From one of my favorite singer songwriters (Joanna Newsom, En Gallop, Milk-Eyed Mender):
"Never get so attached to a poem, you
Forget truth that lacks lyricism, and
Never draw so close to the heat, that
You forget that you must eat"
In an age where emotion almost always trumps reason, it's nice to hear one of the more entertaining lyricists of our time acknowledge the danger of unconstrained romanticism.
And, in a recent exchange on a listserver I monitor (where naval strategy is a frequent topic), there was a discussion of the limits of a purely physical/materialist foundation for a military. I'll quote at length (in the order of comments):
comment 1
Jeff,
Krepinivich’s article and others all continue to overlook the fact that there is a foundational flaw in our Western Philosophy and only with our Philosophy. The East Asian and Islamic Philosophies are free of this self-imposed boundary that has truncated our intellectual /mental processes. In addition, the operating philosophy of the West Logical Positivism was declared “collapsed" by eminent Western Philosophers but that knowledge has been consistently ignored by the Defense Department and Armed Services. The existing Western Philosophy worked well as a framework and guide for Physical, i.e., Materialistic, problems but it is failing to provide the added framework and guidelines for Knowledge Processing Science. The non-materialistic domain is where our adversaries are starting to leave us behind while we are stuck in materialistic or physical domain. America has the knowledge needed to correct the basic philosophical problems and in addition has the requisite knowledge to leap-frog our adversaries and then take the lead into the 21st Century.
Thank you.
Ed
response to comment by Captain Hughes:
All:
I don't think I follow all of this but it may be connected to the following. When Francis Bacon et al, tried to correct Western philosophy's--especially what was called natural philosophy--distortions and corruptions by the alchemists, soothsayers, and fortune tellers by demanding a scientific basis for truth, they (probably unknowingly) set in motion the intellectual revolution that has now reached the sad claim that "if you can't prove something scientifically with measurable evidence then it doesn't exist or you must act as if it doesn't." And as we all know even scientific proof is regarded always as tentative.
The Western scientific age has thrown the baby of human insight, goodness, beauty and truth, warror spirit, and everything else metaphysical out of rational thought. Because of this keen loss, some people think that the Asian philosophies and Islam have something superior to offer. More likely this is only true in the sense that our Western roots in philosophy and religion were emasculated by the scientific revolution. Modern Western philosophy is now neutralized (tongue tied) and reduced to things like logical positivism on the understandable if trite side, or to jargon on the obscure side with intellectually uncommunicative stuff that is only understood by other "philosophers." I can't help suspecting them of having become the new soothsayers--charlatons themselves in a sort of modern pseudoscientific pretension.
HERE IS THE POINT
Any theory of combat worth the name must talk about (1) the physical part (more kills and wounded over there than on our side), (2) the mental part (persuading the enemy he is losing while using your brain to shoot from a superior position) (3) and the spiritual part (overcoming your fear and imposing it in the enemy). Soldiers are appalled by mention of the soul, or metaphysics, but every experienced fighter believes in willpower and the need to follow positive leadership. Some of these things are measurable and so admissible in our scientific age, but most of them except casualties are just ignored in planning and analysis. If treating the soul as real is what is meant by Eastern philosophy, then yes, there's something in it that the West has lost.
I am treading on getting off the legitimate subject matter authorized by Jeff for discussions, but I don't think strategy, policy, operations, or (and especially) combat can be discussed without including some metaphysics.
Captain Hughes
and, my response in a private e-mail to Captain Hughes:
As someone with a longtime interest in the philosophical shifts you describe, I must compliment you on a clear description of what was lost in the wake of Kant/Hume/etc.
As logical positivism crashed and burned in the early 20th century (e.g., Godel's Incompleteness Theorem), a shift occurred: from modernism's epistemological optimism/utopianism to postmodernism's epistemological pessimism/relativism.....from a focus on an objective reality that can be completely understood & described, to a focus on language games about a subjective/arbitrary "reality" where meaning is a social construct imprisoned in a specific time and place.
Both extremes deny the metaphysical, and thereby reflect a fatally truncated understanding of what it means to be human. The negative consequences for us and our social organizations continue to emerge. Whether any society can long survive without a serious/robust metaphysical foundation remains unclear.....
Thank you for speaking up!
Walter R. Smith
The recent confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor have highlighted the fact that even a supporter of a "living constitution" (appearing before a forum that also overwhelmingly holds the same view) feels the need to adopt a facade of originalism...perhaps evidence that a significant majority of the population remains uneasy with a postmodern epistemology when it comes to the law.
Finally, Francis Schaeffer (How Should We Then Live?) records an observation his son made about how the 23rd Psalm has evolved in the West from the Enlightenment:
They began - I am my Shepherd
Then - Sheep are my shepherd
Then - Everything is my shepherd
Finally - Nothing is my shepherd
Even though Schaeffer's son appears to have since rejected a traditional understanding of scriptural authority, his description of modernism's descent into nihilism remains trenchant.
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