Evolution 1.1.2008 and counting

Stephen Granville O'Kane, writer born right in the middle of the 20th century on 26th April 1951.

~ University study allowed me, to some degree, to control the hours I worked. After 1979 life turned into a mix of learning new ways to manage my health - diet, allergy treatment, rest periods - alongside finding ways to write. For developing my ideas the surest guides proved to be people who infuriated me: journalists talking glibly about death and dishonour (of women) without explaining what they were on about, and politicians like Norman Tebbitt complaining about our lack of moral standards while ensuring that anyone outside the political campaign team would be frightened off the moral standards anyway. I hadn't planned this, but the Nineties and Noughties have seen me doing a mix of continental and Anglo-American varieties of philosophy. In fact I'm happy about the mix, for I see both trying to tackle an essential problem of modern society; that of finding what is genuine and authentic but without dogma. Anglo-American analytic philosophy aims to define when we can accept something as true - or that it follows from what is held to be true - while continental philosophies are more likely to be looking for the basis of authentic experience. Jurgen Habermas' theory of ideal communication is also an example of a blend of those two kinds of philosophising, although I would have preferred him to have warned of the dangers, moral as well as practical, of lack of rationality in social communication rather than making a formal assumption of its rationality.

~ My writing focuses on topics which scare people - like moral choices, and having to make decisions between them. If I succeed in making people a little less scared of them than before, so that they search for wisdom rather than a blind pretence of authority, I shall be happy. ~ So far, my author tally includes: Politics and Morality under Conflict, Pentland Press, (1994), and `What Right to Private Property?', Economy and Society, (November 1997). A second book entitled Ethics and Radical Freedom published (by Melrose Books) in 2006. Following a recommendation (I have no idea who from!) I have now acquired an entry in the Dictionary of International Biography (first in 2003 edn.).¹

Experiences and Adventures

1. Produced by the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge CB2 3QP, England. Telephone (44) 01353 646600 Fax (44) 01353 646601. Please place any orders or queries with that address.

~ Other hobbies include (a) weather and climate (many of us are more likely to be fighting over land than flooded out), (b) music - almost anything except rap (sorry!). Sadly, market button holes don't seem to allow us to have someone like Pytor Tchaikovsky who had no trouble doing anything from cutie fantasies for the ballet to modelling the Apocalypse. Whether its Mary Poppins or Ruwandan genocide and most in between; Tchaikovsky would be your man. (c) exploring ways of doing things with health restrictions:

If like me you have problems with ME/CFS/CFIDS/NDS/...(Whatever the Medical Profession Want to Call It Syndrome),why not take a look at Sussex & Kent ME/CFS Society, or Axford's Abode (lots of lowdown) and Wends Myalgic Encephalomyelitis awareness site?

Under a different head, I am a member of Assert (Brighton and Hove), which has yielded a mentor through the Aspire Project.

Friends and companions (including female) also welcome. My email contact: gs@o-kane.f2s.com. Web address: www.o-kane.f2s.com.

 

Moving my philosophical activities on from being just the lonely seer tapping away includes finding other interesting people (not necessarily professional philosophers). So far I've come up with: (a) A quite new organization working with ideas and philosophical arguments from a practical point of view called simply the Institute of Ideas. Their director, Claire Fox, is a panellist on The Moral Maze and they organize numerous debates on social, ethical, cultural and philosophical topics; (b) Philosophy Around the Web; (c) Contemporary Philosophy, Critical Theory and Postmodern Thought; (d)Philosophers Carnival ;(e)Darwin at LSE; (e) CHANGESTAR; (f) If you are wondering what secularists are doing in the new world of religion and politics...look into the philosophical/humanist newsgroup, and theBritish Humanist Association. I don't necessarily see eye to eye with all they say, but you can find plenty of viewpoints relevant to ethics - especially for trying to make ethics work today. For more perspectives, very different but intimately bound to philosophical questions, compare and contrast Rebecca Kiessling Conceived in rape / Pro-life speaker and the World Transhumanist Association.

Summary of Politics and Morality under Conflict

 

~ I felt I had to design this work for tackling a different problem from that which many past books on political theory and ethics are concerned. Nowadays comparatively few people care what the moral basis of the state is - most of them just assume there isn't one. (That is especially since only academics and rightwing polemicists are used to counting patriotism amongst moral imperatives.) At the same time, moral issues, ranging from justifiable warfare to family cohesion, form differing parts of the political battleground. This includes the unofficial politics of pressure groups and ideological tribes, as well as the official stratum of politics comprising policy programmes and legislation.

~ The book involves a mixture of historical discussion and contemporary issues like abortion and nuclear weapons. I argue that politicisation of morals (and moralisation of politics) is a process witha long history which those who complain about disintegration of unified moral culture cannot expect to reverse. Indeed, such complainants are often identified with a 'conservative' ideology.

~ The latter part of the book considers the importance of this for ethics. No ethical philosophy which fails to take political divisions into account - for instance, through assuming that all good and informed people will agree on essential issues of value - stands a chance in these conditions.

Summary of Ethics and Radical Freedom

~ My second book Ethics and Radical Freedom takes up the theme that existentialism can serve as a model for political democracy. (Eh?) That does mean treating existentialist philosophy in a fundamentally different way from past formulations. Instead of arguing that human life cannot be understood without the concept of freedom I argue that freedom is now an unavoidable feature of our empirical existence (maybe not Being?), at least in any modern context. This still implies that the existentialist themes such as 'existence precedes essence' and 'Being incorporates Becoming', perhaps expressed in general terms through the idea that we must constantly choose our values and meaning in life, convey a real truth about us and the problems we face. But that truth finds its way through to us by our actions and the way we use our technology (and its sheer power) rather than by ontological (metaphysical) realities expressed by our language. That arises despite most people's resistance to having to make nasty choices or decisions. It is in the nature of democracy that decisions are alterable after a limited period of time, being left unchanged if the decision is reaffirmed or there is no significant support for a change but even values enshrined in a written constitution can be discarded if atttitudes change strongly. Unless the dissident and the awkward are able to challenge received opinion the democracy is seen to be threatened, unlike a dictatorship or, indeed, traditional culture where they are not allowed to.

~ Yet the history of dictatorship in the twentieth century serves to show how deep the problem of choice goes. Neither the revolutionary dictatorships which promised a great new future, nor the more conservative ones like Franco which sought to retain an old authority, could eliminate moral, and associated political, fragmentation even when they definitely intended to do just that. The most they could do was to drive it underground, leaving it to return, often in deeper form precisely because of the record of dictatorship itself and the issues surrounding that.

~ Accordingly, moral philosophy has to make its peace with existential choice in whatever way it can. In this second book I am exploring ways in which ideas of 'social contract' and the Aristotelian notion of 'means' between lack of particular moral values and display of an excessive degree of them (consider spendthrift, thrift, and meanness for example) might be updated to work with a world of moral choice.