Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Angrboda]

With those questions in mind, I tend to ask myself if certain notions are self-sustaining or self-defeating. The assumption that on a fundamental level human reason cannot accurately reflect on itself and also that sense cannot, in principle, extract knowledge of reality – that stance – leads to some very dark places. Interior life deconstructs. Science devolves into magic. In the workaday world most people, me included, may not feel the corrupting influence of these ideas. Nevertheless, I strongly suspect those ideas operating under the surface of Western culture.

My suspicion is that underlying such themes is an issue of control. We want reason to be self justifying and the world to be intelligible because only in the sense that it is are we in control of our fate. I think if anything is lying under the surface of Western culture it is a modern anxiety about control being an illusion. Perhaps this is a natural fear: man seeks to exert his dominance over the environment. But at the personal level, where a larger and larger proportion of the population experiences hardship day to day, the loss of a feeling or sense of control must surely be terrifying.

This suspicion of mine, which ultimately might prove unfounded, comes from my recent interest in the larger medieval folk culture of miracles and demons surrounding the Scholastic universities that cultivated and reinterpreted the most advanced ancient pagan thinkers. I’m trying to understand Scholastic philosophy on its own terms, through its pre-modern context rather than looking back at it through the lenses of either a modern mechanistic worldview or a post-modern world of deconstruction. As it applies to what I was saying earlier, I’m curious to know to what extent cultural narratives inform our perceptions of how the world works on the most fundamental levels. Maybe quantum curiosities only challenge modern narratives of causality, whereas they might have seemed perfectly normal from the perspective of a possibly earlier understanding of causality, one based not on mechanistic interactions but rather participatory engagement. If so, is it reasonable to recover pre-modern worldviews and adapt them to reflect current knowledge?

Well, I wish you luck with your project. It does sound like a fascinating undertaking. I'm a bit skeptical as to whether pre-modern conceptions of causality will have any such propitious effect, but I could be wrong. I tend to concentrate less on those areas where we have some degree of control over the content of our thinking, such as encultured ideas and worldviews and focus on those parts of the process which don't change. To that end, I see themes like intelligibility to be mostly gloss on the themes of how we arrive at our conclusions independent of culture and worldview. It reveals a world in which our lack of control is paramount. Is that a dark world? To me it just is, I don't make a value judgement on it. That probably reflects my Taoist beginnings. Is that an example of a pre-modern worldview being brought forward into the present? Perhaps. Or is it simply my own inherent biases revealing themselves? Hard to say. Maybe it's both.