Philosophy was invented because people disagree with each other. Think about it. If you hold an idea in your mind, that means you believe it to be true. If everyone agrees with you, then you never have a conflict. Imagine then that one day someone disagrees with you. They tell you that you're wrong. It might come as quite a shock. The first time it happens you might try to convince them by arguing the particular facts in question. The second time it happens you might do the same thing. But if people continue to disagree with you, it might occur to you that either you are wrong, or they are wrong, or both of you are wrong. This might lead you to consider how one goes about proving who is right or wrong. This might lead you to consider what truth and falsehood mean. What is truth in general? What is falsehood in general? How does one prove anything to be true or false. And so on.
And thus you are forced by the circumstance of being disagreed with, to search beyond the moment... beyond the particular facts... and to consider the particular more abstractly.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Monday, May 21, 2012
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Polykleitos and bicycles
The ancient Greek sculptor Polykleitos constructed an ideal figure referred to as the Kanon, which was meant to exemplify his theories of the ideal human body. In so doing, Polykleitos did not simply create a particular sculpture... but created sculpture itself... as the Kanon became the basis for the art of sculpture moving forward.
I was thinking of this in relation to bicycles. Is there a Kanon of the bicycle? I'm not sure that there is a specific bike in existence that would be the ideal bike, but there certainly are theories of ideal bike proportions. You hear these things all the time... chain stay length, fork rake, seat tube angle, etc. etc.... and usually these things are discussed as if there is an ideal frame in the mind that everything refers to. Usually the 56cm frame is the basis for such things.
The 56cm frame is the frame size for a certain sized human being. Probably someone who is 5'8" to 5'10" tall, or there about. So if the ideal frame dimensions are based on 56cm, then this means the ideal rider is 5'8" to 5'10". Bike frames are scaled up and down for smaller and larger riders, but the truth is, that very small and very large frames are simply not correct.
Like all rationalized, canonical ideals, they are based on presumptions about what is ideal. In the case of Polykleitos, the ideal would be defined in terms of numerical relations between different parts of the body, and their relation to the whole. These numerical relations would have derived from (I assume) Pythagorean numerology, and the general love that the Greeks had for number and relations. Of course, there are many different systems of numerical relation, so the use of one over the other has to be argued for somehow. In the end, the selection of something as the basis for idealization will be disputed and rejected by those who choose different standards.
This seems to be the case in bike frame design. For instance, I reject the canon of the ideal bike, because I am 12 inches taller than the ideal rider. I reject the notion that their is even such a thing as an ideal rider. There certainly is the "average rider" height, but that is not the same as the ideal. And although we might presume that "the average" is all that anyone is really talking about, I think that in practice the average has taken up the role of the ideal.
Rationalizing an ideal is a convenience. It allows one to not deal with any existent that does not fall within it's parameters. In this sense it excludes much of reality, in favor of a selective subset of reality that conforms to... well... conforms to the basis from which the subset was derived. It is self-referential. And again, the basis of that self-referential subset is always open to debate... particularly from those who are not within the parameters of the subset.
In the case of cycling, this is me... so tall that my bike is wrongly dimensioned in many ways. My cranks are too short... bottom bracket too low... stem too high... wheels too small... handlebars too narrow.... knee to pedal ratio all wrong, front end too far forward, and so on and so on. The canon of the 56cm bike gives rise to the entire cycling industry... to the production of bikes... to the sizing of all components and frame geometries... and when the performance of a tall rider suffers, it is a self fulfilling prophecy. It's easy enough to say that the 5'8" rider is ideal, because they perform well on average. But part of their performance edge is the fact that they have bikes constructed to their bodies... whereas the very tall or very short do not.
So clearly, rationalized ideal canons can serve as self fulfilling prophecies of exclusion.
In the case of the human figure, one can argue for canons of proportion, because in the end one can refer to observable characteristics of human beings... and can arrive at an "average" body. But at what point in the thought process does "average" become "ideal"? The shift from observation to idealization occurs when we look for the average... because the average is a numerical abstraction. If the length of a body is "on average" equal to 7 heads, then we have an abstract head size. We are no longer dealing with specific reality.
Once we have an "average" head, it natural to presume that there must be something in the nature of humanity that produces such an average. Such an average proportion plays into the construction of human identity... of what it means to be human. This then becomes the ideal. Depending on how one constructs and uses such abstractions, one could be Aristotelean about it... or Platonic. But when one constructs a SPECIFIC instance of the ideal, one is definitely Platonic, because it is an attempt to show the form of the ideal.
The Aristotelean argument against Plato's forms is that for them to exist, they must be something particular, and thus they cannot be ideal. An Aristotielean would never construct a canonical object. Only a Platonist would do so... only a Platonist roots the ideal in an object, rather than having it simply exist as an abstraction.
In the case of the bike industry, they are Platonic. They have a Platonic ideal of the bike. If they were Aristotelean about it, they would understand the bike in terms of "any rider"... they would not exclude tall riders or short riders. They would formulate the nature of the bike in terms of it's fitness for the purpose to which any person puts it. But they don't do this.
The whole bike industry is Platonic.. and it doesn't exude understanding... what it produces is an endless stream of Platonic ideals derived from rationalized standards that are usually not explained. If you dig behind the assumptions... you will find the same presumptions about rider size and the canonical bike. And probably if you found the average height of all the people in the bike industry, in bike shops, and in the bike media... it would be 5'8" to 5'10".
I was thinking of this in relation to bicycles. Is there a Kanon of the bicycle? I'm not sure that there is a specific bike in existence that would be the ideal bike, but there certainly are theories of ideal bike proportions. You hear these things all the time... chain stay length, fork rake, seat tube angle, etc. etc.... and usually these things are discussed as if there is an ideal frame in the mind that everything refers to. Usually the 56cm frame is the basis for such things.
The 56cm frame is the frame size for a certain sized human being. Probably someone who is 5'8" to 5'10" tall, or there about. So if the ideal frame dimensions are based on 56cm, then this means the ideal rider is 5'8" to 5'10". Bike frames are scaled up and down for smaller and larger riders, but the truth is, that very small and very large frames are simply not correct.
Like all rationalized, canonical ideals, they are based on presumptions about what is ideal. In the case of Polykleitos, the ideal would be defined in terms of numerical relations between different parts of the body, and their relation to the whole. These numerical relations would have derived from (I assume) Pythagorean numerology, and the general love that the Greeks had for number and relations. Of course, there are many different systems of numerical relation, so the use of one over the other has to be argued for somehow. In the end, the selection of something as the basis for idealization will be disputed and rejected by those who choose different standards.
This seems to be the case in bike frame design. For instance, I reject the canon of the ideal bike, because I am 12 inches taller than the ideal rider. I reject the notion that their is even such a thing as an ideal rider. There certainly is the "average rider" height, but that is not the same as the ideal. And although we might presume that "the average" is all that anyone is really talking about, I think that in practice the average has taken up the role of the ideal.
Rationalizing an ideal is a convenience. It allows one to not deal with any existent that does not fall within it's parameters. In this sense it excludes much of reality, in favor of a selective subset of reality that conforms to... well... conforms to the basis from which the subset was derived. It is self-referential. And again, the basis of that self-referential subset is always open to debate... particularly from those who are not within the parameters of the subset.
In the case of cycling, this is me... so tall that my bike is wrongly dimensioned in many ways. My cranks are too short... bottom bracket too low... stem too high... wheels too small... handlebars too narrow.... knee to pedal ratio all wrong, front end too far forward, and so on and so on. The canon of the 56cm bike gives rise to the entire cycling industry... to the production of bikes... to the sizing of all components and frame geometries... and when the performance of a tall rider suffers, it is a self fulfilling prophecy. It's easy enough to say that the 5'8" rider is ideal, because they perform well on average. But part of their performance edge is the fact that they have bikes constructed to their bodies... whereas the very tall or very short do not.
So clearly, rationalized ideal canons can serve as self fulfilling prophecies of exclusion.
In the case of the human figure, one can argue for canons of proportion, because in the end one can refer to observable characteristics of human beings... and can arrive at an "average" body. But at what point in the thought process does "average" become "ideal"? The shift from observation to idealization occurs when we look for the average... because the average is a numerical abstraction. If the length of a body is "on average" equal to 7 heads, then we have an abstract head size. We are no longer dealing with specific reality.
Once we have an "average" head, it natural to presume that there must be something in the nature of humanity that produces such an average. Such an average proportion plays into the construction of human identity... of what it means to be human. This then becomes the ideal. Depending on how one constructs and uses such abstractions, one could be Aristotelean about it... or Platonic. But when one constructs a SPECIFIC instance of the ideal, one is definitely Platonic, because it is an attempt to show the form of the ideal.
The Aristotelean argument against Plato's forms is that for them to exist, they must be something particular, and thus they cannot be ideal. An Aristotielean would never construct a canonical object. Only a Platonist would do so... only a Platonist roots the ideal in an object, rather than having it simply exist as an abstraction.
In the case of the bike industry, they are Platonic. They have a Platonic ideal of the bike. If they were Aristotelean about it, they would understand the bike in terms of "any rider"... they would not exclude tall riders or short riders. They would formulate the nature of the bike in terms of it's fitness for the purpose to which any person puts it. But they don't do this.
The whole bike industry is Platonic.. and it doesn't exude understanding... what it produces is an endless stream of Platonic ideals derived from rationalized standards that are usually not explained. If you dig behind the assumptions... you will find the same presumptions about rider size and the canonical bike. And probably if you found the average height of all the people in the bike industry, in bike shops, and in the bike media... it would be 5'8" to 5'10".
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
The Virus Inside Myself
The Virus Inside Myself
Several years ago, I was listening to the radio, when I noticed that many singers kind-a sound alike. They might sound like Pearl Jam, or Hootie and the Blowfish, or that Smash Mouth guy, or whatever. Times change, of course, and in time the new sound-alikes come along and sound like whatever else is happening. It felt nice and smug and good to realize that those singers were just copy cats who sold out ever sounding like themselves just to get on the radio.
It occurred to me also, that if those same singers had been born in China, then they'd be singing in a very annoying Chinese way. But then it occurred to me that if I were born in China, that I would speak Chinese too... and that I'd have that annoying Chinese voice, and I wouldn't even sound like me, and I wouldn't even consider it "annoying". So I had to admit that the sound of my voice wasn't anything inherent in me, but was simply a cultural artifact... an accident of my birth and upbringing. It quickly dawned on me that very little of what I consider "essential me" was rooted in anything inherent in me. This was difficult to consider, and very threatening. I have always been one to guard my identity closely, and am not prone to allowing foreign influences into my mind. I don't believe myself to be defined by group inclusion, or by blindly accepting the dictates of religious or social morality, or by anything other than the independent judgement of my mind.
Yet as I reviewed my life, I saw that much of what I considered to be my identity wasn't anything that hadn't been placed there by society. My voice, my clothes, my sense of the universe, my feeling for the east coast (vs west coast), my speaking of English, my penchant for dialog and humor, my owning of a car, working a white collar job, driving a car, etc... I could suddenly consider myself as as being composed to a very large extent of things from that outside world that had slowly invaded the carefully guarded inner sanctum of my being. I characterized them as viruses... as foreign bodies inside myself that had somehow gotten in. The virus had spread to everything.
As I surveyed the "damage" it occurred to me that I had an almost impossible time seeing these external forces as viruses. After all, we only know a virus because we can contrast it to the host body that it occupies. But as I considered myself, I realized that my host body was made up of external influences to such a large degree, that that virus label seemed inverted. Perhaps these viruses were not some rogue minority inside of my majority identity. Perhaps my identity was the rogue faction. Perhaps my sense of myself was the minority. Perhaps these viruses were actually the things that made me who I was in a substantial way... such that they weren't viruses at all. Perhaps my sense of myself was actually the virus.
Perhaps I was the virus within myself... a self formed substantially from external influences that have settled the vast territories of my consciousness, beyond the control of me. Formed when I was young and unaware... formed while I slept... formed while I passively absorbed the continuous onslaught of all that goes on around us 24/7. An open door immigration policy for external influences... enacted in youth, and necessitated at every step of the way in order to conform to social expectations. School, more school, socializing, work, romantic relationships, absorbing culture. And so on.
This can be read in one of two ways
(1) my identity is composed of a collection of external forces, which we call viruses, but since these viral elements make up who I am, I have become (my identity is) a virus, such that there is no difference between the inside and the outside.
(2) my identity is NOT made up of the external (viral) elements. My identity is actually equivalent to that which has become aware of the viral infection.
This situation remind me of Descarte's Cogito meditation, wherein he casts doubt on all that he knows... but cannot escape the reality of himself being the one who doubts, such that the one true thing he knows is that he exists as a thinking thing, and therefore, Cogito Ergo Sum... I think, therefore I am. He exists because he is aware of himself doubting.
In my case, the doubt is not in terms of knowledge, but in terms of identity. Like Descarte, I review all the former road signs and markers of identity, and find them to be nothing more than external things that have infested my identity. However, the one thing I cannot doubt is that there is some sense of ME that exists outside of all those external influences, which shuns those things and stands horrified by those influences. That is the true and protected self. I may be composed of external things, but there is another level at which I exist NOT defined by those things. Descarte can say "I think, therefore I am", and I would say of myself, "I question, therefore I have an identity".
So this places me at war with the external (non mental) aspects of my being. They are viruses, and only being "in here" (in my mind) makes me safe.This type of thinking makes you want to start throwing out parts of yourself that seem irrelevant. First you toss out stuff that you don't really need. Maybe fifty percent of your material possessions and personal habits are simply unnecessary... things you simply picked up from the world around you. So you thrown them out. That felt really really good. So you look for more things to get rid of.
Over time, you can divest yourself of many things that you formerly considered to be essentially you... and as you do, you feel as if you are being reborn... that layers of waste and decay are being stripped off of you, like layers of an onion being peeled away to reveal the "real you" that lies buried inside. But the more you divest yourself from, the more you start to feel vulnerable. It's one thing to throw away a pair of shoes that don't really define you... it's quite another to throw away a career that you fear has defined you. As the layers peel away and you wait anxiously for the pure you to appear under all the layers of real "stuff" that imprison it, a strange fear starts to creep into you... the fear that perhaps there is no "real you" under all the layers. The fear that perhaps the layers are actually part of who you are, such that when they are finally all stripped away... there is nothing at the core... nothing material... just the immaterial mind, now unbounded by the matter that must exist in harmony with... and so it escapes unchecked into personal breakdown and madness.
Several years ago, I was listening to the radio, when I noticed that many singers kind-a sound alike. They might sound like Pearl Jam, or Hootie and the Blowfish, or that Smash Mouth guy, or whatever. Times change, of course, and in time the new sound-alikes come along and sound like whatever else is happening. It felt nice and smug and good to realize that those singers were just copy cats who sold out ever sounding like themselves just to get on the radio.
It occurred to me also, that if those same singers had been born in China, then they'd be singing in a very annoying Chinese way. But then it occurred to me that if I were born in China, that I would speak Chinese too... and that I'd have that annoying Chinese voice, and I wouldn't even sound like me, and I wouldn't even consider it "annoying". So I had to admit that the sound of my voice wasn't anything inherent in me, but was simply a cultural artifact... an accident of my birth and upbringing. It quickly dawned on me that very little of what I consider "essential me" was rooted in anything inherent in me. This was difficult to consider, and very threatening. I have always been one to guard my identity closely, and am not prone to allowing foreign influences into my mind. I don't believe myself to be defined by group inclusion, or by blindly accepting the dictates of religious or social morality, or by anything other than the independent judgement of my mind.
Yet as I reviewed my life, I saw that much of what I considered to be my identity wasn't anything that hadn't been placed there by society. My voice, my clothes, my sense of the universe, my feeling for the east coast (vs west coast), my speaking of English, my penchant for dialog and humor, my owning of a car, working a white collar job, driving a car, etc... I could suddenly consider myself as as being composed to a very large extent of things from that outside world that had slowly invaded the carefully guarded inner sanctum of my being. I characterized them as viruses... as foreign bodies inside myself that had somehow gotten in. The virus had spread to everything.
As I surveyed the "damage" it occurred to me that I had an almost impossible time seeing these external forces as viruses. After all, we only know a virus because we can contrast it to the host body that it occupies. But as I considered myself, I realized that my host body was made up of external influences to such a large degree, that that virus label seemed inverted. Perhaps these viruses were not some rogue minority inside of my majority identity. Perhaps my identity was the rogue faction. Perhaps my sense of myself was the minority. Perhaps these viruses were actually the things that made me who I was in a substantial way... such that they weren't viruses at all. Perhaps my sense of myself was actually the virus.
Perhaps I was the virus within myself... a self formed substantially from external influences that have settled the vast territories of my consciousness, beyond the control of me. Formed when I was young and unaware... formed while I slept... formed while I passively absorbed the continuous onslaught of all that goes on around us 24/7. An open door immigration policy for external influences... enacted in youth, and necessitated at every step of the way in order to conform to social expectations. School, more school, socializing, work, romantic relationships, absorbing culture. And so on.
This can be read in one of two ways
(1) my identity is composed of a collection of external forces, which we call viruses, but since these viral elements make up who I am, I have become (my identity is) a virus, such that there is no difference between the inside and the outside.
(2) my identity is NOT made up of the external (viral) elements. My identity is actually equivalent to that which has become aware of the viral infection.
This situation remind me of Descarte's Cogito meditation, wherein he casts doubt on all that he knows... but cannot escape the reality of himself being the one who doubts, such that the one true thing he knows is that he exists as a thinking thing, and therefore, Cogito Ergo Sum... I think, therefore I am. He exists because he is aware of himself doubting.
In my case, the doubt is not in terms of knowledge, but in terms of identity. Like Descarte, I review all the former road signs and markers of identity, and find them to be nothing more than external things that have infested my identity. However, the one thing I cannot doubt is that there is some sense of ME that exists outside of all those external influences, which shuns those things and stands horrified by those influences. That is the true and protected self. I may be composed of external things, but there is another level at which I exist NOT defined by those things. Descarte can say "I think, therefore I am", and I would say of myself, "I question, therefore I have an identity".
So this places me at war with the external (non mental) aspects of my being. They are viruses, and only being "in here" (in my mind) makes me safe.This type of thinking makes you want to start throwing out parts of yourself that seem irrelevant. First you toss out stuff that you don't really need. Maybe fifty percent of your material possessions and personal habits are simply unnecessary... things you simply picked up from the world around you. So you thrown them out. That felt really really good. So you look for more things to get rid of.
Over time, you can divest yourself of many things that you formerly considered to be essentially you... and as you do, you feel as if you are being reborn... that layers of waste and decay are being stripped off of you, like layers of an onion being peeled away to reveal the "real you" that lies buried inside. But the more you divest yourself from, the more you start to feel vulnerable. It's one thing to throw away a pair of shoes that don't really define you... it's quite another to throw away a career that you fear has defined you. As the layers peel away and you wait anxiously for the pure you to appear under all the layers of real "stuff" that imprison it, a strange fear starts to creep into you... the fear that perhaps there is no "real you" under all the layers. The fear that perhaps the layers are actually part of who you are, such that when they are finally all stripped away... there is nothing at the core... nothing material... just the immaterial mind, now unbounded by the matter that must exist in harmony with... and so it escapes unchecked into personal breakdown and madness.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
A post-modernism test
This test will indicate to what extent you are open to understanding post-modernism. The test below presents two sequences of numbers. Choose the list that seems to make the most sense.
A: 4, 7, 3, 8, 5, 1, 9, 2, 6
B: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Choice A:
This choice is the post-modernist choice. If an unordered list of numbers makes as much sense to you as an obviously ordered list, then you might not find post-modernism hard to understand.
Choice B:
If you chose B, then you might be confused by post modernism.
Analysis of test:A: 4, 7, 3, 8, 5, 1, 9, 2, 6
B: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Choice A:
This choice is the post-modernist choice. If an unordered list of numbers makes as much sense to you as an obviously ordered list, then you might not find post-modernism hard to understand.
Choice B:
If you chose B, then you might be confused by post modernism.
Both lists present numbers of no particular relevance. After all, what does the number 4 or 7 (or whatever) have to do with anything? List A is unordered, and makes the meaningless of the numbers obvious. This list symbolizes the endless flux of reality. List B has been ordered. The act of ordering has imposed human meaning on the endless flux of numbers. The human mind is attracted to such order, because it is the only way to grasp something about the flux.
But where is the truth in an unordered list of numbers? There is none. The numbers by themselves don't mean anything. Even in list B, the numbers themselves have no intrinsic meaning. The truth of list B is contained in it's order. Truth is that which humans bring to endless flux, to structure it, to represent it to the mind in a way that allows one to usefully deal with it. The opposite is to have no useful representation, which is simply confusion.
Post-modernism asserts that the imposition of order on the world, and the desire to grasp the nature and structure of things... is a culturally induced fantasy that has no relation to reality. They look at the list above and chose A, not because it makes sense to them, but because list B does make sense, and they believe that this sensible ordering of list B is a lie. In their view, they choose the truth of the endless flux over the lie of the ordered universe. They believe that not knowing is the truth, and that knowing is a lie.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Why post-modernism is hard to learn
I've been curious about post-modernism ever since I was told it existed. Things are funny that way. One day you're living your life just fine, and the next someone comes up and tells you that you are living in the midst of a tectonic shift in human consciousness. How does one process such news?
My reaction was typical, I suppose. The first thing I asked was, "What is post-modernism?" I went forth trying to read and comprehend all manner of writings on post-modernism. Some writings were source documents of post-modernism, others were essays that tried to explain what the source documents were saying, and yet others were surveys and overviews of post-modernism. In nearly all cases I walked away confused and annoyed, often not being able to finish reading a piece because it ceased to make any sense, and my mind ground to a halt.
Through sheer determination, a few lucky breaks, and a background in more sensible philosophic perspectives, I was able to construct for myself a coherent idea of what post-modernism is. Like so many things that are obfuscated in their learning, the payoff is so much less that the effort involved in learning about them. Which means that the most interesting thing about post-modernism is not what it purports to be, but why it is so hard to learn. In fact, the obscurity of it tells most of the tale. The pathology of disease is always more interesting and illuminating than it's victim, whose particular maladies are just so many sad inevitable consequence fatuously set in motion at the moment of infection.
Post modernism is hard to learn about because it is essentially a skeptical take on culture which denies reason, logic, objective knowledge, and the very idea that abstract, unifying ideas can really describe reality. Given this, writers on post modernism do not employ reason, logic, or unifying ideas when they write about various topics, and especially when they undertake to describe what post-modernism is in itself. Given that they deny unifying theories and grand narratives, they are not free to describe post-modernism itself in an elegant and unified way.
The paragraph above would seem to be an outsiders critical view of post-modernism, which is true. But this critical view is exactly what post-modernism says about itself. Post-modernism comes right out and says that unifying theories and knowledge are not possible. The problem comes when post-moderns then try to communicate a broad range of ideas. They bring to these ideas the obscurity demanded by their premises, and so produce confused writing. If their writings were clear, they would undermine their committed belief that clarity is an illusion.
Their writings present a fragmented, non-unified view of the world that is difficult for the reader to understand... because "understanding" really amounts to a unified view of the world... which is precisely what post-modernism denies. In the end, post modernism cannot even be understood as a philosophy, because it cannot represent a unified body of knowledge. Instead, it offers a fragmented collection of observations designed to have us conclude that unified knowledge is not possible. Many of the observations of post-modern thought are not entirely without merit, as they are effective at casting a useful, critical eye on social and cultural institutions and ideas. However, these critical insights do not add up to a philosophy. And despite the examples that post-modernists put forward to prove that knowledge is a suspect quantity, their very ability to do so rests implicitly on their belief that they have discovered the truth... a truth that their skeptical philosophy denies. Again, a contradiction.
It is a well known truism that one cannot make the skeptical claim that "Knowledge is not possible", because whoever says that is claiming to know it. In effect they are saying, "Knowledge is not possible, and I know that", which is self refuting. Whatever aspersions are cast upon knowledge by a philosopher, those same aspersions apply to the philosopher casting them. The moment you criticize knowledge, the knowledge you employ in doing so has to be held to the same criticism. If you deny knowledge, then your knowledge has to be denied. It's a terrible cycle of pointlessness.
Skeptical philosophies (such as post-modernism) exist only to the degree that the skeptics ignore, evade, or are ignorant of this fundamental aspect of knowledge (that it can't be refuted). It really is very curious how a philosopher can dedicated an entire theory to describing how knowledge is not possible, yet that philosopher never sees the contradiction in claiming to have such knowledge. We don't need to fall for this, but unfortunately we are subject to its effect in post-modern writings. And more than anything else, we are subject to it when post-modern thinkers attempt to explain what post-modernism is.
But before we get to any of this, let us first administer a post modernism test. This test will indicate to what extent you are open to understanding post-modernism. The test below presents two sequence of numbers. Choose the list that seems to make the most sense.
A: 4, 7, 3, 8, 5, 1, 9, 2, 6
B: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
If you chose A, you can stop reading now. This choice is the post-modernist choice. If an unordered list of numbers makes as much sense to you as an obviously ordered list, then you will not find post-modernism hard to understand.
If you chose B, then you might be confused by post modernism. Read on.
Returning to the two kinds of errors referred to above, let us continue.
Through sheer determination, a few lucky breaks, and a background in more sensible philosophic perspectives, I was able to construct for myself a coherent idea of what post-modernism is. Like so many things that are obfuscated in their learning, the payoff is so much less that the effort involved in learning about them. Which means that the most interesting thing about post-modernism is not what it purports to be, but why it is so hard to learn. In fact, the obscurity of it tells most of the tale. The pathology of disease is always more interesting and illuminating than it's victim, whose particular maladies are just so many sad inevitable consequence fatuously set in motion at the moment of infection.
Post modernism is hard to learn about because it is essentially a skeptical take on culture which denies reason, logic, objective knowledge, and the very idea that abstract, unifying ideas can really describe reality. Given this, writers on post modernism do not employ reason, logic, or unifying ideas when they write about various topics, and especially when they undertake to describe what post-modernism is in itself. Given that they deny unifying theories and grand narratives, they are not free to describe post-modernism itself in an elegant and unified way.
The paragraph above would seem to be an outsiders critical view of post-modernism, which is true. But this critical view is exactly what post-modernism says about itself. Post-modernism comes right out and says that unifying theories and knowledge are not possible. The problem comes when post-moderns then try to communicate a broad range of ideas. They bring to these ideas the obscurity demanded by their premises, and so produce confused writing. If their writings were clear, they would undermine their committed belief that clarity is an illusion.
Their writings present a fragmented, non-unified view of the world that is difficult for the reader to understand... because "understanding" really amounts to a unified view of the world... which is precisely what post-modernism denies. In the end, post modernism cannot even be understood as a philosophy, because it cannot represent a unified body of knowledge. Instead, it offers a fragmented collection of observations designed to have us conclude that unified knowledge is not possible. Many of the observations of post-modern thought are not entirely without merit, as they are effective at casting a useful, critical eye on social and cultural institutions and ideas. However, these critical insights do not add up to a philosophy. And despite the examples that post-modernists put forward to prove that knowledge is a suspect quantity, their very ability to do so rests implicitly on their belief that they have discovered the truth... a truth that their skeptical philosophy denies. Again, a contradiction.
It is a well known truism that one cannot make the skeptical claim that "Knowledge is not possible", because whoever says that is claiming to know it. In effect they are saying, "Knowledge is not possible, and I know that", which is self refuting. Whatever aspersions are cast upon knowledge by a philosopher, those same aspersions apply to the philosopher casting them. The moment you criticize knowledge, the knowledge you employ in doing so has to be held to the same criticism. If you deny knowledge, then your knowledge has to be denied. It's a terrible cycle of pointlessness.
Skeptical philosophies (such as post-modernism) exist only to the degree that the skeptics ignore, evade, or are ignorant of this fundamental aspect of knowledge (that it can't be refuted). It really is very curious how a philosopher can dedicated an entire theory to describing how knowledge is not possible, yet that philosopher never sees the contradiction in claiming to have such knowledge. We don't need to fall for this, but unfortunately we are subject to its effect in post-modern writings. And more than anything else, we are subject to it when post-modern thinkers attempt to explain what post-modernism is.
But before we get to any of this, let us first administer a post modernism test. This test will indicate to what extent you are open to understanding post-modernism. The test below presents two sequence of numbers. Choose the list that seems to make the most sense.
A: 4, 7, 3, 8, 5, 1, 9, 2, 6
B: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
If you chose A, you can stop reading now. This choice is the post-modernist choice. If an unordered list of numbers makes as much sense to you as an obviously ordered list, then you will not find post-modernism hard to understand.
If you chose B, then you might be confused by post modernism. Read on.
Returning to the two kinds of errors referred to above, let us continue.
Post-modernists don't believe in objective knowledge. They believe that knowledge isn't based in reality, but rather, that knowledge is the name given to the stories (narratives about the world) that people tell themselves and each other. As such, these stories are conditioned by personal bias and cultural conditioning. These stories are true for a person, or for a people, but they are not true of the world. Unfortunately, this comes across as a simple case of skepticism being repacked for modern times.
In its basic form, skepticism is the assertion that knowledge is not possible. The root of this belief, from the time Plato, all the way to last Tuesday, is the desire to define knowledge in absolute terms. But for absolute human knowledge to exist, we would have to be all knowing and infallible. But that is not the nature of human consciousness. We are not all knowing and infallible, and therefore absolute human knowledge is a meaningless category.
We might ask if absolute NON-human knowledge could exist. To assumes that, we would have to identify some form of consciousness that was all-knowing and infallible. There is no such thing. People have supposed that supernatural gods are all-knowing and infallible, but their existence is as yet unproven.
The fact that absolute knowledge doesn't even apply to humans is pretty obvious. So what do we do with this conclusion? To some, this is clear evidence that humans cannot really know things, and so the only conclusion is that whatever humans claim to know is simply subjective and relative... that is... not objective.
We might ask if absolute NON-human knowledge could exist. To assumes that, we would have to identify some form of consciousness that was all-knowing and infallible. There is no such thing. People have supposed that supernatural gods are all-knowing and infallible, but their existence is as yet unproven.
The fact that absolute knowledge doesn't even apply to humans is pretty obvious. So what do we do with this conclusion? To some, this is clear evidence that humans cannot really know things, and so the only conclusion is that whatever humans claim to know is simply subjective and relative... that is... not objective.
To others, the fact that humans are not all knowing and infallible is clear evidence that human knowledge cannot be judged by an absolute criteria. If humans by their very nature are not all knowing and infallible, then this idea of absolute knowledge has nothing to do with the knowledge produced by humans. If it is not in human nature to be absolute, all knowing, and infallible, then why on earth would you require that of people? Why denigrate the status of human knowledge because it doesn't meet a criteria that is irrelevant to human beings?
This is the problem at its core. It is a philosophic issue... an issue in epistemology. It is not unique to post-modernism. Post-modernism simply applies skepticism to a range of later 20th century issues that are of interest to... post modernists. The issues seem to be centered on highly politicize topics in sociology and cultural criticism, and trace their historic roots to the general Marxist idea that ideology is determined not by truth, but by power.
I can already hear post-modernists howling at this claim... that is, if they deign to take my seriously at all. But if they do, they will insist that I really don't understand post-modernism. However, if I ask them to go ahead and explain it to me, they will deliver to my ears lengthy, cartwheeling, tangent laden, never ending explanations that don't seem to zero in on a clear idea of what post-modernism is.
But here's the funny part... that NOT EXPLAINING is exactly the point. If you put forward a theory that claims knowledge is not objective, then you are skating on thin ice. After all, theories themselves are claims to knowledge. You can hardly put forward a theory that human knowledge is simply a narrative that people tell each other, but that has no objective connection to reality... but then ask that your theory be considered as objective fact. The theory itself must be understood to be simply a narrative with no object connection to reality. So your theory negates itself. Simple as that.
Nobody who puts forward a theory wants their theory to be understood to be subjective and relative. Everyone wants their ideas to be taken as objective, that is, as explaining how reality really is. Even when their idea is that there is no objectivity, they want that idea itself to be objective. This is a terrible and pathetic state of affairs to be put into. It reduces these arguments to self-refuting deadends. When all the complexity of the post-modernists issues are stripped away, you are left with people saying simply... "You can't know anything, and I know that". The self refutation in that is so blatant, so obvious, so raw-bone stupid, that one is hard pressed to understand how anyone can accept it. At that point, the reason it is accepted is NOT contained in the argument itself, but rather in the pathology of the mind that accepts it. To claim that making claims is invalid is the self-refuting endless loop of insanity.
So far, this might be making all too much sense. One might be lured into thinking that post-modernism is easy to grasp because this philosophic analysis is making sense. This is not the case. Post-modernism works very hard to not be understood. One way they do this is by NOT engaging their philosophical underpinnings in the way I have above. I can reduce their ideas down to essentials, but they refuse to accept the validity of that. That's no fun. Instead, this modern skepticism is dressed up in a broad range of costumes.... that is... a broad range of socially relevant issues. All of the endless ambiguities and self-contradictions that arise in human society, and that are reflected in sociological and political fact gathering, are beamed back at us as proof that knowledge isn't possible.
And who can deny it. If you walk into a crowd of arguing people, and take what they say at face value, and don't judge it... you end up concluding that there is no truth... because there is no agreement. If several people within the crowd form a faction, and by so doing achieve political power, and by that power are able to sway people to their beliefs, then you end up concluding that there is no truth, because it is only raw power that sways people. So in general, if you look to the crowd (society) as the locus of truth, you probably conclude that knowledge is not possible.
Classical philosophy has not looked to the crowd to theorize about human knowledge. They looked at the individual, by way of a theory of the mind. The mind was considered as an aspect of the individual. But post modernism doesn't work that way. They look to the group (society). I don't know why they find that so persuasive. Certainly, group behavior is made possible (necessarily so) by aspects of human nature. But human cognition is a function (primarily) of individual consciousness as it perceives the external world. Obviously, we are subject to external pressures and cultural influence, and a person can succumb to those pressures and come to believe a lot of nonsense. However, a person can also not succumb to that pressure, or not fully, and therefore they can pursue knowledge on their own, free from that influence.
The point that I am aiming to make here, is that post modernists are oddly unable to explain the meaning of what they suggest are their ideas, and that this inability derives from the these very ideas. If your position is that knowledge isn't possible, but you then want to have a cool intellectual career and publish lots of books and articles that claim to be knowledge, then you cannot engage in a clarification.
Let's return to the post-modernist test again. Both lists present numbers of no particular relevance. After all, what does the number 4 or 7 (or whatever) have to do with anything? List A is unordered, and makes the meaningless of the numbers obvious. This list is the endless flux list. List B has been ordered. The act of ordering has imposed human meaning on the otherwise irrelevant endless flux of numbers. The human mind is attracted to such order, because it is the only way to grasp something about the flux.
A: 4, 7, 3, 8, 5, 1, 9, 2, 6
B: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Post-modernism asserts that the imposition of order on the world, and the desire to grasp the nature and structure of things... is a culturally induced fantasy that has no relation to reality. They look at the list above and chose A, not because it makes sense to them, but list B does make sense, but they believe that this sensible ordering of list B is a lie. In their view, they choose the truth of the endless flux over the lie of the ordered universe.
But where is the truth in an unordered list of numbers? There is none. The numbers by themselves don't mean anything. Even in list B, the numbers themselves have no intrinsic meaning. The truth of list B is contained in it's order. Truth is that which humans bring to endless flux, to structure it, to represent it to the mind in a way that allows one to usefully deal with it. The opposite is to have no useful representation, which is simply confusion.
So the question arises... if you want to comprehend what post modernism is... where should you turn? Should you read post modern writers? It would seem you should. It's usually best to engage source materials when studying history. Of course, there is great benefit in reading surveys that are written by contemporary thinkers. This is especially true when the source documents might be a bit too complicated to understand without an introduction to their background. Fair enough.
It seems to be the experience of many people that grabbing a so-called post modern intellectuals book off the shelf, and diving it, is to experience complete confusion. This has been my experience as well. So then one turns to surveys in order to get a background picture of what is going on. But the problem there is that these surveys are written by practitioners of post-modern thinking. This renders the surveys themselves confusing. Having been written by post-modernists, they will lack clarity. They will refuse to define post-modernism succinctly, because succinct definition is exactly the kind of thing post-modernists don't believe in. Instead, they will attempt to survey all the NON-CLEAR things that the source documents contain, but this act will lack clarity as well, for the reasons cited above.
And this goes on endlessly. To engage in post-modern study is to wade into a vast sea of thinkers who recognize no connection between what they say and reality, or between what they say today vs. what they said last week, or between what they say and what some other post-modernist has said. You couldn't invent a more confusing paradigm.
Another tactic that post-moderns use, in order to not be nailed down on an issue, is to frame the issues of post-modernism in terms of what other post-modernists have said in the past. This diffuses everything through a decentralized collective opinion. The only way to even grasp what the issues are is to engage in a lengthy process of indirect referencing back and forth between what the members of the collective say. But what they "say" is like-wise refracted through this same collective. There is an overwhelming sense of constant indirect references. The rubber never meets the road.
But this is exactly as it should be, given the post-modern mentality. Because in addition to rejecting objective knowledge, and the belief that all that exists is narrative.... post-modernism raises up language as the ultimate authority. Words become reality... or rather... words become the only thing we'll ever know. Since there is no chance that words can frame reality in an objective way.... and since our narratives are all we can claim to know (in a subjective fashion, of course)... and since language underlines narrative.... then the only reality we know is words.
Instead of language existing to represent our objective ideas about reality.... language becomes reality. The means of representation (words) become the object of representation (words again). This is clear enough in post-modern writing, which talks endlessly but seems to say nothing. We keep waiting for statements to come forth... statements about the world. But they don't come. Instead, only more words.
The amusement park
One of the advantages of not being able to afford the entrance fee for the amusement park, is that you are forced to sit outside in the parking lot. Without the prepackaged activities of the park to entertain and distract you, you are left to your own mind. It's just you and the parking lot and whatever you can make of that. You can walk around and see what you can see. You can walk around the amusement park and view it from outside. You can observe the coming and going of the customers to the park. You can observe the employees of the parking coming to work, going in the employee entrance, and occasionally coming outside for smoking breaks. You can notice delivery trucks pulling up and unloading soda and popcorn and whatever else they sell in the park.
Over time, you will come to observe the entire coming and going of all those involved in this enterprise of the amusement park. The nature of the park will then be seen as having two distinct parts. The first part is the illusory part... which is what you consume when you enter the park and succumb to the prepackaged entertainment and distractions that have been created for your consumption. The other part is the behind-the-scenes part... the part you have observed from the parking lot. If the first part (the illusion) is the fantasy part, then this second part (the non-fantasy part) is the mechanism in the real world that gives rise to the illusion.
If you never actually enter the park and experience the fantasy, then you will never be able to figure out exactly how the behind-the-scenes mechanisms work. It will remain very mysterious why people show up and walk through doors labeled employee, or why soda and popcorn are delivered daily, or why trash is hauled away at the end of the day. You might start to theorize about what is probably going on in the amusement park, but you won't know for sure, because the experience of the illusion is not the same as the way in which the illusion is constructed.
On the other hand, if you never leave the amusement park, then not only don't you know how it is constructed, but very possibly you won't even know that it is constructed. You might behave as if the illusion is real. You could spend your whole life in the amusement park, and never know it.
Such a scenario is reminiscent of the movie The Matrix, where the distinction between constructed reality and actual reality is unknown to the captive inhabitants of an artificial world.
If only our own situation were so simplified. If we were literally trapped in a matrix, then at least we would be free of the blame. But we aren't trapped in a matrix... we walk into that matrix freely, and stay in it not because our minds are controlled, but because we choose to stay. We drive up the amusement park every day, park the car, get in line, pay the fee, and float off into whatever fantasy awaits us.
If there is one flaw in the otherwise pretty flawless logic of The Matrix, it is that the machines had to keep the humans trapped inside.
Is reality really that bad?
Over time, you will come to observe the entire coming and going of all those involved in this enterprise of the amusement park. The nature of the park will then be seen as having two distinct parts. The first part is the illusory part... which is what you consume when you enter the park and succumb to the prepackaged entertainment and distractions that have been created for your consumption. The other part is the behind-the-scenes part... the part you have observed from the parking lot. If the first part (the illusion) is the fantasy part, then this second part (the non-fantasy part) is the mechanism in the real world that gives rise to the illusion.
If you never actually enter the park and experience the fantasy, then you will never be able to figure out exactly how the behind-the-scenes mechanisms work. It will remain very mysterious why people show up and walk through doors labeled employee, or why soda and popcorn are delivered daily, or why trash is hauled away at the end of the day. You might start to theorize about what is probably going on in the amusement park, but you won't know for sure, because the experience of the illusion is not the same as the way in which the illusion is constructed.
On the other hand, if you never leave the amusement park, then not only don't you know how it is constructed, but very possibly you won't even know that it is constructed. You might behave as if the illusion is real. You could spend your whole life in the amusement park, and never know it.
Such a scenario is reminiscent of the movie The Matrix, where the distinction between constructed reality and actual reality is unknown to the captive inhabitants of an artificial world.
If only our own situation were so simplified. If we were literally trapped in a matrix, then at least we would be free of the blame. But we aren't trapped in a matrix... we walk into that matrix freely, and stay in it not because our minds are controlled, but because we choose to stay. We drive up the amusement park every day, park the car, get in line, pay the fee, and float off into whatever fantasy awaits us.
If there is one flaw in the otherwise pretty flawless logic of The Matrix, it is that the machines had to keep the humans trapped inside.
Is reality really that bad?
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Humor is uniquely human
The ability to make sense is not unique to humans. Rocks make sense. They are what they are, they conform to the law of identity. If things act upon them, they are affected in a predictable way. If they act upon something, they affect the other thing in a predictable way. This sensible nature is shared by everything in the universe, so really, everything in the universe makes sense.
The only thing that isn't controlled by this overarching materialism is human consciousness. Our minds are free to roam. What should we do with this freedom? Should we conform our minds solely to consideration of the material world? Should we fill our heads with facts and figures and information and theories? Should we use our freedom to turn ourselves into biological containers of the boundless information of the dead material of this universe? Our minds are free in their capability, but if we put them only in the service of the material world, with it's infinite facts and figures... we are not free. The details of the universe are endless... and pursuing them without limit will fill up every nook and cranny of our minds, pushing our humanity out. We will be slaves to the real.
The only escape from being not that much different from a rock, is to NOT deal with reality. Tell the universe that you don't give a shit. Laugh at reality. Humor is only possible to humans, because only humans can look at reality and NOT draw the reasonable conclusion. We choose to look the other way. We can draw unreasonable ones... unexpected ones... ones that make us laugh. Laughter is freedom, laughter is determinism leaving the body.
Laughter reminds us that WE determine how to view the world, not the other way around. Laughter reminds us that there is irony in the human condition. We are so dependent on knowledge to survive, yet that survival is pointless without decisions that cannot be constructed from that knowledge.
These decisions can only be made by free individuals.
Laughing at reality is not, ultimately, to disrespect it. If you need to achieve some materialistic goal in the universe, then by all means focus on the facts, as that is your only chance of success. Laughter doesn't serve the material requirements of survival, it serves the psychological needs of a human being. The need to feel free, to be reminded that our existence is not entirely rooted naked facts.
Laughing at reality is not, ultimately, to disrespect it. If you need to achieve some materialistic goal in the universe, then by all means focus on the facts, as that is your only chance of success. Laughter doesn't serve the material requirements of survival, it serves the psychological needs of a human being. The need to feel free, to be reminded that our existence is not entirely rooted naked facts.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Emotion & Reason
Emotions are not tools of cognition. This simple and fundamental statement about the relationship of reason and emotion is both profound and trivial. It's profound in that it makes a clear distinction between the two that we often see blurred in the minds of many people, who see emotion as an immediate, unmediated, and infallible source of knowledge about the world. These people would do well to contemplate the simple truth that their feelings aren't cognitive, that they aren't conceptual awareness of the facts of reality.
On the other hand, the idea that emotions are not tools of cognition is also trivially true. Because we recognize cognition to be an operation of the rational mind (whatever that might be), and we see the operation of the rational mind as a distinct from the emotional mechanism (whatever that might be), then it is simply true by definition that emotion is not a tool of cognition... or that emotion is not a tool of reason... or that emotion is distinct from reason.
Equally fundamental, elegant, and simple is the fact that "Reason is not a tool of Feeling", though I've never heard this phrase uttered by an objectivist, or anyone for that matter. This is simply the inverse of "Emotions are not tools of Cognition". The profundity of this is that it makes a clear distinction between the two that we often see blurred in the minds of many people, who see reason a means for feeling. These people would do well to contemplate the simple truth that their ideas are no substitute for feeling, and that their ideas about what they feel are not the same as actually feeling.
On the other hand, the idea that reason is not a tool for feeling is also trivially true. Because we recognize feelings to be the result of the emotional mechanism (whatever that might be), and we see the operation of the emotional mechanism as a distinct from the rational mind (whatever that might be), then it is simply true by definition that reason is not a tool for feeling... or that reason is not a tool of emotion... or that reason is distinct from emotion.
According to Rand, emotions are subconscious, automatized value judgments. Reason is an active process of focusing the mind... of differentiating and integrating. In the Romantic Manifest, she describes the interaction between the two... stating that for every thing we encounter in the world, we ask two questions. We ask "what is it" (identification), and we ask "what does it mean to me" (evaluation). She proposes that there is then a parallel development in consciousness that results from this duality. In one direction there is reason, presiding over our conceptual framework. In the other direction, there is emotion, presiding over our values. We can't think conceptually without reason, and we can't experience our values without emotion.
However, emotion does not fuel itself. Emotion relies on the rational mind, since we cannot form any but the simplest pleasure/pain values without the use of our rational minds to provide conceptual statements of meaning. This would seem to suggest that reason is the more important function, and therefore we can rely on reason to tell us what we feel. After all, it is reason that answers both of the questions, "What is it", and "What does it mean to me". Reason seems to be in charge of everything, and since we're in charge of our reason, then we can be in control of our thoughts and feelings by using rationality.
This belief that reason can be used to both think and feel is what I'll refer to as psychological rationalism. It is the opposite of the the reliance of emotion, which I'll call psychological emotionalism. The flaw in psychological emotionalism is pretty obvious... that you can't feel conceptual knowledge. Concepts have to be pursued actively. The flaw in psychological rationalism is less obvious.
Well intentioned objectivists will always deny being rationalistic, though I doubt they could tell you why. It is this inability to articulate the cause of rationalism that makes it unlikely that they will avoid it. The trap is this... that reason is not in charge of the mind. If you believe that reason is in charge of the mind, you will always end as a rationalist.
Does this mean that emotion is in charge of our minds? Probably more so than reason. However, that's not really the answer. I believe that what is "in charge" of the mind is a cooperative, interlocked process whereby reason and emotion are just two aspects of consciousness. We divide them for the purpose of analyzing them, but that division only exists in our minds. To carry on as though this were a real division forces us to choose one or the other.
One might say that just because your consider them separate, you don't need to choose one over the other, that you're not forced into the dichotomy. But this is false. One is always forced into the dichotomy when one accepts the very separation that the dichotomy relies on... which is the rejection of the fact that they are two aspects of the same consciousness that are united in every action of the mind.
The way in which these two aspects of consciousness are united requires that we break them down a bit more. I think that we can conceive of reason and emotion as having an active and passive part... or more likely a reactive and proactive part. The break down is as follows.
Emotions
Reactive - reinforcement of value and physical reaction based on value associations in our
subconscious
Proactive - active process of experiencing the world, directing our attention to what we care about,
and only after that attention is directed thus do we have a context for thinking.
Reason
Proactive - active process of forming ideas, but cannot begin if we don't have a value association
with the object that we are considering.
Reactive - thinking is mostly reactive, in the sense that we plumb our context of knowledge for
conceptual connections that allow us to relate new phenomenon to other knowledge.
"What it means to me" is primary to "what is it". Emotion is primary to reason. Emotion begins life as the pleasure/pain mechanism of the organism, and is not evaluative in the way that it becomes later on. This is parallel to the way in which concept formation isn't present immediately. The ability to feel derives from our animal nature, and keeps us forever connected to that nature. The ability to think also comes from our nature. But whereas our animal nature requires that we feel (due to pleasure/pain responses)... there is no requirement to think OTHER than in response to our feelings. Thinking begins life in relation to pleasure and pain, and even as it evolves away from such basic considerations, it never changes it's relation to feeling (emotion). We begin to think because something affects us (pleasure pain), and over time we think because things "mean something" to us (emotion).
Our emotional life is not only the standard of value, but it is forever establishing the context of relevancy (what it means to me) that reason requires. We direct our gaze not with reason, but with emotion. Once the gaze is directed, reason steps up and does it's thing. Reason is an organizing capability, and like so many organizing principles, we incorrectly make it an end in itself... and we start to view the organization as more real than the things organized. This is a mistake... leading (as stated earlier) to psychological rationalism.
This unbroken chain of action and reaction begins at birth, and doesn't stop.. We might take a slice of this and analyze it as follows:
Emotionally Pro-Active Step: We desire to focus on something.
Rational Pro-Active Step : Focus on object and analyze it.
Rational Reactive Step: Compare new information with context of knowlege.
Emotional Reactive Step: Physical reaction and reinforcement of value.
Emotion is not cognition, but it is awareness. In fact, the vast majority of our awareness of the world is emotional in nature.
On the other hand, the idea that emotions are not tools of cognition is also trivially true. Because we recognize cognition to be an operation of the rational mind (whatever that might be), and we see the operation of the rational mind as a distinct from the emotional mechanism (whatever that might be), then it is simply true by definition that emotion is not a tool of cognition... or that emotion is not a tool of reason... or that emotion is distinct from reason.
Equally fundamental, elegant, and simple is the fact that "Reason is not a tool of Feeling", though I've never heard this phrase uttered by an objectivist, or anyone for that matter. This is simply the inverse of "Emotions are not tools of Cognition". The profundity of this is that it makes a clear distinction between the two that we often see blurred in the minds of many people, who see reason a means for feeling. These people would do well to contemplate the simple truth that their ideas are no substitute for feeling, and that their ideas about what they feel are not the same as actually feeling.
On the other hand, the idea that reason is not a tool for feeling is also trivially true. Because we recognize feelings to be the result of the emotional mechanism (whatever that might be), and we see the operation of the emotional mechanism as a distinct from the rational mind (whatever that might be), then it is simply true by definition that reason is not a tool for feeling... or that reason is not a tool of emotion... or that reason is distinct from emotion.
According to Rand, emotions are subconscious, automatized value judgments. Reason is an active process of focusing the mind... of differentiating and integrating. In the Romantic Manifest, she describes the interaction between the two... stating that for every thing we encounter in the world, we ask two questions. We ask "what is it" (identification), and we ask "what does it mean to me" (evaluation). She proposes that there is then a parallel development in consciousness that results from this duality. In one direction there is reason, presiding over our conceptual framework. In the other direction, there is emotion, presiding over our values. We can't think conceptually without reason, and we can't experience our values without emotion.
However, emotion does not fuel itself. Emotion relies on the rational mind, since we cannot form any but the simplest pleasure/pain values without the use of our rational minds to provide conceptual statements of meaning. This would seem to suggest that reason is the more important function, and therefore we can rely on reason to tell us what we feel. After all, it is reason that answers both of the questions, "What is it", and "What does it mean to me". Reason seems to be in charge of everything, and since we're in charge of our reason, then we can be in control of our thoughts and feelings by using rationality.
This belief that reason can be used to both think and feel is what I'll refer to as psychological rationalism. It is the opposite of the the reliance of emotion, which I'll call psychological emotionalism. The flaw in psychological emotionalism is pretty obvious... that you can't feel conceptual knowledge. Concepts have to be pursued actively. The flaw in psychological rationalism is less obvious.
Well intentioned objectivists will always deny being rationalistic, though I doubt they could tell you why. It is this inability to articulate the cause of rationalism that makes it unlikely that they will avoid it. The trap is this... that reason is not in charge of the mind. If you believe that reason is in charge of the mind, you will always end as a rationalist.
Does this mean that emotion is in charge of our minds? Probably more so than reason. However, that's not really the answer. I believe that what is "in charge" of the mind is a cooperative, interlocked process whereby reason and emotion are just two aspects of consciousness. We divide them for the purpose of analyzing them, but that division only exists in our minds. To carry on as though this were a real division forces us to choose one or the other.
One might say that just because your consider them separate, you don't need to choose one over the other, that you're not forced into the dichotomy. But this is false. One is always forced into the dichotomy when one accepts the very separation that the dichotomy relies on... which is the rejection of the fact that they are two aspects of the same consciousness that are united in every action of the mind.
The way in which these two aspects of consciousness are united requires that we break them down a bit more. I think that we can conceive of reason and emotion as having an active and passive part... or more likely a reactive and proactive part. The break down is as follows.
Emotions
Reactive - reinforcement of value and physical reaction based on value associations in our
subconscious
Proactive - active process of experiencing the world, directing our attention to what we care about,
and only after that attention is directed thus do we have a context for thinking.
Reason
Proactive - active process of forming ideas, but cannot begin if we don't have a value association
with the object that we are considering.
Reactive - thinking is mostly reactive, in the sense that we plumb our context of knowledge for
conceptual connections that allow us to relate new phenomenon to other knowledge.
"What it means to me" is primary to "what is it". Emotion is primary to reason. Emotion begins life as the pleasure/pain mechanism of the organism, and is not evaluative in the way that it becomes later on. This is parallel to the way in which concept formation isn't present immediately. The ability to feel derives from our animal nature, and keeps us forever connected to that nature. The ability to think also comes from our nature. But whereas our animal nature requires that we feel (due to pleasure/pain responses)... there is no requirement to think OTHER than in response to our feelings. Thinking begins life in relation to pleasure and pain, and even as it evolves away from such basic considerations, it never changes it's relation to feeling (emotion). We begin to think because something affects us (pleasure pain), and over time we think because things "mean something" to us (emotion).
Our emotional life is not only the standard of value, but it is forever establishing the context of relevancy (what it means to me) that reason requires. We direct our gaze not with reason, but with emotion. Once the gaze is directed, reason steps up and does it's thing. Reason is an organizing capability, and like so many organizing principles, we incorrectly make it an end in itself... and we start to view the organization as more real than the things organized. This is a mistake... leading (as stated earlier) to psychological rationalism.
This unbroken chain of action and reaction begins at birth, and doesn't stop.. We might take a slice of this and analyze it as follows:
Emotionally Pro-Active Step: We desire to focus on something.
Rational Pro-Active Step : Focus on object and analyze it.
Rational Reactive Step: Compare new information with context of knowlege.
Emotional Reactive Step: Physical reaction and reinforcement of value.
Emotion is not cognition, but it is awareness. In fact, the vast majority of our awareness of the world is emotional in nature.
Writing style VS. Thinking style (from my critique of Donald Kuspit's book The End of Art)
The issue of writing style vs. thinking style arose in my mind as I read Donal Kuspit's book "The End of Art". It was a difficult read overall, due to Kuspit's manner of writing. I found myself wanting to critique his writing style. Other online reviewers have noted it as pretty bad. One reviewer referred to it as "leaden", which is funny. But when I think about it, I'm not even sure that he has a writing style. Rather, he has a "thinking" style that you become aware of through his writing, so there is a tendency to describe his thinking as a writing style. I think this is a mistake.
I have a metaphor in mind to describe the difference between a thinking style and a writing style. Imagine a person who is kind-a crazy... who walks around mumbling to himself the names of the presidents of the united states. Imagine he does this over and over again. Now imagine that this person is asked to write down his thoughts. Probably he will write down the names of the presidents of the united states over and over again. This will produce long sentences with lots of commas between the names. When we read this, we might be inclined to conclude that this writer has a ponderous and wordy "writing style"... when in fact the answer is that he is simply crazy, and that his writing is simply in the service of his craziness.
Could this crazy person be tutored in "proper writing style" so that he didn't write lengthy sentences that go on for a paragraph, and that simply list the presidents of the united states over and over again? No, he could not, because his crazy manner of thinking is the dominant factor in how he writes. In fact, to change his writing he would have to change the way he thinks. In other words, to not write crazy, he would have to stop being crazy.
We have to stop blaming "writing style" for the craziness we read. We have to hold the mind of the author responsible. We have to recognize that it is "thinking style" that is the culprit. When we don't, we end up in the strange situation of blaming writing style for what confuses us, but attributing non-confusing writing as being from the writers mind. In other words, the author (his thinking style) gets credit for anything he says that makes sense, but the blame is passed to "writing style" when things don't make sense.
Is Kuspit crazy? Well, no, not really. If he mumbled the names of the presidents of the united states over and over again we would say he is. But he doesn't. What he does do is mumble and intone the names of one intellectual after another, in the form of attributions of quoted material, that he constructs into run-on sentences. Nothing seems edited or streamlined or culled or reduced to it's essence, or abstracted. We bear witness to the totality of Kuspit's consciousness as he performs a core-dump of his brain.
And what a brain it is! It's chock full of knowledge. He knows all about Kandinksky, and all about Duchamp, and all about all kinds of modern artists. And he knows all about what lots of other critics say about these artists. And he knows all about what Hegel said, and Kant, and Plato and Aristotle. He knows all about what all these postmodern, post-art artists said and did. And even though I'm saying this in a semi-mocking tone, I don't mean to suggest he doesn't know this stuff. I think he does. And when he mixes it all together into page after page of dense references and attributions that he pulls from this sea of knowledge... I'm sure I'm not gonna tell him he doesn't know what he's talking about.
But although he knows what he's talking about, I don't think he knows what he is saying. He just seems to be talking non-stop. He doesn't mumble the names of the presidents of the united states like the crazy guy does... but on a higher intellectual level, I think he's performing a similar act of craziness. Of course, when you are an educated art critic, you aren't called crazy. Perhaps you are called "difficult", or "dense", or "involved", or "deep". Those are all polite ways of not dealing with the underlying.... uh... insanity?
There is of course the tired, old counter argument to what I'm saying, which is that Kuspit's intended audience is other academics and intellectuals who expect this kind of writing style. That's the kind of argument that grid-locks critiques of post-modern writing, wherein some hypothetical "intended audience" legitimizes even the most incomprehensible writing. It's also an ad-hominem attack on the critic, who is cast as not-smart-enough to understand the writing.
The clarity of writing directly impacts the clarity of the ideas expressed in writing, for if it did not, we would have to admit that there is a disconnect between the form of writing, and the subject of the writing. That is, we would have to accept that there is a disconnect between the WAY something is written, and the MEANING of what is written. This makes no sense.
Conversely, the clarity of the meaning directly impacts the clarity of the writing, for if it did not, we would have to accept that confused ideas could be expressed in a clear and direct fashion. But we don't see this in practice. In practice, confused ideas are typically hidden inside dense, incomprehensible wordplay.
To summarize the combinations of writing and meaning, I would say...
Clear Writing + Clear Ideas = Ideal
Clear Writing + Confused Ideas = Doesn't really exist
Confused Writing + Confused Ideas = post modernism
Confused Writing + Clear Ideas = Doesn't really exist
I know someone is going to think, "Who cares if the writing is verbose, as long as the ideas are clear". Unfortunately, the last category above (verbose writing, clear ideas) is a nebulous category. If the form of writing impacts the meaning of the writing, then to some degree the poor writing drags down the meaning, and so the ideas are never completely clear. I think that this is the case with Kuspit. I say that his ideas are clear enough, but the truth is, they are only just clear enough to keep me somewhat satisfied, and to struggle through his foggy writing. In fact, the fog of his writing makes his ideas (when they appear) seem more satisfying than if there were no fog at all. His writing withholds clarity, making you desperate for it... so that when it occasionally appears, you devour it, and feel satisfied. But this is not the as being clear.
As mentioned above... his ideas seem clear when they emerge from the fog. But the very fact that the fog is included in his writing makes it impossible to understand his writing in it's entirety.
Like I said before, Kuspit indulges in verbose writing practices. I assume this is due to some academic background that he can't escape from. This practice not only impacts his writing (verbose) but also his general mindset. He seems unable to consistently take a position, preferring instead to use a constant stream of attributions to other thinkers to support marginally important ideas.
Here is a made up example that dramatizes the point. I might say the following in my own voice...
"It was a really nice day, so I decided to go for a walk and enjoy nature for a while".
Now, if I Kuspit-ize that sentence, I would write it as follows...
As Hegel noted, "Being on the occasion of a day finer than it's antecedent"... I likewise noted my own moment self-same, and so, as Aristotle noted in Posterior Analytics, between consideration and action lies choice... I just so did choose to go for a walk... and in so doing did I thus, as William Morris advised, "Drew deep into my breath the full measure of the natural world". And this went on for a temporal and spatial interval.
Now obviously, I exaggerate and use fanciful examples... but you get my point. Kuspit employs this approach consistently. It's mostly annoying. And draining. And when you do finally parse from it's complexity the underlying idea of... "It was a really nice day, so I decided to go for a walk and enjoy nature for a while", your mind is tired in a way that robs that sentiment of the direct expression it deserved. Ideas and art and people deserve to be presented directly, not mediated through a series of intellectual filters, whose purpose is all to do with habituated writing styles of intellectuals.
Verbiage is a bad thing. It is defined as an overabundance of words, so in one sense, reducing the number of words can reduce the verbiage. This assumes that the same idea can be communicated in fewer words, and that this reduction will be clearer. Sometimes this is possible, but sometimes the only way to reduce the number of words is to make the expression even more terse and difficult to comprehend.
If a reduction in words it too terse, then the writer should use MORE words. The expression should be fleshed out into more words, more sentences, etc. Make it longer, but clearer. This is often possible.
Kuspit needs to strive for clarity through fewer words, or more words. He also needs to stop couching every little thought in terms of attribution to other intellectuals. So this book suffers mightily from these poor practices. However, it is not fundamentally incomprehensible, and the ideas contained in it are of interest... so go knock yourself out and read it.
By the way, I'm sure that someone might note that this review... where I'm so critical of Kuspit's verbose writing... is itself verbose at times. This is true, too... I could have done a better job of condensing in some spots, and expanding in others. But this is no contradiction. It simply points out that great writing requires time and energy, and my alloted time is up for now.
I have a metaphor in mind to describe the difference between a thinking style and a writing style. Imagine a person who is kind-a crazy... who walks around mumbling to himself the names of the presidents of the united states. Imagine he does this over and over again. Now imagine that this person is asked to write down his thoughts. Probably he will write down the names of the presidents of the united states over and over again. This will produce long sentences with lots of commas between the names. When we read this, we might be inclined to conclude that this writer has a ponderous and wordy "writing style"... when in fact the answer is that he is simply crazy, and that his writing is simply in the service of his craziness.
Could this crazy person be tutored in "proper writing style" so that he didn't write lengthy sentences that go on for a paragraph, and that simply list the presidents of the united states over and over again? No, he could not, because his crazy manner of thinking is the dominant factor in how he writes. In fact, to change his writing he would have to change the way he thinks. In other words, to not write crazy, he would have to stop being crazy.
We have to stop blaming "writing style" for the craziness we read. We have to hold the mind of the author responsible. We have to recognize that it is "thinking style" that is the culprit. When we don't, we end up in the strange situation of blaming writing style for what confuses us, but attributing non-confusing writing as being from the writers mind. In other words, the author (his thinking style) gets credit for anything he says that makes sense, but the blame is passed to "writing style" when things don't make sense.
Is Kuspit crazy? Well, no, not really. If he mumbled the names of the presidents of the united states over and over again we would say he is. But he doesn't. What he does do is mumble and intone the names of one intellectual after another, in the form of attributions of quoted material, that he constructs into run-on sentences. Nothing seems edited or streamlined or culled or reduced to it's essence, or abstracted. We bear witness to the totality of Kuspit's consciousness as he performs a core-dump of his brain.
And what a brain it is! It's chock full of knowledge. He knows all about Kandinksky, and all about Duchamp, and all about all kinds of modern artists. And he knows all about what lots of other critics say about these artists. And he knows all about what Hegel said, and Kant, and Plato and Aristotle. He knows all about what all these postmodern, post-art artists said and did. And even though I'm saying this in a semi-mocking tone, I don't mean to suggest he doesn't know this stuff. I think he does. And when he mixes it all together into page after page of dense references and attributions that he pulls from this sea of knowledge... I'm sure I'm not gonna tell him he doesn't know what he's talking about.
But although he knows what he's talking about, I don't think he knows what he is saying. He just seems to be talking non-stop. He doesn't mumble the names of the presidents of the united states like the crazy guy does... but on a higher intellectual level, I think he's performing a similar act of craziness. Of course, when you are an educated art critic, you aren't called crazy. Perhaps you are called "difficult", or "dense", or "involved", or "deep". Those are all polite ways of not dealing with the underlying.... uh... insanity?
There is of course the tired, old counter argument to what I'm saying, which is that Kuspit's intended audience is other academics and intellectuals who expect this kind of writing style. That's the kind of argument that grid-locks critiques of post-modern writing, wherein some hypothetical "intended audience" legitimizes even the most incomprehensible writing. It's also an ad-hominem attack on the critic, who is cast as not-smart-enough to understand the writing.
The clarity of writing directly impacts the clarity of the ideas expressed in writing, for if it did not, we would have to admit that there is a disconnect between the form of writing, and the subject of the writing. That is, we would have to accept that there is a disconnect between the WAY something is written, and the MEANING of what is written. This makes no sense.
Conversely, the clarity of the meaning directly impacts the clarity of the writing, for if it did not, we would have to accept that confused ideas could be expressed in a clear and direct fashion. But we don't see this in practice. In practice, confused ideas are typically hidden inside dense, incomprehensible wordplay.
To summarize the combinations of writing and meaning, I would say...
Clear Writing + Clear Ideas = Ideal
Clear Writing + Confused Ideas = Doesn't really exist
Confused Writing + Confused Ideas = post modernism
Confused Writing + Clear Ideas = Doesn't really exist
I know someone is going to think, "Who cares if the writing is verbose, as long as the ideas are clear". Unfortunately, the last category above (verbose writing, clear ideas) is a nebulous category. If the form of writing impacts the meaning of the writing, then to some degree the poor writing drags down the meaning, and so the ideas are never completely clear. I think that this is the case with Kuspit. I say that his ideas are clear enough, but the truth is, they are only just clear enough to keep me somewhat satisfied, and to struggle through his foggy writing. In fact, the fog of his writing makes his ideas (when they appear) seem more satisfying than if there were no fog at all. His writing withholds clarity, making you desperate for it... so that when it occasionally appears, you devour it, and feel satisfied. But this is not the as being clear.
As mentioned above... his ideas seem clear when they emerge from the fog. But the very fact that the fog is included in his writing makes it impossible to understand his writing in it's entirety.
Like I said before, Kuspit indulges in verbose writing practices. I assume this is due to some academic background that he can't escape from. This practice not only impacts his writing (verbose) but also his general mindset. He seems unable to consistently take a position, preferring instead to use a constant stream of attributions to other thinkers to support marginally important ideas.
Here is a made up example that dramatizes the point. I might say the following in my own voice...
"It was a really nice day, so I decided to go for a walk and enjoy nature for a while".
Now, if I Kuspit-ize that sentence, I would write it as follows...
As Hegel noted, "Being on the occasion of a day finer than it's antecedent"... I likewise noted my own moment self-same, and so, as Aristotle noted in Posterior Analytics, between consideration and action lies choice... I just so did choose to go for a walk... and in so doing did I thus, as William Morris advised, "Drew deep into my breath the full measure of the natural world". And this went on for a temporal and spatial interval.
Now obviously, I exaggerate and use fanciful examples... but you get my point. Kuspit employs this approach consistently. It's mostly annoying. And draining. And when you do finally parse from it's complexity the underlying idea of... "It was a really nice day, so I decided to go for a walk and enjoy nature for a while", your mind is tired in a way that robs that sentiment of the direct expression it deserved. Ideas and art and people deserve to be presented directly, not mediated through a series of intellectual filters, whose purpose is all to do with habituated writing styles of intellectuals.
Verbiage is a bad thing. It is defined as an overabundance of words, so in one sense, reducing the number of words can reduce the verbiage. This assumes that the same idea can be communicated in fewer words, and that this reduction will be clearer. Sometimes this is possible, but sometimes the only way to reduce the number of words is to make the expression even more terse and difficult to comprehend.
If a reduction in words it too terse, then the writer should use MORE words. The expression should be fleshed out into more words, more sentences, etc. Make it longer, but clearer. This is often possible.
Kuspit needs to strive for clarity through fewer words, or more words. He also needs to stop couching every little thought in terms of attribution to other intellectuals. So this book suffers mightily from these poor practices. However, it is not fundamentally incomprehensible, and the ideas contained in it are of interest... so go knock yourself out and read it.
By the way, I'm sure that someone might note that this review... where I'm so critical of Kuspit's verbose writing... is itself verbose at times. This is true, too... I could have done a better job of condensing in some spots, and expanding in others. But this is no contradiction. It simply points out that great writing requires time and energy, and my alloted time is up for now.
Video Postmodernism vs. Written Postmodernism
Since so much of the writing (both source and survey) on post-modernism is written by practitioners of that dubious art... and since most of it, whether original source documents or second hand analysis of source documents, is borderline unintelligible... I have taken to looking for videos lectures on the topic.
I started doing this by accident, when I ran across a youtube link on postmodernism while searching for some postmodern text. I was initially reluctant to watch video lectures, as I don't really want to look at a talking head. If I am going to be confused by post modernists, I'd prefer not to see their faces. But a funny thing happened when I finally did watch a video... it started to make sense.
I was surprised how intelligible people became when they speak their ideas out loud, rather than writing them down. It seems that when proponents of postmodernism sit down to write, they engage in obscure writing styles. I can only assume that this is the culture of postmodernism. The writing style echos the thinking style... which is decentralized, non-hierarchical, non-committal, vague, etc. But when they speak, they are forced (by the nature of speech, I suppose) to be more to the point. This results in something actually being said that can be understood.... which is a minor miracle for some of these people.
This is not to say that a good postmodernist can't deliver a 10 minute stream of run on sentences that don't seem to make any sense. I've listened to a few of those already. However, I think it really does come down to the difference between writing and speaking. Writing is a private activity that doesn't occur in real time, and doesn't have an audience staring back. Therefore, writers can craft obscurity, and often do. I don't think that postmodern writers even consider writing to involve communication. It seems to be more of an expressive, experimental form of literature in which they weave a fabric of suggestive ideas, none of which they seem particularly committed to... though they consider the tapestry as a whole to have an intuitive meaning.
But speaking is a public activity, done in real time, with an audience looking back. These conditions may not be the best for the aforementioned expressing, or even lengthy theorizing, but they are very good for summarizing and communicating.
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