"It is no longer thought that determines the object, whether through representation or intuition, but rather the object that seizes thought and forces it to think it, or better, according to it. As we have seen, this objective determination takes the form of a unilateral duality whereby the object thinks through the subject." — Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, p 149
Sometimes we protest too much. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is essential for me because he wrote about the primacy of perception (prior to conception), and how the immediacy of the world underlies our conceptions of it. There is a pre-reflective tangibility to Being that opens up meaning as consequence. Perception prior to conception. The Real is that which remains after we shut the fuck up. Whatever story we want to tell is so much less than the primacy of this tangible reality.#postmetaphysics“So long as the 'me' is the observer, the one who gathers experience, strengthens himself through experience, there can be no radical change, no creative release. That creative release comes only when the thinker is the thought, but the gap cannot be bridged by any effort. When the mind realizes that any speculation, any verbalization, any form of thought only gives strength to the 'me', when it sees that as long as the thinker exists apart from thought there must be limitation, the conflict of duality, when the mind realizes that, then it is watchful, everlastingly aware of how it is separating itself from experience, asserting itself, seeking power. In that awareness, if the mind pursues it ever more deeply and extensively without seeking an end, a goal, there comes a state in which the thinker and the thought are one. In that state there is no effort, there is no becoming, there is no desire to change; in that state the 'me' is not, for there is a transformation which is not of the mind.”– Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom, p.140.
UPDATE barely on topic:
David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, on the embodied mind:
"As much as we like to think about the body and mind living separate existences, the mental is not separable from the physical... We have discovered that the large majority of the brain's activity takes place at this low level: the conscious part – the "me" that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is only a tiny bit of the operations. This understanding has given us a better understanding of the complex multiplicity that makes a person. A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. To know ourselves increasingly requires careful studies of the neural substrate of which we are composed." [source]And Raymond Tallis, scholar and former professor of geriatric medicine at Manchester University, in response:
"Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self, requires a brain in some kind of working order. Remove your brain and bang goes your IQ. It does not follow that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us, nor that the best way to understand ourselves is to stare at "the neural substrate of which we are composed". This is because we are not stand-alone brains. We are part of community of minds, a human world, that is remote in many respects from what can be observed in brains. Even if that community ultimately originated from brains, this was the work of trillions of brains over hundreds of thousands of years: individual, present-day brains are merely the entrance ticket to the drama of social life, not the drama itself. Trying to understand the community of minds in which we participate by imaging neural tissue is like trying to hear the whispering of woods by applying a stethoscope to an acorn." [source]I think both of these fellas are correct. Intellectual capacity is a biological phenomenon founded in large part on unconscious functions and processes, while at the same time its higher-order cognitive operations are contextual enactments of distributed properties associated with and expressed through complex networks and communicative activities. A non-reductive materialist framework takes both irreducible capacities and physical embodiment into account when trying to understand mental action. There is no contradition in this regard. Confronting the Real entails thinking matter as matter and not being afraid to limit your speculations accordingly.
ht/dmf
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31 comments:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/29/neuroscience-david-eagleman-raymond-tallis
I shall pester you further concerning
"A non-reductive materialist framework takes irreducibility and physical embodiment into account. Confronting the Real entails thinking matter as matter and not being afraid to limit your speculations accordingly."
"Materialist" frameworks are not the only to do the former part. And, "confronting the real" implying "thinking matter as matter" does not necessitate "materialism." It does not necessitate any -ism, actually. I say this not to gain-say, but to point out that many philosophic positions of the 20th century have these points in common.
Jason,
I do think thinking matter as matter requires a deep understanding of the material basis of reality. Without a robust account of matter-energy how can we possibly hope to enact truly ecological thinking, ethics and practices?
Perhaps you are talking about a particular strain or doctrine of traditional materialism? I'm not. I'm talking about allowing a perceptual intimacy and conceptual awareness of corporeal existence to guide our speech acts.
I think american pragmatism is useful too in this regard. James and Rorty and Davidson were all quite clear about how the use concepts takes place against the background of the real world. As you know, I'm heavily influenced by Rorty. And in ALL things philosophical/speculative I try to stay close to James' attitude in his Pragmatism (1907).
As for materialism, we can stick a feather in a hat and call it macaroni if we like, but its still a feather. I'm all about feathers.
"The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the 'beast.'"
- Chris Hedges
http://anthropos-lab.net/
Michael,
I must note that James was a realist, while Rorty is the arch anti-realist and is part of your anti-realist/epistemic nominalist streak.
I don't disagree on your general points. I'm just saying that your premises do not necessitate that conclusion.
If I recall Rorty wanted to integrate Dewey’s naturalism with Davidson’s view of truth in way that completely rejects issues related to the realist-anti-realist distinction. So to call Rorty an anti-realist is to seriously misrepresent his position. Rorty was never an anti-realist. In Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991) he clearly argued that language-users are always in touch with a reality that is not itself linguistic. Rorty argues for an anti-essentialism or anti-foundationalism only with regard to language (concepts).
Once we dispense with concepts that evoke the now discredited scheme-content gap, the distinction between appearance (“useful fictions”) and reality (“objective facts”) disappears. What remain are one’s community practices unfolding in an endless process of adapting systems beliefs in response to current and future conditions.
Michael,
That’s not what “anti-realist” in most contexts means. You seem to be equating “anti-realist” with “idealist.” An anti-realist insists that the world is not a “truth-maker” (to use the analytic term) of our ideas, and the various kinds of anti-realism diverge on why and the implications. Rorty is a loud quietist about this, because he doesn’t think there’s anything we can say about the world beyond our discourses. Does it work for us? Then it’s true. He takes James and takes a linguistic turn. He borrows Dewey mostly for the politics, but while he uses the word "Dewey," his work has little relation to Dewey's actual work.
I would not invoke scheme-context or appearance/reality distinctions; you are talking to a card-carrying pragmatist, recall, who knows his Rorty very well.
Rorty was not a naturalist; he eschewed metaphysics entirely and might as well ahve been Humean on this point.
“Realism” means more than “I think the external world exists.”
into the wilds of materialism:
http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Granta-Audio-Horror-London-Launch
Bottomline is that Rorty rejected the realist-anti-realist distinction. And, considering what you say above, I reject that dichotomy as well. Rather, I read Rorty (and Derrida) in light of my own realism and the inescapable presence of the real.
I would also suggest that it is simply not possible to be an anti-realist about issues in the world. Holding a firm position about any topic makes you a realist about that particular topic. Meaning itself is based on the consequential actions of alterity. Anyone who suggests otherwise is uttering incoherence.
And although one can be a realism or non-realist about particular issues, I would argue that all forms of Realism rely on the premise that a mind(language)-independent world exists.
You have to remember when dealing with me that I reject most traditional categories in favor of negotiated meanings between traditions, common usage and innovative reworking. Most appeals to strictly academic terminology will most likely result in frustration.
Jason,
To be honest, you call yourself a pragmatist but I have seen very little evidence of this other than scholarly relation. I don't mean that in a sniping way either. I just wonder where is the pragmatic attitude of tracing the ‘practical consequences' of our communications (e.g., how they affect our practices). What I witness is a lot of conservative comments and criticisms about terminology and academic categorization.
I’m trying to adapt philosophical concepts for applications in thinking, acting and relating in an age where old habits can no longer function. The pragmatic attitude should be more interested in what value such mutations might have than protecting particular boundaries. Non?
At some point I should probably distance myself from "materialism" here because in all important senses I'm really only a realist who has discovered that speaking concretely and intelligently about the world requires knowledge of and a deep appreciation for the nature and operations of matter-energy and other cosmic forces. Without appeal to actually existing compositions we remain detached from the world and limited by our own abstractions.
“What then is truth?...truths are illusion which we have forgotten are illusions, worn-out metaphors now impotent to stir the senses, coins which have lost their faces and are considered now as metal rather than currency” - Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p.96
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/johndewey/dem&ed.pdf
Michael,
Rorty did not reject the distinction, but did a Wittgenstein and dissolved it. Yet he dissolved it be saying that we cannot know the difference between the real and "not unqualifiably real," which is the distinction between what exists independently of humans and what exists in some way dependent on humans. Rorty is "anti-realist" about all issues, and almost only Rorty actually believes he's dissolved those distinctions.
Rorty was frequently taken to be speaking nonsense for the very reasons to which you allude. Holding a firm position on any topic is entirely irrelevant to realism. I have repeated the distinction between realism and anti-realism, again and above, because you seem to be unfamiliar with the precise distinction. Rorty never denied the existence of the world; please see the definition repeated here and in my prior post, as we will continue to miscommunicate until the proper definition is observed.
As far as meaning being based on "consequential actions," that's a reduction of Perice, usually by way of James, performed by Rorty and neopragmatists.
As for rejecting appeals to "strictly academic terminology," I cannot take that except in a negative fashion; it indicates that everything should be relative to how you or your group views things. It replaces rationality and logic with an aesthetic. I am claiming this to be a consequence of that position.
As for myself being a pragmatist, "pragmatism" is a scholarly tradition, and thus you should not be surprised. On the flip side, I don't see you at union organizing, or political rally meetings, or any other event wherein the practical implications of the words could be observed. I will not talk about those on the 'net, and this is the first time I've ever mentioned them. It's bad politics and dangerous.
Finally on the pragmatic point, you are in danger of "colonizing pragmatism" as my recent post claims, because there is vastly, vastly more to pragmatism than the bastardization of Peirce's pragmatic maxim that you implicate. But that's what the popular intellectual public knows, so my other points appear invisible because no one recognizes those aspects of pragmatism.
Classical pragmatism is a "mixed constructivist" (to use the analytic term) view, whereas Rorty is a social constructivist, which is a form of anti-realism. Hence, of course we would agree with your qoute from Nietzsche. But not even James agrees with that. This is not a point of obscure interpretation, but basic identification.
Finally, you should reconsider 1) how a pragmatist scholar might take being called not a pragmatist amd 2) your presumption that you know anything about my personal life, or that I would blog about it. Too many activists are all talk and no action. I'm all action, and blogging about it hurts rather than helps. Finally, I leave the more politically controversial stuff for Facebook, which is still relatively low-key. Don't ask for details.
Thanks, DMF, as I haven't seen that edition before.
http://sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/1658/1/menary.pdf
Jason,
When you write a statement like “Rorty did not reject the distinction, but did a Wittgenstein and dissolve it”, you are being antagonistic. Rorty rejected it because he believed the problem was a false dichotomy and wanted to dissolved it. Sure. But why would you need to be right (and me wrong) about that? It’s the same damn thing.
I never read Rorty as arguing that we don’t have access to the real, but rather that our languages or vocabularies can have no special relationship to the world other than gesture. The real world of politics and suffering are very much accessible and relevant to human life.
Does Rorty go to far? Absolutely he does. Contra Rorty I think we can have more or less adaptive vocabularies specified and more or less adequate to particular tasks. Human activities flow from the dance and mutual affectivity of our embodied capacities and extended affordances. That is not something Rorty would be down with.
In regards to your praxis, that is not what I was talking about. I was wondering where your pragmatism is related to discourse. You seem to think concepts have absolute reference, and you seem to argue for the purity of traditions or discourse regimes. You also make appeals to “reason” and “logic” vs. aesthetics which puzzle me. This is not what I take to be the attitude of pragmatism – that being more interested in how concepts can be used and their effects. I don’t sense that attitude in our communications. Instead I sense a strong need to be absolutely correct about very technical issues and strong gestures towards authority. All that is fine, whatever floats your philosophical boat, but where does the rubber meet the road with any of this?
You write:
“I don't see you at union organizing, or political rally meetings, or any other event wherein the practical implications of the words could be observed.”
I have written on this blog about some of my political projects here: http://www.archivefire.net/2010/06/they-few-we-many.html
Also, I have been a political activist for over 20 years, protesting at every major political summit or meeting within a 500 mile radius of my home since I was 15, I am a former Black Bloc militant, current political rally organizer, and I have recently worked on several political campaigns for the New Democrat Party of Canada. In fact, the only reason I remain 'anonymous' online is for political reasons.
I have also worked directly on the front lines and as policy advisor for homelessness, mental health and public education for my entire professional career. Every single day I put theory into practice focused squarely on helping the people and communities I work with. And everything I write and talk about on this blog is put towards evolving my personal and professional praxis. For me philosophy is only a series of language games played to help us imagine more and do better. So if you are looking for someone who is all talk and no action you definitely got the wrong dude.
Your write:
Finally, you should reconsider 1) how a pragmatist scholar might take being called not a pragmatist amd 2) your presumption that you know anything about my personal life, or that I would blog about it. Too many activists are all talk and no action. I'm all action, and blogging about it hurts rather than helps. Finally, I leave the more politically controversial stuff for Facebook, which is still relatively low-key. Don't ask for details.
I didn’t say you were not a pragmatist. I said I see no evidence of it other than in theory in what you communicate. I don’t feel the ‘spirit’ of pragmatism when communicating with you. Pragmatism very broadly conceived is a major part of my belief system. Everything for me is about relations and coping in the world: wayfinding (cf. Tim Ingold). You seem to me more like an analytic philosopher using pragmatism for scholarly purposes. That might just be a function of how I read you (thus entirely a projection), or it might be something you might want to consider?
Michael,
I will have time for a fuller response later. Let me put it this way. If I read like an analytic, in which case I bet Peirce reads like that to you, then you read like a person who is familiar only with neopragmatism and Rorty. What distinction is that? Rorty appropriated every thinker he came across for his own purposes, and most things that he attributes to a thinker, Dewey included, are only partially true and somewhat misleading.
What gives me that impression? Statements such as "vocabularies," (Rorty-only), "coping in the world" (Rorty predominately, but some popularized James, etc. As a scholar, I am drawing upon resources in pragmatism with which you may not be familiar because they have not been popularized.
What have you to say of continuity? Of rationality as well-ordered habit yet real of nature? Of the agapic love of the cosmos? Of reflex arcs? Of "Logic: The Theory of Inquiry" (Dewey's famous book), or the fact that Peirce is foremost celebrated as a logician and semiotics? That all thought is (literally) abductive for Dewey?
Btw, you repeated Rorty's nominalism, which none of the classical pragmatists share. Dewey would spin in his grave if he saw what neopragmatists attribute to him, especially Rorty.
As for rubber meeting the road, I will have to come back to that. I will say that you are hitting all my buttons, and it is a good thing we know each other well enough that I know not take it as hostile. Recall, we both agreed on direct communication.
Jason
You write:
Let me put it this way. If I read like an analytic, in which case I bet Peirce reads like that to you, then you read like a person who is familiar only with neopragmatism and Rorty. What distinction is that? Rorty appropriated every thinker he came across for his own purposes, and most things that he attributes to a thinker, Dewey included, are only partially true and somewhat misleading.
Fair enough. I certainly appropriate the work of others for my own purposes. I’m fairly transparent about that. For a clear expression of this see here : http://www.archivefire.net/2011/06/on-feral-philosophy-part-1-deviant.html
My interests is in mutating theory as praxis and for practice. If we don't change our forms of life, our behaviors and relationships all the poetics in the world won't help. This is the core of my intense interest in "infrastructure".
Infrastructure, for me, is the combined functional affectivity of specific ecological, institutional (including the symbolic) and cognitive assemblages. I believe the term can be a bridging concept possible of generating hybrid actions and knowledges between the seemingly separate domains of politics, ecology, psychology, architecture, community development and others. And no one tradition or thinker should be privileged in this regard.
I would support an approach that integrates (accepts, incorporates, balances?) the insights of various structuralisms and post-structuralisms with an intentional, participatory, empirical and pragmatic attention to the material-energetic and consequential conditions of life. The key issue, then, is how theory can assist us in developing, cultivating and/or enacting healthier psycho-socio-ecological modes of being and becoming.
As for specific terminology and discourse generally, my use of "vocabularies" is certainly Rortyian, but ‘coping in the world’ is a phrase I use associated with notions coming from Heidegger mashed with Darwin, and clarified by Tim Ingold’s work on wayfinding. For me, human activity is thoroughly oriented towards adaptation in the broad sense. Everything from bodily adjustments to egoic negotiations are hitched to our general need for adapting within precarious bio-social-cultural environments. So language-ing is about coping not correspondence. The fact that we have externalized schematic references through tokenized artifacts (writing, narrative, etc.) doesn’t change how human language-ing and thinking are capacities evolved for wayfinding but only serves to expand the types of objects and artifacts we are required to cope with. In this sense, ecologies of discourse are not composed of pure genres but of historical and open sets of interacting signification, reference and association operating in the context of specific political and material conditions.
Jason,
You write:
What have you to say of continuity? Of rationality as well-ordered habit yet real of nature? Of the agapic love of the cosmos? Of reflex arcs? Of "Logic: The Theory of Inquiry" (Dewey's famous book), or the fact that Peirce is foremost celebrated as a logician and semiotics? That all thought is (literally) abductive for Dewey?
Not much to say about most of that. At a certain level I could care less what Peirce has to say. I can think for myself. And some “issues” most thinkers dwell on are irrelevant to me because they seem to be strictly conceptual problems, related to elaborate abstract narratives based questionable assumptions. To accept a particular set of philosophical problems we are always forced to accept certain frames of reference and particular linguistic associations. Wittgenstein was a brilliant logician who came to realize that logic was an exercise in chaining together assumptions. He argued that most philosophical problems are only problems of confused thinking attached to misleading language. Derrida exposed this undecidability as well. We should follow their lead on this.
Rationality in general is a complex story. You can get an outline of where I might be coming from on that topic from the previous comments.
How am I a nominalist again?
Michael,
I don't think that intellectual endeavours like the one we are engaged in have a significant influence on practice. Instead, they are a honing of praxis via theoria, but this is a difference that does not make a difference except as it is actualized in on-the-ground activities. Hence, for most of us, our day-to-day lives are what matter most, and a very few of us may be in a position for our theoretical capabilities to make practical differences. Politicians, judges, public figures, and teachers may do this, though the last only over the long-haul.
The danger that I wish to avoid is have a "theory of practice" rather than a "theory of practice for practice." It's the difference between a person who "knows all about politics" but cannot be a political operative. Aristotle would call it the difference between theoretical and practical knowledge, except that he insisted that the former was founded on the latter, while our age splits the two.
There is another danger that I wish to avoid that is closely related to the first. Mashing together ideas almsot always creates Frankensteins of thought that are ill-considered. Rather than building upon the past, such theories are only as good as the individual, and rarely is an individual such a genius that this method works. For most of us, barring "genius" in the Romantic era sense, that path leads to narcisism, unintentional or not.
I am having, by the way, an entirely practical discussion, and if you understand me, then you will see how what I say applies whether you agree or not.
As for your way-finding or coping, I do not find your articulation compelling for the same reasons as my disagreements with Rorty. That method works, both theoretically and practically, but it aestheticizes practice in dangerous ways. See my blog post about my critiques of aestheticization, which is one of my principle intellectual (and personal) targets.
As for your not having much to say about my flurry of scholarly questions, I am not surprised. You challenged my credentials as a pragmatist, but don't seem to be familiar with the tenets of pragmatism itself. You dismiss these things out of hand, and if that is the kind of conversation that we are going to have, then I would rather not have it. You are wielding Wittgenstein as if a talisman to perform your creative synthesizing, which makes it look like your are doing the usual post-modern performative dance. Once someone takes truth or philosophy to be performative or "practical" in that way, they no longer respond to rational, logical, or scholarly considerations. Persons such as myself concerned about those considerations then lose any desire to communicate with them, because they won't be pinned down on anything. It's the equivalent of tossing about ad hoc hypotheses in science.
We really don't need to speak more about nominalism.
I do appreciate your candor. From this point, I don't think conversation would be productive. Even if I continued, I would become more pedantic than I already am, which is probably too much as it is. In closing, I would not use theory to do anything practical except as preparation, and I do not think that vocabulary construction in the Rortian sense is helpful.
“In the realm of every ideal we can begin anywhere and roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity. Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong to each other by inward kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers of reaction, to see is to approve and understand” (William James 1897/1956: 264).
“Grammar is not accountable to any reality, it is grammatical rules that determine meaning (constitute it) and so they are not answerable to any meaning and to that extent are arbitrary” (Wittgenstein 1974: 184).
“The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we have nevertheless an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever... If we try to hold fast to the feeling of direction, the full presence comes and the feeling of direction is lost... Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to show, is that ‘tendencies’ are not only descriptions from without, but they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all” (William James 1890: 253-254).
“The origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language – I want to say – is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’[Goethe]” (Wittgenstein 1980: 31).
"Contra Rorty I think we can have more or less adaptive vocabularies specified and more or less adequate to particular tasks. Human activities flow from the dance and mutual affectivity of our embodied capacities and extended affordances. That is not something Rorty would be down with."
Rorty was actually pretty receptive to my extension of his "radical" behaviorism in these ways, he just didn't think that this was philosophy (more psychology/anthro), which didn't really matter to me as I wasn't interested in such camps/distinctions.
-dmf
Dirk,
When did you have contact with Rorty and why?
I'm down with that, DMF.
back when I was working on my dissertation (a dreadful work that really never came together as my readers were largely MIA, one of the many problems with interdisciplinary studies), on this topic actually, around 2005-6, he was a very generous correspondent.
DMF,
One of the principle differences between Dewey and Rorty, that I believe your were implicitly invoking, is Dewey's theory of continuity, which is derived from Peirce's synechism. The experience of quality is also the experience of nature itself, and not just a matter of social practice or vocabulary. Dewey was a scholastic realist, and Rorty was not. Rorty thought Dewey's metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics was trash, or they "rehabilitate" Dewey by reading his use of the word "naturalism" in contemporary terms, which violates everything Dewey stood for.
Michael, if one attends enough philosophy conferences, one can meet all the notable philosophers of the day. And query them. That does not mean that they answer, and I am particularly perturbed with Cornel West on that point.
JH, I agree that your take on Dewey is certainly closer to his intent in terms of his texts but what I'm also suggesting is that Rorty's "blind-impresses" and such open enactivist-like possibilities such that his work need not be taken the way limited way that Brandom and all use him.
this might be of some interest hereabouts:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/014480l131p12403/fulltext.html
ps C.West is an ass along these lines, when I talked with him briefly in Memphis he was very encouraging about staying in touch and furthering the conversation and than nada. whereas folks like Rorty,Lysaker, Critchley,Ronell,and Pickering
have all been very open to corresponding, sometimes for years, which is telling I think.
To add to your list, Mark Johnson has been gracious when corresponding to me, though I had the benefit of association with a friend of his. Johnson is closer to my interests, but hey, those are expanding.
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