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?
Friday, February 14, 2014
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.
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