What’s the Point If We Can’t Be Perfect? Research Time, 10/05/2018

I want to pick up on the point I was talking about on Monday’s post. Aporias – the endpoint of Jacques Derrida’s greatest works. Those moments where, as you examine a concept or work through an argument, the idea itself escapes from you. And it escapes because you know it so well.

It’s a very profound idea. Paul Patton writes about aporia very well, delivering a critique of the idea that equally implicates the main trend among Jacques Derrida’s work. In the words of Canada’s most famous and equally annoying scholar, post-modernism.

A lot about Derrida was erased in his popular
uptake. His most famous books are his early ones,
the ones that made the biggest shocks when they
dropped. I've met a few Derrida fans who don't
know what to make of his later work, who don't
understand why he would have made such a
puzzling turn to ethics. They're always the
ones who have to be reminded where Derrida
came from – that he was a black Algerian Jew.

I mean post-modernism in its popular reception – among barely original academics, and many in areas of real life who were familiar with only a vague outline of the major messages of Derrida’s work. It was the notion that we aren’t even able to express truth in language.

This is the general reception of the aporia in Derrida’s work. He took many different approaches to the same concept throughout his career – absolute truth. Derrida followed through on one of Nietzsche’s central projects – he wanted to develop a way of thinking that followed atheism to its logical endpoint.

No matter how limited human reason might be in the world – goes the traditional Western idea – there still is an absolute truth about the nature and order of the world. That’s God’s truth, the word that expresses being itself.

So here’s Derrida thinking through whether truth is possible when God is truly dead to you. When there is no Word. His later work considered that idea in an ethical context – How does absolute truth emerge from our ordinary experience with other people?* From our ordinary experience with other people – love, friendship, being asked for help.

* And the answer was already in ancient Jewish teachings. Please never forget that Derrida was Jewish, a religion with a long-running culture of mystical scholarship that is both pantheist, atheist, and monotheist.

I think the philosophical tradition among its keepers in the university sector – at least that sub-section called Continentals – would have been better off if this end of Derrida’s career came first. As it is, it was his nature as an academic – a historian of philosophy as well as a philosopher – messed with the reception of his idea.

The first half of Derrida’s career focussed on the history of philosophy – so he was examining all the traditional arguments and works where the godly concept of absolute truth appeared as a serious aim. He brought those concepts to aporia to demonstrate the real untenability of absolute truth without some point in your thinking where you take it as given.

So you made all the traditional arguments trying to arrive at the truth of some philosophical concept like justice or knowledge as going nowhere by their nature. Derrida wasn’t a nihilist – he was a phenomenologist, an atheist, a Jew, a historian, and a deeply ethical person.

But when you reveal the emptiness of absolute truth without also giving people at least a clue to where it actually occurs in the material world, you end up with nihilists. Your sequel came too late.

That’s the heart of Paul Patton’s critique of Derrida – his big argument at the start of his most purely philosophical book. It was the interpretation that he used to shock other academic philosophers out of their thrall to Derrida and onto Deleuze.

Deleuze makes aporia – the most unsettled but most profound state of philosophical thinking – into his starting point. Aporia is a particularly solemn way of catching hold of that total chaos where there’s no reliable truth or fact – chaos.

Derrida’s early philosophy was about revealing how our comforting and dogmatic truths reduce themselves to chaos. Deleuze starts his philosophy crafting order from chaos.

A very oversimplified story. But all polemics are.

How Could We Have Missed It? Research Time, 02/05/2018

You know, I want to be a little careful about how I write this post, given how Kanye West’s publicity for his latest single seems to have taken an unexpected turn.

Through some of my notes from a while ago, I’m having another look at a recurring problem in my own political thinking – Why do people desire their slavery? I’m not at all talking about what Kanye’s talking about, and I’m rather glad I never have.*

* My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is still a masterpiece, and I’m going to keep listening to it. Though I will never do so in a way that will ever give Kanye West money again. He’s had enough of mine.

If you don't understand its danger, you can't protect yourself.

No, I’m talking about the slavery of fascist ideas – embracing the leadership of an increasingly authoritarian state as long as it acts in the name of your resentments.

I started reading the latest book by Timothy Snyder this week, The Road to Unfreedom. It's a fascinating analysis of the ideas, ideologies, imagery, and marketing communications techniques at the heart of modern fascism’s resurgence. Some thoughts on that one directly are coming eventually.

I’m still looking through this idea with Gilles Deleuze’s concepts themselves, for now. Paul Patton’s book on his political concepts reveal a few useful aspects of our return to fascism.

For one thing, he helps explain how so many mainstream leaders in governments, political parties, businesses, and international institutions didn’t really see this anti-democratic movement coming. There were troubling developments in places like Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary.

Awful parties with policies built around racism were terribly successful in local elections. But those were in backward countries, the excuses went, where democratic thinking was still under-developed.

Billionaires and former spies kept dying rather violently. Some words were definitely said along diplomatic channels, but it was surely a simple matter of a heavy hand from an old-fashioned leader. Nothing to be concerned about. Nothing to see here, folks.

Why did so many liberal democrats not see the danger of fascism’s comeback? I think Deleuze, Patton, and Snyder are all onto something, though they all describe the same phenomenon a bit differently.

Picture: A kindly old man.

Democrats tend to feel like the principles of democracy make so much sense, that it’s intuitive that it’s the best life. The problem is, they’ve been raised in a democratic country with democratic values baked into almost every aspect of the culture. Or at least enough for it to be really significant.

Most liberal democrats are ordinary folks for whom this society is just how government, law, business works. When you take something for granted so intuitively as most liberal democrats take democracy, you’re unable to conceive of a different way of life. Once people understand democracy, you think, of course they’ll want to embrace it.

That’s dangerous thinking, because it means you no longer know how to argue for the greatness of democracy. You never learned what democracy’s real virtues were. You only know the call-and-response.

What’s great about democracy? “Freedom!” What keeps us free? “Democracy!” Isn’t it great to be free? “Yeah!”

If you can’t even conceive why people would reject your values, then how can you even start figuring out how to protect them from attack. It's difficult enough for you to understand why anyone would want to attack democracy in the first place.

George W. Bush said “they hate our freedom.” Which sounds amazing. But what does it mean? It’s been nearly two decades since I first asked that question. Since we all should have been asking that question. But so few of our leaders – whether politicians, writers, or business leaders – can even take a decent shot at answering.

The Full Implications of Empiricism, Research Time, 08/04/2018

Follow the logic of a position through to its natural conclusion. This isn’t always done. Usually, when you’re talking to other philosophers, it never gets done because someone sidetracks the story with a question, interrupts, and swings things in a totally different direction.

Usually the direction of their own work. I’ve been there. I’ve done it before, unfortunately for my trying to avoid hypocrisy. But I don’t want to do it anymore.

What seems like ordinary beauty in art to us today, was a revolution
that enraged people with its provocative smashing of aesthetic rules
taught as universals. Could art be beautiful if it wasn't faithfully
realistic? We don't ask that question now.
Henri Matisse, Still Life With Lemons

So the other day, I wrote a few quick remarks about Gilles Deleuze’s critique of Hegel. Well, not Hegel per se. But the idea that was at the core of Hegel’s work, and which so profoundly influenced so many thinkers in the society where Deleuze lived – mid-20th century France.

The real is the rational. Reality has the same fundamental structure as human rationality. Begin by understanding the simple and arrive at the complex, until at last you’re able to comprehend all the complexity the world can possibly offer you.

There’s another aspect of this way of thinking as well – your attitude to universal knowledge. When I say universal knowledge, I mean questions, answers, and inquiries to questions like “What is beauty?”

Plato’s most famous dialogues are prime examples. I’ve met enough students and professors who see philosophy as a discipline to be about discovering the answers to the questions that Plato never could discover.

Let’s leave aside the most obvious critique of this idea – that aporia was the point of any inquiry into a universal question like “What is beauty?” and “What is justice?” Questions that aren’t supposed to have answers, that aren’t built to be answers, but to encourage thinking.

So that's aporia. You want to explore more of that, go read some Jacques Derrida. I’d recommend starting with a really short book he wrote called Aporias. Surprise surprise.

Deleuze explores a different aspect of these universal questions. Universal questions are fundamentally general – You search for a concept that holds across all cases. The problem with such a project is that it presumes the structure of human rationality as it is will extend legitimately over all of existence.

You want to buy Plato to wear on your chest?

If I can use some insider’s imagery to describe the attitude – you presume that a thinker doesn’t have to leave his armchair to figure out all the great truths of existence.

What does that presumption mean? That the powers of human rationality are already complete. And that’s a very presumptuous presumption.

Empiricism is a perspective of epistemic humility – we’re humble about the powers of human knowledge. Acknowledge that we’re contingent creatures whose power to think is pretty remarkable and kind of amazing, but that arose from conditions that resulted in some biases and blindnesses.

Humans aren’t perfect. Humans have a lot to learn about how our knowledge can develop, a lot of new powers that can help us live better in our world. What are those powers? I have a few ideas, and I’ve talked about them before. But you can only figure out what those powers are or can be if you investigate the world.

I’m going to go back to Plato for this illustration, because of the power Plato holds over philosophical thought for the Western tradition. I mean, Plato is the only person of whom the entire tradition has been described as a series of footnotes to his work. I love a lot of the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead, but I think his Oxbridge cultural conservatism was showing a little too much here.

A lot of Plato’s dialogues start with Socrates challenging the adequacy of everyday thinking about complex concepts – beauty, justice, piety, love, etc. Somebody frames their thinking in terms of asking, for example, what things are beautiful.

Socrates’ character is right to call these questions inadequate to the task. The question “What things are beautiful?” doesn’t explore why we think those things are beautiful in the first place. So you have to explore “What is beauty?” before you can figure out what things truly are beautiful. You have to understand the general categories before you can start building your taxonomy.

Marcel Duchamp was one of the most progressive
artists of the last century because of how he
purposely challenged the notion of what could
even count as art, let alone what counts as
beautiful. His work didn't even try to be beautiful,
and so ended up redefining whole new ways to
think about art and beauty.

This aspect of Plato’s influence has severely limited how empiricism could develop in the Western tradition, because it frames any investigation of the world as requiring complete general knowledge to get off the ground and guide itself.

But this critique doesn’t kill empiricism, as too many over the last 2500 years have thought. It forces empiricism to get serious. Let’s lay out how the model questions should go.

Uncritical Empiricism: “What things are beautiful?”
General Questions: “What is beauty?”
Contingent Empiricism: “What can this show me about beauty?”

The general question is how rationalism can inform empiricism. But having been so informed, an empiricism that follows this more nuanced logic to its endpoint will understand the contingency of its questions.

Ask what the world can show you about your concepts, your terms, your categories. A contingent approach to empiricism is how knowledge can progress. Our knowledge can become more complete, can approach completeness.

But total completeness isn’t an achievable goal – it’s an asymptote, an attractor. We improve by using progress toward completion as our guide, but understand that only God can ever be complete. We, in contrast, can be better.

Paradoxes of Democracy II: Deeper Truths than Facts, Research Time, 22/03/2018

The research I’ve been doing this month for the democratic governance white paper dovetails with interests for my larger projects on political philosophy. I’m also writing today’s post to get through a sharp turn in my paper’s argument.

Let’s start with my example from yesterday – the dedicated movement Trumpist. Let’s call him TD. He watches FOX, reads Breitbart, listens to talk radio no his commute, enthusiastically follows The Donald’s Twitter feed.

How dare you, TJ? How very dare you?! Do not use the Satan image
from a much under-appreciated but a personal favourite Doctor Who
story of mine from the Russell T Davies era. This is not for you!

TD considers Barack Obama an authoritarian socialist, the climate justice movement a hoax to enrich Al Gore and other investors connected to the Democratic Party, and the Clinton Global Initiative a money laundering and influence peddling scheme for Democratic Party interests around the world.

Given all this, TD is actually a very virtuous person. He believes that a culture of corruption and kleptocracy has grown around the Democratic Party, and that Donald Trump’s Republicans are the crew to drain the swamp.

The problem is, these are conspiracy theories, propaganda, and extremist lies. They have just enough basis in reality to be believable, or at least plausible, even though it’s become nearly impossible to tell whether the suspicion of corruption or actual corruption came first to justify the investigation.

TD lives in a media ecology in which these ideas about the moneyed progressive left are explored and repeated regularly as if they were true. The ethical centre of his heart isn’t the problem – it’s the input he uses to guide it.

The question becomes how you orient a person to recognize the greater corruption – that Trump’s family and administration is the real kleptocracy. TD’s entire thinking is informed by messaging that constructs a pretty comprehensive understanding of the world. It’s just that they’re based on alternative facts – alternative facts with enough rootedness in real history to be plausible.

I think I've found my new favourite image of Vladimir
Putin. Art by Pete Kirill

I'm not sure how to break into the worldview of people like TD. A basic principle of TD’s political thinking is that any progressive message is the idiocy of liberals or the lies of the corrupt (or communist) Democratic Party.

One article I found in my research helped me situate where such people sit as ideological objects. Timothy Snyder is a historian/philosopher of the culture and politics of eastern Europe and Russia. He wrote about Ivan Ilyin, one of the most innovative and complete fascist political philosophers.

Ilyin was a new name to me, and one I’d like to explore more of. Especially since several of his principles of governance have become explicit policies and approaches of Vladimir Putin’s government.

What stood out to me was Ilyin’s idea of how a fascist leader treats history. I think I’m safe saying that folks with progressive politics have a specific understanding of history. Orienting politics toward justice means identifying, understanding, and healing after old crimes.

So the past is a field for investigation, exploring all the gritty detail of history as you can. You must understand precisely what was done and how if any of us can have a profound enough cultural conversation to overcome our mutual hatreds, break the social/racial castes that make global human civilization so hateful.

But if you don’t want to do any of that awesome shit, then history becomes something else. You don’t have to investigate the real unfolding of history – if anything, you want to obscure, bury, and deny it. Repackage history as a lost golden age that only our fearless leader’s will and power can restore.

An image to illuminate your ideal. A utopia.
• • •
Ilyin’s work seems like the most multidimensional exploration of fascism as a political philosophy – in Snyder’s telling, makes me want to get hold of Snyder’s new book to ground myself in Ilyin’s thought before seeing if I want to engage it in any detail for Utopias.

Maybe a more sustained engagement with Russian fascism is for another project. I’m doing enough with Utopias already. I don’t want to add more and more to it.

Follow the Causes Not the Office Walls, Research Time, 06/03/2018

There's a particular kind of academic thinker in philosophy departments that holds the discipline back from what it can be. I’m not sure how best to label them.

It would be one of those pithy, insulting but accurate labels. The kind of label that would make you chuckle when you’re reading Nietzsche. In my research circles, there aren’t too many of these people. But if you’ve had any experience in different universities’ philosophy departments, or been to a few disciplinary conferences, you’ll know the type.

The Skull of the Smoking Mirror, representation of the Aztec god
Tezcatlipoca – co-creator of the human world, god of time, and
the embodiment of change through conflict. I suppose you could
call Tezcatlipoca the god of creative destruction.
I could see an eccentric egomaniacal Silicon Valley billionaire
building a shrine to Tezcatlipoca in his home.

I could call them the over-specialist, but it’s connected to a term – specialist – that’s still complimentary. Maybe the disciplinary conservative, but that’s too clunky. Here’s a cheeky word – tell me what you think.

Mirror-skull.

Whenever they think they’re looking outside at the world, they’re actually looking at more of what they already know. Here’s their model action, what best exemplifies the way they think.

A student brings a paper to a Mirror-skull prof for comments. The prof reads it, and among his* comments are stars written next to some footnotes, reference list items, and sources throughout the paper. They’re the places where he’s marked “Not philosophy – Remove”

* While they’re often his, sometimes they’re hers as well. One of the most insufferably (and sadly unexpectedly) such academics I’ve met is a woman.

If a work isn’t part of the academic discipline of philosophy, it isn’t worth including in a philosophy paper. For example. Say I’m writing a paper about Richard Rorty, and I refer to Neil Gross’ excellent philosophical biography of Rorty. It’s a book that threads philosophical exploration of Rorty’s ideas with an argument about how his life circumstances conditioned those ideas.

What would a Mirror-skull say? Cut it all – it isn’t philosophy.

Now, there probably aren’t this many people working in academic philosophy who embody this attitude so intensely. I’ve met a few, but they’re just the purest expression of a tendency that I’m not the only one to highlight. It’s a tendency to fly away from any kind of transversal approach to knowledge.

How can people learn from research when all the new material is
locked away where no one can reach it without paying thousands
in subscriptions or tuition?

The Review and Reply Collective has recently posted some pretty brutal critiques of the state of contemporary university philosophy. Kenneth Westphal has published an artful and artistic fist of rage against a university system that has given itself over to elitism and marginalization.

It’s a complex piece, but if I can summarize the basic message in a sentence or two, it’s like this. It’s utter hypocrisy to position your institutions as the leading edge of human knowledge when original research is so heavily restricted from the general public through the enormous paywalls of academic publishing prices.

Here’s another example. The first in a round of reviews of Taking Back Philosophy by Bryan Van Norden is scheduled to post at the Review and Reply Collective next week. The book is a polemic, following up a gauntlet he threw down in the New York Times a couple of years ago.

Van Norden is an American researcher who specializes in Chinese and Indian philosophy, specifically Confucian and Buddhist strains. He writes comparative philosophy for journals. It’s a very respectable university career.

His book is a call for diversification in philosophy departments, for basically two reasons. The one he concentrates on most is, I think, the least persuasive. That reason: North America is becoming more diverse ethnically and in cultural heritage, so departments must design curriculums to speak to the positions of their students.

I don’t think this is the most persuasive because a major movement of political revanchism in the West today is turning all the power of the state machinery to holding and reversing that diversity growth. There’s nothing inevitable about the diversification and pluralism of Western countries.

Western people can no longer treat the cultures and traditions outside
our lineage as unworthy of attention. Business leaders, politicians,
and activists all understand this. Yet there are still so many in
philosophy departments that remain stuck in their minds that have
become mirror-walled prisons.

His other reason for diversifying the philosophy curriculums of the West is more compelling to me, despite Van Norden’s relative de-emphasis. Our world is globalized. As non-Western economic centres grow in power and influence, we’ll need to study their own philosophical, ideological, moral, and political traditions to deal with people from these regions as competitors, friends, and partners.

Just as a study of Western philosophy can help you understand German, French, English, or US-American cultures, a study of East Asian philosophy can help you understand Chinese, Korean, Cambodian, and Indonesian cultures.

The Review and Reply Collective itself is rooted in the global community of Science and Technology Studies, Social Studies of Science, Social Epistemology and other sub-disciplines that – instead of narrowing their focus – expand and diversify their influences and research bases.

For about a decade now, I’ve understood that breaking through common-sensical disciplinary boundaries improves your knowledge. The causes of real phenomena don’t pay attention to the contingent structures of our university disciplines.

I got to thinking of this reading some old notes on Deleuze and Guattari, about their critique of Jacques Lacan in Anti-Œdipus. They understood how psychological states have their causes and conditions not just in the psychiatric, but in historical, social, and economic processes as well.

It seems common sense to us now, but an academic orthodoxy had fallen across French psychiatry and psychology, stating that mental health had only mental causes. Transversality often breaks with common sense – so much the worse for common sense.

Tony on Gil II: How Politics Begins in Thought, Jamming, 05/03/2018

As the principle has been received popularly these days, it’s been kind of a shit show. A disaster. The centrepiece of contemporary reactionary conspiracy. And at the centre of some serious anti-Semitism too.

Yet it is actually true that radical social and political change begins with culture, with how people understand themselves. That includes what resources they have available to understand themselves, whether or not they use them.

Here’s how Antonio Negri put it in his essay on the thought of Félix Guattari – The best way to deal with the death of Man is to celebrate the self-creation of people.

Is nihilism the only response to the impossibility of universal
knowledge?

So what does that actually mean? Let’s unpack it.

The “death of Man” is the old way of thinking about the birth of what’s called postmodernism. There was once, so the story goes, a universal concept of the human that everyone could believe in – the living embodiment of universal reason itself.

Faith in the Man of European culture as the highest yet expression of universal reason peaked in the 19th century, as this image of the universal Man justified the global imperialist occupations of the time. But it was also the heart of Westerners’ conceptions of themselves as individuals and as a culture. Even subordinated people like women, the poor, or well-off members of racialized groups believed it.

But the scientific underpinnings of this self-image – Western Man as the most advanced organism on Earth – began to slip as the implications of the truth of evolution began to be understood in popular culture.

Life developed contingently, and reason was fundamentally instrumental, if not a spandrel. The Western image of Man was teetering from his superiority’s justification. Not only was there no purpose in Nature itself, but such a purpose wasn’t the dominion of Earth and all other peoples.

Frankly, it's easier to think of yourselves as the highest achievement
of the human race when you have everyone who's different from
you treating you like a divinely appointed king.

I’m not going to get into the details of what effects came immediately from this crisis of faith in Western Man. We’ll be here for the length of a thousand* dissertations. I want to get to the last few decades, when the broadly existentialist tradition that flowed from this idea finally started getting creative about how to handle it.

* At least, just to get a vague sense of all that was going on.

Think about the contemporary creative approach in terms of knowledge. What kind of systems of thought and investigations could you use to achieve genuinely universal knowledge?

Here’s the kind that was the only sensible answer to that question during the heyday of that concept of Man – a single, simple field of knowledge that encompassed all the variety of Earth. Lay aside Denis Diderot’s actual thinking, and consider the popular image of the original Encyclopedia – all the facts and truths of the world in a single compendium. One house of knowledge.

If you lose the possibility of that achievement, then you lose your bearings. Compared to that one all-enfolding universality, everything else falls short. I mean, of course it would. Less than perfection can never be perfect. By that standard, no human knowledge can measure up. True may as well be false, good and evil are meaningless, there’s no right or wrong.

But only the fool says in his heart that because there is no universal, there is no truth or good. It only means that there’s no universal, truth, or good.

Jomo Kenyatta in a gathering of Mau Mau liberation fighters. What
was good for Kenya wasn't good for Britain, living demonstration
that not every approach to the world can harmonize together.

This doesn’t reduce to any of this “Good for me and Good for you” relativism that you hear from self-entitled 18-year-old dudes taking their first philosophy course and trying to get the prof to justify their dickishness. At least, that’s where I always heard it.

See, that relativism shut people up in themselves – in their own subjectivity – much deeper than they really are. It ignores the fact that we all share a material world. So our different conceptions of truth and good – as individuals, as cultures, as mass media empires – will overlap and influence each other.

We live in society, in relationships with each other. We all figure out similar problems in the ordinary and profound parts of our lives. We communicate.

We harmonize a whole bunch of different approaches to the world. They overlap and reciprocate ideas, among so many other ways of influencing each other. The best way to organize how to get as many approaches to knowledge as possible working together is so that everyone who has something productive (or at least potentially productive) can contribute to the overall project for knowledge and truth.

The only approaches not permitted are those that denigrate and devalue other approaches. It smacks too much of the false arrogance that there’s one universal truth, and that of course there’s one Man that expresses it.

The Emptiness of Meaning in an Exploded Life, Research Time, 22/02/2018

Jean-Claude Polack once wrote a wonderful essay about Félix Guattari. Polack is a French psychiatrist who worked with Guattari at La Borde for more than a decade. His essay in The Guattari Effect volume blends philosophy, psychiatric theory, medical practice, and memoir of an old friend.

My personal favourite in the volume, even more than the essays by Guattari himself. I love Guattari, but I can never expect him to write in a straightforward way.

For that reason, Polack explains a bit better than Guattari what the core principles of their practice were, and why they constituted such a major break from Freudianism.

We are material assemblages all functioning together, and sometimes
those functions can break down or overheat.

Polack describes in very clear terms the experience of working in an indefinite-term, in-patient, live-in communal facility for the most intense psychotics in France. Their patients literally were totally unable to control their minds.

The mainstream schools of psychiatry in France in the 1960s and 70s were shot through with a rationalism that was utterly inadequate to deal with such people as psychotics.

Polack describes Freudian rationalism as the quest for the one true meaning of all the deranged and delusional behaviour a person expresses. If I can put it in the language common to semiotic and postmodern philosophy of the time – because Polack did – it’s a quest for the signifier.

This is why, from this important epistemic perspective, I find a lot of postmodernist philosophy a bit tiring compared to the concepts of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. The emptiness of the signifier as necessary ground of meaning was a serious philosophical issue to so many – Jacques Lacan, Jean Beaudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze.

Hang on. Yes, I did just say Gilles Deleuze. The Logic of Sense included a lot of inquiry about the signifier-signified relationship, how solid meaning in language and communication always slips away. In his creative philosophy, I consider Deleuze to have been in danger of slipping into the same lostness that so much postmodernism fell into.

We shouldn't be so afraid to conceive of ourselves as machines. No
matter how scary the prospect might be to us sometimes.

Not much danger, but a danger nonetheless. Then Guattari showed up to demonstrate that none of this signifier stuff was really all that important to the human mind and thought. It fit well with another set of concepts in Deleuze’s work – expression.

Each body has a range of potential activity that you can explore. Some of that activity is productive, helps augment and strengthen a body. But that kind of productive activity depends on restraint – channelling, controlling activity.

A seriously schizophrenic psychotic isn't able to channel her activity at all – she can only act, or follow an obsessive central idea to its endpoint. When that’s the kind of mental illness you're dealing with, a narrative explanatory technique like psychoanalysis isn’t going to work as therapy.

Guattari and Polack – and never forget the contribution of La Borde’s chief, Jean Oury – designed therapy regimens that literally retrained psychotics to control their thoughts, moods, and actions.

The stroll through the clinic gardens built relaxed spaces in experience. The grid – a communally-managed timetable of chores – reintroduced patients to performing tasks, focussing on the practical world, and responsibility to others.

It didn't work for everyone, of course. Some people’s neural systems were too damaged. Guattari often combined these re-socialization therapies with anti-psychotic drug regimens to keep people physically on an even-enough keel to function. But they worked far better on schizophrenics than the “talking cure.”

It was therapy that repaired the machine.

Knowing the Causes of Power, Research Time, 21/02/2018

There were a lot of reasons Félix Guattari broke with Jacques Lacan and the whole rest of the Freudian-influenced schools of French psychiatry. I talked about a couple last time.

How one point of unquestioned rationalism survived into the science of psychiatry – to understand the causes of the condition is itself part of the cure. How the images arising from singular cases were taken for universal symbol structures of human personalities. Both thanks to the influence of Freud.

Here’s a third issue that constituted such a radical break – the image of the therapist’s authority.

I don’t mean this in the sense of practical, institutional authority. Guattari understood that therapists, clinicians, and those who are responsible for the care and cure of the severely mentally ill required authority to do their jobs. They needed to prescribe drugs, coordinate clinical activities, design a therapy regime.

You don't really want anyone to be authorized only by themselves, do you?

All those required legal authority – the power of a signature. Your decisions had weight, and so needed to be taken with responsibility. That responsibility required thought and devotion, an ethical weight of obligation to act in the patient’s best interest – to let their good guide you.

I read an essay by Guattari a while ago that described the dominant culture of psychiatry and mental health care practice drifting from that ideal. He gives us Lacan’s words, “The analyst is authorized only by himself.”

There are two ways to read this. One is ontologically. The cause of some practicing psychoanalyst in some little town – call him Jack from Paris* – having his authority doesn’t come from Jack himself.

* Paris, Ontario.

Jack has to earn degrees and certifications in the fields you need to be expert as an analyst and therapist. He’s cultivated deep technical and philosophical medical knowledge. His legal powers are enabled by a complex web of institutions, laws, and regulations.

Another way you can read it is ethically. Jack’s authority flows from the trust people put in him – those who hired him, administer his certification renewals, maintain the laws that give him the right to prescribe drugs and therapies, and enforce those laws when they're broken.

Both are correct, of course. And not mutually exclusive. Just looking at different features of the world. The conclusion from both sides of that argument is that the statement “The analyst is authorized only by himself” isn’t adequate to empirical reality. Such an attitude isn’t going to fit properly with the real circumstances of an analyst’s working life.

What happens when a guiding philosophical element of training conflicts so brutally with the reality of practice? Breakdown. You end up with a body of professional analysts who tick the institutional boxes, but practice with none of the respect for the mentally ill that you need to practice properly.

Certainly not enough to transform respect into mutual respect. That’s the authority of expertise, an inescapably ethical relationship. Guattari understood that a philosophical principle of considering the analyst an absolute power – the revealer, prober, curer – undermines the possibility of ethical relationships among therapists and patients.

You can't really hold such a principle and practice medicine at the same time. Thought conditions reality when the reality is our actions and relationships.

Can a Philosopher Let Herself Trust? A History Boy, 07/02/2018

After a very intense post yesterday, I want to relax a little bit. So I’m going to talk about the philosophical implications or mutual expressions of Riemannian geometry.

That's a serious joke. See, I’ve studied mathematics as someone learning about mathematics. So I know how to follow and read equations, I can see what a given operation is doing in a particular step, I can look back at the whole thing and have a decent idea of how you got from the beginning to end.

Here's how Deleuze described how Riemann changed the way people
did geometry. How he shook it to its core. Geometry had traditionally
been about the construction of different shapes. But Riemann figured
out a way to study mathematically space itself, how to construct
different spaces as well as different shapes, to see how different
shapes would behave in different spaces. A whole new axis of
complexity in geometrical possibility.

If I read the history or philosophy of mathematics, I can understand all the concepts fairly easily. I have to think a bit about it, but as long as the writer is reasonably competent, I can understand what they’re talking about.

It’s like being able to read a language, but not speak it.

I know enough mathematics to know that I’d be a terrible mathematician. When it comes to mathematics, I rely on colleagues I can trust. I run an idea by them – sometimes on a space like this blog. I ask them to comment, give a few thoughts. Tell me if I’m on the right track – definitely if I’m missing something.

I feel like university-trained researchers – I’m talking especially about the humanities and social sciences – get trapped in some paradoxes. Quite a lot of them. This one is mistaking a need to build expertise for your job, for expertise being the necessary condition of saying anything at all.

For instance, my case. If I were at a research conference, and there was a talk on some really interesting ideas in philosophy of mathematics in an otherwise lacklustre timeslot, I’d probably go. I’m pretty sure I have gone.

Sometimes – not all the time – folks would react with astonishment that I’d go see a talk in a field in which I wasn’t some level of expert. I do political theory, ethics, European thought, philosophy of ecology and biology.* Why would I go to a math theory talk?

* The people who know philosophy of ecology and biology would know that you have to understand mathematics at least as well as I do. But anyway.

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite infinity

My best friends in the university sector would, if that slot was lacklustre for them too, consider coming to the math theory talk with me. But others have been incredulous. As if the only thing you were allowed to be curious about anymore was what you were already an expert in.

Gilles Deleuze was a much better mathematician than I am. He studied mathematics well enough to teach it at the secondary level in France, which is more than I ever managed.

Study of Gottfried Leibniz’s work on differential calculus and Bernhard Riemann’s heterogeneous geometry helped Deleuze develop concepts of change and variety as fundamental principles of existence.

So when I read an article by someone who’s themselves become an expert in philosophy of mathematics and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, I’ll learn from what they say. Same way I learn from anyone who’s become an expert in what I want to learn about.

I read about how Deleuze interpreted Riemann’s work as tracing the mathematical structures of heterogeneous spaces – spaces that have entirely different properties, but are contiguous, that flow into each other. Objects can travel casually among all these spaces – ordinary as a walk between neighbourhoods – and be unaltered.

They just tumble differently. Into a valley, up a hill, around a bend, around several bends that seem like straight paths when you walk through them. Whatever. Doo bee doo.

Reality seen topologically. Perfectly legitimate – simply not quite what most of us are accustomed to. Let’s explore what makes us uncomfortable. And rely on people we trust – in their expertise and their character – to be our guides so we don’t lose ourselves.

No Rest in This World or the World to Come, Research Time, 25/01/2018

If you're wondering why the puppy is here, it'll
become important later. Right now, the puppy
wants to remind you of an old Talmudic saying
which was the closing sentence of one of
Salomon Maimon's first books.
Scholars of wisdom have no rest in this
world, or in the world to come.

You know what I love about Salomon Maimon? He was a dirty, smelly, drunk who sat in a bar for years, barely employed, pretty damn poor – but he could still get an essay out to one of the leading philosophers of the era to make an incisive critique of his work that still stands up centuries later.

Maimon was a scholar of Torah and Talmud for most of his life – teaching, writing essays on the great Jewish theologians, commentary on Kabbalah, textbooks on the Jewish religion and the Hebrew language, and works of original philosophy.

But Christian-descended people know him best for his critique of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Why his critique became so famous is actually a beautiful story.

Maimon was a fairly minor figure in German intellectual circles of the time, but knew some of the well-connected folks. Maimon knew a guy named Markus Herz, who also knew Immanuel Kant. Maimon read the Critique of Pure Reason shortly after it was published, and had some brilliant critical things of his own to say about it.

He wrote these ideas in a fairly long letter, which Herz passed along to Kant. Kant read it, and it blew him away. He publicly thanked Maimon, and praised him in public appearances as one of the only critics of his new work who was actually picking up what he was throwing down.

That any intellectual at the top of his game in creativity and public profile would do that is remarkable. That Kant would do that to a pretty obscure Jewish person – in 1780s Prussia, where Jews were pretty deeply racialized and persecuted – is a moment of ethical beauty.

I'm not exactly a Kantian, or a devotee of his philosophy. But I have a lot of praise for him as a person.

Maimon is the subject of an essay in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy, the book that’s been inspiring my last few posts – even the ones that got more than a little weird and creative. So what was the main idea in Maimon's thinking that could be said to have influenced Deleuze’s thinking most?

After a fashion, we can't see it if it doesn't move either.

It’s an understanding of how perception works that broke radically with what was taken for granted in the intellectual and scientific culture and knowledge base of Maimon’s time, the last decades of the 18th century.

Kant’s discussion of perception – and pretty much every philosophical and scientific discussion of perception – rested on an assumption that appears pretty common sense. Assume that you see things in the world.

I'm not making some kind of skeptical argument. I’m talking about objects. I see a tree. I see a bus. I see a field of grass. I see a fence. I see a puppy. I see a person. When I see a puppy, I immediately experience the puppy as a whole.

Each of these wholes in our perception – the puppy, the fence, the tree, the bus – is a stable identity in our experience.

Here was Maimon’s alternative. We don’t see wholes with stable, unambiguous identities. We perceieve actions, movements, fluctuations of differences, changes, that our perceptual apparatus – the sense organs and nervous system – assembles into what we perceive as objects.

A puppy comes into our room. We first perceive the puppy through changes. Where there was silence, there’s now skittering and yipping. Where there was an empty room, there’s now this beige-and-white speckled vision. A faint odour of dog breath creeps into your nose.

There isn’t just that one change. The whole scene continues to fluctuate. Barks alternate breathing, paws pound the floor in rhythm. The shape of the dog in our field of vision grows larger as it approaches. Its legs and ears flop and fly about. At every instance, we perceive changes.

Our real experience of the material world isn’t the objects in it – it’s the changes in it, the differentials, the fluxes. You look at pretty much all contemporary science of perception – with input from neurology, medicine, biology, robotics – and they’ve pretty much proven Maimon’s argument. At least in a kind of essence.

Our world is material and real, but what’s most material – most easily grasped by an organism in perception – are its changes, its movements.

Clues, Signs, Traces, Imperatives III: Care, Composing, 24/01/2018

So the detective.

There were four qualities of thought in that tentative description I gave of that persona, the conceptual persona of philosopher as detective. Care, attention to detail, commitment to ideals, understanding causes and conditions

Care. In several senses of the word, but I first want to talk about the sense of carefulness. You’re aware of the power of your own words, actions, and thinking. You don’t dismiss what you’re doing at any time as being inconsequential.

A wonderful spin on the detective myth in the last couple of decades
is when the detective's ideals are rooted in the life of her family,
friends, and community. Where she acts to bring justice to her own
world, even when it's the inconsequential scale of a little town.

This is because you understand that any action – no matter how trivial, ordinary, or small it might be – can have wide and massive consequences. Not just any intentional action, but any event at all. Any minor flux in the development of the universe.

As a proverb, it’s the butterfly’s wings that cause a hurricane. “For want of a nail.”

People who act with care are attentive to chaos, mindful of the power that a small difference, a small change, can make in a massively wide web of processes, bodies, and networks. A few poorly stamped punchcards can change the course of human civilization.

Attention to detail. Why do I emphasize this when I’ve already talked about carefulness? Because I don’t want to refer to detail in the world, as you investigate it and discover new aspects of existence. No, I mean attention to detail in your own thinking.

If you’ve ever taken an intro-ish level philosophy course, you probably heard a lot of talk about rigour in writing. Way too many teachers – from the lowliest marking assistant to full professor – think this amounts to meticulous disputation. Argue over every detail, hunt for every flaw, for every suspected flaw, and interrogate it ruthlessly.

That attitude makes it very easy to think you’re a brilliant philosophical debater when you’re in fact a gaslighter. Listen to an argument, think of a way to spin some self-defeating interpretation.

Talking about Sherlock Holmes is almost inevitable when you talk
about detective myths in contemporary culture. His massive
gravity in the development of the myth makes him impossible to
ignore. I liked the stories as a boy, but today, I find the character so
limited. Sherlock has an ethical detachment – no matter how the
portrayal depicts his friendships, Sherlock remains inescapably
a detective who investigates for the joy of puzzle-solving. The
consequences – the ethical heart of the case – are important to
him, but remain in the shadow of his perverse joy of the case as
an intellectual game.

“Couldn't you say that . . .” is a phrase I’ve heard pronounced with the most poisonous smugness, dribbling milky vomit from a mouth onto a seminar table.

Philosophical writing, done best, means that you make every word count. You write with such precision that even your ambiguities are a perfect balance of provocation and befuddlement. Create the space for your readers to finish your argument themselves – the same message each in their own way.

It’s what you should at least aim for, even if you never quite achieve it.

Commitment to ideals. See the paragraph above. You rarely, if ever, achieve the best that you’re capable of – a perfect push to your limits. But if you always try for it, you’ll avoid your very worst and do better than if you’d lived and thought without ambition.

I don’t just mean your character, though I certainly am talking about your character. I’m also talking about all your values, everything you want for society. Fail if there’s no other way out, but you’ll fail with dignity.

Better than nothing, I guess?

Understanding. Accountability to yourself. Always know what you’re doing. Not just in its potential consequences in the chaos of life, though there is that. Not just in living with integrity, the dignity that manifests in commitment to ideals, though there’s definitely that.

There must always be a pathos to the detective – caring about the
world because he's part of the world, the fundamental
interconnectedness of all things, including himself. A union of
knowledge and chaos that inspires joy and love.

Develop a sense of personal gravity – always be aware that there’s a very serious dimension to your actions. Consequences of chaotic actions – losing your spare horseshoe nails, poor maintenance on an election punchcard machine in Florida – are not a matter of games.

You don’t just look down on the Earth like some kind of immature god, where we’re all just playthings you watch for entertainment. Destruction has to elicit sympathy if you’re going to avoid becoming a callous, deranged, psychopath.

So I’m coming back to care. A full walkthrough of each of the four domains of philosophical thinking – existence, knowledge, character, and society. If I can get technical – ontology, epistemology, ethics, and morality (or politics, when the crowds get big).

Care now in the typical sense – I care for you, your life and well-being concerns me. I will suffer if you’re harmed or if you become a worse person than you are now. Strength and joy empower you, no matter where they occur and what expresses them. That there is more such strength and joy in the world, the better that world is.

The danger of a life in chaos (existence), the detailed attention of concern (knowledge), which reveals the gravity of your actions (morality), becoming a ground for your commitment to reshaping the world for the better (ethics, character).

The detective whose careful attention to the seemingly inconsequential details of the world reveals a terrible injustice that she cannot ignore without correcting. As an image, it’s a cultural myth. As a concept, it’s a comprehensive philosophy.

Thought Moves So Needs to Work, Research Time, 15/01/2018

Any empiricism worth the name will inevitably be a pragmatism. What the hell does that actually mean?

Remember what I was saying on Friday about philosophical conversation on profound metaphysical concepts – that they never actually end anywhere definitive. That, in itself is not a problem. But when you say the conversation’s point is to discover profound metaphysical answers, you break the process.

Aporia – when a conversation sputters into infinity. It’s the moment in a chain of reasoning when you realize that the only way to engage this concept is constant reinterpretation and self-critique.

Plato’s dialogues are excellent examples of this kind of reasoning.

These are always questions about the essence of profound ethical and ontological concepts. What is the nature of existence? What is the universal good? What is justice?Conversations and reasoning about these questions will never get you definitive answers – only deeper, more detailed, context-shifted new approaches to the questions.

Do you think your words are powerful enough on their own that you
can argue your way to the most profound truths?

That's great! We want those new ways to understand the concepts we use to understand our existence and our ethics. We need to figure out how our values can guide us through tough times – how we can adapt our values to new needs and crises.

The problem is when we approach these questions actually thinking they can have definitive answers – full stop, the answer is given, tell the populace.

You can’t perfect concepts as profound as “What is the divine? What is the good?” to deliver it to people as an absolute. They are imperfectible, because they’re adaptable.

So if you want to deliver answers to profound metaphysical questions as perfected dogmas, be prepared to deliver inadequate product. Because the concepts in those questions are not adequate to definitive, unchanging answers.

The moral truths of low-impact communities like Hellenic Greece won’t help us deal with, for example, the problems of our ecologically-transformative cities as moral concepts for how we run societies.

Here’s another problem with thinking profound metaphysical questions have definitive answers, which you can discover through argument. You become too caught up on the back-and-forth, refuting each other over and over again. Worst of all, you come to think this mutual refutation is getting you closer to that powerful metaphysical truth.

You find yourself asking entirely the wrong questions yourself – and definitely getting answers that are so wrong in so many ways. It’s because you’re trying to end an inquiry that functions best by never ending, by always remaining open.

I don’t just mean stop it, of course – anyone can stop a philosophical argument whenever they want. When I say end, I mean complete it with a clear, definitive, correct, universally valid answer.

Treating questions of justice, existence, the good, and others like those as if they weren’t mean to change and adapt swings you away from their purpose – adapting our ethical thinking to the new moral problems we face.

It swings you away from the world and into yourselves.

Freedom From Thought, Research Time, 11/01/2018

I was reading an interesting article yesterday morning on the way to work. Joan Scott’s “How the Right Weaponized Free Speech” didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. But it reminded me of those things, which made for a downbeat start to my day.

It discussed the victory of revanchist politics on most college campuses in North America today. The most vile, aggressive racist, sexist, and anti-trans expression is now considered protected speech. Meanwhile, attempts by the victims of racist, sexist, and anti-trans bullying and verbal assault are declared fragile snowflakes and fascists for wanting to have their places of education protected from such bullying.

You'll be free because I'll tell you exactly what to think!

You might read this and think, ‘Surely, it’s the opposite! Surely free speech is under siege on campus, thanks to those protestors!’ If you think that, it’s a sign of revanchism’s victory – the presumption that racist speech needs protection because it’s someone’s opinion.

Right there is the false equivalence that won the white supremacist wing their victory on campuses – that freedom to speak and discuss issues is the same as freedom to hold your opinion in the face of any and all criticism. Opinion has become sacred.

Gilles Deleuze wrote about this, in very abstract terms of course, in the final pages of What Is Philosophy?. Opinion was never supposed to be sacred, according to the values of free speech and free discussion.

Don't even say opinion is the battlefield, that free speech is about conflict over people’s opinions, and who shares which opinions. Opinion, says Deleuze, has the most potential of any other form of human thinking to destroy knowledge itself.

Opinion destroys knowledge because an opinion is an attitude that transforms an idea or a perspective into an aggressive posture. An opinion is the product of a dogma, a set of principles that can easily appear to be legitimate knowledge, but that’s a false appearance.

How can we make this distinction? Well, there are questions of falsifiability, of course. This is the old recourse to fidelity to truth, opposed to fidelity to a given opinion. If you hold a belief, but are willing to drop or change it in the face of contradictory of contrary* evidence, then you ultimately care more about truth than your particular opinion.

* Respectively.

That’s one distinction, but I think it doesn’t quite make the distinction I think is best. It doesn’t identify the toxic elements of any thinking in terms of opinion. Fidelity to the truth foregrounds correspondence – it distinguishes good from bad opinion. Good opinion is humbly held, falsifiable opinion. Bad opinion is dogma.

The political heart of Gilles Deleuze's work is a guide to fight
fascism where it lives and thrives – inside your own fearful soul,
when you're scared of taking responsibility for your own
thinking and knowledge.

Deleuze’s distinction is between opinion and creative thinking, between holding an opinion and seeking to become a genuine expert. See, when you hold an opinion with humility, that’s nice, but you still rely on some authority to sanctify that opinion. You still aren’t in charge of your knowledge – you’re following orders.

No one can ever be in charge of their knowledge at the intensity or comprehensiveness of becoming an expert in every subject. There’s too much to know. I’m instead talking about an attitude toward knowledge – learning enough about how knowledge itself works to know how to take charge of your own knowledge without skepticism becoming a universal acid.

When you think only in terms of your opinions, you think algorithmically. The opinion becomes a template that stamps out each new thought of your own according to its pattern. It’s cookie-cutter thinking, mechanistic thinking according to a plan.

Deleuze calls it the thought that ends thinking, because you become an echo, a copy. Your thoughts follow dogmas. As an artist, your product becomes entirely cliché. As a follower of science, you think all knowledge will ultimately reduce to some formula that can fit on a tshirt. As a thinker, you think only in talking points.

Such thinking is comfortable because you take no risks. You just pump out whatever is expected of you when you join a community that gives you your thoughts to think. Such a life may not be empty – you may have a lot of friends in that lazy community, and they may comfort you when you’re confused.

A life of opinion means never being confused again – you always know what to think and say. Because you’re not thinking, you’re repeating. Because you’re not speaking, you’re parroting.

The Relief of Reading Brilliant Work, Jamming, 07/01/2018

As you can tell from some of my posts involving his work in the past, Richard Dawkins annoys the hell out of me.

He’s the unfortunately self-appointed intellectual leader of the obnoxious, smug (and borderline racist* these days) New Atheist movement.

* No, seriously. He actually has gotten pretty ignorant-old-man racist.

Not all atheists can be as whimsically humorous as the New
Zealanders. Unfortunately, most of them are enormous jerks and
bullies.

I’ve been waiting for someone to come along and write the perfect polemic of Dawkins and all the cruel, demi-bigoted ideas he’s been spreading through Western popular culture. My wait is at last over.

That author’s name is Morteza Hashemi, my colleague at the Reply Collective, and the book is Theism and Atheism in a Post-Secular Age. I deeply hope that his publisher makes an affordable softcover edition available and promotes it reasonably well.

Like any genuinely effective polemic, it does more than just act as a polemic. For one, Hashemi’s takedown of Dawkins’ and Daniel Dennett’s arguments against God’s existence are also insightful and efficient accounts of a dangerous and very popular misconception of how scientific knowledge works.

He labels it well as the myth or ideology of “economy and coherence.” It's a delightfully straightforward way of labelling a perspective on science that I’ve always had trouble putting a concise name to.

It’s the notion that the greatest benefit of scientific knowledge – apart from its truth, of course – was that it was simple, reductive, and ultimately rested on only a few principles. Science as a long, unified story of progress that would ultimately lead to a universal Theory of Everything™ simple enough to fit on a t-shirt.

That vision of science has, over the last couple of decades of conspiracy theories, gotten scientific institutions in a lot of trouble. Because once research was published and reached popular consciousness on how science works and has actually developed, reading that throws the “economy and coherence” concept into the bin.

I feel sad for Bruno Latour. He doesn't have to beat himself up over
how other people have used and abused his work.

Or at least it should. The feelings of regret among researchers of science history, sociology, and philosophy are because of an unfortunate unintended effect such research – works by people like Thomas Kuhn, David Bloor, Bruno Latour, and others in these traditions.

A) How you should understand this research.
1. “I believe science is true because of its economy and coherence."
2. Reads about how scientific fields actually diverge and diversify.
3. “It seems science doesn’t need to be economical or coherent to be true.”

B) Here’s how too many people understand this research.
1. “I believe science is true because of its economy and coherence.”
2. Reads about how scientific fields actually diverge and diversify.
3. “It seems science isn’t economical or coherent.”
4. “Therefore, science mustn’t be true.”

You see what happened there? You hold onto the ideology of economy and coherence as the standard of truth, instead of letting the empirical research show you that it isn’t. This is how revanchists and people with billions of dollars invested in oil companies want you to think.

The petroleum billionaires want you to think scientists are all con-men because they don’t want to waste the money they’ve invested in petroleum. The revanchists want you to believe their extremist Christianity over more pluralistic ethical views about religious belief and its more complex place in human knowledge.

Latour likes to blame himself, because he published so much empirical research on how scientific institutions and knowledge functions. But there’s no reason (other than perhaps watching too much Hannity), to choose (B) over the more empirically faithful (A).

If the plurality of scientific knowledge makes it all a lie, then we never would have developed industrial society in the first place, you wouldn’t be able to read this, and I wouldn’t be able to write it. Let’s move on.

Get Your Hate On I: Problems of Reference, Research Time, 03/01/2018

Yes, I took the Xmas week off from writing on the blog, especially when I was in Montréal to visit my father’s side of the family. But I’ve kept up my research, of course, and I’ve been working through different ideas on how Gilles Deleuze’s thought affects my own thinking.

I want to talk, over the next day or two, about an argument that takes up the sixth chapter of What Is Philosophy?. Deleuze could find inspiration for his own projects in pretty much any field of the Western tradition. Except one.

It’s difficult to give a precise name to the tradition, because there were writers who called themselves and were called Analytic Philosophers whom Deleuze respected. Bertrand Russell was among them. Ludwig Wittgenstein, not so much.

My interpretive allegiances are a little different, because my own memories of having learned the great figures and history of Analytic Philosophy™ are very different. I was educated in North America, and my senior colleagues and teachers included people who thought almost all the work of Deleuze and others lumped under the near-meaningless heading of “Continental Philosophy” was nonsense and charlatanism.*

* Most of this comes down to writing style, but I want to leave questions of style aside. At least for a day or two.

Willard Quine, one of the most consistent reductionists in the
recent history of philosophy. It is no coincidence how boring his
books are.

But I do broadly agree that the tendency in self-identified Analytic Philosophy is unfortunate for actual philosophical creativity. Deleuze discusses it directly in What Is Philosophy?.

Let’s start from one important question. What is empiricism anyway? Deleuze calls himself an empiricist, but the major thinkers whose ideas defined typical Analytic Philosophy™ considered themselves empiricists too. And the latter would never have considered Deleuze a true empiricist. Marketer in obscurity, more likely.

To me, empiricism means that the ultimate purpose of creating philosophical concepts is building frameworks to understand the world. Deleuze would call it thinking immanently, where thinking is about understanding what you and everything else in the universe can do.

What are our capacities? What are our abilities? How can thinking in different ways open opportunities for understanding and action that wouldn’t have come about if we weren’t thinking in those ways.

The empiricism of Analytic Philosophy™ is very different, in Deleuze’s account of it. Under this model of thinking, being an empiricist means your concepts are always rooted in direct reference. Concepts are about meaning, and meaning is rooted in referring accurately to some part of the world.

I consider Willard Quine the arch-empiricist of Analytic Philosophy™, because he was so uncompromising in his brutal reductionism. Here’s a representative quotation, from his book of essays, From a Logical Point of View:

“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience.”

You might find it a funny coincidence how so many of the most
esoterically dry and reductionist philosophers were white male
academicians from the upper or at least aspirational crusts of
their societies.
I don't think it's a coincidence at all – I think it's a possibility
condition.

Philosophical creativity becomes impossible when you consider the only purpose for thinking as correct reference. The only philosophical thoughts you can have legitimately, in such a framework, are the building blocks of quantificational logic. “There is,” “For all,” “For some,” and build from there.

Once you consider reference and the quantificational logic that grounds mathematics the only purposes for philosophy, philosophy becomes – relatively speaking – dead ground for thinking.

You can’t find meaning or meaningfulness in more complicated ideas or concepts than the frameworks for understanding truth conditions. So social, psychological, political, and moral concepts are out the window.** Even the energetic metaphors of scientific and mathematical thinking are gone because what matters is only truth conditions and reference.

** But there is an Analytic™ tradition of moral and political philosophy. Maybe so, but G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica reduces ethical and moral thinking to problems of reference – What acts and situations are good? As for the political, remember why John Rawls broke so big with A Theory of Justice – no one in philosophy departments had done original creative political thinking in decades because the Analytic™ model made it illegitimate. Rawls found a way that would work on that model.

Who wrote Waverley? What colour is this cup on the table?

I share Deleuze’s frustration here. Who cares? The school of Analytic Philosophy™ began with a lot of remarkable potential. But it was all squandered on the pursuit of problems irrelevant to people’s lives, as if those were the most important problems imaginable. What matters is what’s interesting. What’s needed.