Posts tagged "philosophy":

What Is Principle and Can We Know It?

The opening chapter in the same-title book of Leonard Peikoff's "Why Act on Principle?" - a collection of his best articles and talks - starts with paying attention to the most commonly observed intuition of our world today: we live in a "complex" world. As the author then points out, the utterance of this observation is used as an argument for a methodology that goes unchecked in today's society, which is called pragmatism.

So, what is wrong with pragmatism? Is it not a reasonable thing to do for any well-educated man?

The world is complex, and man's life is inherently complex. "He has countless choices to make, he has the whole world spread before him, he must continually make decisions and weigh results keeping in mind a multiplicity of factors." Facing the complexity, the most fundamental methodological choice man must make is whether he can find a generalization over concrete, and if so, how can he find such a generalization?

As a pragmatist, the answer is no. Instead of looking for generalizations, a pragmatist deals with the particular. "Well, it depends on the situation." says a pragmatist. You then press him further, "Had we studied as much of the situations as possible, is it possible for us to come up with a generalization that says something about this situation?" "But who could have?" The pragmatist deflects. "A principle is a basic generalization. We have learned principles suited for many situations from the vast wealth of human knowledge." You should now strike straight into the heart of the issue. "You are just being simple-minded." The pragmatist inevitably resorts to ad hominem. That's when you know that's where the "Big Lie" is.

It cannot be further from the truth to say that a rational thinker who acts on principle is being "simple." Contrarily, he engages in a complex mental activity that condenses information he has gathered and retained. "Concepts are man's means of condensing information," and the conceptual faculty in humans is called "reason."

With reason, a man can fully grasp new principles from experiencing reality. And a man does not need to do it alone. Experiences gathered from other men and principles reasoned by other men can all be a man's source of new knowledge. To say a man acting on principle is simple is a grotesque defamation, and we must be ready to rebuke it immediately.

Of course, that is not to say a man is not fallible. After all, man and all men's experience is expanding, thanks to our growing wealth of knowledge. Newton's law of gravity was not wrong, in the face of the theory of general relativity, but a knowledge applicable under a specific context that men had not known otherwise. It is not a repudiation of man's capability of reason but an endorsement of men's ability to continually expand our understanding of reality.

So, a principle is a basic generalization, and can men know it? Absolutely.