Being Without Existing, Composing, 05/02/2018

It’s a basic rule of thinking decently-well that you shouldn’t apply concepts from scientific fields to moral or political thinking, and vice versa. But . . . .

The most famous example of these cross-domain applications gone horribly wrong is social Darwinism. There are plenty of opportunities to read up on how this popular interpolation of a scientific idea to a political imperative caused horrifying human disasters. Please read the links – they’ll open in separate tabs.

Riffing on a hilarious misinterpretation I've heard from too many
old conservative academic philosophers – Deleuze as simulacra.

Aside from the horrifying political consequences of the most notorious example, it’s just bad form epistemically. You can’t make a straight translation of abstract scientific concepts into a moral imperative. Especially when your example gets all the actual principles of the science totally wrong anyway.

Even Gilles Deleuze, well known philosophical weirdo, would say so. One of the major principles of his last book, What Is Philosophy?, was that scientific knowledge was mathematical and referred to specific situations – philosophy operated very differently.

But . . . . there’s a way to carry scientific concepts into other domains of thinking. It’s a process of abstraction.

Identify the most fundamental aspects of a scientific concept, abstract them into a diagram – so hold onto the complexity, but without the specificity – and experiment to see where else that abstract diagram makes sense.

You aren't so much drawing a conclusion – like the social Darwinists did – as you are an investigation. Where else can this concept apply fruitfully?

Where’s an example of this actually working? Then we can see, in specific terms, how that process of thought works. Well, Deleuze developed one – how the abstract structure of the scientific concept of the infinitesimal and the strange attractor can make sense of the existence of impossible ideals.

That’s a weird and dense thing to say. So what do I mean? In Leibniz’s calculus, an infinitesimal is the smallest possible differential relation. No differential – a dynamic relationship of ∆x/∆y – can ever reach zero. That’s just zero. But their smallest possible relationship is an infinitesimally small difference.

The thing is, infinitesimal quantities can’t exist. They definitely can’t exist in experience, because our perceptual powers give out at sizes of objects and movements way bigger than the infinitesimal. They can’t exist in reality either – the smallest any physical fluctuation can be is about 1.6x10^-35 metres. Way longer than infinitesimal.

All you have to do for your dream to become reality is become a
god. That's well beyond the realm of possibility, but sadly, it's an
ideal that all too often guides our actions.

Infinitesimals can’t exist materially, but they exist as asymptotes in reality – you approach it, and can get closer and closer to it, but never actually reach it. It’s infinitely far from you, or infinitely small. An unreachable target that guides the trajectory of your approach.

And that’s what a moral ideal is – an unreachable target that nonetheless guides your real action. An ideal is real without existing – it’s the principle that provides the underlying logic of your action.

Any ethical act or project you work on will always be disappointing and an utter failure if you treat your ideal as achievable – if you think that a practical action plan will actually make an ideal come true.

Best case scenario, you’ll be disappointed when your ambitious plans to make the world a perfect place fall short of what you aimed for. Instead of pride in what you’ve achieved, you’ll feel ashamed that you couldn’t have done more.

Worst case scenario, you’re Mao Zedong leaving tens of millions dead and a nation of a billion horrifically traumatized. Yeah, that’s fine.

The function of the moral or ethical ideal in human thought is to be the asymptotic attractor for our lives – it governs our development without itself ever being a real state of affairs.

Now ask how such an ideal can be used for the betterment of humanity or for brutal destruction. What facilitates its progressive uses? What facilities its destructiveness?

That right there is what Utopias is about. I think I’ll start the introduction this weekend.

What In the World Will People Think?! Research Time, 04/02/2018

When I was reading through that book of essays on Gilles Deleuze’s influences, one name struck me for an odd reason – it was totally unfamiliar to me.

Who are some of these guys?

Josef-Maria Hoëne-Wronski. Who the hell was this guy? He got a brief mention in a small corner of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s most dense book. But I’ve never come across him in all my research into the corners of Napoleonic-period German philosophy.

Here was his major project, in a few paragraphs.

It’s the 1780s. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason drops, and blows a lot of the intellectual scene in Germany away. It broke with long-established ways of thinking about human nature and thought, but did so by explicitly engaging with its major problems and solving them.

Naturally, Kant's solutions set up an entirely new set of problems. Wronski was a major figure in Polish mathematics and physics, so he had the knowledge base to approach many of the problems Kant’s work posed for the foundational principles of physics.

Kant’s first revolutionary book described how the structures of the mind – frameworks as simple and built into our experience as space, time, number, causality – conditioned experience. Human reason alone – as in logical reasoning – had no power to reach any foundational principle for why the frameworks of our mind were as they were.

Now, Kant would ultimately centre those principles in ethics and morality – practical reason. Wronski would move in a totally different direction – physics, particularly calculus.
• • •
Quick jump out of this to talk history. At the undergraduate level, the history of Western philosophy is usually taught as though there are clear boundaries in its development – classical, medieval, modern, critical, contemporary. 

Steve and I disagree on a lot of substantial ontological and
epistemological issues and debates. But we always have very
fruitful – or at least very entertaining – engagements and
conversations.

All too often, those boundaries settle into researchers’ thinking as they progress as a scholar and specialize. That’s why philosophical work that shows the continuity through all these breaks – the little differences and influences across what we think are distinct periods – is the most valuable history of philosophy to me.

I’m indebted to my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller for having written books that taught me so much about those continuities that our oversimplifying undergrad curriculum paints over and erases. Of all the mentors, teachers, and elders I’ve had over the years, he’s taught me the most about this.
• • •
The choice made sense to Wronski. He was a physicist who came from the German-Polish professional world, where you learned Leibniz’s calculus alongside his complex and imaginative ontologies. So intensely creative, ontologically fertile metaphysics was an ordinary part of mathematical thinking for him.

In most of our undergraduate educations in philosophy, we learn that no one thought this way after reading Kant’s Critiques. That was the long-term effect, but just because it’s happened by now, doesn’t mean that it never took a long time anyway.

Wronski may have thought little of bringing Leibniz’s multivector hybrid approaches to physics, mathematics, and ontology. But the presumption got him into trouble, costing him a job at the Marseille Observatory.

It turns out that it isn’t always acceptable to develop a complexly hybrid ontology of the origins of the universe when you’re supposed to be mapping star movements. At least not outside your lunch breaks anyway.

Who are these guys, Kemo Sabe? Another inadvisable direction.

Wronski eventually became most famous in the intellectual circles of his day as a bit of a crank. As people were abandoning the approaches of Leibniz, he was carrying them forward. As it became less acceptable to motivate philosophical and scientific work using religious and theological principles, he was discussing how mystical visions helped inspire his metaphysical work.

The first major product of this exploration was his Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics and Algorithmic Science. It was a massive synthesis of Leibnizian ontologies of calculus with Pythagorean numerological mysticism, all tuned to the problems of post-Kantian philosophy.

His correspondences and friendships with major figures in European mathematics like Joseph-Louis Lagrange meant that this first book was reviewed in high-rolling circles. This quickly turned into a problem for Wronski, since IPMAS was universally panned, including in the review by Lagrange.

Eventually, Wronski’s own faith in the universality of algebra and calculus ended up just as limited as the Pythagorean faith in flat-planed geometry. After ambitious mathematical papers were likewise panned, he spent the last 30 years of his life in poverty. Still grinding away at epochally-ambitious philosophy and mathematics. But fruitlessly.

Wronski’s work turned out to be a dead end. So associating him with Deleuze becomes incredibly dangerous. The insults Wronski received on his way out of intellectual prominence – mystic spewing madness and nonsense – sound very similar to the insults academician analytic philosophers spew at post-structuralist thinkers like Deleuze.

So an essay talking about the influence of such a reviled figure as Wronski on Deleuze – who is widely reviled as a charlatan in many university circles – has to be careful not to associate them too much. Lest you justify the haters.

Making Gottfried Leibniz an Empiricist, Research Time, 18/01/2018

A small patch of light shows only how much more darkness there is
beyond it.

Yeah, that title shows just how weird you can get when you’re talking about the influences of Gilles Deleuze in the history of ideas. I’m going to see if I can do this in less than 1000 words. Just one post.*

* Starting after this note, anyway. Yesterday ended up being super-busy – I couldn’t get the energy together for a post. But let’s put some dense effort into this one. Developing an unconventional empiricism is one of the themes running through Utopias, and I’ll probably pick it up in future writing.

So let’s begin. I’ve criticized some of Daniel Smith’s interpretations of Deleuze’s work, but he wrote a weird and fascinating essay in that collection about Gottfried Leibniz. Now, the textbook account of Leibniz is that he was one of the arch-rationalists.

Rationalism is typically contrasted with empiricism – Descartes-Spinoza-Leibniz opposing Locke-Hume – mind as the source of the world opposing world as the source of the mind. Like most really simple stories about complex philosophical thinkers, it breaks apart in so many ways once you actually look at them all.

But Leibniz. So Smith’s essay is based on a very left-field interpretation of Leibniz’s Monadology.** Here’s a super-casual primer on the concept.

Gottfried Leibniz and his immense courtly wig.

** An interpretation of Deleuze’s interpretation? Or using Deleuze’s interpretation to build your own interpretation? As a component? Or as an inspiration? I think the answers are, respectively: Sort Of, Yes, Pretty Much, and Definitely.

Every place in existence has a perspective on the world that you can take from it – these monads each move and develop according to their own paths. That perspective is analogous to a spot in an enormous labyrinth, as complex as all of reality itself – but it can't see the whole network, only its local area.

How much and what aspects of existence’s catacombs a monad can perceive depends on the powers that place has at a particular time. If a monad becomes a creature’s mind, then it can illuminate quite a bit of existence, thanks to its powers of perception and thought. If a monad becomes a rock, not so much.

Sidebar-ish. The monads don’t actually interact with each other in Leibniz’s thinking. They just move in harmony because maintaining that harmony among all existence is the power of God in the world. Important for knowing the Leibnizian context, not so much for Smith’s Deleuze-inspired take on the concept.

Okay. Are you still here? So the monad is simultaneously a physical perspective in the world and a concept. Let’s not get into the finer points of the argument, or we’ll be discussing it for four hundred years.

Bottom line, because every monad illuminates – literally perceives – some range, however small, of the world, that perspective is the concept of that monad. Since philosophy deals with pure concepts, the ultimate subject matter of philosophical thought is existence. Sorting perspectives, monads, aspects of existence, places.

This is not Gottfried Leibniz, but Brian May, legendary
guitarist of Queen. His hair, however, has always
been real. And it's spectacular.

Inference, deduction, interpretation, and argument are legitimate modes of philosophical thinking. Most of us accept that these days. But Smith-via-Deleuze’s interpretation of the Monadology implies that discovery, observation, and hypothesis are also modes of philosophical thinking.

Remember that sidebar? It’s important now. Monads don’t gain their powers relationally – on Leibniz’s thinking, each monad is isolated from each other. Remember as well that a monad is essentially a place. So each infinitesimally small place in existence never interacts with any other. They illuminate the world – as far as they can, given the potential of the place – not by interacting, but by expressing existence through their capacities.

Each place expresses all of existence, but the character of that expression depends on what the bodies and processes constituting that place can do. Philosophical thinking is all about understanding expression.

Because you understand the world through understanding the expression of places, it’s rationalism that actually disappears. Thought becomes empirical by nature – analyzing expression means analyzing the world. So philosophical thinking is the bedrock of all other techniques of knowledge.

It’s a very strange kind of empiricism. I definitely don’t consider it Leibniz’s own thinking. It’s a creative take on an already dense, complex, and inventive piece of philosophical writing. It’s worth picking it up and seeing what can be done with it.

We Can't Live With Our Scars, Class: Nightvisiting, Reviews, 01/11/2016

Check out my first two reviews of Class, of "For Tonight We Might Die" and "The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo." You can support more TV review projects like this and even bigger things down the road at my Patreon page.
• • •
Three episodes in makes me feel safe enough to offer a casual description of what Class is all about, at least in this first season. It’s grief. 

Exploring all the aspects of grief – how it appears in our lives, what scars and traces it leaves, how it shapes our personalities, the different ways to travel along grief’s line of flight. What grief makes of us and makes us become.

It doesn’t get more explicit in this episode, where,

SPOILERS!!

cited, a hideous alien fungus that feeds off the intense emotional energy of grief squirms through the bunghole of time and manifests in front of thousands of Londoners as their dead loved ones. It speaks with all of them to amp their feelings of grief, sadness, and loss as high as they can go, then wraps them up in its spores.

If I could say there was one issue I had with "Nightvisiting," it would be
that the dialogue was a little too clunky at times. Tanya herself had
some of the most dangerously expository dialogue, occuring in an
emotionally intense dramatic conversation that lasted almost through
the entire episode.

Our Stories Make Sense of Us

The major confrontation the creature has is its talk with Tanya, manifesting as her father Jasper on the two year anniversary of his sudden death from a stroke. 

But it also confronts several of the other cast members, or at least tries to. It appears to Ram as his murdered girlfriend Rachel, naturally, as her killing is the central traumatic event that drives his character. 

The creature talks about how much humans crave closure in their lives, that they let grief and mourning torture themselves so much more than any other species it’s come across.

The reason why is rooted in how we make sense of our lives. Humans understand ourselves by telling stories about ourselves. These are our histories, at all levels of human development, whether as a family, a community, globally, or as individuals. 

We want our narratives to be comprehensive, complete, and clear. Comprehensive in that a narrative offers a full view of what it describes. The story takes in everything that matters to the development it describes. 

This is different from a narrative’s completeness. Being complete is to be definitive – it’s the only story about a person or a development in a person’s life that you need to tell, once it’s been told.

And a narrative is clear when its meaning as it ends is unambiguous, delivering a transparent set of messages. This is “the moral of the story” if I can talk like a mediocre grade school teacher for a moment. 

The ending stuck with you precisely because it refused to be clear-cut.
Most of us had to figure out the true ending, unable to accept the actual
ending of genuine ambiguity. We hate ambiguity enough in real life,
where it happens all the bloody time.

I would say that clarity is the most important feature of a narrative in that introducing even the least unclarity or ambiguity to the meaning or end result of a story is more upsetting than a shortcoming in comprehensiveness or completeness. 

Think of how obsessed so many people were over the ending of Inception. There, the story’s clarity was carefully manipulated to encourage just that reaction among its audience. Constantly arguing and interpreting together whether Leonardo DiCaprio was or wasn’t still in a dreamscape became part of the West’s cultural conversation. 

In that case, it wasn’t a flaw of the story, but an attentively calibrated part of the story itself. The arguments we all had over the meaning of the story were themselves part of the story. It was how Inception literally incepted all of our minds.

Humans fundamentally want the stories we tell to be complete, comprehensive, and clear. This is ultimately true for the stories we tell about ourselves – which is how we make sense of ourselves entirely. We understand our lives by making ourselves into a story.

This is a narrative way of describing what in more ontological philosophy is called the principle of sufficient reason – everything that exists has a cause or reason for its existence that all fits together in a perfect, if madly complicated, order. That the world fits together is the fundamental premise of human reasoning.

My mother even says this as a platitude, and she’s far from the only one. So many times when I’ve faced unforeseen problems or crises, she says, “Everything happens for a reason” to reassure me.

For all that Tanya's Vivian Oparah gets the extra-moving melodramatic
scenes in "Nightvisiting," April's Sophie Hopkins demonstrates the
most virtuoso (and also underrated) skill of any actor: She has some
of the most stilted dialogue in the entire episode, explaining her
history with her abusive alcoholic father to Ram. It's a moment of
simultaneous exposition and emotional rawness, nearly
impossible to carry out at its knife-edge balance.

I respond that this idea only makes sense retroactively, after we’ve already dealt with whatever disaster has been foisted on us. In the moment, I still have to wade through whatever shit that I have to deal with. Mom, you're a Leibnizian who raised an existentialist, and I'm sorry about that.

Grief is so troubling to us because the event of sudden loss or sudden ending destabilizes that premise. For example, Tanya describes how she would check in on her father whenever he came home from a night shift as a police officer because his patrols were a time of danger. 

If one night, Jasper didn’t come home, it would have been terrible, but it would at least have made sense to Tanya. There would be a clear cause in the potentially dangerous work that he did to his own death. Dying of a stroke in the bathroom makes a mockery of that coherence in her life.

That's the real horror of an existentialist look at the world. You accept the fact that a cause isn’t the same as a reason and that our narratives of our life won’t necessarily (or even that often) have clear-cut meanings and results. 

What Our Grief Reveals

Grief is the emotional and subjective dissonance when our yearning for a rational order in our lives meets the fact of real complexity and chaos. These moments of crisis can be quite revealing for a person, as it shows what we depend on to make sense of our existences.

The most illuminating conversation the creature has is with Quill, where it manifests as her sister. This sequence is the most sustained sequence of character development we’ve gotten for Quill so far, as we not only get to see her people’s paradoxical familial relationships, but also a look into her own motives.

Quill’s grief over her family and people – wiped out in the genocide of Rhodia – manifests as an image of who she should be. Ultimately, it isn’t love for her sister that most tempts Quill to let the creature capture her. In human ways of thinking, the pain of sudden loss would be the most enticing lure. 

One criticism that Phil Sandifer's review of the episode mentioned was
that the notion of Tanya's grief over her father being the strongest such
feeling in London seemed a touch sloppy. But I prefer to think of the
creature's focus on Tanya being a matter of her regular proximity to
the time bunghole as well, a mild piece of metafiction that the
interdimensional dangers of the rift affect the show's main cast the
most because it's their job to draw the rift's fire. They're the front
lines on these emotionally vulnerable alien invaders. Sounds like a
fine part-time job while you're finishing up high school.

But for Quill, it’s the fact that she’s been rendered impotent in so many ways. What truly draws her in is the prospect of being a true warrior again. The real object of her grief isn’t even the destruction of her people, but her loss of how she conceived of herself. The loss of her dignity as a warrior.

Charlie always held such emotional distance from his own family that he has no real grief. So the creature can’t even really manifest to him. Charlie’s story doesn’t have a rupture of the sort that breaks his sense of who he is. His narrative remains coherent as the guardian of the souls of his people in the Cabinet of Light.

We’ve already worked through Ram’s grief in the last episode, so Rachel’s spectre freaks him out, but then sends him out on the proactive role that he took on by the end of “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo.” 

And April has, like Charlie, already repaired whatever breaks in her narrative were caused by the violent abuse of her alcoholic father. The events of her father’s violence became the foundation of her personal strength.

As for Tanya, her defeat of the creature makes clear what seems to be another theme of Class in this first season. She severely weakens the creature by feeding it with her anger instead of the subjective breakdown of grief, so that Quill’s physical attack can force it back into the rift. 

It's literally an instance of a character using the force of her personality to defeat the story’s monster, just as Ram did last week talking the dragon into leaving Earth. So here we have the moral of the story – each of us can find the strength within ourselves to vanquish our demons and become who the world demands we are.

The Immense Power of Unrestrained Philosophy, Research Time, 13/03/2014

I’ve taken a couple of slow days as I’ve been sluggish from getting a tetanus vaccination the other day. But even though my mind feels a little heavy, I can still think. One thing I’ve been thinking about as I look through my notes on these Donna Haraway essays is my relationship with the naturalistic fallacy, the idea, pretty universally accepted in philosophy, that you can’t derive a moral statement (about what you ought to do) from an ontological statement (about what there is, or how it is). 

Though Haraway has definitely encouraged people to think
very differently over the years, I'm just not sure how much
potential universities ever had for fostering genuine
change in society.

I see this functioning in terms of the separation of philosophical domains. Ontological, epistemic, moral, and aesthetic problems are rarely treated as if they have anything to do with each other. But I think some of the most remarkable and powerful philosophical ideas come from thought processes that blur and mutate the shapes of those boundaries. Take, for example, the situational feminist epistemology that Haraway develops. 

Writing in the early 1990s, she’s concerned to overcome accusations of relativism of which feminist and other philosophies critical of standard accounts of science have been accused. I feel that so much progress has been made since then.* But she probably explains situational epistemology better than most writers I’ve come across. It’s an epistemological thesis advanced for ethical reasons, with what I see as some wonderfully strange ontological implications. 

* Not that much progress has been made since then. I sometimes feel as if philosophical conservatives continue to make the same old accusations against streams of thought influenced by Haraway, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Edward Said, or other critics of the possibility of pure objectivity. No matter how much folks with whom I sympathize may develop nuanced ways to have our criticism and our objectivity too, I’ve come to doubt whether the people we’re trying to convince even bother to read such work. 

Knowledge is perspectival. There can be no knowledge that is literally, in Thomas Nagel’s words, a view from nowhere. Pure objectivity is impartial, but we can compare, contrast, and combine the partial perspectives of people. There is no dichotomous separation of the purely subjective, variable, and unreliable, from the purely objective, consistent, and true. All partial perspectives are themselves objective, and can be understood and mapped.

Leibniz's hair was even bigger than that of the
greatest rock musicians of the 1970s. The 1600s
was a strange time.

Every subjectivity is a partial illumination of an enormous and complex world. Each such illumination is unique because it only has a single, particular position in that complex world. There is usually far more of the world unseen through a single partial perspective than there is seen and understood. Essentially, this is the structure of subjectivity that Gottfried Leibniz spells out in his monadology. The structure of a monad is, in this way of thinking, the same structure as a subjectivity: a partial view on a world that is far more complicated than that single illumination can reveal on its own power alone. 

There are definite differences, of course. Each Leibnizian monad contains the same entire world within it, with its partiality defined by its inability to illuminate the whole of that world and the different location of its illumination within it. So all relations are internal to a monad, where Haraway’s subjectivities all exist in a world and illuminate it externally. And of course there are significant differences in their philosophical priorities. Even just considering their different stations in the world show this. Leibniz was a courtier to German princes, where philosophical and mathematical work was an elite activity, subject to the ostensible supervision of theological authorities. Haraway is a university professor who came of age in a politicized liberal academy that saw higher education democratized to a wide public. But the older metaphysical system can be used as a model for the contemporary epistemic and ethical system. This is not only how we can learn about and illustrate our philosophical ideas, but also how we understand the world where they develop and their power in that world.