Why can’t life always be beautiful?

Jun 162013
 

Hans Baldung Grien – Three Ages of Woman and Death (1510)

[A blog post from friend of PEL Phillip C.  It's a bit longer than our normal posts and is heavy with the name drops but I'm going to let it go because it's on art, is related to a discussion group and I make the editing decisions around here - Seth]

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” —Michel Foucault [1]

If life is beautiful, why can’t we always experience it as such? Is it not in moments of beauty that we find life most engaging? Anything could be beautiful. Beauty is an excess: the latent, frivolous, life-affirming power (eros), lurking around every corner, waiting to be noticed by anyone with the sufficient leisure to do so. And it’s not even necessarily a luxury of leisure, for even (or especially) in the face of death, the reality of beauty smacks us in the face and takes us by surprise. I’m reminded of observations recorded by the holocaust survivor and psychologist, Viktor Frankl:
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Is Experimental Philosophy Bad Science?

Jun 122013
 

Wikipedia tells us that Experimental Philosophy (X-Phi) is:

an emerging field of philosophical inquiry that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions. This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a philosophical methodology that relies mainly on a priori justification, sometimes called “armchair” philosophy by experimental philosophers.

So what makes X-Phi experimental is the use of data rather than (presumably) data-less a priori reasoning. This is confusing. Even when employing ‘pure reason’, philosophers use data – if only the data of their senses, experience and consciousness. Would anyone deny that Descartes used data when he came up with the Cogito? That it was the data of his own experience doesn’t make it less valid qua data. Continue reading »

Come Join My Heraclitus Not School Group

Jun 092013
 

For Episode #79 (to be recorded in late June and released in July), we’ll be reading Eva Brann’s The Logos of Heraclitus and interviewing her about it. She was a colleague of Dylan’s at St. John’s, and her book exhibits that love of etymology that has come up recently on PEL whenever Heidegger is mentioned, for which St. John’s is notorious. This is pretty much what you have to do to talk about Heraclitus, as there are no surviving full texts by the guy. He’s just quoted by other ancient writers. You can view all of his fragments here along with where they were quoted, but Eva really goes all out to weave a narrative out of this, bringing in Pythagoras and others whose work she thinks Heraclitus was responding to. The “logos” is about meaning, about patterns: she sees Heraclitus as the first real philosopher of science, who noted that nature performs according to regularities and asked about the relation between that lawlike behavior and the regularities themselves.

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The Self and Selfishness (and Aesthetics and “The Fountainhead”)

Jun 022013
 

SelfishnessI’m continuing to try to get some Rand thoughts related to The Fountainhead out of my system so that I won’t feel the need to bring them up while on the episode devoted to her more straightforwardly philosophical works. I also feel the periodic need for synthesis, to try to recap some ongoing themes in our episodes in a way that would require an overly long monologue if I tried to do this on the podcast itself. We’ve had a number of episodes now that weigh in on the development of the self. What I’ve often called the naive view of self is that advocated by Hobbes, who claimed that everyone is selfish, that all actions proceed from selfish motives.

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Not School Fiction Group Reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Jun 012013
 

This May, PEL’s Not School Fiction Group read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, the author of No Country for Old Men (which PEL covered) and The Road. Blood Meridian is a dark masterpiece set in 1849 where a runaway kid joins a gang of scalp-hunters led by the Judge, a philosophizing warmonger. The Judge’s views on existence come out in several stories and fire-side conversations about witness, will, and war, though if you want to hear him, there is plenty of violence between his sermons which makes the book notoriously hard to read. Not gratuitous violence, though, as Harold Bloom says, “The violence is the book. The Judge is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature. The Judge is violence incarnate.”

Here, the kid sees the Judge enter a city in Mexico:
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Philosophy as “Literary” (or “Is the Sky So Very Big?”)

May 302013
 

Following up on my recent post skeptical of a strong formulation of the difference between philosophy and science, I’ve been thinking about the character of many philosophical claims, particularly in light of my current reading of Rand.

In addition to the readings for the podcast proper (which I’ll post about within the next week, but I can tell you right now that we’re covering these two books), I’ve been choking down as an audiobook The Fountainhead, the earlier (and shorter) of her two main novels; she wrote it in the late 30s/early 40s (published 1943) before Atlas Shrugged or her expository philosophical pieces.

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Philosophy Doesn’t Make Propositions?

May 232013
 

No ClaimThere’s a claim I laid out from Deleuze in the episode that I wanted to bring up for explicit discussion. I think it’s provocative and deserves some thought but is almost certainly wrong.

It’s about the picture of science as producing concepts and not propositions. I gave the example of Descartes’s Cogito, and laid out a few of the apparent claims involved in that (the inference from thinking to a persistent subject doing the thinking, for one) that haven’t historically stood up to criticism very well. I said there that Deleuze would point to a case like that to demonstrate that when you extract conceptual features and make them into regular old propositions, they become “mere opinions” of no scientific value, and you get endless, largely fruitless debate. This is what makes many people just dismiss philosophy as a lot of hot air.

But of course you could just take the case to be demonstrating weaknesses specific to Descartes’s position. So I’d like to invite readers here to consider other cases that they have some recent familiarity with to see if the same holds up. Here’s an example from the top of my mind:

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Virtual Insanity: Social Media with Jacques Lacan

May 212013
 

Jacques Lacan draws[A post from Peter Hardy, longtime fan and contributor]

For a couple of years I have been lurking on PEL’s Facebook group, biding my time for the perfect moment to pounce on this blog.  Recently I got to thinking about the philosophical ramifications of social media. Especially as we’ve just been looking at Jacques Lacan, for whom a central concern was to highlight negative aspects of language and by extension, social interaction. Continue reading »

On Daniel Coffeen, Rhetoric, Deleuze and Such

May 172013
 

Daniel in his native habitat

[editors note:  Daniel was our guest on the Deleuze episode recently and will be posting a bit in our blog over the next couple of weeks]

Since I discovered Deleuze in grad school, he has pervaded in various ways my teaching, writing and thinking. My dissertation proffered a model of rhetoric and specifically the trope; its final chapter focused on Deleuze.

And so when I began teaching the Intro to Rhetoric at at UC Berkeley (where I also earned my doctorate), I delivered a highly Deleuzian view of rhetoric (even though we never read Deleuze in that course —an intro lecture is no place for Deleuze). The texts included Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” JL Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, Nietzsche’s “On Truth & Lie” and Plato’s Phaedrus.  I taught that for the sophist a text is never right or wrong, true or false. It’s our job as readers to maximize what’s interesting in a text, to articulate its performance (not just what it says but how it says). This, alas, is how Deleuze and Guattari argue we should assess philosophical concepts: Not whether they are true but whether they are interesting, remarkable and important. Continue reading »

Education’s Blunt-Object Epistemology

May 092013
 

fairtestI’ve often thought of education – my chosen field – as applied epistemology. This was a conceit. Education does not explore or enact the subtle, rich, body of epistemological thought. Education has an epistemology, a vulgar blunt-object affair that is, essentially, the product of the limitations of the structures of traditional schooling.

The problem can be seen if one looks at the act of assessing knowledge. As a teacher, you’re expected to assess the knowledge of the kid in front of you continuously through the learning process. What does the kid know when he or she comes to you? What do they come to know from your lessons? What do they know at the end of the unit? What do they know at the end of the year? What do they know while walking the stage in their cap and gown? This should all sound familiar. These reflect basic questions of epistemology. What is it possible to know? How do you know? How do you know what they know? How do they know what they know?

Brushing up on your epistemology won’t help. In its most abstract form (if you’re talking about “neutral monism,” for example) epistemology provides no comfort to the teacher trying to determine whether or not the kid in front of her “gets” the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Every teacher knows you can’t directly access the kid’s knowledge. We recognize that typical school tests are a proxy for such direct knowledge. We recognize that with our assessments we are constructing epistemological “if-then” statements. We are setting up a condition with an outcome that would only be possible if the student held such knowledge. If the student can answer questions about the French Revolution on a test, then, it is supposed, they know about the French Revolution.
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Go Hire Genevieve, Resident PEL Artist

May 082013
 

As mentioned at the end of one of the recent episodes, Genevieve Arnold, who’s been good enough to do art for us both in last year’s PEL site redesign (like this and this) and for all of our recent episodes, is available if you’d like to hire her to do some art. For instance, she did my most recent album cover, was able (and more importantly, willing) to work with existing material (Ken Gerber’s “brain guy” picture) to create many of the images on this site (she even managed to match Ken’s style to add Dylan to the caricatures picture), and has a pretty vast range both stylistically and in terms of materials. Check out her site, www.genevievearnold.com, to see her sewing/stuffing/drawing (she does clay too!).

We’re honored that she’s helped us out so much, and she should be getting paid a lot to do this.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Zizek! – The Elvis of Cultural Theory [Review]

Apr 292013
 

zizek posterZizek! is one of those documentaries centered around one really, really interesting person. For that reason it’s more like Crumb or Bukowski - Born Into This than more famously philosophical movies like Waking Life. Zizek!’s structure is simple: The director and a small crew simply follow Slavoj Zizek as he goes about his daily business, which pretty much amounts to him walking around his apartment and traveling to lectures. It’s an entertaining film about a figure of whom most philosophically minded people are aware without knowing much about him. For the people already familiar with him, don’t worry, all of the “Zizek-tropes” are present: weird anecdotes, facial ticks, and self-deprecating humor, etc.

This is not an educational film. I probably know as much about Zizek’s philosophy after watching this movie as before, and this is despite the fact that the director intends to be pedagogical. This is because the film’s quick summaries of Zizek’s work are basically just factoids, full of vague phrases that do not accomplish much illumination, like the statement that claims Lacan was considered “a return to Freud.” I have no idea what this means and I feel 99 percent of the people who watch this film will feel the same. For the most part,  Zizek himself struggles to communicate anything of philosophical depth and clarity in the shortish interviews. But this is forgivable because he might be one of the most interesting people alive to observe (he communicates plenty of his salty charisma and humor though). Throughout the film I watched his face, transfixed, asking myself what many people have asked about him: is he on coke? Does he have ADD? Why does he always have phlegm in his mouth? Continue reading »

Topic for #76: Deleuze/Guattari on What Philosophy Is

Apr 262013
 

On Sunday, 4/21/13, we recorded our discussion on chapters 1-3 of What Is Philosophy? (1991). Gilles Deleuze was a recent French philosopher (he died in 1995) who has probably been requested as much or more than any other figure by our listeners. His style is highly idiosyncratic: difficult somewhat in the manner of the other recent French figures we’ve covered, but frankly, quite a lot more fun; his work with Lacanian psychotherapist and political activist Felix Guattari in particular is very creative and riddled with jokes.

The main task of What Is Philosophy?, the pair’s final work together (Guattari died not long after) seems to be setting up a new conceptual framework for understanding what philosophy is and how it differs from science and art. What is philosophy? It’s the creation of concepts, specifically complex and interesting ones, that enable us to see the world in a different way. No concept is simple: each contains as components other concepts, meaning that they tend to be created in batches. It’s a very anti-foundationalist view: concepts are active creations performed on a “plane of immanence,” which you can think of as a pre-philosophical field of intuitions and sensibilities.

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More on Terrorism from Jonathan R. White (Huffington Post)

Apr 222013
 

Jon was the guest on our terrorism episode, which has unfortunately become timely again. In light of the events in Boston he was asked to write about the nature of modern terrorism in the Huffington post; read the article here. As he did in our episode, he stresses in the article the need to rationally understand the nature of modern terrorism in order to respond to it effectively:

Several fundamental concepts should guide anti-terrorist policies. When not used as a tactic in guerrilla war, terrorism is essentially a problem for law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Military force should be used sparingly and in support of law enforcement. There is no psychological pattern of a terrorist and no single path to radicalization. Rather, all types of people follow multiple trails to terrorism. One of the best tools in the anti-terrorist arsenal is to develop law enforcement agencies that act as extensions of neighborhoods. These agencies can root out all types of problems before they happen, including terrorism… Finally, it would be helpful if the mass media, especially cable news, would spend time explaining the complex background of modern terrorism. This would be much more responsible than breathlessly awaiting the next stage in a terrorist drama.

Jon was also gracious enough to get permission from his publisher to share about 20 pages from near the beginning of his book Terrorism and Homeland Security where he deals with the definition of terrorism. Note that he does, here, discuss states that use terrorism, and not just individuals. There’s even a section titled “Another Perspective” about Noam Chomsky. Jon gives some historical definitions and then also gives a tactical typology that places various actions on a spectrum from simply criminal activity to political activity with a corresponding type of response (i.e. law enforcement, law augmented with military force, military).

This book excerpt is now posted on the Free Stuff for Citizens. Sign up to go read it.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Lacan’s “Four Discourses”

Apr 182013
 

Four discoursesWe briefly referred on the episode to the fact that, as for Marx, for Lacan, all ostensibly theoretical talk is really tainted in some way. Whereas for Marx, we’re really just repeating, or perhaps reacting to in some more complicated way, the ideology of those in power. Lacan, following Freud, looks for a psychological explanation, for an underlying meaning or meaning structure that is in some way responsible for what we’re really saying, whether we know it or not.

Fink deals with this in Ch. 9 of his book “The Four Discourses.” These are:

1. The Master’s Discourse. This is discourse ruled by the master signifier, which has no literal meaning. From p. 131:
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Lacan’s Ontology

Apr 172013
 

Lacan's spheres[Editor's Note: Wayne here is currently leading one of our Not School groups on Deleuze. Being well-versed in this area and having made some helpful comments on this blog, we asked him to clarify what he took to be Lacan's ontology. Thanks, Wayne!]

Jacques-Alain Miller once asked asked Lacan, “What is your ontology?” Lacan replied saying that we should read both Badiou and Zizek to find out (guess he deferred to philosophers for ontology). While their ontologies are illuminating, I’ll try here to extract Lacan’s ontology from his own system as much as possible, continuing with Fink’s groundwork in The Lacanian Subject.

Phenomenological Ontology: Subjectivity

Lacan appears to closely follow the Freudian/psychoanalytic concept that the Real represents a psychological time prior to the symbolic (linguistic) order, prior to linguistic consciousness (before language). However, Lacan says that the unconscious is “pre-ontological.” The Symbolic (language) “cuts into the smooth façade of the Real creating divisons, gaps . . . sucking it into the symbols used to describe it, and thereby annihilating it.” (Fink, p. 24) Lacan is presenting the limits of language and experience as symbolic representation in the face of the Real.

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The Not School discussion of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death

Apr 132013
 
Courtesy of neilpostman.org

Courtesy of neilpostman.org

In the first week of the “Not School” group devoted to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, it’s clear that a tension runs through the book that – with only a little bit of investigation – can be seen running through Postman’s entire career. It’s a function of what he called the “thermostatic view.”

“In the thermostatic view …  you do not ‘hold’ philosophies. You deploy them.”

On the one hand, Postman is a visionary rhetorician and communications progressive. His ideas are firmly based in Marshall McLuhan and Alfred Korzybski but he synthesizes these and others into the coherent system encapsulated as Media Ecology. On the other hand, Postman is also kind of a conservative crank. He isn’t watching the shift in media from a typographic culture to an image culture with the disinterested fascination of an anthropologist. He’s watching it with the dread of an extremely perceptive and articulate prophet, lamenting the end of typographic days. On the one hand, he revels in the urge of the Enlightenment to construct and discover knowledge via free, clear thinking and promiscuous inquisition. On the other hand, he is appalled by the way in which free, clear thinking and promiscuous inquisition have led to a society that abandons the mechanics – linear argument, typographic culture – which undergird the Enlightenment urge! Continue reading »

Another Reason to Philosophize

Apr 122013
 

Courtesy of natureofhumannature

Has science destroyed the dream of philosophy? Was Stephen Hawking correct in claiming,“Philosophy is Dead?” These and a few more questions were raised, or more so alluded to in a recent debate by Paul Horwich and Michael P. Lynch in the Stone in March. The two philosophy professors debated the current state of philosophy using Wittgenstein as a platform.

Horwich went first, focusing on the pessimistic state of Wittgenstein’s later days and his growing disinterest with the potential of philosophy.
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Beginning in Wonder

Apr 112013
 
WonderCat courtesy of cheezeburger.com

WonderCat courtesy of cheezeburger.com

In episode 73 the question was of ‘why do philosophy’ was posed. There are many ways to come at this question and in the episode the PEL guys kept coming back to two things: Curiosity and Wonder.  How are these two words linked, if they are, and what is their relation to philosophy?

The essay “Beginning in Wonder: Placing the Origin of Thinking” (in Nikolas Kompridis’s (ed.) Philosophical Romanticism) by Jeff Malpas gives an interesting, Heideggerian, interpretation of this question. Malpas’s position is that wonder, which he traces back to the writings of Plato and Aristotle, must be held distinct from curiosity. Unlike curiosity, wonder cannot be extinguished with an explanation:

A clear demonstration of this distinction is given by the fact that we may be struck by wonder at some phenomenon in spite of being satisfied with our understanding and explanation of it. A rainbow, for instance, can inspire wonder in a way that is quite unaffected by the knowledge that it is produced by the refraction of sunlight through droplets of water in the atmosphere. Continue reading »

Douglas Hofstadter’s “I Am a Strange Loop” on the Self

Apr 092013
 

From our Lacan episode and my comparison of Lacan with Sartre, you might think that this “no self” deal was just a Continental idea. If you remember back to our Owen Flanagan interview, however, you’ll know that (besides this being a doctrine in Buddhsim) this is also one of the main positions within the analytic philosophy of mind, due perhaps largely to Derek Parfit, though the idea goes back to Hume at least.

One author I recently spent time studying through the Not School philosophy of mind group is Douglas Hofstadter, who I’m here going to call “Doug” so I don’t have to type and potentially misspell “Hofstadter” 30 times. Doug became a big name in philosophy largely due to his very popular Gödel, Escher, Bach, a fat tome that graces many a wanna-be philosopher’s bookshelf (Mine included), likely not too far read. I Am a Strange Loop, which is the one I read, is his more recent work (2007), meant to expand upon the view of consciousness put forward in his earlier work.

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