Category Archives: Philosophy

The twin fears

Philosophy

One one hand, we don’t want to be tyrannized. On the other hand, we don’t want to be alienated.

We want to be connected to other individuals and belong to some human circle of some breadth, but not at the expense of having our individual particularities and potentialities suppressed or condemned.

Temperamental and circumstantial variability between people can lead to disagreements on what is threat and what is threatened: some will say individual being is threatened by the tyranny of social being; others will claim that social being is threatened by the alienating effect of individual being exalting itself at the expense of all other considerations.

Philosophical minds who see tyranny as the greatest danger tend to gravitate (or levitate?) toward the liberation of radical subjectivism. Philosophical minds who see alienation as the greatest danger tend to pursue the common ground (or groundedness) of objectivism.

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These fears point toward two metaphysical poles of consciousness, which in my metaphysical manifold (the star diagram) is the vertical axis. The lower pole represents fragmentary being – instincts that flow “up” into our awareness from the semiconscious and apparently unconscious regions of our minds. The upper pole represents the unification of fragmentary of being in greater scales of being, the kind of being of a person absorbed in a conversation or in love.

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Anxiety toward the upper pole tends to see unification as necessitating suppression of essential differences – trending ultimately toward a tyrannical uniformity. In response, the upper pole is denied or an intellectual tourniquet is applied at some scale, either at the level of individuality, or at the level of the romantic couple, or of the family, or of a circle of intimates, or even of a political party, a nation, a religious sect. (One comfort of a self-idolizing collectivity: the members always find ready agreement among themselves that what they worship is the God, or some analogue to God. Solipsism can infect being at any scale, not only individual minds. Ideology can be seen as mass solipsism.)

Anxiety toward the lower pole tends to see the instincts as unwelcome disruptions that destabilize unity. The very existence of certain unacceptable impulses is denied or generalized into voiceless indistinction – packed into categories such as “the sinful nature of man”, or “the unconscious”, or “neuroses” – with the practical consequence that certain instincts are marginalized and denied a place in greater scales of being. An intellectual tourniquet is applied somewhere below the motivations that disrupt acceptability, perhaps at the level of action, or speech, or thought, or acknowledgement, or even awareness.

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It is interesting to observe that the twin fears justify and reinforce one another.

A person who fears the “upper pole” does so because the fearers of the “lower pole” provide them ample grounds for fear: the collectivities that fear the irruption of instincts really do create circumstances hostile to individuality, full of taboos, compromising social requirements and distractions from what one experiences as personal destiny.

Conversely, the individuals allergic to every kind of being that exceeds them while requiring something of them – (such people usually don’t mind the concept of greater being as long as it stays hermetically sealed in a non-practical “beyond”, and will often orient their lives around this theoretically-omnipotent, practically-impotent Transecndence) – will sometimes reject entire categories of ethical behaviour, or even morality as a whole, and in so doing destroy the possibility of authentic participation in being beyond individuality and its multifarious insticts. It may appear to seek intimacy with other people, but what it really seeks is stimulation of its instincts in response to other people (which it confounds with “love”).

The antitheses provide one another a legitimate enemy. They are founded on a single obsolete conception of being.

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Culture will not live in the median between the dominant antitheses of our time.

Culture will not live in the compromise between the individual and the collective, or the dualism of subject and object, or the babble of relativism and absolutism, or the distinguishing of artifice and nature, or the separation of (neutral) observation and interpretation, or the existence or nonexistence of God.

These antitheses can only be resolved in practical transcendence, in a different way of understanding.

Not a textbook

Biography, Hermeneutics, Pragmatism

I cannot believe how much I am enjoying rereading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. I have a couple of exciting new leads: Paul Feyerabend – who is certain to be a terrible influence on me (consider the title of his main work: Against Method) – and Clifford Geertz, a cultural anthropologist. The last time I read this book was in early 2006, and the two leads of that reading were Kuhn (paradigms) and Gadamer (fusion of horizons), so anyone who has spoken with me at any length at all will immediately understand the impact Bernstein has already had on me.

(I’m gradually acquiring the entire bibliography of  Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, and my library is becoming even more home-like.)

What’s fascinating about Bernstein is that his books appear at first glance to be closer to textbooks than original philosophical works, but that is not the case. He does original philosophy in the medium of comparative discussions of other people’s thinking. His philosophy is deeply social, but this does not mean he places the locus of his philosophy outside of his own understandings or his own experience. (It is understandable why someone unfamiliar with his mode of thought might see it that way. This is actually one of the issues he addresses in his writing.)

I buy lots and lots of books for my friends. I’ve given more copies of this book away than any other book.

Feeling panoptic

Ethics, Philosophy

One of my favorite philosophical feelings is looking out on the world and seeing every relevant problem roughly settled. Unknowns and dangers remain, but everything is in its place, doing what it must do and ought to do.

I think this is the feeling happy old men have when they walk around on land they own and love.

It may be the ideal mood of introverted sensation (of the Jungian personality typology).

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I’m calling this mood and this sense of things panopsis. (ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek panoptos ‘seen by all,’ from panoptes ‘all-seeing’ + –ic .) The optical root of the word is key.

The kind visualizations I do, when successful, induces panopsis in regard to a problem and how to go about thinking about it.

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Panopsis might be a gentle form of ideology, or it might be the worst kind of ideology in larval form. It might be fundamental to sanity, or it might be something more ominous. The morality around this state of mind is problematic for me.

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According to Buber:

The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.

According to Levinas:

In religions and even in theologies eschatology, like an oracle, does indeed seem to ‘complete’ philosophical evidences; its beliefs-conjectures mean to be more certain than the evidences – as though eschatology added information about the future by revealing the finality of being. But, when reduced to the evidences, eschatology would then already accept the ontology of totality issued from war. Its real import lies elsewhere. It does not introduce a teleological system into the totality; it does not consist in teaching the orientation of history. Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present. Not with the void that would surround the totality and where one could, arbitrarily, think what one likes, and thus promote the claims of a subjectivity free as the wind. It is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being, as though another concept, the concept of infinity, were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality, non-encompassable within a totality and as primordial as totality…

The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak. It does not envisage the end of history within being understood as a totality, but institutes a relation with the infinity of being which exceeds the totality. The first ‘vision’ of eschatology (hereby distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religions) reveals the very possibility of eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context. The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision – it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics. But it is a ‘vision’ without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type – which this work seeks to describe.

I didn’t abandon Levina because I thought he was wrong.

But then, according to Nietzsche:

What is romanticism? – Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fulness of life – they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight – and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and who seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anesthesia, and madness. All romanticism in art and insight corresponds to the dual needs of the latter type, and that included (and includes) Schopenhauer as well as Richard Wagner, to name the two most famous and pronounced romantics whom I misunderstood at that time – not, incidentally, to their disadvantage, as one need not hesitate in all fairness to admit. He that is richest in the fullness of life, the Dionysian god and man, cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition, and negation. In his case, what is evil, absurd, and ugly seems, as it were, permissible, owing to the excess of procreating, fertilizing energies that can still turn any desert into lush farmland. Conversely, those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need above all mildness, peacefulness, and goodness in thought as well as deed – if possible, also a god who would be truly a god for the sick, a healer and savior; also logic, the conceptual understandability of existence – for logic calms and gives confidence – in short, a certain warm narrowness that keeps away fear and encloses one in optimistic horizons.

Thus I gradually learned to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian pessimist; also the “Christian” who is actually only a kind of Epicurean – both are essentially romantics – and my eye grew ever sharper for that most difficult and captious form of backward inference in which the most mistakes are made: the backward inference from the work to the maker, from the deed to the doer, from the ideal to those who need it, from every way of thinking and valuing to the commanding need behind it.

Regarding all aesthetic values I now avail myself of this main distinction: I ask in every instance, “is it hunger or super-abundance that has here become creative?” At first glance, another distinction may seem preferable – it is far more obvious – namely the question whether the desire to fix, to immortalize, the desire for being prompted creation, or the desire for destruction, for change, for future, for becoming. But both of these kinds of desire are seen to be ambiguous when one considers them more closely; they can be interpreted in accordance with the first scheme (which is, as it seems to me, preferable). The desire for destruction, change, becoming, can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with the future (my term for this is, as known, “Dionysian”); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them. To understand this feeling, consider our anarchists closely.

The will to immortalize also requires a dual interpretation. It can be prompted, first, by gratitude and love; art with this origin will always be an art of apotheosis, perhaps dithyrambic like Rubens, or blissfully mocking like Hafiz, or bright and gracious like Goethe, spreading a Homeric light and glory over all things. But it can also be the tyrannic will of one who suffers deeply, who struggles, is tormented, and would like to turn what is most personal, singular, and narrow, the real idiosyncrasy of his suffering, into a binding law and compulsion – one who, as it were, revenges himself on all things by forcing his own image, the image of his torture, on them, branding them with it. This last version is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, whether it be Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will or Wagner’s music – romantic pessimism, the last great event in the fate of our culture.

(That there still could be an altogether different kind of pessimism, a classical type – this premonition and vision belongs to me as inseperable from me, as my proprium and ipsissimum; only the word “classical” offends my ears, it is far too trite and has become round and indistinct. I call this pessimism of the future – for it comes! I see it coming! – Dionysian pessimism.)

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It might be possible to dismiss Levinas as a romantic pessimist if I view him through Nietzsche’s optic. However, this type of dismissive viewing is precisely what Levinas is calling into question in his work, and I cannot shake off that question. But hermeneutically engaging romantic-pessimist thought… is it dangerous or unhealthy? I think it probably is. I’ll return to Levinas when I have happiness to waste.


Parallax and intentionality

Biography, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I had been using the metaphor of parallax for a couple of years before Zizek’s Parallax View came out. The entire book turned out to be structured around the parallax metaphor and he used it essentially the same way. At that point in my life I was inclined to interpret that kind of coincidence as either an inevitable rediscovery of core esoteric truths or as some sort of synchronicity.

Once I learned about the connection between Hegel and Marxism, though, I realized parallax is one of the most universal and obvious examples of the dialectic form (thesis-antithesis-synthesis). If the dialectic form is a pre-existing cultural entity – and not a minor or obscure one, either – it is possible that the “rediscovery” of it was a lot more guided than it seemed to me at the time. I may not have been taught it explicity, but it is not difficult to see how it could be absorbed passively.

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The key to understanding passive cultural absorption is realizing objective conceptual thinking is only one of several forms of understanding a mind has available to it for interrelating and unifying the multifarious parts and aspects of its experience.

Naive thinkers are marked as such by their incapacity to distinguish the objective form of thought (which is ontological) from the objective being of a thing “thought about”. This observation is itself not “objective”: it exists as what I have been calling an intellectual move, or “the dance”. It’s the fundamental insight of late Wittgenstein and the Pragmatists.

Maybe I picked up the the Pragmatist dance from following along, trying to understand – trying to think-with a philosophical author, as opposed to thinking-about the apparent subject matter presented by the author in my own way, by my own pre-existing habitual moves. Maybe having been raised Unitarian-Universalist, which was a major tributary of Pragmatism, made me receptive to thinking in that way. Maybe there was a temperamental predisposition. At any rate, later, when I learned the counts and the names of the steps and the history of the dance’s invention and development, it was a factual consummation of something super-factual.

It gave objective form to a transmissible form of essentially subjective truth. It made it easier to share. Before, I’d have to demonstrate it, or indicate it with strange analogies.

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I had this thought last week and forgot to write it down:

Can we learn essentially subjective (that is, existential) truths from other subjectivities, or are we limited to objectivity – learning objective facts about subjectivity from one another?

Are we subjectively inert, sealed inside our own temperaments, and our own experiences?

Another big question: If we can learn essentially subjective truths from one another, is that best achieved through talking about subjectivity – through psychologizing? A theme I’ve encountered repeatedly among thinkers working from the Pragmatist and the Phenomenological traditions is intentionality: that there is no such thing as thinking without an object of thought. Thinking divorced from intentionality is nonsense.

Perhaps sharing a problem with another subjectivity, a problem that involves coming to a deep understanding for the sake of being able to collaborate on solving the problem is a more direct route to subjective learning than psychologizing.

I’ve even wondered if psychologizing isn’t ultimately a defence against sharing psychology – a counterfeit intimacy used as a block against authentic intimacy with the other – a sterile mutual self-exploration where shared experience is founded on sameness. Otherness is distant, sealed on the far side of an experiential membrane – never pursued, never approached, never welcomed. The radical other is an object of fascination, or fear, or mystification to be contemplated or classified but never touched.

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I see art as essentially bound up with subjective sharing.

Lesser art depends on recognition. It calls out to those who already know. Art decays into nostalgia and then pastiche.

Great art makes new knowers.

Philosophy is thought-art.

Reckless claims

Philosophy

My point of view: There is no metaphysical individual. Individuality is entirely immanent.

A modern point of view: To view one’s individuality as essentially real and placed spatially within a monistically material world…

A perennially pernicious point of view: To identify one’s individual consciousness with the monad…

To see one’s individual consciousness as a metaphysical entity within an essentially conscious monad…

Three years with hermeneutics

Biography, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Rereading Bernstein after three years, I’m tempted to say (very tentatively) that Bernstein influenced me as radically as Nietzsche did.

Where he led me was a infinitely more vulnerable than where I was before (which, though it was painful, was tough and explosively ecstatic) but I can’t help but believe it was a movement toward something superior, at least on days when my thought is clear.

Much of spirituality is just crude philosophical self-defense. Even much or most of Christianity-Judaism is a reversion to the old pre-Judaic religion. Reading Bernstein put an the end to all that for me, and that is why so many people who were allies (in metaphysical individuality) before began to intuit a sort of treason, even before I became conscious of it myself.

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This morning I reread the section of Beyond Objectivism and Relativism that gave me the word I desperately needed to designate the bizarre world-altering experience I’d had reading Nietzsche: “hermeneutics”. I remember the relief I felt when Bernstein quoted this passage from Thomas Kuhn:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

Morality, good and evil

Ethics

The properties of objects generally remain constant or change predictably according to rules.

The properties of subjects may be constant or at least predictable, but they are also capable of drastic and seemingly arbitrary change. Change can come with little warning. When change comes it can alter the qualities of a subject so radically that the subject can even become unrecognizable. People say “you’ve become a stranger” or “I don’t know you anymore.”

If objects were like subjects a glass of water weighing a few ounces today could weigh fifty pounds tomorrow. The glass and its contents could simply vanish.

It would be difficult to exist in a world where this happened. But consider this: Our fellow subjects, capable of such arbitrary change, are (at least normally) what matters most to us in the world. To a large extent we are nourished, supported and sustained by our relationships to other subjects.

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Behavioral disciplines gives subjects constancy and predictability. They provide assurance to those who love us, depend on us, or simply co-inhabit the world with us that we will remain with them as who we are, neither withdrawing nor encroaching in any way that harms them. It stabilizes our shared inter-subjective social world to levels approaching that of our shared objective one.

When I discuss morality and ethics as something good, this goal of behavioral discipline is one I have in mind.

When I attack morality I am attacking something different: the claim of one person to the right not only to require another person to be reliably and usefully what they are but to decide for them what they ought to be and how they ought to be useful. To the degree a morality justifies regarding another person in predominantly functional terms to the exclusion of subjective considerations – that the morality demands of other subjects not only the stability of objects but also the passivity of objects – I regard that morality as illegitimate. The extreme of moral illegitimacy, where subjective considerations are completely eclipsed by functional ones is evil.

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To regard another subject subjectively is to regard the subject as essentially a subject: the center of a world that overlaps one’s own. The essence of morality is response to transcendent subjectivity. It begins with the acknowledgment of Namaste, and actualizes through living, enduring, mutually-beneficial relationship. In a mutually-beneficial relationship all members of the relationship feel improved by their own standards for participating in the relationship.

In mid-life…

Philosophy

“In media vita (In mid-life). — No, life has not disappointed me! On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year, – ever since the day when the great liberator came to me, the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge – and not a duty, not a calamity, not a trickery! – And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others, for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure, – for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. ‘Life as a means to knowledge’ – with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily and laugh gaily, too! And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?” – Nietzsche

Some Christopher Alexander

Philosophy

This passage from Christopher Alexander’s Timeless Way of Building changed my life:

A man is alive when he is wholehearted, true to himself, true to his own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations he is in.

To be happy, and to be alive, in this sense, are almost the same. Of course, a man who is alive, is not always happy in the sense of feeling pleasant; experiences of joy are balanced by experiences of sorrow. But the experiences are all deeply felt; and above all, the man is whole and conscious of being real.

To be alive in this sense, is not a matter of suppressing some forces or tendencies, at the expense of others; it is a state of being in which all forces which arise in a man can find expression; he lives in balance among the forces which arise in him; he is unique as the pattern of forces which arise is unique; he is at peace, since there are no disturbances created by underground forces which have no outlet at one with himself and his surroundings.

This state cannot be reached merely by inner work.

There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need do only inner work, in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself he need only change himself. This teaching has some value, since it is so easy for a man to imagine that his problems are caused by “others.” But it is a one-sided and mistaken view which also maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient and not dependent in any essential way on his surroundings.

The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life. Others make it very difficult.

The rest is great, too.

Random patriotic thoughts

Pragmatism

Intention – a “why” – is an ethical question and is always future-tense, even if an intention in question occurred in the past. To understand a past intention is to reconstruct its future.

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An idea from Dewey’s Freedom and Culture that’s stuck with me: “We cannot continue the idea that human nature when left to itself, when freed from external arbitrary restrictions, will tend to the production of democratic institutions that work successfully. We have now to state the issue from the other side. We have to see that democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail; we should be frank and open in our recognition that the proposition is a moral one — like any idea that concerns what should be.”

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Systems thinking is about taking responsibility not only for yourself but also for your determining conditions. It means taking an active stance toward your factical situation. It means acknowledging that much “inner work” must be done in one’s “outer world”.

It involves knowing the boundary: the ontologically peculiar region between where you as an autonomous being ends and the conditions that contain, exceed and determine you begin. Conditional determinations are strange and indirect in their effects and they defeat reductionist modes of thought.

The interplay is nonlinear. You change the conditions, you change the self who changes the conditions.

Perhaps many romantic and poetic intuitions are pre-thoughts lacking the right intellectual tools for practical understanding.

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Pragmatism appears deep only to those who think deeply. To everyone else, it just looks like mere expedience, arbitrary relativism, anti-spiritualism, chaos and superficiality.

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I’ve been reading American Pragmatists in the morning and Obama’s Audacity of Hope at night. A romantic and poetic intuition to play with: What if the USA can be loved – not despite its philistinism – but philosophically and culturally? What if the USA is on the verge of waking up to its own world-historic philosophical importance, which is so elusive that it looks pedestrian to the untrained eye, even/especially to those versed in European esoteric metaphysics and to their exoteric dupes, the rank-and-file American patriots who love the USA generically (as any Roman loved Rome, as any Nazi loved Germany?

Perhaps no civilization since ancient Greece has had something so philosophically revolutionary in its womb.

Repost from my old journal (4/1/06)

Philosophy

For the last week, I’ve been reading Richard Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.

Bernstein’s discussion of Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift, specifically the difficulties that arise in conversation between representatives of incommensurable frameworks, has been valuable.

I’ve had an unusually high number of painful conversations in the last four years, and I’m getting a clearer picture of why this is happening. Inter-paradigmatic conversations are intrinsically intellectually demanding and anxiety-provoking, even for those who love them. I am becoming increasingly aware that my taste for this kind of conversation is not only uncommon, but perverse. It has occurred to me that the sort of reaction I get when I attempt to engage people in these conversations is a natural self-defense of society, similar to a body’s response to a disease.

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I can be buddies with nearly anyone, as long as I am polite enough not to try to establish a friendship with him. The catch is, if I sense that someone could be my friend but nonetheless insists on remaining a buddy, I don’t want to associate with him at all.

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I’ve been fixated on the doctrine of “the death of the author” since Wednesday. Something about it offends me deeply. It’s burst into a full-blown problem. I have managed to clarify it enough that maybe I’ll get some relief from it.

Here is what I’ve come up with: Refusing to try to understand the author and his intent as fully as possible, and making this refusal a principle, is to formally seal oneself within one’s own paradigmatic horizons.

If this were limited only to the act of reading it would be detestable enough, but I think here reading signifies far more than reading – and extends inevitably to listening – the receptive element of relationship.

For me, relationship itself is reconciliation of paradigms – the enclosing of author and reader, speaker-listener and listener-speaker, within a shared horizon that encompasses both participants. Without this receptivity to the being of another, love is impossible.

What usually happens in relationships (and in conversations) is a sort of “parallel play” where one listener collages an image of the other (or of the other’s idea) out of whatever psychic clippings he has on hand, and tries as hard as possible to ignore the discrepancies between his image and the actuality of the other.

This appears at first glance to be a gentle approximation assembled roughly due to limited time and access to data. Unfortunately, I’ve been stupid enough to test this appearance. What I’ve found is that it is very similar in structure to another of my bête noire concepts, “responsible freedom” – that illusory “freedom” that survives as long as you don’t exercise that freedom as if it were your right. Similarly, these approximate friend-images depend on polite falsifications – “masks”. (One of the more horrible suspicions I’ve entertained is that all freedom is to some degree “responsible freedom, and that all love is to some degree mask.)

What this means is if you are too different from another person, and this person feels dependent on his paradigm for his own sense of security, self-esteem, mastery or purpose, that person is likely to falsify his image of you in order to protect his paradigm. Press more, and he will attack you – with his image of you, sometimes with unexpected ferocity.

This is what I call “spiritual injustice”. Spiritual justice is the will to understand each person from his own perspective; spiritual injustice is the willingness to misrepresent a person to make him fit within one’s own perspective.

Seen from this angle, the doctrine of “the author is dead” is nothing more than making a virtue of systematic spiritual injustice.

This is why the doctrine of “the author is dead” is personally offensive to me: To declare the author dead is tantamount to saying “I do not want to know you.” Without the sincere desire to know the other – however incompletely realized in practice – there is no friendship, and no possibility of love. Weirdly, in my experience it’s most unjust people who see themselves as most “loving”.

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Politically “the author is dead” is also dangerous. Consider the spirit that dominates the world right now – Two paradigms: theocratism (the marriage of a dominant machiavellianism and a submissive religiostic fundamentalism) and liberalism (in the commonly used sense) distort one another’s images into strawmen.

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Getting back to Bernstein’s book, my hope is that by studying the phenomenon of paradigm shift I can have more justice toward injustice. I believe this is the supreme structure of virtue: the ouroboros. When justice has justice for injustice it is most sublimely just; when love loves the loveless it is the most sublime love; when the rational understands the irrational; beauty sees the beauty in hideousness, etc.

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A very tentative hypothesis: Understanding the term “ontological hermeneutics” might require a conversion experience – living through at least once the process of an invisible background becoming a foreground against a new background. Until then, hermeneutics remains an “external” or “Apollinian” study of perspective focusing mostly on effects of context on opinion.

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What most people call “Christianity” might very well be a spiritual injustice perpetrated against Christ – and the perpetual process of overcoming that injustice. By that I mean overcoming the injustices against Christ who spoke the parables, fed the hungry and healed the sick at least as much as I mean overcoming the injustice of killing the Christ on the cross. Only Christ can have justice for Christ.

Another version of the same diagram

Philosophy, Pragmatism, Symbols and diagrams

I’ve been struggling with the same inchoate problem since early 2006. It appears to center on the meaning of the I Ching trigrams, but in fact the I Ching has only provided a form for approaching the problem. The interest I’ve have in the I Ching has been a by-product of struggling with this problem.

One thing I’ve noticed is that my interest in trigrams seems to move in step with my interest in pragmatist philosophy. I think what the trigrams mean is best accounted for in pragmatist terms. The trigrams are better understood in terms of how they are used than by what they represent. The use of the triads is unification and stabilization of the experiential flux. The trigrams are a typology of interpretive schemas used to unify experience.

Securing reality

This quote by C. S. Peirce always belongs with this diagram:

“Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premisses which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.”

Plan for a short video clip

Philosophy

An animated depiction of individual and collective attention (intended as information design, not as art):

The scene is a large room with a table in the middle. It appears to be night time, the whole thing is filmed in shades of dark gray and black.

A young woman walks into the room, surrounded by two amorphous blobs of illumination, a dim larger one that expands and contracts smoothly and a brighter one that encases her body but flares and darts out in tendrils, sometimes several at once. When the woman walks into the room the brightness initially shoots around the room illuminating various objects, with the dim light seeps behind, gradually filling out the room. She sits at the table.

A young man walks into the room, also encased with two blobs of illumination. His light has a different character. His dim light stays closer to his body and holds a spherical shape. It tends to contract. His bright light moves more slowly and systematically than the woman’s. Where the woman’s brightness moves in abrupt, multiple streams the man’s tends to stay in a single, broader and smoother stream.

When the man sees the woman, his light immediately stops moving about and concentrates entirely on her, leaving his own body entirely.

Shortly after the woman spots the man. Her light extends from herself out toward him and then, following his light, the brightness traces back to herself, so her own body and his body are brightly illuminated with a connecting strand of light. Her dimmer light continues to illuminate the whole room, while his dimmer light contracts around the woman and the table, contracting even further as he sits down with her and begins to talk.

As they talk their lights move together in a sort of dance. Her bright light continues to dart out around around the room, and his follows behind. Sometimes his bright light moves upward, straight overhead, apparently on no object at all. Hers shoots along his line, then darts away, hitting random spots in the room simultaneously, then returning, leaving, weaving. Occasionally their lights converge and move together back and forth, alternating between the man and the woman, then the lights diverge again.

A third person walks up to the table and sets an object on it. The lights center around the object and begin to synchronize until the two brighter lights appear to be a single light with waves moving around its edges and the two dimmer lights blur into a gradation.

Dewey’s Hegelian moves

Philosophy

Dewey’s primary move appears to be the Hegelian dialectic (thesis / antithesis / synthesis ). An example of this move is his analysis of Marxism and Libertarianism. He saw the two of them opposed within a common assumption that collective human action is predominantly economic in nature. Within this view socialism appears to exist along the continuum between the extremes. Dewey, however, places socialism outside the continuum, for the reason that it acknowledges the existence and legitimacy of other forces which influence collective human life both at the individual and coordinated-collective (a.k.a. political) scale.

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I tried to draw the Hegelian dialectic structure before I knew Hegel (or Kant, or probably someone else) had invented it. I called it a “duodualism” diagram.

Duodualism

After I drew it, I began to see the form everywhere in both in ideas and in symbolism (for instance in the Carthusian cross).