Non-reductive, not-too-academic PHILOSOPHY

[Extollager]

No time now to go into the background on this. I solicit suggestions for works of philosophy as indicated in the thread title. Non-reductive philosophy is non-materialistic-determinist, does not explain higher human capacities as "nothing but" phenomena given off by non-rational processes. NR philosophy accepts that human freedom is, if not absolute, a real thing. The beautiful is a category of reality and not simply of taste. Plato, Pascal, Coleridge, Owen Barfield, Roger Scruton, Iain McGilchrist, probably Michael Polanyi, possibly Thomas Nagel would be examples of philosophers of a NR persuasion. I don't know very much about this specific matter let alone philosophy in general, hence am not suited to reading articles and books meant for philosophy students and professional philosophers.

Indeed, several of the persons named above might be better known as something other than a philosopher. McGilchrist is a psychologist. Polanyi was a polymath. I could have included C. S. Lewis, whose Abolition of Man is a work of philosophy, as is his critique of naturalism in Miracles, but of course he is better known as a writer of fiction and a defender of Christianity. I definitely don't have in mind folk who used to be known for "metaphysical," writing, i.e. occult philosophy or "Traditionalism," such as René Guénon and Martin Lings.

 

[hitmouse]

I would recommend 2 books by Anthony Gottlieb:

Dream of Reason: the History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance

Dream of Enlightenment: the Rise of Modern Philosophy

I have these in paperback. Detailed but very lucid discussion of the development of western philosophy. I found these fascinating and satisfying from a non-academic perspective.

 

[tinkerdan]

I'm not sure what the OP is looking for exactly here.

My Limited understanding is that reductionist philosophy is the idea that one can better understand a system by reducing it to its parts and examining and understanding those parts.

The Non 0r maybe more likely Anti-reductionist philosophy is that one can only fully understand the system in it's entirety-wholeness.
This is a holistic attitude which is what Fritz Perl's spoke about in his work In and Out the Garbage Pail.

It brings to mind the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Where each blind man grasps a different part of an elephant and gives his explanation of what it looks like. If they only would start pooling their experience then they might come closer to a realistic picture.

Through out all the possible systems I'm not sure one of these could could be considered more materialistic than the other or entirely non-materialistic.

 

[Extollager]

What I had in mind is the characteristic tendency of much modern thinking to say that something is "nothing but" something less alive, less free, more mechanical. E. F. Schumacher writes about this in A Guide for the Perplexed. The trajectory is to eliminate ever more thoroughly the specifically human. The ultimate destination is that all causes are materialistically determined, that is, products of non-rational factors that have nothing to do with human values. Dennett sounds like the kind of reductive thinker I have in mind:

Is consciousness just an illusion?

Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett believes the human brain might not be that special.

www.bbc.com

(to say nothing of less accomplished thinkers)

The kind of philosophy I have in mind might start with our experience of ourselves as self-aware creatures, capable of empathy, etc. The human difference over against other animals is profound. A simple way of putting it is like this:

rocks and minerals exist; the only way they can be said to reproduce is by crystal growth, so far as I know, since they are not alive

plants are alive and reproduce, altering their environments by breaking them down

animals are alive, reproduce, are conscious, and alter their environments by making them more orderly than before

humans are alive, reproduce, are conscious, are self-aware, and alter their inner world through exercise of choices, e.g. to learn a language, to subject themselves to increasing exposure to frightening things in order to overcome their fears, as well, harmfully, as willfully impairing their consciousness by drug abuse, etc. Animals (nonhuman) may be deceived but they do not deceive themselves. An animal may feel pain from cancer but it doesn't tell itself it's just a case of the flu (the way Lovecraft did when his cancer symptoms were worsening, as I remember). Humans value things that are of no adaptive advantage as well as ones that are. For example, many people feel quite strong aesthetic emotions at the sight of sunset over a mountain range. If they were there in those mountains food might be scarcer, the climate harsher, etc.

A reductive philosophy must find some way to explain away (or to ignore) such emotions, but isn't likely to convince those not already convinced on other grounds.

But these are only thoughts on one or a few aspects of the matter of non-reductive philosophy.

Animals possess intelligence, but so far I'm not aware of claims for particular animal geniuses. But genius is a "common" feature of humanity. By "genius" I mean, or would include, the capacity to make excellent choices, more or less simultaneously, in some endeavor. For example, a poet calls upon memory (personal experience [perhaps including dreams as well as wakeful experience], historical knowledge, experience of others as imparted by film, painting, writing, music, whatever), verbal skill (vocabulary, diction, semantics, the dimension of language including pure sound), etc. -- more or less all together in the composition of a poem. As Schumacher argues, then, uniquely with humans it is the exceptional that "defines" the species.

Reductive philosophy will probably prefer to focus on "the norm," usefully generalized.

Non-reductive philosophy will want to take into account historical consciousness. Animals have no history though they may have an evolution. Now, what does it mean to possess historical consciousness? Non-reductive philosophy might want to explore this. (There's a book by John Lukacs that probably would help me on this topic.)

What makes for true development in the arts -- and also what makes for false or harmful directions in the arts? I think NR philosophy would explore this question more interestingly than reductive philosophy. Logical positivism was reductive in its doctrine that only empirically verifiable statements were meaningful. I wouldn't expect it to be helpful in a philosophical evaluation or exploration of poetry, for example.
Glancing at a Wikipedia article on Nikolai Berdyaev (whom basically I haven't read), he sounds like a non-reductive guy. For him creativity, love, and relationship are key concepts. On hand I have Martin Buber's I and Thou, which I think will be a good example of what I'm after.
Below: Buber, Schumacher.

 

[Extollager]

Martha keeps an eye on things outside. Anya Taylor's Coleridge book I've read, want to read again. The others I have started but want to start over. Harding's Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth is indeed a work of philosophy. You can read Lewi's introduction of what Harding is up to, and Harding's book itself, here: The hierarchy of heaven and earth : a new diagram of man in the universe : Harding, D. E. (Douglas Edison), 1909-2007 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
It might be hard to read the title of one of the books: Iris Exiled: A Synoptic History of Wonder, by Dennis Quinn. Description below. Beauty: A Very Short Introduction by Roger Scruton is in an Oxford series.

Giles (ginger) and Jenny (dark calico) with Theism and Humanism by Arthur Balfour and Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek by Thorleif Boman.

These books would, I anticipate, all be in the non-reductive vein.

Iris Exiled is a critical history of wonder from the Bible and Homer to modern times. Dennis Quinn examines the subject in relation to various disciplines and modes of discourse- philosophy, theology, poetry, art myth, history, rhetoric, psychology, education, and modern science. Quinn shows that wonder, originally seen as the principle of philosophy and poetry and as a passion essential to the highest order of education, has been weakened by certain intellectual, cultural, and religious shifts during the past 600 years. The history is synoptic in two senses of the word: it is comprehensive but selective, and illustrative not exhaustive. Iris Exiled is presented from a single theoretical perspective, that of the original understanding of wonder as developed and set forth by such authors as Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Ruskin, and Joseph Pieper, as well as a host of other writers of all kinds and from all eras of western history.

 

[Extollager]

Non-reductive philosophy acknowledges that we can only bring ethics to the scientific enterprise; we cannot derive ethics from the sciences. We may determine that we are acting ethically if we experiment on unwilling mice or rabbits, but are acting unethically if we experiment on unwilling human beings; but science is of no help in making that judgment. The experiments conducted on prisoners of war by Imperial Japan's Unit 731 were, as far as I know (not having subjected myself to much detail) "good" science: careful observation under controlled conditions; but the experimenters were war criminals.

 

[Extollager]

Tess with three more philosophical works I have not read but think I would like to -- Buber especially.

 

[Extollager]

The Eccles and Robinson is probably non-reductive. Don’t know about the Stewart but it’s probably the one I’ll tackle next of all these books-and-cats pictures, The cat here is a rescued alley kitten, Kimble.

 

[tinkerdan]

I'm still not comfortable that I fully understand where the OP is going with this.
When I look at what is described as Reductionist and Anti-Reductionist, they appear like two sides to the same coin.
The reason I say tis is that neither one has really reached the furthest part of the potential of their goal.
That is to say the reductionist want to reduce things to the individual parts and look at the whole somewhat as a function of these individual parts with a disregard for the whole system. But they might never be sure they have reduced them to the final individual parts.

For example take a bolt and a nut as a system. That is reducible to one bolt and then one nut. But the bolt is reducible to a material that was worked into the shape of a bolt and the nut is of the same ilk. Then that reduces to the atoms that make up that material and that to the parts that make up atoms and then there are even smaller parts that may or may not be at or close to the end of the reduction--each new revelation leads to a need to further reduce, so maybe one can only be mostly uncertain that they have reached the final reduction.

On the other end you could look at man as a system of many parts in the anti-reductionist camp. But, look outward, they become the system of humanity that are part of a system of the earth that's part of a system of planets that's part of a system of galaxy and so on and so on.

So they are both looking at a system that is part of another system and a part that is made up of other parts. Sure they can stop a some point relevant to present knowledge, but they are hampered by the nagging doubt that they might have reached either the furthest reduction of the highest possible system.

They are just theorizing from a point they have chosen to freeze things in one direction or the other--They could both be stuck within systems of widely different degrees with a rather erroneous assumption they have reached their ultimate goal.

The bottom line is that they are likely both dealing with systems and seeming to be traveling in opposite directions on a possibly infinite scale when considering present knowledge and future knowledge.

It's all vanity and a striving after the wind.

 

[Extollager]

Let me see if I can help.

Lovecraft is a good example of the reductive philosopher for my purposes. Of course he's probably unknown in professional philosophical circles. But his thinking would go something like this:

1.The empirical scientific method and scientific instruments (increasingly refined) reveal the only knowledge that is real knowledge.
2.Psychology can pretty much be collapsed into biology (Lovecraft was fascinated by ideas of racial inheritance, etc.).
3.Biology can pretty much be collapsed into chemistry. Organisms are structured as they are and behave as they do largely because of chemistry.
4.Chemistry can pretty much be resolved into physics. With physics we reach bedrock.
5.Morality is an illusion. The mechanisms of mindless nature are in charge of things.

The movement with reductive philosophy is farther from the world as we experience it (with ourselves as agents, i.e. beings who possess self-consciousness, ability to make meaningful choices, etc.) to a view of things marked by abstraction and determinism.

Non-reductive philosophy would see things differently. It values the sciences along these lines:

1.Physics relates to that part of our existence that we share with the basic forces of nature such as gravity, etc.
2.Chemistry relates to that part of our existence that we share with everything that has physical form, from stars and interstellar gases to gorillas.
3.Biology relates to that part of our existence that we share with living things, from molds to monkeys.
4.Psychology (I realize its status as a science is, rightly, debatable) relates much of the time to that part of our existence that we share with conscious creatures, from mice to whales.

Non-reductive philosophy would say, however, that when you have examined human beings with these various disciplines, you are not able to account for everything. You are not accounting for the specifically human as long as you explain everything in terms of the things we share with nonhuman things, and "explain away" the rest.

If you hold to reductive philosophy, you have accounted for the human insofar as it can be understood in terms of what is not human.

That does miss out a lot, e.g. creativity, freedom, morality, self-determination, and so on. It leaves out a whole domain of traditional philosophy, namely teleology, the consideration of purposes. Dare I say it, it leaves out the meaning of life.

I think a not insignificant number of people go to college and when they graduate, they feel less affirmative about life, including their own lives, than when they matriculated. They have absorbed reductive thinking. They now cannot bring themselves to say that good and evil are real; these, they say, are just names for social preferences and aversions in a given society. However, they may, paradoxically, invest certain persons or things with passionate hatred on "moral" grounds, as when they fixate on certain social classes or politicians as the incarnation of badness. People of this type are not able to make the sound discriminations of value that a well-educated person should be able to make, unless they were people like that to begin with, before they went to college.

 

[Extollager]

As a footnote to my previous comment.


A question: what responsibilities, other than utilitarian ones, do we have to animals? Of course we have responsibilities towards animals that are really responsibilities towards ourselves: if we eat animals to stay alive but do things that make animals sick, our food supply may be impaired. But what about animals we do not have a use for? What responsibilities do we have to them?

I include under the "utilitarian" heading arguments that go like this: we don't have a use for (say) plankton. But plankton is eaten by fish that we do eat, or is eaten by fish that fish we do eat, eat -- etc. That's still utilitarian.

So do we have responsibilities to animals we don't use? I don't think reductive philosophy can give an affirmative answer. Yet many people would say that they do sense that we have responsibilities to animals we don't have a use for. A non-reductive philosophy can allow for (e.g.) humility towards life, maybe even beauty, that we did not create but can only destroy. It would find in the specifically human dimension of life a capacity for values that are more than, other than, utilitarian but real.

So I'm looking for books, articles etc. that come from a non-reductive philosophy. Except because I want to understand people I disagree with, I don't have much use for reductionism as a philosophy. As a method for scientific research, sure, it has uses. They are justifiable not on its own terms but other terms, such as the value of human life and the nobility of trying to ameliorate suffering, etc.

 

[Swank]

Sometimes I read philosophy and feel like I am feeble minded, unable to see the deep concerns that the philosophers go to such great length to examine.

But I think it still more likely that philosophy is just the ultimate expression of the clash between natural language and rationality - so the attempt to balance the two are a kind of blindness. Like trying to express math by adjusting the flavor profile of vanilla ice cream. Language didn't arise to express concrete ideas, and concrete ideas are demonstrable without language.

"Truth", "hope", "meaning" are words for feelings, not elements of fact. We should recognize that divide and not suffer for it.

 

[Extollager]

I'm too rusty in my Plato these days. But I think in a couple of his dialogues, Socrates debates with Thrasymachus and Callicles, and there might be some pertinence with your view. But discussion of those dialogues (Gorgias, Republic) would probably belong in a separate thread, since this one is about explaining what non-reductive philosophy is, and identifying works in that tradition. Your comment would be a good example of the influential reductive tradition. It sounds Nietzschean -- if my sense of the guy, whom I haven't read, is correct.

 

[Swank]

I'm too rusty in my Plato these days. But I think in a couple of his dialogues, Socrates debates with Thrasymachus and Callicles, and there might be some pertinence with your view. But discussion of those dialogues (Gorgias, Republic) would probably belong in a separate thread, since this one is about explaining what non-reductive philosophy is, and identifying works in that tradition. Your comment would be a good example of the influential reductive tradition. It sounds Nietzschean -- if my sense of the guy, whom I haven't read, is correct.

From what I can tell, that debate was about morality and justice - and who deserves what from society. Is that what you're referring to?

I'm saying that morals, justice and deserving are irrational concepts - and not actually subject to logical consideration.

 

[Extollager]

I wasn't limiting the concern of non-reductive philosophy to social obligations, though that topic would be included. But your second sentence is, yes, what I thought you were saying before.

So in this thread I'm not so much looking for the application of different philosophies to particular matters of debate, but for simply sources in the non-reductive philosophy category. I did an informal reading-in-conference as an introduction to Plato about 38 years ago, and read Walden in college, etc., but I haven't had any systematic instruction in high school or college in philosophy. I thought some folks here might have suggestions for more non-reductive philosophical works, and tried to explain what I mean by the term.

This got started when I was reading my most recent letter from an 87-year-old friend, and something he said led me to compile a list of the philosophical works I have read over the years (mostly a lot of Plato and Owen Barfield!). It seemed to me that what I liked was non-reductive and that others here might be interested in the same.

 

[Swank]

Pardon my off topic editorializing.

 

[Extollager]

Pardon my off topic editorializing.

No problem at all -- it was neat to see someone take an interest! And your posting was helpful in clarifying what non-reductive philosophy is not.

 

[Extollager]

More non-reductive books, I think.... McGilchrist I have to start over. It’s 25 years since I read Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences and longer than that since I read the Pascal. Tess is the book cat again.