Reaching for Respectability, Jamming, 08/02/2018

Sociology and I have an interesting relationship. Aside from the fact that two of my oldest friends are a husband-and-wife sociologist team, I’ve relied on sociological studies for a good number of empirical sources in my own work.

Sociological theory is also a pretty fertile ground for philosophical creativity too. Pierre Bourdieu, Max Weber, Randall Collins, Claude Lévi-Strauss are just a few sociological theorists who have been influential in philosophical circles.* I’ve gone to the work of these and other folks for my own research.

One of those artistically-rendered maps of the internet, allegedly
composed from every individual IP address.

* And departments, which overlap far too often.

Niklas Luhmann gets listed as a sociologist and social theorist – grappling with the concepts of his systems theory of communication and meaning takes up most of a chapter of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity.

Jürgen Habermas’ communicative action theories has influenced huge swaths of sociological and human rights theory. Bruno Latour is a philosopher whose actor-network ontology of social relations was so influential that he’s taught as if he were a sociologist.

I’m no stranger to this discipline. It’s my main transdisciplinary direction when I take a flight.

But some sociologists are dangerous. They’re shunned. Or at least considered creative thinkers whose strange directions were never worth following empirically. Gabriel Tarde seems to be one of them.

The essay about him in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage is pretty fascinating. Éric Alliez wrote it, and I’ve loved his essays on Deleuze whenever I’ve come across them. I’d describe his writing style as the most artful lack of restraint. So here’s the short version of what Deleuze saw in Gabriel Tarde.

An implicit theme of this book is to show the depth of Deleuze’s debt to Gottfried Leibniz as a thinker – aside from the essay on Leibniz himself, there’s Wronski and Tarde, identified as Leibnizian thinkers in their own spheres.

So when Deleuze was hunting for concepts of existence as fundamentally heterogeneous, he stalks through a shadowy Leibnizian tradition. What made Tarde’s ideas Leibnizian?

Gabriel Tarde

Gabriel Tarde developed a model of sociological thinking that preserved psychological dimensions of human life at that macro level. I’ve just terrified every sociologist in the room.

The first thing about sociology you learn – seems to be in all the introductory courses – is that its founding principle was that the social was its own set of causes. The social was a level of existence with its own governing laws and principles that could never reduce to psychology.

It almost sounds like sociology is justifying its existence – which was actually the founding process of sociology.

Alliez explained this in his essay – Tarde and Émile Durkheim were contemporaries. Tarde was a marginal figure, who made his name developing criminology. That work eventually got him appointed to a professorship at the Collège de France, the platform for his critiques of Durkheim.

Durkheim was at the centre of important intellectual networks in Europe – building the first French university department of sociology at University of Bordeaux, then joining the Sorbonne.

That institutional role as the leader of sociology’s installation in the French research university saw Durkheim in a curious intellectual pressure. Sociology was caught between a firm division – too empirical and mathematical for the humanities, too humanistic for the sciences.

Durkheim, in laying out the core principles of sociology, did so to make sure it would be recognized as a science. He worked to build a consensus in the French academic world for the reality of the social as a plane of existence with its own rules and composition processes.

In this context, Tarde’s theory was very dangerous – especially given the awful 19th century European tendency to see all causal connection as reduction. Tarde’s theory was that built the social and all its processes emerge from the collision of huge numbers of individuals.

Today, we understand that theory as emergence. But 19th century thinkers didn’t understand emergence at all – they only understood reduction. So if one process comes from another, you don’t need to understand the resulting process in itself – only its components.

That attitude would have led people to think that the social was unreal because it was a product of individual interactions. So Durkheim suppressed it.

Yet Tarde – and that underground lineage of thinkers that Deleuze drew so much from – seem to have won out. Our universe is heterogeneous, a world of changes, where was emerges can be radically different from what was.

Theories of the Real and Practice of the Ideal, Jamming, 24/02/2015

One of my regular commenters on the blog is a colleague from the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, Thomas Basbøll, a writing coach in Denmark. He and I have philosophical disagreements about pretty much everything we talk about. Probably our most profound disagreement is over the nature of reality; you don’t get much more profound than that.

Thomas retired his own blog last year (at least for now), but on one of my posts last week about the nature of objectivity and the ethics of journalism and communication, he wrote a few things about the nature of society and social existence. He distinguishes between things and people. Things are the subject matter of objective knowledge and material processes. People are the subject matter of subjective processes, including the social institutions that people create to manage their societies at large scales. 

Distinguishing a human ideal from a material real
all too often blinds us to the material causal power
of human technology and civilization, material which
embodies and expresses thought.

It’s a dualism that I’m not really cool with, in my own perspective. Mostly, that’s because of my thorough materialism: I’m not comfortable with making strong distinctions on the basis of substance, particularly when humanity slots into a category of its own. I’m not going to give solid arguments as to why this is the case and more essentialist dualisms are wrong. I don’t think metaphysical facts are of this kind. We can’t definitively say which are true and which are false by empirical investigation or deduction. 

I can describe a particular broad set of metaphysical concepts that constitute a general perspective on how to understand existence, and argue pragmatically for why it is better for us to make sense of ourselves and the world along these lines rather than others. This is basically what Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity does with ecocentrism, metaphysically, ethically, and morally. 

Given our current situation, a philosophical approach to humanity’s world that follows the general pattern of humanism, taking humanity to have an essence that makes it of a substantially different kind than the rest of nature conditions maladaptive behaviour. A metaphysics of our continuity with nature conditions more sustainable activity.

Thomas’ metaphysical distinction of things and people defines action as something different from the real, though I doubt that it is kosher to put them in a hierarchy of more or less reality, as has sometimes been done in philosophical history. He writes that “only materiality constitutes the objective reality.” Social institutions, being the creations of humans, exist as subjective (or perhaps intersubjective) idealities. Action in the context of a society (the only action possible) has a dynamic of obedience. But institutions don’t give orders that individuals follow. 

Instead, think of institutions as establishing the frameworks and conditions for social and political action. A social institution is an ideal entity that we understand, and what constitutes our understanding is our practice (or should I say praxis?), moving according to the possibilities for action that their frameworks structure.

A very intense Ian Hacking.

Thomas cites Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality as a key philosophical touchstone in this conception, that what is socially constructed is other than real. But I’d stand on the shoulders of another landmark sociologist philosopher as a touchstone for my developing my own view: Ian Hacking, who wrote that what was socially constructed was just as real as anything else, because human actions and relations are themselves real, material processes.

I worry that Thomas downplays the reality of emergent entities, entities that are constituted through relations. Because relations constitute all bodies, structures, and matter. I find it very retrograde to regard entities constituted through human action as somehow less real than entities constituted through other kinds of relations. 

Thomas also has some fascinating ideas in some older entries about the nature of language that flow from his distinction of the material real and the human/social ideal. Our languages and our ways of knowing the world, under this distinction, are traditions of action and understanding, a notion that he evokes Borges to explore. 

For one thing, the correspondence conception of truth as the assertion of facts is pretty inadequate in this model. But because traditions are ideal entities in Thomas’ thinking, so they guide and determine our actions, moving us to think in particular ways. And he may be right about the character of language and knowledge paradigms as traditions, but his distinction of real and ideal may encourage us to think that our models of knowledge are somehow disconnected from reality. 

Think about this implication of that disconnect: If we our traditions of methods to know the world are ideal in a sense that they’re distinct from reality, schiz between the ideal and the real becomes inevitable, almost a matter of definition. Being so deeply situated in our traditions as we are, the ideal becomes a prison cutting us off from the real. We lose the conception of our knowledge and social action as causal.

• • •

He slips and slides away from easy definition. Borges.

Thomas refers to Borges’ story “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim.” It’s the story of different ways that a particular story is interpreted. The subject of our contemplation is the narrative of a young man searching for an ideally good and holy man, and each of the protagonist’s encounters brings him to characters progressively approaching this ideal. The story ends with only a brief glimpse of the mysterious al-Mu’tasim.

Borges describes this fictional book as having two separate editions. In the first, al-Mu’tasim is described in superlative terms, but has particular idiosyncratic traits, clearly a person with his own life who has achieved much ethical progress. This al-Mu’tasim is barely glimpsed in the story, but we know that he is a real person in the narrative, with a singular history and identity, from whom we could learn. 

The al-Mu’tasim of the second edition is a pure idea. Each person the protagonist speaks with about him describes him as a reflection of themselves. This al-Mu’tasim is an image of perfection to which we can only approach while it remains equally distant. Such is the flaw of the unreal.

• • • 

This is one of the main reasons I’m glad that I take part in the SERRC. Adam Writes Everything will participate over the next month or so in a new experiment in book review writing, which I’m really quire excited about. I hope to promote it beyond just the circle of SERRC, spreading it to wider academic publications and forums. 

Beyond these experiments, SERRC is also a gathering place for people with remarkably diverse philosophical approaches, perspectives, and ideas to work on common problems. Our diversity cuts off unfortunate tendencies to philosophical groupthink that all-too-often emerge in communities based solely in university institutions and content-restricted journals. SERRC is the kind of community that I think will make genuine philosophical progress over the next century.

Our Desperate Misdirected Search for Simplicity, Research Time, 26/05/2014

I attended a couple of very interesting talks in philosophy of biology yesterday. One was my friend Y discussing his research in the history of evolutionary biology, and the other was a critique of Carl Craver's conception of levels of explanation in biological phenomena. If any insight was common to both, it was that intractable problems arise when you develop and employ concepts for scientific interpretation for the sake of simplifying phenomena.

A short version of what I took away from the account of Craver's idea. Organic and ecological systems are ridiculously complex, so it's a good idea to figure out how to simplify and systematize your understanding of them. In this case, Craver described a series of obstacles and difficulties in making sense of causation between micro, meso, and macro levels of biological phenomena. So at one level of analysis, bodies and processes affect each other through causes. But when processes at one level of analysis affect processes at another level, they don't cause these other processes. Instead, the notion is that these processes constitute each other.

Consider the relationships among our cells. These are incredibly complicated exchanges among chemical processes, which, taken as a whole, constitute a whole organism. The processes between the cells are in relationships of mutual causation. All these processes working in tandem constitute the organism called Adam Riggio.

However, levels of analysis aren't absolute. Think about an army who loses a battle because, in the process of assembling itself for battle, suffers a contagious viral infection among its troops, allowing the opposing army to devastate them. The viral infection, despite existing on a micro level relative to the macro level phenomenon of this multi-nation war, has literally caused war casualties. When such viruses are biological weapons purposely released into the opposing army, then the relationship of causation is even more clear.

If you divide causation from constitution by level, then you won't adequately understand the entire event. Even though conceptually, taking multi-level causation into account is very difficult to handle, you have to do it. If the phenomenon you're dealing with is complex, you won't adequately understand it if you simplify the concepts you use to make sense of it.

It's a common platitude in philosophy, and quite often in ordinary life as well, that if you can't make your explanation of some phenomenon remarkably simple to understand, then you haven't done a very good job of explaining. But when the phenomenon in question is as complicated as a meteorological or climatological phenomenon, an organism's internal processes, or a growing viral epidemic in society, a simple explanation will not do. Simplicity is, in many ways, the worst type of error in thought, because it is precisely so easy to understand. When understanding comes to easily to you, it's incredibly difficult to convince yourself, let alone convincing other people, that your concepts are inadequate. That you have cut away too many relevant aspects of the world from your analysis in the name of simplification.

Correcting that kind of mistake isn't just difficult because you can so easily become comfortable in your simple understanding of events. It also requires admitting that you need to do a lot more work. And no one likes making their lives more complicated. Even if it's necessarily complicated.

When the Opposites Are False, the Middle Ground is Empty Space, Research Time, 24/07/2013

Being the first person since possibly Mrs Nagel to give Thomas Nagel the benefit of (so very many of) the doubts on his new book has had fascinating results already. I don’t think he’s anywhere near right, but in this case a ridiculous falsehood offers intriguing possibilities for thinking. 

Now that I’ve actually started reading Nagel’s book instead of just reading accounts of people disgusted with it, I have a much better sense of his thought process going into it. In other words, I think I see what it would look like if Nagel wrote a History Boy post about his own book. In many ways, he’s working from a conception of philosophy that no longer holds, at least from my point of view. But this conception is actually remarkably popular, because most of the philosophical work that has taken this down has gone largely unnoticed by the general population of North America (at least, but I’d say of Earth if I had easy access to those kinds of surveys), and unnoticed in pretty large pluralities of the philosophical community as well. 

First, as far as Nagel is concerned, Mind and Cosmos isn’t a book about evolutionary theory or philosophy of biology, but about philosophy of mind. It’s an extension of the same line of thought that produced “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” For Nagel, the mind — our experiences of pains and pleasures, our consciousness and non-propositional thinking — cannot be reduced to physical phenomena without losing content. There is content to thought that is non-reducible to movements of matter, and we experience it intuitively.* And since evolutionary biology is all about the movements of organic matter as it changes through the dynamics of its ecological relationships, this scientific discipline is hit with the same critique as all the others: reductivism.

* Yeah, you can probably see where I’m going with this.

His goal is to find a middle ground between the kind of thinking that makes mind the foundation of material, and the kind that reduces the mind to the material. In this specific regard, the two perspectives that he called theism and materialism are close to opposites. And he thinks philosophy hasn’t really come up with a middle ground. I have two problems with this.

There are few in the history of philosophy who
fascinate and frustrate me more than Henri Bergson.

Problem number one is that Nagel isn’t doing new work on this problem. Henri Bergson theorized this opposition in depth, developed a detailed middle ground that constituted a metaphysical philosophy more comprehensive than that of damn near every philosopher that has tackled this before or since his career, and he did it all more than 100 years ago! Bergson was especially advanced in building a detailed account of how consciousness worked, which was the entire point of his greatest book, Matter and Memory. All Nagel can do, meanwhile, is appeal to the “obvious” appearance of consciousness in experience. But consciousness is still a simple entity to him. If Nagel were to take Matter and Memory as seriously as I’m taking Mind and Cosmos right now, he’d find more than an interesting book. He’d find an intellectual predecessor who has already surpassed him in many important ways!

What prevents this is that Bergson’s reputation collapsed after his fights with Einstein in the 1920s and once Bertrand Russell was convinced that Bergson was an obscurantist, mystic-minded twat (never mind that Russell’s technical work was so dense as to be his most difficult material and Bergson wrote so clearly that he was a pop-philosophical superstar decades before Russell became one). So no one ever read him again except Gilles Deleuze and the people who followed him. And no one in analytic philosophy ever reads Gilles Deleuze. So Nagel would not be expected to have read Bergson. I was impressed to find a Bergson footnote, though that’s the only mention of him in the book, and I doubt Nagel has read his works in any detail. The footnote offers a very over-simplified account of his concept of vital force.

My problem with Nagel number two. Ultimately, I think Nagel’s project in this book is misdirected because he takes the subject matter of materialism to be divided into an opposition that’s false. His goal is to find a middle ground where there is no between to discover. Nagel still believes, along with popular culture, that mind and matter are incompatible, and that science functions by reducing phenomena to the movements of matter. I think the ontology of the future isn’t just a non-reductive materialism, but an emergent materialism, where the structures and movements of matter at a micro-level constitute wholly new entities with wholly new laws of behaviour at its progressive macro-levels. 

That doesn’t fit Nagel’s narrative of two opposing camps through which one must find a middle ground or productive compromise. But I’m not interested in fitting into his or anyone else’s narratives. I want to make my own.