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.

Making a History for Yourself, Research Time, 12/01/2018

So I also wanted to expand my reach into books about Gilles Deleuze, returning to some of the authors I made use of during my research for Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. But since Utopias has a more human political focus, I wanted to take the field from a different angle.

Basically, a decade ago, I started researching material that specifically applied Deleuze’s ideas to problems in environmental thinking and philosophy of science. Now, I’m looking for some more straightforwardly political applications – theories of institutions and revolutions.

When the truth lies in ruins, understand decay.

Some of the material I picked up explores the influences and roots of Deleuze’s ideas. A book of essays that I found really illuminating was called Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage. Twenty chapters, each about 20 philosophers, artists, and scientists who’ve influenced Deleuze.

Or at least, they’ve been mentioned in barely enough detail to merit someone writing an essay about them. I’ll hit you with my thoughts on a few or more.

There are some essays in that book that are totally obvious. For instance, the one about Plato. A critique of Platonic frameworks of thinking is the centrepiece of one of Deleuze’s most notorious books, Difference and Repetition. So of course there’s going to be an essay in a book like this about Plato.

So narrowing a comparison of Plato and Deleuze’s ideas down to anything sensible is never going to be complete. But if you want completeness and straightforward neatness in your life, don’t read philosophy.

Let’s just look at some lessons.

The way we’re typically taught Plato in early philosophy education,* the highest goals of his philosophical thinking revolved around coming to know the essence of things, the essential nature of the world. We tend to be taught the dialogues that revolve around “What is this?” questions – What is justice? What is piety? What is the good? What is love?

Plato's dialogues are taught as though philosophy is all about searching
for the universally true answers to fundamental questions about the
essences of reality. Yet all the dialogues that carry out such questions
end in more profound cycles of confusion. So why do we teach
philosophy as if we're really looking for genuine universal truths?

* All too typically.

But there’s a weird little schizz here. Those dialogues revolving around “What is X?” questions always end in aporia – you never settle on any definitive answers that escape critique. The questions of “What is X?” always end on unstable answers. It’s a mystery that you understand better, but it’s still ultimately mysterious.

Here’s where you reach clear doctrines that arise from Plato’s dialogues without being destabilized – Those are dialogues revolving around questions like “How much?” “Where and when?” “Who?” “How?” “In what cases?”

Those are questions that are about real dynamisms in the world. You don’t learn anything about universal or general aspects of existence by blatantly asking “What is the universal essence of this?” Those questions lead to aporias – you understand the question and the concept a lot better, but you don’t get any definitive answers.

You understand the fundamental aspects of the universe by looking at parts of the real world, tracing common features and the principles through which differences emerge. You get to real answers with specific questions – with an empiricist attitude.

Using Plato to learn about empiricism. That’s pretty freaky. That’s how you should use the history of philosophy.

An Engineer Has No Use for Relativism, Research Time, 23/11/2017

Back in my academy days, I’d sometimes get into insufferable conversations about the truth. “What is true?” “What does it mean to be true?” “Truth is all important.” “The purpose of philosophy is to find out the truth.”

By the time I started my doctorate, I had about settled into my approach to philosophy – as conceptual engineering, the creation and exploration of frameworks to understand the world. When I’d talk about this approach with people, I’d often – not that often, but often enough – get questions from other scholars about what that had to do with the search for truth.

Well, it has nothing to do with the search for truth. Truth doesn’t really play an essential role in this activity. If you were learning about a philosophical concept – René Descartes’ cogito, for example – accuracy is important.

Accuracy is a kind of truth – you have to make sure that you weren’t making errors, that your interpretation of the relevant words doesn't run roughshod over the page. But if you were to ask me if I thought the cogito was true? Back in 2009, I’d tell you that I didn’t think it mattered.

I’ve met some philosophy scholars who believe that the ideas of their focal primary material are true. I’ve known people who think Descartes was right. Straight-up philosophically correct about the nature of the mind, world, and existence. Same goes for Spinoza, Kant, Hegel – I’ve met people who genuinely believe that these writers were right. Full stop.

I find that attitude tends to get in the way of understanding other thinkers. You always judge them inferior to the object of your faith. And it is faith. Ultimately, we’re not investigating the real world when we study great works of philosophy. We’re reading books.

So that was 2009. These days, I’m even more radical about this. Ask me now about whether the cogito or any other particular philosophical concept is true – in 2017, I’ll tell you that the question isn’t even proper to ask. Like asking a geologist about the diet and exercise habits of sedimentary rock formations.

I've been in some cramped seminar rooms before, but this is ridiculous.

Does this make my way of thinking philosophy relativist? No, because I’m indifferent to truth in philosophical thinking. You don’t ask if a concept is true in the same sense that you don’t ask if a computer program, or a lamp, or an engine, or a shoe is true. You ask what it does and how it works.

Logic – should I say logics? – still applies to concepts. But that’s because logic isn’t about the truth of any of its propositions, only about how to infer among propositions.

Concepts can contradict each other – you can’t include some concepts together in the same big apparatus of understanding. Deleuze gives a beautiful example, the kind of simple yet comprehensive statement about the field that a long-practicing expert can make.

He says that you can’t build a philosophical system that combines a Descartes-style cogito with a Plato-style ontology of Ideas. For the Platonic Form or Idea to exist, being must be primary – but the cogito’s purpose is to provide a foundation for being and exists in each subject.

Ideas – thought comes to be because Ideas exist. Cogito – thought provides the guarantee of existence. They contradict, so they can’t both be part of the same philosophical framework, the same thought machine.

The logic of conceptual engineering is that of conditions and creations. Such logic maps compossibility.

The Utopia of the Mass Grave, Research Time, 19/10/2017

There’s a common right-wing argument against utopian thinking, which is rooted in the libertarian impulse for small government. The emotional ground of that argument is an appeal to the horrors of totalitarianism.

Stalinist* Russia and Nazi Germany are the real-life outcome of what the modern libertarian (and generally conservative) right-wing considers socialist utopias. Now, for my purpose at the moment, I don’t want to argue over the facts of whether secret police states are the logical, conscious, or unintentional end-points of socialism. I want to talk about the structure of the argument itself.

Rick Sanchez, hero to those who don't know that he's actually
there to be laughed at.

* That is, Russia when it was run by the NKVD in the 1930s-40s.

You can see the structure very clearly in a straightforward reading of Plato’s Republic. Put all the metafictional and metaphilosophical readings of Plato’s work to the side. They don’t matter for the sake of this argument.
• • •
The most straightforward reading of any book is usually the most popular, if only because it’s the easiest to make. Same reason why The Catcher in the Rye inspires so many jerks** – Holden Caulfield’s voice dominates the narrative. Literally, because he’s the first-person narrator of the whole thing.

** And at least one murderer.

The easiest way to read the book is to let the dominant, most charismatic perspective – and the perspective that’s always justifying his actions in his own moral terms – dominate your own thinking with its charisma.

I sympathize with pragmatic libertarians who are careful and complex
in their justified criticisms of state power. But the more dogmatic folks
– and yes, I'm mostly thinking of the Rand disciples – are surprisingly
dim planners of the most obvious failures.

Same reason why so many misogynist, immature jerks love Rick and Morty – you hear Rick justifying all your worst inclinations, but you don’t realize that his words are meant to indict themselves. You have to step back from the text – get metafictional about it – to get the point. But that’s a step beyond just going with the flow.

The same problem happens with The Republic. Going with the flow of the text, without getting meta about it, it’s Plato arguing for the ideal structure of a community and its institutions. Its content is absolutely horrifying – rigid caste system and community-wide family structures. Now think about the book as a model for your own political action.

How do you build a better society? Sit around with your friends and colleagues, figure out a hypothetical structure for society that you think would be perfectly harmonious. Then, when you control your state’s military, police, nationalized corporations, bureaucracy, tax authority, organize the entire society according to that exact plan.

Change the entire country – from law to culture to thought – in a generation.

What a paradise it was.

Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. You’ve conceived of politics as a craftsman or engineer conceives of a problem to be solved. Conceive of the best possible end state, and move your society toward that state using the quickest and most intense means.***

*** Of course, the quickest means is rarely the quickest possible means.

Thinking of politics that way – as a pre-planned organizational structure to which you want all of society to conform – enables massive state violence. Consider the end, and its perfection justifies all means to achieve it.

That was Pol Pot’s revolution. The plan was the purest communism, stripped even of basic identity, and the action was to impose that structure with brute force of arms.

You don’t keep the means-end calculation out of political thinking just by declaring a few methods – like mass murder, forced starvation – beyond the pale. You’ve just drawn a limit on the same sociopathic concept to mark where you start to feel nauseous.

If you want your audience to understand the actual ethics that you
threaded into your show, you have to make your most charismatic,
interesting character its voice.

The answer is to avoid means-end thinking in politics altogether, because to conceive of a balance between the virtue of goals and the force of methods is inherently unethical. It nudges us to believe in sacrifice or contribution to common goals as a burden – the limit marks what burdens we consider too much to bear.

The calculation itself of what goals justify which methods is totally perverse because it makes you think of your neighbours, friends, and community members as raw material to build a masterminded social machine.

Making resources of those you should respect.
• • •
Now, for this post, I’ve been following an argument Hannah Arendt makes in The Human Condition. Chapter 31, if you want me to be specific. When she's talking about Plato in this way, she isn’t talking about what Plato actually intended, or her genuine account of The Republic’s meaning.

She's talking about how most people received it. Students who read maybe a chapter in an elective survey course where they got a C+. Media provocateurs who take their straightforward or half-cocked reading way too seriously.

Arendt is talking about the popular reception of Plato – an example to give insight and structure to a popular concept that creating a perfect society is the same as creating a building. Make a plan, bend some resources into shape. To draw attention to how perverse this everyday way of thinking is.

To demonstrate the need for change in human thought itself.

Hating Democracy VI: Only If You Deserve Freedom, Research Time, 28/10/2016

Continued from previous post . . . There are three serious threats today to democratic institutions and the social freedoms we’ve built and continue to build in the West. Two of them have a serious level of political and social power.

One would be the nationalist cultural conservatives – whether they define themselves in terms of religion (American Biblical literalist Evangelicals), race (the alt-right), or both (Dugin-style Russian nationalism). 

The other would be oligarchs – the political movement for small government, lower taxes, an end to all welfare state institutions, and the removal of almost all labour and environmental protection laws. 

It's not as though either of their victories would make no different in
people's lives. States are powerful institutions, and the American
state controls literally millions of armed personnel across all levels
of law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies, and the
standing army. Trump would wield that power in the name of
white nationalism, and Clinton is a second wave feminist who at least
also believes there should be a welfare state.

But democracy has been criticized and attacked pretty well ever since democracy in any form has existed. Working in the Western tradition* – and reading Jacques Rancière in particular – most folks learn Plato’s arguments against democracy pretty early in a humanities education.

* I only know little bits of the democratic idea in the Asian traditions of politics and philosophy. But Mozi’s philosophy of universal love seems like it’s been a roiling undercurrent of Chinese political thought from the Warring States period onward.

Basically, it’s that democracy – rule of everyone by everyone – is the rule of the mob, the ignorant masses who destroy themselves with chaos and tyranny. Maybe their community collapses after takeover by a charismatic despot who seduces the people into supporting him. Maybe the community fragments into internal conflicts. 

This idea is at the heart of all ill will toward democracy and universal freedom – that only the wise deserve to be free. Because only the truly wise will know how best to use their freedom. 

In the institutions of democracy, that means restricting the right to vote. Not by some explicitly crude metric like race or religion. But by a person’s level of knowledge about their democratic institutions, the policies of the candidates, and the history of the country.

This was an idea that the conservative scholar David Harsanyi published this May. It amounts to a literacy test, which is one argument against its use. You’re damn right it would have detrimental effects against marginalized communities, disenfranchising huge swaths of people who need more than anyone to be heard by the powerful in society.

But the idea is seductive, because as an abstract principle, it makes perfect sense. If you don’t know anything about the real effects of the power you wield in voting, you shouldn’t use that power until you have the knowledge to use it wisely.

The modern Russian state is the perfect counter-example to the theory
that all a democracy needs is democratic institutions. Putin's
government has to be accountable to its people and report on its
activities. There are multiple political parties who contest fair
elections. Putin even has constitutional term limits that he has to
dance around to remain in control of the country. Russia is no
democracy.

So there’s a more profound argument to make here in favour of the democratic drive for everyone to have the maximum possible say over their own futures. At first glance, what I’m about to say may sound completely absurd – that knowledge of democratic institutions doesn’t matter for your civic engagement in a democracy.

Think about everything I’ve written about as I’ve hammered out my conception of immanent freedom in society. Democratic institutions – like elections, government transparency, and voting – are actually the least important elements of a democratic society.

They’re necessary, but far from sufficient. Institutions alone can produce an entrenched oligarchy – rotating in and out of legislative power through elections, all parliamentary parties corrupt, campaigns so expensive and financed by absurdly rich individuals and huge corporate subsidy. 

Why does that sound so familiar to me?

You can be a democracy and be an oligarchy. Knowledge of institutions doesn’t make a difference if you still let those institutions slide into a transparent oligarchy. 

What makes a democracy a society of freedom is the activism of people. People demanding a better deal, not only from their government, but from each other.

So in a way, Harsanyi and Plato are right that you need knowledge and wisdom to build a truly free society. But it’s a different kind of knowledge than the institutional and historical. It’s the knowledge of the networks, relationships, lives, and imbalances of justice all over your society.

One kind of knowledge that makes you more free? Knowing people from lots of different ethnic groups, cultural communities, social classes, genders, and sexualities in your city and your country. It’s the basic knowledge of the literal fabric of your society. 

You learn what kinds of people exist in your society – what makes you different, and the struggles for common dignity that bring you together. And that's the fundamental fabric that holds real freedom together.

Hating Democracy III: The Rabble Babbles, Research Time, 21/10/2016

Continued from last post . . . In case you think this weird democratic hate on for democracy stops with the end of the Bush years, an intellectual very influential on today’s anti-democratic politics said essentially the same thing.

Yesterday, I described this disgust at real democracy as the belief that people’s freedom is living under and loyalty to democratic state institutions. That democracy isn’t actually the government of the people by the people, but institutions like regular elections of officials and leaders, a free press, and nominal transparency in government.

Rancière sums up the hypocritical anti-democracy like so:

“A good democratic government is one capable of controlling the evil quite simply called democratic life.”

In other words, freedom is little more than unchecked personal desire at the expense of the common good or a higher form of social life. Here’s a thought leader in our own time – even our own moment – saying exactly the same thing: Nick Land.

Another aspect of Land's political philosophy is that our transhumanist
impulses will eventually take humanity's elite in a radical divergence
from humanity itself to survive our ecological crisis. As a slightly
serious joke, he describes the monstrosity to some as "face tentacles."

Land’s The Dark Enlightenment is a founding philosophical text of the alt-right movement, and he’s the closest the alt-right has today to a top philosopher. The barrel isn’t exactly very deep, but he’s still a genuinely intelligent man and sharp writer. 

I personally wish he hadn’t given himself over to a movement of resurgent white nationalism and just stuck to horror philosophy and the attempt to think the abyss. But sometimes, I also think that too much abyssal thinking leads to some very terrifying, violent places.

Anyway, Land’s argument against democracy (at least one aspect of it) goes like this. 

People basically act from self-interest – this could be literal individual interest, or in the interests of your family, clan, circle of close friends, or organization. Maximum, no more than a few hundred people, maybe just a little more than the max number a person can genuinely know as people.

Rulers of democracies are no different. But in a democracy, no individual or faction is ever in power much longer than a decade. So a given set of rulers, affiliates, factions, and sponsors develop a tendency to loot the state and profit as much from their control over the common wealth as they can.

People who know they’ll only be in power for a short while will only ever think in the short term, and never lay down long term plans for their society to accomplish important tasks. Like surviving an onrushing planetary ecological crisis. Only a ruler-for-life will do that, because their self-interest will run over the longest possible term. 

Here’s my take on this argument against democracy. After about a decade, when organizational rot has set in at the seat of power, the people have to kick the rulers out to reset the corruption clock. 

It’s essentially very similar to Land’s argument, but I refuse the additional step of believing that being a CEO-for-life (or until you feel like retiring) makes you a virtuous ruler who always thinks and plans for the long-term health and vibrancy of his national culture.

The most recent long-serving Prime Minister of my country Canada
was tossed out of power after nine years, when plenty of corruption
scandals had already taken root in his office. But even if he'd won
the 2015 election, he would have retired voluntarily one or two
years afterward anyway. Because we're a democracy and you don't
stick around in the top office for life.

From one perspective, I’m actually more pessimistic about human nature than Land, whose argument essentially describes a national chief executive as a benevolent despot. 

As far as I’m concerned, any moderate-term wielding of state power corrupts the office-holder. So rulers and their cliques have to be forcibly retired before the taste for filthy lucre sets in. Despotism is inevitably malevolent – kleptocracy at best, and at worst Stalin. 

Democratic institutions are the framework to keep those forced retirements smooth and peaceful. That insurance against state corruption is the central justification for democratic institutions. But real democracy is a lot more than just the institutions.

But let’s get back to Land and anti-democracy for the rest of the post. Land’s argument returns one of the oldest criticisms of democratic governance in the world – it starts in Plato’s Republic, where he calls democracy the babbling of self-important jerks. I’m paraphrasing, of course. But that’s the idea.

Plato’s critique of democracy has been a touchstone in Western political thinking ever since it was published. Yet Rancière makes a very incisive stab at Plato’s doubts about democracy. It’s so obvious when I read it that I smacked my own head – not quite literally, but it was one of those moments. I wondered why no one had thought of it before.

Why are we taking a self-professed opponent of democracy at his word about the character of people who actually embrace democratic culture and governance? Yes, he had seen a democratic assembly condemn Socrates to death for radical sedition. Which is extremely bogus.

But Plato describes democracy at its worst, as if its worst was its essence. That’s not an argument against democracy per se – it’s an argument against letting your most paranoid, socially conservative, closed-minded passions rule your democracy.

Sounds fine. But I’d seem to be in a bit of a pickle. Given what I’ve said today about how inevitable corruption is, how do I expect to stop people’s most paranoid, conservative, closed-minded passions and prejudices from taking over society? . . . To Be Continued

Save Us IV: The Real Idea, Research Time, 15/12/2015

See, the interesting thing about this esotericism idea is that it’s basically the presumption that there are hidden meanings in texts. There’s a conspiratorial twist to it, because it seems Strauss talks about a true hidden meaning, what the author was really trying to say.

The esoteric conception of writing seems to be that a great author is always subversive, but hiding his subversion to avoid persecution from a hostile public. So while he might appear to be a particularly nuanced thinker of his current epoch's mainstream, he’s actually a radical pushing ideas that the masses and the powerful would find horrifying.

A provocative thing to say, that Strauss' vision of
interpretation makes philosophy into a tradition of
conspiratorial thinking. Hard to put Spinoza in the
same category as David Icke.

Investigating this hidden meaning, and what it could be, is interpretation. This is the bulk of what philosophers today do: they study the great works of their field's history and interpret them. 

Most of the interpretation that goes on in today's academic world* is ersatz at best, empty wheel-spinning too often, and masturbatory at worst.

* I was quite happy that Kastely’s Plato book wasn’t one of these. While it didn't have a concrete political program in today's context, his interpretation of Plato himself as a radical democrat – almost an anarchist by some lights – at the heart and origin of Western philosophy is a message we should all hear.

Professors in the humanities are under intense career pressure to publish as much and as quickly as possible. They have to demonstrate research productivity with regular articles in the most prestigious journals. 

Peer reviewers at such journals are under pressure to reject as much as possible because of a high volume of submissions, and to maintain a reputation of prestige that comes with a high rejection rate. 

So the easiest way to pass these gatekeepers is to write an interpretation with enough formal rigour to pass muster as an argument, and that otherwise fits the general paradigm of inoffensive historical scholarship. Original, but nothing that really challenges the profession’s conventional thinking.

This isn't just what professors face when they have to
grade their papers, but also when they become editors
of the most prestigious journals in their fields. They
have high rejection rates to maintain their prestige, but
because they're so prestigious, they get an enormous
number of submissions from ambitious young
professors desperate for a publication credit that
could make or break a tenure-track job application.

Yet here you are writing in a tradition whose landmark works actually did challenge and change conventional thinking. This is a paradox I'm glad I've stepped away from.

But take Leo Strauss seriously and you face the idea that philosophy is a tradition of conspiratorial trickery. The great works of philosophy changed their culture’s way of thinking, but were only successful because they made a radical new way of thought look like it followed naturally from the ordinary.

If a writer expressed his radical ideas too blatantly, the shock would make the population reject the change. Socrates is the example. He was the most confrontational, nakedly honest philosopher in the tradition.** And that total honesty got him executed for political crimes, as a subversive challenging Athenian morality and tradition.

** I think Spinoza comes close, but his most radical work The Ethics was weird enough to be blatantly radical but still escape reactionary wrath. Besides, he had already alienated the entire Dutch public with the open atheism of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

This is what I think is so valuable about Kastely's book.*** He not only makes Plato an esoteric thinker – hiding a radical democracy in a work, The Republic, that’s typically taught as Plato’s totalitarian vision of the perfect society.

*** And what I tried to express in my dialogical review last month. But I think I let the dramatic aspects of the dialogue overcome the more philosophical examination. It’ll be better next time.

He’s an esoteric thinker on a mission to redeem his old teacher, by incorporating him into a method that could be more successful at challenging popular morality and political culture than open confrontation. And this is supposedly Plato's real mission.

This is an idea of Strauss' that breaks with the usual talk of interpretation. It gives interpretation a precise, correct content. There’s something to discover in a great philosophical work that was there from the beginning.

Strauss quite likes this idea that there’s a single real true meaning always out there for us to discover. The idea that there is no such truth is one of the notions he considers to have destroyed political thinking and philosophy generally. The stereotype is that this idea came with postmodernism.

But in Natural Right and History, Strauss argues that it comes from Thomas Hobbes. To be continued . . .

Save Us I: Abject and Garbage, Research Time, 10/12/2015

Your political priorities have a lot to do with what you think of human nature. What we’re capable of, and what’s impossible for us to do. 

The message, common in American political discussions
after horrifying gun violence incidents, that the only
defence against a crazy person with a gun is your own,
preferably bigger, gun, has a genuinely interesting
philosophical idea behind it. It's that humanity can
never become mature enough to solve conflicts
without violence, and your only defence from
violence is your own readiness and ability to kill.

G the libertarian once wrote me, “Don’t you believe in human nature?” He implied that human nature was inherently violent, selfish, animalistic, cruel. That’s why governments could never be trusted to ensure people’s welfare or a fair society, because leaders and officials would abuse their power. That’s why people needed to stockpile as many guns as possible, to defend themselves against governments and other groups who’d suppress and destroy them.

Inherent. Think about what that means. Immutable. Essential. Unchanging. Unchangeable. That’s how we’ve historically thought about human nature. No matter what we think that nature is, it is what it is, was, and always will be.

It’s taking humanity a long time to understand that change is possible. Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze. Me. We still need to learn the message.

Different civilizations have had different conceptions of what human nature is. Reading Leo Strauss on human nature is pretty slippery, because Natural Right and History doesn’t quite take an explicit stand on the subject* once he gets into the different epochs of this concept.

* And this is weird. I started reading Strauss thinking he was going to be the centrepiece of modern neoconservatism, but his own writing seems quite detached from the politics of his time. I’ll have to get hold of some of Shadia Drury’s work about Strauss, as she’s the primary source for this argument.

It’s going to take us a while to get through this. But it’ll be interesting. 

So Strauss spends a chapter examining the ancient Greek concept of human nature, and its political implications. His sources are mainly the philosophical writings of Plato and Cicero. 

The short version of this whole argument, exegesis, interpretation, and riff of overlong sentences and dry language goes like this.

Many heroic Greek thinkers have a disturbing tendency
to get themselves killed by the local statesmen.

Ancient Greek culture’s predominant philosophy culminated in Stoicism, of which Cicero was the most famous and politically powerful.** Skepticism was at the heart of this philosophical tradition, but so was political engagement.

** That didn’t stop him from getting killed by the imperial army after falling foul of the rulers. Killing your opponents has a much longer history in politics than peaceful compromise. At least when states are involved.

Because Cicero’s Stoicism began with Socrates. Socrates was the ultimate negative philosopher, whose method – when he was alive – was assaulting people and their beliefs, so that they could be torn down. Socrates believed that real knowledge of political and moral truths would be invulnerable to his dialectical attacks. If they weren’t, well then watch your world burn.

Plato developed this basic idea in a more profound direction that wouldn’t necessarily make enemies of your entire community. In Plato’s hand (or rather his pen), Socrates’ aggressive skepticism became a philosophy of aporias. 

There’s still no answer to the problem of whether you have knowledge of the good, but at the end of any of Plato’s books, you understand the question much better. You remain perplexed about what’s right, but you're not confused anymore because you understand the concepts around the problem. 

Aporetic thinking had a huge resurgence in philosophy during the late 20th century, particularly with Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray. But ancient Greek society developed aporetic thinking in the direction of Stoicism. 

I'm coming to the conclusion that this is probably a
better analogue in popular culture to what kind of
person Socrates was than I was ever taught in class.

In this model, so says Strauss, there is a form of perfect and true justice. But this genuine justice is strictly in the domain of the divine. Humans are corrupt and can’t access true justice.

Humans aren’t completely debased, though. Depending on how you interpret the idea, which for the Stoics was an open debate, humanity could achieve a diluted form of divine justice. The concept of human justice as a dilution of the divine was an acknowledgement of our essential corruption. Yes, it’s something like divine justice, but not. The best we can do.

Or perhaps it was a secondary form of justice, different in character from the divine, but related to it insofar as it was justice at all. The secondary form of justice has a purpose, however: uplift. 

Humanity could pursue justice, and in doing so, repair our corrupted nature. The pursuit of justice wasn’t a compromise, but a route to restore our lost divinity. To be continued. . . . 

Embedded Critical Thought II: You Become a Mere Spectator, Research Time, 14/01/2015

Continued from last post . . . Philosophy romanticizes ancient Greek civilization. Anyone who’s been exposed to the discipline on a casual basis has seen this in some form. Myself, I’ve seen the romantic attitude toward the life of Socrates as a role model for philosophy, I’ve seen Plato described as having defined the core, eternal problems of the discipline. I’ve also read a good chunk of Heidegger, who considered the pre-Socratic ancient Greek sages as the paradigm philosophers. 

I find the McLuhans’ engagement with Greek culture and modes of experience more enlightening than a lot of what I’ve read in philosophy proper* because they’re critical of its shortcomings while also aware of its advantages. Their particular focus is on ancient Greek culture before the development of alphabetic writing, a form of abstraction in linguistic thought that they analyze as having begun a process of abstraction in how Western cultures approached knowledge.

My old philosophy department at McMaster taught a
communications course, but it was the ethics of
communications, discussing truthfulness, lying, privacy
rights, and the one-per-week discussion of general ethical
theories over the first five weeks. Not one hint of actual
ontological philosophy of communications media itself.

* I say philosophy proper because, even though McLuhan is widely regarded as a philosopher, especially in public discussion of his work, I was never actually taught his work in a philosophy department. This was the case for all the departments where I was a student, and any department that hosted a philosophy conference. The only academic conference I ever attended in my time as a university worker that dealt with McLuhan at all was the International Conference on the Book 2012. It was an interdisciplinary conference, with a hefty dose of media history and theory, that changed its location every year. The 2012 conference happened at University of Toronto, and in honour of its host, a couple of keynotes discussed the work of its favourite son. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at any of the research concentrations of its philosophy professors.

Alphabetic writing and its accompanying abstraction in thought was, in McLuhan’s account, the genesis of true self-consciousness. Its abstraction detached you from the visceral qualities of your encounters with language. I should say, linguistic affects; literally how spoken and written words smacked you around in the course of your daily life, and how the changing character of those constant smacks transformed how you thought about yourself.

While I find a lot of useful concepts and ideas in Laws of Media, their discussion of alphabetic abstraction as the literal foundation of self-consciousness has a little too much essentialism for my liking. Let me put it this way: they explain this idea, in chapter two of the book, through a contrast of Western modes of subjective experience with Asian ones. 

Yeah, it sounds a little racist. Now, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt (the McLuhans are Torontonians, after all, which is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, even in the 1980s when Eric McLuhan finished this book), interpreting their discussion of this as referring to the streak of individualism in Western morality and conscious self-conceptions that isn’t really present in East Asian moralities.**

So about Ge'ez script, you guys?

** They make no mention of individualism in African or indigenous American moralities and self-conceptions. The cultures of those continents have a variety of writing systems: alphabets, syllabaries, pictographs, hieroglyphs, or no writing at all. And there doesn’t seem to be any analysis of any individualism that arises in Indian culture, which has used a popular alphabetic writing system for centuries. This is on top of the absence of Hebrew culture as the true origin of alphabetic writing in the Mediterranean.

But they actually write that Chinese people aren’t truly conscious of themselves as individuals, and that the Taiwan government’s state-administered mass adoption of an alphabetic shorthand script in the 1980s would transform their entire subjectivities within a couple of generations.

I work with a very different conception of the foundation of subjectivity in Ecology, Ethics, and The Future of Humanity, which is the autopoietic system generated from metabolic chemical reactions. It’s the simplest form of a physical membrane demarcating an inside and an outside, minimal physical discreteness. Being physically discrete and moving in the world as such a body is a more primal form of individuality than the McLuhans consider here. So as a physical phenomenon, individuality is fundamental to organic life.

So while McLuhan doesn’t always sound as if he’s talking about epistemic concepts, how we understand what we are, that’s what he’s talking about. Otherwise, he wouldn’t really make sense.*** Because there are epistemic advantages to our individualistic attitudes and the abstraction of our alphabetic thought processes. 

*** I sometimes think that this is why the more petty and dogmatic analytic philosophers I’ve encountered genuinely believe that Continental philosophy is nonsense and charlatanism. They presume that a discussion about knowledge which wouldn’t make sense if it were about reality is actually about reality.

The recitation media of the ancient Greek world required such constant attention as part of its engagement that you put so much effort into memorizing the words in real time and lose all your objectivity. You aren’t really able to judge or critique what’s told through recitation. 

This is why Plato’s vision of reason banned poets from the rational society. This is the kind of poetry he was talking about, epic recitation that sucked its audience in so deeply that it destroyed any ability to question or critique. The distance that abstract thought affords lets us question and investigate our cultural chroniclers. The McLuhans and I differ on whether electronic real-time media degrades our objectivity in the same way. To be continued. . . .

Every Worthwhile Philosophical Creation Has a Purpose, Research Time, 07/01/2014

Plato was a serious man who dealt
with serious issues. Nonetheless, he
still put a lot of crude jokes in
Socrates' mouth.

Daniel Smith won me over with the first essay in his Deleuze compendium, called “The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism.” It was the most beautiful kind of attack on two concepts that I’ve found hideously mangled in discussions of post-modernist philosophy and Deleuze studies more particularly, the simulacrum and the reversal of Platonism. Its beauty lay in its complete avoidance of any negative critique whatsoever. He simply explained how the concept functioned in Deleuze’s reading of Plato (with Nietzsche’s help) and in Deleuze’s uptake of Nietzsche’s project of reversing Platonism.

All my discussions of Smith’s work come with the caveat that you should really just read his book your damn self for the best possible account of his writing. This essay in particular is clear, thoughtful, considerate, and, above all, creative. It’s also a wonderful introduction to Deleuze’s way of engaging with philosophical inquiry, which I’ve picked up for my own thinking about philosophical texts and projects. The usual way we’re taught to think about philosophy in our undergraduate courses is to evaluate arguments in terms of their validity and truth. These are important dimensions to any philosophical argument, but they aren’t all that matters. A more revealing question is what the philosophical project is for. In a way, you can say that this kind of interpretation politicizes philosophy, but it’s a very profound politicization. 

Deleuze understood Plato’s philosophy as motivated by a need to distinguish the validity of rival claims to truth, those who truly understand from those who are clueless from those who purposely aim to deceive. I’ve discussed this last summer in relation to Hegel’s account of the motives of Socrates and Plato in his Philosophy of History. The Platonic Idea (and its culmination in the form of the Good) is the impartial standard by which all claims to truth may be judged. A true notion expressed in the world is true insofar as it resembles some aspect of the transcendent Idea/Good. A simulacrum is an idea that does not resemble any feature of these forms. 

I think, like Foucault, I'll probably spend my entire
philosophical career explaining why an immanent concept
of morality accomplishes all that a transcendent can,
without any of the unfortunate problems of the latter.

When Deleuze develops an ontology of simulacra, (as well as what I consider his unfortunate phrase from The Logic of Sense, “the power of the false”), he is too easily interpreted as a token post-modernist for whom any question of truth is meaningless, and for whom existence has no intrinsic worth. This was an empty, if publicly effective, critique of the progressive French philosophy of the period: that a vision of the world without transcendent eternal truth, especially moral truths, is an empty nihilism that licenses all manner of horrifying activity. My colleague at Waterloo, B. S. Nelson, recently posted an old interview with Michael Foucault where he defended himself against those very charges. 

Having identified the central purpose of Plato’s philosophy, what it’s for, Smith describes how Deleuze reverses Platonism. His article lists a variety of mistaken ways to think about reversing Platonism that miss the central point. Deleuze’s goal was to build a framework to approach philosophy that didn’t focus on the question of settling rival claims to truth. Instead the focus shifts to the assembly of social and physical structures themselves. In Difference and Repetition, the book where Deleuze did most of his work developing his creative critique of Platonism, he described this assembly as the generation and play of differences, and as the repetition of creative moments. His work over the 1970s progressed this inquiry, but using the concepts of assemblage and notions from contemporary ecological science.

Deleuze wasn’t opposed to philosophies based on settling rival claims, he simply wanted to promote a different paradigm with different problems. He developed and promoted a vision of the world as a Chaosmos — systems and fluxes interacting in fields of mutual affectivity. 

This is the vision of the world I adapted to environmental moral philosophy debates in my Ecophilosophy manuscript. Moral questions are determined through the actual relations of people and the benefits and harms individual behaviour and political structures cause. The kinds of questions you ask and concepts that you use are completely different; philosophy is for the creation of entirely different ways of thinking.