Facts, Values, and Philosophy as Criteriological

Ah yes, that good ol' fact/value distinction.

I haven't thought about it in a bit and somehow got to thinking about it today. One of Bloom's major arguments in The Closing of the American Mind is that we've been thoroughly dragged into the distinction between facts and values. He thinks it a problem because it makes it easier for us to engage with relativism. The world of values, the world of culture, is one in which there are no rights or wrongs, only different 'lifestyles'. Bloom, believing that some forms of life are better than others, won't stand for this. That's why Bloom spends a good deal of time in that book retracing the history of German philosophy and sociology–he wants to free us from that way of thinking by demonstrating that its existence is merely historical.

I found it stimulating to think about the facts/values distinction in relation to Collingwood's claim that philosophy is fundamentally criteriological. The business of philosopher, that is to say, is to determine the criteria by which something can be judged. Goodness, for example, is not something that exists as a hard 'fact', but as something that has to be collectively defined by a group of people.

It seems to me that the concept of criteriological thinking is a nice antidote to the relativism implicit in the idea of values. Values and culture have a connotation of immutability, or at least of detached contemplation. Culture or values are things to be respected, to be understood without judgement. More specifically, they are concepts that were invented in a time in which Western people were afraid of applying Eurocentrism to other groups.

Thinking in terms of criteria successfully preserves a sense of uniqueness in groups, avoids a specifically Eurocentric point of view, and leaves room for critical thinking and the possibility of rejecting a certain way of living, which we all know is necessary.

All of this also connects to Jonathan Lear's writing in Open Minded, with which I am only beginning to look at. Lear's major claim, that the disciplines of philosophy and psychoanalysis are threatened by the modern intellectual climate that prefers answers and doctrines over  questions and exploration. Lear equates standards with deadness: when a certain question has been answered and a standard established it means that the question is no longer worth asking, we already know that. This is a great boon in many ways, as Lear observes, we don't want our dentists pondering the best way to clean our teeth while they work on us. We want them to already know how to clean our teeth. But with disciplines like philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, literature, or most of the humanities, we do ourselves a great disservice by seeking standards or doctrines. For, in many ways, the purpose of the humanities is to permanently embody and embrace the fundamental questions: What am I? Where am I? What am I to do? What is a good life?

The human questions are criteriological, straight up.

It seems to me the real danger is that in our love of standards we have forgotten to care for the fundamental questions, the disquieting mystery at the heart of our simply being here. It is thinking that needs to be kept alive, no doubt.

Nature and Nurture

is short for biology and narrative.

Can you think of an influence of nature that is not susceptible to nurture?

Can you think of a biological influence that cannot be shaped by a narrative?

I think this question goes a long way in answering the question, Why must we treat history and not science as the proper study of humans?

I just want to remember this question for now.

Inside Out and Outside In. Thought and Thinking. Reflections on Modern Habits.

I'd like to sit with two comparisons.

We, as Moderns, have certain habits of thought that we may think essential, but that turn out to be contingent and therefore plastic.

The first has to do with how we relate to the outside world. The second, with how we think of thought.

I'm slowly making my way through Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly's book, All Things Shining. I'm quite happy with it so far.

They claim that the Homeric Greek experience of reality was profoundly different from ours, and that we could gain something by reflecting on the gulf between our experiences.

To put it crudely, the Homeric Greeks were open to the world in a way that we are not. Their experience was something that was imparted to them by the world, whereas ours is something that we impose upon the world. Their experience flowed from outside in, whereas ours flows from inside out. To paraphrase, they say that the Homeric Greeks views themselves as empty heads open to what the world had to offer. Their sense of control or involvement in the world hinged on their ability to be attuned to the mood of a situation. Truth, in other words, was already present in the world, and their task was to be sensitive to it, to await its call.

Our experience, on the other hand, is not of openness, but of manipulation. Our experience flows from inside out: we are habituated to think of ourselves as autonomous rational beings that must impose our own will on the world. I find this conception of the self deeply troubling for numerous reasons. I can't think about that right now.

I won't build a bridge right now. But there is another idea that is deeply connected that I'd like to reflect on.

I had a conversation tonight with a young man that I'm quite fond of. We were reflecting on the relationship between the world's fluidity and the stillness of thought.

Thinking, it seems to me, is often expressed in terms of solidity, in a language that betrays the instability of reality. Thought, that is to say, is intimately tied to generalization. This, I suspect, is why Bergson claims that we have failed to clearly think time and have instead substituted metaphors of space for clear discussions of time, space and time being synonymous with permanence and change, as I've seen in Ravaisson's Of Habit.

Bergson believes that conceptualizing time as time has serious implications. For one, when we think flow clearly we can begin to experience flow more clearly. Life is nothing but flow.

My experience, I say without hesitation, is incessantly novel, always exploding with newness. The specter of redundancy, no doubt, beckons constantly.

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Monday.

We all know the regularities and drudgeries of our lives.

Illusions, I say.

They, and not I, deserve the Abyss.

So, how do I live and love flow? How do I recognize that my life is not regular and boring, but rich, novel, and unique at each moment?

What are the limitations of the claims: Nothing is ever the same. Nothing has ever happened twice. Similarity and difference are illusions. Particularity and uniqueness are the only truth. Change is the only reality.

There is no answer. Fucking duh. To accept the reality of flow is to reject answers and to embrace questions.

Therefore we cannot accept thought, we can only engage in thinking.

There are no complete systems of thought that await a greater Genius. There are no answers that will finally negate pain, illuminate love, and banish death.

There is only learning to love and coping with pain.

And that is no tragedy.

It is the condition of beauty.

Heidegger, as much as I love him, should not be as startling as he was. This statement is meant in no way to detracts from his intelligence and insight, but to point out how misguided our thinking about the human condition is, and to vindicate John Gray's claims about our unreflective importing of Christian ideas.

We moderns could use to experience the world as something that flows from outside in. (Remember that Buddhism advocates a healthy type of self-forgetting).

We moderns could stand to leave behind thought in favor of thinking.

There is no substitute.

Philosophy as the Purposeful Ordering of the Soul

I'm not interested in complete definitions.

But I find it highly provocative to define philosophy as the purposeful ordering of the soul. This, Bloom tells me in Love and Friendship, is how Rousseau conceived of philosophy.

I reckon it has something to do with habit formation, with the cultivation of intuition, with the management of biases and heuristics.

Philosophy must do something for the heart as well as the mind.

An apparatus constructed on dry land
Submerged beneath the waters of my soul
Ordering and sorting the bubbles
So as to love more and hate less
So as to see more clearly into myself and others

Tautology. Other Things.

Several philosophers I like tend to revert to tautologies. Chiefly: 'It is what it is' and 'This is what I have to do because this is what I have to do'. I am of course referring largely to Collingwood, but I've also observed this tendency in Dewey, and I think Bergson. Others, too, no doubt.

What is up with this? How can you just say that 'it is what is is' and expect to be taken seriously by rigorous thinkers? How can you avoid the conclusion that my friend observed tonight: 'everything is what it is'. Because if everything is X then nothing is X.

Aye.

A minor point.

Yet there is a depth in this tautology. A depth that may reside in the concept of particularity.

Because things are not merely in the sense that they are general, but are in the sense that they are precisely what they are.

When I resort to the tautologies I often mean to imply a sense of particularity. I mean to say: 'Hey, this is the situation you are in, and as much as you'd like it not to be true, it cannot be compared or reduced to other kinds of situations'.

'It is what it is' is a recognition that I am what I am and nothing else.

I am singular and the world is singular.

This fits nicely with what I'm trying to think about: that there is no substitute for reflection, no knowledge other than knowledge of the self.

How to square this with the buddhist claim that there is no self, I don't know.

I admit, moreover, that I am tired of thinking. I'm incredibly tired. Ready to apply to graduate programs. Ready to doubt my choice.

Ready to live until I die.

I hope I have the strength to die gracefully.

Studying Ourselves

I ask: What is the best question?

I answer: What am I?

Glancing back at Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, I read Suzuki claiming that we study Zen not simply to study Zen, but to study ourselves.

I think that philosophy of mind should be striving for a similar goal.

This is one of the practical implications of the characterization of mind that I am working towards.

Mind as pure process, knowledge of mind as historical.

Parrhesia and Antifragility

A mere note.

I'm currently reading Foucault's lectures from 1982-83 'The Government of the Self and Others'.

Parrhesia, the ancient Greek concept of truth speaking, fearless speech, however we translate it, is the central concept.

50 pages in Foucault has clarified its meaning to the point that I grasp it as a telling of the truth undertaken despite unpredictable risks that accompany it.

It is only logical, then, that the notion of parrhesia have something to do with the notion of antifragility.

Taleb's notion of antifragility is a way of mitigating the shortcomings of predictive knowledge.

Parrhesia has no need for prediction. We speak the truth because we know it to be true, not because we know what it means, what it will do, what its implications are.

We speak the truth so we can walk that path of truth, not because we can see where that path leads.

The true path may turn out to be nothing more than the speaking of the truth.

Aha. Right.

Parrhesia, antifragility, and aesthetics of existence as ethics. The task is only to care for yourself by expressing what we know to be true, which puts us in a position, gives us an attitude, that will benefit from anything that happens.

Dat Image

'Tis Love and nothing
More that drives me.

I am not a clean child,
I am a misguided Human.

Groping for soft things
I lose myself in their images.

Yet I know gold exists
beyond the image.

Some Quick Thoughts on Different Functions of Knowledge and Philosophy of Mind

Two things.

One is a question I am now able to ask more precisely because of a distinction I've made. The other is an answer that I've tentatively arrived at.

I can now put my concerns about natural science more precisely. My concern with science stems from the fact that all knowledge functions in two ways. 1. As a more or less empirically true statement. 2. As a narrative that enables and encourages certain practices. We tend to focus on the former element of knowledge. We think that truth, empirical accuracy, reproducibility, all that good stuff, is the essence of knowledge or truth. But we don't as frequently ask ourselves, 'what are the consequences of using this empirical truth as a metaphor or narrative that governs my actions?'

Two examples of these different aspects of knowledge.

The first: social darwinism. When folks were talking about social darwinism they were operating on good empiricism, clear reasoning, some evidence, etc.. I'm sure it seemed like a viable explanation of how the world worked. Empirically, it was legitimate. As a narrative, however, social darwinism enabled a lot of really bad things to happen. It allowed people to justify manipulative behavior, 'dog eat dog' attitude, social engineering, and general cruelty or lack of empathy. Social darwinism has turned out, empirically, to be not the only truth about humans or nature. We are also compassionate, loving, caring creatures. Many creatures can be, it turns out. Social darwinism is an instance in which an empirically grounded truth had serious consequences as a narrative that governed behavior. And those two things are a bit separate.

It seems like things move from a natural is to a social should.

Second example: the brain. Yes, I am probably my brain. I don't doubt that everything I do comes out of that blob of meat. Empirically, very true. But, the real question I have is about the brain as a metaphor or narrative: What kinds of behaviors are encouraged by this idea that everything we do is the result of chemical or biological process that is largely mechanistic? My concern is that when we apply mechanistic metaphors and explanations to ourselves, as natural science encourages, we run the risk of behaving mechanistically.

These questions of mine are all related to Roger Smith's work on the concept of narrative self-creation, the idea that we can become something simply by telling a story in which that is what we are. Being Human is an excellent book and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the philosophy of history, science, or mind.

The second point I'd like to note is an answer that I have arrived at about contemporary attempts to ground philosophy of mind in cognitive and neuroscience.

I have this suspicion that what is called philosophy of mind isn't actually talking about minds at all.

I don't think contemporary philosophy of mind  answers the question, What is the mind?

I think contemporary philosophy of mind is answering the question, What makes the mind possible?

Because when you tell me about neurons and all the things that make the mind possible you haven't actually told me anything about actual minds. You haven't told me what a mind is, you've merely told me the conditions that make mind possible.

This answer, I should be careful to say, is not small potatoes. What makes the mind possible is a profoundly important question and I am forever indebted to the work of psychologists and philosophers of mind who partake in the natural sciences.

My point is that we should think clearly about what questions we are answering with the kind of work going on in philosophy of mind.

If we want to answer the question, what is the mind?, we need to study history. Because mind is, as Collingwood knew, only what it does. There is no human mind, in its perfect essence, out there somewhere. This is consistent, too, with Deleuze's materialism. As Delanda says, Deleuze's real accomplishment was to create a materialism without essences, one in which we see reality as a constant changing flow. In that case, everything is pure process, there is no such thing as a state. Regularities are only temporary manifestations, which will break down into irregularities if given enough time.

The implications for the study of mind are clearer to me now: mind can only be what  mind has done. Mind, then, can only be known through history. What psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind can tell us is the conditions in which mental activity becomes possible. What history can tell us is what a mind actually is, what our own minds actually are.

Philosophy of Mind Without the Brain

As Collingwood so aptly observes, mind rendered in the language of natural science ceases to be mind. Indeed, the scientific commitment to reductionist analysis ensures that mind cannot be discussed as mind; it can only be discussed as brain, as chemical process, as matter.

What is the price of reductionist analysis? According to Mr. Allan Bloom, the price is the complexity and ambiguity of our inner life. Scientific analysis always involves the exclusion of certain elements of experience. As Winchester notes, taste, smell, color, and any other element of experience that can be written off as ‘subjective’, is necessarily ignored in scientific analysis. Clear thinking is inherently Procrustean. We cut the edges off of reality in order to think about it more precisely. Concepts come at the expense of reality’s complexity.

Nowhere is it more important to overcome the Procrustean tendencies of thought, however, than in the study of mind. The human mind is unique in that its pre-reflective experiences can be altered by the introduction of new ideas: the stories we tell are the lenses through which we experience the world. We are responsible for our own narrative self-creation.

To speak of the self as a brain, which necessarily involves ignoring certain parts of the mind, is to impoverish our experiences. If the stories we tell about ourselves leave no room for ambiguity, uncertainty, or powerfully confusing emotions, then those things will not register in our experience in all their clarity and vibrancy.

What I am insisting, then, is that we need a language that can both accurately describe mind, and help us preserve and amplify our experience of it.

There is such a thing as a philosophy of mind without the brain: it belongs to the humanities. It belongs to novelists, historians, poets, and philosophers (of certain kinds). This is the sentiment Bloom so clearly expresses in Love and Friendship. It is truly a tragedy, he claims, that psychology has been denied to the novelists and monopolized by the natural scientists.

I can think of no task more important to me than preserving the complexity of the human experience by developing a language that does it justice. This is the business of history and philosophy: to speak of mind in a way that maximizes the possibilities of mind, to use language as “a machine that continually amplifies the emotions,” as Flaubert would have it.

Flaubert, Taleb, Bergson

I want to write an essay on Flaubert, Taleb, and Bergson.

Flaubert, for me, represents the problem of self-deception. In Madame Bovary I experienced many characters that were so wrapped up in a rigid narrative that they were incapable of dealing with reality. Charles is so wrapped up in using science and medicine as a way to ignore the difficulties of reality. Madame Bovary, on the other hand, is so wrapped up in Romantic language and literature that she can't perceive clearly past it anymore.

Taleb, I think, offers a language in which we can precisely render this problem of self-deception. Viewing the world as Charles and Emma do, he would say, is a procrustean problem: it comes from the desire to fit the messiness of reality to the cleanliness our ideas, rather than to tailor our ideas to the nuance of reality.

Bergson, however, offers a view of knowledge in which we do not have to cut the edges off of reality for the sake of our ideas. Bergson's concept of intuition allows us to appreciate reality in all of its ineffability, hopefully avoiding modern procrustean tendencies.

I think it would be a wonderfully exciting piece of writing for me to do.

It addresses many things that I'm currently interested in. Obviously, three things. Self-deception, the relationship between ideas and reality, and the distinction between knowing from the inside versus the outside (the former obviously belonging to empathy/simulation, the latter obviously belonging to science/analysis).

Flaubert, Majical Cloudz, and Normal Words

"He did not distinguish, this man of such great expertise, the differences of sentiment beneath the sameness of their expression. Because he had heard such-like phrases murmured to him from the lips of the licentious or the venal, he hardly believed in hers; you must, he thought, beware of turgid speeches masking commonplace passions; as though the soul's abundance does not sometimes spill over in the most decrepit metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of their needs, their ideas, their afflictions, and since human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing-bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars."

Reading Flaubert has been a delight. The above passage has stuck with me over the last week.

I've been so concerned these days with the distinction between generality and particularity. In Rodolphe we see a character whose experience of love and sexuality has been dulled by the sheer number of lovers he has had. Love all appears the same to him. In grand, ordinary language he sees nothing but the mundane. Elaborate language does nothing but mask the plainness of love.

The particularity of poetic language simply points to the boring generality that undoubtedly lies in our souls. There is, however, the possibility of the inverse: that normal, generic language can point to the deepest, most particular feelings. 

This is something that I recently encountered in the singer Majical Cloudz. His lyrics are awfully plain. 

Here with you
We're a pair me and you
In my soul it's true
I wanna know you
I would love to
When you go
I will worship you
I will remember you
Of course I would
I would love to

Yet listening to him sing, and seeing him perform live revealed the depth in those words. It is something that you can sense in his voice, something you can read in his body and feel in his eyes. 

There is something great about regarding ordinary words as indicative of something unique.

I greatly prefer to think of generality as an indicator of particularity. 

Nothing is as boring or ordinary as it seems. 

Explaining Me. Explaining You.

"I'm not a loser!" he screamed at the disinterested pedestrians. "God doesn't think I'm a loser! He created me!" he desperately asserted. "I'm a winner!" he exhaustedly claimed.

I was an interested pedestrian. His shouting was painful to listen to, and I was thankful that my comfortable life afforded me a distance from his experience. I don't want to know that pain. But I suspect that his pain was very real.

There is a continuity, I believe, between how we explain our own behavior and how we explain the behavior of others. When we habitually explain our own behavior in terms of reason and rational accomplishment, we tend to habitually explain other people's behavior in the same terms. Their failures become failures of reason, their successes accomplishments of rational work. As Collingwood said, we paint the outer world with the same palette with which we paint our inner world. We explain other people's behavior with the same terms we explain our own.

History, for Collingwood, is a story of necessity, of why things had to happen in the unique ways that they did.

There is something moral, he believed, in seeing our own lives in terms of necessity.

Not the necessity of determinism (whether divine or biological), but the necessity of self-knowledge, of the debt that we owe to our sense of reality.

For what he was after was a unified mind, one that could bring itself fully to a decision, to a moment, to a life.

The unified mind is one that knows what it must do. It ignores the clean logics, favoring instead the difficult decisions that preserve the rough edges of reality.

I will not remove my edges in favor of cleanliness.

I want the jaggedness.

I don't believe that man on the street was crazy, as I heard some folks giddily remark.

I believe that man on the street was an explicable being, acting as he needed to act.

It hurts me to believe so. Yet I know of no other adequate explanation.

It cannot simply be a failure of reason, a lack of intellect.

A late night rant like that can only be explained in terms of clusterfucks, that is, complex intersections of particular circumstances.

I want to explain him this way because I want to experience choice in this way. I want to see his expression as necessary because I so often feel my own expressions to be necessary.

I want to paint him in a loving light because I need to paint myself in a loving light.

Be careful how you explain human behavior.

You may end up as one of the monsters that surround you.

Mourning

When they woke up

That morning he stretched

Out his hand, letting his fingers

Bow gently upward.

He felt a familiar web.

That tangled cluster of

Beautiful hairs that he

Wanted to cover him.

We’re all well aware of

What it is that smell can do.

The moments it can pull

From your heart and

The decaying images it can

Ressurect. It was these

Moments that aroused him most.

Engulfed in her aromas,

Dank and floral.

Already tasting the coffee he
would make for them,

Already losing himself in those

Persistent images of their future.

That Which Takes Care of Itself

At some point in Antifragile Taleb says, 'as if the world needed to be governed'. He is referring to international institutions, and their attempts to control the world.

More specifically, he is referring to the spirit of interventionism that has so thoroughly overtaken the modern world.

My life, it turns out, is taking care of itself.

The more I learn to let go and see what is around me the more I see what it is that I must do, and the more I do it.

There is no need to make anything happen.

There is only what is to be done.

Can't Shake It

I can't shake the problem of authenticity and necessity.

It is such a thread in Collingwood's thought. The artist's work is absolutely necessary. Dutiful action is absolutely necessary.

Is there more than one authentic action open to a person? Or is there a single action that is most authentic?

Ugh.

Can't shake it.

Inner-Directedness

I'm reading The Closing of the American Mind.

I like it quite a lot.

Allan Bloom wanted to preserve the idea of the philosophical life. He believed that value relativism was threatening the American democratic spirit.

I was just reading a chapter about Nietzsche and the rise of value relativism.

Something about how inner-directedness seems impossible to us.

I think it is possible.

Moreover, I think it is singular.

Inner-directedness does not produce alternatives. Inner-directedness produces definite direction.

Definite, particular, direction.

To act authentically is to act in the only way that we can.

To act authentically is to act necessarily.

Inner direction does not know of alternatives.

Finding Balance in The Venture, Turning to The Open, Becoming Human

1. Being After The Enlightenment: Modern Man in Opposition to The World

Martin Heidegger believed that the West’s commitment to the principles of the natural sciences has alienated us from the nature of Being. By accepting the natural sciences as the only form of knowledge, and in attempting to found society on pure reason, we have forgotten what it means to be human. We are no longer at home in the world, fully situated, as other animals are. We have tried instead to place ourselves above and outside the world. We no longer regard ourselves as part of nature. We no longer dwell in the Open. We seek to dominate nature through science and technology, hoping to find shelter and protection in objective modes of thought. Our commitment to reason and representative modes of thought means that we are “not admitted to the Open. Man stands over against the world. He does not live immediately in the drift and wind of the whole draft” (‘What Are Poets For?’ in Poetry Language Thought, 106). By thinking scientifically, and more importantly, by thinking objectively, we have alienated ourselves from the experience of Being in the world.

Our withdrawal into science, however, has offered little protection or relief from the difficulties of Being. On the contrary, science has plunged us into a deeper state of confusion, into a destitute time in which we “have not yet come into ownership of [our] nature,” where “Death withdraws into the enigmatic. The mystery of pain remains veiled. Love has not been learned” (Ibid., 94). In short, our quest for scientific knowledge, while incredibly fruitful in some regards, has left us alienated from the human experience, unable to cope with the bare fact that we are in the world. Since the Enlightenment and the rise of scientific method, Western Man has not sat comfortably in Being. 

Perhaps the natural sciences just need more time. Perhaps at some point in the future those methods will be able to answer the question of what it means to be human, what death means, why pain exists, and what it means to love. Heidegger’s wager, however, is that science will never be able to answer those human questions, and that answers can only be found in poetic and philosophical modes of thought. I agree with him, and am here to add support to this claim. 

I believe that science will always fail to answer these questions about the human experience because it’s methods are fundamentally reductionist. That is, science prefers to analyze things not in terms of wholes, but in terms of constituent parts. I believe that the natural sciences have provided us with a multitude of ways of explaining our behavior that avoid the raw complexity of the human experience. We speak of ourselves in terms of our brains, our genes, our chemical impulses. In doing so we avoid difficult discussions of our emotions and thoughts; we avoid the most human parts of ourselves in favor of cleaner, material analysis. We prefer to speak of ourselves as machines, driven by material processes, rather than as humans, driven by thoughts and feelings.

I personally believe that experience alone allows me to brush aside these types of mechanistic explanations of behavior. If you have no faith in your own ability to think and feel, then I don’t know what I can do for you. Consciousness and the human experience are self-evident to me. But if the experience of being human isn’t enough for you, then let me use a brief discussion of the idea of emergent properties to try and persuade you that it deserves it’s own terms.

I’ve done a little bit of reading about emergent properties and nonlinearity, primarily in Manuel DeLanda, but also in Nassim Taleb and Alan Beyerchan. The main idea is that natural processes cannot be represented in linear ways, they do not follow a simple A to Z development. This is because somewhere in natural processes properties emerge that are greater than the sum of their parts. Water, for example, is comprised of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule. But to learn everything there is to learn about water we cannot simply analyze what hydrogen is and what oxygen is. The nature of water is not contained in those elements alone, but in the combination of those elements and the way they give rise to new properties. The properties that are ‘water’ emerge out of the combination of those smaller particles. Water, being an emergent property of smaller components, thus deserves analysis on its own terms, and cannot be reduced to its constituent parts. Thus, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. All biological processes, too, are a great example of emergent properties. A heart, for example, is made up of certain kinds of cells. But we cannot fully understand what a heart is just by understanding the types of cells that comprise them. We would have to examine a heart as an emergent property of that combination of cells, discussing it not merely as a collection of a certain type of cell, but as a unique whole that deserves analysis on its own terms.  

Consciousness, emotions, and all the rest of humanity, I am claiming, is an emergent property of simpler material processes. What this means is that the human experience of conscious thought, feeling, and agency cannot be fully reduced to the brain, genes, or any other reductive mode of explanation. Just as water deserves to be analyzed as water (and not as 2 Hs and O), and hearts deserve to be analyzed as hearts (and not in terms of their constitutive cells), so too does the human experience deserve to be analyzed in its own terms (and not in terms of brains or genes). The notion of an emergent property shows that complex systems deserve their own terms, and that any attempt to try and reduce them to more basic elements reflects a misunderstanding of natural systems. I believe that the human experience of consciousness is one of those complex natural systems. It is an emergent property of the brain, and even though it can be traced back to the brain, it cannot be fully understood in those terms.

What, then, are the terms that the human experience deserves? Heidegger’s answer is that we need the language of poetry and philosophy. More specifically, Heidegger believed we needed to speak of life as a venture, as a process of finding balance in a world full of risk and uncertainty. These terms, Heidegger believed, sit more comfortably with the experience of Being, and can allow us to be more human. To develop these terms is to try and counteract the epistemological domination of the natural sciences that has seized the modern world. This is about epistemological balancing.

2. The Venture and Being In The Open

The problem, therefore, is that modern man’s relationship to science has plunged us into a state of nihilism. We are groundless, unable to understand how one belief is superior to another. God is dead, and we killed him by means of rational inquiry. Here we are, fearful, godless, hopelessly relativistic, and staring into the Abyss. The task of modern man, for Heidegger, is to turn away from the Abyss, to rediscover a kind of ground for Being. The turn from the Abyss, he believes, is a return to the Open, to the Venture that is life in the world. Moreover, it is poets and artists that are to aid us in this task, for being “a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods” (Ibid., 92). We must find a way to be human again. We must find a way to return to the Openness of the Venture.

The Venture is one of Heidegger’s crucial ideas. I believe that the Venture is comparable to the idea of a nonpredictive view of the world. It is a way of characterizing life as a journey, an unpredictable movement. If the problem with the modern view of the world is that it embraces purely rational and predictive views of the world, then the task is to develop a different view of the world, one that is less reliant on reason and prediction. The idea of the Venture is meant to show us see that man cannot place himself fully in opposition to the world, and will never be able to fully control it. For “Nature ventures living beings, and ‘grants none special cover’.... Plant, animal, and man... agree in this, that they are not specially protected” (Ibid., 100). To be in the world is to be at risk, to hang in the balance. Heidegger also says, however, that “those who are not protected are nevertheless not abandoned. If they were, they would be just as little ventured as if they were protected. Surrendered only to annihilation, they would no longer hang in the balance.” (Ibid., 100-101). To embrace the Venture, then, is to embrace life as a risk, as an unpredictable process, a path to be courageously embraced for all its peril.

By embracing the instability of the Venture, however, we gain a new kind of protection. We find ourselves more at home in the world, more comfortable with the uncertainty that will constantly confront us. We embrace the perils of the path, we make the perils our home. “What is ventured,” he claims, “can follow the venture, follow it into the unprotectedness of the ventured, only if it rests securely in the venture. The unprotectednes of what is ventured not only does not exclude, it necessarily includes, its being secure in its ground. What is ventured goes along with the venture” (Ibid., 101). The way to recover the ground that the Enlightenment stole from us, the way to turn away from the Abyss, is to be found in the venture. As he said, what is ventured is necessarily secure in its ground. That which is ventured understands that there is no stable ground, that the world will never be predictable, and that we will never understand it. Yet, paradoxically, comfort with the instability of life is a form of stability in itself. 

Embracing the Venture, then, is about accepting life’s groundlessness, and finding that this acceptance is a new sort of ground. Comfort with fluidity provides a unique sort of stability. Heidegger also expresses this idea by discussing ‘the shieldedness of the open’

In our use of scientific thought we have placed ourselves above and outside of the world, hoping that our objective modes of thought would provide us some sort of protection from the ‘Open’ of the world in which all other animals dwell without choice. Paradoxically, placing ourselves above and outside the Open has left us less protected, less able to deal with the difficulties of Being. Heidegger borrows this concept of the Open from the poet Rilke, and draws on his letters to explain its significance. In a 1926 letter Rilke explained the Open as such: 

“the animal’s degree of consciousness sets it into the world without the animal’s placing the world over against itself at every moment (as we do); the animal is in the world; we stand before it by virtue of what peculiar turn and intensification which our consciousness has taken.... By the ‘Open,’ therefore, I do not mean sky, air, and space; they, too, are ‘object’ and thus ‘opaque’ and closed to the man who observes and judges. The animal, the flower, presumably is all that, without accounting to itself, and therefore has before itself and above itself that indescribably open freedom which perhaps has its (extremely fleeting) equivalents among us only in those first moments of love when one human beings sees his own vastness in another, his beloved, and in man’s elevation towards god” (Ibid., 105-106). 

The crucial thing to note here is the relationship between consciousness and the Open. Rilke believes that man is not welcome in the Open because our consciousness underwent a certain ‘intensification’ that caused us to engage with the world in terms of the representation and objectivity. Our habit of engaging with the world as object has caused it to become opaque and incomprehensible to us. Instead of being in the Open, we attempt to use the world for our own purposes, engaging it as raw material for our own self-assertion. 

That is to say, we prefer the technological domination of nature over being in the Open. The heart of the matter is the representative, scientific, modes of thought that emerged out of the Enlightenment. Our habit is to transform the world to make it fit the image of our minds. “To such a willing,” Heidegger claims, “everything beforehand and thus subsequently, turns irresistibly into material for self-assertive production. The earth and its atmosphere become raw material. Man becomes human material, which is disposed of with a view to proposed goals. The unconditioned establishment of the unconditional self-assertion by which the world is purposefully made over according to the frame of mind of man’s command is a process that emerges from the hidden nature of technology” (Ibid., 109). Thus our representative modes of thought close us off from the Open, blind us to the reality that we already are, and hardly need to make ourselves into anything. It is this resistance to the Open that causes modern anxiety and distress. It is this turning against the Open that leaves us groundless in our being: “What threatens man in his very nature is the willed view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man’s being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects. But the peace of this peacefulness is merely the undisturbed continuing of relentlessness of the fury of self-assertion which is resolutely self-reliant” (Ibid., 114). It is the fight against the Open that leads us into the Abyss, that leaves us groundless. 

To be in the Open is thus to belong to the world, to not regard it as raw material for domination or control, but to see it as the ground of our Being that needs no willing. But how does the Open offer a protection all it’s own? 

The protection that comes from the Open is the protection that comes from being in touch with reality, with what is. In scientific modes of thought and in technological willing there is a denial of what is in favor of what could be. As Wendell Berry argued, scientific and technological language can never be fully in touch with reality because it necessitates “talking about, if not in, the future, where” things are not: “All the grand and perfect dreams of the technologists are happening in the future, but nobody is there” (Standing by Words, 60). It is in the nature of scientific and technological thought to close us off to the present, to estrange us from reality. This is why Heidegger claims that objective thought “blocks us off against the Open” (‘What Are Poets For?, 117), and why going along with the venture makes “a secureness for us in the Open” (Ibid., 118). The shieldedness of the Open is thus the protection that comes from a knowledge of reality. Or, as Heidegger puts it, “To turn into the Open is to renounce giving a negative reading to that which is” (Ibid., 122). 

I fear I’ve been repeating myself. But the point is that Western man needs to reject the unhealthy habit of objectifying the world and the people around us. We need to overcome the form of thought that, ever since the Enlightenment, we have been addicted to. For so “long as man is wholly absorbed in nothing but purposeful self-assertion, not only is he himself unshielded, but so are things, because they have become objects” (Ibid., 127). We need to find a way to be in the world again, and not set ourselves over and against it. In short, we need to find a way to be connected again, to love again. I believe these concepts of the venture and the turn into the Open embody this hope and desire for love and connection. 

3. The Open and the Venture as Connectedness

The true significance of the idea of the venture and the Open is that they allow us to talk about love and connectedness in ways that scientific language cannot. All of these quotations and my writing feel opaque. But there is something honest in the way Heidegger is speaking. There is something about the human experience, something about love and connection, that can only be discussed in poetic and philosophical language. It is this spirit of connection and love that I want in my own life. This spirit of connection, however, does not stop just with connections to other people, but extends to the entirety of the world. It is with this idea of the Open that we see Heidegger’s desire to feel a connection to all that is. 

That Heidegger’s philosophy is fundamentally about connectedness becomes clearer if we reflect on his relationship to earlier philosophers. Hubert Dreyfus argues that Heidegger’s philosophy was conceived directly in opposition to the Cartesian tradition, which reached its pinnacle with Edmund Husserl. Husserl founded his philosophy on the distinction between human subjectivity and the objects being observed. Most philosophy since Descartes, in fact, has assumed that knowledge must grounded on the distinction between subject and object. Heidegger, however, challenges this distinction between subject and object. He wagers, instead, that humans are far more connected to and embedded in the world than the subject/object distinction implies. When we are living and things are going well, we do not feel separate from the things around us, we do not experience ourselves as subjects examining objects. We feel a flow, a connection to what we are doing and to the people and things around us. 

It is this feeling of connectedness, this experience of being in the world, that Heidegger is trying to articulate. The task of being in the world, however, is not a simple one. It is incredibly difficult, especially as modern beings. We have forgotten how to dwell, we have lost touch with what Heidegger refers to as ‘the simple unity of the fourfold’: earth and sky, divinities and mortals. There is a simple unity to being that is somehow lost on us. “This simple oneness of the four we call the fourfold. Mortals are in the fourfold by dwelling. But the basic character of dwelling is to spare, to preserve. Mortals dwell in the way they preserve the fourfold in its essential being, its presencing. Accordingly, the preserving that dwells is the fourfold” (Building Dwelling Thinking, in Poetry Language Thought, 148). For Heidegger there is no denying our connectedness to all that is, and therefore no need to distinguish between subject and object. That distinction only reinforces the perceived separateness between us, others, and the world.

The challenge, Heidegger argued, was to learn to dwell. In his essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ he argues that we have misunderstood the relationship between dwelling and building. Western thought assumes that we build in order to dwell, that first we build homes and communities and then we dwell in them. For Heidegger, however, dwelling must precede building. It is by learning to dwell, learning to be in the world and belong to it, that we truly begin to build: “Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build” (Ibid., 157). This is because dwelling is “the basic character of human being” (Ibid., 146). Only by learning to dwell to we become comfortable and stable in the fourfold, in the simple unity of the world. Once we become comfortable dwelling, building will take care of itself, it will emerge organically from our belonging to the world. Once we recognize that we can only “build out of dwelling, and think for the sake of dwelling,” we will begin to feel a connectedness to the world that will bring us far more authenticity and love (Ibid., 159). Once we have learned to dwell we will learn about another part of ourselves: the “invisible innermost of the heart” where we are “inclined toward what there is for [us] to love: the forefathers, the dead, the children, those who are to come. All this belongs in the widest orbit, which now proves to be the sphere of the presence of the whole integral draft” (‘What Are Poets For?, 125). In dwelling in order to build, in the Open and the Venture, we find a deep spirit of love and connectedness that can never be understood through the language of subjects and objects. 

I have been deeply impressed by my contact with Heidegger so far. I have only begun to skim his work, and look forward to delving deeper into his thinking. Above all, I am excited to see that his philosophy is eminently human, and poses a serious challenge to the distinction between subject and object. I agree with him (and others) that the West’s commitment to scientific/objective modes of thought has ravaged our culture. There is a need to rethink what it means to be human, to relearn to connect to the Open, to reinvent the idea of love,  and to learn to set out into life as a venture. In short, I want to know how to embrace life’s uncertainty with a spirit of connection and balance. 

The next step for my thinking is to explore the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and other philosophers that I’m fond of. In particular, I want to see what will happen if I pass Heidegger through the prism of R.G. Collingwood’s thought. There are certain similarities I see between them, and I believe that a comparison would prove fruitful. In particular, I want to know how Collingwood’s theory of reenactment relates to Heidegger.

On Necessity as a Possibility and The Singularity of Authenticity

Jargon jargon jargon. Forgive the flashy title.

Two things. First, I was thinking tonight that necessary action, paradoxically, is a possibility, an option that we can choose from. Because we all know that there are many different things that we could do. But among those many things, there is the possibility that one of those options could appear itself to us as necessary. It is possible that one course of action could be justified only by saying "this is what I have to do."

Basically, there seems to be a way that necessity could be a possibility, an option, and not pure necessity.

It becomes a different kind of necessity: The necessity of what we know about ourselves.

This idea of necessity as a possibility or option leads me to my second question, the question of authenticity.

Second thing. I ask this: Is it possible for there to be more than one authentic action open to an individual? Or are there actions that are more authentic than other actions? Is there a maximally authentic action that we can perform?

To me it seems like the answer is no. Authenticity is singular. The idea of authenticity points to a way that things must be. There are degrees of authenticity, no doubt. It isn't as simple as saying 'this action is totally inauthentic and this one is authentic'.

But there are some actions that are more authentic than other actions. There is a course of action that is most authentic. And that most authentic seems to be pretty particular, pretty singular.

If we grasp ourselves, and grasp what it is that is most authentic, then we have to do it. We have to be true to ourselves.

It appears to me that in any given moment there is only one course of action that is truly authentic. Authenticity is singular.

These ideas are complimentary. To perceive action as necessary, to see necessity as a possible course of action, and to believe that authenticity is singular, are compatible ideas.

They both point to Collingwood's notion of duty. They imply that there is a form of action in which possibility and necessity overlap, leading us to do the only thing we can do.

Both of these things, moreover, find there most powerful reference in the idea of self-knowledge. If we truly understand ourselves we perceive options, but we know that one of those options is what we must do, that one of those options will be the most authentic expression of who we are and what we understand about our situation.

I am trying here to unravel Collingwood's claim that "A man's duty on a given occasion is the act which for him is both possible and necessary: the act which at that moment character and circumstance combine to make it inevitable, if he has a free will, that he should freely will to do." It seems to me that I can move closer to solving this problem of duty by asking about the question of authenticity, by asking if there is more than one course of action that can be considered authentic. I don't have a robust answer to this question, but my tentative answer is no. Authentic action is singular, not plural.

The idea of authentic action, that is, action based on a deep understanding of self and world, is action that can be perceived as both possible and necessary.

Duty is authentic action. It is action that is owed to the self based on deep knowledge of the self.

Duty and authenticity. A great pairing, one I'm happy to have come to tonight.

Action as Both Possible and Necessary

Possibility and necessity seem like exclusive concepts.  Possibilities are by definition plural.  Necessity is by definition singular.

Yet Collingwood argues that the highest form of moral action, which he calls duty, happens at the intersection of the possible and the necessary.

I've been dropping bits and pieces about this problem of duty lately.

I don't know how to write about it yet.  I fear I'm not being very diligent with my studying.

But I do think that this idea of dutiful action as necessary action has something to do with self-knowledge.  We would find an action to be both possible and necessary because we understand ourselves, and understand that our character and our situation offer us no other alternative.  Even if we can conceive of other alternatives, we know we can't do anything else.

Self-knowledge, moreover, is in many ways knowledge of our habits.  Knowledge of habits, in turn, has something to do with historical knowledge.  Knowledge of both our own history, and our larger history.

All of this makes me think a little bit about the relationship between language and emotion.  Language as the house of being.

Last night a friend asked me about the problem of truth.  I asked him about Zen and the idea that everything is flux and flow.  How is truth preserved in this conception of the world as flux and flow?  Is the truth of Zen somehow a historical truth?

The idea is that there is no such thing as a general emotion, only particular emotions.  Emotions acquire their particularity, moreover, from historical moments, from the unique cultural (linguistic) circumstances of an age.

So is truth always an historically situated truth?  Does Zen aim for a historically situated truth?

I think yes, but can't be sure.

Effort.

Effort?

I ain't got no time for that.

Maybe it's just because I'm reading Nietzsche. He is talking a lot about how responsibility is an illusion, how action is always necessary.

I don't think it isn't quite that strict.

I feel like the deeper issue is one of honesty, of feeling what it is that we are actually feeling.

The issue with effort seems to be more about self-deception, about resistance to reality.

Either way, I'm tired of effort.

I don't want to 'make things work'.

I want life to work for me.

You mad, bro?

This is one of my favorite things to say lately. Sure, it's a meme. Sure, it's really stupid and doesn't mean much.

My friend says that there is no good response. Because you either say 'no I'm not mad' and you sound mad, or you say 'yeah I'm mad' and then you sound stupid. 

You mad, bro?

Check andddddddddddddd mate.

The truth is, however, that I am mad.

I still feel uncomfortable with the directionless of my life. 

I wrote earlier about Nietzsche and his claim that man's life must ultimately be squandered, that it is the 'feeling above all feelings'. He is probably right. 

Why this life over that life?

Why this choice over that choice?

Reason is a tempting mode of thought, and the relativism that emerges from it is hard to deny.

Yet I deny it.

I fight it.

And this is a problem that I might have with Nietzsche. He was living in the thick of the Enlightenment's collapse. He felt so clearly that the work of the Enlightenment had left us groundless. He knew that the West's commitment to reason was thoroughly bankrupt and would never help us live better.

But I think Nietzsche doesn't push enough at the idea of truth. 

I admit, I haven't read enough Nietzsche. I've only read his early writing. Perhaps he came to an idea of truth, an antidote to relativism.

What I'm really expressing here is my own desire for truth, my conviction that there is a reality that ought to be pursued.

I don't know how to specify this truth. But I believe that there is a kind of truth that needs to be pursued.

We need to ask if there is such a thing as truth.

I saw an article that argued that Romney was running a 'post-truth' political campaign.

Either way, I unequivocally reject relativism. I'm not having this willy nilly 'ain't no goodness' business.

Some things are better than other things.

There is such a thing as goodness.

There is such a thing as truth.

Deal with it.

Dissolving Distinctions: Subject/Object, How/Why

I think that the human world demands a unique form of explanation.  We need a new vocabulary that lets us understand ourselves and others in fuller ways.

We need a humane vocabulary that is free from the epistemological bullying of the natural sciences.

Because the distinctions that apply to thought about the natural world do not apply to the human world. With humans we cannot cleanly make the distinction between subject and object, nor the distinction between what, how, and why.

In thinking about other humans we are thinking about other minds. When our mind grasps another mind it has not grasped it as an object, but as a simulation that we have brought to life in our own mind.  Collingwood argued this point til his dying day.  John Searle, however, put it even more clearly: "The explanation of an action must have the same content as was in the person's head when he performed the action or when he reasoned toward his intention to perform the action. If the explanation is really explanatory, the content that causes behavior by way of intentional causation must be identical with the content in the explanation of the behavior" (Minds, Brains, and Science, 67, emphasis removed). To explain another person's actions is to understand their thoughts. To understand another person's thoughts is to think those same thoughts for yourself.  Thus Collingwood was able to argue, with humans "the object is enacted and is therefore not an object at all" (The Principles of History, 246). 

The distinction between what, how, and why is also blurring to me these days.  This is something I'm learning personally through reflection and attempts at meditation.  When I know what my feelings or thoughts are it is immediately clear to me why and how I have them.  The understanding that I'm trying to gain of myself is fuller than those distinctions and cannot be adequately divided into the neatness of what, how, and why.  Those questions are totally rolled together, and cannot be taken apart.

Our normal scientific language cannot be applied to humans.  There is a need for a more human language.  That language is to be found in history, philosophy, and the rest of the humanities.

The humanities.

Duh.  

Ughhhhhh Nietzsche Feels Good.

I was trying to read a book by Jim Holt, Why Does The World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story. It aggravated me, though. I have other questions to ask. I don't really care very much about the origin of the universe.

So, today I've started reading Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human and it feels reallllly good.

I like reading him.

He was talking about Man's position in the world, and our ultimate aimlessness. He says that if one considers ourselves part of this overall aimlessness, our "activity acquires the character of squandering in [our] eyes. But to feel squandered as mankind (and not just as an individual), as we see the single blossom squandered by nature, is a feeling above all feelings. But who is capable of it? Certainly only a poet–and poets always know how to comfort themselves" (Aphorism 33).

Excellent.

Excellent stuff.

The Truth of Art, History, and Duty

For my friend Collingwood, art, history, and what he calls 'duty' all offer access to a form of truth.

The artist is one who is accessing the truth of his own heart by using his imagination to transform a difficult emotion into a clear and expressible 'idea'.  The artist is one who learns a truth about himself through the use of consciousness and expression.  It is through expression alone that the artist learns about himself.  Prior to an emotion being expressed, it existed in a different form.  It was dormant, existing at a lower state of consciousness, existing as a trace.  Through the act of expression, these traces are pulled to a higher level of consciousness, being transformed into something new in the process.  The truth of art is thus an emotional and mental truth becoming known through the transformative power of conscious expression.

Through art we learn something about ourselves we already knew, we just come to know it with greater clarity.

The historian, on the other hand, is one who accesses truth not only about himself, but about people in the past.  The historian, in some ways, is also an artist.  He, too, uses his imagination to elevate an impression into an idea.  He, too, uses consciousness to learn something through the process of expression.  What the historian wants to know, however, is not the truth of his own heart and mind, but the truth of other hearts and minds.  What the historian expresses then must be something external to himself.  The traces the historian seizes upon are not the traces of thought and feelings in his own heart, but the traces of thought and feeling left behind by people in the past.  This is why Collingwood claims that the historian is merely recreating past thought in his own mind; understanding past actions by rethinking the thoughts that made those actions possible and necessary.  The truth of history is thus aesthetic truth applied to the actions of the past; that is to say, in thinking historically we learn about the hearts and minds of past actors by becoming those minds, and expressing for ourselves what those minds expressed through their actions.

Through history we learn something about past actors that they already knew about themselves, that they expressed in their actions.  In thinking historically we are already thinking aesthetically: we are knowing something that is in a sense already known; we are simply knowing it with greater clarity.

We see this link in Collingwood's aesthetics and in his philosophy of history.  The unifying factors are how we use consciousness to understand the relationship between thought and action.  I think, however, that the concept of necessity also binds the two together.  What we feel, and thus what we learn about ourselves, is not something we asked for: it was simply something in our hearts, something necessary.  In history, too, we are not choosing what we learn about: we are learning about what happened.  And in learning about history, we see why it had to happen the way it did.

Now, these ideas become more difficult when we try and parse Collingwood's concept of duty.  The more I think about him the more I see that duty was what his thought was building towards.  It is duty that would bind his aesthetics, his philosophy of history, and his philosophical method, into a coherent moral concept.

To act dutifully, Collingwood would say, is to treat action in the present in the same way that we treat the actions of the past.  That is, as necessary.

The consciousness of duty is the consciousness that says 'This is what I have to do because this is what I have to do'.  Dutiful action needs no utilitarian analysis, and it needs no reference to a rule.  Dutiful action requires no explanation at all.  It is simply what must be done, it is what we owe ourselves.

We begin to act dutifully, he argues, when we appreciate ourselves as unique beings acting in a unique situation, having only one course of action open to us.  That course of action is the only one open to us because it is the one that emerges organically from the unity of our heart, mind, and circumstance.

That dutiful action is necessary, however, does not compromise the idea of freedom.  Freedom, Collingwood argues, is incorrectly identified with caprice.  Someone acting dutifully, doing what they know they have got to do, has arrived at a fully free and rational conclusion. "A man's duty on a given occasion," he argued, "is the act which for him is both possible and necessary: the act which at that moment character and circumstance combine to make it inevitable, if he has a free will, that he should freely will to do" (The New Leviathan, 17.8, his emphasis).  In acting dutifully, we already know what it is that we must do.  All that stands in our way are misconceptions about the nature of our character and our circumstances.

The truth of duty, then, just like art and history, is a truth that is already known.  To act dutifully we only need to know more clearly what it is that we already know.

Duty is some kind of form of consciousness in which we move forward into the future perceiving ourselves like historians perceive the people of the past, like artists perceive themselves.

Duty is some sort of aesthetic-historical morality.

How odd.

There is something in duty that lines up with my current attempt to write about the West's relationship with predictive knowledge, and Taleb's claim that we need to cultivate a nonpredictive view of the world.

This writing was an essay, an exploration to help me get there.

I'm pleased with what has happened here.

Off The Path. Into The Open Field.

The lack of clear direction in my life is a pain that I'm becoming more comfortable with.

I once had much clearer narratives for my life.  I wanted to go to graduate school, most likely for military history.  I had an idea that my education in history would lead me to be a philosopher of sorts, specializing in Clausewitz, Collingwood, and other people that I still love to think about.

I had a plan.  I had a path to walk.

Tonight someone said to me, 'How interesting that you've stepped off that path, and into the open field, to find out what it's really all about.'

What life is all about, they meant.

Because life isn't only about the academy.  It's about living.

This metaphor of off the path and into the open field sounded really good to me.  She admitted she was borrowing from a group of poets who advocated 'open field' poetry.  Something to do with form and structure.  She couldn't recall it entirely.

I'm trying to live a less predictive life.  I'm try to not force a narrative.  I still find myself coming up with narratives, and hoping that they will work out.  But it doesn't seem to work very well.

More than ever, I'm giving in to how I feel.  I'm learning to feel more clearly.

It's strange.

Trusting yourself is strange.

Accepting tautology is strange.  But I've accepted two.  It is what it is, and, This is what I have to do because this is what I have to do.

Confident, self-reliant action.  Self-knowledge, self-trust.

All this is so vague, right?  So incomprehensible.

So important in the world of practice and so vague in the world of ideas.

I'm trying to learn the practice.

I'm not sure if I want or need to get around to the ideas.

What Is.

It is profoundly disappointing to feel that some things simply are.

That I can admit yet another tautology into my repertoire: It is what it is.

My tendency, and the tendency of liberal academia, is to say: 'Well, maybe it isn't quite what it seems it is.  Because if we shift our perspective slightly, if we apply a different lens, if we look at it through another set of ideas, we find that what is actually isn't quite what we thought it was'.

Relativism abounds.

I'm more hostile to it than ever.

Because some things simply are.

Reality is out there.

This realization is most painful when it comes to the reality of my own heart and mind.  I simply feel certain things.  I simply think certain things.  I am something.

I am not a blank slate, I am not raw material, I cannot fashion myself into whatever kind of being I want to be.

The mastery I can have of myself will never be the mastery of the natural world, of raw materials.

It can only be the master of self-knowledge.  The mastery of understanding myself, knowing who I am, and being that way more consciously.

Consciousness does not help me make myself, willy nilly.  Consciousness helps me know myself, so that I can become that thing more fully.

I am something.

How painful.  So painful.

Other people, too, are something.

They feel and think certain ways, and I can't do anything about that.  That hurts, too.

Because I don't understand why other people think and feel what they do.  I don't even understand why I think and feel the way I do.

But I can no longer pretend that I'm not already something.

I am.

The Shieldedness of the Open

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker with a picture of a Native American man on it.  It said "The Earth doesn't belong to us.  We belong to the Earth."

These days, I feel like I belong more than ever.

I want so badly to belong to my situation, to my world.  I no longer want to set myself above and beyond that space that I occupy.

I want to be, in a fuller sense than I've ever been.

I want to feel what I'm feeling.  Nothing else.

This is something that I've come to through therapy, through meditation.

But I also have some powerful intellectual referents.  Heidegger, in particular, has me super jazzed.

Unfortunately, I have a strained relationship with the intellectual end of this feeling.  In the past, I've lost myself in my intellect.  I've let my writing be disconnected from reality.  I've let my writing become masturbatory.  Pleasurable, but disconnected from reality.

These days, I really want to continue my intellectual development.  But I'm more committed than ever to practice.

In his essay, "What Are Poets For?", Heidegger lays down some real shit.

The essay revolves around the problem of technological nihilism: that we are addicted to scientific and objective forms of thought.  These objective forms of thought, he claims, have left us disconnected from reality and unable to access the truth of Being.

Being, for Heidegger, has something to do with being in the 'Open'.  The Open is something that animals exist fully in.  But something that humans have lost touch with through our modes of thought.  Through science we have managed to place ourselves above and outside of the Open.  We have managed to objectivize the world and ourselves, turning everything into raw material for some greater human plan.

Our relationship with abstract, objective thought, has plunged us into a too willful willing.  We no longer feel the fullness of Being, the simple unity of the fourfould, as Heidegger might say.

We no longer dwell in order to build, we simply build without a sense of dwelling.

Paradoxically, Heidegger believes that by situating ourselves in opposition to nature, the Open, we have become unshielded.  That our tendency to think objectively, to manipulate people and the world, leaves us more vulnerable to the pain of Being.

Somehow, there is more shieldedness in the Open.

Somehow, accepting the vulnerability of the Open makes us more shielded.

This idea resonates so powerfully with me.

I want so badly to know myself, to express myself, and to be known by others.

And this type of knowing does not happen through objective modes of thought.  It happens in the Open.  It happens in the unity of the fourfold.

True strength comes from vulnerability.

Shieldedness comes from the Open.

I feel it.

Yet I'm trying to write about it.

I'm not sure if that is a problem, but I don't feel like it is.

Slowly

My writing is moving mighty slowly. I have plans, outlines, ideas.

Plans, outlines, and ideas, about a writing project that is against the idea of planning.

How odd.

What I'm really against is not the idea of planning, but the idea of naive planning. The idea that planning is a necessity.

I asked a friend earlier today, 'Why do we think we need to make life happen?'

Life happens whether we plan for it or not.

It is like Taleb, when he said, 'As if the world needed to be governed.'

Take it easy, now.

Let it come as it does.

Look At Yourself.

"Look at yourself, boy," says that song I'm listening to.  It is a women singing, actually.  I wonder what she means.

"Look at the sunrise, look at the moonlight.... I know what's best now," she says.

Sometimes when I listen to songs I imagine that these people are talking to me.

And when this woman talks to me I have a hard time with what she is telling me to do.

I never thought it would be so hard to look at myself.  Not because I look away in disgust, but because I find myself looking at so many things that I don't know which thing is authentic.

I have so many ideas, so many things I feel, that it can be hard to know what is real.

I once told someone that I was afraid of all the secrets that I kept from myself.  They didn't understand.  They felt that honesty was something that was easy and only a matter of intention.  In some ways, they are right.  But in other ways it is much harder than that.

I have many ways of keeping difficult feelings at bay.  I had many walls that I had put up.  Some of them narrative.  Some of them needed no words.  I simply didn't look at certain things.  Didn't feel certain things.

It is difficult to know where to look when attempting to look at oneself honestly.

But I'm starting to feel it all much more clearly.

I'm reckoning more than ever with the limitation of thought.

What I'm really discovering is the power of feeling.

So strange for me, a person who has always been incredibly emotional, to realize that I have fought my feelings so much; that I had chosen to ignore their logic in favor of a cleaner, clearer, more superficial intelligence.

I'm beginning to understand the intelligence of my feelings.

Telephone Vines Invade My Ear

Once I was picking up a phone and suddenly found myself with the image of a large vine sprouting from the phone, going straight into my ear.

On the way in, the vine sprouted all kinds of little branches and twigs and flowers and stuff. All up in my ear canal.

I couldn't help but laugh.

My girlfriend at the time asked me what I was laughing about so I told her.

She laughed and said 'who thinks about things like that?'

I am not comfortable with how strange I am.

I've Begun.

This is the introductory portion of my new writing project, tentatively titled: Planning, Understanding, and Duty: On Technological Nihilism and Historical Consciousness.

1. Introduction: Planning and Understanding

Predictive knowledge, that is, ways of understanding that claim to forecast future events and prescribe responses, is both a comfort and a hindrance.  It feels good to claim that we know what is going to happen, and that when the time comes we will know how to act.  It feels good to have a plan. Believing that we have predicted and adequately prepared for the future can temporarily relieve anxiety.  

The comfort of a plan, however, is often illusory, and comes at a price.  Things rarely go according to plan, and often a plan is a merely narrative that protects us from the harshness of reality.
When a plan reveals itself to be an illusion we are left unprepared to deal with the complexity of reality, facing instead our own self-deception.  Rigid plans and narratives fragilize us by giving us a simplified and inaccurate view of reality.  We are left without knowledge of ourself or our situation.  Meanwhile, reality is still out there in all of its complexity and incomprehensibility.  As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you‘re busy making other plans.”

Living without a plan, however, seems inconceivable.  How does one moves through one’s life without a trajectory, without a sense of the future? How am I to live if I am not trying to predict and anticipate the future? This obsession with prediction and planning, however, is a uniquely modern condition.  Historical-philosophers like John Gray and Nassim Taleb have persuaded me that it was with the Enlightenment that the incitement to predict and plan first seized Western culture.  This habit of planning, moreover, is related to more serious cultural problems that came out of the Enlightenment.  In particular, it implies that the West has developed an unhealthy relationship with science and technology; that our culture has developed an addiction to superficially articulate language; and that we have traded in the slowness of wisdom and judgement for the speed of naive rationalism and interventionism.  In short, Western culture’s addiction to prediction and planning is a result of the technological nihilism that emerged from the Enlightenment.  

Individuals living prior to the Enlightenment had less of an inclination to plan and predict.  They were closer to what Taleb calls ‘a nonpredictive view of the world’.  The antidote to the West’s technological nihilism, I believe, is to be found in this idea of a nonpredictive view of the world.  That is, a view that assumes we are never going to fully understand the world, that we will never be able to predict the difficult and tragic events that lie in the future, and that the task of prediction and prescription is a fool’s errand that must be abandoned.  Our only option is to develop a nonpredictive view of the world, to learn to live with difficult questions, to cultivate the courage to go forth into uncertainty, to rely on our own capacity for judgement, and, perhaps most importantly, to welcome uncertainty and volatility into our lives.  I am here to try and add to that project.   

I will defend the idea of a nonpredictive view of the world by focusing on a simple distinction between planning and understanding.  As I’ve tentatively argued, the modern world has inherited an unhealthy habit of prediction and planning, and that this habit is a part of the technological nihilism that emerged from the Enlightenment.  This is not a claim that I expect to be taken on faith.  Part of this writing, therefore, will be spent providing evidence that the Western world does indeed have an unhealthy relationship with planning that needs to be overcome.  Once I feel confident that I have established this, I will then advocate a nonpredictive view of the world.  

The main claim is that understanding ourselves and our situation should take precedence over planning a potential future.  This follows from the claim that plans will organically emerge from understanding, while understanding will not necessarily emerge from plans.  It is possible to have a plan without grasping reality, but it is impossible to grasp reality and not know what is the right thing to do.  As a friend of mine once told me, you don’t need to imagine the future, because if you are fully in the present, grasping reality, you will be creating the right kind of future for yourself.  It is this type of living, this nonpredictive view of the world that relies above all on understanding, that I intend to elaborate.

By drawing attention to the benefits of understanding I am not trying to completely discredit the idea of planning.  Rather, I am suggesting that we are in the habit of turning to planning before we truly understand what is going on, and that we may benefit from redirecting our mental energy towards the task of understanding.  As I said, plans will emerge organically from our understanding.  I feel justified, therefore, in distinguishing between naively rational plans and organic plans.  I believe that we are more inclined to rely on naive plans than to let plans emerge organically from understanding.  God knows that I have had plenty of naive plans, and boy did they burn me in the end.

The idea of a nonpredictive life, one that is best lived in the present and without rigid plans has many precedents.  Zen Buddhism and aesthetics, for example, encourage living in the present while keeping planning to a minimum.  I believe, however, there is another mode of thought that can help us hold a nonpredictive view of the world: historical thought.  It is my goal in this essay to argue that historical thought offers us a nonpredictive view of the world, and that it also offers us a powerful form of morality.  This argument will rely most heavily on the work of R.G. Collingwood.

At the end of his life, Collingwood was attempting to articulate his philosophy of history, which he believed would culminate with something he called ‘historical morality’.  Moreover, Collingwood implied that he viewed historical morality as a counterweight to the European habit of scientific thought.  He believed that the West’s relationship with scientific thought was the definitive fact about Western culture, and that Western morality had suffered as a result.  In particular, he believed that scientific thought, with its focus on the distinction between subject and object, had led us to objectify people, treating them as means to ends.  He hoped that the philosophy of history could provide the foundation for a new type of morality that would not focus on mastering people, but rather on understanding people.  He put this point quite clearly in his outline of The Principles of History: “If [my philosophy of history] is worked out carefully, then should follow without difficulty the characterization of an historical morality and an historical civilization, contrasting with our ‘scientific’ one....  A scientific morality will start from the idea of human nature as a thing to be conquered or obeyed: a[n] historical one will deny that there is such a thing, and will resolve what we are into what we do. A scientific society will turn on the idea of mastering people (by money or war or the like) or alternatively serving them (philanthropy). A[n] historical society will turn on the idea of understanding them.” (The Principles of History, 246).  Collingwood, unfortunately, never lived to complete his final work. I, therefore, am attempting to chase his logic, and to answer the question: What would it mean to found a morality and a civilization on the notion of understanding?  Moreover, that Collingwood places historical morality in opposition to scientific morality provides me the perfect launching pad for addressing my concerns with Western nihilism.  He hoped to overcome the West’s unhealthy relationship with scientific thought by showing how historical thought could be a healthy alternative or counterweight.

I fear I have not been explicit enough.  What I really hope to accomplish in this essay is to show how historical thought has the potential to alleviate the anxiety and barbarity that scientific thought has bequeathed us.  This is not to say that scientific thought should be banished; it has done wonders for life on Earth.  Science, however, does not deserve the unabashed worship that it receives.  It needs to be criticized for its tendency to simplify reality and to prescribe action; we need to reckon with the fact that scientific thought encourages us to have rigid narratives that fragilize us to volatility and uncertainty.  It would be good to explore alternative modes of thought that rely less on prediction and planning; it would be good to explore nonpredictive views of the world that rely solely on understanding.  Historical thought, I believe, is such a type of thought, and can serve as a counterweight to scientific thought’s nihilistic tendencies.

So, that is what I’m here to do.  I’m going to show you that science possesses nihilistic tendencies, and that it relies too heavily on predictive knowledge and planning.  Then I’ll try to explain to you the value of a nonpredictive view of the world, and how history can help us rely on understanding, as opposed to planning. Onward.