To be conscious is to have memories. To be free is to reflect on the limitations of freedom.
In this writing I am attempting to become more free by reflecting on my memories and the way they've governed my life.
Memory, it turns out, has become an important vein in my thinking that has led me more places than I would have guessed. This is due in large to Henri Bergson's odd little book Matter and Memory. Bergson is an impressive yet unfashionable thinker. I could not have anticipated the places he has allowed me to go.
Using his ideas as a starting point, I would like to reflect both on memory in general and on my memories in particular. In doing so I will be reflecting on my past behavior and trying to understand how it was connected to my sense of the past, my memories.
We begin with one of the central claims of Matter and Memory: Memory is not not singular but dual. If we think carefully, that is to say, we discover that we do not possess a ubiqutous mental faculty called 'memory' that allows us to recall the past with ease. We find, rather, that memory has two distinct faces, one that is intimately tied to the temporal, mental, and particular, and another that is spatial, bodily, and general. To demonstrate this dual character of memory Bergson asks us to reflect on what it means to learn something 'by heart'. When we learn, for example, to recite a poem by heart, we gain a mechanical ability to deliver that poem on a moments notice. We can simply stand up and rattle the whole thing off. This form of memory that allows us to recite a poem by heart, is atemporal, meaning that it is no longer tied to the specific periods in time in which we recited the poem out loud to memorize it. This memory, instead, is generalized: it exists in us as something separate from all of the individual moments in time in which we were actually reading the poem. Memory, for Bergson, thus does two things: It "ends in the record of the past in the form of motor habits" and also "retains the image of the situations through which is has successively travelled, and lays them side by side in the order in which they took place" (Bergson, Matter and Memory, Digireads, 2010). In other words, our memory has both the character of being particular by retaining images of the actual moment in time in which we perform an activity, and of being general by converting all of those particular instances into a generalized motor habit. The former, as I said, is temporal or mental in it's functioning, while the other is spatial or bodily.
I would like to lend an example from my own experience: barista work. Anyone who spent much time reflecting on the life of a barista, as I have, could tell you that barista work is largely a matter of habit and muscle memory. It is a profession built of incredibly simple and repetitive motions that must be precisely replicated. In order to become consistent, baristas practice practice practice. We repeat our motions over and over again. Constantly tamping, pulling, steaming, pouring. The goal of this training and practice is to forget the individual case in favor of a generalized set of motor habits. Thus I could step up to an espresso machine right now and would have a whole arsenal of motor habits that would aid me in my work. Yet, if I reflect, I can stop and think of dozens of particular instances in which I made not merely a drink but that particular drink. This general muscle memory, in other words, rests on a foundation of particular instances.
These are the two faces of memory. Look into your own mind and you will find that you have them both there. You have a slew of particular, temporally bound memories, and you have a more general , atemporal set of ideas or dispositions that have been distilled from those particular experiences.
That memory should function in such a dual manner, according to Bergson, is explained by the practical orientation of life. To live is to be oriented towards doing. Thus all functions of life, from the body to the mind, are pointed towards action. This is no less true of memory. That we naturally distill general lessons from our particular experiences is not surprising. Memory, after all, is a faculty of the mind that is also oriented towards action.
Memory, in the two senses we are discussing, aids us in our quest to act by augmenting our perception of the world. What is it that keeps the world from presenting itself to us an incomprehensible jumble of images? Why am I able to discern this table, this kitchen, this beer bottle, and this computer in front of me? Because I have memories of experiencing them in the past: I've dealt with many tables and many beers and therefore don't need to look at them or think about them with the same kind of intensity that I did when I saw them for the first time. Imagine what a child's experience must be like. It must be just an endless series of images, incomprehensible and confusing. Only when the child has accumulated much experience of looking and acting will images start to become coherent and sensical. In other words, not until a child has accumulated an adequate store of memories can it begin to act consciously in the world. Thus Bergson argues that "there is no perception which is not full of memories" (Ibid., 17). Everywhere we look and everything we do, we are seeing the world through memory colored shades.
The implication of this and the crucial conclusion is this: Memory tends to supplant perception. It is often more economical to allow the residue of experience to stand in for the labor of detailed attention in the present. "In most cases," Bergson writes, "these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as 'signs' that recall to us former images" (Ibid.). Here we would do well to reflect on the Buddhist lauding of the child for actually 'seeing a ball roll across the floor', whereas an adult often lets their concept of the ball and the floor stand in for actual observation. We could equally say that we let our memory of a ball rolling across the floor stand in for the actual seeing.
Is this not true of us in our own lives? How many of us actually look carefully and closely at every door, every bus, every barista that we encounter? Do we not simply let our 'understanding' and our memories do that work for us? It is in no way vital to my activity right now that I look closely at this table in front of me. I know what a table is. I've seen them hundreds of times. I remember them. Yet, if I look closely at this table I discover all the blemishes on it, all the cracks and scratches that are not present if I let my memories of tables stand in for my actual observing of it.
Good. We've established several points.
(1) Memory is dual. One aspect of it is particular and temporal, another is general and atemporal.
(2) Memory is intimately linked with the need for action.
(3) Perception restricts itself based on it's orientation towards action, and thus tends to substitute the memory of things for the actual observation of said things.
The next thing that we must note is that human perception is not primarily visual, but narrative. Human action, that is to say, is not conducted or understood simply by how things look, hear, sound, or whatever. Human action is conducted and understood by means of thinking. Thought and intention, those self-evident activities of the human mind, are always the arbiters or human action. To 'perceive intentional action' then is to perceive thought. Thought, moreover, is not perceived by means of the senses, but by means of narrative or story. I've spent much time writing about this elsewhere and don't care to go into it now. But if you doubt that human action is only intelligible, 'perceived', in the form of a narrative please go see R.G. Collingwood's The Idea of History, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Jonathan Gottschall's The Storytelling Animal. Or just pause and reflect on your own life. How do your own actions assume meaning? How do you justify your own actions to yourself? You do it by telling a story that has a past, present, and a future. We are made of stories.
If perception is structured by memory, then, we cannot avoid the conclusion that our narrative perception of ourselves and those around us are shaped by memory. I bet that if we reflect on our lives we will see that we find a duality in the narratives we use to perceive the world just like we will find in our memories. We will find that we tell certain stories about ourselves that are particular and temporal, (such as that one time on September 7th 2011 where I gave two weeks notice at my job) and others that are general and atemporal (like the idea that I am a solitary person or a loner). The former example is something that actually happened to me, something that I did without a doubt. The latter, however, is a conjecture or generalization that has been distilled from particular events in my life.
That general habits or general narratives should arise out of particular events is totally understandable. Of course the temporally specific form of memory tends to give way to the atemporal general kind of memory. It is simply more practical. Nature, of course, favors general, bodily, spatialized memory. Living beings thrive far more from being able to distill generalizations from their specific experiences than from being able to dwell and reflect on particular events. The former trumps the latter.
Bergson knew damn well, however, that humans are not purely practical beings. We acquired a sense for reflection, for thinking, for theoretical and contemplative living. If we wish to live a thoughtful life, we must take a step back from the realm of action and thus from generalized forms of memory. Instead, we ought to sit with our particular memories, understanding them for what they were in their particular time, refusing to generalize them into lessons or doctrines for action.
Having arrived at this point, understanding that human perception is fundamentally narrative, and that it is influenced by memory in the way described above, I feel I am in a good position to reflect on my two forms of memory.
I begin with a simple admission: I have to learned to hate myself.
Somehow during the course of my life I experienced enough pain, and I saw myself as the cause of this pain, that I began to think that there was something wrong with me. That I was 'broken' or unlovable or 'damaged' in one way or another.
I was always a sensitive, nay, a fragile child. Overrun and bullied by my own feelings. I remember walking into my first preschool with my mother, seeing children playing all kinds of games, screaming running shouting. I remember the fear I felt at the idea of joining them. I remember the boy in school everyone called 'Timmy the cry baby' and how deeply thankful I was that he was identified as such and not me. It could have been me, and I was grateful to have that attention directed towards him and not me. I remember the deep anxiety I felt in 4th grade, when I would wake up crying, not wanting to go to school, not wanting to get on my bike to meet the neighbors for our daily ride.
Fear, it turns out, was the governing emotion of my childhood. I don't even know why! My parents loved me and did everything they could to take care of me! Perhaps they were too soft with me? Too easy on me? I don't know. I don't know how this happened to me.
I remember knocking a bunch of my teeth out in first grade. Receiving special attention for this damage I'd done to myself. The conversations about fixing it. 'Fixing it'. Something to be fixed, I understand. But also something to accept and understand.
I remember being in middle school and how fearful I was that my girlfriend would break up with me. What other people would think of me.
I can recall countless particular instances of feeling inadequate and fearful. It's as if though I was already resigned to being fearful, broken, wounded.
I felt so much fear, and still feel fear, at the idea of having to face this life. I've got to live the whole god damn thing? And we suspect that it doesn't mean anything in the big picture?
I can recall so many individual particular instances in which I felt afraid, felt inadequate, felt out of place or strange.
Being the living thing I am, I took those particular memories and I generalized them. I converted them from individual instances of things that happened to me and I turned them into a story about what I am. I am not just a being that experienced these things, I am a being that was made for these kinds of experiences. I am not a being of possibilities who happens to have struggled in different elements of my life, I am a being made to be afraid and alone.
At some point in my life I arrived at this conclusion: I am not a being that has experienced pain and loneliness at certain moments in my life, I am a being made for lonesome suffering.
Ha. When I began to realize that I was living this story I could hardly believe it. It couldn't be.
Yet it is true.
The more I reflected on my past the more I realized how much my experiences had passed through the prism of that narrative. Events that should have been minor pains or difficulties turned into devastating events: a girl breaks up with me, I don't get a job, I am not welcome in a certain setting. Yet these things would devastate me. And they devastated me not simply because they were painful experiences but because they were evidence and corroboration for the story I was secretly living in which I was an unlovable and broken being.
My generalized memories, the narrative arc I'd distilled from them, in which I was broken, had become dominant, and all of my particular experiences were now being interpreted in their light.
There was no room for particular experiences to be particular experiences. Particular experiences could only function as further evidence for the story of a damaged and unlovable being.
Funny shit, right?
In doing this writing, by claiming that I have been a slave to the story I've been unconsciously living, I am trying to carve out a new space for the future. I look back and I see nothing but restrictions on my freedom and my ability to experience new things. I have been so deeply dominated by my particular memories and the general narrative I've culled from them that I've had such a reduced capacity for new experiences.
I'm calling you out, generalized narrative.
I'm here to reclaim my particularized experiences.
Here it goes.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Saturday, December 6, 2014
Being Over and Against or In The World
This phrase, 'over and against', is one that has become familiar to me primarily through my reading and reflection on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rilke, Strauss, and other similar thinkers. The notion of being 'over and against' the world is often contrasted with the idea of being 'in the world'. Animals, Heidegger and Rilke would have us believe, are 'in the world' in a way that we are not. Something different happened to our form of consciousness. It acquired some kind of intensity or severity and it puts us in a position not of being in full accord or harmony with the world, but being outside of it, against it, poised towards manipulating it.
This applies to ourselves just as much as it does to the outside world. It is not only the natural world that has become an object of rational control, but our own bodies and minds. We submit ourselves to the same standards of control that we apply to the outside world. We, too, are raw material to be rationally manipulated.
In Heidegger's thinking this stance of being 'over and against' the world is tantamount to nihilism. Nihilism, at it's core, is an attitude or orientation towards the world that asserts (or assumes) that there is no meaning in the world other than the meaning we impose upon it.
This notion of being 'over and against' the world is undeniably spatial: it always involves a spatial metaphor in which we find ourselves on the 'outside' of ourselves and our experiences. We are not engaged directly in the 'flow' of experience, but have placed ourselves outside of it, assuming a perspective that is somehow detached from the immediacy of what we are going through.
My life has, as of late, been tumultuous and uncertain. My living and working situations have both undergone significant changes. It has caused me some pain and, to be frank, so much has been changing inside and outside of me that I've lost track of what is happening to me. I have no idea what I'm becoming, and I'm tempted to embrace Nietzsche's claim in Ecce Homo that one becomes what one is through habitual misinterpretation of what one is, through constant mistakes and failures. I am becoming what I am, no doubt. But it is hard for me to let go and simply go with my becoming.
Instead, I have resisted what is happening to me.
This resistance, moreover, has a spatial quality to it. I have not simply allowed myself to be immersed by my experience. I have placed myself 'over and against' my self. I've been looking down on myself, refusing to accept that this is my life, that this is what is happening to me. I feel this movement outside of myself. This push to be elsewhere.
It comes along with a kind of arrogance. An indigence or sense of superiority towards my situation.
In reality I know that I'm just not capable of facing the pain head on. I cast sideways glances at it by adopting this arrogant pose. I set myself outside of it and thus ease the pain I experience by being in it.
I am not in control. This causes me pain. The arrogance of separation is what helps me cope with it.
How unfortunate.
I'd like to be strong enough to face it head on, without the pretense of superiority.
A task, no doubt.
This applies to ourselves just as much as it does to the outside world. It is not only the natural world that has become an object of rational control, but our own bodies and minds. We submit ourselves to the same standards of control that we apply to the outside world. We, too, are raw material to be rationally manipulated.
In Heidegger's thinking this stance of being 'over and against' the world is tantamount to nihilism. Nihilism, at it's core, is an attitude or orientation towards the world that asserts (or assumes) that there is no meaning in the world other than the meaning we impose upon it.
This notion of being 'over and against' the world is undeniably spatial: it always involves a spatial metaphor in which we find ourselves on the 'outside' of ourselves and our experiences. We are not engaged directly in the 'flow' of experience, but have placed ourselves outside of it, assuming a perspective that is somehow detached from the immediacy of what we are going through.
My life has, as of late, been tumultuous and uncertain. My living and working situations have both undergone significant changes. It has caused me some pain and, to be frank, so much has been changing inside and outside of me that I've lost track of what is happening to me. I have no idea what I'm becoming, and I'm tempted to embrace Nietzsche's claim in Ecce Homo that one becomes what one is through habitual misinterpretation of what one is, through constant mistakes and failures. I am becoming what I am, no doubt. But it is hard for me to let go and simply go with my becoming.
Instead, I have resisted what is happening to me.
This resistance, moreover, has a spatial quality to it. I have not simply allowed myself to be immersed by my experience. I have placed myself 'over and against' my self. I've been looking down on myself, refusing to accept that this is my life, that this is what is happening to me. I feel this movement outside of myself. This push to be elsewhere.
It comes along with a kind of arrogance. An indigence or sense of superiority towards my situation.
In reality I know that I'm just not capable of facing the pain head on. I cast sideways glances at it by adopting this arrogant pose. I set myself outside of it and thus ease the pain I experience by being in it.
I am not in control. This causes me pain. The arrogance of separation is what helps me cope with it.
How unfortunate.
I'd like to be strong enough to face it head on, without the pretense of superiority.
A task, no doubt.
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Tight Clothes, Or, What I'm Doing to My Body
Ughhh I'm trying to get dressed to go eat thanksgiving dinner at someone's house and all my clothes are so tight. I won three pairs of Dockers Alpha pants (which I like a good deal). Two of them are now missing buttons because they are so tight and the third pair is so tight I don't think I can wear them. I've got some jeans on and an old favorite shirt and a cardigan and they are all sooooo tight.
I've never experienced such tightness before.
They are tight because over the last six months I've made several changes to my life. I've joined a gym and I regularly lift as much weight as I possibly can. I've increased my caloric intake to a level that I never knew before. I've put on 20 pounds. Plenty of muscle, some fat.
I was a child the last time I encountered this issue of outgrowing my clothes. I didn't even care then.
This feels like a new experience, given that now I buy my own clothes and that this growth is of my own doing.
I mostly have half-baked and undeveloped ideas about what I'm doing to my body or why I'm doing it. I've been reflecting on it some, but I haven't yet really grasped my behavior. Why exactly am I doing this? What exactly is it that I've been doing? Why did I start and why do I continue?
It touches on a variety of issues that I like to think about: the question of the relation between the mind and the body, the question of strength (both mental and physical), the question of strength and vulnerability.
All of this has occurred to me as I've been working to change my body. It's occurred to me to write about. But I've not yet felt the urge or the need. I had some free time just know after putting on my clothes and felt like jotting this down.
I'll give a closer look at these issues at some point. In the meantime, I'll continue to wonder why I'm lifting big weights as I lift big weights.
I've never experienced such tightness before.
They are tight because over the last six months I've made several changes to my life. I've joined a gym and I regularly lift as much weight as I possibly can. I've increased my caloric intake to a level that I never knew before. I've put on 20 pounds. Plenty of muscle, some fat.
I was a child the last time I encountered this issue of outgrowing my clothes. I didn't even care then.
This feels like a new experience, given that now I buy my own clothes and that this growth is of my own doing.
I mostly have half-baked and undeveloped ideas about what I'm doing to my body or why I'm doing it. I've been reflecting on it some, but I haven't yet really grasped my behavior. Why exactly am I doing this? What exactly is it that I've been doing? Why did I start and why do I continue?
It touches on a variety of issues that I like to think about: the question of the relation between the mind and the body, the question of strength (both mental and physical), the question of strength and vulnerability.
All of this has occurred to me as I've been working to change my body. It's occurred to me to write about. But I've not yet felt the urge or the need. I had some free time just know after putting on my clothes and felt like jotting this down.
I'll give a closer look at these issues at some point. In the meantime, I'll continue to wonder why I'm lifting big weights as I lift big weights.
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Blogging
I don't blog as much as I used to and I'm troubled by it.
I've often wondered, 'What if I reach a certain age, say 30 or 40 years old, and I look back at this blog and marvel at all this writing I've done'. In other words, I fear what I'll become in the future, and that my relationship with reading and writing will be a mere fluke in the story of my life.
Why is that such a problem? Why do I have this idea that reading and writing is an integral part of a good life?
Lately I've found that my desire to write is being subsumed by my desire to reflect.
My desire to write was previously wrapped up with a need to be accepted, a need to be praised, a need to fit in. Homelessness has been a problem for me. I've not felt like I've belonged anywhere in quite a long time. Though I wasn't conscious of this when I applied to graduate school, I really wanted that to be a home for me. A place where I would be greeted and protected in a certain way. I don't know if it could have served that function for me, but I assumed it would. I'm not sure why.
Now that that world is less of a priority (or possibility) for me I no longer think of my writing in the same way.
My real business is reflection. My real business is taking care of myself and keep tracking of myself. My business is paying attention.
Is blogging a way for me to pay attention? Does it aid me in my goal of being reflective?
I think so.
I am currently working on an essay that I'm really enjoying. It's been a lot of fun. Same authors (Clausewitz, Collingwood, MacIntyre, etc.), but lots of new thoughts, new ideas. It feels great. It pushes me in my day to day life, it keeps me sharp, it provides me with 'aha' moments in which I feel like I've made a break through.
I feel pained sometimes because I think that my serious thinking will just be a fad or temporary obsession in my life. I have had (I confess) many obsessive hobbies in my past: model building, hackey sack, flat land biking, video games. I've seriously pursued a variety of hobbies throughout my relatively short life.
Will serious thinking and reflecting be yet another one of these obsessive hobbies? I suspect not. Yet I fear the answer is a yes. I fear this is just an episode in my life where I try to think seriously and where it doesn't all amount to much.
Ha.
The fear! I quote two songs for you: "Motherfuck, the fear is back. The fear is back, the fear is back. No place to hide my shamefulness, no place to hide my discontent." A lovely song by John Maus. Another song: "This fear, that lives inside of me, subsides far too infrequently."
In the last two years I've managed to identify the way that fear has dominated my life. It's been a governing emotion. How strange to acknowledge and to understand that I've been ruled by fear. Some say CREAM, cash rules everything around me. I, on the other hand, say FREAM, fear rules everything around me. I've been working hard to minimize the role of fear in my life.
I, much like Kevin McAllister, am not afraid anymore. I am ready to confront my life, whatever that means, whatever it will take.
And I know, I hope, that reflection will be a central part of it. All I can ask for is to be able to step outside myself on occassion, to maintain some perspective on myself, and to laugh and cry often.
I've often wondered, 'What if I reach a certain age, say 30 or 40 years old, and I look back at this blog and marvel at all this writing I've done'. In other words, I fear what I'll become in the future, and that my relationship with reading and writing will be a mere fluke in the story of my life.
Why is that such a problem? Why do I have this idea that reading and writing is an integral part of a good life?
Lately I've found that my desire to write is being subsumed by my desire to reflect.
My desire to write was previously wrapped up with a need to be accepted, a need to be praised, a need to fit in. Homelessness has been a problem for me. I've not felt like I've belonged anywhere in quite a long time. Though I wasn't conscious of this when I applied to graduate school, I really wanted that to be a home for me. A place where I would be greeted and protected in a certain way. I don't know if it could have served that function for me, but I assumed it would. I'm not sure why.
Now that that world is less of a priority (or possibility) for me I no longer think of my writing in the same way.
My real business is reflection. My real business is taking care of myself and keep tracking of myself. My business is paying attention.
Is blogging a way for me to pay attention? Does it aid me in my goal of being reflective?
I think so.
I am currently working on an essay that I'm really enjoying. It's been a lot of fun. Same authors (Clausewitz, Collingwood, MacIntyre, etc.), but lots of new thoughts, new ideas. It feels great. It pushes me in my day to day life, it keeps me sharp, it provides me with 'aha' moments in which I feel like I've made a break through.
I feel pained sometimes because I think that my serious thinking will just be a fad or temporary obsession in my life. I have had (I confess) many obsessive hobbies in my past: model building, hackey sack, flat land biking, video games. I've seriously pursued a variety of hobbies throughout my relatively short life.
Will serious thinking and reflecting be yet another one of these obsessive hobbies? I suspect not. Yet I fear the answer is a yes. I fear this is just an episode in my life where I try to think seriously and where it doesn't all amount to much.
Ha.
The fear! I quote two songs for you: "Motherfuck, the fear is back. The fear is back, the fear is back. No place to hide my shamefulness, no place to hide my discontent." A lovely song by John Maus. Another song: "This fear, that lives inside of me, subsides far too infrequently."
In the last two years I've managed to identify the way that fear has dominated my life. It's been a governing emotion. How strange to acknowledge and to understand that I've been ruled by fear. Some say CREAM, cash rules everything around me. I, on the other hand, say FREAM, fear rules everything around me. I've been working hard to minimize the role of fear in my life.
I, much like Kevin McAllister, am not afraid anymore. I am ready to confront my life, whatever that means, whatever it will take.
And I know, I hope, that reflection will be a central part of it. All I can ask for is to be able to step outside myself on occassion, to maintain some perspective on myself, and to laugh and cry often.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Friendship
Aha! It is nearly the end of September and I haven't written a blog post. What a shame it would be if I left a month unmarked, unremarked upon. I find so much in my life so remarkable. I just avoid this particular medium.
I tend to value my voice, my speech. I'm currently trudging my way through Aristotle's De Anima, 'On the Soul'. I often find books challenging. Sometimes I find them downright inscrutable. This is one of those cases. I intend to finish it, but I don't have many hopes for understanding it.
One thing I have grasped, however, is that Aristotle places particular emphasis on speech, because speech is the aspect of human behavior in which the soul is most clearly exhibited. I have reflected on this during my morning commute, sitting on a bus, quietly whirring, not a voice disturbing the mechanical peace.
Speech also seems to be a central element of friendship. After I read 'On the Soul' I'll probably read some fiction, spend some time relaxing. But I also intend to read the Nicomachean Ethics. As I've learned from a friend of mine, friendship plays a central role in Aristotle's account of the good life. My friend has told me that Aristotle goes so far as to argue that a person who possessed all other forms of goodness would not choose to go on living if they did not have friendship. Friendship has to be one of the highest forms of goodness.
One aspect of friendship that I have been reflecting on is it's exclusive character. We favor our friends more than we favor others, and that is simply how it is. We speak to them about matters closer to us, we let them in our truths that we don't let others in on. We care for them in a way that we don't care for others.
Honestly, I've lost my train of thought. That's okay. I'll just say that friendship seems to be an awkward question in some ways because it points to the question of inequality, the question of love.
I tend to value my voice, my speech. I'm currently trudging my way through Aristotle's De Anima, 'On the Soul'. I often find books challenging. Sometimes I find them downright inscrutable. This is one of those cases. I intend to finish it, but I don't have many hopes for understanding it.
One thing I have grasped, however, is that Aristotle places particular emphasis on speech, because speech is the aspect of human behavior in which the soul is most clearly exhibited. I have reflected on this during my morning commute, sitting on a bus, quietly whirring, not a voice disturbing the mechanical peace.
Speech also seems to be a central element of friendship. After I read 'On the Soul' I'll probably read some fiction, spend some time relaxing. But I also intend to read the Nicomachean Ethics. As I've learned from a friend of mine, friendship plays a central role in Aristotle's account of the good life. My friend has told me that Aristotle goes so far as to argue that a person who possessed all other forms of goodness would not choose to go on living if they did not have friendship. Friendship has to be one of the highest forms of goodness.
One aspect of friendship that I have been reflecting on is it's exclusive character. We favor our friends more than we favor others, and that is simply how it is. We speak to them about matters closer to us, we let them in our truths that we don't let others in on. We care for them in a way that we don't care for others.
Honestly, I've lost my train of thought. That's okay. I'll just say that friendship seems to be an awkward question in some ways because it points to the question of inequality, the question of love.
Friday, August 22, 2014
Aha
Yes yes writing is a strange and confusing thing to do.
I've begun my latest essay in earnest. I say 'latest essay' as if though I still pounded out essays like I did in the months and years immediately after finishing undergrad. I used to produce that ish, man. Sometimes I look at my output and I wonder how I did it.
It's not like it was even all bad writing!
I just reread my essay on nihilism, magic, and amusement and I wasn't even mad about it! I was totally engaging with a bunch of different thinkers, working through their ideas, trying to think along with them and draw some implications and clarity from it all.
Yet now I find myself being so much more careful, so measured in my writing. Doing proper footnotes, trying to sound proper and speak to an audience.
One thing that was affecting my writing in those first few years out of college was that I wasn't confronting the other things going on in my life. Namely, I wasn't confronting the complexity and, more so, the difficulty of my experiences with women. I was ignoring the fact that I was lonely. I think during much of my college career I lost touch with some of my emotions, especially those that have to do with intimacy and sex, knowing and being known.
At the end of 2012 I began to face those feelings more seriously. Mainly because my heart got broken. Mainly because it was exceedingly fragile. Anyone I cared for could have broken it. I just happened to place it in hands that weren't ready or willing to hold it. So naturally it fell, naturally it shattered.
SOMETHING SOMETHING GOTTA HEART OF GLASSSSSS.
I've very much worked on my resiliency, my robustness. My antifragility?
Yet the output of my writing has been affected by another factor: my rejection from graduate school and the pain it has caused me.
When I set out to write an essay for my graduate school applications I approached it quite seriously. I worked very hard on it, I tried to make it focused, diverse, rigorous. All this crap. I'm not sure how good that essay is. I know that it tried to do wayyyyy too much way to quickly. It embarrasses me that I submitted such a thing to the universities I wanted to go to.
Now I can't seem to engage in my attempts at scholarly work without some pain. I feel so inadequate. I feel like I've failed.
To render this in terms of perspective taking, it's as if I am observing all of my writing through the eyes of a generic academic who has refused me entry into the institutions.
Oh it hurts.
Haha. I don't know what to think. What to do.
I'm delighted that I've begun this essay that I'm working on. The title, you ask? Well, surely I'll share. Tentatively (but not really): "Matter and Mind in Strategic Education: Perspective Taking and Political Wisdom in the Philosophy of Carl von Clausewitz and R.G. Collingwood"
I love the phrase 'Matter and Mind in Strategic Education'. I like alliteration.
I think that matter and mind, too, are pretty fundamental categories that belong to science and the humanities, respectively.
Eh, that's all I've got, really.
I was just so amazed that as I was going through On War, looking for the proper evidence to show that Clausewitz's concerns were eminently practical, that I was so daunted, so pained for a moment. It is a daunting book, there is no doubt about that. But my pain isn't simply that the book is difficult. It is that I find my life difficult, I find my ambitions thwarted, my ego bruised, my current working situation counter to my feelings of who I am.
Hmm. What pleasure I take in writing what I wrote tonight. What pleasure I take in writing this now!
Ohhhh to try and find an avenue to think.
Ohhhhhhhh.
Oh.
I've begun my latest essay in earnest. I say 'latest essay' as if though I still pounded out essays like I did in the months and years immediately after finishing undergrad. I used to produce that ish, man. Sometimes I look at my output and I wonder how I did it.
It's not like it was even all bad writing!
I just reread my essay on nihilism, magic, and amusement and I wasn't even mad about it! I was totally engaging with a bunch of different thinkers, working through their ideas, trying to think along with them and draw some implications and clarity from it all.
Yet now I find myself being so much more careful, so measured in my writing. Doing proper footnotes, trying to sound proper and speak to an audience.
One thing that was affecting my writing in those first few years out of college was that I wasn't confronting the other things going on in my life. Namely, I wasn't confronting the complexity and, more so, the difficulty of my experiences with women. I was ignoring the fact that I was lonely. I think during much of my college career I lost touch with some of my emotions, especially those that have to do with intimacy and sex, knowing and being known.
At the end of 2012 I began to face those feelings more seriously. Mainly because my heart got broken. Mainly because it was exceedingly fragile. Anyone I cared for could have broken it. I just happened to place it in hands that weren't ready or willing to hold it. So naturally it fell, naturally it shattered.
SOMETHING SOMETHING GOTTA HEART OF GLASSSSSS.
I've very much worked on my resiliency, my robustness. My antifragility?
Yet the output of my writing has been affected by another factor: my rejection from graduate school and the pain it has caused me.
When I set out to write an essay for my graduate school applications I approached it quite seriously. I worked very hard on it, I tried to make it focused, diverse, rigorous. All this crap. I'm not sure how good that essay is. I know that it tried to do wayyyyy too much way to quickly. It embarrasses me that I submitted such a thing to the universities I wanted to go to.
Now I can't seem to engage in my attempts at scholarly work without some pain. I feel so inadequate. I feel like I've failed.
To render this in terms of perspective taking, it's as if I am observing all of my writing through the eyes of a generic academic who has refused me entry into the institutions.
Oh it hurts.
Haha. I don't know what to think. What to do.
I'm delighted that I've begun this essay that I'm working on. The title, you ask? Well, surely I'll share. Tentatively (but not really): "Matter and Mind in Strategic Education: Perspective Taking and Political Wisdom in the Philosophy of Carl von Clausewitz and R.G. Collingwood"
I love the phrase 'Matter and Mind in Strategic Education'. I like alliteration.
I think that matter and mind, too, are pretty fundamental categories that belong to science and the humanities, respectively.
Eh, that's all I've got, really.
I was just so amazed that as I was going through On War, looking for the proper evidence to show that Clausewitz's concerns were eminently practical, that I was so daunted, so pained for a moment. It is a daunting book, there is no doubt about that. But my pain isn't simply that the book is difficult. It is that I find my life difficult, I find my ambitions thwarted, my ego bruised, my current working situation counter to my feelings of who I am.
Hmm. What pleasure I take in writing what I wrote tonight. What pleasure I take in writing this now!
Ohhhh to try and find an avenue to think.
Ohhhhhhhh.
Oh.
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
Self-Hate and Memory Armor
I hate to admit, I've not done a good job of loving myself.
I have, in fact, hated myself quite deeply. This fact has been hidden from me for much of my life. I didn't even know I hated myself. If someone had asked me, 'how do you feel about yourself?', I probably would have told them that I thought I was alright, that I liked myself, et cetera. Part of me does like myself.
Yet I behave in so many ways, and I experience so many emotions, that would only be possible if I had a profoundly negative view of myself. Breakups and rejection, for example, have always been devastating for me. Even when I am the one doing the breaking or rejecting, I'm still devastated.
Why? Why is this?
Because, as it turns out, I have been living a story in which I am unlovable, in which I am broken and in which someone won't be able to love me in spite of my ticks and inconsistencies.
For if I were living a story in which I was lovable, in which I had a good chance of ending up in a satisfying love affair, then one botched six month relationship or a polite rejection from a friend of a friend wouldn't touch my heart so deeply. Yet those experiences not only touched my heart, they went to its core, they echoed with a personal truth that rang so loudly it lapsed into silence.
These silent narratives, these thoughts that I silently think, have led me to govern myself hatefully.
I've often reflected on the way I treat my friends and family, the compassion I love to show not only to them but to strangers or whoever. Yet I deny this compassion to myself.
On occasion I imagine myself holding myself in my mind's eye. I see the child that I've always been, I see myself being small, being held by myself. I deserve the compassion that I give. Why don't I receive it? Why don't I take it for myself?
When I was seeing my therapist I used to talk to him about the deep sensitivity and fragility that has always followed me. My inner life has always been intense. I've always churned deeply.
Tears have always come to me.
Ohhhhh how embarrassing it was for me. Other kids didn't seem to be overwhelmed by tears the way I was. I recall one kid from preschool, Timmy the crybaby, they called him, who cried quite a lot. Thank god I never acquired such a nick name. Yet I remember feeling relieved that it was him who had received the spotlight for his sensitivity. I was fast. I was other things. Those things could be accentuated and my fragility downplayed.
My fragility was also a point of tension in my family. My sister is not like me. She doesn't succumb to her feelings in the same way I do. They break me. She endures them with greater ease.
I often see myself as tearing at myself from within. I don't think she does.
My fragility hurt me in my love life. I was incapable of expressing myself to my most long-term companion. I was deeply hurt by conflicting desires. I behaved in conflicting ways, and I know I hurt her.
Yet it remains an issue for me that it doesn't remain for them.
For now what I am dealing with is not merely the fragility that is still a part of me, but the scars that have been left by my emotional pains.
To be more precise, lets not call them scars, lets call it armor. Memory armor.
I have been reflecting on memory both generally and in particular (thanks, Bergson).
Memory, in general, is something that accumulates and eventually provides us with habits, biases, and heuristics that we use to navigate the world. I have walked down Broadway in Capitol Hill hundreds of times, and I no longer need to look very carefully about where I am going. I have pulled thousands of shots of espresso and made thousands of lattes, and can now do those things habitually, probably with my eyes closed.
The essential point about memory is this: they unconsciously coalesce into general conclusions and habits that govern our behavior and constrict our perception. Memory eases the burden of seeing by substituting past instances of experience for observation in the present.
Do you look carefully at every tree you pass? Do you look closely at every barista you deal with? Of course not, you fucker, you know damn well what a tree is and what a barista is. You don't need to look at these things because, practically, memory can sufficiently supplant perception.
But what if some of our memories have led us to the wrong conclusions about the thing we are dealing with? What if our past experiences have been incorrectly generalized and we are now incapable of observing the thing in front of us? What if memory has us convinced that we are A when we are actually B?
My memories, I am implying, have provided me with the general conclusion that I am a fragile person, destined to be hurt and run over by the world, never to love or be loved.
How dare I extrapolate such self-hate from my memories! How can one be so hostile and unforgiving of oneself?! What kind of person thinks of oneself in such perverse and distorted ways?
Many of us, I suspect.
But this makes sense in a way. It is armor, protection against the pains of the future.
Love hurt me. Love hurt me deeply. I loved someone so much that I was incapable of disconnecting from them. I couldn't be without them, yet part of me knew I had to be. I tried to pull away, and was always pulled back.
I was not a consistent person then, I am not a consistent person now.
So I took that pain, that experience of love, and I said to myself: 'This reveals your deepest contradictions. This shows you how powerless you are against your own emotions. There is something deeply, deeply wrong here.'
What a lesson to unconsciously learn! Ha!
I took those experiences, I took those memories, and I layered myself in them. I let them harden under years of solitude and smoke. I fought my loneliness as my mentors prescribed. I took my memories and I used them as a blue print for a suit of armor. I guarded myself against those pains.
I recently had an experience where I took that armor off. There are no actual wounds there. I am not a jagged and broken thing.
I am a sensitive human, with an inner life of great intensity, and I will continue to be hurt by the world. I will continue to wear these emotions on my young face and I will continue to hear my voice break and my lips quiver under their weight. I will continue to relish my sobs and my frowns.
But I don't want to be afraid, and I don't want to wear these painful memories like a suit of armor.
I won't allow my anger to step up and supplant my sensitivity.
I have to learn to bear this intensity.
The alternative is hiding. The alternative is a wall of anger. The alternative is putting on a suit of armor built of memory. The alternative is self-hate.
For this intensity will not go away. It will merely swell behind the walls I create until it finds a chink in my armor.
I have, in fact, hated myself quite deeply. This fact has been hidden from me for much of my life. I didn't even know I hated myself. If someone had asked me, 'how do you feel about yourself?', I probably would have told them that I thought I was alright, that I liked myself, et cetera. Part of me does like myself.
Yet I behave in so many ways, and I experience so many emotions, that would only be possible if I had a profoundly negative view of myself. Breakups and rejection, for example, have always been devastating for me. Even when I am the one doing the breaking or rejecting, I'm still devastated.
Why? Why is this?
Because, as it turns out, I have been living a story in which I am unlovable, in which I am broken and in which someone won't be able to love me in spite of my ticks and inconsistencies.
For if I were living a story in which I was lovable, in which I had a good chance of ending up in a satisfying love affair, then one botched six month relationship or a polite rejection from a friend of a friend wouldn't touch my heart so deeply. Yet those experiences not only touched my heart, they went to its core, they echoed with a personal truth that rang so loudly it lapsed into silence.
These silent narratives, these thoughts that I silently think, have led me to govern myself hatefully.
I've often reflected on the way I treat my friends and family, the compassion I love to show not only to them but to strangers or whoever. Yet I deny this compassion to myself.
On occasion I imagine myself holding myself in my mind's eye. I see the child that I've always been, I see myself being small, being held by myself. I deserve the compassion that I give. Why don't I receive it? Why don't I take it for myself?
When I was seeing my therapist I used to talk to him about the deep sensitivity and fragility that has always followed me. My inner life has always been intense. I've always churned deeply.
Tears have always come to me.
Ohhhhh how embarrassing it was for me. Other kids didn't seem to be overwhelmed by tears the way I was. I recall one kid from preschool, Timmy the crybaby, they called him, who cried quite a lot. Thank god I never acquired such a nick name. Yet I remember feeling relieved that it was him who had received the spotlight for his sensitivity. I was fast. I was other things. Those things could be accentuated and my fragility downplayed.
My fragility was also a point of tension in my family. My sister is not like me. She doesn't succumb to her feelings in the same way I do. They break me. She endures them with greater ease.
I often see myself as tearing at myself from within. I don't think she does.
My fragility hurt me in my love life. I was incapable of expressing myself to my most long-term companion. I was deeply hurt by conflicting desires. I behaved in conflicting ways, and I know I hurt her.
Yet it remains an issue for me that it doesn't remain for them.
For now what I am dealing with is not merely the fragility that is still a part of me, but the scars that have been left by my emotional pains.
To be more precise, lets not call them scars, lets call it armor. Memory armor.
I have been reflecting on memory both generally and in particular (thanks, Bergson).
Memory, in general, is something that accumulates and eventually provides us with habits, biases, and heuristics that we use to navigate the world. I have walked down Broadway in Capitol Hill hundreds of times, and I no longer need to look very carefully about where I am going. I have pulled thousands of shots of espresso and made thousands of lattes, and can now do those things habitually, probably with my eyes closed.
The essential point about memory is this: they unconsciously coalesce into general conclusions and habits that govern our behavior and constrict our perception. Memory eases the burden of seeing by substituting past instances of experience for observation in the present.
Do you look carefully at every tree you pass? Do you look closely at every barista you deal with? Of course not, you fucker, you know damn well what a tree is and what a barista is. You don't need to look at these things because, practically, memory can sufficiently supplant perception.
But what if some of our memories have led us to the wrong conclusions about the thing we are dealing with? What if our past experiences have been incorrectly generalized and we are now incapable of observing the thing in front of us? What if memory has us convinced that we are A when we are actually B?
My memories, I am implying, have provided me with the general conclusion that I am a fragile person, destined to be hurt and run over by the world, never to love or be loved.
How dare I extrapolate such self-hate from my memories! How can one be so hostile and unforgiving of oneself?! What kind of person thinks of oneself in such perverse and distorted ways?
Many of us, I suspect.
But this makes sense in a way. It is armor, protection against the pains of the future.
Love hurt me. Love hurt me deeply. I loved someone so much that I was incapable of disconnecting from them. I couldn't be without them, yet part of me knew I had to be. I tried to pull away, and was always pulled back.
I was not a consistent person then, I am not a consistent person now.
So I took that pain, that experience of love, and I said to myself: 'This reveals your deepest contradictions. This shows you how powerless you are against your own emotions. There is something deeply, deeply wrong here.'
What a lesson to unconsciously learn! Ha!
I took those experiences, I took those memories, and I layered myself in them. I let them harden under years of solitude and smoke. I fought my loneliness as my mentors prescribed. I took my memories and I used them as a blue print for a suit of armor. I guarded myself against those pains.
I recently had an experience where I took that armor off. There are no actual wounds there. I am not a jagged and broken thing.
I am a sensitive human, with an inner life of great intensity, and I will continue to be hurt by the world. I will continue to wear these emotions on my young face and I will continue to hear my voice break and my lips quiver under their weight. I will continue to relish my sobs and my frowns.
But I don't want to be afraid, and I don't want to wear these painful memories like a suit of armor.
I won't allow my anger to step up and supplant my sensitivity.
I have to learn to bear this intensity.
The alternative is hiding. The alternative is a wall of anger. The alternative is putting on a suit of armor built of memory. The alternative is self-hate.
For this intensity will not go away. It will merely swell behind the walls I create until it finds a chink in my armor.
Sunday, July 13, 2014
What I Think About
I'm not sure what I think about anymore.
Its interesting to have let go of graduate school ambitions and to still feel inclined towards reflection and philosophy. I found it comforting when Bloom told me in Love & Friendship that philosophizing was a solitary quest. It obviously has to be.
It's just odd to me that there is such an institutional structure that structures philosophy. It has become a career path, a way to make a living.
John Maus said in an interview that he doesn't think we should make our living by being musicians, that the threat/reward of money threatened something about artistic integrity. I wonder the same things about the universities. Is 'publish or perish' really a good model for producing sound scholarship? So I have my doubts about the universities, their goodness, their ability to provide philosophy with an adequate home.
The problem with no being involved with the universities, however, is that I can't do my reading and writing with a ton of rigor. I have to work full time! I have a job where I'm just scraping by, having friends, trying to date, trying to live.
Why do I have to be poor and strapped for time if I want to be scholarly? Eh, my professor pointed out a long time ago that there is a reason that monks used to be scholars. It takes time! It takes a lot of time! Building a certain cast of mind, becoming a certain way.
That, perhaps, is the scariest thing, and the thing I think about and fear the most. I fear that I won't be able to continue thinking in these ways. I've worked hard to learn about philosophy, to learn about myself. I've become something different because of the work I've done. I can tell. So the kind of person that I've made myself into is directly related to the way I've learn to think through my reading and writing. Now I have to keep thinking if I want to stay who I am.
There is no telling what kinds of things I will think in the future, what kind of person I'll be. But I want to continue to be thoughtful and reflective. I see no reason why I shouldn't continue to reflect in the future.
It's just hard not having any way for it to be a source of identity. I think, I read, I write. Yet I have no institutional support in this task.
Who knows what I think about.
I know what I've been reading.
Joyce.
Collingwood.
Plato.
So on so on so on.
I will think more.
Its interesting to have let go of graduate school ambitions and to still feel inclined towards reflection and philosophy. I found it comforting when Bloom told me in Love & Friendship that philosophizing was a solitary quest. It obviously has to be.
It's just odd to me that there is such an institutional structure that structures philosophy. It has become a career path, a way to make a living.
John Maus said in an interview that he doesn't think we should make our living by being musicians, that the threat/reward of money threatened something about artistic integrity. I wonder the same things about the universities. Is 'publish or perish' really a good model for producing sound scholarship? So I have my doubts about the universities, their goodness, their ability to provide philosophy with an adequate home.
The problem with no being involved with the universities, however, is that I can't do my reading and writing with a ton of rigor. I have to work full time! I have a job where I'm just scraping by, having friends, trying to date, trying to live.
Why do I have to be poor and strapped for time if I want to be scholarly? Eh, my professor pointed out a long time ago that there is a reason that monks used to be scholars. It takes time! It takes a lot of time! Building a certain cast of mind, becoming a certain way.
That, perhaps, is the scariest thing, and the thing I think about and fear the most. I fear that I won't be able to continue thinking in these ways. I've worked hard to learn about philosophy, to learn about myself. I've become something different because of the work I've done. I can tell. So the kind of person that I've made myself into is directly related to the way I've learn to think through my reading and writing. Now I have to keep thinking if I want to stay who I am.
There is no telling what kinds of things I will think in the future, what kind of person I'll be. But I want to continue to be thoughtful and reflective. I see no reason why I shouldn't continue to reflect in the future.
It's just hard not having any way for it to be a source of identity. I think, I read, I write. Yet I have no institutional support in this task.
Who knows what I think about.
I know what I've been reading.
Joyce.
Collingwood.
Plato.
So on so on so on.
I will think more.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
The Self, The Network of Gazes, and Living Through the Screen
What I am is inseparable from what you are. I do not have some kind of autonomous self that subsists independently from the people around me. The people I come into contact are an integral part of what I become.
For when I engage with you I am not simply deducing your mental process from your words. I am doing something more like recreating your mind within my own. I simulate your mental processes as I observe them in order to be connected to you and therefore part of my understanding you is becoming you within myself. What I know of you is really something that I know of me.
Similarly, when I am around you I not only see from my point of view, I imagine how you view me. When I walk down the street, for example, I often have an internal image of what I look like from behind, how a stranger would view me walking down the street. I always see myself from both within and without.
Sometimes the view from without is a definite perspective, like that of a close friend or lover. Sometimes the view from without is vague, amorphous, not belonging to any one person in particular, but rather a general sort of mind that I assume belongs to our time and place.
All this should be fairly obvious. Of course the self is not some static entity. It changes based on who I am around. And, more specifically, it changes based on what perspectives I am able to imagine myself from. Thus my therapist posed the very intelligent question, 'Which me do I get to be around this person?' The point being precisely that relating to different people make us into different things because it forces us to occupy their perspective and therefore to subtlety change ourselves. The point being: The self emerges out of the constellation of perspectives that we take on a regular basis.
This idea of the self as hinging on the possible perspectives we can imagine ourselves through is at the heart of Foucault's work on panopticism. In Discipline & Punish Foucault wrote about a 18th-19th century prison design known as the panopticon. The idea is that there is a guard tower standing in the middle of a ring of prison cells, each one visible from the tower. The top of the tower is totally blacked out, whereas the cells are fully lit at all times. The prisoners therefore cannot know if they are being watched at any particular moment, but they know that there is a possibility for them to be viewed at any moment and thus they must behave as if though they were being observed.
The idea of a panopticon is therefore essentially a means of control that functions by forcing an individual to view themselves from a point of view other than their own, in particular, an outside perspective that has the capacity to judge or punish. In the case of the literal panopticon, a prisoner is being forced to imagine they are being watched by a guard who could inflict punishment on them if t hey catch them breaking a rule. There is, however, a more general point to be made: any new perspective I learn to take allows me to criticize and praise my actions in new ways. This is why Allan Bloom said that great authors must be worn like a pair of glasses through which we see the world. I've also read that therapy, from the patient's point of view, is about learning to build a more balanced perspective in part by using your relationship with your therapist as a touchstone for healthy consciousness. I can say from personal experience that it is a useful to ask, What would my favorite professor say about this? Or what would my therapist say to me right now?
The ability to internalize another person's perspective, and learning to criticize oneself through that perspective, therefore has significant repercussions for our actions. Foucault used the image of the panopticon precisely to draw attention to how our behavior can be altered merely by 'the gaze' of another. He therefore meant the panopticon primarily as a metaphor for the way our current social order depends on a regulatory 'network of gazes'. Our dominant institutions, penal, legal, psychiatric, medical, etc., all institutions that exert power on society by producing knowledge about what is and is not acceptable behavior, therefore putting a corral on the potentials for action. The knowledge they wield, moreover, expresses itself in a gaze: a point of view that each of us internalizes and learns to criticize ourselves through. Foucault might say that there is a doctor, a psychiatrist, a judge, and a priest inside us all. Or, more precisely, we have all learned to silently judge ourselves through those perspectives.
So much of our experience is filtered through these dominant perspectives. So much of what we are is about the other perspectives we imagine ourselves from, which stories we tell about ourselves from which points of view. I am thus claiming that the self is something that emerges out of a 'network of gazes', or, to put it differently, it is the sum of all the points of view, all the silently simulated perspectives, that we carry with us in our daily lives. Solitude, friendships, relationships, all breed very different kinds of selfs.
If it is true that the self is something that emerges out of the variety of perspectives that we carry within us, what does this say about our relationship with media in general and facebook in particular?
With media in general we have to recognize that many of the things we may think about ourselves, our bodies or our minds, is often being generated by a machine that doesn't want to make us into better people. It wants to make us into consumers. It wants us to buy into unrealistic standards for our bodies and our relationships. We can catch ourselves criticizing ourselves through this lens we've internalized from marketing and media generally. We can label it as such. In doing so we can place a little bit of distance between us and those narratives. In our initial dealings with media it is easy to be unaware of its subtle influence on behavior, but the goal is to recognize that it serves a regulatory function that you are capable of resisting for yourself, free to explore alternative narratives of what you'd like to be.
Foucault would wager that such an activity is 'political'. It is true that the dominant institutions of our society have become somewhat politicized. I can't eat at Chic-fil-a anymore, god dammit. I wish I could just eat one of those chicken sandwiches because it's a fabulous sandwich. Chic-fil-a's approach to social and political issues, however, overrides that. The medical industry, psychiatric clinics, and penal institutions, too, are major structures of our political system. But does merely thinking about them differently constitute a political action? I suppose that being open to counter-narratives and alternative subjectivities could drive one to have a certain political leaning or attitude towards action. I've never quite grasped Foucault's thinking on politics. I know I'm not the only one. Forgive this digression.
In addition to being critical of the dominant narratives around us, we can actively seek out positive forms of media that will provide us with new points of view which to view ourselves. Reading and getting to know an excellent philosopher, for example, can provide you with a new set of eyes to see the world through. I can say that my world view has become noticeably richer and more exciting because of the contact I've had with friends, therapists, and philosophers. Each of them offers me a new perspective that I can see myself and the world through. At the end of it I feel like I'm able to build up a more realistic perspective on myself and the world because I try to find a place within myself where I can balance all the perspectives I've internalized. Recognizing that a more realistic sense of can self emerge out of interaction with diverse perspectives is very helpful in the task of reflection and self-cultivation.
I finally just want to comment briefly on what all this means in relation to facebook. Facebook is a very strange thing if you think about it in the terms I've presented here. It allows us to imagine our profiles from the perspective of hundreds of people that we've met throughout our lives, many of whom are acquaintances at best. I think in turn people tend to put their 'best foot forward' online: we choose our best pictures, we spend time thinking of witty things to share, we want to be acknowledged. There is an interesting quotation from some bro named Steve Furtick. It goes, "The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel." What is facebook if not a permanent highlight reel?
My concern here is that we are abstracting ourselves, that we are forcing ourselves to become generalized people, one's more amenable to the packaged presentation that something like facebook or okcupid enables. This imperative, moreover, is something that may emerge out of the network of gazes that facebook provides us. When all we see is people having tons of fun and posting great meals and changing their statuses to engaged or married or whatever it can be easy to assume that they experience no speed bumps, no fits of self doubt or sadness that come out of nowhere. But of course they do. We all do. What I'm wondering, though, is if it's possible that long term exposure to facebook (as a network of gazes that we imagine ourselves through) can have a lasting affect on our behavior? If we take a picture of every meal, if everything is documented, and we know that it is being documented, is it not true that a part of our mind is perhaps imagining what that picture will look like to the hundreds of people we know online? Is not part of our mind therefore detached from the situation itself, and the experience in some ways passes through imagined screens as we experience it?
Other people have written about facebook as a panopticon. It makes perfect sense. I have not, however, seen anyone render the panopticon in the language of perspective taking and simulation theory more specifically. When we do render facebook panopticism in the language of simulation theory, we get something like what I'm trying to talk about. I'm struggling. But the idea is that facebook can exert a regulatory affect on our behavior by providing a huge number of perspectives that we criticize and praise our actions through. Facebook as a network of gazes, moreover, exerts a generalizing power, forcing our self expression to be condensed and trimmed. It encourages us to display only our highlight reels, and I fear we may forget how to move comfortably behind the scenes.
For when I engage with you I am not simply deducing your mental process from your words. I am doing something more like recreating your mind within my own. I simulate your mental processes as I observe them in order to be connected to you and therefore part of my understanding you is becoming you within myself. What I know of you is really something that I know of me.
Similarly, when I am around you I not only see from my point of view, I imagine how you view me. When I walk down the street, for example, I often have an internal image of what I look like from behind, how a stranger would view me walking down the street. I always see myself from both within and without.
Sometimes the view from without is a definite perspective, like that of a close friend or lover. Sometimes the view from without is vague, amorphous, not belonging to any one person in particular, but rather a general sort of mind that I assume belongs to our time and place.
All this should be fairly obvious. Of course the self is not some static entity. It changes based on who I am around. And, more specifically, it changes based on what perspectives I am able to imagine myself from. Thus my therapist posed the very intelligent question, 'Which me do I get to be around this person?' The point being precisely that relating to different people make us into different things because it forces us to occupy their perspective and therefore to subtlety change ourselves. The point being: The self emerges out of the constellation of perspectives that we take on a regular basis.
This idea of the self as hinging on the possible perspectives we can imagine ourselves through is at the heart of Foucault's work on panopticism. In Discipline & Punish Foucault wrote about a 18th-19th century prison design known as the panopticon. The idea is that there is a guard tower standing in the middle of a ring of prison cells, each one visible from the tower. The top of the tower is totally blacked out, whereas the cells are fully lit at all times. The prisoners therefore cannot know if they are being watched at any particular moment, but they know that there is a possibility for them to be viewed at any moment and thus they must behave as if though they were being observed.
The idea of a panopticon is therefore essentially a means of control that functions by forcing an individual to view themselves from a point of view other than their own, in particular, an outside perspective that has the capacity to judge or punish. In the case of the literal panopticon, a prisoner is being forced to imagine they are being watched by a guard who could inflict punishment on them if t hey catch them breaking a rule. There is, however, a more general point to be made: any new perspective I learn to take allows me to criticize and praise my actions in new ways. This is why Allan Bloom said that great authors must be worn like a pair of glasses through which we see the world. I've also read that therapy, from the patient's point of view, is about learning to build a more balanced perspective in part by using your relationship with your therapist as a touchstone for healthy consciousness. I can say from personal experience that it is a useful to ask, What would my favorite professor say about this? Or what would my therapist say to me right now?
The ability to internalize another person's perspective, and learning to criticize oneself through that perspective, therefore has significant repercussions for our actions. Foucault used the image of the panopticon precisely to draw attention to how our behavior can be altered merely by 'the gaze' of another. He therefore meant the panopticon primarily as a metaphor for the way our current social order depends on a regulatory 'network of gazes'. Our dominant institutions, penal, legal, psychiatric, medical, etc., all institutions that exert power on society by producing knowledge about what is and is not acceptable behavior, therefore putting a corral on the potentials for action. The knowledge they wield, moreover, expresses itself in a gaze: a point of view that each of us internalizes and learns to criticize ourselves through. Foucault might say that there is a doctor, a psychiatrist, a judge, and a priest inside us all. Or, more precisely, we have all learned to silently judge ourselves through those perspectives.
So much of our experience is filtered through these dominant perspectives. So much of what we are is about the other perspectives we imagine ourselves from, which stories we tell about ourselves from which points of view. I am thus claiming that the self is something that emerges out of a 'network of gazes', or, to put it differently, it is the sum of all the points of view, all the silently simulated perspectives, that we carry with us in our daily lives. Solitude, friendships, relationships, all breed very different kinds of selfs.
If it is true that the self is something that emerges out of the variety of perspectives that we carry within us, what does this say about our relationship with media in general and facebook in particular?
With media in general we have to recognize that many of the things we may think about ourselves, our bodies or our minds, is often being generated by a machine that doesn't want to make us into better people. It wants to make us into consumers. It wants us to buy into unrealistic standards for our bodies and our relationships. We can catch ourselves criticizing ourselves through this lens we've internalized from marketing and media generally. We can label it as such. In doing so we can place a little bit of distance between us and those narratives. In our initial dealings with media it is easy to be unaware of its subtle influence on behavior, but the goal is to recognize that it serves a regulatory function that you are capable of resisting for yourself, free to explore alternative narratives of what you'd like to be.
Foucault would wager that such an activity is 'political'. It is true that the dominant institutions of our society have become somewhat politicized. I can't eat at Chic-fil-a anymore, god dammit. I wish I could just eat one of those chicken sandwiches because it's a fabulous sandwich. Chic-fil-a's approach to social and political issues, however, overrides that. The medical industry, psychiatric clinics, and penal institutions, too, are major structures of our political system. But does merely thinking about them differently constitute a political action? I suppose that being open to counter-narratives and alternative subjectivities could drive one to have a certain political leaning or attitude towards action. I've never quite grasped Foucault's thinking on politics. I know I'm not the only one. Forgive this digression.
In addition to being critical of the dominant narratives around us, we can actively seek out positive forms of media that will provide us with new points of view which to view ourselves. Reading and getting to know an excellent philosopher, for example, can provide you with a new set of eyes to see the world through. I can say that my world view has become noticeably richer and more exciting because of the contact I've had with friends, therapists, and philosophers. Each of them offers me a new perspective that I can see myself and the world through. At the end of it I feel like I'm able to build up a more realistic perspective on myself and the world because I try to find a place within myself where I can balance all the perspectives I've internalized. Recognizing that a more realistic sense of can self emerge out of interaction with diverse perspectives is very helpful in the task of reflection and self-cultivation.
I finally just want to comment briefly on what all this means in relation to facebook. Facebook is a very strange thing if you think about it in the terms I've presented here. It allows us to imagine our profiles from the perspective of hundreds of people that we've met throughout our lives, many of whom are acquaintances at best. I think in turn people tend to put their 'best foot forward' online: we choose our best pictures, we spend time thinking of witty things to share, we want to be acknowledged. There is an interesting quotation from some bro named Steve Furtick. It goes, "The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel." What is facebook if not a permanent highlight reel?
My concern here is that we are abstracting ourselves, that we are forcing ourselves to become generalized people, one's more amenable to the packaged presentation that something like facebook or okcupid enables. This imperative, moreover, is something that may emerge out of the network of gazes that facebook provides us. When all we see is people having tons of fun and posting great meals and changing their statuses to engaged or married or whatever it can be easy to assume that they experience no speed bumps, no fits of self doubt or sadness that come out of nowhere. But of course they do. We all do. What I'm wondering, though, is if it's possible that long term exposure to facebook (as a network of gazes that we imagine ourselves through) can have a lasting affect on our behavior? If we take a picture of every meal, if everything is documented, and we know that it is being documented, is it not true that a part of our mind is perhaps imagining what that picture will look like to the hundreds of people we know online? Is not part of our mind therefore detached from the situation itself, and the experience in some ways passes through imagined screens as we experience it?
Other people have written about facebook as a panopticon. It makes perfect sense. I have not, however, seen anyone render the panopticon in the language of perspective taking and simulation theory more specifically. When we do render facebook panopticism in the language of simulation theory, we get something like what I'm trying to talk about. I'm struggling. But the idea is that facebook can exert a regulatory affect on our behavior by providing a huge number of perspectives that we criticize and praise our actions through. Facebook as a network of gazes, moreover, exerts a generalizing power, forcing our self expression to be condensed and trimmed. It encourages us to display only our highlight reels, and I fear we may forget how to move comfortably behind the scenes.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Degrees of Theory
Theory can be many things.
At their most intense theories are prescriptive.
At their most basic they are observational.
In the former case one has predicted a phenomenon so well that one can reasonably create a doctrine or set of rules that will prescribe a course of action.
In the latter a phenomenon is so unpredictable that one is satisfied with simply observing it properly.
Observation is obviously a part of every theory.
Prescription and prediction is clearly not.
Understanding the many layers of theory is definitely important if we are going to grapple with Clausewitz.
The rough gradient of theory:
Observation
Identification of regularity
Generalization
Prediction
Prescription.
Those five things are generally a part of theorizing. But not every theory need follow them in that order.
Regularity is a tricky question, especially with human phenomena.
For in nature we simply identify regularity.
In humans we have the extra problem that we can not only identify regularity, we can also create regularity. Thus we must worry about mistaking habit (second nature) for (first) nature.
This problem of reflexivity and habit should make us tread lightly in the realm of human theory.
We don't want to make ourselves into simple abstract beings just for the sake of clear thinking.
Let experience overrun the theories, I say.
I owe so much to William James and Henri Bergson right now. Thanks.
At their most intense theories are prescriptive.
At their most basic they are observational.
In the former case one has predicted a phenomenon so well that one can reasonably create a doctrine or set of rules that will prescribe a course of action.
In the latter a phenomenon is so unpredictable that one is satisfied with simply observing it properly.
Observation is obviously a part of every theory.
Prescription and prediction is clearly not.
Understanding the many layers of theory is definitely important if we are going to grapple with Clausewitz.
The rough gradient of theory:
Observation
Identification of regularity
Generalization
Prediction
Prescription.
Those five things are generally a part of theorizing. But not every theory need follow them in that order.
Regularity is a tricky question, especially with human phenomena.
For in nature we simply identify regularity.
In humans we have the extra problem that we can not only identify regularity, we can also create regularity. Thus we must worry about mistaking habit (second nature) for (first) nature.
This problem of reflexivity and habit should make us tread lightly in the realm of human theory.
We don't want to make ourselves into simple abstract beings just for the sake of clear thinking.
Let experience overrun the theories, I say.
I owe so much to William James and Henri Bergson right now. Thanks.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Resistance
I resist many things in my life.
It was an undercurrent for many years. I was so habituated to favoring what wasn't that I lost touch with what is. My mind drifted more easily in the was and could.
I've become more acquainted with the present. I like it here quite a lot.
I'm far more conscious of resistance now. When the moment demands a mood, when the bus won't get me somewhere on time, when my mind or body won't cooperate with me. Yet my resistance still surprises me.
I am currently resistant towards writing. Even these keystrokes bring me a bit of pain. That last sentence made my brow furrow and my left eye compress into an awkward painful wink.
Writing has always involved a 'towards which'. I have always written with a future in mind. A future in which I am an academic, a professor, a lauded and accepted thinker among a community of thinkers. Writing was previously a means to an end, the end being graduate school and a scholarly profession.
But the idea that one can be a 'professional philosopher' is of recent origin and seems less and less viable to me. One can be a professional teacher. One cannot be a professional philosopher. My best friends have told me so. Bloom clearly asserts that philosophy is an individual task. Collingwood is adamant that the life of a professor is not the best life for a thinker who hopes to write books.
This is such an obvious fact that it often escapes my gaze.
I wanted philosophy to provide my primary access to the world, I wanted it to supply my community. But it won't. I suspect the American universities are bankrupt, another casualty of the new American oligarchy.
Many other issues are presenting themselves to me as relevant. I continue to reflect and I have no intentions of stopping.
But do I intend to stop writing? Why do I find it so difficult to write in the present? I've so often written in the future. I've done this work with the idea of it leading me to somewhere else, some place that I am not, somewhere with people that I don't know.
But I love where I am, and I love the people I know.
I'm not sorry I didn't get into graduate school.
I'm sorry that thinking and philosophical living has been so impoverished by its confinement to the university. I'm sorry that it has been rendered so politically and socially impotent. I'm sorry that we have a shitty institutional structure that only provides pseudo-engagement with the world of politics and philosophy.
I'm sorry that people read Clausewitz so poorly.
I won't resist my thinking. I don't want to resist my thinking.
But it isn't 'taking me anywhere', it won't be a career for me, and that causes me pain. It is the death of a dream, the death of a fantasy.
I think this is for the best. I don't want the poverty and desperation that comes from the university life.
I see how it could very easily lead to sloppy thinking. In that world one must publish or perish, not think clearly and honestly.
I still find my heart and my mind so full. The world is richer than it's ever been for me, and I don't need any person or institution to ground me.
Although, I wouldn't mind a person.
It was an undercurrent for many years. I was so habituated to favoring what wasn't that I lost touch with what is. My mind drifted more easily in the was and could.
I've become more acquainted with the present. I like it here quite a lot.
I'm far more conscious of resistance now. When the moment demands a mood, when the bus won't get me somewhere on time, when my mind or body won't cooperate with me. Yet my resistance still surprises me.
I am currently resistant towards writing. Even these keystrokes bring me a bit of pain. That last sentence made my brow furrow and my left eye compress into an awkward painful wink.
Writing has always involved a 'towards which'. I have always written with a future in mind. A future in which I am an academic, a professor, a lauded and accepted thinker among a community of thinkers. Writing was previously a means to an end, the end being graduate school and a scholarly profession.
But the idea that one can be a 'professional philosopher' is of recent origin and seems less and less viable to me. One can be a professional teacher. One cannot be a professional philosopher. My best friends have told me so. Bloom clearly asserts that philosophy is an individual task. Collingwood is adamant that the life of a professor is not the best life for a thinker who hopes to write books.
This is such an obvious fact that it often escapes my gaze.
I wanted philosophy to provide my primary access to the world, I wanted it to supply my community. But it won't. I suspect the American universities are bankrupt, another casualty of the new American oligarchy.
Many other issues are presenting themselves to me as relevant. I continue to reflect and I have no intentions of stopping.
But do I intend to stop writing? Why do I find it so difficult to write in the present? I've so often written in the future. I've done this work with the idea of it leading me to somewhere else, some place that I am not, somewhere with people that I don't know.
But I love where I am, and I love the people I know.
I'm not sorry I didn't get into graduate school.
I'm sorry that thinking and philosophical living has been so impoverished by its confinement to the university. I'm sorry that it has been rendered so politically and socially impotent. I'm sorry that we have a shitty institutional structure that only provides pseudo-engagement with the world of politics and philosophy.
I'm sorry that people read Clausewitz so poorly.
I won't resist my thinking. I don't want to resist my thinking.
But it isn't 'taking me anywhere', it won't be a career for me, and that causes me pain. It is the death of a dream, the death of a fantasy.
I think this is for the best. I don't want the poverty and desperation that comes from the university life.
I see how it could very easily lead to sloppy thinking. In that world one must publish or perish, not think clearly and honestly.
I still find my heart and my mind so full. The world is richer than it's ever been for me, and I don't need any person or institution to ground me.
Although, I wouldn't mind a person.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Thinking
Oh such restlessness in my mind right now. I want to channel it into some kind of energy so that I can write. I want to write on Clausewitz and other related things. Like William James and Bergson.
Unfortunately that writing is wrapped up with a future that no longer seems accessible to me and thus causes me a kind of pain.
Doing scholarly work on Clausewitz was something that I wanted to do in graduate school. I wanted to really tackle On War and Chicago or Chapel Hill. Alas, I won't be going there this year. I'll continue to live my life this year.
It's interesting and difficult for me to acknowledge that doing academic work causes me pain.
I was doing some academic writing the other day and an acquaintance came into the room and told me he thought it was cool that I did that kind of stuff for pleasure. I unreflectively told him that it was causing me pain.
I've been struggling to have clear feelings this week or two. They've remained amorphous to me, covered in that generic blanket of anxiety and fear. I'm trying to peel back that blanket a little bit, get a clearer picture of what is really going on in my heart and mind.
It involves a lot of longing. A lot of pain at things I want that aren't present for me. Things like love, like a potential academic career.
An academic career? What a nightmare. I read so many articles online about how you shouldn't go to graduate school for the humanities. Just don't do it! It seems pretty obvious. Yet so many of us hold out hope that we are the tenured ones, we are the ones who will come out on the other side unscathed, thinking our beautiful thoughts.
It probably won't happen for me, and that is hard because it means the future is unimaginable.
For what the universities represent is not simply an institution that could give me a job. It is a way of thinking, a way of living.
How is philosophy to persist as an attitude when the institutions meant to house it are broken and the larger institutions are hostile to it? At the very least, the working world is not really conducive to philosophical thinking. But neither is being a university professor, Collingwood warned me.
I think my draw to the universities is really about love. I think that being in a university gives me the idea that I would be welcomed in a certain way by the people there. We would be brothers and sisters in thinking. We would think together, shelter ourselves from the world that did not nurture our minds.
So what is the point of doing this work in the present?
I see the Clausewitz scholarship as being so muddled. I look at my professors book and I read Clausewitz and I know he has it better than anyone else. Then I look at other writers, Strachan, Paret, and I just don't get where they are coming from.
Clausewitz is so much clearer than we think he is. We just have to spend a lot of time following him. It isn't until Book II Chapter II that he unveils his reform of the theory of war. It does not disappoint.
I wish I didn't know the things I know. I wish I could forget.
Unfortunately that writing is wrapped up with a future that no longer seems accessible to me and thus causes me a kind of pain.
Doing scholarly work on Clausewitz was something that I wanted to do in graduate school. I wanted to really tackle On War and Chicago or Chapel Hill. Alas, I won't be going there this year. I'll continue to live my life this year.
It's interesting and difficult for me to acknowledge that doing academic work causes me pain.
I was doing some academic writing the other day and an acquaintance came into the room and told me he thought it was cool that I did that kind of stuff for pleasure. I unreflectively told him that it was causing me pain.
I've been struggling to have clear feelings this week or two. They've remained amorphous to me, covered in that generic blanket of anxiety and fear. I'm trying to peel back that blanket a little bit, get a clearer picture of what is really going on in my heart and mind.
It involves a lot of longing. A lot of pain at things I want that aren't present for me. Things like love, like a potential academic career.
An academic career? What a nightmare. I read so many articles online about how you shouldn't go to graduate school for the humanities. Just don't do it! It seems pretty obvious. Yet so many of us hold out hope that we are the tenured ones, we are the ones who will come out on the other side unscathed, thinking our beautiful thoughts.
It probably won't happen for me, and that is hard because it means the future is unimaginable.
For what the universities represent is not simply an institution that could give me a job. It is a way of thinking, a way of living.
How is philosophy to persist as an attitude when the institutions meant to house it are broken and the larger institutions are hostile to it? At the very least, the working world is not really conducive to philosophical thinking. But neither is being a university professor, Collingwood warned me.
I think my draw to the universities is really about love. I think that being in a university gives me the idea that I would be welcomed in a certain way by the people there. We would be brothers and sisters in thinking. We would think together, shelter ourselves from the world that did not nurture our minds.
So what is the point of doing this work in the present?
I see the Clausewitz scholarship as being so muddled. I look at my professors book and I read Clausewitz and I know he has it better than anyone else. Then I look at other writers, Strachan, Paret, and I just don't get where they are coming from.
Clausewitz is so much clearer than we think he is. We just have to spend a lot of time following him. It isn't until Book II Chapter II that he unveils his reform of the theory of war. It does not disappoint.
I wish I didn't know the things I know. I wish I could forget.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Institutions of the Heart and Mind
I recently read an article about my generation's anxiety with marriage.
We don't feel economically stable. We don't know how we are going to make our way in the world. Thus we don't feel comfortable thinking about marriage or children. How are we to think of these things unless we feel stable in our livelihoods? How are we to get married and live out this narrative unless we can buy a house and 2 cars?
I'm worried here about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'm worried that we are forgetting about love because the institutional structures no longer support it. For marriage is but an institution meant to corral our experience of love, sex, and procreation.
The university system, like marriage, is an institution that structures the activity of thinking. Similarly, the universities are experiencing a bit of a crisis. They no longer have the means to fulfill the narrative that they have built themselves upon. They don't provide an appropriate or accessible outlet for thinking, just as marriage does not provide a strong framework for love.
My hope, my conviction (which I very much need to be correct), is that the experiences of love and thinking can exist in spite of the institutions that fail to facilitate them.
Love and thinking are self sustaining activities. The heart and the mind do not need institutional structure. Though it'd be awfully nice to have it.
We don't feel economically stable. We don't know how we are going to make our way in the world. Thus we don't feel comfortable thinking about marriage or children. How are we to think of these things unless we feel stable in our livelihoods? How are we to get married and live out this narrative unless we can buy a house and 2 cars?
I'm worried here about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'm worried that we are forgetting about love because the institutional structures no longer support it. For marriage is but an institution meant to corral our experience of love, sex, and procreation.
The university system, like marriage, is an institution that structures the activity of thinking. Similarly, the universities are experiencing a bit of a crisis. They no longer have the means to fulfill the narrative that they have built themselves upon. They don't provide an appropriate or accessible outlet for thinking, just as marriage does not provide a strong framework for love.
My hope, my conviction (which I very much need to be correct), is that the experiences of love and thinking can exist in spite of the institutions that fail to facilitate them.
Love and thinking are self sustaining activities. The heart and the mind do not need institutional structure. Though it'd be awfully nice to have it.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
A Rough Outline
Hmmm, I like typing into blog space more than I like typing into a word document. Perhaps it has a feeling of finality, or it gives me a sense of directness. This writing is going somewhere in that it literally will be deposited into the void of the internet as soon as I click 'publish'. Word documents just sit there.
I've got some juices flowing on an essay on Bergson, Collingwood, and Clausewitz. I love dramatic and involved titles, naturally, so this one is tentatively titled 'Political Education in Bergson's Universe: Collingwood and Clausewitz on Preparing for the Unforeseeable'.
The thread that ties these three together is their insistence on the unpredictability of the world. They all reflected seriously on the shortcomings of predictive knowledge and the consequences of novelty and the unforeseeable. In fact, I dare say that prediction (or novelty) was the central problem that all three of these thinkers grappled with. Yet each of these thinkers explored the question of prediction in different domains. Clausewitz thought of war, Collingwood of history, and Bergson of the natural world. All three of them, naturally, were intelligent and diverse enough to reflect on all of these topics. Clausewitz spoke of history and natural science; Collingwood of natural science and war; and Bergson of history and war. They merely had different emphases.
One problem I'm trying to explore in this writing is Leo Strauss's claim that Bergson didn't produce a political philosophy. Apparently Bergson's final book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion did indeed elaborate a moral and political philosophy (centered on love, I hear). I will have to suss out that claim for myself at some point. In the meantime, however, I believe I can take some steps to understanding how Bergson's philosophy is at the very least compatible with things I already understand in moral and political philosophy.
Indeed, Collingwood and Clausewitz offer a moral and political philosophy that I believe is compatible with Bergson's thinking.
That's enough for now. These are the notes I took today:
"Bergson
I've got some juices flowing on an essay on Bergson, Collingwood, and Clausewitz. I love dramatic and involved titles, naturally, so this one is tentatively titled 'Political Education in Bergson's Universe: Collingwood and Clausewitz on Preparing for the Unforeseeable'.
The thread that ties these three together is their insistence on the unpredictability of the world. They all reflected seriously on the shortcomings of predictive knowledge and the consequences of novelty and the unforeseeable. In fact, I dare say that prediction (or novelty) was the central problem that all three of these thinkers grappled with. Yet each of these thinkers explored the question of prediction in different domains. Clausewitz thought of war, Collingwood of history, and Bergson of the natural world. All three of them, naturally, were intelligent and diverse enough to reflect on all of these topics. Clausewitz spoke of history and natural science; Collingwood of natural science and war; and Bergson of history and war. They merely had different emphases.
One problem I'm trying to explore in this writing is Leo Strauss's claim that Bergson didn't produce a political philosophy. Apparently Bergson's final book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion did indeed elaborate a moral and political philosophy (centered on love, I hear). I will have to suss out that claim for myself at some point. In the meantime, however, I believe I can take some steps to understanding how Bergson's philosophy is at the very least compatible with things I already understand in moral and political philosophy.
Indeed, Collingwood and Clausewitz offer a moral and political philosophy that I believe is compatible with Bergson's thinking.
That's enough for now. These are the notes I took today:
"Bergson
- Generally outline the idea of the universe as pure becoming, pure novelty
- Identify the problem that our habitual modes of thought stabilize, do not think with movement, cannot often perceive the novelty around us
- Thought as the extension of our perceptions. Space and the manipulation of matter as default state of thinking. Spatial thinking and division as the normal mode of our thinking and what stands between us and the novelty of things. Mind and time as the realm of novelty more purely.
- The importance of engaging with mind and its unity with time and thus the importance of breaking with the habit of thinking spatially and learning to think in terms of time, learning to think in terms of unity, difference and not identity
- The method of developing this kind of consciousness of duration as the image, as purposeful perspective taking, images as prompting an intuition
What we will find in Collingwood and Clausewitz is Bergson’s task of intensifying inner life by plunging ourselves into the duration, the expansion of our sensory apparatus, put towards explicitly moral and political goals."
Monday, March 10, 2014
Philosophy, The Purposeful Intensification of Inner Life, and Subtractive Learning
I still wonder what precisely philosophy is. There are so many different ways to define it or think of it. Deleuze calls it the creation of concepts. Rousseau, Bloom tells me, speaks of it as the purposeful ordering of the soul. Collingwood spoke of it as a form of second order knowledge, and later controversially claimed it to be a purely historical form of thought.
One thing seems undeniable: It begins with an admission of ignorance and from there proceeds into a quest for knowledge. It is above all a process, no doubt. A verb, not a noun.
Fortunately the philosopher I am most focused on right now, Henri Bergson, understood that the world is pure process, and that it is our business to think in a way that moves in tandem with the world. Bergson challenges us to think movement, think change, and, above all, to think time (whereas thought is typically spatial). I don't have the chops to go into this yet. I'm working on sorting Bergson, but he's a challenge.
One thing, however, is definitely clear to me: Bergson believed that the task of philosophy was to purposefully intensify our experience of the world, to attune us to the constant unfolding of novelty that is always happening within and without. As he says in his essay "The Possible and the Real," he is struck by "the continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty which seems to be going on in the universe."This explosion of novelty, moreover, is far from an abstract phenomenon, but a deeply personal experience: "As far as I am concerned, I feel I am experiencing it constantly. No matter how I try to imagine in detail what is going to happen to me, still how inadequate, how abstract and stilted is the thing I have imagined in comparison to what actually happens!" ('The Possible and the Real, in The Creative Mind, 73). I literally laughed out loud as I finished typing that quotation. Bergson's sense of the world was so wondrous and beautiful! He felt the intensity and uniqueness of every moment with such clarity. I can't read his writing without also being struck by the novelty and freshness of every moment. There is no such thing as identity, no such thing as sameness, only difference. Reading Bergson makes this infinitely clear, not only intellectually, but viscerally and emotionally.
The world is more intense after reading Bergson, and he would be delighted to hear me say that.
He provokes such love and such fear in me. He opens my eyes to the world in a way that I badly crave. Reading him is like staring at the familiar landscape with a new friend who is seeing it for the first time: he imparts such freshness and such particularity unto that which has become so stale and generic. I'm holding back tears as I write this, his thought creates such emotions in me.
So, the obvious question is, Why is it so hard to perceive the uniqueness of the world? What stands in the way of us and a raw experience of reality in all of its particularity and unpredictability?
Chiefly, classificatory and generalized language. When we speak of the world in terms of 'kinds' and 'types' we reduce things to what makes them similar, essentially sheering off all their elements that make them different. Thinking in terms of generalities, moreover, is a pervasive modern habit that comes out of our relationship with natural science.
The intensification of inner life, becoming attuned to the novelty of every moment, is therefore partially a matter of overcoming our attachment to general concepts.
The process of shedding our conceptual apparatus is to be conducted through metaphysical study, which Bergson thus calls 'the science of dispensing with symbols'. Metaphysics, then, is a way of using language that is supposed to help us leave behind our general conceptual apparatus. Hmmm.
It has something to do with Bergson's concept of the image. The kind of language used in metaphysics differs from scientific or classificatory language because what it seeks to do is to plunge is directly into the flow of novelty and unity of our lives. Metaphysics is meant to plunge is into the flow of time, whereas scientific language is meant to divide the world in terms of space. Metaphysics is meant not to give us an analytical understanding of reality, but is supposed to give us an intuition of the pure flow of time, which he called duration. Thus he said that "the philosopher's sole aim should be to start up a certain effort which the utilitarian habits of mind of everyday life tend, in most men, to discourage.... No image will replace the intuition of duration but many different images, taken from quite different orders of things, will be able, through the convergence of their action, to direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, any one of them will be prevented from usurping the place of the intuition it is instructed to call forth, snce it would then be driven out immediately by its rivals" ('Introduction to Metaphysics', in The Creative Mind, 139).
I'm sorry I'm just throwing these quotations out. But the idea is that metaphysics involves a use of language that is supposed to get us past language and instead plunge us into the ineffable novelty of reality. We are meant to use diverse forms of language so that we can dive head first into the flow of time and reality.
Oof. Challenging thinking.
A final point.
Bergson's thinking about metaphysics, about intuition, about what stands between us and the intensification of our inner lives and a purer relationship with reality, can be called a form of subtractive learning (a la Nassim Taleb in Antifragile). Taleb is a strong advocate of what he calls subtractive epistemology: We get smarter by taking junk out of our heads, not by adding things. Bergson, too, believes that contact with pure duration and reality is achieved mostly by forgetting all of the generalizations that we have become so habituated to. Metaphysics is a form of purposeful forgetting, or subtractive learning.
Such beauty in him.
One thing seems undeniable: It begins with an admission of ignorance and from there proceeds into a quest for knowledge. It is above all a process, no doubt. A verb, not a noun.
Fortunately the philosopher I am most focused on right now, Henri Bergson, understood that the world is pure process, and that it is our business to think in a way that moves in tandem with the world. Bergson challenges us to think movement, think change, and, above all, to think time (whereas thought is typically spatial). I don't have the chops to go into this yet. I'm working on sorting Bergson, but he's a challenge.
One thing, however, is definitely clear to me: Bergson believed that the task of philosophy was to purposefully intensify our experience of the world, to attune us to the constant unfolding of novelty that is always happening within and without. As he says in his essay "The Possible and the Real," he is struck by "the continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty which seems to be going on in the universe."This explosion of novelty, moreover, is far from an abstract phenomenon, but a deeply personal experience: "As far as I am concerned, I feel I am experiencing it constantly. No matter how I try to imagine in detail what is going to happen to me, still how inadequate, how abstract and stilted is the thing I have imagined in comparison to what actually happens!" ('The Possible and the Real, in The Creative Mind, 73). I literally laughed out loud as I finished typing that quotation. Bergson's sense of the world was so wondrous and beautiful! He felt the intensity and uniqueness of every moment with such clarity. I can't read his writing without also being struck by the novelty and freshness of every moment. There is no such thing as identity, no such thing as sameness, only difference. Reading Bergson makes this infinitely clear, not only intellectually, but viscerally and emotionally.
The world is more intense after reading Bergson, and he would be delighted to hear me say that.
He provokes such love and such fear in me. He opens my eyes to the world in a way that I badly crave. Reading him is like staring at the familiar landscape with a new friend who is seeing it for the first time: he imparts such freshness and such particularity unto that which has become so stale and generic. I'm holding back tears as I write this, his thought creates such emotions in me.
So, the obvious question is, Why is it so hard to perceive the uniqueness of the world? What stands in the way of us and a raw experience of reality in all of its particularity and unpredictability?
Chiefly, classificatory and generalized language. When we speak of the world in terms of 'kinds' and 'types' we reduce things to what makes them similar, essentially sheering off all their elements that make them different. Thinking in terms of generalities, moreover, is a pervasive modern habit that comes out of our relationship with natural science.
The intensification of inner life, becoming attuned to the novelty of every moment, is therefore partially a matter of overcoming our attachment to general concepts.
The process of shedding our conceptual apparatus is to be conducted through metaphysical study, which Bergson thus calls 'the science of dispensing with symbols'. Metaphysics, then, is a way of using language that is supposed to help us leave behind our general conceptual apparatus. Hmmm.
It has something to do with Bergson's concept of the image. The kind of language used in metaphysics differs from scientific or classificatory language because what it seeks to do is to plunge is directly into the flow of novelty and unity of our lives. Metaphysics is meant to plunge is into the flow of time, whereas scientific language is meant to divide the world in terms of space. Metaphysics is meant not to give us an analytical understanding of reality, but is supposed to give us an intuition of the pure flow of time, which he called duration. Thus he said that "the philosopher's sole aim should be to start up a certain effort which the utilitarian habits of mind of everyday life tend, in most men, to discourage.... No image will replace the intuition of duration but many different images, taken from quite different orders of things, will be able, through the convergence of their action, to direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, any one of them will be prevented from usurping the place of the intuition it is instructed to call forth, snce it would then be driven out immediately by its rivals" ('Introduction to Metaphysics', in The Creative Mind, 139).
I'm sorry I'm just throwing these quotations out. But the idea is that metaphysics involves a use of language that is supposed to get us past language and instead plunge us into the ineffable novelty of reality. We are meant to use diverse forms of language so that we can dive head first into the flow of time and reality.
Oof. Challenging thinking.
A final point.
Bergson's thinking about metaphysics, about intuition, about what stands between us and the intensification of our inner lives and a purer relationship with reality, can be called a form of subtractive learning (a la Nassim Taleb in Antifragile). Taleb is a strong advocate of what he calls subtractive epistemology: We get smarter by taking junk out of our heads, not by adding things. Bergson, too, believes that contact with pure duration and reality is achieved mostly by forgetting all of the generalizations that we have become so habituated to. Metaphysics is a form of purposeful forgetting, or subtractive learning.
Such beauty in him.
Friday, February 14, 2014
Splerg
I think that sometimes I would get on this blog and I would just simply write without knowing where I was going with it. I remember that I felt really good about it because both Foucault and David Shields had informed me that the word essay comes from the word assay, an attempt, a setting out, a journey of sorts. One does not need to know where one is going when one begins to write. One simply begins to write.
I once heard Rick Roderick praise Heidegger's ability to simply start writing. He didn't waste time with clearing out his presuppositions, making the space for thought, he just begun thinking.
Thinking is the clutch word, the one we want to remember. As a new friend pointed out to me, philosophy as a noun has always been a bit tricky. Philosophizing is a thing we do, not a thing that is. Thinking is what we are after, not thought.
It's interesting I recently found myself uncomfortable with the word argument. I think that thinking sounds way better than argument. Because I don't know what the argument is. It has too many connotations of an already settled view, of an attempt to persuade others. It feels eristical, whereas I'd like to feel dialectical.
I like something Nietzsche said. To paraphrase, 'it's hard enough for me to remember my opinions let alone the reasons for holding them!'
Thinking is such a lively activity, such a rewarding process. Why settle it into a state? Why finalize it into a system or a world view? What is good in stability in thought?
Where is stability in the world? Is all thought Procrustean, artificially stable? Is stability only an outcome of practical necessity? Or can we intelligently speculate on stability?
I once heard Rick Roderick praise Heidegger's ability to simply start writing. He didn't waste time with clearing out his presuppositions, making the space for thought, he just begun thinking.
Thinking is the clutch word, the one we want to remember. As a new friend pointed out to me, philosophy as a noun has always been a bit tricky. Philosophizing is a thing we do, not a thing that is. Thinking is what we are after, not thought.
It's interesting I recently found myself uncomfortable with the word argument. I think that thinking sounds way better than argument. Because I don't know what the argument is. It has too many connotations of an already settled view, of an attempt to persuade others. It feels eristical, whereas I'd like to feel dialectical.
I like something Nietzsche said. To paraphrase, 'it's hard enough for me to remember my opinions let alone the reasons for holding them!'
Thinking is such a lively activity, such a rewarding process. Why settle it into a state? Why finalize it into a system or a world view? What is good in stability in thought?
Where is stability in the world? Is all thought Procrustean, artificially stable? Is stability only an outcome of practical necessity? Or can we intelligently speculate on stability?
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Barista Prep and Nascent Ideas
Brahhhh! I'm busy busy.
I'm competing in the big western regional barista competition in 10 days and I'm feeling jazzed about it but it's taking up a lot of my time!
I am staying late at work, I'm thinking about it a lot.
The only problem is that I feel spread thin! I want to spend time with people I like! I want to read books that excite me! I want to write an essay that I began and am feeling excited about!
In particular, I really want to be reading Bergson's The Creative Mind. I've already digested parts of it in the past 6 months, but I'm going back through it, reading a bunch of the essays, trying to wrap my head around what Bergson was all about.
It's going well. It led me to the idea for an essay about Bergson, Collingwood, and Clausewitz. All three very explicitly made the claim that we needed to greatly reduce, if not close, the gap between theory and practice. Bergson speaks more of speculation and action, but sometimes gets closer to the language of theory and practice. Collingwood and Clausewitz both used the language of theory and practice explicitly.
For all three of them the union of theory and practice was above all a way to have a rawer experience of reality, one unmitigated by general concepts (ie theories). For them the real challenge was to use theoretical, speculative thinking, as a way to gain a clearer and richer experience of reality. Skepticism about general concepts and an acknowledgement of the limitations of language seems to be central to all three of them. Reminds me of Taleb and Bloom, too.
I think it is going to be some really exciting writing. But alas, I must compete. I must represent Visions. I must make my friends and peers and self proud.
I'm excited to go to LA and do this!
Yayyyyyy!
I'm competing in the big western regional barista competition in 10 days and I'm feeling jazzed about it but it's taking up a lot of my time!
I am staying late at work, I'm thinking about it a lot.
The only problem is that I feel spread thin! I want to spend time with people I like! I want to read books that excite me! I want to write an essay that I began and am feeling excited about!
In particular, I really want to be reading Bergson's The Creative Mind. I've already digested parts of it in the past 6 months, but I'm going back through it, reading a bunch of the essays, trying to wrap my head around what Bergson was all about.
It's going well. It led me to the idea for an essay about Bergson, Collingwood, and Clausewitz. All three very explicitly made the claim that we needed to greatly reduce, if not close, the gap between theory and practice. Bergson speaks more of speculation and action, but sometimes gets closer to the language of theory and practice. Collingwood and Clausewitz both used the language of theory and practice explicitly.
For all three of them the union of theory and practice was above all a way to have a rawer experience of reality, one unmitigated by general concepts (ie theories). For them the real challenge was to use theoretical, speculative thinking, as a way to gain a clearer and richer experience of reality. Skepticism about general concepts and an acknowledgement of the limitations of language seems to be central to all three of them. Reminds me of Taleb and Bloom, too.
I think it is going to be some really exciting writing. But alas, I must compete. I must represent Visions. I must make my friends and peers and self proud.
I'm excited to go to LA and do this!
Yayyyyyy!
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
The Nihilism of 'Sportsball'
Our recent superbowl victory has brought my fine city a surge of positive energy. I found myself in huge crowds of people, partaking in huge doses of collective energy.
The cry would emerge from nowhere: SEA!
We all knew the appropriate response: HAWKS!
I, personally, take great delight in screaming with crowds, and would find myself screaming both the call and the response.
Yet every now and then there would be another call, clearly audible despite the size of the crowd: SPORTS! SPORTSBALL! or SPORTSBALLING!
A generic call for the excitement of 'sport'. This idea of 'sportsball' has been circulating on several websites, including The Oatmeal, and in particular this comic:
I was surprised at how frequently I heard the cry of sportsball, and I have been reflecting on what it means, why the particular chant of 'Seahawks!' is being traded for the generic cry 'Sportsball!'
I fear it is another example of the ironic stance liberal American's take towards ourselves and our communities. We all feel that there is a bit of silliness to the unabashed support of a sports team. As The Oatmeal's comic really shows, there is nothing really behind these practices, their arbitrariness is never far from our minds, and it seems to prevent us from enter fully into the energy they offer us.
We cannot be fully sincere in our commitment to sports because we know they are groundless entertainment, precariously suspended, resting on nothing concrete.
This generic cry for 'sportsball' is symptomatic of a larger crisis in the modern world: we cannot take our own actions and emotions seriously because we "live in a world transformed by abstractions" and we ourselves have "been transformed by abstractions" (Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 255). Beneath all of our concrete daily practices lies some horrible, generic truth. Our attempts at romantic intimacy are just expressions of our unconscious sexual desires, our work is merely a result of deterministic economic forces, our deepest longings and desires are just outcomes of our evolutionary design or our neuro-genetic makeup. We have a plethora of ways of reducing our inner and social lives to lesser, base phenomena. As Bloom knew, a man who privileges such explanations "cannot take his activities on their own level but only as the complex result of lower more primitive causes. Such people get into the bad habit of being ironical about what they do in life, for it must always be interpreted in terms of other things for which it is only a cover-up" (Bloom, Love and Friendship, 22).
Is the cry of 'sportsball' not precisely this kind of 'cover-up' for the fact that we know our enthusiasm for sports is baseless in a world defined in scientific terms? Is it not the same nihilistic irony that threatens sincerity in so many aspects of our lives?
I want to scream, with great sincerity: SEA!
And I want you, with equal commitment, respond: HAWKS!
For I feel no shame in an unabashed commitment to the surface of things. I think it a necessary part of a connected, loving, magical life. I find great depth in the surface.
The cry would emerge from nowhere: SEA!
We all knew the appropriate response: HAWKS!
I, personally, take great delight in screaming with crowds, and would find myself screaming both the call and the response.
Yet every now and then there would be another call, clearly audible despite the size of the crowd: SPORTS! SPORTSBALL! or SPORTSBALLING!
A generic call for the excitement of 'sport'. This idea of 'sportsball' has been circulating on several websites, including The Oatmeal, and in particular this comic:
I was surprised at how frequently I heard the cry of sportsball, and I have been reflecting on what it means, why the particular chant of 'Seahawks!' is being traded for the generic cry 'Sportsball!'
I fear it is another example of the ironic stance liberal American's take towards ourselves and our communities. We all feel that there is a bit of silliness to the unabashed support of a sports team. As The Oatmeal's comic really shows, there is nothing really behind these practices, their arbitrariness is never far from our minds, and it seems to prevent us from enter fully into the energy they offer us.
We cannot be fully sincere in our commitment to sports because we know they are groundless entertainment, precariously suspended, resting on nothing concrete.
This generic cry for 'sportsball' is symptomatic of a larger crisis in the modern world: we cannot take our own actions and emotions seriously because we "live in a world transformed by abstractions" and we ourselves have "been transformed by abstractions" (Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 255). Beneath all of our concrete daily practices lies some horrible, generic truth. Our attempts at romantic intimacy are just expressions of our unconscious sexual desires, our work is merely a result of deterministic economic forces, our deepest longings and desires are just outcomes of our evolutionary design or our neuro-genetic makeup. We have a plethora of ways of reducing our inner and social lives to lesser, base phenomena. As Bloom knew, a man who privileges such explanations "cannot take his activities on their own level but only as the complex result of lower more primitive causes. Such people get into the bad habit of being ironical about what they do in life, for it must always be interpreted in terms of other things for which it is only a cover-up" (Bloom, Love and Friendship, 22).
Is the cry of 'sportsball' not precisely this kind of 'cover-up' for the fact that we know our enthusiasm for sports is baseless in a world defined in scientific terms? Is it not the same nihilistic irony that threatens sincerity in so many aspects of our lives?
I want to scream, with great sincerity: SEA!
And I want you, with equal commitment, respond: HAWKS!
For I feel no shame in an unabashed commitment to the surface of things. I think it a necessary part of a connected, loving, magical life. I find great depth in the surface.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Meaning, Posited and Found: Craft, Community, Love.
Nowadays it seems fashionable to say that the meaning of life is to make life meaningful, or that life is what you make of it. The idea that life has a definite meaning seems to have died with God. In his wake we have assumed a Nietzschean stance towards meaning: to live life meaningfully is to create your own meaning, to carve out a lifestyle, to be an existential artist, to posit your own values.
Vonnegut put this idea in relatively tame terms, declaring that we are here to fart around, have a good time. On this view, life's meaning is not out there, it is not waiting for us to discover it. It is something that we hold within us, that we paint the world with. Similarly, Nietzsche talked about how we are free to create meaning in our own lives. The free person, for Nietzsche, is the free spirit, he who is creative and lively enough to make the world meaningful. Thus he wrote in his notebook of 1887:
"values and their changes stand in relation to the growth in power of the value-positer,
the measure of unbelief, of 'freedom of the mind' that is admitted, as an expression of the growth in power
'nihilism' as the ideal of the highest powerfulness of spirit, of the greatest over-abundance of life: part destructive, part ironic"
(pg 148, 9[40], in Writings from the Late Notebooks, edited by Rudiger Bittner).
Perhaps this is why Nietzsche says that the free person is akin to the warrior. "The human being who has become free–and how much more the spirit who has become free–spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeeps, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior." (Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, 542). Why a warrior? Because one is a carver of the world? Making it mean what you want it to mean? Bending it to your vision?
Is the Will to Power a psychological phenomenon?
I'm not sure.
I do believe, however, that there is meaning already in the world. It does not come from me. It is there for me to find.
The meaning of life is not simply to make life meaningful. That may be part of it. But part of me wants to say 'The meaning of life is right in front of you'. It is here, and our business is to be attuned to it.
These thoughts were put to me with great clarity in Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly in their book All Things Shining. Their task is to balance our view of the world by reminding us of how meaning can be found rather than simply posited, as Nietzsche seems to have believed.
Their analysis of our situation is exciting, sophisticated, and accessible. To be brutally schematic, they write a historical narrative that shows that Western experience has gradually become more and more centered on the rational autonomous individual, reaching its apex with Nietzsche's assertion that meaning is strictly a matter of value-positing.
Following Heidegger, they claim that there are two ways that we can find meaning already existing in the world: craft and community.
A craftsman will often have such an intimate relationship with her raw material that it seems to suggest meaning. A carpenter, for example, may say that a piece of wood wanted to be cut in a certain way. I find this in my own craft. Milk, for example, wants to be poured in certain ways. It has its own properties and I use it according to its preferences. I feel this meaning to be contained in the milk, and not merely imposed.
In community and group energy, too, we find meaning. Dreyfus and Kelly continually point to sports as an example of meaning outside of us that can be found in the world. They claim that in those moments of collective joy meaning 'whooshes' up around us. It is not merely imposed or posited by us, but sweeps us away. Heidegger similarly talked about moods as shared phenomena, as something that belong to the space and not to individual minds.
In both instances our task is not to create meaning, but to be attuned to the meaning that already exists. Our job is to find the meaning, not make the meaning.
These are excellent points and ones I'm happy to reflect on. They do indeed get us a few steps away from the nihilism implicit in the view that the goal of life is to make life meaningful.
My interest these days is in the question of love as a form of meaning that is already in the world. I want to try and use love as a way out of nihilism.
Love, as Bloom knew, is not posited. One does not decide to see love in the world. One walks into it, as if into a magnetic field.
Here is perhaps the crucial point: the dominant experience we have is of moving the world. We posit our values, we hatch our plans, we control our lives. Love, just like craft and community, on the other hand, is fundamentally an experience of being moved.
This is a point that I'm beginning to explore. I've been slowly reflecting on it since I read Love & Friendship, but my thinking has acquired some momentum after reading Dreyfus and Kelly, Nietzsche, Strauss, more Bloom, and others. I'm finding lots of exciting ways to connect the question of love to my concerns about nihilism.
More thoughts to come.
Vonnegut put this idea in relatively tame terms, declaring that we are here to fart around, have a good time. On this view, life's meaning is not out there, it is not waiting for us to discover it. It is something that we hold within us, that we paint the world with. Similarly, Nietzsche talked about how we are free to create meaning in our own lives. The free person, for Nietzsche, is the free spirit, he who is creative and lively enough to make the world meaningful. Thus he wrote in his notebook of 1887:
"values and their changes stand in relation to the growth in power of the value-positer,
the measure of unbelief, of 'freedom of the mind' that is admitted, as an expression of the growth in power
'nihilism' as the ideal of the highest powerfulness of spirit, of the greatest over-abundance of life: part destructive, part ironic"
(pg 148, 9[40], in Writings from the Late Notebooks, edited by Rudiger Bittner).
Perhaps this is why Nietzsche says that the free person is akin to the warrior. "The human being who has become free–and how much more the spirit who has become free–spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeeps, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior." (Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, 542). Why a warrior? Because one is a carver of the world? Making it mean what you want it to mean? Bending it to your vision?
Is the Will to Power a psychological phenomenon?
I'm not sure.
I do believe, however, that there is meaning already in the world. It does not come from me. It is there for me to find.
The meaning of life is not simply to make life meaningful. That may be part of it. But part of me wants to say 'The meaning of life is right in front of you'. It is here, and our business is to be attuned to it.
These thoughts were put to me with great clarity in Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly in their book All Things Shining. Their task is to balance our view of the world by reminding us of how meaning can be found rather than simply posited, as Nietzsche seems to have believed.
Their analysis of our situation is exciting, sophisticated, and accessible. To be brutally schematic, they write a historical narrative that shows that Western experience has gradually become more and more centered on the rational autonomous individual, reaching its apex with Nietzsche's assertion that meaning is strictly a matter of value-positing.
Following Heidegger, they claim that there are two ways that we can find meaning already existing in the world: craft and community.
A craftsman will often have such an intimate relationship with her raw material that it seems to suggest meaning. A carpenter, for example, may say that a piece of wood wanted to be cut in a certain way. I find this in my own craft. Milk, for example, wants to be poured in certain ways. It has its own properties and I use it according to its preferences. I feel this meaning to be contained in the milk, and not merely imposed.
In community and group energy, too, we find meaning. Dreyfus and Kelly continually point to sports as an example of meaning outside of us that can be found in the world. They claim that in those moments of collective joy meaning 'whooshes' up around us. It is not merely imposed or posited by us, but sweeps us away. Heidegger similarly talked about moods as shared phenomena, as something that belong to the space and not to individual minds.
In both instances our task is not to create meaning, but to be attuned to the meaning that already exists. Our job is to find the meaning, not make the meaning.
These are excellent points and ones I'm happy to reflect on. They do indeed get us a few steps away from the nihilism implicit in the view that the goal of life is to make life meaningful.
My interest these days is in the question of love as a form of meaning that is already in the world. I want to try and use love as a way out of nihilism.
Love, as Bloom knew, is not posited. One does not decide to see love in the world. One walks into it, as if into a magnetic field.
Here is perhaps the crucial point: the dominant experience we have is of moving the world. We posit our values, we hatch our plans, we control our lives. Love, just like craft and community, on the other hand, is fundamentally an experience of being moved.
This is a point that I'm beginning to explore. I've been slowly reflecting on it since I read Love & Friendship, but my thinking has acquired some momentum after reading Dreyfus and Kelly, Nietzsche, Strauss, more Bloom, and others. I'm finding lots of exciting ways to connect the question of love to my concerns about nihilism.
More thoughts to come.
Friday, January 24, 2014
Methodological Dualism
One of the biggest problems I have in my thinking is the methodological dualism that I've inherited from Collingwood. I was reading about how German philosophers and sociologists in the 19th and early 20th century made a distinction between the way we explain humans and the way we explain nature. Collingwood took this distinction very seriously and famously argued that humans can only be understood in terms of thought, whereas nature can be handled in terms of laws.
One of the central things driving this kind of methodological divide is that of regularity and by extension prediction.
Gotta go!
One of the central things driving this kind of methodological divide is that of regularity and by extension prediction.
Gotta go!
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
An Aborted, or Temporarily Halted, Essay
I began this essay but never pursued it. It was tentatively titled: 'Knowing Mind, Scientifically and Historically'. It was going to be an exploration of Collingwood's claim that philosophy of mind can be fully dissolved into history due to the fact that mind is only what mind does. Mind defined as pure activity needs to be studied only in concrete instances, that is, through history. Mind therefore cannot be studied by the natural sciences, which deal with regularity and generality.
As I move through my numbered days I continue to ask: Who am I? Or, even more urgently, I ask: What am I? This world remains a mystery to me. My place in it is still opaque, rarely presenting open fields, never pulling me into a full, comforting embrace. I’ve yet to hear the voice, which some seem to hear, calling: ‘You are perfect. You belong here. I love you.’ I merely move forward, timidly groping in the dark, stillness being foreign to my nature.
There are other voices, though. No shortage of them, in fact. Everywhere I turn there is a competing vision of what I am or what I can become: A Man. A Lover. A Husband. A Father. A Sane Person. A Healthy Person. A Law Abiding Citizen. A Sexual Being. A Soul. An Ego. An Id. Lastly, and most unequivocally, A Brain.
I can’t deny that I am, or may become, many of those things. Yet none of them feels quite right. None of those words will ever capture me. The question, ‘What am I?’ retains its weight, and I still carry it.
Self-knowledge is by necessity incomplete. We humans are the object that does not stay still, as they say. Or, more precisely, we are the animals that change in response to the way we speak of ourselves, we create ourselves by telling stories about ourselves. The quest for self-knowledge is thus reflexive: it continually turns in on itself, endlessly reacts to itself, and ideally becomes a kind of narrative self-creation.
I’m here to spend some time reflecting on this question, What am I? What does it mean to know myself? I’ll be doing some reflecting on my own thoughts and experiences, but I also have some philosophical claims I’d like to develop. Chiefly, the idea that contemporary philosophy of mind, with its emphasis on cognitive and neuroscience, is not producing something we can call ‘knowledge of mind.’ It answers not the question ‘what is the mind?’, but ‘what makes the mind possible?’. This question about the mind’s conditions of possibility, moreover, is always asked in the spirit of natural science: with the desire to produce an account of the mind that is consistent with and utilizes the insights of physics, chemistry, and biology. Such a union to the natural sciences, however, is precisely what prevents philosophy of mind from answering the question ‘what is the mind?’ For embracing the natural sciences as the path to self-knowledge means importing an assumption that is detrimental to the study of one’s own mind: that all explanations must be given in terms of regularities, generalities, and abstractions.
Knowledge of one’s own mind can never be a generic knowledge, applicable to all people in all times and places. No, it must be a unique knowledge of my particular mind in its own unique time and place. The only mind accessible to us is our own, therefore anyone who claims to know mind can only be claiming to know their own mind. This claim holds two interrelated implications for philosophy of mind. First, it means there can be no set of theoretical propositions that can hand knowledge of mind to us ready-made, we must delve into ourselves, plunge into the depths of our own minds and learn first hand who we are and what minds are. In short, there is no substitute for genuine reflection on ourselves. Second, this implies that any theoretical proposition made by philosophy of mind must be subservient to this process of personal reflection. What philosophy of mind tells us about what makes the mind possible is therefore not knowledge of mind in itself, but a set of propositions that can foster productive reflection on our own minds. I am proposing that we regard philosophy of mind in precisely the way that Shunryu Suzuki regards Buddhism:
The purpose of studying Buddhism is not to study Buddhism, but to study ourselves. It is impossible to study ourselves without some teaching. If you want to know what water is you need science, and the scientist needs a laboratory. In the laboratory there are various ways in which to study what water is. Thus it is possible to know what kind of elements water has, the various forms it takes, and its nature. But it is impossible thereby to know water in itself. It is the same thing with us. We need some teaching, but just by studying the teaching alone, it is impossible to know what ‘I’ in myself am. Through the teaching we may understand our human nature. But the teaching is not we ourselves; it is some explanation of ourselves. So if you are attached to the teaching, or to the teacher, that is a big mistake. The moment you meet a teacher, you should leave the teacher, and you should be independent
In claiming that philosophy of mind is subservient to reflection I am casting my allegiance to a school of philosophy advocated by Michel Foucault. In The Government of Self and Others Foucault argues that modern philosophy takes two dominant forms. The first is committed to the “question of the conditions of possibility of a true knowledge.... the analytic of truth” (20). This approach is typical for American philosophy of mind, with its emphasis on what makes the mind possible based on what we know about the natural world. This kind of philosophy strives more often for a normative scientific theory: A set of general propositions meant to identify and explain the regularities of a phenomenon, typically with the goal of prediction and manipulation. Alternatively, philosophy can strive to answer the question “What is present reality? what is the present field of our experiences?” (20). This is Foucault’s project, a type of philosophical reflection that strives not for complete systems, but for practical insights into ourselves and the world. A philosophy of mind carried out in this way would regard general propositions about the mind as incomplete in themselves, and would rather regard them as aids to thinking about ourselves in the present. Philosophy of mind, in other words, is not knowledge of mind at all, but a tool that allows us to know the only mind we can know, our own.
My God.
I want to begin blogging with greater regularity. My graduate school applications are out and I'm (im)patiently waiting for decisions.
This blog has been an interesting and rewarding part of my life. It was about a year ago that I stopped writing regularly on it. My output was quite extensive for a while. Then I slowed down. I wanted to focus on applications, I began to doubt the seriousness of my thinking.
I feared that I would never go to school, that I was just some self-centered young man who liked to spin his pseudo-philosophical wheels.
Now that my applications are in I can rest a little bit more easily. I've taken the first step in becoming an academic, or a teacher, or some kind of professional thinker. I remain just some guy for the time being.
One of the strangest parts of the application process was dealing with the homelessness that I feel in the world. I don't know what it means to belong. I suppose I belong in my family, and I suppose I belong among some of my friends. But somehow I just always have this feeling of not belonging.
I once wrote a poem about how
I am not a stranger
How this is not a strange land.
Yet, I don't believe myself. I don't dwell very comfortably. I take great pleasure in feeling that feeling with clarity, though.
In applying to schools I certainly had this idea, this vague, barely conscious hope, that I would find a home in a university: that a group of people would greet me in a way I felt true to my heart.
This homelessness confounds me. I think I partly inherited it from my father. He partly inherited it from Nietzsche. I partly inherited it from Nietzsche.
I recently read Twilight of the Idols while my friend Jeremy was in town. Nietzsche is his major influence. One night we drank quite a lot of wine and were getting into the thick of talking about Nietzsche. My emotional response surprised me.
Even though I was the one doing most of the talking, I was experiencing the conversation more as a listener than a speaker. I had had enough to drink that words were flowing from me without hesitation.
I told Jeremy that I felt like I was reliving the trauma of Nietzsche: the trauma he felt in his own life, the trauma that he unleashed upon the world, the trauma of a world without meaning, the trauma of being responsible for creating my own values (not that I buy into the idea of value creation, anyways).
He is a serious challenge, one that I'm excited to be taking on.
I'll be posting here more regularly.
This blog has been an interesting and rewarding part of my life. It was about a year ago that I stopped writing regularly on it. My output was quite extensive for a while. Then I slowed down. I wanted to focus on applications, I began to doubt the seriousness of my thinking.
I feared that I would never go to school, that I was just some self-centered young man who liked to spin his pseudo-philosophical wheels.
Now that my applications are in I can rest a little bit more easily. I've taken the first step in becoming an academic, or a teacher, or some kind of professional thinker. I remain just some guy for the time being.
One of the strangest parts of the application process was dealing with the homelessness that I feel in the world. I don't know what it means to belong. I suppose I belong in my family, and I suppose I belong among some of my friends. But somehow I just always have this feeling of not belonging.
I once wrote a poem about how
I am not a stranger
How this is not a strange land.
Yet, I don't believe myself. I don't dwell very comfortably. I take great pleasure in feeling that feeling with clarity, though.
In applying to schools I certainly had this idea, this vague, barely conscious hope, that I would find a home in a university: that a group of people would greet me in a way I felt true to my heart.
This homelessness confounds me. I think I partly inherited it from my father. He partly inherited it from Nietzsche. I partly inherited it from Nietzsche.
I recently read Twilight of the Idols while my friend Jeremy was in town. Nietzsche is his major influence. One night we drank quite a lot of wine and were getting into the thick of talking about Nietzsche. My emotional response surprised me.
Even though I was the one doing most of the talking, I was experiencing the conversation more as a listener than a speaker. I had had enough to drink that words were flowing from me without hesitation.
I told Jeremy that I felt like I was reliving the trauma of Nietzsche: the trauma he felt in his own life, the trauma that he unleashed upon the world, the trauma of a world without meaning, the trauma of being responsible for creating my own values (not that I buy into the idea of value creation, anyways).
He is a serious challenge, one that I'm excited to be taking on.
I'll be posting here more regularly.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Composure, External and Internal
Sometimes I tell my friends that I am losing my mind.
Sometimes they tell me that I seemed fine, that externally I seemed normal.
Sometimes I don't change my behavior, but my thoughts run wild.
I don't know what it is that changes.
I am able to act in one way, but my mind is going another way.
Is my mind just a way of acting?
Sometimes they tell me that I seemed fine, that externally I seemed normal.
Sometimes I don't change my behavior, but my thoughts run wild.
I don't know what it is that changes.
I am able to act in one way, but my mind is going another way.
Is my mind just a way of acting?
Saturday, January 18, 2014
Collingwood, Strauss, and Two Kinds of Historicism
I've recently become aware of Leo Strauss's criticisms of Collingwood. Strauss claimed that the two greatest threats to modern political philosophy (epitomized by Socrates) were positivism and historicism. Collingwood, he apparently claimed, was the most sophisticated proponent of historicism. Some of Strauss's claims, however, don't square with my understanding of Collingwood.
Both of these men deserve my consideration, and I intend to give both of them plenty more of my time. Here, however, I want to offer a few preliminary thoughts on what I see as shortcomings in Strauss's views on Collingwood.
All I've read of Strauss's criticism so far came from his review of The Idea of History, a book that cannot be considered as representative of Collingwood's thought. Tricky tricky, that book.
I can't write patiently now.
Strauss mainly focuses on the idea that Collingwood is a historicist.
He mainly seems to detest the deterministic nature of Collingwood's determinism.
Collingwood speaks of necessity. Not of determinism.
Collingwood, I think, is not a historicist in a determinist sense. The first sense.
Collingwood is a historicist in the sense of being a contextualist. He always pays attention to the historical setting in which a thought was taking place, emphasizing that we should try to think just like the author thought.
Strauss harps on Collingwood for not properly reenacting Greek thought.
He never says that the idea of reenactment is flawed in itself, only that Collingwood failed to do it properly.
Strauss's student, Allan Bloom, moreover, often uses metaphors that invoke Collingwood's notion of reenactment.
I think that distinguishing these kinds of historicism can do some help in reconciling my allegiance to Collingwood with my fondness for Allan Bloom and my budding interest in Strauss.
This is not clear. I want to write more on this soon.
I also want to write on Collingwood's anti-positivistic tendencies, his insistence on the unpredictability of the world, and his idea of reenactment as a way of learning about the human world. Sounds a lot like Clausewitz, Taleb, and nonlinearity stuff.
Both of these men deserve my consideration, and I intend to give both of them plenty more of my time. Here, however, I want to offer a few preliminary thoughts on what I see as shortcomings in Strauss's views on Collingwood.
All I've read of Strauss's criticism so far came from his review of The Idea of History, a book that cannot be considered as representative of Collingwood's thought. Tricky tricky, that book.
I can't write patiently now.
Strauss mainly focuses on the idea that Collingwood is a historicist.
He mainly seems to detest the deterministic nature of Collingwood's determinism.
Collingwood speaks of necessity. Not of determinism.
Collingwood, I think, is not a historicist in a determinist sense. The first sense.
Collingwood is a historicist in the sense of being a contextualist. He always pays attention to the historical setting in which a thought was taking place, emphasizing that we should try to think just like the author thought.
Strauss harps on Collingwood for not properly reenacting Greek thought.
He never says that the idea of reenactment is flawed in itself, only that Collingwood failed to do it properly.
Strauss's student, Allan Bloom, moreover, often uses metaphors that invoke Collingwood's notion of reenactment.
I think that distinguishing these kinds of historicism can do some help in reconciling my allegiance to Collingwood with my fondness for Allan Bloom and my budding interest in Strauss.
This is not clear. I want to write more on this soon.
I also want to write on Collingwood's anti-positivistic tendencies, his insistence on the unpredictability of the world, and his idea of reenactment as a way of learning about the human world. Sounds a lot like Clausewitz, Taleb, and nonlinearity stuff.
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