Coenoscopic and Ideoscopic Knowledge

The terms as proposed have a Greek etymological root, “coenoscopic” meaning  “directly viewed”, as in unaided sense perception; “ideoscopic” meaning  “specially viewed”, as in observation enhanced by instruments and controlled  experimentation.  

 

And of course these two means of knowing are only relatively, not absolutely,  independent. Although ideoscopic knowledge logically presupposes  coenoscopic knowledge and cannot have validity if coenoscopic has no independent  validity, yet neither can coenoscopic knowledge escape being shaped and  influenced by the results obtained by ideoscopy. We can all see as a matter of  coenoscopy that the sun revolves around the earth.Yet we all know as a matter  of ideoscopy that it is rather the earth that moves relative to the sun. The core  foundation of the perceptions is a relative motion between sun and earth: this  coenoscopy certainly attains. But that the relativity is earth to sun rather than  the apparent sun to earth would never be known were it not for ideoscopy. That  mistakes are always possible, however (fallibilism being the basic condition of  human knowledge, after all), does not invalidate the distinction between the  two types of knowledge and the foundational character that coenoscopy enjoys  respecting the ideoscopic development that we know as science in the modern  sense.

John Deely 'Purely Objective Reality' (2009)

Voegelin "The New Gnostics"

Charles DeKoninck claimed that he could teach the whole history of modern philosophy as the overlooking of the distinction between what is more known to us and what is more known in itself. This is clear in a thinker like Descartes, who claimed that something like motion or the soul were simply evident to him. The paradoxes of idealism all rest on this same error: i.e. thinking that an idea is the sort of thing so well known to us that all our knowledge could in fact be of nothing but pure ideas.

Alfred North Whitehead named this the fallacy of the misplaced concrete:

"The enormous success of [the enlightenment’s] scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand matter with its simple location in space and time, on the other hand mind, perceiving, suffering, reasoning, but not interfering, has foisted onto philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering of fact. Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on an equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the [wrongful] ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century."

Voegelin explained the fallacy with this illustration:

"A plant is a plant. You see it. You don’t see its physical-chemical processes, and nothing about the plant changes if you know that physical-chemical processes are going on inside. How these processes will result in what you experience immediately as a plant (a rose or an oak tree), you don’t know anyway. So if you know these substructures in the lower levels of the ontic hierarchy and go into the physical, chemical, molecular and atomic structures, even farther down, the greater becomes the miracle how all that thing is a plant. Nothing is explained."

If one seeks to construct an explanation of a plant—or a soul, or a text, or a bat—from the material knowledge gained through science he commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. “If you deform your experience by trying to explain what you experience by the things which you don’t experience by which you know only by science, you get a perverted imagination of reality—if you see a rose as a physical or atomic process.”

This “scientistic ignorance becomes a civilizational disaster because the substantial ordering of existence cannot be achieved through the acquisition of knowledge in the phenomenal sense.” The problem proceeds beyond mere ignorance (which can be remedied, though not easily) when the “belief in the self-sufficient ordering of existence through science is socially entrenched. … The spiritual desire, in the Platonic sense, must be very strong in a young man of our time in order to overcome the obstacles that social pressure puts in the way of its cultivation.” This creates social stratification through the mechanisms of prestige and various economic incentives. It also gives rise to what Voegelin calls “aggressive dilettantism” in matters outside the narrow purview of the expertise possessed by the scientist and imposed as a standard on all others. “What the scientistic dilettante cannot understand must not be proposed in discussions of a problem.”

Gardiner "Eros and Ambition" Rieff's 'Psychological Man'

A New Culture and a New Human Being

As embodied in Psychological Man and his Viennese exemplar, Rieff suggests that the modern revolution is above all a cultural revolution, more profound than any merely political or economic one. The engine of this revolution is the rise of democracy, which radically alters the nature of human relations and generates its own indigenous culture. Modern equality utterly transforms social relations, not just on the political or economic level on which human beings act representatively, as members of groups or as bearers of rights, but far more interestingly, in the realm of personal life. Human relations are at bottom always relations of individuals, and it is here that the democratic revolution has utterly transformed moral understandings sanctified by time immemorial—especially, needless to say, in the realm of relations between the sexes, and by the same token, within the sexes as well. By removing or crippling the old formalities and conventions of social life, democracy creates a culture in which individuals are supposedly free to relate to each other simply as such—as pure individuals or pure “natural” beings, as it were. This idea of nature evidently presupposes the total socialization of man, but in a way unlike any other society. Believing that they are children of Eden, these “emancipated” democrats act out the latest script written for them by popular culture.

Perelandra Falls ?

"If he now failed, this world also would hereafter be redeemed. If he were not the ransom, Another would be. Yet nothing was ever repeated. Not a second crucifixion: perhaps—who knows—not even a second Incarnation ... some act of even more appalling love, some glory of yet deeper humility. For he had seen already how the pattern grows and how from each world it sprouts into the next through some other dimension. The small external evil which Satan had done in Malacandra was only as a line: the deeper evil he had done in Earth was as a square: if Venus fell, her evil would be a cube—her Redemption beyond conceiving. Yet redeemed she would be."

CS Lewis "Perelandra: Voyage to Venus"

20 Year Anniversary 'Triumph of the Therapeutic'

The Therapeutic is the symbolic truth of the present age. He is  . . an assault, more and more successful, upon all sacred barriers. Those high barriers broken down, the therapeutic politicised, bursts into no free space, and into no broad daylight. Rather to his constant surprise, he finds himself buried incredibly deep in a night he never consciously desired. From this burial, the therapeutic may yet find a way up to the higher life. Anyway I do so hope, for the sake and souls of those who make it inside one of the leveling elites than for those who remain in the spiritual safety, however deadly dangerous politically and therefore bodily, of being outsiders.  Philip Rieff - preface to 1987 ed. The Triumph of the Therapeutic

RR Reno: Teaching and the Young

“But there is a deeper point that conservatives need to make. Our sense of instability, our feeling that everything is up for grabs, and our anxious insecurity has its most destructive source in the triumph of desire over restraint in contemporary culture. Divorce and serial cohabitation bring fluidity and change into the most ancient touchstone of permanence: home and hearth.

On this point, it seems to me that American conservatism must recognize the primacy of social mores over economic philosophy and foreign policy. We need to expand an old argument. A democracy depends upon citizens capable of ordered liberty. And a culture that seeks economic vitality and is committed to global leadership also requires citizens who can distinguish responsible autonomy from a life of anomic desire. We can endure the inevitable risks of marketplace and battlefield—but only if we have some confidence about the stability of the deeper, more fundamental things of life.

In our liberal constitutional system, and in our culture of live-and-let-live tolerance, it will be difficult for conservatives to shape a convincing public philosophy of cultural authority. But that’s what we need. Because functional cultural authority is the source of deep existential stability, the stability that will allow us to endure the economic and geo-political insecurities that our nation—one committed to vibrant economic growth and global leadership—must entertain.” RR Reno

And Leszek Kolakowski on teaching:

“You must know that nothing is good or evil, but I am teaching you that some things are good and some are evil, in order to induce in you conditioned reflexes which are useful for the maintenance of solidarity in communal life which is neither good nor evil but must be seen as good” [Kolakowski ‘The Presence of Myth’ p.25]

“The natural social self defense against education so conceived (that is an education which gives up authority or employs authority while at the same time proclaiming its fictitiousness) is understandable. Since an effective inheritance of values is always the work of authority, and every act of emancipation from authority may arise only in the name of values absorbed thanks to authority, a scientistic upbringing is therefore an absurd utopia.”