Category Archives: Eleutheria

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1994

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

In October I attended the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Council of Georgist Organizations in Fairhope, Alabama. Situated on the idyllic eastern shore of Mobile Bay, Fairhope celebrated its centenary this year. The founders of the “colony”, as it is still referred to by many residents, were primarily Iwoan followers of the nineteenth century philosopher and economist Henry George such as E.B. Gaston and W.H. Greeno. By making land freely available to the early settlers, the original colonists believed that social justice could be historically achieved and that such an experiment had a “fair hope” of success.

The basic principle of the Fairhope utopians is still with us in a number of different guises. All people have an equal entitlement to the bounty of nature and that such opportunity cannot be circumscribed by any one person without repaying the community for such a privilege. Any monopolization of the gifts of nature must be commensurate with a reimbursement to others for being denied their proportionate share in what nature has to offer. Conversely, all people have a right to the fruits of their labour and efforts, the denial of which is a fundamental infringement of their right to property in themselves. The denial of property in ourselves and the freedom necessarily aligned with such a concept, be it through the state’s appropriation of labour income, social therapy and the ethics of society or the profusionof laws which negate both the ethics of self-perfecting and the ethics of the altruism, is one of the most singularly acute problems facing the philosophical reformation of our culture.

The Fairhope utopians sought to implement these principles through the vehicle of the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation, which leased lands in the community to settlers. This corporation is still in existence, although lands held in trust for the community are now limited and surrounded by fee simple lands in the fast-growing greater Fairhope area. Interestingly, the Fairhope pier and neighbouring beach and parkland are the only shoreline in Mobile Bay which is accessible to everyone and not owned and restricted by private interests. The colonists believed that all should be able to enjoy and revel in the sublime natural beauty of this estuary on the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

During the conference in Fairhope I had the opportunity to introduce a new book of mine entitled CITIES AND GREED: Taxes, Inflation and Land Inflation, which is published by the Canadian Research Committee on Taxation. I have been the Director of Research for the Committee for the past eight years. This study examines the interlocking problems which pervade our urban economies and systems of local government finance. It proposes solutions that are based on a number of the philosophical concepts espoused by the Fairhope utopians, Henry George, the physiocrats and classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo. The book is available through the Institute for $19.95 (Cdn.) or $14.95 (U.S.) plus $3.60 shipping and handling.

The current issue of ELEUTHERIA contains pieces by Peter McCormick and myself. McCormick’s piece is a revised version of an invited paper presented at the XIVth International Taniguchi Symposium in Philosophy, held in Kyoto, Japan, September 8-13, 1994. The essay on Schweitzer and Bach was originally given by me at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics at McMaster University in May, 1987. I have made only marginal alterations in syntax since that conference.

The Institute now has available for purchase Volumes One and Two in its MONOGRAPH SERIES. The monographs, entitled, Speculative Philosophy and Practical Life and Psyche and Cosmos, are by James Lowry, and originally appeared in ELEUTHERIA. Each volume in the MONOGRAPH SERIES contains a Concordance and Line Numbering for easy reference. Prices per copy are available upon request.

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1994

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains the second part of James Lowry’s essay on Reason and Religion as well as the conclusion of my article on Hegel, Habermas, Piaget and Epistemology. Both articles distinguish between speculative reason and the modern appeals to what may be loosely called “quasi-rationalities”.

On April 9, 1994 the Institute held the first of a series of seminars on Plotinus’ Enneads. These seminars will concentrate on Book VI of the Enneads entitled “On the Kinds of Being”. There are three treatises on the kinds of being in the Enneads. On April 9th the seminar dealt with Chapter Two or number forty-three in Porphyry’s chronology. Chapter Two opens with a discussion of the Platonic categories of sameness, otherness, rest and motion as found in Plato’s Sophist and raises the issue of whether or not “being” itself is a category.

A substantial portion of Plotinus’ text focuses on the exclusivity of the categories. A crucial matter for exegetical insight into the text is how the interpreter is to understand Plotinus’ use of Aristotelian language and turns of phrase. It should be remembered that Neo-Platonists were required to study Aristotle before taking up Plato. The first writings of Proclus were, for example, commentaries on Aristotelian texts.

The description of Plotinus as a Neo-Platonist is misleading since even a cursory acquaintance with the Enneads reveals a wide-ranging synthesis and rearticulation of the complete history of the Greek philosophical tradition. The references are subtle and the arguments richly terraced. “On the Kinds of Being” is not simply a restatement of the Platonism of the Sophist or the Parmenides but an original metaphysics expressed in a refined and highly nuanced language.

In future issues of ELEUTHERIA we hope to publish a commentary on Plotinus that captures the work currently being undertaken in the Institute seminars.

* * *

The Institute now has available for purchase Volumes One and Two in its MONOGRAPH SERIES. The monographs, entitled, Speculative Philosophy and Practical Life and Psyche and Cosmos, are by James Lowry, and originally appeared in ELEUTHERIA. Each volume in the MONOGRAPH SERIES contains a Concordance and Line Numbering for easy reference.

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1993

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

This instalment of ELEUTHERIA contains the first part of an essay on Reason and Religion by James Lowry as well as Part One of an article by me entitled Hegel, Habermas, Piaget and Epistemology. Both articles deal with the critique of reason and knowledge that pervades the modern retreat from a single and unified concept of mind.

The Enlightenment emphasis on reason has been transformed into rationalities, perspectives and situational epistemologies. The Kantian critique of Enlightenment reason nevertheless resulted in a circumscribed doctrine of knowing. Kant laid down the objective conditions for a possible experience and a science of knowledge while postulating a scientifically impenetrable noumenal world. Hegel proceeded into this noumenal world, exposed it and its phenomenal counterpart as moments in the unfolding of the Idea, and thus brought back to any doctrine of knowing the issues of totality, unity and internal coherence.

Post-Hegelian modernity quickly lost sight of any principle of reason or knowing predicated upon a concept of truth that is necessarily allencompassing. Truth, knowing, mind and hence philosophy itself fell into a fracas of historicized doctrines, reductionisms and eventually formalized sub-disciplines. Many of these disciplines have forgot their own history and evolution. Philosophy is now slated for extinction in many of our most prestigious universities.

The essays in this issue of ELEUTHERIA show that philosophy must be unitarily rational and coherent. It is an undertaking that is prior to and comprehensive of religion and science. Modern epistemology is an attempt to be a dephilosophized doctrine of knowing that presumably will have some relevance to our socio-political and economic institutions. This is a contradiction that cannot be resolved by the assumptions of this epistemology. The same is true for religious doctrine. Only speculative philosophy sustains these contradictions while completing their resolution.

* * *

The Institute now has available for purchase at $5.00 per copy Volume One in itsMONOGRAPH SERIES. The monograph, entitled, Speculative Philosophy and Practical Life, is by James Lowry, and originally appeared in the Fall, 1990 issue ofELEUTHERIA. Each volume in the MONOGRAPH SERIES contains a Concordance andLine Numbering for easy reference.

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1993

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

This instalment of ELEUTHERIA contains two pieces on aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Mozart and the Aesthetics of Absolute Music which was first given by me at the Learned Societies Conference at Queen’s University in May, 1991 and Peter McCormick’sCrimson Words, Pale Fires of Reason: Philosophy and Poetry at the End of the Kantian Era at the XIIth International Congress in Aesthetics in Madrid in September, 1992.

Speculative philosophy has traditionally comprehended art as the immediate appearance of absolute mind. The idea of beauty is a sense-world unity of subjectivity and objectivity.

The content of art is spiritual, its form is the embodiments of the individual arts. The concrete perfection of the ideal in art is the unity of spiritual content and material form. This ideality presents itself as the infinite, free and self-determined work of art bereft of all unnecessary externalities and contingencies.

The counter-absolutism of modernity has refracted our approach to art as much as it has philosophy and religion. In its lowest manifestation art is perceived as entertainment and amusement. In education it is manipulated for its social utility. Moreover, art no longer bridges imagination and sensibility – a necessary connection in the stabilization of subjectivity. Historically, embodiment and contingency have become prior to spiritual content. Form is simply abstraction, a nonembodied reaction to oversubjectivized art.

As the first appearance of absolute mind art is primarily self-determining and this is the basic difference between it and mind as anthropology, phenomenology and psychology or as an institutional or social ethics. Art is a self-determining immediacy in which a shifting emphasis between content and form results in the particular arts and in art history as such. This issue of ELEUTHERIA explores this shifting emphasis and the immediacy of speculative thought in musical and poetic aesthetics.

* * *

The Institute now has available for purchase at $5.00 per copy Volume One in itsMONOGRAPH SERIES. The monograph, entitled, Speculative Philosophy and Practical Life, is by James Lowry, and originally appeared in the Fall, 1990 issue of ELEUTHERIA. Each volume in the MONOGRAPH SERIES contains a Concordance and Line Numberingfor easy reference.

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1992

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

This instalment of ELEUTHERIA completes James Lowry’s series Psyche and Cosmos that began with Volume III, Number 2 in the Fall of 1991. The full article is available from the Institute as a softcover volume in its MONOGRAPH SERIES.

Reflection on the thought orientations of modernity; its spirit, limitations and false idealities, has been prevalent in the pieces appearing in this publication. How one understands modernity is today usually the mirroring of a disciplinary or historical education. Hence, the psychological, sociological and economic “modernities” that colour much of the contemporary realms of professional discourse.

The categories and conceptual referents used to circumscribe modernity range from the more universally illuminating to the fleeting empiricisms of anecdotal commentaries. The modern tendency to elevate the Aristotelian category of potentiality () above actuality (), and to ignore altogether complete reality (), forms, for example, a sounder basis for insightful reflection than the current legislative ideologies which idealize the incidental. The necessity for philosophical coherence becomes more pronounced as our socio-political languages fragment, and institutional life is increasingly subject to artificialities of contract law and brokered interests. The inevitable result is the desiccated language, as symptomatic of significantly diminished conceptual powers, of Canada’s recent constitutional forays and the spreading bankruptcy of political dialogue.

The two pieces in this issue, Roy Hanna’s review of James Robertson’s Future Wealth: a New Economics for the 21st Century and James Lowry’s Charlottetown Discord, approach modernity from the absolutized subtexts of economics and politics. Both orientations strain humanity to the limit through an excessive one-dimensionality; economics, presupposing that advances in spirituality are only possible on a material substratum, and politics assuming that consensus not conceptual rigor and internal cohesion can lead to an amelioration of institutional life. The necessity of speculative thought as a rational basis for political and economic organization will be explored in future issues of ELEUTHERIA.

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1992

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

The lament for the condition of public education continues in the press and in more seasoned academic discussions. The back to basics movement ranges from the systematic cultural critiques of Alan Bloom and others to the straightforward hope by parents that their children be taught to read and write. Liberal democratic education, rooted in the ethics of society and cultural historicity, is social servicing, nursed by a vast industry of situational consultants who refer primarily to a pedagogy originally anchored in the sociology of knowledge. The principal thesis of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, that there are modes of thought which cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins are obscured, was transformed into the considerably less rigorous notion that there are no modes of thought severable from their social origins.

The condition of public education obviously reflects the condition of our culture and ultimately of our philosophy. And it cannot be known that our culture has a coherent history and theoretical underpinning if history is the only arbiter of how we think about history and culture. The transhistorical abstractions of the older metaphysics were inevitably displaced by historiologies – empirical, sociological, economic, hypothetico-deductive – and cultural self-portraits that cultivated a contingent instability and tedious revisionism. Such historiologies are equally abstract and unsupportive of any form of cultural unity, or more speculatively a unity in diversity. As Edward Gibbon once said of the ambassadors of a Renaissance Greek emperor: “persuasion is the resource of the feeble; and the feeble can seldom persuade”. The modern cultural historiologies do not even have an emperor.

Philosophy is neither historical nor transhistorical, contingent nor provident. Education is initially imitative, that is, sourced in an externality that the student does not yet know as a totality of subjective and objective referents. As an achieved mediacy, education overcomes itself and attains a nonimitative mediacy that is fundamentally the standpoint of philosophy and thus both historical and transhistorical. Educational institutions conceived as social service agencies absolutize the externalities of educational development and as such are inherently counter-philosophical. Our current educational environment is incapable of making such a critique of the educational milieu because it is devoid of a sufficiently rigorous speculative philosophy. The abstract socio-historical methodologies which drive the educational bureaucracies in the end prohibit more than promulgate educational and cultural development.

Most people are aware of this unhappy state of affairs. This is why many are calling for radical solutions, which are consistently opposed by entrenched interest groups in the public schools and universities. Radical reform is nothing but fundamental reform. Radix in Latin means “fundamental”, but such reform is itself abstract and unstable if not properly contextualized within a broader speculative and philosophical portrait of human nature and human organizations.

The current lament for public education will continue as long as speculative thought enlivens only at the margins. As people recoil from the mediocrity of the government schools, more resources will filter out to the marginalized centres of speculative rationality. This has become apparent in recent years, with the growth of sentiment for the voucher system in the United States and widespread disenchantment in Canada with high per capita educational costs and disproportionally low scholastic results. The 1990s could prove to be the decade when a command system of education becomes transformed into one more guided by a general speculative reason.

* * *

This issue contains the second instalment of Dr. James Lowry’s Psyche and Cosmos. Causation theory pervades by necessity the realm of education and educational theory. Speculation about origins and causes are one of the earliest enthusiasms of a developing mind. There is little outlet, however, for these speculations, as one advances through the present educational system. The deadweight of sociological reasoning blurs reflections on the relation between the individual and the universe, making them appear irrelevant and puerile. Dr. Lowry shows that if these initial speculations on cosmology and the individual are taken up into a more rigorous system of thought, then educational theory and practice will no longer be vulnerable to continual detours and unimportant excursions. The rigor of systematic speculative thought is nurtured by our more immediate and youthful speculations about infinity, the origin of the universe, and the stark isolation of the individual. The third and final instalment of Psyche and Cosmos will appear in the next issue of ELEUTHERIA. provinces.

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1991

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

This issue contains pieces by Ian Lambert and James Lowry. Mr. Lambert, who is currently an attorney in the Cayman Islands with Maples and Calder, writes on the relationship between free will and causation as conceptualized by Henry George and Ludwig Von Mises. Traditionally, free will and causation have been looked upon as mutually exclusive; causation thus negating and eliminating free will; free will disrupting and rendering unintelligible cause and effect relationships. George and Von Mises demonstrate that it is conceptually incoherent to think of free will apart from cause and effect relations. It is only insofar as the will creates cause and effect relations that those relations become intelligible to us. Equally, a sequence of causes and effects only have meaning insofar as we relate them to our will acting independently and causally upon the external world. Understanding free will and causation as aspects of the same concept is to think speculatively about their complementarity and interrelation.

Lowry’s article Psyche and Cosmos will be serialized over the next three instalments of ELEUTHERIA. This monograph is a systematic examination of the circular and linear referents buried in the paradox of causation and the desire to return to origins. Dr. Lowry shows how in the very life of thought uncertainty demands certainty, ambiguity determinateness and subjectivity objectivity. This article speculatively interrelates a broad range of dichotomies that, in modern philosophy, are generally looked upon as delimiters to conceptual liberation. Dr. Lowry’s work is therefore as much an answer to the problematics of modern philosophy as it is a going beyond that philosophy in its explicit characterization of philosophy as such.

* * *

In May of this year the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada decided that “private scholars” would no longer be eligible to apply for research grants. This decision discriminates against a significant and viable sector of the Canadian research community. The arguments stated in the Council’s letter, dated June 20, 1991, to the Presidents of Learned Societies to support revoking the eligibility of private scholars for research grants are seriously flawed.

The Council makes a comparison with the policies of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Medical Research Council which is inappropriate. The research programs of the other federal granting councils require a much stronger institutional context, both with respect to the procurement of equipment and to the teamwork necessary to carry out scientific empirical research. By contrast, a significant proportion of the research in the human and social sciences takes place outside of the university. This is evidenced by the fact that university-based researchers generally leave the university setting when they go on sabbatical or obtain research time stipends and research grants.

The Council states that the university environment is the only one which “provides opportunities to combine research with teaching and training opportunities”. This is parochial in the modern context where many scholars work and flourish in non-university based institutes and research centres. It is private scholars and nonuniversity based inquiry which add diversity, imagination and vitality to many of the disciplines which the Council supports.

The decision of the Council was taken without any prior consultations with either private scholars or the academic community in general. Many scholars thought that the days of “executive federalism” and decision-making in a void had passed.

The Council is in effect discriminating against perfectly qualified scholars and researchers, who do not want university positions becauseit is not the most favourable environment for the pursuit of their research, or who for reasons usually beyond their control cannot get university positions. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council was created by Parliament to “promote and assistresearch and scholarship in the social sciences and humanities”. The Council best fulfils this mandate by concentrating on excellence in scholarship irrespective of the academic or social status of the author. This mandate is severely weakened by Council’s move to drop support for all research conducted solely by non-university based scholars.

The Council should review and revoke this decision. It diminishes support for the Council’s efforts amongst its very own clientele. This support is not something that can be overlooked with impunity, especially in a fiscal and constitutional climate where there is discussion of possibly disbanding the three federal granting councils or devolving their mandate to the provinces.

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1991

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

During the week of March 21-27, 1991 I attended a conference in London, England on “War and Peace” sponsored by the International Union for Land Value Taxation and Free Trade. The participants, who were from the U.S., the Soviet Union, the U.K., Hungary, Australia, Denmark, South Africa, the Netherlands and Canada, share an interest in the social and economic philosophy of Henry George. In 1879 George published Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth…The Remedy, which is one of the most widely read and translated texts on the philosophy of political economy. This work had a substantial influence on such varied modern figures as Leo Tolstoy, Sun Yat-Sen, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Aldous Huxley, and Milton Friedman. Here in Canada, Georgist schools of economic science flourished during the first half of this century in such cities as Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The philosophy of Henry George also led to the formation of an international movement devoted to the recouping for the community of publicly created values and benefits which have hitherto been largely monopolized by a few individuals and interests with its accompanying maldistributions in wealth and power.

The conference was also the scene for the launching of a new book on Georgist philosophy entitled Now the Synthesis: Capitalism, Socialism and the New Social Contract, edited by Richard Noyes (London, Shepheard-Walwyn, 1991). Interestingly, this work uses Hegel’s concept of the dialectical unfolding of history to argue for a holistic philosophy that sets aside the failures and distortions of both capitalism and socialism in favour of a social order which examines anew property rights, the ownership of land and natural resources, taxation and the development of institutional structures over the past several centuries which have “disfigured the rights of the individual”, negated the natural environment and adumbrated our sense of community.

Hegelian dialectico-speculative logic, as historically instantiated, argues that philosophy comprehends (begreifen), in its time, the most explicit working of the Absolute. The limitation of Hegelian speculative philosophy is that it is primarily reflective (nachdenklich) and historical, not futural. The famous passage in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right is à propos:

The teaching of the concept, which is also history’s inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

In reflecting on its own development, philosophy comes to understand the process of history, and thus its underlying continuity. Equally this continuity must be interrelated with novelty, paradigm shifts and the severe diremptions of a modern intellectuality that focuses primarily on imagination and the discursive rather than the rationally integrative and the speculatively reconciliatory. Even more importantly, mature philosophical reflection on the process of history must also have room for the power of the anticipatory hope which lies buried in future expectation.

There is a fundamentally speculative orientation in the socio-economic philosophy of Henry George. His exposition of a practical life and civilization that is based on the theoretical complementarity and dialectico-speculative mediation of freedom and property rights, of the production and distribution of wealth, of individual liberty and equal justice for all, of respect for all natural life and the environmentally sound creation of wealth, and of the tradition and its imaginative reworking and development, is not only an accomplishment that scholars must further elaborate but also a disclosure which holds great promise for the future betterment of society.

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Expanding the publication frequency of ELEUTHERIA has been suggested by a number of members of the Institute. Semi-annual publication does not nearly cover the large amount of materials that Institute members currently have ready for the press. However, our financial resources do not, at present, allow us to increase the number of issues. Our General Endowment Fund is not currently able to meet the semi-annual operating expenses of ELEUTHERIA.

I urge all members and interested parties, who have not yet brought their membership fees and donations up to date, to do so in the near future. Donations to the Endowment Fund are encouraged and greatly appreciated. There are many ways to make such donations, through loans, trust agreements, bequests, matching funding and so on. For example, if you work for a company that has a matching charitable funding program, you can direct that every dollar you donate to the Institute be matched on a dollar for dollar basis with a corresponding donation to the Institute from your employer. All you have to do is to give a copy of the official receipt you receive from the Institute for your donation to your employer and direct the corporate donation to the Institute. Professional investment and legal advice on Canadian charities and tax law is available from the Institute free of charge. As an interim measure, the Board of Directors has decided that if there is a sufficient increase in funding, supplemental issues of ELEUTHERIA will be published in the near future.

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The Institute on February 23rd and 28th sponsored two seminars at the University of Ottawa on the topic “Modernity and History”. These seminars, led by Peter McCormick, were a sequel to the seminar “Understanding Modernity” held by the Institute on March 31st, 1990. The review of Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, which appeared in Volume II, Number 1, is followed in this issue with a continuation of that review and a comparative consideration of Stephen Toulmin’sCosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. The portrait of modernity in the earlier review is filled out by McCormick with a critical evaluation of Taylor’s historical narrative in the Sources of the Self. The contours of this narrative are then contrasted with the competing historical interpretation of the origin of “theory-centered” philosophy in the seventeenth century presented by Toulmin in Cosmopolis. Sponsorship of seminars and presentations on the nature of modernity are a regular part of the work of the Institute.

I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Peter McCormick on being named a Killam Fellow of the Canada Council. Over the next two years he will be relieved from his teaching duties at the University of Ottawa. This will enable him to concentrate on his writings in the areas of metaphysics and the philosophy of art.

Table of Contents

• MODERNITY AND HISTORY by Peter McCormick
• ON PRAGMATISM by Francis Peddle
• PHILOSOPHY AS A CHESS GAME by James Lowry

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1990

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

Western philosophy traditionally occupied itself primarily with the identification of the rational component of human nature and the articulation of the interrelationship between rational self consciousness and the realm of sensible being. Equally, reflection on the nature of the universe focused on the search for and the inquiry into the first principles of the cosmos. The discovery of these principles, and their systematic elucidation, was thought to be the condition precedent for determining the order of obligations in the moral sphere and the foundation of rational institutions in civil society.

Modern, post-Enlightenment philosophy has been a sustained critique of the quest for first principles and of the laying forth of the essential nature of both personhood and the natural environment. The quest has been said to be futile, the foundations of ethics undiscoverable and the search for an essential core to human nature an unfortunate obstacle to revealing what is human and to what should constitute our actions in the private and public spheres. Modern discourse has therefore inverted the thought-world of classical Greek philosophy. Plato and Aristotle wished to conceptualize and portray the contingent within the necessary, the infinite within the finite as determinate, time within eternity and language as an epiphenomenon of thought. Modern philosophy, by absolutizing historical contingency, has expunged ab initio the validity of reflecting on the necessary or of supposing that the external world contains within it discoverable, objective truths.

While making thought functionally dependent on language, and in viewing the activity of thought as redescriptive, contemporary philosophy has had great difficulty in shedding the basic terms of the final vocabulary of classical metaphysics. The counter-absolutistic reflections of much of twentieth century philosophy liberally employ the contrastive terminologies of the older traditions while often making resolute but ultimately failed attempts, as in Heidegger and Derrida, to neologize their way into non-privileged and thoroughly historicized vocabularies. Therefore, even though thinking has been purged of the “limiting” nisus towards hoping to find absolute, unrevisable truths, it is still delineated in relation to such necessary truths as inherently “contingent”. Literary anti-foundationalism flourishes in our universities often without recognition or understanding of the foundationalism that makes possible the reaction. The result is frequently neither coherent philosophical argument nor literary pieces of any perceptible quality. Much of this “anti-foundational” activity would be looked upon by many as relatively innocuous if it were not for the fact that it has itself become the “theoretical foundation” for much of the dialogue in contemporary institutions – educational, political, financial, and religious. Redescriptive vocabulary construction is now axiomatic. Its fluid referents and values form the putative substrata of institutional life in the various manifestations of policy development, legislative enactment, resource allocation and decision-making.

Out of the modern thought-orientation also flows a variety of equally dogmatic reactions. Religious fundamentalists, physicists turned Buddhists, philosophers become poets and mystics, and analysts who typically prefer a bureaucratized and austere distribution of social goods as a means to purge civil society of the tyranny of the focus imaginarius, are some of the many permutations. The “relevancy” of literary culture has become a basic problematic.

If the activity of thought is delimited to self-creation, novelty and the perspectival reiteration of the contingent, then this activity is by definition a continual effort to remove itself from the “relevant”. if this is taken as something other than merely a abstractly subjectivized self-referentiality. Modern philosophy has not, however, become “irrelevant” simply because it is an abstract theoretical selfconcern, since actual theoretical being is inherently practical and concrete, but because it has deliberately construed its relation to thought and the world as preeminently “non-theoretical”. The result is that it can onlyconceive of its relation to the world within contexts, options and alternate strategies. But this relation is still primarily self-oriented, that is, it has onesidedly absolutized its practicality and is thus insufficiently stable within the community at large to count for anything other than yet another interesting view of things. Philosophy has become a weakly competing perspective within a world where the formation of such perspectives is determined primarily by socio-economic externalities. The internally generated thus pre-determines its own irrelevancy.

Speculative philosophy, in contradistinction to both modern (post-Enlightenment and contemporary) and traditional philosophy, neither vacates the theoretical field nor takes it in abstraction from the practical. Further, speculative philosophy recognizes permanentsubstrata in human nature and selfconsciousness and actualizes the presence and recognition of such substrata in historical contingencies. And, it further contextualizes the attempt in historicized reflection to deny the existence of these substrata as itself a self-absolutizing and negative reductionism. Speculative philosophy therefore demonstrates its relevancy in the actual working out and articulation of the pervasiveness of speculative principles in such fields as law, economics and sociopolitical/ economic organization.

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains two essays on the interrelationship of the theoretical and the practical in speculative thinking. The first considers he work of Albert Schweitzer and Henry George with respect to integrating ethical individualism into a concrete program of fiscal and economic reform based on George’s idea of land value taxation as the foundation for the organization and maintenance of delivering social or merit goods and services. The second essay applies first principles to the elucidation of a sound program of portfolio management and investment. These essays have not been ran domly juxtaposed, as is the prescribed format for many literary productions, but are internally connected. This connection is to be found in their speculative content. By taking the manifestations of the modern “non-theoretical” relation to contingent existence as itself an implicitly “theoretical” position, these essays demonstrate that theory and practice can only be meaningfully thought about and practised when neither the historical nor the permanent as such are taken as the fundamental condition of mental and physical life.

II

On October 24th the Institute held its Third Annual Meeting of the Board of Directors. Dr. Lowry was reelected to his position as Vice-President and Dr. McCormick remains as a Director. I will continue in the offices of President and Secretary-Treasurer.

Membership dues for 1991 will remain at fifteen dollars ($15.00). Any donations received at or in excess of fifteen dollars ($15.00) entitle the donee to a membership in the Institute.

The Board noted that Dr. McCormick was named a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer 1990 Institute in Aesthetics, at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He also was able to pursue further research at Freiburg in late summer thanks to the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. Besides giving papers at several scholarly meetings this Fall, Dr. McCormick will return to Japan in November to participate in the tenth Tamiguchi Symposium on Eco-Ethica in Kyoto and Tokyo. The sequel to Dr. McCormick’s “Understanding Modernity” which was in the previous issue will appear in the Spring, 1991 instalment of ELEUTHERIA.

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1990

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

Although words and texts are the central referents for reflective activity in the arts and letters, the publishing industry has never had a halcyon relationship with the disciplines that come within the rubric of the humanities. It is a rare occasion today when a humanist finds a thoroughly sympathetic publisher following faithfully the tradition of such Renaissance scholar-printers as Aldus Manutius! Apprising businesses of the virtues of our intellectual heritage in an increasingly non-literary culture is perhaps a more daunting task, though one not to be shirked given present trends, than for humanists to go into the publishing business for themselves.

As is well known only a small fraction of publications in, for instance, philosophy are commercial successes. The bulk of the output in the discipline is artificially supported by other publications and by various, primarily governmental, subsidies, the distribution of which proceeds through the conduits of academic editorial committees, on to libraries and into the hands of those with a special interest in the subject.

The publication of journals in the humanities is a component of academic life that is currently undergoing a re-appraisal. In many instances libraries now face decisions about how many humanistic journals should be delisted if a new scientific publication is to be acquired. Humanities journals also face a growing problem of funding. Larger proportions of the membership fees to Learned Societies are going into scholarly publication. Government too is having second thoughts about supporting journals whose reading clientele could easily fit into the author’s car.

There is also the problem of access. Younger writers, and those not working in the mainstream, as well as some established authors, often find it difficult to get their articles accepted for publication. Too much energy, that could be more profitably employed, is spent trying to find a suitable journal or amenable editor. When one is eventually found, considerable time usually lapses before it ends up in print. Out of this milieu a great deal of standardized and mediocre work finds a ready outlet, while inspiring pieces are often left to wither on the desk of the jaded craftsman.

There are a number of causes which have led to this parlous state of affairs. Overspecialization in the humanities, in recent decades, has created an ever increasing spate of journals. Esoteric subspecialities have very small subscriber lists. By definition many such publications rarely address the fundamental concerns of thinking and living. They are thus devoid of a vibrancy and spirit that would make one want to preserve them at all costs. Another problem, not unrelated to the issue of specialization, is that much material is published primarily for the external reason of gaining security and promotion within the university hierarchy. Apart from the rather curious spectacle of taxpayers’ money being used to further lighten the public treasury, this situation has led to uniformity and a serious decline in the weight given to the content of what is written. Artificial methodological standards and restrictions have been superimposed upon publications in the humanities that are foreign to the essential orientation of these disciplines.

Self-institutionalization and self-publication have been common in our cultural tradition. The list of famous texts that were originally produced through the author’s financial and even technical support – texts which have often spawned their own industry of secondary literature – is extensive. The established knowledge industry has a tendency to view this disdainfully as vanity publishing, while others see it as indicative of the innovative and original rebelling against a more oppressive form of intellectual culture. A typical concern, for instance, is thought to be that a decline occurs in editorial standards when there is an increase in self-publishing. Equally, however, this thinking can be seen as the desire to maintain a hegemony over any challenges to accepted intellectual beliefs since it assumes that all literary production must for some reason be policed.

It is not improbable that in the coming years humanistic publication, and the associated activities of scholars in general, will undergo a considerable shift from governmental to private funding. The transition will be difficult for many. Others will resist the change by continuing the call for more government funding. Some will simply be resigned to the inevitable and do nothing. If this change from a social to an individual basis in the financial under-structure of intellectual activity in such areas as philosophy and literature does occur, as I think it will, then the varied interplays between trade and business and the more noble pursuits will once again assume their traditional place. With some exceptions, worthwhile artists, philosophers, poets and teachers have always been able to find patrons, supporters and followers because they speak to the elemental and the significant in the thought and life of all people, no matter how dimly felt and unarticulated. The socialized bureaucratic dispensation of cultural benefits appears to encourage an abstract self-referentiality. What is methodologically sound and fashionable is copiously sponsored, while insight, depth of thinking and coherent reflection are too often shunted aside.

II

The Institute has been attempting to address these issues by means of both its theoretical and practical constitution which is partially reflected in its publishing agenda. We have recently launched a campaign to introduce libraries and interested individuals to the concept of a looseleaf publication in the humanities, and more particularly in philosophy. Legal practitioners and researchers are already quite familiar with looseleaf services. In the humanities, however, the traditional journal has remained the format of choice for most editors. The primary disadvantages to such a format are high costs, lack of flexibility in adding new features, such as supplements, and significant time lags in publishing already accepted articles and essays. By distributing ELEUTHERIA in a looseleaf format we hope that a paradigm will be created, using modern technology, so that humanistic publications will become accessible and affordable, while serving more adequately the aims of writing in philosophy and its related disciplines. I encourage all members to bring the Institute’s looseleaf service for ELEUTHERIA to the attention of university and public libraries as well as to individuals.

Another feature of ELEUTHERIA that we regard as important is its wholly non-governmental source of funding. What we are trying to create is a capital endowment fund out of which will come sufficient income to finance this publication and eventually a more expansive publishing program. Our LIFETIME MEMBERSHIPS are an aspect of this effort. Capital funding, in place of operating grants, for publications in the humanities is quite unusual in the current environment, where governments are the primary sponsors of such publications. Individuals are the best source of capital donations. Although building up capital endowments is initially quite time consuming and painstaking, especially in the context of the humanities, over the long term the pay-off in terms of security and a reduction in energy expended on fund-raising is significant.

On February 2nd of this year I addressed the Board of Directors of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities with a presentation entitled “Learned Societies, Funding and Tax Law”. The proper and informed utilization of charitable tax law is an integral part of limiting the dependency of learned societies on government funding. Although donations to arts and culture rank low in the charitable priorities of most Canadians, it is now necessary for humanities scholars to focus on new sources of funding. Persuading donors to give to the humanities will also help these disciplines clarify to themselves their activities both in relation to the nature and purpose of their undertaking as well as with respect to their role in our overall cultural development. There will undoubtedly be casualties in this process, but a more vital, rich and surefooted community of active players in the humanities may very well emerge.

On March 31st the Institute sponsored a seminar in Ottawa entitled “Understanding Modernity” which was led by Peter McCormick who gave a critical review of and a commentary on Charles Taylor’s new book Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity . Out of that seminar came the review which is included in this issue ofELEUTHERIA . It is expected that early in the Fall the Institute will hold another seminar in Ottawa wherein Taylor’s work will be further examined and contrasted with Stephen Toulmin’s new book Cosmopolis . Occasional seminars and presentations on various topics related to speculative philosophy are an aspect of the work of the Institute.

Table of Contents

• Understanding Modernity by Peter McCormick
  • A Portrait of Modernity: Moral Sources, Instrumentalism, and Morality
  • Moral Frameworks, Incomparable Goods,and The Moral Spaces of The Self
  • Qualitative Distinctions, Moral Realism, and Articulacy
• Transcending Modernity: Albert Schweitzer and Beyond by James Lowry
• Beyond Modernity