We Must Rearticulate the Aristotelian Gestalt

We must pull the sword of value realism from the rock of materialism.

The gestalt of western philosophy, for over a millennium, was a belief that Goodness was ontologically basic. Aristotle claimed that Goodness was the uncaused cause, and all things moved towards it of their own accord. Christianity was a re-articulation of the Aristotelian gestalt.   Men in the west believed for a millennium that the world was good. We acted accordingly. The world got better.

Western elites stopped believing the world was good over the last few centuries. The world has continued to improve, not because of elite beliefs, but despite them.

Today, the idea that goodness is real and therefore guaranteed over the long term is heresy. The present elite zeitgeist says something like, “the outcome you want is a subjective property of a small number of causal branches in a massive tree of possible outcomes, most of which will kill you and everyone you care about.”

Who is right here?   The truth of this question is obviously important because it has immediate practical consequences for how we, as individuals and collectives, act in the world. 

Does the arc of the moral universe really bend towards justice? Is progress real? If so, is it an inevitable product of the laws of physics? Or something that happens only when men act with sufficient virtue?  

I think there are very good reasons, based on physics and computer science, to believe Aristotle had the right of things. I find these arguments, and the evidence for them, more compelling than the nihilist alternative.  I think value is real, and ontologically basic, and that we can arrive at this conclusion using the same kind of reasoning that lead to the scientific method.

This essay introduces and motivates an attempt to re-articulate the Aristotelian Gestalt in materialist terms. I write this because I have benefited tremendously from seeing other attempts to do the same. 

I am choosing to build on materialism not because I am a materialist, but because materialism seems to include a built-in consensus mechanism, which is probably why the west adopted it over sticking with aristotelianism.  

The best thing you can do, as my readers: tell me where the argument is weak. Tell me where there are holes, where there are gaps, where it doesn’t work. If you think I’m full of shit, please, kill this version of me, so that N+1 can learn from its weaknesses and try again.

What follows is not the argument - that comes next - but the historical and technological context that I believe is necessary to grasp the philosophical zeitgeist among western elites today. An argument like this needs a prologue and a setup, but it still has to stand on its own.  If a thesis like this needs to synthesize the sciences and the humanities, consider this essay the humanities portion of the argument.

How We Got Here

The full story would take much longer to tell, so i’ll pick up in media res with recent events, i.e. the last half millennium, since it’s the most relevant part here.

The Catholic Church built such an enormous focus on Truth, that the elite consensus in the west was that Truth was more important than anything else.  The Church said, and scripture, affirmed that God was Truth. The Church, of course, said that they had a monopoly on interpreting the Truth.  The advent of the printing press in Europe, however, made it possible for anyone to spread ideas, leading to a period of chaos much like today.

The protestant reformation killed pan-european acceptance of a centralized authority and replaced it with a decentralized truth-finding process  based upon a ‘trusted source’ - the bible.

Geocentrism - brought about first by Kepler’s predictions and then validated via Newtonian Mechanics - replaced scripture as the ‘trusted source’ with the material world.

As humanity accumulated more and more fact beliefs, Hume’s fork elevated fact beliefs over value beliefs. Hume pointed out, correctly, that facts don’t give rise to values.  Western elites collectively stuck with the ‘fact’ side of the fork because fact beliefs are easier to form consensus on, and consensus is necessary for economic growth and the projection of military power.

Cannons may be the final argument of kings, but the logistics necessary to get cannons, gunpowder, and troops all together constitute a necessary preamble to that argument.

The protestant reformation presented so many arguments for different things being true, and all the agents and persons making arguments seemed either corrupt or at least deeply motivated and therefore biased. If the truth is the most important thing, how can we find it, given that we all have biases and motivations? 

Materialism seems to provide an answer: we can all reproduce scientific experiments.   It doesn’t matter what your motivations or your background, we can all measure how long it takes a rock to fall the same distance.  The material world doesn’t seem to care or respond to our motivations; when we perform the same material process, and we measure it carefully, we keep getting the same result.

This reproducibility seems to suggest that fact beliefs are more real than value beliefs. 

At this point, the ‘trusted source’ for truth was our senses, the conceptual scaffolding we used to integrate this truth was Newtonian mechanics. Value beliefs still existed, but they started taking a backseat to things we could measure and predict.  Many elites still held religious convictions, and the catholic-protestant conflict kept religion clearly within the elite Overton window.

The Apex and Decline

The spirit of Aristotle began to decline in the west when Newton explained the motion of both cannonballs and planets with the same simple equations. This spirit drew its last breaths as Darwinian evolution, the ultraviolet catastrophe, and Riemannian geometry seemingly shattered the notion of a world that was sensible, reasonable, meaningful, and good.    

At the start of the 20th century, Antebellum western man had peered beyond the edge of crystal spheres and encountered, not beautifully enmeshed gears indicating a masterful design, but chaos, despair, madness, and confusion. And then the archduke of Serbia was assassinated. 

Western belief in value realism suffocated, slowly over the centuries, and all at once in the mud at flanders.  The old worldview, of a place that was intrinsically good, ordered, and intelligible now seemed as out of place as a mounted charge at a machine gun nest.

Yet I do not think the transition out of the Aristotelian Gestalt was a step down, so much as a growth phase in humanity’s cognitive evolution. It was materialism’s ability to facilitate decentralization of power, while still maintaining some level of consensus, that led to its widespread uptake.   

In short, I think materialist monism displaced our prior conception of the aristotelian gestalt because, in practice, materialist monism, riding on the cultural background radiation of the protestant-catholic schism, did a better job of articulating the aristotelian gestalt, given the technological and political state of europe at the premodern era. 

Quine was right. Ideas cannot be evaluated as independent propositions. All ideas a person could hold relate to one another in a web of concepts. The web of concepts, itself, means different things in different material contexts.   The net effect of materialist monism in the early modern era was that the world became possessed of a spirit of abiding trust in material reality to be intelligent and to regulate itself, of its own accord.  

In a sense, materialist monism started out as a kind of faith in reality itself: to be consistent, discoverable, understandable, and, ultimately, habitable.  Of course, there were downsides: materialism, taken seriously, cut us off from accessing the wisdom of our ancestors who spoke of such “nonsense” as spirits, God, and providence.  It is, however, worth considering the words of CS Lewis Here:

“The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.”

At the start of the early modern era, perhaps materialist monism was a better articulation of the Aristotelian gestalt, given the cultural and technological state of the world. 

If this was so, however, it is clearly no longer. Materialism has now run its course. Our understanding of the material universe has advanced to the point where most experiments cannot be reproduced by anyone. No one can build the large hadron collider in their garage, nor can they conduct large scale probabilistic efficacy studies of vaccines.  Most of modern science runs on ‘trust’, which is why things are falling apart now.

If the printing press lead to an era of decentralized communication, the advent of broadcast technology temporarily put that genie back in the bottle.  Licenses to broadcast and transmit information, coupled with corporate advertising as a mechanism of financing print broadcast, lead to a re-centralization of narrative power.   

The telegraph and railroads lead to the possibility of wider communication mechanisms, and once this happened, the elites in the west pounced on the possibility of gaining control over the narrative. Local newspapers were deeply interested in politics, but railroads lead to the possibility of large corporations which had no interest in local squabbles. Corporate advertising lead to the adoption of a sterile, bland style of communication that feigned disinterest.  A confluence of incentives lead to both the great war, and the rise of technocratic powers.

A modern priestly class has ascended to power, only this time with the absence of an official org chart, and the presence of mass broadcast technology. 

We must restate the Aristotelian gestalt, using materialism as the base, because that materialism has been the foundation of the last several hundred years of progress.  We do no service to our ancestors by disregarding the true gains of the recent past, in an attempt to re-animate the wisdom of the distant past.   

Materialism as Shared Elite Mythology

We must move forward, and build upon that materialist philosophy foundation, not by treating materialism as ontologically basic, but as a reliable consensus layer.  

Jordan Peterson has convinced lots of people to take the idea of God more seriously, essentially by taking materialism as given and then arguing that the Bible’s long lifespan, outliving kingdoms and nations, means it’s a repository of effective strategies for life. Peterson claims the biblical God is ‘the fundamental animating principle of reality’, which sounds a lot like the Greek conception of the Logos. 

In essence, Peterson’s argument is that we should take the Bible seriously because it’s been around a long time, which means it must have worked well in its it attempts to articulate fundamental normative truths,  ways to live that will allow you to thrive despite the suffering and malevolence you will inevitably encounter in life.  Peterson’s claim is that the bible encodes procedural knowledge that is valuable and we mistake it for semantic knowledge that is factually incorrect.

“Fundamental animating principle” sounds a fair bit like claiming that the classical conception of God actually maps onto something like “the laws of physics and mathematics,” i.e. Truth itself.

 Claiming that the laws of physics and mathematical truth are intrinsically good would be wild to most western elites today, but this is the Aristotelian gestalt: reality is good. 

I believe that materialism, taken seriously, gives rise to the need to consider what our ancestors would have called “spirits” and “transcendent values”, even “angels” and “demons”.    The development of computational complexity theory and the widespread prevalence of machines which transmit living, evolving flows of information to our minds finally gives us the capacity to articulate, in material terms, why we should believe the World is Good, that choices are real, and that the cultivation of virtue is a necessary precondition for a life of flourishing, but also that things will be ok for the whole, even if they go poorly for us. 

Conclusion

Hume’s fork was mistaken: value precedes facts. Geocentrism is not correct, but its gestalt has a greater articulation.  If Christianity was an embodied image of the Aristotelian thesis enacted as a human being, what we need is a higher-resolution computation-and-physics-aware articulation of the same, not for the masses - who have the guide they need - but for the nerds, those who turned from God because they really did want to believe only what was true, who rejected faith not out of pride, but out of the humility that says, “I don’t want to believe something that isn’t true, even if it feels really good.”

No, we do not find ourselves the only planet in a universe physically centered upon us.  We do find ourselves to be biological robots in a causal system whose parameters were not selected at random from a uniform distribution. They could not have been.

We find ourselves living inside a causal system whose specification is so extremely precise, it is as if we look out with our telescopes into the space of all possible dynamic systems, and see nothing remotely comparable to our cozy home in parameter space. 

We are not the center of material space, because materialism eventually told us there is no center, only what we can observe.  We do appear to be at ‘the center’ of the much larger mathematical space of possible causal systems, in that we cannot see - with our mathematical imagination or computational telescopes - any other causal systems which give rise to structures of such enormous complexity as ourselves, living beings that walk on two legs and model arbitrary causal systems with our physiologies.

We find ourselves to be bipedal apes who outcompeted other more powerful animals due to our extended childhoods, our curiosity, our capacity to run for long distances, to work in large groups, to learn from our ancestors, and to use our fingers precisely and delicately.

We find ourselves to be storytelling primates who can tell ourselves stories about the means, manner, and method by which we tell ourselves stories, and in so doing, we can find that we can change the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, giving rise to hyperstitious patterns, where our imagined futures become real. 

We find ourselves capable of playing imaginative games, of conjuring arbitrary causal structures in our minds, inhabiting them with our actions, and then seeing if those causal structures work better than what we once thought was real.  Entrepreneurial pursuit and scientific experimentation have the same essence: and that is, disciplined make-believe in pursuit of the good. 

The strategy that seems to help us primates best navigate the world that seems to be tailor-made for life, the strategy that best allowed one group to dominate the others is: Disciplined play. Ordered liberty.  Curiosity and drive tempered with reverence for the past.

These seeming-opposites are the Aristotelian ‘mean of vices’, recast as something like, “all good things come in pairs which are in tension with each other, because short term tradeoffs are real.” ¹

Somehow, we find ourselves playing a game in which these beautiful things are the dominant strategies.  Or, at least, we know they were, until we stopped playing them at scale because we became convinced such ideas were silly and old fashioned. These are the strategies that conveyed immense material power on the west. Having abandoned them, we see our decline imminent. 

I have put my hand upon the sword.  I have not yet begun to pull, but rather, to tell you what I'm going to do next.  This was my attempt, reader, to convince you that it’s worth believing, worth considering: value is the core of reality.

And now, you must choose. An argument is coming next. Such an argument warrants a prologue like this, but it must also stand alone, for the kind of person that hates flowery words and history and just wants to get to, ‘for every epsilon, there is a delta…’

You must choose whether or not to entertain the idea. To play with it. Not to believe it, of course, but to consider it. To allow it to rest within your soul, and see if it takes root. Only you can determine if that combination of words means something. 

You will have to decide.  Not whether I have dislodged the sword, but whether this is an imaginative narrative sufficiently plausible to be allowed to live inside your subconscious mind so that eventually you can draw the sword yourself.  If it’s real, it will work better as a denizen of the psycho-ecology inside your skull.

The argument comes in the next post.  Stay tuned.

1. Squint at these just right and you’ll see a pattern reminiscent of how a quantum computer works: all invalid solutions destructively interfere with each other, as if being itself were a quantum computer, computing a virtues way of being. Only the valid solutions are left standing, as a nation lead by narcissists can only field soldiers too anxious to say ‘No’ to what is clearly wrong.