Category Archives: Ethics

Beautiful and most brave

Enworldment, Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

From Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism:

Hegel cannot accept Kant’s transcendental idealism because it presupposes a transcendent realism: the commitment to a realm that in principle can never be experienced by humans.

In the margin I wrote “This is a good commitment; it is the essence of goodness.”

Braver published this book in 2007. It’s a useful book, or at least useful for what I am trying to do with my book (which is to propose a philosophy of design which assumes transcendent realism but affords us finite but significant latitude to design our own transcendental conceptive schema through which we may interact with the inner-face of transcendence and participate within reality in life-enhancing ways.)

It approaches the Continental Realism versus Anti-Realism debate using methods drawn from analytic philosophy to produce clear, sharp distinctions on a number of key fronts — and to demonstrate how analytic and continental styles of philosophy can be used in concert for better depth and thoughtcraft.

A few years later, Braver published a followup paper, “A Brief History of Continental Realism”, where he introduced a new term “Transgressive Realism” which he described as

a middle path between realism and anti-realism which tries to combine their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. Kierkegaard created the position by merging Hegel’s insistence that we must have some kind of contact with anything we can call real (thus rejecting noumena), with Kant’s belief that reality fundamentally exceeds our understanding; human reason should not be the criterion of the real. The result is the idea that our most vivid encounters with reality come in experiences that shatter our categories, the way God’s commandment to kill Isaac irreconcilably clashes with the best understanding of ethics we are capable of.

This is exactly what I believe, which why I’ve described my metaphysics as a metaphysics of surprise. Only surprise reminds us that something transcends our minds. As Bruno Latour put it, “Whatever resists trials is real.” Our participation in reality constantly produces resistance, and helps us recognize the difference between our understanding and what engages our understanding while exceeding it.

I attach religious significance to actively wanting transcendence, reality, resistance and seeking it even while we seek to understand. We do understand, but there is always more to understand — inexhaustibly more — and if we are alert, sensitive and generous, we will notice how much and how often we need to understand differently and better, in order to accommodate our fellow-persons and those aspects of reality they care about. This is not worship of human “otherness”, but human otherness where transcendence reveals itself and challenges us most conspicuously.

Unfortunately, power has a way of tempting us to substitute our own understanding for reality. We want to control our environment to use technology to keep things things reliable and predictable in order to tame surprise and constrain and confine it to the realm of play. A little surprise delights us. Radical surprise disrupts us, immerses us in chaos, crushes us with perplexity.

Even the threat of impending radical surprise fills us with apprehension and puts us in fight-or-flight mode. It makes us nasty.

And here is where power gets its bad reputation. If a fellow person threatens us with radical surprise, and we have the means, we will use our power to make that threat go away. We will require that person to be polite and avoid controversial or potentially hurtful topics. We will prohibit certain bad opinions from being spoken in public. Then we will prohibit these opinions from being said in semi-public, then from being said in private. Then even indirect or accidental expressions become taboo. Eventually even the suspicion that these opinions are privately held — or even unconsciously present — is addressed as a threat. We might feel entitled or even obligated to help people stop having these beliefs and adopting our own instead. We may start requiring behaviors that are performative affirmation of our beliefs. We might require explicit declarations of agreement, as conditions of employment or membership in civil society. In some places and times, these conforming behaviors and declarations have been conditions of the right to continue living in the community, or living at all.

A person with control of enough wealth, institutions and political force will almost inevitably, unconsciously begin to slide in this direction, demanding more and more surprise-damping conformity from fellow-persons to erase the disturbing difference between transcendent reality and our own thoughts about it.

Solipsism is the ultimate luxury; when weaker people are compelled to serve the solipsism of the stronger, this is abuse of power.

To be good, we must want transcendence, seek transcendence, accommodate transcendence even when we have the power to dictate reality to those lacking the power to resist and to be respected as real.

*

Pay close attention to who is unworthy of your consideration — because here is where your root biases — your sacred biases — do their work.

Pay attention to those biases you are biased toward and those you are biased against, because these are where your root biases reveal themselves to others while concealing themselves from you. These also are biases — your sacred biases, the ones who do the most self-righteous evil.

Critical thinking makes its own thinking the object of critique — it is reflexive. Critical thinking avails itself of the critiques of others to detect what it would otherwise miss. We are tempted to choose only the critiques from others that we are biased toward receiving — the ones who reinforce our sacred biases — but these are self-gratifying and easy, which is why this kind of “critique” is so popular — and, for a enterprising exploiter of fads, so lucrative. People don’t go to tent revivals because they are averse to being called sinners. They go because the diagnosis and remedy is a small price to pay for moral omniscience.

Listen to those who are angry and fucking hate your guts because you are so comfortable, complacent, omniscient, smugly self-satisfied, so aligned with “the right side of history”, so good — when in fact you are just a typical oppressor, too powerful to be confronted with that fact.

Consider for a moment, the possibility that, despite all their obvious faults, whether they are not to some degree justified in hating you. Test your irony and see if you can hold both conceptions in your mind simultaneously and hear the chord they form. Switch from straw-manning their faults to steel-manning their assessment of your faults. See if you can hear all four sides of this conflict.

Do all this and then I might respect you as a critical thinker and a lover of transcendence — of wisdom — of inconceivable conceptions waiting to be born.

*

Nietzsche said:

There is a point in every philosophy when the philosopher’s “conviction” steps onto the stage — or to use the language of an ancient Mystery:

adventavit asinus
pulcher et fortissimus.

The ass entered
beautiful and most brave.

My conviction, beautiful and most brave: Thou shalt welcome the stranger… transcendence.

This conviction, this priority, this “prior” — this sacred bias — is unreasonable and stupid, and I am unable to not believe it is absolute good.

Maybe you can help me believe otherwise.

You are not empathic

Ethics

You are not empathic.

I’m sorry, it is true. This is mainly because you have become confused about what empathy is.

What you experience when you believe you are being empathic is the exact inverse of empathy.

In empathy, we approach an actual person with the intention of acquiring a new or modified understanding of how they interpret and respond to the world, because the understanding we currently have is inadequate for making sense of their emotions, beliefs and behaviors. We approach the problem of the other not making sense with the working assumption that the fault lies with our own failure to understand, not that the other is nonsensical — that is, confused, insane or deceptive. Once we gain an adequate understanding, we assume, we will be able to make sense of their feelings and perhaps even respond to what they experience with similar emotions.

What you do is reversed on each point. You are far less concerned with actual persons, but rather with abstractions of persons.

You conceive a person with whom you intend to empathize as an instance of a category of person — a type — to whom typical things happen. You recognize a structure: “This category of person has, once again, been subjected to that category of mistreatment by that category of person.”

In other words, a pre-existent dramatic or mythical structure has been matched with a story being told. The storyline itself is an embellished variant of a familiar myth. The actors in the story are match with a mythical figures who serve as the dramatic personae. These personae will serve as the intentional objects of the intense feelings the spectator will have.

It is important to note that there is absolutely no change in understanding here, as there is in empathy. All necessary understanding in this emotive event arrives pre-fabricated and will not be challenged, but rather reinforced by its re-instantiation, which transforms it into another example of what always happens.

It will also be charged with emotions. The relating of the story is invariably emotional. And not subtly but full-on operatic. There is sorrow, despair, outrage, righteous fury, cries for vengeance — all the stuff of the Greek theater.

The spectator observes the intense emotions expressed in the telling of the story, and mimetically reproduces them in herself. (I use the feminine pronoun here because this mimetic capacity is regarded today as highly virtuous and it has become customary, when speaking of virtues, to use the feminine pronoun.) She instinctively imitates the feelings of the storyteller and co-feels these same strong emotions in herself.

Many people who, like you (perhaps misinformed by sentimental sociopath Brené Brown) call this imitative emoting “empathy”. This very natural, very animal sentimental imitative receptivity is sympathy. It is important to have, but it is not particularly rare and it is only good when tempered with reason and willingness to understand in new ways — that is, as a supplement to empathy.

So, the last step occurs when the sympathetic spectator attaches the overwhelming emotions she has reproduced in her own imagination to the mythical structure and the actors. She is then able to believe that she has had emotions about people, and she believes that she is empathetic. What she has really experienced is something like what the audience at a romcom pays to experience. Newly whipped up familiar emotions about familiar stereotypes experiencing familiar situations with familiar themes. Zero intellectual effort yielding lots of gratifying feels.

Where real empathy is needed, however, this same “empath” is intellectually opaque and emotionally somewhere between indifferent and hostile.

If someone approaches her with a different viewpoint or with feelings she cannot match to a preexisting mythical structure, she cannot compute and cannot muster much concern. Their feelings or opinions “do not make sense” which means they must not be valid and that the person is irrational or hostile or deluded and not worth understanding. If they press the matter, and continuing trying to get her to understand, and she is unable to distract herself or evade or otherwise make the unfamiliarity go away, she get angry, cold, mean, alienating, and eventually vengeful.

The children of “empathizers” understand this about their mothers, and figure out how to become little instantiations of mythical protagonists. Ordinary feelings about ordinary individuals are not important enough to warrant a mother’s attention or sustained affection — but if the child is experiencing some kind of social or political persecution, now that gets her feelings all revved up! Now the child becomes a cause she can really feel.

This is sufficient to account for so many young children manage to get caught up in social turmoil and controversy and adopt new attention-getting identities: children need parental attention and will get it any way they can.

In reality, though, every child is unique and often deeply odd, and requires actual empathy and understanding. Children force parents to change and mature and develop in order to  love them fully, in their entirety. But fundamentalists, whether of Christianist or Progressivist inclination, cannot get outside their own heads and experience anything that transcends their own solipsistic imaginations. Their kids get unbelievably fucked up, but the fundamentalism explains it all away or “normalizes” it with yet more myth.

So now that you know you are not empathic, you might find yourself in need of a more accurate term for what you are. I suggest “sentimental mythologue”.

It is a great label, and you might be proud to bear it and identify with it, since being a sentimental mythologue is celebrated nearly everywhere today.

But please don’t be satisfied with this label.

Please do not remain in this deficient state — especially if you are a parent or a spouse who aspires to be real marriage.

I urge you to develop genuine empathy.

Why? Because human beings need love. They need to give it and receive it. Without it they fall into despair, anomie, self-destruction. What passes today for “empathy” precludes love, blocks love and makes love impossible — even between a mother and her child.

You are not a critical thinker

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

You are not a critical thinker.

I’m sorry — you just aren’t.

You don’t know what it means. You haven’t put in the right kind of effort.

Despite what you think, “critical thinking” is not just doing an extra-good job of thinking the way you happen to have been trained to think — and, consequently, reaching the correct conclusions your correct and competent thinking reaches.

That is the opposite of critical thinking.

The problem is this: You have your criticism pointed in the wrong direction.

You think “critical thinking” is thinking up criticisms of how other people think. But, everyone does that.

The fundamentalists who send their kinds to Jesus Camp to learn ludicrous garbage and become braindead foot soldiers of the salvation army — they train their kids to memorize and recite arguments that demolish foolish worldly wisdom.

When they do it, it is easy to see that this is not education in critical thinking. It is only indoctrination.

But when you do the same thing, it is different because you are teaching what is true.

Are you really so dim that you cannot see that this attitude does not make you different from those dumb fundamentalists, it makes you exactly the same as them?

You, like they, have grown so smugly self-certain of your own correctness that you’ve lost the ability to put yourself on equal footing with others who, like you, have lost that ability. And you lost that ability because you, like they, have failed at critical thinking.* (see note below.)

The critique of critical thinking is pointed back at itself, not at others. This is what makes it different from what most ideological dummies do, and what makes it as rare as hen’s teeth.

Critical thinking examines its own presuppositions, its own conceptions, its own habits, its own blindness, and it breaks down its own certainty and its own clarity.

Critical thinking is a harrowing process. It leads directly to disagreement with anyone who has not engaged in it, themselves.

Critical thinking is essentially nonconformist and essentially anxious.

If you need your thinking to always be delightful and playful you can’t be a critical thinker.

If you need people to pat you on the head for being a good person, you can’t be a critical thinker.

As long as you cannot do without the comfort of being surrounded by a community of benevolent, like-minded kindred-kindred spirits — all of whom congratulate you and each other for their critical thinking, and for their ethical excellence and their deep concern for the marginal (or at least the like-minded marginal) — you most certainly can not be a critical thinker.

Of course, you can call yourself a critical thinker. I can’t stop you.

But I can laugh at you for calling yourself that. And you can’t stop me.

NOTE: * For instance, have you ever once asked yourself how, if other people can be unconsciously cognitively biased and prone to self-interested motivated reasoning, you can be sure that your use of these concepts isn’t biased and self interested? No you haven’t, because you’ve only deployed these critiques against other people, not against your own ideological dogmatism.

Or have you ever once wondered how, if “Whiteness” can be an identity that “erases” itself in order to continue enjoying unjust “privileges”, how you can be sure you yourself don’t enjoy unacknowledged self-erasing identities with unjust privileges — perhaps one that grants you the unjust privilege to be the arbiter of all matters of justice? No, you haven’t, because asking that question will knock you off your perch, and you love that perch.

Have you ever once noticed that your “offense”, your little “traumas”, your righteous “PTSD” tantrums bear a hell of a resemblance to what you call “fragility” and “rage” and “hate” and aversion to being criticized? Again, no, you have not, because you cannot take what you dish out. (I’m not kidding: I’ve seen people start blubbering, crying actual tears, when confronted exactly the way they confront others, and then actually complain of mistreatment, when they urge others in the same position to “lean into their discomfort.”) But no, you believe you should not have to be subjected to the discomfort of aggressive, radical, unwanted criticism of the kind you subject others to… because you are right and they are wrong.

But you are not right. You are only prejudiced toward your own views, because you are you, and you happen to have enough power to bully others with your ideology and force them to pretend to agree or at least shut up. Isn’t that a “power differential” of the kind your ideal is sworn to oppose? But, see, this is a good power differential. This is responsible bullying for a higher cause, meant to redistribute prestige and humiliation to make things more equitable. So say you, at least when cornered. Everyone else sees it as just the kind of bullying every powerful group does, and always finds a way to morally justify.

Critical thinking could help you overcome these profound intellectual and moral defects, but you won’t do it. You don’t want to be less certain, less, clear, less self-satisfied, less confident.  You’ll only try to make everyone else do it, because when their confidence and certainty is broken it gives you the advantage you unconsciously crave — a desire which, for your own advantage, you repress and disguise as justice. You are full of shit, and you are hated by the truly socially vulnerable — not those pampered, pseudo-vulnerable fellow overclassers you call “marginal” and “vulnerable” “protected classes” — for the very best of reasons. If that revolution you enjoy longing for ever comes — God forbid! — I think you’ll be quite surprised who gets lined up against the wall.

Gutensperger

Biography, Ethics, Philosophy

My McLuhanite friend has been talking to me about “Gutenberg Man” — a species of human consciousness shaped by a society saturated with and shaped by the printed word. Wikipedia says:

McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. Apropos of his axiom, “The medium is the message,” McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented.

*

For awhile now, I’ve noticed a kind of mentality that seems to connect with McLuhan’s concept. This mentality understands entirely in terms of cognitive objects, which entails removal of the subject from the matter to be understood, so that the matter is viewed from a point exterior to the problem.

When this mentality thinks, cognitive objects are analyzed (disassembled) and synthesized (assembled or reassembled) into systems, like an engineer tinkering with a gadget, set before him on a workbench. There is distance separating the thinker and the thoughts, and the thinking takes place across this distance. The thinker extends his intellect to the problem and puts together facts or ideas into arguments, or theories, or demonstrations. It all takes place with words. If there is no word, there is no thought. Thinking is a linguistic matter.

*

Much can be accomplished with this style of thinking, but it does have sharp limits — in what it can create, but also in what it can understand.

One realm of understanding that stands fully outside the limits of this mentality is religion. Inside its boundaries is only fundamentalism or anti-fundamentalism. It cannot even conceive the kinds of truths known to a religious mind, which is perfectly okay with them, because (to them) religion is just a mix of rustic platitudes and dangerous nonsense. Religions must be instructed by more advanced, scientific minds to COEXIST — by emphasizing the essential rustic platitudes and suppressing the inessential dangerous nonsense. But wouldn’t it just be better to keep the rustic platitudes and trash the remainder?

I find the limitations of such mentalities intensely frustrating. They stand inside their limits, demanding (with smug, smirking skepticism) a preview of what will be known beyond their limits, because, of course, “there is no there there” — and failure to produce the requested preview is evidence of this fact. Or, alternatively, they demand proof that their current way of thinking is inadequate — and if they cannot be driven from their current position with overpowering arguments, it is reasonable to conclude there are no real reasons to change their current understanding.

In both cases, a particular understanding of the nature of understanding is excluded from play, and all that is left in in play is bounded — imprisoned, in fact — within the realm of objective thought.

This exclusion prevents them from understanding their condition within the world, and supports a mode of knowing better described as bystanding themselves. Subjectively, they stand apart, oblivious to themselves, except as a bundle of thoughts about themselves (psychological, biographical, social, scientific, magical), anonymously knowing things about things.

*

Because I get mean when communication is needlessly thwarted, and because I enjoy inventing insults, I am calling this condition Gutensperger’s Syndrome. It is, like Asperger’s Syndrome, an empathic incapacity — but one caused by an incapacity to think outside the limits of objectivity and explicit language. It makes a thinker immune to radically new understandings that implicate one’s own subjectivity and potentially transform it. Those with Gutensperger protect themselves from such transformations and all its dreadful preliminaries.

*

Once I recognize a person as a Gutensperger’s case, I know that any attempt to philosophize with them will only end in tears. I must keep things shallow and light, most of all when they want to be “deep”. And they always do. But only in order to persuade themselves that they have already gotten to the bottom of things.

Liberal virtue mimesis mad libs

Anthropology, Ethics, Politics

A few days ago I threw a design tantrum on my blog dedicated to design tantrums:

Apple seems to think its Jobsian Reality Distortion Field is still operational. It thinks that if it keeps pretending its botched syncing is a magically simple cloud experience — if it sings out “ta da!” insistently enough — its cult of uncritical boneheads will just believe what Apple wants them to believe. And you know what? Apple is 100% correct.

But I do not believe. I do not believe because I notice things and think about them. That is what smart people do. Stupid people copy the thoughts of people they think are smart, and then stupidly imagine that copying smart person thoughts makes them smart.

In that last I suspect I am dumbing down Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and applying it to the contemporary virtue of virtues: smartness.

It is interesting though, how much contemporary progressivist culture rejects mimesis in word, while embracing it in action, producing some pretty comical effects for spectators positioned outside progressivism.

Nobody — or at least nobody in in the ascendant professional class — wants to be a cultural copycat. Everyone wants to be the originator of his own beliefs, attitudes and practices. And every fails dramatically, because originality doesn’t come from intense need to be original and determination to achieve it. Originality comes from noticing what one notices (not just what everyone else is fixating on) and trying to find a way to make clear, coherent and persuasive sense of what strikes one as relevant. It’s the “persuasive” part that is hardest. It requires intellectual honestly beyond what most people have — because most people believe mimetically, and play little or no attention to whether they, themselves, are persuaded.

To put it into my mimetic liberal virtue mad libs formula: Unoriginal “original” people copy the ideas of people they think are original and imagine copying Original Person Ideas makes them original.

A person urgently seeking answers to questions they themselves feel urgently — or, even better, the capacity to resolve perplexities they themselves have entered, with any form of positive or negative resolution, whether it be question, answer, problem, solution, or response — will accept help wherever they can find it. They’ll borrow, steal, copy, whatever — and they won’t stop until they experience genuine persuasion and relief from the question, problem or perplexity. The originality follows from this uncompromising pursuit of clear, cohesive persuasion. As James Dickey said “Amateurs borrow; artists steal.”

So, now I’m wondering what happens if the other virtues of progressivism — those remaining traces of waning liberalism — are subjected to this same mimetic virtue mad libs formula. I’ll make a quick list of the liberal virtues progressivists still prize: Liberalism (as opposed to illiberalism), Strength (as opposed to weakness), Uniqueness (as opposed to conformity), Objectivity (as opposed to ideology), Empathy (as opposed to self-centered).

Let’s mad lib these and see how it goes:

Illiberal “liberal” people copy the ideals of people they think are liberal and imagine copying Liberal Person Ideals makes them liberal.

Weak “strong” people copy the behaviors of people they think are strong and imagine copying Strong Person Behaviors makes them strong.

Conformist “unique” people copy the qualities of people they think are unique and imagine copying Unique Person makes them unique.

Ideological “objective” people copy the beliefs of people they think are objective and imagine copying Objective Person Beliefs makes them objective.

Self-centered “empathic” people copy the emotions of people they think are empathic and imagine copying Empathic Person Emotions makes them empathic.

It seems to work, at least for liberal virtues.

And also, just as Girard says (or I think he does, because I still have only read about his thought and have not yet read him) competition to possess these virtues exclusively and deny them to the out-group produces hostility and an overpowering need for scapegoating.

Nonconformism

Anthropology, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Ethnomethodologically speaking, a nonconformist is a human breaching experiment.

Breaching experiments violate the tacit rules of the social game. When those rules are violated players no longer know how to move around. Perplexity ensures.

Nonconformists inspire perplexity, anxiety and hostility.

*

If we understand personalities to form and sustain itself through ethnomethods, and if we understand personalities to be constituted of varying abilities and tastes — it follows that any particular culture’s ethnomethods will favor some personalities over others. This accounts for why some people are attracted to certain cultures and repelled by others. It also accounts for why we might want to borrow customs from other cultures. Foreign borrowings can can help us feel less alien in our own culture.

*

Regarding identity, the compulsive obsession of our self-alienated times: If we wish to reshape our culture we can create new roles or we can change the meanings of old roles. Both of these strategies require a holistic shift in ethnomethods. A private ethnomethod is like a private language, and it cannot sustain personhood. The notion that a person can be a person inwardly without a supporting social setting — one with ethnomethods that allows a person to signal and to be recognized as the kind of person one is — reveals a fundamental essentialist misunderstanding of personhood.

In times when radical cultural change has been desired by a marginal few, the forming and sustaining of new kinds of personalities — kinds of personality more accommodating to the variabilities of ability and taste — motivated the formation of subcultures. These subcultures were voluntary. Those who needed them joined them; those who did not, ignored, avoided or scorned them. Sometimes subcultures were attacked and persecuted. Nonconformity produces perplexity.

Now the most powerful classes of our society wish to change the ethnomethods of our culture to conform with the ethnomethods of certain large subcultures. Because these are the preferences of the most powerful — those who dominate both the public and private sphere — these are not mere preferences, but morality itself. Consequently, those who resist these changes are immoral.

Because the most powerful are acting on behalf of groups who are minorities, and because they champion the ethnomethods of subcultures who have been persecuted in the past, they miss the fact that they themselves are overwhelmingly powerful and that they are behaving precisely the way dominant groups always do. They are perplexed by anyone who fails to see the justice in their domination and refuses to conform to their new norms — and perplexity makes them hostile. So they persecute conconformists, and pretend this persecution is required to defend the vulnerable.

It is all motivated reasoning that serves to justify persecution and domination, just as it always is when one group gains enough power to rule unopposed. It is always done in the name of morality, but this time — always — it is a moral morality.

It’s been God.

It’s been Freedom.

Now it’s Justice.

Someday it will be something else. And, as always, everyone complicit in this madness for Justice will have been doubters all along. Until then they have no doubt: justice must be done.

*

“Beings must pay penance and be judged for their injustices, in accordance with the ordinance of time.” — Anaximander

“Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.” — David Byrne

Schmoness: a tantrum

Ethics, Trefoil

We humans have no idea how to handle conversions.

When “the scales fall from our eyes”, or…

…when we suddenly become aware of the element within which we swim (“this is water!”)…

…when we suddenly become aware of the gross institutionalized, systemic injustice of a system that we, ourselves, have participated in…

…when we wake up in an oikophobic nightmare and finally see the evil in which we are immersed…

…or…

…when we swallow a hard truth that gives us a xenophobic glimpse into the goings on of a  cabal meeting in distant lairs…

…when we finally see the They Live writing on the wall that we have been dupes of a totalitarian global elite who’ve sold us libertine liberty in order to buy out the very ground of our humanity so they can excavate it, leaving us traditionless, soilless, bloodless, posthuman…

All becomes clear.

We transcend the world of confused, shadowy obscurity into a new clearer realm of dazzling insight.

We are enlightened, born again, woke, red-pilled into the Kingdom of Truth.

And we try in vain to unshackle the minds of the complacent consumers of shadows plays but they are strangely invested in these illusions. They do not want to wake up. They complain that you are the one who is strangely invested in illusions. You are the one who needs to return to reality.

And you know what?

They are right.

Because, as deluded as they are, you are doubly-deluded.

You believe you have transcended to Transcendence.

And you are wrong. You have only transcended to another immanence… an immanence that is oblivious to its own obliviousness .

You love your new immanence. Some immanences truly are much better than others.

Some immanences give wonderful relief from despair. Or from onerous obligation. Or from anomie. Or from self-fragmentation. Or from fear. Or from perplexity, or indifference, or faltering.

Every new immanence gives us relief from some painful form of alienation.

This relief from alienation bestows a beautiful illusion upon us that we have popped outside the human condition and can now experience it from an external godlike perspective. We can now see where we were imprisoned objectively in the bright sunlight, in a way impossible when we were still sealed inside its cold, dark, clammy walls.

This conceit that We have escaped ignorance, that We have transcended to insight, that We now know — is a new and for most, much worse meta-imprisonment, meta-immanence, meta-ignorance, because now we lack all motivation to see that we are still inside the human condition — still a schmo among schmos.

Nope, mere shmohood is not good enough for I — the one true I who was born to sit on the egoic throne situated at the very center of the universe.

We are as gods: woke, red-pilled, enlightened, born again.

We are reborn into a community of others who are also woke, red-pilled, enlightened, born again. They all agree with me that our tribe really knows, where other tribes only think they know. But I trust my tribe, because, according to me, they know.

I call this condition misapotheosis.

In misapotheosis we think we’ve become something special, when we are really just another know-it-all, ignorant-ass god.

There is nothing more human than mistaking yourself for a god.

*

Are we doomed to divinity?

Probably. Being a god is divine.

But we can, if we decide to choose otherwise.

If, by some miracle, we manage to stop spewing our hot wisdom at the unfortunates around us, and just listen — (no, not that way; don’t “be a good listener”) — if we really listen with hearing ears, and hear with a faith that, despite our glorious omniscience we still have something deeply, urgently important to learn…

…if we can miraculously incarnate ourselves back on the human plane as a mortal student…

…we discover that we can transcend again.

And again.

And again.

Each time we return more human and less godlike.

Each time we find ourselves in a world populated more densely with gods and more sparsely with mere humans.

If we do this too much we may become like Diogenes wandering the streets with a lantern asking “Where are the fucking humans? All I see are crowds of glorious, all-knowing gods.” And if we happen upon a Socrates who actually knows he doesn’t know, we almost fall out of our chair.

*

It takes perseverance, effort, wisdom, talent to become a mere human among humans.

It takes more than most people have to understand the ordinary, humble miracle of liberalism — to feel the obligation to hammer out with others the questions of what is true? what is just? what is beautiful? what is good? and to do so as an equal among equals, a schmo among schmoes.

We want to transcend our schmoness and exalt ourselves as the ones with insight into Just Justice, True Truth, and so on and so on.

*

Equity is the unfair imposition of one hubristic group’s of fairness on those who have lost too much power to resist it.

Only a god could be ignorant enough to enforce equity on others without noticing the inequity of it.

*

Somehow, in this time — this time that everyone agrees is a uniquely degraded, distracted, dissatisfied, despairing, dangerously demented time — somehow in this time everyone has become wise to liberalism.

Everyone is too radical and insightful to buy liberalism.

Everybody knows what this society really needs instead of liberalism.

If only those who really know could have their way.

*

So goddamn many gods.

So few humans.

Self-exalting debasement

Ethics, Politics

“This is not a matter of politics; it is a matter of doing the right thing.”

What notion could be more politically wrong than this?

Politics is essentially about contested rightness and wrongness within a community of equals.

This community of equality is a higher rightness than any one person’s or any one faction’s opinion ever could be. To know this with one’s entire mind, heart and body should be the primary qualification for entering politics.

Anti-evil

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Much evil originates in the belief that an other is evil, and therefore must be dealt with as evil — that is, ruthlessly.

Belief in evil motivates evil-doing. For that reason I am perhaps excessively reluctant to attribute evil to others.

I prefer to see evil-doers as possessed by evil-generating bad faiths — faiths that can, if addressed with sufficient insight, patience and skill, be dispelled.

I have attempted such dispelling numerous times with numerous people, and I have failed repeatedly. But I must believe it is my own shortcomings, not the strategy, that has made me fail, and that overcoming these shortcomings will produce success. My failures are not evidence that the dispelling of bad faiths is impossible, nor is it evidence of undispellable, irredeemable bad faith — of evil.

Are there irredeemably evil people? Do they exist in large numbers? I cannot know that, so I will bracket that question, and move forward with a rigorous maybe. I will proceed with what I do know, and know firsthand.

What I know firsthand is that most people want to be good, and that when they fail at being good, what causes the failure is misconceptions of what good is and how good is achieved. I am absolutely, maybe unreasonably, convinced that if such people were offered a more immediate and resonant understanding of goodness they would adopt it.

So my strategy is to attempt to appeal to those still able to hear appeals — people who are not so wound up inside closed ideologies that they can only hear answers to the closed questions they have been trained to pose — people who are still, to some degree, still alive to new questions — or, better, alive to open-ended listening that reveals responses to questions we have not learned to ask.

I am not interested in wasting my time appealing to those who are so closed and circular that conversing with them requires me to enter their circularity and spin with them within their presuppositions, their evidence and their logic.

And I am also not interested in direct combat with alleged evil people. I will lose that confrontation and I will lose myself engaging in that kind of confrontation.

While there are still reasonable people with ears to hear appeals from beyond their own dogmatic or ideological circularity, I will voice those appeals.

This approach will allow me to do who I am and to become who I aspire to be, and it provides me an alternative to fighting monsters and becoming one. If I fail at making progress, it will be an honorable failure.

I am planning some rhetoric adjustments. Here are some prototypes.

Prototype 1. Progressivists have learned some true things about how social situatedness, self-interest and dominant ideology can combine to make oppressors unconscious of their own oppression. My message to them is this: your understanding is true, but not true enough. There is work left to do, and perhaps the hardest work is ahead of you. Some underasked questions: How does your class distort your view of what is true and just” Who ought to decide what is true and just, and what is untrue and unjust? Who ought to be excluded from such decisions, and who ought to decide who gets excluded? How is truth and justice determined in a society free of class hierarchy — or at least in a society that aspires to free itself from class oppression? This is a hard thing to do when your class has both become accustomed to its power and can feel that total hegemony is within its reach.

Prototype 2. Conservatives have learned some true things about what it is like to be vulnerable, scorned and humiliated. But has it learned to desire the elimination of such vulnerability, scorn and humiliation, rather than simply wanting it to happen to other people who, according to conservatives, deserve it? In other words, can conservatives transcend cultural hierarchies and wholeheartedly embrace pluralism?

Object rights versus subject rights

Ethics, Politics

Let’s call object rights whatever rights we believe we have pertaining to the thoughts other people have about us or about things that concern us. “If the thought is about me, I should have something to say about it.”

Let’s call subject rights our perceived rights pertaining to thoughts we think. “If it is my thought, it is none of your business what I think unless I choose to involve you”

I regard subject rights as absolute, and I regard object rights as nonexistent, unless they are voluntarily granted.

Of course, we all have subject rights to think whatever wish about one another’s thoughts. And if we disapprove of what we think another person thinks about us, or if we feel disrespected or willfully misunderstood, we might choose to sever relationships with that person. For this reason it is prudent to make an effort to show respect.

To the degree a person or group prioritizes their own object rights over other people’s subject rights, that person or group is narcissistic. Narcissists are unable to respect even if they attempt to behave politely.

Interpersonal rights

Ethics

The thinking we do about the world in general and the people who inhabit it necessarily applies to individual persons.

But those individual persons also have their own way of thinking about the world, about people, and about themselves.

What right does a person have as an object of another person’s thought? If a thought is about me, do I have any say about that thought — or about the faiths, theories or assumptions that generated the thought?

Compounding this problem is the question of conceivability. In my philosophical work over the last couple of decades I have acquired new conceptive capacities that enable me to have new thoughts and spontaneous understandings that were inconceivable prior to the acquisition. Truths appeared ex nihilo from the inconceivable ground of reality, the pregnant nothingness from which all existence springs. If we try to express one of these newly conceived. truths to the “uninitiated”, that truth is, to them, manifest nonsense.

But this strange ignorance cuts both ways. How can any of us eliminate the possibility that another’s nonsense is not, in fact, an as-yet inconceivable truth?

To make matters far worse, each new truth changes us and changes our sense of where we ought to attend next. Our truth changes, our project changes, we change — who we aspire to become changes.

The question for me becomes this: does this other who wishes to converse with me seem to understand this condition? Do they seem to appreciate the difficulty of mutual understanding, and to have some sense of what it takes to navigate conceptive differences?

We can never answer this question with perfect certainty — but in our practical choices of who to engage and who to ignore, we must make a practical response. In cultivating some relationships, neglecting or even severing others we engage in a kind of triage.

My triage decisions have everything to do with whether another person seems sufficiently aware of this condition and its practical consequences to converse respectfully and productively about matters of shared interest.

But if a person approaches me in a way that suggests that they believe that their right as an object of thought trumps my rights as a thinking subject — my inclination is to disregard that person as hopelessly unphilosophical, narcissistic or both.

By demanding a right that is not theirs, they lose that right.

Bad faith pandemic

Ethics, Philosophy

The original reason I picked up David Cooper’s Existentialism: A Reconstruction, was my recognized that the aggressive spread and intensification of Progressivist identitarianism is a bad faith pandemic.

The passage below, from distills the problem precisely:

The thesis of Being and Nothingness is that conflict is the way of Being-for-others of people who are in bad faith. The implication is that people who ‘convert’ from bad faith will, and must, relate to one another in a different way, that of ‘intersubjective solidarity’. This implied thesis is, I suggest, equivalent to that of reciprocal freedom. That is, the claim that my freedom depends on my ‘collaborating’ in the freedom of others is a restatement of the claim that I exist in good faith only through adopting the perspective of ‘intersubjective solidarity’, and abandoning the ‘oppressive’ attitudes which obtain in the regime of conflict.

The reasoning is as follows. Bad faith, we know, is first and foremost the view of oneself as object-like, as something In-itself or present-to-hand. This view is a false one: in particular it is a failure to recognize one’s capacities of existential freedom. Now we also know that the primary mode of bad faith is ‘the predominance of the Other’: the tendency to view oneself through the eyes of others, as just one more series of events in the universe. However, and crucially, it is only because I regard others in this objectifying manner that, looking at myself through their eyes, I regard myself in this manner too. If others are objects for me, I am an object for them — and hence, via the prism they provide for self-understanding, an object for myself as well. Having broken with ‘intersubjective solidarity’, I receive back from others the objectifying conception I form of them, an ‘image of myself as the Other’. Through treating others as alien, I become alienated from myself, and my freedom becomes an ‘oppressed freedom’ through my effective denial of others’ freedom. This is what Sartre meant by saying that ‘in oppression, the oppressor oppresses himself.’

*

A person indoctrinated in Progressivism will seek self through identity.

As the Progressivist poses it, implicit in the question “Who am I?” or “Who are you?” is an answer of the form “What am I?” or “What are you?”

The progressivist preface “Speaking as [an identity]” implies a “speaking to [an identity]”. Even when this preface is not explicitly voiced, it is implied, and it is felt.

And this identitarianism is not only for public political action. Insistence that the personal is political” ensures that the Progressivist is permanently insulated from others, interpersonal relationship and, most of all, any sense of self.

But according to Progressivism the emptiness, hopelessness, numbness, nihilism, anxiety and anomie experienced by so many Progressivists (and their children) is inflicted by those non-believing nonconformists who refuse to adopt the identity theories Progressivism to accept the identities they confuse for themselves and to behave in the ways Progressivists demand.

Of course, it is obvious all the suffering is caused by the bad faith of Progressivism itself — just as the torments of Christian fundamentalists are caused not by the devil nor by the wicked, but by their own hellish dogma — but there is no arguing with fundamentalists.

Freedom system

Ethics, Politics

From Cooper’s Existentialism: A Reconstruction:

‘In the end,’ writes Marcel, ‘there must be an absolute commitment’, and what
‘matters most’ is the ‘fidelity’ demanded by this commitment. This squares with his earlier rejection of commitment to principles as ‘idolatrous’, since the commitment now in view is to persons — to other people and to God. (Like Buber, Marcel thinks that fidelity to people is intelligible only through a similar relation to God. …)

Corresponding to this commitment to others is a further form of availability. Earlier, unavailability was understood intellectually, as a ‘hardening’ of a person’s descriptive and evaluative categories. What matters more to Marcel
is unavailability to other people. This is ‘rooted in alienation’ from them, an inability to allow them a ‘presence’ or ‘influx’ in one’s life. They are mere ‘cases’ or ‘objects’. ‘When I am with an unavailable person, I am conscious of being with someone for whom I do not exist.’ The last volumes of Proust’s novel depict, in Marcel’s opinion, a coterie of people chronically unavailable to each other, obsessively enclosed in their private worlds as Proust himself was in his cork-lined room.

The remedy for such unavailability is commitment: for it is only through this that others come to ‘have a hold’ on me. And it is through this ‘hold’, and the reciprocal one which I have on them, that our lives interpenetrate and we become truly ‘present’ to one another. But what are the constituents of this reciprocal commitment? In part, the mutual exercise of the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity. In charity or ‘generosity’, for instance, I must be pennanently ‘on call’ for the other person, in case he is in need. More interesting is the point made, in very Buberian terms, in this passage: ‘if I treat the Thou as a He [or any identity], I reduce the other to … nature: an animated object … If I treat the other as Thou, I treat him and apprehend him qua freedom … what is more, I help him … to be freed, I collaborate with his freedom.

Availability, then, is a reciprocal relation through which each party is committed not only to treating the other as a free person, but to enabling and ‘collaborating with’ his freedom. This has an important implication. A person can only realize himself’ qua freedom’ as a participant in such reciprocal relations. For, outside of them, he is without ‘collaborators’ to ‘help him … to be freed’. This is what Marcel emphasizes when he writes that in contrast to the ‘captive soul’, the one which is available to others ‘knows that … its freedom … does not belong to itself.

With remarks like these, it is clear that Marcel is in the territory not only of Buber, but of Sartre who, we know, also states that a person’s freedom
‘depends entirely upon the freedom of others’.

Existentialism was conceived in the years preceding the Second World War, when the public became a They, a mass of “people chronically unavailable to each other”.

When folks get woke or red-pilled, they lose availability.

That is how I experience politics.

That is why I hate ideologies: They kill the souls of past, present and future friends and turn them into body-snatched aliens.

I, Thou, We

Ethics, Judaism, Love, Metaphysics

We is an immanent-transcendent hybrid.

In any We there is immanent I and transcendent Thou. Each participates in the We and collaboratively brings it to life.

Both individualism and collectivism misses part of the picture and in practice alienates self from other, or the self from self.

*

Most marriages are either two legally-joined selves who remain alienated from each other, or one self-alienated self wholly dedicated to another self. And most people believe these are the only two options. Love can’t happen where there is only fairness or altruism.

Consequently, many are wedded, but few are married.

*
It is a theological mistake to treat God as as a Thou. God is All, and therefore Thou — but not only Thou.

Distributed divinity

Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

My theology is one of distributed divinity.

Every person is a swarm of divine sparks of intuition seeking pluralistic unity in a self — I. Every self seeks pluralistic unity with other selves — We. And each We seeks ever greater scales of pluralistic unity — We expanding toward and beyond the bounds of universality.

This my understanding of the meaning of the “raising the sparks” at the heart of Kabbalah.

*

Distributed divinity is politically enacted through distributed judgment in all its various forms (liberal-democratic, economic, cultural, etc.)

*

Any group who aspires to centralize judgment around its own ideological convictions of what is true and just suffers from collective hubris.

*

I believe with the Greeks that tragedy is the fate of hubris.

I understand comedy and tragedy to be a matter of perspective.

Tragedy is hubris experienced from a first-person perspective (I or we).

Comedy is hubris witnessed from a third-person perspective (he, she or they).

Whether something feels playful and comic or serious and tragic has everything to do with whether it pertains to you as a first-person being or whether you detach yourself and view it from a third-person vantage.

*

Staying aloof, refusing to engage in the first-person, and viewing what others take seriously as comic — these are all ways to savor power and invulnerability.

This is why we mock enemies with a smile.

A smirk of this kind says “I don’t have to take you seriously”.

A punch in the face says “Yes you do.”

*

Revolutions are what happen when words stop working.

*

Especially right now, decent people must do their part to make words work.

To make words work, we must really listen to reason, which means seeking the validity of other views, not dismissing, condemning or mocking them.

We must seek persuasion, and settle for nothing less. We must approach others as equals, and try earnestly to persuade them, while remaining open to being persuaded ourselves. This is entirely different from convincing ourselves that we are right by making arguments that demonstrate to our own satisfaction the superiority of our own view. It is also different from polemically bludgeoning another person until they surrender just to make the bludgeoning end.

And when seeking to persuade, never forget that nobody is fooled by feigned listening. Forced politeness is never mistaken for real respect. If you can’t find it in yourself to respect the other, don’t talk to them, because it will make things immeasurably worse. The use of pretend listening and faked respect as rhetorical tools — liberal “dialoguing” of the Al Gore variety has insulted and alienated at least two generations of conservatives, and it must stop or progress will continue to reverse.

Reason only works when it is underwritten with authentic respect and equality.

*

If you can’t see how you can possibly be wrong — if you can’t understand how someone could believe what they do — if you cannot imagine changing you mind on on some moral matter — none of these are evidence of anything other than a personal incapacity — an incapacity that can be overcome through dialogue.

We never see how wrong we are — or how much more right we can be — until the very instant an epiphany hits and we suddenly and spontaneously conceive an insight that, just a moment before, was inconceivable.

*

Faith in dialogue has superseded my commitment to all other particular beliefs.

My Judaism is existential.

You are responsible

Ethics, Philosophy

We are responsible for our own irresponsibility, even if we refuse accept that responsibility.

*

If we do not choose our philosophy, a philosophy will choose us, and make us its host.

Perhaps that philosophy will tell us that we are socially determined, and that we are not responsible for how we are. But, for whatever reason, many such philosophies, hold others responsible. But these impersonal forces require us to act in certain ways… out of what? Justice…?

*

It is interesting how the very people who profess nihilism are the most horrified to be accused of immorality. They have no metaphysical support for morality, yet they take the “epiphenomenon” of guilt and shame far more seriously than those who give morality metaphysical significance.

It is hard not to suspect them of theoretical whistling in the dark — that they profess nihilism precisely because their belief in morality and their feelings of shame are too deeply felt and too undeniable — and acknowledging them as real and valid is too much to bear.

So the emotions are accepted as real but epiphenomenal, and the cause of the emotions is bracketed and shot into the noumenal vacuum.

Beliefs versus arguments

Ethics, Metaphysics, Star

Commonsense obliviousness, which can include philosophical commonsensical obliviousness, forgets how pervasive and ubiquitous metaphysical beliefs are.

Whenever we are not thinking phenomenologically — carefully bracketing the sources of our experiences (a very strenuous and unnatural effort!) — and instead take our experiences at face value as experiences of reality, we live metaphysically.

Humans are naturally (and second-naturally) metaphysical.

One of our most primordial, ordinary and important metaphysical beliefs the faith in the reality of past and future. To interpret our memories as records of a reality that has passed, or to understand our imagined anticipations as attempts to foresee a reality to come — both of these take the given present as a part of a larger transcendent reality.

The same goes for the reality of what we experience as phenomena — Kant’s noumena, and the reality of the space within which they extend, which stretches on into the distance beyond our vision, and according to modern commonsense, endlessly into space — these are also metaphysical beliefs. We naturally (and in the case of “infinite” space, second-naturally) go beyond the present givens and take these experiences as parts of a larger transcendent reality.

But our most important metaphysical beliefs concern the reality of other people — not as space-extensive noumena, but as fellow selves. If we take fellow selfhoods as a transcendent reality we begin to see our own selfhood as part of a larger transcendent reality of multiple selves.

And less obviously, our own selfhood is also a matter of metaphysical belief. The nature of this selfhood, and the possibilities of change in one’s selfhood (or even how we conceive selfhood) go far beyond the given present — far further, in fact, than the other metaphysical beliefs.

*

Of course, philosophers love playing the epoché game, bracketing this dimension or that, or all of them together in radical skepticism, or even total Humean solipsism.

But playing around with concepts and seeing what one can construct and argue is not at all the same as changing beliefs. We can affirm or deny assertions all day, and we can claim that we believe or doubt these assertions, but, fact is, whether anyone can prove it or not, these claims are truthful or untruthful reports on our real beliefs.

This line of thought always brings me to C. S. Peirce’s call to intellectual conscience: “We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

*

In the last couple of decades, and especially in the last year I’ve given a lot of thought to the distinction between those thoughts we think with, and the thoughts we merely think about.

The distinction I am making here might parallel that between beliefs and assertions.

How do we know the difference? One test is whether the truths asserted are consistent with truths performed. If one asserts a moral principle, does one act in accordance with the principle, and its full pragmatic consequences — or least hears and responds to appeals? Or does one find reasons to disregard the principle when it makes claims on oneself instead of others. Hypocrisy is a sign that one uses assertions that one does not really believe.

But belief goes beyond simple avoidance of hypocrisy.

I’ve been reading about Habermas, and he talks a lot about the performative truths inherent in discourse. The very act of engaging in discourse implies beliefs, and to deny them is a performative contradiction.

Habermas is a holdout for absolute morality, as something distinct from relative ethics. And his arguments seem to point to precisely my own beliefs on morality, as evidenced by what actually offends me and inspires my contempt — not only of others who offend against me, but also myself when I offend against others. My formulation would almost certainly bother Habermas, but here it is: Thou shalt be fully metaphysical. For me, I feel this belief most intensely with respect to other people, which is a Jewish attitude.

I cannot doubt in my heart that there is something contemptible about treating others as less real than oneself.

I believe that denying the full metaphysical reality of other selves is a betrayal of what we cannot doubt in our hearts is evil — and that any theories that support that effort is also evil. Conversely, any theory that intensifies our awareness that other beings are both real and other is, at least in that respect, good.

Another insight from Habermas has captured my attention is this: morality is not to be determined monologically, but rather dialogically.

And this might reveal another angle for unlocking the full value of the Electrum Rule: “Do to others only what you would have them do to you.” Wouldn’t we always have others involve us in decisions that impact our lives? The Electrum Rule is essentially dialogical, and it is this dialogical reciprocity that drives its non-linear development through degrees of prime.

*

If philosophy aims at changing our beliefs, and we authorize our intellectual consciences to serve as referee, this certainly does raise the stakes of philosophy — but it does it make philosophy less playful? — Only if by playful we really mean frivolous.

Serious players of any game despise frivolity.

Response to a design ethics interview

Design, Ethics, Politics

A friend of mine is interviewing designers on ethics in design. A couple of my team members participated. This sparked a guilt-wracked conversation that I thought he might find interesting. Here is what I told him:

For what it’s worth, as a consequence of your interviews with us, my team had a painful conversation about our personal culpability in class supremacy. We design consultants are hired, not only to increase revenue through better products and services, but also to “increase efficiencies”, or to “scale operations”, both of which are code for eliminate working-/service-class jobs. Good proclass employees as we are, we do our jobs with Eichmannian effectiveness.

We all make good livings helping our own class dominate through entrepreneurial and corporate initiatives that siphon more money into our own class while sinking those who get “disrupted” into ever-deepening poverty and despair.

If a real worker’s revolution were ever to happen, I think many of us might fail to recognize it, since we are so accustomed to situating ourselves on the side of justice and of historical heroism. The workers, themselves, I fear, might beg to differ.

We proclassers use environmental and identitarian social justice issues to distract from a large and very angry elephant in the room: The proclass — (the professional class operating under the dominant ideology we call “progressivism”) — is the single most oppressive group in this country — and in the world. This class has been bought by capitalism and serves its interests with near-perfect obedience, even while ritualistically and ineffectually badmouthing it.

Proclass privilege is a privilege none of us will ever voluntarily check because it is the root, but rarely named, source of our collective and individual power. If we check that privilege, we lose the privilege of calling all the shots on what is true, just, and good in our society. We will have to put our values on equal footing with those who see things differently — and that we will never do!

Truthfulness

Ethics, Philosophy

Habermas’s obsessive triading chimes with my own triad OCD. From Finlayson’s Very Short Introduction:

On Habermas’s account, modernization is a process comprising several related developments… First, there was a massive growth in knowledge, particularly in the natural sciences, from the 17th century onwards. Medieval science, an unreliable method of attributing supposedly explanatory properties to substances on the basis of piecemeal observations, was largely based on the authority of Aristotle. Gradually, this gave way to a more systematic approach that married precise techniques of measurement with mathematical theory formation, and a new method of formulating and testing predictive hypotheses. So successful did the new sciences turn out to be that their rise to prominence led (over several centuries and in combination with other factors) to the decline of the authority of the Aristotelian tradition, to the waning of the authority of the Church, and to their eventual replacement by the epistemic authority of natural science and reason. In its turn, Habermas contends (following Max Weber), this massive increase in technically useful knowledge led to the separating out of three distinct spheres of value.

It comes as no surprise that there turn out to be three distinct value spheres. For the differentiation of the value spheres takes place in the wake of the transfer of epistemic and practical authority from religious traditions to validity, and according to Habermas there are three distinct kinds of validity.

In turn, these three dimensions of validity correlate one to one with the three spheres of discourse: theoretical, moral, and aesthetic. … The view is that as religious world views collapse in the wake of rationalization, the problems this hands down are taken up and resolved within one of the three domains of knowledge: the natural sciences, morality/law, and the arts. Learning processes continue and knowledge deepens, but henceforth always within a single domain.

The consequences are twofold. Modernity brings about a vast increase in the amount and depth of specialized knowledge, but this knowledge becomes, in the same process, detached from its moorings in everyday life, and floats free from ‘the stream of tradition which naturally progresses in the hermeneutic of everyday life’… The gap between what we know, and how we live, widens.

So…

  • The validity claim to truth, which addresses the theoretical value sphere falls within the knowledge domain of science.
  • The validity claim to rightness, which addresses the moral-legal value sphere falls within the knowledge domain of morality and law.
  • The validity claim to truthfulness, which addresses the aesthetic-expressive value sphere falls within the knowledge domain of art.

Truthfulness belongs to the domain of art? That seems to strain art beyond its proper limits, but worse (if I’m getting this right) it neglects an element of experience Nietzsche emphasized and called intellectual conscience.

What do I understand truthfulness to be? It is taking seriously the question of what one really experiences as true — including what one really believes — and refusing to confuse belief with what one can successfully argue.

A person can state a scientifically-established fact, or make a sound legal argument, and see no flaws in the fact or the argument, yet, somehow, for mysterious reasons, remain unpersuaded.

Many technically-minded objective people are proud to disregard their subjective sense of persuadedness, and then valorize this act of self-suppression as submission to reason.

But to Nietzsche — and to me — this is spiritual self-mutilation, and what it amounts to is not submission to reason, but rather to explicit language. It is alienation from the wordless. Submission to explicit language cuts one off, not only from art or natural beauty, but from all direct intuition of reality, including, I’m afraid, the reality of other people.

For this reason an underdeveloped intellectual conscience weakens the moral conscience. One can be talked into all kinds of abhorrent bullshit if one thinks only with words.

*

What initially made me fall in love with my wife was that she made direct appeals to my intellectual conscience. I don’t think anyone had ever engaged me that way before she did, and it shocked me. She made me see that sometimes I was not expressing a genuine belief but rather logically explaining away what I believed at the core of my being.

Since then, I’ve realized that only people with functioning intellectual consciences can be taken seriously as philosophers. If you habitually ignore your intellectual conscience or have such a weak intellectual conscience that it doesn’t register, nothing will really be at stake in your conceptual talk — philosophy will just be a diversion, a momentary vacation from the everyday.

I want the everyday to change, to become more vital, vivid, valuable and charged with significance. For that to happen we must genuinely adopt new beliefs.