The Concept of “Getting At”

When my wife, philosopher Linda Reardan, and I read a new writer whose ideas do not quite fit our established notions, we ask ourselves “what is this person getting at?” The ideas are not ridiculous, to be dismissed out of hand, nor do they strike us as correct identifications of the facts of reality. “Getting at” means these writers are attempting, in their own way and depending on their historical context, to make what they believe to be correct identifications.
 
A major error, of those who have swallowed positivist premises, is to dismiss new (or different) ideas as not “verifiable” or not “falsifiable”—terms that are red herrings from post-Kantian philosophy and especially from Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. Another error, of many who follow Ayn Rand, is to dismiss such ideas because they do not agree with her philosophy, therefore they are not worthy of further consideration.
 
For the past several months (May 2023–February 2024) I have written posts about two scholars and what they were getting at: economist Ludwig von Mises and psychologist Sigmund Freud. Despite accepting some Kantian ideas, Mises produced outstanding works based on defending the epistemological foundation of economics against the positivist premise that all science must be quantitative. In addition, I address the issue of “subjective value” in economics (see also this post) as being essentially the same concept as what Ayn Rand calls socially objective value, which means, consistent with her theory of concepts, that value is not metaphysical, in the thing. Rather, it is psychological or epistemological (both words used by her).
 
Freud, who is far more Aristotelian than Kantian even though he lived in a neo-Kantian culture, focused on reality to help distressed patients discover un- (or sub-) conscious thoughts and experiences that made them unhappy in the present and then proceeded to help them achieve happier lives. He was not a “pan-sexualist,” as critics have said of him. As a result of his accomplishments, Freud must be considered the father of modern psychology.
 
Let us now go back to Aristotle and look at one issue he was “getting at,” though many Greek philosophers could be used here as examples of the “getting at” premise, including Plato. Indeed, Aristotle was developing further the discoveries of Socrates and Plato on universals, reason, and definitions when he came up with his theory of universals known as moderate realism.* Aristotle, in contrast to Plato, believed that the universal essence or form of a thing is intrinsic or embedded in the individual thing, and we abstract it using nous—reason—to arrive at rational knowledge.
 
Aristotle’s theory today is a layperson’s common-sense epistemology that says, “We just see tableness in the tables out there in reality.” But that is not correct, as critics of the theory for centuries have shown. Essences are not out there, in the thing. Ayn Rand, aware that the mental process is more complicated than Aristotle believed, improves his theory by demonstrating that abstraction is a mental process of omitting precise measurement of the many similar tables we have observed. That is what gives us the universal. The process, she goes on to discuss, is even more complicated, requiring volitional effort to form abstractions from abstractions (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, chap. 1–3).
 
Aristotle was “getting at” the right thing, but did not quite get there.
 
Moving along chronologically, let us look at Christianity. St. Augustine, according to Professor E in the Appendix to Ayn Rand’s Epistemology (262–63), was the first in history to give us the concept of consciousness (though the Stoics anticipated it). The Greeks had identified several important processes of our minds, such as perception, imagination, emotion, and reason, but did not put them together into one concept. Augustine’s human consciousness was a reflection of the monotheistic Christian God, who, in effect, is the “giant consciousness in the sky” that causes events on earth and may or may not grant us our wishes through prayers (Independent Judgment and Introspection, 38–40). Augustine’s concept of consciousness nevertheless was a step forward.
 
Descartes, more than any of the previous religious thinkers, in a confused manner, brought the consciousness in the sky down to earth and put it in our bodies, making it personal to each one of us (likely influenced by Protestantism). He attempted to integrate mind and body as a naturalistic entity, but is remembered, though the dichotomy goes back to the Greeks, as the one who gave us mind-body dualism. Descartes’ fundamental error was to assert that consciousness is the first thing we know, not existence. This is his prior-certainty-of-consciousness premise that continues to plague philosophy today. Or, as Linda has observed, modern philosophers, ever since Descartes’ cogito (I think, therefore I am), have been stuck in their own minds trying to find a way out to reality.
 
When we get to Immanuel Kant, we do have to acknowledge that he is the first to solidify the notion that consciousness is not a mirror of nature, as critics of moderate realism say to disparage the doctrine, but has its own identity. Unfortunately, he concluded, or rationalized—philosopher Walter Kaufmann (116) describes him as a “virtuoso of rationalization”—that because consciousness has a nature we can never know true, noumenal reality, only a phenomenal world.
 
Positivism is a doctrine I resist granting anything to after getting it in spades in graduate school, but I must admit that its advocates were attempting, and still attempt to this day, to answer Kant’s conclusions and to defend science—at great expense. The expense of positivism was, and still is, to declare the following meaningless: metaphysics, universals, facts, values, and truth. The “truths” it says we can know are only those that are synthetic, that is, tied to perceptual concretes—they are not universal—and analytic “truths,” which are universal but arbitrary and say nothing about reality. The positivists’ misguided “contribution” is to require in the human sciences a distorted version of the method of the physical sciences. (See “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” in Rand’s Epistemology, 88–121.)
 
Pragmatism, instead of being a villainous philosophy, was a doctrine of empiricism, based on the acceptance of the biological nature of consciousness and the attempt to defend knowledge and science against the attacks of the German, British and American Idealists, this last including the work of Brand Blanshard. The so-called pragmatic theory of truth, namely that truth is what works, attributed to William James, may be poorly formulated, but it is an answer to the rationalism of idealism. It insists that we must stay tied to real activities of life to know what is true. Using this theory of truth, we can say, with qualifications, that capitalism is true because it works, whereas socialism is false because it does not work. My qualifications are that a theory of truth requires more than what the pragmatists offered.
 
John Dewey, whom I read extensively when writing Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, did not like the word “pragmatism,” preferring “instrumentalism,” in the sense that thought is the instrument of action, which means all thought and knowledge are for the sake of action, not ivory-towered speculation. I learned many things from my study of Dewey. One is to trust the original source of the author’s own words, not summaries. I read three summaries who disagreed with each other and did not sound like what I read in Dewey. After I had read many works of his, I read Dewey’s Metaphysics by Raymond Boisvert and agreed with him that Dewey not only has a metaphysics, but that it is Aristotelian and his theory of truth is a correspondence theory, though Dewey improves on Aristotle’s theory by rejecting any form of intrinsicism of essences or values.
 
For more on what I found Dewey to be “getting at,” read my post in Applying Principles, 295–99. No, Dewey does not have a theory of concepts or universals, nor is he an advocate of capitalism. I did not read his works on ethics. His metaphysics and epistemology, however, were “getting at” something. He is difficult to read, though he does sometimes use interesting business metaphors, such as, subject matter in education is the working capital of thought. His theory of education is not too different from that of Maria Montessori—and is not, I must emphasize, what many progressive educators say it is.
 
Let me conclude this post with reference to two previous posts about the Bible. The first concerns Jewish political commentator Dennis Prager’s The Ten Commandments, which, he points out, should be translated from the Hebrew as the Ten Statements. What is significant about this short book is that it is not deontological in the Kantian sense that they are ten duties. Indeed, Prager says that these ten statements have driven the development of civilization and “are the greatest list of instructions ever devised for creating a good society.” One other mistranslation, he points out, is that “do not kill” in 1610 King James English should really be “do not murder.”
 
My other post looks at Matthew 7:1–6 in the New Testament. The first verse is the “do not judge” statement that Ayn Rand has made pointedly negative comments about, though some of her followers misunderstand her interpretation of the advice. The rest of the Matthew verses relate the Golden Rule, an early statement of justice, and emphasize that we should use the same standard of value when judging others as ourselves. And that we should be careful when forming partnerships, personal or professional, lest we end up throwing our pearls to pigs who turn on us, trampling the pearls and attacking us.
 
Pretty good advice coming from the New Testament. Even the Bible was “getting at” many true things.
 
 
* In an earlier post, I referred incorrectly to Aristotle’s theory as naïve realism. The theory is occasionally denigrated as “naïve” and I seem to recall it in my undergraduate days being identified as such. But the more acceptable term today is “moderate,” or sometimes “metaphysical,” realism, meaning the essence is “out there” in the thing.

In Defense of the Religious, Or: Why the Left Should Stop Rubbing the Devouts’ Noses In It

As a child I witnessed our family cat having his nose forcibly introduced to something in the house that he shouldn’t have deposited. Then, he was summarily tossed outside.

It was not a pretty picture.

The communist/fascist Left today rejoices at doing something similar to anyone who is religious, especially those who are politically conservative Christians and Jews. The Left revels in hurling ad baculum shouts of rage, hostility, and aggression, which Laird Wilcox has so aptly identified as “ritual defamation.”

And, to continue the analogy of “tossing outside,” leftists try to get anyone who challenges them, or disagrees with their mantra, silenced or fired—for example, YouTube’s restricting of Prager University’s five-minute videos for violating “community guidelines” and the sacking of political commentators Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, plus several others.*

Full disclosure before continuing: I am an atheist and have been since I was sixteen. Around that time, in 1963, I watched a television show called “The Defenders,” starring E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed, father-son attorneys who represented an atheist high school teacher. I did not know the meaning of the word “atheism,” so I had to look it up. Hmm, I said to myself, that sounds interesting! Soon after, I read Ayn Rand, majored in philosophy in undergraduate school, and never looked back.

Be that as it may, dear leftists, I did attend a Protestant church and Sunday school for those first sixteen years—and our culture is decidedly Judeo-Christian and has been for at least five thousand years, give or take several centuries or millennia. Our cultural history is part of our cultural identity. It cannot be denied out of existence.

I do disagree with a number of religious issues, including the not insignificant one about the existence of a god. I also disagree with the concept of sin, the emphasis on self-sacrifice, and abortion. (See the second footnote in my earlier post about the insincerity of both pro- and anti-abortionists and what both should be fighting for.)

On the positive side, I relish watching Prager University’s five-minute videos, which are highly polished and highly essentialized, often with strong messages defending free speech and free markets. I don’t agree with all of them—this usually includes those of founder Dennis Prager, himself a Jewish conservative and biblical scholar. His videos usually concentrate on religion and the assumption that morality can only come from God. Socrates, Ayn Rand, and many other philosophers throughout history disagree.

Nonetheless, Prager’s little book (110 pages, with study questions) on The Ten Commandments is illuminating. The general (and, to me, surprising) thrust of Prager’s commentary is that the commandments are what have driven the development of civilization and are therefore necessary for its continuation.**

The word “commandment” in Hebrew, Prager points out, is correctly translated as “statement,” thus the Ten Commandments should be referred to as the Ten Statements. If true, this significantly demotes the deontological, duty-based interpretations of the Judeo-Christian ethics.

Other insights: the sixth commandment, “You shall not kill” (Exodus 20:13), as worded in my 1953 Revised Standard Version of the King James translation, should be “Do not murder.” That’s because the word “kill” in 1610 also meant “murder.” If the commandment literally meant “kill,” Prager emphasizes, we would all have to be vegetarians.

The tenth commandment, “do not covet,” says Prager, is the only one that “legislates thought,” as opposed to behavior. And this is significant, he continues, because it underlies and motivates the previous four—murder, adultery, stealing, and perjury. The thief’s coveting of my wallet or computer eventually causes him to help himself to both.

Equally illuminating is the book Killing Jesus by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard. The two Catholic writers have convinced me that Jesus, a middle easterner, did not look like those white Anglo-Saxon Protestant movie actors of the 1950s!

The book is about the historical Jesus with fascinating detail, but not overly detailed like many scholarly histories. Indeed, I would describe all of the books in the authors’ Killing Series as masterpieces of essentialization. They are page-turners.

The most significant new detail, to me, is the shape of the Roman cross. It was a capital “T,” with no ascender extending above the horizontal crossbeam. The vertical beam was left permanently in the ground, so the crossbeam and prisoner had to be lifted up to be put into position.

What Jesus and other prisoners carried to the killing ground was the horizontal beam. And that would be after a vicious whipping by a couple of Roman soldiers, who were watched carefully by their superior officer to ensure that they gave no leniency, nor did they kill the prisoners. This last would deprive the prisoners of their ultimate humiliation by crucifixion.

As a historical portrayal, the authors handle Jesus’ alleged miracles by writing “people say” or “it was said” that such and such occurred.

A considerable part of the book portrays Jesus’ integrity and independence against the Pharisees, Temple elders, and others who felt threatened by him. The Pharisees were experts on the 613 commandments or laws of the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, which also include the more familiar ten). The Pharisees repeatedly tried to trap Jesus so they could have him arrested and executed.

Jesus frequently responded to the entrapment schemes with parables that puzzled his tormentors, or he answered their questions with his own question. The latter part of the book becomes something of a thriller with the various parties to his demise struggling to come up with a justification for his execution.

Pontius Pilate, for example, could not go against Jewish law to order a crucifixion, unless Jesus posed a clear threat to Rome. The threat to Rome Jesus finally admitted to was that he was king of the Jews, therefore a sovereign. To Pilate, though, Jesus was essentially still a preacher, so Pilate’s solution was to offer a choice to the Temple parishioners, who in fact were shills of the elders and Pharisees. They, of course, chose Barabbas; Jesus was sent to his death.

So . . . communist/fascist, rabid leftists, you hate religious people so much that you cannot find anything of value in their cultural heritage, including the above, which, of course, is also your heritage? You hate them so much that you must treat them like dehumanized scum??

Get a life, leftists. Or, rather, get some ideas, based on reason, logic, and objective reality that can be discussed in rational discourse.

Your envy, cynicism, and malevolence are defeating you. What’s that Christian virtue? Ah, pity!

I’m starting to pity you.

I think I’ll go have a discussion about the Ten Commandments and Jesus with a devout Christian or Jew.


* Unfortunately, because of today’s epistemological chaos, Prager University is mistakenly calling their treatment by Google, owner of YouTube, “censorship,” which it is not. Censorship is an act only performed by the government. . . unless Google has been blessed with crony governmental handouts and other favoritisms, as in the “renewable” energy and electric car industries. If so, censorship would be the appropriate term. Otherwise, I have to acknowledge that Google seems to be exercising its property rights.

** “The Ten Commandments,” says Prager, “are the greatest list of instructions ever devised for creating a good society” (p. 79). And a good society that the commandments establish, Prager says earlier, is a free society (p. 6).