Aphorism of the Day: Wisdom lies in the interval between knowing thyself and promoting thyself, which explains why its generally so cramped and cranky.
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Thanks Roger! I sometimes think the reason I’m never in the loop is simply because I fear nooses…
One of the things that most struck me encountering Derrida for the first time was the notion that there were two pasts. Before this encounter, I had assumed that the past was the Past, unitary, and that memory was my primary purchase upon it. I felt anchored, like a burr in history’s great shaggy hide. I felt central. No matter how scrambled I was, my frame and the frame of the world remained identical. That weatherbeaten phrase, ‘mind-altering,’ held no hidden profundity for me. Everything was always more of the same, more or less.
I got fucked up, then I woke up. Why, hello, sun…
You prick.
Derrida opened my eyes to the possibility that the Past was not quite so simple. What if what I called the ‘Past’ was a fabrication, a mere representation, forever trapped in the now, forever hurtling away from the blackness that had birthed it. What if the glass on the bottom of the existential boat was a television screen?
Derrida, in keeping with the linguistic formalism that was de rigeur among French academics at the time, theorized this problem in structural terms. Yes, Scott, you are rafting on a flat-screen, but it’s the only window you got, so you’re pinioned, you see, caught between transparency and transmission, dread truth and accursed fabrication. What you called the Past is in fact an originary repetition, a transparent transmission, and you will dwell out your remaining years trapped in the paradoxical in-between.
The Past was fractured into the past qua originary, and the past qua repetition–into the past as it is and the past as you make it. All of us, it seemed, were condemned to live two warring histories, the one always claiming to exhaust the other, only to be thrown back time and again by its infinite inexhaustibility. Thus the history of philosophy, the parade of pretenders to the throne endlessly overthrown. Plato. Aristotle. Kant. Hegel. Meaning, Derrida said, had the structure of a never-ending coup d’etat.
And so, in certain circles at least, Derrida swept the table, offering professional interpreters a dogma that promised both a contrarian political radicality on top of the prospect of never-ending employment. Expensive scarves and free meaning for everyone! Small wonder he was swept into office the way he was… Reagan should have been so lucky.
But I smelled a rat. Derrida’s biggest problem was also the most ancient: his inability to account for the cognitive difference, the fact that all claims are not equal. To be fair, he improvised an ingenious way to avoid confronting this problem–he was nothing if not a subtle thinker. The traditional way of hanging philosophical positions unable to account for the cognitive difference is to charge them with performative contradiction, to claim, in effect, that they require the very truth-function they are seeking to demolish to perform their demolition. Au contraire mon frere. Derrida actually embraced this performative contradiction: of course deconstruction begs the very transparency it demolishes! Performative contradiction is the natural state of all language all the time. And so the crafty Frenchman bequeathed to the world a theoretical outlook that recontextualizes its every refutation into an instance of proof–an example of what I’ve since come to call Performative First Philosophy.
But he still couldn’t account for the cognitive difference. And short of this, how could you say he had a remotely viable theory of meaning? He could explain why philosophers inevitably failed, sure, but the truly important question, certainly, was why scientists managed to succeed. Our lives–not to mention our sanity–literally depend on the reliable way language gets things right–the fact that not all differances are equal. Just consider the crucial ethical role of the past, the way crimes only become crimes after the fact. What about Holocaust deniers? You deconstruct them, they deconstruct your deconstructions, and…
Do we call it a draw? Infinitely defer the penalty kicks?
Needless to say I have a very different way of looking at things now. I still find it amazing the amount of water Derrida still draws in certain academic circles–but this just means that too few of my old professors are dead. The atavistic philosophies that seem to be replacing him strike me as even worse: whenever someone begins discussing Meillasoux or Badiou I always bring up Chaitin and his contention that mathematics is a branch of physics. Simply raising this claim, I remind them, relativizes their claims. I don’t need to be right, only cogent, and they find themselves back in the lap of ‘correlation,’ as they call it.
Which is to say, the ancient dilemma of the cognitive difference.
Naturalists don’t pretend to have solved this problem. They simply point out that not all claims are equal, and that when it comes to theory, scientific claims seem to be far and away the most reliable game it town. So, if we want to understand what the cognitive difference is, we’ll have to wait for science to pick its disordered way meticulously forward. And hopefully, we philosophers, groping in the dark the way we do, will happen upon some of the concepts it needs. A trunk here. A tail there.
And for some perverse reason, I now find myself stumbling in the most troubling–even terrifying–dark of them all, one that no one ‘serious’ seems even willing to entertain, though its spectre has hung like a haze about humanity since at least the ancient Greeks. The problem of nihilism.
At least I find myself back in the lap of a singular past. There’s no labyrinthine inside, no ‘absolute outside’ outside the dichotomy of inside/outside, just vectors of depletion and truncation, information that I happen to have and information I happen to lack. Derrida’s characterization of the formal structure of necessary insufficiency isn’t, as he wants to think, itself a performative exemplification of that very insufficiency so much as another garden variety distortion. There is no ‘cut’ between the past ‘as experienced’ and the past ‘as it is,’ but rather an informatic continuum of loss and distortion that either effectively integrates me into my environments or does not, ‘pasts’ that reliably engage the machinery of the present versus ‘pasts’ that do not.
Because the ‘past’ is nothing more than a kind of device, another bewildering dividend of evolution, one that can be refined, tuned to interact with other processes, onboard and off, as effectively as possible. It is neither window, nor screen–but a spade that allows us to rob those graves we need to. Party with the corpses.
How is the past any different from the present? There is no present, as time never stops, so the use of the term ‘present’ is just for discussion purposes. And the future? That doesn’t exist either, not yet, not now, not ever. Reality isn’t real. Hey, but who cares anyway?
IIRC if there’s one thing physicists seem pretty sure we’re wrong about, it’s our perception of time.
I ran across someone once (not in a Dylan way, though!) who had the position that all of time was already determined. Like a book that’s all been written already. But to me, you can’t render the latter parts without former parts – there HAS to be a point of rendering. And the latter part cannot be known before then. But on the other hand, your not necessarily clued into that point – you could be part of a pre-rendered universe and yet to yourself it all seems to be coming out right now.
In the end it seems like one can slip into either set of shoes interchangably – one, where the universe has been rendered already and the other where your right on the cusp of the determination.
I find it’s easiest to return to Stover’s “What does this get buy you? How does this help you in life?”
There’s a reason people like Larry can find the philosophical in Stover, and others the fantastic, and still others just come for the punches.
It’s probably why I just skip over a lot the amateur hour consciousness masturbation in these posts while I wait for TUC updates.
At some point you have to come up with more than lame dismissals, Sci – at the risk of making Dylan’s point too well. “Why deal with the difficult, when you can believe any old thing?” (A line that Matt abandoned, by the way, after a weekend of drinking and arguing).
You skip over the “amateur hour consciousness masturbation” because it’s over your head - and all you know is you don’t like it, don’t agree with it. Wikipedia will only take you so far! But rather than admit as much you do exactly what Dylan says: you step back into your sense of superiority, and pass judgment on perceived second-order defects. Bakker is suffering depression. Bakker is self-obsessed. Bakker is just an amateur.
This is the way the game is played, irrationally, egocentrically, defensively: the real lie is the pretense of insouciant insight. You really don’t have a clue as to what I’m on about. Since you’re the smartest person you know, that means there must be something wrong with what I’m on about. But without understanding it, how could you say one way or another?
So what makes this second-order diagnosis any different? Maybe nothing. The best way for you to demonstrate this is to demonstrate you actually know what it is you’re dismissing and why you are dismissing it! Failing that, it seems the odds are good that Dylan is right. You are the sham he takes you to be.
The one who pretends to stick around for TUC updates, knowing full well there are none.
I’m hardly the smartest person I know, being friends with or related to a bunch of PhDs and MDs disabused me of that notion.
But for me, it’s less a need to bone up on neuroscience+philosophy via Wikipedia (nice dig haha!
) than a simple calculation of opportunity cost -> If you’re right we’re better off waiting for real scientists to tell us what’s up with the brain/body/reality anyway.
Seems like Dylan’s point is I’m better off not finishing his book. At least, in the speed-dating relationship between authors and readers, that’s my current conclusion.
Oof. Just reread my post and realized how harsh it probably sounded. I’m just trying to egg you into thinking a little harder about your own thinking:
For instance, do you really think, that in the entire world, there should not be at least one website/thinker/writer devoted to the nihilistic implications of contemporary science and the social and cultural challenges we could very well be facing as a result? What you seem to be consistently asserting is no, based on some vague assumption that… I’m not really sure. And I don’t think you are either, which is why you resort to the questionable rhetorical tactics you have. I have to admit I was disappointed (and, perversely enough, delighted) to find that ‘Bakker is suffering depression/I hope he gets help’ comment over at Westeros. You’ve been reliably dismissing a book that has reliably predicted the ways you would try to dismiss it!
And remember, just because you think there’s other people ‘smarter than you regarding X and Y’ (which everyone does) doesn’t mean that your voice isn’t the most intelligent sounding one in the room – to you! We all find ourselves the most convincing in the beginning and in the end.
Dylan has many points, but germane to this, his point is simply that you are full of elitist shit that you paint over with egalitarian rhetoric, that the more effort you put into consuming the cultural artifacts of your ingroup, the more invested you become in preserving their authority and denigrating the authority of others – especially those artifacts that genuinely threaten your self-congratulatory values – what makes you feel ‘special.’ Only self-hatred will set you free, on the personal level. Only violently rejecting the values of the academy and embracing dreck will set you free on the social level…
Where ‘free’ is understood as ‘free from delusion’ of course.
Haha, no worries on being harsh – a lot of people I’m around like to play rough!
I’m hardly the smartest person I know
Then why the definite ‘amateur hour consciousness masturbation’ designation from you? It’s like you want to go from knowledge to knowledge, rather than from gamble to gamble. If you were to say ‘It seems like amateur hour, but I could be wrong and dang if that were the case’, fair enough. It’s fair enough not to want to be dragged into something purely on ‘do you think your the smartest person in the room’? But one hardly has to be definately sure it’s all a masturbation, to decline partaking of it? Then again I guess a ‘knowledge to knowledge’ vs a ‘gamble to gamble’ approach probably warrants a post on that, I might be being a bit glib in the sell of the latter.
Some would argue that ‘Caring’ is the only real thing, Gary, the very thing that structures past, present, and future!
I missed this post until now. I am trying to follow you though, Scott. The fact is, I’m just not certain how important ‘real’ is in the end. What I do know is that each day that passes is gone, and the road ahead becomes shorter. So i understand sadness and regret and fear and lost opportunity, but I also understand the tears of love, the pleasure of innocence and the satisfaction in very simple things. Real? I’m not sure it’s relevant in the end or even in the process. I’m not a scientist and I don’t need proofs to write verse or reasons for enjoying a fine wine over a bottle of ripple. Is it interesting? Yes. Meaningful? To some I suppose. I love to learn. I love to think. I love to be informed and introduced to new perspectives. I love to turn strings of words into beautiful sentences too. Hyper-consciousness is a cross to bear, not a path to liberation. I’m blessed by not being smart enough to completely lose my mind in contemplation of my meaninglessness. Instead, I find meaning where I can and stumble forward toward the inevitable end. I admit that am trying hard to leave behind a consensus of memories. For some reason, that seems to matter to me.
Sorry for straying from your subject…..
I’m really no different than you, Gary, except that I actually get paid to go dark places. As an old Nietzschean, I’m sure you remember the feeling of intellectual freedom that comes with thinking these things, but also how important it is that somebody think them. All of us grope and stumble. And for whatever reason, so very few thinkers or writers actually tackle the question why outside of the anaesthesia of received wisdom.
I know for a fact that you ARE blessed with the smarts – you’re just not cursed with the time!
Just out of curiosity, how tall are you Scott?
(If you don’t mind my asking).
6’6″ 240lbs of twisted steel and sex appeal.
You’re a monster.
A sexy one.
Hmm, I think I’m still going to read Humanity, apparently by one Johnathan Glover, as it was a gift.
The problem of cognitive difference, in my ridiculously arrogant and ill-informed opinion, becomes a problem when we burden it with the concept of “truth”.
Now, numerous philosophies have tried to claim that “there is no truth”, only to end in showy and embarrassing shipwreck against the mighty rock of empiricism. This is because both sides of the argument have confused the claim that “there is no truth”, with the claim that “all claims are equal”.
Which is obviously nonsense.
What we must realize is that “truth” doesn’t exist, not because all claims are equal, but that truth is a secondary concept, not a primary one. The notion of “truth” is cognitive shorthand for *predictive power*.
In other words, this truth thing we care so much about really means “generates predictions that will match future observations”.
This, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, snarks and grumkins, is why science always wins. Because science is, by its very definition, the process of optimizing claims for predictive power. Science defines its very self as whatever process wins the predictive-power contest.
Neither philosophy nor any of the rogues gallery of the academic humanities will ever beat science at the predictive-power game.
But have we not just substituted one term for another? What does the term “predictive power” give to us, that the term “truth” does not?
Well, the problem is that the term “truth” is burdened with the expectation that it be binary. True or False. All or nothing. Infallible or useless. But claims aren’t like that. Not only are some claims better than others, some claims are better than those claims, and some claims are still better. In fact, claims exist on a sliding scale from uselessness to infallible predictive power.
If, instead of arguing what is “true”, we begin measuring the predictive power of claims, we immediately dispense with most of the failures of philosophy, but we do so because we have suddenly found that we are doing science now.
“Well, the problem is that the term “truth” is burdened with the expectation that it be binary. True or False. All or nothing. Infallible or useless. But claims aren’t like that. Not only are some claims better than others, some claims are better than those claims, and some claims are still better. In fact, claims exist on a sliding scale from uselessness to infallible predictive power.”
Can you give an example of claims that are not “equal”. I never really understood what Scott meant by saying, that not all claims are equal, but now I’m beginning to get it, so thanks for that
I’ll take a stab at it; hope this helps.
Imagine we have two competing claims.
1) I claim that the gunpowder in the bullet in my revolver will be ignited by percussive force initiated by the action of trigger and hammer.
2) You claim that the ignition of the gunpowder charge in a magazine additionally requires an initial, lengthy ceremonial chant in praise of Xiuhtecuhtli, the Aztec god of fire.
I shoot you dead while you’re still looking up the pronunciation on Wikipedia.
Here we can see that your theoretical claim had a superfluous ontological component. The metaphysical error you made in your theory had a measurable result – you’re dead, and I’m not.
Someone who wished to argue that all truth claims were equal would have to account for your inability to make any additional claims subsequent to this little experiment.
As an aside, I’m kind of fascinated by the way violence and murder occupy a critical, yet generally unacknowledged epistemological position. It seems to me that a precondition of uttering a true proposition is surviving long enough to do so, which means that I don’t know how I’d characterize truth without incorporating concepts like minimal calorie budgets, social exile, combat and coercion in general.
Anyway, that’s how I’d approach your question.
Bravo, David. I spent some time thinking how one might respond to this. Obviously, dietl, you should extend this analogy into endless wank concerning academic philosophy
. Even if those thinkers do actually have something fantastic to say half the time.
> Can you give an example of claims that are not “equal”. I never really understood what Scott meant by saying, that not all claims are equal
Okay, let’s examine two claims.
1. The moon is made of rock that split off from the earth while it was still molten.
2. The moon is made of green cheese.
Claim #1 and #2 have some obvious quality of being “unequal”. We know that #2 isn’t “as good” as #1, and even after an expert tells us that #1 is *wrong*, we still know #1 is somehow “better” than #2.
When I say that #1 has more *predictive power* than #2, it all becomes clear. Claim #1 predicts that pieces astronauts bring back from the moon will be made of rock. Claim #2 predicts they will be made of cheese.
Claim #1 will match some observations that claim #2 won’t. Claim #2 won’t match any observations that claim #1 doesn’t.
Claim #1 is *better* than claim #2. Therefore, not all claims are equal.
Where does the quality of better come from?
The problem with reducing truth to predictive power is that it leads to positivism – a position chock full of absurdities all its own. Personally, I remain agnostic on the question of What Truth Is, content to muck about with a variety of things that seem involved in truth, such as predictive success, theoretical fecundity, consilience, and so on. The curious structure of truth, and the formal semantics that arises out of it, I’m inclined to think involves the way the brain has to ration and hierarchize the information it takes up in the generation of behaviour, the tools on its belt, versus the tools ‘back in the truck.’ But this is just all guesswork. I really think that truth will never be effectively understood using intentional concepts.
> The problem with reducing truth to predictive power is that it leads to positivism – a position chock full of absurdities all its own.
The problem with referring to the literature when talking to an engineer is that we haven’t read it.
However, it seems to me (from giving myself a five minute wikieducation), that the major objections to positivism are that it supports the status quo rather than challenging it, that it is “reductionist”, that it reifies social constructs, and that it treats emergent properties as concrete entities.
I would dismiss the last point as being descriptive of the failures of positivists, not the failures of positivism. An emergent property with predictive power can still be understood as an emergent property, and it is only the failure of some of our feeble brains to fully grasp how properties emerge that cause us to go looking through brain for the “philosophy center”, the “short-term memory”, the “area responsible for our attitude towards cottage cheese”, and the “area which causes us to be easily impressed by overconfident PET scan studies”.
The third objection fails to understand positivism, or at least my version of it. Saying “Hey, that’s a social construct! It’s not really a thing! You’re treating it like a real thing just because it has predictive power!”… is using the words “real” and “really” to sneak the notion of absolute truth in the back door. Which is, of course, begging the question. One cannot dismiss a philosophy that replaces the notion of absolute truth, by appealing to the notion of absolute truth.
The second objection is a logical non sequitur. The word “reductionist” is a characterization which boils down to “I find it emotionally unpalatable that I live in a mechanistic universe, therefore I don’t”. I don’t think I need to kick this idea to show you how broken it is.
The first objection is even less logical. It’s a straight-up argumentum ad baculum.. an appeal to consequences. It merits the time we need to point that out, and not a moment more.
Now, I may not have done the arguments against positivism full justice, but since there’s a difference between reading about Horkheimer and reading him, if you want better strawmen, you’re going to have to set them up for me… I don’t know exactly what they are supposed to look like.
>I remain agnostic on the question of What Truth Is, content to muck about with a variety of things that seem involved in truth, such as predictive success, theoretical fecundity, consilience, and so on.
One tactic that may yield results here is that one can adapt a self-reference tactic, similar to the famous proof of the Halting Problem’s undecidable nature.
Apply each model of “truth” to itself.
It seems to me that the predictive power of the notion of predictive power is fairly high. And that the other notions to which you refer don’t add much. Consilience just means “more predictive power”, and fecundity, while always nice to have, isn’t a trait of “truths” that makes them “more accurate”… just a trait that makes them “more useful”.
>The curious structure of truth, and the formal semantics that arises out of it, I’m inclined to think involves the way the brain has to ration and hierarchize the information it takes up in the generation of behaviour, the tools on its belt, versus the tools ‘back in the truck.’
Interesting. But I would still argue that what matters to us about truth is the ability to know what to expect.. predictive power.
>But this is just all guesswork. I really think that truth will never be effectively understood using intentional concepts.
Talking about “understanding” the notion of truth is a little bit tricky. It is, after all, a word we made up, and therefore “understanding” it is not so much a matter of discovery as a matter of fiat, or at best, self-understanding.
Even though it would be much cooler to have to pray to the god of fire to shoot a gun and I much prefer a moon made of green cheese, I can understand why you come to the ridiculous conclusion, that the other claims are the better ones
I thought about it for a while and I don’t really agree with everything, but I think this might become a quite boring discussion if I would go into detail about this.
So, thank you David and Devon for making this more clear to me!
PS: All hail Xiuhtecuhtli! And pray that he forgives you your blasphemous comment!
Naive question time:
What is the difference between the Past and History?
This post got me thinkning of John Crowley’s Aegypt series, which I recently started reading (I’ve finished the first book), and the idea of there being more than one history of the world is a prominent feature of Crowley’s story. Is Crowley’s idea of more than one history the same thing as Derrida’s two pasts?
Thanks
Dharma, you may want to check out Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire if you’re interested in this connection between reality, location, and time.
Thanks for the suggestion.
I very much enjoy Mr. Moores comics (I esp. enjoyed Promethea) but haven’t read Voice of the Fire yet because I was leary of his being able to pull off a novel…I doubted his ability to effectively communicate his ideas without having an artist give them shape.
I will add it to my To-Read list.
Not sure why it’s billed as a novel, it’s a short story collection with interconnected parts.
I’m not sure, having never read Aegypt. It all depends on what he means by ‘multiple histories’ is metaphysical or epistemological. If the former, then chances are Deleuze was his inspiration. If the latter, then if could be Derrida. It’s a great idea though, especially in the former sense. We’re prone to think of the past as something singular and irrevocable that the present distills out of a plural and revocable future. Turning this assumption on its head (like Deleuze does with his notion of virtualities) makes for a strange world indeed.
As far as I understand the party with the corpses bit, to me it seems somewhat like treating each molecule of a wave across a body of water as disparate. And as if the heightened state is alive and the relative to the rest of the pool state is dead. Surely it’s the inertia that is the living element (or atleast living as in that can die/end), the water simply the expression? Sure, inertia is not all that tangible, not solid like we like to deal with in middle earth. But still. Further, what happens when that wave rebounds and comes back to the wave generator – effects how it generates the next wave? In this way does the inertia continue/continue to live?
And is the aphorism a trap street, given how it talks about wisdom, the having, and that’s kinda a promo in itself? If so I only just got it, heh!
Finally I don’t know if it helps, but with LTG I was thinking about the flower thing and the ugly penis thing – at the time I kind of thought, but yeah, and one of them uses a compound eye’d, exoskelital, envenomed dagger weilding (which it drags its own guts out if it uses) creature to burrow into it’s sexual organs and buzz off into the air with sticky cum on it, to land on another colourful sex organ and rub the plastic of it’s outer cum laden shell against the cold of that organ. Ie, the penis is ugly, but ugly is closer to human than the alienesque is. So that’s my resistance!
Callan (in a comment I can’t reply to) asks exactly the right question – “Where does the quality of ‘better’ come from?” This is the question that always brings me up short whenever the vulgar pragmatist in me starts mouthing off.
Pragmatists struggle with two basic criticisms, I think. The first is that they’re making unjustified assertions of value. When I say P is True because P works, I’m always vulnerable to someone who asks me:
“In what way does it ‘work’?”
“What is this ‘working’ you refer to?”
“How do you know that ‘working’ is sufficient justification for a belief?”
Tough questions! If I point to the fact that my beliefs have predictive power as justification for them, I’m just begging the question – what grounds my belief that Predictive Power Makes Something True (or valuable, or justificatory)?
One response is to just deny foundationalism generally. I could say I value predictive power not because I can demonstrate its value, but just because I’m wired that way, and we can discuss values, but never decide among them objectively. This leads to the other standard criticism of pragmatists – relativism. If I value predictive power, but I can’t explain why without circularity, then how can I persuade you that you should value it too?
On my good days, I like Richard Rorty’s Liberal Ironism: I believe in my values (western, liberal, pluralistic science), not because I can demonstrate their worth, but because they’re mine. If your values differ, and as long as you’re willing to be civil, we can discuss our values, and establish any areas of commonality we might have, while demarcating those areas where our values are incommensurable. I support my own position to the hilt, while simultaneously recognizing that my position has no greater claim to Magic Truth than any other. There is no Right or Wrong, but there is Us and Them, and we can still talk to Them while time remains.
On my bad days, I prefer my own perspective, which I’m calling Existential Pragmatism. What makes a belief ‘work’? When it has greater combat power than its rivals. What makes predictive power the supreme Value? Because of its use in life-or-death struggle. While the losers on the battlefield may not have been Wrong, or their beliefs False – well, they’re still Dead, so if we call them False, they’re not exactly going to be able to contradict us, right?
This isn’t really a normative view – all I’m saying is that the survivors are going to have a more compelling and convincing version of truth than are the silent dead. I’m not really comfortable with normative philosophy anyway, so I’m cool with it.
Sorry to ramble on. I always find I’m So Damned Smart in my own head, but every time Callan posts, I discover I know waaaay less about what I think than I thought I did.
Another way to put the problem faced by normative contextualists is that it all comes down to, as Wittgenstein says, “beating with sticks,” or training. When you look at it in these terms, it collapses into nihilism very quickly.