A Normative Crowbar
What happens if we look at philosophy through normative goggles ? Does it help us clarify what philosophy is and what it has always already been doing ?
The philosopher as such [ implicit in the concept ] makes claims about how one, if one is 'rational,' ought to think.
The philosopher reasons from rational norms to rational norms. I include semantic norms with an inferential focus.
In philosophy, rational norms confront themselves. We rationally articulate (and create!) what it is to be rational. This is one way to interpret humans as historical beings. Today's norms are all we have to appeal to as we create tomorrows's. We are Neurathian rowboats on a wide and empty sea.
I
Hopefully this is enough to get us started. I give you a theme, lazies and gentlethem. Let's have fun.
The philosopher as such [ implicit in the concept ] makes claims about how one, if one is 'rational,' ought to think.
The philosopher reasons from rational norms to rational norms. I include semantic norms with an inferential focus.
In philosophy, rational norms confront themselves. We rationally articulate (and create!) what it is to be rational. This is one way to interpret humans as historical beings. Today's norms are all we have to appeal to as we create tomorrows's. We are Neurathian rowboats on a wide and empty sea.
I
Hopefully this is enough to get us started. I give you a theme, lazies and gentlethem. Let's have fun.
Comments (12)
Try on the goggles of an abnormally normative approach.
The philosopher need only ask : what is a philosopher ?
Was ist das--die Philosophie?
What is this, this philosophy ?
Meaning is use, and lies are only useful if they are understood and believed. Therefore the thought police must enforce truth-telling, and arrest the lies, because if lies prevail, all meaning is lost.
Quoting unenlightened
I would say they are special section of the thought police, perhaps internal affairs.
Hmm, maybe starts with the philosopher loving an idea in himself and trying to make it real with language in order to give him the sense he is grounded in the social order--because to control language is to control the social and the philosopher confronts social osmosis to avoid dissolution. The primary norms of survival and reproduction of linguistic objects then utilize the philosopher in a kind of symbiotic structuring of his intersubjectivity that socially elevates him and propagates them. Of course, this problematizes the location of the agent, with the norm getting mixed up in process--philosophizing then being to give the self over to particular processes that instantiate counter norms to those of prevalent thought, letting language explore itself as best it can through the medium of a scared and horny ape in order to progress the evolution of ideas. Or something.
Quoting Baden
Have you ever looked into Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence ? For Bloom, the strong poet (the one that forces itself into the canon) resents dying more than others, rages, I guess, against the dying of its little light, which it must see writ large indeed on the public soul. Rorty looks at philosophers through this lens, as poets who command us to look at the world in their way, the proper way.
Quoting Baden
Yes. Genes and memes. Where does he begin and the memes that use him stop ? What is he but a self-referential, self-marketing, bag of memes ? The memes in that bag must work together. Perhaps selves are bags of cooperative memes because they are candidate policies for a community that relies upon coherent strategies for dealing with its environment and its internal issues like law and incentive structures.
Quoting Baden
Individuals can be thought of as nodes for a parallel and adversarial computation. For Feuerbach , the individual doesn't so much think itself as it hosts the interaction of memes. By growing up in a world, we internalize semantic norms, such as what 'properly' follows from what. Like spinning tops, we can write metaphysics as a castaways, but the we that writes is sediment or software just doing its thing, updating the blockchain, waiting to be reconnect to the enternet. Dennett discusses how our neurons themselves are little fellows that competing employment to earn their glucose.
Thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by the species acting through the individual. In thinking, Feuerbach wrote, I am bound together with, or rather, I am one withindeed, I myself amall human beings (GW I:18).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
Quoting Baden
Yes. But toward what ? I think (?) it's just the enlightenment autonomy project. To be superstitious is to be thrown, to be bound, to not have been given the choice. We do we want ? Distance (for the the view and the safely) and grip (finegrained control) ? Do both the individual and community also need self-representing myths to hold that fattening bag of memes together ? As you say, scared and horny. Fear keeps lust in check, and maybe narcissism substitutes or transforms lust (look at that handsome stoic in the mirror!).
Only checked that reference after reading this. The comparison is well made though; both the poet and the philosopher seek to reorganize discourse, only in different ways. The poet directly through transforming it in order to avoid its inherent drag on meaning and the philosopher indirectly in order to extend its interpretability, i.e. its concept-carrying capacity. Both are identity making, the former finding solace beneath language and the latter through it. Discourse loses depth in use like a tire loses its grooves and its a constant battle of the emotional and intellectual creative to maintain a grip on the road that is identity. I find myself heavily oriented to the poetic, which has the disadvantage of a tendency towards ambiguity and obscurity but the advantage (for me :smile: ) of being more fun, non-committal, and emotive when it does hit.
[quote=Milan Kundera] The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure. [/quote]
(This also though part of the reason I was a kind of crappy teacher because I tended to overcompensate against my better instincts in order to toe the line.)
[quote=plaqueflag]Yes. Genes and memes. Where does he begin and the memes that use him stop ? What is he but a self-referential, self-marketing, bag of memes ? The memes in that bag must work together. Perhaps selves are bags of cooperative memes because they are candidate policies for a community that relies upon coherent strategies for dealing with its environment and its internal issues like law and incentive structures.[/quote]
Yes, but again, as soon as efficiency is reached grip begins to be lost. So were bags of memes that when they work too well take their grounding for granted and wear out the ape they rely on for functioning because they smooth away the tensions that allow the expression of the energies needed to function. Its like you have communities with laws and incentive structures that the better they become the worse they become because their path of progress necessarily imbues a self-ignorance that ends up impeding progress (and just so a different path may be taken). The individual here plays himself out in the social through its various recursions, family, community, nation etc. Real progress is the goal of reaching an impasse that requires reverse and repetition. Dialectic all the way down.
[quote=plaqueflag]Individuals can be thought of as nodes for a parallel and adversarial computation. For Feuerbach , the individual doesn't so much think itself as it hosts the interaction of memes. By growing up in a world, we internalize semantic norms, such as what 'properly' follows from what. Like spinning tops, we can write metaphysics as a castaways, but the we that writes is sediment or software just doing its thing, updating the blockchain, waiting to be reconnect to the enternet. Dennett discusses how our neurons themselves are little fellows that competing employment to earn their glucose.
Thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by the species acting through the individual. In thinking, Feuerbach wrote, I am bound together with, or rather, I am one withindeed, I myself amall human beings (GW I:18).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/ [/quote]
Im not very familiar with Feuerbach. I ought to fill that gap but I think its important to maintain a tension between believing and not believing this. You ought to believe it in order not to believe it; that is you commit yourself to your own irrelevance in the face of the social just so that by creating regardless, the logic of your action creates its own justification in the face of what becomes an impotent explicit belief. That way you turn tables on the social which usually acts on you, forcing your actions and rendering your denials that it does impotent. Sall about the powah!
[quote=plaqueflag]
Yes. But toward what ? I think (?) it's just the enlightenment autonomy project. To be superstitious is to be thrown, to be bound, to not have been given the choice. We do we want ? [/quote]
We want to exist. I exist therefore I must exist is the only coherent ethical injunction (see too: Beckett "I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on") and a more salient corollary to Descartes cogito. We want to exist and we want to exist more. And the only way to do that is to play. And the only place to play is language. Philosophy is one mode of play in pursuit of the ethic of existence.
[quote=plaqueflag]
Distance (for the the view and the safely) and grip (finegrained control) ? Do both the individual and community also need self-representing myths to hold that fattening bag of memes together ? As you say, scared and horny. Fear keeps lust in check, and maybe narcissism substitutes or transforms lust (look at that handsome stoic in the mirror!).[/quote]
Grip, yes, nice of you to mention that and retroactively justify my earlier tire metaphor :party: . Also yes, the self-representing myth is the myth of personal significance; just as social myths originally rested on supernatural justifications and then philosophical ones. Individual self-representing significance as myth then allows the conditions for individuals to actually instanitate social reality and its myths through the creation of Gods and philosophies. Were using each other, the stalk and the bale, and we either make a strawhouse out of that that a wolf will blow down or we end up in a bonfire. Thats our lot.
This is how I understand what Heidegger means with gossip / chatter. Deflated average generic tribal soul. We depend on in it. It is almost sanity itself. But it's limp and fuzzy facelessness. Brave new metaphors cool off into a common sense which is deaf to the contingency of those metaphors, which have hardened into obviousness which resents being challenged.
Quoting Baden
I very much relate. Do you like Nietzsche ? When he's joyfully wicked, there's nothing better.
Quoting Baden
Yes, it's complex like that. In some ways we are tendrils inventing new communities, creating the taste our work (our personalities as our essential work) along with that work.
Quoting Baden
Exactly. That's also in Feuerbach, a species' love for itself. Play. An organism 'vents it power' most thoroughly in play. Will-to-power, will-to-explore, will-to-play, will-to-recontextualize-for-the-hell-of-it, will-to-fuck-around, will-to-sing, will-to-spontificate. [ Yes, spontaneously pontificate. A Freudian might say pondeficate ? ]
Quoting Baden
It's just so endlessly good, an infinite game.
Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty, Schlegel writes in Lyceumfragment 42: for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated. The task of a literary work with respect to irony is, while presenting an inherently limited perspective, nonetheless to open up the possibility of the infinity of other perspectives: Irony is, as it were, the demonstration [epideixis] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe (KA 18.128); irony is the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos (Ideas 69). A literary work can do this, much as Schlegels Lucinde had, by presenting within its scope a range of possible alternate plots or by mimicking the parabasis in which the comic playwright interposed himself within the drama itself or the role of the Italian buffo or clown (Lyceumfragment 42) who disrupts the spectators narrative illusion.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/#PhiAppSchIdeTra
I like reading Nietzsche better than I like Nietzsche I think. I get the impression, having read a biography, he was overcompensating for his own social inadequacies and taking out his frustration on some easy targets at times. But he's one hell of an entertainer and one hell of a psychologist. He's the type of philosopher you could not know what the hell he's talking about and yet fully agree with him. Blonde beasts, yeah, go baby! No, wait...
:up:
Quoting Baden
He explodes and gives us the fragments. Some of them are lovely, others hideous. He reminds me of Hamlet, poisoned and poisonous and yet transcendent.
Quoting Baden
I've also read bios, and I'm sure his weird life was the soil for just his kind of flowering...all those ladies pampering him. Then a too-passionate Wagner obsession, a rebellion. But his best 200 pages probably stack up against anyone's.
https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/logic/ms179.htm
The only justification for reasoning is that it settles doubts, and when doubt finally ceases, no matter how, the end of reasoning is attained. Let a man resolve never to change his existing opinions, let him obstinately shut his eyes to all evidence against them, and if his will is strong enough so that he actually does not waver in his faith, he has no motive for reasoning at all, and it would be absurd for him to do it. That is method number one for attaining the end of reasoning, and it is a method which has been much practised and highly approved, especially by people whose experience has been that reasoning only leads from doubt to doubt. There is no valid objection to this procedure if it only succeeds. It is true it is utterly irrational; that is to say, it is foolish from the point of view of those who do reason. But to assume that point of view is to beg the question. In fact, however, it does not succeed; and the first cause of failure is that different people have different opinions and the man who sees this begins to feel uncertain.
It is therefore desirable to produce unanimity of opinion and this gives rise to method number two, which is to force people by fire and sword to adopt one belief, to massacre all who dissent from it and burn their books. This way of bringing about a catholic consent has proved highly successful for centuries in some cases, but it is not practicable in our days.
A modification of this is method number three, to cultivate a public opinion by oratory and preaching and by fostering certain sentiments and passions in the minds of the young. This method is the most generally successful in our day.
The fourth and last method is that of reasoning. It will never be adopted when any of the others will succeed and it has itself been successful only in certain spheres of thought. Nevertheless those who reason think that it must be successful in the end, and so it would if all men could reason. There is this to be said in favor of it. He who reasons will regard the opinions of the majority of mankind with contemptuous indifference; they will not in the least disturb his opinions. He will also neglect the beliefs of those who are not informed, and among the small residue he may fairly expect some unanimity on many questions..
Fixing belief is perhaps like fixing a policy for action and response, for both individuals and communities. Rationality is a quest to do this with power and confidence through teamwork. Sociality is primary. I have to give a fuck about other people. I have to admit that I give a fuck about other people. But, as Peirce notes, the reasonable cannot bother too much with the unreasonable (who are, in their unreasonableness, antisocial). The danger is mistaking a reasonable innovator for an antisocial dogmatist. Peirce's interest in continuity might be relevant here. If a person is too far out, too 'ahead' or 'outside' of their own time, they are not yet intelligible. This seems to have happened to Peirce himself. If we largely create our own logic ,admittedly always within the constraints of its history, then it's only time that can tell us whether an eccentric was 'ahead' or merely forever 'outside' of their time. If they catch on, we can describe this catching-on as intellectual progress, an update of the community's 'softwhere.' History is, to some degree, a random walk (Tychism).
This to me is the 'open region.' Thrown into and embedded within spirit we did not choose, we also thereby have the means not only for a serious twist of that spirit but also for play.