Tradition All the Way Down

On the Epistemic Primordiality of Tradition

Most people don’t think about where their beliefs come from. Even among people of cultivated common sense, the issue doesn’t take up much of our attention. The midwit is content to believe in “settled science” of the Bill Nye kind. More intrepid travellers aren’t afraid to follow the science into darker and more “problematic” territory. But rarely does the traveller go all the way down the rabbit hole, like Gilgamesh seeking out the immortal Utnapishtim. If he did, he might share Gilgamesh’s frustration.

As we discussed in our articles on the is-ought gap [1] [2], moral propositions aren’t really propositions at the end of the day, but always conceal commands. No combination of “is” statements will ever by themselves demand action. There is a gap between metaphysics and ethics—the is-ought gap. At some point the chain of moral “is” statements must terminate in an “ought” statement, and whenever you have an “ought”, there is lurking behind the ought a command. If a statement demands action of you, it’s because it either comments on or points to some command.

Let’s give an example: it’s wrong to have sex before marriage. But why is it wrong? We could say “because sex is for reproduction and reproduction is sanctioned only in marriage”. But why? Why are either of those “is” statements valid? If you ask “why” enough you will eventually come to the bedrock reason: “because God said so”, or God commands it. All moral statements finally cash out to commands in exactly the same way.

This is the case not just for morality, but for epistemology, for any belief at all. If a belief is warranted, this means it demands that we accept it. There is a command in there somewhere demanding that we do something—believe.

Commands are even behind predication itself. To have a proposition—the basic element of metaphysics—you need to bring a name into conjunction with a predicate, which ultimately depends on another name. “Jesus died” depends on there being a thing “Jesus” and another thing “life” that he lost. But where do we get these names? They are things that we are commanded to notice. This is what it is to define something, for a thing to be perceived and rise above the threshold of consciousness in the first place—it must be brought before us, and we must be made to assume its existence.

This is all just to say that the command is prior to the proposition. Whether it’s a) being commanded to notice a thing that is then predicated, or b) having warrant for a belief, or c) a proposition cashing out to commentary on a command, everything we say, all intelligible language, depends on commands—commands to notice X, to believe X, or to interpret according to X.

The takeaway here is that metaphysics (the propositional picture of the world) cannot justify the command. The proposition isn’t the primitive element. The command is the primitive element. For there even to be metaphysics at all depends on there being an authority that generates the names to be predicated.

But we have a problem here, or at least, we think we do. How do you know which commands are authoritative? After all, anyone can issue a command. What makes them a real authority? The answer can’t be metaphysics, because metaphysics depends on authority already being in place. The answer is that authority is primordial.

We have made the case in the Ancestral Principle article that authority essentially means fatherhood. But we still haven’t answered the question “who is the real authority?” After all, how do we know who our real father is? Whether or not you think fatherhood is authority, the question will show how authority relates to truth.

Let’s take this question as literally as possible. You believe that Joe Smith is your father because your mother pointed at him and said “Dad” before you could even grasp what was happening—she commanded you to take him to be Dad, and all that entails. But what if she were wrong? Or lying? What resources are at your disposal to know one way or another?