetic or ‘larger’ aesthetic that recognises the conditions in which these ‘lesser’ aesthetics are relevant. Thus, for example, measurement with a everyday yardstick is perfectly sensible so long as what is measured is not too small or too fast, in which case quantum measures are necessary. This is the Political Principle of measurement. 

Illustration of the relative importance of the choice of metric

Below is a simple graph showing a strait forward linear metric on the x axis and the natural logarithm of the values of this metric on the y axis [y = f(x) = ln(x)]. Each is a very distinct metric despite the fact that both are expressed in the same numerical scale of 1,2,3 etc. Measurements taken on one will be dramatically different from measurements taken on the other. Any error in measurement on either metric will likely be insignificant in comparison with the difference in measurements between the two metrics. 

Students of economics will recognise this graph as indicating the declining marginal utility of money, an established principle of micro-economics. Yet the declining marginal utility is rarely used in analysis because it is difficult to estimate and to use in calculations. Therefore it is presumed in all of financial and risk analysis that there is constant marginal utility of wealth and income - an example of the many times that economics and other social sciences look for their keys under a lamp post simply because there is light there.

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