I'm uncaging the philosopher in me to let him prance around a bit. I promise to tranq him in the neck and shove him back in his cage to return to the serious business of writing on something terribly importantly serious like Babylonian entrail extispicy for you dismal theology and history majors that usually read this blog.
What are “Fact and Opinion” worksheets?
If Plato, Socrates or Aristotle took these tests, they'd flunk. De facto, they’re epistemological catechisms enforced by the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core. They usually teach a street variety of positivism, a philosophy declared dead by philosophers since the late 1970s.
What’s positivism?
The drill sheets affirm positivism to the extent that they assume the self-refuting claim that only those things accessible to mathematics and the five senses (i.e. science) can be known. I say this is self-refuting because such a claim cannot itself be verified by the five senses or mathematics. You will never meet a living professional philosopher who holds the view.
A. J. Ayer, who I’m informed was the Ivan Drago of positivism, reflected after its funeral, "I suppose the most important [defect]...was that nearly all of it was false." And, amusingly, if sociologists like the Jewish-German Edmund Husserl in his Crisis of European Sciences are correct, the philosophy, particularly an extreme form called scientism, happened to coincide with a certain early 1940s German political movement (bit more on that towards the end).
Ok, I’ll humor your dystopian sci-fi plot since you contributed the word extispicy to my vocabulary, but how exactly do these worksheets plunge a soul sucking iron proboscis into the minds of our children?
Students are given worksheets rowed with statements and are asked if those statements are matters of fact or opinion. A top website, from which I will be drawing my examples, clarifies:
“…I teach students that a fact is any statement that can be proven: ‘there are 10,000 feet in a mile.’ Even though this is incorrect, I teach students that this is still a fact…define a fact as any statement that can be proven true or false…”
In other words, the truth content of the following examples is irrelevant. Following are categories that educators are teaching yield no knowledge in any way constituting proof or fact—namely, art, human purpose,morality and beauty. (Basically, everything that really matters.)
Art
OPINION: “Popular music today is not as good as it was in the past.”
The answer key informs us sentences of this nature, regardless of truth content, belong to the realm of opinion—that some music cannot in fact be deemed better that other music or, if we were to cite other examples like “The huger games will be a great movie,” that the quality of all art is subjective opinion. Have the authors really ever considered what this means?
You may not have a personal taste for a band like the Bloodhound Gang and such immortal hit lyrics as “You and me baby ain’t noth’ but mammals So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel,” but according to this view, one cannot dare assert the lyrics of Keats, Homer or Solomon are in any objective (read: real) sense better than these. Since music cannot be put in a beaker, you cannot assert the knuckle-dragging superstition that the soaring eternal stillness of John Tavner’s Funeral Canticle is in any real sense better in its aesthetics and artistic content than the stochastic, vomiting of Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrete.
My mind drifts to an account of Rudolf Otto during a stay in Morocco:
It is Sabbath. You find yourself in a grimy small apartment within the ancient city, sacred night falling. In the street outside you hear the lifting of uncanny, ancient tongues, cantillating in style resembling Islamic chant. The voices heave and soar, weaving into a pulsing chaos. It is impossible to distinguish individual words. Building, like the desperation of Tiamat writhing in her final moments. Then, in a supernova of terror, the babble crashes into explosive unity: “Qadosh! Qadosh! Qadosh! Adonai ztevaot; melo col ha’arezt kevodo!” (Holy! Holy! Holy! Is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!)
Immediately, you are obliterated into nothing. If all the mountains of the earth were to consume you, they could not hide your feeling of nakedness, and your terror is not of the common iron-blood sort. No, it is that rare feeling of creeping flesh that most of us primarily will know from hearing a good ghost story. In this moment your mind holds communion of understanding with those who speak of the gods haunting these antique desert lands, and you have understood Isaiah who cried out “Woe to me! I am undone!”
Thanks for that mawkish theological reverie Ben, but how exactly can a thing like music be objective?
I agree there is room for subjectivity to art, but truth is objective, and does not music aim to teach truth to our guts and chests? If this is the case for even some music then there must be music that conveys truth accurately and some that does so poorly or lies about truth all together. To this extent, the quality of music and other art is objective.
If it is true all people listen to music from some desire to become unified with the things the music is about, and if music is philosophy felt, and philosophy the pursuit of success—the department of education would have us be unified with all things indiscriminately, since success also is blacklisted as an epistemological phantasm.
Success
OPINION: “The more money someone has the more successful they are.”
We are informed judgments of success like this cannot be proven true or false. Other examples are easy to find. The American Library Association tells us the statement, “People should be able to watch as much TV as they want,” is only opinion. But then, this demands that there is no provable chief purpose or end to man by which the actions of his life may be compared in order to call one life objectively more successful or better lived than another.
I work at an airport. Once my coworker who has five children made the mistake of mentioning to a cargo pilot that she has lots of kids. The pilot responded by telling her, “That was a stupid choice. I chose not to have kids, and now I’m a millionaire.” What would you say to this man? The authors of these worksheets could not take an opinion in the matter. If they did, their own drill sheets would cry out against them. They can offer no proof he is less or more successful for aiming his life at acquiring comfort and toys rather than laboring over children because success for them is a standard we each must create subjectively.
Not only does this doctrine declare war against all religions (since religions exist to inform us what truly successful living is), will not the educational ouroboros turn and devour itself? Why do we send children to school or have them read about Harriet Tubman if there is not some objective standard of greatness we believe they are obligated to strive for? Why should youth steeped in Latin be deemed more successful than youth steeped in Family Guy reruns? (I assure you the latter will be more sociable.) If the aim of government is to promote a successful society, what will become of the society which repudiates the possibility of knowing facts about what success is?
Morality
OPINION: “Drug dealers belong in prison.”
OPINION: “Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior.”
OPINION: “It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism”
Dr. McBrayer has already spanked these worksheet authors here for teaching children there are no moral facts. I fear it’s condescending to the reader’s intelligence to elaborate what happens when a nation accepts the idea that there are no knowable laws above men’s laws. It is no coincidence that the Nazis appealed to legal positivism (specifically John Austin’s Command Theory) throughout the Nuremberg trials. If there exists no universal moral law above men’s laws by which to compare men’s laws then there is no such thing as just law or unjust law, and law can never be said to have improved. There is only the capricious Athenian mob ladling hemlock-punch into dixy cups for the MLKs, Antigones and Nelson Mandelas it doesn’t like.
Beauty
OPINION: “The Hudson River is the most beautiful river in New York.”(source)
OPINION: “The ugliest sea creature is the manatee”
OPINION: “Popular music today is not as good as it was in the past.”
OPINION: “The most beautiful state…[is] Missouri.”(source)
“In my young days,” confessed one Sung critic, “I praised the master whose pictures I liked, but as my judgment matured I praised myself for liking what the masters had chosen to have me like.”[1]
Until modern times, most men treated beauty as if it were something objective. When I say “objective” I mean that beauty was, for them, located outside of the mind in reality. It was possible for our emotional reactions to be proper or improper when beholding beauty, and it was possible for us to be right or wrong about what was beautiful [2]. Plato and Plotinus believed beauty existed in the realm of the Forms; a thing was beautiful to the degree that it mimicked this ultimate and perfect standard. Augustine asks whether “things are beautiful because they give pleasure, or give pleasure because they are beautiful.” He argues the second to be true [3]. For him beauty was ontologically grounded in God: “This is the unchangeable truth which is the law of all the arts…"[4]
On this view of reality, beauty was a target at which we aimed. We could make bad shots and good shots because the bull’s-eye was the standard. It is this understanding of beauty that drove Polykleitos to sculpt his ‘Canon’ of the ideal masculine form, and seems the impetus of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man [5]. It was the reason Coleridge could agree with a tourist who called a waterfall sublime while being upset with the other who misidentified it as something closer to “pretty,"[6] and it is the reason I once witnessed a boy spanked by his parents for looking out at the Grand Canyon at sunset and retorting, “It’s just a big stupid hole in the ground!” Much of our philosophically impoverished education system will have none of this. It largely trains children to parrot their catechism, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Lewis, who indicted the educators of his day for also teaching beauty is relative, also believed it is the very subtlety of these sorts of exercises which are dangerous:
“The very power of [textbook authors] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”
Ah, invoking a guy who wrote overrated unicorn books. Why are you throwing a tantrum over the idea beauty is in the eye of the beholder?
When I say “This sequoia forest is beautiful” I am not merely saying something about my subjective emotional state. In fact, the creation of my subjective emotional state itself is founded in my belief that the sequoia forest really is beautiful. But the Common Core’s metaphysic teaches us the object our emotional state is grounded in is a delusion. It is as when you believe a ghost is in the room with you and so, it produces the appropriate emotion of terror. Once you have investigated to discover your belief in the ghost was a delusion, nothing demands your reaction of fear. You cannot remove the heart and expect blood to keep pumping. The forest really is not beautiful, and so, when I feel a thing is beautiful that feeling does not correspond with reality; the feeling is a crock! It has lied about what is there in reality. We have a word for that which only exist “in the eye of the beholder” but not objectively in reality: Hallucination.
Conclusion (from a guy who hates writing conclusions):
These worksheets are, of course, gnomic of a larger problem: Our society, and so, our educational system, largely believes and propagates the idea there is no world beyond Plato’s cave. If art, human purpose,morality and beauty are matters of the heart, then society maniacally stands over us chanting “Kali ma! Kali ma!” as she rummages around in our chest cavity. But your classroom doesn’t need to be a 1980s-Hollywood human sacrifice scene. With just a toothpick of philosophy even your children can vanquish the majority of the world’s armies of lobotomized empiricist zombies and their slings and arrows of stupid party lines about opinions being armpits everyone is entitled to and beauty being a delusion in the eye of the beholder.
But most importantly…..
But most importantly…..
*pulls dart out of neck*
*plop*
[1] Quoted by Kakuzo Okakura, “Art Appreciation” in The Book of Tea.
[2] See Lewis, The Abolition of Man: or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 25. See also, Crispin Sartwell, “Beauty.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014), [on-line], accessed 7 April 2014, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/.
[3] Augustine, Earlier Writings, ed. J.H. Burleigh (New York: WJK Publishing, 1953), 255.
[4] Ibid., 254.
[5] Note on Vitruvian and canon sculpture
[6] This story is preserved originally in Dorothy Wordsworth, Recollection of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803. ed. J. C. Shairp, (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1874), 37. My interpretation (and translation of the original term “beautiful” to “pretty” for clarification derives from Lewis, Ibid., 14ff.