Luke Responds to Konrad

Actually written JULY 21, 1996

Ok, so now it's my turn to talk about Konrad and I, and how we relate.

You may wonder why I would create an alternate personality so opposed to my natural one. Why would I create my own enemy like that?

One may suspect, for example, that Konrad is just a “straw person” for me to attack, more exactly, a “straw pragmatist”. Hence, all I’m really doing is letting Konrad build his best case against me (yet contrived by me through him) so that I can tear it down and feel like I’ve won some grand argument. In a sense, this would reflect badly on me, revealing my fear of arguing with a genuine pragmatist.

I will level with you. I do indeed fear arguing with pragmatists, whether genuine or contrived. In fact, I may fear arguing with Konrad more than arguing with a natural pragmatist. Konrad is more threatening precisely because he is the “pragmatist within”.

But now he’s even more of a threat, for he’s no longer just within. I’ve taken that inner pragmatist and crystallized him into an integrated personality to be reckoned with. He threatens me all the more because he is both inner and outer, he has the inside scoop on me, and he can antagonize me as would another person.

But the question remains: Why did I create him, especially if he threatens me so?

The answer is so complex that I don’t really know where to begin. Let’s start with the most fundamental reason, then:

I just felt like it.

So why did I feel like it?

I was miserably lonely and I blamed it on my foundationalist personality, so I wanted to become a socially loved pragmatist. But I also loved my foundationalist personality, so I drew a compromise of sorts, a temporary one, perhaps. Failing actually becoming the pragmatist, I created Konrad to help me do it in stages, perhaps.

But now that he’s here, for whatever reason, I find him useful enough to keep him around.

If I do eventually become the socially loved pragmatist, Konrad will help me negotiate the changes I’ll need to make.

I think he helps me negotiate my transition to pragmatism by making it easier to identify the link between my foundationalism and my pragmatist sympathies. Since he helps me keep them separate in my mind, I can more easily spot where they overlap – the link. It is likely through this link that I will cross over.

So I hope I’ve made it clear by this that Konrad is no sort of “straw pragmatist” for me to kill off for intellectual sport. He may be contrived by me (“straw”), but I don’t mean to tear him apart. In the end, I may find that I have become him.

But in the meantime, I do intend to quarrel with him – not to destroy him, as I’ve made clear, but to give both of us clearer definition in contrast with one another. The fight keeps us “pure”. As nations well know, nothing fosters internal coherence like external conflict. The fighting we do actually nurtures us toward our own purity.

Fine, so let’s get on with the quarreling.

Konrad has insinuated some fairly harsh things about me – all about my self-alienation, self-absorption, and my corresponding other-alienation, and my subsequent deep wish to manipulate others by casting some sort of “foundationalist spell” on them.

If you are not clear about the exact nature of his accusations, let me try and spell it out here:

Konrad thinks I’m dangerous, that I have the potential to hurt people.

In fact he thinks I have a subtle intention to hurt people.

In the kindest interpretation, my intention to hurt people is part of an emotional “sickness”, a sort of compensation for having been abused by some significant care-giver in my formative stages. I hurt others because someone programmed me to interpret all human interaction in only terms of this abuse.

This is a popular diagnosis for many people who have social problems. But there are some particulars about my version of it that are worth explaining.

According to Konrad, my particular “sickness” incorporates a sophisticated, philosophical rationalization to protect it. At the philosophical level, Konrad and his like call this rationalization foundationalism, or absolutism, or just realism.

In essence, foundationalism is my excuse to hurt people, and, to a large extent, the means by which I hurt people. Let me explain this.

One way to hurt people is to measure them against a standard, and find them lacking. Take the classic “one to ten” scale of beauty, where “10” means the most beautiful. It can be hurtful to find you have been measured on this scale and rated at only a “one” or a “two”, or worse yet, a “negative four”. After being measured this hurtful way, it can be a comfort to realize that the standard is relative, that other folks may have different beauty standards against which you may measure quite high. But it is the tendency of foundationalism to prevent the relativizing of standards. A foundationalist may come along and claim the beauty standard is an absolute, that only one beauty standard can be correct, and that the other standards are simply wrong – invalid. Hence this particular foundationalist tries to convince you to accept one standard for beauty, even if you don’t measure highly on it, even if it hurts you.

From this we may easily conclude that this particular foundationalist actually wants to hurt people, at least certain people. You can see why this sort of foundationalism can be seen as mean, cruel, and anti-social.

This is what Konrad thinks about me.

No, I am not a beauty-standard absolutist-foundationalist, though I once was. But that’s another story.

My particular brand of foundationalism applies to how well people grasp reality. That is, I believe in one, absolute standard for knowing the truth. Hence, I try to convince you that if you don't believe certain things, you are simply wrong. If your self-esteem happens to depend on these beliefs, then I threaten your self-esteem by trying to convince you these beliefs are wrong. If I shake your confidence, or worse yet, if I succeed in convincing you, I therefore hurt you. I make you feel diminished, inferior.

Again, we may conclude that I actually “want” to hurt you this way. Likewise, that I design the standard of truth deliberately to make you appear wrong just so I can hurt you.

Konrad thinks so.

He would probably add that making others feel diminished, attacking their self-esteem, is my preparation for manipulating them. Once a person is “broken”, I can tell them what to do, what to believe. I can enjoy a power trip over them.

This is the “foundationalist spell” Konrad warned you about. I break your self-esteem and manipulate you with the spell of foundationalism.

And if I get good at it, doing it to lots of people, I can become a dictator of sorts. This makes me dangerous, not benevolent at all, but malevolent. I just want the power trip.

And it is this abusive power trip I seek in all social relationships because, as has been hinted, I don’t know any better since that’s what I got in my formative years.

Ok, so that's Konrad’s accusation in review.

So how can I defend myself against this?

Let me begin by acknowledging how plausible it seems that foundationalism causes, or excuses malevolence. I myself suspect it explains a lot of people’s behavior. But...

...I for one think it’s premature to condemn foundationalism only to malevolence. There is more to the story.

Could not foundationalism alternatively support benevolence?

Let me build a plausible case for this. And remember, I’m not trying to prove foundationalism is true, just that it can be embraced from benevolence. I will try to make this case by telling the story of my own foundationalism.

I’ll start by establishing my benevolence, then linking it to my foundationalism.

I don’t like the way people suffer at the mercy of a harsh environment. Nor do I like the way people suffer and die at one another’s violence, erupting from conflicting passionate desires. I want people to live comfortably with the world and to deeply love one another. Hence my benevolent feelings.

As for my actions, I choose to seek the causes of these conflicts and sufferings, hoping thereby to discover ways to lessen them.

When I seek these causes, I hope to discover the true causes, the ones that actually apply. This is as opposed to the illusionary causes, the ones that seem like they apply from a specific, subjective point of view, but actually do not. So I don’t want to be wrong about the causes, for if I'm wrong, I won’t be able to help people – I may make things worse, in fact.

So you see that I want to be very careful to get the right causes, the ones that will at least do the job of helping people.

But here is a peculiarity in my brand of foundationalism: I know my estimations of causal relations are bound by contexts of subjective perspective that I can never escape. I can never be positive that I have the correct causal relations. I am riddled with skepticism here. My end result is that I do my level best and hope it’s enough – I hope it works. I can never know whether I have the true cause of human miseries and joys, but I can at least hope to discover causal estimations that are sufficient for easing misery and creating more joy.

So then, where is my foundationalism in this? This last paragraph made me look a lot like a pragmatist, where causality is concerned.

My foundationalism is in my certainty about the impossibility of causal certainty. The foundationalist principles I believe in logically imply that I cannot be certain about the causal interactions that I hope will help people. It is these foundationalist principles that informed me of the possibility of error, of error that could hurt people.

Were it not for my acceptance of these foundationalist principles, called axioms, and the general skepticism they imply for causal estimations, I might jump to very harmful conclusions about what causes what, with disastrous results for the people I care about.

You see, I rely on axiomatic certainty to help keep me in doubt about most other causal relations.

I don’t intend to explain why these foundationalist axioms lead to this kind of doubt. It would take too long and distract us from the point I want to make. My point here is not to prove this doubt comes from acceptance of these principles, but that I believe it is so. I’m here to defend my benevolence, not my grasp of the truth. I’ll defend my grasp of the truth elsewhere.

Ok, so back to my argument.

If I have established this sort of causal doubt for myself, then what I’m left with is a desire to try specific things out in a given context to see if they work, to see whether they help humanity. Hence my foundationalism leads to a sort of pseudo-pragmatism.

I say “pseudo-pragmatism” because real pragmatism involves the option to doubt the foundationalist axioms as well. Doubting the axioms is not an option for me, as Luke. But it is for Konrad. And this is largely what divides us.

Anyway, I hope you can see the plausible link between my foundationalism and my benevolence. The foundationalist axioms caution me against committing to estimations of causality as if these estimations were immutable absolutes, thus keeping me flexible enough to change my estimations when evidence comes in that they are wrong. And this makes me more likely to discover estimations of causes for human suffering and joy that may actually help.

And I wish Konrad and other pragmatists would give me credit for this plausible link between my foundationalism and my benevolence.

But they don’t. They just stick to their guns as if they were certain that no such link applies. They accuse me of rationalizing and assert that no such link applies.

If anything, they assert a link between foundationalism and malevolence, as I’ve outlined earlier, implying that my true motives are malevolent.

And this hurts me. This alienates me. This denies me visibility. That is, it denies me the harmony between what I know about myself from the inside and the way in which others treat me.

Let me stress this: I am in emotional pain because of this! I am lonely and feel “pent up” inside, emotionally cut off from everyone else. I swear, if someone were to come along and truly give my credit for my benevolence linked to my foundationalism, I’d weep in their arms like a lost child come home.

But nobody ever validates it. Instead, I get some pop-psychology explanation for my feelings, some link to childhood neglect or abuse. And, ironically, I receive such explanations from people who seem so damned certain of themselves.

Lest I be accused of hypocrisy here, I want to say that at least I won't offer my causal link between my benevolence and my foundationalism with that kind of certainty – not in my better moments at least.

I mean, I too have asserted many causal links as if I were certain. I too get carried away in the heat of my emotions. Consider when I just said “I swear, if someone were to come along and truly give my credit for my benevolence linked to my foundationalism, I’d weep in their arms like a lost child come home.” That was a statement of causality. It says that recognition would cause me to weep. And I seemed pretty sure of myself, didn’t I?

Ok, so now it’s time for one of my better moments.

I really don't know with certainty whether I would weep like that if I got validated, but it sure feels like that at times. I don’t really know about the causal link between my benevolence and my foundationalism, either.

But then, Konrad and his like do not really know this link is false, either, even while they seem so certain. And in their better moments, they too will confess this.

This being the case, I at least want my suggested causal link considered plausible. Yet they never seem to allow it.

And this brings me to another phase of my argument with Konrad.

If pragmatists hope to smear me as malevolent by claiming my foundationalist/absolutist standards of truth are elitist and oppressive, they cannot leverage this attack unless they themselves adopt an absolutist stance on truth. This is revealed in the certainty they adopt when they tell me my benevolence/foundationalism link is wrong. They are certain I am wrong. They think it’s absolutely true that I am wrong.

Hence, we can see that the pragmatist is a sort of absolutist in denial.

Yes, I am turning the tables of accusation against Konrad here. Remember how he called me a pragmatist in denial? Well now I’m calling him a foundationalist in denial.

And he can’t defend himself from this accusation in the least. No matter what he claims about my character, benevolent or malevolent, this claim commits him to an absolutist notion of truth.

His only alternative is to withdraw his accusation that I’m malevolent. There simply is no way to meaningfully call me malevolent without also claiming that what he claims is true, absolutely true, foundationalistically true.

Let me make this clear. The foundationalistic notion of truth is a philosophical axiom, which means it is inescapably true and self-evident, and it also means that one cannot possibly deny it without implicitly affirming it. Try, for example, this statement: “There is no absolute truth.” If this statement (which is about truth) is true, then this statement is itself one of those non-absolute truths, which means this statement allows exceptions to itself. So here is a statement that is an allowable exception to it: “There is some absolute truth.”

Consider the absurdity of the alternative. Is it absolutely, foundationalistically true that I’m malevolent? If he says “no”, that I'm truly only “pragmatically” malevolent, then what does that mean? It must mean that I’m malevolent so far as it serves him to think so, or that he is caused to think so. If this is so, then what about what I myself think of my character? This too, according to him, must be what serves me, or what I'm caused to think of myself. And the disagreement between us is not resolvable by any standard of the way things really are. Then how is it resolvable?

This is how: Think and do and try whatever works. And if nothing seems to work, let it fester, or let it be a contest of physical force, or both, or, again, whatever works.

I insist, this is all we’ve got without an absolutist notion of truth by which to inform us whether I’m really benevolent or malevolent.

Surely, the only thing he can do is run. And that is precisely what he does.

Well, this counter-accusation is a neat trick on my part, but it’s not my whole point. There’s more complexity to deal with here. Konrad’s pragmatism has more tricks up its sleeves.

There remains the ultimate pragmatist weapon to confront: The Dance of Non-Commitment.

Konrad may alternate between certainty or doubt as it serves him, about anything he wants to be certain or doubtful about, contradiction regardless.

He is able to be an absolutist when it serves him, and to be complete relativist when that serves him.

Well, I want to clarify that. I’d say he may alternate between incompatible candidates for truth, embracing each of them in turn as absolute, and thus refuting the abandoned one by embracing the next.

Hence, he may attack me with certainty, and then later embrace, with certainty, the notion that such attacks can never be certain. Contradictions of this sort do not bother him. Hell, he enjoys them.

So it does no good to argue with Konrad by way of showing him his inconsistency. That’s a losing battle from the start. Try to pin him down, try to make him commit to one belief and all that it logically implies, and he just “dances” over to some other belief. And he dances faster than you can form your logical argument against his current position.

With the help of some more metaphors that I’ll mix together into an amusing hybrid creature, I hope to explain how this Dance of Non-Commitment works.

See, arguing with a pragmatist like Konrad is like punching a tar baby. There’s no satisfying logical resistance, no satisfying triumph of persuasion. The pragmatist simply absorbs your argument into its body of theories that conflict with the others.

Hence the most sophisticated pragmatists may even absorb the argument that pragmatism is false (foundationalism) without harm to their adherence to pragmatism. To the sophisticated pragmatist, foundationalism is merely one of the many instances of pragmatic belief to embrace or reject as it serves us. And it does no good to point out to the pragmatist that believing this about foundationalism is itself an instance of a belief held with foundationalistic certainty. The tar baby pragmatist merely repeats the absorption as many times as you point this out. And it can go on infinitely. [I cover the infinite regress aspect of this again in the writing called “The Strongest Support for Anti-Realism is ‘Rhf-Gumnlad Hoopiewid’”.]

Loosely, I like to call this “tar baby epistemology”. Tar baby epistemology is any epistemological behavior capable of absorbing any logically conflicting theory as an instance of itself.

I stress the word “behavior” because such an “epistemology” could not properly be called a theory. As a whole, it can say nothing about the way things are, about reality – in essence it can literally say nothing. Brute truth is, it is not any sort of epistemology at all, but rather a behavior.

It is the behavior of believing alternate theories which may or may not cohere with one another, or with reality. Metaphorically, this believing behavior is a dog that, as an integrated whole, cannot bark, but whose parts do bark in turn as they are caused to, sometimes hearing one another, sometimes not, sometimes believing they are the whole dog, sometimes not, sometimes believing they are barking, sometimes not, sometimes believing they are foundationalist, sometimes not, sometimes believing they are theorizing about the way things really are, sometimes not. Fundamentally, it is a behavior about belief, and therefore cannot be a belief, not the whole dog anyway.

And wherever this dog wanders, it necessarily disqualifies itself as a theorist – even in epistemological matters. Insofar as it believes anything about its own belief behavior, that belief is a slave to that behavior, and subject to negation by that behavior. It is too busy dancing from one barking dog part to the next barking dog part to commit to anything it may have barked.

This being the case, the tar baby epistemologist does not deliver much of a punch by way of logical argument. It really isn’t saying anything, but is only practicing its “belief behavior”. As a social being, the tar baby seeks to persuade and be persuaded by means of verbal behavior as a whole, not just logic or reason. In its arsenal of verbal behavior are not only logic, but illogic, emotional expression, threats, rewards, whatever works.

But, this sort of “holistic persuasion” is a formidable punch indeed. There’s plenty of evidence indicating that it works better than just plain logic, overwhelmingly better.

But now here’s the question that I’m aiming at here: Is this pragmatism benevolent? Can this tar baby, this parts-of-dog barking, care for the well-being of humanity?

Well, before I try to answer this question, I would like to point out who is qualified to answer this question.

I insist that the pragmatist cannot be taken seriously when answering this question. Since whatever a pragmatist believes about its own benevolence is not so much a theory, but a bunch of verbiage subject to the practice of whim-based belief adoption, whatever the pragmatist says isn’t expected to be correlation to reality, and therefore isn't saying anything – just more verbal behavior. Konrad’s verbal behavior toward denouncing my benevolence, for example, cannot be expected to correspond to the way things really are, except perhaps by accident, persuasive though it may be.

Therefore, I claim that only a foundationalist, like myself, can really answer the question in any meaningful way. This does not mean I’m likely to answer it correctly, but only that I’ll try to make my answer conform to the way things really are.

Well then, how do I answer the question? Can pragmatism be benevolent?

I think I must answer the question with another question: Benevolent to whom?

[I did not finish this writing. But here’s a quote I collected to help support the answer I might have given:]

...

I think Ayn Rand expressed this fear [of the pragmatist] with dramatic eloquence in her novel, The Fountainhead, in Mallory’s speech to Roark (Page 332):

Listen, what’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me – it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out. [i.e. a pragmatist “beast”] You’d have nothing then but your voice – your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. I don’t think I’m a coward, but I’m afraid of it. And that’s all I know – only that it exists. I don’t know its purpose, I don’t know its nature.

[Drop the mic. Cue: NoMeansNo - Cats, Sex and Nazis]

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