Category Archives: Philosophy

Luria-Latour

ANT, Judaism

The book I have been reading for the last thirty or so mornings has been Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. I am currently reading the chapter on Isaac Luria, and it is sparking insights and connections with other things I’ve read, in particular with Bruno Latour’s philosophy of irreductionism.

Before I start quoting passages, I confess that I am doing what I always do: connecting mystical intuition of beyondness with mundane experiences of alterity (otherness) — including the experience of scientific inquiry on its outer edges — that region Thomas Kuhn famously labeled “crisis”, the phase of inquiry where the material, the symbolic, the logical/mathematical, the sociological, the psychological, the factual and the intuitive domains we ordinarily keep carefully compartmentalized blend together and interact unnervingly and chaotically. Boundaries redraw themselves and the terrain itself shifts with the lines. Smooth, solid ground of certainty becomes turbulent water which threatens to swallow and drown. New kinds of reality leap out of nowhere, revealing the fact that nothingness was concealing very real realities which had been staring directly into our eyes as we stared through them at objects we preferred seeing because we knew how to know them.

But I’ll let you judge for yourself whether I am abusing mysticism by shoehorning mystical answers into philosophical (philosophy of science) questions. Rather than pick through Scholem’s scholarly exposition in an attempt to summarize it all, I will instead quote from the overview of Luria’s life from Daniel Matt’s Essential Kabbalah:

…Luria wrote hardly anything. When asked by one of his disciples why he did not compose a book, Luria is reported to have said: “It is impossible, because all things are interrelated. I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea burst its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul has received? How can I set it down in a book?” We know of Luria’s teachings from his disciples’ writings, especially those of Hayyim Vital.

Luria pondered the question of beginnings. How did the process of emanation start? If Ein Sof [Divine Infinite] pervaded all space, how was there room for anything other than God to come into being? Elaborating on earlier formulations, Luria taught that the first divine act was not emanation, but withdrawal. Ein Sof withdrew its presence “from itself to itself,” withdrawing in all directions away from one point at the center of its infinity, as it were, thereby creating a vacuum. This vacuum served as the site of creation. According to some versions of Luria’s teaching, the purpose of the withdrawal was cathartic: to make room for the elimination of harsh judgment from Ein Sof.

Into the vacuum Ein Sof emanated a ray of light, channeled through vessels. At first, everything went smoothly; but as the emanation proceeded, some of the vessels could not withstand the power of the light, and they shattered. Most of the light returned to its infinite source, but the rest fell as sparks, along with the shards of the vessels. Eventually, these sparks became trapped in material existence. The human task is to liberate, or raise, these sparks, to restore them to divinity. This process of tikkun (repair or mending) is accomplished through living a life of holiness. All human actions either promote or impede tikkun, thus hastening or delaying the arrival of the Messiah. In a sense, the Messiah is fashioned by our ethical and spiritual activity. Luria’s teaching resonates with one of Franz Kafka’s paradoxical sayings: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival.”

In particular I see a profound connecting between idea of divine sparks distributed throughout the world and the notion of forces and forms of resistance described in this gorgeous passage from Bruno Latour’s one purely philosophical work, Irreductions, included as an appendix to his sociological classic The Pasteurization of France.

…We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing? Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

This text follows one path, however bizarre the consequences and contrary to custom. What happens when nothing is reduced to anything else? What happens when we suspend our knowledge of what a force is? What happens when we do not know how their way of relating to one another is changing? What happens when we give up this burden, this passion, this indignation, this obsession, this flame, this fury, this dazzling aim, this excess, this insane desire to reduce everything?

When I view religion in this light, I start feeling incredibly pious and my theological doubts evaporate into panentheistic certainty, or at least a blessed doubt-failure.

Bodies and categories

Ethics, Politics

If an individual elects to be part of a political body, then that individual shares responsibility for those who act on behalf of that body. It is fair to hold people responsible for what their political bodies do.

But if you classify a person as belonging to some category of person, and on that basis hold that person responsible for the actions of others who (according to you) also belong to that category, you are committing a grave sin against liberalism.

The line between belonging to a political body and being assigned to a category is a blurry and crooked one. No simple formulas exist to sharpen it. The line is not traced along the boundaries explicit declarations of membership: people are often cagy or deluded about the political significance of their actions. But neither are the lines those gridded out by ideology: every theorist has his correct schema.

The lines must be surveyed case by case through dialogue between the disputants.

Jewish red thread

Ethics, Judaism

A part of my autobiography that I had to compress into two lines was my experience with Jewish thinkers. Judaism only became a serious interest for me following my very strange experience of intensive study of Nietzsche starting in 2002 and extending to around 2006. During this time under Nietzsche’s influence I excavated the assumptions at the foundation of my understanding of the world.

Nietzsche was absolutely insightful on many points, but rarely as right as his here: If you want to get at the assumptions that matter, the most important thing to dig up is the ground beneath the warning signs that say “Do not dig here.” Those signs mark the pay dirt of self-transformation — at least if you begin with morality. (I believe this qualification is another insight of equal value to the first. Questioning values you do not actually hold — values which you have not internalized, that you do not live and that are not the the stand-point and vanishing-point of your perspective — is lazy nihilism or cynicism and it will do nothing or worse.)

From the Preface of Daybreak.

At that time I undertook something not everyone may undertake: I descended into the depths, I tunneled into the foundations, I commenced an investigation and digging out of an ancient faith, one upon which we philosophers have for a couple of millennia been accustomed to build as if upon the firmest of all foundations — and have continued to do so even though every building hitherto erected on them has fallen down: I commenced to undermine our faith in morality.

Hitherto, the subject reflected on least adequately has been good and evil: it was too dangerous a subject. Conscience, reputation, Hell, sometimes even the police have permitted and continue to permit no impartiality; in the presence of morality, as in the face of any authority, one is not allowed to think, far less to express an opinion: here one has to — obey! As long as the world has existed no authority has yet been willing to let itself become the object of criticism; and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality as a problem, as problematic: what? has that not been — is that not — immoral? — But morality does not merely have at its command every kind of means of frightening off critical hands and torture-instruments: its security reposes far more in a certain art of enchantment it has at its disposal — it knows how to ‘inspire’.

But despite what so many people say about Nietzsche, his goal is not at all to live an amoral and unprincipled existence. It is to reform one’s own relationship with morality. I believe his purpose is to re-establish one’s own values on realities that are less speculative and vastly more immediate, motivating and durable.

Nietzsche did a bang-up job with the demolition and ground clearing of my worldview. But it was a chain of Jewish thinkers who help me piece my soul back together, and to reassemble it toward a reality not confined to my own mind. And that realism most of all included the belief in the sacred reality of other minds.

Somewhere I made a list of the names of the Jewish thinkers who helped me, and I plan to expound on each, but for now I will just list some of them.

I was especially interested in the fact that whether the thinkers were religious or secular there was a distinct commonality among them, and I felt that this commonality connected with me in a vitally important way. It might have been an inheritance from lost Jewish ancestors, or maybe it was transmitted to me via Christianity, but the total experience of reading these thinkers made me want to enter and participate in the Jewish tradition.

Overcoming ressentiment

Ethics, Politics

I’ve been thinking a lot about ressentiment lately. It saturates the news, art, conversations, nearly everything. Or so my eyes tell me.

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What is ressentiment? It is not as some (including me) an exact synonym of resentment, but a distinct flavor of resentment. I had been blurring them into synonymity, but the differences are important enough that I intend to start using the terms more precisely. According to Wikipedia,

Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one’s own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

So my understanding is that ressentiment blames others not only for specific grievances but for one’s own existential state — how one is and how one habitually feels about life. I view it as both analogous and connected to Heidegger’s beautiful distinction between fear and angst. Fear has an object. Angst might seem to have an object, but in fact angst belongs to the subject. Remove the object of fear and the fear dissipates. Remove the object of angst and the angst must find another object. Resentments can be resolved by addressing the object of resentment. Ressentiment is insatiable.

The Dhammapada gets this right:

The hatred of those who harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is never appeased.

The hatred of those who do not harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is easily pacified.

Through hatred, hatreds are never appeased; through non-hatred are hatreds always appeased — and this is a law eternal.

Most people never realize that all of us here shall one day perish. But those who do realize that truth settle their quarrels peacefully. (I included this last stanza for the Heideggerians.)

Another problem: Ressentiment generates an aggressive ugliness that radiates and discolors everything and everyone around it. Sadly this ugliness is not confined to the eye of the beholder, but somehow reflects into the eyes of those beheld, which leads directly to the next point.

Ressentiment is counterproductive. The objects (the alleged causes) of ressentiment are only agitated and energized when approached with ressentiment. Resentment breeds resentment, and the infection spreads and intensifies. In combatting ressentiment it is necessary to cultivate lightness, cheer and buoyancy, and to resist succumbing to ressentiment’s natural darkness, dourness and deadweight. (Does this smell like Nietzsche to you? That is because it is Nietzsche. It is the cornerstone of his moral vision.)

All this should make it clear why I’ve recommitted to rooting out ressentiment in my own soul. Unfortunately, I have accumulated a great deal of it over the last decade. It will take some work to clean myself out. One key element of this effort has been to limit my exposure to other people’s ressentiment, especially those two antithetical ressentiment philosophies which have seemed into the mainstream from the fringes, and which have become the substance of popular politics. Staying away from social media has helped a lot.

Shells and pearls

Chord, Fables, myths & parables, Ideas, Judaism, Philosophy

This is a series of rewritten, streamlined posts on the theme of shells and pearls, which I’m considering incorporating into my pamphlet. I’ll link to the originals. If you have time to compare, let me know if you think anything was lost in the chipping, sanding and polishing.

Evert

Announcing an exciting new vocabulary acquisition: evert. I have needed this word many times, but I’ve had to resort to flipping, reversing, inverting, turning things inside-out.

Evert – verb [ with obj. ] – Turn (a structure or organ) outward or inside out: (as adj. everted) : the characteristic facial appearance of full, often everted lips. DERIVATIVES:
eversible (adj.),  eversion (n.). ORIGIN mid 16th cent. (in the sense ‘upset, overthrow’): from Latin evertere, from e- (variant of ex-) ‘out’ + vertere ‘to turn.’

With this wonderful new word I can say things like this:

“An oyster coats the ocean with an inner-shell made of mother-of-pearl lined. Anything from the outside that gets inside is coated, too. A pearl is an everted oyster shell, and an everted pearl is a shell’s inner lining. Outside the shell is ocean, inside the pearl is ocean. Between inner-shell and outer-pearl is delicate oyster-flesh, which ceaselessly coats everything it is not with mother-of-pearl. It is as if this flesh cannot stand anything that does not have a smooth, continuous and lustrous surface. We could call the flesh’s Other — that which requires coating — father-of-pearl.”

Irridescent Irritants

Minds secrete knowing like mother-of-pearl, coating irritant reality with lustrous likeness.

Nacre

You are absurd. You defy comprehension.

That is, you defy my way of understanding. I cannot continue to understand my world as I understand it and understand you.

That is, you do not fit inside my soul.

I am faced with the most fundamental moral choice: Do I break open my soul? or do I bury you in mother-of-pearl?

Father-of-Pearl

(A meditation on Levinas’s use of the term “exception” in Otherwise Than Being.)

We make category mistakes when attempting to understand metaphysics, conceiving what must be exceived.

Positive metaphysics are objectionable, in the most etymologically literal way, when they try to conceptualize what can only be exceptualized, to objectify that to which we are subject, to comprehend what comprehends — in order to achieve certainty about what is radically surprising.

In my own religious life, this category mistake is made tacitly at the practical and moral level, and then, consequentially, explicitly and consciously. Just as the retinas of our eyes see things upside-down, our mind’s eye sees things inside-out. We naturally confuse insidedness and outsidedness. By this view, human nature is less perverse than it is everse.

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Imagine, with as much topological precision as you can muster, expulsion from Eden as belonging-at-home flipped inside-out.

That galut in the pit of your gut: everted Eden?

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A garden is an everted fruit, and a fruit, an everted garden.

The nacre inner lining of a shell is an everted pearl, and a pearl, an everted nacre lining.

The exception is the everted conception, and the conception, the everted exception.

The earliest mention of pearls from this blog was posted on December 14, 2008.

Nacre

Pearls are inside-out oyster shells. Or are oyster shells inside-out pearls?

The oyster coats its world with layers of iridescent calcium. With the same substance it protects itself from the dangers concaving in from the outside and the irritants convexing it from the inside.

The earliest use of this mother-of-pearl metaphor I can find in my stuff was posted on another blog platform in December, 2006. (Again this has been edited. In my opinion, the original was uglier and more opaque. I’ll post it in the comments.)

Transcendence, non-understandings, misunderstandings

An unresolved understanding becomes a live question — an existential irritant. To ease the pain of non-understanding, the question is coated with an answer, like a pearl. Such answers re-explain away ideas which were never offered as explanations. What ought to be known internally and poetically is known about externally and factually.

Any surprise that the mezuzah I placed on the doorpost of my library is encased in mother-of-pearl?

Hanging the mezuzah inspired me to clean up my office! It’s nice to be in here, again.

 

Summarizing my philosophy

Philosophy

I have never really made an attempt to summarize my own philosophy.

Mostly I just describe and explain the world from the standpoint of that philosophy. This is no accident. It actually connects to a central principle of my philosophy: My philosophy denies that philosophies can be described directly. Certainly philosophies have content, but the essence of a philosophy is practice. In philosophy (or at least the kinds of philosophy I favor) the content serves as a medium for practice.

For this reason, philosophies ought to be viewed primarily as demonstrations of alternative ways of thinking. A person who wishes to understand follows a thought, not only in order to grasp the factual content of that thought, but in order to learn how this kind of thinking is done. This is analogous to how a person might pick up a tune or join into a dance without explicitly thinking, memorizing and self-instructing. Of course, different people with different talents find intuitive participation easy with some types of activity and difficult with others, and this is true for intellectual subjects.

So in philosophy, comprehending the content of the philosophy is the goal of the work but not its purpose. The purpose is to learn how to do a particular kind of comprehension — a philosophical motion — so that kind of comprehension can be applied to similar problems. (This is why when scholars argue over what a philosopher really thought on this or that topic, it seems like what they are doing is only tangentially related to philosophy. And this is why I steer people away from reading surveys of philosophy. Such surveys tend to focus on the content of the thinking but omit the practices.)

I am going to go ahead post this as a possible first installment in an attempt to communicate my philosophy. More to come.

 

Crests (repost)

Philosophy

Years ago my sister and I were swimming in the ocean as a storm was coming in. The waves were huge and powerful. It was nearly impossible to move from the shallows where broken waves grappled in churning knots, out further to where the waves dropped one another in perpetual quarter-ton suplexes, and further still to where we wanted to be: the place where the curls were forming. Out there the waves were still simple, and their univocal thrust could lift us and carry us back over the violence and set us on shore. But the closer we got to the break line, the harder it was to stand upright and progress. We would get knocked off our feet and thrown to the bottom, and tumbled back into the foamy mud, our mouths and noses full of dirt and our bellies scored by shell fragments.

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Where the water is deeper, it is more impersonal and disciplined; waves move through the ocean and the ocean feels the movement running through it. Each quart of water makes a patient circle like a rider on a ferris wheel, returning again and again to where it began.

But once the force of the wave hits resistance, everything gets personal. The water at the bottom is smashed into the sand; the water in the middle loses its balance and begins to topple; the water at the top is overthrown and falls on its face. Volumes of water compete to be the wave, to have the wave’s momentum. Every eddy strives to pull the rest of the ocean in its wake. A foaming brood of rivers coil, constrict, crush and swallow each other endlessly.

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Somewhere between the calm power of the depths and the ambitions of the shallows, where the waves touch bottom with the tips of their toes, there is motion that can move us through or over the dirty spasms of everyday conflict to bring order where there are too many orders. But to get there we must wade, fight, get slammed, sliced up and set back by the very waves we hope to ride in.

Realism

Philosophy

For stylistic reasons I am considering adopting the term “realist” instead of “transcendent”.  I mean the same thing by both words, though: they both refer to being that exists independently of our minds and therefore has the capacity to shock our expectations and our logic. Only active and receptive engagement — experiment — permits us relationship with this kind of being (as opposed to relationships with our own ideas of things, which is relationship between parts of our selves).

But concepts that refer to such relationships tend to degrade into ones that lend themselves to mental reduction.

Transcendence distorts toward arbitrary magic, but realism distorts toward rule-governed matter-of-factness. Real transcendence is between the two — approximate order with unpredictable interludes of inexplicability. When it comes to this kind of subject of thought, words empty faster than they can be made up.

Latour’s transcendences

Philosophy

I’ve been writing my own thematic index of Latour’s latest magnum opus (the 4th of his career, by my count), An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (or AIME). One of the most interesting of these themes is Transcendence. 

Latour repeatedly points out a distinction between “mini-transcendences” that occur across all continuities and “maxi-transcendences” that stand unified above or behind reality, causing and unifying all things. For Latour, any unity is the hard-won result of numerous mini-transcendences, not the cause of some hidden, pre-existent, transcendent force orchestrating from another plane of being.

By making this distinction, and then expounding it by distinguishing fifteen different kinds of mini-transcendence, each with its own kind of trajectory and way of leaping (and many with their own version of maxi-transcendent, space-filling ghostly entity that usurps the role of causer and unifier), Latour is helping me sharpen and refine my own religious understanding, which sees the best ascetic denial in renunciation of big billowy grand gods, to better embrace the infinite God who approaches us in much smaller, less glamorous and more challenging ways every minute of the day. 

Equalities

Philosophy, Politics

It seems true to me that the kind of equality that matters most is legal equality — equality before the law. 

To secure full, enduring equality before the law it is necessary that some degree of social equality be maintained. Severe social inequality will lead to unjust legislation and distorted law enforcement. This principle is demonstrated dramatically in America’s “war on drugs“. 

 But I so not see legal equality as a means to acheive actual social equality. At most it is a means to potential social equality — rough (and no more than rough) equality of opportunity. It is social equality that is the means to the end of equality before the law. This priority makes me hostile to any distinctions between categories of citizen in policy.

(Just to confuse things more,  legal and social equality are different from political equality. Political equality is equality in ability to influence our collective actions, including our ability to move toward greater legal and/or social equality. Political equality also depends on social equality and preserving the right of citizens to organize in ways other than economic or governmental. Unions and public assemblies are vital to preserving or correcting the other kinds of equality. )

I think the stance I just outlined is basically conservative, but my concerns about social inequality interfering with legal (and political) equality pushes me past the middle point, into left-leaning regions of the political spectrum. At least, that is what I think. 

Change

Philosophy

It is no accident and it is not mere convention that with thinking we say “I changed my mind” and with action we say “I changed my ways” but with morality we say “I had a change of heart.” Some things we do; other things are done to us. But what is done to us — what or who does this doing? Your response to this question indicates what might change if you were to have a change of heart. 

Just thinking

Philosophy

Everybody who thinks thinks by way of a philosophy.

Few of us attempt to understand the philosophy that produces our idea of the world and every idea about the world — the interlocking of whole and parts. Few introspect. 

Even fewer actively modify our own philosophies to see how our experience of the world changes when our philosophies — our root philosophies — our idea-producing ideas — change. Few change their worldview. 
And fewer yet modify our own philosophies and try to practice what we’ve made, and how practice and experience lock together into a reinforcing circle or spiral. Now our idea-producing ideas produce new actions, which produce new results, new data, new ideas to make sense of the data, deep and surprising responses to what transpires. A new experience of life. Few change their lifeworld.

A change of mind, a change of ways, a change of heart. 

This is what is at stake in philosophy.

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Some people have little idea how philosophy as I describe it could be done, so they do not attempt it. The notion to try doesn’t occur in the first place, or it seems impossible so it is not attempted. This is for the best, most of the time. 

Some do attempt it by reversing themselves on key opinion. They change sides from pro to con or con to pro, and now think the opposite of what they used to think. According to their philosophy — which was never touched and remains intact — they are converted.

But everyone does have a philosophy, and the less they realize it, the more they are dominated by it. 

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Is it an absurdity that the United States of America a nation founded by philosophers, whose foundation is a philosophy, has a powerful tradition of anti-intellectualism? 

Or is it a necessity?

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Even people who philosophize do their philosophizing with a philosophy, dominated by that philosophy. Philosophies behind philosophies behind philosophies — an inexhaustible regression. 

Why do it?

Procrustean skull

Judaism, Philosophy

People who hate the infinitude of reality have procrustean skulls. What refuses to fit inside the mind is chopped to fit or pulverized and poured in. (Transcendence is an experience — an intuition  of otherness or beyondness they’ll tell you.) …Or exiled and attacked as an enemy, because you can have your enemy …Or exiled and worshipped, because you can have your religion, and your object of worship, too …Or dominated and trained to stay curled up tight in a brain-sized ball …Or failing these: annihilated.

Look where the violence is directed, and there you will find God. Look into the origin of the violence and there you will find the mind who needs to be the know-all, be-all and, if necessary, end-all.

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.
— Milton

Machloket

Judaism, Philosophy

Since last Saturday I’ve been obsessing on the concept of machloket, “sacred arguing”. I haven’t been this happy since I learned the word “agonism”.

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I hoard ideas. This is the root of my terrible book problem. Many of the books I’ve collected are really just husks for a single gorgeous statement. Certain ideas make me so desperately happy that I try to anchor them to this world in every way I know how. I buy books that properly express and enshrine the idea and then I put the book in its place in my library. I scan passages (and often entire books) into my wiki, cross-referencing, thematizing and weaving them into the rest of the electronic fabric I use to augment my brain, which is inadequate for my purposes. I write about these ideas, sketch diagrams of their structures, and honor them with geometry and typesetting. I buy up domains. I know I do not and can not possess them, but I try anyway.

I just had to stock up on machloket books.

Newish political model, v.3

Philosophy

This is a rambling mess, but I wanted to get the idea out… it probably should have gone into a private diary, but if you saw my traffic stats you’d understand that this blog pretty much is a private diary.

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Inspired by feedback I have received, by recent events and by books I’ve read on the varieties of authoritarianism, I have been rethinking my old “newish political model” with new simpler language and with the addition of a third dimension.

In my new model, the dimensions are liberty, equality and fraternity — three of the four active ingredients of the famous battle-cry of the French Revolution, minus the last “or death” which was wisely dropped after the Reign of Terror.

This framework is rooted in the same Enlightenment values from which the American and French revolution grew, and makes no pretense of neutrality. But it has learned something from history about revolutionary extremism (even/especially extremism in service of liberal values) and has found guidance in the two sayings inscribed at Apollo’s temple at Delphi. “Know thyself” (because are all susceptible to self-privileging, especially when we appoint ourselves the enlightened dismantlers of it!) and “Everything in moderation” (which include even our own values!)

These values structure a political agenda, and despite the agenda’s principled modesty, it is not lukewarm. It is uncompromisingly moderate, because these values can only co-exist and co-flourish in moderation.

This framework is offered as a tool — an ideological lens — for seeing the world in a centrist liberal-democratic way. Someday maybe it will be a partisan tool for an as-yet unformed party who represents citizens holding a political position that has not yet found articulation or self-awareness.

As a partisan tool, it is not meant to do justice to all possible political positions. It is meant to strategically build bridges between previously separated positions, to drive wedges between previously allied positions that no longer share the most important values, and to encourage new alliances which have been obscured by how we define our current political positions, framed by the libertarian-biased and suddenly profoundly obsolete Political Compass model. (Seriously, where would you plot Bannon on the Political Compass? Or that other nazi wannabe guy who’s always prancing around with his Weimar hairdos, Roman salutes and “sly” Goebbels references? Authoritarian Left? Come on.)

The purpose of this model is to rally centrists committed to liberty and justice for all against those committed to liberty and justice for few at the expense of all others. Anyone in the latter category should definitely object to this conspicuous biases of this model. It does not do them justice, because it is not meant to, because I’m not interested in extending justice to illegitimate positions. It is meant to drive illiberals back into the margins, and, if possible all the way back into their moms’ basements.

I don’t know how to draw this, yet. For now I will describe the three axes that define the conceptual space within which political positions are situated.

As this is a highly-biased Centrist model, the extremes of each axis is cast as either  +) untenable or -) evil. The 0) point is defined as the most desirable point sought between the extremes.

Liberty (individual autonomy): freedom of individuals versus authority of collectivities. Who determines how an individual is to think, feel and act?

+) an individual alone determines individual being;

-) the collectivity determines individual being;

0) at the center an individual determines individual being within reasonable limits set by a collectivity.

What kinds of collectivity are we talking about? According to this model any group capable of imposing its will on an individual is considered a collectivity capable of curtailing individual liberty. This differs from Political Compass, which views liberty as curtailed primarily by the federal government.

And what are reasonable limits? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

Equality (power distribution): desirability of equality versus desirability of rank. How much disparity of power among individuals is acceptable and ideal?

+) each individual is given the same power and resources as every other;

-) each individual is given different amounts of power and resources according to rank;

0) at the center every individual is guaranteed a fair opportunity to acquire power and resources.

What kinds of rank are we talking about? According to this model every value system ranks differently and imposes rank according to its own logic. Societies can rank-stratify by family, class, wealth, race, education, talent, temperament, party membership — anything to which the word “deserve” can be applied. This differs from Political Compass, which casts equality issues in terms of government regulation.

And what is fair? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

Fraternity (scope of obligation): universalist/globalist obligation versus tribalism/nationalism obligation.
+) in-groups and out-groups are abolished and moral obligation is extended to all of humanity (or even all living beings);

-) in-group membership is sharply defined and moral obligation is confined to the in-group;

0) at the center in-groups and out-groups are defined and moral obligations exist for each but in differing degrees.

How are in-groups and out-groups defined? According to this model in-groups self-define according to whatever criteria seems most relevant to the group. Examples of in-group determinants include place of origin, place of residence, citizenship, race, class, religion, ideology, party-membership. Political Compass does not consider the dimension of fraternity, because fraternity is largely invisible unless one is denied obligation due to out-group status.

And what are the in- and out-groups, and what is our degree of obligation to them? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

50 words for snow

Philosophy

For the last several months I’ve been reading Hannah Arendt’s epic The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is a three part work that begins with histories of both antisemitism and imperialism, which set the stage for her analysis of the phenomenon of totalitarianism.

It has taken me a couple of months to get to the third part. (I actually started the book mainly for the first. Long story.) What stands out most is how nuanced Arendt’s vocabulary is around tyrannical forms of government. For her, totalitarianism is different from dictatorship, despotism, right-wing authoritarianism, and others I havent bothered inventorying (yet). I feel like an Ecuadorian learning the 50 Eskimo words for snow.

It has made me realize that we Americans are so anxious about our freedom that we “other” all illiberal forms of government into a giant miscellaneous category of unfree political orders which we label with more or less synonymous pejoratives, all of which threaten us with a variety of terrifying impressionistic possibilities drawn from books, movies and History Channel specials. Most of us have vague (and, I am realizing mythologically deformed) understandings of how these various forms of government look (even from the outside, much less from within!), how they emerge and develop, or what specific factors and conditions support their rise or suppression. Nor do we understand the psychology of the various types of actors who collaborate and clash in these situations.

Yet, somehow — everyone thinks they do already know, at least in outline. Nobody can be told anything that runs counter to their gut sense of reality. Everybody is busy, needs to keep their heads down, needs to tend to their own lives… I’m learning from Arendt that this is part of the phenomenon.