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The Nature of Athenian Democracy: An Answer to a Reader's Question
A reader asks in a comment on my post The Character of Socrates and His Bad Arguments: The anti-democratic dialectic:
March 8th, 2008 - 08:16 pm
"Jerry,"A couple of questions: "1) When Plato uses the term democracy does he refer to the practice of Athenian government (which I take it was something like the government envisaged by the American founders, a government of the "right people" who own property)? Where could he have gotten a more radical concept of democracy from? "2) Though the allegory of the cave is supposed to be a metaphor about knowledge (the difference between opinion and true knowledge), it does present a suggestive picture of an actual political state. If so, what state is it meant to depict? Seems unlikely that Plato would depict an ideal aristocratic form of government in this way, though that is what it seems to be. This discussion is further confused by current opinion that Strauss and the neoconservatives were inspired by Plato's idea of a ruling class of philosopher kings." I will answer the first question in your comment in this post. But I urge the reader, whoever he or she is, to spur me to go on to the second question because it is the more complicated question. To answer the second question involves an evaluation of the place of philosophy in a democratic society. It requires literary judgment about the place of Plato's "allegory of the cave" within the Republic. It urges a contrast between our current philosophical interpreters of Plato and Socrates with the historical interpreters of Athenian society that produced Socrates and Plato. (In our specialized academic factories the philosophers rarely talk to the historians, except in the most trivial ways.) Finally your question can be properly back-lit by a contrast between Karl Popper and Strauss, who came to complimentary conclusions about Plato but for opposite reasons. When dealing with the political web of the allegory of the cave and its many connections a short answer is simply not enough. This is true if for no other reason than that the allegory comes in the context of explaining who and what a philosopher is and how he (for Plato a philosopher must be gendered "he") can guide and guard the state. So dear reader, please hold me to my promise to go down into this cave and come back out with a bit of explanation.
As for your first points, let me state bluntly that the premises of your questions are wrong. What I offer below is an explanation of the radical nature of Athenian democracy and a historiographic explanation for why the nature of Athenian democracy has been ignored or slandered.
Periclean Athens was a democracy of all citizens. Athens remained a democracy for more than 300 years and I would argue, at its height, was one of the most radical democracies in history. After the Age of Pericles Athens continued to be a democracy, except during brief periods of political unrest and Spartan sponsored tyranny. Even after Alexander conquered the city, and ended Athenian independence, internal affairs were run democratically until Athens organized a rebellion against Macedonian rule. The time of Socrates and Plato was part of the most expansive periods of Athenian democracy. If you were a citizen you were a person who could, and probably would, serve on the administrative and policy making councils of the Athenian demos. Practically all of the important political positions were filled by lottery. All citizens in good standing were eligible for the lottery. Important issues were put to the vote in the assembly of all citizens. To maintain control of the aristocratic classes individuals of the upper classes were encouraged to bring law cases against other members of the upper classes, and the judges of those cases were large juries chosen by lots. Aristocrats were rewarded for ratting on other aristocrats for nonpayment of religious dues to maintain public festivals. If an aristocrat became too powerful he would often be ostracized. Modern day societies could learn a lot about control and punishment of rulers and owners by studying Athenian methods. Imagine if Corporation X could be rewarded by forcing another Corporation Y to pay Corporation X's taxes if X discovers that Y is violating health and safety rules, or is polluting, or is not paying its taxes. Such a situation would mean that "trial lawyers" would constantly be hired by one corporate entity to make sure that other corporate entities do not violate the commonweal. This was essentially the situation between aristocratic families in democratic Athens. Also, imagine if every five years or so we could vote to confiscate the property and send into exile any CEO that we choose by a simple majority vote. That might help keep the CEOs in line and stop them from laying off or transferring factories to non-union environments. Athens was, of course, a limited democracy, but what limited the democracy was the exclusivity of citizenship, not economic restrictions within Athens. Some of the richest residents of Athens were non-Citizens, called "metics," who had been invited to Athens because of their expertise in some craft or trade. Cephelus, who the reader meets in the first book of "The Republic," is reputedly the richest man in Athens and yet he is not a citizen and neither is his son Polemarchus, who was probably born in Athens. Foreigners and their descendants, no matter longer how long they lived in Athens, nor how successful they became, could not become "Athenians." Women were not considered citizens, nor did they have many legal rights, or rights of property. There is also the historically contentious problem of slavery, and the debates of slavery's relation to democratic Athens. Citizens could not become slaves, because of the reforms at the root of the democracy. But there is a good argument that imperialism fed slavery, and that slavery allowed for leisure even among citizen-tradesmen. Still, those who served on the assemblies and committees that amounted to the Athenian governmental apparatus were selected by lot. There was no property qualification for citizenship and no property qualification for being selected by lot to serve in the government apparatus. *[See bibliographical note below.] My questioner is wrong to say that Athens was a government of the owners of property. And the questioner is mostly wrong to point to Athenian democracy as a model for the Revolutionary generation of the American colonists in the future United States. For that last statement I would like to make some qualifications. Some of the more radical revolutionists anticipated some of the more radical "romantics" and did indeed look back to Athens as part of the "republican" tradition that they aspired to. The challenging radicalism of Athenian democracy was never accepted in all of its messy "populism". Thomas Paine is one such radical, but there were others. These were mostly "localists" (my term). It must be emphasized that many of these "radical democrats" were not themselves aware of some of the more radical aspects of the Athenian constitution. A list of aspects of the Athenian polity they were unaware of were "punishment" of powerful aristocrats through the encouragement of law suits, annual votes of ostracism, and other anti-aristocratic measures that might have transformed "radical republican" thinking into "radical democratic" thinking. In the debate over the Constitution these "localists" became anti-Federalists. Of those who drew up the U.S. Constitution, the evidence shows that James Madison was influenced by the Roman Constitution as a model, or rather the Roman Constitution as they knew it through Polybius and Montesquieu. The concept of separation of powers, with each power as a check on the other was from the Roman constitution. The concept of "mixed" government -- monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy -- balanced in a republican form of government, was also considered a reason for the success of the Roman Constitution and was copied by Madison. * Even given the mistakes in the premises of the above questions they are still good questions. Such questions and misconceptions get to the heart of a long debate in the literature on the basic nature of Athenian democracy. The debate has taken place on both the left and the right. But the debate has not been over the nature of the Athenian constitution, per se, or over whether all citizens could vote in assemblies. The historians are certain of these aspects of the Athenian city-state. The debate is over whether Athenian Democracy was merely a democracy, de jure, but a de facto oligarchy. There are three political traditions that have through the ages framed the debate over the nature of Athenian Democracy: (1) The radical democratic supporters of democracy; (2) Conservative and reactionary critics of all democracy as a form of mob rule; (3) Liberal and social-democratic critics of ideology and propaganda. It will not surprise most readers that until the late 19th Century most historians fell into the second category of conservative and reactionary critics. The people I am terming "radical democrats" were mostly left out of the "official" historical debate. Thus you would find the radical democratic arguments among non-historians such as Romantic poets, or in the speeches of politicians, or as a negative reflection of the arguments of philosophers. It was not until the generation of 1968 found made its long march through U.S. and British universities that notions of radical democracy found its reflection among professional historians. Liberal and social-democratic historiography appeared late on the scene and was mostly concentrated in Germany. Most of the social democratic historiography only survived for a short period and found its demise with the rise of fascism. All three of these traditions divided among themselves along similar lines. Was Athenian democracy a façade for elite or oligarchic rule or was it the real thing? If it was the real thing was Athenian democracy a form of terror inducing and redistributive "mob rule" or was it a stable form of "rule of law" with norms for elite control of the mob and democratic control of the aristos? Was the "slave mode of production" and imperial domination essential to the success of the "democracy" (thus making "democracy" a façade for the exclusive domination of Athenian citizens over others) or was Athenian domination of others simply a side-effect of the strength and patriotic unity of the democracy? Along with these questions a number of subsidiary questions formed: for instance, was some amount of equality imposed upon the aristocratic classes at the expense of liberty? Was the demand for equality in Athens simply a façade used by some factions, or individuals, of the aristocratic classes to politically defeat or ostracize other aristocrats? What might seem a bit strange is that the debate over Athenian democracy was crystallized around contemporary evaluations of the rise of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. But I think most readers with a working knowledge of 20th Century history can see how the problematic aspects of Athenian democracy could be worked out around the multiple crises (and failures) of revolutionary socialism between 1917 and 1939, i.e. the rise of Fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain, and the triumph of the Stalinist dictatorship. In a sense, the question of whether Fascism was a form of mob-rule, and thus a deformed form of democracy, was the same as the question of whether democracy in Athens was the rule of the "demos" or a façade for the dictatorship of the demagogues. The question of whether Stalinism was the dictatorship of the proletariat or the terror regime of the nomenklatura was posed in similar ways in the historiography of Athenian democracy. It is also a bit strange, to me at least, that the main polemical statement articulating the negative side of the debate over Athens was in a book about the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Principate of Augustus. The book is one of the best classical histories written in the 20th century and rewards reading by historian and non-historian alike, Ronald Syme's "The Roman Revolution." It was published in June 1939 and Syme wrote under the pressure of the events in Italy, Germany, Spain and Russia during the darkest period for liberals and social democrats. Syme stated that "The Roman Revolution" was both a historical and political intervention against the dominance of Stalinism and Fascism. Near the very beginning of Syme's elegantly written book is what has been termed "Syme's Law." "In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade." (p. 7) That sentence is the statement of Syme's Law. Once stated, many historians, for good and ill, and on the left and right, recognized the truth of Syme's Law. But is it a universal truth? Put it this way. It can easily be seen that our Republic here in the United States, for a long time, was simply a Republic that was acknowledged as a national oligarchy with some local democracy. As John Jay said: "Those who own the country should rule it." But are all democratic forms actually a façade for the rule of a small group of "men"? Is this true of all small towns as well as the country as a whole. Is there any tug of war between oligarchic dominance and democratic institutions? Apply some of these questions to the Athenian city-state. The history of the rise of democratic forms in Athens is the history of the suppression of family based alliances in favor of economic-based alliances. The rise of democracy involved the suppression of the arbitrary rule of family-dominated clans who exercised sovereignty over land and slaves as if they were proto-states, in favor of small landowners who farmed their own land. These smaller landlords increased their social power by making alliances with a small group of tradesmen, skilled and unskilled. This final point, the rebellion against the arbitrary rule of richer landlords and their family alliance, is what we usually call the formation of "the rule of law." The rebellion against family rule and the formation of the rule of law is paralleled in the city-states that under went a military revolution based on the hoplite phalanx. It seems that the military revolution that occurred around the same time in these city-states promoted small landowner unity against the rule of the big man or big family -- the chief, or the king and his allies. This occurred because the phalanx was the best military formation yet invented for a relatively small city-state. In order for a phalanx formation of hoplites to work, a high-level of training and trust must be maintained within the formation. The training of an army of citizen-farmers and the necessary high level of solidarity between those farmers led to group formation and group consciousness against the aristocrats who were mostly on horses. Thus around the 8th and 7th Centuries B.C.E. in many of the Greek cities throughout the Mediterranean legal rules were first formed and eventually individual rule was replaced by collective rule. Athens was unique both for the relative low quality of its land and the resultant size of its trading classes. This made the base for the transformation to collective rule much wider in Athens than in other city-states. Add to this the necessity of training a citizen-navy further increases the social weight of the citizens necessary to create a democratic city-state. Eventually collective rule encompassed all citizens. Simultaneously a number of "limiting" rules were instituted to prevent the reassertion of oligarchic rule of any kind, most particularly the choosing of government administration through a lottery where all citizens participated. But it was mostly the political and ideological influence of Syme's Law that pushed the debate from 1939 onward. The debate over Athenian Democracy in the post-war period paralleled the debate over the difference between "stable" democratic societies, that respect the rule of law, and private property, and "mob rule" that aims at revenge against minorities or confiscatory redistribution of wealth. Plato recognized the radical challenge of Athenian Democracy to the rule of "the best," the rule of the nobles. Was politics really only the rule of the strong? Do the strong set the definition of what is called justice? It challenged him to question the nature of every political construct and constitution. It led him to realize that the "rule of the best" and the "rule of the strong" did not coincide, especially since he had before his eyes the example of the strong "demos" and the weak aristocracy. How could an "aristocracy" become so weak? That was the next question. And the answer was because the aristocracy was in truth not made up of the best men, of the "true" elite. Plato further saw that all of the "best" aristocrats (Pericles for instance) had adapted themselves to the democracy by taking up "speech-making" and it was the job of those faux-philosophers "the Sophists" to teach the aristocrats how to make speeches. The Sophists gained the enmity of Plato because they taught the aristocrats, the "natural" ruling class, to accommodate itself to democratic forms. But the main reason why Plato opposed democracy is that he saw clearly that its "truths" were formed in the market place, the agora. The coin of the political "market place" was not gold or silver. The coin was rhetoric. In the view of Plato, rhetoric created values, false values from his point of view, but false values that could be exchange in the dirty politics of bartering for power. In the Assembly and in the Law Courts the Athenian's philosophy, a philosophy of the masses, was formed everyday. Plato believed that this was a false philosophy, what we would call today an "ideology". But he did not deny its power and he did not deny its origins in the democratic practice of debate, of give and take. Ultimately mass juries of citizens formed the power of democratic ideology in the crucible of "judging" guilt, innocence and punishment in the open courtroom of the agora. And as a result of the rhetoric of debate in the agora mass assemblies of citizens gathered and made political "decision" that turned "ideology" (this "false philosophy") into the reality of power. It is precisely at here, at the crossroads of mass power and debate, decisions and rhetoric, that Plato's "Philosopher Ruler" and the "allegory of the cave" can be seen as a solution to this mess of mob rule. Plato would oppose the false philosophy of the masses making decisions as a collective with the true philosophy of the eternal thoughtfulness.
* Bibliographical note: A book that goes through the arguments over the nature of Athenian Democracy is Josiah Ober's "Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens." I highly recommend Ober's book for those interested in the technical issues of the status of democracy in classical Athens. Ober, in my opinion, is a bit of an old fashion "radical democrat" in his point of view. He is not a Marxist in his method. Ober writes from within a tradition of American pragmatism as he reinterprets it through John Searle's "Speech Act Theory." I am heavily indebted to Ober's work though in the end I would emphasize the "exclusivity" of the citizenship requirment as a crucial factor in Athenian cohesion.
A historian who argues for a conclusion similar to Ober's is Ellen Meiskins Wood in her book "Peasant, Citizen, & Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy". She writes from within a Marxist tradition. It is especially interesting how the class analysis tradition of Meiskins Wood contrasts with the elite-mass analysis if Ober. Both of these books are interventions in a long argument about the nature of Athenian democracy. Thus one of Wood's point is that the great Marxist historian G. E. M. Ste. Croix was wrong to emphasize that Athens relied heavily on slavery in his great book "The Class Struggle in the Ancient World." Ober's book argues against what might be called "the American functionalist view" that Athenian democracy was a facade for elite or oligarchic control. Meiskins Wood argues against some in the Marxist tradition of interpreting Athens as if slavery and slavery alone could define its mode of production. For a general introduction to Athenian Democracy I would suggest two short and easy books, "Athenian Democracy" by A. H. M. Jones and "The Birth of Athenian Democracy: The Assembly in the Fifth Century B.C." by Chester G. Starr. Both of these books can be found cheaply and the Jones book is usually available at good libraries. For more on the Roman Republic and the U.S. Constitution see Paul Rhae's "Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution." Also see William Everdell's "The End of Kings" and for an old succinct article that I think I can email to anyone to see, The Influence of Rome on the American Constitution, R. A. Ames, H. C. Montgomery, The Classical Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Oct., 1934), pp. 19-27. There have been many books written on this subject but this short article sums up the view of the influence of the Roman Constitution in a few short pages. I think one conclusion United Statesians should draw from this is that in order to understand the origins of their constitution they should read Polybius. In the main body of the text I bibliograph Ronald Syme's "The Roman Revolution". I suggest that the reader look at the book for himself. But if there is a need to know the extent of the impact of Ronald Syme's book on classical historiography I suggest looking through Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Principles edited by Kurt A. Raaflaug and Mark Toher. Most of the essays reflect directly upon the impact of Ronald Syme.
Jerry Monaco
10 March 2008
New York City
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In May 1913 Bertrand Russell was working on a manuscript called Theory of Knowledge. The project was abandoned in June when Russell decided that he could go no further. His theory was at a dead-end and he couldn't back out and start over. It was because of Wittgenstein's criticism in conversations with Russell that the manuscript was abandoned and Russell never attempted to publish his "theory." This history is recounted in Russell and Wittgenstein on the Nature of Judgement by Rosalind Carey (Continuum, 2007, 150pp., $110.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780826488114. [That is right; $110 for 150 pages]). The technical reasons for Russell's failure are accounted for in this very expensive book. (Such books are produced for libraries and then mostly cordoned off from the general public on the shelves of security-guarded university establishments; establishments; which are, by the way, supported in one way or another at the public expense. Such is the state of knowledge in the corporate state. For the most part the general public does not feel the loss because these expensive published theses of 150 pages are mostly nests made by the academic squirrels. The historical nut-gathering that these nests are made to hold is often badly written, though sometimes interesting. But the academics themselves are not really to blame since they are fulfilling an institutional imperative -- publish or perish. Publication seems to be the university's way of accounting for the productivity of their professorial employees, like the aggregation of standardized tests are supposed to measure the health of our elementary schools. Call this the "Fordism" of the educational factories.) For biographical, historical, and philosophical reasons I am interested in Russell and Wittgenstein in 1913 and thus this book would be interesting to me. But how am I to get hold of such an outlandishly priced piece of work unless I gather some friends to storm the Columbia Library while decommissioning the security guards in the process? So I must make do with book reviews and with my own knowledge, when discussing Carey's book. Some squirrels do interesting things, and this book is a case in point. I think that someone should write a piece of fiction focusing on the lives of Russell and Wittgenstein from May to June 1913, the period of the writing and abandonment of Russell's Theory of Knowledge, and bringing into the novel the events of the subsequent six years, as if in a dream of history. Within six years of the Russell and Wittgenstein conversations both were imprisoned; Russell for his opposition and protest against World War I and Wittgenstein as an Austrian prisoner-of-war in Como and Cassino. While Russell was in prison in 1918, he returned to philosophy after a long time writing only social and political works, and wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and began the book The Analysis of Mind, which was partially a tactical retreat from his attempt to create "a theory of knowledge." While Wittgenstein was a prisoner-of-war in Italy in 1918-19 he rewrote and rethought some of the portions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he had finished during his course of military service. (Someone should compile a list of the great men and women who were imprisoned during the period of the First World War. Russell, Eugene Debs, and Rosa Luxembourg come to mind immediately, but the list could be extended to hundreds of names. Does anyone know of a good book that gives a global history of resistance to World War I? If it hasn't already been written it should be written.) The countries that Russell and Wittgenstein called home were fighting a war against each other and still, in the early part of the war at least, the two managed to exchange letters and post-cards. In February 1919 Wittgenstein wrote to Russell, I am prisoner in Italy since November, and hope I may communicate with you after a three-year interruption. I have done lots of logical work which I am dying to let you know before publishing it. How did such posts get through the lines of war? Did they go by way of neutral countries? According to Ray Monk this post-card found Russell at Lady Ottoline Morrell's country house, Garsington Manor. A postman delivered the card to a place where Russell was not listed. Perhaps the British postal services favored the ruling classes because it beats me how a card gets from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp to a person of no certain address, unless that person got special attention paid to him by the postal services. But in the Spring of 1913 all of this was in their future. Wittgenstein had not even published a major work when he froze Russell into place on his theory of knowledge. In fact Wittgenstein was in effect Russell's student, not a fellow teacher, and yet his influence, his ability to paralyze thought, was infamous. This shows one of the great missions of Wittgenstein. In spite of the philosophers, because of the philosophers, Wittgenstein's mission was basically an anti-philosophical practice. He endeavored to get philosophers to shut up -- or at least to stop publishing so much of what they write on the "deep" philosophical subjects. He was against proclamations of philosophical "knowledge" and the propounding of philosophical theories. He was engaged in a philosophical practice that would in effect limit the very notions of what we call knowledge. Wittgenstein's only published major work, the Tractatus, was anti-theoretical to the core. It did not present "a theory" of logic and its relation to language, or a "theory" of propositions. What it set out to do is to clarify certain aspects of language use and misuse from within a philosophical frame. The Tractatus attempted to set the limits of what any philosophical theory could accomplish. It did this by attempting to show that the capacity of language could only express through propositions what can be thought, and that there is much else that cannot be thought through propositions but can only be shown. On the level of propositions the Tractatus itself does not present a theory, but rather makes clarifications about the possibility of philosophical theories given the limits of language use. But on the level of "showing" the Tractatus as a whole is emblematic of a kind of anti-philosophy: we are shown the limits of human thought and knowledge. The limits of knowledge that can be made from propositions "show" from the book as a whole. There are only a few philosophers who agree with this interpretation of the Tractatus, and fewer still who agree with the interpretation of Wittgenstein's work which would turn the work as a whole into an anti-philosophical practice. The underpinnings of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, his clarification of language use as putting limits on what we can call thought or knowledge, is itself an anti-philosophical practice to the core. Personally, I think that Wittgenstein is correct, when he insisted that nobody understood the Tractatus, when it was written, and few understand it now. It is because very few people can accept a work that is a set of propositions that say one thing and a book as a whole that illustrates what the set of propositions says cannot be theorized or philosophized by pointing the way to silence. The book is a form of practice. It practices what it preaches. If most philosophers set out to accept the anti-philosophical practice of the Tractatus, they could not write the articles and books, which are their bids for job security in the current academic system. So Wittgenstein while writing from the prison camp in Italy continually complained, perhaps even whined, that Russell would never understand the Tractatus. Russell wrote back: Throughout the war I did not think about philosophy, until, last summer. I found myself in prison, and beguiled my leisure by writing a popular text-book, which was all I could do under the circumstances. Now I am back at philosophy, and more in the mood to understand…. Don't be discouraged, you will be understood in the end. (p. 162) I think in the matter of understanding both men were wrong about the other. Wittgenstein has yet to be understood because philosophers have a hard time understanding books that are also practices. (Perhaps poets best understand such philosophical works.) And Russell understood Wittgenstein on an intuitive level that has never been acknowledged. Back in June 1913, because of Wittgenstein's anti-philosophical criticism, Russell quit his Theory of Knowledge. And for the first time Russell himself began to think about the limits of knowledge and the limits of theory. Theory, after all, can only confront and provide knowledge of a very small part of the world. More than thirty years later Russell came out with a book called Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. It is my contention that this book is a strange bastard child of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In 1913 Wittgenstein planted the seeds of "theory-skepticism" into Russell's thinking and over the course of Russell's long life that skepticism grew. Unlike our modern skeptics, the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, Russell's skepticism constantly turned around on itself and embraced nationalism, the social system of classes, philosophy and even science. Russell's skepticism did not limit itself to skepticism about religion. There came a time at the end of his life that he began to look at his own intellectual pretentions as also a form of superstition. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits is not a "theory of knowledge" but an attempt to describe knowledge and how we come to know. In short, Russell's book is an anti-theory. It is not an anti-theory in the multiple ways that the Tractatus is an anti-philosophy -- propounding, illustrating, and practicing anti-philosophy all at once -- but an anti-theory in a much more everyday way. The goals of Russell's long book were modest, unlike the immodest idol-smashing goals of Wittgenstein's short book; one of the limits of human knowledge is that there can be no grand theory of knowledge, and no metaphysical ground to knowledge, but only local descriptions of how in a common sense way we as individuals, with these brains, can come to know limited parts of the world through specific theories. As Russell himself wrote at the beginning of Human Knowledge: To scientific common sense (which I accept) it is plain that only an infinitesimal part of the universe is known, that there were countless ages during which there was no knowledge, and that there probably will be countless ages without knowledge in the future. Cosmically and causally, knowledge is an unimportant feature of the universe; a science which omitted to mention its occurrence might from an impersonal point of view, suffer only from a very trivial imperfection.
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Don't ask a philosopher about the meaning of life:
"I rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did, and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don't imagine I'd ask someone whose credentials consist of a PhD in philosophy." - Jerry Fodor
The answer to philosophical problems are not in philosophical thought --
"The sickness of a time is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings; and it was possible for sickness of philosophical problems to get cured only through a changed mode of thought, not through a medicine invented by an individual." - Wittgenstein
I think that Witt's reasoning is along the following lines.
Philosophical questions are never solved by individual philosophers proposing solutions. Philosophical problems simply tend to disappear, change, or are simply forgotten when for what-ever reason (epochal change, scientific development, historical movement) people change their mode of thinking. When this happens philosophical problems suddenly change, they are not solved. Basically, like so much of Witt.'s aphorism, this statement represents a tendency toward anti-philosophy.
Jerry Monacomusic: OTR Now Live! OTR - |
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At ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) anti_philosophy ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) yofaceizscrumpy comments on the whole idea of the anti-philosophical project:
self -contradiction
yofaceizscrumpy
2006-10-15 08:57 pm
Sorry for interrupting you this evening, but it seems like your community is a walking contradiction.
As any sophistica can see from dictionary.com, "the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct" is the definition of philosophy. To be anti-philosophy is a totality that claims truth.
I kindly request that you disband your entire community this instant.
Anti-philosophy is simply an attitude or approach of skepticism to the possibility of most or all philosophical projects as philosophers themselves define their projects.
There is a simple reason to take an attitude of "anti-philosophy." All great philosophers, from the very beginning of the conversation that we call "philosophy", have been in some sense anti-philosophers, rejecting the very idea that any kind of philosophy is possible or that all previous "philosophy" was philosophy at all. Whether Plato or Rousseau or Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, or even such an infamia as Heidegger, (and many more) the first original steps in their philosophical work was to question whether philosophy, or at least systematic knowledge as assumed by philosophy, is possible at all. Is it possible to "know" (or describe or find a method to produce) the structure of "reality," the conditions of knowledge, the foundation of "being" or "thought," or the grand historical movements of "spirit" or the inherent logics of "Mind", in the way that philosophers claim, or are the very claims a form of self-deception?
Further, any advance in "knowledge" (science, theoretical thinking, mathematics) has represented both a break from philosophical rumination and a crisis of philosophy. Every scientific advance has represented a reconception of philosophy because previous philosophy is found to be limited and unfounded... And yet rarely do the professional advocates of the philosophical project look at itself with humility. The whole dung-shifting machine just rolls along as if all previous speculation had not been thrown onto the heap. All philosophy, like all religion, becomes an illustration of shifting into the "holes" left by science and literature, a "God" of the gaps approach... where there is no "science" it is there philosophy shall fill in the gaps. And finally any "advance" in "experiential understanding" has been pre-philosophical and has largely involved the kind of experience we get from the visual arts, poetry, drama, novels, etc. In fact, basically, what we call philosophy has nothing to do with wisdom or knowledge... Philosophical practice is basically a parasite on the arts, out of which the discipline of philosophy grew, during the historical period when arts separated from religious ritual... And philosophical practice is also parasitic on science, from which philosophy reacts by constantly redacting itself and reforming itself as commentary on scientific practice.
To the extent that you can say that an "attitude" or "approach" is philosophical, only to that extent can you say that "anti-philosophy" is a philosophy, and thus represents a contradiction, or perhaps a systematic paradox. But this in-itself represents the kind of imperialism of knowledge that philosophy has been accused of by every great philosopher who started his/her philosophical career as an anti-philosopher. Philosophy seeks to dominate all forms of knowledge, seeks to be a term that is everywhere and nowhere. In this way it is a lot like the word "language" or "ideology". Everything becomes a "language" and thus every aspect of mind or communicative experience is filed under the category of language, thus we get "the language of music" and "the language of architecture", etc., etc. The same occurs with the term ideology.... Among some "thinkers", even some anti-philosophers, all thought becomes an example of ideology and thought-itself is not possible without "ideology". You can parade out as many dictionary definitions of philosophy that you like to prove that an "anti-philosophical" attitude is self-contradictory, but it doesn't negate the fact that the definitions themselves are self-contradictory, assuming that all thought is philosophical and that philosophy is both everything and nothing.
This is the way that many use the term "philosophy". Philosophy is not only some kind of "systematic thought" obtaining to wisdom, knowledge, and understanding of the world, but also something that we "have" implicitly, simply because we think at all. Thus it is impossible to be an anti-philosopher because by definition all systematic thought of any sort is philosophical, and if the thought is not systematic, then the implications of thinking, is itself philosophical. Thus the reasoning goes, "To think 'anti-philosophically' is an example of philosophical thinking." But this is like the Cretan who says all "Cretans are liars", the very fact of making the statement I am "anti-philosophical" is either paradox or contradiction. Well the former rather than the latter. Yet the possibility exists that it is neither. It is simply a double-bind statement created by the systematic gossip of philosophers themselves, those engaged in the intellectual circulation of gossip to the extent that they have imposed a dictionary definition that is totalistic and intellectually imperialistic. But let me suggest that like most double bind situations, this situation was produced by a category mistake or a problem of logical typing. It is possible to be "anti-thinking" in certain situations. If I am a baseball batter, I am not thinking at every moment about how to swing the bat. If my baseball coach tells me that you have to get "beyond thought" and "just swing" wjem you are in the batter's box, I know that he is saying that "conscious" thinking is harmful to my batting average in this situation. But to define his "anti-thinking" statement as also a "thought" and thus self-contradictory is a form of sophistry, the same kind of sophistry that practically all philosophers engage in at one time or another. They, the self-described lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, have propounded their definitions through intellectual gossip, so that you are a philosopher whether you know it or not and no matter what you do or think getting beyond philosophy is impossible.
But lets be real. A "Philosopher" is a professional category in our modern society. Propounding philosophy is what those rarefied "professionals" do. But before "philosophy" was a profession it was a denotation of a systematic orientation to life that was "positioned" outside of organized (western) religion. Philosophers were not so much anti-religious as un-religious. Philosophy had an historical beginning and it has historical limitations. It was born when literature began to separate itself from religion and it began to attenuate when science began to separate itself from both religion and philosophy. Philosophy as an historical practice has always shaded into literature and myth on one side and science and mathematics on the other. Philosophy is not "strictly" bounded or limited by these other experiential practices and ways of producing understanding, but philosophical practitioners have always ignored the fact that they are simply continuers of these other projects. At its best philosophical practice provides abstraction and meta-comment on literature and science. At its worse philosophical practioners pimp off of literature and science while at the same time pretending to dominate both of those practices and proclaiming the originality of their discipline. An anti-philosophical point-of-view is simply a point-of-view that recognizes the historical limitations of philosophy and hopes for the further attenuation of philosophy in the future. But let me emphasize, that It is only the arrogant imperialism of some philosophers that necessitate anti-philosophy. To the extent that any other field -- religion or even physics or biology -- exhibits this sort of arrogant yearning to dominate other fields, then they too should be called to task.
Then what is left of philosophy? Mostly gossip. The true subject of philosophy has always been gossip in one form or another. It is gossip taken to a higher level -- the gossip of complex society commenting on the fact that face-to-face society, where gossip truly matters, is no longer possible. Philosophy is essentially meta-gossip, on the form and function of complex structures of growing human society.
There is no "contradiction" in being an anti-philosophy philosopher: if you believe that philosophy is parasitic meta-gossip, then your function is to reveal how philosophy works as a form of meta-gossip. Yet we assume that this practice of critique of philosophy that I am calling "anti-philosophy", is also a form of meta-gossip. The snake eats its tail.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
27 May 2007
(reedited 28 May 2007)
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Wittgenstein's Fright at Cultish Mathematicians:
An Incident in the History of the Philosophy of Mathematics or
What did Wittgenstein mean by Cantor's theories being a "cancerous growth" on mathematics?
A question asked;
When commenting on Cantor's ideas of uncountable sets and different levels of infinity, Wittgenstein called it a "cancerous growth on the body of mathematics". Cantor's (and others such as Dedekind) ideas have since provided the basis for much of the development of mathematics thereafter. What could have led Wittgenstein to make such a remark? What did he mean by it?
The hard part in answering this question is trying to explain the pure mathematics in everyday language so that a common reader will know what was at issue between Wittgenstein and those, such as Bertrand Russell, who thought that Cantor, Weirstrass and Dedekind provided a solution to metaphysical problems of the foundations of mathematics. If I get the basic statement of the background wrong please correct me. Still I think it is necessary to state the problem in everyday language because one must have a clear view of how much Cantor's discovery went against common sense. If the reader can understand this she will also be able to understand why so many philosophers and mathematicians thought that Cantor's theories of the infinite did not say anything that made sense. But more important for this note the reader will be able to see how Wittgenstein's view differed from the other condemnations of Cantor's line of thinking.
Cantor considered the problems of infinite sets. The common logic since Aristotle had been that the infinite was not actual but only potential.. But against common logic Cantor showed that there are sets larger than the infinite sets of natural numbers. He showed specifically that no infinite set could have as many elements as all possible subsets of that infinite set. This led to a revolution in how we conceived of set theory and of the infinite. The infinite could no longer be considered an anomaly. In other words their were different "kinds" of infinite sets. (Oh mathematicians forgive my simplicity!) What Cantor was able to show was that infinity was "actual" not just an unimaginably large number, not just "potential". He showed there are infintie sets that are larger than other sets that are also infinite. The best example is the set of all natural numbers versus the set of all irrational numbers. Both sets are infinite sets. But the set of all irrational numbers is "larger," or contains more members, than the set of all natural numbers. (Forgive me. I have merely stated the same notion in a number of ways while avoiding technical language. I did this in the hopes that non-mathematical readers will get my drift. Possibly I'm just furthering your confusion. Also for those of you who may belong to the school of mathematical realists forgive me for stating all of this as if it were just another kind of reality.)
When a mathematician comes to such conclusions philosophers sneeze. Why? Because to decide that the infinite set of irrational numbers is larger than the infinite set of natural numbers is to indirectly decide questions posed at the origins of Aristotle's metaphysics, i.e. the metaphysical status of the infinite. Philosophers of Mathematics recognized this if no one else did. Russell accepted the mathematics but spent much time trying to ground the insight into his own formal logic.
Wittgenstein rejected Cantor but he was not the only one.. Ponicare said, "There is no actual infinity; Cantorians forgot that and fell into contradictions. Later generations will regard Mengenlehre as a disease from which one has recovered " Brouwer said that: Cantor's theory was "a pathological incident in the history of mathematics from which future generations will be horrified." Another quote in my notebook is from Wittgenstein. "Cantor's argument has no deductive content at all.' Yet I would distinguish this reaction from Ponicare and Brouwer. I take Wittgenstein to mean that he would not argue with the mathematics but would just proclaim it all irrelevant to any philosophical or logical view.
I think most of these reactions were simply a matter of an inability to reconceive ancient notions. But many mathematicians seized on Cantor's theory. Some philosophers were horrified. It didn't seem gentlemanly that these theories were being used as solutions to ancient problems philosophy. Also, the mathematicians who ceased on Cantor's theories treated them as if they were the second coming of the Pythagorean theorem or a new discovery of Pi. Cantor's theories made much of what was said previously in the philosophy of mathematics hard to justify. There were philosophers who were simply exasperated. Why don't mathematicians stop this nonsense, leave us alone, and get back to their equations? What I wonder is, if there were many mathematicians with a philosophical bent who were discouraged by the narrowness of the philosophers. This is an historical determination that is hard to make. No one can ever know what was lost by way of dogmatism.
Wittgenstein was one of those who looked at all of this as an attempt to establish a New Pythagorean Cult around pure mathematics and formal logic. But even though I reject his view I think it should be fully understood. At base Wittgenstein had interesting reasons, that I think can't be easily countered, unless one is a thorrough going rationalist or believes in a pragmatic realism that states in the long run we just work and see what works. (I am somewhere within those choices.)
Wittgenstein's view of mathematics was unique and I doubt one could find more than two people who would have agreed with him in 1932. But I don't think he cared much about who agreed with him, except for Turing. When he was giving a course on these subjects it seems that the only person he cared to 'make see' his point of view was Turing, who would argue with W all the way. Wittgenstein thought that "belief" in mathematics was a kind of religion among intellectuals. He would throw out what must have seemed like Delphic statements at the time such as:
"There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics."
"I shall try again and again to show that what is called a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention."
The quote about "cancerous growth" is not referring directly to Cantor but rather to Russell's discussion of Cantor, Weirstrass and Dedekind.. Russell believed that pure mathematics had laid the foundations which could ground mathematics in formal logic. For Wittgenstein, these mathematicians' solutions to problems of the infinitesimal, the infinite and continuity and Russell's acceptance of these solutions as great achievements of mathematical logic had "deformed the thinking of mathematicians and philosophers." But Wittgenstein's position was not the same as other philosophers and mathematicians who criticized Cantor, et. al. He did not question the mathematics of the solutions or criticize their premises, he questioned whether these solutions were solutions to mathematical problems at all. More precisely he re-categorized the solutions to another context outside of mathematics and tried to demonstrate that the new context where these solutions must be discussed could be either accepted or rejected without effecting mathematics or logic at all.
Wittgenstein's reference to the 'cancerous growth' on mathematics encapsulates two related notions: In his view mathematicians had grafted onto mathematics the following: (1) the idea that mathematics somehow gave answers to what Wittgenstein believed were metaphysical questions and (2) the idea that when doing certain kinds of 'pure mathematics' what you were doing had some connection to that other kind of game called 'formal logic.'
It was these metaphysical 'answers' and the development of a formal logic that were the 'cancerous growth'. Cantor (and the way others developed Cantor) was just an example of this 'cancerous growth.' To the extent that I understand the issues here I think that Wittgenstein was being dogmatic. To the extent that I understand W'ittgenstein's concern I think he was trying to get the best mathematicians (mainly Turing, who he much admired) to see how both mathematics and formal logic had no real 'foundation' but could be restated in ways that were not 'elegant'. These 'non-elegant' restatements would be equally 'true' in that they would come to the same conclusion without flaws but would seem absurd. I think Wittgenstein was saying that sometimes the elegance of the solution tricks us into accepting it as fundamental or correct.
If I remember, correctly some of what Wittgenstein wrote in his notebooks on these subjects was recently published (4 years ago?). It seems to me that much of Wittgenstein's rhetoric seems to come from the fact that he simply could not get Turing to see that his (Wittgenstein's) picture of mathematics was one possible view of the cathedral. He just thought that all mathematicians were misled on the "reality" of Cantor's proofs and then compounded it all by developing false notions about proclaiming that here - at last -- was the foundation of mathematics.
Of course I may be too hard on Wittgenstein here. There was something in his whole notion about how the "game" of mathematics should be played in order to make sense in the world that also led him to reject Godel's theorem. Who knows maybe in the end we will find that the way Wittgenstein viewed the "game" of mathematics was a sort of anti-foundational foundationalism. I trust I am being appropriately obscure!
Again these are very complicated questions and unfortunately unlike during the 80 years between 1860 and 1940 we don't seem to have great mathematicians who are interesting philosophers and great philosophers who are good mathematicians. The other possibility is that I don't know what I am talking about. It has been a long time since I studied these topics, a long time since those courses where very smart and inarticulate professors tried to explain to me (a very dumb but articulate student) the elegance of pure math. At the time I agreed with Wittgenstein on at least one point. The elegance seemed purely imaginary.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
9 March 2006 (originally written - 5 Feb 2005)
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| » The "Folk Psychology" of Philosophers & the Social Networks of Gossip: Example-the Mind-Body Problem |
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The Strange Persistence of the "Mind/Body Problem" and the "Folk Psychology" of the Philosophers as an Example of the Social Networks of Gossip:
In one of these posts I made the mistake of ironically using the term 'folk psychology' to describe the persistence of the 'mind-body' problem among philosophers. The absurdity of that persistence I take as a given. What is taken as the "mind-body" problem – i.e. the inability to account for the 'qualia' of experience on a pre-determined physicalist basis or the impossibility of giving a physicalist account of "what it is like to be a bat," for example – is the same problem that is encountered in all areas of scientific inquiry, including the hard physical sciences.
Two quotes I am fond of will illustrate this thesis.
The question of what kind of a world [quantum mechanics] describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics. Minimally interpreted, the theory describes a set of facts about the way the microscopic world impinges on the macroscopic one, how it affects our measuring instruments, described in everyday language or the language of classical mechanics. Disagreement centers on the question of what a microscopic world, which affects our apparatuses in the prescribed manner, is, or even could be, like intrinsically; or how those apparatuses could themselves be built out of microscopic parts of the sort the theory describes. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm/
"It is not to be supposed, in any case that 'perceiving' an object involves knowing what it is like. That is quite another matter. We shall see later that certain inferences, of a highly abstract character, can be drawn for our perceptions to the objects perceived; but these inferences are at once difficult and not quite certain. The idea that perception, in itself, reveals the character of objects, is a fond delusion, and one, moreover, which it is very necessary to overcome if our philosophy is to be anything more than a pleasant fairy-tale."
Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy .
The first quote is from a standard account of the human problems encountered by common understanding when trying to explain the implications of quantum mechanics. The second quote is from Bertrand Russell's lead up to his philosophy of knowledge. These quotes should be taken together, but with the following addenda – perception-itself is also part of that intrinsic physical world that is intrinsically unknown – except that we do know what it is like to experience our own perception. On the other hand a scientific theory, even one that is primarily mathematical, is simply a "non-common sense" way of perceiving the world, or the relations of the world that we take for "objects." Further, all of these perceptions of the world can be conceived of as "appearances," but not as " mere appearances," i.e. it is not as if the appearance itself was somehow unreal or not a part of the world that we investigate, when we investigate the nature of what is real.
Galen Strawson put this best, in describing some ideas that he partially derived from Russell:
In having Experience in the way we do, we are directly acquainted with certain features of the ultimate nature of reality, as Russell and others have remarked – whether or not we just put what we known into words in any theoretically tractable way. And this is so whatever it is best to say about any non-Experiential ( e.g. dispositional) aspects of the mental that there may be. We may certainly hope to develop our understanding of the nature of the Experiential, but we can do this only by adding to what we already know of it by direct acquaintance.
…
[H]ow things appear or seem is how they really are, the reality that is at present in question just is the appearing of seeming. In the case of any experiential episode E, there may be something X of which it is true to say that in undergoing E, we only have access to an appearance of X, and not to how X is in itself. But serious materialists must hold that E itself, the event of being-appeared-to, with all the qualitative character that it has, is itself part of physical reality. They cannot say that it too is just an appearance, and not part of how things are, on the pain of infinite regress. They must grant that it is itself as reality, and a reality with which we must, in plausibility, be allowed to have some sort of direct acquaintance. As Russell says, we must 'treat "seeming" with respect". Real Materialism by Galen Stawson in Chomsky and His Critics, edited by Norbert Hornstein and Louis Anthony at p. 67, quoting B. Russell in An Outline of Philosophy , p. 101.
The basic mistake of those philosophers who persist in referring to the mind/body problem is an inability to break out of there own common sense notions of what science does and does not teach us. The same is true with the philosophers who refer to the problem of the "mental" or of "qualia." The problems they refer to are not unique to a naturalistic study of the world of the mental or of experience. It is rather an aspect of the limits of all theoretical study. These limits have been expressed in various ways since Newton's theoretical revolution in science. Empiricists, idealists and materialists alike have expressed them. What has not been recognized is the reason that they exist whenever we think the world through theoretical science. In effect, the special kind of thinking that is represented by a descriptive and explanatory theoretical model, a theory that is pragmatically testable, with tests that are repeatable, is very narrow in its representations of reality. In many ways these theories are simply other ways of "perceiving" the world. This means that the problems of perception and "seeming", the problems of making sure of reality, which we have in everyday life, do not disappear when we use a theoretical construct to refine our perceptions. The problems of appearance, of knowing what things are like, do not disappear in the physical sciences, as they don't disappear in the sciences that deal with the mental, they are only given sharp relief. They are made deeper.
I think it will be helpful here to quote the whole passage that Strawson refers to above. Russsell first points out that some of the problem that philosophers have is that they don't ask themselves 'what is meant by "seeming".'
If a dream or a table 'seems' to be one sort of thing, while it is 'really' another we shall have to admit that it really seems, and that what it seems to be has a reality of its own. Nay, more, we only arrive at what it 'really' is by an inference, valid or invalid, from what it seems to be. If we are wrong about the seeming, we must be doubly wrong about the reality, since the sole ground for asserting the table composed of electrons and protons is the table that we see, i.e. the 'seeming' table. We must therefore treat 'seeming' with some respect. Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy , p. 101.
For years Noam Chomsky has pointed out that the mind/body problem is not only wrong it is simply not even comprehensible. This is not because we know so little about "minds" or "perception" or "experience" but just the opposite; what we don't know about is what the physical really is. A "body", in the way that the Cartesians stated the mind/body problem, is a concept that has been shown to be unsustainable, since Newton elucidated his theories. Every fifty years or so physics comes along with another refinement of what the 'physical' really is. It turns out that just possibly the physical is just as well conceived of as little bits of information. Strawson points out that Russell once remarked "that the reason that physics is mathematical is not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little." (Strawson, op.cit. p.61) (Note, if Engels insisted upon calling his materialism "dialectical" it is because he had some intuition of the truth of how little we know about the physical. In other words "dialectical materialism" as originally propounded was a primitive insight into our lack of knowledge. The idea of the physical was meant to be a provisional and unstable concept, a constantly moving target. The fact that Engels had this insight, even though he was a very bad scientist only means that he was trying to understand the crisis of materialism after Newton and Darwin. There is no reason to bow down to an idea of philosophy that was meant to make up for our lack of knowledge of the physical, when we now have much greater insight into the reason why such concept as "materialism" or the "physical" don't stay pinned to the mat.)
The confusion comes with most philosophers because they think we know through science what the physical and is, and the real problem is to try to explain the mental or the qualia of experience. The opposite is true in a really interesting way. We know our own minds and experiences intimately. We experience the qualia of experience and thus this seems to us to be what needs to be explained or accounted for. Mental experience "seems" so florescent and effervescent to us, so unsettled. Non-mental objects on the other hand "seem" so solid and relatively easy to define, mainly because we are programmed to handle them, touch them, taste and smell them. They seem stable and there is reality in the "seeming", but what our theoretical evaluations show us is that we know so little about the physical. We simply don't know what it is. The "seeming" of our experience is what we really know. To quote Russell again:
"The essence of matter appears to be this: We can distinguish series of events in space-time which have a certain kind of close resemblance to each other, such that common sense regards them as manifestations of one 'thing'. But when we look closely at the question, it turns out that what physics offers is something more abstract than this. Take, e.g. the continued existence of a certain electron. This means to say that events in a certain neighborhood will be such as can be calculated on the assumption that there is an electric charge of a certain standard magnitude, in the middle of that neighborhood; and that the neighborhoods of which this is true form a tube in space-time.
So long as we stick to the standpoint of pure physics there is a certain air of taking in each other's washing about the whole business. Events in empty space are only known in regards their abstract mathematical characteristics; matter is only an abstract mathematical characteristic of events in empty space. This seems rather a cold world. But as a matter of fact we know some things are a little more concrete. We know, e.g. what it feels like when we see things. 116 (Emphasis mine.)
Yes, this is exactly the way it should be described. What we know is what it "feels like": to perceive. We know the perception of "things" from the "inside" of our own experienced reality. Since we know this experienced-reality intimately, the illusion arises with most philosophers, -- i.e. the philosophers who set goals for how explanations must be given if we are to explain the qualia of experience in a naturalistic way, -- that it is somehow these experiences that must be explained intrinsically, and "reduced" to the "physical", if mental experience is to be explained at all. But it is precisely our knowledge of the physical that cannot be apprehended through anything but a mathematical abstract except by way of the seeming of experience. The problem of intrinsic knowledge of the physical is as great, if not greater, than the problem of qualia.
Once again Russell says it much better than I can.
It used to be thought 'mysterious' that purely physical phenomena should end in something mental. That was because people thought that they knew a lot about physical phenomena, and were sure they differed in quality from mental phenomena. We now realise that we know nothing of the intrinsic quality of physical phenomena except when they happen to be sensations, and that therefore there is no reason to be surprised that some are sensations, or to suppose that the others are totally unlike sensations. The gap between mind and matter has been filled in, partly by new views on mind, but much more by the realisation that physics tells us nothing as to the intrinsic character of matter. 117 (emphasis mine).
My supplement to this is that the optimistic connotation of this paragraph ("It used to be thought… We now realise … no reason to be surprised… the realisation that…") has been undercut by subsequent history. And this is what I find curious. What was true then in 1927 about what physics told us that we don't know about the physical is even truer now after almost eighty years of further discoveries of the strangeness of the physical. Yet philosophers persist in not hearing the news.
How to explain this?
Well philosophers seem to have an explanation of the way they think only they apply this explanation to others in an inside-out fashion. What I am saying is that they project and externalize their notions into a theory that they call "folk psychology" and then attribute the workings of the theory onto the common people. Ian Ravenscroft at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/ explains one version of "folk psychology" in the following manner…
[F]olk psychology is a theory of mind implicit in our everyday talk about mental states. In the everyday traffic of our lives we make remarks linking sensory experiences to mental states; mental states to other mental states; and mental states to behavior. Thus we remark that the smell of freshly baked bread made Sally feel hungry; that Sally wanted to go on a diet because she thought that she was overweight; and that Sally went to the fridge because she desired a piece of chocolate cake. According to some philosophers, remarks such as these (or suitable generalisations of remarks such as these) function as a term-introducing theory which implicitly defines terms such as "believe", "want" and "desire".
Ravenscroft, then quotes David Lewis instructing us to do the following in order to build a model of a "folk psychology":
Collect all the platitudes … regarding the causal relations of mental states, sensory stimuli, and motor responses. … Add also all the platitudes to the effect that one mental state falls under another … Perhaps there are platitudes of other forms as well. Include only the platitudes which are common knowledge amongst us: everyone knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so on. Lewis, D. (1972): "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications". Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50: 249-58.
My contention is that the only folk that such a model would be applicable to are members of the caste we call the intelligentsia, and that in particular such a model would be instructive only when constructed from the "platitudes which are common knowledge" among philosophers. In such a case, we would call the results of this model an "ideology". We know that the intellectual caste is more susceptible to ideology than most and we won't be surprised by what we see from the results of the collection of such platitudes.
The transmission of these platitudes we will call "gossip", because as should be clear all philosophy is basically transmitted through gossip and is often nothing more than gossip itself. When common people and "housewives" (sic) engage in gossip it is called by its true name. When intellectuals engage in gossip it is often called "philosophy."
In The Sociology of Philosophy: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Randall Collins states:
In the case of the ideas we are concerned with…, the ideas that matter historically, it is possible to demonstrate that the individuals who bring forward such ideas are located in typical social patterns: intellectual groups, networks, rivalries.
The history of philosophy is to a considerable extent the history of groups. Nothing abstract is meant here – nothing but groups of friends, discussion partners, close-knit circles that often have the characteristics of social movements.
Well how much such ideas "matter historically" is a matter of empirical demonstration. I do agree that these ideas are transmitted through "social networks" that "have the characteristics of social movements." But I do think that what really matters are actual social movements, like the one that ended slavery, or the movement that brought us the realization that women should be full and equal members of our society. What philosophers are engaged in is "gossip". This is not to devalue gossip. I believe that gossip is important to any culture, though when gossip becomes a mass media commodity it is greatly deformed. But I also think that we should call what most philosophers do when they transmit their ideas by its correct name, i.e. gossip.
Why insist on calling certain aspects of the transmission of philosophy a form of gossip? Isn't this abusive to philosophers? Yes, I am afraid that professionally trained philosophers will not even understand the basic point of my insistence that what they do is a form of gossip. I want to persist in a view that all human beings are philosophers and that philosophy must become a democratic and cooperative activity. Calling the transmission of philosophy a form of gossip illustrates the fact that doing philosophy is an activity of everyday life and it is not like science a technical specialty that needs long years of training. The same is true of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political analysis and participation, foreign policy, singing songs, telling stories, etc. Philosophy, as something 'technical' and separate from what the rest of us do is the product of a self-consciously anti-democratic movement, an aristocratic reaction to the threat of democratic decision making in Greek city-states. In other words, it was a semi-secular invention of a defensive intelligentsia. Such discussions that take place in philosophy and literary criticism, in the non-academic sense of these words, belongs to us all and can be understood by us all, or else they have failed in their main job, the shaping of open dialogue.
Now, as far as the conception of folk psychology is concerned, and its transmission through the hierarchical social network established through gossip, I think what it can be used for is explaining the persistence of the platitude called 'the mind/body problem.'
When I originally called the mind/body problem part of the 'folk psychology of philosophers' my correspondent did not understand the irony. He thought that both the mind/body problem and folk psychology were meant to be taken seriously as products of philosophy instead of as the transmission of gossip by other means, i.e. through the formation of an ideological world view appropriate to philosophers.
Let me say finally that folk psychology is a fine illustration of retail bullshit in its relation to gossip. The notion of folk psychology seems to me the academic homologue to the idea of the 'folk tale' among the nineteenth century philologists. It is also similar to the notion of 'folk music' among the Bohemians. Such notions arise when a social group that wishes to understand "the masses" posits a notion of a "primitive-authentic" and projects this authenticity upon others. The term "folk psychology" is a term of art which derives from the intellectual elitism of the academic (mis)conceptions of everybody else. The only people that the notions of 'folk psychology' actually describes are the philosophers who use it and who persist in such pre-Newtonian notions as 'the mind/body problem.' It is the equivalent of many other insular and parochial notions that are raised to pseudo-theory.
Intellectuals may exhibit a 'folk psychology'. Everybody else can make do with old fashion common sense – which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. As Bertolt Brecht said, in a much different context, people have no desire to become folk.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
9 January 2006
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http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing
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Jan. 9th, 2006 @ 10:45 am
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| » The Break Between Sartre and Camus: Gossip, Invective, and the Meaning of History |
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A young friend who is writing a paper on existentiallism asked me to explain the Sartre and Camus break-up to her. So I did. This is material that has been covered so often that I don't know if I have offered anything knew. Never-the-less I decided to post it here for those who might be interested. As an aside, it might be interesting to write an essay taking off from this about the whole notion of "choosing" with "in" history. This idea about history seems to me especially religious... as if history was a kind of god.
The Break Between Sartre and Camus: Gossip, Invective, and the Meaning of History. : A Question from a Young Friend
Your question: "Why did Sartre and Camus argue and split (or, as you put it. "have a falling out")?"
Someday I would like to write an essay about intellectual fame and literary gossip and its meaning for philosophical issues... I think the "true meaning" of the "split" between Sartre and Camus, tells us more about the subject of the "literary star system" and the "ghost of gossip" that haunts every petty bourgeois intellectual enterprise than it tells us about the important historical issues behind the parting of ways . But some other time.
Basically the feud between Sartre and Camus was about each individual's relation to resistance and violence, history and action. Sartre and Camus argued over some of the following issues -- political commitment, the nature of history, the relation of the "writer" to the struggles of the oppressed, the nature of violence and terrorism, the role of the individual, etc. All of this was in the context of the growing anti-colonial movements, especially movements against French Imperialism in Africa and Indochina and the postwar influence of Stalinism over the European working class and these same anti-colonialist movements. Sartre's emphasis was on opposing oppression in France and opposing French imperialism. Camus' emphasis was on opposing the tyranny of Stalinism and similar totalitarian tyrannies and would not support an anti-imperialist movement that would simply lead to another form of oppression. For Sartre, Camus' moral position provided backhanded political support for imperial oppression. For Camus, Sartre's political position provided moral cover for Stalinist domination. From this distance we can see that they were both correct and both fundamentally confused.
These I believe are the important issues in a nutshell. Readers can stop here if they feel no need to learn more about the interesting gossip or the entangled history.
Like all else in the literary world the break between Sartre and Camus began as a feud over a bad book review, the book we know in English as Albert Camus' "The Rebel." In 1951 Camus published "L'Homme revolte". In 1952, soon after the publication, France was deep within one of its periodic political crises, involving Indochina, Algeria and national strikes. In the mean time the only writers with moral credit among the French working and middle classes were the intellectuals who had in one way or another participated in the fight against the Nazis. In this respect Sartre and Camus were the pre-eminent literary stars of the post-war era. They were often paired together as representing a style of revolt among the rising young intellectuals. The radical youth of the era grabbed at existentialism as representing their moral disgust at the hypocrisy of a bourgeoisie that so easily collaborated with Nazi occupation and representing their need for freedom of thought against the stultification of a mechanical Marxism as represented by the PCF.
It was in this situation that Francois Jensen wrote a scathing review of Camus' book in Sartre's journal "Les Temps Moderns." Camus in response wrote to Sartre accusing him of making a personal attack in order to gain political points with his leftist friends. Sartre wrote back accusing Camus of betraying the cause of the oppressed in order to advance his career as the popular writer of petty bourgeois angst. Well, all of this is the usual literary gossip, and the Parisian literary culture can be especially vicious, probably because French "intellectuals" are not only "writers," "philosophers," and "artists" but are also caught in the frenzy of fame that elevates the writer to the equivalent of a rock star. It's hard to imagine now but "Paris Intellectual Culture" once held an analogous place in French Society that "Hollywood Star Culture" holds in the U.S. This meant that the friendship between Sartre and Camus was broken in public and the events were played out in the newspapers and broadcast from the lecture halls, in a way that is hard to imagine for a present day American. It would be as if some imagined feud between Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish were to be covered by the New York Times, the Daily News, and the Fox News channel. More than anything else this magnified the bitterness of the break. It also tended to obscure the issues behind the break, then and now.
Beneath the posturing, gossip, and frenzy of fame there were actually a few serious philosophical and political questions. And as far as those are concerned it is not easy to say who was more wrong-headed Camus or Sartre. In current intellectual culture, with its automatic bourgeois self-satisfaction (which parades as democratic righteousness while obliterating democracy everywhere) it is usually Camus who is given the last word. Many U.S. writers today (especially those around the oddly jesuitical "New Republic" magazine) would turn him into Saint Camus. Yet when I was coming to awareness intellectually in the 1970s, at a time when U.S. atrocities in the Vietnam war were still obvious to U.S. intellectuals, Sartre was looked upon as the model of the committed intellectual and Camus was considered a naive, if unwitting apologist for imperialism. Much of this is simply the clouded sensorium that is the politics of literary reputation and has more to do with our current ideological battles than with history or moral principle. The issues behind the rise and fall of literary reputation are interesting, but not important for this particular post.
To understand the historical issues that give the little literary feud between Sartre and Camus some historical significance it is necessary to understand what most left-leaning French intellectuals understood in the postwar years. They all knew that the French "bourgeoisie" had quickly given in to the Fascists, and collaborated with German occupation. Most believed this was because the bourgeoisie feared the communists more than the fascists. They all believed that in the countries occupied by the Germans it was the communists and the socialists who organized the underground resistance to the Fascists. In short the Stalinist Communist parties emerged from World War II with moral credit for their resistance to the Nazis and the ruling classes of France and Italy were largely discredited. For independent intellectuals, such as Sartre and Camus, who opposed the Nazi occupation with varying degrees of risk to their own lives, the significant question was, what attitude should be taken to the PCF, the French Communist Party. The best known of this group of independent intellectuals, beside Camus and Sartre, were Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron. But there were others who would make their reputations much later such as Cornelius Castoriadis and the intellectuals around a little known but very interesting group called "Socialisme ou Barberie". I mention this group because it was one of the few left intellectual formations that offered commentary on these issues that more than holds up today.
The first break between Camus and Raymond Aron on one side and Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on the other took place over how to characterize the Stalinist party and what attitude to take toward the newly reconstructing "bourgeois" parties. Basically, Sartre believed (at least up until 1956 and the Hungarian Workers Rebellion against the Stalinist Communist Party) that the Communists were an oppressive party but were the only game going and represented the interests of the oppressed. Camus believed that all political parties were basically oppressive and that the leaders of these parties cynically claimed to represent the interests of the oppressed in order to become oppressors themselves. (I am highly oversimplifying.)
But being writers and intellectuals who were also French, Sartre and Camus were bound to create a theory of their disagreement that would bring it back to fundamental philosophical differences with world historical import.
For Camus, individual rebellion, the ability of the individual to say "No" to the oppressive regime was the highest value. (I suppose one could make Antigone the great patron saint of this attitude.) But the history of the previous 200 years seemed to Camus to call into question the very basis of "rebellion" as a collective act of liberation -- of revolution. Collective rebellion, would simply result in organized murder and, therefore, even though the individual "Rebel" should be honored for his act of resistance -- that act of resistance being the basis for asserting human dignity -- revolution itself would fail to constitute justice. For Camus, all collective action could only constitute more injustice. If Camus was willing to take collective action against the Nazis it was only because Nazi injustice was all invasive and total. This meant that any kind of rebellion at all was a Pascallian wager that had to be accepted. In fact for Camus, the Nazis proved his point about the futility of collective rebellion, since the Nazis were simply one more example of that futility. All revolution led to greater terror, even when it was a reaction to the terror of the status quo.
Camus' solution to this "paradox" between individual rebellion, which establishes the basis for human dignity, and collective rebellion, which creates the basis for increasing repression, was the solution Sartre regarded as typical of the petty-bourgeois writer. Camus believed that one should essentially "privatize" rebellion, make rebellion into a moral standard of ones own life that could be expressed in the ethics of one's art. Rebellion in Camus' view could not establish a world of justice, but when the rebellion of the individual is turned into the directed energy of human art, it can create a universe of meaning.
Sartre believed that the only way to resist oppression was to make a moral choice. So far he agreed with Camus. Sartre also believed that collective rebellion would inevitably lead to violence. But far from shrinking from this violence Sartre tended to think that collective violence was one of the motors of history and the only choice to make was on which side of history the individual would choose to fight. For Sartre and Camus the choice was moral, as well as political. But for Sartre the choice of rebellion was also the choice of history. It sounded to Sartre like a betrayal of the values of the Resistance to Nazi occupation to say that collective rebellion only leads to more violence. Later it would sound like a betrayal of the liberation movement of the anti-French Algerians, to say to them that they should not rebel collectively. For Sartre it was merely a choice between supporting the violence and terrorism of the Algerian rebels against the French oppressors or supporting the violence and atrocities of the French colonialists against the Algerian people. To say that one should retreat into one's own art was simply to make a choice by default, it was to engage in an act of bad faith by pretending not to choose. For Sartre personal retreat into art was merely another way of supporting the violence of the status quo.
If one remembers that, at this time (1952), France was actively trying to recover its empire in Indochina and Africa, and that Sartre was actively opposing French colonialism, whereas Camus believed that the anti-colonialists had no "moral legitimacy", then one can get a sense of what the feud was "really" about from Sartre's point of view. If one remembers that Sartre was trying to "existentialize" Marxism and therefore not offering very acute criticism of the "political acts" of the Stalinists, then one can get a sense of what the feud was "really" about from Camus' point of view. For both writers the basic principle was "how" to oppose oppression. For Camus "collective resistance" to oppression only leads to more oppression. For Sartre Camus' "quietism" could only lead to the triumph of the oppressors. Camus believed that Sartre had become an ideologue giving cover to Stalinist domination, while he, Camus, was the advocate of individual human dignity. Sartre believed, that Camus was an apologist for French Imperialism, while he, Sartre was simply choosing to be "in" history and Camus was choosing in "bad faith. "
The question of who was "correct" in this argument is not the correct question. The question is how can we come to an historical understanding of the moral issues presented by Camus and how can we come to a moral understanding of the historical issues presented by Sartre. In many ways, in 1952, each represented the missing center in each other's thought. Camus' refusal to see that any fight for the oppressed could be meaningful, and Sartre's refusal to see that his uncritical support of the "resistance" of the oppressed could lead to a glorification of violence, seems to me to dance around the same basic absence in the world view of each philosopher.
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Quotes from Sartre and Camus:
I offer below a few enjoyable quotes from Sartre's "Reply to Camus", which in French reads with the voyeuristic thrill of observing a distant intimacy, like hearing your best friends breaking up in the next room. Sartre constantly addresses Camus as "you, you, you,..." as if it were his version of "J'Accuse." These quotes are "fun" and the reader will get a good flavor of Sartre's side of the argument.
Sartre's "Reply to Albert Camus" is a polemic worth reading if only for its rhetoric of energizing invective.
Sartre tells us that Camus is claiming to be tired of the fight. Sartre replies:
"[I]f I were tired it seems to me that I would feel some shame in saying so There are so many who are wearier. If we are tired, Camus, then let us rest, since we have the means to do so. But let us not hope to shake the world by having it examine our fatigue."
"[T]he only way of helping the enslaved out there is to take sides with those who are here."
Sartre speaks of Camus' relation to history and to Camus secondary relation to his own personality "outside of history", as if Sartre could perform an existential psychoanalysis on Camus, in a way he would later write about Baudelaire, Jean Genet, and Flaubert.
"Your personality, alive and authentic as long as it was nourished by the event, became a mirage. In 1944, it was the future. In 1952, it is the past, and what seems to you the most intolerable injustice, is that all this is inflicted upon you from the outside, and without your having changed. ... Only memories are left for you, and a language which grows more and more abstract. Only half of you lives among us, and you are tempted to withdraw from us altogether, to retreat into some solitude where you can again find the drama which should have been that of man, and which is not even your own any more...."
Sartre continues:
"Just like the little girl who tries the water with her toe, while asking, "Is it hot?" you view history with distrust, you dabble a toe which you pull out very quickly and you ask, "Has it a meaning?" ... And I suppose that if I believed, with you, that History is a pool of filth and blood, I would do as you and look twice before diving in. But suppose that I am in it already, suppose that, from my point of view, even your sulking is proof of your historicity. Suppose one were to reply to you, like Marx,: "History does nothing... It is real and living man who does everything. History is only the activity of man pursuing his own ends.... It is only within historical action that the understanding of history is given. Does history have a meaning? Has it an objective? For me, these are questions which have no meaning. Because History, apart from the man who makes it, is only an abstract and static concept, of which it can neither be said that it has an objective, nor that it has not. And the problem is not to know its objective but to give it one."
With this invective, Sartre could carry the reader with him. What is not remembered about Sartre is that he was one of the great polemicists of our time and wrote best when he was personally angry. Thus the young intellectuals of the time were more likely to read Sartre's side of this argument rather than Camus' side. It was only later, when reacting against Sartre's supposed "communism," his commitment to fighting for the oppressed even if the oppressed used violence, that Camus' clear eyed anti-Stalinism was used as a bludgeon against Sartre's wrestle with the French Communist Party. Sartre could be naive. He could cheer any and all anti-colonial movements on the one hand and cheer Israel as an exemplar of overcoming oppression on the other. But simple ignorance of the history of the time usually prevents most people from understanding the "argument" between Sartre and Camus.
In the end, when Camus died, Sartre showed his grudging, and admiring respect for Camus. The following is a quote from the obituary Sartre wrote for Camus:
"He [Camus] represented in this century, and against History, the present heir of that long line of moralists whose works perhaps constitute what is most original in French letters. His stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, waged a dubious battle against events of these times. But inversely, through the obstinacy of his refusals, he reaffirmed the existence of moral fact within the heart of our era and against the Machiavellians, against the golden calf of realism."
Some quotes from Albert Camus
"By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more."
"A free press can of course be good or bad, but most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad"
"The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily."
"A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world."
"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."
"Stupidity has a knack of getting its way."
Jerry Monaco
New York City
19 December 2005
This post has been carnivalized! Check out the Philosophy Carnival @ Rad Geek - Philosophy Carvival #24. He reviews the posts thoroughly. I nominate Rad Geek as the best carnival blurb writer!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
--
Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture
http://www.livejournal.com/users/monacojerry/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is
Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing
http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/
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Dec. 18th, 2005 @ 12:53 pm
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| » "Thirty Two Short Films" and Two Utopian Essays |
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Two utopian essays I wish to write based on Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.
The Legal Understructure of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
First, I would like to show how this film is about making and violating norms and rules. In other words it is a film about law in action and about making a human life. The film is illustrative of how human beings are adopted into a legal system that they at first perceive as benevolent ande later as monstrous. The only retreat is into the borderlands of the North or into death or possibly self-imposed solitary confinement where the only laws are those of one's own psyche. By analyzing both the structure and the content of Thirty Two Short Films a modest contribution can be made to showing how the state of the law invades the artistic imagination.
The myth of the artist as genius and the biographical legend of Glenn Gould, as the tortured, obsessed, addicted, manic-depressive, solitary, eccentric failure - a Coleridge of the piano - is the outward story of this movie. But Gould is also presented as initially called-forth into music by his mother and as always-already in the process of ideological interpellation as human subject. Excuse the Althusserian jargon, but I am sure that the film maker actually had this in mind in making the movie. The movie itself seems to be an illustration of Lacanian craziness without any of Lacan's obscurantism. In other words the movie is actually fun to watch and playful about film-making itself. What is missing from Thirty Two Short Films is all but the slightest hint that a phenomena such as Gould cannot be explained without trying to understand the biology of a musical prodigy. But since we know so little about such subjects and we know next to nothing about the biology of this musical prodigy, perhaps it is best to merely state that there is a need to explain the biology and admit ignorance our beyond this recognition.
Yet, even once we assume the biological basis for Gould's genius, and perhaps of his craziness, the film does a great work in showing us how such a person is called forth into the world as both a subject/object of the law and one in subjection to the rules around him. It shows the dominion of expectations and how a lone petty bourgeois genius has few choices to rebel - isolation, accommodation, acceptance, squirming, eccentricity, aestheticism, the cult of art, the world as work of art, etc. It shows that the institutions that Gould was born into were no longer fit for a musician who could not tame himself to a simple definition of performance or music or the legal definitions of art as an individuals piece of property.
Look at the rigid institution of performance that Gould was called into. That institution was no longer made for artists with a strong imagination but for people who needed cultural validation without the hope of hearing music. The cabaret singer could be heard. The rock and roll concert could be endured. A smoking and slightly high jazz audience in some basement somewhere could actually engage the music and perhaps contribute to it. But what did Gould have? Big, overheated and freezing, concert halls with chairs meant to torture the audience into submission to the music. Concrete and wooden halls that both deaden the sound of the piano notes as they move toward the back and reecho sounds into senseless repetition as they bounce off the side. The staring faces of audience, some enraptured, some amused or abused or bored, but all of them staring upwards at the stage until their necks crick, staring up at the "star," the musician, because somehow they are supposed to worship he who is able to bring-forth music. There are always vagaries of live performance, but the live performance of the concert pianist did not have to be a form of sublime torture for the audience. Whatever the reasons Gould gave up performing live, whether his abnegation originated in neuroses or in misplaced dogma about the new McLuhanesque media universe, the fact is that playing the classical piano in concert has become fixed in the concert hall. It was a fetish. No wonder pianists and musicians of all kinds began to look for new venues to play in. Yet, the law of the land seemed to be that a pianist of Glenn Gould's sort had to play in venues such as Carnegie Hall. Gould should have invented his own place of performance, and lived in it somewhere in Toronto. Sinatra used to invite a gathering of mostly beautiful women into the studio as he cut his great albums of the 1950s. They would sit on the flower against the wall and watch. Perhaps on occasion Gould could have done the same. But then where would his solitude have gone to?
The fact is that one does not establish an institution such as the great performance hall out of a love of music. It is an exhibition of power, of bourgeois pride, of hubris, of false and true generosity, of misplaced class paternalism. One establishes such institutions as a need for great display arises, but the question is who or what is on display? The Athenian theatrical celebrations were for the sake of religion and law, but mostly they were the place where the demos was flattered, reprimanded, put on display, chided, tweaked, justified, legitimated. The relationship between theater and law in democratic Athens was direct and conscious and replayed every time a trial was held in the same place as a theatrical performance. The relationship between an operatic performance and the law was more attenuated but can certainly be seen in most of Mozart at the time his operas were performed. My point is that the relationship between audience and work of art in these other great halls was direct and defined. The love of drama or music may be a result of this relationship but it was not the reason why these performance venues came about in the first place. They were displays of the power of the demos of Athens, or displays of the King's dominance, or of the counter-hegemony of the bourgeoisie, or a product of simple old fashion civic pride What ever the artist's place in this scheme of things, and the artist rarely let himself fit neatly into the these places of performance, there were actual reasons for such venues to exist? For what reason does a concert hall exist, for a performer such as Gould? There was no law for Gould to justify.
In this unwritten Utopian essay I would wish to imagine a place for performance of music in a world of radical democracy, a place where even a person such as Gould could perform and be a part of a larger consensus. Imagining a place for a Gould performance, even in a retrospective imagination of Utopia circa 1964, imagining a world where Gould could be called forth and presented in music and sound, with the ability to make music out of the sound of voices, as he often did, and also make music from the flow of Bach, that could be heard in the way he wished it to be heard. What kind of social world would have to exist for Glenn Gould's ideals of interactive performance to be brought forth? What would the legal relations and institutions of such a world look like?
The Autobiographical Understructure of Thirty Two Short Films
The second essay is simpler. A demonstration that one can take any movie and then structure one's own life around it, writing your own life into the movie. Such a demonstration will illustrate how we always take such narratives and let them call us out. Narrative helps us to structure our own lives, our own imagination.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
11 December 2005
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
--
Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture
http://www.livejournal.com/users/monacojerry/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is
Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing
http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/
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Dec. 11th, 2005 @ 01:46 pm
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| » Friendship, Gossip, & Methodology of Social Research |
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I suppose I should file this under the category of pomo-nonsense writing. But I choose to make some use of it. If you wish you can skip the quote and go directly to my unwarranted use of the quote.
The introduction to the book discusses the various senses of Derrida's claim, "no deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction" (1), in particular by showing that there is nothing narcissistic about it in so far as deconstruction is at work in phenomena, including political ones, rather than being a theoretical movement of Derrida's single-handed invention. The first chapter reviews some themes from The Politics of Friendship, which Thomson sees as Derrida's "most extensive political work" at the time and thus uses as a guiding thread throughout (1, 8). Here, the aporias of political friendship in general are transposed to democracy to yield an analysis of its inevitable self-delimitation: if democracy is a promise of universal inclusiveness, of each singular one counting equally, its fraternal or national limitation on members naturalizes the ineluctable decision of inclusion and exclusion. Repoliticizing this decision may thus lead to an experience of undecidability at the heart of any necessarily bounded democratic 'community.' Such an aporetic experience would prevent democracy from ever imagining itself equal to its concept: given the constitutive but irreconcilable demands its very idea harbours, democracy is an unfulfillable promise, thus remaining, like all meaning, infinitely deferred, always 'to come' from an unanticipatable future, and 'spectral', that is, hovering between absence and presence. Although it is not set up this way, the rest of the book may be seen as fleshing out -- once again, not analytically but by closely following their occurrence in other Derridian texts and contexts -- the ensemble of claims and concepts thus introduced: universality and singularity, brotherhood, nationality, and exclusion, depoliticization and repoliticization, community and openness or hospitality, originary violence and the promise of non-violence.
From a review of Deconstruction and Democracy by Alex Thomson, Continuum, 2005, 208pp, $120.00 (hbk), ISBN 0826475779, reviewed by Matthias Fritsch, Concordia University @ Notre Dame Philosophical Review.
First, I have to ask, if this makes any sense at all. Lines such as "the aporias of political friendship in general are transposed to democracy to yield an analysis of its inevitable self-delimitation" are mostly non-sense or in need of translation into everyday language. But I suppose that this is a language-game that needs to be played in order to make ones way in the hierarchy of academic life. Such games are no better or worse than the way corporate managers speak to each other or competing lawyers in the same office display their knowledge in order to get the partners attention. So if I were to translate the above quote I would have to say that "friendship", when read as a text, presents certain paradoxes that can be "flipped" around an axis of antinomies (insider/outsider, equality/dominance, patron/client, complementarity/non-complementarity) which are all aspects of political friendship. When such aspects of political friendship are read into mass society or translated into our ideals of democracy the limits of democracy can be seen in the same dynamics. The problems of inclusion and exclusion, equality and dominance, etc, will multiply exponentially. Whether this only applies to the "text" of friendship or also to to social relations is irrelevant to a true deconstructionist because there is nothing outside of the text.
I once browsed Derrida's Politics of Friendship with rising frustration at its obtuseness and its lack of connection with anything but its own language, the unbroken circle of references, and I concluded that the work of making sense is not worth the light cast across the subject. But here is my problem: I think the choice of subjects of many of the postmoderns, (including post-marxists) are important. Writing about the politics of friendship, or its bastard child gossip, from a philosophical and critical point of view is important, revealing and neglected. It is from what we call friendship and gossip that politics begins to emerge as something distinct form kinship relations. It is from the malleable norms of social groups and the narratives developed around those norms that religion begins to emerge. And finally it is from the politics of religions and the struggle of larger social-groups in growing city-states that the institutions of law emerge. Thus to focus on the politics of friendship and the circulation of gossip is to bring into view an important part of politics in general. Interestingly enough, as Derrida knew, the idea of focusing on friendship (as both inside and outside of politics) goes back to the roots of philosophical thinking about city-states, Plato and Aristotle.
So I constantly think that many people such as Derrida point to significant problems. (Even Heidegger can point to significant problems on occasion.) But what is worse, as far as my own hostility to postmodern obscurantism is concerned is that sometimes the pomos are the only ones pointing to the problems I wish to investigate. This puts me in the quandary of overcoming the pomo fog before I get to what I want to bring to point.
My instinct is to start with a methodological naturalism integrated with a very pragmatic historical materialism, an historical materialism that is informed as much by Shelley, Darwin, Kropotkin, Rudolf Rocker, as by those directly in Marx's tradition. My instinct is to put what I have to say into a language that allows for communication with others, a language that tries to make sense of the phenomena or event as part of what we know of human nature, even if it is a non-determined or an overdetermined aspect of human culture. What I mean by that last phrase is that there are many aspects of the human species, such as language development, which are underdetermined by social relations and thus exhibit aspects of biological growth. In contrast cultural development is often multiply determined and untraceable, exhibiting aspects of chaos, for instance much of ideology needs multiple social determinations in order to grow and often exhibits features of learned ignorance or willful blindness. Even with this distinction firmly in mind, I would insist that the capacity for willful blindness must be biological and probably resulted as an evolutionary trade-off, we just don't know how or why, and I doubt we ever will.
On the narrow poiint I agree with Derrida, there is a politics of friendship and that politics may disrupt democratic politics. The fact is, and we know this as much from our study of higher primates as from human beings - friendship and social networks are essential to politics. (See Franz de Waal's books, for example Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among the Apes.) There is no human exclusivity in politics of freindship and nothing that can be explained through a search for a metaphysical ground or, for that matter, repeated demonstrations that there is no metaphysical ground. The politics of friendship is a biological and cultural phenomena of many species of higher primates. When looked at from this point of view (a point of view that assumes methodological naturalism, and the coherence of real materialism, while leaving open the possibility of being shown the wrongness of ones ways) the mysteriousness and mysticism surrounding many of these matters disappears. The higher primates, for the most part, develop their own culture and recognizable alliances based on friendship. Human politics-itself is probably rooted in the small group politics of about 150 people. In such groups friendship and politics merge. At best such groups can be democratic in a way that is consensus driven.
In mass society the politics of friendship and the social networks that go with them can create a dialectic of inclusion/exclusion. My favorite example is how for quite awhile people of Irish descent all but monopolized many big city U.S. police departments and people of Italian descent were very prominent among sanitation workers and parks department workers in New York. Similarly in order to apprentice and work in many crafts in New York (plumbers, carpenters) one had to be be sponsored by someone who was already a master craftsman. Such sponsorship included those within ethnic and political friendship networks and excluded others outside of those networks. Such monopoly of job opportunity is often built on client/patron political relations, kinship networks, neighborhood organization and mobilization, and sometimes exclusive unionization.
What I would observe is that applying notions derived from biological anthropology, evolutionary psychology or cognitive science to the field of my particular interest the law does not warrant definite scientific conclusions. The lack of a highly structured theory of law that is both precise and realistic will continue. This is because we know so little about so much in anything that has to do with intentional actions of humans, and in fact all living beings. But a combination of attentive use of the natural sciences along with a very alert view of group and class formation can throw more light than simply staying within the fortress of signs or the magical thinking of economics. For example there are many good empirical observations about group formation of higher primates and how norms form within groups that makes nonsense of some speculations about law. In some cases a speculation about the law have been shown to be probably incorrect. This does not mean that we know what is correct. Such is often the relation between science and other areas that can not be reduced to narrow scientific theory. Science and empirical observation can often lead us to discard our speculations without leading us to hard theories. Even within the field of philosophy, where we are not trying to come to a definite historical or sociological conclusion, what we know from science (and about how natural sciences work) limits what we can speculate about. For example, the deconstructionist view of language is impossible from what we know of how the brain works and thus we must reevaluate most of Derrida with this in mind. What I am basically saying is that the emerging disciplines of cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, biological anthropology, etc. must be looked at with skepticism, but they are also limits to our own speculation in the history and philosophy of human societies and this includes those of us who wish to write about the actions of legal institutions and real-existing law in human societies.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
8 December 2005
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
--
Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture
http://www.livejournal.com/users/monacojerry/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is
Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing
http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/
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Dec. 8th, 2005 @ 03:29 pm
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| » Retail & Wholesale Bullshit: Crit & Quotes on Frankfurt's ON BULLSHIT |
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Retail & Wholesale Bullshit: Criticism & Quotes on Frankfurt's On Bullshit
On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt I finished Frankfurt's little philosophical essay On Bullshit. Here are some preliminary thoughts on why I think the book is misconceived. But don't mistake my intent. The essay is fun to read and can lead to thoughtful discussion. Basically, I think that Frankfurt ignores the current social conditions that make "bullshit' prominent in our society. "Bullshit" is transformed in modern society from a shoddy phenomena into a phenomena which has its own standards of excellence because it is sustained by a market for bullshit. Frankfurt states correctly that, "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit." (p.1) But then he goes onto say "we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And why we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis." This is where I begin to disagree with Frankfurt. It seems to me proper to ask why bullshit is such a pervasive part of our culture. I think that the basis for bullshit, bluff, puffery, humbug, hokum, quackery, etc is part of the human need for gaining the confidence of the other, even in circumstances when the person who needs the confidence and trust does not deserve it. Thus people imitate the qualities that gain personal confidence in any particular society at any particular time. But we are the only culture that has developed a whole industry called 'public relations' or 'advertising' that is dedicated to nothing but 'bullshit.' That industry is one of the biggest in our society and spends much time and research trying to produce better and less detectable bullshit.
Frankfurt starts off from the wrong point. I don't think that it is helpful to begin a philosophical analysis of 'bullshit' with conceptual analysis. To ask "what is 'bullshit'?" from a conceptual-analytic starting point seems to me about as fruitful as to ask "what is 'Rome'?", without reference to Roman history at any particular point. I propose three starting points in order to begin thinking about 'bullshit' : First, 'bullshit' as a cognitive phenomena; Second, as an historical phenomena; Third, as an institutional phenomena. Of course one cannot hope to have a scientific or theoretical point of view of a phenomena such as bullshit, in the first place because we don't know how 'bullshit' as a folk concept may relate to the cognitive phenomena of producing or recognizing 'bullshit.' Perhaps the best service Frankfurt could have provided was a simple analysis of how the concept is used in folk psychology along with an analysis of whether the English word 'bullshit' has some equivalent in all or most languages. In other words how universal is the concept of 'bullshit' among homo sapiens?
I can't answer these questions, nor can I provide a larger framework to discuss the notion of bullshit. As far as our own cognitive processes are concerned in detecting bullshit, we all like to believe that we know it when we see it, but I suspect that that is largely self-flattery, like the belief that we are good at detecting lies or are good judges of character. So let me suggest that on a very low level the problem of 'bullshit' is a 'perceptual problem' of trust and skepticism, of detection of fakery and puffery. Let me further suggest that such a problem exists in all societies. Yet as societies grow complicated and more populous the problem of bullshit becomes more pronounced. These are societies where people come in contact regularly with unknown quantities and qualities, whether unknown people or claims about unknown things and events from 'known' non-personal sources, that cannot be judged in the context of regular everyday reciprocal relations. In sub-cultures based on commodity trade the problem becomes crucial. A merchant needs to be able to judge the 'value' of products unknown to him by detecting the amount of a traders puffery. In societies based completely on commodity production, and the the resulting industry of advertising bullshit, it seems to me that bullshit tends to dominate most forms of non-personal communication.
Frankfurt, certainly deserves praise for doing something that today's philosophers should engage in more - analyzing particular problems of everyday life that are intractable to the (so called) human sciences. There are broad hints that we can gain from the cognitive sciences and from evolutionary psychology about the phenomena of bullshit and bullshit detection but these hints are by necessity incomplete. We are only now making a beginning at understanding these phenomena in everyday life. How bullshit operates in ordinary language and how it is understood by folk psychology are also good questions. There are also other problems of everyday life that should be considered philosophically. For instance one of the most important human problems is gossip and how the development of language has dovetailed with the cultural phenomena of gossip as a verbal substitute for grooming and distribution of hierarchy. Again there are some broad hints that we can draw from cognitive science and evolutionary psychology on this phenomena. We could also analyze the phenomena of gossip from the point of view of ordinary language and folk psychology, but ultimately I think the problem is one that is not conducive to theory or categorization. But again we run into some of the same social developments with gossip as I described with 'bullshit.' No matter what function gossip may have served in the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural community that function has now been transformed. Gossip in today's capitalist society is a commodity and must be analyzed as such. And yet such phenomena as "bullshit", "bullshit detection", and "gossip" (in both its bonding and vindictive aspects) has been traditionally ignored by philosophical inquiry, as have so many other aspects of our everyday lives, aspects of life that once formed the integument of the human community. Let me suggest that one reason that these aspects of everyday life have been ignored is that the subject of philosophy has rarely received the kind of self-criticism that accepts "philosophizing" as just another aspect of everyday life. Every human has an implicit philosophy of the world, society, and of life, as Gramsci was fond of pointing out. To put it bluntly, much of philosophy is about 'bullshit' or is bullshit or is about 'gossip' or is gossip. To analyze 'bullshit' or 'gossip' as part of human relations, to try to understand these phenomena from a philosophical point of view is to inevitably dismiss most of philosophy and practically all of philosophy as practiced in our academies. I do believe that there are exceptions through-out history and today. And just because a particular philosopher is gossiping when he propounds his philosophy does not mean that he can't write something interesting and strong. A good example would be Nietzsche's reflections on Socrates ugliness in "Twilight of the Idols." But all of these divagations only point to what is wrong with Frankfurt's way of conceiving of the phenomena of 'bullshit.' It is not possible to have a well worked out 'theory' of 'bullshit'. More precisely, it is not possible to have a non-trivial model-description and/or theoretical explanation of 'bullshit' as an everyday phenomena, that allows us to see anything that is not intuitive or not already generally understood. All that is needed to understand "bullshit', in the best way that it can be understood is, normal intelligence combined with rational thought and skepticism. So to begin with I am skeptical of Frankfurt's theoretical intentions. I am also skeptical of the need for conceptual analysis. The fact is that each person from her own point of view thinks or believes that she knows bullshit when she hears it. But nobody is quite sure if their particular bullshit detectors are accurate, at any particular time, and some of us ignore the warnings in our heads. I suppose some conceptual analysis of the term "bullshit" is not a bad thing, since it hasn't been dealt with as a philosophical phenomena before. Frankfurt points to Max Black's book The Prevalence of of Humbug (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) as an approximation to a study of "Bullshit." Frankfurt quotes Black's definition of humbug as an approximation of 'bullshit.' "Humbug: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes." quoted at Frankfurt p. 6. My own first reaction to this definition is that it is very close to the idea of 'puffery', a word often used by judges in their opinions about why someone has not lied when making a contract. The person offering the contract 'fell short of lies' and has engaged in 'mere puffery'. If the contract was for the sale of a product, there is no necessary implication that the product itself is shoddy, but certainly the product was represented as something more than it actually turned out to be. Puffery is certainly a kind of bullshit. Frankfurt later gives an example of what Black means by Humbug. "It is easy to think of familiar situations by which Black's account of humbug appears to be unproblematically confirmed. Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about 'our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.' This is surely humbug. As Black's account suggests, the orator is not lying. He would be lying only if it were his intention to bring about in his audience beliefs that he himself regards as false, concerning such matters as whether our country is great, whether it is blessed, whether the founders had divine guidance, and whether what they did was in fact to create a new beginning for mankind. But the orator does not really care what his audience thinks about the Founding fathers or about the role of the deity in our country's history, or the like. At least, it is not an interest in what anyone thinks about these matters that motivates the speech. "It is clear that what makes Fourth of July oration humbug is not fundamentally that the speaker regards his statements as false. Rather, just as Black's account suggests, the orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression of himself. He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history. What he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings" (Frankfurt, p. 16-18).
Is this true? I am happy to agree that this particular Fourth of July orator is offering us a load of bullshit. The effect of this kind of oratory on the victim is most likely boredom, so not only is it bullshit, it is also ineffective bullshit. I also admit that the orator is concerned with putting himself over on his audience. But there is also something else going on here, a form of indoctrination that we think of as ideology. The orator is surely trying to get his audience to buy into patriotism, but it is just as possible that the orator is trying to convince himself of the mumbo-jumbo he is reciting. Frankfurt immediately goes into a discussion of bullshit as part of the shoddy. "It does seem fitting to construe carelessly made, shoddy goods as in some way analogues of bullshit. But in what way?" p.21. "The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who - with the help of advance and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth - dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right." pp.22-23. Yet "However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something. There is surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly craftsman, some kind of laxity that resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline." p. 23 I think that the flaw in Frankfurt's kind of analysis is clear in the confusion of these passages. The personal may often be political but institutional norms, constraints, and demands are not the same as psychological motives or the actual products that are surrounded by bullshit. Or to put my thought with a bit of bullshit like Hegelian pretentiousness, there is a qualitative, and not simply a quantitative, difference between retail bullshit and wholesale bullshit . The difference is in (1) how bullshit is produced, (2) how bullshit functions, and (3) the art put into the production of bullshit. And the crux of the difference between merely psychological bullshit, which usually allows little room for excellence and thrives in retail, and institutional bullshit, which thrives in wholesale and has produced its own norms of excellence, is the the fact that our society has established a well elaborated division of labor of bullshit mass production. Retail bullshit is always a bit shoddy; wholesale bullshit can have its own excellence. Or as Gore Vidal once famously told us in an essay on Hollywood, "Shit has its own integrity." It is the very fact that there is a division of labor between industrial production of shoddy commodities and the industrial craftsmen of bullshit, that allows for the production of high quality bullshit, that distinguishes bullshit in modern (post)industrial society from the bullshit of the Sophist or Rhetor in fifth century B.C.E. Athens or the bullshit of the slave-seller in first century C.E. Rome.
In our society bullshit is so prevalent because it is produced with no connection with what is actually being referred to. Wholesale bullshit is allowed its excellence because the producers of such bullshit can look at it as a craft in and of itself. On a micro level the public relations industry produces bullshit for bullshit's sake. The product is not what is being promoted. In fact bullshit is the product. In our society it is a frightening fact that bullshit has its own integrity. Bullshit is the air we breath. It is not simply marketing but it exists in every single institution that bases itself on modern capitalist production. Every time a manager talks to you about 'team work', or is trying to get you to smile as you stand on your feet for nine hours a day at a cash register, you are certainly encountering bullshit and the forced institutional production of bullshit. There is no truth value which adheres to "excellent" bullshit. In other words wholesale bullshit has its own integrity and is neither true nor false. It functions to confabulate, to provide a narrative, to provide a set of associations, but those connotations are neither true nor false. It is a category mistake to ask if wholesale bullshit has any truth value. It is like asking whether cheering for the Boston Red Sox instead of the New York Yankees has any truth value. The difference is that with wholesale bullshit we are supposed to believe that there is a truth value where there is none. We are supposed to believe in what wholesale bullshit propounds like we are supposed to believe in the Catholic Church. The shoddiness of bullshit can be on the speakers end or the hearers end. But what ever the shoddiness is it is not in what is being referred to or promoted (though it certainly can be) but rather it is the shoddiness of not thinking through. Frankfurt states, "Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely to identifying and combating what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of 'nonsense.'" then he relates an anecdote from Fania Pascal: "I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: "I feel just like a dog that has been run over." he was disgusted: "You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like." p. 24. "Now assuming that Wittgenstein does indeed regard Pascal's characterization of how she feels as an instance of bullshit, why does it strike him that way? It does so I believe, because he perceives what Pascal says as being roughly speaking, for now -unconnected to a concern with the truth. Her statement is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality. She does not even think she knows, except in the vaguest way, how a run-over dog feels. Her description of her own feeling is, accordingly, something she is merely making up. She concocts it out of whole cloth; or, if she got it from someone else, she is repeating it quite mindlessly and without any regard for how things really are." pp. 30-31. "What disgusts him is that Pascal is not even concerned whether her statement is correct." Now this gets at some something essential about bullshit. And in fact it is part of the excellence of wholesale bullshit. Retail bullshit doe not bother to take into account whether a statement is true or false, or accurate. The art of wholesale bullshit is to create statements that are neither true, nor false, and cannot be tested for accuracy. If it were possible to construct a statement that was all connotation and no denotation and made you feel pleasure or fear and then you associated your fear or your lack of pleasure with your lack of what the bullshitter wanted to dish to you that would be the consummate art of wholesale bullshit. It's not failing to get things right it is failing to try. Bullshit "is unconnected to a concern with .. truth-value ..." p. 33 "[Wittgenstein] construes her as engaged in an activity to which the distinction between what is true and what is false is crucial, and yet as taking no interest in whether what she says is true or false. It is in this sense that Pascal's statement is unconnected to a concern with truth: she is not concerned with the truth-value of what she says. That is why she cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth -- this difference to how things really are - that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." pp. 33-34. "This crux of the distinction between [the bullshitter] and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. the success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This dos not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are." pp. 54-55. "It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction." p.55 The bullshitter is more likely to to construct a story that is neither true nor false.... "Why is there so much bullshit...There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit many not have increased." p. 62. "Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing that he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligation or opportunities to speeak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepency is common in public life,...." p.63 I think here the distinction between retail bullshit and wholesale bullshit would be apropos. "The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any relaiable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possiblity of knowing how things truly are. These 'antirealist' doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested effeorts to determine what is true and what is false and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry." p. 64-65. Though I am in complete solidarity with the point of this statement I think again that he gets things a little upside down I think that an objective inquiry would lead to the conclusion that 'these "antirelaist" doctrines' are in many ways mirrors of the advertising, and propaganda industry that surround us at every turn. Later Frankfurt says that insead of correcteness as an ideal the antirealists turn to sincerity. This I think is a rebellion from the obvious feeling that everything one does when one participates in consumer culture has to be insincere. Jerry Monaco New York City Revised - 9 December 2005 -- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://www.livejournal.com/users/monacojerry/ His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/ Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/
Selected by Philosophers' Carnival XXIII @ Right Reason. Philosophers' Carnival homepage.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Selected by Philosophers' Carnival XXIII @ Right Reason. Philosophers' Carnival homepage.
Oct. 7th, 2005 @ 05:46 pm
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| » On Ideology: More Preliminary Remarks |
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On Ideology: More Preliminary Remarks
There is no science of ideology.
Ideology is a very loose term meant to refer to the constraints on thinkable thoughts within institutions and society. Any ideology will place constraints on the questions that can/should be asked and properly answered, and rules of 'correct' or 'proper' ways of acting and speaking in any given institutional or societal context.
There can be no exact definition of a concept such as ideology. We should not expect to give an exact definition of ideology, as if we were attempting to define a theoretical concept such as "species" in evolutionary biology (itself not easy to define) or a concept such as "entropy." Theoretically developed sciences attempt to define basic concepts within the theory or model of the science with Freagean exactitude. This attempt is never completely successful - or if it were to succeed the science at hand, or that portion of the science, would be complete. Even in the most exact of sciences their is a certain looseness in the definitions of theoretical concepts. The looseness of any particular definition may not be revealed until practical scientific problems that implicate previous definitions show that there was something wrong or incomplete, in part or as a whole, in the theoretical model of the science undergoing change. Contra-Althusser, we can never approach such exact definitions of what we call ideology. If we ever do so we will find that we are no longer discussing 'ideology' but rather something like the computational values of syntactical transformations, or some other theory that has not yet been invented. (Just like in physics there is no longer a "problem of motion," in the Aristotelian sense, because physics has realized that the problem of motion is simply not a scientific problem. Perhaps it is a problem of the "limits of theoretical knowledge.")
It is necessary to begin a discussion of ideology by reflecting on how its study cannot be a science and on reflecting on how science itself works. I contend that in order to understand ideology we must be able to separate it from knowledge. I maintain that there is a border between what Althusser called "theoretical ideologies" (the dogmas and doctrines abstracted from such practical ideologies such as religion. mythology, economism, humanism, legalism, etc.) and theoretical knowledge (science) and even what I shall call non-theoretical knowledge. If there is no part of human endeavor that we can call "knowledge", then quite simply I will give up the fight to the defeatists among the post-moderns who believe that all organization of theoretical thought is simply another kind of ideology. Here, I stand on the same ground with a diverse group - John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Louis Althusser, Stephen Jay Gould, E. O. Wilson, Noam Chomsky, a set of people who might not have a single other thing in common and certainly would not ever consider themselves as part of the same party - that one of the functions of the good "philosopher" and historian of science is to separate ideology from what we know, to draw a line between the ideological and the scientific, to understand that the development of theoretical knowledge is a practical work that is an aid to human liberation and ideology is an instrumental development of rule and cohesion.
The undefinable aspect of the notion of "ideology" is in fact one aspect of the underdetermination of "meaning" in language, or if you prefer "indeterminacy" in the "semantic field of values" of all concepts and words. I prefer the former to the latter because I think it approaches closer to what we know about the nonrational pragmatics of syntax in language use. Just to make clear we must accept the fact that in a natural language there are no exact definitions. Dictionaries assume "knowledge" of the definitions of words, they assume the connotations in their denotations.
From these reflections I am ready to state some theses about "ideology" and how it works. (Note these theses are not "proven" and cannot be proven in a scientific sense, but they remain to be "illustrated" and argued.)
1) Particular words have larger meanings (connotations, penumbras) and dictionaries assume these meanings they don't "give" them. "Doctrines" of ideology seek to limit the meaning of words and concepts to particularly denoted assumptions.
2) Unlike in a dictionary, the denoted assumptions of a doctrine of ideology, are not explicit, but implicit. Through repetition and context-limits the denoted assumption of an ideological concept are meant to be heard, as if the dogmatic denotation was the complete connotation of the concept.
3) A more general thesis: All ideological concepts (all ideology) is overdetermined - unlike what we call "meaning" in language, which is underdetermined.
The "trick" or task of ideology is to transform dogmatic speech of ideology. This is done by making the explicitly denoted definitions of the dogma into implicitly accepted notions, ideas, connotations. How this occurs is through repetition, indoctrination, the presentment of artificial double-binds, or seeming paradoxes, and the suppression of underlying assumptions. Thus a concept, word, or notion that is bound by the dogmatic definition of ideological production in time comes to assume the whole "meaning" of the word. The explicit denotational aspect of the concept, word or notion, takes on the aspect of implicit connotation. The funny thing about this is that in many cases, perhaps in most cases the effacing of the original implicit connotation with an explicit denotation that assumes the aspect of an implicit connotation is itself an implicit process.
But here the life of natural languages and the daily struggle of real people contribute to the instability of ideology and the process of dogmatic substitution. If a word or a concept receives a dogmatic defintion, and that dogmatic definition subsequently subsumes the connotation of the world, then it is always possible that, in the course of individual or class struggle, the definition will be "flipped" or another word will be "invented" to refer to what is beyond the limits of the dogmatic definition. (The above paragraph is a general statement and does not necessarily apply to the particular processes in specific institutions - say legal institutions. Further, I am talking about a process that in modern societies often fails, because all modern societies are diverse, not homogeneous, etc.)
Note: I want to make explicit an assumption underlying the above remarks: Language itself is not socially constructed. What the theory of universal grammar calls the "language faculty" is a biological construct. We don't know anything that can reach the level of theoretical knowledge about "meaning" or "texts" and other aspects of language use. Thus my underlying assumption is the distinction drawn by many linguists and philosophers of language between language and language-use.
When we discuss ideology we must distinguish several variations and side-issues. In other words we must discuss distinctions.
A) Matters of ideology as a whole: i.e. how ideology is produced and works in and through social institutions and how certain "world views" are formed, that become 'second nature.'
B) Matters of conscious doctrines and dogmas that are abstracted from ideology.
C) Matters of religion and the institutions of religion.
D) Matters of institutions in general (legal, educational, business, etc.) and the particular "world-views" produced by those institutions.
E) Matters of mythology, story-telling, narrative that may be foundational, or may guide, or may derive from ideological thought.
F) Matters of illusion and delusion.
G) Matters of pattern-making and perception, which can only be thought of as biologically based, but maybe "culturally" shaped.
(Note as to (E): Great and strong myths and narratives always transcend ideology because they provide a larger experience of the world that cannot be simply contained by limited doctrines. This is to a certain extent as true in certain narratives contained in religious thinking as it is of the great "individual" and personal works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tolstoy, Kafka, Joyce, Nabokov, Borges. To a smaller extent this observation can also apply to such "literary philosophers" as Plato, Nietzsche, Freud. The ability of all kinds of art to transcend all ideological categories, while to a certain extent remaining within them, is simply one of those human faculties that we know about but cannot theoretically explain.)
These matters may be interconnected but they are not the same.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
--
Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture
http://www.livejournal.com/users/monacojerry/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is
Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing
http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/
Sep. 12th, 2005 @ 04:29 pm
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| » Some basic questions about legal institutions.... |
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What would a critique of legal institutions look like that proceeds from (1) a methodological naturalism, (2) a cognitivist approach to individual perception of the rule of law, and (3) a realist approach to social violence as perceived by the law and as perceived by those "within" and "without" the legal institutions?
By methodological naturalism I mean an approach that assumes that the human species is a part of the natural world and thus human capacities and the institutions that we build can also be looked at as part of the natural world. There is no need to posit or believe that 'language' or anything else is somehow 'non-biological' or supernatural. There is no need to believe that culture is somehow anti-natural, or beyond nature, or supernatural. Methodological naturalism is informed by all the other sciences but not enthrall to them.
By a cognitivist approach I mean that we who study legal institutions should look carefully at the meager evidence available from the cognitive sciences, and similar models, and also be aware of the limitations of those sciences, which are now only taking baby-steps. (I do not rule out such models as game theory, systems theory, etc. as long as we realize the status of the models themselves.) Thus we can show how perceptions and ideological world-views are shaped and contested by individuals and groups.
By a realist approach I mean that we who study legal institutions must realize that we are bound by the limits of what the sciences currently tell us and that it may be unhelpful to stray to far beyond the clues they offer . This means we are also bound within our current limits of knowledge, limits that may extend indefinitely, simply because of the limited capacity of our species' cognitive abilities. Thus we may run into logical paradoxes in our reasoning about such matters as human choice and the limits of any particular human system. The crucial part of a realist view of legal institutions is to understand that sometimes the only way to tell what we know about a legal institution, or any human institution, is to study the institution in historical and societal context, to compare the institution and its structures to other similar institutions in the past, and to ask the question "what does this institution do?" - a variation of Karl Llewellyn's project.
No matter who I read - Duncan Kennedy or Brian Leiter or Peter Goodrich, all of whom I value for different reasons, I am still left wanting.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
6 July 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco
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Jul. 7th, 2005 @ 08:22 pm
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| » The Dawkins-Gould Dispute Over Evolution: Intrinsic Understanding and the Narrowness of Science |
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The Dawkins-Gould Dispute Over Evolutionary Mechanism: Intrinsic Understanding and the Narrowness of Science - A Confusion of Mysteries With Problems
"Eldredge maintains that Dawkins and other 'ultra-Darwinians' are far too reductionist, wanting to explain everything in terms of natural selection and the competition of genes for survival. Gould recently published a long polemic about this in the New York Review of Books, but it is not easy to see the disagreement between the two schools as a large or significant one. Both sides believe that the influence of natural selection is enormous, but that it operates only in the context of environmental circumstances that make some characteristics of organisms adaptive and others not, and are responsible for the extinction of species from time to time. Both sides believe that some features are directly explained by natural selection, and others are mere side-effects. They also both acknowledge that physics and chemistry constrain and shape the biological possibilities and the range of possible genetic variation. So why are they so cross with each other?
"My guess is that it is a conflict over purity. In the present state of understanding, the theory of evolution by genetic mutation and natural selection, through the differential reproductive success of individuals, is an explanatory schema. It describes the rough form of an interminable history of births, reproductions and deaths without specifying the enormously complex chemical details on which it depends, most of which will never be recovered. The actual story includes countless minute, non-lethal chemical changes in the DNA of reproductive cells each of which resulted, through embryonic development, in viable alternative organisms, slightly different from their parents.
"This schema inevitably raises the question whether the story can be told entirely from the bottom up - everything being explained in terms of particle physics - or whether some higher-order principles of organisation enter the picture, increasing the story's probability."
From Why so cross? by Thomas Nagel: A review in the London Review of Books of
Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins · Penguin, 350 pp, £20.00
and
The Pattern of Evolution by Niles Eldredge · Freeman, 225 pp, £17.95
at
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n07/nage01_.html
My own observation on the reason for the dispute is entirely different. I think it mainly comes from both sides misunderstanding of the narrowness of scientific explanation and the broader meaning of that narrowness for how and what humans know and can know. Gould tends to emphasize the mysterious side of what we don't know but I see nothing inherently mysterious in the fact that scientific explanation is narrow and the human mind is limited. Dawkins tends to believe that everything is reducible to scientific explanation. But he constantly runs into his own paradoxes of what is not yet explained. Or to put it another way, Chomsky once remarked that human 'ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries'. What rankled Dawkins about Gould was the deeper meaning that he gave to the mysteries, and the belief that some mysteries would always remain mysteries. In short, Gould tended to a mysticism of mysteries. On the other hand what rankled the late Gould about Dawkins was his basic attitude that everything, in principle can be explained by scientific reductionism. Dawkins tended to turn all mysteries into problems that science can solve. I suspect that what divided the two were their basic (philosophical) world-views of the nature and practice of science itself.
Coming at this dispute from the point of view of a physics education one can say several things about the nature of science.
First, one reason why physics is so powerful is that it is very narrowly focused. Second, physics deliberately places limits on what it can explain and is tolerant of the mathematic reductions that may lead to apparent semantic paradoxes. The paradoxes in human thought are accepted as just the way things are and the math is accepted as explaining them.
Third, physics has stopped trying to 'explain' some of these paradoxes and others in other than theoretical terms. The theory may not match everyday thinking but who cares. The theory works anyway. Some paradoxes such as how to explain motion or a continuum are simply considered either outside of theoretical science or are bracketed until the paradox is reframed in theoretical terms.
Fourth, physics does not look at intrinsic explanation as its province. Thomas Nagel, who wrote the review I quote above, once wrote an article called "What is it like to be a bat?" He said that since science can't answer that question it will never be able to explain consciousness. This is the same kind of misunderstanding of science that he displays in his guess about the dispute between Dawkins and Gould. The problem isn't that science doesn't explain consciousness intrinsically. This misunderstands the narrowness of scientific theory. Physics long-ago gave up the belief that it had to understand the basics of what we call matter intrinsically. Maybe intrinsic understanding of what we call 'matter' will result from our physical theories and maybe it won't, but to demand that intrinsic understanding of 'matter' must result from a physical theory in order for it to be complete is itself nothing more than a metaphysical imposition upon science.
To illustrate this more clearly let me quote the beginning of a good article on Quantum Mechanics, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Quantum mechanics is, at least at first glance and at least in part, a mathematical machine for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles — or, at least, of the measuring instruments we use to explore those behaviors — and in that capacity, it is spectacularly successful: in terms of power and precision, head and shoulders above any theory we have ever had. Mathematically, the theory is well understood; we know what its parts are, how they are put together, and why, in the mechanical sense (i.e., in a sense that can be answered by describing the internal grinding of gear against gear), the whole thing performs the way it does, how the information that gets fed in at one end is converted into what comes out the other. The question of what kind of a world it describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics. Minimally interpreted, the theory describes a set of facts about the way the microscopic world impinges on the macroscopic one, how it affects our measuring instruments, described in everyday language or the language of classical mechanics. Disagreement centers on the question of what a microscopic world, which affects our apparatuses in the prescribed manner, is, or even could be, like intrinsically; or how those apparatuses could themselves be built out of microscopic parts of the sort the theory describes.[1]
That is what an interpretation of the theory would provide: a proper account of what the world is like according to quantum mechanics, intrinsically and from the bottom up. The problems with giving an interpretation (not just a comforting, homey sort of interpretation, i.e., not just an interpretation according to which the world isn't too different from the familiar world of common sense, but any interpretation at all) are dealt with in other sections of this encyclopedia. Here, we are concerned only with the mathematical heart of the theory, the theory in its capacity as a mathematical machine, and — whatever is true of the rest of it — this part of the theory makes exquisitely good sense.
Nobody doubts that QM is a good theory, or that in fact it, at some point in the future, may become a completed theory. And yet the theory may never answer the questions of what a microscopic world is like, or could be like, intrinsically. It is possible that such an answer will be provided in away that seems satisfying. On the other hand it may not.
What Dawkins, expects evolution and biology to provide is an answer to the question of what the biological world is like intrinsically. That kind of answer is neither necessary for a successful scientific theory, nor should it be expected. What the late Stephen Jay Gould, thought was that these intrinsic questions were somehow 'mysteries' in an old fashion sense of the word. I don't think they are mysteries, I just think that the hope for intrinsic understanding is one of our biological insets, which also points to the biological limits of human knowledge.
What Thomas Nagel has always pointed to as his understanding of the scientific project, since at least "What is it like to be a bat?" is that the phenomena of the world must be explained intrinsically in order to be truly understood.
This is the philosopher's misunderstanding of the working's of science.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
30 June 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco
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Jun. 30th, 2005 @ 02:35 pm
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| » The Policy of Torture: What is New About the U.S. Policy of Torture? |
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The Policy of Torture: The Amnesty International Flak and What is New In the U.S. Policy of Torture: Annals of The Republic of Hypocrisy:
The Secretary General of Amnesty International, Irene Kahn, condemned torture as practiced by the United States.
The whole of the Bush administration and much of the media was extremely upset at the arrogance of A.I. Amnesty International has no place investigating torture committed or condoned by the U.S. government. By doctrinal definition the U.S. neither commits nor condones torture and any organization that says that it does is also by definition anti-American. There is a quite simple logic here that is very easy to understand by anyone who is willing to apply standards of moral judgement.
Susan Sontag wrote in the New York Times not long after after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke,
The administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word ''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the most to be admitted. ''My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word.' '....
Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit the damage of the widening revelations of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere -- trials, courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, resignation of senior military figures and responsible administration officials and substantial compensation to the victims -- it is probable that the ''torture'' word will continue to be banned. To acknowledge that Americans torture their prisoners would contradict everything this administration has invited the public to believe about the virtue of American intentions and America's right, flowing from that virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Torture of Others
If an official enemy of the United States commits torture by making a person stand naked in a prison cell for 48 hours with water up to his or her knees, then very little proof is needed to condemn that enemy. Anyone who testifies that this enemy of the U.S. has tortured a person in this way will be perforce believed. If a friend of the U.S. commits the same act of torture then there are several strategies that will be employed to dismiss the torture. The people who testify to the torture will be dismissed as liars. If this does not work the people who committed the torture will be disassociated from the government that is friendly to the United States and called 'rogue elements.' The United States Government which has in the past trained torturers in 'interrogation methods,' will claim that the torturers they trained were being trained in order to educate them in humane methods of interrogation and that any torture that took place afterward was caused by over zealousness. Finally, there is always plausible deniability. Since World War II the U.S. has trained the political police of oppressive states around the world in techniques of torture - the Central Intelligence Agency created torture gulag the Savak in Iran, the Argentine and Brazilian military government, the Death Squads of Central America, the DINA in Chile, (see, excerpts from the CIA handbook, (here, here, & here) used to train Latin American security forces) the Apartheid government in South Africa, the Indonesian state and many, many more. The connection between the U.S. Government and training for torture of the secret police of friendly states is so well known and so well documented that I would hope that I would not have to go over all the evidence every time I speak to a U.S. citizen about this history. But unfortunately U.S. citizens know less about the history of the way their country acts in other places in the world than most people around the world. Which brings me to the final and most effective strategy used to dismiss torture by those associated with the U.S. government - most likely the torture will not be reported upon in the United States and thus there will be no need of dismissal at all.
But this was way back when the U.S. was worried about its reputation abroad. Now the U.S. only has to provide plausible reasons for the U.S. population to think well about itself and its government. For the most part U.S. facilitation and practice of torture is looked upon as a public relations problem, no more. For the most part the current U.S. regime doesn't even try to hide that it commits torture, has a policy of torture, and cooperates with torture states. This is because it is the official policy of the U.S. to practice torture, proclaim that it is practicing torture, and merely cover it up by claiming that the torture it is openly practicing is not torture at all. That is what is new in U.S. policy. That is what I propose to investigate in the series of comments on this weblog. It is the new policy of torture, the reasons behind that policy, and the legal ideology behind its justification, which has not been commented upon even by those of us who are shocked by the actual practice of torture. That is what has been missed by all of those who have commented on the Amnesty International report, and to a certain extent by Amnesty International itself. The U.S. has proclaimed a policy of torture and has simply said that what ever the U.S. does is by definition not illegal and thus not really 'torture.' Thus when Bush, Rumsfeld and company say that the Amnesty International reports are not true, they simply mean that the U.S. government is incapable of committing torture and anyone who says that it does is an enemy of all Americans. Thus when the U.S. does not commit torture by simple Orwellian logic it is not torture.
The relevant passage in the Secretary General Irene Kahn's statement that so offended the Bush Administration is the following:
the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to “re-define” torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding “ghost detainees” (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the "rendering" or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.
The USA, as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide. When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity. From Israel to Uzbekistan, Egypt to Nepal, governments have openly defied human rights and international humanitarian law in the name of national security and “counter-terrorism”.
Without explanation the offending phrase 'gulag of our times' sticks out and shocks people. Why would a U.S. concentration camp be compared to the Soviet system of concentration camps? First of all there are many differences and perhaps the differences point to Secretary Khan's hyperbolic phrasing. For instance the Soviet camps were for the most part work camps and were developed to contain internal enemies. The archipelago of U.S. camps in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and a number of other third countries, is not meant to contain internal opposition to the U.S. regime but is meant to contain essentially kidnapped foreign nationals. Also, the numbers of people in these extralegal U.S. prisons are nowhere as great as those that were contained in Soviet political prisons. (Though, I would like to point out that since the passing of the South African apartheid regime and the old Soviet Union my country now proudly ranks number one in imprisoning its own population. This says something very important about a certain kind of oppressiveness in our national 'legal culture.')
But these differences between the Soviet prison system and the U.S. archipelago of extralegal prisons should not blind us to the point Secretary Kahn is making in her introduction to the A.I. report. The U.S.G. has established a system of prisons in third countries which U.S. leaders claim are outside of all known laws and conventions. In this system of prisons U.S. law does not apply and neither, so U.S. leaders say, does international law. Worldwide state after state has proclaimed, when questioned about their own human rights practices, that if the U.S. can violate human rights and due process openly then other countries can do so under the cover of law and fog.
This is the effect of the significant change in the U.S.G.'s policy toward torture. The U.S.G. has always "outsourced torture" (The title of a recent article in The New Yorker OUTSOURCING TORTURE by JANE MAYER, The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program. Issue of 2005-02-14. The U.S.G. has done so through client regimes that we have supported, and sometimes 'established', in order to maintain control of local populations and retain control of important local resources for U.S. corporations. We train the torturers and support the regime. But we did so covertly and not as the proclaimed aim of our policy.
I will quote from Jane Mayer's article:
The most common destinations for rendered suspects are Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Jordan, all of which have been cited for human-rights violations by the State Department, and are known to torture suspects. To justify sending detainees to these countries, the Administration appears to be relying on a very fine reading of an imprecise clause in the United Nations Convention Against Torture (which the U.S. ratified in 1994), requiring “substantial grounds for believing” that a detainee will be tortured abroad. Martin Lederman, a lawyer who left the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002, after eight years, says, “The Convention only applies when you know a suspect is more likely than not to be tortured, but what if you kind of know? That’s not enough. So there are ways to get around it.”
***
The Bush Administration’s departure from international norms has been justified in intellectual terms by élite lawyers like Gonzales, who is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Gonzales, the new Attorney General, argued during his confirmation proceedings that the U.N. Convention Against Torture’s ban on “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” of terrorist suspects does not apply to American interrogations of foreigners overseas.
***
The Bush Administration’s redefinition of the standards of interrogation took place almost entirely out of public view. One of the first officials to offer hints of the shift in approach was Cofer Black, who was then in charge of counter-terrorism at the C.I.A. On September 26, 2002, he addressed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and stated that the arrest and detention of terrorists was “a very highly classified area.” He added, “All you need to know is that there was a ‘before 9/11’ and there was an ‘after 9/11.’ After 9/11, the gloves came off.”
Laying the foundation for this shift was a now famous set of internal legal memos—some were leaked, others were made public by groups such as the N.Y.U. Center for Law and National Security. Most of these documents were generated by a small, hawkish group of politically appointed lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and in the office of Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel. Chief among the authors was John C. Yoo, the deputy assistant attorney general at the time. (A Yale Law School graduate and a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, Yoo now teaches law at Berkeley.)
***
Soon after September 11th, Yoo and other Administration lawyers began advising President Bush that he did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions in handling detainees in the war on terror. The lawyers classified these detainees not as civilians or prisoners of war—two categories of individuals protected by the Conventions—but as “illegal enemy combatants.” The rubric included not only Al Qaeda members and supporters but the entire Taliban, because, Yoo and other lawyers argued, the country was a “failed state.” Eric Lewis, an expert in international law who represents several Guantánamo detainees, said, “The Administration’s lawyers created a third category and cast them outside the law.”
***
The legal pronouncements from Washington about the status of detainees were painstakingly constructed to include numerous loopholes. For example, in February, 2002, President Bush issued a written directive stating that, even though he had determined that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war on terror, all detainees should be treated “humanely.” A close reading of the directive, however, revealed that it referred only to military interrogators—not to C.I.A. officials. This exemption allowed the C.I.A. to continue using interrogation methods, including rendition, that stopped just short of torture. Further, an August, 2002, memo written largely by Yoo but signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee argued that torture required the intent to inflict suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” According to the Times, a secret memo issued by Administration lawyers authorized the C.I.A. to use novel interrogation methods—including “water-boarding,” in which a suspect is bound and immersed in water until he nearly drowns.
Notice here what we are dealing with. The people in the administration want to find a way to do something 'different.' If they want to do it then it automatically must be 'good.' Right and wrong does not come in here and morality and legality is always after the fact when someone is trying to figure out a way to do something violent or repulsive that happens to be in their own self-interest.
So now we get to the lawyers. (In a future post I hope to deal with some of the ethical and philosophical issues of this as relates to lawyers and 'exceptions' to the law) They are seemingly doing what lawyers always do, reifying and twisting legal definitions in order to find an interpretation of the law for the client to do what the client wants to do anyway. The term of art for this 'praxis' (fn.1) ( Read more... ) is called 'legal reasoning.' One may object that the kind of reasoning used to interpret a standard such as 'substantial belief' or 'more likely than not' in contract law should not be applied to denying a person all due process so he can be sent to a country where he will be tortured but if necessary to defend a client a lawyer will argue anything. The problem here is that this was advice given by lawyers interpreting, I would say twisting, the law before the fact. In when what lawyer is providing legal fog for the leaders of the most powerful nation on earth, who as long as there is no internal opposition to what those leaders want to do can turn any interpretation into fact and torture and bomb the world if they so choose, then it can be seen that interpretation of the law merges with justification for torture. If we say that dunking a person underwater until they almost drown is not torture then as far as U.S. law is concerned it is not and there is no one in the world that will hold the U.S. responsible.
But of course the people being tortured have to be the right kind of person. That kind of person is a person we define as not having any rights that the U.S. government is bound to recognize. My phrasing deliberately paraphrases the famous Dred Scott decision. A slave is a person who has suffered civil death and so is a person who is declared an "illegal enemy combatant."
If one actually read what Secretary General Irene Kahn has said, instead of condemning A.I. for being anti-American, then one can see that her point about U.S. torture is not that it is something that is hiddent and need to discover - no she is talking about the torture that we all know about, the torture that is proclaimed as part of our official policy, the torture that the Bush administration has proclaimed not to be torture simply because the U.S. is doing it in the open. What needs to be condemned, what we citizens of the world and especially citizens of the U.S. must oppost are rather the policies of torture, and the policies that allow for torture to be legally ignored, the policies that are openly proclaimed by the U.S, and the policies that most educated United Statesians ignore to their detriment. What we must see, is not only the people who are sufferering now under regimes of torture, but all of those who will be tortured in the future by our open march back to the dark ages of proclaiming torture a good, of redefining torture as just another technique of human control.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
06 June 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco
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Jun. 6th, 2005 @ 07:28 pm
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| » Wittgenstein & Hemingway, #2 Philosophy and Illustration |
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Wittgenstein & Hemingway, #2 Limitationism, Philosophy, and Illustration through Fiction
(Part One can be found at Hemingway & Wittgenstein #1 The Wound and the Bow, Absence and Insight)
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus famously ends
6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
'7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.'
In the preface of the Tractatus, written long after the main text was finished, Wittgenstein emphasizes the importance of his ending to his whole work.
The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
Thus the aim of the books is to draw a limit to thought, or rather -- not to thought, but the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, who should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be non-sense.
Thus in the Tractatus there is a sense, in which the work begins and ends at the same place.
There is every indication that Wittgenstein himself gave a 'mystical' interpretation to these words, or, to put it in another way, what was beyond the limit of expression of thought could be 'felt' or 'experienced' but not expressed in language. Wittgenstein believed that there might be something 'beyond' the limit of thought, but he also thought that he could show that in order to define the limit of anything, (i.e. what is beyond the bounds of any system of expression) you would have to get to the 'other side' of those boundaries, which is impossible when the boundaries themselves cannot be thought from within the system of expression.
This mode of argument is actually easily understood by reference to a popular book often given to young math students. I am thinking of Edwin Abbott's Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions (Read Flatland at this link). In that wonderful geometrical satire the narrator is a two-dimensional square who is unable to think or understand the third dimension. In fact Square is unable to even perceive three-dimensional objects. Three-dimensional objects are like gods to him. Square is able to have un-expressible experiences of what is beyond his normal two dimensions but those experiences can not be translated into thoughts expressible in either formal or the everday language of the Flatlanders. Of particular interest here is Chapter 16, How the Stranger Vainly Endeavoured To Reveal to Me in Words the Mysteries of Spaceland. In this chapter a Sphere 'enters' Flatland and tries to explain the world of Spaceland to the two-dimensional Square. The notions that the Sphere tries to explain to the Square are of course incomprehensible to the Square. But in the very next chapter the Square is able to experience Spaceland, without comprehending it, or being able to explain it adequately to himself or as it turns out to his fellow citizens of Flatland. One of the problems that all of Wittgenstein's philosophy is trying to put into rigorous form are the same notions that Edwin Abbott is trying to illustrate through narrative in Flatland. (The difference between illustration and a more or less formal system of expression is important, thus I wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that I am using Flatland as illustration and not as formal expression of the limitationist claim.)
Given that human thought is limited, and given that we can only think from within these limits, there is no way that we can think both sides of the limit. Readers of this web log will recognize this as another expression of the limitationist thesis of human knowledge. But they may also recognize another theme that has been a constant in my journals, the theme of the paradox of boundaries that haunt all aspects of human thought, for example as expressed in my little note The Edge of the Universe: Lucretius, Einstein, the Limits of Knowledge. (Also see Evolution, 'Self-Transcendent Belief Systems' where I give Chomsky's definition of the limitationist claim. It is important to note how often these paradoxes repeat in the history of human thought. A partial list would include variations on 'the Liars Paradox,' paradoxes of human choice, and of notions of intentionality and reference. The more important examples I think come fromt the history of mathematics and science. Russell's Paradox in set theory, the notion of limit in calculus, the use of the idea of 'absolute space' in physics, etc.) Part of my proposition is that much of what we call 'modernism' and 'post-modernism' in philosophy, literature, and criticism is simply a more or less self-conscious probing of these paradoxes of boundaries and limits. It is also my thesis that these paradoxes are not in fact 'unexplainable' it is just that from within whatever system we meet up with these paradoxes they can't be explained with the tools of that system. Sometimes there is simply a limit that we reach which is the boundary of expressible thought of the system. The problem comes when that system is human thought itself.
Human thought is expressible in many forms, natural language, formal systems of logic and mathematics, or various kinds of artistic expression. The boundaries of the expression of thought in language and mathematics are simply the limits of those systems. Knowledge is one form of experience but it is not the only form of experience. (Not all experience is knowledge but all knowledge is a form of experience.) To put it simplistically, knowledge is a limited form of experience, which is distinguishable from other forms of experience because it is expressible in a more or less formal system. In this case I am using the term 'formal system' very loosely. When compared with most expressions in the world of mammals (for instance cries of alarm like the signals for 'snake' and 'hawk' among some primates) human natural language is a formal system. But a natural language is not as rigorous as mathematics or Fregean systems of formal language or attempts at rigor within physics, which to some extent, tend toward the definitional quality of a formal language. But something more complicated happens in literature and art because the boundaries of the work of art must be evaluated in several ways. For my purposes in these philosophical reflections the two most important ways to evaluate a work of art are the 'frame' of the work given to it by the artist and the 'experience' of the work by the viewer or reader.
The great narrators of the modernist tradition such as Hemingway in his short stories and Nabokov in his great works, Lolita, Pale Fire, and, Ada, or Ardor : A Family Chronicle often reveal the frame while hiding the frame's intricacies. There is the obvious frame of the novel itself but there is also the frame that is delimited from within. In effect what we see as readers of these works is the two-dimensional frame but not the three and four-dimensional frame that the author constructed in the story. The frame becomes an absence within the work that the good reader can only experience, yet is unable to define by remaining within the limits of the whole of the work of art. Writers such as Nabokov deliberately constructed their novels so that the reader could experience the internal frame without seeing it, unless the novel was reassembled from without after many re-readings. In many ways Nabokov's strictly philosophical reasons for doing this was to put both the characters he invented and the reader that pays good attention to the novel in the same position that Wittgenstein believed that human beings were in relation to human thought. (For a good attempt at an explanation of how Nabokov's fiction work I would suggest Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery by Brian Boyd. I only wish that Mr. Boyd would write a short essay on what Nabokov was trying to do in Pale Fire, In the end, we don't know how works of art 'work' as experience, how they give us a new sense of 'experience,' but what I take as the most important aspect of art is this experiential side to the work, that the work gives us that is beyond what can be formally expressed.
What Wittgenstein was trying to do through out his philosophical career is show the limits of language or, what in his later philosophy he called more broadly, language-games. He concentrated on the thinkable aspects of 'propositions about the world' (in the early philosophy) and language-games (in the late philosophy). He was not trying to show the limits of what could be 'experienced' as a whole. Thinking is only a small portion of 'experience as a whole.' What he was trying to show was the limits of what was 'thinkable' from within a system,. He was not trying to show the limits of what could be experienced as a human being. In respect to what may be called Wittgenstein's 'art' he in fact trying to illustrate something very similar to what both Nabokov and Hemingway were trying to illustrate -- he was illustrating what could not be expressed.
Wittgenstein himself tried to show this to his first readers: I quote his letter to a friend and potential publisher of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus written in November 1919, not long after Wittgenstein's return from a prisoner of war camp.
"In reality... the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the forward which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I'm convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are bubbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it." (Quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk p. 178.
From what I said above, the reader may guess that I believe that the best illustration of Wittgenstein's way of 'delimiting from within' among modern novelists can be found in the works of Vladimir Nabokov. But Nabokov is as intricate and as complicated as Wittgenstein himself, more so in fact. Thus by way of illustration I prefer to use first Edwin Abbott but more prominently Ernest Hemingway. I also think that there is something psychologically similar between the nortoriously introverted Wittgenstein and the raucously extroverted Hemingway. The psychological similarity between the two, I hope, will point the way toward how we can think historically about the ideas and the wounds that provided the historical experience which made the ideas accessible as a certain tendency of thought among writers, both novelists and philosophers.
For now I would like to leave the reader with two quotes from Hemingway and a final note on 'the dangers of illustration.'
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway outlined his "theory of omission"." He states:
"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."
In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway writes of his character's relation to language and specifically of his relation to certain hollow words.
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. Gino was a patriot, so he said things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understood his being a patriot. He was born one. He left with Peduzzi in the car to go back to Gorizia.
Finally, by using Hemingway, Nabokov and Abbott in reference to Wittgenstein, I am simply trying to illustrate something about the 'limitationist' thesis of human knowledge, that I will try to define more rigorously later. But when ever illustrating something or drawing a picture of something we both produce a deficit and a surplus. Bertrand Russell, when writing about the structure of the atom and the theories upon which atomic structure is based said something that we should keep in mind.
"The theory of atomic structure... like everything else in theoretical physics, is capable of expression in mathematical formulae; but like many things in theoretical physics it is also capable of expression in the form of an imaginative picture.... When we consider the nature of the evidence upon which the above theory of the atom is based, we can see that the attempt to make a picture of what goes on has led us to be far more concrete than we have any right to be. If we want to assert only what we have good reason to believe, we shall have to abandon the attempt to be concrete..." (In Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy p. 83.)
What we run up against, once again, when we try to provide an illustration for something, which can only be said with utmost accuracy more formally, is the difference between knowledge as a limited experience, and all that we are able to experience beyond our more or less formal systems of knowledge. It is the same limitation that Abbott's Square runs up against in the difference between the attempt to understand, in formal language, the difference between the two dimensional world and the three dimensional world. The Square in Flatland has three possibilities: He can experience the three dimensional world or describe it accurately in the formal language of his two-dimensional concepts. The other alternative is to try to draw a picture or make an illustration of the three dimensional world with his two dimensional tools. This will end up being an attempt to bring his experience of three dimensional Spaceworld into the two dimensional world of Flatland. But in making this attempt the illustration will loose something in preciseness and accuracy and also loose something of the Square's original experience of Spaceworld. On the other hand the mere attempt to make an illustration will also gain something for the world of Flatland. The 'stronger' the artisitic attempt the more the more the potential surplus of experiential gain will be through the use of the imagination. The Square's attempt to make an illustration will itself become an experience with its own rules and imaginative possibilities, an experience that was not there in the first place, an experience not only for the Square, but also for others in Flatland.
Jerry Monaco
New York
23 March 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco
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Mar. 23rd, 2005 @ 11:42 am
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| » Science and Common Sense |
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Science and Common Sense
The exchanges in the posts on 'sexual selection and race' have been fruitful for at least one thing. They have made me realize how badly the methods of scientific thinking are taught in schools in the United States. The anonymous poster in that exchange simply insisted that her 'common sense' was self-evident and therefore there was no need to consider evidence, or apparently even logic.
Richard Lewontin, a biologist who did not shy from controversy once wrote something apropos of our notions of common sense.
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
From Richard Lewontin,, Billions and Billions of Demons, a review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
In my work-life in various factory jobs, I have met many skilled machinists who have never gone to college; all of them, without exception, knew how to think logically and scientifically. They also knew that their 'common sense' notions had to be measured against evidence. This I believe was just an aspect of their profession. I have also met many lawyers who knew how to recognize evidence but, strangely, did not know the difference between evidence that was merely speculative or definitional, and evidence that was in some way testable or repeatable. This I believe is an aspect of the lawyer's profession. The main concern of lawyers is manipulating arguments and definitions, not testing evidence. The 'epistemological standing' of the evidence is a lesser order of importance than how it can be presented in an argument or how it can be used to stretch or contract definitions.
On the other hand most of the people I meet who have graduated from colleges, and have majored in subjects outside of the sciences, do not understand the methods of science or how science and logic can be counter-intuitive and simply destroy our common sense notions of what we think of the world. Further more they don't understand that such a statement as "I don't need evidence because I have my common sense and my common sense tells me X" is simply a non-sense statement. What we call common sense is itself a kind of evidence. But it is a very weak kind of evidence usually based on cultural prejudice or untested and non-verifiable subjectivity.
There are certain statements we simply accept because there are no ways to verify the statement either way or in order to verify or provide evidence for the statement we would have to do too much research. "The chair I see near my writing desk is a 'physically real' chair" is one such statement. I accept the physical reality of the chair without much proof and hope when I sit down that I am not hallucinating. In this sense I accept that a certain class of objects, such as chairs, are solid enough for me to sit upon without investigating the nature of that 'solidity'. I will check on occasion to see if the chair is 'rickety' but not to the extent that an engineer is supposed to check the stability of a bridge. I don't need to be an engineer or a carpenter to decide that the chair is stable enough or solid enough for me to sit upon. The problem is that once we try to go beyond our common sense and investigate the nature of 'stability' and 'solidity' we run into many problems that contradict our common sense. For example I could perform an investigation using my very amaturous study of physics. Quantum mechanics has shown me that this solid chair that is beneath me as I write these words is in fact not very solid. Against common sense, physics has shown me that the chair is made up of atoms that are mostly 'empty space' between the nucleous and the 'planetary' electrons. In other words there is more space than there is continuity. The old saying was natura non facit saltum ('nature makes no jumps.'). Against all common sense this has been disproven, and quantum mechanics has shown us that the physical does not abhor a vacume, but it does abhor our common sense notions of what is 'real.' None of this prevents me from sitting on the chair. It does prevent me from relying on my common sense alone.
Bertrand Russell once wrote:
"It is not to be supposed, in any case that 'perceiving' an object involves knowing what it is like. That is quite another matter. We shall see later that certain inferences, of a highly abstract character, can be drawn for our perceptions to the objects perceived; but these inferences are at once difficult and not quite certain. The idea that perception, in itself, reveals the character of objects, is a fond delusion, and one, moreover, which it is very necessary to overcome if our philosophy is to be anything more than a pleasant fairy-tale." Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy.
This can be said of the opinions that we call 'common sense' in spades.
The idea that our personal observations of our very limited social mileau can reveal very much beyond our own prejudices, cultural biases, and self-justifications is a fairy-tale that only rational thinking can overcome. What most of us believe is 'inevitable' or 'natural' about our social reality is usually only contingent and only a very small part of the many possibilities of human nature. People who don't see this will forever be caught in their own distorting biases with no possibility of learning that many portions of their world view are simply the pleasant fariry-tale that they tell themselves. This is as true of myself as it is of others (such as the anonymous correspondent in the debate on 'race and sexual selectiion'). But I suppose we all think that we try to get beyond our pleasant fairy-tales. Unfortunately this is not easy to do and most of us try to hold on to our narrow biases and do not engage in conversations that might expand our world views. Yes, I too live in 'my own world', as we all live 'in our own worlds.' The first step in trying to obtain a non-subjective view of what ever we call reality is to admit this fact and, then, to try to transcend it by mutual agreement on what we can accpet as evidence and what we can call common ground. Again, unfortunately, many people will not question the little worlds they live in and like a narcissitic child will insist that their little world is the whole world.
There is a sense of security in maintaining our world-views and a sense of secuirty is necessary to continue to live a life that is not too unhappy. In this sense I think our 'world views' connect up with our biological needs in some undetermined way. As long as our world views are not grossly 'dysfunctional' within our given societal and 'natural' environement we usually maintain them. As long as our 'world views' don't kill us and don't put us at a selective disadvantage in relation to other human beings, then they are neutral from an evolutionary point of view. Further, it is possible that some world views that are positively destructive or even 'irrational' might provide temporary advantage over other people, who maintain less destructive world views. But it is also possible that some world views may provide short run selective advantages and, yet, in the long run may destroy us all. (Examples of such world views might be thae secular 'faiths' we call 'nationalism' and 'jingoism' or, when we profess the 'faith', we call these views 'patriotism' and 'national interest.')
How is it possible to convince another person to see that, in order to have a conversation in the first place, our notions of evidence and rationality must be grounded in something beyond our amorphous worldviews and our subjective cultural assumptions? Statements like 'biology is in the face,' and supposed conclusions that the face shows human racial sexual preferences, and that the fact of human diversity ipso facto means that there are human racial sexual preferences, need to be shown through reason and evidence in order to be accepted. If the person holding these views can't show them by reason and evidence, then we must assume that her assumptions are a kind of prejudice. In the case of the exchange that I am referring to here, the actual evidence to a large extent contradicts the cultural assumptions held by the anonymous poster. Also, since the notions put forward are a 'racial theory', I can't help, but conclude that this cultural assumption is derived from the racist and sexist assumptions that are rife in our culture. I would make a similar interpretation in regards to any notion or belief, that a person held without evidence.
My reflections on the difference between the skilled machinist, the lawyer, and the average graduate in humanities is only anecdotal, but my preliminary conclusion is that thinking rigorously, understanding the nature of evidence, and knowing when to use one's own 'intuition' and 'common sense' as an hypothesis to search for evidence is a practical matter of 'doing.' The truism is that people learn by practice. I would push the truism a bit further. People who actually perform this kind of thinking become smarter, self-skeptical, and questioning. People who don't remain within their little worlds without realizing that their 'world' is not the world.
Jerry Monaco
New York
March 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco
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Selected by Carnival of the Godless 28
Mar. 21st, 2005 @ 03:17 pm
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| » Hemingway & Wittgenstein #1 The Wound and the Bow, Absence and Insight |
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Hemingway & Wittgenstein #1 The Wound and the Bow, Absence and Insight
It is possible to use Wittgenstein to understand Hemingway. It is also possible to use a close reading of Hemingway's short stories to reveal a way to read Wittgenstein.
I am not making a claim that there is a 'theory' of Hemingway's short stories and that theory is revealed by Wittgenstein's early notions in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of how the world is delimited. Nor am I am making a claim that using Hemingway's fiction provides special insight into Wittgenstein's early thought or his later thought on language games. But I do think that there is a confluence between the two that has not been noticed. There is a certain symetry in how they conceived their disparate work. That symetry is probably psychological and trivial in a personal sense but is less trivial when considered historically, as part of the philosophical and literary consequences of World War I and the modernist revolution. The symetry may also be able to give students a better view of both Wittgenstein and Hemingway. I claim that my rather odd reading of both of them together can show how they used language and narrative to reveal certain boundaries of human knowledge and language. Specifically, both tried to show what could not be told within the frame of reference of a story or the frame of reference of a 'language game' or in the early Wittgenstein the frame of reference of propositions about the world. Both came to understand their very different kinds of practices (story telling and philosophizing) as developing techniques to show the places of omission and absence in narrative or in our understanding of the world of philosophy.
I have several main points. First, my intention is to say something about the psychological reasons why these two different personalities developed their techniques in the context of each practice. I will do so by pointing out how the historical wounds, both psychological and in the world-view of the writers led to deep insight into certain absences in how we view the 'world'. I would like to do this using the insights of Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow. Both Hemingway and Wittgenstein were engaging in a psychological project of reparation of a missing world. The strange psychological confluence between the two is a merely tenth order concern for both Wittgenstein's philosophical conclusions and Hemingway's aesthetic accomplishment, but I think that it may help the reader of both to understand how historical and psychological contingencies give us insight into the world we wish to write about.
Second, I would like to show how the experience of narrative can give us insight into philosophical concerns that may at first seem remote from the specific narrative, and especially how that experience can give us insight into all the parts of the world that are currently beyond our theories or beyond the possibility of human knowledge.
Third, I want to show that it is impossible to ignore the experiential side of any philosophy, whether that experiential side is in the actual writing or saying of the philosophical work or practice, or whether that experiential side is in the world-view that we derive from the philosophical work or practice. (I would like to make a narrow exception for formal logic but only to the extent that the person following a formal system does not derive a world-view from the system. To an uncertain extent the person using a formal system does derive a world-view from that system, but it is to a smaller extent than most post-structuralists believe. I think formal systems are mostly delimiting. They show us where we have run into contradiction and paradox. When the map of the limited formal system is made into a map of the whole world beyond the formal system then the experiential side of the formal system becomes relevant to the derivation of a world-view. I am using the term 'world-view' very loosely at the moment, similar to the way Engels used it at the end of the 19th century to distinguish ideological doctrine from something more amorphous.)
Fourth, in analyzing these two writers, who do not have much in common on the surface, I would like to illustrate certain notions about the 'limitationist' thesis of human knowledge -- i.e. the thesis that since we are biological systems there must be preset biological limits to what we can know.
Jerry Monaco
20 March 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco
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Mar. 20th, 2005 @ 06:12 pm
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