There’s a lot of painful lessons about love in this passage from Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. I used to want my daughters to read it, but really this is for the boys. The last conversation between Cosimo and Viola is excruciating.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Ditto
Serres: “Whether royal or imperial, whoever wields power, in fact, never encounters in space anything other than obedience to his power, thus his law: power does not move. When it does, it strides on a red carpet. Thus reason never discovers, beneath its feet, anything but its own rule.”
I’ve tried to make this point several times when observing the phenomenon of the elevator pitch.
Today’s power is busy, and it expresses itself as intense impatience: “Say it so I get it instantly and effortlessly, or don’t say it.” This constraint constrains all communication to repetition of the already-known; a reference to a thought already had; a ditto; flattery.
(Ditto. Irony detected and left intact.)
“I don’t know my way about”
For expertise the unknown means “I still haven’t figured out the answer to this problem.” Expertise lacks the answer, but what the question is and how it will produce an answer is not in question.
For philosophy the unknown means “I still haven’t figured out how to think about this problem.” Philosophy lacks not only an answer, but the way to ask and answer a possible question. How to ask and answer and what the answer is are found together.
Wittgenstein’s formulation is elegant: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.”
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Any explorer in a new land will not know his way about. His skill is not in already knowing the landscape. His skill is navigating unmapped territory and finding his way about. He will emerge with a map. He will not try to draw it before he has explored it.
We should be suspicious of any explorer who claims to already have a map and to know his way around unexplored territory. Either he’s taking you somewhere that has already been settled, or he doesn’t know his way about “I don’t know my way about” and is likely to get you lost in the wilderness.
Innovation needs philosophy.
What is reason?
Reason is willingness to submit to trial by experiment.
Unreason believes reason is logical derivation of truth from principles.
Cast scotoma
Hermes casts a scotoma instead of a shadow, and wherever the scotoma falls, the ground looks exactly like it should: a human-shaped pool of blindness shimmering with perfection.
Protected: Aphorisms on blindness
Grammatical alchemy
Let’s not have a face-to-face conversation this time. That’s what kids do. They gaze at one another, each a potential mating object for the other, seeing, being seen and being seen seeing.
Instead let’s have a face-face-to-object conversation. Let’s do science together. That’s the only way to get to know one another intimately, as subjects.
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Each individual I runs a circuit through the world of things on its way to becoming a We.
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Grammatical alchemy: First person singular becomes first person plural by way of third person, and in the process second person singular is transmuted from third person to first.
Saulinism?
I was talking with a good friend of mine last night about “organized” atheism and why we both distance ourselves from it.
For me, the problem with atheism does not lie in the incorrectness of the belief it professes. If you were to make a list of the average atheist’s professed disbeliefs, my list of disbeliefs would match it, check for check. I am especially in agreement with atheists in their disgust with the Fundamentalist “God”. On my list that box is checked twice and starred.
Where I find atheists lacking is in their philosophical complacency. The atheist’s checklist of disbeliefs is too short, and it doesn’t grow. That’s fine if the question of God’s existence bores you and you have other things to think about. That is just a non-theism: non-concern for the question. I also respect anti-Fundamentalism, though I question the choice of philosophy as weapon in that battle.
But what about these “militant” atheists who furiously check and re-check the same three boxes? I believe they actually help Fundamentalists by treating the Fundamentalist theology as the last word on faith, when it is not even the first. Fundamentalism is not religion taken to an extreme, it is failure of religion to begin.
Here is what I’d like to convey to the tiny handful of urgent truly philosophical atheists: There is no single belief in God, and so there cannot be a single disbelief in God.
Being an atheist is necessarily harder than being a theist, because you must understand a belief before you can refute it. To do the job right, an atheist must not only able to enter the belief (or at least its conceptual space) in order to understand it. This “entry” is the nature of authentic theisms, and if you do not know what I am talking about, you have some basic learning to do before you can get going. Then the atheist must find the way back out this belief. Finally, he must be able to draw a map of that path from entrance to exit. This atheism is difficult and respectable.
Here is an outline of an atheism I could respect: this atheism would industriously hunt down every existing conception of God in order to understand and destroy it. Once it destroyed every existing conception it would then turn its attention to anticipating every future conception, in order to prevent its birth if not its conception.
Let’s give this atheistic discipline a name: Saulinism.
But do remember: it is easier to get in than to get out — especially once you know the difference between in and out.
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P.S. Or make it pretty.
Briefs and the politics of creativity
Creative briefs come in every shape and size. Some are brief statements on a single sheet of paper, while others fill a briefcase.
They also reflect drastically different philosophies of creativity and the politics of creation.
If I were going to classify them — and you know that is exactly what I’m going to do — I’d put them in two categories:
- Briefs that specify, by sketching out a creative answer to be fully fleshed out by the team.
- Briefs that problematize, by sketching out a productive question to be answered by the team.
I won’t pretend I don’t have a very strong personal preference, but I admit that both approaches when applied well with the right team can produce great results.
Introversion and extraversion strategies
I very nearly re-wrote a post I already wrote in 2010, drawing out a chord from two passages from Nietzsche and Buber, both distinguishing between dialogue that takes place between individuals and discussion that takes place among members of a group — what Buber called interhuman versus social phenomena.
The reason I was going to write it was to jot down my intention to express these ideas as venn diagrams. A sketch:
Each individual has a certain set of personal things they can/will discuss. Two individuals are likely to have some amount of overlap. But with each additional individual the overlap diminishes.
But each individual also has a larger set of things they can be expected to be able to discuss — a more public or social mode of discussion. This set is a combination of very accessible topics, which approach pure sensory fact (the weather, for instance) and convention: the manners we have all been taught, the attitudes to which we are expected to adhere, the shared values we all are expected to uphold. The more people present, the more the conversation will have to follow the public mode.
I think introversion and extraversion has less to do with numbers of people than with what kind of interaction is more or less likely to happen as people are added or subtracted. So, as Buber noted, two individuals can be alone but still interact in a public or extraverted mode. And three or four introverts with similar interests can still interact in an introverted mode.
When introverts get finicky over chemistry of groups, I suspect it an attempt to preserve a possibility of introversion. Likewise, extraverts will often invite a wide range of people into a situation in order to make boring introverted conversation less possible. And some introverts will do the same thing, to get relief from themselves, temporarily or permanently. Conversely, extraverts will sometimes enlist introverts to help them excavate their privacy.
Now that I’ve written this out, it is very unlikely I will draw the idea.
Speckled time
When we lay on our backs and look up into the night sky, vast distances and time are laid out flat on a firmament. Flat here, flat now: like everything.
Points, lines, planes, volumes…
Between the extremes of black and white are shades of gray. Beyond the monochromatic gradient are colors.
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Between the continuum that spans individualism and collectivism are degrees of egoism and selflessness.
Dignity of rebellion
Rebellion seems to be losing its good conscience. It is palpably less socially acceptable to be socially unacceptable than it was a decade or two decades ago. With each passing year breaking taboos becomes more taboo. No wonder we require so much tolerance and permissiveness.
Excavation
Many people believe humankind once possessed truth and then lost it, and so they now look for it in ancient sources. When that truth is found it will be this: the truth made by each future for its future.
Peculiar universality
There is nothing more idiosyncratic than an individual burning with the need to develop a comprehensive and universal understanding of existence. But these freakish craftsmen are the manufacturers of common sense and it is by their products that you and your people make sense of the world.
A tragic flaw
The less completely we understand it, the more completely we want to control it.
Ontological work ethic
Next time you are tempted to question the reality of some being with the question “does it exist?” or “is it real?” instead ask: “How might this entity in question exist? — and given this possible way existing how do we test its actuality?”
This is the kernel of the ontological work ethic.
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Disbelief is just as hard as belief if one has an ontological work ethic. There are so many possible modes of existence one must eliminate before one can declare nonexistence of some thing. And to declare something nonsensical is in some ways even harder.
It is so much easier to begin with limited ontological repertoire — a set of templates — and to check any reality candidate’s qualification against the most approximate template: “If it is not real, it is, by definition, imaginary.”
It is so easier to start with simple criteria for what might be considered true, and refuse to even consider any truth that fails to satisfy these criteria: “If it is not true, it is, by definition, false.”
And of course, it is so much easier to question a person’s character than to question the things a person says. When facing a stranger’s strange claim, we prefer to examine the stranger’s head or history than examine his strange claim.
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Real and actual are not synonyms.
Actuality is immanent. Reality is a metaphysical speculation derived from actuality: actuality’s transcendent cause.
I am tempted to try to find terms to correspond with each of my metaphysical axes.
Cosmos, time, awareness :: Real, actual… authentic? genuine? true? faithful?
Latour on false religion
Finally, someone says it: Fundamentalism is not “religion gone too far”, but the betrayal of religion.
Until now, I’ve been arguing against characterizing Fundamentalism as “extremist” forms of various religions (for instance, Christianity taken to extremes of strictness and intensity becomes Fundamentalist), but in fact a single religion with denominations defined by which host religion the fundamentalism has infested and perverted (so Islamic Fundamentalism is the same religion as Christian Fundamentalism, but outfitted with different forms) — but perhaps even affording Fundamentalism the status of a religion might be giving it too much credit.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to characterize Fundamentalism as a pathologically inadequate and blasphemous modernist philosophy assembled from words stolen from religion.
Fundamentalism is what results when a thoroughgoing modernist willfully assigns truth to religious texts and traditions that are entirely incomprehensible from the modernist perspective. Instead of allowing the truth(s) of a text to be revealed to the reader as transfiguring insights, the text (a mass of words) itself is taken as the revealed thing, and faithfulness to this revelation is understood to mean adhering to the first interpretation (the “self-evident” meaning) arrived at by a mind trapped inside modernism. Of course, the consequent absurdities resulting from this ludicrous method makes sincere belief — that which we cannot help but take for true — impossible. This is where “faith” enters the stage: all opinions on what is to be regarded as true or false is labored out by the mechanics of explicit ideology, and the output (the Belief) is prioritized over the spontaneous beliefs that arise from reflective lived experience.
Anyway, here’s Latour’s take:
…This phenomenon [of religion] is not defined by an original type of subsistence, of risk, but, on the contrary, by an often desperate quest for substance, guarantees, some substratum. For those who use the term “religion” are really appealing to another world! And this is exactly the opposite of what we are trying to identify. There is no other world — but there are worlds differently altered by each mode. The fact that people speak tremulously of “respecting transcendence” hardly encourages the ethnologist to take this phenomenon seriously, since she sees quite clearly here the wrong TRANSCENDENCE, the one that has IMMANENCE as its opposite rather than its synonym. What is so disagreeable in the appeal to the “supernatural” is that the “natural” is accepted in the same breath. And if someone speaks, in hushed tones, of “spirituality,” we are warned that a peculiar idea of “materiality” has just been swallowed whole. Why should our investigator be concerned with those who raise their eyes toward Heaven to speak ill of the things of the Earth, of “rampant materialism,” of “humanism”: what do they know about matter, reason, the human?
What passes for religion today can offer only a particularly discouraging avatar of the quest for immobility, for the incontrovertible, the supreme, the ideal. Some have gone so far as to take religion as a quest for the absolute, and even as a nostalgic portal to the beyond! Religion turned into a “rampart against relativism” and a “supplement of soul” against the “secularization” and the “materialism” of “the world here below”! No targeting mistake is more spectacular than this one. Really?! All those treasures of intelligence and piety only to end up with this? Thousands of years of uninterrupted translations, continual variations, prodigious innovations, to end in a quest for foundations? How can anyone be so mistaken as to worship these false gods?Even if she steps completely out of her role, the indignant investigator no longer even dares to call such a perversion a category mistake. “Heresy” would be a euphemism; should she speak of category horror? How puerile they seem to her, the ancient confusions between Yahweh and Baal or Moloch! The idolators would never have dared confuse their God with an undistorted transport, an immobile motor, an uncreated substance, a foundation: at least they knew that one could not institute Him without a path of alterations, interpretations, mediations. Fetishism is only a peccadillo alongside the idolatry in question here: the replacement of the religious by its exact opposite, the confusion of the relatively holy with the impious absolute. And this blasphemy is uttered in the temples themselves, at the heart of the churches, before the tabernacle, from the pulpit, under the wings of the Holy Spirit! Where are the prophets who could have spewed forth their anathemas against these pollutions, these ignominies, these abominations? Where are Jeremiah’s tears, Isaiah’s lamentations?
No, if the investigator wants to hold onto her sanity, she has to look for the religious outside the domain of religion. She has to hypothesize that what is called “the return of the religious” manifests only the return of FUNDAMENTALISM. And we can understand why. Incapable of situating multiform values in institutions made for them, reactionaries of various stripes fall back on an ersatz solution that seems superficially to “defend the values” — by placing them out of reach!
What’s left of philosophy for me
For me, there are two modes of philosophy left, a sort of philosophical alpha and omega of starting thought and finishing it (in the sense of finishing furniture):
- Wittgenstein’s formulation, “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.” This I see as philosophy proper: thought seeking footing in chaos.
- The design of a worldview — or better, lifeworld — rooted in explicit language (words, images, gestures: perceptible forms) and oriented toward a certain way of existing as a person. This may actually be the essence of religion.