Category Archives: Philosophy

“Doing the Work” of liberation

History, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

Reading the passage below from Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic, a constellation of thoughts hit me in rapid succession. I will try to recreate it.

Here is the passage:

Understanding the essence of Technic as related to the instinct for violent appropriation and domination of the ‘beast of prey’ (which, coherently with his misinterpretation of Nietzsche, he deems as ‘noble’), Spengler unveils both the fundamental connection between Technic and Western modernity, and the former’s essential tendency to uproot and rewrite reality.

Both these aspects of Technic, and particularly its violence, were witnessed first­hand by one of the most eclectic German authors of the twentieth century, Ernst Jünger. A volunteer in the ranks of the assault Shock Troops, Jünger barely survived the ‘storms of steel’ of the First World War. In the trenches on the Western Front, he had a chance to experience the cataclysmic power with which Technic can literally uproot the reality of the world, unleashing its power like an ‘elemental force’ capable of rewriting what humans believe to be the unchangeable substance of the world. As it was immediately clear to the then young author, the First World War was the dawn not just of a new kind of ‘warfare of materials’, but of an altogether new kind of reality. From the murderous flood that had buried the reality of old, a new cosmic order was about to emerge — and the experience of this passage left Jünger at once utterly paralysed and strangely exhilarated.

. . .

During the interwar period, such ‘demoniacal lightness’ didn’t abandon Jünger, as he attempted to distil his early intuitions of the new spirit of the age in his 1932 book Der Arbeiter (The Worker).

In its pages, Jünger developed an exalted, apocalyptic vision of a new world reborn as a product of Technic, and centred around the totalizing principle of Work. This was no mere ‘work’ as we commonly understand it, but Work as a fundamental principle to which every social form and structure was to be adapted. As Technic would vanquish any previous form of reality and all remnants of the old and feeble values, Work would transform the innermost aspects of all things, and particularly of humans, as if by rewriting their whole genetic code. The actualization of the prime symbol of Work would then amount to a thorough mutation of the existent, that would be at once metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic.

One of the features of a fundamental creative energy is the ability to petrify symbols into an infinite repetition which resembles the process of nature, as in the acanthus leave, the phallus, the lingam, the scarab, the cobra, the sun circle, the resting Buddha. In worlds so constituted a foreigner doesn’t feel awe but fear, and still today it is not possible to face the great pyramid at night, or the solitary temple of Segesta, sunk in the sunlight, without being scared. Evidently the human type which represents the form of the Worker is moving towards such a kind of world, clear and closed upon itself like a magic ring; and as it grows closer to it, the individual increasingly turns into the type.

It will take the rise of Nazism, the death of his son in battle, the collapse of Germany and, most importantly to Jünger, the invention of the atomic bomb, to swerve him off the path of a heroic embrace of Technic’s coming reign.

Here is the sequence of thoughts:

  • “Arbeiter” as Jünger conceived it is a clear expression of what Eric Voegelin identified as the essential characteristic of political gnosticism in its various forms. “The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man’s creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order… the order of being must be interpreted, rather, as essentially under man’s control. And taking control of being further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being — the murder of God.” The goal of political gnosticism is to make the eschaton (a reality which is essentially beyond time) immanent within history, which is impossible.
  • In the Jewish religion, the first commandment is “You shall have no other gods besides Me.” This means observant Jews refuse to acknowledge the man-made gods of political gnosticism. They are a fly in the ointment of every totalitarianism, if not a monkey wrench thrown into the machinations of the social constructors who wish to be or make or imagine a divine counterfeit. As Dara Horn said, “I think there actually is a complete intertwining between the history of the Jewish people and anti-semitism — and I don’t think you can understand one without the other — because it goes back to the Passover story. The foundational concept of Am Yisrael, of the people of Israel, is monotheism, belief in one God, rejection of idolatry. And today we see those things, and it sounds like religion. We think of that as like a spiritual idea in the ancient Near East, that’s a political idea, and you see it dramatized in the Passover story. In other societies in ancient Near East, like ancient Egypt, they’ve got lots of gods. And one of the gods is the dictator. The Pharaoh is considered one of the gods. The whole story of the Exodus is a showdown between the God of Israel and the Egyptian gods, especially the Pharaoh. So when the Jews in ancient times said that they don’t bow to other gods, what they actually were saying is that they don’t bow to tyrants. This is an anti-tyrannical movement since ancient times. … An anti tyrannical movement is always going to piss off tyrants.”
  • Then I recalled the most famous use of the term “arbeiter”: over the gates of Auschwitz. “Arbeit Macht Frei”: “Work makes one free.” Reading this slogan in Jüngerian light is horrifying. And when I recall that one of the slogans of “antiracism” is “Do the Work” and with a goal of spiritual liberation, it all comes into focus. Attacking Jews, whether in the name of Nazism, Marxism, Progressivism, or political Islamism — this is something every totalitarianism eventually does. Of course a camp that literally annihilated Jews, in order to annihilate the Jewish people and its stubborn covenant with God, in order to annihilate the reminder of God’s presence in the world would bear the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

No, reality is not constructed.

Only some kinds of truth — objective truths — are constructed. These truths are pluralistic and relative, and it is wrong to treat them as absolute.

But higher truth is given and revealed to those who will receive it. This truth — a relational truth — acknowledges an Absolute reality that is beyond construction and comprehension.

And this Absolute and the truth that testifies to the Absolute morally binds us in crucial, undeniable and unavoidable ways.

Walk good.

Pluralism

Esoterism, Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I agree that many moral and theoretical ideas historically treated as absolute were more relative than their adherents realized.

I also agree that such relative beliefs — being approximate and contextual — can be true in their own way, with different trade-offs — even as they conflict.

But I no longer believe that all truth is relative or pluralistic. Some truths transcend relativity and pluralism: to deny them in thought is wrongheaded; to defy them in practice is immoral.

We can debate where the boundary lies between the relative and the absolute.

But if you argue that no such boundary exists — why are you arguing?

Practical fantasy

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

Back in the early 2000s, my brother and I developed a “practical fantasy” vision of bicycles.

Scott ran a bike shop. Over the years, conversing with many customers, he began to notice that everyone who cares about bicycles carries in their soul some ideal image of themselves within the world, and they project that ideal image onto their bicycle, onto themselves as rider, and onto some ideal riding scenario.

A gearhead is one such archetype. He owns the lightest, most advanced technology. He imagines the awed envy of fellow cyclists when they see how his bicycle is specced out and how light it is… Wannabe racers imagine themselves bursting ahead of their rivals… Wannabe couriers snake through dense traffic taking insane risks, scoffing at the certainty of gruesome injury and likely death… There are tweedy retro fetishists, transporting themselves from home to cafe to studio to bookshop. (Who me?) … Rugged all-terrain riders, carrying their survival gear into the wilderness… Ultralight nomads Eurail from country to country with their foldable, carrying only what fits in the knapsack… We defined a small set, but the full list is extensive.

Scott wanted to decode those practical fantasy archetypes, so he could equip the subset of cyclists he liked and served to fully actualize their fantasy.

Central to this practical fantasy vision was a goal: Transform the fantasist into an actual rider. Liberate the bicycle from its garage imprisonment, and liberate the cyclist from their skull imprisonment.

When I recall this vision, it is just one application of a general theory of design.

The same dynamic applies in every situation where a user of some designed instrument extends their own ideal being into the world through that instrument — enworlding and self-actualizing themselves — making themselves at home in a world they partially shape to their own ideal.

Reminder: Philosophies are one such instrument.

Complicit in evil

Ethics

The type of person who believes the essence of evil is injustice — bias, greed, selfishness, callousness, and so on — tends to interpret more radical forms of evil as justified reactions to injustice.

They have a truncated conception of evil. Anything  beyond injustice on the spectrum of moral negativity — sadism, hatred, vengeance, malevolence, the desire to annihilate — is as invisible to them as ultraviolet.

Unfortunately, their conception of good is equally truncated. This type views the essence of good as the fight for justice against injustice. As a result, they are all too inclined to interpret radically evil actions as aggressive — but righteous —  resistance to injustice, deserving their full, enthusiastic support.

Consequently, this type not only tolerates radical evil, but supports it — and at times actively participates in evil.

Misfinition

Judaism, Philosophy

I have a reading group that meets on Sundays. We initially formed to read Buber’s I and Thou together, then we attempted Rosenzweig. Now we are reading Daniel Matt’s Essential Kabbalah, a compilation of beautiful passages from Kabbalists, one after another — including this one by Rav Kook:

The essence of faith is an awareness of the vastness of Infinity. Whatever conception of it enters the mind is an absolutely negligible speck in comparison to what should be conceived, and what should be conceived is no less negligible compared to what it really is. One may speak of goodness, of love, of justice, of power, of beauty, of life in all its glory, of faith, of the divine — all of these convey the yearning of the soul’s original nature for what lies beyond everything. All the divine names, whether in Hebrew or any other language, provide merely a tiny, dim spark of the hidden light for which the soul yearns when it says “God.” Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry. Even attributing mind and will to God, even attributing divinity itself, and the name “God” — these, too, are definitions. Were it not for the subtle awareness that all these are just sparkling flashes of that which transcends definition — these, too, would engender heresy.

Yesterday, when we were discussing the mismatch between human thought and God’s infinitude — repeated in many passages, expressed here by Kook with “Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry” — I coined a word for this most fundamental of category mistakes: misfinition: the attempt to define and thus render finite what is essentially infinite.

But this is not the only place we make this category mistake. Whenever we try to make any subject — who is, by virtue of subjecthood vis-a-vis ourselves, both transcendent and non-finite — into a finite object of knowledge, we commit a minor heresy.

And we cannot stop doing this when our mind compulsively tries to grasp and comprehend and have whatever it touches. Wherever we find ourselves engulfed, integrated, involved, environed — we cannot resist the temptation to once again grab the garden by the fruit and consume it, so we can have it as our own property. We do this even to our own subjectivity, and when we do, we are narcissists.

It is in its undefinability that every subject is created in the image of God.

Moral misappropriation

Ethics, Judaism

Jewish prophets innovated speaking truth to power.

It was Jewish monotheism — worship of the one God above all, to whom all must answer — that, for the first time in human history, distinguished goodness from political power. Only this world-transcending authority authorized a righteous man of God to rebuke a king.

And speaking truth to power on behalf of the powerless — this, too, was a Jewish invention.

Before the Jews, there was no distinction made between might and right, and the powerlessness had no moral standing or significance.

This moral vision has been so thoroughly appropriated by modern leftists that they take it for granted, and no longer recognize its source. And when these leftists step on the neck of “zionist” Jews, allegedly in the name of justice, they do so standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants.

If you want to understand modern antisemitism, Mary Douglas’s forward to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift offers an important insight:

Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. it might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.

And if you think a freely-given gift generates resentment, that is nothing compared to a stolen “gift” that the “recipient” wants to possess as their own natural birthright, theirs to have without any debt of gratitude.

We see this in right-wing supersessionism, and in left-wing appropriation of the Jewish invention of social justice, which is really just post-religious christianoidal appropriation of vestigial spiritually-unrooted moral attitudes.

Materialoid idealists

Philosophy

To think a lot about matter, to use the language of physics as your “final vocabulary”, to force all ideas to ground themselves in scientific truths before they are accepted as valid — none of these mental operations makes a person a materialist. It makes the the person an idealist who uses materialist concepts and language to construct a mental world. It makes them a materialoid idealist.

They think the mental model of the world inside their head is a faithful duplicate of the real world, and whatever they deduce about their mental world is necessarily true of the real world. They might say “I might be wrong”, but their doubts are epistemological, when they should be ontological. They misconceive what truth is.

Materialoid idealism is a kind of anti-religious fundamentalism.

Like all fundamentalisms it is collective-solipsistic.

Like all fundamentalism, it appropriates language meant to orient us to a reality of which we are a part, in which we participate, but which transcends us and reduces it to a set of ideas that fit neatly inside one’s own understanding, that is our own property, which we worship as supreme.

Fundamentalism is ideoidolatry.

Materialoid idealists are scientistic fundamentalists.

There is a weird sort of hostile consanguinity among fundamentalists. It’s like “honor among thieves” — an adversarial kinship among folks who live in opposition to one another but who operate at the same plane of existence. It is why debates between theists and atheists never go anywhere. They are self-reassurance rituals, that outside the us-versus-them, there is nothing.

This kind of person has two kinds of hate.

There is the ordinary comprehensible hate of fellow fundamentalists who believe the wrong things, who worship the name and notions of Allah or Jesus instead of the name and notions of Feynman or Marx.

Then there is the deeply anxious uncomprehending hate of aliens whose beliefs and practices simply make no sense at all, and which bring up all kinds of visceral, sincere but ineffable unpleasantness.

The second hate is so much worse that fundamentalists will set aside their shallower hate and ally against it, however much it exposes how little they actually care about the positive ideals they go on and on about to justify their true negative ideals.

Real materialists interact with materials, their thinking is a response to difficulties they encounter in the course of these interactions, and what they come to believe about materials are ideas that effectively guide their interactions.

The cartophiles

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

Many of us are like lovers of maps and mapmaking who have never traveled outside our own room. We pore over our maps and draw up our own atlases, but we have never seen any place that wasn’t presented to as an image as flat as a map. Our maps are made out of words, and even images are midased into hieroglyphs when touched by our wordeyes.

Techne + logos

Design, Etymology, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Etymologically, technology implies service-dominant logic!

techne- — craft.

-logy — speak, tell.

Technology is the explicit tip of craft. Technology is explicit know-how.

Originally, technology was not the product of explicit know-how, but rather, the system of explicit know-how that enables production.

In that intellectual deformation Heidegger called technik/technicity, the industrial faith of engineering, all relations are frozen into commodifiable things.

And no, Marxists, this is not capitalism. Or not only capitalism; it is you, too. Your own ideology is dominated by technik, which is why wherever you overthrow capitalism you replace it with something even more industrial and soulless.

This problem is deeper than economy, deeper than the question of who owns and controls the means of production, deeper than our methods of production. It cuts all the way down into how we conceive materials, how we approach them, how we relate to them.

Marxists turned the contents of Hegel’s idealism upside-down, without ever inverting his idealist metaphysic. The content was churned inside the unmoving container of mind, which remained, as it always does in such ideologies, “its own place”. It is an idealist metaphysics that thinks its thoughts about matter and thinks all this thinking gives it the object of its thought.

Such “materialism” never receives the blessing of material’s apeironic smile. “Typical man,” she says, “always confusing your ideas about me with me.“

Truth strata

Philosophy

However much the content of our philosophies claims relativity, constructionism, or ephemerality, the act of making such claims indicates universal absolutes. It appears to be a performative contradiction.

Is this a restatement of the same argument we’ve all heard — that relativism self-refutes, by making a non-relative assertion? Yes and no. The content is the same. But here, we are doing something different.

We are not refuting or negating the relativist claim, but rather indicating a transcendent tendency of thought — a self-transcendence that leaves strata of thought-modes in its wake.

The claim of relativity establishes a new mode — one that is not itself relative.

And the recognition of this modal establishment constitutes yet another mode.

Some truths are relative, constructed, and ephemeral. Others are less so.

And some truth is absolute, universal, and eternal. The evidence of this final kind of truth is most conspicuous when we attempt to deny its realness.

Subject of study

Philosophy

When I read esoteric texts — texts where the content is not immediately understandable, for instance philosophy, sociology, theology, hermeticism — and work hard to understand the content I am reading, the primary goal of the effort is not to understand the content. That is a secondary goal.

The primary goal is to experiment with new subjectivities. With esoteric content I must make changes to my own subjectivity in order to comprehend what is being conveyed. To understand means to change myself into a subject capable of comprehending the material.

But these changes to myself extend beyond the content, to my overall experience of reality. I find myself noticing different things and finding them significant in new ways. My aesthetic tastes change and see beauty and repugnance in different phenomena.

Each change makes experiential tradeoffs. Some things get sharper, clearer and more important. Other things become fuzzier, cloudier and lose significance. Existence as a whole takes on new tones and flavors. I’ve read things that make reality seem hopeless and not worth the trouble. I’ve read other things that make reality seem deeply tragic, essentially painful but infinitely valuable.

Most of all, the overall effect of all this subjective change has highlighted realities that never change. These alone seem true to me.

And what most people around me regard as “the truth” seems an artifact of some truly unfortunate subjective states they never chose, but to which they are loyal, not out of love but lack of alternatives.

The crafty animal

Philosophy

We understand ourselves better when we conceive of ourselves as beings who craft. Our meta-understanding of understanding — our conception of how understanding happens — becomes more comprehensive and pragmatically sound when we root it in craft.

If you are acquainted with the history of laboratory science, you know that modern science dawned with the material crafting of scientific experiments.

Yes, humans think, we observe, we use language. And we understand important things about ourselves when we understand ourselves as thinkers, observers and speakers. But when we try to put these things at the center of our existence, we lose something essential about our being and our understanding of being, and all resulting notions suffer from disastrous detachment from infinity.

Not so with craft! Craft preserves material as what it truly is — not infinitesimally small particles or all-encompassing expanses or energy or space-time continua or anything the mind a divine physicist can conceive — but rather, the purest and most protean apeiron.

I’m game for the philosopher’s eternal mad libe: The human being is the _____ animal.

The human being is the crafty animal.

Word torture

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

There is much to hate about Boomers, but their most hateful fault is their sexuality.

This sexuality is characterized by two equally unfortunate ideals: frankness and naturalness. Deployed in tandem, these ideals destroy everything mysterious and fascinating about love, and reduce it all into stinky, sweaty, hairy, biodegraded mess encapsulated by the Boomer’s favorite word for what most enjoy doing to each other: “make love”.

I think I speak for my generation when I say I’d much rather make war.

Some social critics have blamed the divorce pandemic of the 1970s on the Boomer’s infamous narcissism, egocentricity and irresponsibility. There is no doubt those Boomer vices played a significant role.

But I think there is a more direct and obvious explanation: the horny grossness of Boomers just made them unable to stand being around each other.

Admittedly, this is hate speech of the worst kind. But I blame society, both for my hate and for my hypocritical embrace of this hate. And I blame this particular unrepentant outburst on the Boomer author of a horrible book I’m trying to read read now — a book on Kabbalah.

How can I be expected to exercise moral self-discipline, after days of writhing, retching and throwing up in my mouth over sentences like this:

His wife said, “Raphael, why do you waste your energy on trying to make books for Jews?” He would reply, “Because your father, his memory is a blessing, wasted his energy trying to make books for Jews, and when I married you, his business was part of your dowry. And besides, I love making Jewish books almost as much as I love making love to you.” Then she would be silent.

My margin note: “stunned silent by disgust at horny Boomer frankness.”

Another passage relates a joke told by a rabbi on a first date.

Seated at the cafe, Kalman tried to relax by telling a joke.

“So there are these two old Jews who are obsessed with knowing what happens after you die,” he said, putting his fork into a slice of coconut cream pie. “They swear a solemn oath that, God forbid, whoever dies first will stop at nothing to contact the one who survives. Moishe dies. Yonkel sits shivah, says kaddish for eleven months..”

“Shivah? Kaddish?”

“Jewish mourning rituals. But nothing happens. Then, after a few years, one evening the phone rings. It’s Moishe!

“Moishe, is that you?’

“‘Yes, it’s me, but I can’t talk long.”

“So then quick, tell me, what’s it like?” asks Yonkel.

“Oh, it’s wonderful here. I sleep late, have a big breakfast, and then I make love. If the weather’s nice, I usually go out into the fields and make love again. I come back inside for lunch and take a nap. Then I go out into the fields and make love, sometimes twice. I have a big dinner, and then, most evenings, I go out into the fields again and make love. Then I come inside and go to sleep.

“And that’s heaven!?” Yonkel gasps.

“Heaven?” says Moishe. “Who said anything about heaven?

I’m a rabbit in Minnesota!'”

What a relaxing first date joke! And how was the joke received? Did she scream or run away? Nope.

It worked. Dr. Isabel Benveniste demurely covered her mouth with her napkin and laughed; her eyes twinkled behind her thick glasses.

Demurely.

This love interest, if you can’t tell, is a stock Boomer favorite: the bombshell-hottie-disguised-as-a-nerdy-librarian. In this case she is an astrophysicist who stole the rabbi protagonist’s heart while delivering a lecture on the origins of the universe.

She looked taller, more severe, off the podium. What little makeup she wore was perfect; her black curly hair fell flawlessly about her face.

The rabbi, it turns out, was inspired to became a Kabbalist after a mystical experience in an observatory.

Kalman Stern just stood there gazing through that opening in the dome and into the starry firmament. He repeated his teacher’s words: a point of light . . . containing everything yet to come.

And for just one moment, the heavenly lights reciprocated his affections: They condensed themselves like a torrent gushed through the narrowing walls of a sluice. They slid through the slit in the nine-inch Alvan Clark refractor dome’s open mouth.

They squeezed themselves into a single spark of moistened light and planted a silent kiss on the lips of Kalman Stern. He swallowed hard and blinked, trying to clear his vision. He never told anyone about it. Even if he had wanted to, he didn’t know how.

He wasn’t aware of it then, of course, but that was also when he became a Kabbalist.

I swear, if I can force myself this through this writing and drag myself all the way to the end of this book, it will be a miracle. It will be nothing less than a new and irrefutable proof of the existence of God.

The problem is, there’s some good information — even profound insights in this book. It’s hellish indignity, but, in my life, that’s where wisdom hides out — under steaming heaps of cringe.

Gerundity

Design, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

We can think of metaphysics our understanding of what is really real, behind the world of phenomena.

We can also think of metaphysics as something we do. Metaphysics is an action we perform when we need to integrate a subjective experience into absolute reality as we conceive it. (This is often called “objective” reality, See note below on why I do not.)

For some particular object of some particular experience to be part of reality it must find its place in an ontology rooted in some particular metaphysic. I’ve called this “touching base”. Say, for instance, a person has an emotion or intuition and wants to account for what it is. Is it an epiphenomenon of neurobiology? Is it a message from the spirit world? Is it a manifestation of an archetype? Is it the detection of a moral principle. What do we do to give this wisp of subjectivity the dignity of realness to ourselves and to those who know what we know? What substrate or matrix do we link it up to?

We can pragmatically establish the meaning of a metaphysics by its practical consequence. What kind of ontological grounding operation do you do in order to situate a subjective experience within your best conception of absolute reality? That is the pragmatic meaning of your metaphysic.

In my library life, I’m thinking about process philosophy.

In my office life, I’m thinking about service-dominant logic (SDL).

I can’t find where I wrote this, but I swear this is an older thought: service-dominant logic is an alternative business metaphysic.

Both of these philosophies/frameworks volatilize things into interactive dynamics, and blur the boundaries between noun and verb.

They put relations at the heart of reality.

Every noun is a gerund in disguise.

Light, photon and wave.

Being. The doing of am.

YHWH: was-am-will-be

Note: Some people have a metaphysic that is identical to their ontology. Others have a metaphysic that transcends their ontology. For the former, absolute reality is (or often is) objective reality. For the latter, objective reality and absolute reality are different.

Habermas’s simple move

Philosophy

I love Habermas’s simple move: to separately and comparatively analyze the propositional and performative dimensions of communication, in order to illuminate the universal norms implicit in all communicative acts.

When what is done in a speech act (an implied performative truth) contradicts what is said in its content (an explicit propositional truth), we encounter what’s known as a performative contradiction.

A famous example: “This sentence is a lie.” The act of asserting implies truthfulness, but the content denies it—undermining itself through its own performance. A more familiar example: “I don’t care what you think of me.” If that’s true, why say it? The act of saying it appeals to the very judgment it pretends to reject.

Performative contradictions throw tacit performative truths into sharp relief—truths that otherwise slip by unnoticed. They function like ethnomethodological breaching experiments: by violating invisible norms, they make them visible. Communicative acts, it turns out, are ethnomethods—and if Habermas is right, they are universal ones. “Anthropomethods”, maybe?

Habermas’s mature project was to uncover and clarify the norms presupposed by all communicative practice—not what we say about norms, but what our saying always already performs. In doing so, he sought universal norms of communicative rationality—structures that transcend the relativity of our claims by grounding them in the conditions that make understanding itself possible.

Vulgar appropriation of philosophical language drives me nuts. People love the mouthfeel of philosophical terms, but they cannot tolerate the practical consequences of actual understanding. So they make words forged expressly to say something new and elusive and different and level them down to say something old and obvious and same. (And don’t even get me started on appropriation of design language, which is, essentially the leveling down of practical phenomenological language to please the ontic palate.)

“Performative” is a particularly egregious example — one that reverses its intended meaning. In vulgar usage, it’s taken to mean theatrical, inauthentic: the speaker is just being an actor before an audience.

But in Habermas’s framework, and in the philosophical tradition in which Habermas works, performativity is not about deception, it is about action. What is performed in communication is not less real than what is said — it is more real.

Speech actions speak louder than words.

Grampy musings

Biography, Philosophy

It is a supreme privilege and joy to help initiate a baby into human society.

It is intrinsically good on every level — spiritually and emotionally, of course, and even somehow physically — but it is also intellectually fascinating. “Early childhood development” stops being a remote body of knowledge, and becomes experience-near insights, rooted in prolonged firsthand experience. A passage like this makes immediate sense, because the experiences to which it refers are so fresh:

Pointing is not a solitary act by which one actor or thinker confronts the world, identifying objects by means of this act. Rather, the act of pointing implies not only that there is something else to be pointed to, but also that there is someone else to perceive the pointing. Pointing is a fundamental social process. Pointing only makes sense within a social relationship: if a subject is pointing at something to another subject.

Although Kamlah and Lorenzen mention this fundamental sociality of pointing, the impact of this insight is accounted for in sociology, in the sociology of knowledge and in science studies rather than in philosophy. The communicative act of pointing makes it clear, in fact, to what extent knowledge and thinking are social: pointing is founded on a relationship between at least two subjects, who refer to a third element in a way that makes sense to them. If we consider pointing to be a basic act, we must also consider its basic sociality. It is the most general thesis of this book that communicative actions, such as pointing, are the fundamental social process by which society and its reality is constructed.

But now I am thinking about the full range of nonverbal communication that occurs between a baby and adults. Deictic communication (pointing, referring), including indicating actions to imitate, are part of it. But equally important is expression of physical and emotional states — most importantly to indicate needs.

All the talking we eventually learn to do is rooted in a primordial unity of physicality, of feeling, of perceiving, of relating — a world we inhabit a few painful, precious years before language develops to mediate it, tame it — and unfortunately, all too often, to eclipse and replace it.

The key to living in reality (versus our conceptualizations of reality) is maintaining connection with the primordial chaos, and keeping language in this role of mediator, and not as something that dominates or eclipses our participation in this strange, very physical, very intuitive participatory relationship we have with what William James famously called “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”.

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.

Craft brings us back to materials, so we can hear the buzzing, blooming chaos to which we and all things belong, long before we slice thing up into subjects and objects and qualities — light and dark, upper and lower, dry and wet, animal and mineral — each labeled with a name and therefores — all stacked up and ready to be inventoried, quantified, utilized and managed.

Hyperorder metaphysics

Metaphysics, Philosophy

I remain enamored with Habermas’s framing of system versus lifeworld.

It seems to me that our popular philosophy seeks to project a semi-concealed systems-metaphysic beneath our lifeworld. We want to uncover the secrets of this system in order to understand finally how this semi-chaotic lifeworld emerges.

The philosophers I gravitate toward do the opposite. They like me, see the lifeworld as primary, and that systems are what we humans abstract and formalize from this semi-chaos in order to locally and temporarily order it for ourselves. There is no secret system behind the mess, but a hyper-ordered reality that affords many potential but always-partial orderings.

According to this broad school of thought, science is an organized, intricate, precise collaborative lifeworld activity that generates systems meant to explain the lifeworld as comprehensively as possible, and which appears to transcend the lifeworld, while never actually transcending, except in the metaphysical imagination of the scientistic faith.

By the way, I view chaos as hyperorder, not disorder. Hyperorder is what happens when diverse possibilities of ordering coincide so densely and incommensurably that we are unable to pick out an ordering to make sense of whatever concerns us.

My metaphysic is a metaphysic of chaotic hyperorder. Reality is inexhaustibly surprising. However much order we find in it, that order is the furthest thing from ultimate truth.

A prettier way of saying what I’m trying to convey would be to reverse Camille Flammarion’s famous woodcut “L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire” so that he when crawls up to the edge of a uni-ordered universe and pokes his head through its outer edge he beholds myriad overlapping uni-ordered universes in psychedelic communion.

Or maybe the protagonist keeps on crawling, and thrusting his head through successive spheres of reality, once, twice, myriad times — until reality finally thrusts itself through his head, and he finally realizes that all these experiences of transcendence were just varieties of immanence — an ontological kaleidoscope.

Collective madness

Philosophy, Politics

“Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

Why? Individuals constantly check their perceptions, ideals, norms, opinions, beliefs and plans both with their fellows individuals and with the concrete data of life. This prevents their ideas from becoming fully self-referential, self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling and alienated from life outside the mind.

But with groups, these very checks against individual madness generate collective madness. Group-think and group-feel permeate the beliefs and attitudes of all its individual members. When the individual tries to reconcile their own individual perceptions, conceptions, intuitions and pangs of conscience with those of their peers, they find that they are alone and out of step. Since few people put much work into testing their own beliefs or trying to get their beliefs to integrate in any coherent way, so most people just assume their trusted sources are trustworthy and that their integration with the people around them will produce personal integrity. Instead of challenging the norms around them, they assimilate. They just go with what their peers think, feel, say and do, and assume all critique of these things from groups or individuals are invalid for some known or unknown reason. And when most of what we know about the world comes from content generated by our own group, it is easy to inhabit a largely imagined world instead of a partially imagined one that must answer to controversy and the chaos of reality.

All it takes is readiness to believe in the exceptional virtuousness of one’s own group and the exceptional viciousness of those who oppose you, and a dash of ordinary human incuriosity, and collective madness is inevitable within two generations.

This is one of those times where anyone who is not actively working to keep their minds in contact with mind-transcendent reality is almost certainly floating off in one or another bubble of collective solipsism.