Transcendent Truth Research Articles

First and second things, and the operations of conscience in science

Why is modern science less efficient than it used to be, why has revolutionary science declined, and why has science become so dishonest? One plausible explanation behind these observations comes from an essay First and second things published by CS Lewis. First Things are the goals that are given priority as the primary and ultimate aim in life. Second Things are subordinate goals or aims - which are justified in terms of the extent to which they assist in pursuing First Things. The classic First Thing in human society is some kind of religious or philosophical world view. Lewis regarded it as a 'universal law' that the pursuit of a Second Thing as if it was a First Thing led inevitably to the loss of that Second Thing: 'You can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first'. I would argue that the pursuit of science as a primary value will lead to the loss of science, because science is properly a Second Thing. Because when science is conceptualized as a First Thing the bottom-line or operational definition of 'correct behaviour' is approval and high status within the scientific community. However, this does nothing whatsoever to prevent science drifting-away from its proper function; and once science has drifted then the prevailing peer consensus will tend to maintain this state of corruption. I am saying that science is a Second Thing, and ought to be subordinate to the First Thing of transcendental truth. Truth impinges on scientific practice in the form of individual conscience (noting that, of course, the strength and validity of conscience varies between scientists). When the senior scientists, whose role is to uphold standards, fail to posses or respond-to informed conscience, science will inevitably go rotten from the head downwards. What, then, motivates a scientist to act upon conscience? I believe it requires a fundamental conviction of the reality and importance of truth as an essential part of the basic purpose and meaning of life. Without some such bedrock moral underpinning, there is little possibility that individual scientific conscience would ever have a chance of holding-out against an insidious drift toward corruption enforced by peer consensus.

Ego Readings vs. Reading for Psyche

Jung claims that visionary imaginative literature, because its source is the collective unconscious, helps the collective psyche self-regulate. Proving Jung’s claim is difficult since shifts in collective consciousness have many causes, but an instance of literature’s playing a part in such a shift is Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book which contributed to collective realization of the inherent limitations of point of view. Sometimes literature contributes to collective consciousness through tales bringing into focus a collective crisis, such as Jorge Luis Borges’s stories “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Library of Babel,” and “The Secret Miracle” which convey the modern dilemma of loss of absolute transcendent truths. Literature, however, cannot bring unconscious contents to consciousness if readers read with rigid ego boundaries, what I call ego readings. Slipping free from ego readings is more likely if one becomes aware that one is so reading. If readers already have experience of psyche beyond ego, they are more likely to be able to read for psyche. Still, even if readers do not have such experience, literature itself can initiate one into the existence of psyche as my reading of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger initiated me. One can become aware of performing ego readings through clues such as habitually discovering in the text what one already thinks, reading for plot, becoming angry at a text, discovering that one has been in denial about a text, and reading to find support for an argument. This latter practice characterizes literary criticism, as illustrated by Jacques Lacan’s, Jacques Derrida’s, and Barbara Johnson’s responses to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” Paradoxically, the professional response to literature may obstruct reading literature for psyche. If one can overcome ego resistance to a text, as I suggest through my experience of reading D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner,” one can garner a story’s psychological riches. Still, resistance may arise from ethical concerns, including responsibility to oneself, so that the relationship between self and text requires conscious and conscientious negotiation, an unsettling process as I detail in reference to my reading of Roberto Bolano’s 2666. Once readers are aware of performing ego readings, they can attempt to loosen their ego boundaries through focused attention (an insight emerging from reading Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”), particularly toward numinous moments for characters in a text or numinous responses in themselves. Reading for psyche also is furthered through re-reading, conscious intention, and reflection. For the institutions of literary criticism and of teaching to help readers be open to the contents of the unconscious psyche in literature, teachers and critics need to be aware of the difference between ego readings and reading for psyche. Jungian literature teachers and literary critics can take the lead.

Truth Criteria and the Very Project of a Transcendental Logic

This paper argues that Kant's idea for a new kind of logic is bound up with a very specific strategy for obtaining truth criteria, where he takes Christian Wolff to have failed. While the First Critique's argument against any universal criterion for empirical truth has almost always been treated as extraneous to the main concerns of the Transcendental Analytic, I argue that Kant inserted it at an important juncture in the text to illustrate a signal difference between traditional logics and transcendental logic. Namely, while a criterion of truth as correspondence cannot be provided by traditional logics, since they cannot, in Kant's view, identify an object determinately and distinguish it from others, transcendental logic overcomes that particular barrier. The key to the improvement is to be found in how Kant modifies Wolffian order and “transcendental truth”, while still retaining them as central elements of his project. Once we have reconstructed Kant's strategy, we also gain a new perspective on Kant's puzzling assessments of his relation to Berkeley.

The Emergence of Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (review)

Reviewed by: The Emergence of Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 Helen Hattab Stephen Gaukroger. The Emergence of Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. ix + 563. Cloth, $65.00. The sheer variety of both cognitive and non-cognitive contributions to the emergence of a scientific culture in the West and the complex relations to pre-modern developments that scholars have brought to light over the past decades have put into question both the Enlightenment and Kuhnian accounts of the scientific revolution. Gaukroger’s work performs the ambitious but indispensable task of beginning to formulate an alternative way of understanding this momentous transition, one based on recent scholarship. Gaukroger treats science as both “a particular kind of cognitive product, and as a particular kind of cultural product” (3). His overarching goal is to show that examining the interrelations between the two can teach us something about modernity that focusing on one, to the exclusion of the other, cannot. He argues that the enduring success of Western science was not due to its advances (there were previous advances in other cultures), but due to its ability to consolidate. Successful consolidation promotes the cognitive claims of science and builds a scientific culture to legitimate them. Hence, throughout this book, Gaukroger explores how particular advances (e.g., in astronomy and natural philosophy) were legitimated by their ability to reinforce revelation, unify different disciplines, and exemplify the scientific persona. Since these means of consolidation, unlike methods of scientific discovery, rely on both cultural forces and intellectual advances, Gaukroger makes good on his promise to teach us something that intellectual and cultural histories taken separately cannot. Gaukroger characterizes Western modernity in terms of the eventual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones. He targets the Enlightenment view which, as a result of this assimilation, reinterprets the success of scientific practices over others in ahistorical terms. On this view, the longstanding success of science results solely from cognitive advances, such as the commitment to objectivity (science was assumed to have dissociated itself from religion), the employment of adversarial, non-dogmatic arguments, and the development of quantitative and empirical methods. Gaukroger shows instead that: (1) early modern Epicurean and mechanist natural philosophies forged a closer connection to religious doctrine in response to the ultimate failure to maintain the Thomist reconciliation of theology with Aristotelian natural philosophy; (2) the threat posed by the naturalism of Renaissance philosophers like Pomponazzi led to a privileging of systematization over innovation in late Scholasticism, as well as a renewed interest in natural history, which later spawned the enterprise of physico-theology; (3) the adversarial character of ancient means of cultivating wisdom was rejected in favor of gentlemanly cooperation. This went hand-in-hand with a gradual reassignment of the aims of enquiry from the attainment of a transcendent truth to a productive truth, and the corresponding construction, by Bacon and others, of the scientific persona, which embodied the cognitive virtue of objectivity rather than the ethical virtue of ancient and medieval wisdom. Finally, (4) Beeckman and Descartes failed to achieve the quantification of natural philosophy they aimed for, in large part due to their conflicting commitment to corpuscularian matter theory. The successful replacement of Aristotelian causal explanations in natural philosophy by mechanistic explanations lay in mechanism’s ability to unify all causal explanation, rather than its ability to offer quantitative [End Page 640] explanations of various natural phenomena. Similarly, the experimental methods of Gilbert and Boyle were at first hotly contested, the eventual success of non-foundationalist, empirical approaches owing more to the unifying role played by the experiments of Gilbert, Boyle, and Newton. Although Boyle’s experimental philosophy included a mechanistic matter theory, unlike strict mechanists, experimentalists used experiments to focus and unify heterogeneous phenomena rather than grounding explanations in matter theory. Gaukroger presents the relevant cultural developments and theoretical advances with an impressive degree of detail and accuracy. Readers will gain insights about everything from the differences between early medieval Augustinianism and late medieval Aristotelianism, to Spinozism versus its late seventeenth-century alternatives. Scholars with expertise in specific areas will no doubt take issue with individual claims...

Celestial Discords: The Music of Dante's Paradise

The music that I am concerned with in the present paper is not that of angelic choirs and lyre-strumming seraphim (though of course there is that too in Paradiso). Rather, it is the music of Dante's poetry, and more precisely, the relative lack of a particular kind of word-music that one might expect to feature in an account of Paradise: the music of ecstasy, or jouissance. Because if one of the poem's aims is to communicate the experience of someone who claims actually to have been there, then it might be suggested, to adapt an elegant phrase of Roland Barthes, that Dante's is a somewhat sparing ecstasy, a jouissance parsimonieuse. Setting aside the fraught issue – the subject of animated debate to this day – of whether Dante had actually experienced a vision of some kind, and therefore believed his account of the Hereafter to be in some sense ‘factual’, there is no doubt that in writing the Paradisohe intended somehow to representthe state of bliss, an intent to which he refers with the polysemic verb figurare, meaning at one and the same time depict, imagine and, in accordance with contemporary allegory and typology, identify in the things pertaining to this world intimations of the transcendent truths of the next. If therefore Dante is sparing in his celestial jouissancethis is in part because the demands of earthly representation are such that the state of blessedness, and even Heaven's more transient effects on the ‘still flesh-and-blood’ Dante-character, can only be adumbrated, rapidly suggested and just as rapidly left off. At the root of Dante's achievement, as Auerbach taught us to recognize, is his extraordinary skill as a story-teller, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Paradiso, where, beyond time, there is in a sense no celestial story to tell. Dante fills that void with a variety of earthly stories instead: exemplary human lives and the history of mankind generally as a journey whose end-purpose is the celestial city; scientific, philosophical and theological narratives explaining how everything in creation exists and operates to fulfil that end-purpose; the story of Dante's own progress through the heavens.

What is Genealogy?

AbstractThis paper offers a theory of genealogy, explaining its rise in the nineteenth century, its epistemic commitments, its nature as critique, and its place in the work of Nietzsche and Foucault. The crux of the theory is recognition of genealogy as an expression of a radical historicism, rejecting both appeals to transcendental truths and principles of unity or progress in history, and embracing nominalism, contingency, and contestability. In this view, genealogies are committed to the truth of radical historicism and, perhaps more provisionally, the truth of their own empirical content. Similarly, genealogies operate as denaturalizing critiques of ideas and practices that hide the contingency of human life behind formal ahistorical or developmental perspectives.

Human Rights in Traditionalist Islam

The vaunted clash of civilizations has grown into a Fourth World War of demonization against Islam. The newest strategy is to single out Islam’s essential values, deny that they exist, and assert that their absence constitutes the Islamic threat. This article shows the common identity of classical American and classical Islamic thought so that Muslims, Christians, and Jews can unite against religious extremism. Muslim jurisprudents developed the world’s most sophisticated code of human responsibilities and rights. This is now being revived as the common heritage of western civilization based on the premise that justice reflects a truth higher than man-made positivist law and on the corollary that the task of religion is to translate transcendent truth into the transcendent law of compassionate justice.

Human Rights in Traditionalist Islam

The vaunted clash of civilizations has grown into a Fourth World War of demonization against Islam. The newest strategy is to single out Islam’s essential values, deny that they exist, and assert that their absence constitutes the Islamic threat. This article shows the common identity of classical American and classical Islamic thought so that Muslims, Christians, and Jews can unite against religious extremism. Muslim jurisprudents developed the world’s most sophisticated code of human responsibilities and rights. This is now being revived as the common heritage of western civilization based on the premise that justice reflects a truth higher than man-made positivist law and on the corollary that the task of religion is to translate transcendent truth into the transcendent law of compassionate justice.

Neopragmatic Thought and Counseling Values: Reconsidering the Role of Values in Counseling From an Alternative Epistemological Foundation

The history of Western philosophical thought has been dominated by the search for transcendent truth. As a consequence of this history, various epistemological dualisms (such as fact/value and appearance/reality) have come to structure modes of inquiry. Reliance on such dualisms has resulted in a degradation of values discourse, which, along with other “soft” forms of inquiry, is often viewed as epistemologically inferior to the “hard” sciences. However, particularly within the last century, philosophers have proposed compelling challenges to these dualisms, which, in turn, have massive implications for values discourse. These challenges are overviewed, and implications for values discourse within the counseling profession are discussed.

The Contemporary Aristotelian Museum: Exploring the Museum as a Site of MacIntyre's Tradition‐constituted Enquiry

The connection is made between the Royal Museum of Scotland and encyclopaedia, one of MacIntyre's three rival versions of moral enquiry. It is then asked how MacIntyre's other two methods, genealogy and tradition‐constituted enquiry, would function within a museum. It is proposed that the museum fulfils Haldane's criterion for tradition‐constituted enquiry in that it combines the immanence and open‐endedness of the methods of enquiry with transcendence in the objects of enquiry. The ethical judgments of the visitors constitute transcendent truth in morality; hence one can see the museum as a site of Aristotelian enquiry. To pursue this, the museum is explored as a site of Aristotelian study or theoria, and of MacIntyre's updated Aristotelianism. Therein we study the narratives written by historians and by individuals in a version of Aristotelian epagõgê, or the sifting of the opinions of the many and the wise. This process may also enhance civic friendship and our exercise of practical wisdom towards disadvantaged groups. Finally, MacIntyre's three rival versions of moral enquiry are returned to, and a museum characterised for each. All three are found to involve seriousness in the purposes of enquiry. Attention is drawn to MacIntyre's criticism of the interaction of bureaucracy and social science. It is proposed that such interaction may, in the case of the museum, dilute its seriousness as a site of enquiry.

Symmetry, asymmetry, and the real possibility of radical change: reply to Kochan

In his critique of my book Heidegger and Marcuse, Jeff Kochan (2006) asserts that I am committed to the possibility of private knowledge, transcendent truths, and individualism. In this reply I argue that he has misinterpreted my analysis of the Challenger disaster and Marcuse’s work. Because I do not dismiss Roger Boisjoly’s doubts about the Challenger launch, Kochan believes that I have abandoned a social concept of knowledge for a reliance on the private knowledge of a single individual. In fact, I consider Boisjoly’s observations just as social, if not as scientific, as the results of rigorous scientific study. Kochan’s reliance on a principle of symmetry derived from science studies to explain such politically charged technological controversies tends to mask the role of power and ideology in social life. Kochan interprets Marcuse as a failed Heideggerian who regresses from Heidegger’s social conception of human being to traditional individualism. I am accused of sharing this view. This interpretation overlooks the importance of the Hegelian–Marxist category of ‘real possibility’ in Marcuse’s work and so mistakes his critique of conformist politics for individualist romanticism. Marcuse always attempted to ground radical opposition in a community of struggle without abandoning the heritage of a long critical tradition. This view I willingly share.

Empires of Future Past: Justus Georg Schottelius and the Bellum Grammaticale

The Renaissance in Europe witnessed not just the rebirth of classical learning, but also the renewal of ancient sophistry. The works of Lucian of Samosata (c. 125–180 CE) provided writers such as Erasmus and Thomas More, among many others, with a model of what Bracht Branham has called “unruly eloquence”.1 In Plato's dialogues, the exchange of words between Socrates and his interlocutors points toward a transcendent truth in the heavens. Lucian, who adopted the dialogic form for his writings, had no system, no higher set of values to which he motioned. Instead, his dialogues debunked the fraudulent claims of others. Humanists embraced Lucian's playful mockery and pointed irony to confound ideas received from the scholastic tradition, which argued syllogistically from first principles. In other words, they followed Lucian's technique of artful lying in order to combat stagnant mendacity and thereby to gesture toward a dynamic truth that defied rigid formulation.

The question of sacrifice

In this concentrated and detailed look at questions surrounding the act of sacrifice, Dennis King Keenan discusses both the role and meaning of sacrifice in our lives. Building on recent discussions on the gift and transcendence, Keenan covers new ground with this exploration of the religious and ethical issues that sacrifice entails. According to Keenan, sacrifice pays: one gets a return on one's investment; that is, one suffers to get to a moment of transcendent truth. But what does this economy of sacrifice mean for living an ethical life? Along the way to an answer, Keenan considers the views of Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, Levinas, Blanchot, Irigaray, Derrida, Nancy, and Zizek. Keenan's work affords a sophisticated philosophical treatment of the question of sacrifice. Dennis King Keenan, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, is the author of Death and Responsibility: The Work of Levinas.

The mysteries of eleusis at howards end: German romanticism and the making of a mythology for England

Generally read today as a novel concerned with those personal relationships for which Forster has become famous,Howards End is, even more centrally, as it announces on its own pages, a work attempting to create a modern mythology for England. Taking his cue from the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich Schlegel in particular in his “Talk on Mythology” (“Rede uber die Mythologie”), who, distressed by the materialism, philosophic and economic, that followed the loss of religious faith and the rise of empiricism, called for the making of new mythologies that could speak for transcendent truth, Forster guides the Schlegel sisters, their obvious surrogates in his book, through a spiritual journey that replicates, in modern form, the ancient rituals of Elusis. As the literal tale relates events in the lives of individuals, an embedded symbolic narrative traces the steps of the ancient mysteries, showing their relevance to modern life and their function in modern literature.

God's Bridle: John Calvin's Application of Natural Law

Natural law has made a comeback in legal philosophy. The revival of natural law thinking in the legal academy began about thirty years ago and has managed to gain a seat at the table in current jurisprudential discussions. Defining natural law, Brian Bix declares that it “claims that there are fundamental and evaluative connections between the universe, human nature, and morality.” These connections need not have a Christian or even a theistic foundation. A belief in moral realism, that is, the propositions that “(1) there is an objective reality, (2) human beings can know something about it, and (3) there are some things that everyone can, and some things that everyone ought to, do in response to what they know,” ties together theistic and non-theistic versions of natural law. Yet many prominent contemporary natural law theorists—J. Budziszewski, John Finnis, Robert George, and Russell Hittinger —are Roman Catholic. Despite the fact that Finnis and George develop their natural law arguments without reference to any metaphysical states of affairs or transcendent truth claims, natural law continues to be associated with Thomas Aquinas and the subsequent scholastic tradition. Thus, even standards that Finnis and George derive from the internal rationality of law strike some as disguised theology.

Kant’s Theory of Transcendental Truth as Ontology

I. The Problem of ‘Truth’ in the Logic of Truth If one considers what Kant intended by true cognition, or truth, in his transcendental philosophy, it is clear that his transcendental philosophy is a logic of truth as well as ontology. As is well appreciated, Kant, while referring to formal logic as general logic, names his own logic “transcendental logic”, which contains the principles under which the cognition of objects is possible. According to Kant, ‘transcendental logic’ is the science which determines “the origin, the domain, and the objective validity” of the cognitions of the understanding that relate a priori to objects as pure acts of thinking. In other words, it is the science that defines and determines the legitimate use of the a priori cognitions of the understanding. Kant goes on to refer to the negative part of “transcendental logic” as the “transcendental dialectic” or “logic of illusion”, according to which we differentiate the illegitimate use of the a priori cognitions of the pure understanding, which occurs when the a priori cognitions are applied beyond their legitimate use to objects that go beyond the realm of experience. In contrast, the positive part of “transcendental logic”, which deals with the necessary “principles” without which no object can be thought at all is referred to as the “transcendental analytic” or “a logic of truth”. But how then are we to understand the notion of ‘truth’ here, which evidently is contrasted with the notion of ‘illusion’?

Beethoven: The Music and the Life

Beethoven: The Music and the Life

Crime Stories: Posnerian Pragmatism, Rawlsian Pure Procedural Justice, and the Fictional Problem

[There are many different ways in which law and truth may be said to be related. It is perhaps in the criminal trial that connections between them are of most signifi- cance. An orthodox way of describing a criminal trial is that the criminal procedure is seeking to establish the truth concerning some past event, and that success of the procedure is measured by how close its outcome converges with that truth. Crimi- nal justice presents the community with challenging dilemmas in this regard, such as those arising from the notion of double jeopardy. This paper discusses the Rawl- sian notions of ‘imperfect’, ‘perfect’ and ‘pure’ procedural justice, and suggests against Rawls that it is pure procedural justice that best represents what we want from a criminal justice system. Good procedure makes good criminal law. A com- parison is made with the writings of Habermas and Posner, and given that pure procedural justice eschews transcendental truths, some brief comments are made on the convergence of that position with the realm of the fictional.]

Representation and its discontents: Orientalism, Islam and the Palestinian crisis

Orientalism has become the pivotal account of the relationship between Europe and its others. But its very focused and selective account of Orientalism has provoked controversy from all sides. Said's work must be seen as an argument rather than as the presentation of some transcendental historical truth because we may then see that it fulfils a much broader task set for the ‘Oriental’: to take back the power of representation from the dominant culture. Orientalism remains even more critical now than twenty-five years ago because the task of taking hold of self-representation has become, for Palestinians, a matter of life and death. Resistance (muqãwamah) was first applied to literature by the Palestinian writer and critic Ghassan Kanafani, and the example of post-colonial literature remains the crucial model for the Palestinian people. This article proposes that the post-colonial strategy of transformation turns resistance from a simple opposition to a control of the means of representation. Success for the Palestinian people will never come from armed struggle but from the control of representation and the communication of the Palestinian situation to a dominant audience. In this way the achievement of Orientalism can be extended to the level of contemporary politics.

Poetic Acts: Making Meaning

About five years after I had completed two MAs and a PhD, I suddenly realized that in all that training noone had ever asked me about language. Here I was a fully employed student of poetry, studying the art of language use, and I had never been required to consider, nor had it occurred to me to consider, the nature of the medium. Was this not extraordinary? Great emphasis had been placed on quality of tone and mellifluous prosody, seven types of ambiguity, and the transhistorical truths proposed by metaphor, but no attention had been required on the fundamentals of language itself—how meaning might be generated, how words function, how the structures of language might relate to understanding. It did not take long to look around and find that some literary scholars had begun to ask about language, including, close to home, Isobel Armstrong, and, further afield, emerging structuralist theorists. It took a little longer to begin to understand how the silence on this question was an ideological residue, an idealist inheritance that regarded language as transparent and neutral, as not an active medium. Readers should look through the transparency of the poem, it was supposed, toward the transcendent truths beyond, like Romantic poets reading/rending the veil of nature. But the poem as "window on the world" is an inordinately inept metaphor for poetry/world relationships, and once questions began to be asked, the consequences quickly followed: language is a material as well as idealist phenomenon, it generates perceptions of gender and class as well as transcendent possibilities, it affects assumptions about the human subject, and it connects with the materiality of other historical and cultural activities—meaning in poetry (or any literary language) is neither "self-evident" nor contained within the work itself.