15 June 2024
PART II: Process
Why Processes? (Continued)
Anecdotally, i.e., only in my experience, most people are not philosophers by nature. But, if you’ve read this far, you probably are a philosopher by nature. Coming from a man who recognized Aristotle sometime around age 20, we can return to that stellar source who also acknowledged that well-being is down to your own conduct: the better your actions, the more likely you are to flourish. Living a good life is to do good things well. By my lights, none of those actions is as fundamental as knowing the fundaments.
Let’s look at why you need to know your epistemology. Here’s an example. In 1690, John Locke wrote that the basis of private property is the differentiation created by effort spent. He must have been working with North America in mind or a theoretical first day-on-Earth scenario. If you have a naturally identifiable piece of land e.g., the land that runs from the lakeshore to the treeline and is as wide as the distance between the big willow on the east and the oak on the west. If a family ascertains that no labour has been performed on that land, and that no neighbouring people can identify a prior claimant, then that family begins to work that land. Per Locke, their labour differentiates that land from neighbouring land as well as presumably improving it for habitation. In fact, with the addition of their labour, that approximate rectangle moves from land to private property.
Say a year or two later, that family has built a cabin, sown some fields, and bought a couple cows. They’re pretty happy with their progress and life’s looking good, if they can continue to work and continue to have the health and good fortune to keep working. One day, a person with different values and epistemology comes along and says, “I want the top west corner of this land on which to build my home.”
You can see where laws and courts come into play pretty quickly. However, without laws, customs, and police to enforce those laws and customs, and a government to write the laws…it’s person versus person (Cf. Hobbes, above, p.x). The person who wants that top west corner of the subject land starts approaching other neighbours. He tells them that rights are simple ideas and that ideas aren’t real, they’re just imaginary creations of a certain type of selfish and privileged people. Those neighbours now have to decide a very heavy philosophical question: are ideas real or are they fairy dust?
It is unlikely, but far from impossible, that settling farmers are also metaphysicians. This is a metaphysical question best solved by examining the impact of ideas on human lives. For example, the lives of the British, French, Spanish…settlers who resettled in North America did so for a reason, or a series of reasons.
The immigrant narratives with which I was raised all concerned more political freedom and more economic and educational opportunity. If our exemplified settlers, above, came to Canada to claim their 100-acre allotments, they came for greater (more) opportunity. Opportunity and freedom are both concepts. It would not take practical settlers long to realize that first they had the idea of a better life, while working as Scottish crofters whose crofts were razed. From that decimated state, some young men promised their wives that they would go to North America, get started, and then have the wives join them. Others crossed the Atlantic as couples, many with children.
Here's how their concepts were constructed. I worked on a croft promised to me by the estate’s agent. After five years of constant labour, and a so-so living, that land, with no notice, was reclaimed by the estate and I was s.o.l. The percepts, the things experienced by that crofter, through his five senses, were land, labour, product, market, cash, home, and future. Six of the seven of these nouns can be drawn schematically so as to be represented graphically. In that graphic representation they can be percepts, things sensed but without causal and contextual relations. When those relations are drawn out and understood, conceptual knowledge begins. Conceptual knowledge is required to gain a sense of the future.
Morris (1975, p. 275) defines concept as a noun. He defines noun as another noun “…n. 1. A word used to denote or name a person, place, thing, quality, or act” (p. 898), all things that exist on Earth. He defines concept as “…n. 1. A general idea or understanding, especially one derived from specific instances or occurrences.” In that definition is the same order of constructive operations as our crofter experienced: instances or occurrences that might lead to an understanding or a general idea. More specifically, I lost my land, my work, and my future. Understandings and general ideas consist of relationships between parts in specific contexts. I believe that understanding of concept is also implicit in the construction of the word.
The prefix, con-, is defined as with or thoroughly (Membean, 2024). Examples provided are connect (linking with), convene (gather with), or consensus (agree with). The suffix, cept, is defined as taken. Of interest is the psychological idea of acceptance, the taking of the reality of a situation. This is analogous to an apprehension—or grasping an understanding. As with the crofter, his understanding, of his unfortunate state of being, is an aggregated concept consisting of at least the seven related concepts cited above (land, labour, product, market, cash, home, and future).
This tells us that there is hierarchy within conceptual understandings. The classic philosophical example is table. A table consists of a surface supported by legs. Neither surface nor legs are simple ideas when carefully considered. Going upward in complexity, we move through furniture, rooms, buildings, architecture, place, time, human product, ultimately headed for ontological, things that are.
Returning to our example, the family with the two cows, the new fields, and the new cabin would have sought and received advice and assistance from their neighbours as all these families had crossed an ocean, settled land, and built a new life. They knew first, second, and third hand how hard that was. When Mr. Ideas-Aren’t-Real comes along and says he wants the new family’s northwest corner, the older families will back the newly settled family because of their demonstrated hard work and their newly shared cultural roots of hard physical labour in wildly difficult climatic conditions.
The likely deciding factor will not be jurisprudential concepts but Dr. Johnson’s kicking of the rock. That community would point to the newly cleared fields, fences, access ways, and house and say, “Ideas may not be real, but those things are real. And this family made them real.” This is a type of practical application that leaves us short of the processes I believe have landed 21st century Westerners in their present quicksand.
Ideas are entirely real. Communism, statism, and totalitarianism of any sort can be described based on their values, their products, and their implications i.e., their causal and contextual attributes, as can capitalism, and our current insipid variation, deeply mixed economy. What I hope readers are seeing is that, when our epistemological means are challenged and denigrated, we can lose confidence in our status as knowers. And, having written that sentence, we go screaming back to the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, “All men by nature seek to know” (Barnes, 1995, p. 1552).
Because humans seek to know, having the ways you know criticized, weakens our confidence. This is the cultural battlefield on which we find ourselves, per the opening sentence of the Introduction to this book. And this is why I have asked you, dear reader, to spend so much time thinking about epistemology: If we don’t know how and what we know, our vulnerability increases and our sense of self-efficacy decreases, neither being the hallmark of a well-spirited human being.
To be continued next week.
Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying). He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes. He writes to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the bcc’d emailing list.
Barnes, J. (Ed.). (1995). The complete works of Aristotle: The revised Oxford translation. Princeton University Press.
Membean. (2024, 8 April). Con-. https://membean.com/roots/con-with/#:~:text=The%20prefix%20con%2D%2C%20which%20means,connect%2C%20consensus%2C%20and%20conclude
Morris, W. (Ed.) (1975). The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of The English Language. American Heritage Publishing Co, Inc.
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