The past month has been pretty disruptive for my writing! But I’ve been looking forward to getting back to weekly writing group. I need to go back to the big picture, both to reorient myself after time away and to get myself excited for the whole thing again—as well as giving me something else to do pending the research I need to make progress on the more specific projects I was working on that will advance it in narrowly constrained ways. This past week I started putting together general notes on what I want the system to look like in the broadest possible brush strokes. (As usual, I wrote it for myself so I’m omitting a lot. But I welcome questions!) I’m putting it in this post, beneath the cut. The next step, which I will begin tomorrow, is to build up a conspectus of the system, actually giving its main claims and linking them together logically.
NOTES TOWARD A SYSTEM OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
Concept. The goal is to develop a comprehensive system of practical philosophy from first principles. Autonomy is the central unifying idea. Human beings not only have, as a property, but essentially are a power of self-determination. This has a number of implications for how we understand and describe human behaviour generally, as in the humane disciplines and social sciences; it speaks to a need for a general theory of personal and interpersonal causality as a foundation. We see this as giving economic theory a central place in the social sciences, as the study of interaction and transaction. Autonomy also has implications for ethics: it suggests that an individual human being can ultimately only be bound by a moral law it gives itself. Living among and in transaction with other such beings, however, gives rise to symmetrical conditions of mutual conflict that can only be transcended through a shared moral understanding. We explore the ethical, social, and political implications for those who are called to such an understanding. We propose that the resulting system warrants the labels idealist and liberal, given the role autonomy plays in both the speculative first principles, the normative first principles, and the ultimate political and economic conclusions.
Composition. The system brings together normative and speculative elements. As the project’s ultimate conclusions are meant to have normative purport, the orientating elements relevant to those conclusions cannot be excluded or boiled away as inessential to the project. These elements, however, presuppose a certain conception of the world and of ourselves, without which they would be nonsensical and their prescriptive character completely unmotivated. This conception is articulated in the speculative elements of the work. Both are addressed to the reader and submitted to the reader’s judgment, but in different ways and on different grounds. Speculative presentation always asks the reader, “Do you agree this is an accurate description of the world, in its most general and abstract features?” Normative presentation rather asks, “Is this an exercise you would make of your own free will?” Whether or not these can be reduced to a single question (the normative to a speculative one or vice versa), taken together they represent two moments of a unified practical activity to which the reader is invited. The author does not claim any position of dogmatic authority over readers, whose total control over their own opinions is recognized and respected.
Method. We assume that the reader has their own direct experience of the world, and of their own thinking and feeling, particularized in moments of action; they evaluate the system’s claims by referring to that experience. We generate the speculative content of the system by a method of existential interpretation. We treat human experience as an organic unity, bringing together an understanding of fact and a preference of outcomes. We then offer conceptual claims as expressions of language that give analytic articulation to various parts and characteristics of this unity and the distinctive kind of being it has. We draw deductive entailments drawn from these expressions based on relationships among the various concepts in terms of which this analysis is conducted. This provides the total speculative matter of the system. Normative claims or claims of a mixed speculative–normative character are then submitted to the understanding and preference of the reader.
Organization. The work has four overall divisions, each of which might be developed over the course of multiple pieces of writing more or less independently.
Foundation. The interpretation is developed from first principles. The human being is treated as a distinguished mode of being, having its own character. It constitutes an organic unity whose features must be expressed and articulated. The goal is to provide a conception of human being supporting the work that will follow.
A system of ethics. This division seeks a principle of objective normative judgment, given the condition that human beings have autonomy. The implications for personal and interpersonal conduct are explored, and the possibilities for broader social and political formations are explored.
A theory of civil society. A synthetic recapitulation of the conceptual (a priori) first principles of political economy and institutional choice. This work adopts a catallactic approach, according to which interpersonal exchange is the foundational concept. A sociological conception of power is developed in this environment.
A statement of liberalism. An original and programmatic statement of liberalism, combining a radically progressive socio-cultural agenda with market-oriented economic policy.
The system has a number of influences, more or less explicit. There is a fundamental commitment to clarity and parsimony that inspires us in Medieval conceptualism. The cosmic and systematic character of the work owe a great deal to the speculative tradition of Spinoza to Whitehead. The liberal perspective draws primary inspiration from the classical liberalism of Adam Smith, Benjamin Constant, and John Stuart Mill, but updated with the neoclassical or neoliberal approach of the classical Austrians and Ordoliberals. The actual content of the moral and metaphysical system draws essentially on German Idealism, but with some amendments necessitated by later pragmatism and phenomenology.
Kant. The influence of Kant is pervasive, but might not be recognized by anyone familiar with textbook accounts of Kant. The work draws from a radically revisionist interpretation of Kant. We take Kant’s idea of autonomy literally: the individual human being is bound only by a law it gives itself. We see this assumption as the core not only of the practical philosophy, but the theoretical philosophy as well. Kant’s noumenon is seen as a space for the human being’s practical self-interpretation and self-realization.
Hegel. The emphasis on recognition that Hegel inherits from Fichte is seen as a direct derivation from Kant, and a corollary of human autonomy in community. The efficacy of Spirit is seen as operating in and through human action rather than “over and above” it; the archetypal example, which Hegel himself uses, is Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
Heidegger. We see Heidegger’s method of interpretive analysis as a way to express and articulate the complex organic unity that characterizes the distinctively human mode of being, the mode that Kant designates “practical reason” and that Heidegger designates Dasein. Heidegger’s existential–pragmatic conception of human thought and action gives us a natural way to express our first principles. We avoid some of Heidegger’s obscurantism and moral perversity by directing Heidegger’s idea of authenticity toward Kant’s idea of autonomy.
Mises. We see our project, in its foundations, as providing a synthetic a priori account of intelligent human action. It directly corresponds with Mises’s idea of praxeology. This gives the project sufficient direction to provide conceptual foundations for political economy; we should expect to see the basic elements of microeconomic theory recreated in our interpretation of human being.
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