More Than Mere Images, Composing, 11/07/2018

Over the past week or so, I’ve been thinking about different ways I’ve seen philosophical writers push themselves into more ambitious expressions. The results are beautiful and inspiring. The quality of the results are mixed, but that’s true of any attempt to overcome limits.

You’d be right to ask what limits I’m talking about, for a start. Well, these limits are based in the norms of academic writing, which tend to the self-destructive. Let me take a paragraph or six to explain how.

Academic training in the university sector tends to cause a lot of impostor syndrome. There are many causes for this, but I want to focus today on two causes.

One cause is that there’s no generally acceptable upper limit on how comprehensive a paper must be to appear credible. A writer must always prepare to face someone who calls their work inadequate because it doesn’t refer to a particular writer that critic is familiar with.

A powerful mystical experience can be had here, but only if you're
already open to it. If you aren't open to that phenomenological
communion, you might just see some potentially valuable
minerals that this damn National Parks act prevents you from
accessing, for the economic good of the people.
Image by Jorge Lascar via Flickr / Creative Commons

But research overproduction has made this impossible, especially combined with how long peer review takes. In the sometimes two years or longer between submission and publication, a study might become obsolete or out of date. If an article for a research journal was written in 2015, it won’t be able to include references to relevant stuff published in 2017, even though it didn’t come out until 2018.

So academic writers are brutally scrutinized by journal authorities through a process that makes their submissions irrelevant because publication takes so long.

Another, related cause, is how the training and publication peer review processes are so rigorous about the form of academic research writing. An essay must use a particularly narrow range of writing styles, tones, and ways of explaining ideas, if it’s going to pass the muster of a peer review process for a publication whose credits count toward tenure and job security.

Little to no experimentation is allowed, until you’re so deep into your career that you’ve likely lost your zeal for experimentation in writing at all.

So I have a lot of respect for writers like Jussi Parikka, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, and Jane Bennett, who base so much of their philosophical positions on imagery as a starting point. It’s a method that breaks with the dry prose style where bloodless argumentation and obsolete rationalist attitudes dominate.

Now the question is, like I said a few days ago – Can you open up the evocation of the image to find something philosophically experimental and innovative?

When I was researching Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, I found a lot of academically-written environmentalist philosophy that depended on the power of the image alone for the strength of their argument. I did read one author, Scott Aikin, who dismissed the style of this argument in an insightful, if cruel way – He called it seeing a big rock and having an experience.

The lands where the different nations of the Nishnaabeg lived before
they were driven from their lands by the violent dispossession of
Canadian and American state institutions.
Map by DarrenBaker - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27884645

Thinking about this more mystical philosophical method now, I think the point was well-made, but without giving credit to a failed attempt to write philosophy differently than the academy typically trains you.

The naive environmentalist argument is that these experiences – farming, hiking, naturalistic observation, among others – is that there’s only one correct response to them in thought. But they made no argument as to why that one response is the correct one.

A few days ago, I started reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done. She produces a strong argument for why a reverent, respectful attitude to the ecological networks in which we live is the proper response to experiences of Indigenous ways of life.

That argument is rooted in the philosophical concept of grounded normativity, a central framework principle of many Indigenous North American philosophical traditions, particularly in her own culture, the Nishnaabeg of what is now called the Great Lakes region.

Simpson is building a remarkable philosophical edifice. It’s one of the most conceptually ambitious works I’ve come across in a long time. I don’t want to talk much more about this book right now, because I only just started reading it, and there’s already enough philosophical density to sustain centuries of commentary and uptake. It deserves such devotion.

As for Parikka, his reliance on images to express philosophical concepts is still vulnerable to the Aikin critique. More respectfully, it means that an image underdetermines its meaning. The Geology of Media does interesting things with media theory, and along with allied works like Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, pushes against the tired restrictions of academic style. Reading Parikka, I want his next book to try even harder.

Creative Energy VI: Riding the Lightning, Research Time, 13/12/2017

Let's begin that trip into what Gilles Deleuze called catching hold of chaos. The essence of philosophical thinking.

Try a little experiment in imagination.

Step One. Imagine your intuition is perfectly right every time. You naturally understand every practically important aspect of the world around you – the conditions of every action, the most likely effects of every piece of communication no matter the medium or institution.

Every decision you make in your life is perfect – not by luck or unthinking instinct, but because you understand every situation completely at first glance. Literally at first glance. I cannot emphasize this last part enough.

When thought itself becomes so fast, the distance between
your insights falls to zero. That's what Deleuze means by
catching hold of the infinite.
Image by Aykut Aydogdu. Check out his stuff.

AT FIRST GLANCE.

The most important part of this illustration is that you understand every situation you encounter in your life completely and perfectly at first glance.

Now imagine the same kind of perfect intellectual intuition, but in thought alone. Nothing to do with the world of practical life, unfortunately – nothing to do with social interaction, dancing, home repair, finding a quick way home through heavy traffic. Nothing useful like that.

Step Two. Imagine the same kind of perfect intellectual intuition, but you’re just thinking about the abstract. Concepts, arguments, inferences, images, relationships – all the ways you can put them together as components in more complex arrangements.

You understand all the ways they can fit together and all the dynamics, processes, and frameworks for thinking and perception those abstract ideas would create. That’s in every combination, as you try out each new conceptual experiment, each new arrangement of thought components.

You think so well that you don’t need to doubt yourself or check your work, because you know in thinking it that you’ve understood everything perfectly.

Step Three. Imagine that intellectual intuition in your thinking, but that intuition is in perfect tune because – as it assembles those concepts and abstract components – it’s creating its world.

In Step One – perfect intuition in daily life – you lived in a world and your intellectual intuition connected and flowed with that world in perfect harmony. In Step Two, you’re putting concepts together with perfect accuracy.

But Step Three is actually the same as Step Two. If you’re dealing with thought alone, you’re always retreating from practical life. The concepts are frameworks for thinking to be used in everyday life – that includes a grocery run, negotiating peace treaties, wiring an apartment building, and writing epochal philosophy.

The space where you do your experiments – where you see how the components fit together, try new arrangements, make new arguments, figure out new ways to infer, imagine, analyze, think.

Deleuze described the conceptual persona as something that you became when you were thinking this way, so divorced from the daily needs of your life that your personality could become the concepts you were using. Descartes truly was an idiot – absolute inward-turning – when he was planning and writing his most revolutionary work.

All the other greats likewise became the images of their own thought, at least while they were thinking so intensely.

Speak Ancestors I: A Masquerade Conservatism, Jamming, 01/12/2015

A lot of the greatest minds of human civilization(s) have thought about the fundamental problem of politics as the collision between progressive and conservative values. So how does it break down?

Part of what always bugged me about
Fiddler on the Roof (apart from their not
casting Zero Mostel as Tevye in the film
version) was that Tevye bound himself to
his traditions, even when it broke his
family apart. They were a fundamental
part of his Jewish identity, and his
identity as a person. But he never
thought about why he held his traditions.
That thought doesn't mean you abandon
your traditions, only that you examine
them, their value and meaning.

Tradition is inescapable in any society. Generations accumulate, and over just a few decades of relative social stability, a contingent set of norms, institutions, presumptions, and perspectives feel necessary and obviously true. 

When you defend tradition because it’s tradition and tradition is correct, you should be called a conservative. That’s the idea I get when I read Leo Strauss discussing the political philosophies of deference and critique in the abstract. 

But this idea doesn’t quite fit with how people come to think of themselves as conservatives in real life. Or how people think of themselves as liberal, progressive, or whatever word you think best expresses the push for social change. 

The word ‘conservative’ means a lot of different things depending on what country you’re standing in when you say it. I’m used to the American meaning, referring to literalist Christianity, an uncomfortable haze of racial bias, and strong anti-government feeling.

But that isn’t conservatism, at least not according to what I’m reading at the moment in Natural Right and History. Here’s an example. Literalist Christianity, despite being the faith of many millions of people in the United States, is a fairly new development. 

The conservative take on Christianity would be to read the Bible as a series of complex metaphors, allegories, and ethical quandaries. You know, the proper way to be religious. Instead, American religious leaders and practitioners have innovated a strange new way of reading the Bible that contradicts scientific discoveries and common sense. 

As Strauss analyzes conservative thinking as such, he finds a very Edenic vision of morality and justice. The notion that tradition alone is a guide to true justice depends on the presumption that looking to the past will improve our morality.

That implies that people of the past were more moral than people of the present. If you follow the chain back far enough, then the origin of civilization was a perfect state, or at least as close to perfect as humans can ever achieve. 

Part of what I can't stand about Bill Maher is the stupidity
of his atheism. It's as though he's been surrounded by
Biblical literalists so long that he's incapable of
understanding religion with any clarity of nuanced thought.
I miss the old days when public atheists actually
engaged religious philosophy and ideas. Atheists were
smart back then.

Modern conservative politics features rhetoric that evokes such a golden age of their civilization, and the politicians publicize themselves as working to return society to that golden age. But the true golden age never existed, at least not in the form that most of these politicians describe.

The golden age often evoked in right-wing political discourse – the “again” of Make America Great Again – never existed. The purely Christian society never existed, for example, and neither did a fully technological society without a real government. 

These ideas are innovations. Those who identify themselves as conservatives in contemporary Western politics will deny it, but they’re just as dedicated to changing their society along the framework of a new vision as the left-wingers whose ideas they oppose. 

It’s just that the right-wing progressive agenda depends on myths of the golden age and America’s corruption from a damn near divine origin (in the Constitution), if they want to keep their supporters. 

Because their supporters still believe that whatever the ancestors did was good. They just believe that the ancestors did different things than they really did. To be continued . . . 

Meticulously Understanding Intuitive Theatre, Composing, 09/10/2014

The American cinema of the 1970s is a major influence on
my approach to drama and narrative. I originally planned
You Were My Friend as a pure social realist narrative, like
Hal Ashby's The Last Detail.

Last night was the first time I’ve been able to make it to a rehearsal of You Were My Friend in a couple of weeks. We’ve made great progress on the production. All but the last two sequences have been completely blocked already. Today, I thought I’d talk about an idea that I’ve had about our process of composition and production.

As I write a text like this, a script that’s performed entirely live in front of an audience who’s right in the room with us, I’m intimately concerned with transition and flow. Each moment of emotionally intense drama has to be followed up with a moment of humour. Levity must follow gravity so the audience isn’t dragged down too deeply. As well, each line progresses the narrative just a little bit. Even the most apparently superfluous element like a reactive, “Well, yeah,” contributes to the development of the characters, the story, and their ideas. I conceive of the play, as well as my film script for the Alice project, as one continuous movement.

Getting into the first rehearsals with Mel the director and Samantha and Hannah the cast, a very different process began. Mel breaks down that continuous movement into individual moments, according to the predominant emotional tone. Every tonal shift is a little break in the narrative, as my continuous movement is analyzed into component parts. 

Then once we get to physical rehearsal and the blocking out of scenes, the continuous movement of the play is restored in the performance. Small changes are made to the script, we introduce performance details as we refine and perfect the expression of the narrative on the stage. Most importantly, all the knowledge of that analysis is articulated in the physical movement of the play.

Yet once the script was finished, You Were My Friend had
several fourth-wall breaking and montage elements as well,
shattering its social realist style of expression (though not
its content) as it came to an end. Robert Altman's MASH
was a touchstone here.

This is the closest I’ve come to actually seeing Henri Bergson’s concept of intuition in front of me in my experience. The concept is a strange one, appearing as it does in his books Creative Evolution and Two Sources of Morality and Religion at work in more specific arguments about particular disciplinary areas (biology and evolutionary theory in one, and social/political philosophy in the other). He explains the concept in the abstract in some of his essays in the Creative Mind collection, but precisely what it is remains an object of endless debate* in academic Bergson studies.

* As all debates are endless in academic contexts. The endlessness is a function of the desperation of university academics to keep a debate going past a sensible point, finding more and more distinctions to create research niches in the sub-disciplines of X studies. For an example, see my earlier posts on Daniel Smith's work about Deleuze. Rant over.

After my experience working on You Were My Friend with a director who has such a different method that gels so well with my own, I think I can say, following up on my own suspicions about the concept in Bergson’s work, that this intuition unites the smooth articulation of expert physical movement with the depth of contemplative knowledge that you gain from analysis. It is knowing movement.

What Is Trustworthy About a Visionary? Research Time, 11/03/2014

Through the random posts of a couple of Facebook connections, I came across a remarkable little essay, just over ten years old, by a pair of otherwise unremarkable scholars named Mark Van Atten and Robert Tragesser about the nature of mysticism. In particular, they took a left-field, but deceptively simple, tack on the Common Core Thesis in the philosophy of mysticism. This idea is that, underneath all the divergence of mystical visions, there is a common set of truths at the core of all mystical visions and visionaries.

The notion speaks to our contemporary spirituality of the market of everyday enlightenment. When spirituality can come in a pill, there’s a shaman in every drugstore and on every street corner. But mysticism has played its role in all of humanity’s spiritual traditions. A mystic vision is described as an experience of the Absolute Good, and so that Common Core Thesis would seem to be the only way mysticism could offer genuine guidance in life. When Van Atten and Tragesser discuss contemporary mystics, they’re comparing two people in a profession that’s rarely associated in its popular image with such thinking: L. E. J. Brouwer and Kurt Gödel, the logicians and mathematicians.

I think if I had ever decided to pursue contemporary
philosophy of mathematics itself in any substantial
way, I'd build on the concepts of Kurt Gödel.

Not all visions of an Absolute Good are defined in mystical terms; sometimes they’re couched as political movements, ideologies based on the realization of a single core concept. This is how theories of mysticism can operate in my Utopias project. But I don’t think they’ll play a very central role, and perhaps can play only an underlying role to avoid bogging down my analysis of the religious fervour of politics in the fervour of a singular vision. Singular visions are at the heart of both phenomena, but for an ideologue, that vision can be shared and acted upon, while the mystic vision would appear incommunicable.

Their essay analyses Brouwer’s and Gödel’s different conceptions of the Absolute, and examine the implications of that comparison for the Common Core Thesis. They describe Brouwer as a pure Kantian in one pivotal way: he considered time to be a construction of subjectivity. Going beyond Kant, Brouwer considered mathematics to be an elaboration of the intuitions of discreteness (moments) and continuity (passage or flow) of time. But Brouwer considered this a falling away from the Absolute in which time is not sensed. We are able to achieve practical actions, but in doing so, we are isolated from the true nature of things.*

* In conceiving of the faculty of intelligence or intellect as the ability to quantitatively take stock of the world and focus our thoughts for practical action, Brouwer greatly resembles the ideas of Henri Bergson. Of course, he differs from Bergson in a variety of other, more fundamental, ways. Bergson is an interesting figure in the philosophical tradition of trying to understand mysticism. His treatment of the subject in his last major work, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, is fascinating and nuanced. I don’t quite have the space to go into it here, and I don’t even have a solid enough memory of it to put anything in pixels again just yet. But his entirely immanent conception of what the mystic intuits or experiences wildly differs from virtually every other mystic or analyst of mysticism I’ve ever found, who focus on mystic visions as contact with a transcendent Absolute. It also has no room for any version of the Common Core Thesis. If mysticism becomes an important conceptual pillar of the Utopias project’s analysis of ideology, Bergson’s concept may be a critical alternative to the political absolutisms.

Gödel, meanwhile, conceived of mystical insight as an intellectual matter entirely. His Platonic conception of mathematics made mystical contact with pure mathematical concepts the centrepiece of his epistemology of math. Mysticism was Gödel’s path to intellectual enlightenment, the truth of mathematics. He considered himself extremely influenced by Schelling in this regard.** Contrasted with Brouwer, our trusty co-authors saw them together as disproving the Common Core Thesis. Their concepts of mystical experience, and how they described their own experiences, stand in total opposition and contradiction to each other. There could not be a single universal truth underlying every mystical experience if the content of each of those experiences includes incompossibles, notions that can’t both be true, where the truth of one falsifies the other.

** I’ll say it right now. I’ve never read Schelling. Not one iota. I don’t even really know where I’d start. If any of my friends who have read Schelling have some recommendations on his best books (I don’t want any ‘introductory’ or ‘the easy stuff’ first; I can handle the pure shit), let me know.

If I decide, for at least one dimension of analysis in the Utopias project, to understand ideological absolutism as the worldly articulation of a mystical vision of the Absolute, this paper has been remarkably valuable to me. It offers grounds for the discord underlying all absolutism.

Adam Riggio and the Shocking Concepts, Composing, 17/07/2013

Still working on the ecophilosophy manuscript, impeded by the humid weather, and left wondering whether any future success in my writing career could be invested in a summer home in the Rocky Mountains or elsewhere in the far less sweltering country of British Columbia. I did, however, get some work done, but unfortunately have isolated a paragraph of manuscript that it increasingly appears will have no place in the chapter. 

Some context for the orphan. “All these theories” I refer to are three attempts to build a theory of environmental moral philosophy that is based on a principle of nature’s intrinsic value. One author, Arne Næss, started writing on environmentalism in the 1960s, and advocated a belief system about reality that combined Buddha and Spinoza into a kind of universalist pantheism, which would replace atheist scientism and the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Despite this, he said the reason for accepting this was a common intuition of nature’s intrinsic value, arrived through experiences like mountaineering. Paul Taylor’s major book was published in the late 1980s, advocating a general principle of respect for nature, but also the radical changes in lifestyle this would engender, like the scaling back of industrial society and at least paying lip service to ethical vegetarianism. Nicholas Agar, writing in 2000, accepted the common sense intuition that only that which had a mind was intrinsically valuable, but redefined intelligence so that all living creatures possessed some measure of it. He did not often touch on the issue of lifestyle changes. 

“An interesting quirk of all these theories is how, despite the underlying conservatism of their reliance on what their authors take to be widespread intuitions, they grow more radical with their distance from us in the past. It suggests that radical philosophies eventually have to make concessions to critiques from the very perspectives they are trying to overcome. If a central motive of developing a new philosophical system is to shock people from their dogmatic slumbers and see the limitations of what they take to be common sense, then philosophical criticism, rather than refine and improve ideas, actually strips them of their power to make a radical new beginning. If a philosophical radical must permit a conservative opponent to appeal to common intuitions in critical discourse, then adversarial philosophical argument forces a radical to concede authority to the very institutions and moralities she set out to undermine.”

Yes, this is another of my knocks on the appeal to intuition in philosophy. This will probably happen a lot in many different articulations and contexts. But it also amounts to a problem with contemporary philosophical manners. I mean manners as in etiquette. 

First consider the typical timeline of an academic philosopher introducing a new idea to the community. It doesn’t need to be a big idea, and my argument here works best with more modest ideas. Most of the time, a philosopher will write an essay of about 5,000 words about his new idea and publish it in a journal. Being a new idea, it’s content departs from the consensus view, as well it should. If the writer had nothing new to say, no way in which his thinking departed from the professional consensus, his essay wouldn’t have been published. 

But the usual reaction to such a new idea is criticism. The mainstream idea is well-established, and if it’s especially well-entrenched most folks in the field would consider it intuitively true. For example, when I talk about my distaste for retributive justice (a perspective I’ve only really embraced recently, after a long period of thinking on issues of law enforcement, and the role of the military, police, prohibition of drugs, and prisons in our society), I often get push-back from people who tell me that it’s intuitively true that the perpetrator of a crime or injury deserves to be punished. And the usual reaction to criticism is to make a compromise.

Because a new idea isn’t going to have a game-ready response to every possible critique it may face. And if there isn’t a game-ready response, our philosopher must concede in part. When people argue, there’s a winner and a loser. Those who can’t decisively shoot down criticisms are losers. Usually, that’s the advocate of a new idea. New ideas need time to be explored in all their implications. Sometimes, it takes generations to see all the implications of a new idea. Sometimes longer.

So when the first response to a new idea is the criticize it, the new idea dies stillborn. Its new versions include more and more compromises to the perspective it was invented to challenge in the first place. Instead of being intrigued by a new idea and exploring its subtleties, the common reaction is to attack the idea and force it to defend itself, usually before the idea’s advocates have fully explored all the idea can do. 

I referenced dogmatic slumber for a reason. That was Immanuel Kant’s line about the effect David Hume’s philosophy had on him: it woke him from his dogmatic slumbers. Hume’s ideas were epoch-making departures from what has come before. In many ways, we’re still exploring the subtleties of his thinking, and the implications of his concepts. Kant’s response wasn’t to argue or critique these ideas, defending the mainstream against an attack. He didn’t want to defeat Hume, but to include him as the foundation for a new way of thinking about knowledge. In response, Kant wrote works that have had equal, if not greater, longevity and affects as Hume’s. 

Being creative and open-minded to new directions in thought and life, not being critical and confrontational by instinct, is how philosophical progress is made, how new ideas are made and transform the ways we think.

Never Trust the Gut Over the Mind, Composing, 13/07/2013

Friday, I was working on some edits to my ecophilosophy manuscript, particularly some passages on the nature of intuition. Intuition has become something of a bugbear to me in contemporary philosophy. When I was at the Canadian Philosophical Association this June, I delivered a commentary on a moral philosophy presentation where I ripped into the widespread practice in the field of backing up your argument with appeal to intuition. It’s difficult to read any moral philosophy today that doesn’t at some point back up an argument with an appeal to ‘our common sense moral intuitions.’ Such appeals are all over the theory of knowledge and mind too, with writers justifying their ideas by appeal to their intuitions about esoteric scenarios about what counts as knowledge, or the nature of what mind is. Those who appeal to intuitions take them to be genuine insights into what is true.

For example, one can justify retributive conceptions of justice on the grounds that it accords with our intuition that wrongdoers deserve punishment. In environmentalist moral philosophy, writers have often appealed to our feelings of awe and majesty when we experience grand natural vistas as intuitions of nature’s value.

This appeal is all poppycock to me. In the literal, etymological sense of poppycock, derived from the Dutch pappe cac, meaning soft shit.* Some of the most liberating philosophical work I’ve come across in the last few years has been the work of Jonathan Weinberg. He’s done actual empirical research on ‘common sense intuitions.’ He conducts laboratory experiments where he gives people different permutations of common thought experiments from which philosophers pump intuitions. And there is no agreement or preponderance among people on any of their so-called intuitions. An intuition offers no indication of your conclusion being truth, only that the person considering the question feels that this response is obvious to him.

Stephen Fry, who taught
me the true meaning of
poppycock, among other
things.

*Thank you Stephen Fry, for writing the scene in your novel The Liar where a character insults someone with this exact phrase. It is hilarious.

Maybe the only reason you have an intuition that wrongdoers deserve punishment for their crimes is because you’ve grown up all your life being told that wrongdoers deserve punishment for their crimes. Maybe you’ve never considered seriously the idea that it would be better if we treated criminals and wrongdoers as damaged people in need of care and repair. If that idea sounds silly to you, maybe you haven’t spent enough time training yourself to question the dogmas you’ve absorbed all your life. Because that’s what philosophy is for.

It seems anathema that philosophy, an intellectual tradition that values calm, rational judgement, and critique of mainstream values and ideas, would come to rely on using intuitive gut feelings to justify our arguments, and taking those gut feelings for the indubitable truths of common sense. Philosophy is supposed to be the discipline founded on questioning common sense presumptions, not taking those presumptions as intuitive truths to be justified through our careful reasoning and argument. Philosophy started with the role models of mystics, gadflies, and rebels. I hate referring to Socrates, just because I find such appeals so gauche. But I find it infuriating that the discipline has developed in such a way that so many of us take intuitions to be indications of the truth, instead of intuitions of a potentially problematic status quo that may need to be taken down a peg or three.

We should try speaking a little truth to power, instead of letting established powers dictate what we take to be true.