The fact of existence comes before -- and so, necessarily, lies outside of -- knowledge. Existence is not an attribute of ourselves and so cannot be understood. This falling short in knowledge's reach (which can also be thought of as the gap between action and knowing) is a source of frustration. Knowing is a way for us to control the world, to bring it to heel. But action (even our own) can be autonomous, resisting knowledge.
Kierkegaard's concern was not to usurp action but to quell the anxiety of the person who cannot explain his own existence. He advises us to fill that gap with Faith. Only Faith can bridge the gulf between the bounds of our knowledge and the fact of our existence.
Yet displacement allows us to separate knowing from Being. It is a kind of de-objectifying or de-representing of our lives. It moves knowing into another world (World 2.0, say). The usurping tendencies have been displaced not eliminated. What we are left with is our undifferentiated existence in World 1.0 . There is no need to "know" anything about our being.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
History's One Important Lesson
Andrew Gamble, the Cambridge University politics professor, expresses surprise that the political Left continues to expect crises -- crises of capitalism, to be precise -- to work to its advantage. On the contrary, Gamble argues in his recent book The Spectre at the Feast, the gains have usually accrued to the Right, which is as it should be since "the right have often shown they understand the need of individuals for security better than parties of the left". People crave reassurance, he says, and so turn to authority rather than radicalism at such times.
Quite apart from whether Andrew Gamble has accounted for the manipulations of a corporate-controlled traditional media biased towards protecting existing property interests (not to mention the poverty of imagination that afflicts the alternative media), there isn't much in Gamble's observation that applies to our concerns. But I still cited him here because I wanted to make a quite different point.
The sort of crisis we are talking about --the crisis of culture when the Petri dish that holds the culture no longer provides a hospitable environment for its survival -- is not one where people would crave comfort in the familiar because the familiar has shown to have failed and, furthermore, is being combated by forces that are seen to be equally hostile. At such times, when two equally matched (equally strong or equally weak) forces are locked in mortal combat the conditions are just right for the emergence of a third force.
I call this the Peloponnesian Effect. The two adversaries, Athens and Sparta (and their respective allies), fought each other to a standstill. Neither of them won; each side was weakened by the long drawn-out war. The gains went to Macedonia, a rising power that was able to grow unhindered and would shape the new Hellenistic age.
So the Reformation in Europe set off the bloody religious wars of the sixteenth century and the ferocity of those wars led not just to the birth of the nation-state but something far more profound, far more ambitious and with far greater consequences for the history of our civilization. It made possible the Age of Reason. The coffee houses of London in the seventeenth century were the "intellectual hub" of Stuart (and later Hanoverian) England, according to historian Stephen Inwood. These Penny Universities, as they were called, allowed for more stimulating conversation and discovery --and in the sciences closer to the revolutionary methodology that Francis Bacon had called for -- than the universities which remained steeped in their stuffy Aristotelian traditions.
Quite apart from whether Andrew Gamble has accounted for the manipulations of a corporate-controlled traditional media biased towards protecting existing property interests (not to mention the poverty of imagination that afflicts the alternative media), there isn't much in Gamble's observation that applies to our concerns. But I still cited him here because I wanted to make a quite different point.
The sort of crisis we are talking about --the crisis of culture when the Petri dish that holds the culture no longer provides a hospitable environment for its survival -- is not one where people would crave comfort in the familiar because the familiar has shown to have failed and, furthermore, is being combated by forces that are seen to be equally hostile. At such times, when two equally matched (equally strong or equally weak) forces are locked in mortal combat the conditions are just right for the emergence of a third force.
I call this the Peloponnesian Effect. The two adversaries, Athens and Sparta (and their respective allies), fought each other to a standstill. Neither of them won; each side was weakened by the long drawn-out war. The gains went to Macedonia, a rising power that was able to grow unhindered and would shape the new Hellenistic age.
So the Reformation in Europe set off the bloody religious wars of the sixteenth century and the ferocity of those wars led not just to the birth of the nation-state but something far more profound, far more ambitious and with far greater consequences for the history of our civilization. It made possible the Age of Reason. The coffee houses of London in the seventeenth century were the "intellectual hub" of Stuart (and later Hanoverian) England, according to historian Stephen Inwood. These Penny Universities, as they were called, allowed for more stimulating conversation and discovery --and in the sciences closer to the revolutionary methodology that Francis Bacon had called for -- than the universities which remained steeped in their stuffy Aristotelian traditions.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Introducing the Blog (3): History's Long Thread
This will be my third and last post today, September 30, 2009, the day my blog was born.
The left-right divide in modern politics conceals a deeper fault line in European-influenced thought. This fault line separates the two ways we engage with the world. The tension between the two political impulses can be traced all the way back to Plato’s systematic representation of the world through ideas (objectification) in opposition to the pre-Socratic’s assertion that we must first be-in-the-world (de-objectification) and only with that as our starting point can we come to terms with it. The two traditions are irreconcilable. The first stands for Representation, the second for Being; the first for knowledge, the second for freedom. The first is accused of oppression, the second of relativism.
The dominance of Platonist beliefs went largely unchallenged –or if it was challenged, as Montaigne and Hobbes attempted to do, they failed to provide something for others to build on – until Rousseau’s dissent from Enlightenment beliefs, an impassioned appeal for politics with a moral foundation. This, he said, would be possible only by being free in Nature while surrendering all 'rights' to Society. Individual rights impeded our freedom and we should willingly hand them over. It was an extraordinarily original, and to many an extraordinarily perverse, way of defining freedom. The Romantic Movement in early 19th century Europe persisted with Rousseau’s dream but the excesses of the French Revolution and the age of terror that followed had already doomed their efforts.
The Marxian hope for a 'critical' approach, a form of self-consciousness that identifies and neutralizes the oppressive power of objective truths to change our lives against our wishes and deny us our freedom, follows naturally from Rousseau’s powerful attack on systematic knowledge. All that was then needed was the arrival of the Existentialists—with their stress on the priority of praxis (the Act) over logos (the Explanation) — in the mid-twentieth century to put the pre-Socratics back in the game.
This proved to be wishful thinking though. The objectifying tradition –with science in its advance guard—has vanquished its opposition. It usurps all human experience it encounters. Even madness, long thought to lie outside the reach of objective explanation, has submitted in the face of its encroachment, as Michel Foucault showed so persuasively. No religious dogma was more successful in its hunt for heresies to expose and seize. It delivered a fatal blow to the de-objectifying tradition when it accused it of nihilism. It even took the battle to the court of public opinion where it dragged out the cultural fluidity of the Sixties and served it up as an example of a social order bereft of an anchor. When anything goes, everything goes…..out of the window, was its prosecutorial brief.
So the Enlightenment Project ((the name I shall sometimes give to the Socratic tendency to objectify the world) was back on track. Our mental representations would bridge us to a world out there. And with its return has come the search for law, set by nature and with universal validity. We must genuflect before naturally occurring patterns in some Grand Design waiting to be detected by our minds.
And this is where we find ourselves today.
The left-right divide in modern politics conceals a deeper fault line in European-influenced thought. This fault line separates the two ways we engage with the world. The tension between the two political impulses can be traced all the way back to Plato’s systematic representation of the world through ideas (objectification) in opposition to the pre-Socratic’s assertion that we must first be-in-the-world (de-objectification) and only with that as our starting point can we come to terms with it. The two traditions are irreconcilable. The first stands for Representation, the second for Being; the first for knowledge, the second for freedom. The first is accused of oppression, the second of relativism.
The dominance of Platonist beliefs went largely unchallenged –or if it was challenged, as Montaigne and Hobbes attempted to do, they failed to provide something for others to build on – until Rousseau’s dissent from Enlightenment beliefs, an impassioned appeal for politics with a moral foundation. This, he said, would be possible only by being free in Nature while surrendering all 'rights' to Society. Individual rights impeded our freedom and we should willingly hand them over. It was an extraordinarily original, and to many an extraordinarily perverse, way of defining freedom. The Romantic Movement in early 19th century Europe persisted with Rousseau’s dream but the excesses of the French Revolution and the age of terror that followed had already doomed their efforts.
The Marxian hope for a 'critical' approach, a form of self-consciousness that identifies and neutralizes the oppressive power of objective truths to change our lives against our wishes and deny us our freedom, follows naturally from Rousseau’s powerful attack on systematic knowledge. All that was then needed was the arrival of the Existentialists—with their stress on the priority of praxis (the Act) over logos (the Explanation) — in the mid-twentieth century to put the pre-Socratics back in the game.
This proved to be wishful thinking though. The objectifying tradition –with science in its advance guard—has vanquished its opposition. It usurps all human experience it encounters. Even madness, long thought to lie outside the reach of objective explanation, has submitted in the face of its encroachment, as Michel Foucault showed so persuasively. No religious dogma was more successful in its hunt for heresies to expose and seize. It delivered a fatal blow to the de-objectifying tradition when it accused it of nihilism. It even took the battle to the court of public opinion where it dragged out the cultural fluidity of the Sixties and served it up as an example of a social order bereft of an anchor. When anything goes, everything goes…..out of the window, was its prosecutorial brief.
So the Enlightenment Project ((the name I shall sometimes give to the Socratic tendency to objectify the world) was back on track. Our mental representations would bridge us to a world out there. And with its return has come the search for law, set by nature and with universal validity. We must genuflect before naturally occurring patterns in some Grand Design waiting to be detected by our minds.
And this is where we find ourselves today.
Introducing the Blog (2): Subversion and the Enemy
So we are exhausted by the brittle novelty that is supposed to animate our lives. History is no guide because it provides us with too many possibilities.
Yet there is something stirring again and it comes from an unexpected source. It will allow us to retrieve the freedom we thought we had lost. The blog tells us we should not shy away from this change. It may seem frightening, but it is actually profoundly liberating.
Also, these comments will be in part a fierce rebuttal of the ideas of rationalist scholars like Susan Neiman and Amartya Sen. With this blog I intend to take the fight to them.
• My first objective is to launch a ferocious assault on the objectifying turn in Western culture and the unassailably powerful institutions (market capitalism, our hallowed research universities, the system of positive and natural law) it has spawned. We start to thaw out our lives again by rescuing the freedom that the great contrarians in the European tradition—Montaigne, Nietzsche, Marx and, above all, Rousseau—sought. From the very outset my writings will spurn the shallow notion of freedom that has now been appropriated by those who wish to reduce it to just another concept with useful, indeed utilitarian, implications.
• The blog will disinter the archaeological layers of ideas that have shaped our notions of freedom and knowledge and which have accumulated over the history of European-influenced culture. (There are also some interesting parallels with the shift from a Confucian text-based li to nature-based wen scheme in the Sung dynasty in 12th century China and I shall touch on that very briefly at some point.) And then I will do something else: I intend to show readers how another axial change in our culture has already begun.
• I then hope to radically redefine the meaning of freedom. Freedom has motivated some of our greatest movements but now seems utterly drained of vitality. Yet how I do it is what really matters. I am not just dusting off some tired old notions and writing a dry exegetical tract. By (a) reworking the debate between freedom and authority in terms of how we engage with the material world in the most elemental sense, i.e. whether in a Socratic (i.e. Plato) or pre-Socratic (Rousseau) way, and (b) then showing that we don’t fight for freedom but default into it by displacing the Platonist project into the electronic world, I will be approaching this in a rather original way.
• It is equally important to see this for what it is not. Despite the many references to technology it is not about trans-humanism. Nor is it a speculative foray into the philosophy of history. Nor, again, is it a New Age pamphlet. Its goals are avowedly political, not futuristic. It is a resonant call to non-action—in the same way Gandhi’s satyagraha was a form of passive resistance— an appeal not to stand in the way of burgeoning change.
The material in this blog will have two main themes, each with several interlocking sub-themes:
Theme 1: Freedom has no essence; it cannot be made an object of our understanding because it makes understanding possible. Freedom allows us to act. Thinking is just an act. Yet thinking and especially reasoned thinking are given pride of place in our modern culture. In fact, we are imprisoned by the need to think and all our acts are subordinated to this one act. The blog reasserts the freedom that is our inheritance and that by restoring freedom we are restoring life’s 'other acts'. The notion of a just society then emerges from these other acts. Not surprisingly, the view of “justice” espoused here is at odds with the rational conception of justice formulated by thinkers like John Rawls and Susan Neiman, as well as the tempered-rationality of Amartya Sen.
Theme 2: How do we put ourselves back in freedom? We attain it by displacing thought-acts to the electronic realm. Already a sophisticated synthetic economy exists in some Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games or MMORPGs. (The Chinese government has recently tried to stamp out synthetic money and the South Korean authorities are monitoring whether commercial transactions in some of these online games are spilling over into the material world.) I argue that much more of our lives can be transferred to that realm, hollowing out our lives, and refilling them with these other acts.
Yet there is something stirring again and it comes from an unexpected source. It will allow us to retrieve the freedom we thought we had lost. The blog tells us we should not shy away from this change. It may seem frightening, but it is actually profoundly liberating.
Also, these comments will be in part a fierce rebuttal of the ideas of rationalist scholars like Susan Neiman and Amartya Sen. With this blog I intend to take the fight to them.
• My first objective is to launch a ferocious assault on the objectifying turn in Western culture and the unassailably powerful institutions (market capitalism, our hallowed research universities, the system of positive and natural law) it has spawned. We start to thaw out our lives again by rescuing the freedom that the great contrarians in the European tradition—Montaigne, Nietzsche, Marx and, above all, Rousseau—sought. From the very outset my writings will spurn the shallow notion of freedom that has now been appropriated by those who wish to reduce it to just another concept with useful, indeed utilitarian, implications.
• The blog will disinter the archaeological layers of ideas that have shaped our notions of freedom and knowledge and which have accumulated over the history of European-influenced culture. (There are also some interesting parallels with the shift from a Confucian text-based li to nature-based wen scheme in the Sung dynasty in 12th century China and I shall touch on that very briefly at some point.) And then I will do something else: I intend to show readers how another axial change in our culture has already begun.
• I then hope to radically redefine the meaning of freedom. Freedom has motivated some of our greatest movements but now seems utterly drained of vitality. Yet how I do it is what really matters. I am not just dusting off some tired old notions and writing a dry exegetical tract. By (a) reworking the debate between freedom and authority in terms of how we engage with the material world in the most elemental sense, i.e. whether in a Socratic (i.e. Plato) or pre-Socratic (Rousseau) way, and (b) then showing that we don’t fight for freedom but default into it by displacing the Platonist project into the electronic world, I will be approaching this in a rather original way.
• It is equally important to see this for what it is not. Despite the many references to technology it is not about trans-humanism. Nor is it a speculative foray into the philosophy of history. Nor, again, is it a New Age pamphlet. Its goals are avowedly political, not futuristic. It is a resonant call to non-action—in the same way Gandhi’s satyagraha was a form of passive resistance— an appeal not to stand in the way of burgeoning change.
The material in this blog will have two main themes, each with several interlocking sub-themes:
Theme 1: Freedom has no essence; it cannot be made an object of our understanding because it makes understanding possible. Freedom allows us to act. Thinking is just an act. Yet thinking and especially reasoned thinking are given pride of place in our modern culture. In fact, we are imprisoned by the need to think and all our acts are subordinated to this one act. The blog reasserts the freedom that is our inheritance and that by restoring freedom we are restoring life’s 'other acts'. The notion of a just society then emerges from these other acts. Not surprisingly, the view of “justice” espoused here is at odds with the rational conception of justice formulated by thinkers like John Rawls and Susan Neiman, as well as the tempered-rationality of Amartya Sen.
Theme 2: How do we put ourselves back in freedom? We attain it by displacing thought-acts to the electronic realm. Already a sophisticated synthetic economy exists in some Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games or MMORPGs. (The Chinese government has recently tried to stamp out synthetic money and the South Korean authorities are monitoring whether commercial transactions in some of these online games are spilling over into the material world.) I argue that much more of our lives can be transferred to that realm, hollowing out our lives, and refilling them with these other acts.
Introducing the Blog: Sighting The Terrain
In this blog I write about the crisis in Western culture, though one should perhaps be calling it the crisis of our global but Western-influenced culture. This is my first post; and my comments will be made with no particular regularity.
I expect the blog to have a finite - in fact, short - life. The point is to get a few true believers (and fellow travelers will do as well) to spread the word. The displacement of the world should then follow easily.
I expect the blog to have a finite - in fact, short - life. The point is to get a few true believers (and fellow travelers will do as well) to spread the word. The displacement of the world should then follow easily.
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