Philosophy exercise: call for critiques

[grysar]

So, regyt once told me that philosphy was a meta area of study, that it explored and discovered caves/topics like politics, biology, economics, and moved on while those less meta subjects explored their own cave in depth. I'm not doing full justice to the eloquence of the metaphor, but I think that gets the point across.

In that case I believe this is an exercise in philosophy. I propose, against all comers, an analytic system for understanding effective human action. Specifically for describing codes, honor, moral systems, political systems, economic systems, religions, and the like. I do not seek to describe the actions of animals, unthinking objects, computers, or any other entity that doesn't meet my human-centric definition of self-consciousness.

Namely:
All these systems humans follow hold two opposing but also reinforces forces: power and principles.

Power is both creative and destructive. It gives us drive and is tested in the forge that is reality. Thus it changes as the world changes, for the power of a cave man is not the power of a modern human. It can be internal: sharpness of mind, force of will or strength of body. It can be external: weapons, money, technology, God or gods. It can even be a fundamental rejection of the world and a realization of some truer plane.

Principles are rules, conscious or unconscious. They are restrictions on the means we can employ. They are not goals in and of themselves, except that some goals deny us certain means or demand we use others. They are law, the golden rule, cultural mandates, and the like.

Both of these aspects are necessary. Moreover in an effective system they both must be balanced. Power needs the channel of principle or it will become corrupted: see absolute power or hedonism. Principles alone will lack the ability to achieve their goals or they will stagnate without the renewal of power.

As you get into complex economic or political systems the model can be applied, but complex systems will often have multiple sub-systems that need to check and mutually reinforce one another.

So here are my contentions:

1. This model is quite helpful in understanding what makes an effective system.
   
2. This model can be applied to any of the systems I've described above.
   
3. This model can not be simplified to contain only a single force and it need not be expanded to contain three or more.
   
4. This model is a better window for understanding these systems than other dichotomies: individual/society; order/chaos; good/evil; good/bad; rationality/emotion.
   
5. Any effective system must have both of these aspects and they both must be strong forces in and of themselves.
   

So, I need a quick nap and I'm also smug, so I'll skip the examples for now. I invite anyone to challenge any of my contentions or any other contentions they think are implied. And if you provide me a system, I'll give my breakdown.

Addendum due to Ard's threat of violence. (Note, there's lots of variety, I'll just go with a common one I think of.)

System	Power	Principles
Christianity (old school)	God	Strict code of sacrifice and golden rule.
Buddhism	Enlightenment/Seeing through illusion of reality	Rejecting atachment.
Capitalism	Self-interest; hard work; competition; entrepeneurship	Basic market rules: no violence, no monopolies, etc.
Theoretical communism	Hard work; power in the hand of the workers; collective effort	Work all you can; don't take more than you need.
Totalitarianism	Centralized power without restrictions; government can guide colleective energy of entire society; shaping of individuals to best serve countries need	Unquestioning devotion to leader; leader servers interest of people
Democracy	Power is in people's hand	Must accept results of elections; follow election rules; majority must try to serve interests of all
Utilitarianism	All means are available when appropriate	Means/ends together must server greater good
Natural law	Core desires and needs of humanity	Don't infringe on other's core needs in most cases
Kantian	Moral strength; positive example influences others	Don't do anything that you aren't willing to have someone else do
Nihilism	Rejection of no-win world	Don't give a shit.

Comments

[ardweden.livejournal.com]

EXAMPLE ME OR I PUNCH YOU.

ALSO, RUN SAB.

[(Anonymous)]

You have declared that every system is about the balance of two things. You have defined those two things. You have given the vaguest of statements about how they interact. You have made a few random contentions, which all boil down to "this model rocks" rather than explaining or justifying the model itself.

I'd say that until and unless you explain a good deal further, you can't claim to have come up with much of anything.

At best, this system as presented provides little more than a self-evident truth that is not useful for any further analysis. "Behaviours follow principles. Actions require some form of power."

I can take this, look at, for example, military actions of the Soviet Union, and say, "Well, uh, yes, there was power. And, okay, there seem to have probably been some principles at work." And then what? Well, I can't look at types of power or types of principles, since you insist that your model requires no further subdivision. I suppose the only thing it allows is for me to hazard that the ratio of power to principles is off, or possibly that they aren't interacting properly, but I'd question whether either of these statements is useful or even correct, if we continue to deal only at the general level of "power" and "principles" and not, say, good/evil, moral/ethical, individual/society, rational/emotional, or any of the other dichotomies you dismiss as inferior to yours.

Nicolas

[millenia.livejournal.com]

Quote:

"The only rules that matter are these: what a man can do, and what a man will do."

It's a rather structuralist coding approach, isn't it? Maybe it's because I've had to do so much textual analysis and all that, I just like post-structuralism better.

Shallow commentary. I'm not really intelligent enough to give you more than that.

In response to the new examples

[(Anonymous)]

So, the point here is to look at elements of any theory/position and label the elements as either power or principle?

Even putting aside that I think you've miscategorized many things, seemingly because you are including in power a number principles because in your view they are effective (self-interest is a principle of behaviour, all means are available is likewise a principle of behaviour, etc.), this says nothing I can see as analytically useful.

Put simply: you cannot create further analyses in the abstract using this model (that is, based simply on the general ideas of power and principles) and then meaningfully apply them to all these systems. Even moreso, you cannot create an analysis for one of these systems in terms of its particular power/principle and then transport that analysis to another system and apply it there. Any analysis you create of nihilism using a "rejection of no-win world/don't give a shit" will not apply to totalitarianism and its "centralized power etc".

Nicolas

[unreason.livejournal.com]

I think I disagree with you slightly about the nature of principles. Your view of them seems primarily limiting, e.g. Don't beat up that guy with the noisy lawnmower, don't mug that elderly lady for your rent money, and so forth. This is not necessarily the case. If principles were merely limitations on power, then what of this principle: If you see someone being mugged, you should call the police. Your power is not being limited in this case; calling the police is not limiting anything. In this case, your principles are motivating the use of power, rather than limiting it. So it's important to view principles as both a limiting and an initiating factor. I would describe human endeavor with two slightly different factors: Power, and Motivation. Power goes unused without a motivating factor. Similarly, a use of power being driven by motivation can be arrested by a stronger motivation: e.g. A person's desire for money might lead one to utilize power to steal, but if personal morality is stronger it will cancel out the motivating factor, and thus theft will not occur. So, to use a physics metaphor, power supplies the ability to move, but motivation supplies direction to said power.

We can understand using this physics metaphor why power corrupts:
Let us say we have a bank teller. He has the opportunity to steal from his bank, but does not. Why? Let's make a cheesy pseudo-physics equation:

Banker's action=(Power to act)*(Positive factors-Negative factors)
where
Positive factors include: Desire for money, knowledge of potential power to act
Negative factors: Fear of going to jail, knowledge that current power is insufficient to succeed, moral system

Now, let's make a change. Let's say that there's a mix up in the bank's records, and it makes it possible to steal without the bank noticing. Note that the teller needs to know about this change; power is of little effect without the knowledge of power.

What happens to our equation? Well, the positive factors certainly go up, since our teller now has full confidence that he can succeed in his theft. By the same token, the negative factors of fear of jail and knowledge of the possibility of failure are eliminated. This makes morality the only negative factor. Therefore, it is possible that although the teller's morality was sufficient to retard the motion of theft when combined with the other factors, it is now outweighed in the new equation, causing the teller to steal. I would say that all human society and endeavor fall into this category, with actions being determined by Power and Motivation.

[kagami.livejournal.com]

LJ sucks. I've lost my argument twice now >.<

Ok, I don't feel like typing all that stuff out a third time, so I'm just going to put down a quick summary of my thoughts:

Power and principles aren't necessarily opposed. Principles can provide a motivation for using power:

i.e. Princple: Americans should vote. Why? Americans have the power TO vote, and therefore are obligated to use it.

Power can provide motivation for acting on principles, too:

i.e. Liu Bei is a man of virtue. He does not agree with Cao Cao, who wants to conquer China. Liu Bei is the king Shu and a legitimate heir to the Imperial throne. Therefore, Liu Bei acts on his principles and fights against Cao Cao because he is in a position to do so.

I had more than that, but I'm not typing it all out again :P

Starting Over, Part One.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm trying to take a step back here and figure out why we're on such different pages here, and I think the problem is this:

I tend to think that a good classification system should be one (or both) of two things: elegant in its ability to classify or useful for analysis. Otherwise, I just don't see the point.

I think part of the problem has come from the fact that I've been arguing that- at present- this system has neither, but without properly separating the lines of argument.

Is your system elegant in its ability to classify? You'll have to pardon some deliberate vagueness in what I mean by "elegant", but the idea I am getting at is that items clearly belong in one category (or more) and conversely that they clearly do NOT belong in the other categories, and furthermore that the common elements that result in being placed in each category are a readily apparent sign of common group membership among the items in the category.

An example of an elegant classification system in this sense is, say, the list of BESM characters by eye colour type. Putting aside a few oddities, it is generally possible to determine which group a character belongs and which ones it does not, and moreover all items in the group clearly show common group membership.

An elegant classification system may or may not be useful for further analysis. The eye colour lists are pretty much dead ends, analytically, aside from some observations on role players' preference for exotic eye colours.

(Continued.)