The Worldview of the Metaphysical Dualist

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.

Previously in this series: The Worldview of the Physiologos

The physiologos explained all phenomena in the universe according to the interplay of individual objects moving about according to their varying natures (which, in the Aristotelean sense, is an endogenous drive for change or rest).  Any arrangement in the universe was simply the end result of these movements.  Any kind of apparent order in the universe was bottom-up, or emergent: not imposed from above by gods.  Man was alone in a swirling profusion of matter.  And there was no higher purpose than his own.  And obviously there is no room for an afterlife in such a materialist conception of things.

The notion of this kind of a universe terrifies some men, and it must have been especially terrifying to the first people who ever gave ear to it: the auditors of Thales, Anaximander, and their followers in the 6th century before Christ.  One such auditor, Pythagoras of Samos, was every bit as brilliant as the physiologi.  But he rejected the universe of the physiologi.  Instead he constructed his own, with overarching purpose reinstalled on its throne in the universe, but with a more sophisticated logos (account) of things than that of the theologi.

Like Thales and Anaximander, Pythagoras was a geometer.  Like many geometers to follow, Pythagoras was fascinated, and perhaps even stirred, by the internally consistent truths of geometry.  He was particularly fascinated with proportionality. 

So it was probably a life-changing experience when, as is supposed by some, Pythagoras discovered proportionality in nature.  Pythagoras may have noticed that strings on a lyre which created beautiful harmonies together were commensurable.  For example the musical harmony called the perfect fifth is created by plucking strings whose lengths have the ratio of 3:2.  Why should that be?  Why are pleasant sounding harmonies only made by strings of lengths with commensurable ratios?  The relationship could have just as easily been incommensurable, like a ratio of the value of pi to 1.  But it's not.  And man does not choose to find those harmonies pleasant; they just are.  This may have indicated to Pythagoras that there was an overarching and meaningful pattern and order to the universe after all: a method to the madness discoverable by the mind of man.  This must have been infinitely comforting.

So Pythagoras and his followers built a cult of commensurability.  They tried to find commensurability in the stars and even in human nature.  Any discovery of incommensurability was terrifying to them.  So irrational numbers, like pi (the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference, which cannot be expressed as a ratio of whole numbers) were actually considered a religious secret, which was only allowed to be discussed by the inner circle of Pythagoreans!

Of course, outside of pure math and music, the place he found the most order was in the heavens.  He allegedly learned astronomy from the Babylonians, who for centuries had diligently tracked the orderly motions of the heavenly bodies.  He believed the stars emitted sounds (inaudible to us mortals, of course) of particular pitches according to their orbits, and he believed that these notes were in perfect harmony with each other.  What seemed to strike Pythagoras about the stars was not only their order, but their eternity.

Order, the reasoning power of man to discern order, and eternity all combined in the Pythagorean doctrine of metaphysical dualism.

One myth latched onto by the Pythagoreans is that of Dionysus.  Dionysus was the son of Zeus.  When he was a baby, he was eaten by the evil Titans.  The baby's heart was saved, and used to resurrect him.  And Zeus retaliated against the Titans by incinerating them with his lightning.  The race of man was then created out of the mixed ashes of the Titans and the ingested Dionysus.  Man therefore has a dual nature: an evil body, derived from the Titans, and a divine, perfect soul, derived Dionysus.  For Pythagoreans, the soul was not just an animating force: it was the seat of consciousness and reason, somewhat analogous to our conception of "mind".

Pythagoreans derived from this myth that our divine souls are sullied by our wretched bodies.  When our bodies die, our soul passes on to other bodies, perhaps even to the bodies of beasts.  Of course not all bodies are created equal.  The goal is to be reincarnated as a higher being (a body in which the soul is more dominant) than before.  The great chain of being ascends from dumb beasts whose souls are simply matters of sensation, up toward higher animals capable of reason, and finally up to true divinity.  How does one ascend this great chain of being?  By focusing one's life on affairs of the soul, and not on affairs of the body.  A sex-addled frat boy, falling out a window in a drunken stupor would probably be reincarnated as a slug or cuttlefish.  The life of an architect who applies geometry to his craft might end up as a wash, and he will be reincarnated as another future architect, since although he used his powers of reason, he did so for mundane purposes.  But a mathematician who studies numbers and geometry purely for their own sake might have a shot at attaining divinity in the next life.

Pythagoras created a doctrine that mixed matter with mind, order with chaos, randomness with purpose, and mumbojumbo with sound observation.  In doing so he created a distinctive compromise between the worldviews of the physiologos and the theologos, and started a strand of thought which extends to the present day.

Next in this series: Induction in Ancient Greek Thought

Krugman's Intellectual Waterloo

On Monday evening, Lew Rockwell, from a tip by someone named "Travis", posted this damning quote of Paul Krugman's from a 2002 New York Times editorial:

“To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.”

Krugman.  2002.  Calling for a housing bubble.

What's more, by explicitly calling for a new bubble to replace the recently burst one, he anticipated by 6 years the Onion's hilarious "report" that "demand for a new investment bubble began months ago, when the subprime mortgage bubble burst and left the business world without a suitable source of pretend income."  Except Krugman was being SERIOUS.

The quote caught on in the blogosphere, to such an extent that Krugman actually responded in his New York Times blog Wednesday morning:

Guys, read it again. It wasn’t a piece of policy advocacy, it was just economic analysis. What I said was that the only way the Fed could get traction would be if it could inflate a housing bubble. And that’s just what happened.

So with a deft little two-step, Krugman paints himself as a doctor who gave an excellent diagnostic, and not a disastrous prescription.  One of his ditto-heads posted on his blog that saying Krugman advocated or caused the housing bubble was:

Like saying Nostradamus caused the rise of European fascism.

At the same time, with his headline of "And I was on the grassy knoll, too" he paints his critics (especially the Austrians) as conspiracy theorists, akin to the Lone Gunmen (the Kennedy assassination theorists from the X-Files TV show).  Just like with the matter of Jekyll Island and the events leading up to the creation of the Fed, an OBVIOUS conclusion from a matter of PUBLIC RECORD is portrayed by establishment sophistry as unmoored crankiness.  And once again, it works: another ditto-head dismissively remarked,

"no need to reason with those folks."

Even economist Arnold Kling bent over backwards to interpret the column in a benign light:

He was not cheerfully advocating a housing bubble, but instead he was glumly saying that the only way he could see to get out of the recession would be for such a bubble to occur.

Krugman thanked Kling for his "gracious, sensible explication".  I can just imagine Kling running around his office in glee at having been nodded at by a celebrity Nobel Laureate, exclaiming, "He likes me!  He likes me!"

Mark Thornton on the Mises blog followed up with a devastating collection of 2001 Krugman quotes clearly documenting his support for inducing a housing bubble.  The most damning of this batch is the following from a 2001 interview with Lou Dobbs:

“Meanwhile, economic policy should encourage other spending to offset the temporary slump in business investment.  Low interest rates, which promote spending on housing and other durable goods, are the main answer.”

How the hell can anyone spin THAT as a purely academic musing, and not a policy recommendation for artificially inducing housing spending?

Ignoring the other quotes for a moment, and just judging from the 2002 column, did Krugman support pumping up a housing bubble or not?  Given that, even in his recent blog defending himself, he explicitly stated his belief that "the only way the Fed could get traction would be if it could inflate a housing bubble", there are only two possibilities:

1. He DID NOT support inducing a housing bubble, and wanted the Fed to NOT FIGHT THE RECESSION.
2. He DID support inducing a housing bubble.

Anyone even somewhat familiar with Krugman's attitude toward Fed activism should know that proposition #1, that Krugman supported a do-nothing policy, is preposterous.  So, especially after bringing back in the quotes gathered by Mark Thornton, the case for proposition #2 is overwhelming.

And what about his strawman protests that he didn't cause the housing bubble, much less the Enron scandal or Kennedy's assassination?  The man is willfully missing the point.  What is damning about these quotes is NOT that he necessarily caused ANYTHING.  What is devastating about them is that they expose the intellectual bankruptcy of his economic principles.  Those who look up to him like the second coming of Adam Smith should realize that the neo-Keynesian principles that lead him to advocate aggressive interest rate cuts and mammoth public spending NOW, are the very same principles that led him to advocate inducing a housing bubble THEN.  He would himself affirm that his economic principles haven't fundamentally changed since then.  So the conclusions and policy prescriptions he infers from them are just as wildly wrong now as they were then.

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Related Articles on Mises.org

Krugman's Rearguard Apologists

The Second Coming of Keynes

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The Worldview of the Physiologos

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.

Previously in this series: The Worldview of the Theologos

As I discussed previously, Aristotle distinguished between thinkers who were theologi and thinkers who were physiologi.  I discussed the former in my previous post, and now I shall discuss the latter.

"Logos" means "account" and "physis" means "nature".  So while the theologi (poets, prophets, and priests) accounted for things with reference to gods, the physiologi accounted for things with reference to nature.  

Many belief systems claim that god created nature.  And Cicero wrote a treatise called "On The Nature of the Gods."   So why would Aristotle consider these two approaches to be mutually exclusive?  To answer that, one must understand Aristotle's conception of "nature."

Aristotelean nature is an endogenous drive of change or rest (or as many Aristotelean scholars say, an "inherent principle of change or rest").  The notion of the sun being driven by Helios and his divine horses does not account for the nature of the sun, because the drive moving the sun is exogenous; that is, it is driven by an outside force (that of the god and horses).  Conceivably a study of the drives within Helios and his horses themselves would be both theologia and physiologia, since they concern the nature of the gods.  However, Aristotle's clear-cut distinction probably comes from a recognition that most theologi say, "the gods did it," and stop there, without advancing to the explanation of how or why gods do things in the first place.  Again, Aristotle seems to think of Hesiod as an honorable exception, because he seems to think of Hesiod's Eros as qualifying as an endogenous drive within the gods.  So Aristotle might have considered Hesiod to be a member of both camps.

Still, it was Thales who Aristotle gave the honor of being called the first physiologos.  Thales is often looked down upon by modern scholars for having said that all things have soul.  This derision stems from a misunderstanding of what Greeks meant by soul (psuche).  A soul was not necessarily the seat of consciousness (although it sometimes was).  Psuche was the animating force within a body (as indicated by the fact that the Latin word for soul is anima).  Taken thus, soul (psuche) is a particular type of  nature (physis), since nature is an endogenous drive for change or rest, and soul is an endogenous drive for a particular species of change (animation).  What Thales seems to have meant when he said that all things have soul is that things move according to their own natures (endogenous drives), and not according to the exogenous actions of mysterious gods.

For Thales and the theologi who followed him, the universe was full of things moving about according to their own natures.  The interplay of these movements brought about mechanisms which explain the phenomena of the universe.  For example, according to Anaximander (a student of Thales), thunder and lightning was not Zeus giving vent to his wrath; rather it was the heat and sound resulting from the collision of massive clouds.

With Thales and his followers, the cosmic praxeology of the theologi gave way to the mechanistic naturalism of the physiologi.

Next in this series: The Worldview of the Metaphysical Dualist

The Worldview of the Theologos

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Thales and Deductive Geometry.

Aristotle distinguished between two kinds of thinkers.  There were the theologi and the physiologi.  Logos means "account".  So the two types of thinkers had different ways of accounting for the universe.

Theo means "god".  So the theologi accounted for phenomena with reference to gods.  The ranks of the theologi were filled with poets (traveling bards like Homer) and priests (sacramental priests like the Iliad's Chryses,  oracular seers like the Pythian priestesses,  and peripatetic diviners like Calchas).

For Homer, a plague that decimated the ranks of the Achaeans besieging Troy was caused, not by the unwholesome conditions of a war camp, but by the god Apollo shooting invisible arrows into the army as punishment for King Agamemnon having disrespected his priest.  For the ancient Greek theologos, the sun is a blazing chariot being driven by the god Helios, earthquakes are either caused when Poseidon is angry or when Zeus is nodding his head in making a promise, agricultural seasons come and go according to the mood of Demeter, and the souls of the dead are escorted by Hermes into the underworld kingdom of Hades and Persephone.  Even human emotional states are explained by the influence of gods like Aphrodite and Eris, goddess of strife.

Sometimes such individual acts of god are constituent parts of a greater plan.  The events leading up to the fall of Troy are said, by Homer, to all be toward the fulfillment of the will of Zeus.

 Dios d' eteleieto boulê

(thus the plan of Zeus came to fulfillment)

But, even Zeus is said to be bound by the Moirae (the apportioners, or Fates) and their mother Ananke (Destiny or Necessity).

Thus, according to the most complete theologos, all phenomena are at bottom actions in the Misesian sense: purposeful behavior, products of will.  Therefore, to the theologos, all the sciences are praxeology.

Next in this series: The Worldview of the Physiologos.

Thales and Deductive Geometry

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Divination in the Iliad

In its earliest days, geometry was empirical and inductive. Ancient measurers noticed repetitions and patterns in observed facts. They used these observations of fact as foundations for establishing geometric rules. For example, the ancient Egyptians noticed the pattern that every triangle they observed with sides of the proportional lengths of 3, 4, and 5 seemed to form a right angle. Based on these observations, they accepted that every 3-4-5 triangle, as a rule, formed a right angle. The professional Egyptian “rope stretchers” used this rule found by observation and induction to accurately survey parcels of land.

The true father of deductive geometry (which, conversely, uses rules to establish facts, as well as other rules) was probably Thales of Miletus (635-543 BC), who by the way also fathered natural philosophy (he and the the goddess of wisdom seemed to have a very intimate and fruitful relationship). Thales is said to have traveled to Babylon (another cradle of geometry) and Egypt, and in those travels may have learned inductive geometry from priests and scribes. He subsequently applied his genius to placing the science upon a more secure deductive footing.

Thales allegedly used his understanding of geometry to measure the height of the great pyramids with reference to his own shadow and that of the pyramid.  To do this, he must have started with the premise that light always travels in straight lines.  He deduced from this premise, and his understanding of triangles, that the ratio between the heights of two nearby bodies and their respective shadows should be equivalent.  (This wouldn't be true if light happened to curve for some bodies, making their shadows proportionally longer or shorter than the shadows of other bodies.)  So, Thales waited until the length of his own shadow was equal to his height.  Assuming his premises were true, at this exact time, the height of the pyramid's shadow should be equal to the height of the pyramid itself.  So then it was a simple matter of measuring the pyramid's shadow to determine its height (which mercifully involves no climbing).

Next in this series: The Worldview of the Theologos.

Divination in the Iliad

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Inductive Practical Astronomy.

Homer begins his Iliad as Hesiod begins his poems, by invoking a goddess, probably a Muse (although Homer, unlike Hesiod, does not specify).

A similar kind of divine revelation is embodied in the character Calchas, a prophet...

"who had knowledge of all things that were, and that were to be, and that had been before, and who had guided the ships of the Achaeans to Ilios by the gift of prophecy that Phoebus Apollo had granted him."

Again we have divine knowledge granted by a god, and this knowledge encompasses the past, present, and future.  And like Hesiod, Calchas magically knows about seafaring, although it is not his trade.

In the story of Troy, Apollo also grants Cassandra the gift of prophecy, along with the curse that nobody will ever believe her.

Sometimes ancient Greek prophets would spontaneously realize their prophecies.  Most, however, would interpret their prophecies from various omens: dreams, the arrangement of entrails, and animal behavior.

Aside from any claim of divine authority, such divination can be thought of as a form of praxeology.  It implies that events in the universe can interpreted as willful actions of divine agents.

The diviner saw patterns that other people could not understand.  The layman had to trust the expertise of the seer.  King Agamemnon went so far as to sacrifice his own daughter on the authority of Calchas.

Our most pernicious modern-day diviners are climate scientists.  They too look oh-so-carefully at the patterns in nature that the layperson cannot understand (climate statistics in their case), and pretend to be able to infer from them judgments of great consequence.

Next in this series: Thales and Deductive Geometry.

Inductive Practical Astronomy

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Introducing Works and Days

Much of the Works and Days, like the Theogony, is concerned with outlandish tales about the past.  Here we have the myths of Prometheus, Pandora, and the Ages of Man (Golden, Silver, Bronze, etc.).  No doubt he bases his authority to speak on such matters on his divine inspiration as a poet.

However, in this poem, he also expounds upon techniques for managing natural resources using the stars as a guide.  Here is a sample of his astronomically-based advice:

"When the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are rising, begin your harvest, and your ploughing when they are going to set "

"When the piercing power and sultry heat of the sun abate, and almighty Zeus sends the autumn rains, and men's flesh comes to feel far easier, -- for then the star Sirius passes over the heads of men, who are born to misery, only a little while by day and takes greater share of night, -- then, when it showers its leaves to the ground and stops sprouting, the wood you cut with your axe is least liable to worm."

"When Zeus has finished sixty wintry days after the solstice, then the star Arcturus leaves the holy stream of Ocean and first rises brilliant at dusk. After him the shrilly wailing daughter of Pandion, the swallow, appears to men when spring is just beginning. Before she comes, prune the vines, for it is best so."

Obviously Hesiod the farmer wouldn't have relied on divine inspiration to know such lore.  Again he, like all ancient farmers, would have used induction.  He would have noticed, for example, that in the past, crops planted when the Pleiades star cluster sets (late October/early November)  and harvested when they rise (first half of May) happened to be more bountiful.  He would have inferred from repetitions of such instances that those would be the best times in the future to plough and harvest.

Such careful inductive thinking and experimentation of the working man who improved his tools and techniques, thereby increasing his prosperity, is the realm of “science” which did, by far, the most good for mankind.

Hesiod also holds forth on seafaring, of which he admits he has no experience or "instruction" ("sesophismenos", a word closely related to sophia, or wisdom).  But here, he plays his "divine inspiration" card:

"Nevertheless, I shall speak forth the mind of aegis-holding Zeus, for the Muses have taught me to sing an inconceivable hymn."

Here "inconceivable" is translated from  athesphaton: literally "beyond even a god's power to express".

Next in this series: Divination in the Iliad.