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Article 2487 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern,sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Logic and the Dialectic of Enlightenment
Message-ID: <XcgXDB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 2 Jan 92 14:49:20 GMT
Lines: 133

It has always seemed to me to be significant that logic was born
as a distinct branch of human knowledge at the particular moment
in history when two apparently unrelated historical movements
happened to coincide.  The first of these movements was sophistry,
or to use a less pejorative term, sophism. What sophism was, in
essence, was a method of deconstructing traditional values, any
traditional values, by dialectically questioning the implicit
assumptions or preunderstandings upon which explicit and
consciously articulated propositions depended.  From the start the
motivation for this process seems to have been the delegitimation
of hereditary privilege in the service of a new mercantile
(bourgeois) counter- elite.  Sophism reached its logical end when
Socrates turned its dialectical/deconstructive method on sophism
itself and deconstructed sophism.  He seems to have done that in
the name of preserving at least enough of those "traditional
values" which he thought were minimally necessary for the
maintenance of human community, although, of course, the
likelihood that deconstruction would eventually deconstruct itself
was as great as that a stomach without food would soon begin to
digest itself.

The second historical movement was the loss of political autonomy
of the city-state following the establishment of Alexander's
empire.  Alexander's empire, and the subsequent political unions
culminating in the massive Roman Empire, had two important
consequences.   First it eliminated the self-government of the
city-state (Polis) leaving the citizen only his "private" affairs
to handle since "public" affairs were now in the hands of
professional rulers.  Second, it opened the way for increased
interaction among the heterogeneous ("different") peoples of the
Empire.  Although when he had opened up the lines of communication
between Greece and Iran ("Persia"), Alexander had expected them to
be largely one way at the intellectual level, with "modern" and
rational Hellenic ideas and practices coming in to modernize and
rationalize the primitive and superstitious Iranian society of the
time, in fact "Oriental" (Iranian) superstitions traveled along
these routes as a kind of backwash and brought their "mysteries"
to Greece itself.

It was at precisely this moment in human history, at the
intersection or convergence of these two trends, the end of
sophism and the beginning of empire, that Aristotle created
(invented) logic, humanity's first attempt at artificial
intelligence or automated reasoning.  Logic came _before_ the
creation of the great Hellenic universalisms of Stoicism and
Epicureanism and, of course, before the Hellenic-Hebraic
universalisms of Christianity, Islam and Marxism.  I think that
logic has always been deeply implicated and dialectically involved
with these later universalistic solutions to the problems of
Enlightenment.  The reason for this is that as am "empty" (i.e.,
content-free) formal structure of thought logic could be used to
contain any ideological content in the form of "self-evident"
major premises.

I think Aristotle had the same kind of complex and often
incommensurable motives that drive AI researchers today.  The
quest for _certainty_ in the wake of the deconstruction of
"traditional beliefs," which had had a mythical or "revealed"
character, by sophism, the hope that an automated and "hands-off"
reasoning uncontaminated by personal and parochial motivations
would lead to certain truth; and the contrary quest, the quest for
novelty and discovery and intellectual and social power that comes
from the application of a more powerful technology of thought than
one's competitors.

But "logic," which used an essentially spatial metaphor and mapped
propositions expressed in natural language onto a two-dimensional
plane in what was an early attempt at a formal semantics, was too
complex and difficult to give solace to the average person.  It
remains up to the present time the entertainment and source of
meaning primarily for the intellectually gifted.

Because of its complexity, difficulty and its appeal to fairly
austere tastes, I don't think logic has played the role in the
major "intellectual" movement of western thought, the dialectical
confrontation between "Tradition" on the one hand and
"Enlightenment" on the other, that one might have expected.
Recall that the sophistic/Socratic deconstruction uses a very
simple logic, the location and explication of "contradictions" in
complex superordinate terms made up of multiple branches of
signifiers: complex superordinate terms like "truth," "justice,"
"redemption," "sin," "the good," etc.  The dialectical interplay
between Tradition and Enlightenment has more the look and feel of
a dialogue or bull session between two adolescents, with the
arguments being invented and created on the basis of a complex
collection of factors, only one of which is logical.  In
particular I think each contestant, which we may personify as Mr.
Tradition and Mr. Enlightenment, attempts to use the other's
preunderstanding to support propositions that advance his own
argument.  Thus we find Mr. Enlightenment pointing to a
_tradition_ of fairness and Mr. Tradition pointing to the clear
and _logically obvious_ advantages of doing things his way.  Each
contestant wants to make his point of view the common sense of the
day, what the average person confronting the average issue will
see as the self-evident truth of the matter.

I think it makes sense to use this meta-historical overview to
understand the dialectical clashes of our own day.  It is always
the same debate over again, the "New Lights" of the Enlightenment
versus the "Auld Lights" of Tradition.  We are now in a process of
emerging from a dialectical polarization of the world in which the
most recent and extreme Enlightened universalism, Communism or
Marxism, challenged what was the still emerging consensus or
resolution or "synthesis" of Tradition and Enlightenment, namely
democratic capitalism, largely because that point of view had
never been able to construct a good rhetoric or ideology in its
own defense.  Both the "modern" world, with its opposition of
science versus superstition, and the "postmodern" world with its
superabundance of available surfaces, seem anachronistic.  We are
at a new crossroads, a kind of Archimedean point, at which there
is an opening for new ideas.  Only I've spent the last thirty
years trying to understand the dynamics of the competition between
democracy (or is it capitalism?) and communism so I haven't got
any.  I can tell you why communism was successful at a rhetorical
and ideological level up to the time of Khrushchev's 1956 speech,
and why post-structuralism arose as the specific counterdiscourse
to a moribund Marxism that wouldn't die after 1968, but I haven't
a clue as to the next step.  Having taken my analysis of the
current situation all the way back to pre-Socratic Greece to
understand why intelligent people supported Castro's takeover of
Cuba even though they knew it would bring misery to the Cuban
people and threaten the very existence of humanity -- that was the
problematic which moved me -- I feel like I've just finished a
knock down drag out fight with the school bully, and whipped him,
only to discover that every other kid was studying for the next
test.  I wonder if my analysis is as anachronistic as Marxism
itself.

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


