NEWSLETTER 357: “What ought I to do with my life?”
Friday 05 September 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter The View from Oregon – 357 “What ought I to do with my life?” mailchi.mp/bca69c0f3ea8/the-view-from-oregon-357 …in which I discuss Kant’s three questions, an ambiguity in the second question, the moral law, teleology in the Critique of Judgment, utilitarianism, doing good better, and purposive action…
The Lived Experience of Instrumentation.—A body of philosophy of science has grown up devoted to whether we can authentically assert that we “observe” anything that we observe in a mediated fashion, i.e., what we observe through the mediation of scientific instruments. Do scientific instruments open new horizons of sensation to us, facilitating novel experiences, or must these experiences, necessarily mediated by our existing senses, constitute nothing essentially new in any way? In “squiggly line” science, our experience of some heretofore unexperienced aspect of the world is mediated by the indicator on a recording machine; we do not experience the thing itself, but our experience of the indicator. But this is very much in the spirit of Schopenhauer’s exposition of the dilemma of the Kantian idealist: “…what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself.” At one remove this may be true of scientific instruments—as we know only the eye that sees a sun and the hand that feels an earth, and not the sun and Earth themselves, so too we know only the signal that registers on an instrument, and not the reality that triggers the signal. Moreover, the habit of the human mind, aided and abetted by neuroplasticity, to transform any extension of our senses into a part of ourselves, and for the brain to begin assimilating these experiences as it would any other experience of the eye or the ear, makes these experiences feel as real as any conventional experience of observation. But does this feeling of observation carry any evidentiary weight? Is there a “lived experience” of microscropy? Or of galvanometrics?
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Koyré’s Platonistic Philosophy of the History of Science
Friday 29 August 2025 is the 133rd anniversary of the birth of Alexandre Koyré (born Alexandr Vladimirovich, or Volfovich, Koyra—and in Russian, Александр Владимирович, Вольфович, Койра; 29 August 1892 – 28 April 1964), who was born in Tagenrog, Russia on this date in 1892.
Koyré’s detailed histories of modern science, particularly focusing on the work of Galileo and Newton, sought to demonstrate the transition from the orderly and harmonious cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages to an infinite universe in which the devalorization of being leaves all entities on the same ontological level. Less well known is Koyré’s Platonism and his a priorism.
The Travails of Derivative Being.—Both realism and idealism can be understood in terms of emergence—there is no ontological category that must be denied either of them as long as the order of emergence is retained with either matter or mind as the source of all that follows. Ontological commitments to delirious visions of demons and angelic hosts can be annexed to an authentic naturalism as long as it can be shown that they appeared in the natural order of things—life arises from matter, mind arises from life, and from the fevered imagination of the mind there arises a menagerie of unlikely beings. As long as some causal mechanism for any given existent can be traced back to the sure and certain source of all being, all is well in the closed ontologies of realism and idealism. The problem for either doctrine is when the being of a given ontological derivation of emergence makes claims of autonomy or precedence inconsistent with the order of emergence assigned to it by the emergent hierarchy in question, or when the hierarchy itself holds that it should not give birth to such an emergent. We find in each case it is the value of what has been derived in these complementary great chains of beingthat forbids its existence and places its apparent reality under a cloud. The determination to terminate the chain of derivations as some particular stage is an axiological interdiction in the interestof the higher reality of an ontological ought or ought not. Antiquity already gave us Manichaeism, in which matter is intrinsically evil and should not have been, and modern philosophy has given us physicalism, in which the spiritual world should not have been.
Friday 29 August 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter The View from Oregon – 356 A Thought Experiment in Ancient Technology mailchi.mp/1b22042bb877/the-view-from-oregon-356 …in which I discuss ancient technology, idea diffusion, metallurgy, crucible steel, Hero’s steam turbine, ball bearings, Ulfberht swords, thermal airships, aerial photography, and Life 3.0…
The Agony of Transcendence.—Once upon a time there was an age in our history in which the pursuit of the transcendent was accounted a virtue, and life spent in such pursuit was accounted a life well lived, but this age now belongs to a past increasingly lost in the mists of time, alien to us, and incomprehensible by degrees. The great anxiety of every contemporary philosophy, analytical and continental alike, is that this work might be mistaken for ontologically enfranchising anything that smacks of a transcendental or non-naturalistic being. Even the hint of such a concession is taken for a weakness. The holism of Quine and the analytical pragmatism he inspired displaced the unattainable ideal from its former station as a biological mind attempting to grasp pure transcendence, with the scientist attempting to grasp a complete and exhaustive description of the world—both equally impossible, both equally compelling, both equally vivid aspirations toward which one might strive for a lifetime, without ever achieving that aim, but all the while gathering into oneself a greater and more comprehensive understanding of the world. This is the aspiration that dare not speaketh its own name, and it is this concealed quest that has transformed the pure bliss of reaching beyond life into an agony that must keep silent or risk being betrayed as a heretic—i.e., as a man who has transcended his time.
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Max Scheler on Man’s Place in Nature
Friday 22 August 2024 is the 151st anniversary of the birth of Max Ferdinand Scheler (22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928), who was born in Munich on this date in 1874.
Scheler’s abiding interest was in philosophical anthropology, to which he devoted his last, short work, Man’s Place in Nature. I discuss this book and Scheler’s conception of the distinctive place of human beings in the cosmos. I characterize philosophical anthropology as a kind of metaphysical orienteering that gives us our existential positionality.
The function of monumental architecture.—It is often stated that civilizations typically produce monumental architecture; this is one of ten attributes that V. Gordon Childe stipulated in his paper on the urban revolution, which has since been used as a diagnostic for civilization. That monumental architecture characterizes civilization is clear, but why monumental architecture characterizes civilization is a different question. What function does monumental architecture have in a civilization? Monumental architecture engages all of society, from top to bottom, in a common undertaking. The visionary who conceives, architects who design, the workers who build, the tradesmen who supply, the financiers who fund, and the bureaucratic or priestly class who eventually make use of the structure, all come together around the monumental project, which is a focal point for the city in which it is sited. Moreover, in the earliest civilizations monumental architecture performs this function of engaging the whole of society at a time when the population of a city had given up its hunting and gathering and its village agriculture practiced since time out of mind. In pre-urbanized societies, everyone is engaged in the common effort of survival, so that the members of a nomadic band or an agricultural village each understand what everyone else in their social group is doing, because they are all doing more-or-less the same thing. Craft specialization characterizes urbanism no less than monumental architecture (and also appears on Childe’s list), and while specialization increases economic efficiency, it also threatens social rupture as each sector tends to inhabit its own self-referential world. In this early urban context, monumental architecture is one of the forms of glue that ensures social cohesion.
Friday 22 August 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter On Knowing How to History The View from Oregon – 355 mailchi.mp/e8880623ba94/the-view-from-oregon-355 …in which I discuss knowing that and knowing how, Gilbert Ryle, historical reenactment, moral panics, the witchcraze, Iris Murdoch, recovering past passions and enthusiasms, the rage of Achilles, never again, and Elaine Pagels on the Gospel of Thomas…
Ontological Saturation.—One way in which a concept can be considered narrow would be because only one (or a few) objects fall under its extension. This is the case of “natural satellite of the Earth”—an example employed by Frege. This example, however, isn’t necessarily narrow in the sense of having a narrow extension; it is in another sense a highly general concept because it is a special case of the very general concept of a moon. If, at some future date, the solar system is flooded with many asteroids, say, from some extraterrestrial close encounter, the Earth could acquire many additional natural satellites, and then the concept “natural satellite of Earth” could have a great many objects fall under its extension. The fact that this concept can have a changing extension reflects a generality compatible with its current narrowness. The conceptual simplicity of “natural satellite of Earth” betrays its generality, even if a single object, or no object at all, falls under the concept; in this case, the intension is simple, and that simplicity can yield a narrow or a wide extension. A complex intension more readily yields a narrow extension, and an intension might be narrow in more than one way, but that is because there are an infinitude of forms of particularism that could render an intension narrow. We can arrive at particularism by specifying many properties (restricting the extension by expanding the intension) or through the use of highly particularistic concepts, but highly particularistic concepts are naturally complex, i.e., they tacitly incorporate a greater complexity of intension. The concept “natural satellite of Earth” can be made less complex by eliminating the qualifier “natural” and by substituting any planet for “Earth,” but it can also be made more complex by specifying the diameter or orbital distance or even surface features of the natural satellite. When we think of “The Moon” in all is particularity we could be said to entertain the concept of the Moon, but this is misleading, like Hegel’s “concrete universal,” which isn’t a concept at all. A concept is, as Frege noted, “unsaturated,” but any concrete individual is particular in virtue of its ontological saturation.
Nick Nielsen
NEWSLETTER 357: “What ought I to do with my life?”
Friday 05 September 2025
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 357
“What ought I to do with my life?”
mailchi.mp/bca69c0f3ea8/the-view-from-oregon-357
…in which I discuss Kant’s three questions, an ambiguity in the second question, the moral law, teleology in the Critique of Judgment, utilitarianism, doing good better, and purposive action…
Substack: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/what-ought-i-to-do-…
Medium: jnnielsen.medium.com/what-ought-i-to-do-with-my-li…
Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1nh…
13 hours ago | [YT] | 2
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Nick Nielsen
The Lived Experience of Instrumentation.—A body of philosophy of science has grown up devoted to whether we can authentically assert that we “observe” anything that we observe in a mediated fashion, i.e., what we observe through the mediation of scientific instruments. Do scientific instruments open new horizons of sensation to us, facilitating novel experiences, or must these experiences, necessarily mediated by our existing senses, constitute nothing essentially new in any way? In “squiggly line” science, our experience of some heretofore unexperienced aspect of the world is mediated by the indicator on a recording machine; we do not experience the thing itself, but our experience of the indicator. But this is very much in the spirit of Schopenhauer’s exposition of the dilemma of the Kantian idealist: “…what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself.” At one remove this may be true of scientific instruments—as we know only the eye that sees a sun and the hand that feels an earth, and not the sun and Earth themselves, so too we know only the signal that registers on an instrument, and not the reality that triggers the signal. Moreover, the habit of the human mind, aided and abetted by neuroplasticity, to transform any extension of our senses into a part of ourselves, and for the brain to begin assimilating these experiences as it would any other experience of the eye or the ear, makes these experiences feel as real as any conventional experience of observation. But does this feeling of observation carry any evidentiary weight? Is there a “lived experience” of microscropy? Or of galvanometrics?
13 hours ago | [YT] | 1
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Nick Nielsen
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Koyré’s Platonistic Philosophy of the History of Science
Friday 29 August 2025 is the 133rd anniversary of the birth of Alexandre Koyré (born Alexandr Vladimirovich, or Volfovich, Koyra—and in Russian, Александр Владимирович, Вольфович, Койра; 29 August 1892 – 28 April 1964), who was born in Tagenrog, Russia on this date in 1892.
Koyré’s detailed histories of modern science, particularly focusing on the work of Galileo and Newton, sought to demonstrate the transition from the orderly and harmonious cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages to an infinite universe in which the devalorization of being leaves all entities on the same ontological level. Less well known is Koyré’s Platonism and his a priorism.
Quora: philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/koyres-platonistic-…
Video: https://youtu.be/y-IXOvrW4W8
Podcast: open.spotify.com/episode/39vYXricKU2wd3gz37gRaB?si…
#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory #AlexandreKoyré #infinite #infinity #Platonism #ThoughtExperiments #disenchantment #devalorization #Galileo
6 days ago | [YT] | 2
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Nick Nielsen
The Travails of Derivative Being.—Both realism and idealism can be understood in terms of emergence—there is no ontological category that must be denied either of them as long as the order of emergence is retained with either matter or mind as the source of all that follows. Ontological commitments to delirious visions of demons and angelic hosts can be annexed to an authentic naturalism as long as it can be shown that they appeared in the natural order of things—life arises from matter, mind arises from life, and from the fevered imagination of the mind there arises a menagerie of unlikely beings. As long as some causal mechanism for any given existent can be traced back to the sure and certain source of all being, all is well in the closed ontologies of realism and idealism. The problem for either doctrine is when the being of a given ontological derivation of emergence makes claims of autonomy or precedence inconsistent with the order of emergence assigned to it by the emergent hierarchy in question, or when the hierarchy itself holds that it should not give birth to such an emergent. We find in each case it is the value of what has been derived in these complementary great chains of beingthat forbids its existence and places its apparent reality under a cloud. The determination to terminate the chain of derivations as some particular stage is an axiological interdiction in the interestof the higher reality of an ontological ought or ought not. Antiquity already gave us Manichaeism, in which matter is intrinsically evil and should not have been, and modern philosophy has given us physicalism, in which the spiritual world should not have been.
6 days ago | [YT] | 4
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Nick Nielsen
Friday 29 August 2025
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 356
A Thought Experiment in Ancient Technology
mailchi.mp/1b22042bb877/the-view-from-oregon-356
…in which I discuss ancient technology, idea diffusion, metallurgy, crucible steel, Hero’s steam turbine, ball bearings, Ulfberht swords, thermal airships, aerial photography, and Life 3.0…
Substack: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/a-thought-experimen…
Medium: jnnielsen.medium.com/a-thought-experiment-in-anach…
Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1n7…
1 week ago | [YT] | 0
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Nick Nielsen
The Agony of Transcendence.—Once upon a time there was an age in our history in which the pursuit of the transcendent was accounted a virtue, and life spent in such pursuit was accounted a life well lived, but this age now belongs to a past increasingly lost in the mists of time, alien to us, and incomprehensible by degrees. The great anxiety of every contemporary philosophy, analytical and continental alike, is that this work might be mistaken for ontologically enfranchising anything that smacks of a transcendental or non-naturalistic being. Even the hint of such a concession is taken for a weakness. The holism of Quine and the analytical pragmatism he inspired displaced the unattainable ideal from its former station as a biological mind attempting to grasp pure transcendence, with the scientist attempting to grasp a complete and exhaustive description of the world—both equally impossible, both equally compelling, both equally vivid aspirations toward which one might strive for a lifetime, without ever achieving that aim, but all the while gathering into oneself a greater and more comprehensive understanding of the world. This is the aspiration that dare not speaketh its own name, and it is this concealed quest that has transformed the pure bliss of reaching beyond life into an agony that must keep silent or risk being betrayed as a heretic—i.e., as a man who has transcended his time.
1 week ago | [YT] | 0
View 0 replies
Nick Nielsen
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Max Scheler on Man’s Place in Nature
Friday 22 August 2024 is the 151st anniversary of the birth of Max Ferdinand Scheler (22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928), who was born in Munich on this date in 1874.
Scheler’s abiding interest was in philosophical anthropology, to which he devoted his last, short work, Man’s Place in Nature. I discuss this book and Scheler’s conception of the distinctive place of human beings in the cosmos. I characterize philosophical anthropology as a kind of metaphysical orienteering that gives us our existential positionality.
Quora: philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/scheler-on-mans-pla…
Video: https://youtu.be/iT9c9CLxLTc
Podcast: open.spotify.com/episode/75IfbH8TcTP6H58RaZ5vuj?si…
#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory #MaxScheler #phenomenology #PhilosophicalAnthropology #non-naturalism #positionality #orienteering
2 months ago | [YT] | 8
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Nick Nielsen
The function of monumental architecture.—It is often stated that civilizations typically produce monumental architecture; this is one of ten attributes that V. Gordon Childe stipulated in his paper on the urban revolution, which has since been used as a diagnostic for civilization. That monumental architecture characterizes civilization is clear, but why monumental architecture characterizes civilization is a different question. What function does monumental architecture have in a civilization? Monumental architecture engages all of society, from top to bottom, in a common undertaking. The visionary who conceives, architects who design, the workers who build, the tradesmen who supply, the financiers who fund, and the bureaucratic or priestly class who eventually make use of the structure, all come together around the monumental project, which is a focal point for the city in which it is sited. Moreover, in the earliest civilizations monumental architecture performs this function of engaging the whole of society at a time when the population of a city had given up its hunting and gathering and its village agriculture practiced since time out of mind. In pre-urbanized societies, everyone is engaged in the common effort of survival, so that the members of a nomadic band or an agricultural village each understand what everyone else in their social group is doing, because they are all doing more-or-less the same thing. Craft specialization characterizes urbanism no less than monumental architecture (and also appears on Childe’s list), and while specialization increases economic efficiency, it also threatens social rupture as each sector tends to inhabit its own self-referential world. In this early urban context, monumental architecture is one of the forms of glue that ensures social cohesion.
2 months ago | [YT] | 8
View 2 replies
Nick Nielsen
Friday 22 August 2025
Grand Strategy Newsletter
On Knowing How to History
The View from Oregon – 355
mailchi.mp/e8880623ba94/the-view-from-oregon-355
…in which I discuss knowing that and knowing how, Gilbert Ryle, historical reenactment, moral panics, the witchcraze, Iris Murdoch, recovering past passions and enthusiasms, the rage of Achilles, never again, and Elaine Pagels on the Gospel of Thomas…
Substack: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/on-knowing-how-to-h…
Medium: jnnielsen.medium.com/knowing-how-to-history-e502ae…
Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1n3…
3 months ago | [YT] | 2
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Nick Nielsen
Ontological Saturation.—One way in which a concept can be considered narrow would be because only one (or a few) objects fall under its extension. This is the case of “natural satellite of the Earth”—an example employed by Frege. This example, however, isn’t necessarily narrow in the sense of having a narrow extension; it is in another sense a highly general concept because it is a special case of the very general concept of a moon. If, at some future date, the solar system is flooded with many asteroids, say, from some extraterrestrial close encounter, the Earth could acquire many additional natural satellites, and then the concept “natural satellite of Earth” could have a great many objects fall under its extension. The fact that this concept can have a changing extension reflects a generality compatible with its current narrowness. The conceptual simplicity of “natural satellite of Earth” betrays its generality, even if a single object, or no object at all, falls under the concept; in this case, the intension is simple, and that simplicity can yield a narrow or a wide extension. A complex intension more readily yields a narrow extension, and an intension might be narrow in more than one way, but that is because there are an infinitude of forms of particularism that could render an intension narrow. We can arrive at particularism by specifying many properties (restricting the extension by expanding the intension) or through the use of highly particularistic concepts, but highly particularistic concepts are naturally complex, i.e., they tacitly incorporate a greater complexity of intension. The concept “natural satellite of Earth” can be made less complex by eliminating the qualifier “natural” and by substituting any planet for “Earth,” but it can also be made more complex by specifying the diameter or orbital distance or even surface features of the natural satellite. When we think of “The Moon” in all is particularity we could be said to entertain the concept of the Moon, but this is misleading, like Hegel’s “concrete universal,” which isn’t a concept at all. A concept is, as Frege noted, “unsaturated,” but any concrete individual is particular in virtue of its ontological saturation.
3 months ago | [YT] | 2
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