Wendell Berry on Learning about Limits, Economic and Otherwise...

(This is from a very wise and thought-provoking essay I read a while back by Wendell Berry... I thought I'd re-post some of it here.)

[I]n the phrase 'free market', the word 'free' has come to mean unlimited economic power for some, with the necessary consequence of economic powerlessness for others. Several years ago, after I had spoken at a meeting, two earnest and obviously troubled young veterinarians approached me with a question: How could they practice veterinary medicine without serious economic damage to the farmers who were their clients?

Underlying their question was the fact that for a long time veterinary help for a sheep or a pig has been likely to cost more than the animal is worth. I had to answer that, in my opinion, so long as their practice relied heavily on selling patented drugs, they had no choice, since the market for medicinal drugs was entirely controlled by the drug companies, whereas most farmers had no control at all over the market for agricultural products. My questioners were asking in effect if a predatory economy can have a beneficent result. The answer too often is 'No'. And that is because there is an absolute discontinuity between the economy of the seller of medicines and the economy of the buyer, as there is in the health industry as a whole. The drug industry is interested in the survival of patients, we have to suppose, because surviving patients will continue to consume drugs.

Now let us consider a contrary example. Recently, at another meeting, I talked for some time with an elderly, and some would say an old-fashioned, farmer from Nebraska. Unable to farm any longer himself, he had rented his land to a younger farmer on the basis of what he called 'crop share' instead of a price paid or owed in advance. Thus, as the old farmer said of his renter, "If he has a good year, I have a good year. If he has a bad year, I have a bad one." This is what I would call community economics. It is a sharing of fate. It assures an economic continuity and a common interest between the two partners to the trade. This is as far as possible from the economy in which the young veterinarians were caught, in which the powerful are limitlessly 'free' to trade, to the disadvantage, and ultimately the ruin, of the powerless.

It is this economy of community destruction that, wittingly or unwittingly, most scientists and technicians have served for the past two hundred years. These scientists and technicians have justified themselves by the proposition that they are the vanguard of progress, enlarging human knowledge and power, and thus they have romanticized both themselves and the predatory enterprises that they have served. As a consequence, our great need now is for sciences and technologies of limits, of domesticity, of what Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has called 'homecoming'. These would be specifically human sciences and technologies, working, as the best humans always have worked, within self-imposed limits. The limits would be the accepted contexts of places, communities, and neighborhoods, both natural and human.

I know that the idea of such limitations will horrify some people, maybe most people, for we have long encouraged ourselves to feel at home on 'the cutting edges' of knowledge and power or on some 'frontier' of human experience. But I know too that we are talking now in the presence of much evidence that improvement by outward expansion may no longer be a good idea, if it ever was. It was not a good idea for the farmers who 'leveraged' secure acreage to buy more during the 1970s. It has proved tragically to be a bad idea in a number of recent wars. If it is a good idea in the form of corporate gigantism, then we must ask, For whom? Faustus, who wants all knowledge and all the world for himself, is a man supremely lonely and finally doomed. I don't think Marlowe was kidding. I don't think Satan is kidding when he says in Paradise Lost, "Myself am Hell."

If the idea of appropriate limitation seems unacceptable to us, that may be because, like Marlowe's Faustus and Milton's Satan, we confuse limits with confinement. But that, as I think Marlowe and Milton and others were trying to tell us, is a great and potentially a fatal mistake. Satan's fault, as Milton understood it and perhaps with some sympathy, was precisely that he could not tolerate his proper limitation; he could not subordinate himself to anything whatever. Faustus's error was his unwillingness to remain "Faustus, and a man."

In our age of the world it is not rare to find writers, critics, and teachers of literature, as well as scientists and technicians, who regard Satan's and Faustus's defiance as salutary and heroic. On the contrary, our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible.

Houlgate on Kantian and Hegelian approaches to logical thought...

Unlike Kant, says Houlgate, who attempted to show that through the use of analytic judgments we "do not proceed to a new and different determination, we simply gain greater clarity about what we began with" (whereas with synthetic judgments we really do discover new determinations), Hegel seems to think that new determinations CAN be found analytically -- that is, "the concepts of becoming and determinate being are derived by Hegel simply by considering what is involved in thinking pure being... by 'analysing' that initial determinate concept." (p. 37)

So, in contrast to Kantian thinking, which concerns itself with developing the relations of identity or equivalence between things and/or ideas, Houlgate explains that "Hegelian logic is 'analytic' to the extent that it merely renders explicit what is implicit or unthought in an initial category. However, by explicating the indeterminate category of being, we do not merely restate in different words what is obviously 'contained' in it; we watch a new category emerge." (p. 38, emphasis in original) Thus, "we are required by Hegel's method of 'analysis' to undertake constant and subtle revisions of the way we think." (p. 38) It is this approach, I think, which is a great strength of Hegelian logic. But it also contains an inherent weakness since, to the extent that it is wedded to an historical or material ontology, it results in an inevitable incompleteness that can never be resolved. (I think this is something of what Derrida tries to say vis-a-vis Hegelian thought.)

Houlgate explains that "The dialectical principle, for Hegel, is the principle whereby apparently stable thoughts reveal their inherent instability by turning into their opposites and then into new, more complex thoughts." (p. 38) Hegel believes that a system built upon this principle creates freedom for thought, as thought is no longer forced into the mold cast for it by certain logical necessities that have been dictated by various philosophers. Rather, the only 'necessity' is the logic of thought itself, which is such that there is vast dialectical space for freedom. The question, however, is whether such 'freedom' will truly make one free. It is perhaps instead the case that such openness will leave one actually trapped by the very dialectic that promised to make one free; after all, to have endless possibility for development and the inability to achieve it can very easily become a kind of existential bondage.

Hegel... Arrghh...

In case any of you are wondering what I'm working on these days, well, I've been reading a lot of Hegel, and trying to figure out what he's saying... This is not easy. Here's a sample of what I'm looking at (from Hegel's Science of Logic). I am developing my own interpretation of what he means, but if anyone wants to chime in with their own take on it, go ahead! :-)  (There are, of course, already many commentaries on Hegel and a plethora of varying opinions...)

"Being, pure being – without further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself and also not unequal with respect to another; it has no difference within it, nor any outwardly. If any determination or content were posited in it as distinct, or if it were posited by this determination or content as distinct from an other, it would thereby fail to hold fast to its purity. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. – There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure empty intuiting itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or, it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.

Nothing, pure nothingness; it is simple equality with itself, complete emptiness, complete absence of determination and content; lack of all distinction within. – In so far as mention can be made here of intuiting and thinking, it makes a difference whether something or nothing is being intuited or thought. To intuit or to think nothing has therefore a meaning; the two are distinguished and so nothing is (concretely exists) in our intuiting or thinking; or rather it is the empty intuiting and thinking itself, like pure being. – Nothing is therefore the same determination or rather absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as what pure being is.

Pure being and pure nothing are therefore the same. The truth is neither being nor nothing, but rather that being has passed over into nothing and nothing into being – 'has passed over', not passes over. But the truth is just as much that they are not without distinction; it is rather that they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct yet equally unseparated and inseparable, and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which the two are distinguished, but by a distinction which has just as immediately dissolved itself."

And now for an abstract philosophical question...

Is there such a thing as 'post-metaphysical' thought?  Here is William Desmond's view, and I have to say, I think he's probably right:

"It might be that certain forms of metaphysics are behind us but there is no post–metaphysical thinking, since all thinking is informed by fundamental senses of being which are at work whether we think about them or not. Being post-metaphysical without attention to these is being a poor metaphysician, not a post- metaphysician."

Jacques Ellul on our conceptions of reality...

"Truth is the absolute or eternal. We are not able even to approach its outskirts. We do not construct truth out of bits and pieces added to one another, so as to enable us to remove them and dismantle the construction. By means of language we transmit and understand this truth that is as tightly closed and solid as a dot, reliable as a map, translucent as a crystal, but hard as a diamond. We transmit it and even discern it only through language. Truth is connected to the word and communicated by it. That is, truth is communicated by the most uncertain means, the one most prone to variations and doubt, as we have seen -- by the word, that fragile thing that does not last, evaporating as soon as it has been said. Thus what we are surest of is connected with the most uncertain thing in existence; our most changeable means has to do with what is most certain.

Now here is the amazing thing: this is a godsend for us. How could we live if our senses advised us that the reality in which we live does not really exist in the final analysis, that it is only a tangle of whirlwinds and illusions? How could I walk if my senses showed me nothing but emptiness in front of me? How could I eat if my senses showed me the utter unreality of what I am eating? Not that everything can be reduced to the impressions of my senses. That is not what I mean. My point is that sight and touch, the senses of certainty, give me the guarantee indispensable for living, concerning a milieu that is strange and foreign to me. My certainty is false as far as exact reality is concerned, but this certainty allows me to live."

Well, it's a new year...

...and I've gotten off to a slow start blogging. I won't bore anyone with the details, but part of it involved a defective laptop. Anyway, the new term at Oxford is underway, and I don't have anything too exciting to mention (but everything's going well!). So, here's a little food for thought from the man himself, S.K. (from Concluding Unscientific Postscript)

"The object of faith is the actuality of another person; its relation is an infinite interestedness. The object of faith is not a doctrine, for then the relation is intellectual, and the point is not to bungle it but to reach the maximum of the intellectual relation. The object of faith is not a teacher who has a doctrine, for when a teacher has a doctrine, then the doctrine is eo ipso more important than the teacher, and the relation is intellectual... But the object of faith is the actuality of the teacher, that the teacher actually exists. Therefore faith’s answer is... not in relation to a doctrine, whether it is true or not, not in relation to a teacher, whether his doctrine is true or not, but is the answer to the question about a fact: Do you accept as fact that he actually has existed? Please note that the answer is with infinite passion."

The Laughter of Sarah...

from Tomas Halik's Night of the Confessor:

"The underlying mode of our faith, hope, and love is patience.  Only when we truly fall silent will we be able to hear once more the voice that says to us: Fear not.  I have conquered the world.  I am the resurrection and the life.  I am with you always, until the end of the age.

Fine words, but empty promises?  From behind the tent awning--and from deep within ourselves--comes Sarah's skeptical laugh.  How could that be possible, seeing that we are not only adult already, but also too old for great expectations?

'Why did Sarah laugh?'  Doesn't she realize that there is 'nothing too marvelous' for the Lord to accomplish?  And Sarah lies, because she is afraid.  Her laughter was also an expression of her fear of trusting.  'Yes, you did laugh,' the Lord insisted.

You did laugh, the Lord tells us.  But maybe He'll treat us the way He did our mother Sarah.  Maybe our nervous laughter of skepticism and mistrust will be transformed into the happy laughter of those who have lived to see the fulfillment of His promises."