Secular Reason?
By some odd coincidence, I was going to write something about this because in the last few weeks, a lot of guff has been spewed forth about religion, lack of religion, society, religious impact on society, minimising this impact, and so on. Then Stanley Fish wrote this op-ed piece in the NYT.
It's by no means complete, and it has holes of vagueness in a few spots, but it highlights the problems of purely secular reasoning. These can be summarised like this: 1) it's not human to reason ONLY from 'what is known'; 2) 'what is known' is known only by the rules we form from 'what is known' — ahem; 3) if you reason from 'what is known', then how do you determine what to do with 'what is known', since that would mean that 'what is known' determines its own ends?
From this, one possible conclusion is that one should look for stuff that is not based on 'what is known' in order to figure out what we ought to do with 'what is known'. The problem with that is that there are many things which are by definition illogical and nonsensical (that is, they are inconsistent or incoherent with 'what is known'), and we can't know which (if any) of them actually provides the answer to what we ought to do with 'what is known'.
This leads us in the other direction. We have to figure out, if we want to reason secularly, what to do with 'what is known' based only on 'what is known'. Is this useful, or is this just saying that 'secular' is a mispronunciation of 'circular'?
George Holyoake in 1896 defined secularism in terms of 1) improving the present life by material means, 2) science determining the range of benefits available through material means, and 3) doing good for your present life is good, whether or not you can determine other forms of 'good'. Nietzsche defined it in terms of something more empirical — what is strong survives and is therefore better than what does not survive (and is therefore 'weak'). Kant said that the test of a moral assertion or maxim was whether a viable world could be imagined in which everyone behaved according to this — the 'categorical imperative' test.
Later, the idea of utilitarianism (measured numerically, statistically or economically in circles of ever-increasing complexity) was championed by people like Bentham and then J S Mill. This was Kantianism upside-down — you assess if the end is good, not bothering with the principle or practice leading to it. Marx was dead against this, pointing out that such assessment, based on humans, would change in each era and circumstance of mankind.
The latest word on secular reasoning is probably that of Ayn Rand. She said essentially that you should live for yourself only and that keeping yourself alive in certain ways, because of the pleasure of being alive, should be the main principle of existence. It provides a strong and readily-available basis for a secular life.
So it turns out that yes, there are secular reasons for doing things. Whether they are good reasons or not is arguable. They are probably the best reasons that reason can produce from what reason affirms to exist. Still, the sense of the order of the world being nothing but a circular orbit is sometimes painful. From an information science point of view, can data determine information? Can information determine knowledge? It all seems the wrong way round.
It's by no means complete, and it has holes of vagueness in a few spots, but it highlights the problems of purely secular reasoning. These can be summarised like this: 1) it's not human to reason ONLY from 'what is known'; 2) 'what is known' is known only by the rules we form from 'what is known' — ahem; 3) if you reason from 'what is known', then how do you determine what to do with 'what is known', since that would mean that 'what is known' determines its own ends?
From this, one possible conclusion is that one should look for stuff that is not based on 'what is known' in order to figure out what we ought to do with 'what is known'. The problem with that is that there are many things which are by definition illogical and nonsensical (that is, they are inconsistent or incoherent with 'what is known'), and we can't know which (if any) of them actually provides the answer to what we ought to do with 'what is known'.
This leads us in the other direction. We have to figure out, if we want to reason secularly, what to do with 'what is known' based only on 'what is known'. Is this useful, or is this just saying that 'secular' is a mispronunciation of 'circular'?
George Holyoake in 1896 defined secularism in terms of 1) improving the present life by material means, 2) science determining the range of benefits available through material means, and 3) doing good for your present life is good, whether or not you can determine other forms of 'good'. Nietzsche defined it in terms of something more empirical — what is strong survives and is therefore better than what does not survive (and is therefore 'weak'). Kant said that the test of a moral assertion or maxim was whether a viable world could be imagined in which everyone behaved according to this — the 'categorical imperative' test.
Later, the idea of utilitarianism (measured numerically, statistically or economically in circles of ever-increasing complexity) was championed by people like Bentham and then J S Mill. This was Kantianism upside-down — you assess if the end is good, not bothering with the principle or practice leading to it. Marx was dead against this, pointing out that such assessment, based on humans, would change in each era and circumstance of mankind.
The latest word on secular reasoning is probably that of Ayn Rand. She said essentially that you should live for yourself only and that keeping yourself alive in certain ways, because of the pleasure of being alive, should be the main principle of existence. It provides a strong and readily-available basis for a secular life.
So it turns out that yes, there are secular reasons for doing things. Whether they are good reasons or not is arguable. They are probably the best reasons that reason can produce from what reason affirms to exist. Still, the sense of the order of the world being nothing but a circular orbit is sometimes painful. From an information science point of view, can data determine information? Can information determine knowledge? It all seems the wrong way round.
Labels: Epistemology, Information, Knowledge, Philosophy, Secularism
etched with acid at 2:05:00 pm
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