Category Archives: Ethics

Thoughts on double meanings

Ethics, Etymology, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

I’m thinking out loud here, so please forgive the tedium and unclarity. I’m also traveling, and that always messes me up pretty seriously. Just to get these thoughts out, I’m saying what comes to mind and not worrying excessively over how much sense I’m making much less how persuasive I’m being. So there’s even less reason to read this post than there usually is, so I encourage my nonexistent readership to ignore this post with redoubled nonawareness of its existence.

I just finished Ricoeur’s essay “The Problem of Double Meaning” from Conflict of Interpretations and this is my attempt to digest the material. Here is (in slightly streamlined form) the conclusion of the essay:

It seems to me that the conquest of this deliberately and radically analytic level allows us to better understand the relations between the three strategic levels which we have successively occupied. We worked first as exegetes with vast units of discourse, with texts, then as lexical semanticians with the meaning of words, i.e., with names, and then as structural semanticians with semic constellations. Our change of level has not been in vain; it marks an increase in rigor and, if I may say so, in scientific method. … It would be false to say that we have eliminated symbolism; rather, it has ceased to be an enigma, a fascinating and possibly mystifying reality, to the extent that it invites a twofold explanation. It is first of all situated in relation to multiple meaning, which is a question of lexemes and thus of language. In this respect, symbolism in itself possesses nothing remarkable; all words used in ordinary language have more than one meaning. … Thus the illusion that the symbol must be an enigma at the level of words vanishes; instead, the possibility of symbolism is rooted in a function common to all words, in a universal function of language, namely, the ability of lexemes to develop contextual variations. But symbolism is related to discourse in another way as well: it is in discourse and nowhere else that equivocalness exists. Discourse thus constitutes a particular meaning effect: planned ambiguity is the work of certain contexts and, we can now say, of texts, which construct a certain isotopy in order to suggest another isotopy. The transfer of meaning, the metaphor (in the etymological sense of the word), appears again, but this time as a change of isotopy, as the play of multiple, concurrent, superimposed isotopies. [See comment 1 below] The notion of isotopy has thus allowed us to assign the place of metaphor in language with greater precision than (lid the notion of the axis of substitutions…

But then, I ask you, does the philosopher not find his stake in the question at the end of this journey? Can he not legitimately ask why in certain cases discourse cultivates ambiguity? The philosopher’s question can be made more precise: ambiguity, to do what? Or rather, to say what? [See comment 2 below] We are brought back to the essential point here: the closed state of the linguistic universe. To the extent that we delved into the density of language, moved away from its level of manifestation, and progressed toward sublexical units of meaning — to this very extent we realized the closed state of language. [See comment 3 below] The units of meaning elicited by structural analysis signify nothing; they are only combinatory possibilities. They say nothing; they conjoin and disjoin.

There are, then, two ways of accounting for symbolism: by means of what constitutes it and by means of what it attempts to say. What constitutes it demands a structural analysis, and this structural analysis dissipates the “marvel” of symbolism. That is its function and, I would venture to say, its mission; symbolism works with the resources of all language, which in themselves have no mystery.

As for what symbolism attempts to say, this cannot be taught by a structural linguistics; in the coming and going between analysis and synthesis, the going is not the same as the coming. On the return path a problematic emerges which analysis has progressively eliminated. Ruyer has termed it “expressivity,” not in the sense of expressing emotion, that is, in the sense in which the speaker expresses himself, but in the sense in which language expresses something, says something. The emergence of expressivity is conveyed by the heterogeneity between the level of discourse, or level of manifestation, and the level of language, or level of immanence, which alone is accessible to analysis. Lexemes do not exist only for the analysis of semic constellations but also for the synthesis of units of meaning which are understood immediately. [See comment 4 below]

It is perhaps the emergence of expressivity which constitutes the marvel of language. Greimas puts it very well: “There is perhaps a mystery of language, and this is a question for philosophy; there is no mystery in language.” [See comment 5 below.] I think we too can say that there is no mystery in language; the most poetic, the most “sacred,” symbolism works with the same semic variables as the most banal word in the dictionary. But there is a mystery of language, namely, that language speaks, says something, says something about being. If there is an enigma of symbolism, it resides wholly on the level of manifestation, where the equivocalness of being is spoken in the equivocalness of discourse.

Is not philosophy’s task then to ceaselessly reopen, toward the being which is expressed, this discourse which linguistics, due to its method, never ceases to confine within the closed universe of signs and within the purely internal play of their mutual relations?

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COMMENTS:

  1. This accounts for why many Nietzsche scholars miss Nietzsche’s most interesting philosophizing. They discover a single isotopy, which works at the sea-level level of explicit assertions, and they fail to notice the layers of isotopy beneath the argumentation, despite numerous explicit assertions that these levels do exist and ought to be sought.
  2. This is a fascinating question, and it connects directly with why I began to study hermeneutics. I didn’t know how to think about the kind of truth experienced through understanding of symbols.

    The understanding of symbolic works depends entirely on a reader’s ability to recognize in a symbolic form an analogous form which is indicated obliquely. The reasons for oblique indication are numerous, but the most compelling reason is sheer impossibility of direct expression, which means they refer to what we call radically subjective experience. The subjective experiences I’ve encountered are sometimes unprecedented emotional states, a sense of concealed possibility, novel intellectual “moves” (dance imagery is frequently used), and metaphysical noumena of various kinds (which I am reducing to “experiences of”, or what a friend of mine calls “exophany”, but in the spirit of phenomenological method, which means to defy reductionism: I find disbelief and comprehension of metaphysical reality equally impossible.).

    The effectiveness of radically subjective symbols presupposes the existence of subjective experiences the symbols indicate. A peculiarity of many of these experiences is their utter ephemerality. It appears they are remembered very differently from objective facts, over which we have a higher degree of command, and therefore can prefer to such a degree that we wish to deny the existence of anything but objectivity. A fact or image can be summoned from memory at will like a servant who is normally obedient. But a mood or insight or spirit has a mind of its own, and must be recalled in an almost petitionary attitude: we recollect images and facts and try to create conditions upon which the experience can (to use Octavo Paz’s word) condense, almost as if they are offerings or a home made hospitable for a guest. I think this is actually the importance of prayer. We recall a forgotten spirit, in the hope we will be inhabited once again, and that once present, we will not be abandoned.

    Other double meanings (which I prefer not to call symbols) indicate things that could be very easily expressed in objective language, but which are socially prohibited. The reason “that’s what she said” works so well is because of the legacy of sexual taboo, where all the objects and activities associated with sex were veiled in innuendo. Puns are similar; it is the exercise of the facilities involved in symbolization, but connecting banalities. This is the core problem of very clever people: their activities fail to deliver insights, and are performed only to demonstrate skill.

  3. More and more, this is the difference I see between science and philosophy. Science works within a fixed horizon, analyzing and synthesizing within a framework that is presupposed and not treated as problematic, because it is simply taken as reality itself. This does not only apply to scientific paradigms, but to the metaphysic of science itself which appears in most cases to be entirely innocent. Philosophy, however, concerns itself with the horizons, and attempts to transcend their limits, a process which takes place within the very limits to be transcended.

    It is also ethically significant that philosophy attempts to move outside the closed circle of language. More and more, my own conception of evil is bound up with the refusal to acknowledge being beyond one’s own conceptions of reality. One limits reality to that which one is capable of intellectually mastering, which is objective knowledge as framed by one’s own subjective perspective and which excludes the possibility of subjectivities, particularly super-individual forms of subjectivity that threaten to expose individual intellect as an organ of greater scales of intellect, which include at minimum family, culture and language. Evil is rooted in the attempt to make the mind a place of its own, far from that which challenges its absolute sovereignty over its private universe.

  4. This reminds me a lot of a diagram I used to draw to show the relationship between synthesis and concept. Synthesis means “put together”, and I classify systematization of wholes constituted of atomic elements as a type of synthesis. However, the synthesis reflects another order of reality which is concept, which means “take together”. I think this corresponds to a mememe — an indivisible unit of meaning which is spontaneously grasped as a whole, or gestalt (or to say it in nerd, the whole is “grokked”). It might make sense to see the activity of trying to understand as systematizing and resystematizing parts until they are arranged into a form that is recognized by the intuition as a concept, at which point the understanding occurs. I may need to return to this thought, because it really is relevant to design.
  5. I suspect the desire to locate mystery in the words themselves rather than in what the words indicate is one more manifestation of preference for objectivity. The words are fetishized as the locus of the mystery, which is a form of idolatry. Idol, after all is derived from the Greek word eidos ‘form, shape.’ The formula: the ground of reality of which we are made entirely, in which we always participate, but which surpasses us and moves us is impossible to think about in objective terms, and for this reason we reduce it to objective terms. To put it in the language of Martin Buber, the ground of reality is related to in terms of I-Thou, but we reduce it to terms of I-It. And other people, with whom we exist in relationship, as part of the ground — we prefer to relate to them also in terms of I-It — for exactly the same reason. We want to elevate ourselves above participatory relationship which involves and changes us, and instead to look at others across an insulating distance that promises to preserve us inert.

Seven capacities

Ethics, Ideas, Synesis, Systems thinking

The capacity to describe a situation in all its factual, practical and meaningful dimensions, doing justice to the full experience of the situation is one thing.

The capacity to explain the situation by modeling it as a dynamic with particular causes and effects, inputs and outputs is a second thing.

The capacity to assert an ethic, an meaningful (or emotional) stance toward the situation, which permits evaluation of the situation and its constituent elements, and which orients oneself to the situation is a third thing.

The capacity to envisage an ethic that is not merely a response to a situation, but an independent ideal capable of serving as a positive goal for overcoming an undesirable situation is a fourth thing.

The capacity to discern an ethical vision from an idealized, emotionally-satisfying situational image is a fifth thing.

The capacity to apply an ethical ideal in concrete situations in a way that can, in concrete reality, actually change the facts, dynamics and meanings of the situation from an undesired state to a desired one is a sixth thing.

Finally, the capacity to keep the faith — to cultivate and adhere to a positive ethic — while navigating undesirable situations which compel negative ethical responses which conflict with and threaten to distort or obscure one’s positive ideal is a seventh thing.

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Unfortunately, people do not distinguish these abilities, and the consequences are often disastrous.

Exercise of the first capacity, the ability to empathize, makes people feel understood, and gives them a sense of solidarity with those who share their experience. Exercise of the second capacity, the ability to produce an explanation, makes people feel clear. Exercise of the third capacity, the ability to give someone a feeling of moral orientation toward a problem, makes people feel resolve.

By this point, people stop paying attention to consequences, and begin to simply act for the pleasure of acting with a feeling of solidarity, clarity, and resolve they lacked before. And the action produces all the ideals and images — and eventually, fabricated facts and derivative explanations — to justify, perpetuate and intensify its action.

Every ideology proceeds along this path, winning generic credibility, lower capacities one to create an impression of higher capacities. It all works because all who believe, are invested with the qualities they believe in, and in the belief that these capacities are not only sufficient, but comprehensive.

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This line of thought is similar to the one behind my criticism of the Peter Principle.

To put it simply: We tend to flatten qualitative difference into quantitative degree.

This tendency reduces greatness into double-plus goodness, genius into double-plus smartness, leadership into double-plus administrative competence, etc.

Real difference means we actually need each other’s strengths in order to develop our own and to apply them to greatest effect.

Parental authority

Ethics

Parental authority stands on two conditions: 1) the parent’s actual possession of superior knowledge of the child’s needs, and 2) the parent’s intention to apply that knowledge to benefit the child.

Parents sometimes use coercion outside of parental authority, often for the sake of the smooth operation of the household. This in itself is not illegitimate. The problems start when coercion is confused with authority. The primary perpetrators of this are those who actually do not know the difference, and therefore lack authority.

Conserving, simplifying, forgetting

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Pragmatism

When a person calls himself a “conservative” what precisely is it that is conserved? Is it ideas? Do conservatives wish to keep valued ideas intact and pure?

Or is it a wish to conserve our limited store of moral energy? Despite what we would like to believe, we cannot just will this energy into existence, because will itself is constituted of this energy.

And even if energy were unlimited, time is indisputably limited. If we so expend most of our energy and time sifting through a near-infinite number of details, then wrestling to organize the mess into something clear and cohesive, wouldn’t the result of this effort be so complicated and unwieldy that our efforts would be hopelessly encumbered (not to mention pleasureless)?

It seems our choice is somewhere on a continuum ranging between “analysis paralysis” in the face of innumerable disorganized facts on one hand an or decisive, energetic action based on simplification verging on willful ignorance on the other. To put it in Yeats’ words, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.” I think this tendency grows more and more exaggerated as the old fundamental thought-structures of a culture begin to give out under the pressures of new social conditions, and new underdeveloped and over complicated ones vie (lamely) to replace them.

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Does change resulting from consideration of new and multiple perspectives necessarily mean appending and complicating our idea-world, and making it increasingly unlivable? Probably at first. But thinking deeply can also have a simplifying effect. But this simplification itself takes time and energy, and modes of thinking many people find even more uncomfortable than dealing with baroquely-rehacked, elaborately epicycled and recycled concepts.

Perhaps it is not over-simplification that makes ideologies so damaging to the world — since, after all, all thinking and all abstraction involves selective forgetting and remembering (what we call discerning relevance and discovering generalities) — but rather that the simplifications take into account only what one group or another considers relevant.

Shibbolethargy

Ethics, Politics

Shibbolethargy: A form of intellectual laziness which uses the tools of thought (ideas, concepts, arguments and symbols) to create an appearance of rigorous thought, when in fact the true aim is to signal one’s membership in some particular tribe (and consequently unconditional opposition to other tribes).

At the root of shibbolethargy is the desire to evaluate ideas and actions ad hominem rather than on their own merits, while appearing to rely on principle and reason.

The attitude a shibbolethargic critic strikes is this: when confronted by an uncomfortable, semi-/un-comprehended idea, the most efficient means to evaluate it is to trace it back to the root, to see from what ground the idea has grown (rather than take the opposite course — which requires more trust, time and work — to judge the tree by its fruits). The root of the idea is the believer. If the believer is found to be a victim/perpetrator of some pernicious, delusional ideology, then by extension the idea is contaminated, and all efforts to understand the idea will at best be unfruitful and at worst can result in ideological contamination.

In the end, while many words may be used, many elaborate arguments, memorized and recited, many stories told both anecdotal and historical, no thought has been done and no new understanding has been found. The old understanding is defended and preserved, not so much through understanding and responding to other ideas, but rather through proving (solely to the satisfaction of the defender) that understanding and responding to other ideas is unnecessary — and probably dangerous to boot. In other words, that one is unwilling to see why he ought to think something he has not already thought.

Having a place

Ethics, Judaism

Reading Gilbert Ryle’s explanation of the expression “in my head”, I reflexively asked a Nietzschean question: Why would we be satisfied with understanding thoughts to be located in our heads, as if they occupied a space? Certainly, a thought process could lead us to that idea, and (collective) intellectual habit could preserve it, but could there be something satisfying or comforting about the idea that has made us more hospitable toward it? I recalled a passage from Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition:

The profound connection between private and public, manifest on its most elementary level in the question of private property, is likely to be misunderstood today because of the modern equation of property and wealth on one side and propertylessness and poverty on the other. This misunderstanding is all the more annoying as both, property as well as wealth, are historically of greater relevance to the public realm than any other private matter or concern and have played, at least formally, more or less the same role as the chief condition for admission to the public realm and full-fledged citizenship. It is therefore easy to forget that wealth and property, far from being the same, are of an entirely different nature. The present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole, clearly shows how little these two things are connected.

Prior to the modern age, which began with the expropriation of the poor and then proceeded to emancipate the new propertyless classes, all civilizations have rested upon the sacredness of private property. Wealth, on the contrary, whether privately owned or publicly distributed, had never been sacred before. Originally, property meant no more or less than to have one’s location in a particular part of the world and therefore to belong to the body politic, that is, to be the head of one of the families which together constituted the public realm. This piece of privately owned world was so completely identical with the family who owned it that he expulsion of a citizen could mean not merely the confiscation of his estate but the actual destruction of the building itself. The wealth of a foreigner or a slave was under no circumstances a substitute for this property, and poverty did not deprive the head of a family of this location in the world and the citizenship resulting from it. In early times, if he happened to lose his location, he almost automatically lost his citizenship and the protection of the law as well. The sacredness of this privacy was like the sacredness of the hidden, namely, of birth and death, the beginning and end of the mortals who, like all living creatures, grow out of and return to the darkness of an underworld. The nonprivative trait of the household realm originally lay in its being the realm of birth and death which must be hidden from the public realm because it harbors the things hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge. It is hidden because man does not know where he comes from when he is born and where he goes when he dies.

Not the interior of this realm, which remains hidden and of no public significance, but its exterior appearance is important for the city as well, and it appears in the realm of the city through the boundaries between one household and the other. The law originally was identified with this boundary line, which in ancient times was still actually a space, a kind of no man’s land between the private and the public, sheltering and protecting both realms while, at the same time, separating them from each other. The law of the polls, to be sure, transcended this ancient understanding from which, however, it retained its original spatial significance. The law of the city-state was neither the content of political action (the idea that political activity is primarily legislating, though Roman in origin, is essentially modern and found its greatest expression in Kant’s political philosophy) nor was it a catalogue of prohibitions, resting, as all modern laws still do, upon the Thou Shalt Nots of the Decalogue. It was quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town, but not a city, a political community. This wall-like law was sacred, but only the inclosure was political. Without it a public realm could no more exist than a piece of property without a fence to hedge it in; the one harbored and inclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family.

It is therefore not really accurate to say that private property, prior to the modern age, was thought to be a self-evident condition for admission to the public realm; it is much more than that. Privacy was like the other, the dark and hidden side of the public realm, and while to be political meant to attain the highest possibility of human existence, to have no private place of one’s own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human.

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We will have a place of our own, one way or another. If we cannot have it in physical space, we will create that place socially. And failing that, we will establish it in our own mind and live inside our own private place.

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Giving a person a place in your own life is an act of humanity.

Finished The Human Condition

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I finished Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition this morning.

A passage from the last chapter was especially significant, because it hit several of my own core themes from the last several years (which were, in fact, indirectly implanted by Arendt herself, via Richard J. Bernstein):

  • That humanity is most fully actualized when automatic behavior is transcended in the conscious decision to think, deliberate with others, and  act intentionally.
  • Seeing human life from an exterior position rather than an interior point has ethical consequences.
  • That behaviorism wishes to understand humanity as that which is observed from outside (empirically observed, like science observes its objects), but that only human beings restricting themselves biological-social automatism can be understood in this manner. Fully actualized human behavior requires speech, and it has the power to change the worldview of the “observer”, so that theoretical frameworks and research methods are in question, and the observer is deprived his uninvolved, neutral, outsider perspective.
  • That science is significant as a cultural phenomenon, an extremely effective method of coming to agreements, but that these agreements are not the only kind of agreements possible between human beings, nor are they the highest. (However, they are the easiest agreements to reach, and in a world starving for agreement and its attendant stability, this value can eclipse all others combined. And in fact it has, even in spheres of human activity that call for higher forms of agreement, namely in education, in government and in business. Business defines its goals strictly in terms of quantitative profits largely because this is the easiest standard to set and the hardest to argue against. It makes people feel all hard-nosed and tough to assert it against their inclinations, but in fact this is a cheap and easy move, and it is not a heroic sacrifice, but a cowardly self-betrayal.)
  • That much of commercial life is dominated by behaviorist psychology, and the scientific mode of agreement, both of which eliminate the “revelatory character of action” (which, in Arendt’s definition, includes speech). (“Revelatory character” is antithetical to predictability. Whether predictability is a defense against revelation, or suppression of revelation is a means to predictability, the need to predict and the desire to not be surprised are two of the most powerful, unquestioned and universal corporate values. (This twofold force is singlehandedly responsible for that repellent quality we call “corporateness” (and constitutes the single most obstinate impediment to innovation, which is simultaneously celebrated in word and undermined in action in most groups.)))

Here’s the passage:

Continue reading Finished The Human Condition →

Embracing blame

Ethics

An active, blameworthy life is worth more than a life dominated by the avoidance of blame.

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Anaximander’s Maxim:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

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Arendt, from The Human Condition:

… Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relation- ships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.

In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.

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Humanity is a choice. Dignity acknowledges this choice; respect actualizes it.

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To be human is to resist automatism. Automatism comes from two sides, 1) the artificial (the demands of life in society) and 2) from the natural (the impulses of our own animal nature). Humanity lives between.

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was both artificial and natural. The social context was artificial, but it all played out naturally.

Infinity

Ethics

The infinite is not definable, for the very reason that once something is defined it has been bestowed edges and separated out from infinity.

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One way to indicate infinity is to create a set that includes every possible discrete — defined — entity. This indication, however, misleads, because it falsely implies that zero precedes infinity and that infinity is somehow built upon it. But zero implies the absence of something. A something must be defined in order to exist as something other than a stretch of infinity — and in order for there to be a quantity of something, that something must understood as an instance of a category of which there can be instances. Only after Zero is a third-order entity derived from abstractions and subdivisions of infinity, not a metaphysical starting-point.

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To relate to that which is finite as if it is infinite, or to relate to that which is infinite as if it is finite may very well be the root of evil. Two points to consider: 1) The human mind can only possess and master that which is finite. 2) Every human being contains something of one’s own, possessed by no other human being, and therefore, in respect to another, contains a speck of infinity.

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Other human beings are unacceptable to us to the degree they are alien to us. The infinite contains everything that is us and everything that is alien and it holds them together in an inescapable but deniable unity.

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Levinas: “The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum — the adequate idea.”

Constitution of “who”

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Politics, Pragmatism, Synesis

Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: “In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.”

William James translated this maxim into American, asking of propositions: “What’s the ‘cash value’ of this belief?”

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If the pragmatic maxim is applicable to human beings, the meaning of “who” is determined by all the practical consequences a person can have. Not all people have related to other people in all possible ways, so “who” has a profoundly different meaning, depending on who says the word.

For me, the decisive question is this: How many ways has one been taught?

To be informed of a fact us one kind of learning.

To be trained in a skill is another kind of learning.

But to experience a change in your worldview under the influence of another mind — to experience a deep transfiguration of reality itself — is a kind of learning which invests the word “who” with meaning, mystery and infinite potential.

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A face is a gate.

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It might be productive to re-ask these questions from a pragmatic angle:

  • What kind of being is specifically human being?
  • What is the basis of ethics? What is ‘ought’?
  • How ought a person relate to other people?
  • How ought a person being relate to things in the world, and how should it differ from relationships with people?
  • How ought a human being relate to realities which stand beyond the limits of his understanding?

Proud not to be right

Ethics, Pragmatism

It is easy to see how we are right. It is much more challenging — morally and intellectually — to see how we are not right, or less right than we wish to be.

To see ourselves as right, all we have to do is point our eyes at things, take them in passively in our usual way, and see what we always see.

To see where we are not fully right (or where others who disagree with us are right), we have to attempt to see in new, less familiar ways. To be sure, it requires a certain degree of ingenuity and inventiveness to discover new possibilities of understanding. And of course, it requires humility — preferring being right to merely feeling right. But most of all it requires courage. One must endure temporary but intensely uncomfortable strangeness, resist the constant urge to turn back and retreat to the familiar, and persevere until understanding has been reached. Only through this kind of struggle can a person make considered comparisons based on real insight that addresses an audience wider than those who already see as we see and ditto our opinions.

But it is worth it. The reward is growth and humanity.

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People who already know everything are unable to learn. To them, that of which they ignorant is nonexistent. Why would we learn about things that are nonexistent and unreal?

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Few of us believe we know every fact in the world. We can sense the gaps in our knowledge, and are open to filling those gaps with new information, if that information is understood to be relevant.

The same is true for skills. Most of us can see where are practical lives can be improved by learning new skills. We are open to learning new methods or techniques for solving problems we face, if these methods are understood to be important to our success.

What is much rarer is seeing the need for improving one’s own worldview. The reason? Because one’s worldview determines what is perceived as relevant and important. From the perspective of an isolated individual (whether of an individual or a like-minded collective), one’s worldview is the world itself. It requires belief in intelligence beyond one’s own sphere of intelligibility to see any reason to even consider worldview.

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Most people equate education with the acquiring of facts and skills. Through this process we prepare students for the realities of life. The need for this is well-established, and what else is there to learn?

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If you think about the worst problems facing humankind, what is their nature? Are they a matter of lacking facts? Or lacking people with the technical skills to resolve them? Or are they the result of people who have no idea how to come to a mutual understanding?

To be seen and not heard

Ethics, Etymology, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Politics, Synesis

“You are to be seen and not heard.” This means: you are to be an object, not a subject.

Whatever needs knowing about an object can be known through observation. An object belongs to a world, but a world does not belong to it.

A subject, however, while belonging to the world also has a world that belongs to him. A subject looks back.

Consider the etymology of the word “respect”.

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There is no way to understand a particular subjectivity as such objectively.

One only understands subjectivity by engaging subjectively. One attempts to share the other’s world as the other views it, which means one involves oneself. One learns from the other. In the process, one’s own view of the world changes, and that means one’s own subjectivity changes. The other’s view of the world changes, too.

In an interview two separated views converge and merge into an inter-view.

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Behavior is an objective consequence of subjectivity. The odd thing about behavior: in the end it is phenomenal, and it can be taken as a mode of speech and heard along with the other’s voice, or it can be stripped away from the other and subsumed entirely by one’s own world and simply observed. Even speech can be viewed as behavior, or as mere sound. One can explain an other away or one can illuminate an other’s own self-explanation and understand.

Hermeneutics is hearing. The-hermeneutic-of-such-and-such is resistance to hearing: aggressive mishearing.

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The most immediate and convincing evidence of otherness is dialectic.

Compás

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Ideas

From Nietzsche’s Daybreak:

The many forces that now have to come together in the thinker. — To abstract oneself from sensory perception, to exalt oneself to contemplation of abstractions — that was at one time actually felt as exaltation: we can no longer quite enter into this feeling. To revel in pallid images of words and things, to sport with such invisible, inaudible, impalpable beings, was, out of contempt for the sensorily tangible, seductive and evil world, felt as a life in another higher world. ‘These abstracta are certainly not seductive, but they can offer us guidance!’ — with that one lifted oneself upwards. It is not the content of these sportings of spirituality, it is they themselves which constituted ‘the higher life’ in the prehistoric ages of science. Hence Plato’s admiration for dialectics and his enthusiastic belief that dialectics necessarily pertained to the good, unsensory man. It is not only knowledge which has been discovered gradually and piece by piece, the means of knowing as such, the conditions and operations which precede knowledge in man, have been discovered gradually and piece by piece too. And each time the newly discovered operation or the novel condition seemed to be, not a means to knowledge, but in itself the content, goal and sum total of all that was worth knowing. The thinker needs imagination, self-uplifting, abstraction, desensualization, invention, presentiment, induction, dialectics, deduction, the critical faculty, the assemblage of material, the impersonal mode of thinking, contemplativeness and comprehensiveness, and not least justice and love for all that exists — but all these means to knowledge once counted individually in the history of the vita contemplativa as goals, and final goals, and bestowed on their inventors that feeling of happiness which appears in the human soul when it catches sight of a final goal.

*

If you’ve caught sight of and studied the limitations of the intellectual moves you’ve been trained to perform since toddlerhood, and gained some freedom from unconscious habit of thought, and perhaps even learned some new counts and steps and trained yourself to dance kinetically so the dance dances itself… you’ll see exactly why “objective” thinkers tend to be so sterile and stiff. Objective thinkers know only how to stand apart and think about things. They tune out music as mere noise, and consequently never go beyond the counts.

If we want the world to be a place we love to inhabit, we’re going to have to teach ourselves some new modes of knowing.

Sanity and vision

Ethics, Etymology, Politics, Synesis, Taoism

The world is overrun with visionaries and sane people.

What is lacking is:

  1. vision which respects sanity, and
  2. sanity which recognizes vision.

*

Too often, sanity poses as vision, exotically paraphrasing the same old content in the language and gestures of vision. Why? Because the sane know what the truth is, but they find the truth bland and wish to spice it up a little.

Too often, vision is ignorantly parasitic. It lives off the conditions provided by sanity while denouncing the sanity that provides it. Why? Because the visionary knows the truth about truth, and cannot go back to the stunted “truth” of the sane.

But neither the truth nor the truth about truth is true enough to support community.

*

We need sanity, not because it is more objectively true than vision, but because it is stable, more communicable and therefore more readily sharable.

We need vision, because things are true as far as they go but they are never true enough for long.

*

Human beings need each other — commonalities and differences, alike.

We hate this. Otherness confronts us with the fact of finitude. Individuals longs to be infinite.

*

Re-spect: re– ‘back’ + specere ‘look at.’
“How does this world we share look through your eyes?”

Re-cognize: re– ‘again’ + cognoscere ‘learn.’
“Can you show me a new way to see this world we share?”

Re-duce: re– ‘back, again’ + ducere ‘bring, lead.’
“The world exists as I comprehend it.”

Com-prehend: com– ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp.’
“I am objective.”

Ob-ject: ob– ‘in the way of’ + jacere ‘to throw.’
“The world is reducible to material, to the being of the object.”

Under-stand
“Do you understand that under every object stands an experience, and upon this does an object exists as an object?”

Is experience essentially individual?

*

Synesis means we stand together and see the world as together.
The subject who sees — we — is active. We see together.
The object of sight — the world — is passive.  The world is seen as together.

Synesis recognizes that the solid togetherness of the world is only apparent.
We can see this solid togetherness differently if are open to being shown.

Synesis respects the truth that we human beings need solidity.
The solidity of the world is scaffolding for the solidarity of people.

Synesis is solidity through solidarity and solidarity through solidity.

Both the solidity and the solidarily of synesis long for infinity and pursue it.
This means sometimes solidarity and solidity must be renounced, for the sake of  synesis.
Synesis is essentially self-sacrificing and self-affirming.

*

On this liquid ground of experience we stand together in understanding or we sink under the surface as dissolving individuals.

*

Vision opens sanity. Sanity stabilizes vision.

openstablespiral

Selections from BG&E

Ethics, Philosophy

Preface. Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts. The dogmatists’ philosophy was, let us hope, only a promise across millennia…

…

6. Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoires; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown. Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he –) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a “drive for knowledge” is the father of philosophy; but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere employed knowledge (and mis-knowledge!) as a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see to what extent they may have been at play just here as in inspiring spirits (or demons and kobolds –), will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time — and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive is domineering {herrschsuchtig}: and as such it attempts to philosophize. — To be sure: among scholars who are really scientific men things may be different — “better,” if you like –, there you may really find something like a drive for knowledge, some small independent clockwork that, once well wound, works on vigorously without any essential participation from all the other drives of the scholar. The real “interests” of the scholar therefore lie usually somewhere else, in his family, say, or in making money, or in politics; indeed, it is almost a matter of total indifference whether his little machine is placed at this or that spot in science, and whether the “promising” young worker turns himself into a good philologist or an expert on fungi or a chemist: — it does not characterize him that he becomes this or that. In the philosopher conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal; and above all his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is — that is, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other.

…

205. The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist” — so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent — or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his overall judgment does not mean much any more. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand antennae, he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead in the realm of knowledge — unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience. Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the values of life — that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even a duty, to such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right and faith only from the most comprehensive — perhaps most disturbing and destructive — experiences, and frequently hesitates, doubts, and lapses into silence. Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of God. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a rough game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game …..

…

230. Perhaps what I have said here of a “fundamental will of the spirit” may not be immediately comprehensible: allow me to explain. —

That commanding something which the people calls “spirit” wants to be master within itself and around itself and to feel itself master: out of multiplicity it has the will to simplicity, a will which binds together and tames, which is imperious and domineering. In this its needs and capacities are the same as those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows and multiplies. The power of the spirit to appropriate what is foreign to it is revealed in a strong inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the complex, to overlook or repel what is wholly contradictory: just as it arbitrarily emphasizes, extracts and falsifies to suit itself certain traits and lines in what is foreign to it, in every piece of “external world.” Its intention in all this is the incorporation of new “experiences,” the arrangement of new things within old divisions — growth, that is to say; more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power.

This same will is served by an apparently antithetical drive of the spirit, a sudden decision for ignorance, for arbitrary shutting-out, a closing of the windows, an inner denial of this or that thing, a refusal to let it approach, a kind of defensive posture against much that can be known, a contentment with the dark, with the closed horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: all this being necessary according to the degree of its power to appropriate, its “digestive power,” to speak in a metaphor — and indeed “the spirit” is more like a stomach than anything else.

It is here that there also belongs the occasional will of the spirit to let itself be deceived, perhaps with a mischievous notion that such and such is not the case, that it is only being allowed to pass for the case, a joy in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exultant enjoyment of the capricious narrowness and secrecy of a nook-and-corner, of the all too close, of the foreground, of the exaggerated, diminished, displaced, beautified, an enjoyment of the capriciousness of all these expressions of power.

Finally there also belongs here that not altogether innocent readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and to dissemble before them, that continual pressing and pushing of a creative, formative, changeable force: in this the spirit enjoys the multiplicity and cunning of its masks, it enjoys too the sense of being safe that this brings — for it is precisely through its protean arts that it is best concealed and protected.

This will to appearance, to simplification, to the mask, to the cloak, in short to the superficial — for every surface is a cloak — is counteracted by that sublime inclination in the man of knowledge which takes a profound, many-sided and thorough view of things and will take such a view: as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste which every brave thinker will recognize in himself, provided he has hardened and sharpened for long enough his own view of himself, as he should have, and is accustomed to stern discipline and stern language. He will say “there is something cruel in the inclination of my spirit” — let the amiable and virtuous try to talk him out of that.

In fact, it would be nicer if, instead of with cruelty, we were perhaps credited with an “extravagant honesty” — we free, very free spirits — and perhaps that will actually one day be our posthumous fame? In the meantime — for it will be a long time before that happens — we ourselves are likely to be least inclined to dress up in moralistic verbal tinsel and valences of this sort: all our labor hitherto has spoiled us for this taste and its buoyant luxuriousness. They are beautiful, glittering, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for the sake of knowledge, heroism of the truthful — there is something about them that makes one’s pride swell. But we hermits and marmots long ago became convinced that this worthy verbal pomp too belongs among the ancient false finery, lumber and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that under such flattering colors and varnish too the terrible basic text homo natura must again be discerned.

For to translate man back into nature; to master the many vain and fanciful interpretations and secondary meanings which have been hitherto scribbled and daubed over that eternal basic text homo natura {natural man}. To confront man henceforth with man in the way in which, hardened by the discipline of science, man today confronts the rest of nature, with dauntless Oedipus eyes and stopped-up Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird-catchers who have all too long been piping to him “you are more! you are higher! you are of a different origin!” — that may be a strange and extravagant task but it is a task — who would deny that? Why did we choose it, this extravagant task? Or, to ask the question differently: “why knowledge at all?” — Everyone will ask us about that. And we, thus pressed, we who have asked ourselves the same question a hundred times, we have found and can find no better answer ….

231. Learning changes us; it does what all nourishment does which also does not merely “preserve” — as physiologists know. But at the bottom of us, really “deep down,” there is, of course, something unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. Whenever a cardinal problem is at stake, there speaks an unchangeable “this is I”; about man and woman, for example, a thinker cannot relearn but only finish learning — only discover ultimately how this is “settled in him.” At times we find certain solutions of problems that inspire strong faith in us; some call them henceforth their “convictions.” Later — we see them only as steps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem we are — rather, to the great stupidity we are, to our spiritual fatum, to what is unteachable very “deep down.” — Having just paid myself such a deal of pretty compliments I may perhaps be more readily permitted to utter a few truths about “woman as such”: assuming it is now understood from the outset to how great an extent these are only — my truths. —

Melioristic meditation

Ethics

To attack all forms of collective self-determination — any kind of visioning an ideal, intentionally pursuing that ideal, and evaluating means in terms of whether they advance or harm the pursuit of the ideal…

… to brand every kind of collective intentional coordination of efforts as soulless “social engineering”…

… to hope that compromise solutions on innumerable questions of means, each considered in isolation from the others, will somehow result in something acceptable to all relevant citizens (that is, those with the awareness, the will and the means to take action)…

*

This is America’s state religion, held most fervently of all by our Christian element: An aggregate of self-interested parts, operating under simple rules, will somehow miraculously, effortlessly, inevitably and automatically serve the best interests of the whole.

Ours is an atomistic-mechanistic faith assembled by the blueprint image of the Deistic god of the Enlightenment.

Our self-interests are parts of an enormous intricate moral machine that drives the engine of public welfare. This system was designed for unconcern. Our impulses can — and should — push with unconstrained force against the unconstrained forces of our citizen-opponents. Each takes care of himself, and the system looks after the whole.

The system was designed to replace moral responsibility. Moral responsibility was never humankind’s strong suit. It’s too squishy, too evadable. Following laws to the letter, with no concern for their purpose or consequences — we’re much, much better at that. Push by the rules, and whoever is crushed in your pushing is either a holy sacrifice to competition or an economic infidel (insufficiently motivated to participate in our economy).

*

Here is a question: Do we hold the American moral atomistic-mechanical faith because we’ve seen it work out? Have we judged this tree by its fruit?

Is it possible that our adherence to this faith is just inertia? A fear of the Otherwise? Do we suspect that an improvement for the whole, might not be an improvement for me?

Or do we hold this faith because we are crushed by the sheer size and complexity of the world, and we’re dogged by pessimism that we can improve anything?

I have to wonder if the Founding Fathers imagined the psychological consequences of their lowered expectations. Did they ever imagine that a populace propped up by an artificial public morality might eventually lose all moral muscle-tone?

*

Not only do we pious Americans see no conflict between serving the good and serving wealth — we know for a fact that we  serve the good most perfectly by refusing to get caught up in ideals and instead concentrating on serving wealth. Who says there’s a conflict? With the exception of a few isolated wingnuts, nobody.

*

We fixate on isolated issues because we instinctively know that discussing ends will be catastrophic.

Why? Because we disagree so deeply? Because if we sketched out our ideals to one another that they would be so mutually unacceptable that violence would be inevitable? But, if we can just manage to coerce the other into trying things our own way, they’d see how right we are?

Or, have we neglected altogether the question of how we would like our lives to be?

Or, have we merely defined our ideal negatively? I’d like my life as it is, but without the loneliness, the soul-crushing boredom, the insane stress, the ugliness?

Or, do we just have no idea what a public discussion of ends could be? What forum? What themes? How is it moderated? It cannot be imagined in any detail at all.

*

How many of us believe we have any right to form our lives?

How many of us believe we can play by the rules and end up with lives we really love?

What’s a little strange is that many of us are pretty sure that this system doesn’t actually serve the whole, and when we play, it theoretically serves us — we can pay for our homes, our food and our entertainments — but our lives are not lives we would have chosen. Ah, here’s a moral responsibility every American is required to accept: We are responsible for feeling grateful. We are at least required to tack some gratitude to the end of whatever complaints we express. “Oh, well, it could be worse.” “At least I’ve got a job.” “At least I don’t live in Africa or Iraq.”

Sometimes we console ourselves with our little virtues. We may not love life, and we may not really concern ourselves with the whole — but at least we are good. We adopt little causes and practices here and there that we believe will somehow benefit the whole — the Earth, if you lean left, or America if you lean right.

At least we’re good. That we have.

*

When you live your life wrongly, you lose the capacity to value.

When you lose the capacity to value, you cannot imagine something worth working toward.

When you have nothing to work toward, you live your life wrongly.