Thoughts on Politics

 

My political position is complicated. In general, I consider myself a political realist, a political rationalist of sorts. I think a primary function of government or any governmental type body is the education of the sovereign, the citizens or members of a community, as to the requirements of reality. Of course, what one takes these requirements to be is often more like interpreting a text than a detective determining a set of facts pointing to a definitive solution. I also find it analogous to parenting: you have to make decisions (policy) based on an imperfect grasp of reality about a future one can never predict. I was confident that the Christian Gymnasium was the right choice for my daughter. I had what I took to be good reasons. It was a disastrous choice. Same with my decision to stay with her in Germany. Was a great choice for a while, until it wasn’t. Germany’s decision to rely on booming Chinese markets and cheap Russian energy for their economy, and America for its defense, seemed perfectly logical at the time. Events have refuted it most terribly, but at the time it seemed rational. Political-decision-making is like that.

     My tastes are democratic, but I don’t think democracy really makes sense except at the local level (agreeing with none other than Aristotle). The departmental meetings at the university I work for would be an approximation. I could imagine a democratic form of politics among the villages I knew in Thuringia, had they had any powers of government. For democracy to work, you need a degree of economic equality; you need trust and thus familiarity among the people – actually a sense of community among the people; you need a minimum level of competence among the members of the community. Communication should be face-to-face to a significant degree. You need a public space in which community members can speak and act freely. None of this is given in a large nation state. My ideal form of political society would have the main focus of government at the community level (which assumes, of course, there are communities, which is hardly the case anymore). This of course assumes a lot of economic autonomy at the local level, which is also not the case. Thus, given the economic and social realities of my time (global capitalism), genuine democracy, my preferred form of government, can’t exist. For evidence that it used to exist in parts of America, see Tocqueville.

     It is said that we live in a democracy. Well, I guess it depends on how you define democracy. Given the social and economic realities of my time, I end up defending this “democracy” because it allows more freedom and dignity than other options, though not as much as genuine democracy. Call it liberalism (classical liberalism – in that sense Reagan was a liberal, Lockean liberalism). I think of liberalism partly as a political ideology to protect the upper class from the dangers of tyranny ("kings") and the lower classes ("the people"). To prevent tyranny, it is necessary to be able to vote a government out of office, even if the electorate cannot be considered fully competent and the political communication is skewered by the vast inequality in money and power. Elections are like voting for the CEO of a corporation; he might manage the corporation differently from his predecessor, but he takes over a going concern that he cannot fundamentally change. A country with its corporate economy is like that. Elections can't change much, all things being equal (not equal anymore with pop-fascism competing against liberalism for power); but they can prevent tyrants. The protection of rights, the freedom of inquiry, and the principle of equality under the law are important aspects of liberalism I embrace and don't want to lose. Again, the playing field is far from level in reality, and this distorts everything. In Germany, there is a public media – it could be better but it ensures a modicum of fact-based, neutral (within the limits of the mainstream parties) reporting (so much superior to the corporate media in America). The first principle of the German Grundgesetz is the protection of the inviolability of human dignity – that is right on, although what capitalism understands by human dignity is not pure by any means. In Germany the social market economy is prescribed by law: basically, the state has the duty to correct the worst injustices of capitalism, which is embraced for its productivity and contribution to a better standard of living for all. This was not an idle claim for several decades but other realities are making that argument more problematic than before. Liberalism is in desperate need of reform. How to free up the state and civil society from the corporate economy to allow some consideration of the common good?

      What are the alternatives at the level of the nation state? I suppose a Hungarian-type “democracy,” or “illiberal democracy,” which is even less a democracy than liberalism. A ruling party takes over the media, the courts, the economy at the highest level – and then holds elections that are more of less hopeless for the opposition. While the media controlled by those in power practices making the population stupider, those in power enrich themselves and monopolize all positions of political and economic power. Putin would the ultimate goal of such a regime, a kind of modern version of Mussolini’s fascism. Everything that makes it possible for me to live in liberalism is stripped away.

     Soviet style socialism is also not an option for me. If I have to live in a nation state – and I have to – I think a degree of “socialism” highly desirable, although what form this would take could vary. The relative equality of the socialist countries, even at a low economic level, is not something I would criticize, though with a bit more rationality and a bit less central control a higher standard of living could have been achieved. What makes Soviet style socialism impossible for me is one-party-rule based on a philosophy that is considered absolutely true, like a secular theocracy. With the secret police, monopoly over the media, and the monopoly over the economy used to prop up the power-holders. I system in which just thinking certain thoughts or writing certain things could land you in jail. But I don't think one-party rule or even one-man rule as under Stalin is a necessary feature of socialism as such. 

      So I end up defending liberalism, even though I think capitalism is just a totalitarian in many ways as Stalinism, if not as violent, and think capitalism is starting to correspond less to liberalism and more to the pop-fascist version. Well, is it not as violent? A global economy requires certain conditions in the Middle East or West Asia that has led to horrible oil wars. The normal functioning of the global economy is predicated on the ability to make war to secure its preconditions. And the violence behind the factory systems in countries that do no allow unions, etc, etc. etc. The violence is just outsourced. 

     The pop-fascists are like a Satanic parody of a political movement I always wanted: one that would transform from global capitalism to a more local economy based on some rational definition of real needs, economic security, and dignified work. (I wrote something about my views on capitalism in an earlier entry.) People need home, roots, community, tradition – not only, they also need freedom, etc. Simone Weil gets it right in her book, The Need for Roots. But if for no other reason than self-defense, countries will – tragically! – also need a state. How to balance the requirements of justice and humanity, which I think requires strong local economies and communities with human scale technologies, with survival in a world of potential and actual bully states (of which my country is sadly one) is a problem I have never been able to solve.

Knowledge, Understanding, Interpretation, Conceiving, Translating, and Metaphysics

 

      I don't feel I have worked out the borders between 'knowing,' 'understanding,' and 'interpreting.' There probably are no clear borders, but 'knowing' in general seems less related to the hermeneutic circle. I know that x is the case. States of affairs. Or logical implication and analytical truths. The things positivists like. The second act of the mind, more generally speaking. The first act of the mind, conceiving what some x is, clearly does involve the hermeneutic circle. Since so much of it happens pre-reflectively, just living in the world (hinge beliefs), I think Gadamer's Vor-urteile, or pre-understandings fits. But when trying to deepen these concepts, I often use 'understanding' and 'interpretation' interchangeably. And what to distinguish both from 'knowing.' I want to try to sort that out.

 

Thesis 1

   Knowing, understanding, and interpreting are not three separate activities but three aspects of one and the same movement of the mind. We can distinguish them, but in lived experience they constantly overlap and depend on one another.

 

Thesis 2

   Knowing is the act by which we say that something is the case. It has the form of a judgment: “this is so.” It aims at truth and tries to settle a question, at least for the moment.

 

Thesis 3

   Understanding is the act by which we grasp what something is. It is not primarily about truth or falsity, but about meaning, structure, and relation. It deepens rather than settles.

 

Thesis 4

     Interpretation is understanding made explicit. It occurs when we try to say what something means, especially when meaning is not obvious or when more than one reading/understanding is possible.

 

Thesis 5

  Sometimes I use ‘understanding’ and ‘interpretation’ interchangeably because interpretation is understanding that has become conscious and expressed in language. Not something essentially different.

 

 

Thesis 6

   Understanding often happens before reflection. We already live in a world we understand in a basic way. This pre-understanding shapes everything we later think or say.

 

Thesis 7

   What Wittgenstein understood as “hinge beliefs” belong to this level of pre-understanding. They are not usually stated or proved, but they make all knowing possible.

  

Thesis 8

    Knowing depends on understanding. We cannot judge that something is true unless we already have some grasp of what it is we are judging. Factual statements presuppose agreement in concepts.

 

Thesis 9

   The boundaries between knowing, understanding, and interpreting are therefore not sharp. Each leads into the others, and none can stand alone.

 

Thesis 10

   There is a tension between the desire for stable knowledge and the fact that all understanding is shaped by our situation and history. Any adequate account must hold both together without reducing one to the other.

 

Thesis 11

    Knowing, understanding, and interpreting can be related to conceiving, the first act of the mind. Conceiving is the mind’s grasp of “what something is” without yet affirming or denying anything about it. In this sense, conceiving corresponds most closely to understanding. When we understand something, we have already conceived it in some way: we see it as something. We do not yet say that it is true or false, but we have formed a meaningful grasp of it. Knowing, by contrast, goes beyond conceiving. It takes what has been conceived and affirms or denies something about it. When I say “this is a tree” or “this action is unjust,” I am no longer merely conceiving but judging. Thus, knowing depends on conceiving but is not identical with it. Without some prior conception of “tree” or “justice,” no act of knowing would be possible.

 

Thesis 12

    Interpretation, in this light, can be seen as the refinement and expansion of conceiving under conditions where the initial conception is unclear, partial, or contested. When we interpret, we are not starting from nothing; we are working with an already given conception and trying to deepen or correct it. Interpretation therefore belongs to the ongoing development of the first act of the mind, especially in complex or ambiguous cases.

 

Thesis 13

    Conceiving is never a simple or purely immediate act. Even our first grasp of something is shaped by prior experience, language, and expectations. What we conceive is already influenced by how we have learned to see the world. In this sense, conceiving itself is not free from the dynamics we have associated with understanding and interpretation.

 

Thesis 14 / Conclusion

  All of this can be related to the hermeneutic circle as described by Gadamer. The hermeneutic circle is the idea that understanding always moves between parts and whole. We understand a part only in light of the whole, but we understand the whole only through its parts. This is not a problem to be eliminated but the very structure of understanding itself. In more concrete terms, when we encounter something, whether a text, a person, an event, we do not approach it without assumptions. We already have a preliminary sense of what it is. This initial understanding guides how we interpret particular details. As we attend to those details, our sense of the whole may change. This revised whole then reshapes how we see the parts. The movement continues in a circular, but not vicious, way.

    Understanding is constituted by this circular movement. It is never a simple, one-step grasp, but a process in which meaning emerges through the interplay of part and whole. Interpretation is the conscious working out of this process. When we interpret, we are actively moving within the circle, testing our assumptions, revising them, and trying to arrive at a more adequate understanding.

    Knowing, within this framework, appears as a moment where the movement of the circle is provisionally stabilized. We arrive at a judgment and say: “this is what it means” or “this is the case.” But this stability is never final. Further engagement with the parts or a broader sense of the whole may lead us to revise what we thought we knew.

     A simple illustration can make this clearer. When reading a poem, we may begin with a vague sense of its mood. This is our initial grasp of the whole. As we attend to individual lines and images, we interpret them in light of that sense. But certain details may not fit, and we adjust our sense of the whole. That new whole then changes how we read the lines. In the end, we may arrive at a coherent interpretation and state what the poem is about. Yet this “knowledge” remains open to revision as new aspects come into view.

     Or a person. We understand someone through lived experience, interpret their actions in light of that experience, and know certain facts about them. Yet the full reality of the person always exceeds our grasp. Deeper understanding could, in principle, transform what we think we know, but such complete understanding is never available to us.

     In Gadamer’s terms, this process is guided by our pre-understandings or Vor-urteile. These are not necessarily distortions but the starting points of all understanding. They make interpretation possible, even as they must themselves be tested and, at times, transformed. The hermeneutic circle is therefore not a limitation to be overcome, but the condition under which understanding, interpretation, and knowing can occur at all. (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode)

 

Aquinas and the Acts of the Intellect

    Aquinas distinguishes three acts of the intellect: simple apprehension (conceiving, understanding), judgment, and reasoning (logic). Understanding corresponds most closely to simple apprehension, but in a deeper sense that includes lived and historically shaped meaning. Knowing corresponds to judgment, where the mind affirms or denies something as true. Interpretation lies between these two: it develops what has been apprehended and prepares or revises what can be judged. It is not a separate act in Aquinas, but can be understood as the unfolding of apprehension under conditions of finitude. Reasoning then becomes the disciplined movement from interpreted understanding toward stable knowledge.

 

Finite and Absolute Knowledge

   Absolute knowledge would involve complete understanding, perfectly adequate concepts, and judgments that fully match reality. Human knowing is of course finite. Our understanding is always partial, our interpretations are revisable, and our knowledge depends on a limited horizon. Understanding therefore remains open-ended, interpretation provisional, and knowing dependent on what has been grasped so far. The gap between appearance and reality cannot be fully closed for us, not because reality is inaccessible, but because our grasp of it is never complete. We truly know reality, but never exhaustively.

 

Metaphysics

  Metaphysics, understood as the translation of reality into thought and language, unfolds through the same three moments: understanding, interpretation, and knowing. First, reality must already be understood in some basic way before any translation can begin. We live in a world that already appears to us as meaningful: things show up as trees, persons, causes, purposes, goods. This pre-reflective understanding is not something we construct from scratch. It is the condition under which anything can be thought or said at all. In this sense, metaphysics does not begin with abstract theory, but with a lived familiarity with reality.

    Second, interpretation enters when we try to make this implicit understanding explicit. We begin to ask what these things really are. What is a person? What is causality? What is being? At this point, different interpretations become possible. We articulate, compare, refine, and sometimes revise our initial grasp. Metaphysics, at this level, is not yet a system of final truths, but an ongoing effort to say what is already, in some sense, given in experience.

     Third, knowing appears when we formulate judgments about reality. We say: this is a substance, this is a cause, this is good, this is true. These are attempts to fix meaning in propositions. Metaphysical knowledge, in this sense, is the effort to state what is the case at the most fundamental level. But this translation is never complete. Our understanding of reality is always partial, our interpretations always shaped by our situation, and our knowledge always dependent on what we have so far been able to grasp. Reality always exceeds the concepts and propositions we use to describe it. This means that metaphysics is not a finished system that perfectly mirrors reality. It is a continuous movement in which reality is gradually rendered into thought and language, without ever being fully captured by them. But this does not entail that metaphysics is arbitrary or merely subjective. The process is constrained by reality itself. Some interpretations are better than others because they do greater justice to what is given. Some judgments are true and others false. Translation here is not free invention, but a disciplined responsiveness to what is.

     Metaphysical thinking is no different in principle than interpreting how a Bach fugue or a Beethoven piano sonata should be played (interpreted, translated into sound). I would boldly assert that a great organist and Bach. Glen Gould, it is said, Gould approaches Bach as if the music were a structure to be made intelligible. If Gould emphasizes structure, András Schiff emphasizes musical meaning as experienced, more speech-like, humane. Now I can hear the difference between Gould and Schiff but only someone very-well versed in music can make such judgments. Metaphysics is analogous. Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Heidegger – these are interpreters and translators of Being into thought and word. I believe, after spending much of my adult life with these thinkers, I can make analogous judgments about them, though I would perhaps defer to certain others even more qualified, i.e. wiser. There is nothing democratic about interpretation / translation / understanding.

  I conceive metaphysics is like translating a rich and inexhaustible text. The text is reality itself. Our understanding is our initial familiarity with its language. Interpretation is our attempt to grasp its meaning more precisely. Knowing is our effort to state that meaning in clear propositions. But no translation ever exhausts the original. Which brings me back to the problem of finitude and knowledge. Because we are finite, we never stand outside reality to compare our translation with the original in a complete way. We are always already within the text we are trying to translate. This is why the distinction between appearance and reality cannot be fully secured from an external standpoint. And yet, it does not collapse, because our translations can still be more or less faithful to what is. Thus metaphysics becomes neither a closed system of absolute knowledge nor a free play of interpretations, but a serious and ongoing attempt to let reality speak within the limits of human understanding.

Wittgenstein and Aquinas

Wittgenstein explores the thought that doubt presupposes certainty in the writings collected in On Certainty. Radical doubt, such as Descartes’ skepticism, assumes that every belief must be justified by evidence. But how could justification even begin if everything required justification? At some point, our practices of knowing must rest on things that are not themselves justified by proof. Thus he writes: “The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt.”

Later commentators call the propositions hinge propositions, after a passage in On Certainty. The world exists. Other people have minds. The past existed. Objects persist when we stop looking. These are examples of hinge propositions. We do not infer them from evidence; they are the background within which evidence and knowledge become possible.

      Knowledge does not begin from absolute uncertainty. We already stand inside a framework of trust in reality.We learn language, reasoning, and inquiry within a form of life where certain things are simply taken as given. Hinge certainties give rise to ordinary beliefs, which in turn are the ground of inquiry and knowledge. Our knowledge is finite and fallible, but it rests on non-propositional trust in the world.

     In my previous entry, I discussed this problem: if my knowledge is finite and partial, how can I really say that I know what x is? Wittgenstein’s answer would be that because knowing takes place within a shared framework where reality is already trusted. You do not first prove that triangles exist or that language refers to real things. Such things are part of the background certainty of our intellectual life. So when you say “I know what a triangle is,” you are not claiming absolute metaphysical comprehension but something more modest but still real: namely, that within our shared practices of reasoning and geometry, the concept triangle discloses aspects of something real. For Wittgenstein, therefore, finite knowledge is not a problem to be solved. It is simply the human condition of knowing. We know things within language, practices – within a shared world. Our knowledge is fallible, thus revisable; it can be deepened over time.

 

 

      Though they come from very different traditions, Aquinas and Wittgenstein converge more than one might expect. For Aquinas, the human intellect participates in the divine light but according to a finite mode; for Wittgenstein, human knowledge operates within forms of life that already trust reality. Both reject the idea that knowledge must begin with absolute certainty. Both reject radical skepticism. Both assume that our intellect is somehow already oriented toward reality. Wittgenstein does emphasize something Aquinas says less about: namely, the role of practice and community. Our certainty about the world arises from how we live and act. We do not prove the existence of the external world; we live in it. As a child we learn to point, to name things, to measure things, count things, etc. Through these practices, the world becomes intelligible. Thus certainty is embedded in life rather than deduced philosophically.

      I get closest to this when I reflect on the role core experiences play in my life. I love my children. I cannot doubt that, cannot assume that it is an illusion masking some biological imperative, for example. That certainty comes ready-made with built in assumptions (hinges) about how the world must be for my love to be real. That hinge gives rise ultimately to other moral hinges like cruelty is wrong. Such beliefs, again, are not derived from scientific evidence. They are part of the moral foundation of our world. So what I was trying to say in the previous entry – that knowledge is not so much a function of correct essential-theoretical definitions but actively participating in a shared disclosure of reality grounded in hinge certainties about the world – I think I learned from both Aquinas and Wittgenstein, different as they are.

      Another philosopher I greatly admire, Raimond Gaita, puts this idea into the forefront of ethics. He suggests that our certainty about the dignity of persons is hinge-like. When we truly see another person, their humanity becomes indubitable in a way that is not the result of argument. This leads to the importance love as a mode of understanding. 

The Problem of Finite Knowledge

 Back to my current interests and problems. 

I continue to be perplexed by the problem of finite knowledge. That seems on the surface to be a contradiction. Either I know something or I don't. Applied to Thomas Aquinas, either I grasp the universal and know what some x is – a triangle, water, an atom, justice, man – or I don't. Yet bring mortal and embodied, I only know x finitely, not as God knows it (or in an absolute sense), and therefore not as it really is in its full being. I seem back to Kant: I can’t justify my saying that I know the thing-itself. To say my glimpse of the truth is a participation in the mind of God from a finite point of view (Aquinas) somehow doesn't fully resolve the tension, the gap between knowledge as finite and infinite. More precise would be to say: I have every reason to believe I know some aspect of x, but can't go beyond that.  – I want to try to think through this, again.

 

 

I. The Problem

  At first glance, knowledge seems binary: either I know what x is, or I do not. If I know what a triangle is, then I grasp its essence: a three-sided plane figure. That is, I not only know this or that particular triangle but all triangles whatsoever. I recognize them as triangles because I know what makes them triangles. (This is the faculty that elevates us above other animals, gives meaning to the expression “made in God’s image,” and grounds the Thomist argument for the immortality of the soul.) If I know what justice is, then I grasp its essence: giving each his due, etc. So the puzzle arises: if I grasp the essence (the universal), then I know the thing. But if I only grasp it partially, then do I really know it at all? This creates an apparent contradiction. Knowledge seems to require completeness, yet human knowledge is finite.

 

II. Some examples to deepen the problem

 1. Take something simple: water. Ancient people knew water. They were not merely experiencing appearances. They knew that it quenches thirst, flows, freezes, evaporates, etc. They had genuine knowledge of the real thing. Later science discovered that water = H₂O, i.e., molecular bonding, etc. This deepens understanding but does not reveal that earlier people only knew an appearance. They knew the same reality under a more superficial aspect.

 

2.  As a child living far away from a city, I recall looking at the night sky. I know at first something simple: “Those are stars.” I had grasped an aspect of reality: luminous points in the night sky. But then deeper knowledge unfolded. With my telescope I saw that stars are not points; they are distant suns. I learned from reading that some are vastly larger than our sun, some are clusters or galaxies. The essence of what a star is seems to change radically. My  earlier concept was true but extremely shallow. Had I gone on to study astrophysics (my childhood dream), I would have learned that stars are nuclear furnaces, that hydrogen fuses into helium, that their life cycles involve gravitational collapse and supernovae, that heavier elements originate in stellar death, etc. etc. Again the understanding deepens dramatically. What looked like a dot in the sky becomes a dynamic thermonuclear process in spacetime.

    Even the astrophysicist’s understanding remains partial. They still cannot know the full interior dynamics of every star, every causal interaction in stellar evolution, the ultimate structure of the cosmos, etc. So knowledge deepens but never exhausts the reality. This illustrates part of Aquinas’s idea that the intellect grasps the essence truly but not exhaustively.

 

3. Now consider the inner life of another person, like my son. I genuinely know a lot about his character, his temperament, what kind of person he is becoming. I can truthfully say many things about him: “He is generous,” “He is thoughtful,” “He is somewhat insecure,”etc.  This is real knowledge of who he is. Over the years you discover things that transform my understanding: hidden struggles, deeper motivations, fears you never suspected, strengths that only appear under pressure. Etc. My earlier understanding was real but surface-level. My knowledge of his “essence” as a person deepens. But even if we lived together for a hundred years, there would still be depths of his interior life I could never know simply because I cannot inhabit his consciousness, experience his memories as he does, feel the precise texture of his inner life, etc. No telescope or microscope can reveal this. It is not a technological  or scientific limitation, but one in principle, bound to my being as a finite, mortal, fallible person of flesh and blood. Only a being that knows the interior act of existence of every mind (i.e., God) could know that fully.

     This example shows three layers of truth. I truly know my son; deeper understanding can radically transform earlier understanding, i.e., my conception of him deepens over time; yet complete comprehension is impossible. The interior life of another person can never be totally transparent to any of us. A human person contains more intelligible depth than another finite intellect can fully apprehend. This expresses the Thomistic idea that being always exceeds the concept. So the paradox becomes clearer: You really know something. But what you know always contains more intelligibility than your concept captures. Reality is richer than any finite act of understanding – as far as we know.

      The other power that raises man above animals and make us more truly a finite image of God is the capacity to love, which in this case does essential cognitive work. Many thinkers (Murdoch, Weil, Gaita) say that love deepens knowledge. It doesn’t omniscient, of course, but it does (to the extent it is pure) allow us to understand more truly. The beloved becomes less reducible to our concepts. We see more, yet also recognize that there is always more to see.

     Finite knowledge does not grasp the whole intelligibility of a thing; it grasps the thing itself under a limited aspect, while the depth of its being always exceeds the grasp.

 

4.  But how about an example where deeper understanding, if we had it, which ex hypothesi we don't, would radically overturn what we think we know? A case where we believe we know the essence of x but a deeper understanding – if it were available – would radically overturn that understanding. But such deeper knowledge is in principle unavailable to finite human knowers.

    Take the phenomenon of conscious experience. At the surface level we believe we know what it is. It involves thoughts, sensations, emotions. In fact, many philosophers would say this is the most certain thing we know. Yet suppose (purely hypothetically) that reality at its deepest level contains forms of awareness radically different from ours like forms of consciousness not bound to brains (angels and demons), forms of awareness operating in dimensions of reality we cannot perceive, or levels of mental activity incomprehensible to human cognitive structures. In that case, our present concept of “consciousness” might be as primitive as a child’s idea of a star. We just couldn’t know it. What we think we understand as the essence of consciousness might actually be only a tiny corner of a vastly richer phenomenon. We would be like dogs watching TV or trying to understand calculus or poetry. Human beings might simply lack the conceptual capacities required to grasp certain structures of reality.

 

 5. Another example of this type: time. We believe we know what time is: moments pass, the present moves into the future, causes precede effects, etc. But physics already destabilizes this picture. Relativity understands time as intertwined with space; simultaneity is relative; the universe may exist as a four-dimensional block. This is like the examples of water and stars perhaps.

   Now imagine a deeper level of reality in which time itself is not fundamental. Perhaps the universe is built from structures where temporal sequence is only an appearance. If that were true, then our ordinary understanding of time might be radically misleading. Yet our minds may be incapable of conceiving reality without temporal ordering, because our thinking itself unfolds in time. Thus we might never fully grasp what time truly is.

 

6. Or take Being itself. We think we know what it means for something to exist. But Aquinas holds that only God knows being fully, because God is subsistent being itself. Finite minds know beings through their forms, but the act of existence itself remains partially hidden. If we could grasp existence as God does, the entire structure of reality might appear utterly different from how it appears to us. Our current metaphysical categories might prove radically inadequate. Yet such knowledge would require infinite intellect, which finite creatures cannot possess.

    

      The last three examples are different from the first three. We may truly grasp an aspect of x, yet the deeper nature of x might transform our understanding so radically that our present concept would look naive. So knowledge is not simply true vs false. Rather it can be perhaps true but shallow, true but distorted by cognitive limits, true within a restricted horizon. Appearance need not be an illusion but can’t be equated with full reality.

   For all we know, we could be like creatures living on a two-dimensional surface. Such creatures understand shapes perfectly in two dimensions. Then a sphere passes through their plane. To them it appears as a circle that grows and shrinks. They may develop a correct geometry of circles. But the true explanation, i.e., the sphere, belongs to a dimension they cannot perceive. Their knowledge is not false, but fundamentally incomplete in a way they cannot remedy.

 

III.

  I said that we have every reason to believe we know some aspect of x, but cannot go beyond that. The point is that finite intellects always operate within a horizon. Reality may (or may) extend beyond that horizon in ways we cannot even fully imagine. But within the horizon we still have genuine knowledge. This is how I understand Aquinas. When the intellect knows something truly, it is really in contact with the thing itself. The limitation lies not in falsity  or illusion but in the mode of knowing. Human intellect grasps reality under finite conditions of intelligibility. God grasps reality as the total intelligible order of being. In other words, finite knowledge can genuinely grasp reality while remaining vulnerable to conceptual revolutions that reveal how limited that grasp was.

     For Aquinas we can know something truly without knowing it completely.

We know what a triangle is but we do not know every theorem derivable from triangles, every property triangles could have in every geometry, every application of triangular relations in physics, etc. But our knowledge of “triangle” is still genuine knowledge. Why? Because we grasp the form (idea,essence) truly, though not its total intelligible depth. Aquinas writes: the intellect apprehends the essence according to its own mode. Human intellect grasps reality under a limited intellectual light.

    Thomas uses the image of light. Imagine a vast landscape illuminated by the sun. A person standing with a lantern sees part of the landscape. Two things are true simultaneously: What he sees is real. He does not see the whole. His knowledge is true but partial. God's knowledge is like the sun illuminating the entire landscape simultaneously. Human knowledge is like a lantern revealing real features but only within a radius. So the finitude lies in scope.

IV. 

   But I think the problem goes deeper than this standard Thomistic answer. If I only know some aspect of x, how do I know that my grasp really corresponds to what x truly is? In other words: How do I avoid merely grasping an aspect available to or perhaps even “constructed” by my intellect (or culture) rather than the thing itself? The modern anxiety is of course that perhaps we never know the thing itself, only our conceptual framing of it. My worry is how we can say we know anything genuinely if what we know can in principle be overturned by full understanding, which we do not in principle have.

    So my suggested this reformulation – “I have every reason to believe I know some aspect of x” – is actually very close to what many contemporary Thomists say, especially thinkers influenced by phenomenology. My point, perhaps learned from Hans-Georg Gadamer as well as Thomists like Josef Pieper and W. Norris Clarke, is that knowledge is real but always revisable (within limits), always open to deeper disclosure. Being always exceeds conceptual capture (as far as we can know). Our concepts grasp real being, but being always overflows the concept (Clarke). We know the thing under an aspect. I know my son but I do not know every aspect of his soul. He continues revealing himself and my understanding deepens over time. It is possible, but not certain, that if I could see him through God’s eyes that I wouldn’t recognize him at all. But perhaps much that I thought I knew would make perfect sense. In any case, it would be absurd just to assert that I did not, cannot know him.

     The danger of classical metaphysics is that it can sound too confident: “We grasp the essence.” But what we encounter is more like glimpses, partial articulations, ongoing clarification. Human knowledge is genuine contact with reality, but always under finite intellectual conditions and therefore always open to further disclosure.

     The deepest way of knowing a person (or even reality) is not conceptual mastery but attentive love (love nearly untainted by the fat, relentless ego). It doesn’t make us infinite but it does open us more fully to the real. I love what Iris Murdoch wrote: “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

Shane and the Question of Technology

Anyone who reflects on modern culture will understand that technological civilization reshapes the very conditions under which we experience the world and understand ourselves. Many people are inclined to think of technology as neutral: a device, a platform, an instrument placed at the disposal of human purposes. The moral question then appears to concern only how we use these tools.

      I remember well a line from the movie I saw as a boy, Shane, with Alan Ladd as a gunfighter who tries to give up that life and help a yeoman farmer and his family build a farm and a community against the violent opposition of the ranchers.  There is a short exchange between Shane and Marian Starrett, the wife of Joe Starrett, the yeoman farmer (homesteader), about guns and Joey learning to shoot. In the scene Marian objects to Joey being fascinated with guns and says she wishes there were no guns left in the valley. Shane replies with the “tool” argument, the classic formulation of what we might call the neutral technology thesis: “A gun is a tool, Marian; no better or no worse than any other tool: an axe, a shovel, or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it.” That was said with conviction. (It is still said by the gun lobby and gun lovers today.)

    Interestingly, the film itself does not endorse Shane’s claim. The whole drama quietly undermines it. By the end Shane himself admits that the gun has shaped his life in a way he cannot escape. He feels he must leave the valley:

 

Joey: “Shane! Come back!”

Shane: “Joey, there’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from it.”

Joey: “But Shane—!”

Shane: “You go home to your mother and father. And tell your mother… tell her everything’s all right. And there aren’t any more guns in the valley.”

 

The weapon is not simply a neutral object; it becomes part of the kind of person he is able to be. So the film already contains a tension: for Shane, the gun is just a tool; for Marian, we would be better off without guns at all. The story shows that tools shape the lives of the people who use them. And yes—it quietly reverses the earlier conversation between Shane and Marian. Earlier Shane had defended the neutral-tool thesis: the gun is just a tool; the moral responsibility lies entirely with the person using it.

      So the story gradually undermines Shane’s claim and by the end he recognizes something deeper: once a man has lived by the gun, once killing has become part of his life, he cannot simply put the tool down and become someone else. The gun has formed his identity and his fate. He can restore peace to the valley, but he cannot share in that peace. So the final message to Marian (“there aren’t any more guns in the valley”) carries a double meaning. On the surface it means the threat is gone. But implicitly it also means something like the valley can now become the kind of place Marian wanted, a place where people do not live by guns. And for that very reason Shane himself cannot remain there. This is why the ending is so haunting. The community becomes peaceful because the gunfighter leaves it. In that sense the film ends up much closer to Marian’s view than to Shane’s earlier claim about neutral tools.

     What makes this scene especially interesting is, again, that the film itself contradicts Shane. The whole tragedy of the character is that the gun has formed him. He is a good man, perhaps even a gentle one, yet the skill he possesses (quick on the draw) determines his destiny. He cannot remain in the peaceful farming community. Violence has become part of his identity.

     So the film contains two philosophies. One, that of the frontier philosophy, that the gun is just a tool. Then the tragic insight that some tools reshape the life of the man who carries them.

 

. . .

 

  The tension between Marian and Shane anticipates the later philosophical debate about technology. The claim Shane makes is exactly the one many people still assume: technology is morally neutral; only the user matters. This view fits well with the American frontier ethos in which tools empower individuals, moral responsibility lies witharacter, and objects themselves are neutral. But thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Langdon Winner, David Dickson, Neil Postman, and Adorno refute that assumption in my view. Their basic argument is that technologies restructure the world in which human choices occur. They condition behavior, experience, and social organization. In other words, tools do not merely serve human experience; they also form it.

   I find it fascinating that, given my later interest in technology, this movie from childhood has stayed with me. And despite all my partial agreement with Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, a reason for me to qualify Adorno. Western films often carried compressed moral philosophy. They were a kind of American myth-making. Shane articulates a belief that shaped much of modern technological thinking. This was my first understanding of the thesis that some tools are not simply tools because they change the world and the people who inhabit it. 

. . .

  I wish the gun fools in America would listen to Marian. That only very few people in Germany have guns, and the ones who do have to go through a long process of training to get one, is one of the things I appreciate most about living in Germany. (That everyone has excellence health care insurance is another.) There is a striking relationship between gun ownership and gun death rates among all industrial democracies, and the United States is way off the chart here. That comparison should reframe the debate about whether technologies are merely “neutral tools.” About 155 people per year die from gunshots in Germany on average. The firearm death rate is about 1.1 per 100,000 people. In the United States there were 46,728 firearm deaths in 2023, although more than half are suicides (over 27,000). This is about 14 per 100,000 people. That is not just a legal matter. Part of the dominant culture of the US is given by Shane’s attitude; Germany’s culture on this is more like Marian.

.

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Adorno and Plato, The Culture Industry and the Cave

 

I am revisiting lines of thought that impressed me as a student. I was very impressed with Adorno and the Frankfurt school's critique of mass culture or the culture industry, especially commercial music, which I immediately connected with a political version of Plato's cave allegory. I see it more ambivalently today, acknowledging that commercial art has other functions than wrapping a veil over people's eyes or forming them into the kind of subjects required for commercial capitalism to run smoothly. And some (not much probably) of the art and music was and is decent art or music. I don't think the culture industry reflects a massive elite conspiracy – perhaps closer to that today than then – but still if I see it functionally it seems to serve the same purpose of manufacturing the types of subjects needed and allowing those people to adjust what is left of human nature with an unnatural social system.

   So here in the form of theses what I take to be the core of Adorno’s critique.

 

Central Thesis

The modern culture industry does not simply entertain people or reflect popular taste. Rather, it systematically organizes cultural production – music, film, radio, television – according to the same principles that govern industrial capitalism: standardization, efficiency, predictability, and profit. In doing so, it tends to shape consciousness and emotional life in ways that encourage conformity, passive consumption, and adaptation to the existing social order. The effect is not in general the result of a deliberate conspiracy by cultural elites, but the structural consequence of a system in which culture itself has become a commodity. Within this system, cultural forms train individuals to accept the rhythms, expectations, and limits of a commodified society, even while providing genuine pleasures and occasional works of real artistic value.

 

 

Thesis 1 

    Culture becomes industrial production. Adorno’s basic claim in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (written with Max Horkheimer) is that modern culture is no longer primarily created by independent artists but by large commercial systems of production. Film studios, record companies, and media corporations produce cultural goods in much the same way factories produce commodities. The result is standardization of form, the repetition of formulas, and an emphasis on what is already known to sell. Culture begins to resemble a production line of experiences.

 

Thesis 2 

   Adorno's terms standardization and “pseudo-individualization” represent important insights. Mass culture offers the appearance of difference within underlying sameness. In popular music, for example, songs follow predictable harmonic structures (the three chord song); rhythms and arrangements are familiar; and variations give the impression of novelty. Adorno called this “pseudo-individualization.” Listeners feel they are choosing freely among unique products, while the underlying structure remains essentially identical.

 

Thesis 3 

   The culture industry does not simply mirror society; it helps reproduce it. Its emotional patterns encourage passive spectatorship, quick emotional gratification, avoiding difficult reflection, and accepting existing social arrangements. People learn to consume culture the same way they consume commodities. Thus Adorno claimed that the culture industry “produces the consumers it requires.” It manufactures the types of subjects needed for the system to function.

 

Thesis 4

        The culture industry functions less through secret planning than through systemic pressures like profit incentives, risk avoidance, market concentration, and technological distribution systems. These forces favor predictable, easily consumable cultural forms. In this sense the culture industry emerges almost automatically from capitalist organization of culture.

    In other words, modern technological and economic systems increasingly concentrate control over information flows and cultural visibility in a small number of platforms. These systems are optimized for engagement and profit rather than truth or human flourishing. They thus shape patterns of attention, emotion, and belief in ways that stabilize existing power structures and encourage passive adaptation to prevailing social arrangements.

   This goes to a deeper problem recognized by Plato: Who shapes the images that shape the soul? In Plato’s time that was poets and storytellers; in Adorno’s time, film studios and radio networks; today, global digital platforms and algorithmic systems. The scale and technological sophistication have changed – and thus the potential for totalitarian control – but the philosophical problem is ancient.

 

Thesis 5

    Adorno resembles a modernized version of Plato’s allegory. Images replace direct experience and spectacle replaces reflection. The screen is the wall of the cave. People come to mistake representations for reality. But unlike Plato’s cave, the Frankfurt School emphasized economic and technological mediation: the shadows are projected by media industries embedded in capitalism.

 

Thesis 6

    I don’t think today that all works within the culture industry are artistically worthless. People may use cultural products for many purposes and cultural forms can carry meaning beyond commercial intentions. Mass culture can provide emotional release (which also helps the system). But it can also create shared references and allow small spaces of creativity. I think this softens Adorno’s sometimes severe pessimism.

  

Conclusion

Still, the culture industry as a whole transforms art into a commodity system whose standardized forms tend to shape consciousness in ways compatible with the requirements of modern capitalist society. Although not the result of a conscious elite conspiracy and occasionally producing genuine artistic value, the system as a whole tends to cultivate habits of passive consumption, emotional management, and social conformity that help stabilize an otherwise unnatural or alienating economic order.

 

. . .

 

Plato and Adorno

    For Plato, music is not primarily entertainment but moral education. In the Republic he argues that rhythm, melody, and poetic narrative penetrate the soul before rational judgment develops. Music forms emotional habits, and children absorb patterns of feeling through music long before they can reason about virtue. This anthropological insight is important because musical style reflects moral order. Different musical modes cultivate different kinds of character, some disciplined and courageous, others soft or chaotic. Therefore, the political community must regulate music. Given that music shapes citizens, Plato thinks the polis cannot be indifferent to what people hear. Thus Plato famously proposes limiting musical forms that cultivate excessive emotionalism or disorder.

    Plato’s worry is ethical and political formation: the wrong music can deform the soul and therefore destabilize the city. Adorno begins from a similar thought. Music affects consciousness deeply. But he places the problem within the social conditions of modern capitalism rather than the moral order of a city-state. I listed his key claims above. For Adorno, this produces a particular kind of subject: a consumer whose emotional life becomes synchronized with the rhythms of industrial society. Despite their historical distance, Plato and Adorno share several fundamental assumptions. First, that music shapes the soul. Both reject the modern belief that music is morally neutral. Music forms emotional dispositions, conditions how we see the world, and influences character.

     And culture has political consequences. Neither thinker treats music as merely private taste. For Plato music shapes citizens of the polis; for Adorno, it shapes consciousness such that aligns (despite our real needs) with capitalist society. Music reflects the structure of the society producing it. For Plato, musical disorder mirrors political disorder; for Adorno, standardized music mirrors industrial capitalism. Where they diverge most sharply is in where the problem lies. Plato's diagnosis is that the problem is bad moral formation. Certain musical forms cultivate the wrong emotions, namely, softness, excess sentimentality, uncontrolled passion. The remedy is education and cultural guidance. Adorno's diagnosis is that the problem is commodification. Music becomes a product shaped by capitalist imperatives rather than artistic or communal purposes. The remedy is not censorship but autonomous art, i.e., music that resists commodification (which is why Adorno admired modernist composers such as Arnold Schönberg. I confess I cannot imagine living in a society where the dominant mode of music was that of Schönberg!).

    Still I think Adorna is right about this: modern commercial culture forms people into subjects capable of living within a technological-commercial order that is not fully aligned with human nature. Instead of a cave created by tyrants, we have something like a self-maintaining system of images produced by markets, technology, and habit. Plato believed that music forms the soul of citizens within a political order. Adorno believed that industrial culture forms the consciousness of consumers within a capitalist order. Both believe that the deepest political education occurs not through argument but through the shaping of consciousness and emotion.