[W]hat is the objective basis of politics?

Political Philosophy
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4 hours ago, The Laws of Biology said:

[Aimless rant]

Honestly, most of that is a strange rant about Aristotle that doesn’t have to do with the topic. The only thing possibly relevant is your second bullet. But Aristotle didn’t make claims about a philosophy-centric theory of human history… 
 

7 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

Can a college campus be a city?  Can a city include surrounding countryside?

Sure. I mean, the word city isn’t the important point here, I was just explaining Aristotle’s thinking. Given the forms of organization these days, we could also have things like corporations, campuses, where we can easily find several thousand people interacting. The countryside could count, if those people interact with city goers on a regular basis. What I’m getting at is that the primary unit of consideration for politics is the level of the city, and anything equivalent to that. 

6 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

Similar to “society” the most basic political unit has to be two people.

Basic doesn’t have to mean reduction to the smallest level. Or rather, basic can be the most simple unit, but this doesn’t mean that the minimal unit is the primary consideration. Neurons are the most basic aspect of cognition, but the primary consideration of cognition is not neurons. Instead, it is a complex interaction among neurons, or the way many neurons operate together. In other words, the primary consideration of a subject is whatever system is present, at least when it involves multiple individual things. Politics should be the same, with the primary unit being some system of people. 2 people coming across each other is not really a systematic interaction of people.

 

6 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

What is the purpose of governance?

Governance is not really the question or purpose of politics if it is to mean how people operate within society or ought to operate within society. Families are a kind of political unit, and they have rules of some kind, but this isn’t exactly governance. Tribes are a political unit, but law is not part of how they operate exactly. 

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1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

Governance is not really the question or purpose of politics

True, politics goes beyond how a particular society governs itself. Regarding family and governance being unrelated, I disagree very strongly. In fact, the way a family governs itself influences how people think of a government. This creates the tendency for people to push the idea that if we all treated everyone as family, then we wouldn’t have any problems.

Politics as a body of knowledge has to be concerned about “how to have functional or peaceful resolution to conflict”. Otherwise, what is it concerning? If it were a study of how people interact, then wouldn’t sociology take care of that?

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2 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

Every science, from logic to music theory, serves some biological purpose. This does not make physics or mathematics a sub-topic of biology.

A science is categorized as philosophical if it’s required by life in some fundamental way. For example, living in general requires distinguishing truth from falsehood (epistemology) and the beneficial from the destructive (ethics and politics).

Yes, but doesn’t that confuse the delineation between science and philosophy? As in, saying that “biological purpose” is not a philosophical position but rather a scientific one?

I would argue that I don’t have to know the science behind biology, other than life exists and the fact that I am alive to come to the ethical conclusions that are necessary.

Unless you are saying that knowing that life exists and knowing something about it’s nature inherently is scientific.

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21 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:

In fact, the way a family governs itself influences how people think of a government.

I didn’t say they are unrelated, I said it isn’t exactly governance. No one is commanded by the dictates of law in a family, and law is far more broadly applied than the norms in a family. 

27 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:

Politics as a body of knowledge has to be concerned about “how to have functional or peaceful resolution to conflict”.

That’s the thing under contention. It’s not a good way of thinking to begin with normative standards of the subject already formed. Just as the field of ethics includes proper systems of morality as well as improper systems of morality, politics should include anything that is political. We can’t just assume that peaceful resolution is the purpose of political philosophy, at least not before you even decide the primary unit of consideration. After all, we could say that peaceful resolution is detrimental to the health and longevity of a population because it encourages passivity. Or perhaps the purpose is merely to maximize individual control over populations as if the population is a slave to yourself. Sociology is a closely related field, but politics would go more into group decision-making and and into forming rules. In one way, sociology includes all aspects of socialization, while politics has to include the process of governance and/or enforcing norms. 

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47 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:

Yes, but doesn’t that confuse the delineation between science and philosophy?

Even if the specialized sciences depend for their discoveries on philosophical knowledge (such as the laws of deduction and induction), the latter is still classified as one of the sciences.

Rand defined philosophy as “the science that studies the fundamental aspects of the nature of existence”.

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3 hours ago, Eiuol said:

That’s the thing under contention. It’s not a good way of thinking to begin with normative standards of the subject already formed. Just as the field of ethics includes proper systems of morality as well as improper systems of morality, politics should include anything that is political.

I don’t see any other way other than starting with what would be good for me. Why else would a body of knowledge be accumulated? There has to be a sense of how things should be like (and what shouldn’t it be like) to be motivated to pursue any inquiry.

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2 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

Even if the specialized sciences depend for their discoveries on philosophical knowledge (such as the laws of deduction and induction), the latter is still classified as one of the sciences.

Rand defined philosophy as “the science that studies the fundamental aspects of the nature of existence”.

I’m going by the definition of science where everything has to be demonstrated via experiments.

Perhaps I should ask people what they mean by science first.

What I am arguing is that things like deduction and induction are validated without experiments. Similarly, good governance should be discoverable based on philosophical inquiry.

What I run up against are the areas where experiments have not been done but one can logically come up with the answer.

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18 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:

I’m going by the definition of science where everything has to be demonstrated via experiments

In other words, natural science. The common classification of sciences is into three branches: formal (such as logic, mathematics), natural (chemistry, biology) and social (psychology, economics).

I go with Rand in classifying a science as philosophical if it’s realistically needed by everyone regardless of their occupation, interests and other considerations. In the essay The Objectivist Ethics she laments the lack of a scientific ethics and arrives at one by observation of facts, not experiments. 

 

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11 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

I don’t see any other way other than starting with what would be good for me. Why else would a body of knowledge be accumulated?

But you wouldn’t begin by knowing what is good for you in the domain of politics. And at the outset, you wouldn’t begin by knowing how and if politics is connected to ethics. Not to say that you don’t already have political knowledge, it’s that Rand didn’t articulate a full sense of the foundation of politics, and a clear primary unit is important. 

11 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

There has to be a sense of how things should be like (and what shouldn’t it be like) to be motivated to pursue any inquiry.

For normative conclusions, yes. When we begin inquiry though, we first need a sense of how things are, and hopefully some benefit to continuing that inquiry. To have an objective inquiry, you need some primary unit of study whose nature doesn’t depend on how things should be or the way you would like things to be. 

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11 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

Perhaps I should ask people what they mean by science first.

In general English is pretty bad for making fine distinctions about knowledge and thinking.

The German word _Wissenschaft _is closer to what KP is talking about. It’s usually translated as science, but is meant to encompass detailed inquiry into pretty much any academic subject. 

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On 4/14/2022 at 2:55 PM, The Laws of Biology said:

Imagine that a freshman student majoring in Physics at a university approached one of his professors and asked, “Sir, what is the objective basis for Physics?”

That’s actually easy, although most professors would feel ambushed by such a question.  Measurement is the objective basis of physics.  Measurement itself can be unpacked into a large topic and has epistemology and objectivity embedded within it as premises, with objectivity being a normative standard in itself.  

The objective basis of objectivity is not quite axiomatic (or perhaps it is, offhand I don’t recall)  but it must be closely coupled with the axiomatic concepts of Existence, Identity and Consciousness.

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On 4/14/2022 at 12:27 PM, Eiuol said:

I don’t think that the basic political unit can be the family.

I agree because it (the choice of family as basic political unit) already seems to be making a value judgement that reproduction is the most important or organizing principle in political activity.  Reproduction should be encompassed by the theory but it isn’t quite fundamental enough in my still evolving opinion.

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On 4/13/2022 at 8:48 AM, StrictlyLogical said:

A few things to keep in mind as pertinent to the discussion, either as limiting or informing factors to consider:

 

1.  Metaphysical status of the “individual” versus metaphysical status of a “society” or “collective” (just a group of those individuals).

2.  The distinction between the metaphysically given and the manmade, more precisely, “free-will” of the individual (the way things are in current or past societies are manmade in the sense that they were/are chosen).

3.  Natural philosophy or special sciences (e.g. economics, social sciences) properly deal with what IS, i.e. description, Ethics and insofar as Politics derives from it, and as a branch of Philosophy, is an investigation into “prescription”, what  should one do (Ethics), or what kind of society (its nature, attributes and properties) one should try to bring about to live in (Politics), given the nature of Man, the metaphysical significance of the individual, and in consequence of free-will and Ethics (objective morality).  Politics as a branch of philosophy and not special sciences, although informed with descrive knowledges, is itself prescriptive.

Good points to keep in mind.

  1. Rand’s definition of value is about the actions of “one” and does not reify a collective into existence.  A good example to follow.  Politics is something that “one” engages in, even if it by definition requires some other “one”.

2.  Point taken but should be moot, in that a sufficiently low level conceptualization of what politics is would (I hope) capture the behavior of animals without free will.

3.  Yes, but.   Rand needed an objective definition of value to unlock the field of ethics for her reasoning.  I contend a counterpart is needed for a philosophy of politics.

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On 4/13/2022 at 5:22 PM, Boydstun said:

Has anyone read The Politics of Chimpanzees by Frans de Waal?

I have at last ordered From Leaders to Rulers edited by Jonathan Haas.*

 

Thanks Stephen.  The Chimpanzee book, and other of de Waals’ works look fascinating (even beyond my interest in the topic of this thread).  The Haas book looks to be too “in the weeds” specific as a kind of meta-history for my purposes.

Might there be any amateur philosophers comparable to Roy Childs publishing their own speculative essays on politics that you might remember from those days?

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On 4/15/2022 at 10:54 AM, Eiuol said:

On 4/14/2022 at 11:23 PM, Easy Truth said:

I don’t see any other way other than starting with what would be good for me. Why else would a body of knowledge be accumulated?

But you wouldn’t begin by knowing what is good for you in the domain of politics.

Then how would you begin? You are bound by preferences, predefined preferences and they are at the core of value judgements. It’s as if you’re proposing that Politics is impersonal, like it shouldn’t be about you. Then what is it about?

And as for the smallest political unit, it has to start with 2 people, otherwise one would be talking about internal voices within the same person. (which I suppose one could make the case that some voices within the psyche have more authority than others etc.)

In that case, and I have heard this case made, that politics is the study of “power”. The dynamics of power, of its accumulation, of its projections, of defenses against it etc.
 

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8 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

Then how would you begin?

I just told you in the post you quoted. And my first post. I mean, I’m not saying anything much different from the usual Objectivist position about objectivity.

8 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

And as for the smallest political unit, it has to start with 2 people

You said that already, so I explained why the smallest unit is not necessarily the primary unit for a subject. 

 

 

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The smallest unit would need be minimum three. Two to interact and one to intervene [govern]. 

Consider two individuals on an island (where a quantity of one would need morality the most.)

With two, “might makes right” has nothing to intervene. With three, a potential for a mightiest to be a purveyor of justice exists. (which is an argument for ‘might makes right’ on the face of it."

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3 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

The smallest unit would need be minimum three. Two to interact and one to intervene [govern]. 

I would agree with you Greg, but I would say that two represents the anarchist type of government. Unless you make a case that it does not qualify as a political system.

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Anarchy is no political system. It would be harder to make a case that a politic would be formed by three on an island.

 

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Do you have to have law, or something like it, to have a city?