Hermes casts a scotoma instead of a shadow, and wherever the scotoma falls, the ground looks exactly like it should: a human-shaped pool of blindness shimmering with perfection.
All posts by anomalogue
Protected: Aphorisms on blindness
Grammatical alchemy
Let’s not have a face-to-face conversation this time. That’s what kids do. They gaze at one another, each a potential mating object for the other, seeing, being seen and being seen seeing.
Instead let’s have a face-face-to-object conversation. Let’s do science together. That’s the only way to get to know one another intimately, as subjects.
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Each individual I runs a circuit through the world of things on its way to becoming a We.
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Grammatical alchemy: First person singular becomes first person plural by way of third person, and in the process second person singular is transmuted from third person to first.
Challenges vs. problems
Examining the etymologies of the words, it is strange that we use the word “challenge” as a euphemism for “problem”.
Challenge: ORIGIN Middle English (in the senses ‘accusation’ and ‘accuse’): from Old French chalenge (noun), chalenger (verb), from Latin calumnia ‘calumny,’ calumniari ‘calumniate.’
Problem: ORIGIN late Middle English (originally denoting a riddle or a question for academic discussion): from Old French probleme, via Latin from Greek probl?ma, from proballein ‘put forth,’ from pro ‘before’ + ballein ‘to throw.’
Chord: golden ball
Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is
mere skill and little gain;
but when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball
thrown by an eternal partner
with an accurate and measured swing
towards you, to your centre, in an arch
from the great bridge building of God:
why catching then becomes a power —
not yours, a world’s.
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Dialogue between Michel Serres and Bruno Latour:
Michel Serres: Just as Leibniz wrote a monadology, an elementary or atomic philosophy, here is a theory of valences around atoms, a general theory of relations, like a theology in which the important thing would be angelology — a turbulent array of messengers.
Bruno Latour: Wait a minute. This is very important, but I’m lost again. You are taking up again the metaphor of scientific method, which will not completely convince me, since, on the contrary, the general impression is that the sciences are multiple substantives, a formidable proliferation of objects, whereas for you the synthesizing element…
Michel Serres: …is relations.
Bruno Latour: But, even more than relations, the types of relation.
Michel Serres: Not only the mode of relation but the way this mode of relation establishes or invents itself, virtually or physically.
Bruno Latour: Is it like comparing passes in rugby? I mean the ways of passing and not the configurations of the players?
Michel Serres: Configurations or fixed places are important when the players don’t move — just before the game begins, or when certain established positions are called for at various points in the game — scrimmages or line-outs. They begin to fluctuate as soon as the game begins, and the multiple and fluctuating ways of passing the bail are traced out.
The ball is played, and the teams place themselves in relation to it, not vice versa. As a quasi object, the ball is the true subject of the game. Tt is like a tracker of the relations in the fluctuating collectivity around il. The same analysis is valid for the individual: the clumsy person plays with the ball and makes it gravitate around himself; the mean player imagines himself to be a subject by imag- ining the ball to be an object-the sign of a bad philosopher. On the contrary, the skilled player knows that the ball plays with him or plays off him, in such a way that he gravitates around it and fluidly follows the positions it takes, but especially the relations that it spawns.
Bruno Latour: So, your synthesis would come about in the area of the passes, of movement, and not in the area of the objects?
Michel Serres: Look at how the flames dance, where they go, from whence they come, toward what emptiness they head, how they become fragmented and then join together or die out. Both fluctuating and dancing, this sheet of flame traces relations. This is an illuminating metaphor, if I may say so, for understanding what I have in view — this continuing and fragmented topological variety, which outlines crests. which can shoot high and go out in a mo- ment. The Rames trace and compose these relations.
Bruno Latour: Wait, I need to back up a minute. I thought I understood that there was in general a hermetical conception…
Michel Serres: Hermes passes and disappears; makes sense and destroys it; exposes the noise, the message, and the language; invents writing and, before it. music, translations and their obstacles. He is admittedly not a fixed preposition but, as is said nowadays about mailmen, he plays at pre?pose?, at delivery person.
Zarathustra had a goal; he threw his ball: now you, my friends, are the heirs of my goal; to you I throw my golden ball. More than anything, I like to see you, my friends, throwing the golden ball. And so I still linger a little on the earth: forgive me for that.
Saulinism?
I was talking with a good friend of mine last night about “organized” atheism and why we both distance ourselves from it.
For me, the problem with atheism does not lie in the incorrectness of the belief it professes. If you were to make a list of the average atheist’s professed disbeliefs, my list of disbeliefs would match it, check for check. I am especially in agreement with atheists in their disgust with the Fundamentalist “God”. On my list that box is checked twice and starred.
Where I find atheists lacking is in their philosophical complacency. The atheist’s checklist of disbeliefs is too short, and it doesn’t grow. That’s fine if the question of God’s existence bores you and you have other things to think about. That is just a non-theism: non-concern for the question. I also respect anti-Fundamentalism, though I question the choice of philosophy as weapon in that battle.
But what about these “militant” atheists who furiously check and re-check the same three boxes? I believe they actually help Fundamentalists by treating the Fundamentalist theology as the last word on faith, when it is not even the first. Fundamentalism is not religion taken to an extreme, it is failure of religion to begin.
Here is what I’d like to convey to the tiny handful of urgent truly philosophical atheists: There is no single belief in God, and so there cannot be a single disbelief in God.
Being an atheist is necessarily harder than being a theist, because you must understand a belief before you can refute it. To do the job right, an atheist must not only able to enter the belief (or at least its conceptual space) in order to understand it. This “entry” is the nature of authentic theisms, and if you do not know what I am talking about, you have some basic learning to do before you can get going. Then the atheist must find the way back out this belief. Finally, he must be able to draw a map of that path from entrance to exit. This atheism is difficult and respectable.
Here is an outline of an atheism I could respect: this atheism would industriously hunt down every existing conception of God in order to understand and destroy it. Once it destroyed every existing conception it would then turn its attention to anticipating every future conception, in order to prevent its birth if not its conception.
Let’s give this atheistic discipline a name: Saulinism.
But do remember: it is easier to get in than to get out — especially once you know the difference between in and out.
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P.S. Or make it pretty.
Briefs and the politics of creativity
Creative briefs come in every shape and size. Some are brief statements on a single sheet of paper, while others fill a briefcase.
They also reflect drastically different philosophies of creativity and the politics of creation.
If I were going to classify them — and you know that is exactly what I’m going to do — I’d put them in two categories:
- Briefs that specify, by sketching out a creative answer to be fully fleshed out by the team.
- Briefs that problematize, by sketching out a productive question to be answered by the team.
I won’t pretend I don’t have a very strong personal preference, but I admit that both approaches when applied well with the right team can produce great results.
Introversion and extraversion strategies
I very nearly re-wrote a post I already wrote in 2010, drawing out a chord from two passages from Nietzsche and Buber, both distinguishing between dialogue that takes place between individuals and discussion that takes place among members of a group — what Buber called interhuman versus social phenomena.
The reason I was going to write it was to jot down my intention to express these ideas as venn diagrams. A sketch:
Each individual has a certain set of personal things they can/will discuss. Two individuals are likely to have some amount of overlap. But with each additional individual the overlap diminishes.
But each individual also has a larger set of things they can be expected to be able to discuss — a more public or social mode of discussion. This set is a combination of very accessible topics, which approach pure sensory fact (the weather, for instance) and convention: the manners we have all been taught, the attitudes to which we are expected to adhere, the shared values we all are expected to uphold. The more people present, the more the conversation will have to follow the public mode.
I think introversion and extraversion has less to do with numbers of people than with what kind of interaction is more or less likely to happen as people are added or subtracted. So, as Buber noted, two individuals can be alone but still interact in a public or extraverted mode. And three or four introverts with similar interests can still interact in an introverted mode.
When introverts get finicky over chemistry of groups, I suspect it an attempt to preserve a possibility of introversion. Likewise, extraverts will often invite a wide range of people into a situation in order to make boring introverted conversation less possible. And some introverts will do the same thing, to get relief from themselves, temporarily or permanently. Conversely, extraverts will sometimes enlist introverts to help them excavate their privacy.
Now that I’ve written this out, it is very unlikely I will draw the idea.
Speckled time
When we lay on our backs and look up into the night sky, vast distances and time are laid out flat on a firmament. Flat here, flat now: like everything.
Points, lines, planes, volumes…
Between the extremes of black and white are shades of gray. Beyond the monochromatic gradient are colors.
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Between the continuum that spans individualism and collectivism are degrees of egoism and selflessness.
Dignity of rebellion
Rebellion seems to be losing its good conscience. It is palpably less socially acceptable to be socially unacceptable than it was a decade or two decades ago. With each passing year breaking taboos becomes more taboo. No wonder we require so much tolerance and permissiveness.
Grid sky
One of the points in the universe from which all the stars appear arranged in a grid, happens to be an inhabited planet. So far it has not occurred to the astronomers of this planet to ask why the stars are arranged in a grid, because how else would a grid be arranged?
Excavation
Many people believe humankind once possessed truth and then lost it, and so they now look for it in ancient sources. When that truth is found it will be this: the truth made by each future for its future.
Peculiar universality
There is nothing more idiosyncratic than an individual burning with the need to develop a comprehensive and universal understanding of existence. But these freakish craftsmen are the manufacturers of common sense and it is by their products that you and your people make sense of the world.
A tragic flaw
The less completely we understand it, the more completely we want to control it.
The visionary
There was once a painter whose eyesight was limited to the domain of artistic expression.
He was literally blind unless he had a blank or painted canvas in front of his face.
When he wasn’t painting or contemplating paintings, he had to stumble around with his hand extended in front of him, feeling for forms he could identify, or avoid bumping into — or, in exceptional cases, capture as a painting. His genius was rendering what he called “darkly felt objects” as hyper-visible art.
Whenever the artist did happen upon some novel form “in the outer world” that “demanded to be painted”, he would set up his easel and observe it with his entire being. He would capture in a painting, not just the impression the object makes on the eye, but also on the soul, or as the artist put it “the object’s essence”.
When he finished a painting he would place it in his repertoire of visible things. In the future, whenever his fingertips registered that particular object, or another object identical to it, he could pull the corresponding painting from his collection and see the object through his own vision and experience its essence.
The artist also kept a small sketchbook for less important things that didn’t concern him much — object/obstacles he needed to see just enough to get them out of his way: things of which he needed only to “get a gist”. Of these less relevant objects he sketched tiny, schematic, cartoon-like diagrams, dozens per page. He kept this sketchbook with him at all times more for reference than for drawing. The book only had so many pages, and he was conscious of the need to conserve.
Does this sound like an awkward way to deal with the visible world? Maybe, but it had advantages, too. Where others were constantly glimpsing and losing sights, and incapable of showing their vision to others, the artist was able to produce on demand every image of his entire visual experience. Once he saw something himself, he could convey the image to others, and even provide his followers with replicas of his images to use as a substitute for their own feeble and ephemeral looking. For this reason, the artist was celebrated as the most intensely visual person who ever lived.
Ontological work ethic
Next time you are tempted to question the reality of some being with the question “does it exist?” or “is it real?” instead ask: “How might this entity in question exist? — and given this possible way existing how do we test its actuality?”
This is the kernel of the ontological work ethic.
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Disbelief is just as hard as belief if one has an ontological work ethic. There are so many possible modes of existence one must eliminate before one can declare nonexistence of some thing. And to declare something nonsensical is in some ways even harder.
It is so much easier to begin with limited ontological repertoire — a set of templates — and to check any reality candidate’s qualification against the most approximate template: “If it is not real, it is, by definition, imaginary.”
It is so easier to start with simple criteria for what might be considered true, and refuse to even consider any truth that fails to satisfy these criteria: “If it is not true, it is, by definition, false.”
And of course, it is so much easier to question a person’s character than to question the things a person says. When facing a stranger’s strange claim, we prefer to examine the stranger’s head or history than examine his strange claim.
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Real and actual are not synonyms.
Actuality is immanent. Reality is a metaphysical speculation derived from actuality: actuality’s transcendent cause.
I am tempted to try to find terms to correspond with each of my metaphysical axes.
Cosmos, time, awareness :: Real, actual… authentic? genuine? true? faithful?
Latour on false religion
Finally, someone says it: Fundamentalism is not “religion gone too far”, but the betrayal of religion.
Until now, I’ve been arguing against characterizing Fundamentalism as “extremist” forms of various religions (for instance, Christianity taken to extremes of strictness and intensity becomes Fundamentalist), but in fact a single religion with denominations defined by which host religion the fundamentalism has infested and perverted (so Islamic Fundamentalism is the same religion as Christian Fundamentalism, but outfitted with different forms) — but perhaps even affording Fundamentalism the status of a religion might be giving it too much credit.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to characterize Fundamentalism as a pathologically inadequate and blasphemous modernist philosophy assembled from words stolen from religion.
Fundamentalism is what results when a thoroughgoing modernist willfully assigns truth to religious texts and traditions that are entirely incomprehensible from the modernist perspective. Instead of allowing the truth(s) of a text to be revealed to the reader as transfiguring insights, the text (a mass of words) itself is taken as the revealed thing, and faithfulness to this revelation is understood to mean adhering to the first interpretation (the “self-evident” meaning) arrived at by a mind trapped inside modernism. Of course, the consequent absurdities resulting from this ludicrous method makes sincere belief — that which we cannot help but take for true — impossible. This is where “faith” enters the stage: all opinions on what is to be regarded as true or false is labored out by the mechanics of explicit ideology, and the output (the Belief) is prioritized over the spontaneous beliefs that arise from reflective lived experience.
Anyway, here’s Latour’s take:
…This phenomenon [of religion] is not defined by an original type of subsistence, of risk, but, on the contrary, by an often desperate quest for substance, guarantees, some substratum. For those who use the term “religion” are really appealing to another world! And this is exactly the opposite of what we are trying to identify. There is no other world — but there are worlds differently altered by each mode. The fact that people speak tremulously of “respecting transcendence” hardly encourages the ethnologist to take this phenomenon seriously, since she sees quite clearly here the wrong TRANSCENDENCE, the one that has IMMANENCE as its opposite rather than its synonym. What is so disagreeable in the appeal to the “supernatural” is that the “natural” is accepted in the same breath. And if someone speaks, in hushed tones, of “spirituality,” we are warned that a peculiar idea of “materiality” has just been swallowed whole. Why should our investigator be concerned with those who raise their eyes toward Heaven to speak ill of the things of the Earth, of “rampant materialism,” of “humanism”: what do they know about matter, reason, the human?
What passes for religion today can offer only a particularly discouraging avatar of the quest for immobility, for the incontrovertible, the supreme, the ideal. Some have gone so far as to take religion as a quest for the absolute, and even as a nostalgic portal to the beyond! Religion turned into a “rampart against relativism” and a “supplement of soul” against the “secularization” and the “materialism” of “the world here below”! No targeting mistake is more spectacular than this one. Really?! All those treasures of intelligence and piety only to end up with this? Thousands of years of uninterrupted translations, continual variations, prodigious innovations, to end in a quest for foundations? How can anyone be so mistaken as to worship these false gods?Even if she steps completely out of her role, the indignant investigator no longer even dares to call such a perversion a category mistake. “Heresy” would be a euphemism; should she speak of category horror? How puerile they seem to her, the ancient confusions between Yahweh and Baal or Moloch! The idolators would never have dared confuse their God with an undistorted transport, an immobile motor, an uncreated substance, a foundation: at least they knew that one could not institute Him without a path of alterations, interpretations, mediations. Fetishism is only a peccadillo alongside the idolatry in question here: the replacement of the religious by its exact opposite, the confusion of the relatively holy with the impious absolute. And this blasphemy is uttered in the temples themselves, at the heart of the churches, before the tabernacle, from the pulpit, under the wings of the Holy Spirit! Where are the prophets who could have spewed forth their anathemas against these pollutions, these ignominies, these abominations? Where are Jeremiah’s tears, Isaiah’s lamentations?
No, if the investigator wants to hold onto her sanity, she has to look for the religious outside the domain of religion. She has to hypothesize that what is called “the return of the religious” manifests only the return of FUNDAMENTALISM. And we can understand why. Incapable of situating multiform values in institutions made for them, reactionaries of various stripes fall back on an ersatz solution that seems superficially to “defend the values” — by placing them out of reach!
What’s left of philosophy for me
For me, there are two modes of philosophy left, a sort of philosophical alpha and omega of starting thought and finishing it (in the sense of finishing furniture):
- Wittgenstein’s formulation, “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.” This I see as philosophy proper: thought seeking footing in chaos.
- The design of a worldview — or better, lifeworld — rooted in explicit language (words, images, gestures: perceptible forms) and oriented toward a certain way of existing as a person. This may actually be the essence of religion.