First Principles Tradition
We will never recover our ultimate concern using a 'view from nowhere'
The new Notes feature on Substack is excellent. It’s the same functionality as Twitter but filtered for a user base that loves to regularly write long-form, carefully crafted works. I’d recommend checking it out.
I again don’t have a full essay this week again but I wanted to respond to a particular note that caught my attention:
In the 1960s and 70s the counterculture was very vocal about wishing to move away from anything considered “traditional”. Eventually this counterculture became the mainstream. Today, even our major political parties cast themselves as rebels and underdogs fighting a staid authoritarian ‘man’1.
In this context a new countercultural trend is forming that sees tradition as a valuable part of our inheritance. This ‘new counterculture’ regularly uses arguments for tradition that come from first principles or the scientific method. Often, they are philosophical pragmatists with a commitment to judging truth by results rather than by the validity of a statement (looking for a propositions “cash value”)2.
There is a lot to be said for this new counterculture and the kind of worldview they promote. These arguments from first principles compelling in their own right but they are especially impressive when they can be shown to agree with other sources of inherited wisdom in our traditions.
However, when it comes to actually bringing about the hoped for change in people’s lives the arguments seem to fall flat. They are certainly powerful but the arguments on their own seem to lack the ability to actually recapture a sense of tradition that has been lost.
Paul Tillich described religion as all the things determined by a person’s “ultimate concern”. I think you can, without too much violence, expand this description from religion to tradition in general.
Within a traditional society the traditions are the ways of life that have come about from that society’s ultimate concern. They cannot be reasoned about because they are the boundaries of life itself. The problem in trying to recreate the same patterns from first principles is that even if you happen to get some of them to line up, without the ultimate concern, the activity won’t stick. The level of commitment required cannot be reasoned towards. It must be lived.
This commitment does not necessarily need to be driven by particular absolute beliefs, existential threats, or some religious experience (though of course all of this can help). However, it is essential that the commitment is beyond anything reasonable. There are plenty of lapsed Catholics and Jewish Atheists that show just how it works to maintain a live tradition in the face of these paradoxes everyday.
The transformative nature of tradition lies in our commitment to it as it relates to our ultimate concern. Arguments from first principles may be used to build a rocket that takes people to the moon but they are simply too disinterested - too disenchanted - to provide us with or connect to our ultimate concerns . They will never convince us to be able to say: “This is simply what I do”.
To understand what tradition has to offer we have to meet it on its own terms. Despite how aligned we may become to the conventions of tradition as a result of first principles thinking it will not be enough. The secular view from nowhere that such first principles rely on is ultimately devoid of the commitment that living within a tradition requires.
Mood
This is quite funny really if you think about it.
There are many prominent figures that could be pointed at as being important in this movement. The most popular though is probably Jordan Peterson who has become famous for his quips about the the conservatism of evoloution and the emotional impact of status in lobster groups. A prototypical example of these kind of arguments.