I think humans yearn for law, which is predictable. Its counterpart, chaos, is less well liked. 
Law makes us feel that we understand, even if/when we don’t. We like the comfort of that, I think. But laws are human creations. Reality has no need or use for them.
So “universal” law? How would that work? 
Every writer wrestles with the problem of audience. For whom are we writing? What expectations do we form about how we will be read?
If you’re satisfied with the path you’re journeying on, and believe you’re communicating successfully with the people you want to reach, that is the most important thing. You should ignore what I said.
Yes. I was offering a viewpoint on what struck me as the “error” part. But see above; you yourself are the only person you must try to satisfy, the only one who can say what is an error and what is a success.
Yes, that is a great dividing line in philosophy. I can only say that “either God or relativism” seems to me hopelessly oversimplified.
Oh hell yea, they are, the sole purpose of which is the comprehension of relations.
Yes, and additionally I think, comfort in the law can sometimes be thought of as presupposing respect for law in general.
It would work by means of the entire membership of the set of all humans willfully obliging himself to adhere to it. Technically, with respect to deontological moral philosophy, the entire membership wills himself to act according to that maxim which manifests such a possibility.
Which, ironically enough, regarding moral dispositions generally, is precisely the same reason, not that it couldn’t possibly work, but that human nature is such that rejection of it is just as justifiable as the construction.
It is the case nonetheless, that the idea of universal law does work, re: the law of identity, the LNC, although in the field of pure logic, still proves the possibility.
Yes, and I don’t see how God avoids relativism, or at least a meandering subjectivity. Since no one knows what God wants, and he doesn’t speak to us in person, all we have are a multitude of interpretive traditions, schisms and idiosyncratic conceptions, generally at odds with each other, all claiming that theirs is the correct pathway to what God wants. Theism seems hopelessly lacking in specificity, agreement, consensus, and any reliable means of determining which interpretation, if any, is correct.
Reading “God or relativism” charitably, I think we’re meant to picture a God whose PoV is not in doubt. Therefore, the argument goes, we used to believe there was a “God’s-eye PoV” we could access – a genuine objectivity. Since we no longer believe this, relativism and subjectivity follow as the night the day.
This may well be the theory: God knows what he wants. But when has this ever happened in human culture? Isn’t it usually the case that a plethora of accounts of this point of view immediately arise, with those who have more power tending to call the others heresy? Since we don’t have God on the scene to set any of this straight, all we seem to have are subjective accounts of which version is correct.
Sure, though I think a philosophical version of this has in fact held sway in the West. It’s a kind of direct realism that holds that, if there were no conscious beings, the world would still be as it is. And what could “as it is” mean, under such circumstances? Answer: As it would look to an ideal PoV that would stand in for the missing conscious beings. And this we call God, as the scholastics liked to say.
I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek but in fact I think this doctrine is respectable, and requires argumentation to refute. Your point about the vagaries of actual religious practices is of course unaffected.
Comfort is one thing, but respect for law is quite another, I think.
Sure, no prob. So what is the ground of such comfort? Why is, what makes, the law comfortable?
“Being is time” is likewise helplessly oversimplified, but I find it profound as a summary. Hegel is great on this. Language is not like math. Signs are not vessels of a “universal inside pure meaning stuff.”
I mentioned that we can understand understanding in terms of the reduction of unpleasant surprise. We don’t have the luxury of infinite resources. So we don’t bother with X. We instead look into Y. We feel the call of Y. We have a sense that Y is hiding something behind what it shows. We experience the temporal depth of Y. But X is currently there as bland and useless.
I don’t have a grudge against theism or a dislike of the term “God.” It’s a metaphor. I don’t expect my general approach to make sense, especially immediately, to those who take the framework I am questioning for granted.
I value the feedback. It helps me navigate this particular dialogue. I’d be more of a fool than I am already to resent candor. But I’d be a weak philosopher in the other direction to abandon the attempt to express what has become definite for me. What for me was a massive reduction of cognitive dissonance “should be” quasi-nonsense to others. The signification-for-Joe of basic signs shifts. This is progress in philosophy. But Joe has to use these same empirical objects, these signs, with others for whom the significance has not shifted. Joe has no reason to assume that the significance will or even should shift for Anyone.
Spengler uses “ethical socialism” for the enacted “Faustian” assumption of “One Way” that must be discovered and propagated. Many philosophers indeed take this for granted. “I am trying to find and transmit the singular Truth, or at least approximate this Truth.” But we can think of signs as tools. Not every tool is relevant to each of our peers.
We can soften the “find the universal Truth model.” The social organism — the “poet” — presupposes an ideal audience that need not be Every Rational Person. The signs delivered as a gift need not be attempts to mirror Objective Reality. It suffices that they have, in the eyes of their creator, an enduring value for an ideal community that may be smaller than Every Rational Person. And their value may be conceived in terms other than mirroring or representing.
It seems we are more on the same page than I realized. You also see the connection, clearly, between “God” and “as it ( really) is.” Variants of this doctrine are even dominant.
Opponents of this doctrine only confuse themselves if they try to refute the doctrine as “false.” For the essence of this framework is the dualism between belief and truth. Protagoras is best interpreted as an ontological perspectivist who was mostly badly understood by people “stuck in” the framework that had become conscious and optional for him. “(Generalized) God versus relativism” does have a finger on the sore spot.
Yes, I see the connection. But unlike what I think you’re saying, I don’t believe “as it is” disappears as a concept – is rendered illusory – once we question a God’s-eye PoV. Rather, the question I would pose as philosophically important is: What was the idea of “the view from nowhere” or “God’s PoV” trying to capture? Is there a way of capturing it without insisting that philosophers be theists of a certain stripe?
I think you would answer “No – it’s either God or perspectivism/relativism”; I would say “Quite possibly, so let’s work on it.” Nagel’s aptly titled The View from Nowhere is a terrific starting place for understanding how difficult the issue is.
(And note that I called the theistic position “respectable.” I don’t at all acknowledge atheism as the only defensible philosophical position.)
Just so. That’s why it’s so hard to write well, in any genre. We’re always threading the needle between staying true to our individual conceptions, and finding ways to express them that succeed in communicating with the audience we want to reach.
I experience this acutely in poetry, which I write a lot of. How can I say what I want to say, but also communicate, use language that is meaningful to someone besides me?! If a poem is too arcane, too “personal,” it may cut itself off from all but a few readers. Is that OK with me? Or if I move too far in the other direction, the poem may be easily understood by many, but therefore lose the precision of expression that prompted me to write it in the first place.
This is all to say that I understand and sympathize with your challenge here.
Comfort blanket; security. If everything follows laws, then all is predictable. We are secure, and not subject to the unfathomable vagaries of the Gods. Comfort.
A rather childish sentiment, but…
I wouldn’t call it childish, but it wasn’t what I was looking for either.
We feel comfort from this law, we feel discomfort from that law, but all laws are the same in their construct, regardless of what they are about.
So if laws are about different things and either positive or negative comfort follows from them, there must be something governing which feeling is the proper response for which law.
Something to inform whether the feeling of comfort or discomfort in one law on the one hand, and the feeling of comfort from this law but discomfort in that, on the other, is justified.
And seeing as how those two conditions relate all senses of both sorts of comfort and its response to whatever law, we can ask……what feeling governs the feeling of comfort in general, in relation to law in general?
Respect. What possible feeling of comfort could one ever have for that law upon which he hadn’t already felt respect?
None of which matters, unless for the building of a philosophy predicated on law. You know, like……a moral philosophy.
I think we already tacitly answer this question. “Objective” just means unbiased. The unbiased juror is “biased” in that he speaks the language of the witnesses, but this is good bias. So implicitly objectivity is an ideal absence of bad bias. For instance, the juror should not be the defendant’s mother, or the victim’s.
Then we have peer review. Outsiders try to judge the reliability of a specialist technique by how other specialists judge it. “I am not qualified to say, but those considered qualified seem to approve of it, therefore I should probably trust so-and-so.”
We might also agree that people tend to agree about how things are on the level of the arrangement of empirical objects. So shared perceptual reality becomes the genuine “core” of what later gets inflated to the point of confusion.
“If reductive physicalism is true…”
This phrase gets treated like a reasonable analog of “if there is a package on the porch…”
The “theism” metaphor isn’t a piece of cultural politics. I’m holding what’s flimsy in logical positivism up to what is solid.
Relativism isn’t an emotional term for me. We might use “empiricism.” Basically my aim is to be realistic in the informal sense. Operationalism is a close cousin of what I’m talking about.
We can empathize with Joyce as he began FW. His patron gently scolded him. Pound didn’t like it. He built a maze-wheel. He spent 17 years on this beast of a text. Who was it for ? Well, it does continue to fascinate some. If it had been his first book, I would probably have never heard of it. It could only have been printed at his own expense, or at the expense of a rich disciple.
That book is a good example here, because it is insanely allusive. I see philosophy that way. For instance, Heidegger is a crucial influence for me, at least the work from the 20s. So I “take Heidegger for granted.” I can try to paraphrase some of what I take from Heidegger, but my book is basically aimed at the people who might respond to Heidegger. If they are sufficiently serious about the issues to join my ideal audience, they will read Heidegger themselves. On the other hand, I don’t want to be locked into the “profound continental” stereotype. I am just as serious about the “analytic clarity” of positivism, but not at the expense of reinforcing the very prejudices that I question.
Tricky issue ! But it’s the right kind of trouble to have, IMO.
I’m glad you shared that. I also write poetry, used to be the vocalist in some bands.
Do you like T. S. Eliot ? One of my earliest favorites and after many decades still one of the best, IMV.
This is the question I answered before, in relation to law in general. Your answer is respect, mine is comfort, arising from predictability. Let’s remember that many obey laws, even though they don’t seem to respect them.
Moral philosophy is based on … law?
Not all of them of course; just one.
Anyway, good talk.
I agree, we have many quite uncontroversial examples where we’re able to think of “objective” as either simply unbiased, or else acting together on a shared hypothesis.
But the totalizing critique that I think you’re committed to bites deeper. The view from nowhere has also got to be a view that holds rationality as unbiased, as a way to capture “how things are.” Not for nothing have God and logos been paired in the Western consciousness. And at least since Nietzsche, that’s been called into question.
So as I read post-modernism, the challenge has always been: How does one articulate the totalizing critique without engaging in performative contradiction?
Does this fit the way you also see these issues?
Yeah, that would be the limit case all right! And you raise an important point about the Wake: Joyce knew he was James Joyce, a writer with an international reputation. So it was not unreasonable for him to believe that this massive and strange book would at least attract readers to try it.
There you go – that’s your audience. My question for you would be: Is that also your audience here on TPF?
Cool, now I can picture you gnashing into a mic, great fun! I did my share of that too.
Eliot – yes, 4 Quartets for sure, less keen on Waste Land but some good spots. It got harder for me to read him, the more I learned about his unattractive personality and politics, but if we used that sort of thing to cancel our reading of poetry, we wouldn’t have much left to read. 
Whatever the limits may be, they are to be found through the practice of reasoning and not speculatively. Like the language in which we reason, reason it is a social practice. It may have at one time been something one could do alone, but such a person was and would be,as they said in ancient Greece, an idiōtēs.
In my opinion, where reason may lead is an open question. It is not simply about the techniques of reason but of what we might reason about. Reasoning about and in collaboration with artificial intelligence, for example, might lead us down interesting and fruitful paths. It might also lead us in harmful directions. But none of this is something new. Value-free reasoning is nihilistic. One reason philosophers are being recruited to AI companies is to deal with this.