alight on my web

over-valuing change & novelty

2011-12-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

Someone quoting my personal ad recently queried me with an honest question, one that, I thought, really gets to a kind of comforting narrative we like to live by these days. He first quoted me as writing,

"And what is more, true, 'real', relationships are time-bound processes; that is, they take and require time, effort, consistency, a long arc. Trouble is, as many people are beginning to realize, our society does not sustain or support that. It's all about the new experiences, eternal newness, novelty spinning 'round and 'round and 'round."

And then replied to me, writing, "I agree about relationships requiring time and effort over a long period. However, without novelty, how does one sustain interest? I think too much tradition and routine leads towards stagnation, no? Change is not always good, but it isn't always bad either. But change is constant, isn't that how time and space work? Without change, don't time and space stand still? And without change, wouldn't a relationship cease to grow and evolve? Novelty keeps things moving, not necessarily in a good or bad direction, but moving. That's what I like about it."

To which I then had this to say:

Thank you for the note, and the comments. I suppose that what I am getting at is that it's possible to over-value novelty or change or newness, and that if anything, ours is a world which has over-glutted itself on such things. Second, it's true that change is a constant, to put the point paradoxically; but there are orders of change, say, the difference between geological or evolutionary time and the time-scale of atomic or intermolecular processes. And then there is our own time, caught in-between the imperceptible changes of geology or evolution and the impossibly short moments of an atom or molecule dissolving. So, it's true that change is a constant, but the significance of the change depends on how fast is fast. In a way, the oldest truth about us is that we're bred or adapted for rapidly changing situations, as faced in the thick of the hunt in a forest or jungle; but the most 'novel' thing about us, now, is our stability, or at least our yearning for it, our desire to produce stable forms that can, for a while, relieve us from the burdens of a rapidly-changing world. I would say that part of what made past civilizations what they were was their hope for eternity -- always doomed, of course, for nothing escapes time, but nonetheless, they won for humanity a moment, if only one that lasts an individual life time, of real endurance, certainty in the face of our changing fortunes as time-bound creatures. Why should we let go of such utopistic thinking? Why should we not be even more idealist here? Why should we not want to add the counterpoint of stability and station to the constancy of change and motion?

in conversation about 'progress' ...

2011-12-02T12:10:00.001-08:00

This question of progress has been coming up in my reading recently. When you analyze the concept, I fear that two issues get conflated: scientific/technological (or even purely economic) vs. moral progress. Indeed, that the two notions are conflated so easily is, in my view, an indication that not reason but ideology is at work -- or simply, a kind of theology, the theology of "progress".

In a book on the roots of America's current slow-motion train wreck of a collapse, cultural historian Morris Berman writes: "We want to believe that the future will be better than the past, but there isn't a shred of evidence to back this up. In particular ... scientific progress [add to that, economic, technical or technological progress, etc.] doesn't translate into moral progress; one could reasonably argue that just the opposite is the case. Truth be told ... we are even more superstitious than our medieval forebears; we just don't recognize it. Nor is it likely that we shall abandon these beliefs. It's utopia or bust, even if the odds are weighted toward bust" (Why America Failed, 2012, p. 82).

And the "definition" of progress advanced at the table -- that, ignorant as to which station in life you would assume (a version of Rawls' "veil of ignorance"), any reasonable person would choose the present over any past culture (the idea being that, whatever station you'd actually get when you arrived in the present, the probability of your landing in a better place is greater now than it ever has been) -- really only serves to congratulate ourselves on a few things, all of which are primarily technological achievements, to the exclusion of others. It may be true that we have the technological means of averting famine and of curing many diseases (let us call these pluses in the column of "positive progress", true advances), but equally is it true that not everyone benefits from these things, that nearly 2 billion people are food insecure (the equivalent of the world population a millennium or so ago), that we've also developed the means of mass ecological and strategic/military (i.e, nuclear) devastation -- and this would be serious points in the column of "negative, moral progress". Indeed, one could make a quite powerful case that not only are our so-called positive advancements inextricably bound up with the negatives, but precisely because of our ever-increasing scientific and technical knowledge, the magnitude of the negatives has increased almost immeasurably: unlike human beings c. 1000, human beings c. 2000 has developed armaments that can basically wipe out the species. Thus, while we have made true, real and undeniably good positive scientific and technological progress, so too with the negative progress. What, then, of moral progress? Have we, individually, progressed? We can certainly feed ourselves, cloth ourselves, medicate ourselves (!), and so on ... but are we individually any more morally advanced than our predecessors, say, in Renaissance Europe or ancient India or even Tang Dynasty China (c. 600 -- 815 AD)? On this question of moral progress, it's not so clear -- especially now that we can factor away scientific or technological progress. Indeed, one can argue that we are slipping morally, as human bonds are dissolved in the corrosive acids of consumerism, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues in Does Ethics Have A Chance in a World of Consumers? (the book I mentioned at dinner, which touched off our conversation). From this point of view, it begins to look that either we've made absolutely no moral progress individually, and therefore, summing over the individuals the same; or else we are slipping into a kind of technological/consumerist isolationism, as in the phrase "you're on your own" or "you owe this to yourself", etc.

In any case, the point is that, with the distinction between scientific or economic vs. moral progress in place, it's just not obvious that we've progress at all. Indeed, this seems to be the jist of William Pfaff's review of Fukuyama's new book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, found in last week's New York Review of books (24 Nov.; vol. LVIII no. 18; p. 69 -- 71). He concludes by noting that Fukuyama's book is not about the past at all, put is a projection -- it's really about the "modern" era, and how we've triumphed, how we've "progressed" (a ridiculous argument now that we've unpacked "progress" -- there's just as much evidence for anti-progress as there is for progress). Pfaff concludes: "Thus Fukuyama continues his search for scientific evidence, comparable to that in the physical sciences, to support a belief in human progress -- the religion of our times, or the myth". Indeed, "progress" finally can have no "evidence", for what we are really talking about is moral progress, and that is squarely outside the purview of quantitative analysis, but wholly within the purview of human existence, which is, truth be told, always a struggle right unto the death.

anti-Jobs and the contradiction of social experience

2011-11-17T09:19:00.003-08:00

Here's the sort of perspective I take on Jobs ... and when I look around me and people are afforded easy ways of disengaging with everyone else around them by staring into their i-This or i-That, you realize that what you're witnessing is the (further) dismantling of what was left of a social experience.

The rebuttal that this is just a fact now (ubiquity of the tech devices) that we're going to have to live with, and that we are finding new forms of social experience by means of them, etc. etc., really rings historically hollow to me when the same thing could have been said after Rome collapsed c. 457 and Europe descended into some pretty dark times, with loss of basic knowledge of farming, loss of learning (unless you count anthologizing & indexing), and so on -- which collapse happened precisely at Rome's 'highest' point of development. Would we have said that, well, we'll just have to learn to live without knowledge of farming and do without complex thought & learning, etc.? Seems pretty absurd to me. Same goes for loss of social experience. And we should be clear: tapping on a screen to a disembodied head or going back and forth with lines of text does not count as a 'social' experience -- it's something else and constitutes a departure from it. It is a greater idealism & romanticism to retain the idea that this in fact is 'social' than to decry a loss such as I do here (and it is a loss: the replacement of one thing for something entirely different yet seemingly the same). No, we should be more radical here: we've given up 'social' and abandoned it to something entirely different, but which is sold to us (literally) as merely another form of what we are already (supposedly) in love with, social experience, being social. We are lured by the verisimilitude, and this allurement merely proves decisively our romantic & idealistic attachment to sociality. Here is where brutal honesty is needed: 'social media' etc. is not social; sociality has simply been negated by the technological form, which retains a simulacrum of the original . Rather, what it "is", is technological media conjoined to separated, spatially distanced people, alone together. It is a media that prevents the abandonment of aloneness by populating that solitude with more lone figures. 'Social media' is a romantic & idealistic fiction, trying to hide what it actually is in the skin of what it has actually abandoned.

Of course, we eventually got the Scientific and Commercial Revolutions out of the collapsed civilization of Rome (c. AD 1600, i.e. 1000 years later or so), but plenty of things had to be rediscovered before that (like how to reason out complicated geometrical demonstrations from ancient Greek texts, an ability that most scholars of the Dark Ages would agree had been lost by about AD 800). In other words, as Rome fell some basic cultural things were lost, and then they returned (perhaps even renewed precisely because of the collapse).

Thus, my argument would be that rather than inaugurating a breathtaking new epoch of technological progress that takes man to a higher state of civilization, this techno infatuation could simply be the very thing that does us in -- the 'progress' is our decline.

But that's just my bet, and the point I'm making is that it's as likely as any other.

2011-10-17T18:27:00.000-07:00

Talk about simpletons: I watched a "debate" between Prof. Roger Scruton (Brit philosopher) & your typical American "thinker" -- in this case, Tyler Cowen -- who, characteristically it seems, is the "data" guy, the neo-neo-empiricist/pragmatist with neo-behaviorist leanings (the compounding is intended: American thought struggles to both reproduce and throw off still the shadow of European thought). Cowen played the representative of the hard numbers &facts, against the soft, spiritual-leaning erudition of the British clear-headed academic philosopher. After an articulation of a typically conservative narrative anchored in the old distinction between "quantity" (the numbers and stats) vs. "quality" (the inner details of the human being whose spiritual core, expressed in one key as friendship, eludes quantitative analysis or statistical charts), Scruton does in fact rightly suggest that strictly statistical analysis is lacking; but as to what exactly? ... this seemed to be the magnificently implied deeper question which, begging for specification in the otherwise clarion tones of this British philosopher (an analytic don to be sure), could not be adumbrated in the alotted five minutes poorly constructed aphorisms of the slightly disheveled academic intellectual, charged with championing this fading shadow of authentic friendship in the age of F-book and T-er, etc.

Cowen replies with all the positives he could muster, listing stat after stat, spouting all gushy over "data" -- it's empirical, he kept repeating, as in: unquestionable, authoritative. Study X reports that bonds are in fact strengthened, not weakened, by social media; study Y shows that, in fact, bonds that existed prior to the mediation remain, untrammeled; study Z shows that there are a proliferation of social relationships for your average social media user, as opposed to much lower rates for -- surprise! -- those previous unfortunates who had to depend on the telephone (so, if anything, ye disbelievers, damn the phone, not the Net). And so on, unto nauseating infinity.

I was shocked that Scruton could only resort to some fluffy stuff ... I am not concerned with the quantity, but rather with the quality of the social relationships (but he is now cornered, by this attempted refutation, with supplying a criterion; but then the retort by the tech champion Cowen is, always: but why doesn't SM count under your criterion?, etc.); and this typical maneuver is followed with a line about true friendship being a spiritual affair, or some such holdover from a Romantic tradition that tried to refute the startling superciliousness of the philosophes who wished all to be returned to the analytic bosom of Science, the human being nothing more than a collection of atomic material moments collected for a time by, it would seem, chance (the change meeting of another man, woman, and so on around the human billiards table).

The venerable position of the British philosopher, I say: all true, ... yes, yes Cowen is a naif when it comes to this patently superficial celebration of technological forms of sociality (Cowen seems uninformed of the major twentieth or even nineteenth century critical thought, primarily in Europe, that was neither naive nor exaggerated); but Scruton's remarks play right in to the data worship: after all, how can you "measure" that stuff, right? Scruton couldn't quite express his (sound) intuition that there's something profoundly rotten about tech-ized friendships. The problem is precisely that it's not all bad or all good, and it's philosophically unneeded to try to show that one form is "better" than another, or more "authentic". The point is merely to unmask the illusions & nonsense presented in celebration of technological friendship, and how it is precisely -- and simply -- the very distinction between tech. and non-tech. forms of it that gets blurred and finally eradicated in favor of a new form which is neither all good nor all bad. Indeed, when this distinction becomes blurry (or when it is called into question as even a valid one to draw), then the ideological tricks are played: F-book is so great, "social" media is a great boon -- hurray, humanity has progressed.

Total bullshit: social media is used to track down friends & family for State purposes (harassment, death squads, etc.), used to locate dissidents etc. as much as anything else (a never-ending threat that just dons the latest garb for its purposes). But that's the cheap-shot argument.

Tech forms of this or that always pose for us a radical possibility, which is two-fold: (1) inasmuch as a tech form with which I interact presents to me an opaque and inert objective form, to which I must submit in order to get it to "work", I die, I am in a condition of unfreedom. But (2) from the side of the tech. device itself, it is humanity -- a human being -- which poses a radical question to the thing, and offers it the possibility of true freedom, which only we contain as beings open to choice, etc. In other words: the form of the device already constrains us, transforming our relations through its use, remaking those relations in its image. That is our unfreedom; to the extent that we do not remake the device in turn (which means, renounce its inertial form), we are mere slaves to it. But how do we renounce the form and regain freedom, without at the same time acting as if the tech forms do not (or should not) even exist? This seems to me the real, the substantial, question. Posed in this way, we avoid stupid celebrationism, or naive reactionism; we neither embrace nor revere. We see it simply for what it is: a battle, and a promise ... merely a field of confrontations, and a glimmer of hope which only a human being may offer to the other side. The nemesis, if there be one, is to be found within the mere gulf, the separation, between human beings and devices, never emergent from either one singly.

But, the American "thinkers" are not likely to be able to have that conversation, and sadly the Brit doesn't have time for this Hegelian "nonsense" either. A shame. Scruton is sincere if himself ill-prepared or ill-studied on these questions; Cowen simply a joke of a thinker, buried under numbers he has now power to meaningfully bring to the table of human debates.

the "Blase" Attitude in Internet Dating

2011-06-09T09:10:00.000-07:00

Dear P,

Interestingly, several people have now written in to report the feelings you've just written about. As a pen-pal of mine puts it, at some point, when you get enough anecdotal evidence, they call it "data".

There is some kind of paradox or inconsistency inherent to these social media things, esp. when it comes to dating, romance, finding a mate, and so on. The dilemma we face is that, on the one hand, on some level, we all know that forming a relationship with substance takes real effort, and cannot be sustained on the basis of what's convenient for either person (lots of compromises are needed, etc.; and more deeply you go beyond even 'compromise' to living in tandem with the other person, for better or worse); on the other hand, we also realize how easy it is to meet anyone, in theory at least, and so, given that ease, there is a perpetual tendency to move on at the slightest bit of dis-ease (in fact, the "move on to find what suits you best" sort of logic is what the 'Net, being consumer-oriented, is all about in the end -- but there's no end to that; hence, fatigue, frustration). The problem is that this "move-on" logic just doesn't ever go away, does it? In some sense, there's always that problem: before the internet, there were bars, taverns ... the general public, a sea of other potential partners, mates, etc.

The important thing to realize is that, with the 'Net, what is new is the ease, anonymity and consumer-oriented nature of the whole thing, and the (implicit) understanding that "my needs can be met" and "I can get what I want instantaneously" (like a call-up on Amazon.com or whatever). Previously, you were more or less caught within various relatively permanent yet local social & cultural situations; not traveling much outside your hometown, you were bound by local expectations, etc. If you violated them, you had to live a double-life, and so there was allot to dissuade you from violating these locally-based expectations. Add to that the constraints of family and jobs and you have what some call a "solid" modern world; now, with such ease of movement, ease of shopping -- the general ease of getting what you want -- we're in a "liquid" modern world where social bonds are quite fragile, easy to loose but in fact easy to obtain (hence, OKCupid).

What is most painful, it seems to me, is that, having now gone on multiple dates with multiple people, the repetition is simply fatiguing. Moving from one person to the next literally drains each one of any inherent significance, the more and more you meet (the early twentieth century German thinker Simmel spoke about this, calling it the "blase" attitude).

Our pains are similar to the pains we suffered in the old "solid" world; but they are also different ... we have new problems to contend with. How do we deal with them? I would answer that -- and is this not what cultures have always taught their children? -- a life without guidance, a life without guides (if only ideals that, transcending any one of us, stand silently above us pointing the way home) is an aimless life.

Who or what are our guides, esp. as we grow older, and as we come to maturity increasingly later in life?

Low and the new Beauty

2011-04-26T06:48:00.000-07:00

If 'consistency' were to be given a concrete form, it would be the music of Low. I would argue for an obvious thesis: Low is a band of but one, continuous, evolving Song. The moments when the band stops playing their music seem like a kind of annoyance in the over-all flow; this rest is really just the trough of a single wave motion whose crest is a volume and not a speed: Low can become loud, with the force of its four members playing full-volume, or Low can become soft, brushing at its few drums or plucking softly at its two guitars; and then it can be thinned to a single player, vocalizing over a wisp of a strummed melody. There is no 'fast' for Low; they are adagio.

Settled in a warm church sanctuary (First Unitarian, Philadelphia), after a hot late April day, we first heard Eliot, blowing into a melodica and singing -- intoning, chanting -- a harmonious song. It seemed to be a paean to beauty, in a haunting, ancient mode that matched the Gothic-like architecture that surrounded us. Eliot's musical forces reflected the utter one-ness (for lack of a better term) of this whole musical event (or 'phenomenon' -- I will try to explain in a moment). There were few instruments for Eliot (who seemed to even be beyond gender -- beyond the duality of sexual dimorphism): voice, melodica, guitar, and finally, a banjo so tuned or played -- maybe shaped by the church sanctuary itself? -- as to seem like something ancient, a lost instrument whose music was falling upon us with alien tones. The songs -- again, all seemed to be mere fragments of a whole -- seemed to be songs of love, songs to and about poetry, about integration, putting pieces together (re-union), and they were a gesture towards beauty for its own sake, self-contained, looking inward, finding utter stillness, calm, equanimity ...

There were many elements, at once ancient and terribly contemporary, being grasped this evening within these musics. I want to sketch some of them, put the pieces to you, so that, one after another, their juxtaposition will, I hope, suggest what the significance of this musical phenomenon is for us, early 21st century wanderers in a ruin of cultural fragments.

In a society now completely overwhelmed by distractions, cold calls, continuous on-line engagements, these musics were like a Mass: a holy sacrifice, cut out of the workaday world of noise and clutter, whose performance was a renewal of spirit, a reminder of what the whole purpose of life is: union, integration, Love (putting together elements that have been flung apart). Sacred spaces have always been about shelter, refuge, contemplation, renewal, renovation, rejuvenation, solitude before something greater than your self, putting your selfishness into stark relief: against this sanctuary, this holiness, you are like a nothing, a fleeting wisp, your sorrows fade in the glow of My Love for thee. Seated in pews, almost in devotion, we listed in silence.

There were no references in the musics; there were few lyrics: this music was not 'about' anything outside itself. It was a turn inward. Perhaps another bold thesis, if an obvious one: this music returns to an ancient perspective: do not disturb the soul as it finds itself lost in solitude with the holy Mass. Love, if real, cannot be forced or coaxed into being by considerations external to the lovers. There were ancient, and to us, seemingly brutal and unjust, proclamations decrying the use of music during Mass. Before this, Plato had been perturbed by the emotional possibilities of art (poetry in particular; music less worrisome). We have so venerated the free and liberal expressions of art in our time that we have lost two things in the process: the aim of spiritual freedom; and a coherent perception of sacredness. Yet what we found this evening were two powerful possibilities being actualized, or just, perhaps less grand, essayed: art made into a living movement of soul, art become a holy Mass. For ancient Christians, the Mass was a ritual wholly separated from musics; for Plato before them, Truth was a form only very incompletely indicated by anything visible, audible, sensible. You can see the contrary motion now: Christianity taught renewal of the spirit in the flesh (the Easter proclamation), thus correcting Plato; and then music was incorporated into the Mass, slowly and with reservations (polyphonic music was at first seen as too passionate, too disturbing only to later become officially recognized as spiritually edifying. Again, this is a correction to Plato). Now we have something else, something that, while ancient in perspective, could only be contemporary: the Mass is music, music the Mass. Music is not an appendix to the main story -- this is what constitutes our sacredness. I do not express love through art or music; music is the act of Love, recreated as the Mass recreates the passion of a Christ: life, death and resurrection, that is, renewal of the spirit in the flesh, now, here not elsewhere (in this way, the Mass has only even been about the dynamic motions of Love).

How utterly devotional they were this evening; how utterly un-modern. In the sixties, music was divided: there were musics within the system, and there were musics utterly against it, against its annihilating bureaucratic, monolith of a death-impulse. To a crushing death of spirit, folk music spoke verses of life, peace, wholeness through dissent; it spoke about equality and resistance, not the nullifying and titillating sugar-verses of the plastic bands, mouthing the lullabies of Truth. But in this resistance to the modern bureaucratic system, the system became stronger, more reticent, more voracious in its consumption of all art and human expression. The sixties rebels were ultimately caught in a dialectical bind: the more they pushed, the stronger the opposing pushes, and therefore the more exaggerated and overblown must the rebels become. Until, finally, Rock (an outgrowth of Folk) lost its essence. I can think of that chilling song, sung as Rock gasped for life, sung by Neil Young as Rust Never Sleeps. "Rock will never die," he wails. We can return to Plato for a moment: the truth does transcend the incompleteness of what we can say or do or feel or see or taste or touch with our human hands; the essence slips through. The essence of Rock, a search of love, never dies; it just slips through and, we hope, is reborn somewhere else. But this should not become a morbid hope, a listless search -- and so we must let the visible, audible form of Rock slip away, as we sing, with Neil Young, that this rust never shall sleep.

The hipster generation, much maligned, has let slip the morbid concern with sixties "fight the power" (in its day venerable and necessary). It has, after the eighties and nineties confusions, emerged as a kind of self-contented association of those in need of real culture, with a thirst for creation, and lacking the ambitions of established culture-bearers. Their talents are nascent; their productions small and focused, quiet and needful. There was no anger this evening; nothing but a whiff of concern for justice against injustice: not about big causes, but about local concerns ramified by larger realities (injustice, for example, in the juvenile criminal detention system of Pennsylvania). But this largeness of social and political justice was set aside for inner concerns, which is the only "justice" possible, in the end. The ancient Stoic philosophers remind us that though a man may take my body, may crush it, may tear it to pieces, he may never take my soul, my essence -- and this evening, with attendance mostly of a younger "hipster" sort, songs of spirit, or essence, were sung. They were not about 'essence' or 'spirit'; they constituted the very thing itself. (I will not labor our considerations with morbid talk of 'authenticity' and searches for truth, and so on; funny how the very substance of authenticity includes more than just the concern about it. This is slowly being understood: too much concern for a thing manages to kill that thing itself. We are saying goodbye to modernity and postmodernity by forgetting about it: like awaking from a powerful dream, only to struggle to recall what it was all about, and in that act, you manage to destroy the dream and are thereby pushed to live your life, until the next dream. And so it goes.)

What was going on here, this evening, within these old church walls? I have suggested that what was happening was a confluence of ancient and terribly contemporary things, that, in a way, our contemporary world was being reborn through an ancient vision. The roots of the word temple, or church, go back to ancient Greek words used to talk about the theater, where they set apart a recreation of the struggles of life into and out of death; and from this the Greeks derived a new, philosophical word: theoria, from which we get "theory". A theory is a sacred vision, an insight into reality, a recreation of a portion of that whole reality with our inner vision which, while seeing concrete things, can, as imagination, fly free of them. This is what really worries the gatekeepers of spiritual purity, in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages, down to our times, when they worry us about Art: disturbing the soul, distracting it by the free play of the imagination to no good end. But the snare of these spiritual purists is ironic: they say truth is beyond specifiable form, yet they have the conceit to lay down specific injunctions against specific forms! By a kind of withdrawal from the world, these musics answer the spiritual purist without being spiritual purism. This fact, this non-purism, is significant in itself: by not being about grand themes, or not organized around specifiable notions of this-or-that, by simply being what it is, it is pure, not modern, not postmodern, nothing but itself; not concerned with doctrine but with doing, singing, opening up space, sacredness, silence, stillness ... the things themselves which morbid notions try desperately, under the crushing weight of intellectual history, to indicate, to grasp. Sujan Stevens, in a remarkable interview, complained of this crushing weight in his musical context, and his complaint was about something both practical and theoretical: how could one truly express and even be heard, against such a density of musical history? Yes, he is worried about authenticity, but his concern is authenticity itself, and is a sincere questioning of the possibility of art, of what expressions are left to us, of what 'originality' could mean as civilization wears on, and complexifies, densifies, and agglomerates its cultural productions into museums stuffed with cultural goods. As the productions continue, our minds are turned into museums, robbed of living essence, confused by old forms, lost, listless. What else is there to do?

As I have said, anti-establishment is not what the "hipster" is about, nor is it what those associated that evening were "about" (to repeat: there was no "aboutness" at all). It simply is renovation, self-contained, self-moved, and, I would hazard another thesis: self-emptying. The boldness of Eliot and Low was its sobriety, its calmness and equanimity. Into this space we can pour -- yet another thesis I put forward -- our many civilizations, and their many various ideas. These musics open up a space of universality not possible on the uncertain backs of tired notions rendered stiff by the contortions of a self-absorbed civilization (the essence, I think, of Sufjan's worry).

The de-intellectualized is-ness of this music is unique, as I have tried to show: at once ancient and terribly contemporary. I called it, awkwardly, a "phenomenon", but I am, again awkwardly, trying to indicate something more specific than this tired term has an ability to convey.

Johann von Goethe, whom we usually know as a poet, was also a kind of philosophical naturalist or "natural philosopher" in the appropriate terminology of the day (18th century Europe). He speculated that his work in this area would be remembered more than his literary productions; history had another fate for him: almost forgotten were (are) his works on natural philosophy, his study of color (in opposition to Newton's mechanical analysis), and his many studies of plant life (anticipating and going beyond Darwinian evolutionism). Each individual plant, he saw, was a living form (here we are harkening back to Plato, but rejuvenating him), a "phänomen" dynamically related to what he called an "Urphänomen", the "original", "highest" (and most "general") form. Each plant, each species, is a "One which is Many", to sum up his idea in somewhat mystical terms. Think about how you can take a cutting of a plant, root it, and thereby derive another "individual" plant, which is actually a continuation of the "original" plant from which you derived the cutting. Think about the significance of this (biological) act: many plants derive from one which is itself, literally, from another, and so on; we arrive at a (non-mystical) "One which is Many". The seeds of plants may even be dried and stored for years to be germinated and brought to full form again, reproducing the mother plant, continuing this "One which is Many" indefinitely into the future.

Oswald Spengler tried to apply this "morphology" (the term is Goethe's own) to cultural forms in a bold attempt to study the density of civilizations in a new way: by looking at their morphological relationships -- as living forms -- rather than studying their purely chronological orderings (the succession of "one damn thing after another"), as dead and frozen "facts" or "events" strung, immobilized, like beads on a necklace. This Goethean approach to culture is, I think, helpful here, as it allows me to convey to you the phenomenon of what I witnessed but more accurately: these musics were all of a piece; and individually, they were "phänomen": cuttings from one whole, a dynamic One with Many moments, originally unified but momentarily brought out into a definite form. The moments where the music was absent from our ears were the snips cutting the One, the performances themselves the Many, rooting before us in the stillness of the sanctuary. These musics were unities; they were Love.

There was more going on here in these musics that I can convey at length in the space of a single essay. I hope that I have sketched some of the more important, the more significant, without draping a shroud of sterile notions over this phenomenon, unintentionally hiding it from your view. I have also to reflect, if only briefly, on the meaning of a "review" of musical performances -- yet another form laden with historical accretions at once venerable, useful and also deadening...

Ours is a culture searching, fragmented, confused, lost amidst a wealth of options which, in the end, is our very poverty. Ironically, the brilliance of civilization has now burned us (and we could make this more than metaphoric, as we look upon the tormented globe, with its violent quakes and rains and winds and lightnings, and the terrible power now released from its long-dormant radioactive ores). Returning are what we thought lost forms of human oppression: the Feudal State (the debilitating bureaucratic machine worried about during the sixties and seventies), but now floating high above us in the rarefied environs of the globalized (with the Internet acting in the main as its sustaining cocoon, thoroughly colonized). In our world medieval (and let us wax for a moment somberly poetic), as in our prior world medieval, we found pockets of sacred space, following the brutalization of civilizations, with its penchant for the inner life. Yes, it was, during the Dark Ages, a period of little exuberance, of little outward, joyful explorations of individual expression, or of triumphal regal celebrations (little to celebrate in the joyless world of a crumbling, outer, civilization it must have seemed). Surely there was regal triumphalism; there were festivals, liturgical and civil, raising the spirits of the people a notch or two above the bland sobriety of days, and the sorrows of disease and the barbarity of life outside your village, or city, or your monastery. But the land was lighted with flickering inner lights, castles of spirit, containing a flame, passing it on one to another during the Dark Times, in the hopes of starting a fire again for the minds of future generations, hope for a dying civilization. They became somber, earnest, bland even, in their spiritual concerns; they lost fluency with their parent civilization, and could no longer understand the ancient tongue, or comprehend the joyful poems and discourses of their distant forefathers. But they cultivated something without quite knowing what is was, having lost the "critical" spirit of an ancient Greek or Roman philosopher.

What I was a witness to, I think, was a moment -- a microcosm, really -- of cultural significance the language for which we, I, struggle to find in order to do justice to this phenomenon ... of the "hipster" culture, of these musics of Beauty, of Low, of Eliot wailing softly, equilibrating in her self-emptying songs. Our well-worn forms (of language, of musical and intellectual expression) are failing us -- but under their own weight. We are crushed, with Sufjan, under the weight of our civilization, gasping for new air, for new life, for renewal, for spiritual rebirth.

But, as with our first medieval epoch, we must pause, and take a moment in the sanctuary to ask: as the second medieval epoch dawns, will I become a blank slate, going dumb, or will I keep the flame of Beauty within my soul, keeping an inner sanctuary, celebrating an inner Mass, renewing my spirit, in music, as music -- as art?

Religion (without the one idea I have deliberately refused to mention, to write down, to use) has a funny way of creeping up on a civilization. But the essence of religion slips through the gates of our feudal institutions, it slips from the musicians' fingers, from the philosophers' prose it is drained. But, in wholeness, as Music, as Mass, it is reborn ... has been reborn.

I should like to "thank" Eliot and Low; but I don't want to disturb their souls with my prose and to clutter their is-ness with my notions. But thanks, in any case.

on meeting an online date in "real" life

2011-01-24T16:03:00.000-08:00

Much to discuss, needless to say. Well, to sum it up: there has for a long time in our culture been a great divide between the inner world of "the mind", mediated by writing and reading, and the outer world of the experiences we have with other people and objects that appear to us objectively. With online dating, that dimension that has only been allowed to persist as letter-writing and novel-reading -- an experience that was one of a great sequestration -- has been transformed into the basic bread-and-butter of our social experience. In other words, there's not enough of a sound distinction between inner/outer or between public/private; this is quite ironic because most of Western thought has been devoted to either making one or the other reign supreme -- now, they're utterly confused. My point is that the Internet actually represents -- or directly presents to us -- another mode of existence! It actually -- but we might not see it in this way -- has a degree of autonomy from our waking, day-to-day non-Internet life. We do not appreciate how altogether subtle and difficult it is to integrate the two experiences, that is, to make one whole fabric of life out of a mentalized part and an externalize part of our lives. We cannot accept the deep continuity that there is between the two because we imagine them to be wholly contained within themselves: what I do when and on the Internet is, we wrongly think, wholly self-contained; likewise for what is done "on the outside", during a non-Internet (and primarily non-mentalized) mode of life. This is how I understand what you've so well and touchingly described to me.

I don't recall whether I wrote this specific point up or not, but I like to point out how so many times in literary history has there been a radical, and existential, distinction between the author (considered from the "object" and social side of thing -- the author as he or she could be experienced from the point of view of another person) and his or her written works. The poet Rimbaud sounds like a stinky vagabond; but his poetry strikes like a lightingbolt through to life and love, giving us a portion of truth to consider. Would I like to spend a night with him? Would I like to get a drink with him? I don't know -- probably I'd find him insufferable and annoying; but his writings are an entirely different story. Maybe Rimbaud was more fully what he essentially was in his writings, whereas his outer, "objectified" form -- that as it appeared to others, even to himself -- was absolutely abhorrent, or insufferable, intolerable, disgusting, and so on. We are getting into rather deep and difficult philosophical territory -- worthy of exploration, I think, since it really cuts to the heart of things obscured daily to us -- but I think that this is the basic existential dilemma we now must face in spades: the contradictions of the inner and outer worlds, and how to pull them together? Some people you meet "objectify" rather well; that is, what they are as they appear to others, and to the world at large, is real, solid, coherent with the "inner" world. But for other -- perhaps for most of us -- not so much: we lack "integrity" (in this existential sense I am trying to convey). And what I am saying is that the reverse is also true: the outer form -- how somebody "objectifies" to the world at large -- may be not as rich and complete and as well-developed as their inner dynamics. Art is a way of allowing the inner dynamic out into the objectified world -- into the "light of day" (but art is a species of human expression). But how and whether that art, should it be of a high state of perfection and refinement in the individual, matches the inner dimensions to the outer, is always left open. Perhaps the drunkenness of the young Bach, or the toilet humor of Mozart, etc., proves the point -- I am not sure yet -- but I think the point is clear: how we are presented through the objectification of our inner world, through writing, does not indicate who or what we are objectively. This is an altogether different affair: I might express myself in one way, with depth, with seeming conviction and certainty, but in the outer world, might fully and completely contradict that. Neither one, I am saying, is more real than the other; rather, the two form one whole being, and the tension, should one exist, between the two makes us what we are: complex and evolving creatures. The role of psychoanalysis and other searches of the "psyche" are obvious at this point: they are means of compelling integration in us.

I was really impressed with your description of, I think, this duality of text/person, or intention/act (not to make it sound too academic -- but I think you see what I'm pointing to). We are encouraged to live a life of what Freud and the psychoanalytics call "bad faith" (I don't know who coined that expression). I, for one, know that in my writing, I am one thing, and in the workaday world, the outer world, I am another; sometimes the two are sewn together -- often and only by the flight of my imagination -- but mostly the two are flung in different and often contradictory directions. I am reminded, on this point, by the wonderful and profound novel by Hermann Hesse Steppenwolf: Steppenwolf is a divided soul, and struggles to find unity; in the end, as in the end of the novel of Tolstoy's (War and Peace), do we find the only real, the only possible, resolution: ordinary life, moving about here-and-there, or "chopping wood and carrying water" as the Zen Buddhists would put it. Apart from this, there is nothing (Giordano Bruno made this point when musing on the infinity of the Universe -- that apart from the infinity, there is nothing; and he thought the soul a microcosm. The point of contact is too profound to explore!)

When we meet, you might catch a glimpse of my psyche, now having free roam over the keyboard, as I talk, but in person, something else altogether different -- but no less real, or important, or true -- will doubtless take place; another element of my soul, the part perhaps even hidden from the light of my own reflective mind, will appear, and, it might be, you will be privy to an aspect of the completeness that I, or we, so desire. Aristotle said that "man is by nature a social animal"; perhaps we should add: only in the outer world -- the world full-stop -- are we completed. In the later theological writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the doyen of the high medieval scholastic period of Western thought, taught a "worldly" theology; and I think this is exactly what he meant to add to the overly "inner", the sickeningly interior, tendencies inherent in Western religion: the world, the creation we witness in an objectified form, affords soul an opportunity for a further development, for another chance at becoming more fully what the soul is. The world is a necessary part of life! The world is continuous creation; we are a species of this infinite power, the "Will" willing itself into existence over and over, continuously, unceasingly, creatively. We need this world, and, as much and in the very same respect, the world needs us. We tend to loose sight of this -- we do so because we fail to appreciate the balance required to gain the "integration" we seek. But we cannot disregard either side, the interior or the exterior; the outer or inner worlds.

How to really say all of this without destroying the Mystery that sustains it? Of course, I have already said too much.

response on the topic of technology and being (real)

2011-01-06T21:09:00.001-08:00

Thank you for your very enjoyable email; it's a pleasure to know that you read the articles and that you have started to think them through. What you said about how you're a "person 1.0" -- yes, you and I are, as it were, on the cusp of the great generational changes that are just now becoming not "changes" of course (for that must be relative to those with the conceptual armature to know what the differences are), but, rather, are the baseline, the air breathed normally: "person 2.0" is the remade person whose profoundly mediated and Internet-ized world is constitutive of their very personality structure itself. When you go from a state of being in which a technology, because of its obvious or inherent limitations, is merely (and can only be) used as a tool, to a state of being in which the tool, because of its sheer ubiquity and uncanny ability to attach and append itself to our elementary human experiences (like our basic experience of sight and sound), then the technology becomes something much more than a tool: it becomes part of the user itself -- as I said, now more generally: it has become constitutive of the reality, and therefore no longer can it be considered, strictly speaking, 'artificial' or inauthentic or irreal, and so on. In this case, you've truly entered new historical and cultural territory; I would say that you have crossed a kind of ontological or existential threshold, almost a kind of "point of no return". We haven bitten of the fruit of knowledge, and there' no going back, existentially speaking. Of course, our culture may vanish with all its technological glory relegated to dusty tombs ( ... "and above the crumbling ruins was written: 'I am Ozymandias; look upon my kingdom and tremble'"), and there would itself be the potential for another ontological chasm, but nonetheless, what we have it likely to stay around for a very long time (after all, we still have the wheel).

Now, as we've said, technology is so fundamental to people's experiences that the experience of life without it is becoming increasingly alien. But what do we (the late 1.0's) do or say to the people (the 2.0's -- my students, increasingly!) who are speaking literally and honestly and sincerely when they say: but how can I not use these things or think with them -- they are reality for me (and they are my thinking), and to destroy that would be madness (you'd be literally destroying their psychological cohesion). Our systems of business/commerce, economics, education, government (and our friends too, inasmuch as they happily adopt its forms), however, succeed in marring us to the technologies, and help make us ok with technology in every quarter of human life (thus "humanizing" it for us, and in the process, reducing us and our expectations in order to meet and match the limitations/constraints/demands of the technology -- let's not forget that technology isn't alive, it's inert, a mere machine-thing). What's more: the administrators of each system generally use it (implicitly or explicitly) to define the many elements of practical human life within society (technology is often used as a kind of standard in, esp., the world of education these days, and is certainly part of the very definition of industry, production, the concept of productivity, etc. etc.).

I'm not talking, of course, about conspiracy with a big 'c'; rather I am talking about the small-'c' conspiracy; that is: I am talking about the overall logic of the system -- the systematic relationship between the parts of our whole society, and how they relate to us, the human, living, beings having to navigate (yet another techno-biased descriptor!) the living world as organisms are wont to do.

Notice, my thesis is not anti-technology (or at least I don't intend it to be); rather, I am arguing for a simple thesis, you might even call it a radically conservative one: inasmuch as technology remains a thing, it can only be a tool, and can therefore (hats off to Immanuel Kant here) only be used as a means to some other end outside of itself. That is, it requires a "prime mover" which is human, living, intelligent, and so on ... and so, in this sense, it has a "secondary" kind of reality: it is a dependent thing, dependent on us (living non-things) for its reality and movement and continuance. For every technology, for every program in every computer, and for every so-called "artificially intelligent" construction, as the pioneer of virtual reality himself reminds us in You Are Not A Gadget: somebody or some people, in the beginning, had to sit down, think, and structure the technology-thing, turn it on, and allow it to go. Otherwise, nothing happens. Sad to say, but Johnny 5 is not alive.

a certain personal statement

2010-12-22T23:08:00.000-08:00

I don't like summaries, but I've been impressed with the quality of the personal statements so far on this site; I am thus humbled into writing something more than purely idiosyncratic remarks (although, as someone remarked: could it really be that so many people are so wonderful and living such happy lives? Hmm.). But, in any case ...

Reflecting on my experiences thus far, I tend to get along with people who have serious or sincere interests in art, music, literature & poetry, and intellectual pursuits. I most desire someone from whom I can learn about things that matter most. Those with whom I usually don't get along, in the long run, are, ironically enough, those with whom there is a great deal of initial chemistry but, since it flares so intensely, well ..., nothing's left to work with. And this leads me to reflect on things a bit more closely and carefully. I've seen several theories offered about the whole Internet dating phenomenon, so here's my own:

As research now indicates, having too many choices turns out to be rather a bad thing, in the end: one researcher calls it the "paradox of choice" and I think that's a great term that gets to a common plight we all face in these days of the perpetual and ever-present 'Net. The paradox of choice certainly shows up especially here, in the midst of the Internet dating thing, and it's especially troublesome: too many options leads to a condition of wracking your brains out over which is "the best", or worse, "possibly the best" -- as if such a thing could be picked out by a bunch of statistical rankings and lists of interests nicely tailored to your very own personal specifications. Not that this a bad thing, of course -- but the point is that Internet dating starts with a bunch of false assumptions that go against the mysteries and complexities of love (if that's what you, ultimately, are seeking): the false assumption of getting to choose the "right" somebody for yourself (as if there is no mystery and happenstance involved in partnership and romance and love); the false assumption that specifying "what you want" somehow increases the chances -- always "the chances" -- of meeting the "special someone" (as if there shouldn't be an element of risk or chance at all); the false assumption that I actually, all by myself, know who is "right for me" (why assume that I have special knowledge here? do I not have to let go of some of the things that I think I want some of the time, and accept the things that don't at first seem right at other times?); and so on.

Not only are these assumptions false, but the very form in which we encounter each other here (and through every other mediated, Internet venue) presents us with a kind of debilitating condition, one of increasingly meaningless individual choices. The more choices there are makes each of the choices increasingly meaningless, more abstract, precisely because there are more and more from which to choose -- thus the "paradox of choice". I call this form of the paradox, where we not only are given a spread of options, but we are also tempted to try each one of them out for ourselves to "see which one fits (the best"), I like to call this the "smorgasbord effect". At the smorgasbord, you want to choose as many things as possible, precisely because each untried choice holds out the possibility of matching our desires better than what we've already chosen; who knows what you really want if you haven't really tried enough of what there is to try?

I think you see where I'm heading with this analysis: beyond a certain threshold, choice becomes the problem, not a solution; it becomes the end in itself, that is: the choosing becomes the goal, not any one choice in particular. One anthropologist, Thomas de Zengotita (at NYU I think), calls this condition "optionality". Perfectly stated.

Thus, we face a host of problems just by logging on to this site, clicking on somebody's profile, sending a message to person #'s 1, 2, 3, ..., n and composing increasingly shortened purely functional messages devoid of the possibility of real human connection.

But, we face an altogether more menacing problem right here: the proliferation of options -- the condition of "optionality" we enter here -- paradoxically loosens us from any responsibility from forming and staying with any single human being beyond the purposes and interests we want to "get out of them". Relationships are, as one philosopher (Zygmunt Bauman) puts it, "until further notice" -- ready to be given up, let go of, etc., when they become no longer fun or pleasurable (in our preestablished estimation, of course). Nothing beyond our own pleasure binds us to anyone, and so, when the pleasure ends, so do the relationships; "when the going gets tough, the tough get going". Move on to the next option; see what the other ones are like ... why not? Try them to see which one fits, "try him on for size", you can always send it back and "chalk it up to experience" (I'll have another experience "under my belt").

One other thing to consider: as a recent reviewer of the film "Social Network" pointed out, places like F-book and sites like the one you're on now, tend to induce us to remake ourselves in their image and likeness (this is probably one of the great themes of Western religions too: the creator fashioning the created creature in its own image and likeness, the creature a diminished reproduction of the original -- same begets the merely similar). What is most disturbing about this is that the template that's used to establish the presentation of self is radically impoverished, highly reductive and, ultimately, an injustice done to our full, rich human complexity. In fact, what happens is that, as we mold ourselves to fit into these narrow digital confines, we internalize the standards imposed by these "social media" sites, and then, in a vicious circle of self-fulfilling logic, we are confirmed in our already-narrow view of ourselves as we seem to meet people with whom we might have a good connection, and so on. Our refashioned digitally defined self finds fulfillment and confirmation in the very same forum that has established the criteria of success -- self-congratulatory insularity, oh my! Soon, the fact that we've reshaped our self-image to match sites like these is forgotten, and we adopt the forms of communication, language and social experience dictated by the inert technology of "social media"; we meet each other expecting to confirm or dis-confirm an already impoverished sense of self-other encounter. We are effectively becoming "virtualized": persons with personalities gradually morphed to fit the bounds established by the programmers of the 'Net. But to quote Jaron Lanier, ironically the pioneer of virtual reality itself: "YOU ARE NOT A GADGET!" Come awake to the imagination; come awake to the chanciness of human life, to reality, with grit and non-grit, risk and plan, determination and spontaneity -- come awake my friend!

Of course, I'm not saying that it's impossible to find great friends and romances on here, but we must know fully well what the initial conditions are when we enter the virtual worlds of optionality: we must know what we're up against, and must know that the odds are against us -- the house always wins in the long run.

[Further thoughts on This Internet Dating Thing]
This site, it seems pretty clear after only about two weeks, very rapidly eviscerates itself. The game is obvious: it's a marketing trap -- that is, a profit-oriented venture -- that concocts various schemes to get others to "vote" on your profile, so that you get an email about how "someone voted for you", thus drawing you in again (tauntingly), to ride the merry-go-round once more; and so on, to no end. And thus, we have rapid evisceration, boredom, constant frustration, "media fatigue" would perhaps be a more apt phrase for the phenomenon.

I've also noticed how there are dozens of people floating over my profile, and about 1% response; which, of course, is what you would expect -- but the odd thing is that you get caught, or perhaps frozen, in a question-loop: should I contact, or not? So many choices; what if, perhaps not, is he right, ...?

Well, the truth is, nobody is ever right, and most of us when dating or when in a relationship (a real one) vacillate, ordinarily, between dislike and like, distance and closeness, separation (inner/outer) and relating, depth and shallowness, vanity and virtuousness, and so on. And what is more, true, 'real', relationships are time-bound processes; that is, they take and require time, effort, consistency, a long arc. Trouble is, as many people are beginning to realize, our society does not sustain or support that. It's all about the new experiences, eternal newness, novelty spinning 'round and 'round and 'round. Especially American (US) society: it is one which threw off the yoke of tradition (Old World Europe), and so inherited, or rather internalized, a neurosis: with no superego without (tradition bearing down upon you, the Eye of your ancestor's Past) to foster simplicity or a reduction of one's whim or fancy or free-floating desires, a more terrifying superego has arisen within, the child adrift in a sea of possibilities, crying out for more, for stuff, to fill the void left by the fateful and natural process of becoming a solitary, individual being in the world. How dreadful it is to be human! Alexis de Tocqueville said it best of our society, it seems:

"The woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself".

Think about what this means: terrifying aloneness; neurotic searching, the quixotic endeavor to "find the perfect mate", or to just "do whatever" so as to make the loneliness a little farther off, perhaps something you wont yet have to face ... until, of course, you're older. But that's a future time that is unreal, as the past is. Only now, the fire of the new, the eternal novelty. Your fire will burn twice as bright, and so, my friend, will it last half as long.

If by this point, I haven't been too much of a Debby-downer, then read on to get a flavor for who I am, what I'm about, and what I cannot really say well at all regarding "what I want out of this site"...

anti-experimental philosophy

2010-08-21T08:28:00.000-07:00

I wrote this as a comment to another learned inanity which appeared on the NYTimes. I hate these shitheads. (Of course my comment wasn't "published" because it refused them their irrelevant, sophistical framework for "debate".)

[Here is the Times post to which this is a reply.]

But why no old takes on new problems?

Or just a take on 'problem' itself.

Or, why not ask what the problem with philosophers who study 'problems' is?

How about asking a philosopher who thinks philosophy is not a profession what they think about philosophy and philosophical 'problems' and 'experimental' philosophy (ask Bruce Wilshire, for example, emeritus at Rutgers)?

How about asking a question about what 'expertise' in philosophy is supposed to be anyway, and what assumptions those 'expert' philosophers are making? And how about a question concerning 'progress', and the (associated) need to 'justify' philosophy?

Why are there only philosophers from certain institutions here: Rutgers, Yale, Chicago, Oxford?

And why are they only 'problems' philosophers? Are the 'problems' philosophers the only philosophers who 'experiment'? Why does philosophy need it to be 'practical' or to avoid the 'impractical' charge?

What is Prof. Leiter's 'retrograde' philosopher? Like, is there an anti-retrograde alliance or something?

Maybe it's possible that philosophy is as useless as reading and doing literature, reading and composing poetic verse, and loafing around in the world waiting to hear something that somebody forgot to think. Maybe philosophy has no need of experimentation because philosophy just keeps reminding you that you're not really thinking about what really matters, and that experimentation really doesn't matter until you know what a good life amounts to, and that is never really a settled matter anyway.

Maybe, just maybe, those who want to close the doors to philosophy departments are right for the wrong reasons. Maybe philosophy cannot survive unless it's free, a wide-open luxury to bear witness to reality, most esp. the reality outside of the comforts of money and institutions, grants and foundations, conferences and professional associations.

Maybe, just maybe, the history of the idea of philosophy -- which most young philosophers are painfully uneducated about, are painfully inoculated to by self-serving historians within philosophy itself (just ask Prof. Wilshire -- he wrote books on the subject which nobody seems to read) -- maybe the history of the idea of philosophy (as a discipline) bespeaks a perhaps historically necessary inversion: philosophers not as critics of our society, but microscopists of the mechanisms of its eternal slumber.

Philosophers, professional, experimental philosophers, are doing nothing new, indeed: they are the modern incarnation of 'sophists': well-fed, well-paid architects of the concepts and systems by which the real story of our death is muted.

The truth is that philosophy, literature and poetry never did split; even Aristotle knew that, at the end of the day, the world is an organism, a whole, and to analyze is but a useful fiction: all things seek the Good or Best, in the end. Organizing your mind -- establishment of the logoi within -- was the first stage, the stage of principle, upon which the work of the soul is to be built.

Where is the soul?

Of course, that's just another 'retrograde' concept.

Warm regards from outside the fold,

Michael C. Cifone, (Ph.D., Philosophy)
(Nowhere tenured, not seeking)

Fishy Fish

2010-08-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

Stan Fishy,

Modernday Sophistry

An idea without a thought

A brain without a heart

Windy whitewashed gaping mouth old codger

Stuffed to his Gills,

Electric columns of lifeless love

For the Word, the Text.

My fingers tap with joy

For the confusions

I bring to Our sad ocean of learning.

Aristocracy, sophistry

A big Fish, talking to himself.

Your ocean is a bowl

Atop a marble table

Inside an oblivion:

Alexandria's library tomb,

Fish, choking on air.

contemporary America

2010-02-04T09:11:00.000-08:00

Will Hutton, a British writer, wrote this in his 2002 book The World We're In:

"This ... is contemporary America. If it is rich and entrepreneurial, it is also economically volatile, profoundly unequal and nothing like as productive as it could be, given its enormous assets. Its democracy, one of the great Enlightenment triumphs and a beacon of hope to many societies around the world in both the past and present, now resembles pre-Enlightenment Europe in it dependence on money and private power. This is the orderly country whose citizens routinely shoot each other. This is where worship at church is rivalled only by worship at the shopping mall. It is becoming a land of individual strangers questing for their inner happiness because the public realm is so corrupted and depleted. It is a country that has burst its limits; an economy that is on the edge. And the whole is overshadowed by a tenacious endemic racism that is the still unresolved legacy of slavery and civil war ....
The American dream is of the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness; but the gap between dream and reality is lived out daily with increasing bitterness. America fails almost half its citizens. Cynicism about public and cultural rhetoric compared with actual experience is profound. This is hardly a desirable economic and social model within its own terms; to try to export it to the rest of the world is risible" (pp. 42-43).

on "collective hallucinations"

2009-12-22T23:38:00.000-08:00

As a response to a blog that I follow with interest, I wrote the following, where I raise the question of whether we can find an explanation of conscious, collective hallucinations (for lack of a better term) -- phenomena like apparitions and so on -- that does not in principle deny the reality or external, intersubjective character of such phenomena. This is one of those issues that is like a litmus test of present-day thinking, showing you its true limits and ideological character.

--------------

Recently, a relative of mine told me of two incidents involving what are technically known as "collective hallucinations": phantasms that are witnessed by more than one individual. My relative and her husband (who both, truth be told, suffer from deep depression) were sitting in their living room when they heard a distinct voice loudly utter two words; a couple weeks later, the same voice with the same words were heard again loud and clear.

Of course, it could be as simple as a neighborhood kid pulling a prank (and a proper investigation would have to rule that out, obviously), but the question is, supposing that the voice really was heard and had no obvious or ordinary origin (i.e., it really was disembodied), then what possibly could explain this instance of a collective hallucination which does not explain it *away* and which preserves the intersubjective quality of it (for collective hallucinations are, by their nature, intersubjective)?

Clearly, modern science can admit but two general hypotheses (i.e., there are only two which do not conflict with the basic axioms of the causal-mechanical view):

(1) the voice, while indeed collectively perceived and external the perceivers, was generated by an embodied individual (prankster kid, emerged from a distant TV, radio, etc.)

(2) the voice was, Jung-style, a projection -- but in this case, insofar as this phenomenon was *collective*, it is a collective projection ("sympathetic" projections?)

Hypothesis #1 just is run-of-the mill causal/mechanical style, and treats the voice as a product of ordinary causal processes, whereas #2 is a bit more subtle. But, #2 leaves us with *another* puzzle: how to explain the collective, simultaneous nature of the (seemingly external, adventitious) perception.

We are all here probably familiar with the analogous cases that Jung dealt with regarding the *unconscious*: a wide variety of people were reporting to him dream sequences that bore uncanny similarity to the imagery he was finding in alchemical texts (texts which were themselves drawing on older sacred imagery). Jung then postulates the existence of the collective unconscious, and the notion of the archetypal image.

As far as I can tell (and I'm just beginning to study this here), Jung's is a causal explanation if any is -- just a more subtle one: the archetypal images that arise in our dream world reflect certain somatic processes at work in us, and insofar as these somatic processes remain relatively stable across many generations of human beings, there arise certain common dream patterns. The "collective unconscious" is, then, simply the collective somatic "field" of human beings: the latent somatic patterns that, under the appropriate conditions, "activates", sending "tremors" through our individual psyche (it "bubbles" up from the deep somatic core, through the unconscious and into our conscious worlds).

Here, with Jung's perspective, we cannot treat individuals as atomistic psychic blank-slates who get all their psychic material, as it were, from their "immediate" surroundings (parents, immediate environs, etc. etc.) -- this is Freud, essentially (Descartes with a couple of complexes and a libido). For Jung, we must treat the individual as a kind of "node" (for lack of a better term) in a larger somatic/psychic field, one rooted not only in the body, but also one which "feels" the tremors or vibrations of its own history, encoded in its very material substance (the weight of the collective psyche -- its *history* -- impresses on the individual in the *present*).

So much for explaining the common dream patterns of Jung, which are phenomena experienced while we're unconscious. What about "psychic" phenomena that happen to us when we're awake -- the "collective hallucinations" I spoke about above (which the UFO phenomena, etc. are instances of)? Can we find the conscious analogue of the Jung-style explanation?

As a matter of fact, something like this actually exists. There is an ancient Buddhist school of thought called "mind-only" (vijnapti-matra) which deals with the phenomenon of "collective hallucinations" (I refer the reader to the experts for the details).

In a future post, I'd like to explore this school of thought and see what we can come up with.

dialogue and the body

2009-09-18T12:37:00.001-07:00

Plato regards dialogue as essential for the discovery of truth; solitary thinking is of a lesser nature than the (truly) dialogic (a conversation between two persons).

In the solitary pursuit -- but I only mean through reading and solitary contemplation -- the body is subdued, calmed, inactive, reposeful even. Part of the body is dormant; only 'thought' is active (of, if you prefer, only one aspect of the human soul is engaged -- the 'rational' part; the rest of this soul-body is dormant).

We also must distinguish between public discussion -- free-flowing, wandering, caught up in the moment and in the dynamics of the whole group -- and a true dialogue.

For truth to be pursued genuinely, and for Wisdom to be a love (or to be loved), the entire body must be engaged -- Truth is engaging.

The embodiment of truth requires context, valid context -- that is, proper situation. Here and only here, in the situation (and this is something Wittgenstein seems to have realized), are truth and being in union: the specific or individual in communion with the universal, the general, or, more precisely, the totality of Being (Being as a whole). Thus, truth and reference (which is a feature of language) cannot in this unitive moment be separated; only later, in a formal or "intellectual" sense do we do this (in the Schools, or in purely "academic" disputes).

Thus, when Aristotle speaks about a "real" vs. a (mere) formal distinction, this amounts to a recognition of the unity of truth-being, and the fragmentation possible by way of thought-schemes. To keep this distinction in mind is to keep blood flowing in the philosophical life, and in the intellectual act itself.

And so genuine dialogue is essential to the health of the soul (the body-soul, that is). Never should we forget, here, Nietzsche's admonition: throw into the trash all thoughts that descend to you while sitting in your study, sitting alone, just an inward-falling mind-only! Of course, what is meant is: accept ideas -- truly receive them -- only after their real embodiment, their real situation, unfolds -- lodged, they then are, in the particularity of Being itself, an individual-in-Unity, rather than regurgitated as indigested thought-material.

The body-soul is an organism. We can't forget this. It can get indigestion; it can get sick. Scholasticism is a chronic indigestion, a sign of soul-sickness (but not all Scholastics are soul-sick -- Thomas seems to not have been too distant from his body-soul).

Is it any wonder that we can easily summarize Nietzsche's whole "philosophy" as one of a great clearing out of the indigestion of his contemporaries, as one of soul-health? We don't often hear this about his thinking, and it's often overlooked for more loftier, more "metaphysical" and "ethical" notions (notions, just notions is what these readers of Nietzsche the doctor tend to have an abundance of).

It is fairly simple: go get an enema; swallow some roughage; clear out the pipes; go for a walk (" ... along a country path ...").

But we have to call into mind Rilke, the poet, who many times fell into himself. This falling was a healing act of the soul: in the dark reaches of the soul, we may also, beacause we have coursed the black abyss, find the light of day. Day follows night; the second day.

In order not to turn this discussion you read before your eyes into more of the problem -- more pure intellection, an escape from the incandescent reality of being-and-non-being, light-and-darkness, joy-and-sadness, a forgetting of the richness of embodiment itself -- we have to recall these paradoxes. Light-in-the-darkness; darkness-in-the-light. The falling into yourself that Rilke found is as much a part of life as the walks along a country path that we must take in order for truth to have itself uncovered from itself. Inward Contemplation (falling into the depths of your soul) and Dialogue (two souls communing towards truth, in belonging together along the dialogic path) are jointly needed. Their union is essential to our humanity.

And here, melancholy cannot be avoided, or ignored. It is the dark light that reveals.

On David Bohm and Where To Go With His Philosophy

2009-08-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

Recently, I wrote this little essay on how I understand the thought of David Bohm and where you can go with it -- what adventures you may find within it (is this what Heidegger meant by "along a country path"?).

Bohm and the Unfinished Recovery of Somatic Epistemology.

M. Cifone.

The overwhelming crisis of our age seems to be, as many have pointed out, the deepening loss of a rootedness in our bodies, which, at the same time, means a loss of authentic community with the natural and social worlds. The inner and outer dimensions of life are falling apart.

Bohm called this cataclysmic shift in human consciousness “fragmentation”, and devoted his most important work, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, to an investigation and articulation of what he called a “non-fragmentary world view”. “If [man] thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments,” Bohm wrote,

then that is how his mind will tend to operate. But if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border … then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole[i]

Bohm was obviously worried about the important connection between thinking and being, and this realization has led many to claim that a world view is also a way of life, that is, a being-in-the-world. This is something that psychologists like R.D. Laing and Rollo May also realized, and something that philosophers (and, we hope, scientists) are again realizing[ii]. Thought and concept are not separate realties from the reality of our bodies and ways of being. Physics, then, does not constitute a separate domain of inquiry from psychology, or philosophy, for example. These now-separate disciplines are deeply related: they have a common root in the body. A problem or deficiency in our world view (scientific or otherwise) is, therefore, a problem with our being-in-the-world.

So, this, as I understand it, is the problem of fragmentation Bohm wrestled with over the course of his life. To heal the soul-sick man, then, is to also reconfigure his science, to reorient man and his thinking back to his somatic roots. Most of Bohm’s work in physics, consequently, was devoted to clarifying the essential discoveries of modern physical science that point away from fragmentation and toward wholeness, and Bohm’s work outside of physics proper was devoted to achieving wholeness where it counts: in human beings themselves (in our bodies), as we dialogue, and, therefore, as we relate to one another in real life.

But what, in my opinion, remains obscure is the connection between Bohm’s physics of wholeness and his work on human dialogue and consciousness (what you could call the more “spiritual” part of Bohm’s work). It remains obscure because the somatic basis of Bohm’s thinking remains in the realm of thoughts and ideas.

In the now quite large literature on Bohm’s philosophy and science, what we often find is much talk of an alternative model of reality where, according to the “Implicate Order”, physical (material) processes and the thought process are unified, a world view in which “mind” and “matter” are not separate but form a continuum or “unified field”. We also find much talk of the relationships between Bohm’s thinking and the thinking of philosophers such as Whitehead who also take a “process” view of reality where the mind/matter distinction does not (or cannot) arise (as it does in the Cartesian-Newtonian world view). And we can even find “applications” of Bohm’s philosophy of wholeness in the corporate/business world [iii]. Put simply, we find much talk and much conceptualization and some implementation.

All of this is important work. All of it is necessary (to a certain extent, anyway). But all of it continues to miss the point, I think, which is not about “frameworks” or “process philosophy” or healthy business leadership at all. Nor is it about (mere) “models” of reality, important as these intellectual tools are in themselves. In my view, all of this participates (perhaps unwittingly) in the very problem of fragmentation itself, and does not in itself constitute authentic alternatives to it (there are, after all, authentic as opposed to “counterfeit” wholes, as Henri Bortoft likes to say).

As I understand Bohm, he was trying to develop a way of proceeding with natural science in which it is (at least) possible to relocate human experience—what I am calling “somatic” or bodily epistemology—so as to truly, authentically, overcome the mental/bodily isolation implicit in modern scientific consciousness since the seventeenth century and which now grips man in this age of what Neil Postman called the “Technopoly”.

Bohm’s most important suggestion, then, was methodological, rather than primarily “metaphysical”[iv]. So when Bohm talks about the interdependence of mind-matter or the “undivided wholeness of the universe” this can only have “meaning” in a somatic sense and not exclusively or primarily in a discursive or “rational” sense (which is what a fully-articulated “world view” really amounts to—a framing of experience with a series of logically related propositions). The “Implicate Order” is, then, a road map to something else—not a “metaphysics” that is to replace the (false) metaphysics of the old, Cartesian-Newtonian sciences with their mechanical philosophies. Missing this somatic basis you miss everything important and meaningful in Bohm, and continue to pursue something more like scholasticism rather than the real thing. Missing this you mistake map for territory.

While I cannot go into the details here (and they are just becoming clear to me as I study the matter more closely), I believe that there are larger (“macroscopic”) patterns in play that inhibit the recovery of the body within physics (and science more generally). By and large, the body (the source of all true creativity in science and the various human arts) is noticeably absent from most of what goes by the name of science or philosophy these days. And so we have, I suspect, a new kind of scholasticism taking hold of the majority of “work” on the fundamental problems of science and scientific methodology, or, in Lee Smolin’s terms, we are finding more “craftspeople” than “seers”[v].

It is hard to maintain a balance between somatic and discursive knowledge. The sociologist and cultural critic Pitrim Sorokin argued that there have been rare historical periods where humanity managed to strike up something of this balance (the Greece of Aristotle and the Europe of Aquinas are two of Sorokin’s examples[vi]), but given the overwhelming bias against the actual body in modern institutions of learning and teaching, it is easy to slip into the scholastic coma of mere verbal understanding, to confuse map with territory (the passivity of scholastic debates being an indicator here that you’ve already slipped into this deadening confusion).

This, then, is the challenge that Bohm’s work faces, and this inadequacy can only be overcome by serious somatic work (work with and in the body). I see the opening of dialogues with Asian, Native American and other traditions where somatic epistemology is prominent, as an important step here. The dialogues between students of Bohm’s work (or students of any Western natural philosophy) and Native Americans, Hindus and Buddhists is absolutely crucial.

It is this project of Bohm’s—providing a somatic basis for physics and other ways of human intellectual enquiry—that remains largely unfinished (and poorly understood) in my view. Conceptualizing the world as process and finding a mathematical structure that accords with this way of thinking (the physics of the Implicate Order) is not enough[vii]. Indeed, as Morris Berman put it in his study of this very question, “[w]e are in very murky territory here … no physicist I know of has managed to construct a methodology that directly involves the experimenter in their own experiment”[viii].

The only way out of scholastic ways of thinking and being is to first take seriously the lack of deep body knowledge in most of us who like to worry about “fragmentation”, and to find a serious somatic practice. The first step is, obviously, dialogue: between those trained in cognitive/discursive-style science and philosophy and those who have an authentic somatic practice. The next step is for there to actually be a serious somatic practice in the lives of those seriously exploring the problem of fragmentation.

This inevitably means a long hiatus from the usual academic and institutional quarters where these sorts of things are explored from a cognitive or discursive point of view (for example, working for a long time with Native American shamans, or with Buddhist yogins). It may not lead to any “results”, either, no ground-breaking treatises on “somatic science” (that would probably be the kiss of death in any case). But what this would mean is at least the possibility of a rooted science, a more humane science, beginning with its practitioners. Thanks for reading.

[i] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, p. xiii.

[ii] Even someone like Hilary Putnam, one of the most important thinkers of the “analytic” school of Western Anglo-American philosophy is now, after decades of logical analysis, leaning towards this “embodied” point of view (see for example his recent Jewish Philosophy as a Way of Life). This, is of course, a running theme in the history of philosophy itself, as the historian of ideas Pierre Hadot shows (Philosophy As A Way of Life).

[iii] I am thinking of Joseph Jaworski’s work on business leadership. See, for example, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (1998).

[iv] Though “metaphysics” is going to have to be reinterpreted here from a somatic point of view, the most clear of which we can find in the work of Bohm’s student Henri Bortoft (The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science), and in the work of Morris Berman (for example, in the first installment of his “Consciousness” trilogy, Reenchantment of the World), both of whom draw on a large body of work: writers, philosophers, scientists, poets and intellectuals who've made profound contributions to this question. You get the feeling, reading Bortoft and Berman, that there is an entire tradition hidden from orthodox science and philosophy, a “heretical” tradition as Berman terms it. Bohm is certainly kin here.

[v] The Trouble with Physics (2006), chapter 18.

[vi] See Sorokin’s discussion in The Crisis of Our Age.

[vii] And, as I’ve said, it is merely instrumental to something beyond all this but back to one’s body—“the kingdom of heaven lies within” as Christ said in another context.

[viii] Coming To Our Senses (1989), p. 135.

moral "theory" vs. wisdom that employs theory

2009-08-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

The question for all professional philosophers (one whose answer separates the wise from the mere scholar) is, does your thinking -- your philosophy, your contemplation -- blossom into a living presence in the world where thought and action must be united?

Professionals increasingly do not like to teach the old philosophers, do not like to teach "philosophical theory" -- but they often do not recall the admonitions of Nietzsche to justify themselves. Or else, they have nothing interesting to say: they simply have some ill-conceived distaste for 'theory' -- and that is because they have no true understanding of it (after you read Nietzsche, you must find the deeper understanding of theory in which his "transvaluation" is accomplished: that occurs when you transmute 'theory' into 'health').

Here is my reply to one of the professionals regarding the teaching of 'moral' theory, in particular. I try to demonstrate the point, rather than argue it out as a point (that would be bad theory!):

I think "moral theory" goes the wrong way. Under the spell of mathematical physics, it has preferred to go from abstract principle, to derived consequence (actions following from the axioms) -- or, perhaps worse, from particular instances to a general principle. The former, Kant (duty to obey the principle); the latter, Mill (the natural inclination is what's best, and that is our principle). In both cases, it seems, actions must be programmed to be what they ought to be by the moral principles -- Kant and Mill actually agree here. Nonetheless, the important question being explored is one that we all have to face: what is intrinsically valuable, that is, a 'good' in and of itself, that is not a means to anything else? what is the difference, then, between intrinsic, as opposed to instrumental, values? And the most important point that Kant, Mill and Aristotle all agree on is that I have to struggle against myself (or society) in order to be moral. But perhaps abstract principle is not the way to win it -- is not the heroic way (this is Nietzsche, as I read him). And here is where, I think, Aristotle hits this one on the head: 'happiness' (but this should be rendered, 'healthiness' or wellness of soul, which, recall, is the inner life principle for Aristotle -- hence healthiness) does prove to be intrinsically valuable (it's valuable in and of itself, and not as a means to something else), and his 'virtues' (their general character and specific kinds) are a kind of means ('vehicles' to be embodied) to accomplish it; but they have to be understood as rules of thumb rather than "universal moral principles".

So, as the content of Aristotle's 'virtues', on the whole, prove: there has to be an element of heroism to 'theory': that is, the building of one's character against the lethargy of self, the pressures of society and the confusions of tradition (theories and propositions that get converted into static ideals or idols). And we have to remember the concept of 'theory' in ancient Greece: seeing what is actually before you (i.e., 'truth'), or in Heidegger's words "the beholding that watches over truth" ("Science and Reflection", p. 165). What a 'living' conception! Thus, Aristotle's "virtue theory", properly understood, is alive: he points to examples from experience, and tries to generalize to some kind of rule of thumb: an athlete who works his or her body too hard will eventually wear themselves out and therefore end up destroying the very thing they seek, perfection in strength, etc. ... thus, moderation here ... and so on. Message: struggling to achieve some particular end will, the harder you push, end up destroying that very thing (principle of dialectic -- recall the injunction of Heraclitus that has come down to us: "follow the principle [root or foundation] common to all"). Thus, moderation is the best course of action in anything (does not apply to 'moderation' because that would be a category error, in classic Aristotelian sense: 'moderation' is not an activity but a quality of activities, 'activities' themselves being the actual things here). A 'happy' soul is one which is fully integrated, that is, one that is not coming apart in the sense of immoderation: literally, as above, the continual destruction of one's particular aims by struggling immoderately for them. "Aims" being crucial here: the health of the soul is the unity of the various parts, but obviously there are factors that are beyond one's conscious control ... but what we "aim" at, by means of our concepts or ideas, is exactly controllable by us (freedom to act) -- and here is where the central role of thinking comes into play. Contemplation, as an act which calms the mind from pursuing one and only one particular aim (which, according to the principle of dialectic is going to be ultimately futile, but, in regard to the specific aim itself, merely temporarily fulfilling/rewarding -- recall, again, Heraclitus: "all is flowing"), can be the only highest form of life, the ultimate happiness of man. Contemplation is not negation or avoidance -- that would contradict the other aims of life (body needs nutrition, etc.); it is just an acceptance of what is, a "beholding that watches over truth" (Heidegger again), which involves, obviously, the nourishment of the body (eating, fitness generally -- sexuality, proper digestion, etc.). Thus, contemplation has active and passive aspects to it.

Yes, I agree, modern theory is pretty useless; but the teaching of some of the classic ones can be fruitful, I think (as I've tried to demonstrate). This only if you can get "underneath" the ideas themselves.

reflections on human consciousness and the professionalization of intellectual inquiry: the special case of "analytic philosophy"

2009-02-28T11:13:00.000-08:00

Professionalization is at the same time a forgetting, an anesthetization of human spirit, a plucking out of the wild vines from a primordially haunted garden of being (this idea of a "haunted garden" was beautifully suggested to me by A. Vasquez -- a fellow outsider). Our rootedness continues to be hidden from us, another wave of obfuscation from the ancient recesses of the history of human consciousness. This very description stinks of the forgetting itself, with its "consciousness" and its "history" -- almost sclerotic! Why was is it that some of the rooted called their encounters with Christ erotic? With the divine, a spiritual ecstasy? The professional class, with its separation of individual life from "professional" life, cleaned up the divine love, smoothed it over with distant talk of a far, transcendent-other divinity, a something else among other somethings. Idolatry: the mediation and eventual replacement of the divine with the Other, the Object-to-be-venerated, neatly dispensed and "maintained" by a professional class of spiritual technicians. Meanwhile, spirit is on life-support, confused, drowsy with a forgotten enervation of soul (lived under the surface), its energies continually pent up and released in awkward bursts of sexual fury, obsessive indulgences ... and the great specter of "progress" descends, a Promethean gesture of the deep longing spirit, and finally: the intensification of the "smorgasbord" effect (technology is a glutton's heaven).

And our supposed men and women of reflection -- the philosophers, the pursuers of Wisdom -- have, under this great weight of "progress" and calculative thinking and with this obfuscation of spirit firmly taking hold, our philosophers are experts in the forgetting. They are professionals, technicians.

Bruce Wilshire captured the sense of this professionalization in his The Moral Collapse of the University, devoting one full chapter on the demoralization of philosophers in academia as they become professionalized (he considers in some detail those of the "analytic" tradition -- a tradition that has, unfortunately, been my source of "training" and non-education for several long and trying years. I was to have discovered that I lived in an historical vacuum, amidst paper-cut flat figures of philosophy, who taught doctrines easily summarized in logical stick-figures, ready to be picked apart by the crafty novitiate and brought into class for show -and-tell for the enjoyment -- amusement -- of the rest of the debate-campers).

"All in all, academic professionalization entails criteria of evaluation of one's 'performance' in which the theatrical ingredient is uncomfortably large: one submits activity for evaluation from only a limited stretch of one's life. The full consequences, the meaning, of one's thought about life in not brought to a test by one's life itself. In a broad but significant sense, one is 'performing'."

And the form of this performance, Wilshire continues, is court-room litigation, a form that "fits no historical model of legitimate philosophical dialectic" -- indeed, it is antagonistic and antithetical to it, for it is about winning the debate, a rhetorical theatrics for the sake of making a good point, and closing down your "opponent" (p. 123). In other words, the very opposite of what Socrates, for example, was engaged in: a sincere inquiry into truth, goodness and, finally (perhaps ultimately), beauty. "If all this is true ... then there has been", writes Wilshire, "a return of what Plato and Socrates stigmatized as eristic, a mere disputation, something unworthy of a philosopher", for it trumps pure theoria -- a glimpse of the sacred structure of Being as such -- in favor of mere sound opinion, that is, mere verbal soundness, integrity of the discursive, rhetorical wit. A performance, theatrics for its own sake. Truth is long; truth is arduous; truth is dialectical: the movement of an idea 'round the great expanse of being, out towards beings back towards Being. Back and forth; energetic, erotic, poesis.

What is so remarkable about Wilshire's analysis of professionalized academe, and in particular his understanding of professionalized philosophy, is that he gives clear voice to the shadowy underside of these endeavors: the "mimetic engulfment" that is the cradle of human knowing and being, but whose obscure dynamics is imperceptible to a Cartesian ego struggling to see itself reflected in a world of logical figurations and physical magnitudes (the Sun of Reason is finally too hot for a Daedalus who wants to find his Soul in the rarefied Empyrean circles of the geometers). He throws light on the gnarly, writhing vines of life that course through our discipline, of which only the trimmed front-lawn is ever made visible in professionalism's hallowed argumentative chambers: "the university fails to understand what it is doing, and what it is abetting, because in the dominant conception of knowledge, truth about ethical relations to others is blocked or obscured [that is, "it tacitly assumes that "there is no truth about the human condition as a whole"], as is also our involvement in the moody background world--matters crucial to who we are and to what education should be" which is, as Wilshire says earlier, a leading or drawing out (the origin of education is the Latin educare).

These vaunted chambers, the chambers of the courts of disputation are just the foyer, with bellhop neatly dressed, a pleasant greeting on your way in and out; fiery speeches, with the fire gone out, read on in the convention halls inside, with polite applause after your 30 minutes of litigation concludes -- what a spectacle! the sic et non of wit-against-wit, the non subtly boasting at every misstep of the sic. Outside, in the back, and between the acts, there: the decay, the putrefying egos impoverished, their wills to power evaporated, they now decompose out in the compost heap, keeping the garden of Being, finally, well-nourished. But a confusion looms above these dead mind-bodies like a suffocating miasma: but what am I here for?

Wilshire quotes a passage by recovering philosopher-victim Abraham Kaplan:

"Students of philosopher enter their training with the most admirable philosophical motives. They come with intellectual curiosity puzzled about the foundations of science, disturbed by religious questions, agonized over politics, captivated by literature and art. All that nonsense is knocked out of them" (p. 125).

Demoralized; zombies without a history or conception of one, one more mechanical bit in the clock a'tick-tock: "the consolidation and purification of the secular intellect has been bought at the price of its contraction, and this powers the restless, vulnerable, "point-instant" ego-self. What we get is schizoid disintegration, says Nietzsche, while what we want is 'real, red-blooded life'" (p. 128).

There is no argumentative evasion of this unhealthy dynamic. There is only the break from it, to begin anew a life that tries to heal the divisions and to be comfortable in one's own body (bless that poor but great-souled ancient, Plotinus -- venerable and tortured to be a body. A model for our age.).

Life calls,

Proof or Existential Relationship?

2009-02-23T10:07:00.000-08:00

Many have commented on, and investigated, the alleged proof of the existence of God by the "saintly and unusual" St. Anselm (Josef Pieper's description). The argument is meant to be a kind of rational reach for what is believed by faith but yet unknown to reason (what the Medievals called ratio, one of a few capacities or means of knowing we have in our possession). The essence of the argument is that in the very idea of 'God' is also the fact that God exists fully, so perfectly, that a denial of His existence is not only inconceivable, but, impossible.

And this latter point is absolutely crucial, for I am in agreement with a great many commentators, such as Hegel (as Pieper reports), who have pointed out that many of Anselm's critics (going back to the first, the monk Gaunilon) have simply missed the whole point, have missed the essential idea.

The first powerful reply to Anselm (d. 1109) had to wait until the 18th century, at the height of the Enlightenment: it comes from Immanuel Kant. He points out (in his first Critique) that Anselm's mistake was to take "existence" to be a predicate, arguing (along with Gaunilon, it seems) that what is conceivable is not in itself in accordance with objective reality, a reality that is independent of mind (that is, of thought or idea, which ratio draws from). I may conceive, with Descartes, that, by definition, a triangle is three-sided, and assert that to contradict this is absurd (inconceivable), but this does not establish that a triangle exists, nor does it tell us about the nature of its existence. Kant, characteristically, would continue: this nature only may be known empirically, and so would be dependent upon an investigation into nature itself; this way, we may discover things that correspond to that concept of triangle -- that is, this is a matter for science and not thought alone. All that such arguments tell us is that, hypothetically, if a triangle exists, then it must have three sides. What begins in thought, remains there forever, until we bring that thought to nature; here, science is born.

In other words, "being and thought are different", as Pieper says of Kant's main point. Let us bring back them main point of Kant's: that "existence" is not a "predicate". What does this mean? A "predicate" is that which we may say "holds of" a thing: we may say that, of a spring cheery tree in bloom, that its flower petals are pink; pink "holds of" the petals. We separate out -- in the mind -- the 'petals' and the 'pink'. The petals are the "subjects" of the pink "predicate". In this way, we think of 'petals' and 'pink' as separate realities which may, or may not, be found together. In other words, I can imagine -- and indeed, find -- petals that are not pink (the petals of a sunflower).

What of existence itself? Is this not a predicate? With these questions, Kant establishes a framework for Anselm's logic. And from this line of thinking, according to Kant's reading, there emerges exactly one subject whose predicate is existence itself -- God -- so that the denial of this predicate of existence to its subject God is, by definition, impossible: it would be like trying to deny that a triangle has three sides. The very nature of the subject is existence; existence is joined, inseparable, to this subject. "God", writes Anselm, "is a being greater than which nothing can be conceived". God's is the fullest possible being. God must, therefore, exist not merely in thought but also independent of thought.

But, Kant objects, existence -- being -- cannot be among the predicates of any subject. What the proposition that "the blossoms of a cherry tree are pink" really asserts is that "on the assumption that there are any petals, trees ..., etc. at all, then those of the cherry tree are pink". The proposition is such as to hypothetically associate one thing with another. That the subject exists at all is assumed and cannot be an implication of the predicate. Thus, to take that existence itself as a predicate is to prove absolutely nothing about the existence or being of the subject. It is an illusion of language. It is a circular argument. It is worthless as proof, and worse: it is a verbal confusion.

Says Pieper, who follows Hegel and Barthes: Kant misses the point entirely (Scholasticism, pp. 68 -- 70). He writes: "The force of the argument rests upon God's in fact representing a unique and incomparable case of Being itself", and finally that

"Anselm's line of argument rests upon the fact that the nature of the existence of God is different in principle from the nature of the existence of all other existences, such as that of the island [Gaunilon's chosen example] or of the hundred taler [Kant's example]" (p. 69). (Gaunilon said that we would be committed to the real, mind-independent existence of an "island" if we merely defined it as one such as none greater can be conceived -- which is clearly absurd.)

But, if we think about what was, perhaps, Kant's deeper point in saying that "existence is not a predicate", we may actually discover the possibility that Kant is in full agreement with Anselm.

Kant's claim that "existence is not a predicate" means that we cannot treat 'being' as yet another being in the world, which, like 'pink' may or may not be associated with a subject (a thing that may be in possession of various 'predicaments', to use the old scholastic-Aristotelian word).

If, rather, we take 'God' to indicate being as such and not another being in the world among others, then obviously we have confused the two. Again: if we do treat existence (being) as a predicate, then we have in fact committed a fundamental error which is to confuse existence itself (Being as such) with that which is in existence (individual beings). 'Being' is not something that could be "possessed" by beings.

In other words, the confusion is -- as Kant in effect is saying -- one between metaphysics proper (which, as Aristotle said, is a study of "Being as such") and physics (an investigation into the structure that existence has, an investigation into nature -- "phusis" -- as we find it). For the latter endeavor, "Being as such" is the ground, it is the place where the question, put to the things, keeps its feet firmly planted. The investigation into the things of nature goes on without calling into question Being as such. Here, we proceed empirically, out to nature with concepts and theory; as such, this endeavor is fundamentally conjectural and open. Purely logical deductions are no help as far as what exists and how it exists, in detail.

As for the former endeavor, the metaphysical endeavor in Aristotle's sense (one also adopted, reinvigorated and renewed by Heidegger) it is such as to raise a question concerning Being as such, to investigate it as the ground we walk on. But here we don't so much as ask what it's nature is (in the sense that we ask, where does the 'pink' in the cherry blossom come from? how does the pink arise? are there petals that are not pink?), but we question so as to draw ourselves into the question. In other words, the study of "Being as such" involves our relationship to Being as such -- it is, finally, an expression of that relationship itself.

And this is how we should, properly, understand Anselm's "proof", which, after all, is a "faith that seeks understanding". Anselm begins with the ground where his existence is rooted, and seeks to show that inasmuch as any being exists at all, there can be no denial of existence itself -- which, after Aristotle, we call "Being as such" -- and this is God. God, as Being as such, cannot be coherently denied for it is that which the very doubt itself would presuppose (the similarities to Descartes -- who, not coincidentally, restates Anselm's proof -- are intentional. They reveal how Descartes' own philosophical view obscures the fundamental role of Being as such, a theme both Heidegger and Tillich would later pick up on).

It is with this in mind that Tillich clarifies Anselm's thought. He writes, explaining the nature of the theologian's endeavor, and how religious experience was understood, in Anselm's time:

"experience meant participation in the objective truth implicit in the Bible and authoritatively explained by the church fathers. Every theologian must participate in this experience. Then, this experience becomes knowledge, but not necessarily so. Faith is not dependent on knowledge but, but knowledge is dependent on faith" (History of Christian Thought, p. 158).

In other words, what Anselm was doing was describing an existential relationship in which he actively participated, which relationship was structured by certain realities, such as God. But God represented a special entity, one which, in its nature, implicates all entities, the totality of being. God is understood as the culmination of a hierarchy of being (each of which is separated according to its relative finitude or specific form of "incompleteness of being"). Our relationship to this being is fundamental: it is a presupposition of all other realities; that is, God indicates Being as such. But, crucially, God is not to be considered another being among beings -- and this is the fundamental mystery of being which ratio, finally cannot overcome. When reason does believe this, when man has such an arrogance to overcome such a mystery (that Being is not another being-among-beings), we arrive at various errors, one of which is, as Pieper points out, "rationalism".

Thus, for Tillich, Anselm's is a "theonomous" way of philosophizing: "[it] means acknowledging the mystery of being, but not believing that this mystery is an authoritarian transcendent element which is imposed upon us and against us, which breaks our reason to pieces. ... God and mystery belong together, like substance and form" (ibid., p. 160).

And thus, as Pieper points out, we had in Anselm a kind of balance, or mutual reinforcement, between ratio and fides -- reason and faith. It is the two faces of God that allow their marriage, their harmony. The one face shows God qua "Being as such": that from which we depart in our attempt to know nature, the individual beings that fill existence. The other face, the mysterious face, is God as the perfection of Being: potential being fully and completely realized, which perfection is latent in all, but not now actualized in any one (the mystery is the mystery of Being and Time/History -- as in Heidegger's work of the same title).

Anselm's arguments are so-called, writes Tillich: "they are neither 'arguments' nor do they prove the 'existence' of God. But they do something much better than this. ... [they] are not arguments for the existence of an unknown or doubtful piece of reality, even if it is called 'God'. The argument is right as long as it is a description of the way in which man encounters reality, namely, as finite, implying and being excluded from infinity. The argument is doubtful and yields a conclusion which can be attacked if it is supposed to lead to the existence of a highest being" (ibid. p. 161-2, emphasis added).

Kant, and many of those who follow his thinking, are right to attack the argument as an existence proof. But, when we fully understand the point with Kant's premise that "existence cannot be a predicate", we are lead to a deeper understanding which clears the way for an appreciation of the existential content of Anselm's "proof".

The more appropriate question that must be put to Kant and those who may with vehemence attack such proofs as Anselm's, or the general idea of 'God' itself, is whether they ascribe to a far more general, two-fold principle: that reason is such as to, on the one hand, abolish any and all mystery and finally, on the other, "that there cannot be anything which exceeds the power of human reason to comprehend" (Scholasticism, p. 45). (The other errors would be traditionalism and fideism, which is a complete abandonment of reason and which amounts to a slavish devotion to institutional religion and tradition; and an "empirical rationalism" or "slavish devotion to science" (ibid. p. 73)).

And this latter part of this meta-principle of "rationalism", as Pieper dubs it, is the most serious: for it in effect closes off the freedom characteristic of conjectural science, and seems to, vaguely but perceptibly, indicate a boundary beyond which rational thinking cannot go: that some hypotheses are invalid, others admissible. But unless this be a vacuous and in the end a tyrannical pronouncement, we must know which ones? Answer, by the conjectural method inherent to science. In which case, we don't limit any hypothesis prior to its correlation to the facts of nature. Here, we render the meta-principle weak, potentially empty.

More than this: if we accept that there is a difference between an enquiry into Being as such, as opposed to an investigation of the structure of existence (which presupposes Being as such), then to which enquiry does this meta-principle apply? Does it rule out merely those hypotheses applied to individual beings, and so is a constraint on empirical enquiry? Or, rather, does it apply to those conceptions advanced in the questioning of Being as such? Even here, the regulative principle should not be "there cannot be anything which exceeds the power of human reason to comprehend", but should rather be "is it adequate to being-in-the-world".

In other words, the principle that restrains reason here (in the existential endeavor) should be itself a question that involves the questioner into their individual existence; the principle does not try to impose a conception of what is adequate to reason, it rather allows the concept to follow one's being-in-the-world. This is what Tillich means when he reinterprets Anselm's argument as a "description of the way man encounters reality". For Anselm, the description was adequate to his being-in-the-world.

But is it adequate for me? or for you? That is the question we face today, the more strongly in the light of science, which, for some, is becoming its own unholy religion (God is progress, or ecology, ...), as unholy as the religion of any institution (the Church, the Synagogue, the Mosque). We only know if we go on the path, follow the question itself, which, in the end, involves living. Live!

fundamental vs. hypothetical thinking

2009-02-03T16:35:00.000-08:00

Very few thinkers, and in particular very few philosophers, are engaged in fundamental thinking. It is a mark of fundamental thinking that it is rooted, and that it is directed towards the principle, towards the origin. Heraclitus engaged in fundamental thinking; Aristotle began hypothetical thinking, but looked to reach the origins systematically, by means of the hypothetical method. Aristotle wanted to attain to fundamental thinking by a certain means -- and so we had the first methodology of thinking, systematic thinking. It is not without surprise that we find Aristotle devoting much of his thinking to the structure of concepts, and to making explicit a logic. This becomes the means; experiences are ordered by the mind, and to grasp the order is to grasp reality. And so we build to the principle. But the order of Heraclitus' thinking is reversed. The principle of all things was already the guide, on the way. We ask: on the way to what? To a question concerning Being, a reckoning, or, what is more proper, a revelation or uncovering.

Hypothetical thinking is the thinking that moves by the concept or notion, and builds a way towards things, trying to uncover generalities and similarities and universalities on the way. Darkness is the first chamber; only a glimmer of light is hoped for somewhere on the way out. Our light in the darkness is reason, our thinking that projects a way through the hypothesis. We don't know the way but must map it out. But we are prone to stumble, and so we must worry about error, about the fitting of the notion to the thing out there that we are trying to move toward. The Academies are the proving grounds; hypotheses are borne, they rule for a time, and then they eventually pass away (gradually fade away into the night); darkness again. Knowledge is a distant horizon, misty and vague. We throw out an anchor here, and cast out a shining searchlight there, but we must accept our lonlieness in the vast oceans we travel, and the radical contingency of our situation (at any moment a fog or a torrent might roll in, and we may founder in our once-sturdy ship, our boat of knowledge cast into the wind with its notions set high on the mast). Aristotle, Descartes, Hume and down to Kant -- lonely travelers, collecting all the fragments and generating even more, sands blowing by them and oceans still waiting to be explored. Impatients: Hegel, maybe even Schopenhauer too. They could not wait and sail with the lonely explorers, with their tattered notion-sails. See with the Idea, see the Beyond -- the world is round, go into the horizon and down, out of sight! Transcend! Let go of this earthly prison, soar for the sky (Schopenhauer's is really a philosophy of happiness and liberation, wearing the face of wry and disinterested knowledge of the nature of things which cannot please those things as things at all).

It is a mark of fundamental thinking that it is sharp, and flowing along a focused course, and almost aphoristic, condensed, every word meaningfully present, little superfluities, tight, and a fruitful figuration of language. If it is cryptic, it is a recipe (only unfolding in the act of putting together the ingredients and making the whole batch cook up right and solid and tasty). Fundamental thinking gives just enough, or perhaps even too little, and sets you on the quest itself, with what is on hand. It is a paradox, too: profound and vacuous; large and spacious, but a nothingness (which is vast); impossible to penetrate, and such a gossamer thing as to crumble with the first reach of the mind out to meet it; it cannot be taken in or learned, since it is already present, but is always hidden.

There is much wisdom in Heraclitus' words: "Nature loves to hide".

so, what is it you do?

2009-01-17T13:19:00.000-08:00

I am often asked what I "do for work", and I usually say "leisure". Naturally, that raises some questions and seems not a little enigmatic, if not a little odd. And so I go on:

I suppose it all depends on what you mean be "leisure". As one philosopher (Josef Pieper) put it, "leisure is the basis of culture", the thing out of which culture comes or grows, as it were. What is culture, then, that its basis is in leisure? To cultivate is to bring into being, to grow and to perfect something -- or better, to direct something so as to realize that thing's fullest potential (as in, to bear fruit and seed). What I take to be leisure is the space in which thinking can flourish, thinking itself being the root of culture, which in turn flourishes on the basis of leisure. In this case, thinking is essential to the cultivation indicated here, for it is the cultivation of mind that I'm talking about. Your question, though ("what do you do for work") is really meant to ask, I suspect, "for what are you paid?" and the answer is, simply, "to teach. I'm paid to teach". But, the teaching is an integral part of my thinking; hence, there is no division between work and leisure for me -- they are one and the same thing. The employment matches the activity (thinking); the activity is not done so as to be employed, and I am not employed so as to think.

Fortunately, there exist forms of employment for which this marriage is both sought and is a benefit. But there is a danger here, because this balance is not allowed in most or many forms of employment. This balance, this marriage, is denigrated whenever our activity (thinking) and our working are divided from one another, or when the time to think-for-no-immediate-purpose is diminished. As it happens, in an institutional setting, and for a variety of reasons (some structural and inherent to the institution as such, some social and a product of the social/political/cultural context in which institutions exit), leisure is greatly diminished and so is one's ability to flourish. This is why I seek employment outside the academy -- it is a question of life and thinking. Indeed, I may have to look outside of institutions altogether. Thus, my present quandary. But also, and more problematically: most forms of employment do not embody this marriage or balance spoken of here. Thus, one must be rather creative in "choosing" a form of employment, lest this marriage become a permanent divorce.

roll on by

2009-01-16T19:03:00.000-08:00

"As the American empire rolls mindlessly on, attempting to convert the entire world to its way of life, the loss of what is truly human is going to be heavy. I would like to say things can be turned around, that the nation will wake up, but all the signs indicate just the reverse. Europe many indeed be the likely candidate to replace us, but it is too soon to tell; nor will the renaissance be one of perfection, if and when it arrives. We'll never have a truly "inner frontier" society, so to speak; Lewis Mumford, with his insistence that technology be servant rather than master, and his understanding that relationship and reflection lie at the heart of being human, will always be an oddball in the modern industrial world. The issue, in any case, is not utopia, but something that supports a more authentic way of life."

-- Morris Berman (2005; from Dark Ages America, p. 327)

sex sites: market morals

2009-01-06T22:24:00.000-08:00

Someone recently pointed out what I took to be the obvious: that sex sites run, basically, on a business model, and the participants usually assume a buyer/seller mentality. I reflected on that and said the following, on the "business model" --

The rub is that while we can sometimes successfully predict what it is that we want, and we can usually narrow the list of traits down to those most likely to please us (quite well over time, let's say), not only does it become harder to actually get what you want in any single encounter (b/c we're continually judging rather than experiencing the moment with the person(s) who is(are) present), but also we exit that state of being in which we can be receptive to a person who might be more suited to us, on the whole, rather than in part (the various things we're "looking for").

That is, we are buyers/shoppers of/for specific items, rather than seekers after a whole person (that is, as a person), or, more generally, those in pursuit of the good life (it's so obvious that that's not the "purpose" of these websites that the observation is, by now quite trite). It is here that we follow the market mentality, which, in the end, really isn't: the market has no desires, or aims or cares or worries -- it's only "aim" (which is structural) is the perpetuation of capital, the proper flows of money through its system. But it is not an individual being, and has no life unto itself -- only abstractly. And that's the problem. In order for any market or business system to function right, there must be an element of abstraction inherent in it: function must be separated from material (or, in the case of persons, their function for this or that must be divorced from their real being or their individual reality), and an abstract system of exchange erected so as to mediate the flow of one thing (capital, or money) in concert with the attainment of the other (goods, products -- the commodity, or, as I've called it here, the pure function a thing, or person, fills -- in this case, we're clearly talking about sexual gratification, pure and simple).

But what is the 'capital' in this case -- that is, what is exchanged for the attainment of the commodity? I think it is ourselves -- our bodies and our physical contact -- exchanged for the gratification that another will provide to us. So the "commodity" in this case is like the capital, but in fact, we are both the capital and the commodity: we present ourselves as a commodity, and exchange ourselves as capital. We "become" a commodity in the eyes of another, and we present ourselves as the commodity -- and vice versa. In this sense, there is an extra level of abstraction involved: for we "package" ourselves to be "bought" (accepted) by another (or others), but we must also complete the deal with our reciprocity (though, in some cases
there might lack any reciprocity -- in which case we are giving by our mere presence alone).

If we think of the sex site as a kind of business structure that operates according to market logic, then the system of exchange is abstract, surely, but the abstraction is at the level of our intentions and desires. Thus, in this case, the logic of the market has, inasmuch as we participate in this business structure and adopt its forms, fully colonized our lives -- we implement its logic, and eventually, we becomes its servants. How? We are *not* commodities; we are beings, complex and full, irreducible and splendid to behold. We are the image of the divine, like the light of the sun, reflected in a pool but not wholly contained there. We are not parts joined to a skeleton joined to a mind; we are whole -- being itself rests in us. We are a moment -- how can that be packaged and sold to be bought up?

Like sand, cloud and sky?

Schopenhauer on philosophy

2008-10-30T12:15:00.000-07:00

He writes:

"Philosophy, just as much as art and poetry, must have its source in perceptual comprehension of the world: nor, however much the head needs to remain on top, ought it to be so cold-blooded a business that the whole man, heart and head, is not finally involved and affected through and through. Philosophy is not algebra: on the contrary, Vauvenargues [French thinker and moralist] was right when he said Les grandes pensée viennent du coeur [lit.: the greatest thoughts come from the heart]". From Essays and Aphorisms ("On Philosophy and the Intellect").

But the question that must be faced, in each epoch, is a question concerning reality, what is the world, a question which precedes this understanding of the proper nature of philosophy, art and poetry. If we loose a proper grasp of the essence of Being -- the world -- then we loose philosophy, art and poetry to another conception of Being. And if that conception of Being is itself a shadow of Truth -- if our conception of Being has lost its mooring to the Truth of Being -- then our philosophy, art and poetry, so lost to this false notion of Being, is likewise false. This, then, suggests the question, what is Being? The only answer to that question is the going into the question as such, that is, to begin thinking for yourself. But, as Heidegger has asked, what is called thinking? It is here we really begin, without hope for an end: for once we place our thinking in service of the will -- once we set our thinking onto a purpose, the thinking is a thinking for, rather than a thinking along -- we are no longer thinking for ourselves, but thinking outside ourselves. This going outside cannot rest unless is finds its path along the inner road of thinking. This is not philosophy; this is not contemplation. This is a form of slavery, of thinking-for-a-purpose. This is the kiss of death of real philosophy. There is no self-realization here. There is no rest: thought becomes of purely instrumental rather than of intrinsic value to us. We no longer matter; we fulfill a function, we are the seat of the laws of reason and, as Kant's ethics enshrines for us, we merely have a duty to bind ourselves to the dictates of the laws of Reason. This is the ironic apotheosis of Kant's -- and the Age of Reason's -- philosophy of autonomy: you are only free whenever you exercise your rational faculties in the service of Reason.

The core of a doctrine of Slavery is here. Yes, "dialectic of enlightenment", truly.

Schopenhauer: are we ever free, then? Not if our will is subordinated to the Will of Being itself, as we are then its slaves. But then the question of Being (The Will) must be faced anew. And with that question, we must face our own being-in-the-world and its relation to the Will. But, if there is no relation in the first place, then we face the possibility that our experience is something of an illusion. But through all of this, thinking is central. We cannot deny our thinking itself (Descartes, again). And it is the process of thinking that is our grasp of the Will itself, then; our individuality is found as the Thinking Will. We participate the Will, without wholly or completely being identified with it. And this is the paradox of thought, and of Being. We are thus led to a consideration of not merely thought as a manifestation of Will, but with it the horizon of our thinking, which suggests negation, the end of our thinking. The specter of Das Nicht, or the Nothing spoken of by Heidegger, shows itself to us. But it is an incomplete showing, an "unconcealment" which has no ending to it, it is an always. This "always" leads us back to Being, but without a being-in-the-world, or a will that participates Will. And this point of view, the point of view of Nothing witnessing Being, is the cold desolation of Will itself willing.

Have we now been liberated? From what? From illusions of the will! Schopenhauer heralds a philosophy of emancipation. It is not pessimism, but realistic optimism.

A cautionary note: This cannot be realized notionally; that is, "with the head" only. It must be a feeling, through and through, as much as a resignation of the will-to-purpose; it must be a listening, a following along the inner path. It must be a reception of Truth, an "unconcealment" (what what is already present but not seen); it cannot be a calculation or notional grasp of a truth which is not already revealed to (and so, it seems, we are lead back through our thinking inwardly, to Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum). It is a clearing-of-the-way of Truth, not a discovery or realization (though it is something like that), but more properly a re-collection (and this Plato calls true knowledge). Our knowing is really a being, as opposed to a notional knowing, a "knowing with the head" (Schopenhauer's "algebra"), which is a knowing some-thing rather than knowing itself (which can never, ironically, be separated from Being or Truth).

Embody truth; don't "hold it in view" only. Our vehicle, indeed, is thought, thinking; and, with Aristotle, the highest form of that is contemplation. True philosophy: The temple of knowledge unconceals Being. And contemplation is the casting off of illusion. Freedom.

the meaning of life has meaning

2008-10-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

There is this problem, found swirling about in the debates between "modernism" and "postmodernism", and it is that we find ‘meaning’ caught in this bind, in this dialectic: EITHER meaning is “out in the world, there to be found” OR “to be CREATED by the human subject” – found or discovered, we ask?

The 'postmodern' aspect of Beckett, as with postmodernism in general (should we think in these terms), seems to be railing against what has been called "inherent meaning" – but what is that? Terry Eagleton, in The Meaning of Life, writes: “Talk of ‘inherent’ meanings comes down to talk about trying to describe what is actually there in reality. But it is we who do the describing” (p. 114). And Eagleton’s reply begins with: “… we can talk of meanings as somehow built into things, or as the kind of natures that they have” and that “[i]t is possible that life could have an ‘inherent’ meaning in the sense of one which none of us knows anything about – one quite different from the various meanings we fashion from it in our individual lives” (p. 114-5).

(I simply want to begin from this point without really engaging Eagleton himself. I want to diverge, somewhat, without saying how.)

So then the question simply becomes one of discovering the meaning that life has within one’s own very life, becoming the MASTER of the work that is life. The ‘fact’ or ‘inherent meaning’ here is only had in the act of living itself, but a living that aims to master life, much like a carpenter aims to master the act of wood-working, in order to create certain definite forms. But the “output” and the “work” that produces certain definite woodworks are aspects of one and the same fundamental dynamic, disciplined action (which has a component of thought behind it as well, an INTERIOR aspect). There is a kind of openness to his art – the forms that are made are potentially unending, a function of both the needs of his patrons and his own ingenuity – and there is a certain definite solidity, concreteness and form to what it means to master the art itself: to be a master carpenter means to have perfected woodworking, which finally is embodied by those who’ve come before the apprentice. That is, becoming a master carpenter is also life itself, only with a particular emphasis to it (wood, handwork, output, etc.). There is discovery here – which is the unfolding of one’s life into the art of woodworking, which in turn reveals the LIMITS of thought and work and ultimately life itself – and there is creation here as well. As we create we discover, and as we discover we, in turn, create; the two are not separate but aspects of one unfolding process where the one reinforces and develops the other.

What means ‘inherent’? – inherent in the process of life-mastery is meaning as engagement with the world which is nothing more than a self-realization, an unfolding of the self outward which in turn strengthens the inner life. There is no end to the process, only an end in personal death (but then we must inquire into what ‘death’ is …), and to this extent we cannot speak of the perfection of man but only his perfectibility, the going further and further (it must be open). To the extent that one does not enter this process, or become a master of self, we say that man lacks meaning in life, objectively so (and this is a judgment that can only be made of the whole of a man’s life). There is also the problem of approaching the task, which can itself be a force of deep resistance to the taking on of the task. And so we must speak of “right approach” (Buddhism speaks of this, and especially Ch’an).

The task, finally, cannot be merely notional, nor can the goal – the doing and the thinking and the going must be the goal, for which we might supply momentary signposts and read about the successes or failure of those who have gone before us, and look into the life of our master … but all these are contingent and provisional; they are aids and not the stopping point.

This, finally, is the 'meaning of life', which is just the suggestion of an entry into a doing, that is all. It is empty, in the end, and that is the shape of your heart. Go, do and be.

hierarchy with another dimension; or, the (infinite) desert of instrumental values

2008-09-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

When thinking of things beautiful or sacred, or when thinking of divine things, we soon talk in terms of a kind of ladder, which is a going from below to above. We make the ladder a boundary between two realms when we raise our thoughts to what is beauty or divine -- there is the here below and the up-above. Ascend! But we forget that this is a movement, the going from one place to another. The movement is towards happiness, and it begins with where you are and ends only with yourself, again, after having gone beside-yourself, outside to Being which is only back to your own being-in-the-world. We say that upon this returning-to-yourself in Being that you have ascended, but it is where you are and nothing more. This is not a "having" of anything, it is a being-through things, a relatedness that is the discovery of your rootedness in yourself through this very life, your being-in-the-world.

In this mode, we do not take so as to attain something else, something outside ourselves. That is, the objects are not merely instrumental to us in this case, they ultimately lead to some end which is an end in itself (and this we call intrinsically valuable, for it is not a means to something else but rests in itself) -- and this cannot be anything more than a relatedness to us, our being-in-the-world. I have spoken of art here; art when perfected is intrinsically valuable in this sense -- but we must not forget that art is nothing special!

I want to make a point that should be obvious now, which is that while we might conceptualize the movement from instrumentally valuable things to intrinsically valuables things hierarchically (which are really states of our very own being in the world, states where we have perfected a relatedness to something exterior, which is a turning back to our inward life) -- while, that is, we might say that our workaday life, though having instrumental, value is seemingly less holy than when we turn to that which is intrinsically of value -- this obscures the reality that our life depends on the instrumental, the means to ends, and that the movement itself -- the very rungs of the ladder -- cannot operate without them! Thus, at every moment, at every rung, we have the potential in that very moment of slipping into the being we seek, and losing the "having" of a mere thing. Each step towards the ultimate happiness had in itself the potential to lift us all the way forward, to be that very resting point. Christ was transfigured amidst course, before the crucifixion, burial and resurrection. His very body was the divine-becoming; it was not separate from the ultimate happiness, which is a resting in Pure Being. That which allows our spiritual salvation is this very life. Our chains are also our very means of escape -- the demons keeping us from ourselves are also the very angles freeing us, as Eckhart says. Thus, Pieper writes:

The hierarchical point of view admits no doubt about the difference in levels and their location; but it also never despises lower levels in the hierarchy. Thus the inherent dignity of practice (as opposed to theoria) is in no way denied. It is taken for granted that practice is not only meaningful but indispensable; that it rightly fills out man's weekday life; that without it a truly human existence is inconceivable. Without it, indeed, the vita contemplativa is unthinkable. (Happiness and Contemplation, p. 95)

I add that no moment in the movement through the hierarchy is inherently separate from that which is the end point of it. Every moment has bound up with it the end point itself (Christ was human and divine; our being-in-the-world is this very Pure Being we seek, which is the root of creation, of the movement we find in existence). This is the other dimension. I imagine an ascendency of points (moments), the totality of which is the usual hierarchy (we may call this the vertical dimension, which is a line from below to above -- the ladder); but each of the moments themselves define another axis, orthogonal to the vertical itself (we may thus conceive each point along a horizontal dimension as well). Thus, the divine goal is now; but in our refusal, it is then. My life is a series of refusals; thus, I climb a ladder. With wrong discrimination, though, I lose my way and descend or snap back to a going out of myself to stay with the exterior things. That is, I snap back into a state of being where I move from instrumentally valuable thing to instrumentally valuable thing, and go a'seeking after happiness. I have not found my goal. Thus, vigilance! Pieper writes:

Practice does become meaningless the moment it sees itself as an end in itself. For this means converting what is by nature a servant into a master -- with the inevitable result that it no longer serves any useful purpose. The absurdity and the profound dangers of this procedure cannot, in the long run, remain hidden. André Gide writes in his Journals: "The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it." Here, with his usual acuteness, Gide has described the deadly emptiness and the endless ennui which bounds the realm of the exclusively practical like a belt of lunar landscape. This is the desert which results from destruction of the vita contemplativa. (Happiness and Contemplation, p. 95)

What bleak utilitarian constructions do we find suffocating the landscapes of America (from the US into Canada), choking our spirit -- it is death! What utter barrenness; what utter emptiness of soul. Our space and time are taken from us everyday. Vigilance! This death is our potential life; that is, it is that upon which our soul suffers to its happiness. What can we only be moved to when we realize this? In the realization that our demons are our angels, our very freedom itself, we are stirred (if the realization is a true one) towards compassion, infinite compassion, unending and unconditional. We are stirred to dispassionate embrace, of holy avoidance which is born of a deep knowledge of the course of things (this the South Asians would term dharma).

Be vigilant!

it is not the fruit, or the having of the product of effort -- it is the creative doing that happiness is

2008-09-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

To the title, perhaps, we begin with a reply, which is: and this is the essence of art. Art is, in its essence, not different from anything we may do with great effort and engagement in life. It is in the first instance merely a going back into your being-in-the-world, not a going outward to remain in the things exterior to one's creation. We may say that this is also the principle of God's creative activity, too (and, note well, that by 'God' I understand Pure Being, which is not different from our being-in-the-world). Pieper writes,

... for activity that reaches out into the world certainly does not affect only the field [of farmer], the rose bed [of the gardener], or the block of marble [of the sculptor]; it also affects the actor himself. Along with the doing of any work there is an effect which does emerge, but which remains hidden within the doer himself, perhaps chiefly as a fruit of insight, as a verbum cordis. Perhaps this fruit can grow only in the course of man's dealing with the pliable or resistant matters of a garden, or potter's clay, or marble; perhaps this is the only way in which is can grow. And may it not be that in this processio ad intra, in this inward fructification, lies the truly beatifying element which we rightly ascribe to all creative activity? (Happiness and Contemplation, 1958, p. 56)

Truly, I say, yes. And this, we add, is nothing other than God's creative activity.

But this leaves us with a question concerning art, which is how do we understand art for art's sake? There are, underneath this question, two perspectives on art that we must distinguish between: art as an object of admiration and art as the process of unfolding a creative urge from the inner to the outer spheres.

But all along with this distinction we must remember that, so long as we truly objectify art, we have cut it out from ourselves and it is merely admirable by us -- who may be its creator or its mere admirer. If happiness is sought with or through art, then art cannot merely be an object of admiration, it must also be a calling back to ourselves (when I am its creator, it merely has a more direct relationship to my creative activity than when I'm merely its admirer). And so in this case -- whenever happiness is a goal -- "art for art's sake" means "for the sake of not itself as object but for its sake insofar as it is a calling of myself back to myself". Whenever there is "art for art's sake" and we have mere admiration and no inner connection to it (that is, it plays no essential role in our being-in-the-world), art is an object and we move from one to the other -- this is the "museum/gallery" point of view. In this case, the visual and intellectual appreciative mode takes over from the engaged related mode of connection to art.

A comment made by Huizinga in his The Waning of the Middle Ages
captures, perhaps, the flavor of what I am suggesting here. He writes that art in the Middle Ages

was still wrapped up in life. Its function was to fill with beauty the forms assumed by life. These forms were marked and potent. ... The task of art was to adorn all these concepts with charm and color; it is not desired for its own sake, but to decorate life with splendor which it could bestow. Art was to yet a means, as it is now, to step out of the routine of everyday life to pass some moments in contemplation; it had to be enjoyed as an element of life itself, as the expression of life's significance. Whether it served to sustain the flight of piety or to be an accompaniment to the delights of the world, it was not yet conceived as mere beauty. (1924/1954, p. 244)

Which is to say that it had not yet been conceived in the terms that make the expression "art for art's sake" meaningful. And this difference is significant, for the embodiment of art had not yet been disrupted as it has been since, it had not become an intellectual activity bound up "in the mind" or the purely inner activities of its creator or admirer -- it was not placed in a gallery, or in a school, taken from its soil to a cultivating greenhouse for refinement and study and analysis. This was to happen, for example, with the work of the great codifiers of music, most prominently (and significantly) during the Age of Reason, in the 18th century. For our purposes, this historical and cultural difference represents a new challenge to the artist: man as creator must now return home with the art adopted from without -- it must become an inner activity in which the doing has, back to the doer, a deeper significance than that which is done. So now art becomes at once part of an individual life (our being-in-the-world), potentially part of the life of an admirer of art, and the door is open for art to be considered itself as a spiritual activity, beyond its relation to life in general, or the larger social and cultural context in which the artist or admirer lives. But so too is the door opened for (the) art to become merely an object. And this is the struggle in us: do we rest in the inner life (which is also a deep engagement with the things of our life, our being-in-the-world has at once inner and outer aspects -- we move between them continually); or the exterior life, the life motivated only by things instrumentally valued (which finally leaves the soul's spiritual longing unrequited)? We finally return to Pieper:

To repeat: the activity in which we receive the drink which is happiness is by its nature an activity whose effects work inward. This cannot be otherwise, for only in such activity does the acting person actualize himself. Action which reaches outward perfects the work rather than the person who acts. Under those cicumstances what happens is the the perfection of the work "does not include the creator; he is condemned to return to his lesser ego" [referring to a letter of Konrad Weiss to Katherina Kippenberg; 14 August 1939]. (Happiness and Contemplation, p. 57)

faith and reason during the end of a sensate culture

2008-09-26T17:53:00.000-07:00

What the distinction between faith and reason amounts to is a large topic of debate, to say the very least. I do not propose to enter into the fullness of that debate; nor do I intend to address its principal discussants. I am interested, however, in the principle of each -- that is, their source (which is the original meaning of the term 'principle'). I begin, though, from the premise that man is not a separate creature from the creation of which he is a part. I begin from the premise that his being-in-the-world (I have in mind the term from existential psychology) rests in Pure Being, still and radiant and eternal and corruptible (it is paradoxical), and that our task is to finally encounter this Being as our own being-in-the-world. I do not, that is, hold that Being is separate from our being-in-the-world, nor do I hold that this Being is a Divine form, from which we are originally separate, and to which we hope, via grace or abnegation, to return.

I also assume that our present Age is best understood as a "sensate" age in decline, which Pitirim Sorokin defines as one in which reason grounded in the evidence of the senses is taken to be the dominant mode of knowing. The important general feature of a sensate age is that the idea of a transcendent reality (God, e.g.) is largely disbelieved or is not the organizing principle of the culture, where utility and bodily well-being and pleasure are its fundamental values and that to which all actions (individual and societal) tend (even mental welfare being conceived in largely materialistic or bodily terms). Another crucial defining characteristic during such an age is the exteriorization of knowledge and the centrality of logic and analysis, that is, the predominance of "ratio".

During such an age, the rational faculties of man himself are central; man asserts himself as free to inquire into the secrets of Nature with his very own innate abilities. This is that exuberant confidence of the Enlightenment, which in effect tames the great Infinite for man to study, closely and slowly and with careful analysis. This is the age of autopsy -- the dissection of Nature, the laying bare the parts of nature and comprehending them, with the technologies of man-made reason, as a re-constructed mechanically connected whole. This is the age of disenchantment. And during such an age, faith -- the suspension of rational inquiry in the face of the Infinite, the deep humility that our rational faculty is but a mere part of a large whole and which cannot comprehend the whole, at once, in a single lifetime (think of that deep humility with which Pascal prefaces his famous "wager") --, faith comes under disrepute. This creates an epistemological vacuum: man himself, as an individual, cannot know the Whole (it is the Divine, during the age of faith in Western Europe -- it is God); but, man resigns himself to the authority of tradition and sacred scripture. To know is to put one's faith in an external source, and to imbibe their lessons, to drink deep and become full, so as to fill the void in oneself. During an age of reason, faith becomes a last refuge, where man finally turns when the seemingly wide course of reason leaves him cold.

We must, then, admit that reason is limited and its determinations partial. Our being-in-the-world, though, is this very Being which reason attempts to know. Its tools only return a fragment, whereas we are this very whole. But reason cannot operate without creativity, its fuel. Nothing would be known without a creative urge to move from thought, frozen in icy propositions with ratio, to reality beyond the thought -- Being -- in an open engagement that promises to confirm or reject that original thought. This is science, made possible by various technologies of thought (logic, geometry, algebra) in conjunction with experimentation. Creativity is not the purview of ratio, though. Its lives in intellectus, in insight. No truly groundbreaking discovery about the world conceived in scientific terms could have occurred without it. The creative spark that leads to a scientific breakthrough is something like a "revelation", but one that is quickly tamed by ratio -- it becomes theory (and we might understand theory in very broad terms: the coordination of various facts or phenomena). Even if we grant that science always stands on what has come before it, still, the development of a new theory is truly original in the sense of being a kind of revelation, a revelation of Pure Being to our being-in-the-world.

In our declining sensate culture, reason and faith are often taken to be opposed. But in those rare periods when the two are synthesized -- Sorokin calls such times "idealistic" -- they are not seen as opposed but are taken to be complementary.

Our age is one of deep transformation; we are seeing the collapse of many things so long cherished and idolized: systems of government and life built around an endless chain of merely instrumentally valuable things and acts with little truly of intrinsic value grounding our lives, and the almost complete lack of an understanding of the relatedness we have to Being (we are increasingly distanced from reality -- ours is a highly mediated experience of the world, where our fundamental condition of radical contingency is masked daily by technological devices that afford us the illusion of deep control and mastery of Being). It is an age that threatens to become one of pure unthinking faith -- the subjugation of man to a transcendent Divine Being and the authority that is its putative representative (this Sorokin calls "ideational") -- but this time a faith in Technology. Postman, when he writes about a "technopoly", means to suggest that our present Age is heading towards this sort of technological ideational period; Faith is in Reason/Science and Device, God being of our own construction. During this period, faith and reason would obviously not be in opposition to each other for the simple (but horrifying reason) that the faith would be in reason itself, the transcendent reality that of the controlled world that Science suggests. This would not properly be a synthesis; it would be a corruption.

What would constitute an idealistic age that follows our present degenerate sensate one, in which faith and reason are properly synthesized (that is, with the lessons of the period between the Enlightnement and the Information Age properly absorbed)? I think it will have to do with a proper understanding of the nature of creativity (an aspect of our being-in-the-world), its root in Being, the two of which are related through intellectus, which in turn provides the elements with which ratio formulates, constructs and comprehends, out of which process we freeze a theoretical construct (e.g., science). But if thought, our being-in-the-world, is to remain true to the nature of Being, this construct must necessarily remain open and partial, subject of (unending) revisions. In this way the nature of human knowledge follows the course of Being itself, which is an eternal movement. Reason and faith, therefore, are not incompatible. And, moreover, we understand "divine revelation" to have undergone a significant reinterpretation so that there is nothing transcendent (or even immanent) when we contemplate our relation to Being, that is, the relation between being-in-the-world and Pure Being itself. The two are not; not even One. Neither one nor two. A whole, which is not a counted thing, but an open-ended process of unfolding -- which we may designate in thought as a "totality" but which is no such bounded thing as we could point to, finally, as the One (and so I am calling for a further refinement of Plotinus's doctrine).

Finally, we would have the convergence of spiritual thought and empirical thought, so rent asunder by the champions of the Age of Reason. We would then be able to enjoy another period of rebirth. We would, I think, heal the hubris of "rationalism", as Josef Pieper describes it:

It is clear that without a degree of understanding, faith itself, as an act of the human being, could not be held. No one can give credence to an absolutely incomprehensible message; and one who had not grasped what was being talked about would be unable to receive and believe the direct word of God Himself. "Rational understanding" of the substance of belief must "know" what the divine speech is all about.
It is something else again to demand that divine revelation be made so wholly accessible by rational investigation that its character as mystery is simply abolished. For then both revelation and faith become superfluous. This is what I term "rationalism"; within it lies the assertion that there cannot be anything which exceeds the power of human reason to comprehend" (p. 45 of Scholasticism, 1960, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston).

But all that must be appreciated is the openness and partiality of science, which content depends on the act of intellectus (insight into the nature of Being), which in turn stems from an encounter with Being itself, and we are taken to realize that our rational understanding is of a part with the mystery to which faith is beholden. Our faith is that this mystery, this openness will unfold to the inquiring soul. Our being-in-the-world is the mystery to which our faith is joined. Our rootedness in Being is Truth, and this is the only divine, which is not different from our very own being-in-the-world.

a wandering; or, nomos

2008-09-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

In the pasture, wandering. Along a riverside, following. The beginning; unto infinity.

Captured, standing. Form, bound. The grid, the net.

Eternal space within the bounded -- a flowing into and out of. Now defined.

Tension: release me, no longer contain me. Releasement within the containment.

Now, dialectic. Tension, release. Boundary, boundless. Motion and stasis.

Movement, stillness.

Another level: structure. Still and flow.

Another level: neither, nor.

Finally, unending freedom. Back again. Roam.

Pure Being.

I am a wandering.

teaching is a learning

2008-09-06T11:16:00.000-07:00

Martin Heidegger has, in various places, articulated a deep view of what teaching is, which is a learning that has taken into itself what was taught and married it to what is in us. That is, learning from the teacher is a placement of what is taken from outside within, a grounding of the lesson taught in the actual being of the student. What we already know (our being, how it is that we actually live) is thus related to what is taken from outside ourselves; learning, therefore, is not the taking of what is purely new or external but is, paradoxically, the re-collection of what is already known, that is, our being as it actually is in us (what is already known is what already exists, i.e., our own being. Learning becomes matching the already-existing within us to the already-existing without us, which is just a matching and nothing new, i.e., "from nothing"). Our knowledge is "produced" from the relatedness we gain to the object which we take in as we learn. Relatedness is crucial. Without the relation, knower to known, which is a matching of two already-existing "things", there is no true knowledge -- or what is the same, no true learning.

But I only mimic Heidegger. We should let him speak for himself:

This genuine learning [taking cognizance of what we already know things known to be] is ... already an extremely peculiar thing, a taking where one who takes only takes what one basically already has. Teaching corresponds to this learning. Teaching is a giving, an offering; but what is offered in teaching is not the learnable, for the student is merely instructed to take for himself what he already has [and this echoes --better: amplifies -- Plato's concept of "leaning as recollection", in the Theaetetus]. If the student only takes over something that is offered he does not learn. He comes to learn only when he experiences what he takes as something he himself really already has. True learning occurs only where the taking of what one already has is a self-giving and is experienced as such. Teaching therefore does not mean anything else than to let the others learn, that is, to bring one another to learning. Teaching is more difficult than learning; for only he who can truly learn -- and only as long as he can do it -- can truly teach. The genuine teacher differs from the pupil only in that he can learn better and that he more genuinely wants to learn. In all teaching, the teacher learns the most.

from "Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics" in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (1977/1993).

the cyborg of flying free market capitalism

2008-08-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

It takes flight with a philosophy as its launching pad, a long time in the making. The philosophy is so well-integrated into the structure of society and thought that to question it, or to suggest its inadequacy, is like questioning a fish breathing water. It is fair to say that everything we experience from media, government, education and culture is tinged with a market concern, a buyer/seller mentality, and a general consumerist attitude. Little escapes this panoply of market-serving mechanisms.

British author and social critic Will Hutton states the axiomatic base of this philosophy of market quite succinctly:

"[T]he rights of the propertied and the freedom of business come before any assertion of the public interest or social concerns [and] this has become the consensus orthodoxy. These are deemed to be the only circumstances in which wealth generation and employment can be assured, and thus the citizen would stand to lose more by putting these at risk than he or she might gain from public action asserting common interests. The law of private property rules supreme. In this climate taxation is depicted as the confiscation of what is properly our own -- an intolerable burden that should be reduced. The social, the collective and the public realm are portrayed as the enemies of prosperity and individual autonomy and, worse, are opposed to the moral basis of society, grounded as it should be in the absolute responsibility of individuals to shoulder their burdens and exercise their right alone [the philosophy of social atomism]" (2002, p. 9).

The implementation of the philosophy of Market -- and hence its visible reality -- is achieved on the basis of manufactured, material products that, in turn, yield capital, which is the blood of the Market. This is to say that the Market necessarily depends on technology and cannot exist without it. Therefore, there are three interlocking facets of the Market reality: the manufactured product, capital and technology. This structure, in turn, cannot exist without a supporting social and moral structure. That is to say, the Market also necessarily depends on an interlocking system of morality, politics and economics. Thus, the Market has both a human and a technological face. It is, perhaps, a kind of cyborg.

It is a cyborg where the human elements must be, whether wittingly or not, subservient to the needs of the Market, lest the Market lose its lifeblood and die. The Market and Life are inseparable, and they are sutured together with technology, which in turn makes possible production of goods on the scale needed for the Market to thrive (it may survive without such technological realities, but its presence would not dominate; rather, without a sophisticated technological substratum, the Market would become subservient to the needs of human beings in a state of natural contingency, that is, where they are more at the whim of Nature than present technology allows).

The reality of Market can only be seen in the large-scale pattern, the structure, of society; that is, it can only be seen when we compare the habits of thought of individuals, and when we also look, along side of that, at the over-all movements and change within and among societies. No single individual can "see" the Market, for it is not a "thing". It is, rather, a structure of, and among, things. As such, a more subtle form of perception -- made possible by scientific and humanistic analysis -- is required, in the same sense in which a more subtle, and disciplined, form of perception is needed to interpret the lines and shadows of a medical X-ray photograph, or the lines and streaks produced on a computer screen following a particle collision. In themselves, these specks and flecks and splatters mean nothing. In order to derive meaning, and hence in order to "see" something, these seemingly random structures must be coordinated in thought, with the aid of a more abstract technology, we may say: scientific theory. (We may generalize and define any theory as a coordinating technology that allows a subtle form of perception as the organization of random events into a meaningful whole).

Perception is basic to mankind as a functioning species in the natural and social worlds. That we require a highly specialized and disciplined form of it to see something like the "Market" is no argument against the existence or reality of that Market, just like we cannot claim that no tumor exists because it can only be seen by someone with specialized perceptive abilities such as only a medical doctor reliably possess. (It is often a criticism of a theoretical analysis which tries to describe the reality of the Market that, since we must depend on theory to see it, it is therefore not a tangible reality in its own right. The subtle logic at work here is precisely subservient to the Market itself, though: what cannot be felt or experienced with the senses -- i.e., what cannot be sold in the context of the Market -- does not, therefore, exist.)

The Market exists, has real effects, and causes as much harm as good to the fabric of human life and society. The question we must face is have we truly become subservient to it, does it dominate our life and thought and social structures, and if so, to what end?

There are a few very lucid social critics who manage to penetrate the Market fog. Neil Postman has argued, very convincingly, that we have entered a phase of human civilization he calls "Technopoly", as quite distinct from a "Technocracy". Importantly, in the latter form of civilization, "the citizens ... knew that science and technology did not provide philosophies by which to live, and they clung to the philosophies of their fathers" (1992, p. 47). What Postman does not quite emphasize is that, with the rise of science and technology, and the centrality they assumed in the Industrial and post-Industrial eras, the Market was the coordinating philosophy that subsumed both science and technology, and which puts those human creations to its own use. Thus, whereas Postman specifically focuses on science and technology in a Technocracy and Technopoly, I add the important qualification, under the banner of the Market. Postman continues:

"With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds [the technocratic] disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy" (p. 48).

Technopoly makes alternatives to its market-technological structure invisible by bating us with the allure of wealth, but then switches the meaning of wealth -- originally, the well-being of soul -- to mean just money and the alleviation of strife with its products, leaving us partly sated but inwardly empty. Why empty? Because it is a premise of Market philosophy that needs and wants may be continually created, and thus it creates the conditions for eternal want and need, and promises that it will always provide, that there is no end to its ability dish out. Slowly, everything is seen in this light: unless something (idea, material product) can provide tangible, continuous fulfillment, it is irrelevant. All of religion, sexuality, culture are subsumed under this Market philosophy and all of it is, thereby, materialized as a commodity. There is, then, no discernible alternative to Market-ized religion, sexuality, etc. Thus, as Thomas de Zengotita has shown, we live a life of perpetual mediation (psycho-physical dependence on technologies), and only now-and-then do we find ourselves at the whim of nature (say, in a blinding snow storm in the "middle of nowhere"), which is a state of radical contingency (de Zengotita 2005, Mediated). The medium of mediation, as it were, is the cluster of products and commodities provided to us by the Market, which in turn is its life-support system. To be mediated is to be safely ensconced in the protective womb of the Market, pacified, comforted and anesthetized by technology. That is, not only is the Market, as a global structure or large-scale pattern, best analogized as a Cyborg, but we actually are cyborgs in the more abstract but no less tangible sense in which the very structure of our thoughts and patterns of our lives are entirely dependent on technology -- what Albert Borgman has called "the device paradigm".

To see it in ourselves -- to see the above here below, to see the devices we are subservient to, to recognize the relationship between our actions and thought and the larger context, the Technopoly, we live in -- is to engage in self-analysis; it is to be self-aware. Just as we turn a disciplined eye to the whole structure of social and individual relationships, thus revealing to us the sharp outlines of our system of civilization, the Technopoly-Market, so too can we turn the same disciplined eye upon ourselves, and to our civilization. Our concern with the whole, our civilization, is the same as with ourselves: where are we, how did we get here, and where are we going? Indeed, as above, so below.

Our civilization is at a crucial juncture as we see the rise of such lunacy as the "Singularitarians" who quite literally see the evolution of not man but of "intelligence", finally "freed" (note the transcendent character of their position and rhetoric) of the bonds of flesh, i.e., "nature". Such groups, in their essential dependency on the logic and structure of Market Technopoly, are the modern equivalent of religious cults (this because of their embryonic form to date), and their leaders veritable theologians (technologians) and priestly technocrats. They call to mind the Gnostics of ages past, who used mystery and religious ritual to convince its followers of the sinful and corrupted nature of the body, a tradition that was taken up in earnest by Christianity, despite the fact that the early church considered it "heresy". It is not a heresy; it is the inevitable psychological implication of all such philosophies of pure "transcendence", of which we have our present-day technological varieties. The "Singularitarians" and, we should add, the Nazis (recall "eugenics"), or our more subtle coercive social system, the Market Technopoly, are, as Institutions, no less religious on account of their techo-worship and adherence to "science" or scientific principles (though, as with Nazi eugenics, we should say scientific "principles"). No less of a religious institution, that is, than Christianity, Islam, and the rest. They may preach a philosophy of salvation, but it is no less harmful than what we find in the history of religious or political movements. It will be as bloody and death-affirming, despite its rhetoric.

And that is, in the end, the danger of a Technoloply: the danger -- one which continually resurfaces in human civilizations, it seems -- of overt human death and destruction in the name of progress. What is only dim suggestion of total freedom from nature can easily bloom into a full-on totalitarian regime of oppression and genocide. However, given the subtly of perception required to see the Market, we can only expect that the oppression and human devastation possible in strong Technopolies of the far future will require an equally subtle perceptive ability.

And that is the perception of saints, sages and holy men and women who arise to counter these realities in every civilization. Let us only hope that their numbers are enough to warm the soul of humankind for Ages to come.

pornografication

2008-08-03T21:41:00.000-07:00

When does an aesthetic engagement become pornography? When does something that gives you pleasure become, for you, pornographic? When does the search for a love, or love, become pornographic?

Is it possible to avoid pornography?

Is there anything not tinged with the pornographic?

We have art.

The visual arts. I go to see a van Gogh; a Monet; a Kandinsky. Pleasurable. I go again, and again. I obsess. I need it. I want it. Pornography?

We have musical arts. Bach, Schubert. Or, if you prefer: Wilco, Broken Social Scene. Over and over again: Matthew Passion, D minor violin suite; the G major quartet. And so on. For days, the same artist. The same piece two, three or four times in a day. Over and over. Love out of the sounds, yes. Weeping, deeply felt sadness. Over and over, sadness and o, that sweet joy underneath the great darkness. Back and forth, to it, absence, fondness, back again. Needs, wants. It's rather hard to distinguish now.

The art of words. Back to the novelist, looking for more, for a better high in words, this time it's going to be profound. Really marvelous phrases; silky; like a samurai blade: to the heart of the matter. It really feels great to read it. More and more. Another, please.

O, those tomes of wisdom, dripping with profundity. How many can I stuff into my head at once? Two or three; double, and triple-fisting it. Gandhi, the Maharaj, Sankara before them ... cannot forget the Buddha. Jesus, the Prophets. All of them clustered together for me: o, what deep words they have for me, so penetrating, so far-reaching into my own soul. I weep. Exhilaration.

Then, I am left down, low, tired, lonely again. Back to the mundane world. What pitilessness. Never. Back to the heights! Back to the Castles of Wisdom. Back to the shores of shiny truths. Words like sweet-cream. Sweet-cream for the Soul.

I want fulfillments, I want exuberances, I want Truths.

Pornographication.

Porn.

Another specific instance can be found, which is usually considered to be unique, but which is but one of a category: porn of the flesh, of the body. What makes this porn (perhaps the more well-known of the porns) a bedfellow with the porn of sound, and of the canvas and of the word? Where all the actions and enjoyment, basically, take place: in the mind, cerebellum, cerebrum, c'est la vie.

extemporaneous flight

2008-08-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

o, too high in your blue tomorrows
never the heights can I manage
to forswear never to see you to
the Empyrean again
for tomorrow will never come
and my longing will out
into the breeze
and unto thee be consumed, if
a great fire will find
my soul, there, again
with you I die.

in praise of the "general reader"

2008-07-10T17:30:00.000-07:00

In his introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition of sociologist Philip Slater's In Pursuit of Loneliness, Todd Gitlin ends with this sharp indictment of academia (or, more specifically, of the insularity of academic thought).

A bit of context: Gitlin is bemoaning the sad fact that much of the best academic criticism of our general culture is often mired in jargon and impenetrable theoretical structures that only the initiated can grasp, and with great effort and much interpretation, at that. I would say that there is something to the specialization of academic prose, and I'd make an analogy (not too deep) between the initiation required in the academy and the initiation required for the induction into any meaningful assemblage of serious-minded thinkers (just think of the initiation required for many religious and spiritual traditions: you only get to know the deepest of what the tradition holds sacred once you've proven "worthy" -- that is, truly serious about the knowledge enshrouded by the visible forms of the tradition. I am tempted to also mention the serious period of initiation required of Zen adepts, or those of the Tantras of Indo-China). In any case, Gitlin's critique is important, and something to which I accede.

The left, environmentalism, feminism, "New Age" -- each has its more or less private language and its self-enclosed constituency. If you belong to the academy, it is all you can do to "keep up" with your ever-narrower specialty. An obsession with method, mirroring the culture's obsession with "information," buries ideas. If you resist specialization, you are drawn toward the hall of mirrors called "theory" -- it becomes a full-time occupation to find your way down the shimmering corridors. Odds are that you do not take pleasure from what you read, for social criticism today is professionalized, self-enclosed, and segregated, like the rest of our intellectual discourse. To write accessibly, on the other hand, is to take seriously the democratic faith. It is to render tribute to the powers and curiosity of that crucial figure, the "general reader". Possibly this quaint-sounding creature is real, possibly chimerical. In any case, it is an indispensable act of faith to address her. The Pursuit of Loneliness is still worth reading [given that it was written in the early 1970s] because it honors the mission of sociology not to train a caste of knowers but to contribute to society's knowledge of itself. (pp. xvii-xviii of the 1990 edition of Slater's book)

Indeed, know thy self -- the Socratic dictum.

the in-between

2008-07-04T06:43:00.000-07:00

We plan, we decide. We organize and outline. We go to.

The waiting room; the lobby. The aeroport, the boarding area; to the take-off point.

The corridor, down the street. Where is your final destination?

The memorandum, the reminder. Note-to-self, to-do.

Up-date, up-load; save, file, external memory back-up.

We're all looking for a little bit of life, but life happens when you're just not looking. So move over, and let a little light in, go outside; step aside. Find a little bit of blur. It's all happening and you're not there. Life in-between. Death in-between. You're the out-take, man; ma'am, you're present somewhere else. Really. Set down your specs; let the ink run on your schedule, the agenda's all in-between. It's what you're not doing that matters when you're doing.

Yes, read between the lines. It's all there. Turn the computer off; put the browser and search to rest. Yes, all of that. Turn it all off. Silence, space, slow-motion. Yes, all of that. But go in-between. Don't stop to write it all down; forget to follow the list. Count the empty spaces between each stroke of your pen. There. You've got it.

"Economic Inequality Does Not Mean Anything On Its Own"; or, how the logic of "pure capitalism" trumps the individual for the institution

2008-07-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

In working through Naomi Klein's engaging and dense portrait of Bush Administration capitalism in Shock Doctrine, which is deeply rooted, as Klein documents, in "Chicago-style" economic thinking, I am left with a chilling realization. "The future belongs to crowds", as DeLillo says in Mao II -- that is, to the whole, the collective, the social structure. Abstract entities.

The danger is when these abstract entities are mistaken for real ones, that is, for structures which are in reality made up of individual human beings. The danger, a subtle one, is when these abstracta are drained of humanity; the danger is when human experience -- conscious experience -- is replaced by something greater than it, something that lacks experiences of its own, or a conscious life of its own. When the category or conception of man replaces man, then indeed "the future belongs to the crowds". "Society" replaces "individual" as the basic unit of scientific and moral analysis. In this case, statistics and numerical description must replace local, individual human experiences, necessarily, for no one individual experience can tell us about the abstract whole. And if the whole is taken as prior to, or in any case as independent from, the individuals that comprise it, then individual experience must be trumped by statistical, and in general mathematical, formalism (or so goes the assumption that only mathematics and statistics are adequate for the task at hand). Thus, we see that economics becomes the new physics for the Industrial and post-Industrial Age; economics is the physics for present-day socio-political thinkers, and also, now more frequently, of the government. The dream of extending scientific analytical thought to society is finally being realized. But insofar as it is grounded in a classical conception of physics -- and the mechanical philosophy that often attends it -- economics threatens to bring to the actual social world the problems of thought that plague physics regarding the natural world. However, these problems will not merely be conceptual in nature, or merely make erroneous predictions when applied to domains of nature ill-suited for it (this was the birth of the quantum theory: Newton's physics could not be adequately extended to the atomic domain), the problems will manifest themselves in our actual flesh-and-blood civilization, at the individual and social levels.

We must remember, though, that classical physics does not necessarily imply the mechanical philosophy often associated with it. The characteristic feature of a mechanical philosophy is the assumption that all observable phenomena can be reduced to and are the (inevitable) consequence of the motions or behavior of a set of relatively simple and unchanging entities, manifesting dynamically changing properties, the interactions of which are describable (in principle) precisely by mathematical laws. Thus, the essential assumption in a mechanical philosophy is that underlying any observable phenomena in nature (from the world of planets or molecules, to the world of social structures or people) is some mechanism (separable parts interacting with each other) whose behavior is dictated by a universal (or universalizable) law. However, such a view cannot be maintained for all aspects of classical physics. For example, Newton's theory of gravity describes falling bodies and the motions of heavenly ones in a rather well-unified manner as being examples of a common phenomenon, gravitation. Gravity, famously, resists a mechanical reduction, as the famous debate between the Cartesians and the Newtonians documents. The Cartesian mechanical program of reducing gravity to the pushes-and-pulls of molecules in a fluid -- the "vortex" model of Descartes -- failed. Additionally, the attempt to reduce electrical and magnetic phenomena -- electromagnetism -- to a common mechanical source, on analogy with Cartesian program for gravity -- failed: the "aether" hypothesis could not (and cannot) be empirically confirmed, as attested by Einstein long ago. Indeed, this very problem gave birth to another profound physical theory, Einstein's theory of relativity. No mechanical reduction was provided for electromagnetism; nonetheless, the structure of nature was given by Einstein. There is no need for a mechanical-material substratum, to which electromagnetic phenomena may be reduced.

Nonetheless, the mechanical philosophy continued to be closely associated with Newtonian physics and Maxwellian Electrodynamics (the classical theory describing electromagnetism) during the 19th century. Even after the twin revolutions of the 20th century of relativity and quantum theory -- revolutions which upset the mechanical philosophy -- we can find mechanical thought still dominating scientific thought. The point here is that this is not inevitable in science, yet this philosophy tends to be assumed without argument or scrutiny.

Central to the mechanical philosophy is mathematical description and quantitative, analytical precision, with respect to the reducing mechanism. The new quantitative mode of description necessarily divides itself from so-called "qualitative" description, according to the primary ontological role given to the reducing mechanism. The latter mode of description is now taken to be a more or less insignificant species of "subjective", "human-centered" and "mind-dependent" knowledge and understanding: mechanisms (themselves unthinking, non-conscious, materially inert entities) are fundamental to reality and hence to know the mechanism is to know all that there is to be known.

This is an example of the dominance of what Heidegger has called "calculative thinking". But the philosophical significance is striking: the replacement of experience and the individual with a "view from nowhere", an a-individual point of view. One cannot relate to a mathematical description or a statistic in the way one can relate to a story, a novel, or an encounter with another individual, so one must bury one's own individual experiences and "subjective understanding" in the mathematics; one must put aside one's own thoughts in favor of the science itself. This is "objectivity" as defined by the mechanical philosophy. Thus we find Augusto Pinochet, military dictator of Chile where Milton Friedman's economic theory of unbounded capitalism was put to the test, saying that "nature shows us basic order and hierarchy are necessary". As Naomi Klein then comments, "[t]his mutual claim to be taking orders from higher natural laws formed the basis of the Pinochet-Chicago alliance" (p. 96).

Earlier, Kein offers this telling summary of what economics means for Friedman, Pinochet and the Chicago school: "Economics for them meant that forces of nature that needed to be respected and obeyed because 'to act against nature is counter-producticve and self-deceiving ,' as Pinera [student of the Chicago school and Pinochet's minster of labor] explained" (ibid.). Implicit in this we find another characteristic of the mechanical philosophy: that what we see (i.e., observable phenomena) is an inevitable consequence of underlying mechanisms which are fundamentally beyond the control of individuals. Thus, there can only be two categories of behavior: that which is consistent with, or that which is inconsistent with, the fundamental order manifested by the mechanical operations of nature. Thus, according to a mechanical interpretation of economic science, there is clearly right and wrong socio-political action. Right if consonant with the basic mechanical order of nature, wrong if inconsistent with that order. Socio-political policy must be consistent with the mechanical order of nature as understood by economics.

With the emergence of such a connotation of finality, of universality and ubiquity, the mechanical interpretation of economics threatens to become totalitarian in its application (despite the intentions of its authors or those applying its implications it social policy). And this is the paradox that Naomi Klein attempts to unravel for us, it seems. Milton Friedman and his Chicago school of economics (and those who subscribe to this science-cum-social-philosophy) characterize themselves as, essentially, "freedom fighters" (indeed, as Klein points out, Friedman was recently eulogized as a champion of liberty). For them, unfettered capitalism, summarized by the "holy trinity" of deregulation, privatization and cutbacks to, primarily, social programs (i.e., the oft-derided "welfare state"), is the only means of true freedom in a democratic society. The paradox is that this freedom is the freedom of the market, not necessarily of the individual or all individuals. It is, for the individual, freedom in potentia, abstract freedom. And, as Klein tries to show, it amounts to freedom of corporations to balloon without limit. The free market is the means for individual freedom, says this school of thought, but Klein shows that the market in effect becomes the end in itself, the individuals become the means. In other words, we find a terribly convoluted mechanical interpretation of economics where the human being becomes the mechanism in a larger whole, the market. This in turn becomes the basic unit of analysis in economics. All of social policy and thinking must then be coordinated by this mechanical structure of the market. Only by letting the market reign freely will prosperity (identified with material prosperity) be attained. Wealthy people are happy people, they contend.

Where Friedman and his Chicago school go wrong is not with the attempt to bring economics closer to "hard science" -- with mathematical physics -- or in using mechanical models of nature to attain this aim. Simplified, idealized models that visualize aspects of nature in mechanical terms can be, in a variety of cases, quite fruitful and successful. Newtonian mechanics is a prime example. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that such mechanical simplicity is easy for us as finite creates to grasp. Where Friedmanian economical thought goes wrong is with the implementation of its theories, with its attitude towards its theory, with the mechanical philosophy that attends the scientific work. It, like any other theory, is partial, incomplete and of only limited applicability. It cannot be extended to the entirety of social and political reality. No science can; not even our best, most fundamental physics can attain such universal scope.

Why?

This has to do with a more general understanding of the order of nature, with what our most fundamental investigations into the structure of nature have taught us throughout the centuries.

First, we have learned that the central assumption of the mechanical philosophy is false -- that all phenomena can be reduced to, and successfully explained by, a small set of basic entities and their interactions. From the point of view of fundamental physics, the world is not so simple, and does not admit of such a reduction (though it may for a limited domain). Such a model does not work for fundamental physics -- reductionism is false -- and so there is reason to believe that it is not generally true. From this we arrive at the thesis that the mechanical philosophy is necessarily limited in its scope. And we may also infer that reductionism is of limited validity. With these caveats in place, such programs may without worry be undertaken, but they must be understood as having limited validity. This recognition of the inherent limitations of the mechanical research program, or more generally, the mechanical philosophy, implies that one should not seek to understand everything in terms of it. This is a subtle problem, for the movement from "it is true in this domain, relatively so" to "since it's true in many domains, it is therefore true of everthing" is easily done; it is a common fallacy of human thought. This fallacious inference can have serious consequences, especially when we consider how the mechanical interpretation of Freidmanian economic thinking has been implemented, how it places markets "uber alles", as I have tried to point out, following Naomi Klein's important work The Shock Doctrine.

We can only hope that soon enough we realize the deeply limited scope of our thinking.

dispersion of thought

2008-05-22T23:03:00.000-07:00

In a remarkable final paragraph of his excellent essay " 'Only the Present is our Happiness' " (which I'll quote at the close of this passage) , historian Pierre Hadot captures and summarizes something that has been gnawing at my consciousness for a while.

Just step outside, and watch the I-Poded, Cell-Phoned masses tumbling by, seemingly engrossed in themselves and you find in them (in us), somewhat paradoxically, a radical avoidance of all things now, silent, personal, participating. And remain a bit longer outside, or rather go inside and turn on the Tube, or fall into the Web, and yet another manifestation of such avoidance quickly arises -- but now, we are at a source of it, rather than witnessing the symptom of some deeper malady. Here your mind is awash in pollution, a kind of mental pollution. During this sand-blasting of Soul, I cannot help but get the feeling that all this pollution of mental space -- advertisements being the most obvious example -- has the same effect, which is to disperse our attention, pushing it away from not only our un-mediated, un-manufactured, un-advertised, denuded and plain self (the self in-between-the-acts, the silent self), but also away from the present moment, where in-between the back-then and ahead-of-now the silent self (eternally) resides. Horace's famous aphorism "Seize the day [carpe diem]" is not a sensualist-hedonist exhortation to live it up (that's what the advertisers and the bulk of market-driven society want you to think -- and they can provide the means to do it!); rather, it is a precious modicum of ancient Greek wisdom: in one naked moment is the All; everything is present, eternally, NOW -- if only you can penetrate it, to hear its great silence. Grasp hold of now, and Eternity springs forth, as Hadot reminds us Goethe continually wrote about. But for all our gadgets and worship of the next-new-thing (which is really a worship of the Future, of which we can find many more examples), -- and for all the anxiety that this produces in us -- we are dying to the Now, and hence we are dead before we have lived. Saying such things seems oversaid, somehow, these days; but I suspect that this feeling of banality is precisely what our modern Age wants us to feel, for we are then quite conveniently relieved of the criticism contained in these words. But I will not leave it here, with a barely-escaped charge of triteness. I end with an ending of Hadot's:

Not long ago, Georges Friedmann courageously denounced the tragic lack of balance which has come about in the modern world between "power" and "wisdom". If we have chosen here to present some aspects of one of the fundamental themes of the European spiritual tradition, it was not in order to satisfy some historical or literary curiosity, but to describe a spiritual attitude: an attitude which, for ourselves and for modern man in general, hypnotized as we are by language, images, information, and the myth of the future, seemed to us to provide one of the best means of access to this wisdom, so misunderstood and yet so necessary. The call of Socrates speaks to us more now than ever before: "Take care for yourself." This call is echoed by Nietzsche's remark: "Is it not the case that all human institutions" -- to which we might add: "as well as the whole of modern life" -- are intended to prevent mankind from feeling their life, by means of the constant dispersion of their thoughts?"

ethnocide

2008-05-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

I had one of the most frustrating discussions about the socio-cultural destruction of Tibet recently. Quickly, the argument degenerated into a debate about "modernization" of the Tibetan people and of Tibet as a country, and an argument over whether Tibet is part of, or autonomous from, China.
Of course, my interlocutor (though, this is a generous label) simply failed to realize that "modernization" does not have to come with what many anthropologists and historians are calling "ethnocide" -- the systematic and willful destruction of an ethnicity (that is, language, cultural-religious-social ways of living, etc.). In the case of China-Tibet, the evidence is overwhelming and alarming: railroads bulldozed right through the Tibetan plateau to the capital of Lhasa, and the (largely forcible) "re-location" of ethnic Chinese, a mass migration mandated by the government of China as part of its "modernization" scheme. My interlocutor, naturally (and of course, with cultural-social ties to mainland China itself) tried to spin my quoting of these facts (largely undisputed by all except the Chinese themselves) as "Western bias", and accused me of getting my news from sources like CNN, who're clearly biased (in my interlocutor's opinion) against the Chinese. Well, what can one say to these mud-slinging accusations? How does one respond to the accusation that one's news-sources are (inherently?) biased? My only reply was that I follow news from sources which are equally critical of both American and foreign governments, that is, of both the US and China (and everyone else, for that matter) -- sources other than CNN (which, in my opinion, isn't news so much as infotainment). What else can one say to a mud-slinger?

But clearly, this issue about biased sources was merely a red herring meant to deflect attention away from the core issue: the systematic, militant socio-cultural destruction perpetrated by the Chinese government, of which we can find much corroborating evidence from not only US news sources, but sources from around the world (if there's bias here, it's bias against those who unashamedly violate basic human and social rights -- and this includes the right not to be interfered with socio-culturally). Now, the argument against this claim -- that the Chinese are engaging in, essentially, ethnocide -- is that we are merely witnessing the forces of "modernization", something even His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has agreed the people of Tibet are in need of. But this, too, really evades the problem raised: why does "modernization" (or whatever you want to call the forcible migration of thousands of ethnic Chinese into Tibet, the laying down, quickly, of railroads from mainland China into Tibet, the hostility for Tibetan Buddhism (esp. whenever associated with the Dalai Lama), the prohibition of the Tibetan language as a langauage of trade, commerce (i.e., daily life), and so on), why does modernization necessarily entail the destruction of a culture and society? Does it have to? Do the "forces of modernization" (whatever that is) imply a disintegration of some socio-cultural ways of being, leaving intact only those, say, that are compatible with the "modern way"?

This issue, as so formulated, is quite complex. It requires understanding what "modernization" is, the effects of it (should we be able to adequately conceptualize and study the phenomenon at all) on cultures and societies, and so on. But we needn't really be burdened with such an inquiry (indeed, I think that it might be an ill-formulated one to begin with). What we do need to focus on is not modernization itself, and its relationship to a culture or society, but rather the systematically forced imposition of "modernization", whose elements are quite obvious: fossil-fuel-based technologies (cars, farm equipment), socio-political ideologies foreign to the culture (Communism, in this case), homogenization and replacement of language (Mandarin over Tibetan at school, in the market, etc.), the establishment of a secularized governmental structure (i.e., one emptied of Buddhism) and the sudden migration of non-Tibetans into Tibet (which, since these ethnic Chinese now speak the language of commerce, inundate all available jobs thus implying that Tibetans have little chance of entering the new economic and financial structure ... and so on).

The point here is that it is wrong to force "modernization" (which in this case just means pushing out the old and bringing in the established imperial order -- the Chinese people) onto the Tibetan people (or any people, for that matter, for this is not just about Tibet and China, this is about basic human rights). Thus, we must clearly and sharply distinguish modernization from the forces of cultural and social destruction. Thus, modernization does not have to come along with ethnocide -- it all depends on the form that the modernization takes. If the form that it takes, as in the case with Tibet-China, is simply the displacement of one culture (Tibetan) for another (Maoist/Communist Chinese), then clearly this modernization is wrong. It should cease. And this, indeed, is (and has been) the position of H.H. The Dalai Lama: modernization is good for the Tibetan people, as it enables them to make their own way in a rapidly changing "global" world; but it is not for the Chinese people to bring along with modernization the willful and systematic socio-cultural destruction we are now witnessing (and have witnessed in the past -- let us not forget the so-called "Cultural Revolution" of the 1960s and '70s, at which time the Chinese people themselves actively sought to destroy their own cultural legacy, literature, religion and all. One hopes that the dim but nevertheless potentially potent echo of this tragedy is not making itself felt again in Tibet).

But for all my efforts, I fear that my interlocutor remained unconvinced by my passionate rebuttal. You really cannot win an argument with a passion driving the arguments (however cogent they may be). Indeed, you cannot strive to "win" an argument at all -- and that's the fatal error that we continually make, those of us committed to thinking and reasoning well. To turn the mind of one individual is, at the same time, to exact control over it. And here, in microcosm, is the problem we witness macrocosmically: one attempts to control another, China attempts to control Tibet. The goal of my argumentation was, perhaps only implicitly, to control, to win -- one Ego trumping, bull-dozing over, another. And this power struggle that was playing itself out on a small-scale with this (rather heated) argument was precisely the thing that I was attempting to criticize! I had become that which I was against. Letting passion sway your heart usually ends in anger or hatred, unless you have the (spiritual) power to channel and focus such energy into compassion (which I obviously failed to do).

But, nonetheless, the issue here is serious and deeply important. The question should become how to persuade without inciting rage or hate or anger. I think storytelling is one way: just provide a picture of the rich cultural life being impacted by "modernization", go inside the story, be captured by it; find it within your own self. Compassion is likely to follow.

I think that the renowned anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis was able to pull this off quite well at a lecture he delivered now half a decade ago, back in 2003. And he makes the case for socio-cultural preservation -- the key postulate of my arguments above -- far better than I can. I suggest watching this moving lecture.

into

2008-05-07T22:32:00.000-07:00

In the personal space of the night, with the wind blowing through the freshly green leaves, as the sky, clouded, sings with the moving air, under the weight of the coming storm I sit.

I am taken to somewhere, neither a place nor a specific time. It is in-between something. I am called out of myself and I leap into it, somewhere, at sometime. I cannot quite say.

The heaviness of the clouded city sky, but I am sitting in the tree-tops, far from the city as I want to be.

I think it is death, somewhere, at that time.

I am out of myself, and I think that He cannot find me there; or rather, I have found Him first, where He always was. Out of myself, but an inward trip. Both, of course. My love seeping to the blowing wind, adrift to the sky above. Why do you blow? When will you stop? You are so gentle to me.

I can hold on to you now, and I won't let go.

Or, I do let go and that is when I find you, always there, never gone.

I think it is death, too, with everyone. We're all together again, always, never gone.

cinematic reflexivity (from Bresson to Fellini)

2008-05-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine suggested today that Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest has the naked innocence (if I may elaborate on the theme introduced) of an un-self-conscious New Wave style that was later to become "self-aware", and, we should add, self-absorbed. This would be the film equivalent of breaking one's deep concentration by becoming aware of what one is doing (the act of concentration) from the point of view of an external observer. It's sort of like when you become aware of yourself speaking when giving a talk. Without skill, this reflexivity can quickly derail your talk; with skill, you can guide the flow of the talk, you can seamlessly weave the audience (or the presence of the audience) into your own consciousness-in-motion and use such awareness to aid in the rhythm of your talk, or give it momentum. But in any case, self-absorption -- egoic reflexivity, we might say -- is more a stumbling block than anything. When a film becomes too reflexive, to absorbed in the film-making behind the film -- when it brings to the surface the form and medium by which the narrative is being conveyed -- it risks becoming purely selfish, self-interested, a big Ego needing attention. Or, it risks becoming just about the act of film itself, or a complaint about tired forms and over-used formulae -- it becomes an insular auto-analysis. That is, it becomes hermetically sealed.

In La Dolce Vita, for example, there is a rather soft reflexivity, a subtle presence of the act of filmmaking (of recording the play of events), of watching other lives. Marcello is a journalist -- indeed, a gossip-paper writer. He's always bound up to actors and actresses, always wanting to be in their lives, momentarily finding bliss and beauty in his female muses (conquests), only to be left adrift for the next passing ship -- whilst his own life drifts by, meaninglessly and lovelessly. He is the camera-man behind the lense, wanting to capture the stories, living vicariously through them. He is the viewer too -- as we are, watching his watching. Vita is deeply reflexive, but the reflexivity is merely the undergirding, the groundwork for the play and fancy in the film. It serves to keep us, the voyeur, at a distance -- the presence of the paparazzi, the cameras, the lights (recall the eerie presence of lighting against which Marcello and his "girlfriend" argue violently) all remind us about the act of watching (and that watching interferes with living). Yet, this distance is not just about viewer-viewed. It's also about emotional distance: we're brought into the sufferings and failings and longings of Marcello (his is almost the only perspective we have throughout the film), yet we cannot forge too deep an emotional connection with any of Marcello's lovers, friends, family -- the source of his sufferings, failings and longings. We are, as it were, far away and so close (to borrow the Wenders film title of the same name). The reflexivity of Vita is the result of Marcello's search for lasting happiness (something internal to the film's narrative), rather than being for the sake of auto-commentary (something external to the film's narrative -- i.e., the film qua film). And of course, the reflexivity just adds to the narrative: it is kind of like a character in itself, perhaps the antagonist to Marcello the protagonist. Certainly, the paparazzi often prevent there being real intimacy between Marcello and his lovers; and certainly, being a professional voyeur himself -- a tabloid journalist -- his is a life about the vain exploits of others, thus pushing aside meaning in his own. And he is also a divided protagonist: divided between a life of humane versus inane letters, as it were. And what happens to his intellectual (spiritual?) idol: murder-suicide -- certainly a spiritual-cum-karmic message: not even literature and music and those purely external trappings of "meaning" are meaningful or fulfilling in themselves. That too, in the end, is empty and fleeting and meaningless. We are left with a Ch'an realization: rip the sutras, kill the Buddha if you meet him on the street -- break the mind. Or Krishna to Arjuna: the true war is the war within.

evidence and fact; or, succession of the frameworks

2008-04-30T16:18:00.000-07:00

There is a critical distinction between the evidence that might lead us to accept something as fact, versus the fact for which we have evidence. Facts, as we have learned especially well in the twentieth century, are not facts without a conceptual framework within which they get to be facts at all. I cannot complain about the pain in my left arm without my assuming that such a thing exists -- that I have an 'arm' -- and that I am related to it in a way that makes sense to say 'there is a pain in my left arm'. So, too, with scientific knowledge: we can contemplate the nature of a black hole only if we (mostly tacitly) presuppose certain things about the nature of space and time, and accept, generally, the validity of certain abstract mathematical structures from which the existence of black holes can be deduced, and that there is some relationship between those abstract structures and the instruments we use to probe the galaxy. 'Black hole' brings with it a whole array of other beliefs -- an entire conceptual framework (the exact form and details of which are, to be true to science and philosophy, a matter of great debate and philosophic scrutiny). To propose an altogether new mode of inquiring into nature is, therefore, at the same time to suggest (if only implicitly) the existence of new facts. What is at first perhaps a conjecture, for which a mathematical and physical framework is then erected, or an hypothesis that flips older ways of thinker around, which in turn implies a reorganization of scientific knowledge and explanation (as with Einstein), later, if evidence may agree, opens up new horizons of thought, and new possibilities of existence (be it the existence of new material realities, like black holes, or forms of human experience, like rapid travel). In this way, we discover that sometimes, as Burtt writes, "we learn through the scientist that the facts we perceive need a different description, [and] so we sometimes learn through the pioneer ... that our way of telling what is a fact needs to be replaced by another". "A speculative idea", continues Burtt, "is thus, when it originates, the proposal of a new world in which men might live and think; it is saying: 'Here is a better way of conceiving objective reality that the way you are familiar with.'" (In Search of Philosophic Understanding, 1965, p. 179).

A curious phenomenon of reality is suggested here: mankind may change his framework of thought, and hence the very fabric of facts and evidence, yet in the change from one to another, retain some facts, while others are rejected. The fabric is un-sewn, as it were, new fibers added, perhaps a new loom constructed, and another garment created. Even though the former framework structured man's thoughts differently, nonetheless a certain discernible form and pattern to nature emerged by way of that (now replaced) framework -- those forms and patterns, born out by and agreeing with future evidence and evidential standards, being retained as true insights into nature's details. And this is the progression, it seems, of man's empirical enquiry (as so many treatises of ages past proudly announced). That which is 'objective' emerges in a long-term process, what Burtt calls a process of "objectification" (ibid.). What is important is that which is retained whenever a conceptual shit occurs; and we might call this an invariant structure -- man's true knowledge. Insofar as man gains a sure grasp of those forms and patterns of nature, there is 'truth', what we can call objective truth in the sense that there are invariants of knowledge which are successfully born out by successive criteria of evidence (and here I don't assume that 'successive' means 'progressive'). It is objective not in contrast to 'subjective' (that is, as the philosophers say, 'mind-dependent'), but objective in the sense of invariant across the changes to (man's) conceptual framework (and here I leave the distinction between mind-dependence vs. mind-independence alone and to the side, because of its reliance on a specious, or at any rate contestable, distinction between (individual) mind vs. mechanisically-independent matter -- or, what is worse, between external reality vs. the "merely" internal reality of "my thoughts", which reality we may dub quintessentially "mind-dependent").

So, as man's conceptual frameworks change, so too what facts there are and what evidence there is to support them -- and through the change, some facts remain. How those facts are related to others, and how we understand the facts might change, but the facts that remain constant are, at bottom, the relatively stable forms and patterns of nature come what may. There is here a kind of accumulation, but also a kind of disintegration and loss (and so we might say that empirical knowledge is both accumulative to a certain extent and reconstructive/revisionary too). We certainly know from Aristotle that objects fall; but at what precise rate they do and exactly how remained unknown. Newton (though with much controversy) provided an exacting mathematical representation of motion, and thereby won a phenomenologically accurate description of it. He provided the form and pattern of nature, deducible from a few general principles, by means of which we might understand motion of all sorts. Einstein upset the foundations of Newton's axiomatized knowledge, but as for that which is phenomenologically accurate and useful, Einstein's theory can be rather well ignored -- Newton's follows in the appropriate limiting case, and is certainly true for a limited domain (for velocities much less than that of light's). Thus we see that, even though a framework upsets previous ones, some continuity remains -- and that continuity is form and pattern (we may say "structure" here, and define "form" as "static structure" and "pattern" as "dynamical structure"). What we must relinquish from Newton is a universal and absolute "time", outside the motions and positions of objects; Einstein's system of physics mixes, as it were, time and space (and, in his gravitational theory, matter). But what we retain is, for a certain domain, nonetheless true: objects on earth still fall in a manner consistent with, and entailed by, Newton's physics -- and likewise with (most) of the motions of the objects in our galaxy (we may still use Newtonian methods to calculate their motions, but now and then relativistic corrections are needed, as with the perihelion of Mercury's orbit). By noting these "structural continuities", as we may label them, we find aspects of both accumulation and revision. And thus empirical knowledge is not progressive in a naive sense, but is progressive in a rather subtle one: each successive conceptual framework implies new facts and new evidential standards (in concert with the details of the framework), but when framework-change occurs, we loose the trappings of the old facts while we retain the form and pattern of nature those facts embody. Certain facts will not change: the gravitational attraction of the earth on material bodies; the Periodic Table of Elements. What the nature of these facts is, or how they "hang together" may change, and change radically.

This accumulation and revision to our empirical understanding is indeed curious, and the issue of the 'objectivity' of empirical knowledge takes on a different flavor consequently. Conceptual change is a feature of reality -- no less 'objective' than any other. What there "really is" to reality is that which remains invariant under changes in man's conceptual frameworks. Man does not "grasp" the "reality underneath the appearances" for those appearances are part of the fabric of his reality -- of reality simpliciter. This is where Kant since Plato went wrong (but it is only thanks those like him that we might discover this!): reality is an appearance, and appearances are reality. No ontological distinction exists here (though, we certainly might make such a distinction for deeply important pragmatic reasons, when, for example, we're concerned with abuses of political power, rather than the details of gravity). Such a desire is absurd, and possibly paradoxical in the extreme (we might even say: a pathology of our reflexivity, thoughts about thought).

a comment on American (educated?) personalities

2008-04-30T11:03:00.001-07:00

Morris Berman, whose work I follow with much interest, wrote the following comment on his weblog a couple years back (25 April 2006 to be precise). Having experienced the Academy, and having met those business-types (and in here I include almost everyone I meet in D.C., and almost everyone I meet in the (educated) US) -- the "corporate being", perhaps of the species homo corporationis -- I can say Berman's description is spot-on:

"Put a collection of leading writers, academics, businessmen, artists–practically anybody, really–together in the United States, and what you frequently wind up with is a bunch of aggressive egos competing to be Number One. The conversation will be subtly boastful, filled with witty put-downs and a kind of controlled (or not-so-controlled) narcissism that is so common in the U.S. that we don't even notice it; anthropologically speaking, it's just part of the air we breathe."

the play of the shadows

2008-04-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

We find life often analogized by the Indian mystics as a dream, a mere sport of God -- our bodies, our lives, like so many empty shells washing up from the ocean, decaying on the sandy shore, the bits going to mix up with the vastness of the ocean again. What a comedy, to get worked up about the loss of one thing or another, the decay of one shell amongst an infinity, which is consumed by the Infinite, timelessly, unceasingly. Plotinus did not escape from realizing this, as no sage can if they live among us. His insight recalls the great Bharata war sequence against which the Bhagavad Gita takes place, and the ensuing dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna (Pure Being):

There is a Life full of multiplicity in the universe, and it creates and carries all things as it lives, and it cannot bear not to constantly produce beautiful and well-shaped living toys. The arms of men who attack each other -- even though they are mortal, they fight in graceful order, as is done for fun in the Pyrrhic dances -- go to show that all mankind's serious concerns are only children's games. . . . Just like on a theater stage, that is how we must consider all murders and rapings and sackings of cities: these are all changes of scenery and costume, acted-out wailings and lamentations. In this world, in each event that happens to us in life, it is not the inner soul, but the outer shadow of a person which laments and grieves; everything it does, it does on the stage of the entire earth. . . . Such are the acts of the person who knows only how to live the lower and outer life, and who does not know that in the midst of his tears, even when they are serious, he is playing children's games. Serious matters should be taken seriously only by a person's serious part; the rest of the person is a mere toy. . . . If you play with them and have a bad experience, at least realize that you have fallen into a children's game, and take off the toy that you are wearing [the body]. Even if it is Socrates who is playing, he plays with the outer Socrates. (III 2, 15, 31 -- 59)

Plotinus (205 -- 270 CE)
from Enneads III, 2
as quoted by Pierre Hadot (1989/95, p. 105)
in a translation by Michael Chase

freedom from the Will (not freedom of the Will)

2008-04-28T19:00:00.001-07:00

The will itself will never bring satisfaction, even if it had power over everything it wanted, but we are satisfied the moment we give it up. Without it we can never be discontented, with it we can never be content.

Blaise Pascal (1623 -- 1662)
Pensées no. 362 (472)
trans. by A.J. Krailsheimer (1966/95)

We may ask Pascal, then, whether freedom of the will -- the will in isolation from the Divine, adrift towards one thing or another -- is what we are to be saved from.

Hadot on Plotinus

2008-04-28T16:19:00.000-07:00

The historian of ideas Pierre Hadot writes, in his intellectual biography of Plotinus (Simplicity of Vision), of the dispute between Plotinus (205 -- 270 CE) and the Gnostics. It gets at the notion of God I find most consonant with my own experiences.

Let us set the stage for this remarkable description of the Divine. Plotinus followed Plato (4th cent. BCE Greece) when he writes of the "Forms", the archetypes of Reality. For Plotinus, like Plato before him, this Formal Reality is Pure Being -- that changeless Reality upon which changeable reality (growth, change, duration, decay, cessation, origination -- the life we know very well) depends. Unlike Plato, Plotinus does not distinguish this Formal Reality -- Pure Being -- from the changeable. The changeless is manifest within and through the changing. And my individual soul is part of the Soul of Pure Being, which Plotinus calls "The One". My individual being is not essentially different from this unified Being. Indeed, I may access this unity by my own individual intellect, by an act of perception -- an inner perception, a spiritual Vision. Hadot quotes Plotinus:

'If one were to compare [the world of Forms] to a living variegated sphere, or to something made up only of living faces, shining with living faces ... then one would see it, but as it were from the outside, as one being sees another; in fact, however, one must oneself become Spirit, and oneself become vision' (VI 7, 15, 24-32).

Hadot continues:

At this point, there is no longer any distinction between outer and inner perception. We have gone beyond the level of reflection and perception, and reached that of intuition and contemplation. We now sense that Life is immediate self-contemplation, and we see all things being born from this total vision, by means of which the Beautiful appears to itself as vision. We "are" within the divine Intellect, the Thought which thinks itself. ... As a result of this experience [the merger of soul to the Divine Intellect through spiritual vision], we shall come to know that, since all things result immediately from Beauty, the latter is as much present in the sensible world as it is in our soul. To the Gnostics who despise the world, Plotinus can object: "God is present to all beings, and he is in this world, however we may conceive of this presence; therefore the world participates in God. Or, if God is absent from the world, he is also absent from you, and you can say nothing either about Him or the beings which come after Him" (II 9, 16, 24-27). As long as we are in contract with the divine presence, there is no longer any opposition between outer and inner world. It is the same world of Forms, the same divine Thought, the same Beauty, where all things commune in one single spiritual life, which we discover both within us and outside of us.
[...]
God, then, is total presence: the presence just as much of our self to itself as of individual beings to one another.

Pierre Hadot
Plotinus: Simplicity of Vision, pp. 44-5
1989/1993 (trans. by Michael Chase)

humanities for their own sake? a reply to Prof. Fish

2008-01-08T14:23:00.000-08:00

In a recent NY Times essay, Prof. Fish seems to retreat to the "for its own sake" line of defense of the humanities in the face of a growing crisis of faith in their value, intrinsic or otherwise.

Yes, a reply is in order. By way of a right approach to the issue, witness Kandinsky's (the great German artist's) evaluation of the "art for art's sake" sentiment, employed for the Humanities by the uninspiring and two-dimensional essay of Fish's:

After describing a building filled with many rooms of works of art (read: Humanities' curriculum), Kandinsky describes those who mostly fill those rooms, roving around from room to room, painting to painting, work of art to work of art (read: course to course). He writes in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1914/77):

People with these books in their hands go from wall to wall, turning over pages, reading the names. Then they go away, neither richer nor poorer than when they came, and are absorbed at once in their business, which has nothing to do with art. Why did they come? In each picture is a whole lifetime imprisoned, a whole lifetime of fears, doubts, hopes and joys. Wither is this lifetime tending? What is the message of the competent artist? "To send light into the darkness of men's hearts -- such is the duty of the artist," said Schumann [the composer].
... To harmonize the whole is the task of art. With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. ... But hungry souls go hungry away ....
The vulgar heard stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid". Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have have heard nothing. This condition is called "art for art's sake". This neglect of inner meanings ... this vain squandering of artistic power is called "art for art's sake."
The onlooker turns away from the artist who has higher ideals and who cannot see his life purpose in an art without aims.
It has been said [earlier in the book] that art is the child of its age. Such an art can only create an artistic feeling which is already clearly felt. This art, which has no power for the future, which is only a child of the age and cannot become a mother of the future, is a barren art. She is transitory and to all intent dies the moment the atmosphere alters which nourished her.
The other art, that which is capable of educating further, springs equally from contemporary feeling, but is at the same time not only echo and mirror of it, but also has a deep and powerful prophetic strength.
The spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which she is one of the mightiest elements, is a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards. This movement is the movement of experience. It may take different forms, but it holds at bottom to the same inner thought and purpose.

Wassily Kandinsky
from Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1914, unabridged reprint 1977: Dover), pp. 3-4

What Kandinsky is describing for art I think equally holds of the humanities. It is transformative insofar as any work of literature, philosophy or history is transformative. But transformative of the "spirit", yes, as Kandinsky writes of art. Surely, there are those in the Academy who would do well to steer clear of the transformative works, as they have no inclination or vocation to enliven their students with the fire from these works. But what makes the limit of the few shouldn't make the limit of the Ideal. Professor Fish's essay is just one more sad example of the widening (perhaps now dominant ) acceptance of the deepening rift between "theory" and "myth" or "poetry", and the deepening divide between "sacred" and "secular" in our civilization and in the Academy in particular; it is also evidence of the frequent conflation of religious traditions as such (the purview of the "preacher", whose goal is conversion or a fear-struck obeisance) with the academy as a vessel of humanity's spiritual-wisdom traditions. Both traditions are vehicles of both social change and personal transformation. What really separates the Academy from religion per se is that whereas the latter is often deeply and vehemently dogmatic (most often to the exclusion of other religious or spiritual perspectives), the former (at least in principle) is committed to a kind of radical democracy of ideas. But successful transformation -- good and lasting and deep -- for a society or an individual will always depend on the teacher, and on the openness of the student. And one can find examples, great ones, of both from each tradition, the religious and the academic. But so too can we find poor or terrible examples. Such is the nature of reality, unfortunately: it's many-sided. The academy is transformative and it should be. It wouldn't be a "human" institution if it wasn't (it's the "humanities" after all that we are speaking of). And so we see that it isn't the highest ideal for the humanities to be "for its own sake". Rather, they exist for our sake, for the sake of our spirit -- a refreshment of the soul, as Emerson might say. Kandinsky quotes Schumann: "... to bring light into the darkness of men's hearts" ... yes, even more so for today.

A menace to the expansion of knowledge

2007-12-21T15:51:00.000-08:00

The ultimate menace to deep knowledge, according to the prolific historian Daniel Boorstin (1914 -- 2004), is not ignorance but a certain "pretension to knowledge" ("The Amateur Spirit", 1989). Boorstin asks, which reveals his deeper methodological commitments when doing history, what ways are there to "accommodate ourselves to ignorance while enjoying our common exploring"? Regarding literature and the arts, he answers that

the menace here is in the academies, the pretentious self-appointed custodians of prestige and respectability. Balzac was never elected to the [French Academy]. Posterity and the free public are our authentic [Academy]. Dickens was quite right when he declared that 'the people have set literature free' -- from the arrogance of patrons of which the professions are the latest and the most assertive.

from "The Amateur Spirit"
in Living Philosophies, ed. by Clifton Faidman, 1989

Time ahead

2007-12-11T12:40:00.000-08:00

We are nothing to the Future, as the Past is to us Now. But the future holds as much verity for our descendants as we hold now for ourselves, and as our ancestors held for themselves in the past. Behold, there is only one Law, in Nature as in ourselves. Says Emerson "... this thought I ... is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me" (The Transcendentalist). I am nothing if not a fixture of this Cosmos, honed and fashioned out of It, to only merge back into It. What works in me is a single line from the whole composition, my tune a momentary vibration, a flutter, across the mouthpiece of Nature. In this form, we cannot encompass the whole. But neither too can the diameter encompass the circle, but is a necessary part. Filled with this "wax", we make a part into the whole in our consciousness. Take sight and behold the Spirit in All: you shall not encompass It for It encompasses you. Don't become distracted, don't succumb to chance, the vicissitudes of Fortune or Fate, don't persevere to see only the droplet when a great storm rushes toward you --, but only a presentiment in the reflection of this single portion. Our Poet, with Him we part with an admonition

will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable? Soon these improvements and mechanical inventions will be superseded; these modes of living lost out of memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new seats of trade, or the geologic changes: -- all gone, like the shells which sprinkle the seabeach with a white colony to-day, forever renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as by speech, not only by what they did, but what they forbore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 -- 1882)
from The Transcendentalist (1841)

William James on the Future (of) Philosophy

2007-12-09T16:27:00.000-08:00

After we gather together the fragments of mankind's increasingly detailed knowledge of the universe, sometime far in the future, we can hope to have a coordinated system of understanding. With this in hand, and in sight, we hope -- the Hope of Civilization: let there be a vast Glass Bead Game of knowledge, playing and training and apprenticing one with another to see, from out among the vast detail, a great Mosaic, the Whole. We will, let us hope, then have come home again.

In its original acceptation, meaning the completest knowledge of the universe, philosophy must include the results of all the sciences, and cannot be contrasted with the latter. It simply aims at making of science what Herbert Spencer calls a 'system of completely unified knowledge'. In the more modern sense, of something contrasted with the sciences, philosophy means 'metaphysics'. The older sense is the more worthy sense, and as the results of the sciences get more available for co-ordination, and the conditions for finding truth in different kinds of question get more methodically defined, we may hope that the term will revert to its original meaning. Science, metaphysics, and religion may then again form a single body of wisdom, and lend each other mutual support.
At present this hope is far from its fulfillment.

William James (1842 - 1910)
from Some Problems of Philosophy (posthumously published, 1911)
in William James: The Essential Writings (ed. by Wilshire, 1984)

Forthcoming, A Union: Science, Metaphysics and Religion

2007-12-09T14:29:00.000-08:00

Increasingly, we are a distracted civilization. Increasingly, we are a divided people. Our attentions, collectively and individually, seem to be spread over more things or events each day. Not much room for quietude; not much incentive for concentration; not much hope for contemplation. The flame within is blown out by the windy conflagration without. I have nothing, they have it all.

We are nothing if divided; we are dead if cleaved from the Whole. But what source might we go to for this unitary vision? In William James we find hope in philosophy; but a philosophy renewed, a philosophy holding in its sight the Whole again. The dream -- perhaps an ecstatic vision, or a dark presentiment -- of philosophy was to exact greater and deeper precision, to focus onto all of the many aspects of Nature to know Her and comprehend her infinite detail. We have seen the course of philosophy diverted as a giant river into many basins or reservoirs, emptying itself immeasurably into this or that problem or question. We have seen the establishment of a great many well-founded Lakes, and sunbathers upon Her many shores. The great land that is now nourished by these oases stands still parched, between the one Lake and another -- still there be dessert to traverse from one part to another. Great distances must be covered for those who seek enchantment at Her warm banks. Upon arrival, the pilgrim finds great refreshment; the soul thinks itself to be now, at last, enchanted. But even here, there can only be a momentary rejuvenation, for no sooner than one takes rest, another and another quickly follows. The Lake is small; the water soaked up by each poor, thirsty soul. The enchantment lifts. It is soon time to find another oasis; the desert beckons. Along the journey, the soul finds a look-out hill, a fortunate elevation above the ordinary trek down on the desert's belly. What is seen is a frightful sight: no end, many Lakes, much distance from one to the next. The world is uncreated, eternal, unending -- ancient words bleating in this Soul's memory under the white-hot sun.

The Two Views: A Sermon

2007-12-06T09:19:00.000-08:00

In every era, after mankind had acquired more time to ponder and consider his Place in Nature (or, what is the same: when he came into possession of such notions), there arises two opposing philosophies, or moral struggles. We may simply call them two views. On the one view, we have the passion and burning desire to return to the course of Nature, to step back into Heraclitus's river, to give up the "understanding" of things, the "knowledge" of this or that. We step backward from the Garden, into the Divine womb: this is the Book of Genesis in reverse, as it were. "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil". We are wont, in this passional mood of un-birthing ourselves to ourselves, to undo this knowledge of good and evil, to undo the distinction "man and woman", to undo our "godliness" or our perfection -- for such notions bespeak of the mind broken and lost and loosed from Nature. We are not wont to return to God; we want a full reversal. We want an aboriginal participation. The temptation of Eve -- the female principle -- and of Adam -- the male principle -- was the original thought of man to himself to break from Nature, god being the Intellect's name for Her. It was the temptation that nature always presents to man: domination of Her, by an act of the rational will, with the thought of "self" and "other", of "thing" and "person". On the other view, we have a dispassionate quietude, a resting with the flow and course of mankind's sapience, in the wooden prose of the Academicians, in the dry discoveries and deliberations of the Scientists; or, if we look not too high and strain to see the heights of human knowledge and disciplined inquiry, we may find a certain dispassionate acceptance of the flow of things amongst the ordinary folk, quite contented with this or that new thing, diverted here and then there (everywhere someday) by this or that person or remark or sign-post of the money-changers. Ships adrift, sometimes seeing a frightful storm first looming in the distance then raising fury all about, and then dissolving back into the ordinary course of things, from whence it came. Back on the ship; shovel coal to keep the steam; rest, die, back to the ocean. Or ants on a hill, back and forth to the Queen's Lair, happily or cursedly bringing the good of the Whole on their backs. Cogs turning, sometimes well-oiled, sometimes too frictional. Sometimes this, or sometimes that. The questions of things or persons remaining always with them. The labyrinths of "if" caught in the chambers of "then", encased in the Mind's cloudy Eye -- each droplet of the cloud being another object of the senses, or an aggregation of them into a "view". But should this Eye look at Her, what can we have? Our Poet said "but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of understanding", or earlier: "the savant becomes unpoetic", for the Whole is lost to this cloudy Organ of sight, which now sees only the empirical rays of the whole spiritual Sun.
All acts of the conceptual mind, staying its course among the "things" or the "subjects" and "objects" or the "facts" and "values", are deliberate acts, and are made not to raise the Spirit of man to the heights of Nature Herself, but only to suffer his Soul to the Image it makes from the concept of Her. This Image-of-Nature thinks itself at once humble, for it is wary of its fallibility, and also is filled with hubris, for it has no sense of its original relation to Her. If the Image does not sing, then Nature does not. If the Image does not bespeak of Intelligence or Spirit, then Nature does not. I raise my hands to the empirical Light of this Image, and cast further shadows on the wall, the marionettes of Reason. But my act is only one-half of the play, for I have mastered a "penny-wisdom", as the Poet says, "meantime in the thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a better light", those whose play is complete. For if our "reasons" for things, the delight of the half-witted empiric, stay amongst the things -- the air and light, the sinews and bones -- "but to say that it is because of them that I do what I am doing, and not through the choice of what it best ... would be ... very lax" as our Greek Sage warns -- then we have lost our enchantment of the Whole. We are a broken thing, we are Adam departed from Eve, lost amidst "good" or "evil", this or that.
The philosopher of the Image, The Old Empiric, wants to curtail judgment, dissuade speculative systems, wean "our mind from all those prejudices which we may have imbibed from education or rash opinion", cautiously and skillfully raze the crowded City of Knowledge to the ground, and build anew, "to advance by timorous and sure steps, to review frequently our conclusions and examine accurately all their consequences -- though by these means we shall make both a slow and a short progress in our systems -- are the only methods by which we can ever hope to reach truth and attain a proper stability and certainty in our determinations" writes Hume. Yes, train well your marionette show; discipline the hand that moves before the empirical Light and throws off a good and accurate presentiment in the shadows. But the second act awaits.
The Empiric, who now turns the Image onto itself, asks: whence the Image? Only imaginations may follow upon the thought of this unknowing soul, adrift on the frozen sea of understanding. Yes, indeed, Idealism shows us where this skeptical quandary leads. But all of this is just an idle spectacle, wooden to our hungry and blood-soaked hearts. If it be a "foundation" that these hoary speculators seek, then it is nothing if not the foundation of all. The soil that births the seed that gives flower, never lets either depart; this is the eternal consummation. "And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder", admonished the Prophet; the divorce that the Empiric seeks is allowed but "for the hardness of your heart".
This deliberation of the soul-empiric is a slow-acting poison. It collapses Nature; it draws out her breath in us. It fills our books and our musings with itself only; its hopeful sail draws near only to an isolated island, decays, and leaves the soul to founder in the icy waters of despair, wanting to go home from whence it departed long ago. When, for a moment, the fog lifts -- "Reason's momentary grasp of the scepter" said He -- and our wonder returns, and we take sight of our home in the distance, we can only swell with the poet's song, the philosopher's respectful gaze. But, as the empirical deliberation returns, and we look out of the port-hole, we see the quiet moon -- but it is a doubt. We must probe; our vision becomes a scrutiny. We turn the moon into paper; into summands and sum. "Mythos" and "Theoria" then arise, cleaved one from the other. To divide, measure and conceive; to number and catalog. A miniature repast is delivered to the ravenous soul by Theoria, magnified and made a challenge by the tools of the table. Its full life now halved, Mythos now stands breathless and mute before the feeding soul. The variety of the dishes occupies the soul, but no sight of the Good be found among its delights. Its detail and display has bereaved her of a sight of the Whole. We welcome all to the table, and soon all is with food. A celebration arises, though it be adventitious. But it is without Music to coordinate each soul to the other; there is only the cacophony of tool to plate; the questions of "what is there?" or "how much is there" or "can I have a trifle more" play a momentary tune for this feast.
The only challenge is to leave the small feast for a great Banquet. The evening of our repast gives itself over to the morning of the Eternal Feast.

Facts about the whole vs. the morality of the parts: Alan Greenspan vs. Naomi Kelin

2007-12-01T07:53:00.000-08:00

Let me comment on a very puzzling and sometimes disturbing interview between Amy Goddman (of Democracy Now!) and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan and noted investigative journalist Naomi Klein. (I ask you: Please watch the interview or read the transcript first).

Alan Greenspan is the voice of the American Economic Structure; his eye is focused on the Whole. And the predicates he thinks in terms of are statistical and are not the qualities or properties of individual cases. His mind has been trained to see morality in deeply consequentialist terms; but he must also formulate judgments and opinions now that are dependent upon the predictable (or supposedly foreseen) future consequences of present-day policies. The moral calculus used to evaluate the rightness or wrongness of a particular doctrine, or social/economic policy, is whether, of the Whole, wealth and "prosperity" increase or decrease (the former: good, the latter: bad). Our Great Moral Statistician, or what is the same, Our Mindful Statistical Social Philosopher, sees it that there will always be unavoidable inequality (social & economic), corruption, wasteful spending, ... the usual litany of social and political and economic maladies of our contemporary age. And of course, as a statistical matter, we can certainly expect this claim to be more or less true. And so, the great Consequentialist Economist -- or philosopher of the Statistics of the Whole -- must (justifiably on this view) turn a blinded eye to the individual, and do what's right for the Whole (that sacrosanct object of moral inquiry). Thus Greenspan: "the type of globalized economy that I support has taken hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It’s created a standard of living throughout the world which is unprecedented in history. And to assume that that is something we should be apologizing for, I find, is wholly inappropriate" (transcript of a dual interview by Amy Goodman with Greenspan and Klein). Our Philosopher has his eye clearly trained on the Whole -- not our Nation, but, in keeping with the logical progression of his Statistical Philosophy, the aggregation of all nations, that is, a "Global Economy" (which, for the purposes of this reductive economic philosophy, is all that a nation amounts to). And the "global economy", by the utilitarian-consequentialist calculus, has created a higher standard of living because economic prosperity has been increased (again, for the whole). We must ask, though: does the mere existence of a higher standard of living (supposing we grant him his utilitarian logic) imply a better ("global") world, or does the actual distribution of the wealth matter too? Suppose that most of this newly generated wealth exists in the hands of the fewest -- the situation we now face globally -- does this, which is indeed a situation of greater world wealth, imply that the world is better? Does the mere fact that there is more wealth mean the we are the better for it?

And here is the crux of the issue: it might certainly be true, as a matter of statistics, that there is more wealth in the world, but this is compatible with the fact that this wealth is disproportionately distributed throughout that world. And this is, at present, a fact about the Whole, our whole: most of the world's wealth is locked into increasingly fewer hands, so that any potential prosperity is not enjoyed by the majority (aside from the deeper moral question, a question not about the statistical distribution of money, or the "economic prosperity" on the Whole, but a question about the happiness of the individual within the Whole: why measure happiness, or presume to define the "good", in monetary or material terms?).

So, our Professor of Statistics, and of cold Utilitarian Calculus, cannot avoid a moral consideration of the parts: both the individual human beings upon which the Whole depends for its very existence, and the quality of life implied by the conditions of economic, financial, social and political inequality -- such conditions being perfectly consistent with pure utilitarian and consequentialist logic. But, our Philosopher seems to think it a virtue when he can easily gloss over these mere details; he is sadly happy to cast his eye from the teardrop of the individual to the Ocean of the Whole, the system that promises great Happiness, on the Whole. Our great sufferings are supposed to be allayed by a great refreshing tidal wave of capital, flowing into and over the Whole.

And here lies the heart of the dispute, and the difference in logics, between Naomi Klein and Alan Greenspan. Klein's eye is on corrupt individuals (or aggregations of them) in the various departments of our Government, whereas Greenspan's mind already assumes that very corruption and asks what is the best that can be done (best: the greatest on, and for, the Whole) despite that (unavoidable and inescapable) condition, from which all political structures do suffer. Klein is consistently worried about not merely what the present conditions imply for the Whole (now or in the future), but also what present conditions, and those of the immediate past, imply for individuals now and in the future within the Whole. Klein's moral compass is not magnetized by the Statistical Considerations of a mere aggregation of human beings who are to be considered merely as cogs in a great Economic System -- for Greenspan borders on a terrible reduction of the individual to his or her socio-economic function -- Klein is, rather, motivated by a dual concern: the Whole considered only insofar as it is comprised of, and dependent upon, intrinsically valuable individuals. She is first moved by injustices against the individual, and the general sufferings of individuals within flawed social structures. For Klein, our Moral Eye for the Individual, these structures are justified, and hence may exist in their present forms, only if human individuals are being treated on the whole fairly and justly. If there are great individual injustices, or if there are great inequalities among aggregations of individuals, then the System must be re-structured accordingly. This is not merely a consideration, in Klein's mind, of whether or not, statistically understood, there are great quantities of injustice or inequality. It is also the nature of those injustices and inequalities themselves which are of paramount concern. The concerns of individuals trump the concerns of the Whole; so, we must subjugate that act of forming a judgment of the Whole to the moral realities of the Individual -- and the very invocation of utilitarian-consequentialist premises in social and economic and political matters is therefore beholden to the moral centrality of the One.

Klein, in the view offered here, assumes that we must judge the Whole both from the point of view of the Individual and the quality -- not necessarily measured in purely monetary or material terms -- of existence for the Individual within that Whole. For we must inevitably face -- so seems to be the implication of Klein's thought -- the practical reality that our predictions and hope for the Whole must always begin with the individual, in conjunction with our best instruments of knowledge (Science & Reason). And since it's the individual who always, whether in isolation or in tandem with an aggregation of individuals, must make this determination in the first place, yet we are always prone to error or misconceived notions or philosophies that might cloud our interpretations of the facts, it will inevitably follow that our judgments prove wrong or misguided or otherwise off the mark. And Klein takes it as her task to show that our previous judgments, or the judgments and pronouncements of our Philosophers of Statistics, have indeed proved wrong, or have indeed lead to the opposite sort of Whole World envisioned in their philosophies.

Despite the sophistication of Greenspan's knowledge, and abilities of reasoning, Klein's is a necessary corrective to the imbalanced logic of a utilitarian-consequentialist philosopher of the Whole. I applaud her work and her personal dedication.

"No Country for Old Men"

2007-11-13T12:09:00.000-08:00

Allow me a moment to muse on the Cohen Brothers' new, and terribly moving, film "No Country For Old Men". I have not seen it more than once as of this writing, so my comments must be taken, until I can further view the film, as preliminary. Be that as it may, I was at first shocked by the graphic nature of the violence depicted in the film, but then, having realized that what makes reality also should make for art, I allowed that initial feeling to pass and now make an attempt to bring into relief its deep vision.

Chance or "the vicissitudes of fortune", moral character, and what makes the difference between good and evil (or the nature of "the good") seem to be the prominent themes in "No County". Why "no country for old men", though? From the opening sequence & monologue (I think it was spoken by either the Sheriff or else his brother, whom we meet in a final, chilling, eerie and powerful scene), we get a contrast between the "old timers" and their ways and those of the present (roughly put). (This, indeed, seemed to be something of what was going on in the scene with the Sheriff & his brother.) What do the old timers, then, represent, but the "wisdom of the ages" or the knowledge that can overcome the "perpetual turning of fortune's wheel" (to borrow a phrase from Aristotle's treatise Nicomachean Ethics). There are, seemingly, eternal verities to be gleaned from the "old timer's" and their "old ways", verities often at odds with the brute chanciness or contingency we face in every moment of the present. Every move into the future brings chance, and hence our demise, right to the contours of our skin.
The virtuous man, the Ancients teach us, is that man who, by the light of his own reasoned will can overcome his nature, or turn from his inborn course to the moral life, holding in his mind and guided by the "right principle" (as Aristotle writes in Nicomachean Ethics, book II, sec. ii). That is, the moral life is the one directed or captained -- a ship steered away from a stormy pass -- and one that does not operate by the mere turns of nature herself, or which is not a slave to chance or pure natural contingency. "What is good without qualification?", Kant asks in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, "it is a good will" he replies. And a will is that which is the source of volition, those acts we choose. But no one, assumes the greats, can be good without the exercise and possession of an autonomous will. "You don't have to do what you're going to do", indeed, is often the cry, as Anton himself tells us, of those he kills. If Anton is human -- a sapient creature (with reason) -- then it is his freedom that makes him a monster, in the eyes of his victims, as well as for the Ancients and their moral philosophies. At another moment, we are told that Anton has, indeed, "principles" but ones that are "above" ours (that is, above the ordinary man who is bound to feel compassion for another). For the Ancients, yes, nature has principle, but is blind. "Chance is blind", goes the old adage, and nature is chancy. If Anton has principle, his is blind.
If we take Anton to represent Fate, then it is ourselves, constantly subjected to It, who complain, "but it doesn't have to be like this"; or, I am not bound by the forces of nature, chance, for I might transcend them with the exercise of my will. I -- humankind -- can attain true knowledge and then (only then) might an escape from Nature's clutches be effected. Man, with Science and Law and Government, can, by the operation of his intellect, circumvent or delay you, Anton (Fate). And this is justice: to right a wrong, to correct an evil, to interfere in the course of nature and impose a reasoned judgment. But, as the film so wonderfully implies, is this not a fool's gambit? No one, not even Anton -- the symbol of Fate, incarnate in a man -- can avoid the turning of Fortune's Wheel, chance. Thus, Anton suffers fate -- a crash -- but still pushes forward, not derailed by its power or grip -- for it is momentary in its suddenness, the ordinary course of things quickly falling back into place. But yet Anton remains outside of the grasp of the Law (our wry but profoundly concerned Sheriff).
What are we to do in light of this realization? Are we, then, slaves to Fate or Fortune or Chance? Do we always see Anton just looming in the horizon, a shadowy figure lurking about, seeking our eventual -- our inevitable -- demise? Do we exercise our wisdom, our capacity for reason, to make right choices all for naught? And the harder question: can we overcome Anton (the Sheriff -- the Law -- failing, in his dream and his waking life, to capture Anton). Or, rather, are we to be like the Sheriff in the end: not so much as failing in his quest (for we cannot fail at what is impossible to achieve) as a quiet, knowing yet contented, resignation to the realities of Fate or Fortune. We leave the Sheriff in a humble, yet certain and sagacious, retirement into Old Age (should Fortune be so kind). Perhaps, now their being "no country for old men" -- no where to be for those resigned to the reality of Chance but where you always were, in your life -- we simply enter our place among the "old timers", among the Ancients (or "Ancestors", as the Daoist sage Zhuangzi might laughingly say).
We, finally, embrace Chance for it is in us.

philosophy of the moment, philosophy of the Spirit

2007-10-21T12:24:00.000-07:00

Look fast around you, seeker of Wisdom. All around is the moment, but the moment is shaped by the Spirit and the Spirit by the moment. What beautiful harmony? Hegel says,

Men do not, at certain epochs, merely philosophize in general, for there is a definite philosophy which arises among a people; the definite character of the standpoint of thought permeates all other historical sides of the spirit of the people. The particular form of a philosophy is thus contemporaneous with a particular constitution of a people amongst whom it makes its appearance. With their institutions and forms of government, their morality, their social life and the capabilities, customs, and enjoyments of the same; it is so with their attempts and achievements in arts and sciences, with their religions, warfares, and external relationships; likewise with the decadence of the states in which this particular principle and form had maintained its supremacy, and with the origination and progress of new states in which a higher principle finds its manifestation and development. Geist in each case has elaborated and expanded in the whole domain of its manifold nature the principle of the particular stage of self-consciousness to which it has attained. Thus, the Geist of a people in its richness is an organization, and like a cathedral, is divided into numerous vaults, passages, pillars, and vestibules, all of which have proceeded out of one whole and are directed towards one end. Philosophy is one form of these many aspects. And which is is? Is it the fullest blossom, the "Concept" of Geist in its entire form, the consciousness and conscience of all things, the living reality of the time in connection with a temporal world present to itself. The multifarious whole is reflected in it as in the single focus, in the "Concept" which knows "himself" ... this is the position of philosophy amongst its varying forms, from which it follows that it is entirely identical with its time. But if philosophy does not stand above its time in content, it does so in form, because, as the thought and knowledge of that which is the living value-content of its time, it makes that Geist its object.

Saemmtliche Werke, XVII, 84-6
Trans. by Prof. G. E. Mueller (1959)

nihilism in analytic philosophy, or "Sudokophizing"

2007-10-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

You know, we should really gather together those fellow travelers and found our own place of life and learning. We should do that. But this requires strength and resilience. I'm often too sapped to get up the muster. Institutions are almost always suffocating. So the gathering together can't be a gathering together. But, there is still the gathering together. It begins with the roots, to the fruits, as James has said and as you always remind us. The roots must grow deeply, to fruit well. But there is as much time growing the roots as for there to be the tree and its fruit. "Sudokophy" cannot deeply nourish the roots. It is mere gaming, play of thought uprooted and parched. With this we step out of our student's life and seduce them into life shaded by the alienating specter of Descartes. To this extent, we are disingenuous to our students. That pains me deeply. Evermore now as the sky is deeply gray, hung heavy with warm humid air this far into Autumn. Sudokophy is a gray expanse of cloud hung between spirit and thought, only narrow shafts of light can make it past its grids and forms and coordinates, never the full light of Sun. But yet, as we force them into Sudokophy, we normalize, equalize. The specter of Descartes is the handmaiden of the Product, object-to-be-bought. The allure? To tinker, to play, to occupy for a moment (but many to be occupied by), even if we engage our reflection. We can turn our Reason down into the world and scrutinize, reflect even, but it is a turning-away-from, for a thinking thing has thus lost its own ground as being-of-the-world. Our Sudokophy is reflection on a surface; it is a turning-away-from our selves. It is a perpetual avoidance, to be caught in the labyrinth of Sudokophizing. It is comfortable to play the Sudokophy, with its "concepts" and its "it follows that"-ness. It follows that all the way down to oblivion. As professor Wilshire writes, "Detachment kills immediacy of involvement, and its sustenance and sap. Kills our kinship with plants and animals, and our ecstatic oneness with sky, mountain, sun, wind, bird, and native peoples. Insofar as this is the case, analytic philosophy is nihilistic" (2002, p. 15).

Kant and eternal peace

2007-10-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

It struck me to tears that one of our Enlightenment forefathers had this to say about eternal peace, which glows with such relevance for our Modern World. Never disregard the Greats.

The narrower or wider community of all nations on earth has in fact progressed so far that a violation of law and right in one place is felt in all others. Hence the idea of a cosmopolitan or world law is not a fantastic and utopian way of looking at law, but a necessary completion of the unwritten code of constitutional and international law to make it a public law of mankind. Only under this condition can we flatter ourselves that we are continually approaching eternal peace.

But, should my tears be of joy or sadness?

a world of common values

2007-10-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

I am always struck to tears when some of our intellectual forefathers ring with such wisdom. The Enlightenment has been criticized for many things (colonialism, the hegemony of science, fetishizing science itself, and so on). But what bothers me the most is the often broad-brushed criticism of the Enlightenment's goal of discovering, and preserving (in books, societies, states -- in civilization), "eternal values", values which are supposed to be relevant to all humankind everywhere. Whether or not, as a matter of philosophical speculation, such things as "value" exist, what form it has, and whether there could be universal values at all is one question. Enlightenment thinkers thought they could come up with a philosophical account here that would provide solid epistemological soil in which such values could find rational cultivation and healthy growth. That is one project to which much 20th century skepticism and theorizing has been devoted to proving wrong. Nowadays, it seems that many are convinced that there are no universal, or even objective, values. It's all local, disconnected value. But, the more I read the Ancients (of many disparate cultures), and the more I read the thinkers of the Western Enlightenment, and the more I ponder on the founding principles of modern states, the more I think that all of this criticism is quite misplaced, and confused. I think there are, as a matter of historical fact, values shared by human beings in all cultures. I don't have, nor need, a prior notion of what a value is to know it when I see it (just like good art). Nor do I need a general account of science in order to know good science from bad science; in a like manner, I don't need a general theory of ethics to tell me when a society or single individual goes wrong. You can find a handful of basic values shared by The Buddha, Job, Christ, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Ramakrishna, Gandhi, Dr. King, The Dalai Lama and so on. One is eternal peace, for all humankind everywhere. Surely, not all these souls practiced their sermons -- for they were all fallible human beings.

However, the failings of a single individual, or all individuals always, doesn't demonstrate that there isn't a common value shared by all, or by all humankind, or that values aren't universal, or objective, and so on. Nor, since in each of their respective cultures were there a great variety of human practices in play, does a variety of cultural differences tell for or against the commonality of some set of values. The sheer diversity of thinkers who share a set of common values alone demonstrates, by enumeration, that common values exist. So then it becomes a datum for which any theory of value, or any skeptical position, must account for. Furthermore, even though they might not actually be employed by the religious or spiritual hierarchies of which each of these figures may be a part, or even common to their large socio-cultural contexts, these values are indeed present. That is what "eternal" means here: always present.

But of course, this is mythic: it's hard to argue that, say, pre-Neolithic civilizations had them (a paucity of written documents) or that this applies to every kind of civilization (for roughly, there are nomadic peoples, sedentary peoples, and mixtures of the two) always. But this needn't be the crucial matter here, since we are concerned with our present civilization, going back about three of four thousand years. These values, from the perspective I'm adopting here, are likely the result of larger social and political, environmental and cultural, forces in tandem with the ways in which human beings tend to be reared, and hence how human beings develop into sophisticated thinking/self-reflecting, creatures in more or less sedentary, hierarchically arranged societies. So what I point to as a "value" is a mere abstraction from much structural detail. But the abstraction is a gesture of thought that attempts to get at some truth. We can use our fingers to gesture at the moon, but lest we confuse the finger pointing to the moon pointed to, then we shouldn't be concerned that we have a mere abstraction. As for the reality of value, I can only recommend a life to you!

So, indeed, these values are highly contingent, to some degree "subjective", but they are also objective, and can be described and reported on objectively; and they are universal, to the extent to which certain human beings, under certain conditions will articulate these values (the theory of "logical types" put forward by Russell but deepened by Bateson is the epistemological framework I have in mind here. Where be Metaphysics, you ask me? Let me simply let you live, I reply).

Wisdom, if it can be said, has this feature to it: it is the verbal result of certain individual, psychological patterns of responding to certain larger socio-cultural forces or pressures. It is simply vocalizing a response to the larger quandaries, miseries and ailments of the consciousness of a society at a particular moment in time. Just as an individual is likely to scream when grasping a red-hot coal, so too is the society likely to scream out in response to damaging conditions -- and some can give voice, eloquent voice and discourse, to that pain, the pain of their people. This is the Buddha, Christ, Dr. King, Yogananda, The Dalai Lama, ....

Therefore, we must not commit the common mistake of regarding values as necessarily either objective or subjective, or either universal or local. Both these dichotomies miss a lot of actual, factual, details, not to mentioned a lived reality. Values can be both universal (in form, I think of poetry or poetic philosophy -- a "divine madness" or shamanic vision or a rishi's glimpse) and local (in content or interpretation, given expression in a particular language in a particular culture); they can be contingent (arising at a particular moment in time, and due to highly particular socio-cultural facts) and objective (a response to certain objective structural features of a society or civilization, like war, famine, general strife). After all, we are a single species, with a common set of individual structural features (brains, language, locomotion, personalities, tendencies for pleasure/pain, and so on). It seems likely that certain normative patterns (values) emerge, and that independently of that, certain global societal features (tendency for wars, hording of resources, selfish behavior, etc.) arise out of those patterns, which in turn allows for a set of common values to arise in response to that (non-hurting, universal peace, the salvation for all suffering creatures everywhere) along with a diversity of interpretations of those values (salvation by force, salvation by choice, etc.).

But again, "value" and the structural features of our lived-in reality (our being-in and of-the-world) which we might term "fact" aren't dichotomous. That which we term "value" is itself intimately and interdependently part of the structural features wherein we find, as aspects of various levels of abstract generalization (given in language), bodies, thoughts, movements, societies, cultures, .... Thus "value" is an aspect of the interdependent structural whole. In this sense, the very notion of "objective" as opposed to "subjective" is absurd, an irrelevant analytical question.

critical theory and 'theory' in the Postmodernist's sense

2007-10-05T18:20:00.000-07:00

There is a widespread use of the term 'theory' in the academy, not all of which is sound. It would help clear thinking to respect a distinction between 'theory' in the scientific sense, as opposed to 'theory' in the critical or Postmodern 'theorist's' sense. As for the latter two, Heidegger comes close to a good definition when he is trying to distinguish a "scientific" anthropology from a "philosophic" type:

The name "anthropology" as used here [in the essay "The Age of the World Picture"] does not mean just some investigation of man by a natural science [which treats man as the object of inquiry, made by a subject, a man in particular who is supposed to be representing a class of which he is a member]. Nor does it mean the doctrine established within Christian theology of man created, fallen, and redeemed. It designates that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man.

And in an appendix (no. 10, p. 153) in the same essay, Heidegger writes further that

Anthropology is that interpretation of man that already knows fundamentally what man is and hence can never ask who he may be [as with an inquiry which treats man as an object would, and does in fact, do -- such as with modern science]. For with this question it would have to confess itself shaken and overcome. But how can this be expected of anthropology when the latter has expressly to achieve nothing less than the securing consequent upon the self-secureness of the subiectum [the 'subject', as in Descartes' egoic cogito, self-inquiring into reality, but only through a representation -- an 'idea' beholden unto the cogito -- after which that reality must be established with certainty].

So, in modern science, the term 'theory' designates a mode of discourse wherein objects are inquired into from the point of view of a mute, and altogether absent, subject. Reality is thus a re-presentation to the subject of inquiry; reality therefore, in the relational mode of knowing, is "objectivized" or "objectified" (see "The Age of the World Picture", 1977, trans. by Professor Lovitt, p. 126 -- 133). But, as in critical theory or postmodernist theories, such a relational knowing becomes the "object" of critical scrutiny, and thus the entire mode of discourse itself is in danger of imploding, of collapsing into incoherence. Moreover, the attempt, with this faddish style of 'theory' or 'theorizing', is made to reveal the humanity or historical-embeddedness of the subject behind the objective scientific theorizing. But, if the point of view of this theorizing is supposed to be one where the subject already knows of himself as subject or where we are already supposed to know what we the inquirers are or how we as inquiring beings really do our inquiring (fallibly and imperfectly), then we have not a 'theory' (which presupposes the subject-object distinction) but "a philosophical interpretation of man which explains whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man" (ibid.).

you

2007-09-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

Don't do anything at all except without purpose. Don't schedule, don't "book" someone "in", don't "like", don't be "nice", there's no "whatever" to anything, there's no "quality time", there's no "efficiency", there are no "itineraries" or "agendas", there is no "marketing", there is no "selling" of yourself or its marketing either. Stop. Listen. Contemplate. Go. Move. Don't forget to look up. Hold, silently. Quietude. Weep spontaneously. A sunbeam, a starry night; wind drifting though the leaves at night and then nothing. That's all. Parting. Death. And Life.

real philosophy

2007-09-19T19:54:00.000-07:00

I have been struggling recently with many ideas, ideologies and academic fumes. I have serious misgivings about ideas, ideologies and academia. But I remain more convinced than ever that there are a couple of universal principles around which ordinary good lives are organized, and by which they flourish. One is simplicity. Another is unbounded and cultivated compassion, where one meditates on the virtue, and implements the practice, of the replacement of self with others. Yet another is a method of disciplined detachment from views. Finally, there is the virtue of struggle, to find and engender and cultivate beneficial struggle where you must truly endure hardship and resistance in order to build deep human, and humane, meaning. It's the kind of deep meaning that gets into your bones and that flows through your mind and out through your hands. Growth is pain; real philosophy means real growth and inner change, and so real philosophy is painful. Not many philosophers seem to have realized this; Wittgenstein, I think, was one. I can do no better on this score than to quote Berman's understanding of this playing out in Wittgenstein's work and life (from Berman's 2000 piece, Wandering God):

"Real philosophy, Wittgenstein wrote to Rush Rhees in 1944, involves a willingness to change one's own pet notions, as well as one's life. As such, it is nasty and disagreeable. (Note that we are not a la Joseph Campbell, 'following our bliss' here or making our lives into heroic dramas; quite the opposite.) 'And when it's nasty,' he wrote to his American colleague, Norman Malcom, 'then it's most important.' 'You can't think decently,' said Wittgenstein, 'if you don't want to hurt yourself.' It is not, then, that reality is no more than a text and can be made, in the manner of Derrida, to disappear in this way; that would just be cheating, in Wittgenstein's view. Rather, you make reality "disappear" by merging into it; by living in such a way that the problems of that reality cease to be problematic. 'In a way that is centrally important but difficult to define,' writes Ray Monk [Wittgenstein's recent biographer], 'he had lived a deeply religious life'." (p. 202)

I would write "spiritual" in place of "religious" in Ray Monk's description of Wittgenstein's life, for there should be a distinction between the religious (which can be happy in mere ritual and drunk on doctrine) and the spiritual (which cannot be happy with mere ritual or doctrine, and which is won only with great pain and suffering, and which rests calmly and dispassionately outside of ritual, doctrine and belief). I think a similar distinction can be made between academia and the intellectual, the former more properly being "religious" while the latter more properly being "spiritual". Indeed, this might not, I fear, be mere analogy -- it might be downright isomorphism. The religious academe, like Derrida, is basically a priest of the house of fragmented disenchanted worshippers looking for an escape, but only landing in more verbal morass. It's religion without spirit; empty form; the hollow figures of Eliot's wasteland.

The real philosophers are hidden behind our waking dreams of "real life"; they are steeped in struggle and conflict, sighted wanderers amidst blind, motionless leaders climbing into an endless and desolate and fantastical escape.

the basic problem

2007-09-18T15:09:00.000-07:00

As a civilization we are, to quote Neil Postman following writer Edna St. Vincent Millay, without a “loom to weave facts into fabric, people with no gods to serve, hollow and anxious, distrusting language, uncertain about even the most obvious features of reality, lacking conviction, suspicious of truth” (Building A Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, 1999, p. 9).

Here's how Millay puts it:

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts ... they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.
(Huntsman, What Quarry? as quoted in Postman 1999, p. 9)

capitalism and democracy

2007-09-18T09:44:00.000-07:00

Naomi Klein, famed social critic and investigative journalist, is going to be discussing her new book The Shock Doctrine which argues that, contrary to the arguments of economists and thinkers like Nobel-laureate Milton Freedman, capitalism and democracy are often radically at odds (Naomi Klein in DC). The dominant ideology on this score is that capitalism enhances and perfects democracy (or what is worse, is somehow necessary for its proper function), whereas Klein's study purports to show that, in fact, despite theorists' beliefs, the "free market" ideology that's supposed to be central to capitalism has usually been forced on a society in a time when it's most vulnerable and confused -- that is, when the society has undergone the equivalent of a "shock" treatment. As Klein points out, shock treatment was popular in the early days of psychiatry and remains the single most effective treatment for certain mental illnesses. But the CIA and the US military, as Klein notes, noticed that there's also another use: since shock treatment effectively reduces people to momentarily child-like mental conditions, people under such conditions can be psychologically manipulated for various purposes (interrogation and torture being primary). Indeed, if the treatment is severe enough, there seems to be evidence that a person's mental life can be significantly re-worked. What is true for the individual can also be true for the body-politic. Her main argument is that the historical evidence shows that it's only in times of societal crisis and shock that "free market" socio-political policies are implemented by governments, and then only with bursts of military force and violence, causing widespread social unrest and resistance.

If this forced ideology of "free markets" is all that capitalism amounts to, and if it's only by force that a free market society can be wrought, then a democracy so forged is built on its opposite. And so, democracy here flourishes only after the body-politic is subjugated and oppressed and its ideal of life, liberty and happiness has been broken and stained. As some general once said, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it".

advice to the counselor

2007-09-09T07:40:00.000-07:00

"... Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words."

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (p. 54, Norton: 1934/2004)
trans. by M.D. Herther Norton

Never forget these words, even as the most exalted or masterful or profound teachers voice their teachings to you, for the deepest teaching is the aboriginal identity of teacher, teaching and the taught.

"go it alone", or how a civilization declines

2007-08-21T02:21:00.000-07:00

With the increasing fragmentation of modern life, and the associated diffusion of concern (social, moral, spiritual, and so on) into fewer and fewer capable hands doing the concerning for us (I would say that now, with the increasingly vertical-hierarchical social structures we have paralyzing most of the globe, almost all concern is wielded by corporate marketing engines, or spread-out over increasingly degenerate governmental agencies and bureaus), we get, not surprisingly, a loss of basic human compassion and charity between human beings and their larger communities (which in turn adds to a total loss of compassion and charity between the human being and its State). The mantra here is "it's not my responsibility; that is somebody else's job; it is surely the duty of somebody; it is the duty of the individual; let them take care of themselves" and so on, as the mantra gradually morphs from an assertion of the mere existence of a responsibility between two "other" human beings (never reflexively, of course, is the assertion understood) to the claim that each individual takes care of that individual. Moral and social atomism in the extreme. Is there supposed to be a "responsibility" that compels me to act on behalf of another human being? I thought I made that decision -- I thought the individual acts on behalf of other individuals automatically in the first instance, until the needs of others are met. Will this not imply, if each individual applies it to those around her, a community acting on every one's behalf, rather than on behalf of themselves? Or, am I supposed to think this absurd, because inevitably each individual is, in the first instance, selfishly motivated?

Of course, this dialectic can go on and on, as it does in some philosophical circles today. This dialectic cannot be treated merely as a verbal/conceptual interplay, where the philosopher invokes definitions and theories of morality, and appeals to "moral intuitions" for plausibility -- no, questions of this sort must be located within, and hence debated within, real historical contexts. Our Modern Age is one such context.

But it seems that the conditions that generate human compassion and charity simply do not and possibly cannot exist in our present civilization. Ours is a civilization that is increasingly forced into smaller and more densely populated, now predominately urban, centers of life. Yet this move seems to fly in the face of most of our biological history: given that hominids existed for at least a million years, but urbanization appears only within the last nine-thousand years of our one-million year biological history, we have had urban forms of life only for .9% of our existence as human beings -- and absolutely nothing on the scale that we can see today. Current estimates are that more than half of the world's total population will be urban by 2010, and that by 2030 (less than a quarter-century), most of the world (the 8 or so billion of us by that time) will live in huge, urban megalopolises. The world's present urban population -- 3.2 billion reports recent urbanist Mike Davis in Planet of Slums (Verso: 2006) -- "is larger than the total population of the world when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated". Of the world ... and that was just a few decades ago. This staggeringly break-neck pace of global urbanization (or "hyper-urbanization", we might say) has led Davis to remark that it "will constitute a watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial Revolutions" -- all this in a vanishingly small whiff of time, evolutionarily speaking (a mere fraction of a second on the Evolutionary Grandfather Clock of the Hominid).

So now we return to our basic question, which has now changed and become more suited to the present case: it is not a question of "responsibility" per se when thinking about the larger social and grander civilizational problems (injustices of all sorts, hunger, malnutrition, torture, famine, social unrest, and so forth) that now beset humankind; rather the question is, are the structural features of, and trends in, our civilization compatible or incompatible with our fundamental human needs (that is, our needs as human individuals)? It seems that the answer is squarely in the negative, as many thinkers, philosophers, novelists and chroniclers of the Human Spirit are pointing out (and have pointed out). We return to one such feature of our civilization (for now the term "society" seems appallingly inappropriate), global urbanization.

Human beings need both solitude and silence, and some amount of social interaction, to survive and flourish. Human beings, it seems obvious, also need to be integrated into the rhythms of nature in order to function well. To the extent that human beings are lacking in these basic needs, they are ill (or, perhaps more accurately put, they are "soul-sick" -- what sociologist Emile Durkheim called, for our distinctly modern condition, "anomie"). It seems to me, clearly, that this 20th and 21st century urbanization happens in a way conducive not to more human well-being or soul-satisfaction but less: modern, post-industrial urbanization is happening in a way that puts more of a gap between people and their own bodies, and hence, from other people as well; the trend, moreover, is to cluster the poor into increasingly squalid and oppressive conditions, which in turn fosters not only a visible physical, but also a strong socio-psychological, distance between the "haves" and the "have-nots". Our time is filled, if not with the daily grind of wage-earning in a fast-paced "global" village in the shadow of the Corporation, then with a welter of gadgets, toys, and a seemingly infinite array of entertainment -- and a relentless onslaught of advertising for the next iteration of gadgetry, toys, and entertainment possibilities. The more we urbanize, then, the more we become distanced from what it means to be a human being, discovered in silence, solitude and small-scale social interaction.

Without a catastrophic implosion of this global hyper-urbanization, be it from a pandemic, full-scale nuclear war, or the impending ecological crisis, it doesn't look as if our present trajectory will alter significantly. Rather, what is more likely is that we'll simply choke ourselves to death on our own greed, rushing after our toys, gadgets, conveniences ... our selfishness. Our future, so seems to tally the facts now, is indeed bleak. But it's not one darkened by totalitarian rule (as in Orwell's vision), or one where human beings are drugged into complacency (as in Huxley's vision); no, our future, while it will surely have its share of totalitarianism (be it US-style or Beijing-style) and zombie-hoards of complacency, will be more like Blade Runner (after Philip K. Dick's vision) folded into a horrific desolation prophesied by Walter Miller in A Canticle for Leibowitz:

The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth.
[...]
The last monk, upon entering, paused in the lock. He stood in the open hatchway and took off his sandals. "Sic transit mundus," [I almost wrote ... "gloria"] he murmured, looking back at the glow. ... The glow was engulfing a third of the heavens. He scratched his beard, took one last look at the ocean, then stepped back and closed the hatch.
There came a blur, a glare of light, a high thin whining sound, and the starship thrust itself heavenward.
The breakers beat monotonously at the shores, casting up driftwood. An abandoned seaplane floated beyond the breakers. After a while the breakers caught the seaplane and threw it on the shore with the driftwood. It tilted and fractured a wing. There were shrimp carousing in the breakers, and the whiting that fed on the shrimp, and the shark that munched the whiting and found them admirable, in the sportive brutality of the sea.
A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the old clean currents. He was very hungry that season.
p. 333-4 (EOS: 1959/2006)

theory

2007-06-28T21:06:00.000-07:00

"I understand 'theory' ... not in the perennial philosophical sense of speculative thought detached from praxis but as something like Gregory of Nyssa's sense of a pursuit of a contemplative vision that elevates the mind above the everyday and restores it to its original nature, where praxis is the process of purification of mind whereby one is led to a clarity of thought."

from "Way of Enlightenment, Way of Salvation" (2004)

Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 14 (1), p. 53 -- 74.

James W. Heisig

self-obsessed, intellectualized Enlightenment-mongering; or, escape from Rorty

2007-06-04T19:31:00.000-07:00

There is a certain kind of anxiety and bitter taste I get from reading certain philosophers: on the one hand, they are brazen enough to point out the Academy's insularity, fashioneering, and obscurity in the name of "research" or "knowledge" or "criticism"; but on the other, they are wont to remedy this situation with more verbiage and more ism-ing. What is even more problematic is the almost double-bind these types set for themselves: if I do criticize, then I can be criticized for more of the same insularity; if I don't criticize, then I've damned myself for being disingenuous or (worse) complicitous. And perhaps the height of their woes: to attain a higher ground (dare we say an "enlightened" point of view), they must lay down a solid foundation in the very quicksand they realize is the problem from the start! Rorty is among those caught in this awful, and yes awfully insular, double-bind.

In a 1992 essay entitled "The Pragmatist's Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation", Rorty struggles to admit that he tried to interpret Eco's Foucault's Pendulum in terms that have accompanied Rorty on his philosophical quest out of the great "philosopher's double-bind" to which I alluded above: pragmatism. The trouble? To see the world in the rosy-colored glasses of the theory-obsessed intellectual, to see everything in something's terms -- be it intricate conspiracies for the "Davinci Code-ers" of our popular culture or the insular structures that disease the Semiotician or Structuralist or Derridean (to be pronounced with much bombast) ... or pick your fancy Academalia. "My own equivalent", he writes, "of the secret history of the Templars -- the grid which I impose on any book I come across -- is a semiautobiographical narrative of the Pragmatist's Progress." And now for the meat:

"At the beginning of this particular quest romance, it dawns on the Seeker after Enlightenment that all the great dualisms of Western philosophy -- reality and appearance, pure radiance and diffuse reflection, mind and body ... -- can be dispensed with. They are not to be synthesized into higher unities ... but rather actively forgotten. ... The final stage of the Pragmatist's Progress come when one begins to see one's previous peripeties not as stages in the ascent toward Enlightenment, but simply as the contingent results of encounters with various books which happened to fall into one's hands" (in Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 133).

Now, the set-up here is meant to allow the point to be made that Eco is no pragmatist as Rorty sees it, and so what Rorty thought he saw in Eco initially, now finally "evaporates" when Eco insists on "a distinction between interpreting texts and using texts" (p. 134). Since that is a distinction to which the Rorty-style pragmatist does not adhere to, Eco is no pragmatist (at least in Rorty's sense). But more than this, Rorty is here trying to use Eco to make his larger -- theoretical -- point that

"[f]or us pragmatists, the notion that there is something a given text is really about, something which rigorous application of a method will reveal, is as bad as the Aristotelian idea that there is something which a substance really, intrinsically, is as opposed to what it only apparently or accidentally or relationally is. The thought that a commentator has discovered what a text is really doing ... is, for us pragmatists, more occultism. It is more claim to have cracked the code, and thereby detected What Is Really Going On -- one more instance of what I read Eco as satirizing in Foucault's Pendulum" (p. 141-2).

And naturally, I share Rorty's critique here. But as for the tincture, as for the remedy? "Reading texts is a matter of reading them in the light of other texts, people, obsessions, bits of information, or what have you, and then seeing what happens. What happens ... may be exciting. It may be so exciting that one has the illusion that one now sees what a certain text is really about. But what excites and convinces is a function of the needs and purposes of those who are being excited and convinced. So it seems to me simpler to scrap the distinction between using and interpreting, and just distinguish between uses by different people for different purposes" (p. 144).

What a doubly-bound insularity indeed Rorty does, in the end, suffer from. Calling out against the Platonic-Aristotelian fallacy of elevating a few basic distinctions to sacrosanctity, and the relatively recent attempt by many post-Existentialist modernists to destroy an already- fallacious Western metaphysical tradition in the name of liberation, Rorty simply responds with more "here's how it really is" talk. Yet, that's exactly the kind of stuff he's trying to avoid. Pragmatism is supposed to be a solution, but it's rather like trying to save your friend from sinking in the quicksand by taking hold of his hands in the quicksand. Once you claim "this is how it is", and once you implicitly adopt the linguistic framework in which the bounds and terms of theory, from the Greeks to the Existentials and their progeny, exist, then you're in the clutches of the demons you try to exorcise. There is no escape from theory once you offer a 'view'.

Rorty can do well to expand his reading of Books to encompass the vast collection of (sometimes, admittedly rarefied) philosophical-spiritual literature of the Asians, in particular those of the South Asians. The only salvation here is not more intellection, not more verbiage, not more reams of paper and ink spilt to say or argue that deconstruction and its kin, or Western essentialism and its kin, is bankrupt, fallacious, wrong-headed, or barking up the wrong tree. Rather, what one needs to fill this awful abyss of language is not more of the same, but a real spiritual change, one offered in ancient India. To exit this absurd circling 'round and 'round again one must enact an internal transformation, a deep realization whose product is escape not re-entrenchment and a return to the Pendulum.

There is a long and venerable spiritual tradition in India of emancipatory dialectics, a soteriology that does not just use reason (and this is its negative goal) to destroy other rational constructs or determinations or theoretical edifices, but which seeks (and this is its positive goal) to cut to the heart of the matter: clinging, attachment -- the fetters that keep the pendulum suspended and moving in perpetuity. In short it seeks for spiritual emancipation not corrective intellection. As one progresses on the spiritual path -- and this is not unique to India, for all great traditions teach the same goal -- one learns that there is but one final cause of all dialectical machinations, be they driven by a critical antinomy between Plato vs. Derrida or whatever. Buddha said it best when he called humanity's (well, 5th or 6th century B.C.E. India's) intellectual theory-scapes a "jungle, a tangle" within which we're ensnared invariably. In Buddha's own time, there were, quite literally, hundreds of philosophical schools of thought, dealing with all manner of perennial human concerns (the nature of reality, life-after-death, and so on ... the litany is by now familiar to us). What these arrows do, to borrow Buddha's famous parable, is to pierce the heart (rather, the mind) of the unwary and needy Soul, only to bring Her closer to death (or ignorance). But what makes the bounds of death, also, too, those of life: take the arrow out! The Buddha exhorts us not to worry about the compositional details of the arrow lest we perish foolishly.

For the present case, the arrow itself is theory or intellection. It is to be uprooted and reconstructed only by uprooting and reconstructing that upon which it is based, the mind. Is this suicide? Is this irrationality? Is this to substitute un-thinking for Reason? No! To rise above the vicissitudes of the mind, of life, is not to escape but to finally embrace. Let go of your books, let go of your intellection, let go of your jungles of theory. Let go, look up, and finish. Once you are entangled in the mirroring mirror-room of the Mind, you are ill; you are parched and are drinking a sanded appearance; you require nourishment, cool waters for your tongue. Finding repose above the muddied pool, as a lotus, unfurl your great expanse and breath deeply. It is over! You are a great novel, you are a great dream and its inevitable interpretation. You were always the pendulum, you happily hung it over your own brow and feared its blade swaying to-and-fro. You were always the two antinomies, fighting against each other. Do you see?

liberatory civilization

2007-06-02T16:32:00.000-07:00

Morris Berman ends his The Reenchantment of the World with a vision of society in which persona, individual (or 'individuated') salvation is not only made possible, but is also encouraged and cultivated as an essential facet of a larger ecological macrocosm. His vision is inspired by, and stems from, the pioneering work of the wide-ranging scientist Gregory Bateson, who, in Berman's estimation, masterfully weaved both 'fact' and 'value -- two facets of human epistemology rendered asunder by modern Western science -- together into a coherent, empirically well-grounded, 'science' of man and world, micro- and macrocosm. The importance of such an integrative epistemology for humanity cannot be overemphasized (and indeed, it consumes my own personal intellectual investigations).

Before cautioning his readers about the potential mistakes that History might derive from Bateson's openly 'holistic' (yet impeccably 'empirically' grounded) studies of human nature and culture, Berman is careful to mark out what he thinks is a "liberatory political vision that is consonant with the Batesonian paradigm" (1981, p. 274; the reader is exhorted to read not only Reenchantment, but the entire "consciousness" trilogy of Berman's). An extended quote, which may serve as a kind of blueprint for those seeking an integrative insight into knowledge, society and therefore politics, is in order:

"One of the most obvious characteristics of a future 'planetary culture' will be the straightforward revival and elaboration of analogue modes of expression, a process that will involve the deliberate cultivation and preservation of (digital) incompleteness ['completeness', argues Berman, being the epistemological goal of modern science, whereby all facets of our experience are linearly, and discursively, made plain (usually in 'mechanistic' terms); such a perspective is not only rather impossible in principle, for the very act of this endeavor itself remains always outside the purview of empirical scrutiny, but is also quite detrimental to the human mind, as it really ends in a kind of collective psychosis mirrored on the individual level]. Such a culture [continues Berman] will be dreamier and more sensual than ours. The inner psychic landscape of dreams, body language, art, dance, fantasy, and myth will play a large part in our attempt to understand and live in the world. These activities will now be seen as legitimate, and ultimately crucial, forms of knowledge, and will be accompanied by a direct cultivation of psychic faculties: ESP, psychometry and psychokinesis, aura reading and healing, and others [Berman does not elaborate at length on the details of these modes of human activity, nor does he attempt to amass empirical data relevant to them. Rather, his is an attempt to erect a framework of thought in which such abilities, long described in much of the world's Wisdom literature, are not absurd and whose existence is unsurprising]. Simultaneously, there will be a strong shift in medical practice toward popular and natural healing; an avoidance of drugs and chemical manipulation; and a near merger with ecology and psychology, since it will be widely recognized that most disease is a response to a disturbed physical and emotional environment. Birth will not take place on the 'assembly line' of the modern hospital, but at home, so that ... gentle birth practices ... can once again shape childhood development. In general, the body will be seen as part of a culture, not a dangerous libido to be kept in check, a change in perception which will involve a drastic reduction in sexual repression, and a greater awareness of ourselves as animals. This future culture will also see a revival of the extended family that is today a seedbed of neurosis. The elderly will be mixed in with the very young, rather than dumped in old-age homes for the 'unproductive,' and their wisdom will be a continuing part of cultural life.

Such changes will enable a parallel shift in the ideal of personality, specifically a shift in focus from the ego to the self, and they will encourage the interaction of this self with other selves. The result will be an emphasis on community rather than competition, on individuation rather than individualism, and an end to the 'false-self system' and role-playing that have so badly desecrated (desacralized) human relationships. As for power, it will be the equivalent to centeredness, inner authority, and not the ability to make others do what you want them to against their will. Power will be defined as the ability to influence others without pressure or coercion; the phrase 'position of power' will be recognized as a contradiction in terms, for it will generally be understood that if a person needs a position to feel his or her power, then what he or she is really feeling is impotence.

The future culture will have a greater tolerance for the strange, the nonhuman, for diversity of all sorts, both within the personality and without. This increase in tolerance implies a shift ... the ideal will be the 'many-aspect' person of kaleidoscopic traits, who has a greater fluidity of interests, working and living arrangements, sexual roles, and so on. All behavior will be seen as having at least one complementary, or 'shadow', in need of legitimate expression. There may also be experimentation with modes of thought and relationship which are nonschismogenic -- an attempt to create behavior patterns that are not cululative and which are inherently satisfying rather than dependent upon delayed gratification. The principle of diversity will require the preservation of endangered species and endangered cultures, as factors that enlarge the gene pool of possibilities and thereby make life more stable, durable, and interesting.

Human culutre will come to be seen more as a category of natural history, 'a semipermeable membrane between man and nature.' [Gorsline and House (1974) 'Future Primitive', Planet Drum no. 3] Such a society will be preoccupied with fitting into nature rather than attempting to master it. The goal will be 'not to rule a domain, but to release it'; to have, once again, 'clean air, clean clear-running rivers, the presence of Pelican and Osprey and Gray Whale in our lives; salmon and trout in our streams; unmuddied language and good dreams.' [see e.n. no. 12] Technology will no longer pervade our consciousness and its presence will be more in the form of crafts and tools, things that lie within our control rather than the reverse. We will no longer depend on the technological fix, whether in medicine, agriculture, or anything else, but instead favor solutions that are long-term and address themselves to causes rather than symptoms.

Politically, there will be a tremendous emphasis on decentralization, which will extend to all the institutions of society and be recognized as a prerequisite to planetary culture itself.

sterility of the present Age

2007-06-02T06:44:00.000-07:00

There is a certain kind of sterility that permeates our Age, our Information Age.

This Age is one where we are all awash in a stupefying White Noise. Our individuality is being bleached out, sandblasted away by the continuous stream of de-contextualized, essentially personally meaningless, bits of Digital Garbage flickering before our eyes every day. What is left after this sandblasting is but a bleached-white zombie -- a husk, soulless and starving, parched and thirsty, a torture victim of Information, Consumption, the Market ... our great Idols, our modern-day "graven Images" forsworn in the Good Books of the Ancients.

We are, after this great cleansing, sterile. Our Lands, our Homes, our Talk, our Ambulation over the Earth, our Relations: all are sterile in this bright-beaming, white-hot Noise. But It is not information with which we are awash anymore; It is the appearance of information. To 'inform' is to communicate knowledge. But each part of this defiens requires a meaningful relationship between knower and known: to communicate is to relate, with knowledge, even more so. Relation cannot be here severed, for true knowledge requires it. Wherefore, information cannot be obtained when the knower -- a human being -- is severed from the known -- that which is the content of the information. It was never the principle of deep learning that the intake of pure verbiage or text was the end of knowledge. Rather, a book or a lecture or a personal engagement was the beginning of knowledge. That beginning begun a certain path, directed by the information received. The path led to the content of that information, the knowledge. Having engaged the path fully and deeply, having entered a state of total immersion or absorption into that knowledge, there arises a certain Union -- a yoga -- between knower and known. In this unitive state, then, is the culmination, the fruition, the full realization (lit., the process of coming to reality) of that which was in-formed.

In the rarefied atmosphere of Cyberspace, nothing like this is possible, except for the skilled and the trained. All-to-easy, is it not?, to let the simulation run itself, to let our Minds simply Wiki-peate to each other "knowledge".

The sterility is ubiquitous. In the chatter of our society, nothing but the appearance of conversation is present. Nothing but TV-tubed, Cyber-tongued, seething children are present. The Individual is dead; Meaning dies; Society crumbling.

O, the cool embrace of the white noise, the soothing hummm of the television, the somatic flicker of the Browser; the calming babble of my Corporate Fountain, replenishing my sandblasted Soul; onward, scroll, onward to see you, mind, fall, away into that Space where nothing is nothing is everything together whenever and for whomever.

"The sterility of the bourgeois world will end in suicide or a new form of creative participation. This is the 'theme of our times,' in Ortega y Gasset's phrase; it is the substance of our dreams and the meaning of our acts."

-- Octavio Paz,
The Labyrinth of Solitude (1961)
as quoted in Morris Berman's The Reenchantment of the World (1981, p. 265)

Love in Love's Labour's Lost

2007-05-31T11:30:00.000-07:00

"... And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temper'd with love's sighs:
O, then his lines would ravish savage ears,
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world,
Else none at all in aught proves excellent.
Then fools you were these women to forswear;
Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools.
For wisdom's sake -- a word that all men love,
Or for love's sake -- a word that loves all men,
Or for men's sake, the authors of these women,
Or women's sake, by whom we men are men,
Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths:
It is religion to be thus forsworn;
For charity itself fulfils the law,
And who can sever love from charity?"

from Act IV, scene III;
spoken by Biron (attendant to King Ferdinand)

So, in the end, do these fellows croon but for a vain delight of the Soul, or does Wisdom rest beneath these maudlin lines?

rejection

2007-05-23T11:24:00.001-07:00

The medical concept of 'rejection' is well-known. It is the result of the human immune system attacking a foreign entity; in the case of an organ transplant, the rejection is not of a pathogen, but rather an aggregation of foreign matter, an organ. Even though most medical transplants, or artificially introduced biological substances, are beneficial, there is good evolutionary biological reasons why the body tends to reject such entities -- it helps to protect the human organism, and by consequence, entire populations of human organisms. Indeed, supposing that an 'immune system' is a relatively common biological structure in living creatures, we can see how this promotes the general well-being and stability of many populations of living beings. And, increasing the scope of this generality, we are learning from ecologists that our planet itself, considered as a kind of organic whole, has a kind of 'immune system' which is a mechanism for the total removal of foreign agents from the organism, even if that mechanism entails serious hardship, trauma or wide-spread catastrophe for the organism. The fever that most scientists have diagnosed -- global warming (or it's euphemistic conceptual alternative, 'climate change') is the action of our globe's immune system against the introduction of many a foreign substance -- pollution, the by-product of global industrialization. As it seems necessary, or very likely, that any kind of rapid and global industrialization will produce too much pollution in too short a time, any planetary organism under such duress would develop a fever to kill off the infection.

But we must not treat this system, our Planet or 'Gaia' (as some thinkers term it), as composed of truly, and really, independently working, and organized, component parts. We must not treat, that is, the attack of industrialization on the globe in simplistic terms. The globe, as we have proposed in this essay, is an organism. As such, its parts function as a whole; the whole is ontologically prior to the parts. Indeed, it's reasonable to say that the idea of a 'part' of the global organism is an abstraction, mostly necessary for conceptual ease and for ease of scientific study (a practical necessity, to be sure: we can only study, ordinarily, a relatively isolated part of any demarcated domain of inquiry). But, being honest to the Wisdom of the Ages, this admonition to eschew simplistic terms for the present case can only end if we treat reality itself -- everything -- as an organism, of which our Gaia (where the human organism is microcosmically inter-related to its immediate macrocosm) is but a vanishingly small abstraction. Let us make the next obvious point, extending the logic of this essay ad infinitum: there is a total rhythm, a cosmic dancing to-and-fro, of which our immediate life is but a moment. Our present ecological catastrophe-in-the-works can only be a small spark in the whole cosmic inhalation and exhalation. But we must not treat any of these levels, any of the relative microcosms situated in the relatively greater macrocosms, as real in themselves. That is, we must not hypostatize -- treat a conceptual abstraction as a (concrete) reality in itself. Neither the human organism, nor the global one, nor the Cosmic One, is complete "in itself", in absence of the whole infinite nest of micro-macro interrelationships that can be discerned by our individual or collective consciousness.

This, however, is a trend of human intellection; it is a characteristic of the mind's way of knowing its situation. To hypostatize is natural, as is the act of reifying -- a conceptual cousin of hypostatization. To hypostatize is to concretize a mere concept; to reify is to take a conceptual representation of a thing and "objectify" it. That is, 'reification' is to take a hypostatization and subjugate it to a subject-object dichotomy, to force a division between object and self (or selves). But in an organic whole, in a participatory universe, no such dichotomy exists except in the minds of human beings (or any organism with the capacity for re-presentation and conceptual reflection or intellection). Indeed, 'reality' as such is mere re-presentation only (or "Vijnapti-matra" as the ancient Buddhist school of thought is called in Buddhist Sanskrit). No 'reality' exists except as re-presentation of the continuous flows of the River of Reality.
But our society exists now as the projection of a collective mind mired by the disease of reification. As we project onto reality our inner turmoil out into our immediate environment, so too does our Society project out its deeper turmoil, its inner anger and hatred and greed, onto the world. Our world, then, is nothing but that projection. Society is nothing but its deep desires, playing out on the surface of the Globe.

There is, then, another kind of rejection working alongside the Globe's rejection of our modern (now post-) industrial society; it is a rejection whose origins are in the distant past of the human organism, prior to the rise of what we call 'civilization'. It is the rejection of the increasing reification that attends the industrial, and post-industrial Information Age; it is the rejection of the alienation from our environment that, I propose, civilization itself began thousands of years ago, but which is only now in our present society bearing its awfully poisonous fruit. As humanity became more technologically sophisticated, and as the burden of labouring in our environment to survive lifts, it seems that we begin to loose a fundamental, basic and essential experience of any living organism situated within a life-sustaining macrocosm: what Morris Berman called "participatory consciousness", that total absorption of micro- into macrocosm, where no duality is reflected upon (or present) in that consciousness, and where "inner" and "outer" are fully enfolded into each other and operate as harmoniously as a wave arising from, and merging into, its ocean.

Human consciousness, aboriginally absorbed and merged into its surrounding reality without a concomitant conceptualization of that fact, is rejecting 'civilization'. Civilization, as such, is an act of separation; it severs human consciousness from its sweet ignorance of 'self' versus 'object'. It inspires awareness of 'outer' or 'inner'; it demarcates 'us' and 'other'. So, the history of civilization is the history of a gradual emergence of a kind of chronic, habitual reification. But 'reification' is itself founded upon an elementary notion of 'dichotomy', strengthened by the existence of a civilization. To 'dichotomize' is to delineate between two things in such a way as to reveal real division or difference. As such, it is an act of the human intellect that at first merely marks, or measures out, difference; then, the intellect can elevate those differences to realities in themselves.

But reification is antithetical to our aboriginal absorptive life. Civilization has gradually interfered with that absorption; human consciousness is rejecting it. But our human consciousness is merely a gateway, a conduit: it is a vanishingly small, momentary interface between the micro- and macrocosms. 'We' are also 'It'. So it is that Gaia, our macrocosmic cradle, rejects the products of our modern civilization, its increasing technological sophistication, its mechanization, the domination of nature by machine, and the pollution generated by our technological advances. The inter-dependent whole rejects the disease of civilization: both the situated consciousness of human beings rejects the disease of civilization as much as does the total, global organism. The outer ecological catastrophe we face mirrors the inner social depravity we face (and have faced throughout history), and the personal psychological tumult we experience daily within our civilized, mechanized, oil-soaked play-pens. But this is not a mere idiosyncrasy of our recent past; rather, I submit that what we experience now is simply the rising tide of an accumulation of force swelling from the distant reaches of our own history.

Sailing the Empyrean

2007-05-20T09:50:00.000-07:00

And go out into that plague, too far off to be seen from the horizon of your gloomy shores.
Into the plague, into the bosom of earthly delights,
Your bright light is melted, coagulated, sanded down and reified into a cast-iron sadness.
O how distant!
I make a journey for you, Soul. Set your sail high, to catch the fury of that Divine muse,
To lift you back into Sweet Emptiness.

the illusion of the ornaments

2007-05-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

I can do no better than to begin with a quote from the Laozi, Book I, chapter 19:

"Abandon sageliness and discard wisdom;
Then the people will benefit a hundredfold.
Abandon humanity and discard righteousness;
Then the people will return to filial piety and deep love.
Abandon skill and discard profit;
Then there will be not thieves or robbers.
However, these three things are ornaments (wen) and are not adequate.
Therefore let people hold onto these:
Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires." (from the Lao Tzu, trans. by Wing-tsit Chan 1963, p. 132)

What Laozi admonishes here is, of course, an insubstantial sageliness, an insubstantial humanity, an insubstantial skillfulness. We must pause to ask though, what is 'insubstantial'?
It is rather simple to comprehend, and there are two analogies that might help us. One analogy is the analogy of the house built upon sand; the other is the analogy of the cultivated garden.

I might with great effort and skill erect a wonderful, spacious house, using only the finest and strongest materials and creating the most beautiful and captivating structure a human eye might behold. But I cannot simply build this building on any ground whatever; I must deeply know the land upon which I might erect this structure, lest it simply crumble away, all my effort for naught. By knowing the land well, and deeply, I can mould my imaginations to fit the landscape and terrain -- thus exacting a well-wrought harmony between mind and world. If I build upon sand, then only sand castles or delicate enclosures that sink slowly and happily with the sand should I build, with a strong heart and a deeply-won certainty of my world. Otherwise, move on and quiet the mind of its fancies and fantasies! Built properly -- harmoniously in the deepest sense -- I have a substantial building before me, that is a natural extension of my mind into my world, a mental-to-physical unfolding created with Wisdom and insight. This, indeed, brethren, is substance; this is to be substantial. I cannot project my mind's unknowing eye out into the world and hope to create permanence, satisfaction, stability, joy and abiding bliss when this eye simply manufactures inharmonious phantoms, and sends them out to fill up the Earth. This is the privation of substance; this is an insubstantial act. This is to treat the world as an "other", a mere stage for my stomping about, rattling the rafters for naught. The world simply will reflect back this ignorance; "you are what your deep driving desire is", as the great Wisdom of India proclaims. I can only build what is already in my heart; there is no other kind of work.

Likewise for the cultivated garden. To cultivate is to know the conditions that are present around the garden, and to act accordingly. Useless is it to plant a lemon tree in the cold north; likewise to drench a sun-sensitive blossom in the high-heat of the afternoon sun. Lack of deep understanding is rewarded by the gradual dying of the garden. A garden planted in ignorance is insubstantial -- it lacks the proper conditions under which it will bear the fruits of one's act of cultivation, and it is not properly grounded in an understanding of reality.

But of course, in both cases, one might be able to get along for a while quite well without a deep understanding of the land with which you toil, about to bring into existence a magnificent visage. It is surely magnificent to the eye to behold a wonderfully built garden house surrounded by a blazing act of gardening. Pure beauty, for a moment. To the Eye of Wisdom, what a fleeting moment, what a grand illusion, aided by Time's slow arrow leading to eventual, and total, decay. For nothing will continue rhythmically singing a great song of the cycle of Life in the house or garden wrought from ignorance. For a moment, a burst of pleasure tantalizing and inspiring great reverence. But out of harmony with mind and world, these shinning acts soon fade away into sad remembrances of unwise choices, turning into the dusty mirages they always were.

So it is with "sageliness", "humanity" or "skill" of which Laozi speaks so resolutely. Abandon the insubstantial sagely ways, or the mere ornamental humanity, or merely clever and showy skill. A true sage cannot be known merely by wispy locks of white hair, or by a pious speech, or by a sagacious gesture. Ever more so, sageliness cannot be won by those mere locks of hair, speeches or gestures. It cannot be won by filling up the mind with "deep wisdom". It can only be won by deep insight, by cultivation, and by harmony between the inner and outer worlds. Nothing else will do, all else is a mere adornment for the body or a perfume for the mind. Renounce those! "Embrace simplicity" and "have few desires". Substantial wisdom is like a sandy castle, rightly built atop sand with a mind happily and temperately embracing the eventual dissolution of the castle -- it is a great music, is it not, to have one's craftwork lovingly embrace the water and soggy sand below, to have the castles enfolded into the great ocean! Or, to sing great songs of the lemon tree in cold weather, trying to produce robust fruits! Laugh, with the Laughter of the Immortals!

Is is to Confucianists, disciples of the Great Sage of the Warring States period of ancient Chinese history, that the Laozi directs much of its disdain. Laozi admonishes not the philosophical vision of Confucius himself, but rather the preachers of Confucianism whose wisdom is insubstantial. As with all merchants of wisdom, the money changers in the Temple, they trade for passage onto great, enticing ships sailing into shallow waters, vessels easily run aground. Their tables offer an entry into artificial 'humanity', clever 'skill', and a mere simulacrum of 'sageliness'. They sell their passage as a shiny adornment, an ornament for the poor Soul, who longs for fathoms beyond where any boat may go.

The great Laozi, also known as the Dao De Jing, imparts a difficult spiritual lesson. Human beings can learn certain skills; they might learn volumes of ancient Wisdom and the sayings of many a great Sage; they might even learn what 'humanity' means (in Confucius' sense of the term (ren), it meant a "human-heartedness" rooted in the Golden Mean of unconditional altruism and compassion); but until there is true, deep and inner learning of these mere notions, then none of these notions are present substantially in human beings -- they lack a firm connection to our actual existence, where the inner and outer worlds mutually support and condition each other. Until such an inner change occurs down inside the belly of our Souls, then we merely thump our Bibles of Wisdom, vaingloriously show our fanciful skill, or walk amongst our kin as a mirage of real humanity.

So, then, one can learn a certain skill but not be truly skillful. There are, then, musicians and there are instrumentalists. Musicians play from deep down, from within the heart does their music begin; it is almost an accident that they happen to externalize, and hence put skill to, their inner music. It is not asked "with what instrument?", but "with what handcraft should my inner love come to the ears of humanity?" (I can think of the deep musical spirituality of Old Saint Colombe, who thought of his technically brilliant, and court-pleasing, student Marin Marais that he was a mere skilled instrumentalist and not a musician).

In this light I say, proudly, that it is better to be an unsuccessful yet deeply sincere musician than to be a successful yet insubstantial instrumentalist, however clever he might be. But of course, 'success' or 'failure' is measured in two ways: externally or internally -- by the heart or by popular sentiment dazzled by mere surfaces. And so, it naturally follows that the substantial musician is always successful, as his heart is the fount from which the substance of his musical Spirit arises, and so success in this case is nothing but direct pointing to the substance, the heart, itself.

Look, then, past the shiny ornaments of the Soul; see deep down, to the bottom. If there is doubt as to the depth, go down, swim, drink much of the vast sea. Drink it all up; you are far more vast than a sea, or an ocean. As the wave arises then merges with the ocean, and then appears again, so too the Soul swells and recedes in this great Expanse. Breathe!

the self-illumined lamp

2007-04-28T08:33:00.000-07:00

Thomas Merton, in his Asian Journal, quotes the great South Indian mystic, saint, monk and philosopher Shankaracharya, from the "Crown Jewel of Discrimination":

"Thus the wise man discriminates between the real and the unreal. His unsealed vision perceives the Real. He knows his own [True Self] to be pure indivisible consciousness. He is set
free from ignorance, misery and the power of distraction. He enters directly into peace....

"Those who echo borrowed teachings are not free from the world. But those who have attained [pure blissful consciousness] by merging the external universe, the sense-organs, the mind and the ego in the pure consciousness of the [True Self] -- they alone are free from the world, with its bonds and snares..." (The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, 1975, p. 111)

In this teaching, Shankara imparts a fundamental lesson of all Wisdom traditions, the teaching of self-illumination. But do not mistake this for some obscure or esoteric direction into that which is beyond human grasp. Do not mistake this teaching for the distant, yet radiant white-hot sunlight, of which only a warm ray might condescend to touch the still-cold skin of those seeking the sun. No, this is no esoterism.

To be self-illumined is to not merely be the rattle-tattle of a drum resonating in response to a distant music. It is not to be the mirror, reflecting the radiance of the sun. It is not to be a grand mansion, allowing a great song to be echoed and magnified throughout her great chambers. No, to be self-illumined is to be the reverberation and the drum and the great music, both distant and near. It is to be the mirror, the reflection and the radiant sun, together and unified and never arising or ceasing. It is to be a great mansion, with many great chambers, all the while being the song sung in all parts of all the great chambers of the mansion.

It is You, my Soul. You are the same and different from all these manifestations. You are the arising and ceasing of the sun; You are the arising and ceasing of great musics; You are the arising and ceasing of reflections; you are the arising and the ceasing of joyous song.

Do not reflect, do not echo, do not sing. These are all non-different from You.

The great Yogi Vasishtha writes (c. 11th cent.; Vasishtha's Yoga):

"Whatever there is and whatever appears to be the world-jugglery, is but pure Brahman or the absolute consciousness and naught else. [Ordinary] consciousness is Brahman, the world is Brahman, all the elements are Brahman, I am Brahman, my enemy is Brahman, my friends and relatives are Brahman, Brahman is the three periods of time, for all these are rooted in Brahman. Even as the ocean appears to be expanded on account of the waves, Brahman seems to be expanded on account of the infinite variety of substances. Brahman apprehends Brahman, Brahman experiences or enjoys Brahman, Brahman is made manifest in Brahman by the power of Brahman himself. Brahman is the form of my enemy who displeases me who am Brahman: when such is the case, who does what to another?

"The modes of the mind like attraction and repulsion, likes and dislikes, have been conjured up in imagination. These have been destroyed by the absence of thoughts. How then can they be magnified? When Brahman alone moves in all which is Brahman and Brahman alone unfolds as Brahman in all, what is joy and what is sorrow? Brahman is satisfied with Brahman, Brahman is established in Brahman. There is neither 'I' nor another!

[Vasishtha continues]

"All the objects in this world are Brahman. 'I' am Brahman. Such being the case, both passion and dispassion, craving and aversion, are but notions. Body is Brahman, death is Brahman, too: when they come together, as the real rope and the unreal imaginary snake come together, where is the cause for sorrow? Similarly, body is Brahman and pleasure is Brahman; where is the cause of rejoicing when body experiences pleasure? When, on the surface of the calm ocean, waves appear to be agitated (in the world-appearance), its essence in unchanged and their is neither 'I'-ness nor 'you'-ness. When the whirlpool dies in the water, nothing is dead! When the death-Brahman overtakes the body-Brahman, nothing is lost" (pp. 340-341).

The self-illumined one, then, walks as the body, and as death, and as 'I' and 'thou'. Having left those distinctions behind, there is walking but no one to be found who walks the walk.

detachment from all views

2007-04-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

It is powerfully important to be free from the "tyranny of custom" as Bertrand Russell once wrote.

Such tyranny, sadly, surrounds us and is a constant threat. From the hard-to-discern corporate mentality that is ubiquitous these days, to those political demagogues and theological ideologues commanding our attention on TV and in print, a torturous hegemony of thought descends from all directions. Our minds are clouded and real thought, hard-won and self-created, is an impossibility, save for the stout-hearted.

It is important to note that mostly, these hegemonic idea-factories (like the major religions, and all corporations -- which is now quite a hard thing to really "define" as almost any public thing at all is "corporate", including religious institutions, our nation, and even the Academy) want us to adopt some view, or perhaps an entire framework of thought (by implicitly or explicitly defining the parameters within which their ideas happen). Often, when the hegemonic factory is large enough, or wields a large-enough constituency (like a major religious organization, such as "Family Research Counsel" or your run-of-the-mill televangelist corporation, like Jerry Falwell's), its rhetoric rings with the clarion tones of History or Tradition. In this way, some kind of authority or legitimacy is imparted to its doctrines, almost no matter how absurd or extremist they are. And what's more, any skepticism is simply colored as a denial of legitimate authority, or Truth -- something no one wants to contradict, naturally.

The defenders of the views and frameworks of thought of these hegemonic idea-factories, though, often seem to be suffering greatly -- being in the (mighty) grips of a theory or view. They crave the view or views; they thirst after them; they are intoxicated with the fire they can breathe when touting their views. They suffer.

In the West, the ancient Skeptics had it right: detachment via perpetual inquiry into things. The eternal search itself serving as the necessary refreshment to quell the thirst after views and frameworks of thought. Substituting a profound dialectical query for staid belief was the only moral dictum here. Eternal dispassion. It was a mystical trumpet call; it was not just academic Philosophy. It was not simply questioning for its own sake -- but for the salvation of the suffering soul. Seek after truth, do not stay bound and festering in "truth" -- for truth only exists in the dialectic itself, lived and not merely written or spoken. Philosophy never ends; it keeps the soul in dynamic embrace with its own existence. It is the reality of choice itself, manifesting from the inner to the outer reality. It is the fulfillment of any Existentialism: lived dialectic is the realization of total existential freedom.

Therefore, hold no views.

gate, rain, dharma

2007-04-15T19:04:00.000-07:00

It is raining, the foliage is heavy with water.

Rusted iron, holding back the gate.

Gated karma, turning, whirling.

Wheel of dharma, spinning.

Bright green, dark orange-red, rusted wheel.

Gated entry-way. Entry into the realm of Truth.

White-light, green leaves, rusted gate, colorless water running.

wandering

2007-04-11T21:03:00.000-07:00

As I roam about the deserts of American culture -- of America -- I thirst, but mostly what I stumble upon are mirages to quench my thirst. From a distance, it's rather hard to tell what is and isn't a mirage, what is and isn't genuine water -- water for the Spirit. More than I'd like to accept, the deserts are real and the mirages are too. That's the trouble with illusions, they're certainly real and have real consequences. As a dream of a giant serpent will induce terror, or the mistaken waking vision of one will cause fear, such illusions are indeed real. They are, to be sure, not what we take them to be -- an actual serpent -- but nonetheless, there is a reality to them.

These illusions hide something from us: truth. For a moment, they obscure an aspect of reality under a veil of ignorance. They shroud a part of existence from us, and prevent us from gaining a sure grasp on reality. Fear clouds our mind, we're conditioned by the phantasmagoric vision -- but that is just castles in the sky of our minds.

If I were to drink from a sanded mirage, I would suffocate. If I were to be ensnared by a mistaken serpent, I would laugh. If I drink from a cool fount, I would be replenished. If I were to be pricked by a poisonous serpent's fang, I would die.

But still, this is ignorance. He who walks beyond the mirage and the desert is wise. He who is both the fear and the feared is with knowledge.

Walk, then, amidst this desert, America, and find your liberation. Walk and find those who can point the way from the mirage to the desert and who can embrace both. Learn to be refreshed by a clear fount, and to walk with a brimming pale into the desert again.

Create a mirage of deserts, hiding the great Serpent of Wisdom. Let five serpents shade you from the sun -- a shadow that reveals that which is hidden in the light of the sun.

In all this, be adamantine. Go with certainty. Walk on toward forever, America. Your light can only dim.

tip of the iceberg

2007-04-04T16:32:00.000-07:00

There, seated in a lecture hall, you find more interest in the byzantine cracks spidering their way from base to ceiling. The droopy-eyed orator seems to ooze her life right through her eyelids out onto the lectern; falling, dripping, slowly to the ground. What an awful boring lecture, and what an awful boring human being. The conclusion is easy.

What a separation exists, though, between you and the orator. It is a separation of literally an entire expanse of life-moments. An entire history has unfolded before the moment you sat there to listen to the lecture, most of which were not spent in the company of the witnessed.

Knowledge is an ocean of lived experience; true knowledge is direct insight. By its very nature, a brief encounter with another human being doesn't produce knowledge, merely a datum. Yet, judgement ensues, springing a vast forest from a mere single seed. True knowledge is a self-illumined light in the dark. Only a rare being is able to have this capacity, for most sleep in a shallow pool only dreaming depths yet unreached. Most, therefore, are not knowledgeable nor truly so -- "but the world deals with us in actu and not in posse: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed at from without, it never takes account" (James, Varieties, 1902/2004, p. 128).

And humility does not seem too plentiful either. Humility is simply the ability to recognize -- literally, to bring back into your cognition -- yourself in all. Now: there is a tired old lecturer being ridiculed on the basis of a single moment of her life, when in fact there is an unseen history behind this moment to fill volumes. A life unread, and hence not understood, by most. Before: it was you who found yourself in the same moment, faced by unknowing, yet judging, glances, whispers. Then: the future is not kind, for every individual will find themselves in the same moment, with the same fears or worries all conjured up for naught.

Right judgement, an ancient dictum.

Right speech, right action, right wisdom ...

The INLAND EMPIRE

2007-02-01T20:35:00.000-08:00

I haven't called many films I've seen recently 'works of art', nor have many of the films (many, that is, of the new films that have hit theaters) I've watched recently so fallen within the interiors of my own mind. Like the scent of a flower that so saturates the recipient of its odor, so too has this work of art integrated itself into the inland, inward, interior empire of my mind.

Too much of a thing, like works of art cut from the same stylistic mold, induces a state of unreflective, automatic response. The phenomenon of "automatic pilot" is universal, and a common feature of our experiences. The formulaic call and response of the salutations between human beings ("how are you" ... "I'm fine, and you?"), usually chanted out of some unspoken compunction, is but one example. When done many times over, it looses a potential connection to any real, inward emotion from which one might be motivated to utter this formula, and does not reveal or express any actual relationship between the two interlocutors; rather, this chant merely serves to further a simulacrum of human connection.

Deep and meaningful relationships to the objects and people in our experience are crucial to the human condition itself -- its lifeblood. So much so that in ancient India, many of its mystical "seers" taught that there must arise a balanced and measured "desire" (in Sanskrit, "kama") between a person and their environment or their fellow human beings. But not a desire impulsively untamed, not a desire that recklessly grasps out of a desperate longing for merely momentary gratification. No, the Indian seers were teaching how to become meaningfully connected to the world we daily experience -- from our possessions to those around us. Included here, too, would be objects of art.

But, this is the Age of Information. And what makes it so great, that we can get information instantaneously about anything anytime, is also what makes it so flawed. In the ubiquity of information there is the danger lurking of over-saturation, over-stimulation, too much repetition. We live, alas, in the age, also, of art-whenever-you-like. It is always present, as is anything that can be converted to a digital or otherwise transmissible and storeable form. There is also, accompanying this age of information, the profit-driven engines of the Market in this post-Industrial Age. Art has been commodified, branded and sold to us.

It is now a ritual: go to the movies, or wait for the Digital Video Disc or (even better and more profitable), both. Now, following in-line with the general phenomenon of "automatic pilot", we make the proper substitutions in the case above: it's not a human being we "greet" with prefabricated, conveniently available, social platitudes; rather, it's a movie clothed in a kind of prefabricated platitude of its own: a genre, or the classical Hollywood form known all-too-well. As in the case of automatically saying "hello, how are you" to a person we might very well know rather deeply, with the ritual of movie going so oft-repeated and with movies so often clothed in genre or well-known form we inevitably loose any real connection to the film flashing before our eyes.

Every now and then, a film (or rather, the artistic vision guiding the film) will take this automatic pilot phenomenon into account, and try to "get inside" and stay with its viewer and not allow mere passivity to drown out any real human connection to the rising and falling of experience.

As in life, there must be real struggle to build meaningful human connections, connections that are quite literally "grounded" in the external world by mixing of the internal with the external. Our life, thoughts, emotions, passions, our Spirit, all get bound up to the objects and people of our lives -- but only by actively engaging the world does real connection arise. So too with art. But like a good interlocutor, real art must try to awaken in us a desire to connect, and it must itself put forth genuine effort to forge the connection.

INLAND EMPIRE meets the burden of being a good interlocutor. Its details are hard to grasp, its content sometimes allegorical and sometimes obvious. But it leads viewers into themselves -- into the realms of the dream world and the tenuous divisions there may be between our dreams (or nightmares) and our waking life. Its message -- at once so universal and yet so illusive -- is plain: we are all like the spider, weaving webs of silky conscious narrative threads, subtly interrelated but yet so spontaneously, and sometimes incongruously, linked. So was the teaching imparted by its director on the night of its departure from Washington D.C., by humbly quoting a passage from the golden treasure of human Wisdom, the sacred Upanishads.

Perhaps, after more Empires than the mind have fallen, and the great erosion of History, that sacred leveler of all the mighty, has turned to sand our great land, this celluloid-cum-digital act of meditation will dull. Once the conditions of our peculiar (and possibly idiosyncratic) situation cease, this film too will cease to have its effect on the mind. I cannot speak for Time or History. I can only speak for my own Inland Empire.

Comments about my comments blogged herein

2007-02-01T15:34:00.000-08:00

Well, firstly, my comments tend to the flowery. I'll work on that. I think that Borges once wrote that in their youth, writers tend to err on the side of the baroque, but in their maturity they tend to prune their vines into a more shapen and focused growth (I'm generously paraphasing). There is much wisdom to this observation. My career should be dedicated to this vision!

Also, there is some tendency with this format to show and have sampled the cake batter before the cake is baked and decorated. We blog but to blog quickly and air our thoughts almost as immediately as they occur to our fingers as we type. Editing and careful analysis will suffer in proportion to the amount of time not spent editing and thinking carefully through what is written and then posted. Now, immediately, anyone can read what I'm writing before it's fully baked.
Clearly, this might have some advantages. There is a postmodernism whose skepticism extends to the very act of "writing" as the art of constructing conceptual structures that exude a kind of a myth, the myth of objectivity and rational completeness. When the sloppiness of actual thinking and writing are made plain, perhaps this postmodern will delight in the roughness, the clutter and the incompleteness that goes into the writing process but which is usually cut out of the picture in texts that have been laboured over and edited and otherwise "beautified". What this postmodern might want is the textual equivalent of the "realist" film schools of Europe: reality (in this case, thinking/writing as a spontaneous outpouring of one mind engaged with its own thoughts) untamed, un-tampered with, and beautifully wild. What we take for objectivity in text is nothing but an illusion, crafted by the tenets of reason and a dusty logic; it's nothing but a rational reconstruction of a process that is essentially different from the pristine structures of pure logic (a reality, no doubt, but an essentially conceptual land of the mind!).

But these advantages are peculiar and assume a host of special problems bothering the intellectual. I'm not so much bothered. What I am worried about though, is a more practical issue: that my thoughts are indeed not fully baked. Certain interiors might need some more work, some more thought -- more baking time.

This, let us say, can be remedied quite easily. The "comments" feature of this blog allows for suggestions on where an idea or an essay might require more work, or might have been too quick, or where more explication or argument is needed. These comments are very valuable to the author, and most appreciated.

With that, I bid you welcome into the sometimes difficult web of illusions spun herein.

Regards,
MCC