It's Toughest of All to Accept, Research Time, 18/05/2018

A brief few paragraphs to have a go at a quick classification. Following on from what I talked about yesterday, here are some substantive ways that the animating concepts of Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy set them apart from what’s still the mainstream.

I mean, I do consider the academic ghettoization of the many different philosophies smacked with the “Continental” label to be shameful territorial pissing. One of those paths of thought so smacked is Deleuze and Guattari’s. That annoys me, because their ideas include solutions for a lot of the conceptual problems that are roadblocks for mainstream North American university philosophy.

If you follow their ideas all the way to their natural conclusions, they tend to take out the whole road along with the barricades. But aside from a little rubble, the way forward is clear.

You know she won't live. But then again – Who does?

So what are those ideas?

One. Evaluation is always context-dependent. That goes for moral, mathematical, scientific, empirical. Anytime you examine a process, try to make sense of it, identify a value – that assessment is always specific to a contingency, a particular way the world is.

It’s never necessary and universal, because even the existence of the universe it contingent. It need never have been. Period.

Think about this example. You might think that a context-independent, universal, necessary truth is that chattel slavery of humans is wrong. But if there never were humans at all, would this truth have come to exist?

If the Cambrian extinction had never happened and the Earth’s biosphere developed in totally different directions, any question to do with humans wouldn’t make any sense because there’s be no humans. Ever. Not in future, present, or past. They’re inconceivable. Vague fictions at best – certainly not the sort of things you’d expect to find any truth more solid than the canon of a tv franchise.

Two. Nothing has an endpoint that sums up its existence. Processes stop. Death doesn’t bring anything about a life into a neat little bow. Death just ends it. Authors do that, but they do it by stitching events into narratives. That’s not a life – it’s a story.

Three. Anything that can change can blow to pieces and destroy itself. So everything can destroy itself.

It’s not a comforting world, if you need certainties to comfort you. I recommend cultivating strength of character. Not a perfect process, never really complete, always more work to be done. But then that's true of everything.

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.

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.

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.

A Thinker Is a Process Because She’s a Person, Jamming, 12/02/2018

Two passes at the mistake of searching for the universal, for the one true truth.
• • •
I pity the fool who had to write the essay on Sigmund Freud in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy. It’s because there actually isn’t much to say when a thinker so powerfully rejects a former influence in a fit of rage.

One of the most influential books Gilles Deleuze ever wrote was Anti-Œdipus with Félix Guattari – definitely the most influential among the political thinkers who build on his work. That book was built around a detailed, incisive, forceful, and total rejection of the core dynamics of all Freudian thinking.

Freudian concepts of desire dominated French thought about
psychology early in Deleuze and Guattari's career. They
wrote against it with the fury of a betrayed disciple.

Now, before meeting Guattari, Deleuze did take Freud’s ideas seriously. Many of Freud’s ideas were the core principles of the analysis in Deleuze’s book on Leopold Sacher-Masoch. Several chapters in The Logic of Sense explicitly relied on Freud to build a theory of desire and sexuality.

Nothing reversed so radically in Deleuze’s intellectual life than his belief in Freudian ideas. It took meeting Guattari for him to realize that Freudian psychology was the closest thing possible to an opposite of the direction he wanted to develop – a metaphysical framework based on heterogeneity, variety, difference, becoming.

Working with Guattari helped Deleuze realize that Freud’s entire system was built on a premise that those images – Œdipus in particular – constituted a universal structure to human consciousness.

Guattari – a man who worked all his life with schizophrenics – knew from the examples of his daily professional life that it was far from universal. More than that, the dynamics of Œdipal imagery, concepts, and principles in action on people’s personalities and identities grounds an ethic of unearned submission and servitude to authority of force and might. Father–King–Policeman–Gun–Man.

Fucking patriarchy, man.
• • •
Ronald Bogue ended up writing the most boring kind of history of philosophy paper imaginable – the list. He lists and dispassionately describes the appearances Freud’s ideas made in Deleuze’s work. Doesn’t contribute any more analysis than that.

There's a masterful essay in cultural theory on how Freudian
philosophy of desire and sexuality leads to the ideology of Zardoz.
But I'm not about to write it. That would mean I'd have to watch
Zardoz.

Bogue’s essay expresses a weird kind of regret that Deleuze rejected Freudianism and never relied on Freud’s work again. I can’t quite explain it.

Best I can do is speculate – about the habits and norms of the academics of the global university system. Not what everyone does, of course. I’m just talking about the tendencies people get socialized into as they teach their courses, hunt for research grants and contracts, submit their articles and edit their journals, chase tenure.

There’s a tendency to crave wholeness in a primary material philosopher. At conferences, in classes, and in articles, so many ask questions like, “What was Aristotle’s concept of the soul?” for example. As if there could only be one answer to that question.

Some philosophers are allowed breaks. Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of those, but he was so extreme in declaring it in his life that no one can deny it. Kant was way more professional with his declaration, but it was still pretty extreme.

I was trained to think of such figures as outliers in the broader tradition of philosophy – those were consistent thinkers. Even the two Kants and the two Wittgensteins are each treated as being consistent. The concepts are clear in each one. You’d get weird looks if you suggested that the primary material thinkers were just as uncertain of the ideas they wrote about and the concepts they developed as anyone else.

So much secondary material is scholarship arguing over what a given philosopher really meant by a particular concept. If even the primary material writers didn’t quite know the exact concept – if they were figuring it all out like the rest of us – there isn’t any real hook for why they’re among the ranks of the great philosophers.

Well, there is. It’s the ambition, care, and skill with which they wrote their battles with difficult, vital concepts. Plus, they had the social and institutional connections and reputations to publish their work where it would be widely read and taken seriously.

If you think primary material philosophers reached any truth that make them categorically different from anyone else. We don’t read Aristotle to follow and join along with his concepts about the nature of the soul – We read Aristotle to know Aristotle’s concept of the soul.

Maybe we shouldn’t. You know that everybody shits, right?

Where Does Morality Come From Anyway? Research Time, 19/01/2018

That’s one hell of a question to start with, and I’m not going to say the few hundred words I write here will be definitive. Too many people in the world and human history speak definitively about morality. So I’m just going to riff.

What am I riffing on? An essay in that collection of Deleuze scholars discussing his influences. This one is about the ideas of David Hume that made it into his thinking.

David Hume once described matter as moving with the necessity of
balls across a table when they're smacked with a cue. Yet he also
said that we could never know if an event was truly necessary, no
matter how often we saw it repeat. And it's just as likely that no
one even started playing snooker in the first place.

The influence of Hume on Deleuze is an interesting little avenue, first of all. Deleuze’s first book was Empiricism and Subjectivity, a small book about Hume’s philosophical ideas. But Deleuze didn’t publish another work that size until his book on Nietzsche, which moved in some very different directions.

Deleuze referred to the eight years between those books as lost, of a sort. He was teaching high school and college down in Lyon. A lifelong Parisian, with all the attitudes that implies, Deleuze was bored as shit down south. In terms of his thinking, he ended up moving in totally different directions after that near-decade of research and reconsideration.

His first source of concepts to build a revolutionized empiricism was Hume, the modern-period philosopher best-identified with the term ‘empiricism.’ But it turned out to be a bit of a dead end. Deleuze’s future would lie in much stranger territory.

That wasn’t to say that Deleuze’s engagement with Hume wouldn’t produce some interesting ideas on its own. One example is a really valuable distinction to defend thorough materialist thinking from charges of moral relativism. It’s a distinction between the ground of a principle and its scope.

Here’s how the charge typically goes.
• • •
Start from the presumption that anything that arises contingently in history – it could have not happened after all – can’t be universal. The universal has to be rooted in the necessary. So if moral principles are universal, they must be necessary.

There need never have been a human species. There need never have
been galaxies, stars, planets, or anything other than distant, isolated
fields and minute fluxes of energy. That's okay. We are actually
all here now.

The ground of that necessity can’t be human thought, because human thought – just like human existence – is contingent. We could have never existed at all, had it not been for quadrillions upon quadrillions of events over billions of years. So humans can’t generate principles whose ground is universal. At most, we can discover them.

So universal moral principles would be like mathematical principles and relationships – necessary aspects of the universe itself.

If you’re going to push materialist, empiricist thinking as far as their principles go, you end up with a moral constructivism. We create moral systems as a function of our social life. Any set of moral principles would be able to avoid self-destructing as long as they could keep a society in some minimal degree of solidarity.

There’s a lot of flexibility in those minimal conditions. Can't exactly stand on any universal ground. Morality’s existence and character becomes entirely contingent. Humans are of such a nature as organisms that their society’s survival has these particular conditions.

There’s nothing necessary about that, so it can’t produce universal morality.
• • •
That whole argument confuses ground and scope. It doesn’t make moral truths any less important than they are already if you take them to emerge from contingent activity.

There need never have been humans or moralities. But can there be
other kinds of creatures that need moralities to live? Meeting
them will be the biggest challenge to what moral principles we
consider the genuine universals.

If there were no organisms that were able to develop moral principles, then there would be no moral truths in that world. Same goes for a world that never developed stars – there would be no truths about stars in a universe not dense enough to develop them.

If the universe never developed moral creatures, there would be no truths about morality. But that contingency doesn’t affect the scope of those principles when they actually exist.

A moral truth – at its most profound level – is a moral principle that’s true for all systems of morality worthy of the name. They’d be the truths that apply – somehow – across all the variations that fall within those minimal conditions of moralities that won’t self-destruct.*

* Eventually. I say self-destruct because their principles literally contain their own potential destruction – vicious contraries, explosively direct contradictions.

Moral principles of that sort would have a scope of application that is genuinely universal. For all systems of morality, these conditions and principles apply.

Truths don’t need to be built into the fabric of the universe itself to be universal. They need only apply without exception throughout their scope of application. Bloody difficult enough to figure out what those are.

Mathematical Images As Alive As You Are, Research Time, 29/11/2017

So I'm getting back to talking about Gilles Deleuze again – running back over the ideas in What Is Philosophy?. I first read this book about ten years ago. It was the first long book of his or Guattari’s that I’d ever read.

I didn't understand all of it at first. I mean, you’re never supposed to understand a genuinely good book completely – otherwise, there’s no value in returning to it, which means it isn’t genuinely good. One thing that I had trouble wrapping my head around the first time I read it was Deleuze’s concept of the plane of immanence.

From chaos the plane of immanence takes the determinations with
which it makes its infinite movements or its diagrammatic features.
Consequently, we can and must presuppose a multiplicity of planes,
since no one plane could encompass all of chaos without collapsing
back into it; and each retains only movements which can be folded
together. – Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, Ch 2, Pg 50.

Reading it again now, my superior knowledge has totally enlightened me – No, that’s a fucking lie. It’s still a super-difficult chapter. I have a better handle on it now that I have an extra decade of experience and practice. But holy hell.

Let’s get one stupid objection to this concept out of the way – Deleuze doesn’t think the plane of immanence is some supernatural field of thought. You call this guy a textbook Platonist, I’ll fight you.

The plane of immanence is an image of thought.

Remember Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s first big solo book? Remember how the only chapter you didn’t need a pure mathematics degree to follow closely was called “The Image of Thought.” It was a critique of a way of thinking that unifies all worthy thought along a single vector.*

* The chapter did a lot of other things as well – Difference and Repetition was probably the most dense book of Deleuze’s entire career of writing stupendously dense books. But I want to concentrate on this one thing here.

Call it truth, the real, correspondence, the mind of God. The ideal of thinking was to converge on a unified universal. It wasn’t that Deleuze wanted this gone, or thought it was wrong, or had no value. He just didn’t want this image of thought to be the only legitimate one.

Which I guess means he did end up wanting it gone. Someone says they’re the only boss, then if you (and you, and you, and you) want to be the boss too, you’ll have to fight them for it.

Can we say that one plane is 'better' than another? Or at least that it
does or doesn't answer to the requirements of the age? What does
answering to the requirements of the age mean? What relationship
is there between the movements or diagrammatic features of an
image of thought and the movements or socio-historical features
of an age? – Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, Ch 2, Pg 58.

Start instead from a plural perspective about thought. You can organize thought in many different legitimate ways, each of which opens some avenues and closes others.

It’s analogous to perception. Bats can experience the world with echolocation, for example, and we can experience the world with words. That doesn’t make either the bat’s perception or the human’s perception better or worse than the other in an absolute sense. Bats are able to do some things and not others. Same goes for humans. We each have our niches in the world.

It works the same way in thought. Let’s explain this starting with concepts. A philosophical concept is created when you snatch an idea from the chaos of life, abstract it enough from your own for pretty much anyone to apply, refine it to mathematical accuracy through careful writing and tough self-interrogation.

Then you have a philosophical concept – a thought that can serve as an interpretive framework for thinking and living – a schemata for your understanding.

Like I said a few days ago, concepts can work together, they can conflict, or they can blatantly contradict each other. The plane of immanence is a map of those concepts – their component ideas, how they’d interact when used in a single subjectivity or a single society, or a whole planet.

A map of compossibility space – of the limits and conditions of how concepts can work together in a single, very complicated, system. You could almost call it a philosophy’s geometry.

A Refreshing Refusal of Universality, A History Boy, 23/09/2016

Years ago, when I was doing my Master’s degree, my supervisor* was giving a presentation on philosophy of language. This was the first moment in my education when I was just completely confounded by the reaction of a fellow student. 

* His avatar in this post will be Artie Shaw. Similar enough for people who know us to know who he is, but still doing the duty of a pseudonym. Also, he’d find it funny.

Shaking my head thinking, “Why would you even ask that?” Not at anything aggressive or offensive, but at such cross-purposes to the lecture that no one really knew how to react.

A universe of infinite variety and difference.

It was about a conception of counter-factual propositions as a synthetic a priori – knowledge that you learned entirely through thinking, but which involved reasoning beyond just logical implications of definitions. You had to think through imaginary empirical situations, what could have been.

This lecture was ten years ago, and I largely never again touched the Kripke-inspired philosophy of language that Artie Shaw was ploughing through at the time. So I’m probably messing up the substance of the talk entirely. 

But the point is – this use of the term ‘a priori’ referred entirely to counter-factual reasoning and modal logic, the quantification of possibility. In the Q&A, my colleague The Cartesian asked:

“But what about the universal?”

It was a sensible question from his perspective – The Cartesian was literally a Cartesian. He was steeped in terminology and tradition that conceived of the realm of pure thought as where you discover universal truths. And that’s not what philosophy really does anymore.

I mean, I’ve met plenty of working philosophy professors who still think this way about the discipline. But they tend to produce very unremarkable work on topics that are far removed from the concerns or our day. 

Either the write entirely scholarly material on the works of great philosophers from centuries ago. Or they write on the same problems those earlier philosophers did as if they were still vibrant topics whose answers could grip a society.

I had been leaning this way for a while, even at that young age. But that moment very suddenly pushed me to realize something very important. Problems of universal truth don’t really matter very much, aren’t interesting, and aren’t even productive. They just distract you from the really fascinating issues and ideas of the world.

So I had a wonderful chuckle at Anthony Appiah’s casual rejection of any possibility of truly universal knowledge in human societies. Can we say anything universally true of all humans? In the moral or ethical realm? Probably not. At least not in that traditional sense of the universal as essence, as applying without exception.

This does amount to a blanket declaration, but after more than a century of poking gaping materialist holes of contingency in all those old pretensions to the universal, I think it’s safe to declare it simply. Appiah writes from a solidly pragmatist perspective, and so do I.

There is no universal in human nature. 

Where we think there are universals, there are really just tendencies common enough that we haven’t run into any counter-examples. 

What’s more, we don’t even need shared universals to build empathy between different people. We’re used to the appeals to a shared humanity to encourage peace building. At least in the rhetoric. “Ain’t we all kin?” I sometimes think the idea of a humanity bound by what we have in common comes from spending too long swimming in the conformist language of the nation.

Differences are what fascinates us. If we meet people who are exactly the same as we are, they bore us quickly. Variety and surprise is the basis of our strongest relationships – they challenge us as we come to know them, and open our world to new possibilities.

Even in the most tense and violent places, exploring difference is the foundation of real peace. We’re diverse and unique, and that universal of no universality – the singularity of the world – brings us together.

Save Us V: The World Is Lost But I’m Found, Research Time, 16/12/2015

Well, that turned into a couple of nice false starts. But here we are at the actual start of what I wanted to say about Hobbes when I was writing my follow-up to the Only a God post.

What Leo Strauss has to say about Hobbes is rooted in Strauss' own attitude about truth. The problem of truth – particularly the natural universal rights of man als Männer – is the conceptual core of Natural Right and History.

Here's the pragmatist answer to the problem of
relativism. Many truths doesn't mean there are no truths.
Each truth is partial, limited to a particular unique
domain or set of concerns, and only God knows the
totality of all that truth. But God isn't exactly
forthcoming with the answers, so we have to figure
all this out on our own.

Okay, so what makes truth a problem? 

See, Strauss is a textbook example of someone who thinks that saying “There’s no one absolute eternal truth about X" is the same as saying “There’s no truth at all about X, and you can believe whatever you want about X.” When X is the list of human rights, shit gets serious.

It’s the fear of moral relativism, but in a context where anything that falls short of moral absolutism is total relativism. And Strauss’ analysis of Hobbes is how he roots moral relativism in thinking that goes back well further than the usual suspects like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

The real relativist, as far as he's concerned, is Hobbes. The reason is intriguing, though. It has to do with the implications of a thorough mechanism for knowledge in Hobbes’ thinking.

Before I lay this out, I want to say that these aren't my views at all. I’m walking you through how I understand Strauss’ argument. I think that argument is fascinating as a set of ideas and inferences, but I don’t think it’s true at all.

If everything that exists is a mechanism, then humanity has no powers to progress beyond what we can already do. That includes our thinking. We can only think, plan, and act in a way that’s peculiar to human existence alone. So we can only understand the world in human terms.

If we want to understand everything in the world (the ostensible goal of scientific inquiry), we’d have to understand everything in the world on its own terms. But we only have human knowledge frameworks to work with, so can’t know the world in itself. 

So humans gaining knowledge of truths beyond human experience or thinking is impossible. Reason is impotent. But action isn’t. Mathematics is a human way of knowing, but it does allow us to study how mechanisms work and manipulate them.

The heavily oversignified central illustration of
Hobbes' Leviathan.

Non-human mechanisms are permanently alienated from humanity. But we can use our knowledge of mechanism in the abstract (mathematics and the derived applied sciences) to wrench those alien bodies to behave according to human possibilities.

This is the mind-set of Modernity.* The book of nature is in a language we can never know. But we can burn its pages and remake the world in the human image. Strauss thinks this is a disastrous path, and so have many environmentalists over the years.**

* The epoch, that is. 

** Further notions that environmentalism should properly be a conservative dogma, as it was back when it was called conservationism, and resulted in the creation of America's national park system. But in the 1960s, the movement became critical of big business because of pesticides and pollution, so became the province of hippies. Environmental consciousness still hasn’t recovered the same political power it had in John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt's day, and I don't know that it ever will.

If humanity is so lost in the world that we can only find ourselves, then we'll make sure we can be found everywhere by steamrolling our nature, our character, our way over everything. That’s modernity, says Strauss. 

So we have to figure out a return to the pre-modern mind-set when we rooted philosophical thinking and argument in real endpoints: the actual, absolute, universal answers to our questions.

Hoo boy. To Be Continued . . .

The Fastest Possible Revolution, Composing, 30/11/2015

I picked up some Leo Strauss again, after having put the book down during some hectic weeks. But I think his ideas, particularly as they’re expressed in Natural Right and History, are undeniably insightful about the utopian, revolutionary drive in humanity.

Strauss is supposed to be the philosophical inspiration of the neoconservatives! you shout. And you do. Because it’s true, at least as far as popular discourse – the flows of punditry and political analysis throughout television and the internet – is concerned. 

Is this man a Straussian? No, he's Bill Kristol.

If I involve Strauss’ ideas in the Utopias manuscript, and it looks like I will, it’ll be as a demonstration. The idea that the intellectual leaders of the neoconservative movement that took the American military to Iraq are dedicated Straussians is an intellectual conspiracy.

I literally mean a conspiracy. This article traces the first appearances of the modern consensus Strauss-influenced-the-neocons meme to have begun with an article published by Lyndon Larouche. Larouche apparently claims in this essay that several figures in the Reagan Administration and their associates were followers of Strauss’ political philosophy.

Then Larouche makes an absurd claim that Strauss’ political philosophy is profoundly opposed to his Promethean nature as an engine of progress for humanity in the ever-progressing power of our technology to conquer nature. 

Larouche, in his heyday, was an American communist revolutionary who attempted to build his new society on the recruitment model of a cult. Right down to allegedly brainwashing citizens to have a completely different set of moral presumptions, premises for a morality of Marxist utopia.

From this man and organization came this conspiracy that many in popular discourse believe. I took it for granted so much that I started reading the book as research for my Utopias project. Yet if its source really is a fellow-traveller of Jim Jones, the notion must be absurd.

As I read in Strauss this weekend when I was relaxing with Natural Right and History, you find the truth of a phenomenon by examining its origin.

Yes, Lyndon Larouche is still around and doing things.

In material history, the connection between Strauss and Team Wolfowitz is the product of a philosophical Marxist L. Ron Hubbard. But the myth is widely enough believed that examining conservative thinking AS IF it were true can now teach us a lot about what contemporary conservative ideals are philosophically.

We can find the noble concept that sits in horror at how much violence and war has happened around it. No one ever thought of this concept until after the fact. But it’s the unspoken attractor in the phase space of society. It never even existed until after enough events, actions, and thoughts expressed it. A tendency that manifests without governing.

The conspiracy that the neocons are Straussians is so widely believed by now as to make Strauss part of the intellectual atmosphere of the real conservative movement. Some young Republican is probably reading him now, because he’s heard the same conspiracy theory that the liberal press believes. He just likes what he hears.

What would he hear? I think there’d be two principles.

1) Democracy is the best form of human government we’ve come up with, and people shouldn’t have to live in constant fear of their government. 

2) The world will be at peace when all people are free and treat each other as brothers – this is the natural right of all people for justice, arrived by reason.

I don't think Strauss would be amused to hear
how I talk about him, but he's dead. So he
can become a retroactive inspiration
without making a big deal about it.

That second principle makes Strauss sound more like an anarchist than a contemporary conservative. He describes how democracy leads to a peaceful society where everyone helps each other. But becoming such a society requires everyone to follow their powers of reasoning well enough to uncover the truth for themselves.

This is still revolutionary. Even if the universal truth reason discovers is pretty much what you already believed, if you’re really using your reason, then you’ll have turned against your society anyway. You’ll reject your starting moral beliefs because they’ re products of authority, not reason.

That’s a tough transformation, as if the only way to build a democracy is to be their Socrates, only actually effective. Person by person, you inspire and nudge them to be more mindful of freedom, and to care for others. That makes a society full of people who wouldn’t kill or hurt another.

But that’s a really slow process. The Bill Kristol that lives in our collective head, the magazine editor of neocon doctrine, believes that this will be when every government in the world is democratic. And we can just bomb and invade our way to global democracy.

“As fast as you can!” is not the same as, “As fast as is possible.”

Who Can Determine a Whole Culture? Research Time, 29/10/2015

Let’s look at this problem of fate again. Who we are depends on where and when we were born and raised. It’s not controversial to say that a wealthy man from Kolkata will have a different personality (and positionality) than a poor woman from Namibia or a working-class trans man from Toronto.

The problem of fate for our moral thinking goes deeper than personality. Leo Strauss gets so steamed with the social sciences because he sees what its historicism implies for thinking. 

Our place in culture and history determines the limits of our cognition. They make up the horizon of what we can even conceive. Historicism, as he understands it, means that what each of us can think about coherently is beyond our control. 

Is a world without absolute universals really a world
with nothing to believe in? I don't think the contingency
of reality needs to make us nihilists.

Because our culture determines the horizon of our thinking without any input from us, Strauss worries that total cultural relativism about moral and political values will result. It’s a nihilist’s world.

But there’s a limit to Strauss’ influential conception of historicism. It comes out of his own writing – against what Strauss himself believes – when he starts a long discussion of Max Weber.

Weber is one of the Big Three of the foundation of sociology.* Strauss was delivering the lectures that became Natural Right and History in the 1950s. You engage the fundamentals of Weber’s thinking, it means you’re engaging the fundamentals of the whole social science field.

* Say it with me everybody: Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber.

So Strauss talks about Weber’s key idea that social actions and changes are all constituted by individual agency alone. A society isn’t an entity with its own agency, but the accumulated acts of everyone in it.

Today, we know what that sounds like. It’s a chaotic system where a lot of individual units behave in ways that look unified, controlled as a whole. But they’re the much more complex causes of an aggregate.

When the whole is a culture, individuals determine what happens at the social level. Yet textbook cultural relativism implies that the society as a whole has all the agency over an individual. 

But this still works with Strauss’ worst notions of historicism, relativism, nihilism. Not some monolith like Society™, but all your ancestors’ and community members’ thoughts and actions make the fixed limit to your own thinking.

I’m not yet sure where Strauss is going with this. I’ve only read a little bit into this chapter so far, so I’m just explaining the idea and where I stand in relation to it. But this is how my ideas on it are shaping up. 

A philosophical inspiration to us all.

The real counterweight to this picture of historicism as nihilism comes from a simple fact. Social change is real. It takes time for the change to become comprehensive, but a culture’s attitudes and ideas change over time. If the horizons of our thinking are fixed by our ancestors and community, then each of us would be copies of the past. Social change would be impossible.

And social change clearly comes from individuals. Just roll with Weber’s idea that only individuals – acting in unplanned, messy aggregate – have agency in society. So individual activity prompts and leads social change. 

Each of us has the power, as individuals, to change how we think and understand the world. We can change those limits of our conception, figure out new possibilities for existence itself. 

Strauss says that philosophy is the search for wisdom, and he considers that wisdom the correct answers to universal metaphysical and moral questions. I say philosophy is the tradition of thinking of new ways to think. Social change in the mind before it proliferates through the world. Free your mind and your ass will follow.

Our motivations for agitating for social change might include fidelity to some moral value you consider universal. It might not. Unlike what Strauss believes, you don’t need a universal truth to motivate changing your society in a more just direction.

The quest for justice comes from a realization that anyone can have at anytime. Something is wrong. Something has gone wrong. Something is not working. We must repair it.

The Deceptive Ease of Looking Back, Research Time, 03/12/2014

We don’t really know anything about the past, even the recent past. We think that we do, but that isn’t really the case. It isn’t that we delude ourselves that we perfectly understand the past and where we come from. I’m not going Freud-style with my thinking here. I’m just riffing about a particular idea that Cary Wolfe skirts in his What Is Posthumanism collection about the nature of history.

It’s an an essay called “Animal Studies,” where he examines some of the university system’s professional tendencies that have led to the proliferation of “X studies” disciplines. These remarks are almost marginal, occurring in some closing sections of his overall argument, casually tossed into a discussion to explain a Derridean idea that our sense of our own narrative is foreign to itself. But since he’s such a fan of Derrida, I’m sure he’ll have no problem with my getting some mileage out of an idea he discusses on the margins. 

When I read War and Peace, I was impressed by
Tolstoy's ability to combine the personal scale of
a single noble family with the grand historical
political movement of Napoleon's wars of
European conquest, the man Hegel called "the
World-Spirit on horseback." But Tolstoy still cut
away from the detailed stories of the people
beyond the noble class in those wars. Ostensibly
comprehensive history revealed to be selective.

Where we come from as a culture is often very clear to us. We learn all the basic beats of our countries’ social and political histories in the earliest years of our education. The foundation of our state, major waves of immigration and settlement, the chronologies of the major wars, as well as national and international political events. All this heritage is clear. 

But there’s a lot of our history that doesn’t make it into the history books or the canon of what’s self-consciously culturally remembered. I don’t mean history in that self-conscious sense here, how a culture in the present understands and knows its own past. 

I mean the actual physical causes that interact in the process of roiling time. Almost all of those causes were events that occurred to ordinary people, or that ordinary people created. Wolfe makes a peculiar point. Say 200 books from the Victorian era end up being remembered culturally in some, at least minor form. That’s barely half a percent of all the books that were published in that time. 

Here's another example. I was thinking to myself yesterday that I wanted to find some heavy rock music from the 1960s. I heard a 60s-sounding guitar in a store the other day, but it was heavier than most of the music I knew from the period. So I found this list online that someone who knows WAY MORE about music from this era than I do compiled of 158 heavy rock bands from the late 1960s. I had heard of hardly any. Now, I want to track them down. These were people who formed bands, made some kickass music, and disappeared from our knowledge of history. Yet their actions still contributed to the constitution of our causal history.

And now I really want to get into Atomic Rooster.

Wolfe’s point is that how we understand our own cultural narrative is actually incredibly selective, and has cut a lot away from consideration. We only remember in our history books a few centrally important narratives and chains of events; so much else has been forgotten about and disappeared without a trace in the present anymore, except for proliferating physical effects that effect indirectly and systematically a variety of events today, which will probably later be similarly forgotten.

This fact causes a lot of problems for many influential conceptions of history, particularly any philosophy of history that sees human historical existence as an ultimately unified process. Or at least as a process with a particular end point in mind. Let’s make the scope even more broad: any understanding of history as having any sort of simple organizing concept. 

So I’d actually like to hear from some of my Hegelian friends about this idea. Because when I first started this blog in July 2013, I was reading Georg Hegel’s Philosophy of History, had some good discussions on the subject with B, and some irritatingly dogmatic discussions on the subject with P. Ever since I first started reading Hegel in detail, in a graduate course I took during my Master’s studies going through The Phenomenology of Spirit, I found the goal of this central book in Hegel’s thought is laying out a conception of history that has a clear, unifiable meaning.

But if our understanding of our culture’s own history is so selective in its composition that almost all immanent social phenomena are cut away when we tell the story of a given era or historical path, then even a figure like Hegel who (along with his many, many, many followers and reactors) pitches his own historicism as a universal structure of humanity’s very temporality, then all these pretensions to the universal are a lie.

There is no one story to history of any kind. There is always more to be discovered beyond the neat conclusions of a historicism determined by a single set of concepts. We forget more than we have ever known. We never learn all there is to know. No matter how dead and dull we might think the past may be, there are always more stories to discover if you look.

I Have Never Seen a True Universal, A History Boy, 12/12/2013

Some incidents that are otherwise utterly trivial stick in your minds. Some turn of phrase or remarkable juxtaposition of objects makes an ordinary moment a pivotal moment in your memory, something that you can still recall years later, but that no one else ever bothers remembering. I think that way about the question, “But what about the universal?”

When I was at Memorial University, the philosophy department had a class for its grad students to which anyone could show up. It was a public lecture series by its faculty members and the occasional guest where the enrolled students could conduct a seminar in conversation with the faculty member, and write a paper responding as a peer to the presentation. It’s a brilliant idea, and another wonderful way Memorial’s philosophy department levelled the hierarchy between professors and students. The year I took the class, my thesis supervisor Dr S presented a paper that didn’t have anything to do with my topic at all. It was about the role of the a priori, that which can be known through definition alone, in modern philosophy of language. It featured quite a lot of Kripke, but I don’t remember much else of the seminar except my colleague G’s question, “But what about the universal?”

There was a notion in philosophy that was universal to the discipline until the Analytic revolution: what was a priori true was universal. What was known through empirical investigation (a posteriori) was always subject to doubt or limitation. But knowledge arrived through pure reason’s deduction from definitions (a priori) was universally true. G asked what for him, a Descartes scholar, was a pertinent and important question: If the philosophy of language took the meanings of words to be contingent, then the a priori wasn’t universal anymore, just deductions from definitions that could have been otherwise. G wasn’t okay with that, but I was, and I’m even more okay with it today.

I tell this story to make a point about moral empiricism, treating morality as itself a contingent factor of human biological and social evolution. In this context, the essence of moral concepts are discovered through genealogy: a combination of historical and philosophical investigation and reasoning. We examine the conditions in which a moral concept develops, understanding cultural contexts as best we can, trace how it has changed while operating in the flux of social change and relations, and systematizing that flux. That’s how we understand human morality in a genealogical philosophy.

Margaret Urban Walker has an argument in disguise against the accusation that this is cultural relativism. She considers the standard philosophical trope that the ancient Greeks believed that women were naturally suited to their subservient position. In particular, she examines this through Bernard Williams’ article extrapolating the universal ancient Greek understanding of the nature of women from Aristotle’s works. There’s one surefire way to test whether a subservient position is natural or otherwise voluntary: look at the patterns of force and coercion in a society keeping people in that subservience. You don’t need to force people into roles to which they’re naturally suited or for which they volunteer. If the structures of your society constitute conditions were people of a particular type have no choice but to accept a subservient role, then you have a system of oppression on your hands. 

Claims to moral universality seem only to leave some
people out of consideration, rendering them inaudible and
invisible. Not even in the cool, sci-fi way either.

The argument against cultural relativism comes not only in looking at the social structures that forced ancient Greek women of the citizen class into subservient positions. It’s also a simple matter of finding exceptions. Williams, and too many people who practice philosophy, think of “Ancient Greece” as a unified creature with a single cultural set of norms from which there were no exceptions. He characterizes all people of ancient Greece as sharing this morality that accepted slavery with distaste, but held that women were naturally and necessarily subservient. Then Walker finds an exception in Plato: in his otherwise near-totalitarian vision of The Republic, all gender norms are thrown out the window. People’s social roles are defined by a rigid class structure, but females and males in each class are equals within it. 

There is a cliché that the exception proves the rule. This idea is nonsense. The exception only proves that the rule must be enforced against possible opposition, not that it is truly universal. Indeed, genealogical techniques of examining moralities frequently discover networks of force and exceptions from apparently-established norms. The universal seems to be nowhere in human moral understanding, indeed, almost inappropriate for the venue of moral reasoning.

I’ve come to distrust claims to universality over the years, when it comes to the human sciences. Every such claim that I’ve come across in the history of thought always has exceptions bubbling up contrary to its determination. Or else the universality of this moral belief turns out to be enforced by coercive social structures; the absolutely perfect way things are and always have been faces dissatisfied rebels out to overthrow those social habits and institutions. 

Whenever a claim to universality exists, it turns out that there are exceptions, examples left out of the sweep of a generalization. Because the generalization is taken to be universal, the exceptions drop away from visibility in society. Walker makes an important point about the social nature of human identity. We can only have a functional identity if that identity is acknowledged. Socially, it isn’t a scream of rage if the moral habits of the people around you prevent anyone from hearing it, or from it even being audible. This is how oppression works most of the time. 

There is a universal claim about the social validity of a person or a set of concerns. The claim is taken so much for granted, so intuitively obvious, that it is habitually accepted as true. But there are people who are different from that condition of validity. They exist, they are people, but they are already exceptions from the social order. They’re background noise, at most. I have yet to meet a claim in moral thinking that doesn’t leave this remainder of people who, no matter how hard they scream, are silent because everyone around them has been trained to treat their voices as noise.

When I hear the question, “What about the universal?” my response now is, “Yeah, what the fuck about it?”