15.16. Empirical Concepts vs. Non-Empirical (Metaphysical) Concepts

This is going to be a 'David Hume-like' essay -- but with a difference. I don't throw out metaphysical concepts -- or 'commit them to flames' -- quite as easily as Hume did.

Epistemology can start off very simple but then get complicated real quickly.

Example: I get out of my chair here that I am sitting on. My chair has a physical presence. I can 'empirically' verify its existence by 'pointing at it' and by 'phyically touching it'.

Now here is where we do a 'cognitive dialectical split'. This is the age old 'subjective/objective' split.

My chair can be viewed as a 'subjective phenomenon' that has a presence as a part of my 'perceived phenomenal field of immediate, empirical, sensory contact -- seeing, touching...'.

When I leave the room and step into the kitchen, the chair ceases to be a 'sensory, phenomenal object' for me. However, this does not mean that the chair ceases to exist, a la Berkeley who tried to argue that 'perception equals existence'. He quickly ran into trouble with this point of view: specifically, 'What happens when there is no-one present to perceive something? Does that mean that the 'thing not being perceived' does not exist? Berkeley's response to this was: It still exists because 'God can still perceive it'.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

George Berkeley (pronounced /ˈbɑrkli/, like Bark-Lee) (12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), also known as Bishop Berkeley, was an Irish philosopher. His primary philosophical achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory, summed up in his dictum, "Esse est percipi" ("To be is to be perceived"), contends that individuals can only directly know sensations and ideas of objects, not abstractions such as "matter."

Berkeley's theorizing was empiricism at its most extreme. In his first publication, regarding vision, he stated that we only really perceive two spatial dimensions, height and width. The third spatial dimension of depth is not directly known; rather, it is inferred by the mind. As a young man, Berkeley theorized that individuals cannot know if an object is, individuals can only know if an object is perceived by a mind. He stated that individuals cannot think or talk about an object's being but rather think or talk about an object's being perceived by someone; individuals cannot know any "real" object or matter "behind" the object as they perceive it, which "causes" their perceptions. He thus concludes that all that individuals know about an object is their perception of it.

Under his empiricism, the object individuals perceive is the only object that they know and experience. If individuals need to speak at all of the "real" or "material" object, the latter in particular being a confused term which Berkeley sought to dispose of, it is this perceived object to which all such names should exclusively refer.

This raises the question whether this perceived object is "objective" in the sense of being "the same" for fellow humans, in fact if even the concept of other human beings, beyond individual perception of them, is valid. Berkeley argues that since an individual experiences other humans in the way they speak to him —something which is not originating from any activity of his own —and since they learn that their view of the world is consistent with his, he can believe in their existence and in the world being identical or similar for everyone.

It follows that:

Any knowledge of the empirical world is to be obtained only through direct perception.
Error comes about through thinking about what individuals perceive.
Knowledge of the empirical world of people and things and actions around them may be purified and perfected merely by stripping away all thought, and with it language, from their pure perceptions.
From this it follows that:

The ideal form of scientific knowledge is to be obtained by pursuing pure de-intellectualized perceptions.
If individuals would pursue these, we would be able to obtain the deepest insights into the natural world and the world of human thought and action which is available to man.
The goal of all science, therefore, is to de-intellectualize or de-conceptualize, and thereby purify, human perceptions.
Theologically, one consequence of Berkeley's views is that they require God to be present as an immediate cause of all our experiences. God is not the distant engineer of Newtonian machinery that in the fullness of time led to the growth of a tree in the university's quadrangle. Rather, my perception of the tree is an idea that God's mind has produced in mine, and the tree continues to exist in the Quad when "nobody" is there simply because God is an infinite mind that perceives all.

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Now according to DGB epistemology, the chair -- even when it is no longer in my field of empirical vision -- still has a subject presence for me, a subjective existence, only now it is an 'assumptive or inferred existence'. We can also say that the chair has an 'objective (noumenal) existence in its own right but this is a metaphyical concept because it is a concept -- and assumed phenomenon -- that lies outside of the realm of my, or anyone else's, empirical senses. 'Objective (noumenal) reality is an assumed or inferred reality that lies beyond the emplirical senses and potential for verification by man'. Thus, it is a metaphysical concept -- lying beyond physics and more importantly beyond the possiblity of human empirical verification.

Now let us imagine the following scenario. Most of you have probably watched 'American Justice' or 'Cold Case Files'.

Let us say that a man was convicted of a sexual crime. He declares that he is innocent and appeals his conviction. The man was convicted before the arrival and usage of DNA. Fifteen years later DNA from the crime scene is linked to another known sex offender who it is now apparent committed the crime. The first man who it is now clear was convicted falsely, is released. We can say that based on better empirical evidence, the courts now could make a better 'truth-assertion' or 'truth-assumption' relative to who committed the murder.

What kind of conclusions can we build from this?

1. The 'truth' is very rarely 'final'.

2. The 'truth' is subjective to 'historical revisionism'.

3. One hopes that the 'truth' is being 'honored' and/or 'improved upon' based on any form of historical revisionism; not distorted, mamipulated, and/or falsified.

4. Empirical, observational, and/or physical evidence remains the strongest basis for asserting, inferring, and/or assuming 'truth'; any other form of 'circumstantial', 'inferential' and/or 'assumptive' evidence is much more amenable to multiple interpretations of 'truth' -- and should never be declared 'final'.

5. Subjective testimony is particularly susceptible to narcissistic bias and distortion of truth.

6. The more courts of law prioritize subjective testimony at the expense of emprical and physcial evidence, the more they become susceptible to 'overconvicting the innocent'. Indeed, even courts of law can become 'tainted' by narcissistic bias based on preferential treatment of some and underprotection of others. These are factors that need to be weeded ot if we are to keep our courts -- which should set the highest standards for 'epistemological truth' -- 'epistemologically clean'. If the epistemology is not clean in a court of law, then neither will be the judgment.
(See my blogsites on civil rights, equal rights, legal narcissistic biases, 'The Gaze', family justice, and sexual justice.)


dgb, dec. 30th-31st, 2007.

15.15. From Kantian Epistemology to DGB 'Dialectical Rational-Empiricism' (via Vaihinger)

Man is intelligently designed -- just like every other animal that walks on, swims on, and/or flies over top of, the face of the earth. Even plants are intelligently designed.

Now, whether you want to say that 'God' intelligently designed us, or 'Nature' intelligently designed us, or some other species from a different planet intelligently designed us, or none of the above -- that is up to you. I will say I am an 'agnostic' here -- I don't know. However, it might be argued -- and it has been argued (Vaihinger, the philosophy of 'as if', 1911) -- that sometimes man can utilize 'functional fictions' or 'fictional constructs' (my words, not his) in ways that 'work for him' and/or otherwise 'brighten up his day' even though they may not be 'totally epistemologically accurate', but in effect, do him no harm, relative to their amount of epistemological error. Indeed, if you want to push this point furhter, it could be easily argued that every human construct or concept contains a certain elsement of error or 'fictional component'.

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Hans Vaihinger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In Philosophie des Als Ob (As If), he (Vaihinger) argued that human beings can never really know the underlying reality of the world, and that as a result we construct systems of thought and then assume that these match reality: we behave "as if" the world matches our models. In particular, he used examples from the physical sciences, such as protons, electrons, and electromagnetic waves. None of these phenomena have been observed directly, but science pretends that they exist, and uses observations made on these assumptions to create new and better constructs.

This philosophy, though, is wider than just science. One can never be sure that the world will still exist tomorrow, but we usually assume that it does. Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology, was profoundly influenced by Vaihinger's theory of fictions, incorporating the idea of psychological fictions into his personality construct of a fictional final goal.

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I find it most interesting that Vaihinger was a Kantian scholar. Indeed, I like Vaiinger's interpretation and/or modification of Kant's epistemology better than anything else I have come across. It fits fairly closely with my General Semantic (Korzybski, Hayakawa...) background.

It could be argued -- and I will hang onto this argument for the time being -- that 'God' is one of these types of 'fictional or mythological constructs' that can be useful and important to man -- as long as he is not using the name 'God' to terrorize or poision his own life, and/or the life of others.

I will use a 'pantheistic' construct (see my blogsite on religion, spirituality, and pantheism...) here -- specifically 'God/Nature' or 'God-Nature' -- to function in my writing and my philosophy as 'The Creator' behind man's -- and lifes's 'intelligent design'.

Let's go back to Kant and Vaihinger. I don't mind using Kant's concept/construct of 'noumenal world' as long as it is used in a similar fashion to Vaihinger's philosophy of 'As If'. In other words, Kant's construct of 'noumenal world' becomes an idealistic, metaphysical epistemological concept that is more closely aligned to Vaihinger's Philosophy of 'As If' than anything that Plato wrote on 'Ideal Forms'.

This is an important distinction. In other words, according to DGB's (that's me) rendition of Kant, we live in two worlds: 1. our subjective, phenomenal world of 'as if'; and 2. our objective, noumenal world that we will never know perfectly but we can still get to know better and better through a better and better use of our sensory perceptions and our subjective, phenomenal world of 'as if' that is based on partly 'factual' and partly 'fictional' -- constructs. Sometimes, it doesn't matter how 'fictional' our constructs are; at other times it may be a life and death matter.

Based on this DGB rendition of Kantian epistemology, we have something to workd with -- epistemologically speaking -- and do not have to panic and commit 'epistemological suicide'.

Let us leave it here for now.

dgb, Dec. 30th, 2007.

15.14. Kant's Room (Part 2) Laying The Groundwork For A Dialectic Epistemology -- 'Rational-Empiricsm'

Kant is a good starting point for studying epistemology -- and epistemology being the study of knowledge, we can say also that epistemology is the search for 'truth'.

Starting with Kant, we need to determine what he did wrong in order to go back to doing things 'right' relative to the moving forward of the art and science of epistemology.

Kant created an epistemological dualism but one without solid foundation and without 'moving parts'. Kant did a 'Platonic thing' -- he made the same epistemological mistake that Plato made. He took epistemology into the realm of metaphysics -- into the 'outer stratosphere' -- where it quickly became completely incomprehensible, ungrounded, and had academics shaking their collective heads, and becoming more anxious -- much more anxious, some of them to the point of despair == as it seemed through Kant's view of epistemology that epistemology had no future, no place to go, because it had no foundation.

For me and my presentation of DGB Epistemology, there was, and is, no problem with the dualistic part of his epistemology -- i.e. his distinction between the 'phenomenal world' of our senses vs. the 'noumenal world' of objective reality apart from our senses. This was essentially simply a re-wording of the age-old philosophical 'subjective-objective split'. However, Kant ended up in the same philosophical place -- only perhaps stated things more clearly, succinctly, bluntly than any philosopher before him including David Hume who inspired him to write his masterpiece -- 'The Critique of Pure Reason'.

What Kant said, in effect, is that man could never 'know' his objective-noumenal world because this world was a completely metaphysical world that lay outside the boundaries of his senses.

Now I have no trouble accepting this statement as being 'true' if by 'true' we mean truth in its most perfect, academic, technical, 'anal-retentive' sense. This was the world that Kant was writing from and about.

However, we have to make a distinction between epistemology in its most technical, academic (Kantian) sense and epistemology in the pragmatic, common-sense way that all of us have to go about this business each and every day.

In this latter sense of the word 'epistemology', 'fact', and 'truth, if ten people see a 'chair' in a room and agree that it is indeed there, and nowhere else, has a physical, empirical presence that we can see and touch, and all agree that if they walk out of the room, the chair will still be there when they come back, assuming that no one is there to move it, and all agree that the chair has an 'objective existence' in its own right, apart from human perception -- this is what i would call a 'low level human inference' -- then we can say that our senses at least partly cross the border and dialectically bridge the gap between our subjective and objective worlds.

Now this is not to say that gross mistakes can't be made in terms of the 'probable truth-value' of our subjective perception and/or our interpretation of the evidence before us relative to our objective-noumenal world. It happens all the time. Indeed, sometimes ten or a hundred or even a million people can be wrong on the same perception-interpretation. Often this is either of historical relevance or cultural relevance or economic relevance or narcissistic relevance. For example, people once believed that the world was flat, and theta the sun revolved around the earth. Men also believed at one time that men should have superior rights to women -- in fact, some individuals and cultures still do believe this. Similarly, at one time, some individuals and cultures believed that whites should have more rights than blacks. Similarly too, both judges and juries have often been fooled into believing in a defendant's guilt or innocence, and then been found later to have been grossly wrong.

Yes, mistakes are always being made relative to the objective truth value of some our subjective perceptions and/or interpretations. There is a dialectic that always needs to be going on between our subjective and objective worlds. We need to remain at all times partly skeptical relative to the truth-value of our perceptions and interpretations. However, if we are well trained in the dynamics and probabilities of our subjective, epistemological conclusions relative to the objective world around us, combining good sensory observations with highly credible social reports, good internal logic, and moving up and down the abstraction ladder in the General Semantic sense of this process -- never shutting ourselves off of new arriving information from the world outside us -- then we generally have a right to feel pretty confident relative to these epistemological processes and conclusions.

Some people practice better language and meaning skills, and epistemological skills, much better than others do. We have a right to talk about 'epistemological pathology' and at least the partial connection between epistemological pathology and psychopathology. This is one of the areas where philosophy and psychology overlap and touch each other in the same dialectical way that I have writing about everything else here. Our philosophical foundations influence our psychological foundations and visa versa. There is a process of 'dialectical (two-way) causality'. Actually, there are 'multiple dialectical causalities' at work here as economics, culture, politics, and other factors all have their respective influences on each other.


If we view epistemology in the strictly technical, academic Kantian sense, then epistemology hits a dead-end roadblock. It has no place to go. Worse than that, it destroys the 'observational-empirical-logical' base of epistemology as built up through the philosophical lineage of men like Aristotle, Bacon, Occam, Newton, Hobbes, Locke, and the philosophers of The Enlightenment. These were academic men but they were also men of profoundly wise epistemological pragmatism and common sense.

If I say that 'there is a chair in the room' and ten other people concur with me that there is, indeed, a chair in the room -- it is a far less 'metaphysical-assumptive leap of faith' to therefore conclude that 'the chair exists and it exists and is situated in the room' than it is to try to back up the metaphysical-assumptive claim for example that 'God exists'. Observation, touch, hearing, and empiricism in general have a very big role to play in what we can call the probability of the 'truth value claims' that each of us make each and every day.

In other words, epistemology, in order to have any truth value and pragmatic relevance needs to be 'empirically based' -- it needs to be based on the empirical relevance and 'truth-value' of what our senses tell us is 'true'. Rationalism -- inferences, logic, generalizations, associations, distinctions, and value judgments -- all play a big role in this epistemological process but only when solidly combined with an observational, sensory, empirical base. From the dialectical dualism between 'rationalism' and 'empiricism' is born the creative epistemological integration of 'rational-empiricism'.


Correcting Kant's technical, anal-retentive epistemological problem then where he claims that we cannot 'know' our objective-noumenal world -- is a two fold process: 1. bring common sense and pragmatism back into epistemology; and 2. bring epistemology back down to earth again so that there is both a dialectical process continually going on between our rational and empirical processes, and in so doing this, we also develop a better ongoing dialectical assumptive or inferential connection between our subjective-phenomenal and objective-noumenal worlds.

There will always be a metaphysical component of reality -- that part which is cognitively beyond our grasp. But with inside this 'metaphysical realm of uncertainty' -- which is the foundation for the philosophical grounds of 'epistemological skepticism' -- we have to do the best we can do with the sensory-interpretive tools that God/Nature gave us.

This is where we have to re-ground epistemology and base it on the best sensory-cognitive-interpretive tools that we have available to us. We can do no better because no man or woman amongst us is an epistemological God (i.e., infallible to error).

As Wittgenstein or Korzybski have each said in their own similar but slightly different way, when things start to get too abstract and too metaphysical it is time to start 'pointing at things you can see again' and 'touching things you can feel again'.

Now as Berkley and Hume have shown us, empiricism by itself can be taken too far --into a world of absurdity. In this regard, empiricism -- in its common-sense, pragmatic dimension needs a polar dialectical soul-mate that can balance the groundedness of empiricism with the logical creativity and imagination of man's -- rational mind. What was needed back in Kant's time -- and still is -- is a dialectical epistemology of rational-empiricism.

Let us take a short break -- or until the next leapfrog -- and then move on to a discussion of rational-empiricism.

dgb, Jan. 29th, 2007, updated Jan. 8th, 2008.

15.13. Kant's Room (Part 1): Kant's (Self-Created) Epistemolgical Crisis

I wrote this paper last night and was not completely happy with the results. So I am going to try to write it again tonight seeking more clarity in what I write. It is easy to get lost in a philosopher's abstract words. The good philosopher seeks clarity in his or her abstract words; not confusion and mysticism. And so it is with my work last night. Tonight I seek more clarity in my work because last night I am sure there was at least one point of significant confusion, if not several more.

Kant's first challenge in his most famous book -- The Critique of Pure Reason -- was to 'epistemology'. (The second challenge was to 'ontology' which we will examine in Part 2 of Kant's Room).

Some might say that Kant, in effect, destroyed epistemology. At least, he seriously deflated the epistemology balloon -- which included the balloon of science, sensory awareness, empiricism, and reason.

Here were some of the responses to Kant's ultimate epistemological skepticism which surpassed even David Hume's 'ultimate decontructionist philosophy' in its devastating effect on the academic world at the time -- which I am sure is not what Kant intended.

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'Kant's intellect was essentially destructive.'

-- Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859).
(Duncan Heath, Introducing Romanticism, 1999, pg. 29, 'Metaphysical
Terror')


It seems that I shall become another of the many
victims of folly whom Kantian philosophy has on its
conscience...I cannot wrest myself from its chains.
The idea that we can know nothing, nothing at all,
about truth in this life...has upset me in the very
sanctity of my soul. My sole and highest aim has
vanished. I no longer have one. Since then, I abhor
books...

-- Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). (IBID, pg. 29)

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What Kant did that drove many a philosopher to the brink of insanity and/or suicide (I am exaggerating partly here) was he created a 'black and white -- no gray area -- epistemological dualistic world' where man's subjective, phenomenal world could not have any direct form of contact with -- and thus 'not know' the objective, noumenal world because the latter was outside the domain and power of man's senses.

Before we go any further we need to clear up what I mean by 'noumenal' world here which I am finding out seems to be quite different perhaps than what Kant had in mind by this concept.

What I was missing when I wrote this paper last night was an awareness of how significantly Kant seemed to have been influenced in his thinking by Plato and the latter's epistemological 'Ideal Forms'. This is quite different than what I thought up until today Kant meant by the term 'noumenal world' which was an 'objective, empirical world' -- i.e., 'the thing in itelf' -- that defied the limitation of man's senses and power of reasoning.

Let us try this distinction again becaue it is an imperative distinction relative to my own particular line of 'dialectic thinking'.

If Kant's meaning of 'noumenal world' is something that is completely idealistic and untouchable in line with Plato's epistemological theory of 'Ideal Forms', then everything else that follows here is irrelevant. I don't want to waste my time arguing against such a 'pie in the sky' theory. Such a theory, whether we are talking about either Plato's 'Ideal Forms' or Kant's more 'modern' rendition (created in the 1700s) of Plato's earlier theory substituting the Kantian name 'noumenal world' -- is completely mystical and mythological. Such a theory is all 'smoke and mirrors' and leaves people/left people more confused than before the theory was devised. It should have been left on the drawing board -- in both cases.

Only if we mean by 'noumenal world' the same as what we usually call today our 'objective world' does the argument that follows make any sense. And since I don't now think that Kant meant the idea of 'noumenal-objective-empirical world' when he used this concept -- most of what follows is a Kantian waste of time. Just like I view Plato's epistemological theory of 'Ideal Forms'. And any Kantian rendition of Plato's earlier mystical theory.

There is only one sense in which Plato's epistemological theory of 'Ideal Forms' makes any kind of normal, understandable, common sense: specifically, if I have an idea in my mind -- say, I want to write a book online called 'Hegel's Hotel' -- and that idea in my mind is perculating in my mind before it ever is committed to paper or a blogsite, then this type of idea might be considered to be an 'Ideal Form' -- a sort of 'internal template' of what eventually is being committed to my blogsite here -- but that perspective and argument has holes in it too. Simply stated, the 'internal template' that we are talking about is far from 'idealistic' and only begins to take a more 'idealistic form' as it 'dialectically interacts' with the world outside me, and in so doing, starts to polish over some of the original internal gliches in my thinking.

Thus, in any 'epistemological theory' developed by man to help explain the relationship between man and his inside and/or outside world, there is great deal of 'dialectical interplay and feedback' that goes on between what I am calling our 'objective-empirical-noumenal world' and our internal 'theory-devising-subjective world'.

Ideas don't come out of nowhere. They come from our past and present experience. They may 'hook up' with 'other ideas and experiences' via: 1. association, (generalization, abstraction, classification, categorization, inference and interpetation, causality); 2. distinction (differentation, boundary-making...), and; 3. memory.

These are the three main 'a priori' mental devices that Nature/God blessed us with relative to helping us in our 'evolution' and our 'will to survive'. They do indeed, help us to 'know' our objective, empirical, noumenal world (in the sense that I have been using it here) by taking us to a 'deeper and more essential level of understanding' than can be derived by most animals with smaller brains to work with than man. Having said this, a bigger brain can mean a bigger danger of 'cognitive-emotional self-abuse'. Our chief evolutionary asset -- our brain -- can turn on us under the duress of bad personal experiences -- and become our worst enemy, our worst nightmare. This is 'self-induced-psycho-pathology'.

What am I trying to achieve here?

1. I wish to marginalize Plato's theory of 'Ideal Forms' and any Kantian 'noumenal' rendtion of it. Both theories are mystical and mythological. As David Hume would say, 'Commit them both to flames';

2. It is worth viewing the world we live in as being 'dualistic' in nature just as long as we appreciate the importance of the 'dialectic interplay between our senses and rational self on the one hand (i.e., our 'subjective, phenomenal world') in conjunction with our 'objective, empirical, noumenal world'. Our first subjective world -- when used right -- 'dialectically bridges the gap' between our subjective and objective worlds.

The better we do this -- i.e., the better we 'know' our objective, empirical, noumenal world -- the better we survive.

No fear of an epistemological breakdown.

dgb, dec. 28th, 2007.

15.12 Words, Ideas, and Things -- And Their Essential Bi-Polar, Dialectic Nature

Other philosophers and semanticists have been here before me -- Locke, Russell, Wittgenstein, Korzybski and many others. We will take a closer look at their work at a later date, both in the history of philosophy, and later in this section. But right now, I want to take a shot at this myself -- at trying to figure out at least some aspects of the intricate relationship between words, ideas, and things.

We can start by saying that there is a 'triadic', 'triangular', and/or 'trialectic' relationship between words, ideas, and things. For descriptive purposes, let us imagine an upside down trianglue pointing down towards the 'earth' -- the 'things' and 'processes' on the earth and in the sky -- with the two upper points of the triangle representing 'ideas' and 'words'.

Now let us make another distinction here. Words can be defined. Ideas can be defined. Indeed, words are only sybolic short forms for ideas so both can be 'defined'. In contrast, 'things' and 'processes' or 'phenomena' as I will often refer to them cannot be 'defined'. They can only be 'described' and/or 'named'. Ideas then, are man-made 'mental images'. Words are short forms for these mental images. And anything made by God and/or Nature -- take your pick or split the difference if you are a 'pantheist' -- cannot be defined but only described and named.

Likewise with anything made by man that has some sort of 'phyical presence, substance, and/or process' connected to it. Thus, the idea of a 'telephone' can only be defined whereas the physical presence of a telephone can only be described and/or named. Now that may create problems that I am presently unaware of, but it sounds good right now, so for the present at least, we will go with it.

Some of you might argue that 'words can be described' and 'things can be defined' but I say that this just creates mental confusion rather than mental clarity and we are seeking mental clarity here, not mental confusion. I think the distinction we are making is important.

It should be noted that we can start anywhere on the 'triangular process or cycle' of words, ideas, and things and then move on towards connecting the other two points of the triangle or pieces of the puzzle -- word or name, idea or concept, and 'thing, process, or phenomenal referent'. Tic, tac, toe.

Now, let us back up a bit and analyze part of what I have done here from a different perspective. Anyone can create a new idea and/or make up a new name for the idea. I did that with the word 'trialectic'. To my knowledge, it has not been used before, at least not in anything that I have read. At this point, I realize that you can indeed describe an idea and a word as a short form for the idea. For example, if I wanted to define 'trialectic', I might say something like: A trialectic is the same idea as a dialectic but with three participants rather than two, whether these 'participants' be people, things, processes, characteristics, words, ideas, theories, philosophies...or whatever. Now this definition assumes that you have an idea as to what 'dialectic' means. If not, then more definition and/or description is needed. In this regard, we can define 'definition' as a succinct amount of description aimed at giving the word-idea being defined the most amount of clear meaning possible within the confines of the shortest amount of space possible which is generally one sentence. Any extension of meaning beyond this is usually called a 'description'.

A 'description' of 'trialectic' might move beyond the definition above to give examples and/or to come up with more descriptions of the word/idea that might give it more clarity of meaning to those of you who have not bumped into it before in your reading or thinking -- which probably is most of you in this particular case.

Thus, to correct what was first stated at the beginning of this essay, we need to distinguish between 'word/idea-descriptions' and 'phenomenal descriptions' (the latter representing descriptions of things, processes, animals, people, etc...)

This brings us to one further point. We have talked about the triangular, triadic, and/or trialectic nature of 'words, ideas, and things'. Ideas generally represent -- or are intended to represent -- things, processes, animals, people, encounters, relationships, descriptions, characteristics, etc., all of which we are calling 'phenomena'. This definition is complicated by the existence of 'false phenomena' -- fiction, fantasies, lies, manipulations, errors, dreams, myths, limits in perception, misinterpretations, etc. This we will have to leave for the subject of future essays.

The last point then here that I wish to make is this: words are creations of the human psyche or mind. And if you assume, like I have, based on the work of Anaximander, Heraclitus, the Han philosophers, Hegel, Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy), Freud, Jung, Perls, and many others -- that the human psyche and the human body is basically bi-polar, or rather 'multi-bi-polar' -- then it should not shock us when I say that words as creations of the human mind are also essentially bi-polar. That is, they serve both a selfish and a social function. And similarly, they can be both selfishly (or 'narcissistically' to use the more technical term) and socially defined.

Social definitions require social agreements. Selfish definitions don't. The meanings of words include both selfish and social definitions and descriptions. When we have a 'communication breakdown', this means that we can have any of a significant number of different possible problems that can arise because of the essential bi-polar or dialectical nature of words and their meaning -- such as: a conflict between opposing narcissistic meanings, two different social meanings, a narcissistic meaning and a social meaning, a non-underestood narcissistic or social meaning, and anything else that I might have missed here.

To investigate the ambiguity of the meaning of words and the ideas they represent then, it will usually serve us well to know not only that words have different ranges and focuses of meaning (different levels of abstraction, see Korzybski, Hayakawa, General Semantics...), but also that they have both selfish and social functions, and in this regard, different selfish and social meanings. This is the bi-polar, dialectic nature of words as projections of the human mind and its essential multi-bi-polar, multi-dialectic nature.

dgb, Dec. 16-17th, 2007.

On The Bi-Polar, Narcissistic and Social Nature of Words and Their Meaning

Words and their meaning can be viewed as 'dialectic, bi-polar projections and extensions of the human psyche.

This is no different than any other element of human behavior and culture including philosophy, history, evolution, art, science and medicine, religion, politics and more...

Following in the footsteps of G.W. Hegel, the famous German idealistic dialectic philosopher, and many philosophers less famously before him including Anaxmander, Heraclitus, the Han philosophers, and more -- DGBN Philosophy focuses on one particularly important characteristic of the human psyche -- it's 'dialectic' or 'bi-polar' nature.

Dialectic, bi-polar integration is a key, central facet of every aspect of human -- and non-human -- functioning. When functioning properly, it leads to what biologists and psychologists call 'homeostatic balance'. DGB Philosophy synonyms include 'dialectic balance', 'dialectic-democratic balance', and 'bi-polar balance'.

Philosophical homeostasis -- the principle of the mind and body using 'bi-polar feedback' and 'dialectic idealism' in an integrative, partly conflictual and competitive, partly co-operative and socially sensitive fashion to bring about 'cohesive dialectical unity, wholism, evolution, and balance' -- this is what 'Hegel's Hotel: DGBN Philosophy' is all about.

The DGBN network of some 30 plus inter-connected blogsites that I am building here of which this is one -- are all meant to focus on the inter-related life -- and particularly human -- characteristics and concepts of 'bi-polarity', 'dialectical realism', 'dialectical idealism', 'dialectical wholism', 'dialectical evolution', and 'dialectical harmony' as a means of describing both the many problems and the many potential solutions to human disharmony, disagreement and conflict.

'Dialectic' and 'bi-polar' as words with meaning can be viewed as being partly synonymous with each other, but 'dialectic' in the sense that I am using it here is the more abstract of the two words. It has a broader range of meaning(s). 'Bi-polar' in the sense that it is being used here has a more specific meaning. Bi-polar as used here means 'the opposite ends of a polarity spectrum such as 'black and 'white', or 'male and female' -- brought together in harmonious or partly harmonious unity and wholism through a successful utilization of the democratic-dialectic negotiation and integration process.

Hegel was arguably the first philosopher to really make the 'dialectic' -- both as a phenomenon and as a concept -- famous. Connected to the idea of the dialectic was the idea of bi-polarity -- not used by Hegel but the semantic connection is readily apparent.

'Thesis' and 'anti-thesis' -- two opposing sets of ideas or philosophies or characterics on opposite sides of the 'polar spectrum' facing off against each other, coming into interaction with each other, both attracting and conflicting with each other...this is the nature of the bi-polar, dialectical encounter.

'Great tension creates great energy' writes Carl Jung, the famous psychologist, but in order for this energy to become focused and harnessed in its most productive fashion, the two conflicting bi-polarities -- ideologies, passions, goals, energies -- have to meet democratically and dialectically to work towards establishing a common, harmonious direction of movement.

Paradoxically, this is both the ultimate achievement and the ultimate failure of mankind.

We can become better at achieving integrative dialectic success stories while leaving more and more of the 'either/or power and control game' behind us which creates more divisionism, alienation, separation, divorce, and war -- than the successful 'win-win, dialectical integrationism and wholism' that we are looking for primarily here.

Words, in this sense, are just another of many various extensions and applications of this repetitive dialectical phenomenon. Like every other element of life, we as humans can either 'win big' or 'lose big' around the dialectical phenomenon of words -- and their dialectic, bi-polar range and focus of meaning. What do I mean by this?

Words and their meaning are dialectic and bi-polar in nature. More specifically, they have both 'narcissistic (selfish) meanings' on the one hand and 'more general, social meanings' on the other hand.

Further complicating this matter is the fact that not only do I have a set of narcissistic meanings for any particular word that I may draw out of the more general, social pool of meaning that might be found in -- let's say a dictionary or in the broader and/or more specific context of everyday social usage -- but so do you.

It is here that the dialectical, bi-polar nature of words may clash and conflict -- just like on evry other projective playground of the human psyche. The human psyche is dialectic or bi-polar. So too, is the meaning of words.

My interpreted meaning of a word does not have to be hugely or oppositely different than yours for the same word. It just has to be a little bit different -- and that can mean all the difference in the world.

How many thousands of communication breakdowns used to happen -- and still happen -- when two people trying to meet up with each other at a particular time and place don't have a cell phone?

What the cell phone allows for in the arena of communication when and where two people are not in the same time and place -- is 'dialectical feedback'.

This may not seem readily important but it is hugely important when two people are trying to meet up with each other and haven't been totally concrete and exact with each other -- let us say before they leave their respective homes -- in terms of the details of their 'time and place' meeting.

The other day I went to work and forgot my cell phone at home. I shared email details over the internet with my girlfriend in terms of our usual time and meeting place at Yonge and Highway 7 at the VIVA bus terminal at 4:45pm. This may all seem simple and straightforward -- until one person doesn't have a cell phone. And then 'little gremlins' start to get into one person's or the other's head if something doesn't go exactly according to the pre-stated plan. One person is late. And the gremlins start to build. Maybe she wanted me to come down to Yonge and Finch to get her at the subway station. Of course, none of these intersections will mean didley squat to you if you do not know the 'actual territory' -- and their relationship to each other -- that my words are talking about. 5 minutes late. 10 minutes late. 15 minutes late. And now the little gremlins have become huge gremlins in my head. Where is she? Yonge and Finch? Yonge and Steeles? She probably turned around and went home when she couldn't get me on her cell phone...One time on another meeting when I did or didn't have my cell phone, she walked up to The Silver City Movie Theatre and walked inside to get warm after waiting too long in the VIVA bus shelter.

You start to get what I am talking about. None of this would happen with cell phone contact -- where you can get your dialectic feedback -- 'I'm still on the bus honey but will be there in 5 minutes - and thus push the little and big gremlins back into their many hiding places in your head to resurface on another day (when you forget your cell phone again -- or become victimized by a different type of communication breakdown).

If you and I cannot 'get it together' on what a word means -- which may entail some amount of greater or lesser semantic specification, asscociation, distinction, negotiation, and integration -- then we 'have failed dialectically to communicate'.

A communication breakdown is a 'dialectical communication breakdown' meaning that you and I both have different 'narcissistic meanings' relative to what a word means in a particular context -- and we are either unaware or ignorant as to this 'narcissistic difference' or we are 'unwilling to compromise' relative to this narcissistic difference.

We may be stuck in a 'Righteous, Either/Or, Power/Control 'One Word-One Meaning' Game. 'My meaning is right; yours is wrong.' 'No, I'm right; you're wrong. Let's look it up in the dictionary. Of course, even dictionaries have multiple meanings for words. And they just get the main, broad, and socially popular ones. The more concrete meanings and finesse meanings and unorthodox meanings, and newer 'sub-culture' meanings, and individual meanings...are all left out of the dictionary. They are the vast array of individual, narcissistic meanings that lay people and technical people use in similar and different contexts with constantly changing ranges and focuses of meaning -- every day, and indeed, from moment to moment.

Words and their vast array of social, group and individual, narcissistic meanings are like 'jellyfish'. They change their shape and size all the time. If individual people in dialogue with each other don't catch these various changes in shape and size, range and focus -- then in many instances they 'miss the boat with each other'. They miss each other's individual meanings in the 'nuance' of something that was said but not meant. Not interpreted in the same fashion that it was meant.

This happens all the time -- with or without cell phones -- but in general, the less dialectic dialogue there is in 'danger zones of easily or even less easily misinterpreted word meanings', the more likely we are to 'go for a communication flip and fall'. Hard angry, and/or hurt, upset emotional feelings are often the result -- particularly in areas of interpreted and/or intended greater intimacy.

Words are simply symbolic extensions of the dialectic, bi-polar nature of the human psyche -- and two or more individuals in a social context. The meaning of words can collide narcissistically in a social, cultural forum -- intentionally or unintentionally -- when people don't give dialectic feedback to each other relative to ambiguous words, abstract words, any type of word that is ripe for potential miscommunication.

Take the time when the time is important to 'come down the ladder of abstraction' and enter into a dialogue of 'association' and 'distinction' around the particular usage of a word -- and even 'pointing' if the circumstances require it.

If I am teaching English to a roomful of people who don't speak English, then I will probably need a lot of 'pictures' and 'concrete objects' and I will probably do a lot of 'pointing'.

This is not a bad thing. Sometimes it is a very important, absolutely necessary thing.

If you want to share the same meaning.

dgb, December 15h, 2007, modfied, edited, and updated December 14th, 2008, unknowingly and amazingly almost a year ago to the day that I originally wrote this essay. Or maybe that's just me.

-- DGBN, December 14th, 2008.

-- David Gordon Bain.

-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism.

-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...

Are still in process...

15.10. The Classification of Words

The words in the English language -- for the most part -- can be divided and classified into fairly simple groups. Yes, there are all sorts of intricacies that complicate the matter but we will ignore these at the present moment for the sake of simplicity:

1. 'Nouns' -- represent life and/or man-made structures (visibly non-moving to very slow-moving things;

2. Verbs -- represent life and/or man-made processes (visibly faster moving things);

3. 'Adjectives' for the most part describe nouns;

4. 'Adverbs' for the most part describe verbs;

5. 'Pronouns' either describe nouns as well (like 'the' or 'a' -- definite vs. indefinite articles), or replace them (like 'I' or 'it'...)

6. 'Conjunctions' and 'prepositions' are words that indicate a particular type of relationship between different things -- structures and/or processes (such as 'and' -- conjunction -- or 'over' and 'under' -- prepositions);

7. 'Exclamations' like 'Hey!' or 'Ohhhh!'

Let us get out of this short discussion before my rustiness with English grammar exposes itself, and/or all of the hundreds of exceptions to the rules start to kick in. English would be a relatively easy language if there were not so many darn exceptions to the rules!

dgb, Nov. 1st, 2007.

15.9. The Connection Between Phenomena, Ideas, Words...and Ethics

The study of the connection between words, ideas, and phenomena can be either pretty simple or intricately complex, depending on how deep you want to wade into the subject matter.

For the most part, ideas are internal, mental representations of particular life phenomena, including structures, relationships, encounters, and/or processes -- complications arise when we start to talk about dreams, myths, fantasies, fiction, goals, mistakes, lies, fabrications, cover-ups and ideas that do not reflect something that you can actually physically touch and or see).

Words, in turn, can be viewed as short cuts for ideas.

Putting these two sets of ideas together -- ideas can be viewed as abstractions of phenomena, real and/or not real, and words can be viewed as short cuts for ideas which in turn represent abstractions of phenomena, real or not real, touchable or not touchable, visible or not visible.

Now, for the technical philosophers amongst you, things get profusely more complicated when we start to get into the 'subjective/objective' problem -- a problem that has cursed philosophers for centuries. What is real and what is not real? What is true and what is not true? How do we know? What constitutes 'knowledge'? What is 'reality'? How do we account for 'mistakes' in perception, interpretation, and/or judgment? Much of yesterday's 'knowledge' is today's 'myth'. Culturally, historically, and individually many people believe different things. How do we account for these differences? How do we account for the problem that many, many people may believe something to be 'true' -- but still be wrong?

Epistemology (the study of knowledge) is intimately tied up to ethics, values, and judgments (the study of what is 'good' and 'bad'). How do we deal with the problem of 'bad epistemology' affecting 'bad ethics'. For example, let us say that the ruling government determines that 'vaccinations are good for you'. But a significant body of citizens may believe otherwise. Maybe they believe that 'some vaccinations are bad or dangerous', or that 'the risks of some vaccinations outweigh the possible benefits' or that 'the government is quite possibly being badly influenced by narcissistic drug companies who have no problem distorting the truth of supposedly 'objective scientific investigations' in order to make millions or billions of extra dollars'. In other words, 'knowing' that it is distinctly possible -- and indeed 'realistic' -- to assume that 'power', 'corruption', 'money', 'greed', 'narcissism', and 'conflict of interest' can distort 'truth' and throw all knowledge into serious doubt and disarray, what does this have to say about the problem of 'knowledge' and 'who supposedly knows what'? It is not always the people with the most power and/or credibility that can have the 'most' and/or the 'best' knowledge' but power and credibility can often 'dupe' people into thinking that they do. What do we do about the very credible 'knowledge' or 'evidence towards knowledge' that 'interpretively connects' many particular vaccinations with many very bad health outcomes such as cripplings and other life long serious negative health consequences. If the government says that 'we have to vaccinate our children' and one of our children experiences a very bad health consequence, is the goverment going to take responsiblity for this? Or deny the interpretive connection? What do yu think? The study of knowledge -- epistemology -- is not an easy subject at all when you get into its higher technicalities. However, the amount of potential and real ethical, evaluative damage stemming from people -- particularly people in serious positions of power -- making decisions with very serious consequences to peoples lives based on 'bad knowledge', regardless of whether they are 'honest mistakes' or 'mistakes of 'corruption, narcissism, greed, conflict of interest...' is far more than enough to say to all of us that epistemology -- and the sensory perception and language that gets us to epistemology, i.e, leads us to so-called 'knowledege' -- needs to be taken very seriously and studied very carefully.

This section is an attempt to address many of these problems -- the simpler ones, the more technical ones, and the potentially lethal ones that can and often do lead to huge ethical gaffes and human costs -- the inexcusable ones being the intentional ones based on the narcissism and greed of people in serious positions of power.

dgb, dec. 8th, 2007.

15.8. 'Evaluation and Health' Re-visited

In 1979, I wrote my Honours Thesis in psychology called, 'Evaluation and Health'. The paper was my first major venture into the study of epistemology which is the study of knowldege (although I didn't know it at the tiem) and the effects that language and semantics or meaning have on epistemology, evaluation, emotions, action -- and health.

I now view the essay as a kind of 'virginal' paper. It was written before I had been exposed to many theorists -- philosophers and psychologists -- who I came to either later study or study in signifantly more depth, such as Perls, Adler, Freud in any depth, Jung, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heraclitus, Anaxamander, Kierkegaarde, Foucault, Derrida, and more...Amd subject wise, it was written before I had studied these three topics in any depth: 'narcissism and narcissistic bias', 'transference', and 'dialectics'--meaning 'dualistic and dialectic theory' (as primarily espoused by Hegel -- 'thesis', 'anti-thesis', and 'synthesis').

In other words, the paper was written from an 'Apollonian' perspective (see Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy', and/or Greek mythology) before I'd seriously come into contact with the idea of 'Dionysianism' (again see Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy', and/or Greek mythology) and what Dionysianism means relative to human nature and human behavior. It was like I was trying to be an 'Enlightenment philosopher focusing on the domain of 'thinking' and 'reason' in man's life without fully or even partly acknowledging the domain and impact of 'unreason' (or a different type of reason -- specifically, the influence of 'narcissism' and 'romanticism' on human nature and human behavior.

It was a very big 'gap' in the study of human behavior that I was missing. How well can anyone fully understand human behavior without studying at least to some significant introductory extent, Freud, Jung, Perls, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. I can say that 30 more years of living -- and quite a bit more reading and learning -- has gone a long way towards my more fully understanding, appreciating, and filling in the gap of human narcissism, dionysianism, and dialecticism relative to the understanding of human nature and behavior.

The 1979 paper that you are about to read, was influenced primarily by three sets of theorists: 1. the General Semanticists, Alfred Korzybski and S.I. Hayakawa, 2. the 'cognitive' philosophers and psychologists of 'reason': Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand, Albert Ellis, and Aaron Beck; and 3. Erich Fromm and other humanists.

As important as I think the following paper is -- relative to its epistemological process, structure, and general realm of study -- it can be viewed now, 30 years later, in Psychoanalytic terms as a study of 'The Central Ego (without seriously going into its 'mediating' and 'negotiating' functions which would come more into play as I started to learn about Gestalt Therapy, Psychoanalysis, Jungian Psychology, and Hegel).

Thus, it more or less represents all of the 'dry' elements of studying central ego function without the 'soap opera stuff' added into this study that comes with studying human narcissism and romanticism.

At least in part, the study of human narcissism and narcissistic bias can be viewed as the study of 'anti-epistemology' at least to the extent that it often influences humans to distort, manipulate, embellish, diminish, screen, cover up, and 'subjectify' the 'objective facts' of a particular situation or investigation in order to serve our own wishes, goals, and other fancies. But that is the subject of later work. We will deal with other factors and 'ego-states' in the study of human epistemology, ethics and anti-ethics, in the 'psychology' blog site that deals more specifically with the study of 'human behavior'.

Right now, let us look at the study of what might be called 'objective epistemology' -- epistemology more or less in a 'vacuum' without the extrusive and intrusive influence of 'narcissistic bias'.

db, March 9th, 2007.

15.7. Nietzsche vs. Ayn Rand: Epistemological Relativism vs. Epistemological Objectivism

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. But what is the study of knowledge? Some important clarification is needed here. For our purposes here, our epistemological study does not include the study of values -- this is primarily the domain of morals, ethics, politics, law, religion and the like -- except for one value that I will include here, and that is the value to be real, or worded otherwise, the value of being truthful, of honoring truth. What is the dialectical connection between realism and truthfulness. Realism honors truthfulness and truthfulness honors realism. When I use the phrase 'dialectical connection' I mean that the 'causal connection' and/or the 'nature of influence' works both ways. Realism influences and honors truthfulness. And truthfulness influences and honors realism. When I say that I am a 'dialectical epistemologist' --a term that I have never seen used in philosophy before -- I am showing the combined influence of Hegel and Korzybski (mainly Hegel) in the realm of epistemology which means that I am looking for 'epistemological influences' that work both ways. Interpretation affects evaluation and evaluation affects interpretation. Twenty-eight years ago when I wrote my honors thesis in psychology which was primarily an essay on epistemology, I was not a dialectical epistemologist. I was a 'one way' epistemologist -- I viewed the line of influence from the senses to interpretation to evaluation but it was not until I finished the essay that I started to see that the line of influence could work both ways, i.e., from the top to the bottom as well as from the bottom to the top. I had met Korzybski in my studies (who we will talk about later) but I had not seriously met Perls, Freud, Jung or the prime influencer of all three of these critically important psychologists -- Hegel (with honorable secondary mention to Nietzsche).


What again do I mean by dialectical epistemology? (In fact, you could call me a 'multi-dialectical epistemologist' meaning that I am looking for 'multi-dialectical exchanges and influences everywhere'.) Dialectical epistemology means that as epistemologists, we look not only at the influence of perception and interpretation on values and evaluation, but also we look at the effect or influence of values and evaluation on perception and interpretation. Put another way, we look not only at the influence of epistemology on ethics but also on the influence of ethics (and/or lack of ethics) on epistemology. Or put still another way, you have to look at the dialectical (two-way) interaction between human narcissism and human epistemology. Because human epistemology not only influences human narcissism (and by 'narcissism' we mean a combination of such things as: selfishness, egotism, self-centredness, self-absorption, pleasure-seeking...) but also the line of influence and causality works both ways and thus, human narcissism influences and oftentimes corrupts, poisons, pathologizes...human epistemology.

To emphasize the point I am making here, I like to compare and contrast the philosophical, and in particular, epistemological work of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. There are a lot of similarities between the two philosophers. I like them both but both had their strengths and weaknesses. In a lot of ways, Ayn Rand was the Friedrich Nietzsche of the 20th century. Both were conservative, presumably both were capitalist idealists (we know this in Rand's case, in Nietzsche's case we more or less surmise it from his philosophy). Both believed in pushing to the maximum for human excellence and performance, and not accepting much less. Present day advertsing mottos like 'Just do it' and 'Impossible is nothing' would seem to epitemize much of the core message of both philosophers.

Having said all of this, and pointing out the key similarities in their respective philosophies, it is also important, indeed, critical to note their philosophical, and particularly their epistemological differences. You cannot read Nietzsche without noting the important influence and/or similarity between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer was the ultimate philosophical pessimsist and narcissist. It could be argued that much of Schopenhauer's philosophy came to influence Freud's concept of the 'Id' and 'Freudian Psychoanalytic Instinctual (or 'Idian') philosophy and psychology. Much of this line of influence also went through Nietzsche. 'There are no such things as facts, only interpretations' according to Nietzsche. Ayn Rand would never say anything like this. Indeed, she would be apalled by such a philosophical statement. In this regard, Nietzsche was the ultimate philosophical 'subjectivist' and Ayn Rand was the ultimate philosophical 'objectivist'. Ayn Rand was an ethical idealist and an epistemological idealist -- she was a post-product of the Enlightenment era of philosophy, and indeed, if she had been philosophizing back in the days of the beginning and then the height of science, back in the days of Bacon and Locke and Diderot and Voltaire and Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin back in the early to middle 1700s she would have fit right in and been in her glory. Nietzsche, following partly in the footsteps of Schopenhauer and Rousseau, broke out of this mold of 'human reason, logic, and common sense is everything'. Nietzsche saw a different world and it was not a world run by human reason but rather a world run by human passion, narcissism, dionysianism, selfishness, and irrationality. Partly Nietzsche supported this lifestyle, this philosophy, this line of human behavior. And yet partly, he was hugely skeptical, pessimistic, and cynical about it as well. Rightly so, Nietzsche saw human narcissism, bias, subjectivity and its epistemological and ethical influence leading to distortion, corruption, pathology -- everywhere. Thus, you have Nietzsche the ultimate epistemolgical skeptic, pessimist, and cynic vs. Ayn Rand the ultimate epistemological idealist. And both are important. Once again -- here as everywhere else that I philosophize -- Gap Philosophy or DGB ('Dialectical-Gap-Bridging') Philosophy aims to bridge the gap between Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. I 'work' the dialectic between them and their respective philosophies. I value both and what both had to say. I realize that there is a lot of 'epistemological garbage' out there in the world today, as in every other period of human history, due partly to human ignorance, and partly, more sadly, because of the pathological poisoning and corruption of truth and realism by human selfishness, greed, money, power, narciissism...And in this regard, I walk the bridge epistemologically speaking between Nietzsche's ultimate epistemological pessimism, skepticism and cynism (the Schopenhauer influence), and Ayn Rand's continuation of the 'Enlightenment epistemological ideal' of truth, realism, objectivity, and the American Way (which somehow seems to have gotten lost between Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Bush) ultimately defeating any and all brands of human greed, power, money, manipulation, fraud, hypocrisy, narcissism. Actually, right now I would say that Nietzsche's pessimism, skepticism, relativism, and cynicism is winning the war over Ayn Rand's Enlightenment influenced epistemological idealism. However, as Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Korzybski, and Fritz Perls have all directly or indirectly said, 'Everything is subject to change.'

That seems to me to be a decent introduction to where epistemology stands today in the 21st century -- caught between Nietzsche and Ayn Rand with the 'Nietzschean bad guys largely winning the battle between epistemological bullshit and epistemological truth, realism, and objectivism'. Sad to say, but that is my take on epistemology today. Has it every been much different? Maybe in the height of the Enlightenment somewhere in the middle 1700s.

db, April 11th, 2007.

15.6. DGB Post-Hegelian Epistemology

I wish to introduce the reader to a brand or style of epistemology that has not really been developed so far in the history of Western philosophy. It emphasizes some of the similar, inter-related, and different 'dualistic and dialectical elements' of epistemology (the study of knowledge).

One of the main 'dialectical splits' that I will be talking about is the dialectical split between 'Objectivist Epistemology' which is the name I got from one of the main philosophers specializing in this type of epistemology -- Ayn Rand (1905-1982)--but unless I am overextending my associations here, can be traced back mainly to an Aristolean, Baconian, Lockean, Science and Enlightenment tradition -- the unbiased search for 'objective knowledge' to the extent that this is possible; as opposed to what I will call 'Subjectivist Anti-Epistemology' as laid out mainly by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) which is the assertion -- paraphrased by me -- that 'no human knowledge is objective; all human knowledge is tainted by narcissistic human bias'. Indeed, the path I will follow here is largely one that seeks to trace how great an extent man will go to 'hide 'objective, truthful knowledge' from others and/or even himself.

However, before we investigate this dialectical split between epistemology and anti-epistemology, as well as other types of dialectical relations between 'subjective and objective knowledge', let me share a little of my history in this philosophical discussion, because in 1979 I was very much into -- and indeed wrote my Honours Thesis' on -- what Rand later called 'Objectivist Epistemology'. Indeed, I was partly influenced by Rand at the time, as well as a school of 'linguistics-semantics-epistemology' that I had come in touch with called -- 'General Semantics'. Here is a little of my own personal academic history:


In 1979, I wrote my Honours Thesis in psychology on the relationship between epistemology (the study of knowledge), language, meaning, General Semantics, Cognitive Therapy, and Humanistic-Existential Ethics. It was a lot for an Honours BA student to grab onto, bite into, and chew with any kind of success -- but I was ambitious in my desire -- and I think that the outcome of my essay was moderately successful. The essay was very dry (Kantian-like in this respect -- if not quite up to the latter's standard of thought) but it laid down the foundation for this much larger philosophical project and what it has become 27 years later: Hegel's Hotel: The Evolving Gap School of Philosophy-Psychology-Politics...

The core of my thesis in 1979 was that General Semantics, a largely unheralded school of philosophical thought founded by Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) and 'mapped out' in his classic book, Science and Sanity, 1933 (which linked language, meaning, perception, evaluation, and psychological well-being all together in one inter-connected package), could greatly aid in the development of Cognitive Therapy, and psychotherapy in general. I thought I was relatively alone in my thinking, but it turned out that that there were other philosophical and psychological thinkers who were going down the same, or a similar, path. Unbeknownst to me, in the 1960s and 70s, leading right up to the time I was starting to do my research and writing, a small group of inter-connected psychologists in Esalen, California were already in the process of integrating some of the key ideas of General Semantics into their separate but similarly influenced schools of psychotherapy -- Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy; Virginia Satir, Psycho-Drama Family Therapy; and Bandler, Grinder, and Bateson, Neuro-Linguistic-Programming or NLP.)

I found out some of this information just yesterday as I explored a bit of the history of NLP.
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One of the earliest influences on NLP was General Semantics (Alfred Korzybski) as a new perspective for looking at the world which included a kind of mental hygiene. This was a departure from the Aristotelian concepts of modern science and objective reality, and it influenced notions of programming the mind. Korzybski's General Semantics influenced several schools of thought, leading to a viable human potential industry and associations with emerging New Age thinking. By the late 1960s, self-help organizations such as EST, Dianetics, and Scientology had become financially successful. The Esalen human potential seminars in California began to attract a wide range of thinkers and lay-people, such as the gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, as well as Gregory Bateson, Virginia Satir, and Milton H. Erickson.[NLP, Wikipedia, internet].
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The professor who marked my essay at The University of Waterloo -- Donald Meichenmbaum (who had written a book on related subject matter two years earlier than my essay (Cognitive-Behavior Modification, 1977) -- was also interested in the interconnection between language, meaning, cogntive therapy -- and in his case, behavior modification. He had read some Korzybski and General Semantics, and was also interested in the potential interconnection between Cognitive Therapy and General Semantics.

If the paper had been viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective, it probably would have been labelled as an essay on the 'functioning of the central ego -- in both health and pathology, taking into consideration both the positive and negative effects of the superego, and how General Semantics and Cognitve Therapy (or Gestalt Therapy, Satir's Family Therapy, and/or NLP) can all be used linguistically and semanticly (or 'neuro-linguistically') to modify, moderate, and improve the effects of the superego on emotional feeling and psychological functioning'. Wow! That was a load.

What was not addressed in this 'virginal' attempt at pulling together 'Gap Psychology and Philosophy' was a huge double can of worms that I was about to encounter as I started to more seriously study psychologists and philosophers who I hadn't really seriously studied up to that point (Freud, Perls, Adler, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer... One can of worms was 'transference'. And another can of works we will associate with these three names: 'the id', 'narcissism', and 'dionysian philosophy'.

In other words, 'Gap Psychology and Philosophy' was about to become much more dualistic and dialectic than my honours thesis had aimed to be, because this first essay was mainly from an 'Apollonian' perspective -- which is a lot like talking about 'the Titanic' without talking about the rather huge influence of the 'iceberg' on the Titanic. Or like talking about 'heaven' without talking about 'hell'. Like talking about 'morality' without talking about 'immorality'.
Like talking about 'Christianity' without talking about 'Nietzsche'. In other words, Gap Psychology and Gap Philosphy still had a lot to learn about human nature and human behavior -- on the 'narcissistic', 'Idian', and/or 'Dionysian' side of the 'Apollonian/Dionysian' spectrum, equation -- and 'tragedy'. (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872.)

The question and problem here -- since this is a discussion on epistemology -- becomes mainly this: How does 'Gap Narcissistic and Dionysian Philosophy' impact Gap Epistemology'. Or put another way, how do I integrate and 'bridge the gap' between 'Nietzschean subjective, relativistic, nihilistic epistemology or anti-epistemology' and Randian 'Objectivist Epistemology' as well as with my earlier work in General Semantics epistemology. This is new territory for me -- evolving as I write.

db, Feb. 27-28th, 2007.