The day 1

Logos tempered by logic may eventually save the world

Here I am again, on Sunday morning, a creature of habit, having a cup of syrupy java at Starbucks. People no longer come to Starbucks to meet and converse with one another, and perhaps foment a revolution, as people once did in coffee houses of old, but to talk on cell phones and use the Internet. Sometimes someone I know arrives, but they have no time to chat as they are in a big hurry to get hooked up to WIFI and be on the Internet.

At least everyone is remotely connected. I am rather remote myself. I bring old philosophical tracts to read before turning, ever more skeptically, to the Sunday paper. I have lately been perusing Charles Sanders Peirce’s essay on fixed beliefs. It might be good for people to have a few fixed beliefs, and, if contradictions arise, bury their heads in the sand until they blow over. To the best of my information and belief, I am not an ostrich, but after reading some of the essay last Sunday, I believed things might turn out well enough for enthusiastic people who believe in what passes for reasonable today, or at least do not openly dismiss reason for the sake of divine foolishness. Economics, for instance, pretends to be as scientific as physics, and its faith in rational expectation, equilibrium, and free market theories panned out well for the power elite until the most recent collapse. After some recriminations and feeble regulatory reform, irrational business-as-usual guided by the Invisible Hand continues under the same political-economic faith, embracing such rationalized nonsense that, if everyone tries to overcharge everyone, and if everyone competes to get to the top of the heap, everyone will prosper.

Yet philosophers really should not believe in anything fixed because fixed beliefs would the death of philosophy. I prefer to believe in Nothing on Sundays, having been taught by philosophy that that is the reasonable thing to do, especially when I cannot stand the world anymore because it is nothing but illusion. A philosopher who follows in the footsteps of the greatest of all sophists hence practices virtual suicide should die to the world while preparing for death. And what is death? Nothing. So there is faith in Nothing, at least nothing we know of in this world.

Some dissenting philosopher, say, Ortega y Gasset, who embraces Being because that is all that can be, is bound to discredit belief in Nothing because Nothing does not exist to be believed in; wherefore faith in Nothing is actually faith in something indefinite and therefore destructive of everything finite, rendering the faithful into floundering fools in want of the usual illusive straws to clutch at.

"The World as deception is a most unpleasant reality which we can describe only by calling it and feeling it as Nothing-being, being so for us. Pure Nothing is better because one is satisfied with an absolute non-being and only its self is reduced to nothing. But to be in Nothing, as we are in basic doubt, is to find ourselves subdued and given over to an operative, active Nothing which exercises its terrible crushing, annihilating power on us to live in an atmosphere of substantial deceit, is to witness moment to moment the destruction of every one of our actions and our conditions, the ruination of our enjoyment of life. The anxiety, the deep uneasiness which must have been felt by these first men who did not believe in the gods, for whom the world had collapsed as 'security' and had become a deception for them, must have been terrible. Hence the heroic reaction with which they sought to emerge into something firm and to find certainty for themselves."

Peirce was a practical or reasonable man concerned with what really works. What we see is what we get. What we know about what we see should be reasonable. True conclusions arrived at by reasoning must be supported by observations every objective observer can agree on. A concept is meaningless if it has no practical effect on the way we live and think. The scientific method is the