Category Archives: Pragmatism

Random patriotic thoughts

Pragmatism

Intention – a “why” – is an ethical question and is always future-tense, even if an intention in question occurred in the past. To understand a past intention is to reconstruct its future.

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An idea from Dewey’s Freedom and Culture that’s stuck with me: “We cannot continue the idea that human nature when left to itself, when freed from external arbitrary restrictions, will tend to the production of democratic institutions that work successfully. We have now to state the issue from the other side. We have to see that democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail; we should be frank and open in our recognition that the proposition is a moral one — like any idea that concerns what should be.”

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Systems thinking is about taking responsibility not only for yourself but also for your determining conditions. It means taking an active stance toward your factical situation. It means acknowledging that much “inner work” must be done in one’s “outer world”.

It involves knowing the boundary: the ontologically peculiar region between where you as an autonomous being ends and the conditions that contain, exceed and determine you begin. Conditional determinations are strange and indirect in their effects and they defeat reductionist modes of thought.

The interplay is nonlinear. You change the conditions, you change the self who changes the conditions.

Perhaps many romantic and poetic intuitions are pre-thoughts lacking the right intellectual tools for practical understanding.

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Pragmatism appears deep only to those who think deeply. To everyone else, it just looks like mere expedience, arbitrary relativism, anti-spiritualism, chaos and superficiality.

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I’ve been reading American Pragmatists in the morning and Obama’s Audacity of Hope at night. A romantic and poetic intuition to play with: What if the USA can be loved – not despite its philistinism – but philosophically and culturally? What if the USA is on the verge of waking up to its own world-historic philosophical importance, which is so elusive that it looks pedestrian to the untrained eye, even/especially to those versed in European esoteric metaphysics and to their exoteric dupes, the rank-and-file American patriots who love the USA generically (as any Roman loved Rome, as any Nazi loved Germany?

Perhaps no civilization since ancient Greece has had something so philosophically revolutionary in its womb.

Another version of the same diagram

Philosophy, Pragmatism, Symbols and diagrams

I’ve been struggling with the same inchoate problem since early 2006. It appears to center on the meaning of the I Ching trigrams, but in fact the I Ching has only provided a form for approaching the problem. The interest I’ve have in the I Ching has been a by-product of struggling with this problem.

One thing I’ve noticed is that my interest in trigrams seems to move in step with my interest in pragmatist philosophy. I think what the trigrams mean is best accounted for in pragmatist terms. The trigrams are better understood in terms of how they are used than by what they represent. The use of the triads is unification and stabilization of the experiential flux. The trigrams are a typology of interpretive schemas used to unify experience.

Securing reality

This quote by C. S. Peirce always belongs with this diagram:

“Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premisses which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.”

More Dewey

Pragmatism

Also from Freedom and Culture:

The greatest practical inconsistency that would be revealed by searching our own habitual attitudes is probably one between the democratic method of forming opinions in political matters and the methods in common use in forming beliefs in other subjects. In theory, the democratic method is persuasion through public discussion carried on not only in legislative halls but in the press, private conversations and public assemblies. The substitution of ballots for bullets, of the right to vote for the lash, is an expression of the will to substitute the method of discussion for the method of coercion. With all its defects and partialities in determination of political decisions, it has worked to keep factional disputes within bounds, to an extent that was incredible a century or more ago. While Carlyle could bring his gift of satire into play in ridiculing the notion that men by talking to and at each other in an assembly hall can settle what is true in social affairs any more than they can settle what is true in the multiplication table, he failed to see that if men had been using clubs to maim and kill one another to decide the product of 7 times 7, there would have been sound reasons for appealing to discussion and persuasion even in the latter case. The fundamental reply is that social “truths” are so unlike mathematical truths that unanimity of uniform belief is possible in respect to the former only when a dictator has the power to tell others what they must believe — or profess they believe. The adjustment of interests demands that diverse interests have a chance to articulate themselves.

The real trouble is that there is an intrinsic split in our habitual attitudes when we profess to depend upon discussion and persuasion in politics and then systematically depend upon other methods in reaching conclusions in matters of morals and religion, or in anything where we depend upon a person or group possessed of “authority.” We do not have to go to theological matters to find examples. In homes and in schools, the places where the essentials of character are supposed to be formed, the usual procedure is settlement of issues, intellectual and moral, by appeal to the “authority” of parent, teacher, or textbook. Dispositions formed under such conditions are so inconsistent with the democratic method that in a crisis they may be aroused to act in positively anti-democratic ways for anti-democratic ends; just as resort to coercive force and suppression of civil liberties are readily palliated in nominally democratic communities when the cry is raised that “law and order” are threatened.

 

Willing vs projecting

Ethics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Dewey (from Freedom and Culture):

The present predicament may be stated as follows: Democracy does involve a belief that political institutions and law be such as to take fundamental account of human nature. They must give it freer play than any non-democratic institutions. At the same time, the theory, legalistic and moralistic, about human nature that has been used to expound and justify this reliance upon human nature has proved inadequate. Upon the legal and political side, during the nineteenth century it was progressively overloaded with ideas and practices which have more to do with business carried on for profit than with democracy. On the moralistic side, it has tended to substitute emotional exhortation to act in accord with the Golden Rule for the discipline and the control afforded by incorporation of democratic ideals into all the relations of life. Because of lack of an adequate theory of human nature in its relations to democracy, attachment to democratic ends and methods has tended to become a matter of tradition and habit — an excellent thing as far as it goes, but when it becomes routine is easily undermined when change of conditions changes other habits.

Were I to say that democracy needs a new psychology of human nature, one adequate to the heavy demands put upon it by foreign and domestic conditions, I might be taken to utter an academic irrelevancy. But if the remark is understood to mean that democracy has always been allied with humanism, with faith in the potentialities of human nature, and that the present need is vigorous reassertion of this faith, developed in relevant ideas and manifested in practical attitudes, it but continues the American tradition. For belief in the “common man” has no significance save as an expression of belief in the intimate and vital connection of democracy and human nature.

We cannot continue the idea that human nature when left to itself, when freed from external arbitrary restrictions, will tend to the production of democratic institutions that work successfully. We have now to state the issue from the other side. We have to see that democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail; we should be frank and open in our recognition that the proposition is a moral one — like any idea that concerns what should be.

Strange as it seems to us, democracy is challenged by totalitarian states of the Fascist variety on moral grounds just as it is challenged by totalitarianisms of the left on economic grounds. We may be able to defend democracy on the latter score, as far as comparative conditions are involved, since up to the present at least the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has not “caught up” with us, much less “surpassed” us, in material affairs. But defense against the other type of totalitarianism (and perhaps in the end against also the Marxist type) requires a positive and courageous constructive awakening to the significance of faith in human nature for development of every phase of our culture:science, art, education, morals and religion, as well as politics and economics. No matter how uniform and constant human nature is in the abstract, the conditions within which and upon which it operates have changed so greatly since political democracy was established among us, that democracy cannot now depend upon or be expressed in political institutions alone. We cannot even be certain that they and their legal accompaniments are actually democratic at the present time — for democracy is expressed in the attitudes of human beings and is measured by consequences produced in their lives.

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Nietzsche:

“Whoever does not know how to lay his will into things, at least lays some meaning into them: that means, he has the faith that they already obey a will (principle of ‘faith’).”

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1) Is ethics (as a branch of philosophy) the practice of learning how to lay one’s will into things?

2) I still consider my typology of behavioral disciplines (morals, moralism, ethics and behavior aesthetics) valid, but my (ethical?) attitude toward them may be shifting.

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(Much of what I’ve written below is based on second-hand information on Leo Strauss, and it very well might be wrong. I’ve only read one essay by Leo Strauss, and it was a non-political one. It was actually pretty amazing.)

As I understand it, the fundamental conflict between the Straussians (the school of philosophy upon which Neoconservatism was founded) and the Pragmatists (the school of philosophy upon which Progressivism appears to have been founded) boils down to attitudes toward Natural Rights, the conception of human rights that sees them as metaphysically belonging to human nature within the natural order in general.

I believe both sides agree that Natural Right is a mythical feature within American culture, but they disagree on the practical value of the belief. My understanding is that the Straussians believe the myth is a necessary one, required for the continuance of America as we know it, culturally and politically, because the masses require a metaphysical externalization of morality in order to accept it as valid.

The Pragmatists on the other hand consider the belief an obsolete superstition that must be overcome and replaced with a truer and more resilient concept – that we choose to uphold democracy and freedom simply because we – Americans, in particular – experience it as good and worth preserving for its intrinsic value and the intrinsic value of the constellation of values associated with it. This value needs no further metaphysical validation.

A very important consequence of belief in natural rights is the belief that democracy is simply what happens when obstacles to its realization are removed. When democracy is offered, human nature kicks in and the choice is automatic. The Pragmatist believes that democratic values are cultural, and even the desire for democracy must be cultivated. Further, the continuance of democracy depends not only on the absence of tyrants and democratic political mechanisms and institutions, but most of all on cultivation of democratic attitudes and skills.

What is unnerving about the Straussians is their (reputed) willingness to propagate myths in which they do not themselves believe (or to put it more nicely, telling “noble lies”). Which of the Neoconservatives were actually Straussians, speaking disingenuously (nobly lying) about Freedom, and which Neoconservatives were noble dupes of Straussians? Which Republicans really believed Democracy would be embraced in the Middle East despite the nonexistence of a supporting cultural context, and what were the ones who knew better trying to accomplish over there – or over here?

I’m strongly considering reading Strauss’s Natural Right and History to see if I have Strauss anywhere close to right.

 

Moral anxieties

Ethics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Some catch-all mystical categories seal what is beyond I in glass, where it glows silently and harmlessly and provides evocative mood-lighting to an undisturbed world.

In regard to one another, we are beyond.

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It is hard to tell if hostility to God is what makes us hostile to one another, or hostility to one another is what makes us hostile to God. Maybe one day when my theology liberates itself from liberalism I’ll see a difference. Meanwhile, I am going to look for a conservative who has come even that far. (First up: Frithjof Schuon.)

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I am beginning to suspect that “overcoming metaphysics” is a euphemism for solipsism.

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It is possible to acknowledge the existence of the metaphysical and even to orient one’s life by the metaphysical while remaining a solipsist in practice.

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When I am offended by someone invariably an examination of that offense leads me back to where I have committed that same offense against another.

The I, the We, the Other, and transcendence

Biography, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I picked through several books today without getting traction in any one of them. I started with Richard J. Bernstein’s The New Constellation: Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity looking for references to Martin Buber and Emanuel Levinas (who is generally considered Buber’s heir). I was looking for a summary of their differences, mostly to see if there is any similarity in Levinas’s view on Other and my own. I was also interested in how Bernstein situated Levinas in his understanding of Postmodernity. I began and abandoned Levinas’s Totality and Infinity last year, and I am considering picking it up again.

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I refer to Bernstein for my sense of the postmodern landscape because I trust him as one of the “good postmodernists”, which means he has given skepticism its full, horrific due (thus “postmodernist”) but that he responds to the destruction of truth (as moderns have conceived of it) by seeking some kind of ground upon which reality can be secured, not only privately but socially (thus “good”). For me, the “bad postmodernists” are the ones who use unrestrained skepticism to insulate themselves from all appeals from their fellow subjects, whether the appeals are directly subjective (that is ethical or aesthetic or psychological) or indirectly subjective (that is, objective or empirical) by depriving conversation of any shared factual points of reference. “Bad Postmodernity” has a tendency to “slide into an attitude that ends up with the bare abstraction of nothingness or emptiness that cannot get any further from there, but must wait to see whether something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss”. “Bad postmodernity” is my term. Berstein simply places quotes around “Postmodernity” to indicate modes of thought that imitate the forms of Postmodernity without participating in the substance of the thought which actually does stand beyond the horizons of Modernity. Interestingly, Bernstein excludes both Derrida and Foucault from pseudo-Postmodernity, and presents them in a generous light that makes them seem worth reading.

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I’m in an uncomfortable, intellectually tractionless state right now. This happens to me once or twice a year. I pick around through various books, trying to pick up the scent of where I need to go next.

I think maybe these are the times I’m supposed to summarize where I am.

I’m running short on time this morning, so I will list some of my fundamental views. (I consider these views – a sort of social-existentialism – triggered by Bernstein. These kinds of thoughts began to crystallize for me in 2005, following a deep perplexity arising around the meaning of the I Ching trigrams. I semi-resolved it through reading Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Anyone who knows something about the I Ching and Bernstein’s fusion of hermeneutics and pragmatist thinking should be able to see fairly easily how I synthesized them.) The views:

  • Denial of the existence of truth is often (and I’ve been caught at times saying “always”) a defense against the impingement of the Other.
  • The impingement of the Other is experienced as a change in one’s self.
  • A change in one’s self is not experienced primarily as a change in one’s own qualities as an individual person-among-people, but as a shift in the entire world on the whole and in many parts simultaneously. In other words…
  • A change in the entire world is a holistic change.
  • Subjectivity pervades the entire world, and for practical purposes is the whole world; it is not localized in an individual’s mind.
  • Inter-subjectivity is experienced as change in one’s subjectivity and the whole world, attributable to the influence of the Other.
  • A radical change in subjectivity is impossible to understand prior to the change: it is transcendent. It is understandable only in retrospect.
  • Anxiety (or angst or dread) is the premonition of a radical change in subjectivity.
  • Perplexity is the yet unfinished radical change in subjectivity – in the whole world, which is in disarray.
  • The impulse to defend oneself against impingement of the Other is the fending off of anxiety in the face of the transcendent.
  • The Other is transcendent. The relationship with the Other, the We is also transcendent.
  • An I knows the Other in participation in We.
  • We is a greater self, a whole within which an I is a part.
  • By participating in We, an I senses its situation within greater Selfhood.
  • A We is embedded in yet greater We.
  • The concept of an ultimate We points to the personhood of God.
  • The image of God: The self composed of instincts; the friendship composed of selves; the being that arises where “two or more gathered”.

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I’m recalling a Nietzsche quote:

Where are the needy in spirit? — Ah! How reluctant I am to force my own ideas upon another! How I rejoice in any mood and secret transformation within myself which means that the ideas of another have prevailed over my own! Now and then, however, I enjoy an even higher festival: when one is for once permitted to give away one’s spiritual house and possessions, like a father confessor who sits in his corner anxious for one in need to come and tell of the distress of his mind, so that he may again fill his hands and his heart and make light his troubled soul! He is not merely not looking for fame: he would even like to escape gratitude, for gratitude is too importunate and lacks respect for solitude and silence. What he seeks is to live nameless and lightly mocked at, too humble to awaken envy or hostility, with a head free of fever, equipped with a handful of knowledge and a bagful of experience, as it were a poor-doctor of the spirit aiding those whose head is confused by opinions without their being really aware who has aided them! Not desiring to maintain his own opinion or celebrate a victory over them, but to address them in such a way that, after the slightest of imperceptible hints or contradictions, they themselves arrive at the truth and go away proud of the fact! To be like a little inn which rejects no one who is in need but which is afterwards forgotten or ridiculed! To possess no advantage, neither better food nor purer air nor a more joyful spirit — but to give away, to give back, to communicate, to grow poorer! To be able to be humble, so as to be accessible to many and humiliating to none! To have much injustice done him, and to have crept through the worm-holes of errors of every kind, so as to be able to reach many hidden souls on their secret paths! For ever in a kind of love and for ever in a kind of selfishness and self-enjoyment! To be in possession of a dominion and at the same time concealed and renouncing! To lie continually in the sunshine and gentleness of grace, and yet to know that the paths that rise up to the sublime are close by! — That would be a life! That would be a reason for a long life!

Twos

Biography, Fables, myths & parables, Pragmatism

I used to feel ecstatic riding my bicycle, knowing that this beautiful, simple machine, powered by my own body, could carry me anywhere I chose. I could go to work, or I could pass right by work and travel all the way to Tennessee, or deep into the north. I’d fantasize about maintaining a secret storehouse with all the tubes, tires, chains and spare parts I’d need for a life-time. I’d be free forever.

Now I ride my bicycle and I know that with each bump the frame is gradually weakening. The chain and all the parts are slowly corroding and grinding themselves down against each other. The tires are unrolling themselves into the road like tape, leaving an invisible path of rubber particles everywhere I go. I will need to replace it, bit by bit, by pieces made by other people. Maybe someday no original parts will remain, and this bicycle will exist as a tradition. I am riding over streets made by people, to places valuable solely because of the people there. And what is going on in my body? It is corroding, sickening, healing, weakening, strengthening, replacing its own substance, but its terminus is inevitable. As I ride, I rethink and resurrect the words of people who wrote and died, and I think about living people. And the things I think and have rethought in reading are meant to be told – they demand telling – if someone can hear them.

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If humankind were to perish I’d want no part of what remained. We are in this together; and if we can learn to accept and love this inescapable fact (and stop trying to fantasize ourselves out of it), we can seize our freedom to make our time here together easier to love. Life is still vast.

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Space repeats itself in time. Each moment contains the entirety of space. Space and time repeats itself in each subject. Each subject contains the entirety of space and time. We are forced through time and we move about in space. What about subject, I and We? Can we “move” there? Have you moved or been moved in the interlapping being of an other?

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An admittedly weird digression:

Hermes was the messenger of the Olympian gods who moved infinitely quickly, at the speed of thought. What sort of messages do you suppose he transmitted? Facts?

Janus, the double-faced Roman god of doors, was related to Hermes, and I think he can provide us a clue. From Wikipedia:

Historically, however, Janus was one of the few Roman gods who had no ready-made Greek counterpart, or analogous mythology. We can find in Greece Janus-like heads of gods related to Hermes, perhaps forming a compound god: Hermathena (a herm of Athena), Hermares, Hermaphroditus, Hermanubis, Hermalcibiades, and so on. In the case of these compounds it is disputed whether they indicated a herm with the head of Athena, or with a Janus-like head of both Hermes and Athena, or a figure compounded of both deities.

I enjoy the question of what divine thoughts moved through the split brain of Janus? Was it an inner dialogue? Was there a witnessing consciousness somewhere above or below? Was he of two minds, or one… or three…?

Practice precedes theory

Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Practice precedes theory. Practice is wordlessly active. Theory is the verbal ensurfacing of practice.

Hermeneutics is the practice of performing the ensurfacing practice in reverse  (most obvious when performed in the intellectual realm). It is the reconsititution of wordless intellectual practice guided by the theoretical content, treated as artifact, but not as the essential content of the writing.

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I read Nietzsche hermeneutically, but it took me nearly four years to explain how reading Nietzsche was unlike other kinds of reading. It took me all this time to find the descriptive language for a practice I’d already mastered, but mastered mutely.

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Genuine philosophy is not factual: philosophy presents its factual content like a starry sky, by which the reader/listener can navigate his understanding. The navigating is the essential philosophical act. But most people look at the star-charts and confuse navigation with astronomy.

You cannot summarize philosophy. You cannot factually transfer it. Philosophy is not reflections, it is reflecting. Philosophy must be coperformed, or it degrades into mere fact.

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What has made Nietzsche such a controversial and perpetually fascinating writer is this: much of his content is strictly artifact, often the opposite of his own private opinions. He leaves it to the reader to apply the intellectual practices he teaches; it is up to the reader to apply this practice to his own content and to reach his own conclusions. And he assumes his reader will need to reach his own conclusions because precisely the readers Nietzsche wants (of whom and to whom he wrote frequently) will find the content of Nietzsche’s apparent philosophy, his factual philosophy, completely unacceptable, offensive. But you have to stay with him, anyway, all the way to the ugly end. If you try to cut to the conclusions, you will miss everything.

Nietzsche’s ideal reader – out of the deep, intense urgency – will apply Nietzsche’s practical philosophy to the goal of escaping Nietzsche’s factual philosophy – to the refuge of his own conclusions. And just when you think you disagree with him, Nietzsche winks mischeviously and compassionately.

Remember: Nietzsche called himself the first Dionysian philosopher. Dionysus/Siva: the dancing god.

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The consciousness of appearance. — How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-a-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer, — I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish: as a sleepwalker must go on dreaming lest he fall. What is “appearance” for me now! Certainly not the opposite of some essence,–what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place on an unknown X or remove from it! Appearance is for me that which lives and is effective and goes so far in its self-mockery that it makes me feel that this is appearance and will-o’-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing more, — that among all these dreamers, I, too, the “knower,” am dancing my dance, that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence, and that the sublime consistency and interrelatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve — the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all dreamers and thus also the continuation of the dream.

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I would only believe in a God who could dance.

And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity — through him all things fall.

Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we kill. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

I learned to walk; since then have I let myself run. I learned to fly; since then I do not need to be pushed to move from a spot.

Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me. —

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

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Spoiler: Dionysus is wordless practice, dance doing its dance. Apollo is theory and everything else that belongs to surface. Dionysian philosophy is doing, faithfully, what philosophical urgency (not curiosity or ambition) impels one to do. Only afterward – as  consummation – the accomplishment, which is known only in hindsight, is articulated. This is Nietzsche’s “overcoming“.

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This might be a pretty good scholarly paper.

Pragmatist inkling?

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I’m beginning to suspect praxis is knowledge viewed from the inside… the essential counterpart to what is apparent when knowledge self-reflects or presents itself as knowledge. Consider this possible developmental process: 1) knowledge begins as an instinctive response to a novel situation, 2a) then the response is iterated and refined within the same and similar situations, 2b) and the refined response is demonstrated and imitated between subjects who participate in the interation and refinement process, 3) then the response is reflectively stabilized through analogies and models, and becomes a verbally communicable practice then finally 4) vocabulary is developed for the practice.

I’m sure I’ll see this in Rorty once I start him, because practically I began thinking like a pragmatist back in 2005, when I had to imitate Bernstein’s manner of thinking in order to follow him (learned the steps of his intellectual dance). That is the only way to understand philosophy as such. Since then I’ve applied Bernstein’s ideas and style to many problems – including design problems and political problems I’ve encountered at work. I’ve also found that same style of thought in Wittgenstein and the smattering of pragmatist thought I’ve read. Now I am interested in learning the vocabulary and the ethics of the pragmatist community.

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I’ve worked intensely and uninterruptedly for 40 months, to be able to say this (relatively) clearly: Hermeneutics is spiritual pragmatism. By spirit, I mean the intellect, but not the intellect that is the mental dimension of an essentially corporeal reality. Spirit is intellect acknowledged as the ground of reality.

Reading hermeneutically is navigating the author’s subjectivity by the objects of his inquiries. The real goal of hermeneutics is not to acquire facts, nor even to uncover the structure by which the author orders his factual reality, but rather to learn to think with the author through his work, and eventually to be able to approach problems as the author would approach them. Such practical knowledge cannot be transferred mind-to-mind across the membrane of individual subjectivities as reflective theoretical knowledge can. It requires gradual merging of wills, until one’s intellectual movements spontaneously mirror or at least play off the movements of the other, and understanding flows in without sharp anomalies or blurry romantic notions.

Hermeneutics is intellectual dance; it is spiritual pragmatism; and it is trans-subjective transcendental phenomenology. It all takes place in the borders between whole and part, mastery and tentative participation, insidedness and outsidedness, in knowing how to know when you do not yet know, and knowing the kinds of knowing one might have or not yet expect.

I set out to account for what it was exactly that Nietzsche did to me. He taught me the dance of dances.

Phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, metaphysics

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

This morning Susan asked if I finally passed last week’s philosophical kidney stone. She says I seem to have worked something out.

I had a productive weekend. I think I figured out how phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and metaphysics fit together now as one coherent attitude toward life. I figured it out in a wordless way, though, so I can’t quite express it, yet. (I expect an image or analogy to occur, soon.) I believe this constellation of ideas is essentially liberal. I think I also see how it differs from conservatism, and especially neoconservatism.

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Good article: “What Makes People Vote Republican?” by Jonathan Haidt.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

The dance

Pragmatism

I do a lot of intellectual collaboration at work, and it’s helping me grasp something important about group dynamics: deep teaching and learning are often accomplished in the background unnoticed, while facts and explicit methodology are exchanged in the foreground – and mistaken for the totality of the shared knowledge.

The background can be characterized as the subjective and practical dimension of the sharing, or what I have been calling “attunement”. (I picked up the word from Heidegger, but I am using it differently, to mean an inter-subjective sharing of practice and perspective.)

Attunement can be compared with either learning to dance or inventing a dance with another. The learning is not objective, though it does involve facts. It is learning subjective “moves”, imitating another’s intellectual motions until the motions become one’s own; the new motion becomes second-nature. Then the dance can proceed semi-consciously with partners in response to the total situation, including the other subjects and the objects. The shared consciousness is unselfconsciously absorbed in its objects, until it chooses to self-reflect. The goal, however, is not bound up in the self-reflection. It is bound up in a new way to see and think and act and often also to feel.

(When I was 14 I read a book on tennis. It offered an underhanded trick for destroying your opponent’s serve. Ask your opponent to explain his serve to you. The fluid naturalness of unselfconscious practice gets entangled in self-reflection and broken into discrete pieces. Or think about learning to play a song; or learning to read a new author and hear his natural voice.)

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The books I have always loved to read are the books in which the author dances. (The author can never be dead to me. I read because nobody is more alive and present to me than the authors I love.) Years ago I was confused and unnerved by the fact that I was rarely able to give summaries of the content of the books I’d read. It looked like I’d retained nothing, but I knew I’d retained something perfectly – I could not articulate it. I knew I’d learned it, though, because when I needed it, there it was, perfectly available for application. Now I would explain it this way: after I learn a dance I can do the dance spontaneously, but the instructions are not immediately available to recall. I have to figure them out each time. Half of my memory is amazing. The other half is nearly nonexistent.

(This bizarre quality of my memory is a major vulnerability. People regularly assume I can do things I cannot do at all, such as providing simple sequential instructions or recounting events that just happened. My normal state of mind appears to be completely different from what is considered normal. I am literally “differently abled” – handicapped, but with peculiar compensatory abilities that I’m learning to make valuable in the business world. I will never feel at home anywhere until the people around me understand and accept the fact of my inabilities and provide me the protection I need. I’ve been anxious my entire life, and I am really, really tired of feeling that way.)

Existential entities

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

The existential I – Heidegger’s Dasein – is the cheapest and most exciting philosophical discovery.

The existential You – Buber’s Thou – is more elusive. Catching sight of the concept of the existential You points the way to the development of the intellectual and ethical practice of existing in the I-Thou relationship. The rules in this strata of being are different from those of ordinary objective thought.

Developing the practice of the I-Thou relationship, one necessarily discovers the existential We, the ground of I-Thou. With that discovery one begins to move into the profound and boring world of Pragmatism.

(At this point, I’d call myself a Hermeneutical Pragmatist. When I’m done reading Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology I am looking forward to reading Richard Rorty.)