Thought Is Never Private, Jamming, 11/05/2018

Just a short one this morning. I’m writing this after a very long day. Another thinker Paul Patton talks about in relation to Deleuze is Richard Rorty.

The very, very, very short version of Rorty is that he takes the contingency of reality very, very, very seriously. But that it results in the most unserious kind of materialism you’ll ever find. One very out of step with the demands we now face.

He’s another thinker who takes atheism all the way to its final logic. But he’s entirely too complacent about the result. So the conclusion of Rorty that gets you in the most trouble is that our moral principles are a product of our social relationships, our discourses. Being contingently developing organisms, our moral principles are arrived at contingently too.

So there’s nothing necessary about any moral system. As long as moralities can be made to work in the world, individuals can hold them. We each develop our own personal kink in the set of moral principles we socialize into as we grow and age. But all of that is a matter of our discourse. There’s no absolute in morality.

A nice young boy from a respectable family is not supposed to grow up
as a hateful, resentful, racist, misogynist jerk. That's why American and
Canadian liberals have been so shocked to see emboldened extremists
come out of the most unexpected places. James Damore was right
when he said that liberals couldn't even see their own echo chamber.
But I'm glad he could puncture it for them. By now, even the most
complacent liberals should know how seriously you have to take
your values, because there are people who hate you for them.

Naturally, this freaks a lot of people out when you think about it. But as I’ve read different works of Rorty over the years, I find it makes what should be an existentially chilling thought sound like a banal fact to deal with.

Part of that is his skill with language, but part of that is also his own personality. I definitely don’t think you can reduce everything someone wrote to the general conditions of their daily lives. But it does play a part, it contributes.

So I think one of the main causes for Rorty’s ability to be so calm about a genuinely troubling idea is that he was born into a genteel upper-middle class life, and stayed comfortably in the Ivy League (or close to it) for pretty much his entire adult life. And he put his head down for a very conventional academic career for his first couple of unremarkable decades in the field. His life embodies the image of middle American security of the 20th century.

No wonder he was content to say that we’d resolve our moral differences through pleasant conversation over dinner. He lived a life without real hardship, without the kinds of deep ethical challenge that many experience. Never faced racism, misogyny, violence, poverty, addiction, injustice.

It’s very different to know that such things happen in the world, and to experience it yourself. It’s much tougher to know the real stakes of the world. Rorty could take the contingency of the world so flippantly because he never experienced himself the most intense suffering the contingencies of life can offer.

He could never conceive of liberal thinking being challenged, especially not by a resurgence of fascist social values and white ethnic nationalism in the West. He could easily conclude that the Civil Rights Movement was all it took to end the "conversation" over universal human rights; that the Second World War concluded with the "permanent defeat" of fascism.

That's what all good little boys were taught at school, after all. And he spent his entire life in a social world of good little boys grown up and growing old. He could take it all for granted, and so concluded that we could all take it for granted. The world remains much more serious than Rorty ever thought, and it always was.

Get Your Hate On II: Against Simplicity, Research Time, 04/01/2018

I can understand why Gilles Deleuze would have been especially bitter about what pure Analytic Philosophy™ became. It started as a punk rebellion against pretentious Cambridge Hegelianism.

When I was studying the history of early Analytic Philosophy at McMaster University under Nick Griffin, he told me an amazing story about how that field came to be. G. E. Moore was a graduate student at Cambridge, talking with one of his senior professors, J. M. E. MacTaggart. During this casual lunchtime conversation, MacTaggart offhandedly remarks, “Well, of course, time isn’t real.”

Moore's reaction – “What the fresh fuck?!?!” Or the paragraph-long, overly-polite equivalent appropriate to 1890s England.

Of course, as soon as I thought of this example to update the Waverley
case, I had to throw on this album. More than a decade later, it's still
so good!

That punk spirit – the urge to overthrow an oppressive, beyond-the-world, pretentious Hegelian near-mysticism – animated the forge of Analytic Philosophy. But the school’s leaders focussed that spirit on reducing anything that could suggest the metaphysical away from philosophical thought.

What does that Waverley problem amount to today? Here’s an example better suited to the 2010s.

You remember when Untrue came out and no one knew who Burial was? So before 2008, when you talked about “Burial,” the reference of the name was mysterious, unknown. You could point to the album, listen to the music, but you couldn’t say what the real meaning of the name “Burial” was before William Bevan was outed.

It’s a mind-twisting problem to consider on its own terms. People still write essays returning to Bertrand Russell’s “On Denoting” to this day, more than a century later. But Deleuze’s critique still stands – Who the fuck cares? What does it matter?

In the specific context of mathematical logic, it makes perfect sense. But the extreme reductivism of Analytic Philosophy™ reduces philosophical thinking to these problems of word meaning and reference. Everything of wide or visceral relevance is abstracted from philosophy.

So here’s Deleuze’s argument for why Analytic Philosophy™ is to destructive to genuinely creative thinking.

Reason one. When you apply a problem of reference whose proper context is mathematical logic to all philosophical thinking, you end up reducing all of philosophy to logic. The doctrinaire rationalism of the American Analytics – I’m thinking in particular of Willard Quine and the many other thinkers he influenced – raises science to the ideal of thought.

I've come to think of Richard Rorty as having combined the most
profound errors of American Pragmatist™ thinking with those of
doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™, delivered with all the smugness
of a lifelong Ivy League academician's style.
But that's another post.

But this reductive image of science isn’t even how science actually works. It’s that bizarre science of totalizing unification – the one true form of knowledge. This is why the sub-disciplines of philosophy of science that haven’t yet overcome the influence of Quine and Donald Davidson have become so moribund – their practitioners believe in a unified science that doesn’t exist.

Reason two. Philosophy turns into discourse alone. You exchange logical propositions and proofs – whether as symbolic logic or as propositions with the same simple framework – and evaluate them. Are the inferences valid? According to which system of logic?* A vibrant, creative tradition reduced to tiresome nitpicking.

* Even here, merely admitting that there can be more than one valid system of logic, all mutually incommensurable or irreducible, is more than the presumptions of doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™ can bear.

Reason three. Philosophical conversation becomes mere debates over opinions. Is this a good argument? Are all your inferences valid? What are the facts and states of affairs that justify what you say?

Deleuze calls it Richard Rorty’s dinner table. Casual arguments over minutiae, tossed off with all the commitment of those who are never at risk from anything. As if conflicts over values, ethics, and ways of living have never killed anyone.

They never killed anyone as comfortable as Rorty, or most of the folks who think such arguments are philosophy’s central subject matter.

The End of the Humanities University? Composing, 08/03/2016

I was originally going to write something about Antonio Negri’s take on how the concepts of sovereignty and state-centric war changed in our era of globalization, and in the context of the W years. Multitude came out in 2004, when the madness of George W was at its height. It couldn’t be avoided.

Whatever issues you may have with the mistakes and
problems that have come up in the wave of student protest
this year, like this example from Yale, that students are
so universally driven to direct protest action is a sign of
a deeper rot in the system.

But I decided to lay off that for now. Maybe tomorrow.

Because I wanted to develop my ideas for my panel at the Canadian Philosophical Association this May about Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. I only ended up doing that for a little bit at the end of yesterday’s posts. Sometimes, I’ll write just a prologue.

And save the details for now. Or at least the riffs that, once the final presentations and panel talks are prepared, will become the details. That’s one thing I’ve always used the blog for – preparing my ideas in a free-floating form before their presentation structure is hammered down.

So the discipline of academic philosophy – the professional field of study in the modern university system – faces a serious crossroads today. University management in the West has pretty universally embraced new liberal values. That makes the university very ill-suited today to what philosophy has tried to be over the last couple of centuries.

Philosophy has tried to be two things. One is the leisurely study of a particular canon of intellectual writings, which slowly adds to that canon. This is what Richard Rorty meant when he said (and I paraphrase) that he was paid to sit around pleasant lecture halls and eateries all day at Princeton, read wonderful books, and write about them.

That was never really the case except for the most prestigious academic philosophers – the ones whose professional reputations allowed them to kick back their way through seminars. But it’s still the governing ideal of the profession in its practice.

Bertrand Russell agitated for progressive political causes
all his life, from his years in prison for standing against
the First World War to the last years of his life that he
spent agitating against nuclear weaponry and the
invasion of Vietnam.

Second, philosophy has aimed to be an academic discipline in the humanities. Since its institution in the modern university system in the 1800s, philosophy and the rest of the humanities developed along the same model of the sciences.

I’m being incredibly simplistic here – I’ll remind you that I’ve already identified this as a riff.

But what’s common to these approaches is the separation of the order of philosophers from the masses of humanity. Let’s be absolutely honest when I say that the ideal of the philosophical vocation that Rorty described isn’t work. 

While organizing philosophy in parallel to an empirical science is certainly work, the society still becomes a realm of specialized professionals. An elite with more special and rarefied cognitive powers than the rest of us.

No wonder humanities PhDs have a popular reputation as self-absorbed blowhards. 

The new liberal governance models that run the university system today, though? It’s made professors of all disciplines into working stiffs. Just look at the sad fate of most adjunct teachers today. And even more income-secure professors are often under terrifying pressure from governments that make their education institutions into corporate servants. 

Yet the ethical ideal of philosophy revolves around fighting public ignorance, bringing sanity and reason to the wider world. That’s how philosophy is pitched to undergrads, but it’s forgotten once the ivory tower closes around the professors.

Antonio Negri spent more than a decade in prison on
fraudulent charges from the Italian government that he
was a secret leader of the Brigate Rosse. Where are
philosophy's most notable names today? Fleeing to
Mexico or retiring in disgrace after sexual harassment
and exploitation of students.

And that ivory tower prevents professors from understanding themselves as working stiffs. Jumping from contract to contract and curb-stomping colleagues just for a shot at a permanent position? That’s the mercenary, solidarity-breaking attitude that oligarchical types encourage to stop union movements. 

With the discipline’s institutions turning against its practitioners, I’d say that it’s time to ditch the institution – if not attack it from the inside and agitate to end these unjust demands on practice.

This is what I mean about maintaining philosophy as a tradition beyond academic walls. Writing works whose purpose is to agitate and educate, instead of carrying on arcane arguments in technical language. The institutions have betrayed the ideals of the philosophical tradition. 

An act of betrayal breaks the trust anyone would require to live together, wouldn’t it?