Facts, Values, and Philosophy as Criteriological

Ah yes, that good ol' fact/value distinction.

I haven't thought about it in a bit and somehow got to thinking about it today. One of Bloom's major arguments in The Closing of the American Mind is that we've been thoroughly dragged into the distinction between facts and values. He thinks it a problem because it makes it easier for us to engage with relativism. The world of values, the world of culture, is one in which there are no rights or wrongs, only different 'lifestyles'. Bloom, believing that some forms of life are better than others, won't stand for this. That's why Bloom spends a good deal of time in that book retracing the history of German philosophy and sociology–he wants to free us from that way of thinking by demonstrating that its existence is merely historical.

I found it stimulating to think about the facts/values distinction in relation to Collingwood's claim that philosophy is fundamentally criteriological. The business of philosopher, that is to say, is to determine the criteria by which something can be judged. Goodness, for example, is not something that exists as a hard 'fact', but as something that has to be collectively defined by a group of people.

It seems to me that the concept of criteriological thinking is a nice antidote to the relativism implicit in the idea of values. Values and culture have a connotation of immutability, or at least of detached contemplation. Culture or values are things to be respected, to be understood without judgement. More specifically, they are concepts that were invented in a time in which Western people were afraid of applying Eurocentrism to other groups.

Thinking in terms of criteria successfully preserves a sense of uniqueness in groups, avoids a specifically Eurocentric point of view, and leaves room for critical thinking and the possibility of rejecting a certain way of living, which we all know is necessary.

All of this also connects to Jonathan Lear's writing in Open Minded, with which I am only beginning to look at. Lear's major claim, that the disciplines of philosophy and psychoanalysis are threatened by the modern intellectual climate that prefers answers and doctrines over  questions and exploration. Lear equates standards with deadness: when a certain question has been answered and a standard established it means that the question is no longer worth asking, we already know that. This is a great boon in many ways, as Lear observes, we don't want our dentists pondering the best way to clean our teeth while they work on us. We want them to already know how to clean our teeth. But with disciplines like philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, literature, or most of the humanities, we do ourselves a great disservice by seeking standards or doctrines. For, in many ways, the purpose of the humanities is to permanently embody and embrace the fundamental questions: What am I? Where am I? What am I to do? What is a good life?

The human questions are criteriological, straight up.

It seems to me the real danger is that in our love of standards we have forgotten to care for the fundamental questions, the disquieting mystery at the heart of our simply being here. It is thinking that needs to be kept alive, no doubt.