Category Archives: Philosophy

People inside-outside

Philosophy

I think I took more from Gadamer than I realized. I think I may have introjected that understanding into my reading of Buber, too, though I am not sure how much.

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Some distinctions:

1) an empathetic, reconstructive understanding of the subjectivity (that is the way of seeing) of fellow-subjects

2) a sympathetic, participatory understanding of shared subjectivity (a seeing-with)

3) an objective, psychological understanding of a behaving, communicating fellow-person

4) an objective, participatory understanding of one’s interactions with and reactions to another discretely distanced behaving, communicating fellow-person.

1a) – 4a) the mere awareness and acknowledgment of each of these distinct ways of knowing, apart from their practical application

1b) – 4b) the practical application of this knowledge

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Knowing a dynamic from the outside and knowing how to participate in a dynamic from the inside are entirely different matters.

Myth of the framework

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

According to Bernstein (quoting Popper who coined the phrase) the “‘Myth of the Framework,’ is a metaphor which suggest that ‘we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experiences; our language,’ and that we are so locked into these frameworks that we cannot communicate with those encased in ‘radically’ different frameworks or paradigms.”

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When you understand what people like Bernstein, Kuhn and Gadamer are actually trying to do, watching the spectacle of what they appear to be doing to people who approach hermeneutics (and related problems) from philosophically naive perspectives (both “for” and “against”) is funny but exasperating. The naive opponents manifest precisely the principles they attempt to deny. The naive proponents tend to take positions Bernstein is trying to overcome and become relativist caricatures: living strawmen for the naive opponents to successfully attack.

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Part of the reason I have become less enthusiastic about personality typologies over the last several years is that they are so easily used to assert the Myth of the Framework.

An intersubjective indication of God’s personhood

Philosophy

I reviewed some old posts last week and was happy to discover that I liked them. Here’s a rewording of one of them:

  • Another person exists to us in at least two ways: as fellow objects and fellow subjects. The subjective aspect of other people here is called “the other”.
  • The subjective influence of other subjects is experienced as a change in one’s self.
  • A change in one’s self is not experienced primarily as a change in one’s own qualities as an individual person-among-people, but as a shift in the entire world on the whole and in many parts simultaneously. In other words…
  • A change in self (manifested as change in the experience of entire world) is a holistic change.
  • Subjectivity pervades the entire world, and in fact is the whole world; it is not localized in an individual’s mind. Mind is not localizable, and therefore is not objective-form.
  • Intersubjectivity, then, is experienced as a change in the whole world, attributable to the subjective influence of the other.
  • To the degree that it is radical, change in subjectivity is impossible to understand prior to the change. It is understandable only in retrospect. This kind of change is practical transcendence.
  • Anxiety (or angst or dread) is the premonition of a radical change in subjectivity. Anxiety is a reaction to impending transcendence.
  • Perplexity is the yet unfinished radical change in subjectivity – in the whole world. It is the pain of transcending.
  • The impulse to defend oneself against subjective influence is the fending off of anxiety and subsequent perplexity.
  • Denial of the existence of truth is commonly a defense against the subjective influence of other.
  • The subjectivity of the other is transcendent. The relationship with the other, we-hood is also transcendent.
  • An I knows the other in participation in we-hood.
  • Each we is a greater self, a whole within which each I is a part.
  • By participating in we-hood, an I senses its situation within greater selfhood.
  • Each we is embedded in yet greater we
  • The concept of an ultimate We points to personhood of God.
  • An image of God: The principle common to self composed of instincts; a friendship composed of selves; being that arises where “two or more are gathered”.

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To get a clearer sense of how I understand subjectivity see my second post, “a plan for a short video clip”.

Coercive argumentation

Philosophy

At this moment I am completely uninterested in coercing people to believe against their will answers to question they have no interest in asking. For me there is no pleasure in conversation where the other party is interested primarily in how my points can be invalidated.

I am not saying that debate is useless. Some people enjoy siege and defense, and plenty of real good can come of it. But if you keep your house locked up and rain down arrows and pour molten lead on the head of everyone who comes knocking at your door, this will narrow the range of guests joining you at your dinner table.

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Perhaps some of the best truths must be invited in before they can be known. What basis is there to accept as true only ideas that can overpower your best intellectual defenses?

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For a debater truth is that which wins debates.

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.

Phronesis

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I had what might be a minor breakthrough reading Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism this morning. Perhaps phronesis is not represented by any particular trigram, but rather the capacity for pairs and groups of them to collaboratively respond to the world, each in its way.

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.

Pursuit of persuasion

Philosophy

Philosophy is less the pursuit of truth than it is the pursuit of the genuinely persuasive.

The obvious question: persuasive to whom? That depends on the philosopher’s temperament and circumstances – and perhaps degree of maturity.

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.

Buddy Holly songs

Philosophy

Buddy Holly died 50 years ago today.

An apocryphal Aesop’s fable

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

A loan shark appeared at the door of his debtor, demanding payment.

“I can not pay you,” said the debtor, “but further, I will not pay you.”

“OK, then!” laughed the loan shark, “Let us part ways, both discredited.”

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.

Pragmatist terms

Pragmatism

Some terms associated with pragmatism:

  • Pluralism – A theory or system that recognizes more than one ultimate principle.
  • Fallibilism – The principle that propositions concerning empirical knowledge can be accepted even though they cannot be proved with certainty.
  • Meliorism – The belief that the world can be made better by human effort.

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.