Let's Get Metaphysical

A word of warning: what follows is very long, theoretical, and for many people, quite boring.  If theory is not your cup of tea, please feel free to skip it.  Most of my writing won't be this abstract; in fact, my next entry will be entirely personal.  I just wanted to get it out of the way. 


Allow me to elaborate on the 'formal materialism' I mentioned in my previous post. Again, purely speculative at this point. While I cannot say that I think seven contradictory ideas before breakfast, the labels I use and the exact parameters of what I think are still somewhat malleable. Brisket with a side of Weltanschauung, known to stick to the ribs. Mylanta, please.


Basically, I wish to follow in the vein of such thinkers as Santayana, Alain Badiou, and even to an extent the neo-Thomists (from whom I purloined the term), among others, in attempting a synthesis between the classical realism of Plato and Aristotle and contemporary materialism.  Or, to put it more simply, I think that some human concepts can be provisionally taken to describe real attributes of things in the physical universe.


'Redness', for example, can be taken to represent a real existing quality of red things. The various instances of red that we observe can be supposed to be linked by unchanging causal principles, as well as emergent natural laws. Every instance of red is red for the same reason, has the same cause.  They're not just suggestions, they're natural laws.  :)  Or at any rate, we infer the existence and nature of such laws to the best of our fallible knowledge. 


Individual people and societies also have certain 'laws', though certainly not in the sense of positivist social science, or even of Marxist social science for that matter.  The laws in question are institutions, organizations of people in accordance with fixed normative principles (as opposed to the causal principles mentioned just previously).  Ethics, values, political theories, these are human creations for human purposes.  To put it bluntly, morality is table manners. 


It is in this sense that my current line of thinking is still a form of social materialism, and not moral realism in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense.  Whereas Plato or Aristotle would have held that moral laws have a kind of real existence in a way identical to, or at least similar to, causal laws, a materialist still insists on a kind of fact-value distinction.  Norm and cause are horses of very different colors. 


Unlike a relativist, however, a materialist does not make an absolute fact-value distinction.  Normative principles may be conventions, but they are, in a sense, necessary conventions.  We need values so we can cooperate in order to survive and prosper.  (It should be noted that I take a more expansive definition of "need" and "prosperity" than is usually meant by these words; more on that later.  There is also an intriguing question of why, if morality is so good for us, does it so often seem such a burden?  Karl Marx and others supplied some interesting ingredients for an answer to that question; more on that later as well.) 


By the same token, we don't entirely choose our values.  They are a legacy of the past.  We have the values that we have because of the way our society evolved over history to meet our needs.  Conceiving of the fact-value distinction in this way, making normative universals immanent properties of human institutions, allows us to reintroduce metaphysics to politics. 


Our precise conception of what matter is and how it evolves over time will have important ethical and political ramifications.  Metaphysical speculation of this sort has the potential to answer pressing questions about determinism and free will, mind and matter.  It can inform discussions of how societies develop and how political decisions should be made. 


More on all this later!