How to control our emotions

Axiologist, I agree with you that there is more important business to do than to bicker about completeness, falsifiability and so forth. The problem is that there is no point in moving 'beyond Logical Positivism' until we are not reasonably sure that these questions are not going to come back in their unreconstructed LP form, and throw everything into confusion again.

Many people are nowadays ready to admit that emotions and reason are not separate, and I am among them. But realizing this provides only a very short relief as the question of how we control our emotions comes back with a vengence. As we have just shown, the urge to fight and and other potentially nasty things feature prominently in our emotional world. So we need some way of restraining them. Cartesian dualism belongs to a long tradition in our culture that tries to point to such a way through a posit that there is something called 'reason' that can be stronger than our 'passions'. I agree that this position fails and it is important to say that it does because there nothing more dangerous than the sense of false security that an undetected failed protection device creates. It is partly for this reason that I attack LP. Like cartesian rationalism, LP masquerades as a method to avoid harmful emotional statements. It is therefore important to show its claims to be empty.

Now what about the claims on science ? Everyone wants to have science on its side. Since science has become so sucessful, there are many who are ready to 'courir au secours de la victoire' (run to the help of victory), as we say in french. Quine, like LP, is among those brave people. Indeed, the fight between them really looks like a sordid tussle between the inheritors of a big fortune. Apparently, Quine came out on top and ran away with most of the loot. I find Wittgenstein's position more courageous : science is science, it has its own methods and is amazingly sucessful in its own domain, but it does not provide means to control our emotions. It is just not its busines. Moreover, I believe that one can show (and that is what I tried to do in this blog) that trying to apply science methods (what I call the mistrust game) to that end makes matters worse. Let us just leave science alone and move on. We have to accept to rely on ourselves to find the means to tame the threatening maëlstrom of our emotions.

So the problem remains to find those means or, rather, to chose from the myriad of possibilities that are being peddled to us. The genealogy of ideas you outline (speculative philosophy then natural philosophy then social mathematics then back to speculative philosophy) could be interpreted as the nihilistic account of absurdity going around eternally in vacuous circles, leaving us nothing but despair. Hopefully, I am convinced we can break free of this circle. Tipler has some interesting things to say, I think, but 'religion is part of science' is not among them. 'Science is part of religion' might be a better start. Indeed, if you interpret 'religion' as 'the sum total of what we believe in' then this is exactly how I picture things. Wittgenstein's statement that 'philosophy and science are separate' fits in this view as well : you just need to consider philosophy as another component of this grand total.

But we have not really started yet. If we want to, I think looking more closely at the first term of your genealogy might provide a starting point. You mention 'speculative philosophy' as being composed of religion and metaphysics. But these could, just as well, be seen as irreconcilable opposites. The first few centuries of chistianity were shaped by an internal struggle between rival factions one can more or less identify with them. On the one hand, gnostics (and, later, manicheans) held that it is knowledge that saves (hence their names). On the other, Paulininans, and other currents which eventually coalesced into the orthodox church, contended that only faith can save. Gnostics were direct descendants of the greek philosophical tradition which had been transmitted to them mostly through neo-platonism. From it, they had inherited a devotion for sophia (wisdom, knowledge, from which philo-sophia). Their opponents held for pistis, which is the greek word for faith, but their traditional roots were more jewish than greek. Eventually, pistis won and went on to create christianity in the form that persists to this day. Sophia went underground for several centuries and started to reappear, timidly at first, as scholastic christian theology then more openly and eventually morphed into the countless avatars of modern philosophy, including Logical Positivism. So, when you mention religion and metaphysics, I see the ghosts of the old pistis and sophia.

Pure sophia leads to failure, as is demonstrated by the flaws of cartesian Dualism, Logical Positivism and all the orther isms whose bones get whiter in the sun every day. The conclusion is not very difficult to see : we have to rediscover pistis, faith. Yes, I dare to utter the F-word, and I do so because I have discovered that 'faith' does not necessarily imply 'faith in God' in the sense given to the word 'God' by the three main monotheistic religions. Actually 'God' is a placeholder that has been used to embody faith because it was too difficult to visualize something so abstract without imagining it as some sort of person. In short, God is an hypostasis of faith, but an entirely disposable one, in my view. This is where I find interesting things in Tipler : he proposes another hypostasis for faith (which, by the way, he also confuses with God). To be more precise, I believe it is helpful to equate faith with trust, and this is why I spent so much energy defending it here. You mentioned someone saying that 'anthropology is the secret of religion'. Here we are : trust is what human societies produce. It is more than a necessary condition of their survival, it is their very essence. Let us put faith/trust back to the center of our preocupations because it is where it belongs. Trust is what we do collectively because we are indvidual embodiments of longevity. Our emotions, tamed by a trust producing culture, contribute to our longevity both as individuals and as a collective. Science does not help us in that, or at least not in its present form. So let us keep at bay those who see nails everywhere because they hold a hammer, and use whatever tools we have (philosophy, poetry).

Pistis crushed sophia by excomunication and church-enforced discipline. These means are repellent to us now. But I venture to say that we should probably be grateful to the church to have saved us from gnosticism. Our modern societies probably owe their existence to protestantism more than to anything else, including philosophy (read Weber). Protestantism, though it is anti-church, is unmistakbly christian in that it is squarely pro-faith. And a strong pro-faith current in our culture is what we owe to the choices of the early christian church. We need now to move on beyond God because it is no longer credible (as Doc says, we do not see the motivation any more). But it would be a grave mistake to throw faith overboard in the process. If we were to become gnostics again we would indeed be running in circles.