Bouvard on Anthropological versus Logical First Principles
Isn't positing the center still a first principle? On another note, I started reading Graeber's *On Kings* and was wondering what you made of his division of sacral kings and divine kings? At the risk of being anachronistic doesn't it sound a lot like a Jouvenelian conflict between centralisation and decentralisation. The ruled insist on the sacral nature (and so hold a sword over the king) while the king insist on his divine nature (and so free himself from the sacral claims.)
One could call it a first principle, and even set up a series of subordinate principles: there is the center, the center gives commands, there is a difference between the command issued and the command received, etc. But I don't do it like that because there's no logical necessity here, just an anthropological one. Why start with positing a center? I can't give the kind of reason Descartes could give for "I think, therefore I am"--that is, that's it a basic presupposition of thinking or being as such. Once we start with the center, why follow that with the center issuing imperatives? Again, the reasoning is anthropological, not logical and deductive: this is what humans, as beings defined by having language, do. The progression from the ostensive to the imperative is not logical either--the insight into this follows from a question philosophy never asked: why are there sentences?
I think I mentioned that distinction once, briefly, but haven't come back to it. I'm still thinking about what to do with it. There's also their notion of the "foreigner" or "stranger" king, which I've seen mentioned elsewhere and is important as well. The Big Man comes from within the system, while the king comes from without, and is imposed--or at least that's the way things are imagined or remembered, even though, given the importance of conquest to establishing kingship, there's obviously a lot of truth to it. So far, I want to see if the distinction between the king with no way to protect himself from being sacrificed, on the one hand, and the king who creates a kind of "buffer," on the other, will do the work of the sacral/divine distinction. There's such a mass of historical and anthropological material that it's important to be able to reduce it, conceptually, to different center-margin relations. (But I don't know if it's a centralization vs. de-centralization distinction--in a sense, a system where the king can be sacrificed if it doesn't rain for a couple of months is very "centralized," just in a different way than what we're used to--everyone is completely focused on the central figure.)
This is why I have been taking an interest in MacIntyre's Thomistic conception of first principles. The Cartesian version, or modern first principles, start from the kind of first principles you note. They have to both be immediately accessible to all, and they have to then provide the basis for all further knowledge. This kind of first principles is something you are not positing. On the other hand you are presenting a first principle in a Thomistic sense. There are two classes of first principles, the first is that which is recognizable by all language users (a whole is greater than the parts) but this kind does not furnish comprehensive knowledge. The second does but requires the first principle and the overall scheme in which it is comprehensible to be conceived at once. This form of first principle is only available to the wise in a sense. So in this example, that there is a center is a first principle in the scheme (the anthropological model) you hold and it is only made coheren
Thanks, that's worth thinking about. I do have to read more of MacIntyre. So, there's a kind of "self-evident" principle that is really just in, or elicited from, the meaning of words and sentences (by definition the whole is greater than its parts--if you don't see that you simply don't know the meaning of the word "whole" or the word "part"). The second kind of principle would have to require the first (you certainly can't acquire any knowledge if you don't understand the relation between wholes and parts), but, of course, what counts as "comprehensive" knowledge, or whether that's always a meaningful thing to seek, depends on the sort of knowledge we're talking about. It sounds to me like the kind of knowledge one would have in what I've been calling a "disciplinary space," or what MacIntyre calls a "practice." I don't see any problem with this, and don't necessarily want to argue about using the word "principle" (part of the point here is to distinguish between arguments worth having and arguments not worth having--my only concern here is that arguments over "comprehensiveness" could easily become useless). What I'm trying to avoid or "defer" is really meta-language, which makes it possible for me to say to someone (e.g., a ruler) that you may have your reasons for doing what you're doing, but I have a theoretical system that defines "legitimate rule" and what you're doing doesn't fit that. Countering someone (e.g., a ruler) on "principled" grounds would have to involve working within the "discipline" itself (as ruler you command, and this is my way of doing what a subject does, which is serve or obey). It is the subject's way of obeying or serving that would constitute any "critique," "judgment" or "commentary" on the ruler's actions. It's the only way the meaning of his actions could be revealed to him.
Bouvard on Anthropological versus Logical First Principles — https://center.study/post/reddit-way-way-after-sacral-kingship