Interacting with the World, and Ciceronianus

This weekend, Ciceronianus, author of a wonderful neo-Stoic blog, posted on epistemology. He wrote: "I'm bemused from time to time by the view that the world (as in "reality" or the universe) is, in part at least, our creation, or perhaps is created by each of us for himself/herself."

He named first Kant and later Wilfred Sellars as examples of the sort of epistemologist he has in mind. Let us use the broad term "constructivism" for the broad PoV that Kant and Sellars share, and that bemuses our Stoic.

Ciceronianus, if I understand him, then proceeds to the assertion that such constructivism is either pointlessly obvious or wildly wrong. The obvious and uninteresting point is that "we are human beings, and as such interact with the world as human beings do." Yet those who are most serious about urging that "they shape the world" seem to want to go much further than this, and that furtherness is what bothers Ciceronianus.

I contributed a thought of my own to his comment section.
 

There is a tee shirt that bears upon some of the issues you raise. It shows somewhat anthropomorphized versions of the Greek letter pi (Π) and of the expression √-1.

Pi is saying to √-1, “Get real.” And√-1is replying, “Be rational!”

I’ll pause now while you slap your knees.

The joke, of course, is that pi is an example of an “irrational” but real number, while √-1 is the definition of i, the foundation of the imaginary numbers.

Stoicism

Stoicism is a venerable philosophy with continuing resonance throughout the western world - and with analogs in eastern culture as well.

It comes to mind because I suspect if the economic circumstances are as bad as they seem, and as bad as some of the experts say they will remain -- a lot of us in the industrialized west are going to need to adopt stoical attitudes.

The heart of it then is this, from Epictetus:

"There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things that are beyond our will."

He and his fellow Stoics got there through the following steps.

1. Physics or cosmology. The Stoics were both materialists and pantheists. They saw the whole of the material world as a living being, whom one might well call God, Zeus.

2. Determinism. Associated with this cosmology is the idea of the future as unfolding with inevitability, i.e. a very strict fatalism.

3. Theory of knowledge. The Stoics were opposed to, and in turn opposed, the Skeptical trends of many of their contemporaries. They believed in what they called katalepsis, justified certitude about how the world works. They also believed that the acquisition of katalepsis has an element of consensus to it. This may have been analogous to an idea advanced in the 19th century by Charles Peirce, that truth is that which is fated to be agreed to.

4. Ethics. The Stoic sage, having achieved katalepsis about fate -- accepts that he can't change what will happen, and faces the world without passion. Passion, founded upon ignorance, is in turn the cause of misery. Thus we arrive at the sentiment of Epictetus with which I began.

The whole system of thought was sympathetically described by the novelist Tom Wolfe in A Man in Full.

I'm not advocating it, just putting it out there, in my lazy Sunday nothing-better-occurs to me kind of way.

Blame fate.