philosophy autobiography

Hermeneutic and Preferential Circles

2011-11-20T09:09:00.000-08:00

Is there a preferential circle as there is a hermeneutic circle? The hermeneutic circle describes how we interpret a text through the circular feedback of parts and wholes. We start with the first word (a part) and a sense of what this text we are about to read is about (and so the whole of the text), and then we interpret each succeeding part using our conception of the whole. In turn we alter our understanding of the whole by the understanding we make of each new part. So this is a continual, circular process by which interpretation occurs. At the end of the text our conception of the whole, the meaning of the text, has changed, and it has changed through the reading of the parts which got their interpretation through the then current understanding of the whole, which they, the parts, in turn, continually altered as we read.

So I had the idea that there is another circular process occurring which I call the preferential or, more awkwardly, tendentious circle. While the hermeneutic process is occurring another process is occurring which is the continual adjustment of our liking and disliking of the text. Each successive part rubs us one way or another – actually three ways: liking, disliking and neutral – and changes our feeling about the whole. And each feeling about the whole affects our experience of each successive part. At the end we have our disposition towards the piece: we liked it, didn’t like it or are mixed. This preferential reaction could then be examined more closely.

As I think about it, there is also the involvement of our previously accumulated likes and dislikes which inform the way we react to the piece. But this must also be true of the hermeneutic dimension. To interpret a piece we must use the whole of our understanding, placing it within the context of our larger understanding of things. (This is Gadamer's horizon of understanding.)

The preferential circle occurs with differing degrees of self-consciousness. Most people watch movies with very little consciousness of their reaction to it. And, at the lowest level, all they can say is “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” But we can increase our consciousness of our reaction to the film. Good film critics are reacting to the film and simultaneously or in retrospect recovering their reactions and the reasons for their reactions. (Pauline Kael was a master of this.) Generally this is described as an aesthetic reaction, but it has a personal/psychological dimension that usually goes unexplored. But it can be explored, as I do in the psychology of belief.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part XI

2011-09-07T15:22:00.000-07:00

This is my response to the philosopher's post (Exchange Part X). My comments follow the **. His comments are un-starred.

** Ok let’s not fly off the handle here, it’s only reality that’s at stake. I'm sorry for the length of this, but I get anxious to defend my view.

** Two approaches at answering. The first is something new, an attempt to avoid the thrust and parry. The second is the blow-by-blow responses which I think continues the back and forth.

** First Approach:

** I wonder if there is a different way to approach this difference. After all, Rorty has engaged and parried the best philosophers on this, especially in Rorty and His Critics. So I doubt we will come to a resolution. The thrust, lunge and parry could go on and on. Now we would learn things about our beliefs and maybe modify them so I think that can be beneficial. But I wonder if there is another approach. Maybe to just clarify what the difference is and see if we can agree on the nature of that difference.

** We both think science is extraordinary and a wildly successful way to gain knowledge. We both think that talking about “discovering reality” and making a distinction between “all the evidence points to it and it seems wholly justified, but is it true?” are useful ways to think and talk. But there is a difference (and this is where we have to see if this characterizes the difference accurately) between how we regard the nature and importance of the concept/realness of “reality” or “the real.” You say we’ve got to have a robust understanding of “the real” and give reasons that argue for its robustness and, dare I say it, its reality. Otherwise we can’t understand why science and any other avenue to truth and the real works. We bang into a world out there, if you drop that notion then we lose touch with it and you (Rortians) are making believe that there is no world we bang into.

** I say, channeling Rorty, philosophers have made a valiant effort to know reality through metaphysics and ontology, debates about realism vs. anti-realism, but they’ve been unsuccessful. Let’s stop those debates about this entity that always seems to be on the other side of knowing and just continue with our inquiries and understand them as the result of social practices that produce useful or un-useful results. Scientists will still talk about discovering reality, but there isn’t much for philosophers to add to our knowledge of reality. Let's do a Wittgensteinian therapy on the need for an extra-pragmatic understanding of reality.

** Does that describe the difference?

** I’d go on to ask:

** Is there anything more to know about reality than that it stands as kind of absolute but ever unattainable goal which may or may not be correcting inquiry so that inquiry can approach it? Is there anything for philosophers to say about it – reality – beyond the various knowings of it in science, mysticism, religion, poetry, literature, history? Do the natural sciences tell us about physical reality as it is in itself and so help us with our metaphysical investigations or does science give us one extraordinarily powerful, elegant, useful, dangerous, predictively successful view of physical reality? Is there anything else for philosophers to do with reality? Can they tell us something more about It?

** You’re saying, “Hey Rorty, don’t be so fixated on the rigid, absolutistic, Platonic, Kantian-noumenal, reality. Rorty, you betray your beholdeness to absolutism in your fixation on rejecting it. Instead let’s set aside that Absolute Reality and the attempt to dismiss any discussion of Reality and talk about "reality." There is something for philosophers to contribute, that we don’t get from scientists, about that non-Absolutist reality.

** Second Approach: And here are your assertions and my response interspersed:

I'm not "satisfied that working toward agreement with my fellows" is all that science is doing and I'd venture to guess that most scientists don't see their work that way either. Most scientists view their work (at least the biologists and physicists I've read) as a kind of exploration, an adventure of discovery.

** But we’re asking philosophical questions. Scientists are usually poor philosophers. Rorty has a reply to the Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg, (in “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics”) the only time I’ve sensed irritation in his tone, and, ironically, he defends philosophy from that scientist’s crude defense of a crude realism.

They almost expect to be surprised by the real. They wonder, ponder and nature often surprises them. It's not just playing with human models that have no ultimate reference or can't "arrive" at any reference beyond itself. I mean, do you think it makes sense to say that germ theory, gravitational theory, cell theory and any other well verified theory in science has no reference to the way things really are?

** What’s the difference between the way things are and the way things really are? I think philosophers think there is a “really are” beyond “are.” Is that “really” the too severe Reality that Rorty is hooked on or the more moderate real that you are advocating as a more reasonable view? And what is that real like? We have no idea how things “really” are but we have been successful in wondering if our current understanding fits all the evidence and, as a shorthand, saying “but is it true?”.

Of course, scientific theories don't disclose reality in any final, once and for all sense, but surely they are more correct than theories of infection that appeal to demon spirits. If Rorty were right there'd be no more sense in saying that astronomy is preferable to astrology or evolution to creationism so long as we can secure agreement that that's what reality is like from our fellows, or enough of our fellows.

** But what is the criterion for determining greater correctness? If it’s explanatory power then demon spirits could be as good within its overall weltanschauung as the theory of infection, depending on the needs of the person to retain their culture. If it’s what cures better I’d say the theory of infection. But I don’t see the use of “gets reality better” or “more like the way things are” except for rhetorical and practical purposes. But astrology is preferable to astronomy if you are trying to understand yourself and guide your life. Does astronomy do that? But if you want to predict the next eclipse or know the extent of the cosmos, I say, do astronomy. If your criterion for knowing the origin of species originates in the absolute faith in the literal words of God in the Bible then creationism is superior. My God! what better authority is there than God? I think that’s wrong, but how do I convince the believer? Steven Hales argues that we have to accept a relativism when it comes to deciding between the rational worldview, the Christian worldview and the tribal hallucinogenic spirituality worldview in Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy. Also Rorty is a Kuhnian and there is a different conception of science derived from Kuhn and the sociology of science which does not see science as a gradually more accurate representing of the real.

But the history of science is and has been a testing of models, falsification of models and re-testing against the benchmark of the real.

** Is there any more to say about the real beyond the ways we have of identifying it? Is it matter, spirit, consciousness, God, some substance, the Tao? How do we know which it is? Is it fruitful to pursue it philosophically? It’s certainly fruitful to continue describing and explaining physical reality using science. Is there a difference between what science currently tells us physical reality is like and what reality is really like?

Often, it has been the individual against the community in this regard. Scientists often don't want to see reality in a certain way, they have their own pet theories of the way things are, but if the theory unifies the disparate data in a powerful and elegant way, they can or often do come around.

** Rorty is fine with criteria such as “powerful” and “elegant.” Powerful meaning predictive, consistent with the evidence, cohering with what else we know. Those are fine criteria of science. The coming around can be explained by the adherence to certain criteria and the arising of the younger generations overturning of the older generations conceptions. The creative individual, on the margins, Einstein let's say, takes the anomalies and evidence and the applied standards of arguing and does something new. This causes a crisis for the established figures. They have to wrestle with it, to the degree that there is a democratic structure in their institution. A debate ensues, younger people (usually younger) are excited by this new approach and enter the fray. A struggle ensues. One side wins. We can say the winners have a better explanation, more of the evidence fits, old conundrums are solved (and new ones created) the old theory’s limitations are seen and it is incorporated into a better, more coherent whole. We can do more things – build atom bombs, yea! Is the world remade in the new conceptions image or do we know better what the world is really like?

Scientific theories and their verification are not at all as arbitrary and socially constructed as Rorty makes out. Rorty wants a guarantee and behind his pragmatism there may be this rhetoric of regret, fueled by his Cartesian anxiety. Knowing is taking a look for him and if he can't be supplied with the super look that will bridge the gap between theory and reality, then we're supposed to give up on knowing reality and settle for playing with models and garnering votes from our peers. But knowing is not taking a look, at least not for Aristotle. It may be for Plato. I'm not sure.

** So you’re saying that Rorty is too hung up on a crudely dichotomous, black-and-white division between Reality with a capital “r” versus not talking about Reality except as is useful in given situations which is too pale and makes no sense of science’s successes. And he misses that there is another small “r” real that is neither of those. Is there a philosophical debate about the character of that moderate real? Maybe I’ve gotten too much of my understanding of philosophy from Rorty. Who are the thinkers talking about it and what do they say it’s like? Do they distinguish old-fashioned, Reality, the noumena, what’s seen from the God’s-eye-view from this other thing called “the real” which scientists are very good at knowing and telling us about? And is this real quarks or sub-quarks or something else according to these debates?

Whew!

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part X

2011-09-01T16:09:00.000-07:00

The Philosopher writes:

I'm not "satisfied that working toward agreement with my fellows" is all that science is doing and I'd venture to guess that most scientists don't see their work that way either. Most scientists view their work (at least the biologists and physicists I've read) as a kind of exploration, an adventure of discovery. They almost expect to be surprised by the real. They wonder, ponder and nature often surprises them. It 's not just playing with human models that have no ultimate reference or can't "arrive" at any reference beyond itself. I mean, do you think it makes sense to say that germ theory, gravitational theory, cell theory and any other well verified theory in science has no reference to the way things really are? Of course, scientific theories don't disclose reality in any final, once and for all sense, but surely they are more correct than theories of infection that appeal to demon spirits. If Rorty were right there'd be no more sense in saying that astronomy is preferable to astrology or evolution to creationism so long as we can secure agreement that that's what reality is like from our fellows, or enough of our fellows. But the history of science is and has been a testing of models, falsification of models and re-testing against the benchmark of the real. Often, it has been the individual against the community in this regard. Scientists often don't want to see reality in a certain way, they have their own pet theories of the way things are, but if the theory unifies the disparate data in a powerful and elegant way, they can or often do come around. Scientific theories and their verification are not at all as arbitrary and socially constructed as Rorty makes out. Rorty wants a guarantee and behind his pragmatism there may be this rhetoric of regret, fueled by his Cartesian anxiety. Knowing is taking a look for him and if he can't be supplied with the super look that will bridge the gap between theory and reality, then we're supposed to give up on knowing reality and settle for playing with models and garnering votes from our peers. But knowing is not taking a look, at least not for Aristotle. It may be for Plato. I'm not sure.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part IX

2011-08-06T12:46:00.000-07:00

The Philosopher responds.

My responses to him are inserted and always follow an asterisk *:

I like your spirited reply!

I guess I'm going to just have to read that damn book [Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature] and hope to God I don't lose my "illusions."

* This, for me, raises the question of what makes us attach to the ideas, conceptions, beliefs that we are attached to that "seem right" even when (or if) the argumentation and evidence don't prove them or when the relevant community doesn't agree on an answer? We could say that some of us have an intuitive connection to the way things are, but that begs the question of whether there is a "way in which things are." And what's the nature of the "intuitive" connection? There is an interesting, bypassed world hidden in words like: assumption, intuition, conversion.

That having been said, sometimes it seems to me that Rorty is too absolute. (Ha!). Either the Real is self-present to us in some absolute way, a la Descartes, "clear and distinct" and all that or we must simply give up any hope of knowing the real and turn our attention to more "useful" topics. But isn't that attitude overdrawn? I mean, why can't we, in Aristotelian fashion, move toward the real, make models, test them, listen to what nature is telling us she's like, try to correct for bias, and "slouch toward verisimilitude" (with apologies to Yeats). We don't have to be the (Rortian) victims of his Cartesian anxiety. Rorty seems to couch things in this "all or I want no part of it" way. I believe science is one very good way, perhaps our best and only way, of getting out of our way, and letting nature tell us what she's like. How, for example, can we explain its pragmatic success if it doesn't bear some semblance to the real (note small r)? Anyway, I suspect Rorty's model of knowledge is too Platonic. He'd have done good for a good dose of the Stagirite. But, hell, I haven't done my homework.

* Rorty would be fine with making models, testing them, correcting for bias, even using colloquially the phrases "listening to nature" and "seems right but is it true?" as long as some ambitious philosopher doesn't say "Is nature really telling us things?, What is the 'real'?" Being a pragmatist he'd support all scientific inquiry. He just recommends not getting fooled by metaphors - here the aural metaphor of "listening" rather than the visual metaphor of a "mirror of nature" - like nature telling us what she's like. He suggests that we be satisfied with working towards agreement with our fellows and not taking the Peircian step of "The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in".

* Now how does Rorty explain why science works so well if it's not telling us what nature is like? But does poetry work less well? Does it tell us what nature is like?

* Here's Rorty: "[The pragmatist] drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope. His argument for the view is that several hundred years of effort have failed to make interesting sense of the notion of 'correspondence' (either of thought to things or of words to things). The pragmatist takes the moral of this discouraging history to be that 'true sentences work because they correspond to the way things are' is no more illuminating than 'it is right because it fulfills the Moral Law.' Both remarks, in the pragmatist's eyes, are empty metaphysical compliments - harmless as rhetorical pats on the back to the successful inquirer or agent, but troublesome if taken seriously and 'clarified' philosophically." Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xvii.

* So you and Rorty agree on the doing of science, he would just caution against letting the sometimes useful concept "real" slide into the historically unsuccessful investigation of the "Real."

Thank you for your interesting reply.

* And thank you.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part VIII

2011-07-18T18:43:00.000-07:00

The Philosopher was wondering:

I've been thinking about this question regarding Rorty: Is there
anything natural in Rorty's philosophy, anything, as he would put it, "found"? Or, is everything, "made?"

I thought:

Rorty's a big champion of the natural sciences and we certainly use the designation "natural" usefully. Humans are understood to be natural beings causally tied up in the whole causal unfolding of the physical world. And of course there are our everyday uses of "found" and "made".

But if you or someone else wants the distinction between "found" and "made" to do some epistemological work, like be a reliable distinction between ontologically distinct things one of which - the found - is simply there in the same way for all of us and so serves as a universal touchstone or referrent for reality and so creates an epistemological task of how we know when and who has the perspicuous representing of it beyond all "made" or human-createdness, then they will be disappointed as we see by a review of the history of philosophical attempts to find such a referrent and they should really talk about other, more useful, topics.

By telling a particular story of the history of philosophy Rorty wants to convince people that a distinction - the eternal and the contingent, the phenomena and the noumena, how things are in and of themselves and how they are because we see them that way - has led us astray and been ultimately unproductive, and so other topics are better to be discussed.

But maybe I'm not understanding your question. I assumed that you were saying that natural was connected to found as artificial or artificed would be connected to made.

This is one of the main themes of "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature." I'm reading it again twenty years later and poring over it like its a sacred text. I want to be converted and inducted into the cult! Yet aren't I already a true believer? It seems some small part won't let go. Maybe that's the attachment to the absolute, the transcendent, the Truth. And is that a sane connection to what's real or is it the last vestige of the illusion?

Ah philosophy!

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part VII

2011-06-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

I respond to the philosopher. My responses follow the ***

*** Good to hear your questions and criticisms.

I don't know. You do argue well and forcefully. I am not convinced and I can see you are not convinced by me.

*** Yes, that’s why there is the flourishing area of philosophy examining "rational disagreements."

Let me ask a few more questions about something Rorty says in this text book I have. He says: "A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' (or 'right' or 'just'). . . whatever view wins in a free and open encounter."

Some of my questions are these:

1) Who decides who wins in this "free and open encounter?"

*** The participants and the institutional structures that deem these things. If the participants agree – let’s say the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that we agree there is a 90% chance of man-made climate change – then that’s a powerful, but not conclusive, “win”. That doesn’t mean others won’t disagree – Bjorn Lomborg – and continue to speak against it. Or, science journals decide what gets published. That’s an institutionalized way for someone to “win.” And the winners have to be contended with either as what you must cite in your article or as what you must criticize in order to change a prevailing view you think is wrong. Rorty used the word “content” in that quote to emphasize that that’s all we’ve got, we have to settle for that level of surety.

Who decides what the criteria of "winning" are?

*** The institutional norms in science are decided or maintained by those in power. The criteria that they use have a history dating back to the origins of modern science. But even those criteria have to be struggled over with different criterion gaining and losing power depending on trends in argumentation. The logician Graham Priest has written about the lack of argumentation for the law of non-contradiction and argued that there are true contradictions at the limits of thought. He calls this view "dialetheism." I'm not saying it's right (although I think it is), it just seems like an example of criteria being examined and modified.

2) Hasn't Rorty smuggled in an implicit notion of good into this definition by having the encounter be free and open? If he has, then he has begged the question regarding what is true, right and just. I think this may be true since the reason that he wants the encounter to be "free and open" is presumably, because he thinks that, in this way, it will be more fair, more just and well, right. But isn't this just to assume the truth of the position you should justify?

*** But doesn’t everyone argue as best they can for their view and then if pushed to the limit say: “Well, I just assume, that cruelty is the worst thing we do to each other.” Rorty isn’t saying he doesn’t have beliefs about what is just and right and best justified (true) he’s saying that we can have discussions about our differing moral and political views but let’s drop the Philosophical discussion about what is The Right Moral View, the absolutely right moral view. That conversation looked like it would be helpful centuries ago, but now its gotten so dry and specialized that philosophers no longer play a role in public intellectual life.

3) Following on 2), I want to ask, Why should the encounter be free and open? If the object is winning and if winning determines what is true and right and just, then why not win by any means necessary?

*** If we watch a sports race or political election and are focused on who won, it doesn’t mean we don’t care how they won. Why? Because in the sports race we’re interested in finding the currently best at that sport according to the current rules, or politically we’ve established a majority rule procedure to settle disputes and called it democracy. So winning by the rules is important because we think we get better outcomes and so solve our differences and problems better. Rorty could say that “free and open” allows more people to flourish, feel dignity, offer more varied views and so makes for a better discussion and that these are good things because they make for a better society, which is one that is more inkeeping with the image that he and his allies have for society.

4) If what is true and just and right is determined by who wins, then what happens to minority voices? If winning means simply whichever side gets the most votes (at least that's what I would assume he means) then does that mean that the minority position must be wrong? I assume that this is not what he means, but I wonder what his position on minority views would be since they are not on the "winning" side and so, at least by his definition, they can't be on the side of what is true, right and just.

I'm aware that he advocates cultivating a stance of "irony" toward our "final vocabulary" and so he probably wouldn't want even those who "win" to take themselves too seriously since they could "lose" next year, next month or next week!

*** I don’t think we have to press the use of “winning” in that sentence too far. Rorty can say that winning in intellectual forums is almost never a 100% win. The laws of physics are as close to 100% as you get perhaps, but, short of that, so much is revisable as new generations and other societal changes occur. I can see him elaborating a view in which there are current relative winners and losers and that each individual will, depending on their view, assign differing valuations to the differing sides: a current winner is considered by person A as a should-be-a-loser and person B as a rightful winner.

*** So Rorty writes several lines after the sentence you quote: ‘Habermas] still insists on seeing the process of undistorted communication as convergent, and seeing that convergence as a guarantee of the “rationality” of such communication. The residual difference I have with Habermas is that his universalism makes him substitute such convergence for ahistorical grounding, whereas my insistence on the contingency of language makes me suspicious of the very idea of the “universal validity” which such convergence is supposed to underwrite. Habermas wants to preserve the traditional story (common to Hegel and to Peirce) of asymptotic approach to foci imaginarii [certainties, I believe]. I want to replace this with a story of increasing willingness to live with plurality and to stop asking for universal validity. I want to see freely arrived at agreement as agreement on how to accomplish common purposes (e.g., prediction and control of the behavior of atoms or people, equalizing life-chances, decreasing cruelty)…” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p.67.

Something else I wrote a couple nights ago but didn't send is this:

Here's a pragmatic argument from Socrates against postmodern pragmatism. It's in Plato's Meno:

"I wouldn't swear to other things on behalf of the argument [immortality of the soul, knowledge as recollection] but for this, if I were able, I would fight in word and in deed: that we would be better and more courageous and less idle, if we thought that we ought to seek for what we don't know than if we thought that what we don't know it isn't possible to seek nor ought we to seek."

(My stilted translation of Meno 86b)

I'd say that if you think that truth and good are just human constructions, then there is no real reason to defend them since we're only fighting, in the end, for our right to use our "final vocabulary." But what is that? Is that worth fighting for? Dying for? I don't think there are many things that I would kill for, but I do think there ought to be some things worth dying for. Rorty's postmodern pragmatism gives us nothing to live for or die for and to that extent it is potentially corrupting in just the way that Socrates worries about in the passage above.

If Rorty is right, then we can't be wrong since there's only your perspective and my perspective and his and hers. But no perspective is really any better than any other since they're all perspectives that are made not found.

Socrates' position is just right--between relativism and dogmatism. He rejects both the position that there is no Truth (only truths) and the position that whatever that Truth is, he knows it. He believes that we can and must advance toward the truth. Progress entails vigorous self-examination and examination of others, but if there is nothing to advance toward, nothing to strive for, this can lead to the sort of intellectual and moral complacency he's talking about. So, in the end, I side with Socrates on the grounds of what effects Rorty's philosophy could have on our character. Take care, gentlemen.

*** When and how do we know that we know the Truth? If we can’t know then how does it guide inquiry? It’s true that Rorty does not give us something to live and die for. But who lives or dies for the concept of absolute truth?

*** And is our choice only between striving for Truth and nothing to strive for? This sounds like the either personal taste or an independent standard dichotomy from a previous exchange. We can be motivated to vigorous self-examination and examination of others so that we can learn more, interpret more creatively, create a better world, make our ideas cohere better, or solve problems together. None of those are the Truth but neither are they “nothing”.

*** Why the “just” in “just human constructions”, what’s wrong with human constructions? And what’s the difference between a “real reason” and a “reason”? If “final vocabulary” seems too thin or flip we could say we would fight for our “deeply held beliefs.” They are connected to and gain their meaning from many things like our attachment to family, land, society, way of life, future generations, etc. Those things and others are worth fighting for even if we can’t show that or don’t know if they correspond to the independent standard of truth and the good.

*** Whew! Now you must be convinced! It seems we don’t give up our deeply held beliefs so easily whether we think they have or could have the backing of absoluteness or not.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part VI

2011-06-14T18:20:00.000-07:00

The philosopher writes:

I don't know. You do argue well and forcefully. I am not convinced and I can see you are not convinced by me. Let me ask a few more questions about something Rorty says in this text book I have. He says: "A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' (or 'right' or 'just'). . . whatever view wins in a free and open encounter."

Some of my questions are these:

1) Who decides who wins in this "free and open encounter?" Who decides what the criteria of "winning" are?

2) Hasn't Rorty smuggled in an implicit notion of good into this definition by having the encounter be free and open? If he has, then he has begged the question regarding what is true, right and just. I think this may be true since the reason that he wants the encounter to be "free and open" is presumably, because he thinks that, in this way, it will be more fair, more just and well, right. But isn't this just to assume the truth of the position you should justify?

3) Following on 2), I want to ask, Why should the encounter be free and open? If the object is winning and if winning determines what is true and right and just, then why not win by any means necessary?

4) If what is true and just and right is determined by who wins, then what happens to minority voices? If winning means simply whichever side gets the most votes (at least that's what I would assume he means) then does that mean that the minority position must be wrong? I assume that this is not what he means, but I wonder what his position on minority views would be since they are not on the "winning" side and so, at least by his definition, they can't be on the side of what is true, right and just.

I'm aware that he advocates cultivating a stance of "irony" toward our "final vocabulary" and so he probably wouldn't want even those who "win" to take themselves too seriously since they could "lose" next year, next month or next week!

Something else I wrote a couple nights ago but didn't send is this:

Here's a pragmatic argument from Socrates against postmodern pragmatism. It's in Plato's Meno:

"I wouldn't swear to other things on behalf of the argument [immortality of the soul, knowledge as recollection] but for this, if I were able, I would fight in word and in deed: that we would be better and more courageous and less idle, if we thought that we ought to seek for what we don't know than if we thought that what we don't know it isn't possible to seek nor ought we to seek."
(My stilted translation of Meno 86b)

I'd say that if you think that truth and good are just human constructions, then there is no real reason to defend them since we're only fighting, in the end, for our right to use our "final vocabulary." But what is that? Is that worth fighting for? Dying for? I don't think there are many things that I would kill for, but I do think there ought to be some things worth dying for. Rorty's postmodern pragmatism gives us nothing to live for or die for and to that extent it is potentially corrupting in just the way that Socrates worries about in the passage above.

If Rorty is right, then we can't be wrong since there's only your perspective and my perspective and his and hers. But no perspective is really any better than any other since they're all perspectives that are made not found.

Socrates' position is just right--between relativism and dogmatism. He rejects both the position that there is no Truth (only truths) and the position that whatever that Truth is, he knows it. He believes that we can and must advance toward the truth. Progress entails vigorous self-examination and examination of others, but if there is nothing to advance toward, nothing to strive for, this can lead to the sort of intellectual and moral complacency he's talking about. So, in the end, I side with Socrates on the grounds of what effects Rorty's philosophy could have on our character.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part V

2011-06-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

My responses following the *** to the social worker's comments:

I don't know if I'm responding a la Rorty, but it was Rorty who more or less convinced me that yes, the way reality functions is that the true and the good does amount to our ability to convince another.

*** But a caveat here. I hold my Chomskyan radical critique of US foreign policy for the last thirty years even though it is a minority view.

We can believe our position has some independent status, but there's nowhere to find it. You can do a study, for example a recent one that showed that more competitive societies with higher income disparities are less dynamic, show less creativity, and have lower scores of overall well being, and I can marshal that as evidence, but a committed free marketer will tear apart the study and so it goes. 1984 is what happens when the forces of justice and right (my side) don't fight hard enough against fascism, McCarthyism or whateverism. You can appeal to tradition, but traditons change. As we discussed, there's no standard meter anywhere to point to (and even a standard meter is an agreement). We're not so much inviting a person to sign onto a truth that transcends them, but one that they can agree with.

I guess I also have trouble with you using "only" in front of "individual" or "socially/cultural." Why do those standards have to be demeaned or demoted. I want to live and work in a place that shows toleration, that's free of sexism and homophobia. To me those are truly durable principles to live by, that are worth fighting for (but not fighting with violence, yet force may have to be used, like the force of law, federal marshals etc.). My reason tells me that. I don't value any social or cultural practices that go against those principles and I do think those principles transcend cultures who don't embrace such, yet I'm aware that my principles are a culture, too. Yet, no one could convince me that these principles are only true in certain cultures. So I could say, yes I value your culture in where ever, but I think practices or laws that don't allow everyone to be fully enfranchised are wrong. I love the principle of the rule of law, but I hate unjust laws.

*** And your culture transcending value of anti-sexism could be not acted upon because of another value of national sovereignty and the wrongness of military intervention in another country's affairs. So yes the Taliban's sexism is wrong, but no we shouldn't justify our invasion and occupation by using it because it violates another value: national self-determination.

I do think it's worth giving our reasons, because I do think there's something worthwhile in being reasonable, but I'd have a hard time convincing a romantic of that who values passion over thought. I wouldn't devote my time giving my reasons for my ice cream preference (though I might wax poetical about them) nor would I try to convince or even discuss with someone I felt just loved to argue (unless I was in the mood) or didn't really listen to my point of view.

I know that this position can devolve into might makes right, but that's a principle I don't agree with (unless of course when the MA Supreme Court say the state has to recognize gay marriage-- that's a might I like). But then again, I agree to abide by the country's choice in a president, even if I fight against his/her policies.

*** It may be that in the last instance might makes right. Max Weber said that the state is that entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. A certain regime of truth is in place because secular forces overthrew religious and monarchical forces and now we all know that liberal pluralist tolerant democracy is the best system even though for most of its history "democracy" had a negative connotation.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part V

2011-05-28T07:52:00.000-07:00

The Social Worker asserts:

I don't know if I'm responding a la Rorty, but it was Rorty who more or less convinced me that yes, the way reality functions is that the true and the good does amount to our ability to convince another. We can believe our position has some independent status, but there's nowhere to find it. You can do a study, for example a recent one that showed that more competitive societies with higher income disparities are less dynamic, show less creativity, and have lower scores of overall well being, and I can marshal that as evidence, but a committed free marketer will tear apart the study and so it goes. 1984 is what happens when the forces of justice and right (my side) don't fight hard enough against fascism, McCarthyism or whateverism. You can appeal to tradition, but traditons change. As we discussed, there's no standard meter anywhere to point to (and even a standard meter is an agreement). We're not so much inviting a person to sign onto a truth that transcends them, but one that they can agree with.

I guess I also have trouble with you using "only" in front of "individual" or "socially/cultural." Why do those standards have to be demeaned or demoted. I want to live and work in a place that shows toleration, that's free of sexism and homophobia. To me those are truly durable principles to live by, that are worth fighting for (but not fighting with violence, yet force may have to be used, like the force of law, federal marshals etc.). My reason tells me that. I don't value any social or cultural practices that go against those principles and I do think those principles transcend cultures who don't embrace such, yet I'm aware that my principles are a culture, too. Yet, no one could convince me that these principles are only true in certain cultures. So I could say, yes I value your culture in where ever, but I think practices or laws that don't allow everyone to be fully enfranchised are wrong. I love the principle of the rule of law, but I hate unjust laws.

I do think it's worth giving our reasons, because I do think there's something worthwhile in being reasonable, but I'd have a hard time convincing a romantic of that who values passion over thought. I wouldn't devote my time giving my reasons for my ice cream preference (though I might wax poetical about them) nor would I try to convince or even discuss with someone I felt just loved to argue (unless I was in the mood) or didn't really listen to my point of view.

I know that this position can devolve into might makes right, but that's a principle I don't agree with (unless of course when the MA Supreme Court say the state has to recognize gay marriage-- that's a might I like). But then again, I agree to abide by the country's choice in a president, even if I fight against his/her policies.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part IV

2011-05-19T16:33:00.000-07:00

The Philosopher replies:

Sorry it has been so long since I've replied. I've been mulling over what you wrote. I guess one thing I question is why you think that what is good or true is determined only by whether one can convince someone else of what you think. Is true or good determined only by whether we can persuade another that it is so? You may say that that's the pragmatic upshot of it. I guess I would have to agree that convincing another of what is true or good is important but should those things be reduced to solely my ability or inability to convince you of it? Surely the true and the good (however they are defined) shouldn't amount to simply my ability to convince you of whatever position I happen to hold? Surely those things have some sort of existence, meaning and status independent of whatever individuals happen to believe? Again, I want to say that if you claim that there is no such independent standard then I think that is dangerous in terms of opposing those who wish to ignore such (what I take to be) standards in the interests of defining them for their own political or social purposes. I've just finished listening to 1984 and what Rorty believes is just the sort of philosophy that Oceania and O'Brien thrives on.

The other thing is that you think that we can or should give reasons for what we believe is true or good. But why bother? If the good and the true is just a matter of contingency and is made up why should we bother giving reasons for what we believe? Isn't that like arguing that vanilla is superior to pistachio? Aren't we doing something more than expressing private or cultural preferences by giving reasons? I think so. We're appealing to another person's reason and inviting them to open themselves to a truth that transcends them. Anyway, I don't see any point to argue for my position if what I'm expressing is only my individual or socially/ culturally situated perspective.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part III

2011-05-13T16:17:00.000-07:00

The philosopher writes:

I may be thinking of this whole thing in more Kantian terms than Aristotelian, which I'm not too happy about. But, maybe not.

I think, for starters, we have to define that Protean term, "useful." It's so easy for that term to be used in a myriad number of ways. Useful for what? Useful to whom--and for what purposes? It was, useful, for whites to regard blacks as property for centuries. It was useful for males to regard females as inferior. The list goes on. Once you ask these sorts of questions, it seems to me that the question of some sort of supra-cultural norm becomes inevitable.

If one denies the existence of such a norm, then culture becomes the default court of appeal--and, as the old sociologist (whose name I have forgotten!) once said, "In the folkways, whatever is, is right." The "folkways" then call the moral shots and slavery and male superiority are "true" because they have been deemed "useful" to those in power.

In the absence of any supra-cultural, transcultural norm(s) for deciding what is "useful" Rorty's philosophy sanctifies the status quo, however that is defined by the majority or the dominant cultural voice. This is what I find so dangerous about Rorty. In his own way, he's not so radical or liberal but really rather depressingly conservative.

How are we to critique unjust social or political or moral practices in the absence of any normative notion of truth or the good? If he does offer such a critique, from where can he possibly stand?

Rorty may reply that it's just his claim that this or that is wrong or unjust, but why should we take his perspective seriously since he's just articulating his individual or cultural preference?

Well, I wrote more than I thought I would! Anway, I'm not sure I'm thinking about this correctly or adequately. I may have to come back at this from a more Aristotelian perspective, arguing more for the adequacy or inclusiveness of a moral tradition than the search for a transcultural moral norm, but for now I do think that if there is no transcultural good there can be no theoretical grounds for critiquing injustice--other than, of course, individual assertion--which I take to be inadequate because there are no rational grounds for distinguishing justice from injustice. Rorty may think he needs no rational grounds for his assertion, but then there is no ground for me to take what he is saying seriously.

And I reply:

I hope I have some good replies. Otherwise I'd have to change my mind and I'm very attached to my beliefs. Interestingly, we use rational argumentation to decide what is right in the secular, rational, Enlightenment tradition and so we shouldn't really care if we have to change our minds as long as the view we adopt is the better argued. Yet we are attached to our views for extra-rational reasons and these, I think, are the foundations of our moral views and it is why we cannot make a rational argument to convince all inquirers that one view is most correct, or is the objectively best moral view. Beyond the reasons that we give for believing as we do are also the other reasons we believe: because it feels right, our heart tells us it's true, it would violate our being to believe the opposite, it just seems right, we get choked up when we see certain norms enacted, etc.

Yes, "useful" is only useful if we have some goal in mind. If one of my goals is the flourishing of human beings and one norm is that they must be treated equally when it comes to certain basics such as justice and having the material necessities and if I apply this norm to all human beings then I am applying my norm to all. It's being held, by me, supra-culturally, but can I ground or prove it with rational argumentation to convince those who differ - white supremacists, religious fundamentalists, American-firsters, libertarians - that mine is the objective right, supra-cultural norm? I think not, because our norms, ultimately, are not held for rational reasons. So I tend to use my norms as if they are supra-cultural (even though I can't prove that they are).

What is the difference between the person who believes there are supra-cultural norms or objectively right norms and the one who may apply their norms supra-culturally but doesn't think they can be convincingly demonstrated using reason to be the objectively superior supra-cultural norm? That is, between you and me. You can't, and no moral philosopher can, demonstrate to the satisfaction of his colleagues that he has the best norms and yet believes such an objectively best norm exists. I hold norms that I apply supra-culturally, but don't think that ultimate rational demonstration of them will occur and see no need to cling to the belief in their objective rightness. We all still have our array of moral beliefs of varying degrees of coherence and incoherence which we apply in consert and conflict with others using reason, action and force.

Perhaps the difference here is between the belief that norms are wholly human made and the belief that there is some other origin for norms. Or, perhaps that is how I've interpreted the issue when you had something more like universal norms vs. ethnocentrism in mind.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part II

2011-05-10T14:54:00.000-07:00

Here are my responses to the philosopher's comments about Rorty's views. My responses follow the **** (four asterisks):

Here is a quote from a guy I rather like on the topic of relativism, which I take Rorty to be, me and lots of others. HIs name is Roger Trigg and he's emeritus Prof. of Philosophy, U. of Warwick. He was (and still may be, not sure, Chairman of the United Kingdom National Committee for Philosophy, representing all British philosophy departments--so says the back jacket of this book). This is from his book, Philosophy Matters:
"Richard Rorty is quite happy to demolish the distinctions which he sees built into the vocabulary we inherited from Plato and Aristotle. He says (speaking as an 'anti-Platonist' accused of relativism: 'Our opponents like to suggest that to abandon their vocabulary is to abandon rationality--that to be rational consists precisely in respecting the distinctions between the absolute and the relative, the found and the made, object and subject, nature and convention, reality and appearance.'

**** For Rorty these are fine distinctions if they serve a pragmatic purpose. But if they become reified into eternal objects or essences that limn the nature of reality then they are going to lead to abstruse arguments and philosophical nitpicking that have been exhausted by Western philosophy.

His (philosophical) argument is that these distinctions are not essential to philosophy, any more presumably than are such binary opponents as the self and the other, or even truth and falsity.

**** These distinctions may be essential to capital "p" Philosophy because that's how it has defined itself. But there are many everyday uses of these distinctions that Rorty would endorse. But we don't need get a "theory of truth" or to finally define the self. This isn't going to happen and it's more productive to talk about other things or to create new conceptions of the self. Novelists do this and Nietzsche and Heidegger were creative self creators.

The danger in all this is that of losing grip altogether on the idea of rationality, the idea that there are norms for belief, so that we ought to believe some things and reject others. It is all too easy to settle for what people do believe, and, if they disagree, to resort to a relativism that suggests that differences in belief do not matter. Indeed, 'pluralism' becomes something to be welcomed. Philosophy never ceases to be a matter of rational criticism. It is hard to see how it can then have any function at all. It must become absorbed into the general cultural stream. Philosophers can then articulate the assumptions of one cultural tradition in a way that is irrelevant to the members of another.

**** Or, philosophers could articulate, mediate, integrate, distinguish differing cultural traditions with the goal of creating greater understanding. Rorty would probably like philosophy to become part of the "general cultural stream" instead of falsely assuming a position above the cultural stream. We still have norms of belief, we just don't make believe they are grounded in The Objecitve Norms or God's Norms.

Rorty explicitly allies himself with American pragmatism, an important philosophical tradition, but one which has clearly come from a specific cultural background. Genuine philosophy must aspire to universality. American pragmatism must stand on its merits, and not on the fact that it is American. Relativism cannot allow this, and there is nowhere for Rorty to stand to allow him to recommend his views to those beyond his own tradition. It is not enough to be an American speaking to Americans or, in an even more restricted way, an American East Coast liberal speaking to American East Coast liberals.

**** Rorty embraces an ethnocentrism but that doesn't mean that different vocabularies or cultures are incommensurable. We make sense with others all the time, there's just no supra-sense that we can prove to all others is The Supra-Sense to end all questions of Supra-Sense.

Philosophical justification has to demonstrate why the views of such people are relevant to those with different backgrounds. By attacking traditional conceptions of rationality, Rorty can narrow the scope and impact of philosophy, so that any distinction from the rest of culture is removed. Just as an unremitting, literally mindless, materialism can dissolve reason into a series of physical events, so relativism dissolves philosophy into a series of cultural stances. The one makes philosophy cede its position to science, and the other to sociology or cultural studies. Philosophy becomes impotent, without any distinction between what seems to us to be so and what is so, or might be. What is the point of criticisms or questions if we cannot be wrong? There is no point in examining the basis of our beliefs if the most important fact is merely that we have them, and not whether they are true." (137-138)

**** Yes, the appearance/reality distinction is not useful if it is absolutized. But it can be useful as what we thought was the case (appearance) but now see was not the case (colloquially, reality), perhaps because we now have more evidence. And the thing we are so sure of because it is so justified in the present we may say may not be the truth, using "truth" as a marker for "finding out in the future that what seemed so justified turned out not to be the case." So we have a use for the expression, and so the concept, "Yes, it's justified, but is it the truth?" This is the "cautionary" use of "truth." It makes us hold open the possibility that what presently seems justified may not be.

I think Trigg gets to the heart of the matter with Rorty, here. His relativism undercuts, undermines the very possibility of rationality and philosophy itself--and with that gone, what can philosophy be but "a series of cultural stances?"

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part I

2011-05-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

Here's the first in an exchange with a couple of friends on Richard Rorty's philosophy and other issues. The philosopher writes:

Here is a quote from a guy I rather like on the topic of relativism, which I take Rorty to be, me and lots of others. HIs name is Roger Trigg and he's emeritus Prof. of Philosophy, U. of Warwick. He was (and still may be, not sure, Chairman of the United Kingdom National Committee for Philosophy, representing all British philosophy departments--so says the back jacket of this book). This is from his book, Philosophy Matters:

"Richard Rorty is quite happy to demolish the distinctions which he sees built into the vocabulary we inherited from Plato and Aristotle. He says (speaking as an 'anti-Platonist' accused of relativism: 'Our opponents like to suggest that to abandon their vocabulary is to abandon rationality--that to be rational consists precisely in respecting the distinctions between the absolute and the relative, the found and the made, object and subject, nature and convention, reality and appearance.'

His (philosophical) argument is that these distinctions are not essential to philosophy, any more presumably than are such binary opponents as the self and the other, or even truth and falsity. The danger in all this is that of losing grip altogether on the idea of rationality, the idea that there are norms for belief, so that we ought to believe some things and reject others. It is all too easy to settle for what people do believe, and, if they disagree, to resort to a relativism that suggests that differences in belief do not matter. Indeed, 'pluralism' becomes something to be welcomed. Philosophy never ceases to be a matter of rational criticism. It is hard to see how it can then have any function at all. It must become absorbed into the general cultural stream. Philosophers can then articulate the assumptions of one cultural tradition in a way that is irrelevant to the members of another.

Rorty explicitly allies himself with American pragmatism, an important philosophical tradition, but one which has clearly come from a specific cultural background. Genuine philosophy must aspire to universality. American pragmatism must stand on its merits, and not on the fact that it is American. Relativism cannot allow this, and there is nowhere for Rorty to stand to allow him to recommend his views to those beyond his own tradition. It is not enough to be an American speaking to Americans or, in an even more restricted way, an American East Coast liberal speaking to American East Coast liberals.

Philosophical justification has to demonstrate why the views of such people are relevant to those with different backgrounds. By attacking traditional conceptions of rationality, Rorty can narrow the scope and impact of philosophy, so that any distinction from the rest of culture is removed. Just as an unremitting, literally mindless, materialism can dissolve reason into a series of physical events, so relativism dissolves philosophy into a series of cultural stances. The one makes philosophy cede its position to science, and the other to sociology or cultural studies. Philosophy becomes impotent, without any distinction between what seems to us to be so and what is so, or might be. What is the point of criticisms or questions if we cannot be wrong? There is no point in examining the basis of our beliefs if the most important fact is merely that we have them, and not whether they are true." (137-138)

I think Trigg gets to the heart of the matter with Rorty, here. His relativism undercuts, undermines the very possibility of rationality and philosophy itself--and with that gone, what can philosophy be but "a series of cultural stances?"

Life Experience Affects Criterion Affects Belief

2011-04-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

In a reading group I attend a discussion broke out over whether there is a pre- or sub- linguistic connection to the world where we contact pure experience, a “felt sense” outside of language, or whether language infuses everything so that we cannot say when we are contacting something sub- or supra- or extra- linguistic such as “the way the world is,” reality, raw or felt experience, and when we’re not. So I was defending the Rortyan view that we can’t know when we’re in touch with that which is beyond language because language can always be argued to be already there. Whereas the other guy was saying that no, in his experience, he can mindfully or self-consciously feel into or gain awareness of what’s there which of course includes language but can go beyond it.

I said you can’t know which view – language infuses all access or we have access to experience - to choose because there are compelling arguments on both sides. He appealed to his phenomenological experience: he looks into his experience and experiences things like sensations, urges, emotions, etc. I was thinking that the criterion you choose to decide the question will be a determining factor in whether you see it one way or the other. I have chosen rational argumentation as the ultimate determiner. I know this issue, and lots of other philosophical issues, have not been decided and probably never will. So I lean towards the pervasiveness of language since language, in the form of rational inquiry, seems to generate more debate, as the alleged eternal problems of philosophy indicate. He uses experience as his primary criterion and finds by using that criterion and method that experience is experienced as having both linguistic and extralinguistic contact.

So which criterion to choose? I realized that my choice of primary criterion was influenced by my life experience. I was in graduate school studying for a Ph.D. and doing abstract intellectual work. I discovered Buddhist practice which can be radically experiential and left school and did that. I later became frustrated with and doubtful of it and stopped doing it formally and went back to intellectual work. Experience, in a sense, betrayed me and I adopted argumentation as the way to go. Now there are those who use argumentation and have the view that you can contact reality. So it can’t only be that choice that makes me defend the undecidability of the issue. But this life experience moved me to adopt one view over another and be a person who argues this way rather than that.

The Personal is Philosophical

2010-12-15T10:12:00.000-08:00

In hearing a friend recount an argument she had with another friend I thought about how ethics and ethical norms play a role even in intimate encounters. We tend to think of the fights we have with intimates (friends, lovers or family) as purely personal or interpersonal and having to do with feelings. But there is that aspect of arguments in which people say things like: “You should’ve called.” “That’s an overreaction.” “How could you do that to me.” Each has a charged emotional component but they also assume and assert a belief in what is right and wrong. Is it right or expected to call in this or that situation? When is an emotional reaction an overreaction; how do we judge the proper level of emotion for a given perceived offense? Was the wrong committed a wrong? Each of these presupposes and asserts a view of how to behave properly and improperly. Part of the understanding of propriety is based on what we think is right and wrong behavior given our society and culture. In some cultures there could be great offense in not accepting an offer of food or drink upon entering a person’s home. Is that an overreaction? It depends on one’s belief in the social norm being violated. One’s position on that norm is part of the argument in an interpersonal conflict.

When is a reaction to another’s actions an over or under or proper reaction? It is whether the reaction is appropriate to the behavior that caused it? How is that determined if the two people disagree about the norm violated?

A: How could you do this to me?
B: What are you talking about? It’s not that big a deal.
A: It’s a big deal to me!
B: You’re overreacting.
A: No I’m not. I’m hurt by what you did.
B: Well, you’re too sensitive.
A: I’m not too sensitive. You’re insensitive if you can’t see that what you did was wrong.

The emotional element is intertwined with a normative or ethical element and both have to be sorted out. The ethical element brings into play one’s philosophy of right and wrong.

I wonder if some philosophers have thought and written about this. A quick search of the philosopher’s index didn’t reveal anything, but it does seem like the kind of thing others have thought of already, maybe feminist philosophers.

Bruno Latour and Rorty

2010-10-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

Reading Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope word by word, page by page unlike most books where I jump around and get what I want and then leave it. I see him as doing the practical work not elaborated by Richard Rorty’s anti-essentialism. Rorty suggests we stop looking at things as entities with a nature or essence that we are groping to finally represent correctly. That essentialist mentality leads to tough “What is …?” questions like: “What is the nature of mind?” “What is money?,” etc. Rorty suggests there will be many descriptions of things depending on our needs and goals.

Latour who is describing “science studies” is taking that anti-essentialism seriously and showing how to describe and understand changes in science. Instead of the dominant picture of the world as being one particular way and as always having been that way and that we gradually describe more and more correctly, he describes the many associations and connections that occur in order for a scientific object to become what we take it to be. So the development of atomic energy was an interaction between many actors: scientists, colleagues, funding sources, the military, mineral suppliers, opponents, the public, the media. What “atomic energy” is arises through the interactions of that collective and its character is determined by that array of, what he calls, “articulations” that changes over time. Articulations that last and become well-entrenched achieve the social category of “reality” by becoming an “institution.” The “reality” of the things comes later after the struggle for dominance is won, but it can be reversed since it is an historical and social process. Latour, like Rorty, advocates moving away from the standard modern epistemological view of a reality “out there” which is veiled with a variety of appearances and which we gradually mirror better and better. This way of conceptualizing things leads to a gap between the world as it is in itself and our representations of it and to the irresolvable epistemological and other problems of Western philosophy.

Latour’s view sees all actors or participants – humans and nonhumans – as relationally engaged in creating themselves and each other through the particular way they interact through history. And as history itself moves on there is an ongoing reinterpretation of what happened in the past.

What’s nice about Latour is that he keeps coming back to the central philosophical conflict between the standard, modern, philosophical essentialism and his alternative anti-essentialism instead of leaving the questions hovering in the background.

Gordon Wood in the Radical Middle

2010-09-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

Watching the historian Gordon Wood on Book TV’s “In Depth” program on C-Span 2 where they spend three hours interviewing a noted author. He’s a popular historian of revolutionary America. What struck me was his complete ignorance of questions regarding the philosophy of history writing and the value-laden character of all history writing. He was asked about Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” and saw it as emphasizing only a “dark” view of American history and implied that it doesn’t tell the whole story, which presumably Wood does. Wood says nothing about Zinn’s book being a counter-history to conventional history and that it chooses a different perspective from which to write history, that of the poorer, disempowered people who are generally overlooked in conventional history writing. Wood shows no awareness that there is even a question regarding the perspectival character of history writing. Even on a show for the general public this could be acknowledged.

Then Wood was asked about how he reacts to histories written that are to the political right and to the political left of him. He used the hoary defense of thinking he’s doing something right (correct) because he’s criticized by both sides. This is a ridiculous defense I’ve heard many times since you could also conclude that you are doubly wrong because you’re being criticized twice. But the point of the defense is to portray the two sides criticizing you as having an agenda so Wood can say that he transcends that partisanship but occupying the neutral middle. This is the myth of the neutral observer which people who hew to the reigning values use to make it appear as if they are disinterested truth tellers. Wood can’t see that he has a perspective like everyone else and everyone has to choose the values that will inform their history-telling. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t agreed upon (and debated) criteria for determining facts and good arguments, it means that any history writer who is telling the story of the past must have a value system in order to organize their narrative. This is the argument of Hayden White. What’s striking about Wood is that he indicates no awareness of this perspective and blithely believes that his position in the center, away from the agenda-biased extremes, allows him to simply get at the truth better.

Philosophy's Perennial Problems

2010-08-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

Western philosophy’s perennial problems – mind/body, free will/determinism, objective truth, ethics, etc. - are generally thought to be persisting problems because they capture an essential mystery or conundrum about existence. But here’s a different way of looking at them. The perennial problems of Western philosophy - its recurring problems – can be seen as repetition compulsions. That is, as a pathological repeating on a superficial level of some unresolved issue deeply buried in philosophy’s social-psychology. And if they should be seen as a pathology what is the issue that Western philosophy is trying to work out?

The Meyerhoffian Solution (A personal favorite) - One possibility is that the underlying pathology is a split between the psychology of the thinker and the thinker’s beliefs. Since the major philosophical problems have not been rationally resolved and can be criticized by those opposed to any view, believers in a solution to the problems cannot have their belief in their solution by the reasons of their arguments alone. Their belief in their view and their adoption of their side of the argument has to have some of its origin in their personal psychologies since their reasons do not hold sway. On the foundational level of our beliefs we can’t have our allegiance to the answer to a philosophical problem without our non-rational attachment to a particular way of looking at things. This is fundamental and unresolved, and mostly unrecognized split, in the contemporary rational inquirer, but I’m not sure that resolving the split would lead to a resolution of the philosophical problems. More likely we would know why a given person adopts their side of the philosophical argument.

The Frankfurt School Solution - That perspective would interpret the cause of the persisting dualities of Western philosophy as a result of the persistent socio-economic divisions of contemporary capitalist society. We are socially and economically divided and in conflict with each other through class and power inequalities. There is no inherent betterness in one person rather than another or more reason for one person to have the necessities of life than another yet we must live in a society that distributes the means of existence based on a skewed view of achievement rather than human need. This socio-economic condition creates existential, personal and interpersonal divisions and is reproduced on the cultural level in the persisting contradictions and conflicts that philosophers encounter.

The Neo-Wittgensteinian-by-Way-of-Rortyan Solution - A third explanation I take from Richard Rorty. Western philosophy’s enchantment with the assumption or concept that there is “a way in which things are” leads to arguments about what that “way in which things are” is. If we don’t assume there is a way in which things objectively are (or is not knowable) then everyone is presuming and using a representationalist vocabulary, assuming that our words are representations of the world, and an objectivist or realist assumption that cannot be redeemed. There is no way the world is in and of itself which some of us have a superior insight into. There is the way we hash out our differing views of the world and for the differing purposes we have for doing so. The philosophical assumption – here thought to be false or of little use – is that there exists an entity – the actually existing state of affairs – which is what one side of each argument is matching or getting right but which cannot be shown to exist. By ceasing to assume that we are trying to “get reality right” the attempt to solve the perennial problems of philosophy would not have to be repetitiously enacted and inevitably failed at.

The Mystical-Transcending solution – Here the practitioner of a mystical practice is understood to cultivate the ability to have a direct experience of the nature of reality, bypassing or transcending discursive thought in order to dissolve the boundary between self and other or subjective and objective. The perennial problems of philosophy are resolved in practice and in the transformed being of the practitioner. The duality of thinking is resolved through the non-duality of being.

The Nietzscean-Foucauldian-Rortyan Genealogical Solution – Demonstrate through a historical analysis that what are thought to be the perennial problems of philosophy are not perennial problems, but historically contingent problems. Contemporary problematizing tendentiously interprets past dilemmas as the same as present day dilemmas when they aren’t the same dilemmas. The words used and the social contexts in which they were used changes. Rorty cites works like Wallace Matson’s “Why Isn’t the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?” Foucault describes the practice of genealogy as distinguished from conventional history in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

Bald Ambition in Hardcover

2010-07-18T10:07:00.000-07:00

My book Bald Ambition is now out in a non-virtual form. It has a cool cover. And it already has a negative review! Today it ranked 44th in Books>Nonfiction>Philosophy>Criticism.

You can get it at amazon.

The Metaphysical and the Pragmatic

2010-06-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

The discussion I participated in on talkingblog.com asked which is more real: dreams or waking life. Presented in this way it sounds like a metaphysical question.

But I suggested that determining what is really real is dependent upon the approach or stance or perspective we adopt in order to determine what is most real. So if you are doing psychoanalysis then you could think that dreams are the gateway to the real because one’s real motivations, the real determiners of one’s life, are found by interpreting the dreams and gaining access to one’s unconscious. One could also adopt a commonsensical, intuitive perspective and say that our waking life seems realer than the dream and maybe argue that we think about the dream in waking life but rarely think about waking life while in the dream. As a third alternative, we can adopt and do a Buddhist practice and eventually see that what we regard as normal, waking life is really a dream or a form of being asleep compared to the superior wakefulness of a Buddhist mindfulness practice and eventually enlightenment.

So it seems the practice adopted trumps or comes before the determination of the real. We tend to think that by asking questions like: What’s real? Or what’s more real? We are neutrally inquiring into the nature of things. But this way of inquiring presupposes that this particular method tells us how things are. There are other methods for determining how things are, such as a Buddhist practice or psychoanalysis or appealing to common sense or intuition or faith rather than reason.

But, in another twist, the practice adopted comes with presuppositions about the way things are: which is a metaphysics. In Buddhism they say meditate and see for yourself the nature of experience as it arises and passes away in each moment. That by doing this you will see things are they are. But this presupposes that that method of looking or inquiring is the superior method as well as presupposing other things, such as that the present moment is the true reality, that past and future only exist as experiences in the present moment, that in examining our subjective experience we learn about all existing things, etc.

Likewise psychoanalysis has metaphysical presuppositions that one assumes or adopts by inquiring in that way.

Rational inquiry is an approach to determining the real which hides its assumption that it is the best method of inquiry. The various practices which shape what will be seen as real presuppose a metaphysics or beliefs about how things are which leads one to see things in a particular way.

In answering the pragmatic question of which inquiring practice to choose we presuppose the metaphysical and in choosing the metaphysical – i.e. unquestioningly inquiring using our chosen way – we presuppose the pragmatic superiority of that mode of inquiring.

Is Life a Dream?

2010-05-15T16:39:00.000-07:00

I replied to a post at the Philosopher's Magazine: http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=1767

Here's my reply:

The phrase “Life is a dream” can have a deeper meaning if there is another state beyond the two states of existence: waking life and dreaming. In Buddhism and other mysticisms it is claimed that there is another way of living and relating to reality that makes what we call waking life seem like a dream in comparison to it. In Buddhism the story goes that when a man passing the Buddha on the road and noticing something special about him asked if he were a god or magician or demon, he replied, “I’m awake.” A strange reply (since obviously he was awake) unless there is a state of being that makes our normal waking life seem like a dream in comparison to its superior wakefulness. This is what Buddhism asserts but not only as an intellectual assertion; it recommends a practice that must be done so that one sees or experiences that this is the case. You write as if it is a purely intellectual claim to be considered philosophically or in thought. But Buddhism and most mysticisms are about the person’s decision to pursue a daily practice which involves some sort of method of inquiry that either does or does not wake them up by showing them how what we call waking life is actually like a dream in comparison to a superior wakefulness. The Buddhist practice is mindfulness meditation. The moment to moment practice of witnessing the contents of consciousness – thoughts, feelings and sensations - as they arise and pass away. The claim is that you will see that everything is impermanent, changing. You don’t just think it is impermanent, you experience it immediately and that experiencing alters one’s being.

In psychoanalysis of a Freudian or Lacanian kind you do the practice of therapy in such a way (and with the assumptions and practice) that regard the dream as conveying more reality – the really real – in comparison to our illusory waking life.

I think the crucial question is: what method of inquiry do you choose? If you choose a mystical path and do the practice and see what they say you see then do you then believe that that is the way things are? If you choose to use philosophical reflection and see things in a certain way is that the way things are? So, which mystical practice or philosophical tradition should one choose? Phenomenologists “see,” or talk in terms of different things, than do analytic philosophers. If we ask philosophical questions about the way things are we think that we are just neutrally inquiring, but we’ve really unconsciously adopted a method and approach to investigating that comes with certain presuppositions about how we will know what’s real.

Which method of inquiry is the right one to choose to investigate whether “life is a dream”?

The Will to Believe

2010-04-05T12:43:00.000-07:00

In again reading Richard Rorty’s magnum opus Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature I find myself absorbing it as if it is a sacred text. As if I’m trying to understand The Truth or how things are by reading it. And as with sacred texts, I experience a mix of getting it and not quite getting it. Of course, this way of being disposed to reading it is a direct contradiction of its point, that being that there is no way in which things are or absolute truth or ultimate guarantor of the true, the good and the beautiful and all the implications that flow from not assuming those absolutes exist or are available to us.

This is not the way I read most texts. I generally read them both to understand them and to be critical of them. Yet my oft-handled copy of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature has become as soft and floppy as an evangelist’s Bible. Shouldn’t I be more detached and critical of it? Why aren’t I? Is it saying something that I need to hear? Why would I need to hear that? Why have others chosen some other text as their “Bible?” What is the unique character in which their chosen text speaks to them? What about it and them captured their allegiance?

Yet there is something in the fact that I do keep having to read Rorty’s book. Is it that I don’t believe Rorty’s book is right and, contrary to its thesis, the absolutes exist, or is it the opposite: some part of me clings to an illusory belief in absolutes and reading Rorty is the existential remedying or extraction of this false or impractical belief?

Zizek describes Lacan’s concept of the subject supposed to know. We carry this belief in the subject supposed to know into our psychoanalytic sessions and transfer it onto the analyst. So we imagine the analyst knows the truth of our psychological process. But Zizek, citing Michel de Certeau, describes an even more fundamental concept: the subject supposed to believe. This is the belief we have that there are others, more authoritative than we, who believe completely what we only want to or try to believe.

My subjects supposed to believe are Noam Chomsky (in politics) and Richard Rorty. I do believe what they believe, I’ve adopted their beliefs, but there is a way I don’t believe as fully as they appear to believe. And part of my confidence in my beliefs is dependent upon my imagining that, despite my doubts, they believe completely the things I profess to believe that I’ve gotten from them, but that I feel secret uncertainties about. I believe, and need to believe, in their belief.

Oddly, the certainty I apply to Rorty and am trying to achieve for myself, is in contradiction to the uncertainty which is an inevitable result of his philosophy critical of belief in absolutes.

When "My Spade Is Turned"

2010-02-17T16:22:00.000-08:00

An interesting difference of view that may be an example of reaching a bedrock assumption is the different arguments that Matthew Bagger, a philosopher of religion, and Graham Priest, a logician, make about the fact that mysticism, and, Priest would say, all philosophical thinking, reach an inevitable point of contradiction. Such contradictions are “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao” or none of our concepts can ever grasp God. These assertions are contradictory because they say with words or concepts that we can’t know these ultimate things with words or concepts. Yet they do tell us something about these things.

Bagger argues that this paradoxical quality of ultimate entities is made into something mysterious by religions when they are just paradoxes. Priest says that the fact that mystics and philosophers keep running into contradictions at the limits of thought suggests that there are true contradictions. That we are finding something out about the nature of existence when that is the result we keep encountering. And as a corollary, the law of non-contradiction which says that something’s wrong with our understanding of things if there is a contradiction is, in this case, wrong. The contradictions at the limits of thought may be information we keep rejecting; that there are true contradictions.

Wittgenstein wrote: "If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.'"

Bagger’s book is “The Uses of Paradox” and Priest’s book is “Beyond the Limits of Thought.” Who we think is right is dependent upon the kind of world we want to live in.

Psychoanalyzing Some Philosophizing

2010-01-19T16:29:00.000-08:00

The blog “The Joy of Curmudgeonry” has criticisms of Richard Rorty’s philosophy. The blog’s author employs a common technique which is interesting to psychoanalyze. He takes a one or two sentence quote from Rorty and then “refutes” him. This technique is in contrast to the usual critical method of grasping a thinker's overall argument and responding to it. This facile technique is done more with Rorty and, more generally, with people who are strongly antithetical or fundamentally undermining of the critic’s position. Examples I’ve seen of this technique are numerous: several critics’ responses to Noam Chomsky’s radical political critiques; the analytical philosopher Rudolph Carnap’s making the continental philosopher Martin Heidegger look ridiculous by quoting a particularly abstruse passage without any context; Noam Chomsky calling the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan an “amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan.”; several critics of Jacques Derrida.

The critic’s criticism usually has an air of dismissiveness. The opponent is not worthy of consideration because their view is so wrong-headed that it can be disposed of easily. Yet what’s interesting is that the opposite is the case. The opponent’s view is so radical that it challenges the basis of the critic’s worldview and so is profoundly threatening. When the target of the criticism can make a fundamentally opposed worldview plausible and compelling (and I find all the above named thinkers compelling) it relativizes the critic’s worldview. It’s the profundity of the threat and not the foolishness of the thought that causes the threatened critic to act as if their opponent cannot be taken seriously.

If Rorty were as easily dismissable as the curmudgeon of the blog suggests why are twelve of the top philosophers in the world responding to Rorty’s work in the collection Rorty and His Critics? If he is that easily dismissable what is going on in the book? As we might expect from a knowledge of psychoanalysis, the critic’s tone of easy dismissal hides its opposite. In psychology it’s called a reaction formation. We feel and express consciously an emotion opposite to the one we are unconsciously feeling underneath it. A smug confidence in one’s rightness masks the vulnerable fear of a threat.

Rorty and the Need to Tweak

2010-01-01T15:05:00.000-08:00

The link between Rorty and non-dual mysticism – the Tao, Buddhist emptiness, Advaita Vedanta, negative theology - is that he’s continually trying to convince us that there is nothing to hold onto. There’s no It. No way in which It really is. No essence. That our words, vocabularies, concepts, or the assumption we have about them, keeps fooling us into thinking we can grasp how things are if we get our words to work, our understandings to cohere.

But, according to him, it’s also not the case that we know for sure that there is no essential nature to things. That would be another metaphysic. He wants us to leave off the search, stop asking the bad philosophical questions. But how to let go?

Rorty is the only philosopher I’ve kept reading over the years and yet he keeps doing the same thing just in different ways. As he said, nowadays he’s just “tweaking” what he’s already written. I keep reading him because I can’t let go of the dream. The dream of finding The Answer, the final resting place, where one doesn’t have to search anymore. Wittgenstein said the goal of philosophizing is to be able to stop philosophizing when you want to. I both believe Rorty that one must let that quest go and, since I keep reading him, obviously don’t believe it. To choose his view and say that’s the way it is is to contradict oneself because you choose to rest and feel sure that there is no surety. To do the opposite and cling to a fundamental understanding and say there is a Way, an Answer, The Truth, is to cling to an ideal that you cannot prove and so believe in that which you cannot show and so, as a rationalist, contradict yourself. The contradiction at the limits of thought.

Huw Price on Representationalism

2009-12-01T15:02:00.000-08:00

This from philosopher Huw Price from a lecture he gave called "Two Readings of Representationalism"

The view I’m challenging can be thought of as a loosely articulated combination of two fundamental assumptions about language and thought. The first assumption (call it the Content Assumption) is that language is a medium for encoding and passing around sentence-sized packets of factual information – the contents of beliefs and assertions. The second assumption (the Correspondence Assumption) is that these packets of information are all ‘about” some aspect of the external world, in much the same way. For each sentence, and each associated packet of information, there’s an appropriately 'shaped’ aspect of the way the world is, or could be – viz., the state of affairs, or fact, that needs to obtain for the sentence to be true. The orthodox view bundles these two assumptions together (not recognising that they are distinct). Once both are in place, it is natural to regard language and thought as a medium for mirroring, or representing, these sentence-sized aspects of the external environment, and passing around the corresponding packets of information from head to head.

My proposal rests on pulling the two assumptions apart, foregrounding the Content Assumption but sidelining the Correspondence Assumption, replacing it with richer, practical and more pluralistic understanding of the role of various kinds of linguistic information in our complex interaction with our environment. The key is inferentialism, which frees the Content Assumption from the Correspondence Assumption. According to an inferentialist, the internal logical machinery of language creates packets of information, or contents, but these may be associated with many different functional relationships, in the complex interaction between language users and their physical environment.

From the inside – as ordinary language users – we don’t notice these differences between one sort of content and another. We talk about ‘facts’ of many different kinds – e.g., about tastes and colours, or right and wrong, as easily as about shape and position. The differences are only visible from a theoretical perspective, by asking about the different roles that commitments about these various matters play, in the lives of creatures like us. (Facts thus become a kind of projection of informational structures made possible by language, echoing Strawson’s famous remark that ‘if you prise the statements off the world you prise the facts off it too’ (Strawson 1950); and there is plurality in the resulting realm of facts, reflecting the underlying plurality of functions of kinds of assertoric commitments.)

More of Part of a Worldview: Politics

2009-11-05T11:45:00.000-08:00

The capitalist credo/arrangement of “get what you can acquire through any legal means in the market” is a primitive, animal-kingdom-like approach which humans need to transcend by taking competition out of the equation for gaining the necessities of living. Freedoms in acquiring beyond the necessities can be structured into the workings of the economy with upper limits created through taxation, regulation, etc. This allows the freedom to be entrepreneurial but not at the expense of each person’s right to the necessities of living.

An assumption is that no person deserves the necessities of life more than another person. So what there is must be distributed in such a way that all have the necessities regardless of their capability in acquiring them, assuming the society is capable of producing that level of material abundance. So the society or social group cannot have children or adults in poverty or “going hungry,” or without shelter, proper clothing, medical care or education.

People’s flourishing occurs in a political-economic organization of participatory political and workplace democracy. The laws and policies would be guided by the ideal of each person having maximal control and input in their public places of participation. This would be balanced by the needs of an organization to function through timely decision-making.

These ideals should be applied to the present state of society and see how it measures up in any given case. Unlike the conservative orientation which takes history and tradition as the guides to what can be and so is cautious about social change, my view judges the present according to its ideal and asserts where society does and does not measure up and why.

In the US money generally rules so elites with economic and political power maintain a status quo which favors their interests at the expense of the majority. This state is hidden through propaganda and pervasive mainstream assumptions about what is and is not a serious political or economic issue. The media, being large corporate institutions, have a confluence of interests with economic elites and are part of a taken-for-granted structure which promotes the interests of those on top. There is no conspiracy or cabal maintaining the status quo and the participants are mostly sincere in their ignorance of this situation. A pervasive media and political skepticism must be maintained since what is considered an issue or current event or social fact is an outcome of a system structured around maintaining an unequal and anti-democratic power structure.

Announcing a New Ultimate

2009-10-18T09:19:00.000-07:00

I thought of a new concept for the ultimate stuff or what their really is beyond all appearances. People use varying terms for this ultimate stuff: Truth, Reality, The Real, The Absolute, God, the Tao, Nature. But I think there is a paradoxical and almost not-there quality to the ultimate stuff which is not reflected in those concepts. So we need a word that takes up that space - in our minds and on the page - but which doesn't give us much to cling to, since we really can't prove to everyone that we are the ones who've got It (the Truth, the Right way, God). So I propose that we call the ultimate stuff "The Absence". It is a word, a concept, so it is present and yet it refers to what's not there. It's pleasantly or irritatingly paradoxical since it's identifying something that is missing. Maybe the Buddhist notion of emptiness is comparable, but that has to be clarified by saying: "it really means empty/fullness" and "don't think it means nothingness." The term "The Absence" points to something that isn't there.

A drawback to this term could be that it could refer to a previous presence that is now gone because it went away, but that may be ok too.

Part of a Worldview

2009-10-03T07:33:00.000-07:00

Mine is a pragmatic worldview. This means that I believe in using differing vocabularies or perspectives – scientific, mystical, rational, poetic, practical, religious - to engage the differing encounters we have in life. I’m mostly naturalistic in my choice of perspectives, which means that I like using science, reason and experimentation to understand things, and am suspicious of supernatural explanations. But, if in the struggle to live a good life someone believes in or has a personal experience of God, or finds astrology useful, and they do good, then they should use it. Of course, determining if anyone is using a perspective or vocabulary well is a debatable matter and one has to bring one’s array of ethical beliefs to the evaluations and debate. There is no superhuman arbiter of right and wrong, or if there is, we can’t prove to all participants that we are the ones who know it.

So while the natural and social sciences can be great tools for understanding the world, poetry is also a great vehicle for understanding and experiencing nature which science often neglects, and, in its hyper-instrumentality often hinders. While psychoanalysis fairs poorly in scientific tests of its truth, it can be used well as a means for understanding human life. And, as with most things, it can be abused and used for ill. So one must be careful to evaluate on an individual basis the various uses that people are putting their worldviews, but each worldview will be understood and evaluated according to the assumptions, beliefs and criteria of the evaluating worldview.

Because of this view, there is a great emphasis on how people interact to resolve their differences. Since there is no, non-human higher power to appeal to: whether God, the Law, Truth, Goodness, Reality, we must direct our attention not only to our vision of how things are but how the other sees things and why. In order for that discussion to be a fair one in which the best arguments prevail, the context of the argument has to be uncoerced. Jurgen Habermas describes the “ideal speech situation” in which power differentials of varying kinds are absent so the force of the better argument can win.

But what of worldviews that emphasize a practice or experience in order to know and deemphasize rational argumentation? A Buddhist practitioner could say that you have to do the practice and see for yourself. One alters one’s being then one knows. The question of what a discussion is and how to interact must be questioned.

Experimenting with Worldviews

2009-09-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

As part of my interest in the way a person’s psychology affects their intellectual, philosophical, principled, moral beliefs, I’ve also been interested in worldviews or belief-systems or overall perspectives. Or, in Wilfred Sellars definition (of philosophy): “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” In a recent book by Eugene Webb, “Worldview and Mind,” he quotes Marcus Borg’s definition of worldview: “a culture or religion’s taken-for-granted understanding of reality – a root image of what is real and thus of how to live” (pp 19-20 in Borg’s “The God We Never Knew).

Mostly, philosophical writing uses abstract concepts, but I think it often neglects offering concrete examples that illustrate the concepts. And I think that often this aversion or neglect of offering concrete examples is due to a fear that when one starts going into detail about what one is talking about the problems and anomalies will show themselves. It safer and more comfortable to speak abstractly.

Regarding worldviews, I wondered if I could describe one. So I chose the Christian worldview. And, surprisingly, it was hard. To include all major Christian sects I know of I had to make the most general, bland statements: Is the Bible believed by Christians to be written by God or just the sacred book, or, depending on the definition of sacred, the main book? Is sin central, or is love central? Is Jesus God incarnate or just a prophet? Did he actually rise from the dead or are we to understand the story metaphorically? Is that rising what’s centrally important or not?

Perhaps as the subject is narrowed – Catholics instead of Christians – one can be more specific.

But, instead of taking a social group’s worldview I thought that it would be easier and more inkeeping with this blog’s project to describe an individual’s worldview. Since my own is so ready-to-hand I will describe mine. I do this not to convince anyone of it, but as a researcher into one person’s worldview.

(Although one of the characteristics of one's worldviews is, I think, that we think that everything we believe is right, or, the best we can do right now; that no one knowingly holds a wrong view. Although again, I know a guy who doesn't believe the dinosaurs really existed on earth, yet he also knows that science has demonstrated it. Rational people have unusual and contradictory beliefs, some of which beliefs haven't met each other and some which, more interestingly, have and yet are still simultaneously held. In psychology this is called "cognitive dissonance."

What would a worldview look like? How extensive is it? What’s included and what’s not? How coherent is it? Does a worldview contain specific political beliefs or does a worldview describe one’s fundamental orienting categories a la Kant. And yet, even with those basic, orienting, physical, Kantian categories such as space, time and causality, there is philosophical debate about their nature. And there’s also people who have unorthodox – for the Western scientific rationalist – views of them: Jungian synchronicity, action at a distance, astrological effects, shamanistic and psychedelic space and time alterations, etc.

Since it’s a blog, I thought I’d just start describing some aspects of my worldview and reflect upon, and organize it, later. (As opposed to my usual tendency to make it all nice and polished and presentable before anyone sees it.)

Arational Origin of Worldviews

2009-09-03T15:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a part of an exchange I had at http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=1198

I think it can stand alone.

There are other ways, [besides the Hindu/Advaita view] to experience existence and it's not necessarily the way things truly are (of course it may be). An alternative mystical approach, which I described, is to not have a view about how things are or what the essence of existence is or a metaphysic. One simply remains in a state of profoundly not knowing these kinds of things (but able to know many other things). One persists in the state of viewlessness. I'm partial to the view of viewlessness (so it’s obvious I’m not practicing it), but it seems contradictory to say that it is the Right Way to be.

Today I just read something apropos of our discussion. Slavoj Zizek writes in The Parallax View:

‘“anti-philosophy” – it is not surprising that Kierkegaard laid out its most concise formula: “The fact of the matter is that we must acknowledge that in the last resort there is no theory.” In all great “anti-philosophers,” from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to the late work of Wittgenstein, the most radical authentic core of being human is perceived as a concrete practico-ethical engagement and/or choice which precedes (and grounds) every “theory,” every theoretical account of itself, and is, in this radical sense of the term, contingent (“irrational”) – it was Kant who laid the foundation for “anti-philosophy” when he asserted the primacy of practical over theoretical reason; Fichte simply spelled out its consequences when he wrote, apropos of the ultimate choice between Spinozism and the philosophy of subjective freedom: “What philosophy one chooses depends on what kind of man one is.” Thus Kant and Fichte – unexpectedly – would have agreed with Kierkegaard: in the last resort there is not theory, just a fundamental practice-ethical decision about what kind of life one wants to commit oneself to.’

So Zizek's suggesting the arational basis of the origins of our worldview.

Rorty on Mental Entities

2009-07-13T18:47:00.000-07:00

Two quotes from Richard Rorty on how cognitive science makes a mistake in assuming that entities like “mind,” “consciousness,” “intention,” name essences or substantial entities:

“The Galilean outlook, which says that there is no a priori reason to assume that explanatorily useful terms like ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality’ denote properties which have intrinsic natures, or structures which empirical research can uncover.”

“From this Galilean point of view, anything is recontextualizable either into a context-independent substance or into a slice of an indefinitely wide web of relations, depending upon the need of current empirical inquiry. But there is not sense in asking the question ‘Which is it really a substance or a slice?’"

Page 398 from Folk Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind

Changing Our Relationship to Our Selves

2009-06-14T14:21:00.000-07:00

It's interesting that we can choose to alter our relationship to ourselves and alter our subjective experience and our outward behaviors. I use the process of working with and changing my internal state and outward behavior through the application of mindfulness/awareness, directed by both Buddhist and psychotherapeutic insights and guidance. Buddhism focuses on form not content. Buddhist mindfulness of the present moment either has no interest in the identification of internal contents – one simply experiences consciously the breath or a pain – or uses a noting procedure – “pain,” “judgment,” “hatred” – when those experiences are mindfully observed as present in the moment.

Psychotherapy focuses on content. What’s causing that emotional or physical pain? Why are you judging yourself? What is the meaning of that subjective phenomenon in terms of your unique narrative and needs? So a moment-to-moment practice of the self which combines the two modalities would have both the use of mindfulness in the moment to bring attention and raise awareness and the application of the guiding self-understandings of psychotherapy to direct the attention with an overarching purpose. In both cases we’re altering our selves by changing our relationship to ourselves.

For example, I have a tendency to delay doing things that need to get done. For years I simply acted this out unconsciously, not even knowing it was characteristic of me. Gradually I became aware that there was a pattern of delay behavior occurring in different contexts that was causing me suffering. I would have to do something before a certain date in the future. I would put off doing it because the due date wasn’t here and for whatever deeper psychological reasons that made me averse to action. I would feel anxious as the due date approached that I wasn’t getting it done and I might get into trouble if I don’t do it. Finally, I’d see that due date was upon me and scramble to get it done. Most of the time the thing got done, but if I’m going to do the thing anyway, why not do it immediately since I know it has to get done eventually and save myself all the anxiety and aggravation that I feel while I’m delaying. It didn’t make sense.

For a few years now I’ve been training myself to identify these situations as soon as they arise. For instance, I got a rebate on a new cell phone which I had to send in before June 10th. In mid-May I thought: “Oh, I have lots of time, no worry.” By June 2nd I caught myself thinking “I can wait, it doesn’t needs to be in till June 10th.” But at that moment I realized what I was doing and told myself: “No, this is one of those delay situations that’s going to cause you suffering for no good reason.” I imagined the due date coming and me finding I didn’t have some form I needed for the rebate and missing it. I then felt the resistance to sending it in immediately, the heaviness and aversion. Then I reminded myself that this is a little hurdle I can jump over and that I'd feel better once I got it done. So gathered up the forms and went to my desk and sent it in.

A small example, but illustrative of the combination of mindfulness and psychological insight required to alter a persisting, pain-inducing pattern that manifests in many areas of my life.

The Interplay of Personal Psychology and Philosophy

2009-05-15T02:57:00.000-07:00

Sublimation is when the energy from our desires, needs and emotions is repressed and finds an indirect outlet in intellectual or artistic productions. Here’s an example of how my personal psychology is connected to my philosophical interests. The particular philosophic investigations serve, in part, as a compensation for and alternative solution to unwanted psychological behaviors.

My main philosophical interest is knowledge and I’m drawn to seeing how well a contextualizing or relativizing of knowledge can be defended. So Richard Rorty’s critique of philosophy’s attempt to ground or find foundations for knowledge attracts me. I like reading those who undermine philosophical attempts at certainty, absolutes, foundations, essences, finding the Truth, etc. There is a desire and an emotional charge and payoff when reading the underminers.

Psychologically, in my everyday thinking and behavior, the opposite is the case. I want to create something permanent, be a somebody so I’m not forgotten, find what I really want to do (as if there is the one thing that’s right for me), make sure I’m doing the right thing at any given moment through various ways such as knowing what I’m feeling and wanting, and acting accordingly. All of these behaviors have the quality or the assumption of one right way, establishing something permanently, finally getting it right, getting the right answer, doing what I (objectively) should do.

I also think that this drive for establishing the right way is problematic because I don’t think there is a right way and the underlying belief that I should find the right way is done unthinkingly and not working.

Richard Rorty once said late in his career that he’s really just tweaking the main points he’s laid out years ago. I noticed that my desire to reread Rorty’s work (keep reading the tweaks) – a desire I don’t have with any other thinker – had the quality of me wanting to be convinced of something I believe intellectually but don’t live practically. I want to absorb a relativistic perspective in order to compensate for and remedy the surety-seeking in my everyday life. The philosophic reading and writing would succeed where the personal psychological work of weakening the need to find the objectively right path had failed.

Conversely, it might be the case that if, through some kind of psychological development, I let go of the need to create permanence in daily life, my desire for relativistic philosophizing and the content of my beliefs about knowledge would change.

Deciding How We Decide

2009-04-19T08:14:00.000-07:00

There was a presentation of a new book called “How We Decide” by Jonah Lehrer on Cspan 2 It reports scientific research regarding how people make decisions. A guy in the audience asked a question. He observed how when you ask people why they do things – come to this talk by Jonah Lehrer for example – they come up with reasons that may have nothing to do with the real reasons they did what they did. So the questioner may respond to why he came to the talk: “I wanted to get out of the house.” Or “I’m really interested in the brain and how we decide.” Or “I wanted to be at this cool event to pad my ego.” So people create reasons that may have nothing to do with the real reasons for their actions.

But doesn’t this presuppose that there is a true, right reason that someone knows or could know? Who knows that reason and how? Is it the cognitive scientist who’s studied decision making? Is it the psychoanalyst who knows our unconscious motivations? Is it the common sensical observer with their no-nonsense take on things? Which way of determining motivation do we believe tells us the “real” reason? Isn’t that a contested issue? Who decides once and for all which perspective is the correct one for determining our motivations? Each commitment to a perspective on why we do things is, at some fundamental point, an existential act of allegiance.

What’s important is to know what mode of interpretation, what story of how things are we are choosing. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this or that narrative and explanatory framework? The common sense explanation: “I felt like it,” has simplicity and avoids excessive rumination, but will be limited when more complicated situations arise that don’t yield to simple explanations or when simple explanations no longer work. More complicated psychoanalytic explanations may make intuitive sense but feel speculative or not offer a practical course of action if one is needed. The cognitive scientist’s laboratory findings may or may not apply in this individual case and could be contested on procedural grounds: perhaps the experiment is open to interpretation and criticism.

So each explanatory framework will have pluses and minuses. These pluses and minuses will be determined by the application of criteria from that explanatory framework or from one outside which, because of some overlap, will make demands on the framework being adopted. For example, the common sense observer may use the concept of the brain: “my brain’s not working right today.” The neurophysiologist can ask about the brain and pursue some logical line of inquiry which the common sense thinker, because of the array of reasons they are committed to, will feel obligated to answer. Since different interpretative or explanatory frameworks share concepts and criteria they make demands on each other that they feel obligated to answer in order to maintain their coherence and integrity.

The questioner presupposes the common framework of their being a “way in which things are” or “the real reason we do something” but who or what explanatory framework uncontestedly tells us that? It’s an absolutist assumption that can’t be redeemed.

Insight and Terror

2009-04-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

Why so often is the patient’s realization in psychotherapy simple, a cliché? Because our psychic economy, our defenses, keep us from seeing it. It’s not the complexity of the thought that keeps us from understanding it, it is the terror of feeling what it means about our life for it to be true.

Zizek and Rorty on the Real

2009-02-21T13:37:00.000-08:00

An interesting aspect in Slavoj Zizek’s writings is the way he says something about and uses the concept of “the Real,” yet the Real he describes is similar to the reality that Rorty describes which philosophers and other beings have tried to grasp. For Rorty the real or reality is a philosophically empty concept. We have different candidates for the Real: God, Matter, What Is, Truth, Nature, Knowledge, but the debates about it are inconclusive and it seems to just serve as an unknowable ultimate justifier for our beliefs. Rorty’s pragmatic solution is to stop talking about it.

Zizek’s Real from Lacan is a gap, lack or absence, in a way not there, yet it’s incorporated into a psychoanalytical-philosophical understanding that gives it a useful role in helping us to understand ourselves and the world. The Real as a lack or absence lay at the center of our symbolic order and is why we can’t create a finished intellectual system. It is that uncanny, indefinable attractive something that causes certain objects to attract and entrance us. It is the trauma around which we construct our selves and repeat our behavioral patterns which contradictorily both offer to resolve the trauma and help us to avoid confronting it.

So Rorty says reality as the really real is not there and not a good use of our time to think about. Zizek says yes, it isn’t there in the way people want – a substantial something, a graspable bedrock – but in its absence it is there and has a determining presence which we see in its effects. He analyzes its qualities of attractiveness and repulsiveness. It’s the psychology of what ultimately isn’t there but can’t be gotten rid of.

There’s an Eastern spiritual version of this. The ultimate stuff is paradoxical: The Tao, Nirvana, Atman, the Non-Dual are ineffable and yet named. We try to grasp It or surrender to It but the very effort to know It causes It not to be known. It is beyond conceptuality. But the Eastern practices do believe there is a final attainment or resolution, whereas Zizek and Lacan don’t think there is.

Artifice and Authenticity

2009-02-09T17:29:00.000-08:00

Just saw a movie about the life of Joe Strummer of the punk band The Clash: “The Future is Unwritten” (Great title.) It raises a knotty, disturbing set of issues for me. First, there’s my comparing myself to a great, successful, creative guy. But I’m not as prone to that issue as in the past since I now see more clearly my issues around wanting to “be a somebody” and have an escape route for it.

Second, is the painfulness of the combination of my hero’s personal failings – in this case his narcissism – and his great success in creating powerful, authentic, valuable art: The Clash’s music. The movie showed how Strummer made the decision to join the cool guys – Mick Jones and Paul Simenon - to form The Clash and abandon not only his then current band – the 101’ers – but also abandon his hippie persona and with it his hippie friends. Later, when he became moderately successful with The Clash and old friends approached him, he ignored them. They didn’t fit in with his new image. And in the home movies of the early years of The Clash and their marketing films, you can see their narcissism; the conscious creation of their superiority and their adoption of the attitude that the full-of-themselves famous exhibit. It’s remarkable how that persona infiltrates their bodies and minds so that you can see it dripping from their faces, gestures and walk.

(It was funny to see Bono of U2 in the movie talking about how great it was to see The Clash in Dublin because they weren’t like the usual rock stars driving their Rolls Royce’s into swimming pools. Maybe not, but the movie makes clear that the members of The Clash cultivated a thick and highly self-conscious image of themselves as cool, raw rockers. And yet they made a cool, raw rocking album.)

The interesting contradiction is that accompanying this conscious image-management is an artistic expression of integrity, authenticity and quality. It’s like my friend’s problem with T.S. Eliot. He loved his poetry until he found out Eliot was an anti-Semite. It ruined it for him. But should it, or must it?

Perhaps the two things – one’s personal behavior and being and one’s artistic creations – can be unrelated. And we make the mistake of thinking that they are connected. I always find it funny that people want to interview actors and read about them because they generally aren’t interesting people.

It’s our own narcissism which is the problem: we want our artistic heroes who create works that express our innermost being to personally embody those qualities. We meld their person with their art because their art touches our person. We are looking for an ego-ideal, a fully integrated image of right being and put those artistic heroes into that role of personal and artistic perfection. When their flaws show, it is a narcissistic wound for us the fan. They are the dream of our unrealized selves, realized imaginatively, and so they do great work for us and it wounds us when they fail.

The Mechanics of Psychological Self-Awareness

2009-02-01T09:05:00.000-08:00

Swans Commentary, the online political and literary site, accepted my review of the movie “Slumdog Millionaire.” I’ve been reading and excited about Slavoj Zizek’s writings and I’ve been trying to add to my blog more. These events caused a regression to a problematic psychological approach to living which I became conscious of and tried to change.

I described the problematic psychological approach in a couple of posts in October of 2005. I was living along a spectrum whose two poles were “being an intellectual somebody” and “being an intellectual nobody.” The desired goal was to “be an intellectual somebody” and the feared failure was to “be an intellectual nobody.” The value of my life was determined along that spectrum.

This pathological spectrum is opposed by an alternative approach to life in which I try to “be myself” through following my desires. In the former approach, I imagine an external scale of recognition and rate myself according to it, in the latter approach, I follow my inner desires, interests, and what I “feel like doing.” Instead of being a split person who projects a self-judgment outside myself and then tries to live up to it, I look inward first to find the desires in the moment and then act motivated with their energy.

Recently I found myself at the computer on a day off trying to find something to do but not knowing what to do. I wanted to write or read something but didn’t know what. I’ve had enough experience with such states to know that, when they occur, I need to stop what I’m doing and just sit and do nothing. After sitting for a moment I saw that behind the pressured search for something to do was the repeated thought: “what should I do now, what should I do now…” I realized that with the recent excitements stated above, I was getting ahead myself. The desire to do things had turned into the belief that I “should” do things and so I needed to find things to do. Instead of recognizing and following desire, I was being directed by the pressure to “keep it up,” to “find something creative to do,” to find what I “should do now.” To manufacture the kind of life that I imagined I should be living. That “should” is maintained by a distance from myself. “Should” implies a model and rule to follow, some image to live up to; a molding of myself in its image. Opposed to this is the arising from within of desire: “feeling like” doing this or that and then pursing it; having an inclination to do this or that.

Realizing this seemed interesting so I felt motivated to write it down and it became what I did next, which is this piece.

Review of Slumdog Millionaire

2009-01-27T15:48:00.000-08:00

Hey, check out my film review of "Slumdog Millionaire" at Swans Commentary.

Useful Guilt and Selfish Guilt

2009-01-20T16:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve noticed that there are two types of guilt, useful guilt and selfish guilt.

Useful guilt leads me to change my behavior so that I no longer do the guilt-inducing action because I’ve decided it’s wrong.

Selfish guilt contains all the pain of guilt, and yet, is a selfish indulgence. We feel the pain of guilt to make ourselves feel better. So it is masochistic.

How does it work? If I violate one of my moral judgments – such as, that I should devote myself to the welfare of others, or not eat meat from animals that were mistreated – I’ve done something wrong. But if I don’t want to stop the action I can restore my psychic equilibrium by punishing myself with guilt for my moral infraction. I do a bad thing, punish myself and then feel that the perpetrator has been punished and my moral world is set aright. I feel as if justice has been done or the perpetrator has been punished. I am my own police, judge, prosecutor and prison. Since I have no priest I play that role for myself and gain absolution by causing myself suffering for my transgression. The painful guilt is simultaneously a pleasure since by suffering its condemnation – paying my debt to society – I can continue breaking that moral rule in the future.

The Future of the World

2009-01-17T15:25:00.000-08:00

An online journal called “Kosmos” asked for a reaction from its readers on the following topic:

"Here is the current topic for reflection:

Many of us have been living with the knowledge that our world and its institutions are nearing collapse. We long for that time – that rare opening – when evolution takes a momentous leap forward. The election of Barack Obama aroused an explosion of spirit in the world. It seemed to be an outer symbol of an inner knowing that the tipping point from collapse to creation may well have arrived.

The slogan heard around the world is “Yes we can.” What does this mean to you?"

Here's the first draft of a response:

What does the slogan “Yes we can” mean to me? It means that another empty slogan has gained popularity. The kind of change we’d like to see occurs through social movements - collectivities of more or less ordinary people getting together to push for what they want, not through the election of an official in the most powerful country in the world. Obama is a centrist politician who may, because of the dangers in the current financial situation, make some significant changes in the way things are done, but who will also reestablish, with some modifications, the prevailing order. Better than Bush but also Bush with a human face. Obama is a symbol of the civil rights struggles of the sixties, but he is also an acceptable establishment figure who wouldn’t have gotten elected were it not for the dangerous financial and economic situation.

I’m not sure that we are “nearing collapse.” Collapse could occur, but it’s hard to imagine what it would look like. The “explosion of spirit” in reaction to the election of Obama is not an “an outer symbol of an inner knowing that the tipping point from collapse to creation may well have arrived.” It is an outer symbol of the yearning for a better life which will be realized if common people of a like mind band together to wrest power from those who control things in ways that favor the interests of the powerful.

Much more heartening is some of the change occurring in South America where massive organization has produced some structural changes. By focusing on Obama, we divert our attention from the real work of being involved with others in creating the societal changes we want. To work creatively and productively with others who share our goals requires heightened inner and outer awareness in order to know what needs to be done, how to do it and how to be the kind of person who can engage with others and act together.

The Origins of Belief

2009-01-05T10:03:00.000-08:00

Some friends asked if I’d like to do a reading group on Michel Foucault. I said no, but that maybe we could do a group that uncovers our own beliefs and examines their origns in our own psyches. They recoiled in fear and disgust.

We each have a conscious and unconscious, consistent and inconsistent stance, perspective, or belief-system. Things we’re presented with – ideas, others’ beliefs, works of art, music, situations, current events – trigger reactions, feelings, thought, opinions and considered perspectives. Why those triggered reactions and not others? What is the psychic economy occurring at any given time, and in general over time, in this person that produces that reaction? Why does this one hate that music and that one loves it? What is it triggering in each? I contend that there is an interesting and elaborate psychological story to be told about why those immediate reactions occurred. It has to do with the person who one is.

We could come to learn how a stance, a perspective, being-disposed-to arises, is sustained and how it hangs together. And why, occasionally, conversions occur. Opinions are interesting, but they can get boring. What’s now more interesting is what caused you to hold that opinion. What psychic purpose does it serve?

While the representationality or mirroring-ability of our ideas and beliefs has been unmasked or thrown into grave doubt in contemporary philosophical discussions, we still compete for rightness – the rightness of rendering - in our discussions. Compete for who has got It right. And yet, all the while, we have no foolproof way of determining the It we are trying to get right and can legitimately doubt It’s existence. In our discussions we are trying to get a conception of reality to prevail. (Although, if we share rules for determining validity then we can often come to some agreement.)

What’s at stake in that competition?

1. How the world will look. 2. What we think we should do in it. 3. The integrity of our own beliefs and the legitimacy of the selves and lives that caused and are validated by those beliefs.

The Problem and the Mystery

2008-12-27T13:25:00.000-08:00

On a radio talk show a guy was making the distinction between a mystery and a problem. A problem can be solved and its problematic nature resolved, but a mystery, he said, deepens and increases the more you try to fathom it. We know both these experiences of problems and mysteries.

Yet there is a different understanding of the Mystery that you hear from some mystics. This is the experience of the answer to the Mystery – such as the mystery of life - as being so obvious and simple as to be laughable because we make it complicated and profound. Some mystical insights into existence have the quality of letting go or surrendering that result in a liberation from the mysteriousness. The realized mystic says: “Being just Is,” or some such formulation of the insight. Laughter results when the mystic sees how it is that we, not the Mystery itself, that makes it all so complicated and deep. It’s all experienced as a cosmic joke; all that striving after an answer that is so ridiculously simple.

So another facet of the Mystery - which appears as the solution to it – is that there is no Mystery. The profound insight into how the Mystery is different from the problem can also be experienced as the greatest folly because the Mystery is really the easiest problem to solve. Simply don’t try to solve it.

That can work for some and not others. For others, plumbing the depths of the ever expanding Mystery is the solution, the solution that never solves the problem, making it a mystery.

Repetition Compulsion

2008-12-07T08:01:00.000-08:00

I’ve noticed a repeating pattern when I try to develop my own ideas. After an initial inspiration and excitedly writing down the ideas they don’t seem so great. The inspiration that caused me to write my thoughts wears off and what I’ve written seems commonplace and uninspiring. Is this caused by a negative self-judgment or a later, more realistic assessment of the material?

It could be a realistic assessment of my work’s value. Maybe the excited moment of inspiration is an illusory overvaluation. While my ideas probably aren’t as novel or wonderful as they first appear, when I detach myself from the dullness that they become shrouded in, they usually seem to at least be an interesting addition to the topics they address.

Additionally, the devaluation that comes later seems too complete. A veil of dullness seems to fall over the ideas, as if they don’t matter at all. That seems suspiciously complete or extreme.

Why does this occur if it isn’t a realistic assessment of the worth of the ideas?

Is it just that I thought the ideas and that if someone else thought them I’d think they were interesting? That’s partially true because I do like the ideas more when I imagine that someone else wrote them and I’m reading them in some reputable source. But that was the case – that it was me who thought them – when I had the inspiring inspiration. Why not devalue them immediately? It still leaves unanswered what causes the later devaluation.

Examining the quality of the experience when the ideas are being devalued is important. The ideas seem old or already known. Maybe there is a generalized, positive valuation of the original. Since they are now old they are no longer fresh. So there may be an issue around originality. And I know I have that issue in that I always want to think of something original. I regularly think of the saying, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” which is a maxim opposed to and indicative of my desire for the original.

Or the later devaluation is a defense. By devaluing the ideas myself, through a feeling that they are dull and of no interest, I preempt their being rejected by others. I reject them first in order to avoid a rejection by others. But if that’s the case why isn’t the defense present when the inspiration and the initial writing occurs? Why not think they’re dull right after they are thought? Perhaps there isn’t time for the defense to insert itself. Before the defense has a chance to insert itself, the inspiration is felt and there is excitement, but after, there is the defensive protecting of myself by experiencing the ideas as dull.

But if they are not dull, why experience them that way? Well, it stops me from pursuing them, investing time in them and showing them to someone and risking rejection and disappointment. The veil of dullness is the conscious layer; underneath are the discouragement and a fear of disappointment. This anticipation of disappointment is in advance of the expected disappointment I will feel when my thoughts are rejected by others. And this is expected because of past experiences of excited assertion and a resulting lack of interest or mocking and the pain those caused. I learned not to try and to create my own disappointment, veiled in dullness, before it occurs. It is less painful to do it to myself than to have someone else do it.

So it’s hard to make a good assessment of the value of what I’m writing with this psychological condition occurring.

So how not do it?

Well, I can watch it occurring and note it so that it is not acted out unconsciously. Repeating the pattern unconsciously allows it to continue. By becoming more and more aware of it, it is loosened and other feelings towards the material are given room to occur.

I can also force myself to look at the written ideas and, with a simultaneous knowledge of this process of devaluation, work them over despite it until they ignite some interest.

These may work.

Predictably, this same process occurred with this piece. Now it seems old-hat, not worth more attention, yet initially it felt right and potentially of interest to others.

Examining Experience

2008-12-02T18:40:00.000-08:00

It’s odd that there should be so much philosophical talk about qualia, sense-datum, raw feels and other names for the contents of our subjective experience and so little time spent examining them subjectively. Philosophers generally respect the methods of the natural sciences yet ignore a mode of examination of subjective experience which can afford a better examination of it. The method amounts to looking more closely. This is the method of mindfulness meditation in Buddhism. One sits still, closes the eyes and “watches,” experiences consciously or examines the arising and passing of thoughts, emotions or feelings and sensations. It may be objected that mindful examination of subjective experience is not a transparent or simple examining, but the same could be said for the microscope. The method itself is quite simple. Sit still for a longish period of time – longer than we normally sit still – and examine the contents of experience as they arise. The experience is one of seeing what is already there but more closely. We already do this in small doses when we check in to know what we are feeling. So why not look more closely for a sustained amount of time? It’s odd that a field with a strong empiricist tradition wouldn’t think to examine their subject matter more closely.

Grasping the Mind

2008-11-10T17:52:00.000-08:00

Is there something curious about the fact of our subjective experience? Is it mysterious? Is it oddly immaterial yet causally efficacious? It can certainly look that way to us. Yet I think Rorty would say that it looks that way because of certain conceptual pictures or stories we adopt about the way the world is.

One of those stories is the scientific story of the world as essentially material or physical and the brain being one of those material things that creates the immaterial mind. Furthermore, causality works through the interaction of the material parts being in physical contact with each other. With this background story, how can the seeming immateriality of a thought or belief have an effect?

There is a way the world is constructed in our dominant worldview due to a philosophical and scientific legacy that causes consciousness to seem curious and uncanny. But it is experienced as curious and uncanny relative to that dominant worldview. The felt experience of subjective consciousness is affected by the contextualizing story we’ve adopted. It would look and feel different if we saw the historical causes of that worldview which divides the world in numerous ways – subject and object, mind and matter, private and public - before we even observe, examine and start reflecting upon our subjective experience.

So the brute, self-evident, direct looking at the objects of our internal world isn’t so direct even though it seems like it. It’s not direct because to look at something and perceive it requires a mentality that is already conditioned in various ways: it is infused with meaningful understandings through language; it has a reason to direct its attention; it has a directedness of attention; it perceives what is seen, identifying the thing seen as this and not that. While it feels like there is a “sheer having” of a pain, we can question whether it is “sheer” or unmediated.

We don’t have to doubt the having of pain. But do we have contact with it, pain, in its raw, unadulterated form? To say yes is to open an investigation into this basic datum of experience and perhaps to try to build a theory of knowledge out of it. Rorty would say that it’s been tried and we now know it’s better not to go down that unproductive philosophical road.

Immanent Happiness

2008-10-14T18:41:00.000-07:00

An implicit assumption of mine is that happiness comes when you’ve achieved certain life conditions: a particular job, relationship, level of accomplishment or acclaim. Recently, though, while walking along the street on a sunny day I felt well up from within an experience of happiness. This is unusual for me and didn’t make any sense. It didn’t make sense because I assume that I cannot feel happiness unless I’ve achieved certain things. In my mind there is a strict cause and effect with the environment being the cause and my mood being the effect. Since the conditions for happiness are not in place in my life I cannot feel happiness. In addition, the goal of feeling happiness is a motivator for me to do the things I need to do to become happy. If I were to just feel happiness without those conditions that I know cause happiness being in place then that ruins my taken-for-granted belief system.

I should be pleased with this. “Thank God! I can just have the prize without the work.” But it seems too good to be true and it suggests that my years of struggle have not been necessary. That’s an enormous waste of time and effort.

But perhaps it was just a one off occurrence and won’t be repeated. Although, ironically, it may be due to my not pursuing happiness anymore in the way that I assumed one must try to achieve it: accomplishing some intellectual work that others admire. Maybe it’s a release from the strictures of a warped approach to living. That could cause great relief.

Molding Life

2008-09-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

After completing an activity I sometimes don’t know what to do next and think “what should I do now?” This is not only a thought; it is also an experiential state. I’ve become more conscious of this experiential state and named it the “what-should-I-do-now” state. The state is characterized by my looking outside myself to find the next thing I should do. The phrasing is indicative of what the state is and means. It assumes that there is an objectively right thing to do next and that I need to find it now. It is an attempt to guide myself by external pointers rather than internal guides such as desires or needs. And it presumes that I need to be occupied now and shouldn’t just be unoccupied or doing nothing.

The “should” phrasing and the felt-experience presuppose a particular conception of life and the world. This conception is that there is an objectively right thing to do now and that I will progress in life - get somewhere, be somebody - by fulfilling that objective. For me, getting somewhere has the sense of making progress towards a goal of being rated highly by an external standard held by others. It suggests a worldview in which there are external guideposts which can show me how to discover my next action and how to live in general. So instead of being connected to subjective desires and feelings and following their lead without approval from the outside, I ignore my internal desires and try to achieve an image of what I should be in order to attain attention for accomplishing a goal that others value.

A quite different experiential state is that of “having an inclination” or “being drawn to investigate” or “wanting to know” or “just feeling like doing” whose character contrasts with the “what-should-I-do-now” experience. This experience is one of looking inside myself and discovering what I want and following that inclination. The doing that results is motivated inwardly and so has less of the quality of being forced to act. The idea behind this way of acting is being my own person. It suggests that one lives better by not living outside oneself.

Thoreau wrote, “Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.”

Philosophical Being

2008-08-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

There’s an odd contradiction in a recent book about Nietzsche. In Michael Ure’s Nietzsche’s Therapy we learn about the works of Nietzsche’s middle period. Ure contends that Nietzsche’s main interest was to create a philosophical therapy along the lines of the ancient Greeks who saw philosophy not as a detached search for knowledge but as a practice for becoming a person who lived rightly. The works of Nietzsche’s middle period are filled with acute psychological insights that presciently anticipate Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. Nietzsche is presented as a man with a path to real adult maturity. And it is a fine vision. But in reading the book I remember the biographies I’ve read of Nietzsche and remember how miserable he was in his daily life; suffering from both physical and mental torment. It’s a familiar occurrence. Thinkers who write about a vision of living yet give little indication about the actual living out of that vision. How is it accomplished? Do people who practice that vision actually embody the goal? What happens when they try it? Does it work?

Psychoanalysis certainly has a well described practice of change, but the results of that practice are highly variable. If we think of philosophy in the ancient way – as a practice of the self – then we should be interested in the nuts and bolts of making ourselves into the kind of person that our philosophy describes. I’ve found it very difficult to become the kind of person I envision and have employed, over the last 20 years, a variety of powerful practices of self-development. What we should want to know is: what happens in given cases when particular practices and philosophies are used day-to-day to effect self-change? But generally people are content to remain on the level of theory, describing interesting and attractive visions of the good life. This is where a philosophical autobiography would be useful; but not a person’s story of how their thinking changed over time, but a story of how their being changed over time.

Philosophy, Poetry and Psychoanalysis

2008-06-13T16:06:00.000-07:00

From a review of books about Ezra Pound by Louis Menand in The New Yorker, 6/9&16/08:

Ezra Pound “did not believe that (in the words of the preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray”) “all art is quite useless.” He thought that poetry had a kind of power. He believed, Moody says, “that ‘the perfect rhythm joined to the perfect word’ would energize the motor forces of emotion and will and illuminate the intelligence, and that the result would be more enlightened living.”

This is a way of conceiving of both philosophy and psychoanalysis. The right way to live arises from apt words affecting particular emotions and then the intellect. In psychoanalysis, the right interpretation at the right time triggers a feelingful experience and insight and a change in being and living. In philosophy - in the ancient conception - the right understanding leads not only to accurate knowledge but to right living.

And, regarding the theme of this blog, emotion is prior to the illumination of intellect. We are affectively disposed to experience and then conceive of the world in particular ways which are then made convincing to cognition through the effective arrangement of words.

But we don’t just start from a wordless emotional base which then determines our views. The above quote and our experience with our emotions suggest that the emotions are meaning-laden. As in Eugene Gendlin’s focusing technique the words and the feeling or felt sense are intertwined and each felt sense is linked to precise words. Apt words are experienced as just right; they hit the spot. Feelings are worded. The right words sit rightly with us.

Certain arguments appeal to us, they are appealing. They please our sense of what’s appropriate. We want them to be true. We find ways to defend them and can’t conceive of them being wrong.

Poetry can convey an overwhelming experience of truth and rightness yet that way of wording is far from the literal and scientific language which is supposed to be our best conduit to an accurate representation of things.

McCain No War Hero

2008-05-25T11:02:00.000-07:00

This stuff about John McCain being a war hero is very annoying yet seems to go unquestioned. Would we call a Soviet soldier captured and tortured in

Afghanistan

during their invasion and attempted subjugation a “war hero?” We should have every sympathy for the terrible trauma the soldier suffered and not wish it on anyone, but we should also acknowledge that people engaged in criminal and immoral acts, like the bombing that John McCain did in

Vietnam

and just being apart of an unprovoked

attack on another country, aren’t heroes. Even if the soldier is ignorant of what their country is doing – like most of the soldiers in

Iraq

– there is some measure of responsibility that they should be held to and not treated as sacred icons. And the population of the country doing the attacking and occupying should also share some responsibility, they’re paying for it (me included). Not as much responsibility as the leaders who lied us into the attack, but some.

In an odd way John McCain did the moral thing by giving aid to the enemy since "the enemy" had right on their side since they were fighting for their national liberation against an external aggressor (the US).

Humans, Animals and Morality

2008-03-21T13:25:00.000-07:00

A pervasive prejudice embedded in our culture regarding our valuation of humans and other animals is that when humans act with horrible violence they are commonly described as acting like “animals,” or “beasts,” or “inhumane,” the latter implying that there is something not human about these acts. Yet immoral violent acts are unique to humans and not characteristic of animals. Animals don’t intend to do bad or good. It is only humans that intend and do evil. Our prejudice imagines a bipartite situation with the superior humans on top and the non-human animals below. When humans do very bad things, we imagine that they sink below the human into the animal. But this is not the case since animals cannot do bad.

The actual situation is a tripartite one. On top are humans doing good acts. Below them, in the middle, are the amoral animals acting morally neutral. And below the animals are humans who do bad. While humans doing good are above all other animals, humans doing bad are below all other animals. It’s a slur against non-human animals to call evil-doing humans “animals” and “beasts” because the animals and beasts are morally superior to the evil humans. An accurate situation in which humans act like animals is when we act involuntarily, as in accidents or infants who don’t know any better or people who have lost their minds. The deeply instilled prejudice is that humans are truly human when they do good but become mere animals when they do bad. The truth is that humans doing bad are still as wholly unlike other animals as are the humans doing good. Doing evil has nothing to do with our animality and everything to do with our humanity.

Constructivism's Implication

2008-02-02T15:55:00.000-08:00

Here's a dense and condensed draft of a paper I'm working on:

I will describe an implication of a constructivist view of knowledge. A central understanding of most constructivisms is that knowledge is created rather than discovered. The key difference between discovered knowledge and created knowledge is that with discovered knowledge there is something – nature, the way things are, human perceptions, facts, Reality, rightly applied methods of knowledge acquisition, the final consensus - that we attain or gradually approach which acts as a guarantor and adjudicator of right knowledge. For the constructivist and the believer in knowledge as a creation, the one way things are is not out there to be discovered using the right methods of inquiry. Instead, the very idea of “a way in which things are” and “what’s out there” are understood to be social, linguistic and historical constructions.

An implication of a constructivist view of knowledge is that changing what causes knowledge to be as it is changes knowledge. The genetic fallacy states that the genesis or origin of knowledge has no bearing on its validity. But if there is no ultimate adjudicator of valid knowledge or if one cannot be conclusively proven to be operative, then whatever alters the causes of knowledge having the character it has alters knowledge. We might hope that certain ultimate adjudicators would act as the validators of knowledge whether they are the right rules of reason, the way the world actually is or the confirmed results of scientific inquiry, but, as these are constructed conceptualizations subject to various interpretations and philosophical critiques, they cannot act as ultimate adjudicators of intellectual disputes. Without an unproblematic, neutral adjudicator of knowledge claims, all causes of knowledge can affect the validity of knowledge.

One cause or determinant of knowledge is the arational commitments of believers. For many important issues in academia and daily life there are fundamental differences that rest on a believer’s assumptions, commitments or so-called “rational intuitions.” Many important convictions are not rationally adjudicable and so are due to arational causes. According to the genetic fallacy the psychological and biographical causes of a person’s beliefs play no role in the validity of those beliefs. But on a constructivist view of knowledge, since there is no ultimate adjudicator of validity in these disputed cases, the validity of a proffered piece of knowledge is affected by the psychological and biographical causes of that knowledge. A change in psyche or biography can alter the determination of validity by altering what individuals and, through accretion, groups deem valid knowledge.

If knowers cannot conclusively prove that their view is in keeping with what’s objectively true or right, then validity is a contingent affair affected by whatever causes knowledge to have its current character. If knowledge is constructed, if it is made and not found; then what alters that making alters knowledge. Therefore, whether it is rational argumentation, persuasive rhetoric, a moving experience, changes in social structure, or any other cause of knowledge, these all affect what we understand to be our knowledge.

Lepore's Dilemma

2007-11-06T18:27:00.000-08:00

In a book review in the New Yorker magazine (10/29/07), the Harvard historian Jill Lepore assesses Daniel Walker Howe’s new history, “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.” This review is an illustration of the theme of this blog: the nettlesome and unexamined issues of philosophy and autobiography, of objectivity and subjectivity. Lepore contrasts Howe’s progressive history with Charles Sellers’s earlier and well-known critical history of the U.S., “The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846.” From the tone of her review the reader can tell that Lepore favors Howe’s “rare and refreshing” progressive rendition of American history, but she is responsible enough to quote Sellers asserting that

“Where Howe’s assumptions suggest that I undervalue capitalism’s benefits and attractions,” Sellers continued, “my assumptions suggest that he underestimates its costs and coercions.”… Sellers attributed these “warring assumptions” not to different evidence, methods, theories, or strategies of analysis but to the two historians’ different values.

Although, after quoting Sellers’s relativizing assertions, she noncommitally says “fair enough” and leaves it at that. Lepore, despite being more aware than most, is caught in the middle of the two perspectives, still unable to bring to full consciousness the dilemma that the two major studies present. The differing histories and Lepore’s preference for Howe’s raises the issue of how we determine which history to favor. Is one more accurate than the other and so superior for that reason? Or, is the value judgment that’s placed on something as large as the course of American (or any country’s) history separate from the facts and not something that can be said to be accurate or inaccurate? What do we do with Sellers’s assertion that the cast of the two histories is caused by “the two historians’ different values”? On what basis has Lepore chosen to prefer Howe’s?

What this blog and my paper “Arguments Beyond Reason” is suggesting is that once one has gone through the process of determining which facts are validated best by the differing criteria of accuracy that discussion participants adhere to and employ, there is also the process of determining the reasons we decide to adopt one valuation scheme over another. We can examine our ideal of how we should live which informs the arrangement of the historical story – its moral – and the psychological reasons that each of us comes to adopt that vision of how humans are and how they should be. This latter process is a psychological-spiritual intellectual practice of the self in the tradition of the ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of philosophy, but reworked using contemporary therapeutic methods.

In “Arguments Beyond Reason” and in the more fully developed “A Different Path” I explain how this type of analysis is not just a curious self-interpretive practice but a way to affect truth and knowledge by altering our adherence and relationship to our rational intuitions.

A Psychology of Reading Rorty

2007-09-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

More than any other philosopher I keep reading Richard Rorty; its been 20 years now. What is it that draws me back to him when I don’t read any other philosopher with that consistency? Rorty himself recently said that nowadays he’s just “tweaking” what he’s already written. If it’s the same old stuff repackaged why do I keep wanting to read it? Of course the ease with which he delivers his views makes for a pleasurable read, but there wouldn’t be such a level of desire to keep reading him unless there was something I needed to get from his work. Somewhat contradictorily, I understand what he’s saying while at the same time I can’t quite grasp something and so need to keep reading.

One of Rorty's central and oft-repeated themes is anti-essentialism. That philosophy presumes that things, its objects of inquiry – knowledge, truth, the good, reality, the mind – have an essential, unchanging nature which we can grasp by thinking rigorously about them. It’s assumed that the entities of the world have a nature, are a particular way, and we can finally grasp their nature by thinking rationally about them.

Rorty asserts that this assumption of the essentialism of the objects of philosophy has created problems for philosophy and that a better understanding is that these objects are always meaningful objects that arise from language which in turn arose and arises through our social practices and interactions. Words serve useful purposes for contingent occasions and as those occasions and our needs change so too do our words and their meanings. The concept of “the soul” was a palpable reality (and still is for many), but in philosophical circles it has been replaced by the concept of “the mind” which, for many, has a palpable undeniability.

I ‘m drawn to reading Rorty saying this over and over in a variety of different ways even though I can already state the idea accurately and believe that he’s right. But if I understand the point, why not be done with him? Because there is a level at which I don’t understand it and don’t believe it. So on one level I believe it and on another I believe the opposite. What are those two levels?

On an intellectual level I’m mostly convinced and yet on a psychological level I believe the opposite. Psychologically, in my moment-to-moment, daily living, I assume and operate as if there is an objective way that the world is, objectively right things I should be doing and that it is my job to try to discern them. I live as if my true life course is objectively out there, but I don’t know it and that it is my job to fathom it. This is another example of “the pathos of distance,” the sad separation of humans from some eternal, certain, completing Other which life seems inexplicably constructed to keep us from, or make it monstrously hard to grasp. This Other has taken many forms: it is the nature of the virtues in ancient Greece, it is God in Christianity, Nature in science, the Truth in philosophy.

More specifically, I live as if the central ruling conceptual scheme of my psyche, which I wrote about in my first few blog entries: the fact of being a nobody and the corresponding desire to become a somebody, has an essential and substantive character and reality. It’s an essentialism of the psyche which rules my life, but which, upon reflection, I can see as a mutable, human creation that I needn’t be subject to. But while I can see it intellectually, just as I understand Rorty’s work intellectually, psychologically I continue to act out their dictates as if they were an essential and real polarity of life. Since this living, concrete polarity of nobody and somebody operate in my day-to-day living despite my best efforts to escape them, I gain a secondary, but never completely liberating satisfaction from reading Rorty.

Beginning Philosophy

2007-07-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

Daniel Dennett begins his book Sweet Dreams by asking for the literal truth of consciousness as opposed to the metaphorical image of it as words and images subjectively experienced in the mind. This distinction between literal and metaphorical is not made thematic, instead taken-for-granted. It’s assumed that literal corresponds to material and so the brain while metaphorical refers to our subjective experience of our minds. But the question of the literal and the metaphorical or figurative is quite vexed with some arguing that the literal is a historically contingent category and doesn’t describe a natural kind or the real stuff of the world. That means that in some past eras what we think of as literal they thought of as metaphorical or figurative. For example, in a Christian culture God was literally real. A mechanically functioning Newtonian clockwork universe can be seen as metaphorical in relation to the literal truth of an organically interconnected, God-created world. Others argue that language itself is essentially metaphorical or figurative since it’s an analogy to a reality we don’t know in and of itself. From this perspective, Dennett’s designation of scientific naturalism and materiality as literal is dependent on the metaphorical properties of language.

From another perspective Thomas Nagel argues that Dennett has lost the data of our subjective experience of consciousness. The palpably real subjective experience isn’t figurative or metaphorical, it can be seen as realer than anything else. So Dennett hasn’t explained the data but explained it away. What’s central to know for Nagel, subjective experience, becomes in Dennett’s work an epiphenomenon. The reality of our subjective experience, so different from the third-person perspective of the natural science's examination of the brain, has been lost.

Yet if we want to understand the vivid self-evident reality of our subjective experience then the tradition of phenomenology recommends and practices a detailed examination of it using our capacity to witness it. From this approach we get the tradition originating with Husserl, and running through, among others, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre.

That phenomenological tradition and Dennett’s ahistorical scientific examination can be subject to a historically informed critique from a Marxian-inspired, Frankfurt School analysis which understands the very objects and subjects of inquiry and the methods used to understand them as socially and historically created entities which encrypt within them the conflicts and fissures of the historical era of their arising.

And yet, from another well-argued, but lesser known perspective, all of the above are seen as a problematic outgrowth of and different variations upon the dominant rationalistic inquiry of the modern era seen as the “barbarism of reason” and a result of the wrong course taken by Descartes. Donald Phillip Verene reconstitutes instead the ancient Roman and Renaissance Humanist tradition originating in Roman thought and revived in Renaissance Italy and Vico which places the human ability of conceptualization in our mythic origins and the imagination essential to figuring those myths.

If philosophy’s traditional role is to answer our questions about first things or fundamentals, how, with this diversity of conflicting views, does one even start? On what basis does one choose to do one’s philosophy when there are such fundamentally opposed approaches? To initiate the very practice of one begs the questions of the others. How could philosophy answer this question?

How do the philosophers who enact these traditions initiate their inquiries when the more fundamental question of why proceed in that way goes unanswered? Why are their traditions more convincing to them than the others whose questions they beg? What aspects of them cause them to have the alliance to their approach that they do?

As soon as one starts to do one’s philosophy, all these larger questions of how to even do philosophy have been answered without thinking.

Psychoanalysis and Science

2007-06-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

Found Todd Dufresne’s new book Against Freud on the new book shelf. It is interviews with Freud critics, so a nice introduction and survey. These are people who are, for the most part, strongly against Freud and psychoanalysis. The most famous of the critics is Frederick Crews. One of the many problematic points he makes has always stood out. He says that psychoanalysis has not been demonstrated to be true using experimentation as in science.

Has poetry or literature been proven true in this way? Since they haven’t, should they not be sources of truth and knowledge and used as guides to living? I know Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be a science and some analysts believe in it as a social science, and it has been tested using scientific experimentation, but it doesn’t have to be thought of only in that way.

We can even acknowledge the institutional pathology of psychoanalysis and the damage caused by crude practitioners, but I think Crews would go further to say that it cannot be used well. Yet there are certainly people who have had successful, life-changing analyses. Even if it is a small minority, we’d like to know how that occurred if, as Crews says, the method is rotten.

I think the wiser perspective to take is that there are many perspectives on living that can serve as life-guides and that particular ones appeal to particular people. Various life-guides are beneficial to various people and these same life-guides that are beneficial to some people can be damaging to other people, or are simply not appealing. They each have their strengths and limitations. Generalizations can be made about how various life-guides craft people; there are types – the holy-roller, the gentle pacifist, the Type A go-getter, the reflective neurotic – none of which capture any individual, but can serve as guides to understanding which parts of a person may have been developed and which may have been neglected or are lacking.

Crews assumes there are modes of knowing that put one in touch with reality, like science. But if we think in terms of a coherence theory of truth then any way of conceiving of life for the purposes of living it successfully will be self-reinforcing. To shift from being a scientific type to a poetic type to a therapeutic type to a fundamentalist type to an astrological type, will take a conversion experience, just as Crews experienced in his move from psychoanalysis to scientific anti-psychoanalysis.

Rorty, Concepts and Things

2007-05-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

Just learned that a fourth volume of Richard Rorty’s essays has been published. I’ve been reading him for over twenty years now and, despite the negative opinions of his work that you hear frequently from conventional philosophers, I find his characterizations of philosophy and contemporary thought illuminating and rarely in disagreement with what I’ve read.

One of Richard Rorty’s recent concerns is how we mistake concepts for things. Because we use concepts (which, we often forget, are words) like “mind,” “consciousness, “ “money,” in everyday life we mistakenly think that we can, by thinking about those concepts more rigorously, get at what the things they refer to really are, their essence. Because in everyday life we use the word “consciousness” for many practical purposes we mistakenly think that it is an objectively existing entity which has a definable essence we can grasp. We wonder and ask: What exactly is consciousness?

He’s saying that we are taking a concept that has arisen for practical social purposes and has a multiplicity of meanings – because a multiplicity of uses – and also a history of different meanings caused by different uses in different cultural contexts and mistaking it for identifying an objective entity which has a persisting nature or essence which we can pin down and, by so doing, capture an aspect of reality.

Yet, it’s objected, this thing called “consciousness” seems so palpable, present, intimate, right here. And so it is, but the movement from the experiencing to the describing need not include the idea that we are getting at a piece of the world. Is that what words are doing? Rorty would say the describing is what we do to solve practical problems and make our way in the world, they should not be thought of as mirrors of reality.

Leading a Life

2007-05-16T16:31:00.000-07:00

While petting Rosie – a Chihuahua-Pomeranian mix - I found myself wondering how she felt her life was going. As if she could think in terms of her birth, living and death. I realized it was a projection – something we do to dogs all the time – because, of course, she doesn’t conceptualize her life like that. There’s probably no conceptualization at all.

But then I thought of my own life and how I conceptualize my life in terms of how it is going, what it’s like now and where it might and should go. But seeing the mistaken application of the idea of “leading a life” to Rosie I thought that that way of conceiving of this existence is optional. Perhaps tribal people don’t formulate their lives in terms of whether they’re accomplishing their goals and whether their goals are good ones to be trying to accomplish (but perhaps they do). Certainly a Buddhist practice, through a sustained immersion in the present moment and the gradual withering away of concern with the self, can cultivate a life lived less fixated upon “how my life’s going.”

Of course any conceptualization can be made to seem optional, but there’s still a shock when a conceptualization of life one hasn’t yet made optional is seen as optional. What’s been taken for granted as reality, the unquestioned backdrop for living, becomes one of many possibilities and so potentially revisable.

What to do with this insight? It’s not as if you can alter you’re way of being just like that. It requires a lot of sustained effort and the motivation to do it. Otherwise, it’s just an intriguing possibility to be entertained for a few moments until the attention shifts, the mood changes, a different view of existence appears and a different experiential world arises and becomes, for a short time, the way things are.

Thinking vs. Being

2007-05-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

There’s a particular difference in me between thinking and being; what I believe versus how I operate and what I do.

I believe or am mostly convinced by the idea that everything is impermanent as the Buddhists say and some Buddhist’s experience as a moment-to-moment reality. That all our creations and any fame will evaporate. So, in a larger sense, Einstein’s fame or some lesser thinker’s fame are about the same since it all passes away. It depends on which perspective you take. If you choose the standpoint of eternity, or think in terms of the extinction of humanity, does it matter so much what you accomplished? If you take a more limited or local perspective it can matter very much. Which perspective one takes on existence at any given moment plays a part in determining how one judges how one is succeeding in leading this life.

Yet this understanding of the Great Impermanence, which seems so undeniably true, does not affect my actions and way of living. I still try to get recognition and feel it’s very important whether I do or not. The successes and failures of my intellectual creations affect me, yet are, on another level, an ultimately fruitless enterprise. It’s odd to be emotionally affected by something, that on another level, I think is meaningless. My acting and my feelings contradict my beliefs day after day.

The being yearns to get or create something lasting while the mind thinks that nothing lasts.

Buddhist practice tries to get the mind and body to witness and experience the impermanence and so get mind and being in accord. I don’t seem motivated to do that.

Psychoanalytic practice recommends understanding the roots of the yearning for eternity in - if you are Ernst Becker or Otto Rank - the denial of death or, in some other depth psychology, the frustrated need for love.

The Third Way

2007-04-27T11:13:00.000-07:00

No, not the phony third way of Clinton and Blair from the late nineties, but a psychological third way I’m trying to carve out of my experience. My two other ways, that give the third way its thirdness, are for me: a "therapist self" who is understanding, listens well and asks good questions. The other way is a closed, withdrawn, forever-impinged-upon self who would rather not bother with other people and gets angry at my wife when she has "issues" and “problems.”

The third way is a murky experiential space in between the false, understanding self and the sullen, burdened, withdrawn self. It’s difficult to find it, but recently, on two occasions, I have in my reactions to my wife. I seem to project onto her my hopelessness of ever developing or having a progressive process. When she speaks of her problems, which I’ve heard before, I hear this as a hopeless beating a dead horse and my constricted self arises. She, while upset about the problem, also feels that sharing about it is part of changing it. When I name and then speak of the hopelessness I'm projecting onto her, there seems to be a third way of being in between falseness and withdrawal. I’m forced to bring more of my real self to the interaction.

It's an odd experience to perceive her situation as hopeless, to feel I know that in reality this is hopeless, and then shift perceptions and see that there is no objective hopelessness here, but a projection of my own hopelessness. The state of the world alters in that moment. My biography was determining my reality.

Self Narratives

2007-04-10T15:37:00.000-07:00

It’s interesting how we can tell ourselves our life story in different ways but can’t simply choose one of those ways simply because it is a positive, beneficial life story. Sometimes I tell my story as one of hastily made crucial choices – choosing the wrong major in college and grad school and being stuck with it – and how those mistaken choices have led to my being in a life situation I don’t like. I left grad school before getting a Ph.D., but in my leisure time have continued studying academic works. I ‘d probably be happier as an academic and probably will never be.

But an alternative telling of my story is that I luckily got out of the academic system and the conforming and constraining effects of the tenure system so that I could freely find my own intellectual way and develop my own thoughts. But I rarely tell myself that story although it’s certainly available to be told. Why not tell that one? It seems our self narratives are not rationally choosable. We can’t just choose to tell ourselves the most positive plausible life story. A larger undergirding mood and worldview determines what self-narrative will hold sway.

But also, with me, an overarching, determining standard plays a role. Since I am still trying to achieve somebodyness [see the introductory post of this blog] my actions are rated according to its standard. If I were to achieve somebodyness through my intellectual work then perhaps the positive self-narrative of going my own intellectual way would rise to power and be dominant in my psyche. But if I fail and remain a nobody then the story of me as the guy who missed opportunities and made bad choices will reign.

The third alternative is to loosen the grip of the nobody-somebody spectrum and gain fulfillment by being myself, doing the things I like and evincing my uniqueness. Although, while that sounds wholesome, I can’t make that my guiding life understanding.

Buddhism and Psychotherapy

2007-03-06T16:08:00.000-08:00

For the last two years I’ve been waking up most mornings about two hours before I need to. The same thing happens each time. As I wake up a feeling of fear lodges in my chest. It takes on different shapes and qualities, sometimes being a ball and sometimes being a piercing point of fear. Very soon after the fear arises, I start anticipating the everyday events in the near future and repeatedly rehearse and plan what will occur. Sometimes I can redirect my attention away from the obsessive thinking and just focus on the sensation of fear in my chest. If I can sustain my attention on the fear long enough, and not be distracted by the obsessive thinking, I can actually fall back asleep, but usually not, as I don’t have the power of concentration to sustain my attention on the ball of fear. The sensation of fear is used like the breath is used in meditation practices, as an object of concentration.

I think what’s happening is that I’m getting a glimpse of how my personality gets reconstructed each day. As we fall into sleep we let go of our waking self and become our unconscious self or selves. Upon waking, during those initial moments, in the passage from dream and sleep to waking life, our waking personalities are reassembled. For me, fear is the foundation and on top of it is built my self and the “normal” thinking about the day that a lot of people do, although generally not so repetitively. It’s the thinking that keeps me awake, not the fear itself.

For some reason, a few days ago, I felt that redirecting my attention away from the obsessive worry and planning and back to the sensation of fear itself would be a good psycho-spiritual practice for me. The idea is that there is nothing to fear in the future that requires all that anticipation. If that’s the case then why do I think about it so much? Because the obsessive thinking serves as a distraction from something that was really feared in my past, the nature of which is encased in the ball of fear and unknown to me.

The very convincing false reality is that I have to think a lot about what I will be doing – getting places on time, saying the right things, doing this or that errand – in order to make my day go properly and not have any failures or catastrophes. The true reality is that all of this excessive thinking is unnecessary for good functioning and is a distraction from being connected to whatever feelings are lodged in the fear. The fear is about something that occurred in the past which I falsely imagine will occur again without hyper-vigilant thinking.

So to reconnect to the foundation of my false personality I need to redirect my attention away from the obsessive thinking and back to the proximate source of it which is the fear. When I do that and tell myself that there is nothing to fear in the future and that this is all old fears from long ago, I find the importance of thinking about the future event evaporates and the ball of fear loosens somewhat and releases a little energy into my arms and releases tension held in my back and neck. The ball of fear and its tendrils hold my torso and neck in place. This is the character armor that Wilhelm Reich described and the muscular armoring that Lowen and Pierrakos’ bioenegetics tries to release.

When I use to read stories of Eastern seekers getting spiritual practices from wise masters tailored to their unique needs, I wished that someone would give me the practice just right for me. This practice of interrupting my obsessive thinking and redirecting my attention to the sensation of fear is a unique combination of the Buddhist mindfulness technique guided by a psychoanalytic understanding of the mental-emotional processes at work in me. The mindfulness is used to realize what is occurring and to redirect my attention to what’s occurring in the present moment but guided by a psychological understanding of what I need to do to enhance emotional development.

I’ve had little revelations like this many times in the past and they typically are forgotten. They are convincing at the moment and one feels inspired for awhile, but then moods and thoughts and whole perspectives change and what seemed like “it”, loses its convincingness. So I’m trying to remember Gurdjieff’s understanding that we don’t remember ourselves, that we are really at sea in the ever changing thoughts, emotions and sensations that keep arising and passing away and that without establishing a fixed point of awareness – Gurdjieff’s master “I” – we are just machines or asleep; a concatenation that has no stable self, or aware center. In psychoanalytic terms, this would be how people mostly act out their unconscious issues, their lives determined by the other unconscious self that lives within them. In Buddhism, Gurdjieff and psychoanalysis there is the attempt to liberate ourselves from a conditioning of which we are not even aware by becoming conscious of the process by which our selves are continually being reproduced.

Buddhism vs. Psychotherapy

2007-03-02T19:17:00.000-08:00

I was working on two essays on the Arab-Israeli conflict posted at www.integralworld.net and so couldn’t post here.

A friend reminded me of the difference between Buddhist practice as a mode of self-development and psychotherapy. In the last few years, there have been people and books who have tried to integrate the two, but there is a fundamental contradiction between the two. Buddhism is interested in the form of experience and psychotherapy is interested in the content of experience. I had noticed this in the early nineties and it was one reason (not the most important) that I stopped my regular Buddhist meditation practice.

I told my friend that a Buddhist teacher I saw recently probably has a deep experience of impermanence. Knowing that everything changes on deeper and deeper levels is one way to describe the Buddhist path. There is nothing to hold on to. No person, no thing, not even your self. All that we strive for and try to attain will disappear. I told my friend that if I could appreciate that I could stop being so concerned with being a somebody and avoiding being a nobody (which I described in the early posts on this blog). He suggested that you could know about impermanence and still not know your historical process – the succession of events and experiences that, when more deeply appreciated, ground you in your present life and guide you into your future. This is what Judaism and the Kabbalah would look to as a way to live a full life. The importance of “Tradition!” and the history of one’s people as encoded in The Book. Also, the history of one’s self as reconstructed and re-appreciated as done in psychoanalysis, also created by Jews, for the most part.

Two distinct ways of living and engaging life. On the one hand, the content of your life is simply one ever-changing story whose form can be plumbed to experience the nature of all things. On the other hand, the form of you life – the arising of thoughts, feelings and sensations – isn’t meaningful without understanding the unique content of your psyche and history.

Why do we choose one path over another?

Philosophical Problems

2007-01-15T17:58:00.000-08:00

Donald Phillip Verene writes in Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997) that “There comes a time not to be the interpreter, not to think about the philosophers’ doctrines, but to think about what the philosophers thought about. This is an attempt to get to the inner form of ideas. For this there is no formula. It requires us simply to use whatever ingenuity we have.” (p.xvii)

I like the idea of reaching a point where we stop reciting what others’ have said and start thinking about what we think. But the idea that we will be thinking about the same things that the philosophers thought about is problematic. There is the view associated with Rorty among others that the “eternal problems” approach to philosophy is ahistorical and illusory. The idea that we’re debating the same problems as the Greeks is created through an historical reconstruction.

Explaining Our Beliefs, As Well As Their's: 7th Installment

2006-12-23T09:50:00.000-08:00

Following on my previous blog entry, “Our Criteria of Rightness: 6th Installment”:

We feel very comfortable understanding our own viewpoint as representing the way the world is or as an accurate rendering of the world as it is in itself. And, correspondingly, we judge an opposing view as off and not capturing things as they are. Consequently, we both develop explanations for how our intellectual opponent could be so off in their beliefs about how things should be and are, and we have the experience of perplexity at how they could believe something so different from us.

I think that we all have that feeling of ourselves as being sturdily planted in rightness while our opponents are hopelessly muddled.

But it is readily admitted by the masters of reason - philosophers - that our rational worldviews are based on rational intuitions, i.e. rational assumptions which cannot be further justified. There are very few epistemological foundationalists left. But if our views cannot demonstrate their origin in the way the world is - the one and only reality - and if that is also true of our opponents, then we should also take a look at why we believe what we believe beyond the reasons we give for believing what we believe.

We feel comfortable residing in the ultimately unsupportable perspective we take on how things are and some comfort in explaining the blind spots, stupidity and obstinance of people with opposing views, but we rarely wonder about the psychological origins of our own attachments to our beliefs. Not just what we come to think of as mistaken beliefs, but also what we consider correct beliefs. For if the way the world is cannot be shown to sanction or justify these beliefs, we can rightly wonder about their origins.

It’s comfortable to examine the extra rational causes of our opponent's beliefs, but we rarely inquire into the extra rational causes of our own beliefs.

Rational Relativism

2006-11-30T18:00:00.000-08:00

In contrast to Paul Boghossian’s book refuting relativism (mentioned in my previous post), is Steven Hales’ new book, Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy, defending a form of relativism. Hales is well-schooled in analytic philosophy and logic and will avoid the relativism which asserts the self-refuting proposition that “everything is relative”, and will instead defend the proposition “everything true is relatively true”. Haven’t seen yet how he’ll make that statement non-self-refuting, but I know from previous books of his that he’s aware of the problem and has an answer.

So far, there is a very interesting discussion about rational intuition. This is the necessity of philosophers to say there are certain bedrock propositions which we know to be true intuitively. Hales says philosophy can’t do without them, but it’s not clear how they are justified. How do we decide which of conflicting intuitions are right?

Construction of Knowledge

2006-11-22T16:48:00.000-08:00

Paul Boghossian’s recent book Fear of Knowledge is a critique of constructivism and relativism and a defense of a classical conception of knowledge. In opposition to the idea of the constructed fact he writes “many facts about the world are independent of us…the fact…that dinosaurs once roamed the earth is not dependent on us but is, rather, just a natural fact that obtains without any help from us.” (p.20)

Without human minds, humans’ creation of meaning, the creation of techniques of inquiry like science, concepts, categorizations like “dinosaurs” and ancient history there would not be “dinosaurs.” Without these things there wouldn’t be ideas like “mind-independent world.”

First, create language. Then separate and conceptualize mind, world, objects, etc. Then conceive of mind-dependent and mind-independent things. Then forget all this has happened and imagine that you are transparently perceiving and representing the way the world simply is apart from any human looking at it with their particular perceptive constructions. Then say “it’s simply there, objectively.”

A Hidden World

2006-11-11T14:36:00.000-08:00

Here’s an example of the illusion of the neutral perspective, where presentation is a misrepresentation. A world masquerading as what is.

I was reading the historian of ideas Martin Jay’s new book Songs of Experience where he describes differing modern theorists’ conceptions of experience. We get Jay’s clear, informed, fair-minded descriptions of other writers’ formulations of modern experience and the self. There are chapters on Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, Barthes and others. The world evoked implicitly by this style of presentation is one of clarity, neutrality, a this-is-the-gist-of-what-the-theorist-says tone. While it gives the impression of being a transparent window onto the theorist’s world it actually assumes the existence of a world that is different from the one the theorist being presented creates.

You don’t enter the world of the theorist by reading a description of his work. You don’t experience the world they evoke. By reading secondary sources you remain in the world of secondary descriptions and implicitly assume that world’s posture. Like the articles in The New Yorker magazine. The non-fiction pieces have a distinctive style: clarity, neutral, inquisitiveness, good judgment; our eyes in a strange land. The specialists they write about are domesticated for public consumption. The secondary source is a world of detachment as opposed to the primary texts world of immersion. It gives the experience of a broad understanding of diverse worlds, but it is removed. It’s an uncommitted way of life, which one commits to. The magazine is highbrow recreation. It can’t be too demanding or people wouldn’t want to read it for pleasure during their leisure time. It feels reasonable, objective, moderate, balanced, fair-minded, decorous, not over zealous. Is it worse than the primary source?

It uses what is currently considered literal language instead of the metaphorical or figurative. But according to Rorty and Hayden White among others, these distinctions are historically contingent. Today’s metaphors can become tomorrow’s literality. Heidegger and others are vying to create our new literality. Freud already has. Their original insights have to become what’s obvious, taken-for-granted, what most don’t reflectively know, but everyone enacts.

Emotion, Belief and Philosophy

2006-11-01T15:49:00.000-08:00

My brilliant wife, who’s not an intellectual and so knows more than me, said something interesting. She said, “I feel like I’ve won the lottery in being with you for the rest of my life. Winning that lottery is better than winning a million dollars, isn’t it?” I paused. I wasn’t so sure, but not because she isn’t great to be with, but because I couldn’t feel that in my heart. So I imagined feeling it, and was taken aback when I a ball of loving feeling rose up in my chest. Yet, just as quickly it was suppressed. I had the strong sense that if it had come out I would have felt, at least for that moment, that yes, a lifelong, loving relationship was better than a million dollars. For me, a million dollars means a life of freedom from coerced toil and all the time I want to read, think and write; a dream come true. The power of love felt like it would have changed what I valued. A relationship would mean more to me than my free time.

The choice between a significant relationship and all the money I’d need, raised the issue of what I valued in life. They were significantly different positions (although, of course, one could have both). It’s a common story in America, the person who neglects relationships for success. The adherence to one of these two views on what is of value in life and the different belief systems they represent would be based on the release (or not) of a feeling in my heart. My worldview would change based on a shift in feeling.

That’s not say that this would have been a lasting change. But it suggests the power of emotion to alter the course of a life by altering what one believes is valuable in life and valuable to strive for. Feeling and belief about what is important are the ingredients in our philosophies of life. It suggests an emotive basis for our basic orientation to life.

Our Criteria of Rightness: 6th Installment

2006-10-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

So what if we assume the truth of the no-one-world view of things (as described in my earlier posting No Objective View: 5^th Installment). What is the guarantor of the rightness of our depictions of the world? Our criteria of rightness. We adopt different criteria, weighted in different ways. I like using reason, consistency, appeal to evidence, always being open to questioning assumptions. Others might appeal more to faith, or experience, or the power of rhetoric, or common sense, or tradition, or they give a different priority to the criteria I use, perhaps non-contradiction is not as important to them as is empirical confirmation. (Graham Priest describes the way different criteria that scientific investigators use are weighted, so that consistency or non-contradictoriness may not be what’s of paramount importance.)

When situations arise where we have to engage others about what is right and what to do, we have to, according to my approach (of course their’s might be different and that would then be part of the topic of conversation), be clear about what is believed, what point is being discussed, why we believe what we believe and what criteria we use to validate our beliefs and what criteria we think should be used to validate beliefs and why. The ideal discussion would press forward into each area as it arose. For example, differences over evidence might have to be pursued. That might mean investigating the validity of sources. That might lead to a discussion of the methods those sources use to collect evidence. That might lead to a discussion of how we rate different methods. And so on.

If the discussion was sustained long enough we’d probably have to see what criteria we share in common and what criteria we don’t and give reasons for our criteria. At some point we both won’t be able to defend our criteria any further, we’ll reach a point where we just made an existential choice to believe or assume things. The discussion could end there or, I propose, if the parties are willing, the nature of our attachment to our belief; the psychological reasons why we are attached to particular criteria and beliefs can be investigated. For example, why is consistency so important to me? It’s only one of a number, and perhaps not the most important, criteria of validity. There’s also corresponding with the evidence, plausibility of explanation, simplicity. Why am I not a Whitmanian embracer of contradictions as Marshall McLuhan appeared to be? This has to do with the nature of my person, it can be investigated after argumentation reached its limits.

Extreme Real Worlds

2006-09-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

The comment by John about how Godel proved that there must always be inconsistency in certain large-enough logical systems, reminds me of an observation I had which must have been had by others since it seems obvious. When thinking or experiencing or perceiving to extremes, things become radically different or the opposite of what they appear when one perceives and thinks normally, yet the world or reality so perceived can be as convincing as our normal everyday life.

In physics when you analyze the very small, subatomic world the reality there is radically different from our normal reality and actually doesn’t follow our physical laws. When you look at the very large in cosmology, you get mind-boggling proportions difficult to conceive and mysteries like the big bang and the nature of space, time and the universe.

When you look intensively inward, using a rigorously neutral introspective practice like Buddhism, you experience everything as impermanent and you observe the arising and passing away of your own self. The nature of one’s self, the world and existence appear totally different.

When you examine rationally our beliefs and the important concepts we use – knowledge, morality, reality, good/bad, right/wrong, true/false – you come to no rational agreement about what they mean and skepticism is still a problem after more than 2000 years of thinking. Our everyday certainty is in contrast to continuing, radical, philosophical uncertainty about the facts of life.

The world of dreams is odd and extraordinary in its creativity, craziness and profundity and it’s a “normal” part of every person’s daily experience. In psychoanalysis, we can experience how we act out patterns that we have no intention or awareness of acting out. While we live out one life we are simultaneously living out another, unconsciously.

Finally, our lives are bounded by the two mysterious events of birth and death. When we intimately experience these facts of life that everyone is subject to, they pull us out of our normal reality and can be the most profound experiences of our lives.

It’s as if our everyday world is bordered on all sides by extreme worlds that turn our normal, everyday reality upside down. When we push experience, perception, analysis to extremes, things become radically different, yet entirely convincing.

True Contradictions

2006-09-13T17:03:00.000-07:00

The philosopher Graham Priest has written a book called Beyond the Limits of Thought. He argues that all large-scale philosophical systems will have contradictions at their limits and these should not be regarded, as philosophers do, as the problems we have to solve but as truths about what happens to reason when it pushes the bounds of thinking. These contradictions as true contradictions. All our world views will have them. Priest also says that the central “law” of philosophy, The Law of Non-Contradiction, has never been proved and the arguments for it are quite weak. He and others have developed “paraconsistent” logics, meaning logics that leave room for some inconsistency. He gives the example of certain Eastern logics which provide of contradiction. The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article by him on "Dialetheism", which is the view that there are true contradictions.

I found his work quite liberating because I always viewed contradiction as the enemy. In contrast with this, and, in another way, in keeping with it, I always loved the Tao te Ching which has many contradictory passages which convey great insight and wisdom.

No Objective View: 5th Installment

2006-06-05T16:11:00.000-07:00

If I’m acting on the assumption that there is no God’s-eye-view of things, no Objective perspective which we can touch or be influenced by then I am left with my view and you with yours. I don’t have to claim that the no-Objective-View belief is the absolute truth, I can just ask those who contend otherwise – that there is an Objectively correct view - why they believe it and examine it. So assuming no way in which things are which acts as the final arbiter for whose right, we are left with the best understanding that we make, alone and together. And when we find there are conflicts in our views we can agree to disagree, compromise, discuss it, or fight.

So why do I like the no-Objective-View view? Because I wanted to use reason rigorously and find the right view, but found that the arguments against that being possible were powerful. Rorty, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Buddhism and others all agreed that that kind of certainty couldn’t be found using reason. Yet my psyche still contained the desire to find it: the great quest for Truth. I could continue the quest, perhaps trying to find some experiential certainty through spiritual practices or try to alter the desire and treat it as misguided. But what are the psychological reasons for adopting this relativistic view. I said earlier that people choose their beliefs for psychological reasons, yet here I explain why I chose an important belief by saying that reason led me to it. To be consistent I should explain why that no-Objective-View view is attractive to me. A psychological account of why I attach to this view is needed to be consistent with my argument that we fundamentally believe for personal psychological reasons

Science, Reality and Worldmaking: 4th Installment

2006-05-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

So even the natural sciences do not deliver Reality. They do tell us what physical reality is like, but they cannot tell us what metaphysical reality is like - or Reality - reality as it is in itself when no human, or only God, is viewing it. So I like Nelson Goodman’s notion of worldmaking. We fashion worlds that work to varying degrees of effectiveness and are constrained by the criteria we adopt or presuppose in the worldview. (There’s a critique of Goodman’s full-strength relativism by the philosopher Harvey Siegel that I still want to examine.) People confront us (and we confront them) with various world-fashionings, and we try to make sense, or take action, or make decisions or agree to disagree together. So Rorty emphasizes solidarity over objectivity. The important point is not that I am the one who has reality as it is, the important point is that however I see things, I’ll have to engage someone else and react to their reaction.

But the natural sciences are so successful; doesn't that prove how the world really is? Well, it creates a compelling picture of the world, but is that how the world really is? The question of how the world really is, is a philosophical, not a scientific question. Scientists, as scientists, do not comment on Reality. Romantic poets also tell us how the natural world is in very moving ways. Does the Romantics natural reality have less reality than the natural scientist’s view? Impressionist painters have changed the way the world looks to those who’ve absorbed their vision. Did the world change or did we change? So too the mystic, through arduous and rigorous examination of experience, finds that ultimately nature and consciousness are not as they appear. Are they wrong and the scientists right? And if subatomic physicists find that matter is not exactly made up of a substance does that become reality? By what criterion do we evaluate their differing claims? Who decides which criterion to apply?

The truth, Not The Truth: 3rd Installment

2006-05-17T17:42:00.000-07:00

So what do I believe? I like the idea I’ve learned from Richard Rorty (who got it from Nietzsche) that we need no longer assume that there is a way the world is, or one world out there that is the guarantor of all our true and right statements and disproves all our false and wrong statements. That there is no way-in-which-things-are, no God’s-eye-view of things, which we all are trying to approximate in our various beliefs about what the world is like. Or, if there is a way-in-which-things-are, we can’t know for sure when we’ve gotten to it. Or, for those who are sure – like mystics or those with complete faith – they cannot demonstrate it conclusively to all others.

For years, even after having read Rorty’s critique of The Truth, I’ve always tried to make sure what I say is true by comparing it to The Truth. But I never seemed to be able to grasp The Truth. It was always just out of reach. Rorty is suggesting that this idea of The Truth (or The Good) serves the same role today as God did for previous generations. Foucault called it “the shimmering mirage of truth.” Instead of discovering what was true all along, we make what we call true - or best justified for now - in our interactions with others and the evaluation of each others beliefs.

There is no standard of perfect or absolute objectivity. Objectivity is determined case by case as people share their criterion of validity and agree or disagree that me or you have or have not met the criterion that we may or may not agree upon.

Chosen By Our Beliefs: 2nd Installment

2006-05-15T08:32:00.000-07:00

The approach I described in "Personal Philosophy: First Installment" has a subtle difference from the way philosophers usually assert their views. Implicit in the usual approach to asserting one's beliefs is the assumption that we are the masters of our beliefs; that we decide to believe this or that. Some “I” or self within us has decided that this is true and that false, and for good reason. But I don’t think this is how we get our beliefs, at least not the fundamental ones.

A story illustrates this: In graduate school for sociology I couldn’t understand how people adopted a sociological tradition and method to follow in. There was the Western Marxism of the Frankfurt School, phenomenological sociology, qualitative vs. quantitative field methods, Structural-Functionalism, and others. If we’re all rational scholars then we would have to rationally choose the tradition which gave the right view of things. But how to choose that? I think what happens is that people are drawn to the traditions and views which attract them. They gravitate, are entranced, find it interesting, speak its language, feel it makes sense or any other non-rational way of being converted to a point of view. I don’t think it is generally the case that people rigorously examine all views and then choose the right one. How could they settle such a thing, since the entire discipline itself has not settled such a thing; that’s why there are differing traditions living uneasily with each other. This is why the intellectual divisions in academia are so severe. By engaging with an unbeliever, the non-rational fundaments of your view are in danger of being exposed.

So I think it’s more accurate to say that our beliefs choose or seduce us, rather than us choosing them. This is why people so easily become agitated and fearful when their views are challenged. There is so much of our self at stake when our beliefs are threatened. Dispassionate reason is the mask we use to contain our passionate attachment to a certain way of looking at things. This is why I think that, with enough information, we can determine the psychological work that specific beliefs do in maintaining the existence of the world that we need to have be true.

Personal Philosophy: First Installment

2006-05-14T17:04:00.000-07:00

In trying to write something philosophical I find myself drawn to relativism and perspectivism. I try to elaborate a non-contradictory relativism. I know from the philosophical literature that there are many types of relativism, some mild, some full-strength. But in trying to elaborate what I believe, I am constantly wary of contradicting myself, which is the most popular way to dismiss a relativistic perspective. The relativist is caught making some kind of absolute statement about how things are and so is caught having a contradictory non-relativistic relativism. But recently I thought: why not just say what I do believe without concern for whether it’s contradictory or not. Instead of trying to prepare a bullet-proof philosophy by anticipating all criticisms, just write down what I think is true and then either examine it for contradictions or decide to accept some contradictions as a pervasive aspect of all philosophies at their limits. Just neutrally take dictation of my own beliefs.

What is to Be Done?

2006-05-03T17:09:00.000-07:00

The late Walter Kaufmann, a Nietzsche translator and philosopher, once wrote in a foreward to a volume of Nietzsche, that Nietzsche is the kind of writer who you can read all your life. You keep coming back to him at different phases of your life and he’s still relevant. There’s always more to get. It hasn’t turned out that way for me with Nietzsche, but just recently I picked up old essays by the philosopher Richard Rorty - someone I have gone back to and learned from over the last twenty years - and was still impressed. I learn new facets of a radically different perspective that I find attractive. I like his framing of the idea that our modern search for the Truth and the Good is really a replacement for the pre-modern search for God. That we yearn so strongly for a non-human something to be answerable to – reality, the Truth, the world as it is, the Absolute – that we concoct these God replacements because we don’t want to admit that it’s really just us. We’re answerable to human others and that’s it. So that’s why Rorty poses the question “Solidarity or Objectivity?” and opts for solidarity. We can’t know what the world is like beyond our particular human cognizing and experiencing, but we can try to come to some agreement with, and solve the problems of, us humans.

Knowledge Exacts a Mode of Life

2006-04-22T15:41:00.000-07:00

From Stanley Cavell's "Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy" in Themes Out of School

"the term philosophy can refer either to a body of propositions supposed to comprise knowledge of some sort, or else to a mode of life, and that analyitical philosophy is an example of the former and existentialism an example of the latter." (p.220)

"a body of knowledge or a mode of life." (p.221)

"it is one of Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's best discoveries - or rediscoveries - that knowledge itself exacts a mode of life." (p.222)

Upside Down World

2006-03-13T16:59:00.000-08:00

The media keep reporting that Israel and the US are trying to teach Hamas to play by the rules by not funding the new Palestinian government until they renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist. So the occupying power and its principal financial and military backer, who are collectively responsible for far more deaths of innocent civilians than Hamas, and are now, and have been for the last 35 years, in the process of colonizing the Palestinians’ land, need to withhold and provide incentives to teach the democratically elected party of the people they are violently oppressing to renounce violence and recognize their oppressors right to exist. And this is taken for granted as a perfectly reasonable position in the US media.

Moods and Beliefs

2006-03-12T12:04:00.000-08:00

"Emerson may be said to be a philosopher of moods, and it is one wise with moods who observes that 'Our moods do not believe in each other.' Neither do our philosophies, or visions, which is why the ideal of a pluralism in philosophy, however well meant, is so often an empty hope, and neither do our nonphilosophical and our philosophical moods believe in each other."

Stanley Cavell, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, p. 26

The Social Psychology of Politics

2006-02-27T17:21:00.000-08:00

I thought again of the idea of a displacement issue in media and politics. The society can’t face the real political issues of the day, so they channel their energy and dissatisfaction into a side or displacement issue. The target of the criticism, in this case Bush, has to be in a weakened political position for the faux issue to gain traction. It’s a way for people to attack the person they have doubts about, without confronting the real issues or crimes committed by that person.

Currently, it is the dustup over Bush allowing the United Arab Emirates to manage several US ports. Even in the domain of US ports and national security that is not the real issue. The lack of examination of cargo containers is a bigger port issue. Kerry tried to raise it during the campaign but got no where with it. But on bigger issues such as the failure of the Iraq war and occupation, sanctioned torture and Bush’s admitting to breaking the law by wiretapping without a warrant, the opposition got no traction. The public and the media still need to cling to the myth that Bush is their protector and so they’ll allow any crime. But underneath, the public is wary enough of him that the press, the Democrats and even some Republicans who need to distance themselves from Bush before the 2006 elections, can jump on him for something relatively minor, as long as it can be couched as him not protecting us.

Moods and Worlds

2006-02-27T17:02:00.000-08:00

“The idea is roughly that moods must be taken as having at least as sound a role in advising us of reality as sense experience has; that, for example, coloring the world, attributing to it the qualities ‘mean’ or ‘magnanimous,’ may be no less objective or subjective than coloring an apple, attributing to it the colors red or green. Or perhaps we should say: sense experience is to objects what moods are to the world.”

From Stanley Cavell's "Thinking of Emerson" in his Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, p. 11

Constructing the World

2006-01-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

For over a year now, upon waking two hours early each morning I’m gripped with a fear that I feel as a knot in my chest. My mind immediately starts obsessively thinking about the things I have to do this day, this week. I urgently anticipate and rehearse scenarios over and over, out of proportion to the importance of the upcoming interaction. I’m trying to make sure things don’t fall apart, that there is no trouble. I’m also trying to make sure I don’t have emotional outbursts by being unprepared for social interactions.

This thinking each morning is also the construction of my world. Each morning, as I come out of sleep, I have to reconstruct this fear-based world with its particular character and then live my life in this world. I have enough mindfulness to see the world being reconstructed each morning, as it’s happening, yet can’t stop it. Interactions are a threat and an impingement; so I prefer to withdraw. Contradictorily, I work as a social worker with the chronically mentally ill, and so have to engage very difficult people.

The world I inhabit is thin. Emotions are blunted. Everything is scarce, so saving is important. In many everyday actions I try to save. When driving I try to save gas and save wear and tear on the brakes. I try to keep the heat in the house as low as possible to save energy and money. I save money by bringing my breakfast and lunch to work so as not to eat out, and only buy coffee when I can get reimbursed. When getting water from the faucet I try to use as little as possible. I make sure I don’t waste food. I try to manage my time well so I don’t waste it. My whole world is colored by this scarcity.

This saving behavior is just the outward manifestation of a conception of the world. The world is a place where there is not enough. It’s a desiccated place – dry, lacking water. It’s a place where I’m anonymous or not really known and so lacking recognition. It’s a place without ultimate purpose and so lacking in meaning (although meaning can be found in other ways). The saving thoughts and saving behaviors, on a deeper level, become a pervasive mood or shroud of lack. My world looks and feels a particular way because of this.

Recently, I had short experiences when this world of scarcity was pushed aside for a few seconds, allowing me to get a look at the world I always inhabit. Once, I was caring for this mostly blind, mostly deaf, chihuahua mix. She was a sweet, little, old dog named Stella. She would walk unsteadily around the house sniffing and trying to find her way. I saw she didn’t have water in her bowl and was anxious that the bowl always have enough water so she would always know where water was – not feel scarcity – and so I scooped up the bowl and went to the sink to wash it and fill it. I turned the water on and a mood moved in and replaced the usual me. I turned the water on full force and thought “fuck saving water, I’m going to use as much as I need for her.” Instead of the usual world of scarcity and saving strictures, I felt, for two seconds, a burst of desire to use the resources I needed. The feeling was that this is why these things are here. It suggested a way of experiencing the world, a relationship to it, which is probably common for many people. Things are there for their use, to indulge, without concern. They live in a different world than mine. For those few moments that other world pushed aside my world and I saw a glimpse of another way to be in the world and another world to be in.

Another time, after therapy, I saw a different world. Instead of my usual Spartan, world full of discrete, disconnected entities, I imagined and felt a world in which encountering others was anticipated with curiosity, interest and excitement. Getting involved in interactions would fill the heart with pleasure or pain, but that the encounter of others and the connections and disconnections was a major part of living a life. Engaging family, friends, new people, was a big part of the reason for living and gave life fullness. There are people like this. It arose quickly and left quickly, and it was a radical alternative to my world, where interactions are managed and felt to be impingements.

One's Questions

2005-12-26T15:19:00.000-08:00

Stanley Cavell emphasizes the importance of knowing your particular questions. What are my questions?

How is one to be with oneself? There are choices in how to relate to one’s own experience. How to decide? How should one alter oneself?

How do we reconcile having beliefs we can’t prove that are opposed to others’ beliefs that they can’t prove? This is the problem of differing, irreconcilable perspectives.

What are the implications of not believing in there being a way in which reality is in and of itself?

Should we know through thinking or being? How to decide? Just choose whichever one appeals? Is it an existential choice? If you do both, how is your use of them divided up?

What role do the emotions play in living life, answering philosophical questions or dispelling the need to ask such questions?

Acting Differently

2005-10-23T12:21:00.000-07:00

I am trying to not do the behaviors that are motivated by the desire to be a somebody. So when I get home from work and feel “I should get to the computer and do some of my real work” I now don’t act on it. To a large degree I have been pushing myself to make up for the sacrificed time that making a living requires. I’m curious to see what kind of living results from not having to push myself to get to work during my leisure time.

So far, there’s a feeling of relief and a feeling of exasperation and fear at my giving up the only thing that means anything – being a somebody.

A Modest Proposal

2005-10-10T18:12:00.000-07:00

I’ve written about two opposing forces in me. One wants me to be a somebody by being recognized as intellectually brilliant. The other wants me to just be my unique self. I had an epiphany of how to reconcile the two. I will write a self-psychoanalytical autobiography describing the forces that cause me to be the way I am. It will be as authentic as possible and so a record and an analysis of my true self. But this self-analysis will be so brilliant and incisive that it will be recognized by others and I will be hailed as great. In that way, through revealing my authentic self I will become a somebody. I will reconcile both drives in a great, transcending, Hegelian synthesis.

The Mood That Wouldn't Change

2005-10-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

I quoted Emerson in a previous post saying that our changing moods change the world. I’ve been struck recently how my larger mood seems relatively fixed.

It’s common to find oneself, at the end of the work week, looking forward to days off and what we’ll do over the weekend and feeling a lighter, happier feeling. Or, we’ll fall into a mood in which our life looks hopeless or sad and we’ll wonder what’s the purpose of our life projects that seemed so important. Or, we’ll feel a renewed hope as our life projects feel meaningful.

I’ve been stuck in an overarching mood of despair which appears each morning I wake up and anytime I’m not occupied with some activity. While I’m distracted doing something, I’m not thinking about my situation. It’s the technique of keeping busy that many recommend to avoid painful feelings. But as soon as I stop being occupied, the conditions of my life colored by this despairing mood descend upon me. Life seems purposeless and there’s a terror at wasting my life with no sense of what could make it meaningful.

At 45, it looks like I’m not going to be a somebody as I described in my first two posts. But if I’m not going to achieve somebodyness, then what’s the point? Simply to go from activity to activity trying to feel that that’s enough?

An alternative is to see through the narrow desire to be a somebody. Don’t equate success in life with being a somebody. This is possible to do. But right now, with the somebody valuing regime holding sway, this looks like a way to make myself feel ok for failing at the only thing worth being, ie being a somebody. An attempt to fool myself into thinking that the only thing important to do in life isn’t really important. A consolation prize for failing.

The Battle for Selfhood

2005-10-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading about Nietzsche’s notion of drives that will their own power in John Richardson’s Nietzsche’s System. Different drives within and without have different goals and try to have their way of being prevail. Two competing drives within me have been fighting for ascendancy over the last 25 years and have fooled me regarding which I was acting out.

One drive was latent until I took the GREs in 1984 and got high enough scores to believe I could be a brilliant somebody. I now wanted to achieve intellectual somebodyness.

A second drive arose before that. While in college in 1980, I realized I didn’t want to just get any old job that made enough money and live a shell of a life. I wanted to find what I really loved doing and get paid for that. To do this I needed to discover my real interests and so who I was. Over the years I used various practices like meditation and psychotherapy to discover my unique interests and become myself.

But the line between becoming a somebody and becoming myself has been blurred because for most of the time I was unconscious of the difference and simply acted them out without awareness, as most of us live out our lives. For example, in going to graduate school for a Ph.D. in sociology, was I trying to attain somebodyness through intellectual brilliance or was I trying to follow my true interests? Or, when I started a Buddhist practice and felt drawn by the promise of enlightenment, was I trying to become myself by liberating myself from the self or become a somebody through impressive spiritual accomplishment? It’s still not clear, but at least in the last few months I’ve identified the differing drives whereas before I simply acted them out unconsciously.

This coming to consciousness about these drives appears to be an accomplishment of greater self-awareness, but what drive and what new valuing system is going to evaluate which drive is acting itself out in specific instances and be given the power to pass judgment on them? What drive is that and what’s its interests?

Or, will one simply prevail and then interpret the other in its terms? If becoming my unique self prevails then becoming a somebody will by seen to be a pathological need to gain love through intellectual recognition to compensate for past neglect. If becoming a somebody prevails, then becoming my unique self will seem like the self-help booby prize that those who are satisfied to remain anonymous nobodys convince themselves is all that’s important in life.

Changeable Reality

2005-09-25T09:25:00.000-07:00

The nature of things can be seen differently depending on how you look at it. It can be solidly material, persisting through time, an objective world that’s “out there” and goes on after our deaths. But it can be evanescent, if seen subjectively, evaporating moment after moment in the vanishing present. Or, if seen subjectively in a different way, very solid if we stamp the ground. Or almost immaterial, if seen objectively as physicist do, on a subatomic level in which matter is coming into and out of existence moment to moment.

So if we give up the notion of a or one way in which things are, except for practical purposes, then we would have to focus on how we create our conceptions of things together.

First Crack at Opening to Perspectivism Book

2005-09-10T05:17:00.000-07:00

Just as the differing religions struggle to be the representative of God, all people in contemporary society struggle to be the representatives of the truth. And just as differing religious and political factions use the authority of their assumed connection with God to validate their views, all people who assert their view as the right view defend it by saying that they have a superior relationship to the truth or how things really are.

I will offer a different understanding of what we all are doing when we assert the superior truth of what we believe that dispenses with the idea that there is one right way in which things are or The Truth, and yet which does not lead to a self-contradictory relativism. My view is a kind of perspectivism, one that does not believe all perspectives are equally valid yet does not justify itself by appeal to absolute truth or the way in which things are in and of themselves.

Emerson's Perspectivism

2005-09-10T05:14:00.000-07:00

“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.”

Emerson, Library of America, p.473

A Pernicious Pattern

2005-09-10T04:55:00.000-07:00

In my effort to be a somebody I try to create an original piece of brilliant work. Yet I do this by trying to just create an original piece of work, right off the bat. As if there is no process by which a person evolves towards creating something that is original, which means uniquely theirs.

I walk into a café, sit down at a table and take out a philosophy book I’m reading. As I’m doing this I’m imagining that a person at another table notices the book I’m reading and is impressed, or imagine someone comes over to me and comments on what I’m reading. It’s a small fantasy expressing the desire to be recognized as a brilliant somebody. An attempt to satisfy mentally this need to be recognized.

Perspective Clash

2005-09-03T01:32:00.000-07:00

In a discussion in which the participants disagree there arises a nodal point in each participant which is the central knot or rub which is currently what the two centrally disagree about. It can be felt experientially. There is a constriction or contraction or a holding, sometimes felt in the chest, and one’s arguments are deployed in order to defend, most centrally, that point. People who are discussing, but in basic agreement, don’t feel that nodal point at that time, but it can arise if their discussion happens to stray into an area of disagreement. When disagreeing, we need to convince our opponent and fear that our own view is in danger. It’s rarely the case that people try together to get to the nodal point and understand what they are most centrally disagreeing about.

Magical Personal History

2005-08-30T06:49:00.000-07:00

Another aspect of the magical thinking I described in my elaboration of my introductory post is the way I think of my personal history. In the magical mind state, I see my past as a series of discoveries that promised to be the answer – going to grad school, doing the Gurdjieff work, Buddhist practice, psychotherapy – and them not working out. So the past, in this view, is a series of attempts at salvation. Disappointment and despair set in because experience seemed to have taught me that nothing works, i.e. nothing saved me. I was looking for something that would be It, what I would do, so that I wouldn’t have to search anymore or have to question things fundamentally all the time.

It's an essentially religious, or magical, way of constructing personal history because it is based on salvation and redemption. Some bad (read: sinful) way I am would be transformed by finding the true path.

The alternative view is that my life is a process, a development, and these were encounters I had which I was drawn to, learned from and some of which I incorporated into my present way of being.

A therapist was talking about my process of self-development. I told him that I don’t know if I have a process. He said, “your process is finding out whether you have a process or not.” It’s a curious, profound, contradictory intervention. On the one hand, it leaves me still struggling to make something meaningful about my life, and yet it also suggests a way of understanding even that struggle as that meaningful path. But on the other hand, the struggle itself doesn’t allow the belief in the meaningfulness of the struggle.

This Blog's Purpose

2005-08-15T19:06:00.000-07:00

I want to present an examination of myself. A description and analysis of the workings of my psyche. All the mental and emotional workings that produce the day-to-day life of this person. The recurring thoughts, the moods, the life situations and the reasons why those particular thoughts, moods and situations keep arising.

It’s an uneasy mix of the personal and the analytical. It reveals what’s personal but in such a way that the personal becomes data for the analytical. It’s an odd way to relate to oneself and this way of relating could be part of the cause of the psychological problems I describe. Each self-characterization is a way of life.

In my psyche there is an effort to change the psyche itself. So much writing about self-development doesn’t include the details of the process of self-change and how it works. I’m curious about the very fabric of the reality experienced by each person. What are the forces at play that cumulatively produce this person?

In the process of trying to create some fundamental change in my life there will be a clash of worldviews. We’ll see how opposed worldviews interpret each other using their particular vocabularies in order to make and maintain their differing experiences of reality. This occurs everyday when people are confronted with someone who disagrees with them.

Beyond the evaluation of this particular self, larger questions arise. If each perspective internal to a person sees a different reality then the nature of reality becomes multifarious. How does mood, conditioning and one’s interests affect the way the world appears? Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus, “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” In what way and to what degree is this true?

Three Important Writers For Me

2005-08-14T00:38:00.000-07:00

Only three times in my life since I started reading seriously have I become a devotee of a particular writer. In October of 1982 I became captivated by Noam Chomsky's political writings. I had always been confused about how people chose between being a Republican or a Democrat and why the US, which wanted to promote democracy, overthrew and undermined a number of democracies. I couldn’t understand it until I read Chomsky. Basically, although it is a subtle view despite the attacks against Chomsky in the mainstream press, democracy, liberty and morality are not factors in leaders’ decision-making. Power, control and economic advantage are the real motivators. Ideological rhetoric is just an overlay for the real motivations. Chomsky’s view of things has mostly been mine since I first started reading him. I’ve sought out criticisms of him, but I think his view still stands.

In the mid-80s the philosopher Richard Rorty's writings had a significant impact. I had always yearned to know the Truth and gain certainty, but Rorty’s writings made me see the limits of reason and how the Truth and certainty could not be gained, at least by Reason. He was an Analytic philosopher undermining Analytic philosophy. He argued that there is no way in which we determine whether language – our medium for knowing things - gets the world right because we can never step outside of language and compare it to the world. The world is always language-infused for us.

For the last three months the philosopher Stanley Cavell has captured my attention. The difference this time though is that I’m not sure how or if Cavell will fundamentally change my beliefs the way that Chomsky and Rorty did. While I love reading Cavell, I keep wondering what am I getting out of this and is it changing my beliefs? Reading Cavell is a kind of practice, in the way meditation is a practice. I set aside a time for it and become entranced. Particular observations of his reverberate through me and have an experiential affect. They seem to illuminate a way to go in life, but never quite give explicit directions.

But it’s not as if after reading him I now believe this rather than that, or that I can neatly formulate his view of things. But one formulation is that Cavell is countering the specialization and technicality of the dominant form of philosophy in American and British universities called Analytic Philosophy. One way he counters the dominant philosophy is by describing an alternative philosophical history which includes Emerson and Thoreau, people not considered philosophers by the academic establishment. Much of his writing is in the form of interpretations of other writers, but the best essays contain startling and moving insights about understanding and leading a life.

Elaborating Upon the Introductory Post

2005-08-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

In my introductory post I described one fundamental way I characterize my life struggle. I struggle between striving to be a somebody and fearing ending up a nobody. I don’t experience the possible third alternative which doesn’t exist when living in the exclusive somebody-nobody world. The third alternative is simply to be myself.

The other main way of comprehending my life that I’m subject to is what I call magical thinking. The idea takes many forms, one is that if I just do what I like everything will fall into place. This is the “do what you love and the money will follow” mentality. I guess it could work for some, but in my psychic economy it leaves me reading things I like with no money following. It acts as an illusory or magical way things will change.

Another manifestation of magical thinking is the belief that somehow something will happen that changes my life so that I can be at ease. Like believing that I might suddenly become enlightened. Being at ease can be a great life goal, but it depends on one’s vision of ease. There is also the ease of not doing anything, having no people impinging upon one, and the final ease of resting in peace, R.I.P., or death.

I counter magical thinking with the idea of having to take practical steps to make something different happen in my life. Right now I’m trying to do that by taking practical steps to make a career switch. I work as a social worker now and don’t want to do that anymore and am trying to find a line of work in which I can use more of my skills. But my pervasive despair about life makes me think this kind of change is impossible. So I’m struggling to just take the practical steps despite the negative view I have of the whole project. The despair needs to be understood as a part of the old mindset or old regime which appears to be the truth of the world.

I am trying to counter a conditioned way of seeing and understanding the world with a new regime or way of life. What’s difficult is that aspects of the new way are continually interpreted in terms of the old way. For example, I try to be myself, be my unique self, as opposed to being a somebody. But to the old interpretive scheme being myself looks like being resigned to being a nobody, giving up the struggle. Being like the dumb masses who can live with anonymity. What is that quality of life of being myself that is not just being a nobody, a nothing, a failure?

It’s even hard to write this. What’s the point? I know this stuff already. Why tell it to someone else? And in all probability no one will read it anyway. But if someone does then it must be so well done that it has a chance of impressing someone, maybe the right someone. So here is an example of both the “become-a-somebody” mentality and the magical thinking. No thought (except this one) of just writing about myself to share it or learn from it.