Metaphysics before everything

I have been having a problem running into people who are putting their aestheics before their metaphysics, and its bothering me. People do this all the time, but I often don't have to see it, so the problem at hand its the running into. I would prefer that people put their metaphysics first all of the time, but I would prefer a lot of things in the way people reason and act.

What am I talking about, you ask? Metaphysics is the part of philosophy where we ask "what is the nature of things" or as Wittgenstien like to put it, "what is the case." I would argue that if what know what is, we develop a critical apparaus with which to examine our world, and when we encounter people with different values and aesthetics, we appreciate the difference, expand our understanding of the world, and happily go on our way. When you encounter someone who has a an explicit cosmology (their world view) and a well articulated ontology (their definitions of the concepts they use) its easy for you to see the world they see. When further, they start with a cosmology, so that its not yet determined by what they want it to be like, its open to new data. So for example, you might encounter someone who has not yet read a book, describe the book, and they would be interested in taking this new information (which may or may not agree with their ideas about things) and examining it, integrating it both by attacking and accepting various parts of it.

On the other hand, consider someone who begins with epistomology (they ask the question how do we know what we know) and then forms a metaphysics. Because they are aware of a lack of certainty of some kinds of knowledge, they will not include this knowledge in their metaphsyics. For example, say a person decides they cannot know the minds of others, they can only know themselves, and then forms a world view based only on themselves. This is narcisism. We may not have the same kind of knowledge about the various parts of the world, but the whole world, even the parts we cannot really understand must be included in our world. Once we have as good a notion of the world as we can get, we can form a philosophy and begin to refine our cosmology with a method. So I can begin not knowing about distant planets or the world beneath the oceans, but I can construct a way of knowing that I regard as reliable and begin to examine these little known places with that method. The same is true if we are talking about the nature of good and evil, as much as a place.

Most vexing of late has been the primacy of axiology (values) especially aesthetics (judgements about beauty and pleasure). Putting any axiology first and then to construct a metaphysics afterword is to decide how you would like the world to be, and then to pretend it really is that way. When we think this way, people who disagree with us are idiots because they disagree with the way the world is. This is the kind of thinking that totally shuts down thought. One decided what is true and then assumes they are right.

So I find myself in the public schools, hallowed halls of learning. I am interested in Virginia Postrel's new book The Substance of Style. I am teaching art. After school I wander across the hall to another art teacher and strike up a conversation about Postrel's book. I am myself still wrestling with the ideas within, and so have no firm judgement about the book, except that it is interesting. It is the aestheic argument, that people are capable of creating a valid aesthic for themselves and that their consumer choices are not decadent or vulgar that makes me think that an art teacher would be interested in this. Instead, I am confused by the responce I get: "Why would anyone make such an argument?" I reply, "Why would anyone make any kind of argument at all?" I see the posing of an argument as an attempt to refine my cosmology by use of a reliable rational and/or emperical method. So I take information, compare it to my experience as a test for validity. If the information differs from my experience, I attempt to either falsify one of them or synthasize them, depending on which seems to best explain the observable world. This teacher did not operate this way, and I was initially confused by it. This teacher had an aesthetics and Postrel's book disagreed with it, so the book was silly. As I mentioned this conversation to other people, they either humored me (because I am interested in the most esoteric things like how we philosophize) or they defended the ascetic aesthetic which Postrel attacks. I found myself replaying the conversation in different forms with different evidence. But what I kept encountering was the idea that we are destroying the planet, that technology is moving too fast, and that America is the worst offender. I think these analyses are wrong, but I am open to evidence to the contrary. The reverse was not true. People have decided that they don't like the way America consumes so it must be harmful. I don't like the way America consumes, so I don't consume that way. I recognize that my preference is a matter of taste. As for harm, I look for evidence in the outside world, not in my sense of what I perfer. I think people are making rational choices based on values different from mine. The evidence suggests that there are benefits and costs to the action of various people, and so I assume that their weight of the costs and benefits is rational unless I have some evidence to suggest otherwise. Overall I see a prosperous, healthy society that constantly improves itself. This only happens because it is acting consistently with reality. Pretending that things are they way they are not produces failure. Looking at the way things work closely, looking for cases that reveal the way things are, suggests to me that Americans are living reasonable and rational lives, and that they make reasonable choices.