Bruce Charlton's Notions

Premise: Epimenides is a Cretan. 

Since philosophy took its (disastrous) turn into epistemology with Descartes, reinforced by Kant; intelligent people have become 'hung-up' on the fact that they cannot know with certainty that any-thing is absolutely true.

In its most modern form, this is a self-mistrust; the mind experiences that it is its-self too labile and unreliable to know, and stick to, any truth - even if it stumbled upon such a thing.

This mainstream belief is not quite relativism - which asserts explicitly that truth cannot be known, and doing-so falls into the Cretan Liar paradox of asserting as truth that there is no truth. No - the modern relativism is experiential; more like self-doubt, self-mistrust - based on the experienced lability of thinking; an ineradicable subjective uncertainty about the truth of any-thing (whether general or specific).

This 'existenatial doubt' is partly due to the problem of, the impossibility, of communication - as communication is conceptualised by materialistic science; since any such communication involves multiple steps (expression, transmission, reception, decoding, interpreting etc.), and at any stage there is possibility/ near-certainty of a failure of intent to match-up that which is intended with that which eventuates.

Existential doubt is also partly due to our inner knowledge of a change in capacity, as happens during development - the change from child to adult, or alert and fatigued, between healthy and ill - which encompasses our ability to know anything, and how much we can know.

But ultimately, existential doubt is correct but wrongly understood. Correct because knowing is not the primary reality of existence - and that is why the turn to epistemology was an error (because it tries to make knowing the ultimate metaphysical reality)

Existentialism tried to replace knowing with Being as the ultimate reality; but this did not work, because Being is inarticulate - it can only be discussed indirectly, by communications, so that it falls into the same problem.

The correct conception of reality is the Christian one (the Romantic Christian one, specifically; which detaches Christianity from its distorting and paradox-inducing roots in classical philosophy).

The Romantic Christian metaphysically (by assumption) roots reality in love, and understands love to be creative - hence 'dynamic'. Indeed, setting aside these abstractions; it regards created reality as the loving relations between Beings through time.

Not as knowledge, not as Beings in detached, static abstraction - but as a moving, purposive, meaning-full web of relationships.

Within such a world picture it does not make sense to want, or to mourn the absence of, detached abstract chunks of certainty expressible in words or symbols.

 An example came to mind from the ancient Greek (pre-Socratic) philosophers; among whom there seem to have been two recognized possibilities concerning the nature of reality - which have (as is the way of things) persisted to the present day as being almost the only possibilities underlying a superficial diversity. 

The first is the assumption that: that which is real does not change. Thus reality is eternally-static, is 'outside of Time'. Truth is this reality; therefore truth does not change but is eternal. 

Therefore order is primary and fixed; and movement, time, disorder - chaos or dis-order is a kind of temporary, surface illusion - or delusion.

The other assumption is that reality is always changing, every-thing is in flux. Therefore reality is chaos, and truth can never be known because it is always changing. Nothing can ever be known, because reality is chaotic, without pattern. 

Therefore claims to know truth or to describe reality are mistaken, delusional, illusory patterns - merely a product of limited perspective over a limited timescale.

These two recognized possibilities - stasis versus dynamism, or order versus chaos - are seen to underline all the mainstream religious/ philosophical/ ideological 'options'.  

But they are not the only metaphysical possibilities - because since the 19th century at least one other has been suggested - and this is the possibility I have been describing on this blog over the past eight or nine years. 

This is that reality is divine creation; and truth is harmony with divine creation. Creation is understood as dynamic and also permanent; because creation originated with God and is continuing. 

The permanence of creation lies in the permanence of God, and of other Beings that inhabit God's creation. 

The dynamism of creation derives from its being ongoing, consisting of the eternal elements that are Beings and also continually added-to in an open-ended fashion. 

Now that there is this third possibility for metaphysics; it is easier to see why neither of the earlier options was satisfactory; because both of them required Men to violate very fundamental intuitions. 

The assumption that reality was static order required Men to believe that all change was illusory - yet, paradoxically, there could not be any source of illusion in an ordered static reality. 

On the other hand; the assumption of universal flux and no possible knowledge is self-refuting from a version of the 'Cretan Liar' paradox: if knowledge of reality is not possible then we could never know that knowledge of reality was impossible. 

So far; I have not been able to discover any such fundamental paradox in what might be termed my metaphysics of divine creation; operating in context of what might be termed an animistic universe (in which living, conscious, personal Beings are primary). 

And, since it does a good job of explaining what I feel most needs to be explained: I am sticking with it!

***

Note added: Furthermore; since I believe that this is the best metaphysics (of which I know); I think that Christianity should depend upon it; rather than (as has been the case since shortly after the death of Jesus) a static-changeless metaphysics that (among other things) makes it impossible to explain (without paradox or hand-waving distractions) the necessity and work of Jesus Christ, the presence of evil, and the reality of human agency.  

Fortunately! - many of the most important aspects his metaphysics was first understood, and developed by the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, and the (not very many!) metaphysical theologians in that church. So a lot of the heavy-lifting has already been done.

What remained was to integrate this with 'Romantic' philosophical ideas (including a restoration of aliveness and consciousness of all of divine creation - including 'minerals', as well as plants) - and the most useful to me here have been insights from Blake, Coleridge, Steiner, Barfield and Arkle.   

In this weirdly inverted world, most people spend several hours per day "informing" themselves about what it going on in the world by means of the mass and social media, supplemented by face-to-face gossip... mostly about the agenda established by mass/  social media. 

 

But people neither remember not think about this stuff. They do not even try to make connections, to draw inferences - to make the effort to remember whether their sources proved to be honest and reliable. They don't even try to check whether what is being said makes sense!

In a profound way, people do not trust themselves to understand the world; and therefore open their minds wide to... well, to whatever the world is currently deciding to pour-into their heads. 

This self-mistrust is reinforced by several decades worth of widely disseminated propaganda that there is no free will, that we live in a simulation (or Matrix). 

 ...And that we are fed a diet of lies by those who desire only to exploit us. 

 

In other words; we are supposed to believe the self-confessed liars who desire to exploit us are telling the truth, when they tell us that they are liars who desire to exploit us! 

Clearly, this "Cretan Liar" strategy - telling people not to trust themselves and of liars repeatedly telling you they are lying - has mind-warping consequences if not transcended. 

It is a PSYOPS; the consequences of which are a kind of numbed passivity; motivation becoming little more than moment-by-moment "coping". 

This experience, which we all share, can be regarded as a colossal life-lesson; from which we can and should learn that we ourselves are ultimately the only trust-worthy source. And it then becomes our task to understand how this can be. 

Thus, to avoid chronic despair; we are forced, eventually, into recognizing that we must assume that our personal judgment is the only possible basis of any kind of knowledge - and then to develop an understanding which explains how this situation arose. 

How do we find ourselves in a world where we simply must derive our ultimate beliefs by some kind of intuitive act; and how can we expect that this will potentially lead to reality - to true knowledge...

What are the pre-requisites for such a system of knowing? How can it operate?  

These are questions to which we need to find answers in order to function - yet the externally-provided sources are all telling us (repeatedly) that they cannot provide such answers.

 

Such questions seem to me to lead to a very different set of assumptions that those we started-out with, or which are available from the literature. So very different that Men of the past would regard it as crazy - after all, how can one person overturn, or rather transcend, the wisdom of ages... 

Well, it might seem like crazy if it was not for the extreme and unrelenting craziness of the mainstream, of The Normal, of the way that most people think, talk and behave for most of the time - of the incoherences that they assert; and of the psychological consequences of this situation of endemic self-contradiction. 

We cannot ignore the craziness, and it affects us badly - and if we desire to escape this torment-trap we are compelled to take total responsibility. 

 

So, it can be seen that God is probably allowing this situation of official and mandatory insanity with some valid purpose: in order that we are strongly encouraged to do, that which it is most important that we do. 

 

There is a way out-and-up, and we can each discover it; but we can only each discover it for himself. 

Plenty of people find uncertainty a stumbling block that prevents them taking up a religion; they feel that they are required to be certain about some religious truth or truths - yet they also feel that certainty is a merely psychological state that does not signify truth.

I may be certain about a thing now; but may become uncertain tomorrow - yet (presumably) the thing is true or not regardless of my state of certainty?

If, however, one recognises this mortal life as primarily a time of experiencing and learning, then it is not our job to achieve certainty, but to learn. The stages and phases of certainty are then seen as a part of the process of learning.

Of course this perspective itself entails being 'certain' that this mortal life is indeed about learning (rather than life being 'about' something else, or nothing at all); which ought to mean that there is a 'Cretan Liar' paradox at work: circular reasoning...

But it does not feel like that - perhaps because the idea that this mortal life is for learning does not depend on a single assumption, fact or type of evidence; but arises intuitively - and intuition is the basis of all possible knowledge.

One of the philosophical problems of which I am most aware is that (for most people) there are only two - opposed - models of knowledge: both of which strike me as obviously wrong. 

The mainstream modern view could be called random relativism; which assert that ultimately there can be no knowledge; because all knowledge is relative to the limited perspective and labile capacity of the knower; and that meaningless randomness (or chance) can explain all apparent structure to reality. 

Random relativism removes and purpose (thus meaning) from human life and the universe; and human morality is explained in terms of a by-product of natural selection leading to the innate desire of pleasure and to avoid suffering. 

Mainstream modern 'morality' (of all its many types) is therefore some variant of 'utilitarianism' - which regards (in some way, and there are many versions - perhaps as many as there are relativists) optimizing Man's psychological state, during his mortal lifetime, as the only coherent virtue.  

Logically considered; random relativism is incoherent; since nobody could know that it was true; due to a version of the 'Cretan Liar' paradox. A Man cannot coherently assert that he knows that knowledge is impossible. 

Yet random relativism persists anyway; presumably because of the conviction that it might be true, whether we know it or not. 

For instance: "I cannot know for sure that life is meaningless; but life might be meaningless nonetheless." 

This is, in turn, bolstered by psychological aversions to 'wishful thinking' (or being suspected of wishful thinking); such that the default assumption among those who regard themselves as hard-nosed, bold and rigorous has become established that life is without purpose and meaning, and nothing is really known. 

And, in practice, such avowed skepticism functions more as an affectation and (attempted) status marker than a functional ethic; because those who assert this kind of nihilism nonetheless have strongly held convictions on numerous subjects, which they regard as important and strive to persuade others to accept.

Against this species of mainstream nihilism in public discourse is a version of the religious perspective that previously dominated public discourse. 

This regards truth as absolute, fixed and knowable (by some means). 

Thus true knowledge of reality is regarded as having an unchanging and structured quality, of a nature analogous to crystal; so we could call the understanding of the truth or reality a kind of crystalline knowledge. 

Crystalline knowledge is understood in terms of a created reality whose structure ultimately does not change (although it may go through recurrent cycles).

In other words reality is total, eternal, timeless - reality is complete, cannot be added-to - its structure Just Is: therefore to know reality is also a thing unchanging. 

This type of understanding has been characteristic of almost all 'Western philosophy' - and also of the official theologies of  'Western' (which includes Middle Eastern/ Asia Minor) religions - and of the Eastern Religions when they are given metaphysical form. 

Of course, many of the actual adherents of religions do not share their 'official' theologies, and live in accordance with some sort of 'folk religion' of an unofficial kind, one that is not compatible with crystalline knowledge. 

Or else they hold a variety of internally-incoherent fundamental beliefs - each 'encapsulated', to some extent, from the whole. Indeed, perhaps most religious adherents do this. 

These two version of understanding are usually presented as the only possibilities - and it is assumed that all other proposals will reduce, upon analysis, to one of these two. 

If so, then - by my understanding - we would be left with a choice between two types of incoherence. Crystalline knowledge was comprehensively rejected by Western civilization as inadequate - while random relativism leads to a arbitrary assertions.   

These are two systems of metaphysics - that is, we are concerned with the primary assumptions we make about reality. And, at the level of metaphysics, nothing is proved or disproved by 'evidence' - because what counts as evidence and proof is dictated by prior metaphysical assumptions.

If neither of the above are regarded as satisfactory, then at least one other possibility might be discerned that may prove better - and perhaps even good enough to form a basis for explaining human knowing. 

I believe that I have found such a metaphysical system (that understanding which has been expounded many times on this blog since about 2014) - one that cannot be reduced to either of crystalline knowledge or random relativism; and which does a better job of explaining those things* that I regard as most needing explanation.

 However, although I regard metaphysics as vitally important for me, and for others who are trapped by the false dichotomy of two systems neither of which they regard as satisfactory; nonetheless, metaphysics is not reality itself - but only the most fundamental description of reality. 

It is therefore vital to recognize that no finite description can capture the unboundedness and mutuality of reality; therefore no system of metaphysics can ever be wholly satisfactory - but will always have limits, contradictions and defects. 

*Things such as the primacy of love, free agency, the reality of evil in the creation of a Good and loving God; and the reality of truly generative and open-ended creation that Men can participate-in.