Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

Oh, I don't buy into Hegel's philosophy in general. His whole approach is painfully teleological, as evidenced especially by the Philosophy of History. Hegel is a child of the transcendental ego introduced by Kant, but he wants to formulate it even further into the Absolute Spirit, or movement of history (which is, by some mystical component, somehow attuned to human desires). His dialectical method is important because of the influence it had on contemporary literatures and later writers/thinkers; but ultimately, he's a romantic idealist.

Marx un-abstracted Hegel's Absolute Spirit; he wanted to bring the dialectic back down to earth, so to speak - to remove it from its lofty position as an ideal and universal motion and apply it to the actual motion of material/economic history. Unfortunately, due to the very nature of Hegelian dialectics, Marx was still unable to overcome the teleology of Hegel's method. So even with Marx we still have: accumulation of capital results in disenfranchisement, separation of labor results in alienation, commodity fetishism results in false consciousness, etc... and all this eventually culminates in revolution. Marx is relentlessly causal in his reasoning.

Inequalities and class hostilities can exist without a dialectical materialism to explain them. I continually find myself turning to alternative theorists to interpret these sorts of issues: Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Lacan, and more recently Badiou, Brassier, Meillassoux, etc.

 

[Dak]

"Commodity fetishism"? "Separation of labor" = "division of labor"? Disenfranchisement from what?

 

[Zephyrus]

I've always viewed Hegel as Plotinus speaking German.

 

[Einherjar86]

"Commodity fetishism"? "Separation of labor" = "division of labor"? Disenfranchisement from what?

That was just a vague summarization of certain aspects of Marxism.

The majority of wealth accumulates in the capitalists, disenfranchising the working class. Separation/division of labor alienates workers from the products of their labor. This results in commodity fetishism, whereby the relations between humans become material, and the relations between things become social.

This is all far more complex, but I'm just suggesting that Marx's theory relies on causal reasoning.

 

[Zephyrus]

It's ironic that Marx's theory identifies an unconscious process that was undermined by being brought into consciousness. It's like when people embraced natural selection and became social Darwinists/eugenicists.

Capitalism to me is just a means to efficiency, and the valorization of efficiency is, in view of its logical conclusion, tantamount to a death cult.

 

[Einherjar86]

Indeed. Most Marxists today don't buy the "false consciousness" theory. Žižek argues that ideology doesn't function in what people think, but in what they do.

 

[Zephyrus]

Exactly, and very Marxian. The material precedes the idea.

 

[Einherjar86]

I read a really great article this morning that sums up many of the problems of a unified theory of knowledge, but also avoids the cynical conclusion often levied at those who expose such problems:

A couple excerpts, and the link is below (I just discovered this online magazine Aeon; it's fantastic):

In the 18th century, Hume formulated what is now known as the problem of induction. He noted that both in science and everyday experience we use a type of reasoning that philosophers call induction, which consists in generalising from examples. Hume also pointed out that we do not seem to have a logical justification for the inductive process itself. Why then do we believe that inductive reasoning is reliable? The answer is that it has worked so far. Ah, but to say so is to deploy inductive reasoning to justify inductive reasoning, which seems circular. Plenty of philosophers have tried to solve the problem of induction without success: we do not have an independent, rational justification for the most common type of reasoning employed by laypeople and professional scientists. Hume didn’t say that we should therefore all quit and go home in desperation. Indeed, we don’t have an alternative but to keep using induction. But it ought to be a sobering thought that our empirical knowledge is based on no solid foundation other than that ‘it works’.

What about maths and logic? At the beginning of the 20th century, a number of logicians, mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics were trying to establish firm logical foundations for mathematics and similar formal systems. The most famous such attempt was made by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, and it resulted in their Principia Mathematica (1910-13), one of the most impenetrable reads of all time. It failed.

A few years later the logician Kurt Gödel explained why. His two ‘incompleteness theorems’ proved — logically — that any sufficiently complex mathematical or logical system will contain truths that cannot be proven from within that system. Russell conceded this fatal blow to his enterprise, as well as the larger moral that we have to be content with unprovable truths even in mathematics. If we add to Gödel’s results the well-known fact that logical proofs and mathematical theorems have to start from assumptions (or axioms) that are themselves unprovable (or, in the case of some deductive reasoning like syllogisms, are derived from empirical observations and generalisation — ie, from induction), it seems that the quest for true and objective knowledge is revealed as a mirage.

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/massimo-pigliucci-on-consilience/

Coincidentally, I own both Dennet's Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Wilson's Consilience, but I've only read excerpts from the latter. I really need to get to these.

EDIT: also, got a new blog post up.

 

[Dak]

Good post.

 

[monoxide_child]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...10.972.10j2.12.0.les;..0.0...1c.1.H1cSlQltY1M

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Capitalism to me is just a means to efficiency, and the valorization of efficiency is, in view of its logical conclusion, tantamount to a death cult.

Is there someone you believe to be valorizing efficiency on a mass scale today?

 

[Zephyrus]

Utilitarian ethics, but I don't single out any causa sui. It's a principle of evolutionary biology to maximize efficiency, and technology is an extension of that. Language was the first technology since it enabled the completion of collaborative tasks of ever increasing complexity.

Call me an Aeschylean, but I truly believe that through suffering and toil we come to know who we truly are, so by eliminating it we are draining away our humanity and becoming tools to maintain this machine world whose purpose we believe is to make our lives easier.

We're taking helicopters to the tops of mountains and instead of hiking up them, thereby negating all the self-knowledge and connection to the environment of experiencing the process, of living in the present. Efficiency has only the end in mind, and values the means insofar as they achieve the end and nothing more. But what is that end?

 

[Dak]

The individual has his or her own value system. Ends are subjective, and therefore so is total efficiency.

If I want to enjoy a hike, I hike. If I need to accomplish something at the top of the mountain, the hike is an obstacle. I am hindered from achieving my end.

 

[Einherjar86]

Zeph, am I to understand you're condemning technological development in the name of a purer human existence (or some such idea)?

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

He's worried, in the Singularity Movement, there wont be philosophers Muahahahahahahaaaaaaa

 

[Zephyrus]

Zeph, am I to understand you're condemning technological development in the name of a purer human existence (or some such idea)?

I'm not condemning anything. I'm just pointing out a trend. Human identity is a concept as fluid as any other. However, I do find the lack of presence disturbing (wow, that sounded like Darth Vader). The logical conclusion of valuing efficiency is that it makes us increasingly dissatisfied with more and more things.

 

[Dak]

re: Increasingly dissatisfied with more and more things. What gives you this idea?

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by a "lack of presence"; as in, we're alienated as individuals from the true value of the labor required to achieve our ends...?

I don't want to continue on that basis in case it's incorrect; but I will say that your reference to Aeschylus is strikingly humanist, which perhaps you didn't intend...? The idea that hard work and suffering can allow us access to some pure, or original, condition of what it means to be human is dangerous because it suggests a valorized elevation of an earlier state of existence. Of course, there's no reason to believe that early hominids painting on cave walls occupied a "higher" state of existence. The correlate to such a belief is that humanity now occupies some kind of fallen state and lives an alienated life of subjection by technology.

My reference to technology here is very general, and in fact would include what you identified as humanity's first technology: language. But no matter how far into the past we look, we will always find conditions that impose limitations on human existence; there is no pure human state.

The trouble with talking about humanity as alienated (from value, from labor, from social relations, from "truth", etc.) is that it implies this alienation is an obstacle to be overcome. It posits alienation as a negation of some positive humanity; where, in contrast, the inabilities we come up against are positive conditions of any human existence.

Viewed in this light we come to see the flaws of the traditional Cartesian cogito, many of which have been revealed to us by modern science. Understanding the human as a centered, total and unified subject is a consequence of a long tradition of anthropocentric Enlightenment thought.

John Gray has an interesting quote about technology, actually: "Technology is not something that humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world."

 

[Zephyrus]

Yes, you may call me a humanist. An argument can be made about alienation "from nature," the biological harmony we achieve with the Sun and the seasons and such. But of course that arbitrarily identifies what is properly human as something prehistoric, since the same argument can be made that technology, at whatever stage of complexity, is a natural extension of ourselves. The motivation for "progress" has always been dissatisfaction, but it gets to the point where abstraction from nature in order to superficially satisfy desires or remove perceived discomforts becomes more of a problem itself.

Time is a good example. Time, and horologia, in the modern sense were born of an anti-naturalist Christian worldview in order for medieval monks to perform their daily prayers at fixed intervals. Clocks are an example of how scientific instruments and arbitrary systems of measurement give us a false sense of reality. Naturally the calculation and manipulation of Time became the chief operation of attaining efficiency. Now that the world has become so efficient, we are losing parts of ourselves (what is the self? an object of faith) in order to keep up with it, and not appreciating the present and the value of Dinge an Sie (which, like Platonic forms, have to a pragmatic extent been argued out of existence).

I agree, the idea of presence, or eternity, and fixed human identity are illusory, but they correspond to healthy brain states as touchstones of meaning and purpose, and our faith in them is what motivates us to live fulfilled lives. We academics think we're above that, but our institutions are information-restricting churches as any other. Plato's Academy was registered as a religious organization for that reason.

So I agree with everything you say, but as one steeped in Classical philosophy, I tend to have a negative attitude toward deviation from nature, even if that nature is no more than a chimera of Aristotle's zoo of political animals he calls the polis, or Epicurus' garden.

 

[Einherjar86]

Ah, that clarifies a bit. Good post.

I'm skeptical of the traditional "human/nature" dichotomy, since I see it as a projection of a humanity that distinguishes itself from a variety of others (and human individuals that distinguish themselves from other humans as others). So obviously, in my opinion, there can be no such thing as a "deviation from nature."