User:EnochJ

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I am Enoch. Well, not really. It's an Internet handle I've used for years, and since I have no interest in publishing my real name to the sort of people who read Wikipedia profile pages, I'm going to use it here. Suffice to say, "J" is my first initial and is used to distinguish me from the horde of slavish imitators intent on calling themselves "Enoch" in the hopes of being mistaken for me by readers innocent of such shadowy Internet subterfuge.

I am a twentysomething from Austin, Texas and work in the field of medical administration. My interests are typical of the social category into which I fall (which is to say: middle-class underachiever): abstract philosophy, psychology, natural history, politics, art, pop music, et cetera.

I've studied a variety of philosophical doctrines, and while I've borrowed some ideas from them, I haven't found any philosopher with whom I wholly agreed. For example, I definitely think Hegel was on to something with his dialectic approach to history, but I suspect that most of his favorite examples relied too heavily on dubious historical periodization schemes. Marx's ideas are amazing when applied to anthropology, but as a teleological basis for political theory they lack much. Also, while I'm impressed with the analytical methods of Derrida and Foucault, I remain deeply skeptical about many of the conclusions of postmodern criticism.

To briefly sum up my own ideas, I'm going to use Ayn Rand's lazy-philosophy-device.

Metaphysics
I am more or less convinced of the existence of objective reality, which I define for my purposes as that which continues to punch you in the face when you stop thinking about it. For all practical purposes, the existence of external reality seems evident. However, I question the degree to which we accurately model reality, which brings us to ...

Epistemology
My favorite description of my epistemology is Robert Anton Wilson's notion of "model agnosticism." I regard concepts, abstractions, theories and explanations as models imposed by the mind on a set of data points which are potentially capable of supporting many different and conflicting models. Some abstracts possess great internal consistency and immediate usefulness (reason, the scientific method), some are internally flawed and are useful only because they sometimes motivate necessary actions (theraputic psychology and self-help, activist political rhetoric), some are unuseful and likely untrue but benign (metaphysical superstition, pure fancy), and some are potentially damaging to the human being's ability to discern truth and to actual human lives (totalist political rhetoric). I do not accept any model as wholly representative of reality. Instead, I rank models according to their veracity (how often they have produced results consistent with their predictions), their usefulness to me personally and their harmony with other high veracity models. As a general rule, I consider human knowledge to be quantitative, as opposed to the qualitative nature of objective truth; that is, while statements about objective reality either are or are not correct, valid human knowledge can be identified by its ever-increasing likelihood of truth.

Ethics
I don't believe in objective ethics. I base this conclusion on two premises: David Hume's is-ought problem (on which I agree with his stance), and my disbelief in any kind of intrinsic value system common to all humans (such as Rousseau suggested). That said, I am not a nihilist - I only think that, all ethics being subject to the individual, the law can never be an embodiment of profound abstract truth and should instead be designed around its practical value to society. I consider consequences to be of principal importance in metaethics, but admit that my notion of an "acceptable consequence" is also completely subjective and dependent on my value system.

Politics
Having established that I don't believe in politics as an outgrowth from metaphysical truth, I can only identify my individual values as central to my beliefs here. I am a liberal and a minarchist, mostly out of mistrust for power and for the concept of the nation-state (an inelegant, arbitrary and intrinsically anti-egalitarian concept). I support the libertarian non-aggression principle and agree with the contention that, if the law is properly enforced, less government means less use of coercion overall. That said, I am not totalist or doctrinaire. I can definitely see the value of government in some areas - environmental protection, for example - and am willing to entertain that concentrated economic power can amount to a form of coercion.

My blog, where most of my specific writings on politics and philosophy are archived.