Let’s begin with quotations:
Next: What do you say to those who argue about or from opinions?
Now for some musings centered on those four quotations:
1. There’s nothing much new in modern progressivism and nothing much new in modern conservatism. Both echo thoughts that originated at least 2,500 years ago—probably longer ago—records are scant and “philosophy” wasn’t formalized until people sat at the feet of the pre-Socratics like Pythagoras and then at the feet of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Did people advocate for Left or Right opinions prior to the rise of philosophy? It seems reasonable to assume that even the Egyptians held such opinions, but their hieroglyphs require us to infer those opinions from “pictures.” The division between the two seemingly contrary modes of understanding the Cosmos (and, because it’s part of the Cosmos, Human Nature) lies in that recognition of Nous, or Mind as either maker or observer. A mind-body dichotomy with which we still struggle, or should I say, with which progressives struggle differently from how conservatives struggle, generally leads to different definitions and interpretations of “reality” and value.
Samuel Johnson’s famous kicking a stone to refute Berkeley’s idealism characterizes the essence of the debate between conservatives and progressives. His sore foot was a physical result of the reality of matter and the existence of a reality outside the mind. Now, of course, a refutation of the Johnson’s refutation lies in other phenomena that seem difficult to ignore: Schizophrenic imaginings and psychosomatic pain are human “realities,” just as phantom limbs are for amputees. What to do? What to think? Goodness! Who would question that a phantom limb is not a “real” for the amputee? Who would doubt that schizophrenics don’t hear and see what they think they hear and see, especially after Eltiona Scana, a paranoid schizophrenic, killed little seven-year-old Emily Jones in a park in Bolton, UK? Such incidents are numerous and tragic, and they reveal that some of us live in a world of the mind. Of course, a Johnson-like refutation of “imagined” realities lies in the loss of Emily Jones suffered by her parents: That she died seems to be irrefutably something that occurred “outside the mind.” But in an infinite regression, one might ask whether all minds were connected Matrix-like prior to her imagined birth and death. And so on..
For those “Dr. Samuel Johnsons” the world of Mind-Only has manifested itself in gun laws that do not stop bad actors and in entitlement and victimhood anxieties. The world of the mind is one in which a logarithmic rise in temperature is interpreted as an exponential rise, fostering a panic that humanity will be inundated by seas and blasted by the high winds of super hurricanes regardless of data to the contrary. In that world of the mind, individuals, especially policy-makers, have adopted rather extreme measures they have imposed on the multitudes. The world of the mind has manifested itself in a Hollywood community that partly defunded its police force in the context of rising crime in favor of unarmed social workers on bicycles who will supposedly defuse domestic conflicts—even those involving gun-toting violent offenders bent on shooting rather than on talking. [Gotta do this to you: Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.”—obviously an unacceptable philosophy for those that believe Mind is All. By the way, Emerson also wrote something apropos to the modern world of “victims” of “word crimes”: “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”]
2. Take my understanding of place, for example. Do I believe it exists outside my mind? Sure. I’m convinced after studying both geology and human history that before I built my house, the woody land existed, just not in the form it does today. I’m pretty much locked Johnson-like into accepting the natural and human history of the land on which I live, therefore, and am convinced that it was at one time the location of a “real” epicontinental sea and at another time a vast and thick delta. I can deduce from local rocks that because of its elevation, my land might also have stood as a small island in the middle of Lake Monongahela or have lain beneath but close to its surface. Because of nearby Meadowcroft Rock Shelter and local “Indian mounds,” I accept that neither I nor my immigrant ancestors were the first to walk my woods, that between the Rock Shelter inhabitants as much as 16,000 years ago and the arrival of Europeans just hundreds of years ago, there were also many “Native Americans” who were “real people walking over real land.” Goodness! I have evidence that in the decades before I purchased the land it was part of a farm owned by the Swan family whose descendant divided and sold “properties.” Surely, all those who preceded me also acknowledged a physical reality that I now recognize as having an existence independent of mind. [But even I can recognize that there is an element of “mind” in any place that humans inhabit. Take a look around at your own place, recognizable to you as more than an accumulation of objects. Place for each of us is personal history personified; it bears for us feelings only we know and thoughts only we have. It is, however, part of a two-way relationship between matter and mind: The objective reality of place has had, for want of a better word, the “power” to alter who we are or who we THINK we are]
But I began with progressivism and conservatism in #1, so let me take you back. What has happened to the philosophy of idealism is that modern political progressives have run to an extreme that accepts Nous over Matter as the ultimate reality. Or, rather, to an extreme that says Nous makes Matter or reality. As Jorge Luis Borges writes, “There is no other reality for idealism [idealists] than that of mental processes; adding an objective butterfly to the butterfly which is perceived seems a vain duplication; adding a self to those processes seems no less exorbitant. Idealism judges that there was a dreaming, a perceiving, but not a dreamer or even a dream; it judges that speaking of objects and subjects is pure mythology. * In the twentieth century American idealism became for many a justification for believing that opinion is fact and even irrefutable fact. These most recent versions of idealists play semantic games in which the mere naming becomes reality. I think of a YouTube on-the-street video of a young woman screaming that there were “hundreds of genders.” I suppose she is correct—depending solely on semantics. **
3. The problem with an overemphasis on Nous is captured in Maraboli’s statement. If Nous is all there is, if opinion is all there is, then humanity will never arrive at “Truth.” There will be many “truths.” I suppose that even Dr. Samuel Johnson might agree with that. Certainly, even theoretical physicists agree because they operate that the current understanding represented by the Standard Model might alter with the discovery of a new particle or strings.
But agreement will always elude humans who make their own realities. And that leads to…
4. how easy it is in a subjective world to self-deceive, as da Vinci writes.
When opinion reigns supreme, there is no objective, outside-the-mind reality. Go kick a stone. To an idealist, your pain is “in the mind.” To an idealist, there is no reality to any phenomenon not held by that idealist. I call your attention to a statement by Congressman Naylor of New York who said when he was asked about the summer riots in Seattle that they and their perpetrators, who self-identified as Antifa, were a myth. ***
Maybe this is just an “opinion,” maybe the machinations of my mind-gone-wrong, but the store I’ve been kicking reveals a division between progressives and conservatives that goes beyond arguments about Big and Small government and controlled and runaway entitlement spending. For one side, the progressive side, the Mind Is All, the Nous Makes All, and anyone, anywhere, at any time can accept anything without doubt as reality. The other side, derided by the progressive side as lowly stone-kickers, is willing to doubt on the basis of observing that which lies outside Mind. Of course, this reductive thinking poses its own set of problems, especially since it relies on Mind to reduce, to simplify. Yet, if you exist outside my mind, I “feel” strongly that you understand what I’m saying.
*Borges, Jorge Luis. 1962. Labyrinth: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed by Donald Yates and James E. Irby New York. New Directions Publishing Corporation. Penguin Books. Found in Sears, Sallie and Georgianna W. Lord, Eds. 1972. The Discontinuous Universe: Selected Writings in Contemporary Consciousness. New York. Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. P. 220. The books contain “A New Refutation of Time” by Borges.
**YouTube. Charlie Kirk Interview under the title: “Leftist Claims There Are Over 100 Genders!”
***YouTube: “Jerry Nadler: ‘Antifa is a myth.’” Nadler: “That’s a myth that’s been spread only in Washington, D.C.”
- “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” —Oscar Wilde in De Profundis
- “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” —Harlan Ellison
- “Your opinion is not my reality.” —Steve Maraboli
- “The greatest deception which men incur proceeds from their opinions.” —Leonardo da Vinci
Next: What do you say to those who argue about or from opinions?
Now for some musings centered on those four quotations:
1. There’s nothing much new in modern progressivism and nothing much new in modern conservatism. Both echo thoughts that originated at least 2,500 years ago—probably longer ago—records are scant and “philosophy” wasn’t formalized until people sat at the feet of the pre-Socratics like Pythagoras and then at the feet of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Did people advocate for Left or Right opinions prior to the rise of philosophy? It seems reasonable to assume that even the Egyptians held such opinions, but their hieroglyphs require us to infer those opinions from “pictures.” The division between the two seemingly contrary modes of understanding the Cosmos (and, because it’s part of the Cosmos, Human Nature) lies in that recognition of Nous, or Mind as either maker or observer. A mind-body dichotomy with which we still struggle, or should I say, with which progressives struggle differently from how conservatives struggle, generally leads to different definitions and interpretations of “reality” and value.
Samuel Johnson’s famous kicking a stone to refute Berkeley’s idealism characterizes the essence of the debate between conservatives and progressives. His sore foot was a physical result of the reality of matter and the existence of a reality outside the mind. Now, of course, a refutation of the Johnson’s refutation lies in other phenomena that seem difficult to ignore: Schizophrenic imaginings and psychosomatic pain are human “realities,” just as phantom limbs are for amputees. What to do? What to think? Goodness! Who would question that a phantom limb is not a “real” for the amputee? Who would doubt that schizophrenics don’t hear and see what they think they hear and see, especially after Eltiona Scana, a paranoid schizophrenic, killed little seven-year-old Emily Jones in a park in Bolton, UK? Such incidents are numerous and tragic, and they reveal that some of us live in a world of the mind. Of course, a Johnson-like refutation of “imagined” realities lies in the loss of Emily Jones suffered by her parents: That she died seems to be irrefutably something that occurred “outside the mind.” But in an infinite regression, one might ask whether all minds were connected Matrix-like prior to her imagined birth and death. And so on..
For those “Dr. Samuel Johnsons” the world of Mind-Only has manifested itself in gun laws that do not stop bad actors and in entitlement and victimhood anxieties. The world of the mind is one in which a logarithmic rise in temperature is interpreted as an exponential rise, fostering a panic that humanity will be inundated by seas and blasted by the high winds of super hurricanes regardless of data to the contrary. In that world of the mind, individuals, especially policy-makers, have adopted rather extreme measures they have imposed on the multitudes. The world of the mind has manifested itself in a Hollywood community that partly defunded its police force in the context of rising crime in favor of unarmed social workers on bicycles who will supposedly defuse domestic conflicts—even those involving gun-toting violent offenders bent on shooting rather than on talking. [Gotta do this to you: Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.”—obviously an unacceptable philosophy for those that believe Mind is All. By the way, Emerson also wrote something apropos to the modern world of “victims” of “word crimes”: “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”]
2. Take my understanding of place, for example. Do I believe it exists outside my mind? Sure. I’m convinced after studying both geology and human history that before I built my house, the woody land existed, just not in the form it does today. I’m pretty much locked Johnson-like into accepting the natural and human history of the land on which I live, therefore, and am convinced that it was at one time the location of a “real” epicontinental sea and at another time a vast and thick delta. I can deduce from local rocks that because of its elevation, my land might also have stood as a small island in the middle of Lake Monongahela or have lain beneath but close to its surface. Because of nearby Meadowcroft Rock Shelter and local “Indian mounds,” I accept that neither I nor my immigrant ancestors were the first to walk my woods, that between the Rock Shelter inhabitants as much as 16,000 years ago and the arrival of Europeans just hundreds of years ago, there were also many “Native Americans” who were “real people walking over real land.” Goodness! I have evidence that in the decades before I purchased the land it was part of a farm owned by the Swan family whose descendant divided and sold “properties.” Surely, all those who preceded me also acknowledged a physical reality that I now recognize as having an existence independent of mind. [But even I can recognize that there is an element of “mind” in any place that humans inhabit. Take a look around at your own place, recognizable to you as more than an accumulation of objects. Place for each of us is personal history personified; it bears for us feelings only we know and thoughts only we have. It is, however, part of a two-way relationship between matter and mind: The objective reality of place has had, for want of a better word, the “power” to alter who we are or who we THINK we are]
But I began with progressivism and conservatism in #1, so let me take you back. What has happened to the philosophy of idealism is that modern political progressives have run to an extreme that accepts Nous over Matter as the ultimate reality. Or, rather, to an extreme that says Nous makes Matter or reality. As Jorge Luis Borges writes, “There is no other reality for idealism [idealists] than that of mental processes; adding an objective butterfly to the butterfly which is perceived seems a vain duplication; adding a self to those processes seems no less exorbitant. Idealism judges that there was a dreaming, a perceiving, but not a dreamer or even a dream; it judges that speaking of objects and subjects is pure mythology. * In the twentieth century American idealism became for many a justification for believing that opinion is fact and even irrefutable fact. These most recent versions of idealists play semantic games in which the mere naming becomes reality. I think of a YouTube on-the-street video of a young woman screaming that there were “hundreds of genders.” I suppose she is correct—depending solely on semantics. **
3. The problem with an overemphasis on Nous is captured in Maraboli’s statement. If Nous is all there is, if opinion is all there is, then humanity will never arrive at “Truth.” There will be many “truths.” I suppose that even Dr. Samuel Johnson might agree with that. Certainly, even theoretical physicists agree because they operate that the current understanding represented by the Standard Model might alter with the discovery of a new particle or strings.
But agreement will always elude humans who make their own realities. And that leads to…
4. how easy it is in a subjective world to self-deceive, as da Vinci writes.
When opinion reigns supreme, there is no objective, outside-the-mind reality. Go kick a stone. To an idealist, your pain is “in the mind.” To an idealist, there is no reality to any phenomenon not held by that idealist. I call your attention to a statement by Congressman Naylor of New York who said when he was asked about the summer riots in Seattle that they and their perpetrators, who self-identified as Antifa, were a myth. ***
Maybe this is just an “opinion,” maybe the machinations of my mind-gone-wrong, but the store I’ve been kicking reveals a division between progressives and conservatives that goes beyond arguments about Big and Small government and controlled and runaway entitlement spending. For one side, the progressive side, the Mind Is All, the Nous Makes All, and anyone, anywhere, at any time can accept anything without doubt as reality. The other side, derided by the progressive side as lowly stone-kickers, is willing to doubt on the basis of observing that which lies outside Mind. Of course, this reductive thinking poses its own set of problems, especially since it relies on Mind to reduce, to simplify. Yet, if you exist outside my mind, I “feel” strongly that you understand what I’m saying.
*Borges, Jorge Luis. 1962. Labyrinth: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed by Donald Yates and James E. Irby New York. New Directions Publishing Corporation. Penguin Books. Found in Sears, Sallie and Georgianna W. Lord, Eds. 1972. The Discontinuous Universe: Selected Writings in Contemporary Consciousness. New York. Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. P. 220. The books contain “A New Refutation of Time” by Borges.
**YouTube. Charlie Kirk Interview under the title: “Leftist Claims There Are Over 100 Genders!”
***YouTube: “Jerry Nadler: ‘Antifa is a myth.’” Nadler: “That’s a myth that’s been spread only in Washington, D.C.”
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