This morning I listened to two philosophy podcasts:
I don't remember much about the second one. From looking at this, I am reminded that he proposed a sense of utopianism as an aspect of realism. In other words, our visions of what is desireable and hopefully achievable project into the future and possibly become reality, while the form of realism that excludes vision turns into a sort of brute pragmatism.
Utopianism doesn't seem to have much to do with my daily life, but I thought about homeschooling as I listened. There is sort of a soul of homeschooling, something that animates the brute mechanics and material of it. Whenever I dismiss this part of it I go wrong. "Without a vision the people perish". We might never actually achieve the ideal but contemplating it helps project some possibility of it.
The first podcast I remember better because it was on Hegel's dialectics. Here's an interview of Robert Stern -- hey Mystie, if you are reading, he mentions Durant's Story of Philosophy inspiring him as a young boy to become a philosopher!
The way I understood the podcast, Hegel proposes a sort of method AND historical pattern which has been called THESIS-ANTITHESIS-SYNTHESIS. Stern used the example of freedom vs determinism as an example.
I think this is not a sign of Hegel’s obscurity or incoherence, but really reflects the fundamentally dialectic nature of his project, which is to try to get beyond certain ingrained and very tempting dichotomies in our thinking – between reason and desire, freedom and determinism, theory and practice, the divine and the human, and so on – where his strategy is generally not to pick one side or the other, but to look for some way to combine both in a more stable synthesis.
The host inquired about cases like one person claiming that "torture is always morally wrong" vs another who says "torture can be practiced in certain circumstances." The correct position doesn't seem to be a synthesis of the two.
It seems to me that in this case, the dialectic would aid in getting a better view of presuppositions and values.... you might end up even more convinced that torture was wrong, but you would have a better sense of the reasons behind what was originally just an intuitive conviction.
This (not the torture part but the dialectic pattern part) made me think about the history of heresies in the Church). When a heresy arises, it crops up as an alternative theological opinion -- say, Pelagius's ideas on nature and grace. But then a kind of dialectic occurs. Augustine devoted many words to the controversy, and in the process, clarified a bunch of things that had previously only been implicit. The Church decided that Augustine's position was the true one. But I would say this is sort of a synthesis in that truth was forged out of the reasoning process. If Pelagius hadn't been obdurate and gained followers, Pelagianism would not be a heresy in the historical sense but merely a mistaken and later corrected theological idea, like, say, Tertullian's idea that the Church should not use pagan works for educational purposes.
When I was a freshman in college I was very interested in the Enlightenment and Romantic time, and it was hard NOT to see it as a thesis-antithesis era, a presentation of contrasts. I am not sure Western culture ever reached a synthesis, though. I always read it as a mind-heart schism, like those aliens in HG Wells that get specialized towards one purpose.
Dialectics have way more to do with real life. The etymology is "through/across" and "speak". We do a lot of dialecting in our home. Though I am guessing that Kant and Hegel must have used the word in an idealist sense, it seems to me that the endeavour itself is more personalist, more relational. Like teaching, it forms a triangle between two people and the topic, but it is between peers rather than teacher and student. Even if the dialectic involves a child and parent, or teacher and student, for the purposes of the dialectic the two meet on equal ground. If authority has to be invoked, the dialectic as dialectic is over. Or so I would think.
Later on in the day I read "Exploring the History of Medicine" which I want to use with my 5th grader this year. It was quite interesting. Tiner writes a lot of those short to medium "textbook" type sentence, but the material is way more story-like than textbook-y.
At Mass, the gospel was about Jesus sending out the 72 to teach and heal. The priest talked about our current political climate.
I spent most of the evening, after BBQing hamburgers for dinner, talking to Brendan about lots of things. Mostly historical, cultural and political.
I have been browsing through Sertillages "The Intellectual Life". He says study is a kind of prayer. How so? Prayer is reaching towards something desired, and study is like that too. Of course, in prayer to God, He was reaching first, or there would be no prayer; but something dimly parallel is true of Truth too. "Wisdom calls in the streets" -- truth is right there in your face, moving briskly past, in your path for you to stumble over if you don't pay attention --- as present and apparent as those temporal and visual adjectives suggest. By study you reciprocate truth's call.
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