How is there not a Third Day Adventist Church that believes that everything hangs on what happens between Great Friday and Easter Sunday? That’s an inexcusable empty tray in the steam table of our denominational buffet.
(Sorry, I’m reading theology these days…)
In work and in religion, we paint in a constricted ontological palette. That is, we acknowledge certain ways in which an entity can be, and neglect or deny others.
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Facts, knowledge . . . doctrines, “faith” as beliefs.
Techniques, methods, processes . . . traditions, customs, rituals.
Things, artifacts, outputs, products . . . holy places, relics, books.
People, roles . . . leaders, authorities, fellow believers.
Ethics, manners, prudence . . . morality, laws, acts.
Plan . . . destiny, providence.
Objective . . . judgment.
Brand . . . symbols.
Feelings . . . passions.
Career path . . . spiritual path.
Self . . . soul.
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These thingly things I’ve listed — things we can “wrap our minds around” and comprehend — ideas, methods, products, people, ethics, growth, plans, goals, selves, etc. — all orbit about an essential “one thing needful”, and it is that thing that invests what orbits them with coherence and meaning.
This is not to denigrate things. They are important. We need things in all their variety. But when we fret exclusively over the periphery of thingness, the center vanishes, breaks up, dissipates and loses its capacity to pull the myriad things of the world into relation.
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“The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
– W. B. Yeats
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Even our religion is industrial. Or was our industry formed in the image of what religion has become? Assembly-line ontology.
Back in high school my art teacher used to tell us that the reason our cadmium red, ultramarine blue and cadmium yellow acrylic paints wouldn’t produce a decent violet or green was that they were not “spectrum” red, yellow and blue, which were impossible to produce with paints. I was also mystified at why red and blue-green seemed to vibrate more against one another than red and green.
Then in physics class I discovered the difference between additive and subtractive color mixing, and everything became clearer. I tried to explain it to my art teacher and she didn’t want to hear it.
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For anyone who sat in my room with 25 years ago while I twiddled dimmer switches on red, green and blacklight bulbs and raved inexplicably about cyan and magenta and the nonexistence of pure spectrum pigments — here’s an attempt at an explanation: This turned out to be the prototype for my typical of conflict: “You aren’t approaching this problem from the right angle.” They say: “No, we are. Our materials/facts/data/procedures are not pure enough, and if they were my formulas would miraculously work for a change.”
Arvo Part always sounds amazing in autumn.
Just because all the nonsense you’ve spouted has always turned out to make perfect sense in hindsight — it does not follow that the nonsense you are spouting now will eventually make sense.
Whenever I breach etiquette, and do what everyone knows better than to do, and in the course of normal conversation actually make reference to religion or religious symbols or concepts, I sometimes pay the steep price of being asked if I am religious, or, worse, if I’m Christian. I find I just can’t answer that question. Or at least I cannot answer that question as asked. My views on what religion is (and what religion is supposed to do) have moved so far from the common ground of believers and atheists that my “yes” cannot mean the “yes!” I mean, nor can my “no” mean anything that should earn me an ally or enemy.
This is why reading Bruno Latour’s Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech is a relief. At least I know I’m not alone in this difficulty. And maybe I’ve never been, but that’s part of the difficulty… Continue reading The torments of religious speech
One key purpose of qualitative research is to help us recover philosophical problems in what seem at first glance to be technical problems.
A painter had three colors of paint: black, white and what we would call “red”. Red was the only hue he knew about, so he he just called it “intensity”. He described the colors he mixed in terms of their relative lightness, darkness or intensity.
The painter worked in a studio and never left it. Everything in his studio was some shade or tint of red or gray. (Scholarly note: Some theorists have speculated that the reason all the objects in the artist’s studio were red and gray was that the artist himself had painted them all with the same paints he used for his paintings.)
The artist would compose these red, pink, black, gray, mauve and white objects into monochrome still-life scenes and paint them perfectly photo-realistically in red, pink, black, gray, mauve and white.
One day the painter’s assistant burst into the studio babbling excitedly about a new blue paint he’d seen at the market.
“Blue?” The painter asked him to describe where it fit in the range of colors. How light was “blue”? How dark was it? How intense was it?
The assistant tried to explain it. The painter could tell that what his assistant was describing was nothing more than plain-old intensity. And being a no-nonsense, plain-spoken man, he said so.
The assistant told him that wasn’t right. “Blue” really was different from normal “intensity”.
So the painter challenged him to show him what this so-called “blue” was. “It is easy to talk about theoretical new intensities,” he said, “but it is a whole other thing to actually mix a color. Produce this ‘blue’ for me.” The artist handed the him his black, white and red paints.
The assistant sat down at the easel and began painting the color blue. Or trying to. He mixed up a million permutations of red and black. Then black and white. Then red and white. Then he tried mixing the three pigments together in varying proportions, until he finally found the right combination to make blue.
Seeing blue with his own eyes for the very first time, the artist was amazed. He realized in hindsight how narrow his pink-and-gray studio-enclosed world had been. He spent a few days experimenting with his improvised and somewhat imperfect blue, and decided it was time to leave his studio, and venture out into the world to buy himself some real blue paint.
After this, the artist’s paintings acquired an entirely new depth of richness and expressiveness. His career entered a new stage, and it was only at this point that he became the legendary figure we remember today.
The end.
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The moral of this story: Anyone who wishes to introduce a completely new concept to another person must start where the other person is. We cannot ask anyone to come to us — not right away.
Instead we should explain the concept simply, using only familiar terms that the other person understands. And we should show the other person how this new idea will work within his existing way of doing things.
Once we’ve done that, the other person will understand us better and trust us more, and be far more willing to take the next step in exploring the matter to its depth.
This is how the world changes.
Good luck!
I am leaning toward calling my book The Ten Thousand Everythings.
I am going to return the term “chaos” to the fractal geometers, mythologists and the general public. Chaos is experienced disorder, with many possible metaphysical underpinnings.
My own underpinning for chaos, which is speculative and entirely unprovable, but nonetheless believable and useful, is what I’m calling Myriadex: the simultaneous presence of too many orders which must be filtered down to a manageable subset of systematic, harmonious or at least non-conflicting orders if we wish to experience them as order. Chaos in my view is not ten thousand things waiting to be ordered, it is ten-thousand everythings talking at once in innumerable languages about all things at once and creating intolerable cacophony. We just want reality to speak one truth at a time, so we can hear what the hell it is saying to us.
We tend to think most about what we think best, and this is why so many people love to think in terms of things that are easily quantified. The mind can wrap itself around such things pretty comfortably.
I think this is why when people think about economies, distribution is thought of in terms of material possessions. Material possessions is certainly important, but it is not the only thing at stake in an economy. Another important consideration of distribution that is rarely discussed is personal choice. Really, who would dispute the claim that power is one of the primary “goods” distributed by an economy?
If you look at things in terms of possessions, the problem of poverty appears relatively small. Most Americans are doing very well, even if some have much less than others.
But if you look at distribution in terms of personal choice — how much control people have over how they spend their time — this is where you see extreme imbalances. This is not a matter of quantities of leisure time. It has to do with meaning each person derives from activities, and the control a person has over the decision of which activities to perform. A person who spends 80 hours a week doing something he loves is far freer than a person who
This is the best reason why left-leaners should harp on economic equality: without it, freedom is a mere political theory, not a reality.
Philosophies, like everything, can be designed for usefulness, usability and desirability.
Propaganda is philosophy designed for popular adoption.
Brand is private-sector propaganda.
To disrespect the “mundane” obstacles that confront us in our attempts to meet our goals – to indignantly declare that some obstacles have no right to exist – to believe it is degrading to wrangle with them – such attitude are not only unhelpful practically for navigate these obstacles, they’re also unhelpful morally.
To believe one is too great to bother with lowly things is a sure route to manifest pettiness. (Perhaps the only surer route to pettiness is obedience to lowly things.)
Holding obstacles in high regard elevates us and assists our progress. We are not degraded by humble obstacles when they compel us to afford them the respect they deserve.
This is not a vision of humility. It is the opposite of that.
To wish away politics is to wish away others, and to wish away others is to wish away the world transcending one’s own horizon.
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A widespread cynical rejection of politics as essentially base and unworthy of respect is a symptom of collective solipsism.
In philosophy, finding a new frenemy is the best thing that can happen to you. As the significance and value of the ideas deepens and intensifies, so does the uncertainty of whether your own activation of these ideas will harmonize with the hopes of the author. This electric sense is what jolts me out of bed to read at ungodly hours of the morning.
Bruno Latour:
Only in politics are people willing to talk of “trials of strength.” Politicians are the scapegoats, the sacrificial lambs. We deride, despise, and hate them. We compete to denounce their venality and incompetence, their blinkered vision, their schemes and compromises, their failures, their pragmatism or lack of realism, their demagogy. Only in politics are trials of strength thought to define the shape of things. It is only politicians who are thought to be dishonest, who are held to grope in the dark. … It takes something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician.
Chantal Mouffe:
Introducing the category of the ‘adversary’ requires complexifying the notion of antagonism and distinguishing two different forms in which it can emerge, antagonism properly speaking and agonism. Antagonism is struggle between enemies, while agonism is struggle between adversaries. We can therefore reformulate our problem by saying that envisaged from the perspective of ‘agonistic pluralism’ the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism. This requires providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary. An important difference with the model of ‘deliberative democracy’ is that for ‘agonistic pluralism’, the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs.
One of the keys to the thesis of agonistic pluralism is that, far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence. Modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order. Breaking with the symbolic representation of society as an organic body — which was characteristic of the holist mode of social organization — a democratic society acknowledges the pluralism of values, the ‘disenchantment of the world’ diagnosed by Max Weber and the unavoidable conflicts that it entails.
I agree with those who affirm that a pluralist democracy demands a certain amount of consensus and that it requires allegiance to the values which constitute its ‘ethico-political principles’. But since those ethico-political principles can only exist through many different and conflicting interpretations, such a consensus is bound to be a ‘conflictual consensus’. This is indeed the privileged terrain of agonistic confrontation among adversaries. Ideally such a confrontation should be staged around the diverse conceptions of citizenship which correspond to the different interpretations of the ethica-political principles: liberal-conservative, social-democratic, neo-liberal, radical-democratic, and so on. Each of them proposes its own interpretation of the ‘common good’, and tries to implement a different form of hegemony. To foster allegiance to its institutions, a democratic system requires the availability of those contending forms of citizenship identification. They provide the terrain in which passions can be mobilized around democratic objectives and antagonism transformed into agonism.
A well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing there is the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other forms of collective identification, as is the case with identity politics. Too much emphasis on consensus and the refusal of confrontation lead to apathy and disaffection with political participation. Worse still, the result can be the crystallization of collective passions around issues which cannot be managed by the democratic process and an explosion of antagonisms that can tear up the very basis of civility.
It is for that reason that the ideal of a pluralist democracy cannot be to reach a rational consensus in the public sphere. Such a consensus cannot exist. We have to accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion. The ideas that power could be dissolved through a rational debate and that legitimacy could be based on pure rationality are illusions which can endanger democratic institutions.
The horizon is what makes philosophy such a perpetually humiliating discipline. Schopenhauer said it most succinctly: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Nietzsche also spoke of the horizon myriad times in myriad ways, but always with fathomless irony: “One day we reach our goal — and now we point with pride to the long journeys we took to reach it. In truth we did not notice we were traveling. But we got so far because at each point we believed we were at home.”
This passage from Mouffe’s Agonistics is a beautiful and useful thought-jewel:
…We argued that two key concepts – ‘antagonism’ and ‘hegemony’ – are necessary to grasp the nature of the political. Both pointed to the importance of acknowledging the dimension of radical negativity that manifests itself in the ever-present possibility of antagonism. This dimension, we proposed, impedes the full totalization of society and forecloses the possibility of a society beyond division and power. This, in turn, requires coming to terms with the lack of a final ground and the undecidability that pervades every order. In our vocabulary, this means recognizing the ‘hegemonic’ nature of every kind of social order and envisaging society as the product of a series of practices whose aim is to establish order in a context of contingency. We call ‘hegemonic practices’ the practices of articulation through which a given order is created and the meaning of social institutions is fixed. According to this approach, every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. Things could always be otherwise and every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. Any order is always the expression of a particular configuration of power relations. What is at a given moment accepted as the ‘natural’ order, jointly with the common sense that accompanies it, is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices. It is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity that is exterior to the practices that brought it into being. Every order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices that attempt to disarticulate it in an effort to install another form of hegemony.