Thursday, November 28, 2019

How we determine what is correct

Here's some trilemmas.

Trilemma 1

Consider the following proposal:

  1. Everyone who actually contributes to the project will be recognized as having equal status to the other contributors.
  2. Everyone with contributor status will be given equal power to help determine the right path.
  3. The current power structure will remain the same.

They cannot all be true. Which statement will be rejected?

Trilemma 2

Consider the following statements:

  1. We can solve any question of power distribution regarding how we determine the right path.
  2. We have the motivation to do good by solving such questions.
  3. There is an open question of this type.

They cannot all be true. Which statement will be rejected?

Trilemma 3

Consider the following statements:

  1. The rightness of the path is self-justifying or uses a circle tying back to itself.
  2. The rightness of the path depends on a fixed point outside itself.
  3. The rightness of the path depends on an infinite regress of points.

Are these the same or different?


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Friday, September 20, 2019

Quotes: On deep reading, writing, and meaning

Annie Murphy Paul ("Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer," Time, June 03, 2013):

The deep reader, protected from distractions and attuned to the nuances of language, enters a state that psychologist Victor Nell, in a study of the psychology of pleasure reading, likens to a hypnotic trance. Nell found that when readers are enjoying the experience the most, the pace of their reading actually slows. The combination of fast, fluent decoding of words and slow, unhurried progress on the page gives deep readers time to enrich their reading with reflection, analysis, and their own memories and opinions. It gives them time to establish an intimate relationship with the author, the two of them engaged in an extended and ardent conversation like people falling in love.

This is not reading as many young people are coming to know it. Their reading is pragmatic and instrumental: the difference between what literary critic Frank Kermode calls 'carnal reading' and 'spiritual reading.' If we allow our offspring to believe carnal reading is all there is — if we don’t open the door to spiritual reading, through an early insistence on discipline and practice — we will have cheated them of an enjoyable, even ecstatic experience they would not otherwise encounter. And we will have deprived them of an elevating and enlightening experience that will enlarge them as people.


William Poundstone (Labyrinths of Reason:  Paradox, Puzzles and the Frailty of Knowledge, New York: Anchor Books, 1988. p. 200):

Most rational people do not ponder Newbold's and Levitov's cases long before rejecting them. To say exactly why we reject them is something else. Susan Sontag defined intelligence as a "taste in ideas." It is difficult to codify that taste.

Prince Shakur. When They Tell You To Be Good: A Memoir. Tin House, 2022:

Queer Black people quite literally create new words out of the space that we share with each other, and our appreciation of their power helps us create stories.

Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet. Edited by Maria Jose de Lancastre. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent's Tail, 1991 (a collection of writings that were unorganized upon Pessoa's death in 1935). p. 258):

To say things! To know how to say things! To know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That's what life is about: the rest is just men and women, imagined love and fictitious vanities, excuses born of poor digestion and forgetting, people squirming beneath the great abstract boulder of a meaningless blue sky, the way insects do when you lift a stone.

Aline Kilmer, (quoted by the AP, quoted in The Week, Feb. 5, 2016. p. 19):

Many excellent words are ruined by too definite a knowledge of their meaning.

Akwaeke Emezi. Freshwater. (Grove Press, 2018):

We don’t have to swallow our work or be afraid that it’s too deviant to do well; there is, in fact, no canon we cannot touch. Even when seized by a thousand fears, we can make strange and wonderful things simply for the sake of the strange and the wonderful, we can create without permission, we can write into the unknown.

Mallarme (quoted in Anatole Broyard (d. 1990). Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir. New York: Carol Southern Books, 1993. p. 32):

If a person of average intelligence and insufficient literary preparation opens one of my books and pretends to enjoy it, there has been a mistake. Things must be returned to their places.

Queen Quet Marquetta L. Goodwine, chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. Interviewed by Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: "Rising Waters."

"One thing that people always hear me say came to me as a vision from my ancestors and became the motto for the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, and it’s this: Hunnuh mus tek cyare de root fa heal de tree. You must take care of the root to heal the tree. If you want to get to the root of a problem, you need to dig for it, because roots that are really solid are not on the surface."


Uzma Aslam Khan (The Geometry of God, Clockroot Books, 2009. Kindle location 1718):

Until now we were stepping outside the box the lines were loose. But now Nana wants to follow the laws he wants a legal ghazal [poem]. While we think of one Nana says, 'Everyone understands love through the images of love like the bulbul and the rose or the hunted bird or eye lashes like daggers or we have made up our own. But a ghazal in English is illegal!'

George Saunders (Office Hours, Substack, March 7, 2024):

"Every second we spend writing, we are enacting a stance toward life itself.

The way we ought to feel, according to me: 'I am in this dream called life, living it, sometimes feeling trapped in it, sometimes feeling blessed to be in it, and I want – well, I want to leave something lovely behind, for those who will follow me (and for those who are out there in it with me right now), something that, through its complicated beauty, will bear testimony to how crazy and intense and nice it was being here. I hope to reassure and console with this work. (But not falsely.)'"


Willis Elliott (Flow of Flesh, Reach of Spirit: Thinksheets of a Contrarian Christian. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995. p. 114):

Your 'soul,' by which here I mean your interiority, is compounded of all the conversations you’ve ever had — with other human beings, with God, and with yourself. That’s only one angle from which to describe your soul, but it’s a vital one, theoretically developed by social-psychologist George Herbert Mead (as the social origin of consciousness), and clinically tested and developed by a man I studied with, Hugh Missildine (as 'the child of the past within'). Mead died before I could get to him, but he got to me through his writings. Both men have been important in the shaping of my understanding of interiority and thus in my devising the Thinksheet genre.

James Baldwin, quoted in The San Diego Union-Tribune which was then quoted by The Week, July 28, 2017, p. 17:

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."


Jeff VanderMeer on Twitter: May 20, 2023: I hope more writers will, in the current conditions, be open about the beautiful irrationality at the heart of writing. You can box it in by talking about word counts and whatnot, but at the heart is a raging fire and *being lost* and a deep disrespect for cordial efficiency.

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

ship at sunset

Sunday, September 8, 2019

Quotes: We understand through word, image, sound, motion

"Seneca believed...arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind's weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style."
Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, Vintage Books, 2000. p 92.

"The magic of words still remains for me. I prefer them to ideas."
Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht, quoted by Ron Powers, in The Beast, the Eunuch, and the Glass-Eyed Child. New York: Anchor Books, 1990. p xvii.

"Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in the types and images. It (the world) will not receive it in any other fashion."
Gospel of Philip

"I realized that only in music could I find the answer I was seeking to the questions of the previous evening. Argument I could follow, it weighed with me, yet I could decide nothing from it.
"
Fred Hoyle. October the First is Too Late. Connecticut: Fawcett, 1966, 1968. p 156.

"Walking is the clearest way for me to participate in life, I think, and that’s the best I can do."
Lizzy Stewart, Walking Distance, Avery Publishing, 2019. Excerpted as An Ode to Women Who Walk, From Virginia Woolf to Greta Gerwig on LitHub, November 21, 2019.

"But I think everyone should have a little philosophy, Thomas said. It helps, a little. It helps. It is good. It is about half as good as music."
Donald Barthelme. The Dead Father. New York: Pocket Books, 1975. p 76.


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

a colored line chart representing computerized sound
Image by BroneArtUlm from Pixabay

What do we want more than knowledge?

dandelion seeds about to blow
dandelion by snibl111 from Pixabay

Oddly, the internet discovered this article in July 2021 and lost interest in January 2022. I say "the internet" because all that traffic may have been a burst of bots.

graph of article stats showing a temporary burst of activity before returning to zero

So, I rewrote it and moved it to Medium: "We Knew It Before We Were Quizzed" (Jan 3, 2023)

On Medium, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books.

Friday, April 5, 2019

Building the cathedral: On lifelong education to form a worldview

You can become a member of Medium, where I publish many of my essays. If you do, please see The Living Cathedral of Knowledge (3-min read).

If you'd like to learn more about my work, read my books.


Actual cathedrals of learning

“Oxford made me,” Jan Morris says in her memoir Conundrum, speaking of her first boarding school, her undergraduate years, and adult home. She is speaking of transcendent purpose embodied in a physical place. “I know its fault too well,” she admits, but “it remains for me nevertheless, in its frayed and battered integrity, an image of what I admire most in the world: a presence so old and true that it absorbs time and change like light into a prism, only enriching itself by the process, and finding nothing alien except intolerance.” She adds: “For near the heart of the Oxford ethos lies the grand and comforting truth that there is no norm. We are all different; none of us is entirely wrong; to understand is to forgive.”

She was brought as a child to “the cathedral of Christ Church, Oxford.” She says:

“Every day for five years, holidays apart, I went to service there, and its combination of architecture, music, pageantry, literature, suggestion, association, and sanctity powerfully affected my introspections. I knew that building almost as I knew my own home…An ancient holy building is conducive to secrets, and my secret became so intermingled with the shapes, sounds, and patterns of the cathedral that to this day, when I go back there to evensong, I feel an air of complicity.”

Similarly, Judith Shulevitz:

"He [Paul de Man] and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the critics of the Yale School (Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hills Miller, Harold Bloom) had revealed the volatile core of instability and indeterminacy lurking underneath every philosophical assertion, every scientific method, every work of literature. Nothing we’d learned (we learned) meant what it claimed to mean. All texts were allegories of their own blindness. They glossed over the unthinkable. Our job was to think it for them. We would turn rhetoric against literature and literature against everything else, and come up with something cold and pure and undeluded.

All this gave me an unusually palpable sense of purpose. I was a mole burrowing under the foundations of the tottering edifice of Knowledge. I hung out in the underground undergraduate library, so much uglier and friendlier than the classics library, all bright lights and stale air and soft-cushioned sectional sofas, and read the authors of the new canon: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rousseau, Freud, Baudelaire."

Steven Connor in The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (2019):

"Universities have a fondness for these structures, which sometimes, as with the University of London's Senate House, impractically and overheatingly house libraries. Berkeley's Sather Tower, a campanile whose carillon still plays regularly, houses fossils of animals retrieved from the tar pits of California, as though to figure the transformation of life into stone and then stone into the second life of knowing. When I first visited the University of Pittsburgh I thought the name 'Cathedral of Learning' given to the 160-metre (535-ft) structure that dominates the campus must be an affectionate joke. But that indeed has been its official name since the first class was held in it in 1931. It is in fact only the fourth tallest educational building in the world, after the main building of the Moscow State University, the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower in Tokyo (so named because its curved shape, resembling a bud, seed or pair of praying hands, suggests a nurturing structure for those it contains) and the helical Mode Gakuen Spiral Towers in Nagoya."

Differentiating "women's knowledge" from the default knowledge that men have

A comment by Ursula LeGuin.

"So I began to think: If I’m a woman, why am I writing books in which men are at the center and primary, and women are marginal and secondary — as if I were a man?

Because editors expect me to, reviewers expect me to.

* * *

I didn’t know how. It took me a while to learn. And it was other women who taught me. The feminist writers of the sixties and seventies. The women authors of older generations, who’d been buried by the masculinist literary establishment and were rediscovered, celebrated, reborn in books like The Norton Anthology of Women Writers. And my fellow fiction writers, mostly younger than I, women writing as women, about women, in defiance of the literary old guard and the genre old guard too. I learned courage from them.

But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior — women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?

* * *

We’ve lived long enough in the dark. We have an equal right to daylight, an equal right to learn and teach reason, science, art, and all the rest."

read it on Google Books, pp. 85-86

Lists

Edward Said wrote in Orientalism: "Flaubert felt in the Orient, first, that ‘the more you concentrate on it [in detail] the less you grasp the whole,’ and then, second, that ‘the pieces fall into place of themselves.’ …this was an epistemological difficulty for which, of course, the discipline of Orientalism existed."

Reification

Saskia Vogel:

A book as an object seems so absolute, so fixed, hallowed and concrete. I’ve come to think of this as a sort of intrusive thought. I acknowledge it, and hope the thought will leave me alone. I prefer to think of a text as a transmission and a book as something that pulps in water.

The idea of the hallowed book has its origin in my early education and perhaps in my early years as a reader, in awe of books and what they hold. Perhaps also in my writing ambitions: how does a person write a book good enough for it to be published? For a long time, these questions ran alongside ideas of 'perfection.' But nothing is perfect. And the more I think about literature, the less I need it to meet any sort of ideal or expectation. I’m most interested in how a book will spring to life inside a reader, how they will carry it with them and pass it on. The life the book lives without me."

Caprification

The opening of A. V. Marraccini's book, We the Parasites:

"The female fig wasp burrows into the male fig, called the caprifig, and the process, in turn, is called caprification, when she lays eggs and those eggs hatch. The hatchlings are blind, flightless males and young females. They have incestuous sex. The now pregnant female wasps, the ones Aristotle and Theophrastus call psenes, burst out of the skin of the caprifig and go off to burrow anew into other figs. Both erroneously thought this was a kind of spontaneous wasp generation, but to be fair the actual mechanism is hard to discern such that the biology of it is still a topic now.

The female fig needs to be pollinated to fruit. Bees can’t do this, nor wind, because the inverted flower is sealed up inside itself. So sometimes a female wasp doesn’t crawl into a male fig, where she can lay eggs. Sometimes she crawls into a female fig, where she starves and dies, but in the process pollinates the inverted flower, which can then fruit. The body of the wasp is absorbed by the growing flesh of the fig. You do eat it, in a sense, but you wouldn’t know if I hadn’t told you.

This is called commensalism, a form of parasitism in which the parasite doesn’t actively harm the host. More properly, it’s even a mutualism, dead wasps and male fig husks aside, because the fig and the wasp need each other to reproduce." (pp. 5–6)

It goes on:

"Criticism is a mutualism as parasites like me go, or at least a commensalism, pollinating novels to make more novels; Winckelmann’s halls of beautiful young men in Greek sculpture making the hot breath of living beautiful young men into bildungsroman, which in turn end up in marble of their own. The critical gaze is tearing apart, clawing into the soft central flesh of the tree bud. (p. 7)

It’s a sexual reproductive process, yet “somehow queer. Criticism, too, is queer in this way, generative outside the two-gendered model, outside the matrimonial light of day way of reproducing people, wasps, figs, or knowledge." (p. 7)

To reveal the reason why I'm referencing this metaphor here, I must show this comment too:

"You don’t become a fig wasp on the flanks of the neoclassical tradition without having inhabited it, parasitized it yourself first as practice. This is an education. You tell yourself you are Achilles (or sometimes, Patroclus), you rationalize your world with these models, themselves parasitic on a tradition that you did not yourself make. You learn to be by being them, by pushing into them and unfolding your wet wings." (p. 8)

Otherwise, you might find yourself not the parasite, but the host:

"This is what happens when you get too close to art, undiluted, when criticism isn’t there. It lays its eggs in you. It breeds. It becomes your first kiss, your first lover, your first experience of everything before you even open your eyes. It is there, coursing along in your blood like a pleasing contaminate you can’t ever filter out. ... You contemplate, at some point, if you are merely somebody else’s, a dead author’s perhaps, a psen, laid in the fig of a book." (p. 12)

The Outside Folds In

Erik Davis in High Weirdness:

...psychogenic networks stage the 'production of interiorities,' and they do so precisely by crossing inside and outside. In his account of indigenous spiritual beings, Latour declares that such entities 'are no longer representations, imaginings, phantasms projected from the inside toward the outside; they unquestionably come from elsewhere, they impose themselves.' Here the 'inside' of subjectivity appear as an uncanny fold of the outside, a site where the exteriority of signs and of a-signifying forces impress themselves within.

Lacan coined a marvelous term for this fold: extimacy (extimité), a portmanteau of exterior and intimacy. Extimacy is the intimate other, the unconscious that intrudes from the outside.

Omnology

One might want to study everything broadly. Howard Bloom calls it "'omnology,' a field dedicated to the most zoomed-out cross-disciplinary search for knowledge." For most people, however, this is generally not a reasonable or useful goal. You can't build a beautiful cathedral out of Anything and Everything.

Megalogue

Veering in another direction, one might have a hyperfocused interest in just one subject and hope that everyone else wants to discuss the same thing. Amitai Etzioni calls this a "megalogue." Among "moral megalogues," as he wrote in 2009, "Recent issues have included the legitimacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and whether gay couples can legally marry. In earlier decades, women's rights and minority rights were topics of such discussions. Megalogues involve millions of members of a society exchanging views with one another at workplaces, during family gatherings, in the media, and at public events. They are often contentious and passionate, and, while they have no clear beginning or endpoint, they tend to lead to changes in a society's culture and its members' behavior." James M. Gustafson said that "participation in a serious moral dialogue moving toward consensus is more important than the consensus itself...[because] participation in moral discourse deepens, broadens, and extends [people's] capacity to make responsible moral judgments."

Data bank

A more modern idea is that a giant data trove of beliefs and thoughts could be used to reconstruct a human personality and give it life inside a robot. This is a bit different from the idea of a cathedral, because, while a building designed for worship pays homage to a larger tradition, a personality data bank pays homage only to oneself.

Architecture as Attitude

"...I tell people what they don’t want to hear with a hood punk doll aesthetic. When I think about my aesthetic, I think about architecture. In some ways, when it comes to my personal style, architecture inspires me almost as much as music does. When I think about what I want to communicate through my style, I think about open concept spaces. I think expansive, liberated, present and I’m drawn to wear things that make me feel big, expanded, and beyond societal expectations that fit within a container to make people most comfortable." — Bunny McKensie Mack, quoted in "Everything And More: On the Makings of Bunny McKensie Mack," by Tempestt Hazel, May 18, 2022, Sixty Inches From Center

You May Also Be Interested

Related topics are on "Re-envisioning ‘Environment’". It's an 8-minute read on Medium. Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.


Sources

Jan Morris. Conundrum. 1974. Chapter 2.

Judith Shulevitz. The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. New York: Random House, 2011.

Saskia Vogel, “The Same River Twice: Notes on Reading, Time, and Translation,” Words Without Borders, Jan. 23, 2023

A. V. Marraccini. We The Parasites. Seattle, Wash.: Sublunary Editions, 2023.

Erik Davis. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2019. 2.3.0: Experiments.

"Grand Inquisitor" by Nando Pelusi, on the work of Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. Psychology Today, January/February 2008, p. 41.

Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

"Get Rich Now." Amitai Etzioni. Excerpted from The New Republic (June 17, 2009). Reprinted in UTNE Reader (Jan-Feb 2010), p. 41.

James M. Gustafson. "The Church: A Community of Moral Discourse." in The Church as Moral Decision-Maker (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1970), pp. 83-95. Quoted in James Calvin Davis. In Defense of Civility: How Religion Can Unite America on Seven Moral Issues that Divide Us. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. pp. 168-169.


stained glass cathedral ceiling
Cathedral ceiling by James Henry from Pixabay

Monday, March 11, 2019

Four ways philosophy can fail to point toward a better future

Every philosopher wants truth, and most aspire to some form of fairness and equality as they understand those concepts. But does philosophy succeed in making the world a better place? Here's several ways it can fail to achieve its goal.

1. Everyone cares, but the philosopher can't offer a practical road forward

Peter Levine pointed out in 2013 that many thinkers can envision a better society but can't explain how to get there.

Either Rawls did not take responsibility for changing the world, or he hoped to change it by the following roundabout strategy: first develop a theory of the best possible society by means of academic scholarship, primarily addressed to colleagues and advanced students, and then popularize (or let someone else popularize) the results so that they might influence public opinion and thereby change influential popular votes. I see no evidence that this strategy had any impact, despite Rawls’s enormous prestige in the academy. Public policy in the United States is less Rawlsian than it was in 1970, and liberal activists and leaders who share some of his principles rarely look to him for arguments or guidance. Nor has any other political philosopher had more success than Rawls or his followers and interpreters. This is not a refutation of Rawls’s philosophy, which may be correct on its own terms. I am not a pragmatist who thinks that the only justification of intellectual work is its impact, what William James used to call its 'cash value.' A theory can have intrinsic merit. I would, however, assert that Rawls and his colleagues are no longer writing in the same genre as Plato, Machiavelli, Hamilton, and Madison (and many in-between). Contemporary academic political philosophy does not offer a path to a better society but only an indication of what one would be like. It is a highway without the on-ramp."

Philosophy that isn't actionable arguably doesn't inspire others to action, and, realizing this, the philosopher may not be optimistic about ever reaching the future they have so carefully imagined.

2. Everyone cares, but there is no answer to be found

The novelist Erich Maria Remarque pointed out in 1957 that, if there were a One True Philosophy, the project of philosophy would have already come to an end, just as the discovery of a working medicine generally puts all the snake oil salesmen out of business.

"I walk over to the shelves that contain the works on religion and philosophy. They are Arthur Bauer's pride. Here he has, collected in one place, pretty much everything that humanity has thought in a couple of thousand years about the meaning of life, and so it should be possible for a couple of hundred thousand marks to become adequately informed on the subject — for even less really, let us say for twenty or thirty thousand marks; for if the meaning of life were knowable, a single book should suffice. But where is it? I glance up and down the rows. The section is very extensive, and this suddenly makes me distrustful. It seems to me that with truth and the meaning of life the situation is the same as with hair tonics — each firm praises its own as the only satisfactory one, and yet Georg Kroll, who has tried them all, still has a bald head just as he should have known from the beginning he would have. If there were a hair tonic that really grew hair, there would only be that one and all the others would long ago have gone out of business."

3. The philosopher cares, but no one else does

The English literary critic John Rodker wrote in 1926:

“It is impossible to tell the truth so that it is understood and not be believed, said Blake, but to-day, in the general slackening of all standards, truth, however much understood, has less moral force than it ever had. So that, although some individual be affected to raving point or another utterly blasted, the mass has no use for it, and writing, searching for an absolute truth, goes on at the side of all other activities but influencing them less and less.”

As quoted by Rodker, Blake meant: If people really grasped what the truth meant, they'd believe it. It's like understanding that food and sunshine is good: to be exposed to it is to appreciate its value. Rodker challenged this (albeit from a sideways angle) by observing that people seem to understand the truth, and perhaps therefore they believe it, yet they do not act upon it. This presents a challenge for the philosopher.

4. Not even the philosopher cares

About a decade after Rodker, Ernst Cassirer proposed a reason for this failure of philosophy. He thought it was too wrapped up in making predictions rather than working for change.

"As soon as philosophy no longer trusts its own power, as soon as it gives way to a merely passive attitude, it can no longer fulfill its most important educational task. It cannot teach man how to develop his active faculties in order to form his individual and social life. A philosophy that indulges in somber predictions about the decline and the inevitable destruction of human culture, a philosophy whose whole attention is focused on the Geworfenheit, the Being-thrown of man [as coined by Heidegger, in reference to accepting one’s fate], can no longer do its duty."

Philosophy has to trust its own power, in Cassirer's words. It needs to teach people how to develop themselves to become active members of society. The philosopher has to care about this potential of philosophy, or no one else will.

I suppose, if all we had to do were to accept an unpleasant or ignominious fate, we wouldn't really need philosophy for this. A pill or a stiff drink would do. Philosophy is supposed to light the way out of the tunnel.

An aside: While noting that Heidegger was silent on Nazism, Oliver Burkeman says that, if Heidegger is also accused of

"incomprehensibility, he does have a kind of defense. Everyday language reflects our everyday ways of seeing. But Heidegger wants to slide his fingernails under the most basic elements of existence — the things we barely notice because they’re so familiar — so as to prize them away for our inspection. That means making things unfamiliar, using unfamiliar terms. So you stumble and trip over his writing, but sometimes, as a consequence, you bang your head against reality.”

Which is to say that, one way a philosopher wakes us up is by using poetry. Poetry is language challenging its own boundary, words growing beyond themselves.

How valuable are ideas?

Ideas are a prerequisite to reasoned, planned action. Ideas on their own, however, if not followed by action, are so cheap and prolific as to be nearly meaningless and almost — by definition — useless. Everyone generates ideas. Some jot down keywords in notebooks. Others inflate them to small articles (like this one) that can be shared. Still others write and teach books of philosophy. But none of this achieves its full potential value if it doesn't also somehow lead to action or show others how they can take action. I wrote about this for LinkedIn: "Your old notes aren't exactly 'clutter' (but you might still want to throw them out)."

Violence is imaginable; call it by its names

Reflecting on the paintings of Francisco Goya, Sebastian Smee referred to the painter's "insistence on the stupendous, the monstrous, the scarcely creditable stupidity of human beings."

Smee had seen Goya's paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where they remained on temporary exhibition at the time of his article's publication. Smee is from Sydney, where he knew one of the murder victims in a recent hostage crisis. As he wrote in the Boston Globe in January 2015, he didn't know whether to describe the killer as bumbling idiot. He noted that people tend to use words like "tragedy" and "nightmare" — "uncomfortably heavy, or weirdly abstract" — rather than words that "in many ways feel more accurate. Senseless. Idiotic. Pathetic. Grotesque. Feebleminded beyond belief." People struggle to explain "the Boston Marathon bombing, the insane massacre of 132 schoolchildren that took place in Pakistan on the same day as the two deaths in Sydney, the slaughter of 20 small children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary, the routine, virtually random executions that take place in our inner cities daily, or — more dismally breaking news — the eye-rubbingly futile murders that took place at a satirical newspaper in Paris" earlier that week. None of it is "unimaginable." Goya imagined it in all its "remorseless, terrifying stupidity."

In Goya's paintings, too, we see that "reason is conspicuous only be its absence," and what we have instead is "sheer derangement. Monstrous folly." In Goya's paintings, Smee wrote, we have "a visceral registration of that which is most putrid and pitiful about humans," and we may begin to think that the proper response to atrocities is "not so much to shine the light of reason on them, the better to understand and digest them, but rather to swear never to come to terms with them, never to tolerate them."

How can we declare our intolerance to violence?

Here's one idea. In April 2019, Umair Haque wrote for Medium that the terms "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" represent "some of the most important and vital ideas and concepts in human history, crucial to the functioning of democracies, the rule of law, and the institutions of civilized societies." Those concepts mark where we "began to understand how to genuinely coexist as a world — where the red lines of democracy and civilization lie." When U.S. leaders, believing in American exceptionalism, do not employ these terms to criticize U.S. policies, "we are also saying three things. We are above history. We are above the world. And we are beyond morality. But all those are forms of folly, ignorance, and stupidity — which have come back to collapse our very own society."

After reading these two pieces, I draw my conclusion: It is rational to describe senseless violence in weighty terms — "tragedy" and "nightmare" (Smee), "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" (Haque). Anyone who fails to use such concepts to rationally criticize oneself and one's society has lapsed into the irrational realm — "Senseless. Idiotic. Pathetic. Grotesque. Feebleminded" (Smee), "folly, ignorance, and stupidity" (Haque). While such ignorance may not be the original cause of the violence, it is surely the consequence of not recognizing the significance of the violence. It is the vacuum that violence leaves behind when we do not respond properly. I agree with Smee's conclusion that we must resolve to resist or avoid future violence, and that this is more important than absorbing the meaning of past violence; however, I think that reason can be used in the service of the former as well as the latter.


"prophecies / always sound foolish / at first"
Destiny Hemphill, "what is a ritual with no return?" motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life


Sources

Peter Levine. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Erich Maria Remarque. The Black Obelisk (1957). USA: Crest, 1958. pp. 90-91.

John Rodker. The Future of Futurism. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, Ltd. 1926. pp. 23-24.

Ernst Cassirer. Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935-1945. Donald Phillip Verene, ed. (1979) New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. p. 230.

Oliver Burkeman. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021. Chapter 3: Facing Finitude.

Sebastian Smee. "Atrocity exhibition." Boston Globe. January 11, 2015.

Umair Haque. "The Fascists Are Winning Because Americans are Too Dumb (or Too Afraid) to Call Out Fascism." Medium. April 9, 2019.


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, you can become a member of Medium, where I publish many of my essays.

Friday, January 4, 2019

Does philosophy matter?

William James:

"The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one."
William James. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, together with four related essays selected from The Meaning of Truth. New York: Longmans, Green and Co. 23rd printing, 1959. Original copyright 1907. p. 50.

Daniel C. Dennett:

"Science does not answer all good questions. Neither does philosophy. But for that very reason the phenomena of consciousness...do not need to be protected from science--or from the sort of demystifying philosophical investigation we are embarking on. * * * Looking on the bright side, let us remind ourselves of what has happened in the wake of earlier demystifications. We find no diminution of wonder; on the contrary, we find deeper beauties and more dazzling visions of the complexity of the universe than the protects of mystery ever conceived. The "magic" of earlier visions was, for the most part, a cover-up for frank failures of imagination, a boring dodge enshrined in the concept of a deus ex machina."
Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1991. 22, 25.

Edwin Tenney Brewster:

"Common sense, science, and philosophy are, then, three different levels of insight into the nature of the universe. ... Thus far, on the whole, philosophy has been rather less successful than its partners. There remains, however, still a fourth method of acquiring information, which does not belong anywhere in the common-sense-science-philosophy series--the method of theology. Theology employs the same free speculation as the other three. It rejects its failures in the same fashion. But its test of truth is neither workability, nor the facts of nature, nor inner consistency, but conformity to some datum assumed as already fixed. This ultimate authority is, of course, widely diverse for different theologies. ... But always and everywhere the theological method of discovering truth assumes that some one or more persons know something important about the universe which the rest of mankind cannot possibly discover for themselves."
Edwin Tenney Brewster. The Understanding of Religion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1923. p 66.

Jonathan Lear:

"In the Sophoclean universe there are only two possibilities: either one relies rigidly on human reason or one submits to a divine realm. In neither position is there room for philosophy, that peculiarly thoughtful response to awe."
Jonathan Lear. Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. p. 51.

Jonathan Glover:

"There is room for philosophers who specialize in highly abstract questions and treat them as self-contained. But if this became the norm, there would be a loss. It would stop philosophy making difficulties for Belief. It would also stop philosophy making a difference to anyone's life. The voice of Socrates would trouble people no more."
Jonathan Glover. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, 2001 (originally 1999). p 377.

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, you can become a member of Medium, where I publish many of my essays.

Jordan Peterson on gender quotas in politics (article in the National Post, Dec. 11, 2018)

Jordan Peterson published an opinion piece, "The gender scandal – in Scandinavia and Canada," in Canada's National Post on Dec. 11, 2018.

Update: I posted an article to Medium on January 28, 2022. Really, you should read that.


Focusing on just one or two of my points of disagreement, I sent this letter to the newspaper, which they published in their Dec. 18 issue. Here's a blurry image of the paper...

...and a transcript of my letter.

"Jordan Peterson wants Cabinet members to be selected based on their competence level. Their genders would then reflect those of the MPs overall, he claims, citing what he believes to be statistical likelihood.

Peterson didn’t define “competence;” presumably it needs to come in a special political flavor, distinct from what is valued in, say, construction workers. Nor did he claim that a politician's competence is unchangeable and scientifically measurable. Nor did he provide any reason to accept this mysterious trait as the Cabinet's sole qualification.

He also undercut his own argument by pointing out how a distribution curve works. Violent criminals are far more likely to be men, he says. Why, then, isn't it mathematically possible that the best politicians might typically be women?

To make his point, he needed to show that the 10 percent of MPs ranked as the most 'competent' are indeed a mix of women and men who reflect the gender balance of their peer MPs, and that these aren’t the people Justin Trudeau picked."

Online comments

In the online comments, one reader accused me of playing at being "deliberately obtuse" in my failure to understand what ought to be the "obvious" definition of political competence. (I don't think it's obvious at all, and if I am obtuse, it is surely accidental.) This reader also accused me of being sarcastic (nothing in my letter is sarcastic) and of having "cherry-picked" my responses (well, yes, when the original opinion article is 2,100 words and my response can only be about 8 percent as long, I have to drastically limit what I respond to). Another reader complained that there's no way to rank MPs by their competence level. (Yes; that's exactly my point. Peterson didn't define what he means by competence; we don't know if this unnamed trait is scientifically measurable; and, without ranking each MP's competence level, he can't prove his point.)

My letter to the editor was only about 165 words due to the length restrictions. If I'd had more space, I could have made many more points about Peterson's article.

Additional points

I was most interested in "Part Two (Canada)," which I perceive as the main argument toward which Part One builds. Part Two has the following flaws.

First, he proposes the possibility that “competence is the most important factor” for anyone who works in federal government, then assumes this to be true. He does not even define what he means by competence, though he mentions it in the same breath with “intelligence” and “conscientiousness” (whether to identify it with those virtues or to distinguish it from them, I can’t tell). Let me suggest another important trait for politicians: personal experience that matches their constituents'. For example, when the government sets policy about maternity leave, it is good if many of the decision-makers have themselves previously given birth, because that is a relevant life experience that allows them to readily understand the issues. Abstract forms of intelligence/conscientiousness/competence do not substitute for that life experience. For similar reasons, maturity and career experience are valuable in politicians. Many 20-year-olds are highly "competent" but they aren't quite ready for political leadership. So I don’t accept Peterson’s assumption that “competence is the most important factor” in politicians.

It is especially nonsense since the first half of the article—“Part One (Scandinavia)”—discusses how men and women self-report different personality traits. Statistically, “men are less agreeable,” Peterson reports, while women are “more interested...in people.” It seems to me that being people-oriented, sympathetic, and motivated to reach agreement are great assets in a politician. Rearranging the elements of his own argument could result in the very different proposal that women make better politicians.

To use a visual illustration more common to a math class: Imagine you want to select a handful of the highest-quality M&Ms from a bag. Before you begin your selection process, someone throws out all the blue ones. Does it matter? It shouldn't, because for your practical purposes, all the M&Ms taste the same anyway. They are all adequate for the purpose of being eaten. But suppose there really is a quality difference, and what if all the blue ones are inferior—"less agreeable" to you? Then it doesn't matter if they were thrown out. In fact, it speeds up your task because you don't have to waste time on them. I am not comparing humans to M&Ms; I am using M&Ms as a mathematical illustration to remove some of the feeling and assumptions. And I am not saying that male politicians are inferior to female politicians; I am pointing out that Jordan Peterson made a comment that suggested that they might be, which undercuts his argument because, if it were true, it would affect the mathematical outcome.

He makes an attempt to explain distribution curves. He says: When comparing any randomly selected man and woman, the more “aggressive” individual is probably the man, but not always. The chance of it being the man is only 60%-40%. Which is to say that most humans are not especially aggressive at all. There are some outliers, though—violent criminals—and these are nearly always men. Since he realizes this, I am surprised he misses its implications for identifying the most highly qualified MP. If the most dangerous criminals are nearly always male, isn’t it possible (by the same mathematical rule) that extremely qualified politicians are nearly always female?

Second, he hasn’t argued that Cabinet members need a level of competence beyond what most MPs have. Presumably and hopefully, MPs already have the competence needed to do their own job. If Cabinet members need something extra-special, he needs to explain what that is. It's relevant because he's asking us to consider the statistical likelihood of an MP having that something-special.

Related to that, he claims: “The possibility of identifying a competent person increases as the pool of available candidates increases.” This sounds logical, but as a practical matter it isn’t obviously meaningfully true for this particular scenario. Having a pool of one dozen, three hundred, or five thousand MPs may not increase the numbers of the exceedingly competent among them who have the je ne sais quoi to become Cabinet members. Maybe a few are dumb as rocks, maybe a few are luminaries. But I imagine they are, on average, simply the sorts of people who like to work in politics and who get voted in, and I suspect that most of them are fairly reasonable Cabinet material. If Trudeau needs to pick 17 out of some 88 women MPs and 18 out of 250 men MPs to form his Cabinet, I’m sure he can find reasonable choices. Jordan Peterson is worried that the best people for the job are languishing in the pool of untapped men MPs. He hasn’t convinced me because he doesn’t have a good definition of what makes someone best for the job. Maybe some of those untapped men have an extra IQ point or an extra smidgen of "conscientiousness" over the rest of the people who got tapped? So? The men might also lack the specific life experiences, career histories, and personality traits of the women MPs who got picked. They didn't have to fight sexism all their lives to get elected. What exactly is being ranked here? Lots of complex things. He isn't recognizing that.

And never mind that a PM surely has political reasons for choosing his/her inner circle. It's not just about who's intellectually or theoretically competent, but about who is like-minded, loyal, powerful, charismatic, networked, emotionally stable, won't be an embarrassment, and works well with all the other people who are being picked. These traits control whether everyone — as individuals and as a group — is competent in their ability to get stuff done. Getting stuff done is very important to a PM, and its practical importance will not change or diminish just because Peterson thinks raw IQ matters the most. Politicians will never choose their inner circle based on IQ tests alone—which suggests that IQ isn't the definition of political competence.

Third, Peterson rehashes one of the usual arguments against affirmative action, which is that you can’t hire people who aren’t in the hiring pipeline to begin with. The usual pro-affirmative action rejoinder is that you can make an effort to broaden your awareness of who is really in the pipeline and make an effort to reach out to them and even help set the stage for the long-term so everyone has better options in the future. Peterson misses the point that, when the PM establishes that the Cabinet should be half women, he’s setting expectations for how he wants government to run and implicitly suggesting that he’d like Canadians to elect more women MPs in the future (which, if it came to pass, would render this whole “problem” of Cabinet over/underrepresentation moot).

The first section of the article, "Part One (Scandinavia)," also has its problems.

  • Peterson describes a study method for identifying gender differences: self-reporting and self-description. He says these study results reveal what men and women "are." That is a leap. Self-reporting can have limited accuracy. People are more than what they know or choose to report. He should have stuck to more precise language, e.g. men's and women's "self-understanding," throughout the article.
  • He notes that these studies find a greater gulf in men's and women's personality differences in nations with more gender-equitable policies. He says this is odd, but doesn't propose a hypothesis for it. (It would have been easy to propose an off-the-cuff hypothesis. Mine is: Maybe people engage with their own gender identity differently depending on how egalitarian their society is?) Having no explanation for this, Peterson seems to think (for no apparent reason) that it supports the idea that at least some important gender personality differences are biologically determined, and he seems to think this is a victory over the idea that gender is a social construct. It is not the win he thinks it is. Gender can have biological and social inputs—so? What is the complaint? What is he winning? Who is he conquering?
  • While it is reasonable to assume that physical sex (including genes, hormones, anatomy, reproductive history, sexual habits, and so forth) affects personality, Peterson didn't specify whether these studies considered these factors. Did these studies compare transgender people with cisgender people? Or, chemically castrated prostate cancer patients with younger men? Or...? Peterson just said the studies were about "men and women." Which means the studies might have accidentally revealed the social construct aspects of gender as much as they revealed anything about physical sex.
  • He speaks about these studies in aggregate. There's no link or citation by which I could look up any of these studies if I wanted to.
  • He's worried about some “large-scale experiments aimed at...eliminat[ing] gender identity among young children” and I don't even know who advocates that or what he's talking about. Sounds like a straw man.

2023 update:

Peterson is saying that men won't defend assaulted women unless they think of the woman as their property. That's the only way — according to him — they can empathize or otherwise believe that her rights and dignity are important.


Again, to read more, please see "When You Claim That Experts Don’t Know Their Stuff" (5-minute read). Or, "That Transphobic Peterson/Joyce Video" (10-minute read). You can become a member of Medium, where I publish many of my essays.