Messy First Thoughts

Over the years, I have gone back and forth on this question.  At one point, I sided with Camus: Human beings make meaning.  It’s our nature. However, the universe is indifferent to our efforts, so our project of meaning-making is paradoxical and absurd but also necessary and heroic.  (Zo, correct me if my simplification of Camus is incorrect.)  But, more recently, as I search for a system of thought and values, I think I am inclined toward the rational intelligibility of the universe (RIU).  The Stoics actually say that the cosmos is both rational and conscious although I am not sure I want to go that far… yet.

At the moment, I cannot mount a defense of RIU, but in true dialogical fashion I hope we can hash out some of the thinking surrounding both the claim itself and the postmodern refutation of the claim.

I totally understand why Zo says that the postmodern claim against RIU is less of a leap of faith.  RIU requires so much – the existence of an external world, the accuracy of our sensory data, the mind’s ability to discern patterns and express (in language) that pattern, which both explains phenomena and can predict future instances of that phenomena.  This is exactly how the human mind works starting at infancy.  Nonetheless, because we naturally work this way, does not mean it is true…

We do have interpretations, but even for Nietzsche some interpretations are better than others.  “Better” for Nietzsche might be described as “healthier for human beings and their flourishing.”  Nietzsche’s reading of the world is meant to be liberatory.  For science, “better” might mean more successful at predicting phenomena; it’s highly pragmatic. 

But why are certain theories more successful than others?  I would rather be a patient now than in the Middle Ages because I feel we have a much better understanding of the way the human body works.  I hope I’m not sounding like a naïve realist, but do postmodernists have a way of ranking interpretations?  They cannot claim that all interpretations are equal, can they?

I completely agree that science is “hanging in the air” like all other systems of thought.  It requires deep faith at fundamental levels.

*** (a realization crystallizes) ***

I am not sure that RIU, for me, entails the epistemic claim that we can have perfect knowledge.  I think the universe changes too much for us to be able to formulate grand, enduring theses, like unified theory.  (There is, according to one of my students, evidence that the Laws of Nature change over time.) 

I want to hold onto RIU and hermeneutics because of all the limiting factors between the connection of self and universe.  Is this possible?  For me, there are truths (not Truths), but our access to those truths is imperfect, which demands an intellectual humility vis-à-vis knowledge-claims. 

Yikes, I feel all over the map, here.  But thinking is messy!