Category Archives: Ideas

Empathy

Ideas

Empathy is abstract sympathy.

A merely sympathetic person is limited to what he has experienced himself. An empathetic person can discover  shared or analogous feelings across different experiences and relate himself to an other different from himself.

In Jungian terms, I think introverted feeling might be more sympathetic and extraverted feeling more empathetic.

Chains

Ideas, Pragmatism

“Dancing in chains. — With every Greek artist, poet and writer one has to ask: what is the new constraint he has imposed upon himself and through which he charms his contemporaries (so that he finds imitators)? For that which we call ‘invention’ (in metrics, for example) is always such a self-imposed fetter. ‘Dancing in chains’, making things difficult for oneself and then spreading over it the illusion of ease and facility — that is the artifice they want to demonstrate to us. Already in Homer we can perceive an abundance of inherited formulae and epic narrative rules within which he had to dance: and he himself created additional new conventions for those who came after him. This was the school in which the Greek poets were raised: firstly to allow a multiplicity of constraints to be imposed upon one; then to devise an additional new constraint, impose it upon oneself and conquer it with charm and grace: so that both the constraint and its conquest are noticed and admired.” – Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow

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Philosophy is essentially poetic thought dancing in the chains of successively constraining realities: scientific, psychological, sociological, political, economic, and so on.

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Most of us expect to build up to something compelling (usually some negatively conceived happiness — the absence of what we think is preventing happiness) through faithful observance of constraints. Or we think that if happiness hasn’t occurred, it’s because of some oversight. We start from the ground and aggregate upward. Standing at the top of the heap we think we’ll grab happiness out of the sky.

Philosophy starts from what is compelling and works downward, one reality at a time until it touches earth and closes the circuit.

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The chains of science, like all theoretical chains, are light and fine. They just draw limits around your movements.

The chains of practice, however, actually weigh your limbs down and threaten to immobilize you. Business, socializing, parenting, governing — pursuits traditionally avoided by philosophers — are not outside the domain of philosophy, they’re just such heavy fetters that few thinkers will wear them. It’s not that they are hard to think about. It is that they are hard to think within. They encumber the entirety of one’s being, thought and all.

Beyondness

Ideas

I saw this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

What is happening in this scene?

A typical modern “wise fool” of the religious right is made to feel her limits. She may be unable to comprehend the aesthetic truth which stands outside the horizons of her totalistic vision of life, but the certainty that there is something here to know and the certainty that she is missing it is a viscerally real experience.

This dreadful embarrassment might very well have been this woman’s first authentic experience of transcendent truth.

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It has become certain: something that concerns me is going on beyond my own sphere of intellectual mastery. How do I respond to this certainty? How do I relate myself to this beyondness, this Otherness? This is the root of one’s religious character. And everyone, without exception, has religious character.

Most forms of religiosity involve some kind of invalidation and reduction of beyondness. Invalidation: what exists beyond my mastery doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t exist in any way that concerns me, or its existence is a mistake, or it has no right to exist and ought to be annihilated. Reduction: what exists beyond my mastery is actually some by-product or derivation of things that are within my mastery. (The philosophies of Materialism and Metaphysical Idealism are two extreme, opposing forms of reductionism.)

Forms of religiosity based on invalidation and reduction reassure us: Whatever you need to know you already know. What you need to do is already clear.

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I think it might be time for a public debate on the difference between the foolishness of the wise and the wisdom of fools. What makes the “wise” foolish? Isn’t it feeling so wise that nobody can tell you anything you don’t already know?

We need to shed this prejudice that a low IQ protects a mind against the foolishness of the wise. Intellectual arrogance has a lot less to do with loving the extent of our intelligence than with reflexively hating what stands beyond the limits of our intelligence and inspires dread.

In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan speaks for all who close themselves to the dread of beyondness:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields

Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

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To the degree a man’s truth is closed and private, when he speaks his private truth he is crazy and when he lives his private truth he is evil.

To the degree that man figures out how to share that truth and to speak it with others becomes sane and good — to the others who share it, and to himself. But in the end, if he only considers himself and his community of fellow-believers he still has a private truth, and his insanity and evil are just multiplied, and his ability to recognize that fact is diminished.

It is tremendously difficult to be responsible for the sanity and good of your collective. The collective itself will hold your responsible for being responsible and not indulging its easy, insular agreement with itself that it is privileged in possessing truth and goodness.

Before 0 A.D., an individual had moral obligations only to his own tribe. Individuals were not permitted to be solipsistic and satanic (in Milton’s sense) — but nations were another story. The notion of loving one’s enemy was absurd.

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There is no way out of our current cultural impasse except to realize we all have important and disruptive lessons to learn from one another. We need the knowledge, but even more, we need the disruption.

Everyone has something to show us about life — even a filthy Samaritan, an arrogant Scribe, a noble Roman, a degraded prostitute, a corrupt official, a disgraced, discredited, godforsaken heretic.

An experiment: See if you can accept an insight from a fundamentalist or an atheist today.

Two brain chambers

Ideas

Nietzsche, from Human All Too Human:

“Future of science. — To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented. — If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?”

Skepticism

Ideas

To us, things are such that they suggest they are more than they are to us. This suggested “more” is the subject of metaphysics.

We cannot believe a chair is essentially the phenomena by which we know it, yet we know the chair by way of its phenomena.

We cannot take a memory as something in the present. It exists in a moment in the past.

And nobody loves a person as given by experience, we love the person beyond the experience.

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We are constantly thinking in metaphysical terms, but we cannot believe metaphysics can be this simple, so we invent ghosts.

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Much of skepticism is just the selective severing of phenomena from metaphysical being.

Training vs education

Ideas

A short tantrum inspired by Deb Owen’s blog article “are we waiting for an ‘education crisis’?”:

Training is a matter of preparing a student for specific kinds of situations by equipping them with necessary facts, theories and skills. Training is instrumental and it begins with a need, expressed as a role — a profession — and works backwards to the student.

Education works from the other direction. It begins with the particular student and that student’s virtues, and develops the student as an individual and citizen toward self-fulfillment through service to the community.

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The question of Why is not addressed in training. Training is focuses on What and How.

In education Why is foundational. Knowing how to ask Why — for oneself and with others — is the root from which What and How grow and give Why visible, concrete form. They substantiate and sustain it. But in education What and How are not permitted to crank away without the guidance of Why, as they are in training.

Education is both moral and practical. Training is only practical.

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Training and education are not exclusive categories. There is a degree of training in education and a degree of education in training, especially in a republic like ours. There’s not a bad or good. Neither can be dispensed with. The workforce undeniably needs efficient, effective workers who know how to perform specific kinds of useful tasks. However, it is just as true, but harder to see, that our culture also needs souls who have been cultivated to think beyond means, and to weigh and deliberate  and synthesize and communicate the relative value of various ends to various perspectives.

This is the kind of person who ought to be educators.

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My concern is that the education most of our educators have received is training in pedagogical technique and classroom management. Their entire outlook on education is limited to the domain of techne: skills and knowledge. The teacher has the skills and the knowledge to impart skills and knowledge, and to them, that is education. It is not enough for an educator to love teaching. An educator must also love education.

The sphere of subjectivity

Ideas

Nietzsche, again: “My eyes, however strong or weak they may be, can see only a certain distance, and it is within the space encompassed by this distance that I live and move, the line of this horizon constitutes my immediate fate, in great things and small, from which I cannot escape. Around every being there is described a similar concentric circle, which has a mid-point and is peculiar to him. Our ears enclose us within a comparable circle, and so does our sense of touch. Now, it is by these horizons, within which each of us encloses his senses as if behind prison walls, that we measure the world, we say that this is near and that far, this is big and that small, this is hard and that soft: this measuring we call sensation — and it is all of it an error!”

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People who think subjectivity is inside their heads and the objective world is that which encloses it have it all turned inside-out.

We just like to think of the world and ourselves objectively because objects — that which we grasp with the pudgy little fingers of our comprehension — are easier to think about. Much harder to think is truth which somehow includes, involves and exceeds us.

We reduce being to what is comprehensible and feel that we have mastered life.

To forget a dream

Ideas, Judaism

Two ways to forget a dream: 1) leave it alone and let it evaporate naturally; 2) misremember it with narrative coherence.

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Equally inhuman: total artificiality and pure naturalness.

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At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

– Bob Dylan

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snakeorders

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Dreams, children’s stories, Greek myths (pre-Bullfinch, pre-Hamilton, pre-Disney), raw observations of well-executed research — this is empirical truth. The minute understanding enters the picture — any concept, theory, narrative, even relevance or quantification — (any kind of coherence apart from the fact that these were all experienced by a single consciousness) — the empirical truth is diluted with interpretation.

Empirical purity is lost. Good riddance, too.

Understanding digests raw empirical fact and absorbs it into the body of meaning.

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You want pure empirical truth? Why? Search your biography for reasons. What for you makes the empirical chaos superior to that which hovers over that-which-is, which articulates distinctions and narrates a continuous story? Are you sure you are as empirical as you think?

Here’s my opinion: most of us reject grand narratives (or concepts), not because we are against narratives (or concepts) per se, but because the narrative (which is an expression of our conceptual system) in which we are enmeshed requires us to repel truths which feel suspiciously relevant and meaningful, and systematically excludes them from the general body of meaning, our culture. It is a principled self-denial, a postmodern geek’s asceticism.

Freedom from the dominant narrative and conceptual framework is the means to a better narrative and conceptual framework, one where we have a place. We need a place where we have the words we need say and hear, a place where we can do our work and where we can rest.

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Imprisonment, liberation, building, dwelling… then realizing our dwelling has degraded to imprisonment… that’s the cycle of culture.

We humans keep reinventing what a human is. We’re at least as cultural as we are biological. The line between the cultural and the biological is a fine one. The line is a narrated one.

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In addition to our physical “homeless problem” I believe we have a spiritual homeless problem. How many of us have found situations where we are permitted to do our own kind of service for others, and are valued for it?

Think about the people you love. How often  is there agreement between one’s own sense of value and the collective’s sense of one’s value? Isn’t it more common that the collective has no use for what one wants to give, or is even hostile to accepting it?

One is enslaved or marginalized.

Imagine a world where people actively value what you need to offer, what you feel born to offer.

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Has it ever occurred to you that culture changes because it produces new kinds of people, the people it needs next, and it is up to those new people to effect change, to make a place in the world for themselves?

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“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” *

* Note added Easter Sunday April 16, 2017 / Pesach VI, 20th of Nisan, 5777:

On “Son of Man”: A child of humanity never has a place to lay her head because she is born to make a new place for new heads to lie! Sacred galut. A child of humanity — a new humanity produced by humanity, by culture — by a particular culture, that essentially progressive and eternally productive Jewish culture — is born and reborn. Judaism produces yet one more new kind of Jew, one particularly beautiful link in a long chain of generating generations. How can anyone not want to become part of such a tradition — a project of  human self-reinvention?

 

Note to a professor

Ideas

An email I sent to a philosophy professor I know:

I’ve been thinking about your picture of Nietzsche as skeptic.

I suspect we disagree on some points, but I am not sure about that. I’d like to get some clarification and also to offer you another picture of Nietzschean skepticism to react to.

Obviously, Nietzsche did advocate a consoling, soothing form rigorous skepticism. I understand Nietzsche’s Epicurus as his exemplar of this kind of skepticism: “Epicurus, the soul-soother of later antiquity, had that wonderful insight, which is still today so rarely to be discovered, that to quieten the heart it is absolutely not necessary to have solved the ultimate and outermost theoretical questions. …he who wishes to offer consolation — to the unfortunate, ill-doers, hypochondriacs, the dying — should call to mind the two pacifying formulae of Epicurus, which are capable of being applied to very many questions. Reduced to their simplest form they would perhaps become: firstly, if that is how things are they do not concern us; secondly, things may be thus but they may also be otherwise.” (The Wanderer and His Shadow 7).

I find no evidence that Nietzsche disapproved of this kind of skepticism, and in fact, I believe he saw it as the most honorable alternative to Romanticism, which of course he detested and never tired of attacking in all its myriad forms. I think Epicurus may be the only person besides Goethe that Nietzsche never attacked.

From what I remember of our chats from several years ago, my guess is that we agree this far. The rest I am much less sure about.

Notice in the passage above (WS 7) how conditional his advocacy was. It is presented as a philosophy for “the unfortunate, ill-doers, hypochondriacs, the dying ” — again, for precisely the people vulnerable to Romanticism. There is reason to believe that Epicurean skepticism is only a means to a less gentle, more aggressive “Fredrickian” form of skepticism. Nietzsche describes Fredrickian skepticism in Beyond Good and Evil 209:

“Men were lacking; and [Fredrick’s father] suspected, with the bitterest vexation, that his own son was not enough of a man. In that he was deceived: but who would not have been deceived in his place? He saw his son lapse into the atheism, the esprit, the pleasure-seeking frivolity of ingenious Frenchmen — he saw in the background the great blood-sucker, the spider skepticism, he suspected the incurable wretchedness of a heart which is no longer hard enough for evil or for good, of a broken will which no longer commands, can no longer command. But in the meantime there grew up in his son that more dangerous and harder new species of skepticism — who knows to what extent favored by precisely the father’s hatred and the icy melancholy of a will sent into solitude? — the skepticism of audacious manliness, which is related most closely to genius for war and conquest and which first entered Germany in the person of the great Frederick.

“This skepticism despises and yet grasps to itself; it undermines and takes into possession; it does not believe but retains itself; it gives perilous liberty to the spirit but it keeps firm hold on the heart; it is the German form of skepticism which, as a continuation of Frederickianism intensified into the most spiritual domain, for a long time brought Europe under the dominion of the German spirit and its critical and historical mistrust.”

This recalls the Dionysian/Romantic distinction Nietzsche described most explicitly in Gay Science 370: “Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fulness of life — they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight — and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and who seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anesthesia, and madness. All romanticism in art and insight corresponds to the dual needs of the latter type…” From there he goes on to discuss two forms of pessimism.

So the Dionysian/Romantic distinction can be applied to skepticism, with skepticism regarded as a variety of pessimism toward knowledge. The soothing effect of skepticism is the “peace as a means to new wars”, mentioned in Thus Spoke Zarathustra — a peace Nietzsche preferred to be as brief as possible.

There is a fair amount of support for this view of the two skepticisms and their sequence and relative value:

“Redeemed from scepticism. — A: Others emerge out of a general moral scepticism ill-humoured and feeble, gnawed-at and worm-eaten, indeed half-consumed — but I do so braver and healthier than ever, again in possession of my instincts. Where a sharp wind blows, the sea rises high and there is no little danger to be faced, that is where I feel best. I have not become a worm, even though I have often had to work and tunnel like a worm. — B: You have just ceased to be a sceptic! For you deny! — A: And in doing so I have again learned to affirm.” (Daybreak 477)

“One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics. Zarathustra is a skeptic. Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons. Such men do not look far enough, they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself — behind oneself … ” (Antichrist 54)

Based on these and other passages I can supply if you want to see them, I think that Nietzsche understood Epicurean skepticism to be the foundation for a Frederickian skepticism, neither of which are to be considered the purpose of his philosophy, but only a means to something higher.

So I’m not claiming that Nietzsche was against rigorous, soothing forms of skepticism. I am claiming that he did not view it as any more than a temporary means to something higher. My position is that Nietzsche considered both forms of skepticism to be stages in a process of gradual liberation from positive metaphysics, all for the sake of a post-theological melioristic form of morality. This latter point is a much more complicated conversation. For now I’d like to see how far you agree with me on the Epicurean vs Fredrickian skepticism question.

Ibis

Ideas

ibis

I had to draw myself an ibis.

I like the fact that it looks like a hybrid of snake (the most down-to-earth animal) and bird (the sky-highest animal).

I also admire how it can sit on the surface of the water and stab fish who swim near the surface with its quill-sharp beak.

The ibis is a million times cooler than a liger.

Chord: Nietzsche’s practical metaphysics

Chord, Ideas, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Pragmatism

The circle must be closed. — He who has followed a philosophy or a species of thought to the end of its course and then around the end will grasp from his inner experience why the masters and teachers who came afterwards turned away from it, often with an expression of deprecation. For, though the circle has to be circumscribed, the individual, even the greatest, sits firmly on his point of the periphery with an inexorable expression of obstinacy, as though the circle ought never to be closed.

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Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned!

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A few rungs down. — One level of education, itself a very high one, has been reached when man gets beyond superstitious and religious concepts and fears and, for example, no longer believes in the heavenly angels or original sin, and has stopped talking about the soul’s salvation. Once he is at this level of liberation, he must still make a last intense effort to overcome metaphysics. Then, however, a retrograde movement is necessary: he must understand both the historical and the psychological justification in metaphysical ideas. He must recognize how mankind’s greatest advancement came from them and how, if one did not take this retrograde step, one would rob himself of mankind’s finest accomplishments to date.

With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I now see a number of people who have arrived at the negative goal (that all positive metaphysics is an error), but only a few who climb back down a few rungs. For one should look out over the last rung of the ladder, but not want to stand on it. Those who are most enlightened can go only as far as to free themselves of metaphysics and look back on it with superiority, while here, as in the hippodrome, it is necessary to take a turn at the end of the track.

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One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics… Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons. Such men do not look far enough, they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself — behind oneself … A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength … Great passion, the ground and the power of his existence, even more enlightened, even more despotic than he is himself, employs his whole intellect; it makes him unhesitating; it gives him courage even for unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him convictions. Conviction as a means: many things are attained only by means of a conviction. Great passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not succumb to them — it knows itself sovereign…