I'm not sure where the target of your critique begins and ends, as I do fully agree with your points. Nevertheless, I would still insist on the importance of there being people who diagnose these problems on an intellectual or formal level which doesn't make the opposite error of reducing all issues of bad thinking to a lack of maturity or sin, most of the people for whom this description is accurate being generally too self-satisfied to take such proposals seriously anyways.
The Catholic caught in adultery, one must say, if rebuked and confronted with the word of God, will repent - or at least try to find some way to justify their life style within a Catholic understanding of the world. The "nominalist" or existentialist or however one might have it, will relativise, deconstruct, and question the very idea of human nature, using every means possible to deny what is before there very eyes and what their heart in truth bears witness to, abolishing their very humanity in the attempt to excuse their behavior. (I have witnessed this over and over again in Germany and even among close friends from the US). In such cases the appeal to the moral in whatever form simply doesn't work, which is why it is extremely helpful to show those under the delusion that they came to these conclusions rationally that they have fallen prey to a self-destructive philosophy which one can articulate, describe, and expose problems with, and which has just as much an intellectual history (in the broadest sense of the word) as the Catholicism they reject does. In other words they are no sophisticated Zarathustra prophet but also a subject of the historicity of thought and in a way which they have uncritically accepted.
Naturally nominalism is not the only Boogeyman in the world of ideas, and the world of ideas is certainly not the primary cause of the fall of man; so in this sense I fully agree with you that treating the rejection of nominalism as the solution to our societal problems in a formal sense is a non-starter. Ideas, as Husserl and Kierkegaard suggested, have to be fully received into the soul as bearers of being, which requires life change on the most practical level.
it started with an orthodox writer on substack blaming all the problems in the western church on the filioque. perhaps it ends with you? ha. i have wanted for myself to write something about the conditoins of the possibility of nominalism even being a problem. so as to point out how off some of the thomistic fixation on nominalism seems to be. only in the sense most thomists have rejected so much of the scholastic system, for them to take a hard line against occham when they themselves advocate nouvelle theologie seems crazy. but my thought here was perhaps superficial but that its not objects but acts that need to be made sense of and realism would see the urgency of acting in acordance withe the matter of life as oriented towards an end. i guess if i had to tease it out philosophically, what if realism in moral philsophy entails pragmatism, that we cannot over-speculate without detaching from life. this was the sort of worry behind my vague formulations here. ive been trying to publish a few things that are short, suggestive, representative of my thoughts and trying to give people the tools to understand what i am trying to say without fleshing the idea out fully because people dont want to read that much anyway, and its also more work for me to explain exactly what i mean here. i may deveop it at some point. i do think you and i have some differences of opinion as to the utility of philosophy in life. of course i think philosophy is useful but i restrict it more or see it as perhaps more dangerous, and at some points take amore wittgenstenian turn against optimism that phillosphy rather than simply imitation of good examples can improve life. e.g. the most important things we learn are not explained but shown.
I think I'd definitely benefit from anything you'd write on that. Interesting to me would be 1) what those things are from scholasticism which modern Thomists tend to reject and 2) as you mentioned, what the conditions for nominalism being an actual problem are.
my perspective on this is perhaps broader than I give evidence for thinking (after all, I have been in the last two years specifically on a reading stent concerning Thomistic metaphysics). I don't think *en vivo* rational thought is a cause isolated from the things of personal motivation and experience, nor do I really see a clear break between the philosophical and the spiritual (the bridge, of course, being what some would call phenomenology ;) , which is why I see proper thinking as just as important for the spiritual as the spiritual is for proper thinking.
I agree pragmatism is absolutely necessary, not as a retreat from reality but by, again, in a husserlian sense, suspending our categories philosophical interpretations of the world and letting it simply *be* in its givenness. But in that sense it's just offering a philosophical analysis of what most people would just call pragmatism.
this last paragraph is a doozy. phenomenology is at its most unpragmatic with husserl, even heidegger or levinas seem to grasp this. The worrie is the reduction is a flight from the real. i like peirces definition of pragmatism as the "the meaning of a concept being its sum total of practical consequences for action." the phenomenological reduction is dubious in this frame as i see it. Though peirce did find a utiliti in Husserls approach.
often when i read your writing i think, i wish he would read wittgenstein. on certainty is a small work that would be provocative and convey what i think we disagree about. this is an awareness for the sorts of situations where a philosophical explanation cannot help but only make worse, and the sorts of philosophical explanations that cannot make good of any situation or dispute. ordering people to read books is annoying and arrogant and i apologise but it could help you get a sense where i think the disagreement lies. the strongest thread of thomistic philosophy in the 20th century is decidedly anti-phenomenological, i.e. anscombe geech, etc.
prayer or at least meditation has ordering desire to God as its end. i dont think phenomenology is a bridge becaues i dont think there is any reason to over-theorize the spiritual. which is my pragmatic critique in the essay about phenomenolgy before.
thanks for the encouragement to write that essay. it would be good for me to write and to further extend the train of thought i started in that first essay on curiosity.
when I reference concepts from husserl I'm not trying to import his entire science but rather the practical upshot of his basic observations. a number of academics have been lead to belief in God (for example St. Edith Stein) merely by studying Husserl, largely because of his having punched a hole in the reigning Kantian / teutonic fog, namely that the condition for knowledge is our own interpolation of being onto the conscious field.
Husserl insisted instead that the outer world has authority and cannot be imposed by the subject, but is given by being itself. (bracketing of course his leaving open the question whether the saturation of essences in consciousness participated in reality - it was a matter of posture towards being as a whole, not of specific metaphysics) of course I'm not a Husserl scholar and haven't studied even most things he's written. It may even also be that there's some kierkegaardian and heideggerian concepts tinged in there because I was studying them all at the same time.
but again, the main point I was referencing is not the framework in which Husserl studied the phenomena of consciousness, but rather much more the practical and livable conclusion that it is not me or my ideas which should take authority when I approach the phenomena of the world, but they should speak for themselves.
For me this was an important insight because I by nature struggle with a dangerous tendency to existential levels of anxiety which end up forcing a masochistic relationship with pseudo-rational thoughts—false internal “voices” claiming the authority of logic, but in fact driven by fear or compulsion (Catholics call these in one context scruples, but for me it began to encompass epistemological concerns as well). Having established a much stronger voice in my life which allows me look past these and instead seek what *being* says about itself rather than what my own pseudorational layer of consciousness had to say was the key to overcoming some of the deepest crisis of heart and mind I've lived through.
That brings me to "On Certainty"; in fact, Wittgenstein was one of my biggest inspirations in university and his points actually introduced me to the beginnings of this distinction between truly rational and psuedo phenomena in consciousness, as he helped me to understand that just as we had, with words and language, confused a genus (words) for a species "truth declarations", so also we often tend to confuse modes of consciousness as inherently reality-conformant when they are not. Anyways, I had read the Tractatus and philosophical Investigations, but not "On Certainty", so i've spent the last few days studying it to see what Wittgenstein claims there.
I fundamentally agree with the idea of hinge beliefs (or properly basic) beliefs, the denial of which destroy the conditions for knowledge or doubt itself. The problem I see with applying Wittgenstein's analysis here to the questions we're discussing (should one try to defend essentialism purely rationally) is more practical than absolute. I do think sometimes you do have to defend the truth of things which people cannot not know to be true.
The reason being: people are namely not always morally aware of what they know. This was my biggest problem in college. I would be so bold as to claim that the entire time I was in college, I knew God existed despite thinking I was an atheist. That was 1) because my understanding of God was severely limited, and 2) my own sinful nature put a natural veil between my immediate consciousness and that which I knew to be true such that, while knowing it, I wasn't immediately aware I knew it.
I do believe that it is true, as you seem to claim, that many people would return or be quickened in their acceptance of generally essentialist doctrines of purpose, meaning, nature, etc. by simply living as if. But at the same time, there are many, just like I was in college, who need or want at least a superficial "Wegweiser" which shows them that in doing so they are headed in the rationally correct direction. It's the nature of modern society today that we live so separate, so deeply estranged not only from our own nature, but also from our own knowledge itself in our pursuit of the ego, creating a world of fictive standards and justifications to "morally" navigate the world with no basis in reality (as you have spelled out excellently with privationism) that it really amounts to a leap into utter darkness for some to return to the true world. For some a small roadmap towards finding their way back home is helpful even if it's not going to be everything in the process.
As for phenomenology, I don't see it as a self-contained practice on its own or some sort of method which i live by. for me it was a necessary and healthy correction towards a proper mode of approaching the world. Not everybody needs it, but when you get as screwed up in your relationship to being as contemporary philosophy and a serious anxiety disorder can make you, good phenomenology can be deeply redemptive. So for me it was a ladder which I used to climb back to the "tree" of the spiritual life and I let it fall back to the ground again.. and only revisit it when I fall off the tree every once in a while, so to speak.
I'm not sure where the target of your critique begins and ends, as I do fully agree with your points. Nevertheless, I would still insist on the importance of there being people who diagnose these problems on an intellectual or formal level which doesn't make the opposite error of reducing all issues of bad thinking to a lack of maturity or sin, most of the people for whom this description is accurate being generally too self-satisfied to take such proposals seriously anyways.
The Catholic caught in adultery, one must say, if rebuked and confronted with the word of God, will repent - or at least try to find some way to justify their life style within a Catholic understanding of the world. The "nominalist" or existentialist or however one might have it, will relativise, deconstruct, and question the very idea of human nature, using every means possible to deny what is before there very eyes and what their heart in truth bears witness to, abolishing their very humanity in the attempt to excuse their behavior. (I have witnessed this over and over again in Germany and even among close friends from the US). In such cases the appeal to the moral in whatever form simply doesn't work, which is why it is extremely helpful to show those under the delusion that they came to these conclusions rationally that they have fallen prey to a self-destructive philosophy which one can articulate, describe, and expose problems with, and which has just as much an intellectual history (in the broadest sense of the word) as the Catholicism they reject does. In other words they are no sophisticated Zarathustra prophet but also a subject of the historicity of thought and in a way which they have uncritically accepted.
Naturally nominalism is not the only Boogeyman in the world of ideas, and the world of ideas is certainly not the primary cause of the fall of man; so in this sense I fully agree with you that treating the rejection of nominalism as the solution to our societal problems in a formal sense is a non-starter. Ideas, as Husserl and Kierkegaard suggested, have to be fully received into the soul as bearers of being, which requires life change on the most practical level.
it started with an orthodox writer on substack blaming all the problems in the western church on the filioque. perhaps it ends with you? ha. i have wanted for myself to write something about the conditoins of the possibility of nominalism even being a problem. so as to point out how off some of the thomistic fixation on nominalism seems to be. only in the sense most thomists have rejected so much of the scholastic system, for them to take a hard line against occham when they themselves advocate nouvelle theologie seems crazy. but my thought here was perhaps superficial but that its not objects but acts that need to be made sense of and realism would see the urgency of acting in acordance withe the matter of life as oriented towards an end. i guess if i had to tease it out philosophically, what if realism in moral philsophy entails pragmatism, that we cannot over-speculate without detaching from life. this was the sort of worry behind my vague formulations here. ive been trying to publish a few things that are short, suggestive, representative of my thoughts and trying to give people the tools to understand what i am trying to say without fleshing the idea out fully because people dont want to read that much anyway, and its also more work for me to explain exactly what i mean here. i may deveop it at some point. i do think you and i have some differences of opinion as to the utility of philosophy in life. of course i think philosophy is useful but i restrict it more or see it as perhaps more dangerous, and at some points take amore wittgenstenian turn against optimism that phillosphy rather than simply imitation of good examples can improve life. e.g. the most important things we learn are not explained but shown.
I think I'd definitely benefit from anything you'd write on that. Interesting to me would be 1) what those things are from scholasticism which modern Thomists tend to reject and 2) as you mentioned, what the conditions for nominalism being an actual problem are.
my perspective on this is perhaps broader than I give evidence for thinking (after all, I have been in the last two years specifically on a reading stent concerning Thomistic metaphysics). I don't think *en vivo* rational thought is a cause isolated from the things of personal motivation and experience, nor do I really see a clear break between the philosophical and the spiritual (the bridge, of course, being what some would call phenomenology ;) , which is why I see proper thinking as just as important for the spiritual as the spiritual is for proper thinking.
I agree pragmatism is absolutely necessary, not as a retreat from reality but by, again, in a husserlian sense, suspending our categories philosophical interpretations of the world and letting it simply *be* in its givenness. But in that sense it's just offering a philosophical analysis of what most people would just call pragmatism.
this last paragraph is a doozy. phenomenology is at its most unpragmatic with husserl, even heidegger or levinas seem to grasp this. The worrie is the reduction is a flight from the real. i like peirces definition of pragmatism as the "the meaning of a concept being its sum total of practical consequences for action." the phenomenological reduction is dubious in this frame as i see it. Though peirce did find a utiliti in Husserls approach.
often when i read your writing i think, i wish he would read wittgenstein. on certainty is a small work that would be provocative and convey what i think we disagree about. this is an awareness for the sorts of situations where a philosophical explanation cannot help but only make worse, and the sorts of philosophical explanations that cannot make good of any situation or dispute. ordering people to read books is annoying and arrogant and i apologise but it could help you get a sense where i think the disagreement lies. the strongest thread of thomistic philosophy in the 20th century is decidedly anti-phenomenological, i.e. anscombe geech, etc.
prayer or at least meditation has ordering desire to God as its end. i dont think phenomenology is a bridge becaues i dont think there is any reason to over-theorize the spiritual. which is my pragmatic critique in the essay about phenomenolgy before.
thanks for the encouragement to write that essay. it would be good for me to write and to further extend the train of thought i started in that first essay on curiosity.
when I reference concepts from husserl I'm not trying to import his entire science but rather the practical upshot of his basic observations. a number of academics have been lead to belief in God (for example St. Edith Stein) merely by studying Husserl, largely because of his having punched a hole in the reigning Kantian / teutonic fog, namely that the condition for knowledge is our own interpolation of being onto the conscious field.
Husserl insisted instead that the outer world has authority and cannot be imposed by the subject, but is given by being itself. (bracketing of course his leaving open the question whether the saturation of essences in consciousness participated in reality - it was a matter of posture towards being as a whole, not of specific metaphysics) of course I'm not a Husserl scholar and haven't studied even most things he's written. It may even also be that there's some kierkegaardian and heideggerian concepts tinged in there because I was studying them all at the same time.
but again, the main point I was referencing is not the framework in which Husserl studied the phenomena of consciousness, but rather much more the practical and livable conclusion that it is not me or my ideas which should take authority when I approach the phenomena of the world, but they should speak for themselves.
For me this was an important insight because I by nature struggle with a dangerous tendency to existential levels of anxiety which end up forcing a masochistic relationship with pseudo-rational thoughts—false internal “voices” claiming the authority of logic, but in fact driven by fear or compulsion (Catholics call these in one context scruples, but for me it began to encompass epistemological concerns as well). Having established a much stronger voice in my life which allows me look past these and instead seek what *being* says about itself rather than what my own pseudorational layer of consciousness had to say was the key to overcoming some of the deepest crisis of heart and mind I've lived through.
That brings me to "On Certainty"; in fact, Wittgenstein was one of my biggest inspirations in university and his points actually introduced me to the beginnings of this distinction between truly rational and psuedo phenomena in consciousness, as he helped me to understand that just as we had, with words and language, confused a genus (words) for a species "truth declarations", so also we often tend to confuse modes of consciousness as inherently reality-conformant when they are not. Anyways, I had read the Tractatus and philosophical Investigations, but not "On Certainty", so i've spent the last few days studying it to see what Wittgenstein claims there.
I fundamentally agree with the idea of hinge beliefs (or properly basic) beliefs, the denial of which destroy the conditions for knowledge or doubt itself. The problem I see with applying Wittgenstein's analysis here to the questions we're discussing (should one try to defend essentialism purely rationally) is more practical than absolute. I do think sometimes you do have to defend the truth of things which people cannot not know to be true.
The reason being: people are namely not always morally aware of what they know. This was my biggest problem in college. I would be so bold as to claim that the entire time I was in college, I knew God existed despite thinking I was an atheist. That was 1) because my understanding of God was severely limited, and 2) my own sinful nature put a natural veil between my immediate consciousness and that which I knew to be true such that, while knowing it, I wasn't immediately aware I knew it.
I do believe that it is true, as you seem to claim, that many people would return or be quickened in their acceptance of generally essentialist doctrines of purpose, meaning, nature, etc. by simply living as if. But at the same time, there are many, just like I was in college, who need or want at least a superficial "Wegweiser" which shows them that in doing so they are headed in the rationally correct direction. It's the nature of modern society today that we live so separate, so deeply estranged not only from our own nature, but also from our own knowledge itself in our pursuit of the ego, creating a world of fictive standards and justifications to "morally" navigate the world with no basis in reality (as you have spelled out excellently with privationism) that it really amounts to a leap into utter darkness for some to return to the true world. For some a small roadmap towards finding their way back home is helpful even if it's not going to be everything in the process.
As for phenomenology, I don't see it as a self-contained practice on its own or some sort of method which i live by. for me it was a necessary and healthy correction towards a proper mode of approaching the world. Not everybody needs it, but when you get as screwed up in your relationship to being as contemporary philosophy and a serious anxiety disorder can make you, good phenomenology can be deeply redemptive. So for me it was a ladder which I used to climb back to the "tree" of the spiritual life and I let it fall back to the ground again.. and only revisit it when I fall off the tree every once in a while, so to speak.
,