1. Each person perceives the world marginally differently at each successive point in time and each generation of persons perceives the world collectively in a way different from other generations. To hold a truth from past experience as self-evident is absurd. New conditions create new truths and all conditions are, in some respect, new conditions.
2. Experience is more than language. All our senses and our sense of being are engaged in knowing the world. The word spoken is only a part of knowing and scarcely the most dominant or reliable part of it. The word written is more distant still from the word spoken in its representation of the true state of affairs in the world.
3. How we use a word and the context of the word is more important than the word itself. The text tells us nothing without the context in which the text is used. The text in itself is a false friend. Our use of the text is what matters.
4. Words can never capture the totality of human experience. Words are a simplification of experience and so of being in the world. To use a word is immediately to begin to tell a lie.
5. When we say that two things are the same, we are not able to say that they are the same, we are merely saying that it is convenient that we treat these two things as the same for our purposes and our purpose only derives from words if we choose to make words our purpose. Knowing our purpose beyond and behind words is a more valuable purpose than inventing a purpose from the words to hand.
6. The space that we exist in is a space in relation to our perception of that space. There are as many worlds as there are persons perceiving a world in which they perceive themselves as existing.
7. To define a thing is to remove it from its existence as experienced by a person in the world - definition is the begining of the process by which lies are told.
8. Existence is not logical. It merely exists.
9. Metaphysics cannot exist in words. It can only exist in experience, if it exists at all - which is to be doubted.
10. We are what we do in the world in the flow of time. We have no essence beyond our act in a moment of time and personality is an accumulation of such acts under conditions where the next act will not be precisely like any act ever done before.
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Saturday 6 September 2014
Saturday 30 August 2014
Freedom = Science + Rebellion
"The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing defined"
Some things that are obvious might need careful re-stating or else there will be misunderstandings between us that could prove fatal. After all, in a time of economic and political troubles, people do kill each other over misunderstandings.
All sense perception is an approximation of that which it senses. Since each person has a marginally different biological structure to their senses and of the brain that orders the senses, then each person is:
- i) approximating objective reality (on terms by which no person can ever know that reality except as an approximation expressed through mathematics or language which pre-suppose that a community of persons have agreed on rules that 'level out' personal perceptions into a pragmatic 'normality' that need not be identical with objective reality at all),
and,
- ii) constructing reality in a marginally different way from every other person so that the reality that is pragmatically effective socially is not necessarily either objective reality or the reality of the person whose situation is (possibly radically) different from other persons.
Practically (or pragmatically), a 'social reality' (a working tool for the ends of the majority of persons in a community for the majority of the time or for the ends of a minority which has managed to command the conditions of the majority) is possible.
However, such a reality is never 'true' except pragmatically i.e. its contingency is in-built by the very biological basis of sense impression and the braibn's ordering of data. Social reality is the most contingent of the three forms of reality (objective or mathematical, individual and community) because it is vulnerable to:
- a) the varying numbers of individual realities that enter into it at any one time;
- b) the degree to which such minds are willing to suspend belief in those aspects of their own reality that do not fit with the community's reality;
- c) the power structures by which some individual persons can impose their realities in a value hierarchy against other minds' realities;
- d) changes in internal objective realities (the waxing and waning of biological strengths) and their effect on minds;
- e) changes in external objective realities (facts of nature) and in the realities of members of the community as they individually face not only changes in internal and external objective reality but ...
- f) shifts in the ability of other minds to manipulate their reality, communicate those shifts (not necessarily verbally), and become aware of their own learned experience of socialised reality and of its degree of dissonance from their own individual reality.
In other words, we must start our analysis of reality not by distrusting the relationship between our reality and objective reality (which is an individual construction derived from the interaction of our own objective biological reality with physical reality) but by distrusting the relationship between socialised reality and our own reality.
Whereas our biology and our physical world set certain absolute limits on our perception and on our ability to create a framework for our perception, socialised reality sets limits that are contingent and constantly changing in a way that is far more volatile than 'natural' reality.
This instability of the social can be summarised thus:-
- a) limits set by our own lack of awareness of our situation: the limitation of blind acceptance or irrational understanding of the degree of choice and risk involved in asserting our own reality (often based on anxiety, fear and the deliberate withholding of knowledge by others);
- b) limits set by the 'imperial' aspirations of other minds whose own realities involve the attempt to dictate their victim's reality through the use of custom or habit (see c)) or a command of physical reality (the bending of physical reality to ensure the ability to deploy 'force' or 'manipulation' [i.e. in regard to sense impressions]);
- c) as a corollary of a), the acceptance of custom or habit, what might be called the 'drag of tradition', especially strong where tradition has become part of the armoury of 'imperial' minds with a stake in promoting conservatism;
- d) the limits set by language which is a social tool and not an individual tool (except for the purposes of wilful managing or manipulating social reality) and which, therefore, defines the person, especially in the form of 'shared texts', by reinventing reality for the sake of what is 'average' or 'dominant.
Ergo, individual freedom (i.e. a right state of individual reality) requires a right relationship with physical or objective reality (including the biological underpinnings of sense perception and idea-formation) and a right relationship with the social, which is one of permanent questioning criticism of the social's functioning value to the individual.
The right relationship with objective reality is a questioning respect which encompasses a right relationship with natural laws where they are scientifically and mathematically valid and with observable social phenomena where they take on mass characteristics (such as the flocking of humans in terms of the market or the community).
This right relationship also requires a right relationship with the individual's own abilities to perceive the world correctly and to analyse it. To know what one cannot or may not know because of the conformation of one's own biology is part of this right relationship. Some distrust of the senses, within reason, is wise.
The right relationship with socialised reality is one of permanent and questioning distrust. To understand social phenomena, including the social use of language and of texts, and the use by those skilled in language, texts and the manipulation of sense perception and brain operations of their tools, is not to be construed as acceptance.
The operations of humans en masse (likened to the flocking of birds or the herd behaviour of wildebeest or the pack actions of wolves) must be understood but not taken as necessary conduct for the free individual - the aim is merely not to be sent awry or be eaten, indeed, to be cleverer than the flock, the herd or the pack.
Similarly, the superior 'fire-power' (control over objective reality) or skills of the few who command the many are worthy of no intrinsic respect but are simply taken to be a 'fact in the world' which must be worked around, undermined or defeated as suits the individual reality of the person observing a social reality that is out of kilter with itself.
It may be that an individual reality is in perfect accord with the flock or with the interests of those with 'fire power' but this can only be meaningful if a person chooses with knowledge to be a conservative or the servant of a master.
Otherwise, the individual reality (the person) has become little more than an adjunct of a socialised reality. They have ceased to exist as a person. They have become socialised reality - a passive component of it like the Borg. They have reduced themselves to the level of the animal.
Conservatism and serfdom are not irrational options. They may be objectively sensible relations if the command over objective reality by the social (either as herd-like community or as a community of betas ruled by alphas) is a fact but the 'victim' in such cases should know their vulnerability and should show their teeth as soon as objective conditions allow.
To internalise socialised reality without needing to do so is asking to be the conscripted soldier, the cheap labour, the bored congregation member ... and so the struggle to preserve a right relationship to objective reality (a respect for science and power) and to socialised reality (a resistance to its claims) is the basis of all human freedom.
Some things that are obvious might need careful re-stating or else there will be misunderstandings between us that could prove fatal. After all, in a time of economic and political troubles, people do kill each other over misunderstandings.
All sense perception is an approximation of that which it senses. Since each person has a marginally different biological structure to their senses and of the brain that orders the senses, then each person is:
- i) approximating objective reality (on terms by which no person can ever know that reality except as an approximation expressed through mathematics or language which pre-suppose that a community of persons have agreed on rules that 'level out' personal perceptions into a pragmatic 'normality' that need not be identical with objective reality at all),
and,
- ii) constructing reality in a marginally different way from every other person so that the reality that is pragmatically effective socially is not necessarily either objective reality or the reality of the person whose situation is (possibly radically) different from other persons.
Practically (or pragmatically), a 'social reality' (a working tool for the ends of the majority of persons in a community for the majority of the time or for the ends of a minority which has managed to command the conditions of the majority) is possible.
However, such a reality is never 'true' except pragmatically i.e. its contingency is in-built by the very biological basis of sense impression and the braibn's ordering of data. Social reality is the most contingent of the three forms of reality (objective or mathematical, individual and community) because it is vulnerable to:
- a) the varying numbers of individual realities that enter into it at any one time;
- b) the degree to which such minds are willing to suspend belief in those aspects of their own reality that do not fit with the community's reality;
- c) the power structures by which some individual persons can impose their realities in a value hierarchy against other minds' realities;
- d) changes in internal objective realities (the waxing and waning of biological strengths) and their effect on minds;
- e) changes in external objective realities (facts of nature) and in the realities of members of the community as they individually face not only changes in internal and external objective reality but ...
- f) shifts in the ability of other minds to manipulate their reality, communicate those shifts (not necessarily verbally), and become aware of their own learned experience of socialised reality and of its degree of dissonance from their own individual reality.
In other words, we must start our analysis of reality not by distrusting the relationship between our reality and objective reality (which is an individual construction derived from the interaction of our own objective biological reality with physical reality) but by distrusting the relationship between socialised reality and our own reality.
Whereas our biology and our physical world set certain absolute limits on our perception and on our ability to create a framework for our perception, socialised reality sets limits that are contingent and constantly changing in a way that is far more volatile than 'natural' reality.
This instability of the social can be summarised thus:-
- a) limits set by our own lack of awareness of our situation: the limitation of blind acceptance or irrational understanding of the degree of choice and risk involved in asserting our own reality (often based on anxiety, fear and the deliberate withholding of knowledge by others);
- b) limits set by the 'imperial' aspirations of other minds whose own realities involve the attempt to dictate their victim's reality through the use of custom or habit (see c)) or a command of physical reality (the bending of physical reality to ensure the ability to deploy 'force' or 'manipulation' [i.e. in regard to sense impressions]);
- c) as a corollary of a), the acceptance of custom or habit, what might be called the 'drag of tradition', especially strong where tradition has become part of the armoury of 'imperial' minds with a stake in promoting conservatism;
- d) the limits set by language which is a social tool and not an individual tool (except for the purposes of wilful managing or manipulating social reality) and which, therefore, defines the person, especially in the form of 'shared texts', by reinventing reality for the sake of what is 'average' or 'dominant.
Ergo, individual freedom (i.e. a right state of individual reality) requires a right relationship with physical or objective reality (including the biological underpinnings of sense perception and idea-formation) and a right relationship with the social, which is one of permanent questioning criticism of the social's functioning value to the individual.
The right relationship with objective reality is a questioning respect which encompasses a right relationship with natural laws where they are scientifically and mathematically valid and with observable social phenomena where they take on mass characteristics (such as the flocking of humans in terms of the market or the community).
This right relationship also requires a right relationship with the individual's own abilities to perceive the world correctly and to analyse it. To know what one cannot or may not know because of the conformation of one's own biology is part of this right relationship. Some distrust of the senses, within reason, is wise.
The right relationship with socialised reality is one of permanent and questioning distrust. To understand social phenomena, including the social use of language and of texts, and the use by those skilled in language, texts and the manipulation of sense perception and brain operations of their tools, is not to be construed as acceptance.
The operations of humans en masse (likened to the flocking of birds or the herd behaviour of wildebeest or the pack actions of wolves) must be understood but not taken as necessary conduct for the free individual - the aim is merely not to be sent awry or be eaten, indeed, to be cleverer than the flock, the herd or the pack.
Similarly, the superior 'fire-power' (control over objective reality) or skills of the few who command the many are worthy of no intrinsic respect but are simply taken to be a 'fact in the world' which must be worked around, undermined or defeated as suits the individual reality of the person observing a social reality that is out of kilter with itself.
It may be that an individual reality is in perfect accord with the flock or with the interests of those with 'fire power' but this can only be meaningful if a person chooses with knowledge to be a conservative or the servant of a master.
Otherwise, the individual reality (the person) has become little more than an adjunct of a socialised reality. They have ceased to exist as a person. They have become socialised reality - a passive component of it like the Borg. They have reduced themselves to the level of the animal.
Conservatism and serfdom are not irrational options. They may be objectively sensible relations if the command over objective reality by the social (either as herd-like community or as a community of betas ruled by alphas) is a fact but the 'victim' in such cases should know their vulnerability and should show their teeth as soon as objective conditions allow.
To internalise socialised reality without needing to do so is asking to be the conscripted soldier, the cheap labour, the bored congregation member ... and so the struggle to preserve a right relationship to objective reality (a respect for science and power) and to socialised reality (a resistance to its claims) is the basis of all human freedom.
Sunday 18 May 2014
Philosophy and the World Wide Mind
The author of this blog is a strong critic of the universal consciousness ideology - the final stage of the absurdity that is 'spirituality' - but there is a pragmatic truth in this statement which we should not ignore.
"The boundary of the skin is, in some sense, an illusion. We are constantly exchanging information and energy among ourselves through language, pheromones, heat, electricity, smell, and touch. These exchanges constitute a virtual corpus callosum connecting all human beings together. It’s nonmaterial, and it’s more diffuse than the one in our heads, but it’s none the less real for all that." - Michael Chorost, World Wide Mind
The individual may be an autonomous evolved mind made less autonomous by the social but that mind is embodied in something that is embedded in the physical world with networks of connections that 'anchor' it.
Just as the social and the autonomous mind leach into each other so the movable thing that holds the mind leaches into the material world and the material world leaches into it. Working out what this may mean and clearing out the spiritual hogwash may be the philosophical mission of our time. one that ensures that imaginative science does not try to usurp the reasoning process and guards us against new irrationalities that will continue to block our progress as a species.
"The boundary of the skin is, in some sense, an illusion. We are constantly exchanging information and energy among ourselves through language, pheromones, heat, electricity, smell, and touch. These exchanges constitute a virtual corpus callosum connecting all human beings together. It’s nonmaterial, and it’s more diffuse than the one in our heads, but it’s none the less real for all that." - Michael Chorost, World Wide Mind
The individual may be an autonomous evolved mind made less autonomous by the social but that mind is embodied in something that is embedded in the physical world with networks of connections that 'anchor' it.
Just as the social and the autonomous mind leach into each other so the movable thing that holds the mind leaches into the material world and the material world leaches into it. Working out what this may mean and clearing out the spiritual hogwash may be the philosophical mission of our time. one that ensures that imaginative science does not try to usurp the reasoning process and guards us against new irrationalities that will continue to block our progress as a species.
Monday 5 May 2014
Consciousness Studies, Degenerate Liberalism & 'Libertarian Socialism'
The amount of work on consciousness in academic scientific and philosophical circles has probably never been more intense. Yet every participant in the debate on what it is and how it works agrees that nothing has been resolved. Some (such as Colin McGinn) plausibly claim that we will probably never know what it is.
Mind & Language
Or is that so? Maybe any introspective human knows what it is very well but simply cannot describe it. Perhaps it is description that is the problem - or rather the fact that any description of being and the experience of being are always going to be impossible to align.
There is a school of thought that says that mind is the construction of language. The implication is that consciousness does not exist without language. But if this is so, then, if language creates minds then minds should be able to be expressed in language and yet this is not so.
As we learn more from neuro-science about how perceptions are ordered and filtered in the mind, we see that our consciousness is presented with only a working approximation of reality rather than what is actually out there in all its huge complexity.
Minds exist somewhere beyond language. It might be argued that language itself is a barrier to understanding. As we realise how little our internal theatre accords with what is 'out there', it becomes more credible that language is part of that filtering process between matter and mind and, as intermediary, partakes of the character of neither.
Language unrealises reality so that it can then be pragmatically used by a mind that has been constructed emergently out of matter. So, if language cannot represent matter precisely, this emergent mind that arises out of matter operates in a way that can not only not be described in language but is the tool-user of the tool that is language.
Convergent Theories
This reflects something of a convergence in recent decades of the analytical and continental philosophical traditions. The analysts cannot, linguistically or logically, provide a credible description of the totality of consciousness but can merely present various reasonable paradigms that must be experienced to be understood.
Meanwhile, the phenomenological origins of the continental approach must bend not only to logic (rather than language) but to neuroscience and explore the experience of being conscious in relation to Existence not in terms of an abstract spirituality but in terms of a relationship to the complex matter of the brain.
The most reasonable current models for understanding consciousness are two. These two could turn out to be two sides of the same coin, inexpressible except in dualistic terms because there is not the language for their conjoining. There are other models but these others come down to acts of faith or hypotheses that it is hard to see can be testable.
The first model is monist and sees consciousness arising or emergent out of matter as a function of the properties of matter - we have physicalist, electro-magnetic and quantum physical theories to account for this. We will surely have others derived from, say, research into dark energy.
The second is dualist and posits the reality of mind as something that might be substantially dependent or even emergent on matter (the living brain) but which has become a class in itself. By analogy, complex systems as large as the universe might, possibly, have a consciousness of sorts if consciousness is such an emergent property.
Cartesianism Crumbles
The leap within dualism into a Cartesian absolute separation of mind and matter now seems less and less credible as even the highest alleged states of consciousness appear linked to matter as substrate or necessary pre-condition. Descartes worked within a tradition that had to find a place for the soul as emergent from God - we do not.
All the remaining attempts to retain high dualism, with mind operative outside matter, draw us towards 'faith' which is territory where we cannot go. In this writer's view faith is a misperception of one's own consciousness but, by its very nature, the matter cannot be argued with those who have it.
The monist-dualist opposition to one another may be illusory in itself. Mind is experienced as a known thing different from all other forms of matter but having aspects shared with, say, animals. Unless we postulate the grant of souls from 'above', the most likely hypothesis involves evolutionary emergence.
The debate about animal souls is absurd and we do not want to go where souls only arise with intellect but that consciousness does seem to be emergent on matter operates in a way that is uncomfortable for Judaeo-Christians - we deal with this later.
Mind has not only no reasonable basis for existing outside of its dependence on matter but modern neuroscience has been whittling away many of the higher functions of the mind as biologically based, demonstrating the brain's role in developing a person's perception of reality yet leaving behind, as unexplained, its sense of itself.
Monistic Dualism?
The 21st century working model of the mind is not Cartesian but rather is contingently monist - that is, the mind is a function of matter but has emerged from matter through evolution and through its own relationship to matter has become something that we may say is both matter and mind.
Of course, we end up here by saying that mind is matter in the tautological sense that anything that exists can be termed matter but which, from the perspective of the anthropic universe, is actually very different in quality.
As any philosopher will aver, it is possible to think two impossible things before breakfast. The 'impossibility' here that is that mind is both matter and not-matter simultaneously.
Mind is dependent on matter to exist and for its origin but its emergence has created something so remarkably different from matter, even if it is constructed out of components of ultimate matter beyond our current understanding, that, in effect, it is a new substance, mind.
Dualism thus re-emerges but not in the pure Cartesian form that has sustained Western culture since the Enlightenment and certainly not in the dualist form that has generally dominated religious discourse where the mind (spirit) has descended from some force entirely outside and preceding matter.
Implication
Things are thus flipped on their head. Instead of the body being seen as mere receptacle for some sacred soul or spirit which animates or is the essence of mind, the mind is seen as whole to the degree that it is integrated with its material substrate, its body with all its complex biochemical and genetic components.
It is also a consciousness that can, to a greater or lesser degree, command and control its direct perceptions of reality (the matter beyond the body and the interpretation of other minds through matter) in order to develop a 'realistic' (meaning pragmatically useful) sense of its own self and needs.
The self does not need transcending (because there is no transcendence that is not illusory) but only transforming in real time and in accordance with its relationship to the matter it commands or which commands it (both bodily and in society). This consciousness is rational but only given its inherited bio-chemical nature and historic relation to the world.
Any sense of 'transcendence' is not in accord with some privileging of the mind against matter (which is always implicit in the religious and Cartesian mind-set) but is a process of integrating (individuation) the mind-thing and the body-stuff in order to stand against and manage the social-thing, other mind-body things and raw matter.
This brings into play the insight of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat (1974) - a text whose revolutionary social importance, coming after the work of the phenomenologists and existentialists but before the neuro-scientific revolution, has yet to be fully appreciated by the wider public.
Bats & Humans
In order to bring the thesis up to date here, we might suggest that 'being like' something is to take on the total effect of all their sensory inputs as well as the tools for ordering those inputs in the brain as the 'being like-ness' that we have to come to terms with in trying to think like or have the experience of being, say, a bat. Needless to say, we cannot.
The thesis has been of great importance in understanding a whole slew of philosophical problems surrounding consciousness, including the appreciation that an artificial intelligence will not think like a human because it does not have the same tools as a human nor the same ordering system in its hardware.
But what has not filtered through to the general public is that what Nagel is saying does not apply just to the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of humans being able to credibly imagine themselves as bats or AI as human but the impossibility of any human seeing the world in the same way as any other human.
This is more challenging than it appears because it is not simply saying that we all have different histories and upbringings and so we should all be understanding of each other or, another conclusion, struggle politically to 'reform' other persons and draw them out of their culture and history 'for their own good' or that of 'humanity'.
The implicit ideological position in such models is that there is the same perception in all humans and the same ordering mechanism, perhaps with 'intelligence' alone being allowed to differentiate between persons (in that over-privileging of reason that has also over-privileged all intellectuals in the West).
The Uniqueness of Persons
However, minds do not appear to work like this, simply because they are embedded in bodies. Every person's perceptual apparatus and brain structure is as different as are their fingerprints. Each person, therefore, sees the world in a different way from others - in other words, we are nearly as different from each other as we are from bats.
Or rather, we have become as different from each other as we are from bats because we have evolved (thus perhaps giving a clue to the source of the emergence of mind from matter) as social animals. On our genetic and bio-chemical differences are overlain massive cultural differences that affect both perception and ordering.
A complex brain and perceptual apparatus (including the possibility of perceptual apparatus that may operate on the sub-conscious mind) has not only been under variable genetic change over millennia but the neuro-plasticity of the brain and accident create very different and unique mental maps for every living human.
Any rationalist social or political discourse based on a fixed view of what it is like to be human is doomed to failure as a practical project for the simple reason that the mind or sets of mind that think like this are as much 'sports' as any other type of mind.
Pure reasonableness will neither persuade those who simply do not see the world in the way that 'rational' people do nor have any effect on internal self-rational behaviour that conflicts with the social rationality of the rationalists.
The Failure of the Enlightenment
This is not a situation that will improve for the rationalist Left in the coming millennia. The numbers of perceptual inputs and the numbers of persons multiply massively the numbers of ways of seeing the world.
The ability of persons to conceal their thoughts in their own interest will also create a fantastic range of ways of undermining every rationalist project that is ever presented to humanity by the rationalists.
The obvious historic example is the Soviet experiment. This touted a New Man but crumbled on sclerosis with a flourishing underworld and it required massive murderous onslaughts on its own population. But the American experiment, based on the assertion of a fixed view of humanity in its Constitution, is not in much better state now.
The US is innovative and creative and we would not be discussing these matters if it was not for that quality but it is dysfunctional in other respects. Its rationalist commitment to a single 'form' of liberty derived from a fixed text means that it is poorly adapted to deal with mass inequality or the creative destruction of its own preferred economic system
There is no easy answer to the social and political problems arising out of this quality of humanity - that rationality lies within individual humans who are socially irrational, can hide thoughts and who misperceive reality (or rather can never see all reality like 'God' in order to make best judgement in their own interest let alone altruistically for others).
What Not To Do
One solution is not merely unworkable but cruel and stupid. This is to impose rational solutions from above and then try to bend the 'crooked timber' of humanity to will. This just does not work - or at least it works only for a while if the State is permitted to engage in authoritarian or brute measures.
The current Western situation is that States are attempting to deal with the problem of order and lack of force by 'invading minds' so that the subject receives the perceptual inputs that States want in order to transform minds. The intent is often benign - racism and sexism have been reduced drastically by such methods.
But, given the relative lack of force available to the State in the West, this has degenerated into soft corporatism, media management, coalition-building through various 'progressive' alliances, 'soft power' international relations, surveillance and the creation of an atmosphere and anxiety and the sort of economic populism that has created recent public debt problems.
Much of this works well enough when there is no sustained crisis but withdrawal of the bread and circuses of economic populism, combined with resentment of surveillance and social engineering and the 'truth-telling' role of the internet (noting Wikileaks and Snowden's revelations as just the top of a massive pyramid of alternative information) hole the ship below the waters.
Technological innovation and structural economic and administrative failure mean that the rational discourse of the ruling order in the last economic cycle has been displaced by a return to direct negotiation and alliances between individuals - all with their own individual rationalities. This happened first as consumers and only now as 'subjects' of politics.
Why The Elite Cannot Cope
Elite rationalists loathe 'tribalism' because they fear it and because it offends their universalism under which liberal-minded people are always superior to traditionalists, individualists or socialists and where universalists across the world are of more importance to each other than any of these other categories are at home.
But libertarian and communitarian solutions to problems from the ground-up are much more in tune with the problem of 'being like a bat' than anything that liberal universalists or other ideologues can offer.
The libertarian will work with others to defend his internal rational perspective while others, who perhaps seek order and security before liberty, will combine into families, localities, tribes, societies and so on, building not the activist-style liberal civil society but a community which owes something to both mentalities - but not to universalism.
The new consciousness studies, in this context, may prove as socially and politically revolutionary as Cartesian thinking was to prove after the seventeenth century. The creative tension between bottom up libertarianism and communitarianism or traditionalism looks to be far more dynamic than the sclerotic face-off between top-down liberalism and authoritarianism.
The mind is now no longer abstracted and made universal (except as private belief) but is re-centred in the Self as a mind-body from which it negotiates with others through struggle within, one would assume, shared rules and regulations designed to isolate and contain the harmful psychopath and monster.
The Problem of the Intellectual
The West has seen successive disasters as intellectuals who think in universalist terms have attempted to over-ride private life, community and history in order to change not the world (both material and social) for the better (which is reasonable) but persons as persons.
Enlightenment liberalism, Marxism and (bringing universalism conceptually down to the level of the nation or race) fascism and national socialism have not stopped at improving the freedoms and material conditions of the population (which is good) but have sought to impose a way of seeing the world and forms of language. Specific words are banned, appropriated or promoted!
These have been seen as oppressions against persons, against the particular and concrete and in favour of the general and abstract - and the intensification of these oppressions has generally arisen out of brute frustration that people do not obey the grand narratives of intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats.
Of the great questions of consciousness, the how it works is still under examination by the scientific and philosophical community. It may yet come up with some clear answer but what it is is never going to be fully describable in words or numbers.
The question is why it exists. The obvious response is to deal with this question as a scientific description of its evolutionary and adaptive role within the organism but this begs the real question. Consciousness exists because of its history in our species but we should ask now why it exists when we are aware of its existence.
Being Aware of Being Aware
This self-reflexive aspect to the why is not answered sufficiently by appeal to its functional role in the context of evolutionary history. By becoming aware of consciousness, we turn ourselves from its subject to an awareness of consciousness as a tool for its own purposes. We introduce at this point notions of will - and free will at that.
Intellectuals have got very gloomy about free will in recent decades but this is because they have swung like a pendulum from Enlightenment rationalism to an absurd nihilism. There is an argument against free will in an absolute sense but this tautologically simply extends cause and effect to a level meaningless to the human condition.
Just as the mind is both monistic in origin and substrate but dualistically defined in terms of its emergent properties and actual reflexiveness, so it is possible to accept cause and effect and then note that, in real terms as humans, the substrate is so dense and unknowable that, to all intents and purposes, will exists and is free.
The free will, again, is not granted by a deity but arises out of the human condition as an emergent property of higher consciousness. This is a big issue which should not distract us here but the logic of the situation is that moral responsibility can be returned to centre stage as can the right of resistance to universalist claims.
Consciousness becomes the thing which exists for its own sake and, in existing for its own sake, it becomes the argument for that position which formerly required the existence of god to justify it - the intrinsic worth of itself, the intrinsic worth not of some abstract humanity but of the person who reflects on himself.
The Dark Side
The only danger here is the privileging of the truly self-reflexive over the non-reflexive who might then be seen as little better than bats. This is a fascistic or elitist concept that might see the diminishing of the less educated, the less intelligent and the damaged.
Fortunately, this is easily countered by a rather neat truth for which we can be grateful insofar as it does not require us to rely on moral responsibility as an attribute of higher consciousness (which it will not bear) - this is that no mind can judge another mind because no mind can know another mind. We can see this in two thought experiments.
The most famous postulates a world of zombies able to behave as if they were sentient in a world which only you (or I) have true consciousness.
More useful is the experiment that suggests that, though I am conscious, all others are not only conscious but more intelligent but have been spending their existences pretending to be more or less ignorant, ill-educated and disabled in order to make me believe that I was more conscious than they. This paranoid fantasy makes its point.
I cannot judge the intrinsic worth of any other mind so that, far from fascistic, the new thinking in consciousness drives us to the opposite pole of the political spectrum - towards an egalitarian attitude to minds which demands that all minds have equal body and material chances and that no one should be intrinsically privileged over another.
The Logic of 'Libertarian Socialism'
Such egalitarian individualism is a form of socialism in its ideal sense, one that is neither Marxism (which is really a Judaeo-Christian heresy) nor liberalism but something more respectful of difference than most of the so-called progressive ideologues.
Egalitarian individualism or libertarian socialism does not persecute sex-workers (feminism), demand special privileges because of crimes against the dead (identity politics) or bring rights to the world through the barrel of a gun (liberal internationalism).
Libertarian socialism is thus not universalism nor is it progressivism - it is sui generis, respectful of the private reasoning powers of the individual in a society in which they are given the tools to make their own judgements without fear or lies.
But there is another aspect to the case. Modern consciousness studies are unthinkable without the insights of the phenomenologists, notably Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
Phenomenological Perspectives
Both these philosophers understood that the process of investigating one's self required not only specific training and effort but 'the ability to adopt alternative perspectives on one's experience' [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopy, Consciousness]
This process of adopting alternative perspectives is death to ideological grand narratives. Looking at oneself creatively from different perspectives is only one step from looking at others and their motivations from different and more empathetic perspectives.
Doing so does not necessarily mean that you will agree with others. However, empathy does enable one to draw a distinction between what is good for you and what is good for them and not confuse either with what is necessarily good for humanity. One can have an opinion on the latter but it is contingent on the facts.
The ideologist who places humanity before themselves will soon be placing abstract humanity before you and all other really existing persons so that abstract humanity consists of no persons at all, just a projection of the mind of the neurotic originator of the fantasy. The extreme version of this is the neurotic who places the planet, the distant 'transhumanist' future or God before persons.
Conclusion
What we see here is a direct connection between the revolution in consciousness studies and the potential liberation of the individual in Western culture. What we also see here is a different sort of mind with a different sort of politics.
Under the old mentality, the mind was separated from the body and God was replaced with Reason. Sexuality and desire were denigrated and an abstract vision of humanity treated persons as units to be controlled for some grand narrative that had no relation to the real and complex nature of humanity.
Under the new mentality, we have a fluid and flexible community of equal and creative individuals who seek individuation through coming to terms with their own identities, their bodies and their eventual ageing and dissolution and who build communities through struggle from below.
We can refer here to another philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett, whose multiple drafts model (by which the mind is continuously redrafting reality and itself according to its assessment of inputs) gives us a way of seeing politics as something that is fluid and contingent, based not on absurd rigid principles but on the achievable.
Not only persons but self-organising communities can reinvent themselves continuously on the basis of multiple drafts with every citizen being an input. This is a model of democracy that is greatly at odds with the actual practice of the degenerate liberalism inherited from the Enlightenment.
Mind & Language
Or is that so? Maybe any introspective human knows what it is very well but simply cannot describe it. Perhaps it is description that is the problem - or rather the fact that any description of being and the experience of being are always going to be impossible to align.
There is a school of thought that says that mind is the construction of language. The implication is that consciousness does not exist without language. But if this is so, then, if language creates minds then minds should be able to be expressed in language and yet this is not so.
As we learn more from neuro-science about how perceptions are ordered and filtered in the mind, we see that our consciousness is presented with only a working approximation of reality rather than what is actually out there in all its huge complexity.
Minds exist somewhere beyond language. It might be argued that language itself is a barrier to understanding. As we realise how little our internal theatre accords with what is 'out there', it becomes more credible that language is part of that filtering process between matter and mind and, as intermediary, partakes of the character of neither.
Language unrealises reality so that it can then be pragmatically used by a mind that has been constructed emergently out of matter. So, if language cannot represent matter precisely, this emergent mind that arises out of matter operates in a way that can not only not be described in language but is the tool-user of the tool that is language.
Convergent Theories
This reflects something of a convergence in recent decades of the analytical and continental philosophical traditions. The analysts cannot, linguistically or logically, provide a credible description of the totality of consciousness but can merely present various reasonable paradigms that must be experienced to be understood.
Meanwhile, the phenomenological origins of the continental approach must bend not only to logic (rather than language) but to neuroscience and explore the experience of being conscious in relation to Existence not in terms of an abstract spirituality but in terms of a relationship to the complex matter of the brain.
The most reasonable current models for understanding consciousness are two. These two could turn out to be two sides of the same coin, inexpressible except in dualistic terms because there is not the language for their conjoining. There are other models but these others come down to acts of faith or hypotheses that it is hard to see can be testable.
The first model is monist and sees consciousness arising or emergent out of matter as a function of the properties of matter - we have physicalist, electro-magnetic and quantum physical theories to account for this. We will surely have others derived from, say, research into dark energy.
The second is dualist and posits the reality of mind as something that might be substantially dependent or even emergent on matter (the living brain) but which has become a class in itself. By analogy, complex systems as large as the universe might, possibly, have a consciousness of sorts if consciousness is such an emergent property.
Cartesianism Crumbles
The leap within dualism into a Cartesian absolute separation of mind and matter now seems less and less credible as even the highest alleged states of consciousness appear linked to matter as substrate or necessary pre-condition. Descartes worked within a tradition that had to find a place for the soul as emergent from God - we do not.
All the remaining attempts to retain high dualism, with mind operative outside matter, draw us towards 'faith' which is territory where we cannot go. In this writer's view faith is a misperception of one's own consciousness but, by its very nature, the matter cannot be argued with those who have it.
The monist-dualist opposition to one another may be illusory in itself. Mind is experienced as a known thing different from all other forms of matter but having aspects shared with, say, animals. Unless we postulate the grant of souls from 'above', the most likely hypothesis involves evolutionary emergence.
The debate about animal souls is absurd and we do not want to go where souls only arise with intellect but that consciousness does seem to be emergent on matter operates in a way that is uncomfortable for Judaeo-Christians - we deal with this later.
Mind has not only no reasonable basis for existing outside of its dependence on matter but modern neuroscience has been whittling away many of the higher functions of the mind as biologically based, demonstrating the brain's role in developing a person's perception of reality yet leaving behind, as unexplained, its sense of itself.
Monistic Dualism?
The 21st century working model of the mind is not Cartesian but rather is contingently monist - that is, the mind is a function of matter but has emerged from matter through evolution and through its own relationship to matter has become something that we may say is both matter and mind.
Of course, we end up here by saying that mind is matter in the tautological sense that anything that exists can be termed matter but which, from the perspective of the anthropic universe, is actually very different in quality.
As any philosopher will aver, it is possible to think two impossible things before breakfast. The 'impossibility' here that is that mind is both matter and not-matter simultaneously.
Mind is dependent on matter to exist and for its origin but its emergence has created something so remarkably different from matter, even if it is constructed out of components of ultimate matter beyond our current understanding, that, in effect, it is a new substance, mind.
Dualism thus re-emerges but not in the pure Cartesian form that has sustained Western culture since the Enlightenment and certainly not in the dualist form that has generally dominated religious discourse where the mind (spirit) has descended from some force entirely outside and preceding matter.
Implication
Things are thus flipped on their head. Instead of the body being seen as mere receptacle for some sacred soul or spirit which animates or is the essence of mind, the mind is seen as whole to the degree that it is integrated with its material substrate, its body with all its complex biochemical and genetic components.
It is also a consciousness that can, to a greater or lesser degree, command and control its direct perceptions of reality (the matter beyond the body and the interpretation of other minds through matter) in order to develop a 'realistic' (meaning pragmatically useful) sense of its own self and needs.
The self does not need transcending (because there is no transcendence that is not illusory) but only transforming in real time and in accordance with its relationship to the matter it commands or which commands it (both bodily and in society). This consciousness is rational but only given its inherited bio-chemical nature and historic relation to the world.
Any sense of 'transcendence' is not in accord with some privileging of the mind against matter (which is always implicit in the religious and Cartesian mind-set) but is a process of integrating (individuation) the mind-thing and the body-stuff in order to stand against and manage the social-thing, other mind-body things and raw matter.
This brings into play the insight of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat (1974) - a text whose revolutionary social importance, coming after the work of the phenomenologists and existentialists but before the neuro-scientific revolution, has yet to be fully appreciated by the wider public.
Bats & Humans
In order to bring the thesis up to date here, we might suggest that 'being like' something is to take on the total effect of all their sensory inputs as well as the tools for ordering those inputs in the brain as the 'being like-ness' that we have to come to terms with in trying to think like or have the experience of being, say, a bat. Needless to say, we cannot.
The thesis has been of great importance in understanding a whole slew of philosophical problems surrounding consciousness, including the appreciation that an artificial intelligence will not think like a human because it does not have the same tools as a human nor the same ordering system in its hardware.
But what has not filtered through to the general public is that what Nagel is saying does not apply just to the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of humans being able to credibly imagine themselves as bats or AI as human but the impossibility of any human seeing the world in the same way as any other human.
This is more challenging than it appears because it is not simply saying that we all have different histories and upbringings and so we should all be understanding of each other or, another conclusion, struggle politically to 'reform' other persons and draw them out of their culture and history 'for their own good' or that of 'humanity'.
The implicit ideological position in such models is that there is the same perception in all humans and the same ordering mechanism, perhaps with 'intelligence' alone being allowed to differentiate between persons (in that over-privileging of reason that has also over-privileged all intellectuals in the West).
The Uniqueness of Persons
However, minds do not appear to work like this, simply because they are embedded in bodies. Every person's perceptual apparatus and brain structure is as different as are their fingerprints. Each person, therefore, sees the world in a different way from others - in other words, we are nearly as different from each other as we are from bats.
Or rather, we have become as different from each other as we are from bats because we have evolved (thus perhaps giving a clue to the source of the emergence of mind from matter) as social animals. On our genetic and bio-chemical differences are overlain massive cultural differences that affect both perception and ordering.
A complex brain and perceptual apparatus (including the possibility of perceptual apparatus that may operate on the sub-conscious mind) has not only been under variable genetic change over millennia but the neuro-plasticity of the brain and accident create very different and unique mental maps for every living human.
Any rationalist social or political discourse based on a fixed view of what it is like to be human is doomed to failure as a practical project for the simple reason that the mind or sets of mind that think like this are as much 'sports' as any other type of mind.
Pure reasonableness will neither persuade those who simply do not see the world in the way that 'rational' people do nor have any effect on internal self-rational behaviour that conflicts with the social rationality of the rationalists.
The Failure of the Enlightenment
This is not a situation that will improve for the rationalist Left in the coming millennia. The numbers of perceptual inputs and the numbers of persons multiply massively the numbers of ways of seeing the world.
The ability of persons to conceal their thoughts in their own interest will also create a fantastic range of ways of undermining every rationalist project that is ever presented to humanity by the rationalists.
The obvious historic example is the Soviet experiment. This touted a New Man but crumbled on sclerosis with a flourishing underworld and it required massive murderous onslaughts on its own population. But the American experiment, based on the assertion of a fixed view of humanity in its Constitution, is not in much better state now.
The US is innovative and creative and we would not be discussing these matters if it was not for that quality but it is dysfunctional in other respects. Its rationalist commitment to a single 'form' of liberty derived from a fixed text means that it is poorly adapted to deal with mass inequality or the creative destruction of its own preferred economic system
There is no easy answer to the social and political problems arising out of this quality of humanity - that rationality lies within individual humans who are socially irrational, can hide thoughts and who misperceive reality (or rather can never see all reality like 'God' in order to make best judgement in their own interest let alone altruistically for others).
What Not To Do
One solution is not merely unworkable but cruel and stupid. This is to impose rational solutions from above and then try to bend the 'crooked timber' of humanity to will. This just does not work - or at least it works only for a while if the State is permitted to engage in authoritarian or brute measures.
The current Western situation is that States are attempting to deal with the problem of order and lack of force by 'invading minds' so that the subject receives the perceptual inputs that States want in order to transform minds. The intent is often benign - racism and sexism have been reduced drastically by such methods.
But, given the relative lack of force available to the State in the West, this has degenerated into soft corporatism, media management, coalition-building through various 'progressive' alliances, 'soft power' international relations, surveillance and the creation of an atmosphere and anxiety and the sort of economic populism that has created recent public debt problems.
Much of this works well enough when there is no sustained crisis but withdrawal of the bread and circuses of economic populism, combined with resentment of surveillance and social engineering and the 'truth-telling' role of the internet (noting Wikileaks and Snowden's revelations as just the top of a massive pyramid of alternative information) hole the ship below the waters.
Technological innovation and structural economic and administrative failure mean that the rational discourse of the ruling order in the last economic cycle has been displaced by a return to direct negotiation and alliances between individuals - all with their own individual rationalities. This happened first as consumers and only now as 'subjects' of politics.
Why The Elite Cannot Cope
Elite rationalists loathe 'tribalism' because they fear it and because it offends their universalism under which liberal-minded people are always superior to traditionalists, individualists or socialists and where universalists across the world are of more importance to each other than any of these other categories are at home.
But libertarian and communitarian solutions to problems from the ground-up are much more in tune with the problem of 'being like a bat' than anything that liberal universalists or other ideologues can offer.
The libertarian will work with others to defend his internal rational perspective while others, who perhaps seek order and security before liberty, will combine into families, localities, tribes, societies and so on, building not the activist-style liberal civil society but a community which owes something to both mentalities - but not to universalism.
The new consciousness studies, in this context, may prove as socially and politically revolutionary as Cartesian thinking was to prove after the seventeenth century. The creative tension between bottom up libertarianism and communitarianism or traditionalism looks to be far more dynamic than the sclerotic face-off between top-down liberalism and authoritarianism.
The mind is now no longer abstracted and made universal (except as private belief) but is re-centred in the Self as a mind-body from which it negotiates with others through struggle within, one would assume, shared rules and regulations designed to isolate and contain the harmful psychopath and monster.
The Problem of the Intellectual
The West has seen successive disasters as intellectuals who think in universalist terms have attempted to over-ride private life, community and history in order to change not the world (both material and social) for the better (which is reasonable) but persons as persons.
Enlightenment liberalism, Marxism and (bringing universalism conceptually down to the level of the nation or race) fascism and national socialism have not stopped at improving the freedoms and material conditions of the population (which is good) but have sought to impose a way of seeing the world and forms of language. Specific words are banned, appropriated or promoted!
These have been seen as oppressions against persons, against the particular and concrete and in favour of the general and abstract - and the intensification of these oppressions has generally arisen out of brute frustration that people do not obey the grand narratives of intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats.
Of the great questions of consciousness, the how it works is still under examination by the scientific and philosophical community. It may yet come up with some clear answer but what it is is never going to be fully describable in words or numbers.
The question is why it exists. The obvious response is to deal with this question as a scientific description of its evolutionary and adaptive role within the organism but this begs the real question. Consciousness exists because of its history in our species but we should ask now why it exists when we are aware of its existence.
Being Aware of Being Aware
This self-reflexive aspect to the why is not answered sufficiently by appeal to its functional role in the context of evolutionary history. By becoming aware of consciousness, we turn ourselves from its subject to an awareness of consciousness as a tool for its own purposes. We introduce at this point notions of will - and free will at that.
Intellectuals have got very gloomy about free will in recent decades but this is because they have swung like a pendulum from Enlightenment rationalism to an absurd nihilism. There is an argument against free will in an absolute sense but this tautologically simply extends cause and effect to a level meaningless to the human condition.
Just as the mind is both monistic in origin and substrate but dualistically defined in terms of its emergent properties and actual reflexiveness, so it is possible to accept cause and effect and then note that, in real terms as humans, the substrate is so dense and unknowable that, to all intents and purposes, will exists and is free.
The free will, again, is not granted by a deity but arises out of the human condition as an emergent property of higher consciousness. This is a big issue which should not distract us here but the logic of the situation is that moral responsibility can be returned to centre stage as can the right of resistance to universalist claims.
Consciousness becomes the thing which exists for its own sake and, in existing for its own sake, it becomes the argument for that position which formerly required the existence of god to justify it - the intrinsic worth of itself, the intrinsic worth not of some abstract humanity but of the person who reflects on himself.
The Dark Side
The only danger here is the privileging of the truly self-reflexive over the non-reflexive who might then be seen as little better than bats. This is a fascistic or elitist concept that might see the diminishing of the less educated, the less intelligent and the damaged.
Fortunately, this is easily countered by a rather neat truth for which we can be grateful insofar as it does not require us to rely on moral responsibility as an attribute of higher consciousness (which it will not bear) - this is that no mind can judge another mind because no mind can know another mind. We can see this in two thought experiments.
The most famous postulates a world of zombies able to behave as if they were sentient in a world which only you (or I) have true consciousness.
More useful is the experiment that suggests that, though I am conscious, all others are not only conscious but more intelligent but have been spending their existences pretending to be more or less ignorant, ill-educated and disabled in order to make me believe that I was more conscious than they. This paranoid fantasy makes its point.
I cannot judge the intrinsic worth of any other mind so that, far from fascistic, the new thinking in consciousness drives us to the opposite pole of the political spectrum - towards an egalitarian attitude to minds which demands that all minds have equal body and material chances and that no one should be intrinsically privileged over another.
The Logic of 'Libertarian Socialism'
Such egalitarian individualism is a form of socialism in its ideal sense, one that is neither Marxism (which is really a Judaeo-Christian heresy) nor liberalism but something more respectful of difference than most of the so-called progressive ideologues.
Egalitarian individualism or libertarian socialism does not persecute sex-workers (feminism), demand special privileges because of crimes against the dead (identity politics) or bring rights to the world through the barrel of a gun (liberal internationalism).
Libertarian socialism is thus not universalism nor is it progressivism - it is sui generis, respectful of the private reasoning powers of the individual in a society in which they are given the tools to make their own judgements without fear or lies.
But there is another aspect to the case. Modern consciousness studies are unthinkable without the insights of the phenomenologists, notably Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
Phenomenological Perspectives
Both these philosophers understood that the process of investigating one's self required not only specific training and effort but 'the ability to adopt alternative perspectives on one's experience' [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopy, Consciousness]
This process of adopting alternative perspectives is death to ideological grand narratives. Looking at oneself creatively from different perspectives is only one step from looking at others and their motivations from different and more empathetic perspectives.
Doing so does not necessarily mean that you will agree with others. However, empathy does enable one to draw a distinction between what is good for you and what is good for them and not confuse either with what is necessarily good for humanity. One can have an opinion on the latter but it is contingent on the facts.
The ideologist who places humanity before themselves will soon be placing abstract humanity before you and all other really existing persons so that abstract humanity consists of no persons at all, just a projection of the mind of the neurotic originator of the fantasy. The extreme version of this is the neurotic who places the planet, the distant 'transhumanist' future or God before persons.
Conclusion
What we see here is a direct connection between the revolution in consciousness studies and the potential liberation of the individual in Western culture. What we also see here is a different sort of mind with a different sort of politics.
Under the old mentality, the mind was separated from the body and God was replaced with Reason. Sexuality and desire were denigrated and an abstract vision of humanity treated persons as units to be controlled for some grand narrative that had no relation to the real and complex nature of humanity.
Under the new mentality, we have a fluid and flexible community of equal and creative individuals who seek individuation through coming to terms with their own identities, their bodies and their eventual ageing and dissolution and who build communities through struggle from below.
We can refer here to another philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett, whose multiple drafts model (by which the mind is continuously redrafting reality and itself according to its assessment of inputs) gives us a way of seeing politics as something that is fluid and contingent, based not on absurd rigid principles but on the achievable.
Not only persons but self-organising communities can reinvent themselves continuously on the basis of multiple drafts with every citizen being an input. This is a model of democracy that is greatly at odds with the actual practice of the degenerate liberalism inherited from the Enlightenment.
Tuesday 15 October 2013
'Zizek is to Hegel what Fichte was to Kant'. Discuss.
The occasion of the discussion was frustration with the desperate clinging of our left-wing political intelligentsia to the performance art of the celebrity philosopher.
Zizek is never less than confusing so it is always hard to pin down what he believes in precisely, except that he holds to a form of idealism derived from Hegel and appears to propose a revival of either some form of communism or of utopian socialism.
What I was interested in was not so much what he claimed to believe at any one time but what role he was functionally playing in contemporary philosophy.
I suppose we might summarise my view as suspicion is that he is playing the role of High Priest to a self-defining barbarian tribe who are enemies of the people, the people meaning that population of persons grounded in the business of being in the world, reproducing, having intentions and seeking a better life for themselves rather than fulfilment of some world-historical mission.
We might say that contemporary European philosophy - with its exclusions and obfuscations - stands in relation to the people in much the same way that Grayson Perry (in his first Reith Lecture today) described the art world, in which he is embedded, as a tribe with its own obfuscatory language and exclusions
I posed the question in a Facebook Group and (edited so as not to be too rude about Zizek) this was my side of the exchange though I found no defenders of Zizek.
Proposition
The implicit thesis is that Zizek is doing to Hegel what Fichte did to Kant. In essence, Fichte took a Kantian position and extended it to meet his own needs. What was a conservative philosophy of 'explanation' became a radical philosophy of 'implied action' for radical intellectuals. The exploitation of the 'master' was manipulative and might be regarded as cynical, in the earlier case, if only Fichte had been subject to a more demanding critique of his purpose.
It strikes me that Zizek is making use of Hegel (and Marx as leading historic Hegelian) and playing the same game, seducing young radicals of the Left, as Fichte seduced young German nationalists, into what amounts, on closer inspection, to be well constructed sophistic nonsense. Just as young Germans failed to investigate Kant in order to tease out his flaws so young Europeans are failing to investigate Hegel and do the same. They are taking the grounding of Zizek's thought as a 'given'.
Fichte was the destructive force that laid the grounding for national socialism (far more than the oft-accused Nietzsche or Heidegger). My thesis continues that Zizek may now be laying the ground rules for a possible new European tyranny based on a pseudo-rationalism of devastating potential for harm. Both philosophers are providers of what their small markets want - a reason to believe in nonsense (in the sense that Wittgenstein and other analytic philosophers criticised the obfuscations of such grand idealistic concepts such as 'Geist') .
Response to First Two Responses
I could not agree more with my interlocutor on the need to restore the knowing - and perceiving and creating - subject at the core of things. Sartre, raised in the discussion, is a red herring because Sartre tried to do for Heidegger what Fichte did for Kant and Zizek does for Hegel.
These are all examples of quasi-narcissistic politicised intellectuals seeking to transform a system or position where seriously deep thought has been followed through to a conclusion but under conditions where others will want something that meets more immediately political needs in the next generation (whether liberal nationalism, anti-fascism or anti-capitalism).
These are all examples of quasi-narcissistic politicised intellectuals seeking to transform a system or position where seriously deep thought has been followed through to a conclusion but under conditions where others will want something that meets more immediately political needs in the next generation (whether liberal nationalism, anti-fascism or anti-capitalism).
It is no accident that Kant, Hegel and Heidegger were conservatives nor that Fichte, Sartre and Zizek are radicals but we should not cut the latter more slack simply because they appear, sentimentally, to be on the side of the angels to many people at key points in history - against Napoleon, against Hitler and against bankers.
We may have another example in Saul/Paul in relation to Christ. No doubt, even now, someone is preparing to transform Foucault's thought into a politically potent weapon against something to be hated after the current crisis. I thought I might try NGOs!
We may have another example in Saul/Paul in relation to Christ. No doubt, even now, someone is preparing to transform Foucault's thought into a politically potent weapon against something to be hated after the current crisis. I thought I might try NGOs!
This process of appropriation requires a perversion of the central insights (right or wrong) of the initiating system. Sartre wanted Heidegger and Husserl's insights to mean something in terms of action, for example, although Heidegger's one early entry into action showed staggering naivete without making his insights into the human condition incorrect.
The Buddha was lucky in not having such a person appear in his 'next generation' but the nature of 'initiation and succession' in Western culture makes it almost inevitable that this will happen frequently.
Zizek uses Sartre and other secondary thinkers such as Fichte, but primarily Marx, as tools for his own intellectual ambitions but he does not really seem ever to engage with what it is to be human on the one hand and what is necessary to suppress as human to create a functioning society in any direct or systematic way.
Zizek uses Sartre and other secondary thinkers such as Fichte, but primarily Marx, as tools for his own intellectual ambitions but he does not really seem ever to engage with what it is to be human on the one hand and what is necessary to suppress as human to create a functioning society in any direct or systematic way.
He quasi-endorses revolutionary violence without, for example, understanding its contingency, its body/mind basis or its social psychology (which is odd for a trained sociologist) - he is perhaps the tragic consequence of the reward given for intellectualism in Western culture.
Zizek is not so much the wisdom of the ourobouros as a Slavic dog chasing its own continental tail. An analogy of Zizekian philosophy with conceptual art and financial engineering springs to mind - a contingent response to highly contingent objective conditions in late capitalism.
Zizek is not so much the wisdom of the ourobouros as a Slavic dog chasing its own continental tail. An analogy of Zizekian philosophy with conceptual art and financial engineering springs to mind - a contingent response to highly contingent objective conditions in late capitalism.
Time is always central to understanding the human condition (this much we take from Heidegger) but Zizek seems to see time with no more sophistication than the aforesaid Paul as a form of providential dispensation via an implicit Absolute (somewhere along the line).
This is as ethically dangerous, the old inevitability illusion of Hegelianism, as, in an entirely different direction, the position of radical utilitarians who would place the planet before humanity - in his case, humanity as an abstract is placed before the person.
This is as ethically dangerous, the old inevitability illusion of Hegelianism, as, in an entirely different direction, the position of radical utilitarians who would place the planet before humanity - in his case, humanity as an abstract is placed before the person.
Much of this is magical thinking by Zizek. His thinking on the Muslim veil, for example, is simply stupid - what he thinks is thought by people (if I understand those who have tried to explain it to me) is not what people think.
It is dangerous because it invents, out of the claims about what we are said to think, a puritanical theory of capitalism that holds within it the seeds of a brutal misdirection of social energy towards the repression and suppression of what it is to be human in the world.
It is dangerous because it invents, out of the claims about what we are said to think, a puritanical theory of capitalism that holds within it the seeds of a brutal misdirection of social energy towards the repression and suppression of what it is to be human in the world.
He is, as I say, not so much a monster (he is not) as a breeder of monsters. He enters into a world where no intelligent criticism is made of such untested absurdities as objectification theory (as a point of value statement) or claims about commodification as a process in which persons have no agency.
The denial of agency to working people in general seems to tell us more about the despair of the massive and potentially unemployable European graduate class than it does about the heroic struggle of ordinary 'folk' to 'be' and 'become' against often extremely difficult odds.
The denial of agency to working people in general seems to tell us more about the despair of the massive and potentially unemployable European graduate class than it does about the heroic struggle of ordinary 'folk' to 'be' and 'become' against often extremely difficult odds.
The negative response to the veil in Europe today is not sophisticated but simply represents belief in a direct challenge to an imagined and assumed ownership of a territory. Guests and implicit 'inferiors' are showing they do not care much about 'our' prior ownership of a territory with is organically grown culture.
Worse, those who insist on the veil or support he veil wearers are seen as intending, implicitly, not merely to take their place on 'our' territory but, and this really is galling to the mass, to show no gratitude for our largesse but to seek, as we have done, in their turn, to impose their culture on us by weight of arrogance, belief and numbers - all at some indeterminate time in the future.
Worse, those who insist on the veil or support he veil wearers are seen as intending, implicitly, not merely to take their place on 'our' territory but, and this really is galling to the mass, to show no gratitude for our largesse but to seek, as we have done, in their turn, to impose their culture on us by weight of arrogance, belief and numbers - all at some indeterminate time in the future.
It is a fear of a past being lost in an observable present to a terrifying future. I believe it is explosive and nothing to do with philosophy. It may be a wrong belief and work should perhaps be done 'rationally' to engage with that belief without making prior ideological demands on the believer but it is not entirely irrational to hold it as a belief once you start understanding what it is to be a human in the world.
Zizek is misdirecting here and therefore assisting both in halting the process of rational investigation of a phenomenon and in storing up the tensions thereby an explosion. His acolytes (much as 1848 liberals became 1870 nationalists and then anti-semites), who still speak of liberty and freedom of a sort now, may slowly become monsters of radical centralisation of power, intellectual snobbery and moral censoriousness (in the case of feminist fellow travellers) in their misplaced concern to turn theory into practice.
Contemporary left-liberalism has become infected with this thinking. Wise 'ordinary' people will watch and may have to remove these people from influence with more force than their nice liberal natures have allowed.
One drastic solution might be to close down or sharply reduce the university departments that allow them safe haven and perhaps to create existential-national or regional schools of intellectual resistance to future tyrannies that are based on a re-evaluation of both personal agency and pragmatic analysis.
Austerity perhaps provides us with the opportunity.
One drastic solution might be to close down or sharply reduce the university departments that allow them safe haven and perhaps to create existential-national or regional schools of intellectual resistance to future tyrannies that are based on a re-evaluation of both personal agency and pragmatic analysis.
Austerity perhaps provides us with the opportunity.
Response to two further responses
There is also a connection between individuation and economic prosperity. We should not, I think, underestimate the shift from industrial to post-industrial and then to the 'internet' society.
We might characterise these developments in simplified terms as a shift from corporatist or progressive bourgeois to narcissistic bourgeois to anarcho-demotic. The narcissists find now that they have more in common with the old corporatists than they do with a population that has a simple enjoyment of Miley Cyrus' cavortings.
We might characterise these developments in simplified terms as a shift from corporatist or progressive bourgeois to narcissistic bourgeois to anarcho-demotic. The narcissists find now that they have more in common with the old corporatists than they do with a population that has a simple enjoyment of Miley Cyrus' cavortings.
The anarcho-demotic is precisely not New Age (which Zizek clearly loathes and we share this dislike) because it pleasures itself in experience knowing it is experience whereas New Age thought still denies pleasure at its heart by insisting that experience is truth rather than just, well, experience.
In that sense, Zizek's criticism of New Age thinking is valid. What he cannot do is make the journey into a Nietzschean joy and even tolerance. He cannot just smile at a hippie. He must censure. He has to impose another meaning on the West because he is not alone in not being able to let go of grand meanings and simply live.
He tries to do this (being Hegelian) through synthesis, attempting to resynthesise progressivism with narcissism in order to repeat the ultimately sterile sociological performance of the Frankfort School but with new clothes.
In that sense, Zizek's criticism of New Age thinking is valid. What he cannot do is make the journey into a Nietzschean joy and even tolerance. He cannot just smile at a hippie. He must censure. He has to impose another meaning on the West because he is not alone in not being able to let go of grand meanings and simply live.
He tries to do this (being Hegelian) through synthesis, attempting to resynthesise progressivism with narcissism in order to repeat the ultimately sterile sociological performance of the Frankfort School but with new clothes.
Still it is good to see philosophy back in fashion though it is like giving guns to teenagers when the philosophy is the outpourings of slovenian performance art ... Laibach is for ironists and our university departments do not produce ironists.
Response to a response [how Zizek claims to restore thesubject]
Zizek does have a point in trying to restore the subject (philosophically speaking) and he is a corrective to the worst excesses of post-modernism. In that sense, although his is a wrong turning, at least he is trying to move forward but, if he removes the value of history except as that which has happened and is not to be changed, he is in danger of removing responsibility for the future (ethically speaking).
The future is the unknown consequence of blind histories unfolding - in other words, he is in danger of dealing with ethical consequences as no more than a standing away from the situation as an observer, without responsibility except to the latest iteration of 'Geist which is to be taken as read.
So, crimes in the future are perhaps to be treated as inconsequentially as the crimes of the past. He may not intend this but it is in the logic of the position. I do not think we can simply dismiss the costs of belief and action in the past.
We may sorrowfully understand causes and not share the sentimental transcendental disapproval of American liberalism but there is more to the case than this.
The appropriation of the murdered by (say) Zionism may leave a bad taste in the mouth but an equal bad taste is left by declining to consider that the deaths were not just the outcome of history and no longer to be considered.
They could have been prevented by any one of a number of events. Contingency returns responsibility to us and the study of history is the study of contingencies that might well have lead to different outcomes. Zizek's world still unfolds as as a 'given' history (giving us the lunacy of the inevitability of the European Project in the hands of other Hegelians or the even dafter inevitability of the spread of Western values).
There are two responses to this - a pessimistic responsibility mindful of the weight of consequences (the existentialist position) or a simple cynical faux-optimism that all will unfold regardless in a progressive way and regardless of the casualties along the way.
So, crimes in the future are perhaps to be treated as inconsequentially as the crimes of the past. He may not intend this but it is in the logic of the position. I do not think we can simply dismiss the costs of belief and action in the past.
We may sorrowfully understand causes and not share the sentimental transcendental disapproval of American liberalism but there is more to the case than this.
The appropriation of the murdered by (say) Zionism may leave a bad taste in the mouth but an equal bad taste is left by declining to consider that the deaths were not just the outcome of history and no longer to be considered.
They could have been prevented by any one of a number of events. Contingency returns responsibility to us and the study of history is the study of contingencies that might well have lead to different outcomes. Zizek's world still unfolds as as a 'given' history (giving us the lunacy of the inevitability of the European Project in the hands of other Hegelians or the even dafter inevitability of the spread of Western values).
There are two responses to this - a pessimistic responsibility mindful of the weight of consequences (the existentialist position) or a simple cynical faux-optimism that all will unfold regardless in a progressive way and regardless of the casualties along the way.
A responsible pessimism still seeks that margin of the good through wilful engagement and choice but sees the past dead as exemplars of why we must make choices.
They are irrecoverable and certainly must not be inappropriately sanctified as they might be by the sentimental or the political (as with the Shoah) but they are dead past 'persons' of remembered consequence. The Chinese would immediately comprehends this concept of the ancestor as having their due. They are 'hungry ghosts'.
They are irrecoverable and certainly must not be inappropriately sanctified as they might be by the sentimental or the political (as with the Shoah) but they are dead past 'persons' of remembered consequence. The Chinese would immediately comprehends this concept of the ancestor as having their due. They are 'hungry ghosts'.
It was persons who were victims of ignorant cruelties. Our remembrance may not help them but it might help ourselves and those who come after. Zizek's position may come to be of the essence of evil, potentially a profound evil infecting our species at its core, one of ignorance.
German Idealism represents the central tenets of evil conduct in successive iterations of ideology - whether communist, fascist and liberal internationalist.
German Idealism represents the central tenets of evil conduct in successive iterations of ideology - whether communist, fascist and liberal internationalist.
Response to Four More Responses
It is this claimed 'stand for progress' that I find most objectionable ... does the man have a psychological unconscious pre-disposition to seeing the world burn out of narcissistic outrage at its ineluctable complexity and at an 'is-ness' that does not brook the thoughts of intellectuals such as himself as having relevant meaning.
That may be unfair but reading him on Robespierre certainly gave me the creeps. His utilitarian equivalent may be that dangerous man who writes the justifications for a slaughter of the innocents through analytical reason in order to save 'Gaia' or other species.
We are back to Nietzsche's awareness of the death instinct amongst intellectuals and 'thinkers'. It is as if a word is constructed as a value (whether it be justice or progress) and then all humanity must bend to the Logos - the originating crime of Christianity out of Platonism, the Form of Forms.
This is why Nietzsche is heroic - his 'ubermensch' is not a monster but an 'overcoming' of the tyranny of language.
We are back to Nietzsche's awareness of the death instinct amongst intellectuals and 'thinkers'. It is as if a word is constructed as a value (whether it be justice or progress) and then all humanity must bend to the Logos - the originating crime of Christianity out of Platonism, the Form of Forms.
This is why Nietzsche is heroic - his 'ubermensch' is not a monster but an 'overcoming' of the tyranny of language.
This overcoming of the tyranny of the word, while permitting seduction by it, is expressed in Heidegger's later Socratic teasing out of the genealogy of particular words in the German, working remorselessly towards a proposal for the pre-linguistic sentiment that enabled the word.
One may thus be a thinking brute but a brute with no desire to find reasons to murder once language is understood as to its genealogy. Thus, the only Christian worth knowing philosophically is the one who silently gets the 'mysterium tremendum' that is beyond words and which enables all testaments to be thrust aside before the Christ on the Cross.
Our worst monsters are wordsmiths who drive language to become the aspic in which we are all to be set. This is the word-weaving terrorism of the career intellectual ... I prefer the madman who cried over the beating of a horse.
One may thus be a thinking brute but a brute with no desire to find reasons to murder once language is understood as to its genealogy. Thus, the only Christian worth knowing philosophically is the one who silently gets the 'mysterium tremendum' that is beyond words and which enables all testaments to be thrust aside before the Christ on the Cross.
Our worst monsters are wordsmiths who drive language to become the aspic in which we are all to be set. This is the word-weaving terrorism of the career intellectual ... I prefer the madman who cried over the beating of a horse.
Friday 11 October 2013
Royal Institute of Philosophy
One of the great treats of the lecture season in London is the annual offering of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, generally based on some grand over-arching theme.
Last year the Institute looked at a whole range of philosophical traditions that would be regarded as alien to the Western analytical tradition. The high points for me were two lectures on Japanese philosophy from slightly differing perspectives and an Iranian contribution.
These and others did not merely help understand where contemporary 'others' were coming from (a session on Iranian philosophy might help move peace forward in the Middle East) but demonstrated that these ways of seeing had merit in their own right. It was somehow right to include Nietzsche in the series.
This year's series is on identity - mind, self and person - and I will be sure to go to at least those this month through to Christmas. They are at the heart of my own interests.
I might add that the Institute is serious but not stuffy, the lectures are free (though come early for a decent seat) and the atmosphere friendly. Membership is recommended though my wife has taken the family position on this rather than me.
The Institute has promised podcasts of last year's series and you should look out for them. Even if you are a thorough-going amateur like me, the Institute is such a mine of information and links that it would be hard not to engage with it. If you are at all serious about philosophy it is a 'must'.
Last year the Institute looked at a whole range of philosophical traditions that would be regarded as alien to the Western analytical tradition. The high points for me were two lectures on Japanese philosophy from slightly differing perspectives and an Iranian contribution.
These and others did not merely help understand where contemporary 'others' were coming from (a session on Iranian philosophy might help move peace forward in the Middle East) but demonstrated that these ways of seeing had merit in their own right. It was somehow right to include Nietzsche in the series.
This year's series is on identity - mind, self and person - and I will be sure to go to at least those this month through to Christmas. They are at the heart of my own interests.
I might add that the Institute is serious but not stuffy, the lectures are free (though come early for a decent seat) and the atmosphere friendly. Membership is recommended though my wife has taken the family position on this rather than me.
The Institute has promised podcasts of last year's series and you should look out for them. Even if you are a thorough-going amateur like me, the Institute is such a mine of information and links that it would be hard not to engage with it. If you are at all serious about philosophy it is a 'must'.
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