Category Archives: Pragmatism

Peirce on “what pragamtism is”

Pragmatism

Some gems from C. S. Peirce’s “What Pragmatism Is”.

First, probably the most famous bit from this essay, one of the funnier lines in the history of philosophy:

…the writer, finding his bantling “pragmatism” so promoted, feels that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word “pragmaticism,” which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.

Another, which I think is highly relevant to the Design Thinking debate, largely conducted by non-practitioners:

The writer of this article has been led by much experience to believe that every physicist, and every chemist, and, in short, every master in any department of experimental science, has had his mind molded by his life in the laboratory to a degree that is little suspected. The experimentalist himself can hardly be fully aware of it, for the reason that the men whose intellects he really knows about are much like himself in this respect. With intellects of widely different training from his own, whose education has largely been a thing learned out of books, he will never become inwardly intimate, be he on ever so familiar terms with them; for he and they are as oil and water, and though they be shaken up together, it is remarkable how quickly they will go their several mental ways, without having gained more than a faint flavor from the association. Were those other men only to take skillful soundings of the experimentalist’s mind — which is just what they are unqualified to do, for the most part — they would soon discover that, excepting perhaps upon topics where his mind is trammeled by personal feeling or by his bringing up, his disposition is to think of everything just as everything is thought of in the laboratory, that is, as a question of experimentation. … when you have found, or ideally constructed upon a basis of observation, the typical experimentalist, you will find that whatever assertion you may make to him, he will either understand as meaning that if a given prescription for an experiment ever can be and ever is carried out in act, an experience of a given description will result, or else he will see no sense at all in what you say.

And last, a restatement of a simple but profoundly consequential idea from “Four Incapacities” (“Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”) which hit me from a pleasantly fresh angle:

Philosophers of very diverse stripes propose that philosophy shall take its start from one or another state of mind in which no man, least of all a beginner in philosophy, actually is. One proposes that you shall begin by doubting everything, and says that there is only one thing that you cannot doubt, as if doubting were “as easy as lying.” … Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt, in the least. Now that which you do not at all doubt, you must and do regard as infallible, absolute truth. Here breaks in Mr. Make Believe: “What! Do you mean to say that one is to believe what is not true, or that what a man does not doubt is ipso facto true?” No, but unless he can make a thing white and black at once, he has to regard what he does not doubt as absolutely true. Now you, per hypothesiu, are that man, “But you tell me there are scores of things I do not doubt. I really cannot persuade myself that there is not some one of them about which I am mistaken.” You are adducing one of your make-believe facts, which, even if it were established, would only go to show that doubt has a limen, that is, is only called into being by a certain finite stimulus. You only puzzle yourself by talking of this metaphysical “truth” and metaphysical “falsity,” that you know nothing about. All you have any dealings with are your doubts and beliefs, with the course of life that forces new beliefs upon you and gives you power to doubt old beliefs. If your terms “truth” and “falsity” are taken in such senses as to be definable in terms of doubt and belief and the course of experience (as for example they would be, if you were to define the “truth” as that to a belief in which belief would tend if it were to tend indefinitely toward absolute fixity), well and good: in that case, you are only talking about doubt and belief. But if by truth and falsity you mean something not definable in terms of doubt and belief in any way, then you are talking of entities of whose existence you can know nothing, and which Ockham’s razor would clean shave off. Your problems would he greatly simplified, if, instead of saying that you want to know the “Truth,” you were simply to say that you want to attain a state of belief unassailable by doubt.

Wordworlds

ANT, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Nothing is improved when we replace worldviews with wordworlds.

To paraphrase Bernadette from the Jerk, “It’s not [the meanings] I’ll miss. It’s the stuff!”

Our problem is not metaphysics. It is metaphysical reductionism. And specifically metaphysical reductionisms that allow us to be individually solipsistic with our eyes, or collectively solipsistic with our ears. If we get our hands involved and through interacting with the myriad beings around us, permit a fluid and indeterminately multidimensional metaphysic to stand beyond our capacity to conceptualize — one whose essence is to occasionally shock us — we’ll be better able to live in a real world.

I really cannot read more minds-in-vats. ANT has ruined me.

Alterior expressions

Philosophy, Pragmatism

A quick noting of a thought I had several weeks ago. It seems that the more an author writes in terms of present familiarities, alluding to fresh events of the moment that everyone understands and feels, the sooner the immediacy of the writing will expire. It is a tradeoff: the strategy of connecting ideas to the realities of present readers comes at a cost to connecting them to the realities of future readers, who will experience what was immediate as obscure allusions requiring footnotes and further study, or even as distracting errors if the allusions refer to beliefs requiring revisions (for instance, to discredited scientific notions or moral convictions). The most obscure writings of the present might become the most accessible writing to the future.

The reason this came to mind this morning is that it occurred to me that every form of immediacy might suffer from every kind of distance — temporal, temperamental, spacial, practical, etc..

Even our own immediate feelings can become incomprehensible over time as the fade into biography. This is a new way to see a thought I have been having now for over a decade. But it gives the idea a fresh new immediacy — today, anyway.

But also, our word-defying moods or insights — our sense of the poetic and religious — those might be the hardest immediacies to hold onto and remember, thus poems and prayers. We say them again, hear them again, beg them to return to us in their immediacy.

But thinking beyond the problems of our own private or communal recollections of past  immediacies, and factoring in the problems of communication with other people, these immediate experiences are difficult to convey and share with our most alterious alter-egos. Compounding the problem is the fact that the dread of beyondness clings to such alterior expressions adds daunting barriers to bridgeless gaps.

It might be that the most immediate realities cannot be spoken of in their own terms, but, if they are to be shared, must be refracted through and reflected off the myriad things of our sharable world. To be known at all, our subjectivities must run a circuit through the world we all intuit as one world, and present themselves as alternative objectivities belonging to a pluralistic world. But of course, the immediate reality of the world is that it is simply reality, and to view reality in a pluralistic light is to deny the most basic reality of this experience, so pluralism is not the innocent neutrality it seems to be to itself in its own immediacy.

 

Allegiances

Pragmatism

In college I split the things I cared about into two categories:

  1. The things of which I approve.
  2. The things I love.

Being a young rationalist, I sided against my loves, for things of which I approved.

This lasted into my mid-30s. Starting on my 34th birthday, under the influence of Nietzsche I switched allegiances to what I loved.

Now I am back again, though in a less severely dichotomous form.

I still love Nietzsche, but my allegiance is with John Dewey.

Morality and experiment

Pragmatism, Taoism

What is the pragmatic “cash value” of a person’s moral vision? I propose this: Where is that person motivated or resistant to experiment, at what cost and at what risk?

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Where: What possibilities of reality does the experimenter wish to investigate and bring to light? These possibilities can range from definite hypotheses or questions to indefinite intuitions of potential.

Cost: How much does the experimenter propose to invest or save, and who pays for doing the experiment and who pays for not doing it?

Risk: What level of unpredictability is the experimenter ready to tolerate?

 

Law of Reason

Design, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

To neither lose one’s receptivity nor to lose oneself in it: uncompromising enforcement of the law of reason on all, most of all oneself.

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“Reason? Why?”

Because it is reasonable.

“But that’s circular.”

It is the greatest circle. It is certainly more expansive than the tiny, skull’s-breadth circuit you’ll spin within if you try to move in your own straight line on your own flat terrain.

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Reason is essentially experimental, not logically deductive. To know a thing means interactive fluency. To understand it means to take part, to participate — to become part of an exceeding whole.

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Reason is 90 parts ethics, 4 parts ontology, 3 parts rhetoric, 2 parts epistemology, 1 part logic.

 

 

Latour on the Baby Boomers

Politics, Pragmatism

I found this passage from Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence persuasive and  moving.

I myself belong to the generation designated as baby boomers, at least until age has earned us the dreadful replacement moniker “golden agers.” Without this indispensable reference point, it won’t be possible to tell whether it is reactionary or not to propose, as I did in the introduction, that we should “learn to respect institutions.” Unless we know the genealogical cluster in which you are located, it will be impossible to know, given that habit has so many enemies, whether you want to protect a value by instituting it or, on the contrary, whether you want to betray it, stifle it, break it down, ossify it. Now we baby boomers have drained that bitter cup to the dregs. Confronting the ruins of the institutions that we are beginning to bequeath to our descendants, am I the only one to feel the same embarrassment as asbestos manufacturers targeted by the criminal charges brought by workers suffering from lung cancer? In the beginning, the struggle against institutions seemed to be risk-free; it was modernizing and liberating—and even fun; like asbestos, it had only good qualities. But, like asbestos, alas, it also had disastrous consequences that no one had anticipated and that we have been far too slow to recognize.

In particular, it took me a long time to understand what effect such an attitude was going to have on the subsequent generations from whom we were threatening to conceal the secret of institutions owing to our own congestion (and also owing to our numbers and our appetites for living lavishly and for a long time). We expected these generations to continue (as we had?), through the vigor of their critical spirit, to hold onto the originality of their initiatives, their spontaneity, their enthusiasm, everything that institutions were no longer able (and no longer knew how) to keep going. This was to sin against blessed habit; it was to claim to be continuing institutions without offering any way to ensure continuity. We thought we were protecting values and contrasts by extracting them from institutions—from which we had profited before we destroyed them—like fishermen who claim to be saving fish from asphyxiation by bringing them out into the air. One little hypocrisy too many; we have to hope it won’t be stamped on our foreheads on Judgment Day . . .

And here is the “malign inversion”: by losing the thread of the means that could have ensured subsistence—habit being no longer able to ensure the relay—we have involuntarily pointed in the direction of a return to substance without specifying to the next generation that this return would be truly fatal, precisely for want of defining its means of subsistence. In Pierre Legendre’s words (provided that we extend them to all the modes and not just to psyches), we have broken the “genealogical principle,” that is, the search for antecedents and consequents. Being-as-other can gain its subsistence through the exploration of alterity, through multiplicity, through relations; it cannot ensure continuity by entrusting it to a substance. But without the scaffolding of habits, it cannot subsist at all! Here is where the trap closes, where the miracle product called asbestos begins to make the employees who breathe its microfibers cough their lungs out.

I may be overdramatizing the situation, but I cannot help thinking that if those who are starting to succeed us inadvertently sought to keep speaking of what is true or false, they would have no choice but to plunge headlong into a search for foundations, since institutions can no longer guarantee continuity. In other words, to those who, tired of spontaneity, are nevertheless still searching for truth, we have left no recourse but fundamentalism. Now all the contrasts I have talked about up to this point are lost forever if we set out in search of their “incontrovertible foundation”: God, of course, as we shall see, but also law, science, the psychogenics, the frenzied world itself, in short, the multiverse. If the reader has grasped the weight, or rather the lightness, of habit, he has also understood that there is nothing true except what is instituted, thus what is relative: relative to the weight, the thickness, the complexity, the layering, the multiplicity, the heterogeneity of institutions; but relative especially to the always delicate detection of the leap, the threshold, the step, the pass necessary for its extension. Exactly what Double Click teaches us to miss. By confusing the rejuvenation of institutions with their dismantling, hasn’t the baby-boomer generation made it possible to slip, almost unwittingly, from the critical spirit to fundamentalism? As if a first category mistake about blessed habit had triggered a second, infinitely more calamitous, concerning the radical distinction between what is true and what is instituted. The late modernism that thought it was digging the grave of its predecessors would thus have been digging its own grave!

I am well aware that we would be committing a new injustice, however, if we were to go on flagellating ourselves too long. If it is hard for our children to inherit our muddled passions, how could we have inherited the whole history of Modernism without difficulty? If it has seemed impossible for us to utter the words “truth” and “instituted” in the same breath, it is surely because of the lamentable state in which we had found the aforementioned institutions. If we have criticized them, it is surely because they had not been functioning for a long time—or at least because there was no longer a recipe adapted to their various regimes. If there were just one way to take habits, there would have been just one way to stand guard over institutions while keeping them from degenerating and tipping unnoticed from omission into forgetting. But as each mode has its own particular way of letting itself be omitted by habit, these are the differences that have made it so difficult for a civilization to provide the care that would have been required to maintain all the contrasts extracted by the ontological history of the Moderns.

If our predecessors had spent even a fraction of the energy devoted to the critique of institutions on differentiating all these cares, all these attentions, all these precautions, our generation would never have found itself before empty shells. But the very idea of care and precaution had become foreign to them, since they had hurled themselves blindly into this modernizing furor for which the time for care and attachments, as they saw it, had definitively passed. As if that archaic time were henceforth behind them and they had before them only the radiant future, defined precisely by a single emancipation, by the absence of precautions to be taken, this reign of irrational Reason whose cruel strangeness we have come to understand. I grant that it is hard for the young people born after us to inherit from the so-called May ’68 generation; but can someone tell me what we were supposed to do with the legacies left behind by the generations of “August ’14,” “October ’17,” and “June ’40”? Not an easy task, to inherit from the twentieth century! When will we be done with it? But we must try to be patient: once we have deployed all the modes, we shall know what we are to inherit and what we can, with a little luck, pass on to our descendants. In any case, in the face of what is coming, are not all generations, like all civilizations, equal in their ignorance?

OPP

ANT, Pragmatism

Obligatory Passage Point (OPP) is going to be a useful concept. From Wikipedia:

Obligatory passage points are a feature of actor-networks, usually associated with the initial (problematization) phase of a translation process. An OPP can be thought of as the narrow end of a funnel, that forces the actors to converge on a certain topic, purpose or question. The OPP thereby becomes a necessary element for the formation of a network and an action program. The OPP thereby mediates all interactions between actors in a network and defines the action program. Obligatory passage points allow for local networks to set up negotiation spaces that allow them a degree of autonomy from the global network of involved actors.

To put it in Jamesian language, the “cash value” of all ideas involved in a social situation transacts at the OPP — for a social scientist, at least, who is interested in accounting for the transpiring of events. Is there any perspective deeper than that? (I’ll leave that question open.)

From, for and within

ANT, Pragmatism

Just as science is not really a body of knowledge on what is true about things, but rather the record of disciplined interactions human beings have with things, with a focus on the patterns that predictably occur when certain conditions are in place… philosophy is not really the truth of how human beings necessarily relate to existence (“the human condition”), but rather the record of individuals (who belong to societies) trying to make coherent and comprehensive sense of their own experience, as defined by what they take to be relevant, which is intimately connected with what that individual wishes to do in the world. Existence might be conceptualized in thingly objective terms, or psychological, intellectual, logical, political, experiential, moral, etc. terms.

And because what people take to be relevant varies from person to person — (and perhaps varies most dramatically between the type who decides to conceptualize his experience versus a type who simply interacts with whatever he encounters) — different people will have different philosophies, which will enable them to interact with the world in some very particular way, perhaps as a scientist or a philosopher, but maybe as a salesperson or a respiratory therapist or a concierge or a politician.

So, both science and philosophy attempt to relate to the whole of reality, but always from, for and within some purpose, outside of which there is nothing but the mystery of the possibility of learning and changing. In any intellectual activity an actor is always someone relating something, whether the emphasis is on the someone or on the something and even if that something is taken to be fellow someone/something actors.

I think my use of this approach to relating myself to existence, which includes as a consideration other people approaching existence differently from myself makes me a pragmatist. Never forget: American Pragmatism was a response to the experience of the Civil War.

Crediting James

ANT, Pragmatism

Graham Harman, from Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics:

We are now amused to think that there used to be two kinds of physics, one for the earth and one for the sky. But it is equally absurd that we still recognize two different kinds of reality: one for hard scientific fact and another for arbitrary social power. What exists is only actants: cars, subways, canoe-varnish, quarreling spouses, celestial bodies, and scientists, all on the same metaphysical footing.

I’ll say it again: as far as I can tell Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is nothing more than the most radical form of Pragmatism, which has advanced from its humble clean, abstract, conceptual infancy to a truly radical maturity, which for Pragmatism means a dirty, concrete mess of real life observations and real life applications of the understandings so derived. The most radical form of Pragmatism is practical Pragmatism.

The concept of “actant” is an ontology of Jamesian “cash value”, with all (other?) metaphysics (as such) bracketed — not negatively, but positively as something with force of some kind. When Latour uses accounting language — “I am perfectly happy with the resonance of the word [accounting] not only with Garfinkel’s accountability but also with ‘accounting books’, since the weak but essential link of accounting with economics has been one of the most productive, and unlikely, domains of science studies.” — it seems to me that it is precisely this pragmatic cash value inhabits the cells of the ANT spreadsheet. And really, money is a very human thing, and is embedded in the etymology of some of our most exalted words. It seems that extreme love or hatred of wealth seems symptomatic of of an individual’s rejection of being human.

 

Actor-network theory is practical pragmatism

ANT, Pragmatism, Synesis

Extending my post from a couple of days ago, “ANT = Practical pragmatism”:

When you are temperamentally theoretical, it is tempting to stop at theorizing about practice, and never to practice anything but theorizing.

When pragmatism begins to apply its insights to practice — that is, to a study specific situation with an aim to understand it in pragmatic terms (which will always turn up unexpected theoretical problems which must be resolved) — pragmatism becomes Actor-network theory.

Actor-network theory is practical pragmatism.

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As an experience researcher and strategist, this passage from Latour is galvanizing, because it articulates what I do, and what I’ve had great difficulty communicating to clients and colleagues who still live in an essentially objective world inhabited by opinionated, emotional and behaving subjects:

Even once reality has fully set in, the question of its unity is still pending. The common world has still to be collected and composed. As we shall see at the end of this book, this is where the social sciences may regain the political relevance that they seem to have lost by abandoning the ether of the social and the automated use of the critical repertoire that it allowed.

That idea of “collecting and composing” a shared understanding of the world is what I’ve called synesis. I believe this involves a mode of thinking which goes beyond the algorithmic ideal of business thought into the specifically philosophical mode of intuitive thinking, dialectic.

Then things can be taken even further by modifying the network through the act of design. Maybe this is the best definition of design: intentional modification of actor-networks?

 

 

Explaining away

Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism

Worldviews include within them accounts of alien worldviews held by others. These accounts sometimes also include reasons for why these alien worldviews are invalid and do not require consideration and understanding.

Such invalidating accounts protect one’s worldview from the consequences of understanding rival worldviews and experiencing their validity. It is as if worldviews have life of their own that they preserve as biological organisms do, protecting their outer skin, taking in only that which it can digest and incorporate and repelling everything else.

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Monism, the belief that there is a singular and ultimate truth to be found, inclines people to assume that if something appears self-evidently true, that whatever appears to conflict with it is necessarily false. It is the casual and mostly unconscious tendency of people who have never experienced a shift in worldviews. But those who have experienced a single shift are the fiercest adherents of monism, because they’ve experienced this shift as a conversion from a world of illusion to one of overwhelming truth, which is taken as a discovery of the true world. This discovery is not experienced as the acquisition of new facts about the world, but as a transfiguration of the world itself. The experience is so deep and so dramatic (and pleasant) that is often fails to occur to the convert that the process could occur again, re-transfiguring the transfigured, so the convert fails to look for clues that this is the case. If it does, another conversion is likely to occur: from monism to pluralism.

Pluralism lives on practical terms with the properties of worldviews — the fact that they have “horizons” of intelligibility (which can be characterized as the set of questions the worldview knows how to ask), that they project specific patterns of relevance and irrelevance onto phenomena and fact, that the perspective by which the worldview sees always appears absolute and self-evidently right, and most importantly that worldviews naturally and perhaps inevitably generate misunderstandings which can only be detected with effort.

Consequently, a pluralist always harbors a certain amount of suspicion even toward pluralism, which inclines a pluralist to respect even monistic views, and to attempt to learn from them. But again, pluralism is practical, which means it lives on terms with reality as it experiences it, with the understanding that the surprise of transcendence is a permanent possibility, and that there is no way to predict when such events will occur and what will result from them. Pluralism, unlike skepticism, doesn’t throw up its hands, saying “what can I know?” It doesn’t think of learning as a means to the end of final knowledge. (Arendt identified orientation toward means-and-ends as belonging to the middle stratum of active life, which she called “work”, whose primary activity is the fabrication of artifacts. The stratum above work is “action”, the realm of politics which both presupposes and preserves pluralistic conditions. See Arendt quote below.) What matters, rather, is the desire for particular kinds of knowledge, which signals the next intellectual development, both for individuals and groups of people.

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Arendt, from The Human Condition:

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life. … Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing. Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.

All three activities and their corresponding conditions are intimately connected with the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality. Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history. Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers. However, of the three, action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought.

Supra-individual mind

Pragmatism

Every thought thinkable by an individual mind has already been thought. Future thoughts will come from people who know how to think collaboratively beyond their own individual capacity as responsible participants in a supra-individual mind.

This idea should not be mistaken for common “collectivism”. It is the very opposite of the mob mentality, where each individual is reduced to what all human beings have in common, becoming roughly identical, and behaving according to animal tribal instinct. Supra-individual thinking makes use of intellectual differences as well as commonalities. It is also different from hierarchical team thinking, where one mind understands the problem completely and then enlists the help of others to manage and execute. Supra-individual thinking means more than one person is required to participate if an idea is to be fully understood, so no one person has the “vision” in its entirety. Supra-individual thinking is also different from the kind of thinking that comes from (relatively) homogeneous groups, where once an idea is conceived by one member of the group, all are instantly and effortlessly able to grasp the idea, because arriving at the idea was simply a matter of quickness or luck. Supra-individual thinking arrives at agreements, but not agreements where each person holds an identical conception and opinion, but rather where each person holds conceptions and opinions compatible with the others in guiding collaborative action. And finally supra-individual thinking is not a division of labor among experts in different disciplines. The coherence is not mere systematization of separate black-box parts, but organic, conceptual coherence. Supra-individual thinking is unified intuitively and tacit-practically as well as rationally.

In collaborative thought, the group somehow comes to know something coherently, which is only later completely understood by some or all of the group, but in the meantime is effectively applied to real-world problems.

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Supra-individual mind is similar to common sense, in the meaning of “the sense of reality arising from the five senses perceiving together”. It’s the blind men and the elephant story, except with temperamental/psychological differences substituted for circumstantial ones.

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Supra-individual mind is the concrete actualization of pluralism. It begins with tolerance and skepticism, but then moves far beyond them.

Conserving, simplifying, forgetting

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Pragmatism

When a person calls himself a “conservative” what precisely is it that is conserved? Is it ideas? Do conservatives wish to keep valued ideas intact and pure?

Or is it a wish to conserve our limited store of moral energy? Despite what we would like to believe, we cannot just will this energy into existence, because will itself is constituted of this energy.

And even if energy were unlimited, time is indisputably limited. If we so expend most of our energy and time sifting through a near-infinite number of details, then wrestling to organize the mess into something clear and cohesive, wouldn’t the result of this effort be so complicated and unwieldy that our efforts would be hopelessly encumbered (not to mention pleasureless)?

It seems our choice is somewhere on a continuum ranging between “analysis paralysis” in the face of innumerable disorganized facts on one hand an or decisive, energetic action based on simplification verging on willful ignorance on the other. To put it in Yeats’ words, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.” I think this tendency grows more and more exaggerated as the old fundamental thought-structures of a culture begin to give out under the pressures of new social conditions, and new underdeveloped and over complicated ones vie (lamely) to replace them.

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Does change resulting from consideration of new and multiple perspectives necessarily mean appending and complicating our idea-world, and making it increasingly unlivable? Probably at first. But thinking deeply can also have a simplifying effect. But this simplification itself takes time and energy, and modes of thinking many people find even more uncomfortable than dealing with baroquely-rehacked, elaborately epicycled and recycled concepts.

Perhaps it is not over-simplification that makes ideologies so damaging to the world — since, after all, all thinking and all abstraction involves selective forgetting and remembering (what we call discerning relevance and discovering generalities) — but rather that the simplifications take into account only what one group or another considers relevant.