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

- 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."

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.

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?

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!

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.

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.

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!