From the Gay Science:

In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, also from the sickness of severe suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before. Oh how repulsive pleasure is now, that crude, musty, brown pleasure as it is understood by those who like pleasure, our “educated” people, our rich people, and our rulers! How maliciously we listen now to the big country-fair boom-boom with which the “educated” person and city dweller today permits art, books, and music to rape him and provide “spiritual pleasures” — with the aid of spirituous liquors! How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears, how strange to our taste the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses have become, which the educated mob loves, and all its aspirations after the elevated, inflated, and exaggerated! No, if we convalescents still need art, it is a different art–a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies! Above all: an art for artists, for artists only! We know better afterward what above all is needed for this: cheerfulness, any cheerfulness, my friends!–also as artists–: let me prove it. There are a few things we now know too well, we knowing ones: oh, how we now learn to forget well, and to be good at not knowing, as artists! And as for our future, one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who endanger temples by night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons. No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too profound … We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything. “Is it true that God is present everywhere?” a little girl asked her mother; “I think that’s indecent” — a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is–to speak Greek–Baubo?  … Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial–out of profundity! And is not this precisely what we are coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from up there–we who have looked down from there? Are we not, precisely in this respect–Greeks? Adorers of forms, of tones, of words? And therefore–artists?

We should not tell children: “You’re not the center of the universe.” This statement is not only cruel, it is manifestly false.

Instead, let’s say: “You are not the only center of the universe.

Continue reading Center of the universe →

The words “novelty” and “originality” are often used interchangeably. They are different, however.

Novelty means a newness, in an objective sense. An unprecedented concept has been conceived (or unprecedented artifact has been produced).

Originality means an “originator” has synthesized a concept (or produced an artifact) by his own effort, as opposed to having consciously learned it elsewhere. This does not mean the concept/artifact is unprecedented in the world, only that it is unprecedented in the experience of the conceiver. An original idea will appear as novel to the originator.

This is where the exaltation of originality is dangerous. A thinker, having unconsciously absorbed [extremely un-novel and un-original] cultural values will prefer to believe his ideas are novel and neglect the harder task of finding others who are thinking along the same lines. Such thinkers self-divide into semi-private languages and deny themselves all political force, which does not come from having truth on one’s side, but allies.

Contingent value is always rooted in instrinsic value. If contingent value closes in a self-referential circle, or if it terminates nowhere, the value is empty.

*

The chain of “in-order-to” must eventually terminate at a point where the answer to “why?” is unanswerable.

*

If you’re compelled to ask “why?” in order to determine the value of something, the value of what you are questioning is contingent.

But if you ask “why?” of something you already experience as valuable, whether on principle or by habit, that borders on blasphemy.

*

Sometimes we dig deeper for shallow reasons.

*

A typically deceptively simple maxim from Heraclitus: “Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find truth, for it is hard to discover and hard to attain.”

When reading philosophy, having your expectations fulfilled means philosophy failed to occur.

More Latour:

In religious talk, there is indeed a leap of faith, but this is not an acrobatic salto mortale in order to do even better than reference with more daring and risky means, it is a somersault yes, but one which aims at jumping, dancing toward the present and the close, to redirect attention away from indifference and habituation, to prepare oneself to be seized again by this presence that breaks the usual, habituated passage of time. As to [scientific] knowledge, it is not a direct grasp of the plain and the visible against all beliefs in authority, but an extraordinarily daring, complex, and intricate confidence in chains of nested transformations of documents that, through many different types of proofs, lead toward new types of visions that force us to break away from the intuitions and prejudices of common sense. Belief is simply immaterial for any religious speech-act; knowledge is not an accurate way to characterize scientific activity. We might move forward a bit, if we were calling “faith” the movement that brings us to the close and to the present, and retaining the word “belief” for this necessary mixture of confidence and diffidence with which we need to assess all the things we cannot see directly. Then the difference between science and religion would not be found in the different mental competencies brought to bear on two different realms — “belief” applied to vague spiritual matters, “knowledge” to directly observable things — but in the same broad set of competences applied to two chains of mediators going in two different directions. The first chain leads toward what is invisible because it is simply too far and too counterintuitive to be directly grasped — namely, science; the second chain, the religious one, also leads to the invisible but what it reaches is not invisible because it would be hidden, encrypted, and far, but simply because it is difficult to renew.

What I mean is that in the cases of both science and religion, freeze-framing, isolating a mediator out of its chains, out of its series, instantly forbids the meaning to be carried in truth. Truth is not to be found in correspondence — either between the word and the world in the case of science, or between the original and the copy in the case of religion — but in taking up again the task of continuing the flow, of elongating the cascade of mediations one step further. My argument is that, in our present economy of images, we might have made a slight misunderstanding of Moses’s Second Commandment and thus lacked respect for mediators. God did not ask us not to make images — what else do we have to produce objectivity, to generate piety? — but he told us not to freeze-frame, not to isolate an image out of the flows that only provide them with their real (their constantly re-realized, re-represented) meaning.

I have most probably failed in extending the flows, the cascade of mediators to you. If so, then I have lied, I have not been talking religiously; I have not been able to preach, but I have simply talked about religion, as if there was a domain of specific beliefs one could relate to by some sort of referential grasp. This then would have been a mistake just as great as that of the lover who, when asked “do you love me?” answered, “I have already told you so many years ago, why do you ask again?” Why? Because it is no use having told me so in the past, if you cannot tell me again, now, and make me alive to you again, close and present anew. Why would anyone claim to speak religion, if it is not in order to save me, to convert me, on the spot?

The real intellectual challenge is rarely comprehension of concepts, but accomplishing habitation and perpetual re-habitation of one’s best understandings — and this is accomplished through much more than beliefy faiths. It requires more than spirit. Ethics is about inhabiting and caring for an ethos, which is a collection of many kinds of being, spanning why, how, what — and most of all, who.

It’s always a little odd to have something you invented yourself or helped develop presented back to you as orthodoxy.

Beginners don’t have fluency in the “why” and “how” of methods. They harden the fluidity into hard, fast “what” concretions: action turns into steps; purposes turn into rules, communication turns into deliverables, inquiry turns into techniques, evaluation turns into comparison with standards.

*

To have fluency means to move through a kind of understanding as one’s element. Fluency is participation in a form of life. There is a sort of mastery in fluency, but it is largely tacit and practical, and it is far from reducible to objective mastery.

One can be fluent in a language and be entirely unable to articulate the grammatical rules they follow when speaking. And of course, someone can know the vocubulary and grammar of a language and speak it very badly.

One can know the steps of a dance by heart, but be unable to dance beautifully. (Maybe it would be more accurate to say the steps are known “by brain”.) And someone else can see a dance and do it without ever memorizing steps.

*

My daughters both started speaking and imitating my wife’s mannerisms at the same time. I know that at least some boys feel a need to master the words and syntax before imitating expression.

*

Exercising my trademark questionable judgment, and taken this line of thought to facebook. I tried to mitigate it a bit by applying it to punk:

Watching “Beautiful Losers” last night, it (re)occurred to me how different things are at inception than when they calcify into orthodoxy. There’s a formal continuity, of course, but at the total expense of spiritual continuity. In the mid- to late-70s (and in god-forsaken backwaters, all the way into the 80s) punk was salvation. Now it is a genre to mine for best-practices in “edgy”.

and this:

To an alienated, undignified little shit existing in a punkless world, the discovery of punk/postpunk meant the whole world, literally. It was not a genre: it was pure hope, permission to live. See “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones” to see what I’m talking about.

*

“Change of cast. — As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.”

I knew Latour was Christian.

From “Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame” (pdf):

Religion, at least in the tradition I am going to talk from, namely
the Christian one, is a way of preaching, of predicating, of
enunciating truth in a certain manner… It is literally, technically,
theologically, a form of news, of “good news,” what in Greek was
called evangelios, what has been translated into English as “gospel.”
Thus, I am not going to speak of religion in general, as if there
existed some universal domain, topic, or problem called “religion”
that could allow one to compare divinities, rituals, and beliefs from
Papua New Guinea to Mecca, from Easter Island to Vatican City. A
person of faith has only one religion, as a child has only one mother.
There is no point of view from which one could compare different
religions and still be talking in the religious fashion. As you see,
my purpose is not to talk about religion, but to talk to you
religiously, at least religiously enough so that we can begin to
analyze the conditions of felicity of such a speech act, by
demonstrating in vivo, tonight, in this room what sort of
truth-condition this speech-act requests. Since the topic of this
series implies “experience,” experience is what I want to generate.

…

What I am going to argue is that religion — again in the tradition
which is mine — does not speak of things, but from things, entities,
agencies, situations, substances, relations, experiences, whatever is
the word, which are highly sensitive to the ways in which they are
talked about. They are, so to speak, manners of speech — John would
say Word, Logos, or Verbum. Either they transport the spirit from
which they talk and they can be said to be truthful, faithful, proven,
experienced, self-verifiable, or they don’t reproduce, don’t perform,
don’t transport what they talk from, and immediately, without any
inertia, they begin to lie, to fall apart, to stop having any
reference, any ground. Either they elicit the spirit they utter and
they are true; or they don’t and they are worse than false, they are
simply irrelevant, parasitical.

What a nerd really wants is other nerds who wish to dive deep into his subject with him, for that fundamental human need to share with others what is important to us, and also as a means to deepen understanding through collaboration. Generally if he attempts to share his enthusiasm, though, he gets friendly spectators who observe the surface effects of his excitement over something unfathomable (that is, unfathomably complicated and tedious), and the typological fact that this is always going on with him. There’s good will in the form of friendly sentiment — lots of “good”, little “will”.

The hard part isn’t knowing deep or subtle truths for yourself — we all do that — but figuring out how to share them. And before you can do that, you have to experience why you’d even want to or need to share what’s difficult or impossible to say.

*

First, I discovered that parables can be interpreted from many different angles, some of which have meanings beyond what I’d been able to imagine. Then I started noticing the profundity of cliches and their compact elegance. And now I wonder if many banal and goofy everyday expression might not have more to them than I’d suspected.

*

An answer inhabits the space opened by a question.

*

If you have an answer, it is wise to allow people to feel the question before offering it, so it has somewhere to go in people’s minds.

*

An expansive mind knows how to ask many kinds of questions.

A mind feels hospitable when it can accommodate the questions you ask and the answers you offer.

This is the way to present something truly new. Latour, from Reassembling the Social:

In what follows I am not interested in refutation — proving that the other social theories are wrong — but in proposition. How far can one go by suspending the common sense hypothesis that the existence of a social realm offers a legitimate frame of reference for the social sciences? If physicists at the beginning of the previous century were able to do away with the common sense solution of an absolutely rigid and indefinitely plastic ether, can sociologists discover new traveling possibilities by abandoning the notion of a social substance as a ‘superfluous hypothesis’? This position is so marginal, its chance of success so slim, that I see no reason to be fair and thorough with the perfectly reasonable alternatives that could, at any point, smash it into pieces. So, I will be opinionated and often partial in order to demonstrate clearly the contrast between the two viewpoints. In exchange for this breach of fairness, I will try to be as coherent as possible in drawing the most extreme conclusions from the position I have chosen to experiment with. My test will be to see how many new questions can be brought to light by sticking firmly, even blindly, to all the obligations that this new departure point is forcing us to obey. The final test will be to check, at the end of this book, if the sociology of associations has been able to take up the relay of the sociology of the social by following different types of new and more active connections, and if it has been able to inherit all that was legitimate in the ambition of a science of the social. As usual, the result of whether this has been successful or not will be up to the reader.

The reason this jumped out for me is that it reminds me of my “policy” for responsible productive ideation:

First: inform your intuition. Second: leap forward recklessly. Third: test backwards scrupulously.

Latour, however, is using this same move, not for ideation, but for presenting an argument.

And really, if you are attempting to present a new vision, this is the only way to do it. Here is why: those who are committed to an old competing vision are able to scuttle the alternative way to see the problem, not by asserting conflicting arguments, but by simply asking old questions and requiring answers, which requires assumption of the old perspective. But what is at issue is precisely how the questions are asked. (This is a principle Gadamer called the hermeneutic priority of the question.)

Questioning in alien terms midway through a presentation constitutes an attack on an alien perspective, disguised as inquiry. And it is effective. If the presenter is stupid enough —  or powerless enough — to consent to interruption and to attempt to answer before the presentation is finished, he will find himself entirely unable to make his points to the satisfaction of the inquisitor. He has to go all the way to the end of his idea and make it understood.  If he stops short of the goal and turns around,  his truth will be paralyzed or lost in limbo.

Continue reading Presenting perspectives →

The things that really matter depend on concrete realities — without being reducible to concrete realities.

The thing that destroys what really matters is twofold: 1) reducing what really matters to concrete terms and 2) behaving as if what really matters can exist apart from concrete reality.

Jarrett’s formula: “First I listen. Then I ask good questions. Then I respond.”

Unconditional love means only that the door is always open. The lover might walk out through the door to the loved one, or the lover might welcome the loved one in: it is a matter of what love demands at that moment.

The same is true for forgiveness. Forgiveness is not always something that is extended to another, and maybe it never is.