It’s important to bear in mind that certain issues tend to serve as a distraction from working together for the common good, and therefore that certain discussions, dialogues or arguments are not fruitful because they take energy from the main effort to do this. There are two situations in particular which come to mind in this respect. One of them is the gender identity issue. In certain circles, Mumsnet comes to mind, feminist discussion is dominated by this concern at the cost of others, such as period poverty, the importance of female access to toilets in the developing world, rape culture, domestic violence, and basically everything which comes up in Everyday Sexism. I often wonder if that’s almost the point: to prevent action being taken on these issues by focussing on trans stuff. To a lesser extent, the same issue can arise in conversations about atheism, agnosticism, theism and the much more interesting but rarely mentioned misotheism and ignosticism. Therefore, I have only reluctantly decided to address this point here. It is, however, an important point because sometimes there needs to be a united front on certain issues, and while we’re fighting or discussing, we aren’t addressing those and that serves the “Other Side”. There’s also the issue of what constitutes the other side, and whether that’s even the right way of describing things.
Nonetheless, communication is important and I recently got the impression this wasn’t working very well because I wasn’t giving people the context to my views. It’s not easy to do this because they involved a lot of work and thinking and are, like everyone’s, drawn on life experience, and you haven’t lived my life. All of this hardly needs saying, although it probably does need saying that through no fault of my own, I seem to reliably arrive at different conclusions from everyone else, which is probably to do with neurodiversity, but the conclusions I reach, particularly in this case, might illustrate why I’ve previously described myself as being “neurodiverse not otherwise specified”.
Here it is then.
Immanuel Kant once analysed our apprehension of the phenomenal via something he called “categories”. We are initially confronted with a blizzard of impressions he referred to as the Manifold, and in order to conceive of and think of anything at all, we impose structure on them. The thought that a physical object is known is making a judgement about it. The word is not used here in terms of classification but as what can be stated about any object. They include such things as cause and effect, existence, necessity and contingency. Now at some point in the past I noticed a remarkable parallel between Kantian categories and Freudian ego defences such as projection, rationalisation, transference and the like. I am not Freudian but do believe ego defences are valid and can be observed in oneself and others, although not with sufficient rigour to become valid natural kinds. Also, Herbert Marcuse attempted a synthesis of Marxist analysis of society with Freudianism in his work in the 1950s and ’60s. This is the kind of environment in which I think of the world.
A second, much less nebulous factor in my thinking is based on a process which may be practically universal. There is generally something about the characteristics of the thinker in their beliefs which appears to justify their position, which are convenient for that thinker. For example, a meat eater may believe that humans have souls and other species haven’t or a man may believe that women can’t be raped because “the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down”. A White person may believe that Black people are naturally less intelligent than White people. I probably don’t need to give many more examples. We might like to think we’re objective and neutral, but we aren’t, and in the past this has applied to science so there’s no particular reason to suppose that it no longer applies.
Addressing this is difficult, but one way of doing so is a little like the Cartesian method of doubt, which is well-known enough not to need introduction, but it’s still worthwhile to describe it to pursue this analysis. The Cartesian method of doubt is to systematically doubt everything until one is left with what can be known, in the sense of beliefs which cannot be rationally doubted. This left him, in his opinion, with sensory impressions, the laws of logic and mathematics and his own consciousness, although some would reduce that further. He then made what in most circles today looks like a very silly move involving attempting to prove the existence of a benevolent deity via the ontological argument, which I can’t even be bothered to repeat, in order to establish that he would not be deceived and therefore the “external world” exists more or less as it’s perceived. This was not a sensible move, but the method of doubt is sound.
What I chose to do was establish a similar ethical process in order to reach a stage where my motives couldn’t be doubted, and to reconstruct the world in a similar way based on moral considerations rather than logical or rational ones. This applies mostly to the issue of consciousness. It’s impossible to be certain that one lacks ulterior self-serving motives for particular beliefs and in fact it’s very common for people to believe things first and try to find reasons for believing them later. This is of course rationalisation.
One of the most significant features of my world view, following from this, is panpsychism. If one believes that all reality is conscious (and there’s an issue here regarding whether it’s atomic matter, all matter or matter, energy and space), it’s likely to make one a lot more cautious and considerate. If I believed something else, I could be motivated unethically and it could be about selfishness.
What we consider to be rational thought is in fact moulded by emotions, maybe sometimes unconscious ones. I believe this is true to the extent that we are never truly rational and it isn’t even desirable to be so. We just aren’t, we should embrace that and acknowledge it, and when we explore our reasoning we should also explore our feelings, because the two are inextricably entwined and may not even be distinct.
This has a number of consequences. One is that it solves the problem of deriving an “ought” from an “is”. Utilitarians notoriously attempted to establish the principle of utility from the idea that that which was desired was therefore worthy of desire. This is partly due to a shortcoming of the English language, that whereas many others would use a gerund or future participle to derive their word for “desirable” from “desire”, English instead tacks “-able” on the end: capable of being desired as opposed to worthy of being desired. This leaves the whole world of ethics apparently unfounded in naturalistic terms, and is therefore known as the naturalistic fallacy. But what if it’s the other way round? What if, instead of deriving evaluative terms from descriptive ones, descriptive ones derive from evaluative ones? This would explain why you can’t get an “ought” from an “is”. It’s simply the wrong way round.
A couple of other people have come up with something similar. One of them is the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Much of his thought involves the attempt to purify a Jewish approach to things, although his thought needn’t be taken theistically. It isn’t clear to me whether he is in fact theistic, and this is undoubtedly a good thing because it’s better to transcend the distinction between theism and atheism than to focus on it in, as I mentioned above, the interests of solidarity in pursuing social justive. It also crops up in Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship, and the idea that when we relate to each other it’s ideally face to face, i.e. authentic, honest, personal. There should never be a point where something is simply used, and that of course hearkens back to Immanuel Kant’s Kingdom of Ends.
So there you go. This could’ve been more detailed but I think I’ve at least presented my view even if I haven’t justified it. This is generally how I attempt to conceive of the world and relate to it. It justifies, for example, my veganism, anti-racism, anti-sexism and so forth, and at least in psychological terms helps to explain why I relate to certain people the way I do.
And now I’m going to do the census form.
A Box Of Chocolates 