Bust Nak wrote:theopoesis wrote:Everyone who has responded to these points has ignored the line where I say that I am speaking in generalities, and that any specific analysis would require looking at a specific thinker's works. Fine and well if you don't think both are true, but I dare say that many secularists buy into both scientism and self-actualization.
I don't think "scientific causal determinism" and scientism are the same thing. There are no incompatibility with non deterministic behaviour and science.
That's not what I've read or heard in any of my studies of science, but I'm no expert. You've given no explanation of why the two do not contradict, of how self-actualization and scientism (even if not "scientific causal determinism") can possibly coexist. On the other hand, I've not done the legwork that I need to in order to defend this statement, and frankly I don't think I have the time. Again, we're just coming down to a "he says, she says" type of situation. Not particularly helpful. So I'll just go ahead and retract this statement rather than hit the library.
theopoesis wrote:Hardly the case. Equivocation as a logical fallacy is typically the use of one word several times in an argument, but switching its meaning. I fail to understand how my using the word a single time represents equivocation.
Bust Nak wrote:
Your argument goes: Secularist measure progress and the advancement in morality using an objective standard. Secularism eliminates objective standards of morality to measure progress. There is no inconsistency unless the "objective standard" in these two clauses mean the same thing - they don't, the first "objective" refers to fairness, the second "objective" refers to absolutism.
You misinterpret my argument. Allow me to rephrase:
(1) Secularism claims there is an absolute, universal, objective, true progress from the pre-modern to the modern world.
(2) Secularism claims there is no absolute, universal, objective, true standard with which to measure progress.
(3) Therefore, there is a contradiction in secularism.
I don't know where the idea of "fair" came from. I am not concerned with whether progress is "fair", but with whether we can objectively (truthfully, universally, absolutely, indisputably) claim that there is progress if we reject objective (truthful, universal, absolute, indisputable) standards with which to measure progress. Can we really say: "It is true that we are better off today, but there is no truth"? I say no.
As such, I still say the claim of equivocation is unjustified.
Bust Nak wrote:
I claim that we believe in progress, that we are indisputably better off than our predecessors, but that we have no universally objective standard with which to judge whether we are better off. It is merely a subjective opinion, and progress the self-legitimizing myth by which we perpetuate this opinion.
I guess this is another "I say its true, you say its not" situation. We are indisputably more free than our predecessors, whether that is better or not is a matter of opinion.
I don't think you are understanding me. Progress is not exclusively about freedom. Our metanarrative of progress in modernity claims we objectively (absolutely, truthfully, universally, indisputably) know more truth, we are better morally, we are more developed sociologically, etc. However, we have also reduced truth, morals, and social convention to a relative thing which is not universal (objective, absolute, true, indisputable). So, freedom aside (which may not fall subject to my critique), as a whole, the metannarative of progress and the relativization/perspectivalism of modernity seem to conflict in many people and some scholars in the modern world.
Bust Nak wrote:
To use your example, to objectively (fairly? or truthfully?) say that humanity has made some progress with respect to freedom, we must have a universal standard with which to measure our freedoms and the freedoms of the past.
Which we have -
freedom can be measured objectively.
We must have some way of definitively saying one is better than the other.
No, we don't need that at all. Exactly because "
there is no such objective standard, and therefore our opinion of our freedom today is just that: opinion."
I'm trying to figure out how you're misinterpreting me. It seems maybe you think my first point is a sociological one, and my second a moral? So we can sociologically measure that we are more free, but we cannot say whether this is ethically better? I suppose that would not be a contradiction. Maybe there is another favorable interpretation. Otherwise, the two phrases in bold would seem to be obviously the same contradiction that I am pointing to. Without a clear explanation, I could interpret you as asserting: A: there is an objective standard; ~A: there is no objective standard. This is a textbook example of a violation of the law of noncontradiction (again, unless I interpret you favorably as above).
However, I am trying to argue that modernism has a contradiction where it says our freedom is
truthfully and
morally superior, but that we have no objective (true, absolute, universal, indisputable) system of truth and morals. I'm not juxtaposing a sociological claim with a moral claim. I am saying there is a contradicting set of truth/moral claims.
Bust Nak wrote:
No, I intend to speak of inalienable rights, just like those spoken of in the United Nations' The Universal Declaration of Human Rights for example. The preamble to this document claims: "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights...
As spoken by a political entity. It's just a fancy say of saying they are granting legal rights that they promise not to revoke.
This is an incorrect reading of the document. It claims that there is
inherent dignity. Inherent means, according to the dictionary: "existing in someone or something as a permanent and inseparable element, quality, or attribute." Likewise, it claims that the rights are
inalienable. Inalienable means, according to the dictionary: "not transferable to another or capable of being repudiated." So, according to the words of the document, these rights and this dignity are permanently in a person so that they cannot be removed. Yet, you are saying that these rights are bestowed by a political entity, which by definition would mean that they are not permanent, but came to belong to that person at a specific point in time as a
legal right. You claim that these rights are secure due to a promise of the political body, but I would hope that we all know governments well enough to know how many promises are broken. Such a promise could never be so trustworthy as to make it
incapable of being taken away.
The entire basis of human rights theory is that the rights themselves are inalienable. Just read John Locke's
Second Treatise on Government. Read the US
Declaration of Independence. The very justification for the formation of the United States, the justification for the revolution as a just war, the validation of the need for independence, rested on a specific set of rights which were intrinsic to the people, according to their understanding of rights. Contrast this with modern ideas of government and law, by which all laws are based on convention, and you wind up with the same contradiction that I initially asserted, and which you are committing here.
Bust Nak wrote:
The UN is legally binding as a legal convention through popular consent. But what if the populace no longer consents? Then, according to the legal basis of the UN, they UN treaties should no longer be binding.
Exactly, they are legal rights.
...in which case we must ask why the UN can intervene.
Because their (our) views are backed with real power.
So we are left with Nihilism: rights cannot be permanently secure because laws can be revoked. The only way that we can protect the rights is with sufficient power.
Do those without power lack all intrinsic dignity which we would call rights? Mary Glendon writes an excellent book on this called
Rights Talk which suggests that modern political theory and practice has reduced human rights to an assertion of one's personal desires, so that those who assert most forcefully are those whose rights get protected. But that's hardly what human rights were originally, or how they are understood by many people who appeal to human rights today.
Bust Nak wrote:
I'll explain using Kant's explanation of Enlightenment (which is very linked with modernism) in his "What is Enlightenment?" ... This reason is to be "free from outside direction" which helps humans to be "more than machines." This is the ideal of reason for modernity and for the enlightenment.
Yet, postmodernism has indicated that this ideal is impossible to attain. Our reason is always directed from outside ourselves through the community (Stanley Fish), through history (Michel Foucault), and through our race, gender, and ethnicity (too many people here to list)...
I guess this is what you referred by "specific thinker's works" above. So here we see Kant saying the importance free will is to enlightenment and Fish and others suggesting determinism. So what's the problem unless someone accepts both views at the same time?
The problem is that the same people who are arguing that community, history, race, gender, ethnicity, etc are destroying the possibility of our knowing truth are arguing as if their claims about these things are true. Look at Jacques Derrida, who says that there is no intrinsic meaning in a text, but who objects to John Searle's critique of his writings by saying he doesn't understand the meaning in the text. People do hold both views. Notable secular scholars like Derrida, intro professors in universities across the world, and by proxy many of their students.
The problem is, more importantly, that the metaphysical foundations of modern secularism, laid down in many ways by Kant, are being undermined by modern theories of knowledge. It's a self-defeating project. This is much deeper than a simple contradiction. It's a challenge to whether secularism can build a metaphysics and a metanarrative that allow for the possibility of universal reason of mankind as a way to uncovering truth. The very universal reason that claimed to be the basis of truth is finding that reason is not universal, and truth not obtainable. So I claim that Christianity has metaphysical ways to overcome these problems, and I could point you to the books that do it. But the problem is that I am not seeing, nor have I ever been pointed to, books by leading secular thinkers that are salvaging the metaphysical worldview of secularism.
Bust Nak wrote:
The problem here is that we claim to know objective truths about the world autonomously, but the very "objective truths" we are developing says that we know nothing autonomously. And if we do not arrive at what we believe through autonomous reason, why believe it at all?
I don't understand, why is autonomous related to truth?
Well if reason is autonomous, it believes what it does because of itself and not because of an outside factor. If it is not autonomous, it means that it believes what it does for some reason apart from itself, i.e. not from reasoning and logic. And if the "truths" we have developed were not developed through reasoning or logic, why believe them as true at all?
Bust Nak wrote:
Countless secular thinkers would fall subject to this critique. I'll mention one, and briefly at that: Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Existentialism is a Humanism. "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself." This is the first half of my antinomy (and you'll notice similarities to point 1 above). We create our own identity, who we are, what we are to be, how we exist. We do this through freedom, claims Sartre. But then Sartre makes two moves. First, he claims, "When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men." Our identity we choose for ourselves is implicitly (claims Sartre) the ideal that we would impose on all of humanity. So we are headed towards a contradiction: "man is nothing else than what he makes of himself." Yet we are also something else: namely, what others make of us. Second, Sartre puts this more clearly later: "Thus the man who discovers himself directly in the cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the condition of his own existence. He recognises that he cannot be anything (in the sense in which one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked or jealous) unless others recognise him as such." So here we reach the contradiction: I make my own identity, but my own identity is completely dependent upon others. It is a logical inconsistency in many secular thinkers, such as Sartre.
Ok, I don't really understand what Sartre is getting at there, but I grant that your summary of his thesis is contradictory. Our own indenty and how other sees us, cannot be the same thing, who we are is a combination of things and not one single identity.
I'll address the consequences of this below:
Bust Nak wrote:
...it fragments the self. Whereas once our identity was derived from a transcendent permanent relationship with God, now we are defined by a myriad of relationships with others, but we claim we are defined exclusively by our own self-will. This is fairly standard in the modern analysis of identity...
Why is this fragment of indentity a problem?
There are anthropological, sociological, and psychological studies that suggest that the fragmentation of identity leads to things like stress, anxiety, identity crises, lower functioning socially, artificial relationships, etc. If I have a different identity in each relationship I am a part of, I experience a "loss of self", a loss of a coherent understanding of who I am.
Bust Nak wrote:
Zizek's argument at least is that it is a cultural problem, a Western problem. He could well be incorrect, but if correct he challenges the secular metanarrative's sexual aspects, and this is a key point of contention between the secular and the "prudish" or "sexually repressed" religious alternative. It's a cultural/psychoanalytic challenge to the metanarrative of modernity. I recommend Zizek's Plague of Fantasies if you want to get into more depth on this.
Even if Zizek is correct, I see this as just a problem of life to over come as opposed to an inconsistency in our worldview. The world is changing and we have to deal with it.
I consider it an objection to a worldview if we consider that metanarratives are part of a worldview. Let's turn the table for a moment:
Christianity has a worldview with a metanarrative of sanctification, where those who believe are claimed to grow more holy through the work of the Holy Spirit over time. A very, very common objection to Christianity is that Christian's don't seem to be very holy and that the metanarrative is wrong.
I'm flipping the table. I'm saying that secularism has a worldview with a metanarrative of liberation: we are freed from (among other things) the sexual repression of our past. However, I'm pointing out that our "freedom" in fact undermined our sexuality as many cultural critics are starting to note. Zizek is one such notable person.
Christians certainly respond like you have: sins are a struggle and part of life that we just have to deal with. And your response is equally justified.
But what I'm trying to show here is that many of the same sorts of challenges and contradictions can be thrown to secularism as can be thrown to Christianity around here. We see Christianity challenged all the time, but rarely do I see these equivalents against secularism, partly because the few people assert a whole secular worldview (at least that I've seen around here). So I'm asserting it for the secularist, pointing to notable contradictions in broad secular thought the same that atheists here point to notable contradictions in broad Christian thought. I'm pointing to brilliant secularists like Jean Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, the UN Declaration of Rights, and I'm saying "look, there are problems here." Then, if people like Haven are wanting to choose what to believe, they can see both sides of the debate trying to salvage a worldview that is consistent. Whichever side he, or anyone, winds up on, at least they'll say they've seen the arguments from both sides, and having seen the arguments, at least they'll develop a more consistent, coherent worldview.
