Depth perception
There is no hiding it, or escaping it, this is pretentious.
All I really want to say is that there is such a thing as depth in our lives, that if you were going to try and figure out how to make life more meaningful it would have something to do with it, and that at the moment we have no decent, grounded way of talking about it.
It is not odd at all to us that exactly the same written phrase or sound can be the most significant thing, or the shallowest. And yet if you want to find out what exactly it is about the situation that makes it deep, you’re going to struggle.
It is something like the context of a person’s attitude that allows them to stand-deeply-towards-something (to feign phenomenology). It is something like that, but the thing itself also has to have depth potential. Certainly it is moments that are deep, but also analyses, and words and conversations. Without anyone looking at it, a work of art is not deep. It requires a conspiracy.
There are some fairly safe depth contexts. Poetry is a bastion of depth. Anything that doesn’t pertain to depth isn’t regarded as poetry, but lyric, or limerick, or prose. And after listening to poetry I often end up feeling that everything is deep, that it permeates everything with significance. It is a depth attitude enabler.
Many religions seem to me to be professional depth purveyors. That’s the opiate, it seems to me – the realization of life after death, or gods grace, at a deep level.
Depth is something utterly non-scientific, something you obviously can’t explain with examples, as the context cannot be fabricated just like that. The thought that you will one day die could be a punchline, or could shatter your entire world, and the variable is depth.
What I want to say is that much of academia in the arts is a search for depth, that by drawing out what it is about something that makes it great, by creating a context where you can get to the heart of something, you might spill out for everyone that depth that you fell in love with. What I want to say is that over-analysis and technicalization completely destroys depth, turns it to stone, that the spirit of academia is a contradiction.
In my utterly pretentious opinion, ordinary non-pretentious deep experiences are the best thing our society could support. And yet the forces of shallow enslumberment grow stronger every day.
Infinite, finite, death and Martin
The infinite and the finite weave a thread through the greatest thinkers. As I wrote here Tolstoy boils the infinite argument down to saying – “what meaning has my finite life in an infinite universe?”
Heidegger, according to Simon Critchley on a Guardian blog on Being and Time, completely rejects the idea of an infinite context.:
“The self can only become what it truly is through the confrontation with death, by making a meaning out of our finitude. If our being is finite, then what it means to be human consists in grasping this finitude, in “becoming who one is” in words of Nietzsche’s that Heidegger liked to cite.”
Reading the Tolstoy’s Confession made me think – well obviously you need religion if you put your life in the context of infinite duration and meaning. As I’m out of the market for religion, I’ve got no choice but make sense of the finite life. But how to live your life in full awareness of finitude, in full awareness of my own death, seems just as difficult. Here’s what Critchley says about Heideggers being-towards-death.
“Freedom consists in the affirmation of the necessity of one’s mortality. It is only in being-towards-death that one can become the person who one truly is. Concealed in the idea of death as the possibility of impossibility is the acceptance on one’s mortal limitation as the basis for an affirmation of one’s life.
So, there is nothing morbid about being-towards-death. Heidegger’s thought is that being-towards-death pulls Dasein out of its immersion in inauthentic everyday life and allows it come into its own. It is only in relation to being-towards-death that I become passionately aware of my freedom.”
Is that really the best rationalization for being a passionately free human being? What if you live a passionately free life without once thinking about your death – isn’t the action the thing to be judged on, not the reason? Does it function as a description, not an argument? Perhaps the person who lives passionately free just is living authentically in regards to their death.
It is sometimes hard to understand the tone of philosophy. Why does Heidegger seem deep rather than, say, confusing? Why is the version of these ideas that normal people can actually understand have this odd cultural “an introduction to” place. A place which prevents anyone from reading them as ideas to live by, instead of intellectual curiosities.
Don’t we deep down just want to say – grab life by the nuts, however you rationalize it doesn’t matter. If phenomenological analysis helps, do it. If religion helps, do that too. If farting down a trumpet helps, do that.
The failure of philosophers has been that, despite setting out completely new ways of living, despite having iterated new possibilities for being human, despite wrestling with the most fundamental questions of life, few people have actually lived differently because of them. In introductions to Heidegger, something about his massive influence is often said. I don’t see much evidence of people taking a more authentic attitude towards death.
Freedom and the idiots
Some of our concepts do not fit with how we have to do things. So it is with free will.
The argument over the existence of free will is an immoral argument. For however the argument is settled, making decisions and sticking to them is still something that needs encouragement.
All that the argument over free will demonstrates is that absolute free will, not determined by anything but free will, does not exist. What sort of a thing that would be if it existed isn’t clear – apart from a kind of metaphor or parable.
Saying free will doesn’t exist only means you have stolen the word for your own metaphysical pleasures.
No, free will, our freedom, is not absolute. It is learned and can be either nurtured and encouraged or ignored and undermined.
Free will is determined. It is determined by a person’s abilities – specifically their ability to imagine different courses of action and decide between them, and their courage to do what they think best.
The difficult fact to face is that without the myth of absolute free will, we are left with a matter of ability. Some people are more imaginative, are better at figuring out what to do, and are more courageous. Some people are more free than others. We just have to deal with that.
For people in secular modern life to feel that their lives are their own, to make life something we do on purpose, to end the infinite iterations of our ancestors peccadilloes - free will has to be taught and encouraged and valued and supported at every possible level.
Instead there is just a cold, technical and fundamentally meaningless debate, and the impossibly slow, unthinking ebb and flow of the boundaries in which we live.
The enlightenment
The enlightenment was the period during which the modern identity was forged.
It was based on the idea of autonomy. We human beings decide for ourselves what actions we are going to perform.
The enlightenment decided that human beings are the final goal of human action. The saving of humanity was no longer the aim. The happiness of humanity became the goal.
The population at large does aspire to emancipation, to progress, to more freedom, to more equality and universality.
It is a kind of ideology within modernity.
Tzvetan Todorov on the Enlightenment
[transcribed from philosophy bites]
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incured if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore Sapere aude! [dare to be wise] Have courage to use your own understanding.
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance, nevertheless gladly remain immature for life, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature.
Immanuel Kant,
An Answer to the Question, What Is Enlightenment?
Science is a tool
I’ve just come out of a little daze, where I started a blog called Back Off Science, which I thought would allow me to take down the entire value system of the modern world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn’t work out. I realized over Christmas I really just wanted to use the blog to practice doing some creative abstract writing, which is pretty much what i was doing before, so that’s what I’m going to do now.
I’ve copied across all the back off science blog posts, so if you really like you can read them below.
tom
Stuck between two things
Philosophy is the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language. PI 109
Reading a lot of Wittgenstein at the moment. A moral from the Philosophical Investigations:
Many problems come from our wanting to treat something as something it is not. For Wittgenstein, this was treating the meaning of words as something in some special realm, or treating thoughts as mental objects to which only I have access.
The solution is to look at how we use words and what actually goes on and figure out from that how to treat things. Starting with an idea of what something is and then forcing the thing into that idea only leads to problems.
The same basic problem is faced with the incursion of the scientific attitude into non-scientific areas of language.
We want to treat depression as a medical problem, with an entirely biological explanation, but this makes the fact that we often “catch” depression from events in our life seem quite odd – (“queer” in Wittgenstein’s terms).
We want to treat religion as making factual claims about the universe, but this makes the fact that people are converted to a religion and not just educated about it seem odd.
We want to believe that our experience takes place in the brain, but that makes the shared world we live in an odd place.
We want there to be a firm separation between subjective and objective so that we can put everything on the objective side in a bag marked truth and discard everything else as lightweight. But when we look at the world we find it much harder to fit things into the bag. What, for example, is money? Without our “subjective” acceptance of its value, the objective marks on paper or gold atoms are literally worthless.
I haven’t really understood it yet, but I think I’m on the right track.
Context missing
Someone once suggested to me that cancer was caused by unresolved mental conflict.
I also read that people suffering from Alzheimer’s had a lower incidence of cancer, which would fit into the theory.
And if you were going to take the thought through, you might say that the emotional suppressant qualities of cigarettes should be taken into account.
I’m not saying it is the case – if there is evidence one way or another I have no idea what it is.
All I am saying is that if that were the case, modern medicine would not be able to recognise it.
From the perspective of our current medical thinking, this idea is simply a huge insult, a foul thought. It is inconceivable that cancer is not a question of cells going wrong, of carcinogens.
The context for a real argument about this kind of thing is clearly missing.
Space inbetween
There has to be a space between all these cultural forces – fiction, politics, religion, science, society, morality.
Philosophy might be in that space, but if it is, it is not making much of its position. It must be decades at least since a living philosopher changed the way someone led their life.
Waylaid by the comparison with science and the form of the academic paper, philosophy has become lost, perhaps impossibly sidetracked.
Maybe it was never there. Maybe it was always a clique, talking to its own navel. Occasionally thoughts escaped.
Whatever the case, the world needs creative abstract thinking.
The philosopher
Philosophy is more rubbish than science by a mile.
The first problem is how they fill their time – writing peer-reviewed papers, spending time researching and going to conferences, teaching undergraduates. What use is it for most people? Greatest philosophical breakthrough of the last 20 years anyone?
The extreme positions have already been plotted. There are no discoveries in philosophy.
While their modus operandi mimics science, they are so scared of the rigor, certainty and force of scientific argument, that they keep themselves hidden, quiet little mice of academia, making sure not to rock the boat and draw attention. Tending to a career.
Worst of all, they come up with words like ontology and epistemology (will write next), they debate the hard problem of something everyone does all the time. They use words which ring-fences unfathomable complexity; minute detail. (Such that surely only a professional philosopher could comprehend, of course.)
Well guess what? Philosophy is a science as much as documentary making or being a novelist.
There is the same difference between academic philosophers and philosophers as between english literature professors and novelists (of course they do sometimes overlap).
The subject matter is philosophy. Books and essays and arguments about abstract, conceptual matters.
Except there are no bastard philosophers to be seen. Plenty of novelists, but no philosophers. They used to exist. But now they don’t. They got swallowed up by the scientific attitude (and the old philosophers didn’t help by being utterly impenetrable).
Here is the definition. Philosophy is creative abstract thought. It is that easy.
Is there a need for philosophy? Doesn’t academic theory of philosophy that university professors do look pretty similar?
The old philosophers failed not in intent or genius but in accessibility. The biggest criticism of the best of them was arrogance and elitism. They created no vehicle for their ideas to get outside of a select few (perhaps they were squashed by religion).
My idea of philosophy is obviously a romantic ideal. Don’t you think its worth aiming for?
Faith, religious and non-religious, cannot defend itself from science (or rather in more confusing and accurate terms, all of a certainty’s defences against science are founded on connected certainties). Philosophy should be the buffer between science and life. Philosophy should be telling science to back off.
How do you interest a scientist in ontology?
Ok. It’s a bad word. Please keep reading. Ontology is a terrible word. Rings of something incredibly complicated. (see comments on philosophers, edited out of previous version).
If you feel like writing. Here’s a question. If not, read on…
The question
The question you need to ask yourself is simply this. What is real? What is reality like? If you had to describe it objectively, capturing everything, what would you say?
Scientists are a clever bunch. All my criticism is of science applied to the wrong things, not science as used in the right way.
The problem, in an impossibly abstract sense, is that scientists work on an incoherent ontology. It is not scientists fault in a way. They are by definition not interested in a conceptual argument.
In the most basic sense an ontology is just an abstract conceptual description of what is real. Science does deal with defining what is real, but only after you have decided what kind of questions you need answering, and what importance the answers have.
It is not in the interest of science to question the conceptual system in which their investigation takes place. The inevitable answer is that science does not provide the whole answer.
Scientists themselves don’t seem to believe that they have all the answers. They happily use concepts that lie outside of scientific investigation – the purpose of the investigation, for example. Because the ontology is everything it obviously decides the importance of everything, thats all.
Language does not comply to the laws of physics
Ontologies can be really easy.
I’ll try an ontology from the most coherent materialist angle possible:
Everything that happens is made of matter. Matter can be explained by the rules of physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology.
One part of the material world is brains and nervous systems in humans.
Living brains and nervous systems in humans generate a complex, communal form of life, experienced by each living and awake human.
Every fact about the world only matters to us insomuch as it is part of the brain-created, conscious, conceptually organized life we live. This life takes place in the material world, but a material world overlayed with a complex network of interconnected concepts which are shared by massive groups, cultures, societies and populations of humans. You obviously cannot see these in the normal sense.
Of course everything real is a concept that is made of something. But tell me how where a concept is, is the most useful part of the explanation?
Lets try one. The concept of the novel. All the paper and ink in books and led and computer chip as well, on which they are being written. And add the interconnected neurons of novelists – the ones that do the thinking, and the writing, and the history and criticism of novels and the great novelists, and all the reading.
The question is, so what? I know what a novel is. There is no scientific discovery about paper or LEDs that will help me explain what a novel is.
And here we hit the sticky point. We get confused talking about our own brains. There are discoveries about the brain that are obviously yet to be made. The question is the most useful explanation of how the neurons are connected.
I would argue that the scientific explanation is not very useful in conceptual matters. The best, and most comprehensive possible answer of what the neurons are doing, the organisation of the atoms, is the description of the practice of reading and writing novels. This is inevitably an expansive inquiry based on finding out about the connected concepts, practices and ideas – the grammar of our form of life, to put it in Wittgenstein’s terms.
You explain what a novel is by explaining what reading and writing are, you explain narrative and characterization, the history of novelists, the science of printing and of neurobiology, the anthropology of storytelling. All these things and more give the best, most complete explanation of the novel. (the words explanation and description here mean the same thing).
How can you say that life is not real?
It makes no sense to say that life is not real, but that is exactly what many people seem to believe.
Basically, we all bloody well know that we are conscious. That we are all living lives.
There is all this debate about the science of consciousness. We discovered consciousness long ago, but have yet failed to comprehend the implications of the discovery.
We know that our brains do subjectivity, that this is “what it is like to be your brain and nervous system”. We have known the ontology for a long time. But who would herald the discovery of something they were already plainly aware of.
No. We found out that conscious life took place in the brain, and not for example, the lungs. But we were not particularly interested. The logical conclusions are still sinking in.
These thoughts are so far from the scientist’s interests that it is clearly possible to discount them entirely.
The scientist’s question – “how do I find out what is real?”
The scientist’s answer – “it’s what I do”.
1.What is real? Come on you scientists and atheists and rationalists of all shapes and sizes. For the sake of nothing but inquiry and curiosity, indulge me in this trivial matter. What do you think, in the most abstract terms you can face using, is real? What ontology are you working from? Do it in 140 if you like.
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