Posts Tagged ‘Empiricism’

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William Blake’s Loneliness Of The Soul – Laura Quinney

January 26, 2012

Blake's Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism: Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling Proverbs 8:27, an important passage for Milton) to write upon a scroll that seems to project from his own head.

Blake’s essential topic is the unhappiness of the subject within its own subjectivity, or to use a more plangent idiom, the loneliness of the soul. This unhappiness is very often expressed in dualism, either of mind-body or of subject-object; both imply that subjectivity is anomalous in a material world and that each subject is isolated from others. Blake seeks to repair this deep ontological wound.

He starts from the premise that consciousness intrinsically experiences the intuition of soul and its loneliness in the world (its failure to fit in), or at least consciousness in what he would have called the “six thousand years” of Western history. The major religions and philosophical movements of the West have built on this intuition and also strengthened it. Sacrificial religion, Judaism, orthodox Christianity, Aristotle, and the Stoics all conspire to diminish the ontological status of the human being in its own eyes by representing the soul as “an atom in darkness,” a mere spot of consciousness engulfed by all-powerful external forces. The most recent avatars of this error can be found in empiricism and the New Science.

Blake’s critique of empiricism is usually described in philosophical terms as an objection to its ontology, its treatment of Nature and natural man as final realities. But Blake’s more profound objection to empiricism is psychological: the New Science is “a Science [of] Despair.” It encourages the center of consciousness, or “I,” to regard itself as passive and helpless. The “I” has been thrust into a material world whose power and influence over it are disproportionate; it is invisible and intangible where the world is solid and real.

The world was there before it, and so its “life” is largely reactive. It floats about, an immaterial node, embedded in its disturbing private experience. It can master neither the stimuli to which it is exposed nor the effects of stimuli in its interior. The “I” finds the self to be dark and strange, occupied by things it does not acknowledge as its own — hidden processes and extrinsic “impressions” the world has forced upon it.

In empiricist psychology, personal identity; or the unique “I,” is stranded. Because it is immaterial, it is isolated in the material world, and because it is an atomic or unique existence, it is isolated in itself. Blake summarizes this plight in The Four Zoas in the opening lament of Tharmas, who complains of having a troubling and contradictory sense of self:

I am like an atom
A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity
I wish & feel & weep & groan Ah terrible terrible
The Four Zoas, William Blake

Tharmas says he feels like an “atom” because he is experiencing his subject-life in the terms that empirical science suggests. He must figure the “I” as a thing because the spiritual terms have been debarred.

So he describes the “I” as a little node of consciousness adrift in a dark and alien world of matter. It is a like an atom: single, essential, small, opaque. And yet it is not material after all. Consciousness is not comparable to matter, but once matter is stipulated as the prevailing reality, consciousness loses definition. What place in a material world can that have which is immaterial, and hence wispy and spectral? So Tharmas pessimistically revises his formulation; his “I” is less than an atom, it is ‘A Nothing left in darkness.” But that description does not seem quite accurate to him either, and he has to revise again. “I am… A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity.”

Dwarfed by the dominance of matter, the “I” feels that it is nothing, and yet it also has the opposite intuition: it knows itself as the one reality it is sure of (as Descartes would say), the one true being, an “identity” How to explain this contradiction? The word “identity” takes over here from the word “atom”: it is still reductive, it still suggests thing-ness.

Blake no doubt alludes to the chapter of Locke’s Essay in which he defines “personal identity,” or continuity of the self, in minimal terms as present consciousness plus its continuous memories of itself. This is a narrow definition, befitting a materialist psychology, and to Blake’s mind it deserves parody. Blake counters empiricist definition in this passage by using the word “identity” in a subtly: ironic sense, intimating its perverse inadequacy. Tharmas clearly feels no better once he has defined consciousness as “identity” because he right away dissolves into incoherent emotional protest: ‘Ah terrible terrible.”

Thus he characterizes himself as an “identity” insofar as he “wish[es] & feel[s] & weep[s groan[s]” in vain. Tharmas finds that selfhood seems on the one hand insignificant, cant and on the other, absolutely central. Even in an empiricist, the inter life reasserts its urgency, but it cannot assign a meaning or purpose to either its tumults or their bearing on anything without. A Nothing left in darkness ought not to be burdened with a vain but engulfing internal life, and that is what seems so “terrible.”

Empiricism’s reductive accounts of identity fail to address the urgency the inner life. Blake’s point is not that philosophy remains irrelevant to our daily practice, but rather something much deeper. He perceives that the subject cannot possibly conform to the proscription on selfhood implicit empiricism; it cannot live peacefully with the contradiction between the conclusions of naturalism and the intuition of selfhood.

The place of the subject in a material world has become a vital issue with the rise of the New Science amid the New Science, Blake says, has imposed on the subject an untenable view of itself. One cannot live with the bracketing of subjectivity; it creates a form of psychological division too agitating to be ignored. The transcendent intuition pursues you even if you disavow it. It must be owned, but possibly the worst way to own it is through orthodox cosmology, theology, or eschatology in which the divinity of the soul is referred to the noblesse oblige of a tyrannical creator-god and to fulfillment in another life. Blake recommends instead identifying it with a creative power that is your own possession in the here and now. Above all, he says, how the self thinks and feels about itself must be taken into account. A descriptive psychology like his own, he asserts, speaks directly to the self’s intuitions and fictions about itself.

When Tharmas adopts the empiricist view of the subject — when he defines himself as Natural Man — he falls into a revealing state of confusion. His bafflement reminds us that although empiricism and the scientific materialism to which it is related claim to present an objective or “neutral” view, they are themselves ideological, forcefully “interpellating a subject,” [the process by which ideology addresses the pre-ideological individual and produces him or her as a subject proper]as we would say now, rather than leaving the domain blank, as it purports to do.

Peter Otto forcefully remarks: “Blake is not suggesting that Locke, Bacon, and Newton are wrong in their descriptions of fallen humanity. In fact they are correct.”  That is how we live now. Any body of knowledge that gives an account of human nature automatically “interpellates a subject,” and it perpetrates bad faith when it claims that it does not. Blake makes this argument in his address “To the Deists,” where he insists “Man must & will have Some Religion; if he has not the Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan” (J 52, Ezot).

Consciously or not, everyone holds some concept of the human and the divine and their interrelation. There is such a view hidden in empiricism, precisely insofar as it denies that anything meaningful can be said about the divine and the relation of the human to the divine. For embedded in this notion is an assertion of the subject’s helplessness. If we must have a view, says Blake, let us have a more constructive one. Let us have Blake’s own, in which there is neither a distant nor a punitive God and the human subject does not have to look upon itself as a poor thing abandoned to darkness.

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A Rational World by Paul Davies

January 21, 2011

Paul Davies

 Paul Davies is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist by profession, but these days he also works in astrobiology, a new field of research that seeks to understand the origin and evolution of life, and to search for life beyond Earth. He was born in London, and spent most of his life in the UK. From 1990 to 2006 he lived in Australia, but in September 2006 he moved to Arizona State University to establish BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. Because his interests are very broad, extending from the highly mathematical to the deeply philosophical. Paul has pondered the big questions of existence: How did the universe begin? What is the destiny of mankind? Is there a meaning to the universe? He has written several books and articles on these topics, and even made a couple of television series.

The claim that the world is rational is connected with the fact that it is ordered. Events generally do not happen willy-nilly: they are related in some way. The sun rises on cue because the Earth spins in a regular manner. The fall of a heavy object is connected with its earlier release from a height. And so on. It is this interrelatedness of events that gives us our notion of causation. The window breaks because it is struck by a stone. The oak tree grows because the acorn is planted. The invariable conjunction of causally related events becomes so familiar that we are tempted to ascribe causative potency to material objects themselves: the stone actually brings about the breakage of the window. But this is to attribute to material objects active powers that they do not deserve.

All one can really say is that there is a correlation between, say, stones rushing at windows and broken glass. Events that form such sequences are therefore not independent. If we could make a record of all events in some region of space over a period of time, we would notice that the record would be crisscrossed by patterns, these being the “causal linkages.” It is the existence of these patterns that is the manifestation of the world’s rational order. Without them there would be only chaos.

Closely related to causality is the notion of determinism. In its modem form this is the assumption that events are entirely determined by other, earlier events. Determinism carries the implication that the state of the world at one moment suffices to fix its state at a later moment. And because that later state fixes subsequent states, and so on, the conclusion is drawn that everything which ever happens in the future of the universe is completely determined by its present state.

When Isaac Newton proposed his laws of mechanics in the seventeenth century, determinism was automatically built into them. For example, treating the solar system as an isolated system, the positions and velocities of the planets at one moment suffice to determine uniquely (through Newton’s laws) their positions and velocities at all subsequent moments. Moreover, Newton’s laws contain no directionality in time, so the trick works in reverse: the present state suffices to fix uniquely all past states. In this way we can, for example, predict eclipses in the future, and also retrodict their occurrences in the past.

If the world is strictly deterministic, then all events are locked in a matrix of cause and effect. The past and future are contained in the present, in the sense that the information needed to construct the past and future states of the world are folded into its present state just as rigidly as the information about Pythagoras’ theorem is folded into the axioms of Euclidean geometry. The entire cosmos becomes a gigantic machine or clockwork, slavishly following a pathway of change already laid down from the beginning of time. Ilya Prigogine has expressed it more poetically: God is reduced to a mere archivist turning the pages of a cosmic history book already written.’

Standing in opposition to determinism is indeterminism, or chance. We might say that an event happened by “pure chance” or “by accident” if it was not obviously determined by anything else. Throwing a die and flipping a coin are familiar examples. But are these cases of genuine indeterminism, or is it merely that the factors and forces that determine their outcome are hidden from us, so that their behavior simply appears random to us?

Before this century most scientists would have answered yes to the latter question. They supposed that, at rock bottom, the world was strictly deterministic, and that the appearance of random or chance events was entirely the result of ignorance about the details of the system concerned. If the motion of every atom could be known, they reasoned, then even coin tossing would become predictable. The fact that it is unpredictable in practice is because of our limited information about the world. Random behavior is traced to systems that are highly unstable, and therefore at the mercy of minute fluctuations in the forces that assail them from their environment.

This point of view was largely abandoned in the late 1920s with the discovery of quantum mechanics, which deals with atomic-scale phenomena and has indeterminism built into it at a fundamental level. One expression of this indeterminism is known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, after the German quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg. Roughly speaking, this states that all measurable quantities are subject to unpredictable fluctuations, and hence to uncertainty in their values. To quantify this uncertainty, observables are grouped into pairs: position and momentum form a pair, as do energy and time. The principle requires that attempts to reduce the level of uncertainty of one member of the pair serves to increase the uncertainty of the other.

Thus an accurate measurement of the position of a particle such as an electron, say, has the effect of making its momentum highly uncertain, and vice versa.

Because you need to know both the positions and the momenta of the particles in a system precisely if you want to predict its future states, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle puts paid to the notion that the present determines the future exactly. Of course, this supposes that quantum uncertainty is genuinely intrinsic to nature, and not merely the result of some hidden level of deterministic activity. In recent years a number of key experiments have been performed to test this Point, and they have confirmed that uncertainty is indeed inherent in quantum systems. The universe really is indeterministic at its most basic level.

So does this mean that the universe is irrational after all? No, it doesn’t. There is a difference between the role of chance in quantum mechanics and the unrestricted chaos of a lawless universe. Although there is generally no certainty about the future states of a quantum system, the relative probabilities of the different possible states are still determined. Thus the betting odds can be given that, say, an atom will be in an excited or a non-excited state, even if the outcome in a particular instance is unknown. This statistical lawfulness implies that, on a macroscopic scale where quantum effects are usually not noticeable, nature seems to conform to deterministic laws.

The job of the physicist is to uncover the patterns in nature and try to fit them to simple mathematical schemes. The question of why there are patterns, and why such mathematical schemes are possible, lies outside the scope of physics, belonging to a subject known as metaphysics.

Metaphysics: Who Needs It?
In Greek philosophy, the term “metaphysics” originally meant “that which comes after physics.” It refers to the fact that Aristotle’s metaphysics was found, untitled, placed after his treatise on physics. But metaphysics soon came to mean those topics that lie beyond physics (we would today say beyond science) and yet may have a bearing on the nature of scientific inquiry. So metaphysics means the study of topics about physics (or science generally), as opposed to the scientific subject itself. Traditional metaphysical problems have included the origin, nature, and purpose of the universe, how the world of appearances presented to our senses relates to its underlying “reality” and order, the relationship between mind and matter, and the existence of free will. Clearly science is deeply involved in such issues, but empirical science alone may not be able to answer them, or any “meaning-of-life” questions.

In the nineteenth century the entire metaphysical enterprise began to falter after being critically called into question by David Hume and Immanuel Kant. These philosophers cast doubt not on any particular metaphysical system as such, but on the very meaningfulness of metaphysics. Hume argued that meaning can be attached only to those ideas that stem directly from our observations of the world, or from deductive schemes such as mathematics. Concepts like “reality,” “mind,” and “substance,” which are purported to lie somehow beyond the entities presented to our senses, Hume dismissed on the grounds that they are unobservable. He also rejected questions concerning the purpose or meaning of the universe, or Mankind’s place within it, because he believed that none of these concepts can be intelligibly related to things we can actually observe. This philosophical position is known as “empiricism,” because it treats the facts of experience as the foundation for all we can know.

Kant accepted the empiricist’s premise that all knowledge begins with our experiences of the world, but he also believed, as I have mentioned, that human beings possess certain innate knowledge that is necessary for any thought to take place at all. There are thus two components that come together in the process of thinking: sense data and a priori knowledge. Kant used his theory to explore the limits of what human beings, by the very nature of their powers of observation and reasoning, could ever hope to know. His criticism of metaphysics was that our reasoning can apply only to the realm of experience, to the phenomenal world we actually observe. We have no reason to suppose it can be applied to any hypothetical realm that might lie beyond the world of actual phenomena. In other words, we can apply our reasoning to things-as-we-see-them, but this can tell us nothing about the things-in-themselves. Any attempt to theorize about a “reality” that lies behind the objects of experience is doomed to failure.

Although metaphysical theorizing went out of fashion after this onslaught, a few philosophers and scientists refused to give up speculating about what really lies behind the surface appearances of the phenomenal world. Then, in more recent years, a number of advances in fundamental physics, cosmology, and computing theory began to rekindle a more widespread interest in some of the traditional metaphysical topics. The study of “artificial intelligence” reopened debate about free will and the mind-body problem. The discovery of the big bang triggered speculation about the need for a mechanism to bring the physical universe into being in the first place. Quantum mechanics exposed the subtle way in which observer and observed are interwoven. Chaos theory revealed that the relationship between permanence and change was far from simple.

In addition to these developments, physicists began talking about Theories of Everything — the idea that all physical laws could be unified into a single mathematical scheme. Attention began to focus on the nature of physical law. Why had nature opted for one particular scheme rather than another? Why a mathematical scheme at all? Was there anything special about the scheme we actually observe? Would intelligent observers be able to exist in a universe that was characterized by some other scheme?

The term “metaphysics” came to mean “theories about theories” of physics. Suddenly it was respectable to discuss “classes of laws” instead of the actual laws of our universe. Attention was given to hypothetical universes with properties quite different from our own, in an effort to understand whether there is anything peculiar about our universe. Some theorists contemplated the existence of “laws about laws,” which act to “select” the laws of our universe from some wider set. A few were prepared to consider the real existence of other universes with other laws.

In fact, in this sense physicists have long been practicing metaphysics anyway. Part of the job of the mathematical physicist is to examine certain idealized mathematical models that are intended to capture only various narrow aspects of reality, and then often only symbolically. These models play the role of “toy universes” that can be explored in their own right, sometimes for recreation, usually to cast light on the real world by establishing certain common themes among different models. These toy universes often bear the name of their originators. Thus there is the Thirring model, the Sugawara model, the Taub-NUT universe, the maximally extended Kruskal universe, and so on. They commend themselves to theorists because they will normally permit exact mathematical treatment, whereas a more realistic model may be intractable.

My own work about ten years ago was largely devoted to exploring quantum effects in model universes with only one instead of three space dimensions. This was done to make the problems easier to study. The idea was that some of the essential features of the one-dimensional model would survive in a more realistic three-dimensional treatment. Nobody suggested that the universe really is one-dimensional. What my colleagues and I were doing was exploring hypothetical universes to uncover information about the properties of certain types of physical laws, properties that might pertain to the actual laws of our universe.

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Book Recommendation: A Refutation of Moral Relativism by Peter Kreeft

September 16, 2009

Kreeft BookThere was a reviewer on Amazon that got this book perfectly: “Professor `Isa Ben Adam (nice name in translation), a Palestinian Arab scholar and Absolutist, is interviewed (and debated) by Moral Relativist Libby Rawls, a black journalist and former wife, psychological social worker, surfing instructor, actress, alcoholic, and PI. What a marvellous debate ensues as Libby throws every relativist argument at the learned prof, only to have them roundly and soundly demolished!

This easy non-academic read is a useful guide for those engaged in dinner-table debates on this most crucial of issues. Obviously born from years of experience as an embattled Absolutist in American adademia, this Kreeft work is a delight to read as it sets out the arguments for and against. As everyone who’s ever debated this subject knows, it’s very hard to avoid ad hominems and other flesh-cutting retreats from reason, and they’re here just as in real life. Another step towards the Restoration of Metaphysics. This is the book you’ll want your Relativist friends to read (but which they’ll probably ignore because refutation has too many implications for their personal lives). Get it.”

You’re relativist friends won’t go anywhere near it, but highlight some of the selections below and email them. If you spend anytime on the Internet, as I do, arguing for your faith against the diabolists, learning this stuff becomes highly instructional because you see the how the august liberal mind works. Many just bloviate their talking points so it is possible to engage them and talk the air out of them. For that Professor Kreeft should have our profound thanks.

The Future of Society Under Moral Relativism
The modern West (geographically, Europe and its former colonies; theologically, apostate Christendom) is the first society in history whose mind molders are moral relativists. No other society in history has ever survived without rejecting moral relativism and believing in moral absolutes. There has never been a society of relativists, any more than a society of solipsists. Therefore, this society will either disprove one of the most universally established laws of history, or repent of its relativism and survive , or persist in its relativism and perish… C.S. Lewis said in “The Poison of Subjectivism”, relativism will certainly “damn our souls and end our species.” (He said that because he was a Christian), so he could not disagree with the teaching of Jesus and of all the prophets in Jesus’ Jewish tradition — and later Islamic Tradition, too….In order to be saved, to go to heaven, you need to repent. But you can’t repent if you don’t believe in sin to repent of, and you can’t believe in sin if you don’t believe in a real moral law, because sin means disobeying that. Moral relativism eliminates that law, thus sin thus repentance, thus salvation.

Submission of the Heart to Truth And The Relativistic Churchgoer
A religious believer who knows the true and the good in his head but who doesn’t love it in his heart and his life — he won’t submit to it, he wants to make it relative to his desires, relative to what his heart really loves and wants and seeks — he’ll lose even the truth and goodness he already has by making it relative to himself, his heart, his will, his desires, his demands. He won’t submit is heart to truth. That’s the essence of all true religion: submission of the heart to truth, to God, to what God is: truth and moral goodness. That’s why I say that the honest and moral atheist is a religious man and the realistic churchgoer is not. The atheist really wants to submit to the truth; he just doesn’t know what he truth is. The relativistic churchgoer has had the truth given to him, and he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t want to submit to it, he won’t convert his heart and his life to it. So he chooses to change it instead of letting it change him. He wants to sing “My Way”. …It’s the first things principle: put first things first and second things will follow; refuse to put first things first and you lose the second things too.

Four Different Kinds Of Relativism
There are four different kinds of relativism:
(1) metaphysical relativism is the same as theism (assuming God means the absolute being). Metaphysics is about being.
(2)Religious relativism says there is no absolute religion, no absolutely best or truest religious relationship with God. Atheism says there is no God, no absolute being, no absolute anywhere in reality.
(3)Epistemological relativism says that perhaps there is a being somewhere; but it can’t be known. There’s no absolute in human knowledge, skepticism about the absolute, at least, or agnosticism. Or it could be total skepticism, skepticism about all reality…. Metaphysical relativism says “No absolute in reality”, and epistemological relativism says “Perhaps in reality but not in knowledge” and then
(4) moral relativism says” perhaps there are absolutes in non-moral knowledge, like “two and two make four”, but not in moral knowledge: we know no moral absolutes:. And then finally religious relativism says “Perhaps in moral knowledge but not in religious knowledge. Perhaps love, or the Golden Rule, or justice, can be known to be absolute, but no religion can.” ….Relativism says there are no absolutes… Absolutism says there are some absolutes. At least one absolute. Absolutism is relatively absolutistic, and relativism is absolutely relativistic.

Foundations of Modern Moral Relativism
The first relativist was the devil: “Did God say that in the day you eat of the forbidden fruit you will die? I say you won’t. God is keeping something from you. Eat this and you will know what it is. You will know God’s dark side. The light is relative to the dark, and the dark to the light. Good and evil are relative, you see. The sophists called themselves “wise men”, men of Sophia. Socrates called himself a lover of wisdom instead….Sophists said: “man is a measure of all things — my mind, your mind, any individual mind is the measure of all things, or at least of good and evil — what could be more arrogant than that?

It’s arrogant because the measurers of wisdom can’t be measured by wisdom and they can’t be judged as unwise. If you are the measure, you are the God…Peter Abelard in the middle ages was a kind of Christian relativist with his new teaching that our personal subjective motive was the defining thing that made any act good or evil. But the main foundation of modern relativism in medieval Christian philosophy was William of Ockam’s Nominalism.

Nominalism was the philosophy that reduced all universal terms to mere names, nomina — there are no real universals, is what Nominalism says — and therefore there are no moral universals, like “Honesty is always good” or “Adultery is always evil”, by the very nature of those things , by their unchangeable essence….Ockam’s Razor was his famous principle that led to relativism…”never multiply entities beyond necessity”, that is you should always choose the simplest hypothesis, the most reductionist explanation. Reduce the complex to the simple. That’s why he eliminated universals.

How Relativism Evolved
First through what philosophers call the divine command theory got rid of the more complex natural law theory. The divine command theory says that God’s command is the only thing that makes an act right, or morally good. The natural law theory says that there is also a natural law, as well as a divine law — a law that comes form the nature of the act itself, and the nature of man and that this natural law also makes an act good or evil. The natural law is the proximate cause; the divine law is the ultimate cause. Two causes instead of one; not the simplest explanation. Ockam’s Razor could be used to eliminate either one.

The religious Nominalists like Luther thought they could maximize religion by eliminating the divine law, and the nonreligious Nominalists thought they could minimize religion by eliminating the divine law. Both sides used the razor. The same principle that the Protestant reformers used to eliminate the natural law and natural human reason that knows it, the secularists used to eliminate divine law and the faith that knows that. Faith and reason became enemies instead of the allies that they were in all classical medieval philosophy, whether Islamic or Jewish or Christian.

The Relation Between The Intrinsic Goodness Of An Act And God Willing It
Islamic philosophy had had the same controversy centuries earlier…is a thing right (Socrates used “pious”) because God wills it or does God will it because it’s right? …What is the relation between the intrinsic goodness of an act and God willing it, or between the intrinsic badness of an act and God forbidding it? Which is the cause of the other?  If God’s law causes an act to be good or evil, then God seems arbitrary and irrational, and we’re back in pagan theology with Zeus instead of God.

The bad religious consequence is an irrational arbitrary despot. The bad human consequence is that all of human morality then seems to come from God’s mere power, not from anything rational, anything our reason can understand (Assuming we can’t understand God’s mind and motives, only our own.) That’s the first horn of the dilemma. The other horn of the dilemma is this: if you say that the nature of the human act is the cause or reason why god wills or forbids it, then you’re putting something above God.  Because you’re saying that this thing  — the intrinsic nature of the human act — is the cause of God willing it. Then God is no longer God, no longer the First Cause, the Uncaused Cause.

So you’re back in pagan theology again. The solution was to show that Ockam’s Razor was wrong — An act is good or evil both because of its nature and because of God’s will. And god’s will is rational , not arbitrary, because it flows from his nature. He is good. That’s why he wills good for us, and that’s why good acts are good. So there are really three things involved , three causes, in a sense: God’s nature, God’s will, and the nature of the act. The Razor tempts you to cut two of them away.

Empiricism And Relativism
Empiricism led to what’s called the “emotivist theory of value”: the notion that moral judgments like “Murder is wrong” are really only an expression the speaker’s subjective feelings about murder rather than statements about the real objective nature of the act of murder — in other words there’s nothing right or wrong, but thinking makes it so… David Hume was the philosopher who analyzed moral judgments as subjective feelings, “Murder is evil” really means “I hate murder”

Facts And Values: A Truism
Analytic philosophy has an axiom, an assumption — they almost accept this as a truism — that there’s a radical distinction between facts and values. Facts are objective and values are not And this truism — this false fact of professional philosophy has seeped into popular thinking by a kind of osmosis. It comes out in our use of the word “values” instead of “laws” or “virtues” or “goods“. Nobody ever used the world values to refer to anything moral or ethical because the nineteenth century before Nietzsche or Kant.

The Source of Morality
Morality is objective and comes from universal human nature. It is not subjective and does not proceed some human wills ( a consensus, public, collective, social). The absolutist says reality includes things like God or gods, and angels, or spirits. And eternal truths, the nature of things, unchangeable essences, Platonic Ideas, divine Ideas. So reality can include objective values, real goods. Morality was a dimension of reality before the Enlightenment, not just a dimension of thinking or feeling.

Kant and Morality
Kant’s most important idea was the notion that the human mind makes the truth instead of discovering it, that truth is formed by the human mind. And that includes moral truth, Kant called true morality “autonomous”, that is man-made rather than “heteronymous”, made by another, by God….Kant believed that all minds worked the same way and created the same morality — like logic or math. So morality was universal and necessary for Kant but not objective — one short step from relativism.

Hegel And Relativism
Hegel added another idea that became part of relativism: universal process. Everything flows, everything is in flux. Truth itself evolves, even God evolves, through human history, according to Hegel. History is like a mother and God is its baby. And then along came Nietzsche who aborted the baby.

Existentialism And Moral Relativism
Existentialists generally hold a rejection of ”abstractions”, that is universals, including moral universals. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard praises Abraham for transcending the moral law when he was willing to kill Isaac because “the individual is higher than the universal.”

Deconstructionists
Deconstructionism explicitly denies the very essence of language: internationality. That’s the technical, traditional term for the quality words have that makes them meaningful, significant, signs that point beyond themselves to objective reality. There is no objective reality to these Deconstructionists, no world beyond texts. Texts are worlds and worlds are texts….Nietzsche called himself “the philosopher with the hammer”…He said “We (atheists) have not gotten ridden of God until we have gotten rid of the grammar”…Grammar is the traces of God and creation and form and objective truth and order in language…the deconstructionists rage against even that trace of divine order, because they see it’s connected with moral order.

Denying Absolute Morality
Data comes first , the experience comes first, and it has to judge the theory, not vice versa…Real objective morality, absolute morality can be denied by your modern theory, but only after it is first affirmed by your natural moral experience, by everybody’s moral experience. You can deny moral absolutes only as a Buddhist denies matter…Conscience immediately detects real right and wrong, just as the senses immediately detect real colors and shapes…Moral relativism is to moral experience what Buddhism is to the experience of the senses or what Mary Baker Eddy’s “Christian Science” is the experience of sickness an death. These philosophies all tell us not to trust our experience, that our experience deceives us,  that the thing we experience isn’t really there! They say the experience is an illusion to be overcome by faith…Moral relativism is a faith , a dogma an ideology. Moral absolutism is empirical or experiential. It’s data based, data friendly.

Opinions And Values
Different cultures may have different opinions about what’s morally right and wrong, jus as they have different opinions about what happens after death; but that doesn’t (mean) what’s right in one culture is wrong in another. What’s believed to be right and what really is right aren’t necessarily the same, just as what’s believed to exist after death and what really exists aren’t necessarily the same. We can be wrong about it. Just because I don’t believe there is no hell doesn’t mean there is none or that I won’t go there. If it did, the infallible way to be saved would be just stop believing in hell!…Just because a good Nazi thinks that genocide is right, that doesn’t mean that it is….An opinion INTENDS something; it refers to something, it has a referent. If values are only opinions, what are their referent? “Thou shalt not murder” and “Courage is good” aren’t opinions about how many people will be killed or how many people are in fact courageous. Values are not opinions about facts or opinions about opinions (opinions without referents).

Moral Differences Need Common Premises (An Absolute)
Beneath a moral difference you always find some moral argument. Otherwise it’s not a moral argument. Because all argument needs a common premise. You can’t even imagine a  totally new morality any more than you can imagine a totally new universe, or set of numbers or colors….Try to imagine a society where honesty and justice and courage and self-control and faith and hope and charity are evil, and lying and cheating and stealing and cowardice and betrayal and addiction and despair and hate are all good.  You just can’t do it….You can create different acceptable rules for driving and speech and clothing and eating drinking…but we are not free to make murder or rape or slavery or treason right, or charity and justice wrong. We can create different mores but not different morals….We know from experience that we’re free to choose to hate, but we’re not free to experience a moral obligation to hate, only to love.

The Four Cardinal Virtues
The four cardinal virtues are a kind of trinity, or trinity: one thing with three aspects…in Plato’s version anyway. The three parts are wisdom, courage, and self-control, and together they make up justice. Wisdom means knowing the truth, especially the moral truth, the truth about the good to be done. Courage means the will choosing the good even when it hurts, the will following reason instead of the desires when reason says X is good and the desires say X doesn’t feel good, when it gives pain instead of pleasure. And self-control means not following passion when passion says X is fun and reason says it’s evil — not listening to the philosophy that says, “It can’t be wrong if it feels so right.” It’s also called temperance; tempering the feelings or desires, controlling the desires moderating them, not being a fanatic about anyone , like alcohol or money or media approval or sex….in the minds of  society’s mind molders, self-control has become repression.

Ecstasies
Sex and death are thrills because they’re ecstasies in the literal sense of the word: standing-outside-your-self, out-of-body experiences. Death has been secularized into another learning experience or just another stage of life to accept blandly and limply like a nice night’s sleep…. Sex and drug addicts are looking for heaven…the state of mind that the saints in heaven have and the mystics have for brief moments on earth…in some of the very worst places….God wants us all to have that but not by using drugs or illicit sex.

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