January 22, 1956 BOOK REVIEW | 'THE RETURN OF THE KING' At the End of the Quest, Victory By W. H. AUDEN
" The difficulty in presenting a complete picture of reality lies in the gulf between the subjectively real, a man's experience of his own existence, and the objectively real, his experience of the lives of others and the world about him. Life, as I experience it in my own person, is primarily a continuous succession of choices between alternatives, made for a short-term or long-term purpose; the actions I take, that is to say, are less significant to me than the conflicts of motives, temptations, doubts in which they originate. Further, my subjective experience of time is not of a cyclical motion outside myself but of an irreversible history of unique moments which are made by my decisions.
For objectifying this experience, the natural image is that of a journey with a purpose, beset by dangerous hazards and obstacles, some merely difficult, others actively hostile. But when I observe my fellow-men, such an image seems false. I can see, for example, that only the rich and those on vacation can take journeys; most men, most of the time must work in one place.
I cannot observe them making choices, only the actions they take and, if I know someone well, I can usually predict correctly how he will act in a given situation."
2) The rejection of the idea of a privileged position or of an privileged observer, who has a deeper insight in reality. This is the key idea of Enlightment and of modern scientific methodology, democracy, bureaucracy and of social organisation in general. It is especially visible in Spinoza, Kant, Popper & Hayek.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/CRIntroductionSources.html the Rathouse Series of Very Abbreviated Versions of Classical Philosophical Works for Very Busy People.
Conjectures and Refutations Karl Popper "XIV
In this short section Popper sums up his view that there are many sources of knowledge but none have authority.
XV The authoritarian structure of traditional philosophy
The traditional systems of epistemology may be said to result from yes-answers and no-answers to questions about the sources of our knowledge. They never challenge these questions, or dispute their legitimacy; the questions are taken as perfectly natural, and nobody seems to see any harm in them. This is quite interesting, for these questions are clearly authoritarian in spirit. They can be compared with the traditional questions of political theory, 'Who should rule?' which begs for an authoritarian answer such as 'the best', or 'the wisest' or 'the people', or 'the majority'. (It suggests, incidentally, such silly alternatives as 'Who should be our rulers: the capitalists or the workers?', analogous to 'What is the ultimate source of knowledge, the intellect or the senses?'). "
This political question is wrongly put and the answers which is illicits are paradoxical (Chapter 7 of OSE). It should be replaced by a completely different question such as 'How can we organise our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers cannot do too much damage?' The question about the sources of our knowledge can be replaced in a similar way.
The alternative that Popper suggested is the question of detecting and eliminating error, by means of critical appraisal by all the methods of criticism that we can muster - logical analysis, experimental testing, consistency with other theories etc."
Popper, differently from Kant or Spinoza arrives at correct conclusions from the rejection of privileged knowledge: he rejects any certain knowledge of the reality, replacing it, for utilitarian purposes, with his "falsifiability".
3) Of course, if the knowledge of the real world is impossible to achieve, we must finally accept the personal experience as the basis - and therefore accept the Protagonist privilege.
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Date: 2010-04-19 06:33 pm (UTC)Actually, this is a very informative post. It includes two points, both of paramount importance throughout history of the Western civilisation.
1) Objective existence of the world vs. the individual world as perception.
http://www.nytimes.com/1956/01/22/books/tolkien-king.html
January 22, 1956
BOOK REVIEW | 'THE RETURN OF THE KING'
At the End of the Quest, Victory
By W. H. AUDEN
" The difficulty in presenting a complete picture of reality lies in the gulf between the subjectively real, a man's experience of his own existence, and the objectively real, his experience of the lives of others and the world about him. Life, as I experience it in my own person, is primarily a continuous succession of choices between alternatives, made for a short-term or long-term purpose; the actions I take, that is to say, are less significant to me than the conflicts of motives, temptations, doubts in which they originate. Further, my subjective experience of time is not of a cyclical motion outside myself but of an irreversible history of unique moments which are made by my decisions.
For objectifying this experience, the natural image is that of a journey with a purpose, beset by dangerous hazards and obstacles, some merely difficult, others actively hostile. But when I observe my fellow-men, such an image seems false. I can see, for example, that only the rich and those on vacation can take journeys; most men, most of the time must work in one place.
I cannot observe them making choices, only the actions they take and, if I know someone well, I can usually predict correctly how he will act in a given situation."
2) The rejection of the idea of a privileged position or of an privileged observer, who has a deeper insight in reality. This is the key idea of Enlightment and of modern scientific methodology, democracy, bureaucracy and of social organisation in general. It is especially visible in Spinoza, Kant, Popper & Hayek.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/CRIntroductionSources.html
the Rathouse
Series of Very Abbreviated Versions of Classical Philosophical Works for Very Busy People.
Conjectures and Refutations Karl Popper
"XIV
In this short section Popper sums up his view that there are many sources of knowledge but none have authority.
XV
The authoritarian structure of traditional philosophy
The traditional systems of epistemology may be said to result from yes-answers and no-answers to questions about the sources of our knowledge. They never challenge these questions, or dispute their legitimacy; the questions are taken as perfectly natural, and nobody seems to see any harm in them. This is quite interesting, for these questions are clearly authoritarian in spirit. They can be compared with the traditional questions of political theory, 'Who should rule?' which begs for an authoritarian answer such as 'the best', or 'the wisest' or 'the people', or 'the majority'. (It suggests, incidentally, such silly alternatives as 'Who should be our rulers: the capitalists or the workers?', analogous to 'What is the ultimate source of knowledge, the intellect or the senses?'). "
This political question is wrongly put and the answers which is illicits are paradoxical (Chapter 7 of OSE). It should be replaced by a completely different question such as 'How can we organise our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers cannot do too much damage?' The question about the sources of our knowledge can be replaced in a similar way.
The alternative that Popper suggested is the question of detecting and eliminating error, by means of critical appraisal by all the methods of criticism that we can muster - logical analysis, experimental testing, consistency with other theories etc."
Popper, differently from Kant or Spinoza arrives at correct conclusions from the rejection of privileged knowledge: he rejects any certain knowledge of the reality, replacing it, for utilitarian purposes, with his "falsifiability".
3) Of course, if the knowledge of the real world is impossible to achieve, we must finally accept the personal experience as the basis - and therefore accept the Protagonist privilege.