Terrorists + Heathrow + Wittgenstein + Experience Machine + Whaa?

I don't think Wittgenstein's proclivities changed altogether as much as people make them out to have. That is, his Tractarian views are something like more unrefined post-Tractarian views. It was his masterpiece. (In the original sense of the phrase, the piece on which he worked to end his apprenticeship and gain the title of master.) He makes a curious statement late in the book.

There must indeed be some kind of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but they must reside in the action itself. (6.422)

And I got to thinking.

--I'll ignore for the moment how to translate this sentiment into later Wittgenstein. How exactly does the reward and punishment reside in the action itself?

--You've already asked and answered this question. You said that the reward/punishment lay in a sort of coherence to other peoples; i.e., that your actions would make sense to other people. Your action qua action avoids incomprehensibility. And since being understood is paramount in being accepted and loved, then the coherence of your actions is paramount.

--But what if you grew up in the dirty south during the beginning of the 18th century? If you owned slaves your actions were coherent and understandable. They may even have been lauded.

--How now! Then the reward/punishment cannot be a social consequence. It must illumine or darken your insides, as it were. Is Foucault, then, wrong to speak of the social ramifications of punishment? Was he treating of ethics? Ethics in a vacuum?

--What a queer concept. Does ethics exist without other people?

And things got off topic. I often lead myself astray. The point is this: The Wittgenstein passage got me thinking about reward as well as punishment. The ethical life, as I characterize it, is a life of both prohibition and encouragement. Reward and punishment are meted out with equal ardor.

The idea of reward clicked with the idea of terrorist attacks. E.g., the one being reported on today. Would a suicide bomber be correct in acting if he were in the Experience Machine? He can take in the cultural baggage that he wants; and this would hamper him, I dare say, even more than it would hamper whomever Nozick was imagining entering the EM. Imagine the suicide bomber is offered the chance to hook up to the EM and have the ability to suicide bomb ten, a thousand or a ka-jillion people. He would be confident his plan would work, and he would be certain he was going to heaven. (Or, you know, whatever it is that people think they'll get from suicide bombing.) It could even be set up in a way like Bill Murray's Groundhog Day, in which he could suicide bomb every day, or every hour.

The rub is that he would have to agree to enter the machine knowing that he would only be fooling himself into thinking he was suicide bombing all the time. He would actually die an old, hobbled man who had been hooked up to the EM for most of his life. But during that life...oh what a life.

1) The EM cuts you off from religious incentive to do good.

2) The EM cuts you off from political incentive to do good.

3) Actually, all social interactions as a piece are taken away from your influence.

But the question is coaxed from me (never begged): What of the ethical reward/punishment residing in the act itself? I know I've waffled on this, but this Tractarian Wittgenstinian ethical proposition sounds like the Kantian model of the ethical will. And damn if I don't think that the EM is a fine--maybe even perfect--tester of that will. The suicide bomber, if he were a secular Kantian, would hook up to the EM.

qua qua qua qua

The great phenomenologist auteur.

Stemwinders + Lieberman + November In Any Even Number-Ending Year

I love the phrase stemwinder. It's one of those olde-timey newspaper phrases, like ombudsman, from whose frequent use I get the feeling that no one knows what they mean, exactly. That's ok, though. If a words well-defined use is to be used as an ill-defined word, well then--all the better. Like using the word nebulous to describe 'today's office conditions at four pm'. It's all a little nebulous. (Like when Wittgenstein says in the TLP, "Roughly speaking, objects are colorless." Like, WTF does that mean?? I love the phrase 'roughly speaking'. Roughly speaking, my I shit gold doubloons; likewise roughly speaking, objects are made from tiny, odorless, colorless....OH MY GOD OBJECTS ARE MADE OF RADON!)

Crazy-ass Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) lost her primary.

Despite her defeat, McKinney was unbowed, unleashing a stemwinder of a concession speech in which she barely mentioned her opponent but praised leftist leaders in Cuba and Venezuela, took aim at the efficacy of electronic voting machines and offered several swipes at the media.

and so did Sore Loserman. The WP article makes little reference to stemwinding or ombudspeople, so I'll refrain from quoting it. I'm absolutely reading Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I hope to have finished by the midterms. Bleh.

I hope to have finished it by this weekend. Nozick makes some claims. Boy does that Nozick make some claims. He seems to be a little in love with explaining everything. I suppose that's a good-ish thing; but I could do with some elliptical reasoning sometimes. Just think of all the trees that could be saved if everyone wrote like Derrida. (Not prolifically--that defeat's the enterprise--I mean elliptically.)

The Experience Machine + Descartes

I love the word 'parlay'.

This morning I was riding my bike to work. As I was high on sanctimony, looking at unwashed, smog-dogged autos, I realized I could parlay the Experience Machine (EM) for my Wittgenstein project. That is, hook up Descartes and Wittgenstein with the EM in order to talk about epistemology, ethics and Lebensform.

In the EM there are no ethical ramifications to having no emissions standards. I could drive a fucking Hummer. Could I? If everything were exactly the same then wouldn't I think, maybe, that I shouldn't be driving a Hummer? I should like to parlay an answer, but does a second-order reality really elude the problems of a first-order reality: I think not. [Descartes disappears.] I need to find the hinge.

The Experience Machine

Yesterday during breakfast my friends brought up the Experience Machine (EM). I thought the EM was some sort of new Jimi Hendrix-based roller coaster or something that the kids are into; but it's actually a thought experiment, which Nozick inaugurated in Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's desires?...Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think it's all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there's no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside? (43)

The EM was brought up in a political context, but as things developed (i.e., my friends and I ate our food and sobered up) things got more punchy, and we tried to figure out what people would really do and what the differences are between the EM and reality?

I have a friend who's a total dork; and he thinks the EM is perfect, like the perfect video game. He wishes it upon his family and friends. He seems to think that experience is experience of phenomena, i.e., mental states. And I think this commits him to a Berkleyan-type idealism. For the move Kant makes seems to require something actually there, objects about which we can never know absolutely everything; and Husserl's method requires the human to give meaning to already present objects, both historically and personally; and neither idealist wants to go as far as Berkeley. I think my friend wants to say, though, that rather than human understanding imposing a meaning upon the necessarily-given world, the human understanding simply creates the given world. For he says there's no difference between the EM and reality, and in fact, the former is better than the latter.

This answer to the thought experimentseems to defy tradition, so I'm down with it. But I think my friend is rather callous and inhuman. Under the way I was thinking about things, speaking about the EM is a different language-game than speaking about reality as such. Speaking about the EM is a different language-game than speaking about video games, or reading realistic, Zola-esque novels. I.e., you would want to say that it's OK to kill people in the EM because they're not really people--you're not creating any victims (in the hotshit parlance of whatever). Even though there's no epistemic difference, there is an ontological difference. And that difference in language-game means that something is different. If the words themselves are the same, and the meaning is different, then you can be certain that the context, use or practice is different. This difference in action is the difference between the EM and reality.

Is it OK to kill someone in the EM? Why don't skeptics commit more atrocious crimes? (Or become priests, mediums to the other world of which ours is a poor reflection.) In another world in which, say, there is no ethics, can you act in whatever way you want? How would your actions be different in this non-ethical world and our (supposedly) ethical world?

Middle Age + Single + G.E.D.

[Pictured above: Mr. Tom Ryan, rockstar, hat afficionado, uneducated and unmarried.]

This story in the Times, strangely compelling and depressing; it includes the life of Mr. Ryan.

Tom Ryan used to share a home outside Denver with a girlfriend but now lives alone, enjoying the ability to keep the house as he pleases. That includes a hat rack covered with dozens of commemorative baseball caps.

Mr. Ryan, 54, an electronics specialist who lives outside Denver, bought his ranch house with a girlfriend over a decade ago. He had to buy out his girlfriend quickly when the relationship suddenly ended — or else lose his home.

Mr. Ryan, who attended music college for a year and spent his 20’s singing in a local rock band, did not feel ready [for marriage].

He learned to enjoy the silence and the ability to be as fastidious at home as he pleased.

When he walks in the front door after a weekend trip or a run or a bike ride, he often puts a commemorative baseball cap on his coat rack, and now, about three dozen hats cover the rack, with no apparent space for a purse or a diaper bag.

Mr. Ryan, too, said he enjoyed being single. He stood talking in his kitchen on a Saturday when he had no plans other than a solo bike ride. It was a slow weekend day — his birthday, in fact — and though the phone never rang, he was free for dinner.

The man is "fastidious". This story deserves a daytime Emmy. And what's with the last line? "though the phone never rang, he was free for dinner"? If no one ever calls you, will you ever have plans? I would maybe replace 'expectedly' for 'though'.

.

Bill Simmons + Music

An intensely argued, well-crafted and sustained assault against the Sports Guy's music preferences.

What further infuriates is that Simmons is not an anomaly in the music-writing world; he is the norm in a guild that overvalues the music of its youth. The reason that the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and other artists of the mid-‘60s to early ‘70s are regarded as the greatest of all time has less to do with their particular talents and more to do with the fact that they are the favorite bands of the people who own all of the music largest publications and television networks. So, I’m not blaming Bill Simmons for his obtuse view of the music world, but I am criticizing him for perpetrating like he has an educated opinion of the matter.

Temptation + Dead Rockers

I think yesterday constitutes my resolve's failure. I'm tempted to write about music and literature since those are the things on which I spend most of my time. Yesterday I wrote about Mel Gibson, a man whose descent boasts a celerity heretofore unknown in Christendom. What an ass. But I tried vainly to couch my inane commentary in ethical terms. (I still think everyone's a racist.)

Well, I tried. Yesterday, Love's Arthur Lee (pictured above) died from acute lymphoblastic leukemia at the age of 61. I'm sure the Hype will fill with Love songs, just as it filled with tracks from the Madcap Laughs when Syd Barrett died. I wonder if that oldspouses' tale of death's tripartite longing, the dreaded dying in threes, will be vindicated. Who's next?

Anyhoo. I'll be writing about philosophy next week. I have to work on my MA thesis and I'll have to do some more philosophy to do that. Be advised.

Daily Write + Mel Gibson

I decided at some point to update at least Monday through Friday. I don't know why; but this is a policy decision with which I'm sticking. Another piece of evidence for an externalist/behaviorist-type reasoning about states of mind: I think things, and I think I think things and I thought I think thinks; the ambiguity in the use of the word think comes clear when I write things. Then I see all things, those of which I'm certain and those which fall under the aegis of the delete key.

How many anti-Semites does it take to make a culture anti-Semitic? With an eye toward the future, i.e., America's youth, here are some comments on the Mel Gibson story from US Weekly. (Idea shamelessly stolen from Gawker.)

Everyone makes mistakes. Lighten up on the guy. He’s a great actor and he’s made some fantastic movies. Of course he should be more careful about what he says because everything you do or say is magnified when you are a celebrity.

WHAT does OJ Simpson have to do with Mel Gibson? [Someone previously had brought up OJ Simpson.] There is no comparison here. OJ killed 2 people and got away with it. Mel Gibson admitted he was drunk driving; said some hurtful things - proved he’s human. He’s accepting the consequences of his actions and trying to apologize (maybe way to much but…. at least he did).

I think Mel just has a typically Australian sense of humor, and just to give the guy a break. Not for the speeding & drinking of course, but his wry and cutting remarks. John Lennon used to do it, so do typical Australian males whether drunk or not and no one gets after them. Sure he is a celebrity, and this along with all other tabloids nowadays, will probably boost his career media-wise rather than condemn it in the long run.

The reason why I wanted to look at the comments has to do with my non-rhetorical question at the top of this paragraph. One would be predisposed to call Mel Gibson a racist cracker nutcase, right? Well, I don't know about the average age of these US Weekly readers, but I'd assume they're not that old. They probably haven't seen Mad Max, Bird on a Wire, Lethal Weapon. Hell, I haven't seen that many Mel Gibson movies. I know the latest ones have been pretty brutal. (In, well, the jargonastic and literal senses.) The comments on the US Weekly board were generally all positive. These three stood out as being the most articulate. The "everything you do or say is magnified when you are a celebrity" angle was used in Gibson's latest apology.

What is the different between Aunt Sally spouting off racist comments and Mel Gibson's doing so? In the former, Aunt Sally faces opprobrium only from the people in her vicinity. In the case of Gibson, he faces everyone's reproach. (You would think.) The second comment goes along with these lines--his using religious epithets "proved he's human", which is unfortunately the case. Human beings seem generally bigoted, warmongering and hateful. From his public persona I had never particularly formed an opinion of Mel Gibson. (Before the Passion of the Christ, I suppose.) This is boring.

I put in the last comment because it was plain ridiculous. John Lennon wasn't Australian, and Mel Gibson's career is fucked for the time being.

My point in bringing this up, though, is that the form of life in America is one of anti-Semitism. Maybe I grew up in a generally uncultivated area of the country, but "Jew" was used as a transitive verb, e.g., "You Jewed me out of five bucks." When I was in college, the same stereotypes held. Part of this, I think, is cultivated by pop culture Jewish comedians like Seinfeld and Sarah Silverman. But I find that hurtful Jewish stereotypes are common and pravelant.

Does Mel Gibson speak for America? You would think the answer is no; but if you just look and see what's before you, then the answer is yes. Is there a way to reform this view? Is it even unethical to be racist? What if you never act on your racist beliefs? What if you never offended someone? I think the startling answer is that it is not unethical to be racist in itself. That's why societies still are generally racist. But by racist in itself I don't mean one is justified in committing hate crimes or genocide. But if you live in a community of 1500 people, none of whom are black or Jewish or Chinese, and you never meet any of those people, then who are you harming?

But in an overarching manner, if you think ethics is based on some sort of conceptual plurality concerning practical problems (as Putnam seems to), then I don't think he can say that this racist action is unethical. And the kids seem to agree.

Housekeeping

Wittgenstein refused to live on carpet. He thought the only way to clean a floor was to cover it with used tea leaves, wait for the leaves to dry and then sweep them out the door. Wittgenstein liked to eat the same things every day. He hit children when they wouldn't learn. He liked westerns. Tolstoy. Not Shakespeare. Wittgenstein broke off an engagement with a Bloomsbury chick-a-dee. He walked down the same streets as likely I have. He's a person whom I'm comfortable following.

I was going to work on a MA thesis regarding Wittgenstein and skepticism. But after reading On Certainty, the issue seems more than settled. In fact, I feel certain about Wittgenstein's kinda-sorta refutation of skepticism. In my bones, like an animal, I feel certain. I shifted my focus onto ethics, which was a spiritually rewarding and intellectually damaging project. I'm focused still on that, but Wittgenstein and I--we need to take a break.

I'm going to be reading other people. I know that at first, it might be awkward. Wittgenstein will be on my shelf, and I'll gesture. My hand will extend. It might seem like I intend to take up the Philosophic Remarks or maybe Remarks on Color. But I'll be clasping in my hand some Heidegger, instead. Maybe Rorty and I will be at a cafe, a cafe where I used to read hunched over, my head in a torrent from caffeine and reading over and over again 133 of the Investigations. A place where I used to undergo therapy. But I'll be reading about hermeneutics and analytic and all the things I missed out on since I've made a commitment to Wittgenstein. We were 'exclusive'. Things just went to fast. I read Augustine, and that got me in the mood. And then the Tractatus was so seducing. Die Welt ist alles, was der fall ist. That little singsong, like a bird or a nursery rhyme. Disarming and arousing true Eros, philosophy. But things just went too quickly after that. I need a break. It's not you; it's me.

Conceptual Relativity + Dualism + Putnam + Wittgenstein + Kant

Rather characteristically I did not follow through with my planned reading of Ethics Without Ontology last night. I thought I had exhausted Putnam's line of thought on ethics in that book, and I needed to start another project. That project's not applicable here, though.

I was wondering about Putnam's conceptual relativity, which goes something like,

In certain cases what exists may depend on which various conventions we adopt. (39)

which, I assume, is supposed to seem like a ridiculous notion on first sight. It fails to outrage or amaze me. It seems somewhat reminiscent of Kant's transcendental idealism, but with a desultory nod toward Wittgenstein's notion of Lebensform and language-game. Does Putnam's conceptual relativity commit him to object-appearance dualism?

I think it does; and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It seems to me, and this seemed to me a while ago to hold, that Wittgenstein in a way offers an alternative way to derive categories of the understanding, a non-empirical a posteriori method of looking and seeing what's common. Different people may see different aspects or derive different rules from the same situation depending on a variety of conditions: prior training, culture or even native tongue.

Putnam seems just to enunciate to a further degree of explicitness this Wittgenstinian implication. When looking at the duck-rabbit (pictured below), can you say the rabbit exists if you only see a duck? Vice versa? In some way (one that's probably not very mysterious) our category determines the existence of the aspect that we see. In an analogous way, the category of causality, for instance, determines how different object relations appear to us. But whereas Kant sought to legislate our appearances, Wittgenstein actually keeps the human autonomous.

I'll go on further later. Work is picking up.

Ethics - Ontology + Hilary Putnam

[Hilary Putnam]

Hoping to get a better idea of the ethical tradition surrounding Wittgenstein, I read Hilary Putnam's Ethics without Ontology this weekend. Rather, I read Part I. I'd never before read anything by Putnam, and I found this piece a little difficult. It wasn't conceptually difficult (although, if I had found it impenetrable, indefatigable or idiotic, such an opinion would be accounted for by his notion of conceptual relativity); rather, I found his writing style a little unbecoming. It might be because the book was adapted from a lecture series and was, therefore, modeled more on how one speaks (parenthetically, that is), with lots of stops, and starts and, heretofore unmissed, and, for good reason, generally omitted by one's editors, commas were inserted all around. The man must breathe a lot.

Ignoring for now his anti-ontological thesis, let's look at his ethical one: That ethical propositions are part of a language game to which no object corresponds (anti-ontological), yet they still are objective. The lack of agreement about ethical propositions has to do with their being generally about practical, concrete problems about which people rarely agree anyway. Which is to say, even in the sciences people don't necessarily agree about practical problems. If math is motley, then ethics is, so to speak, motley squared. (What a corny line [that preceding one is {a paraphrase of} Putnam's].)

The anti-ontological thesis was attendant to this ethical thesis. It stated roughly, I think, that there is not one reality to which things must fit and about which we just have different ways of speaking. No. Rather, looking at things from the lens of 'conceptual relativity' Putnam says that the concepts which we use to speak about reality determine what actually exists. (After making this strong claim, Putnam seems to back off and says, rather, that conceptual relativity is a relativity in terms of what we say exists--a big difference.) This idea is supposed to obviate the need for inflationary and reductive metaphysics. It explains everything in a Wittgenstinian way, where we work with what's before us and look for what's really going on in language. I agree. This thesis doesn't necessarily explain why we disagree in ethical matters. But as Putnam points out, philosophers seem rather blind to the fact that we disagree in a whole lot more than ethical matters. It seems as if some consider ethics and aesthetics to be the only areas in which humans disagree. These philosophers have obviously never tried to pick out a restaurant with their girl or boyfriends--only to be stymied by silence, exasperation or the eventual defeat of making TV dinners at home and eating them in separate rooms because you'd just had a huge argument about where to go and why don't you ever pay the check. It's not like I make more money than you; I don't care if I'm the guy. And so on. Disagreements come up in other places than philosophy.

Is this the way for the fly to escape the bottle, though? That there is conceptual relativity--i.e., for me a terrorist is Mohammed, here, who is strapping on some dynamite and for you America is a terrorist and Mohammed is doing the right thing--and that ethical problems are more like practical problems rather than metaphysical problems of trying to find some actions that accord with the Good. Is it just a superstition, or am I partaking in a myth, if I feel that there should be more to ethics? Why does Wittgenstein seem to always appeal to law courts in his writing? It seems like Putnam is almost describing a legal setting rather than an ethical setting when he talks about ethics being composed of practical problems. The civic status of a dispute? The jury is still out on Putnam's take. I'm going to read the second Part of his book tonight.

New Post + Monday

It should go without saying that there won't be new posts until Monday.

Mathematicians + Ethics

Last night I said that mathematicians don't get in fistfights over whether a problem is solved. I think the relevant passage shines a light down on ethics. When Wittgenstein says,

Disputes do not break out (among mathematicians, say) over the question whether a rule has been obeyed or not. People don’t come to blows over it, for example. That is part of the framework on which the working of our language is based (for example, in giving descriptions). (240)

He's talking not about rules, but about people. He doesn't see logic as being normative, but from his work in the TLP, I think ethics must be. He calls ethics earlier in the PI an unclearly defined concept (paraphrase, citation missing). But there are certain ways to sharply define ethics: I.e., by figuring out what is not ethics. All the time I was reading OC, certain things came up that I thought could not be ethics. At first I thought acting with certainty would count as a sort of ethical act (along with Professor Benjamin of U. Mich.). But that commits one to a sort of ethical plurality, for people around the world act differently. Merely describing a person's actions as an ethical action is just the same as to say that one is always following a rule, no matter what he does--it's to say nothing. (A 'cold-hearted killer' would act with certainty in killing.)

But in the above quote Wittgenstein gives us an area in which there are no physical disputes. (I take physical violence to be for the most part unethical.) In the domain of mathematics, say--and Wittgenstein's phrasing makes it seem like there are other domains in which people do not get in fistfights--in the domain of math people don't come to blows over whether a rule was followed. People do come to blows in the domains of baseball, basketball, weapons inspecting, international negotiations, marriage, law, poker and innumerable others. Whether or not to use violence against someone else for his failure to act according to your rule. To say that the decision is an ethical decision is to already have an idea of ethics. And regulating blows is not the sole provenance of ethics. So what's going on? It seems like there isn't any more light shed on ethics after all.

If there must already be an ethical structure in place for there to be propositions about ethics, then from where does the ethical structure come? Is it something to which our actions fit? Are ethics and aesthetics the great super-concepts, the status that Wittgenstein denies to logic and cause?

Wittgenstein + Ramsey + Logic + Rules

[Mathematicians do not get into fistfights about whether a problem has been solved; but as "normative scientists" logicians obviously do.]

Wittgenstein drops this cryptic notion in the PI,

F.P. Ramsey once emphasized in conversation with me that logic was a 'normative science'. I do not know exactly what he had in mind, but it was doubtless closely related to what only dawned on me later: namely, that in philosophy we often compare the use of words with games and calculi which have fixed rules, but cannot say that someone who is using language must be playing such a game. (81)

which characterizes two things: Ramsey's view of logic and Wittgenstein's view of rules. Ramsey, one would think, thinks of logic as telling men how to think, i.e., as normative; i.e., logic is something to which men's thoughts, action and language must fit. Humans needn't play by logical rules. It's something to which they could aspire, maybe.

Wittgenstein's remarks later in the PI concerning 'able to go on' and rule following better characterize his view on rule. (Of course, I'm conflating rule and logic here taking Ramsey to mean that logic is a higher order-type set of rules.) It seems from sections 201 and 202 that Wittgenstein sees grasping a rule to connect to being certain of a rule, and the obeying of a rule is an actual--an act--and not discursive--thinking. That is, every time someone acts, he is obeying a rule. The thought might hold better in the converse: Every time someone obeys a rule, he is acting. The operative contrast is to thinking one obeys a rule.

This all seems to connect to OC, certainly. To be able to go on is to act without reasons; just as to act under threat of soon impending physical harm is to act with certainty. Logic seems to me to be wholly discursive, a set of symbols that fail to fit (i.e., belong necessarily to) our every day actions. I believe this thought lay behind Wittgenstein saying, "My symbolic expression was really a mythological description of the use of a rule" (221). (Which also relates to his remark on rules being ornamental and architectural.) The symbolic expression--the discursive irruption of logic onto the scene--is merely an inadequate stand in for the actual events. The difference between a box score and a ball game.

But his use of the word "mythological" is quite suggestive, too. This passage relates, and it's quite packed; when he says,

Would it not be possible for us, however, to calculate as we actually do (all agreeing, and so on), and still at every step to have a feeling of being guided by rules as by a spell, feeling astonishment at the fact that we agreed? (We might give thanks to the Deity for our agreement.)

it seems to link up to his use of "mythological" above. It seems as if Wittgenstein were taking a dig at the logical positivists' absolute worship of logic. Why not a Deity guiding us? Why must logic guide our actions? We made logic. Our tendency is to sublime logic. But logic is just another language game. Being guided is a family of situations, and all but the most rudimentary I think Wittgenstein precludes our being guided by logic. But what else guides us? Institutions, culture, traditional practices and training? But wherefore ethics? That's the question I continually ask.

Married To The Sea

[from Married to the Sea]

Really good Wittgenstein content will return tomorrow. I've added several new philosophy links to the sidebar [stage right].

Lucidity + Cora Diamond

I've ended my fast after only two days. I feel however quite lucid and awake--even though I didn't sleep much and I have a cold. I'm addicted to eating; I had to get my fix. If I had some sort of cause--i.e., being indefinitely and illegally interned in a human rights-violating facility--then I'm sure I could bring myself around to hunger striking.

I'm still reading Diamond's Realistic Spirit and I think it's marvelous. I've lost the last few days to other activities, but I expect to be far into it by the weekend. Her writing style is much different than the other Wittgenstinian whom I've read (Cavell). (Come to think of it, regarding my post on Shoshana Felman... I seem to remember Cavell having written an introduction for a Felman book. His nonsense detector must be a little better than mine.)

I've been thinking about Diamond's distinction between philosophic realism and the realistic spirit; I haven't yet taken far the idea, but I was surprised by her bringing in Berkeley immediately as a comparable figure to Wittgenstein. I've only read loose characterizations of Berkeley, and some limericks, but now I'm tempted to look into him.

Post-Socratic dialogues like Galileo's and Hume's crack me up.

Fasting + Culture of Life

What was ruminated during a late night drinking session turned into a competition amongst friends; then it turned into something more... I've been fasting (only on the second day, now) along with my housemate, Robin. As went over supra, the fast has now taken on the characteristic of a proxy hunger strike for those who can't, i.e., the detainees in Guantanamo Bay detention center. I know that this is old news,

The hunger strikers are restrained during the feeding. "But of the people I've seen, they're smiling when they're putting the tubes down, not struggling. They tell the nurse which nostril to put it in."

but tyranny never jumps the shark (unfortunately). There is no concept to which facts must fit: Look at the current culture of life, which on the one hand peddles death, and on the other hand deprives human beings of their only human dignity--freedom. Life isn't at the essence of humanity for it goes without saying that the human is alive. This statement ('I am alive') is similar to 'I know I have two hands'. They're both out of place in most contexts. When life is foisted upon the human, the context really should be looked after closely. It's probably a very strange one.

Ethics + Common Sense

As was pointed out by Blender, this thoughtful backpack rapper had to change his name from Common Sense to Common back in 95. He dropped the sense and remained common. I would do the opposite, I suppose, and drop the common and retain the sense. I trust everything else will stay the same.

A few days ago the Executioners Thong had this post about ethics and common sense. The great symphony of text comprised of different fonts, sizes and colors made the post quite entertaining to read; but I don't know if it all quite sunk in. In any case, I think I disagree or I think the author is not thinking well about what's at issue.

What is at issue, I think (those pink links are, like, blistered onto my fucking eyes now) is whether people deliberate about their moral actions or whether we use common sense. Assuming the latter, what is common sense? Common sense is actually "psychological essentialism" by which I mean we have psychological categories into which we sort very quickly all data that are presented to us. If I see an apple I might think "good" if I see a knife-wielding fellow I might think "bad". Or sort into said relevant category. OK. From the post,

If it gets any attention at all, my suggestion that "good and right" is a kind from the psychological essentialist viewpoint will probably be shredded or at least get marked down for sloppiness. What I find most appealing about it as a model of mental processing is that it fits with the way we either deemphasize the negatives or the positives about many things that require our judgment, particularly as the those negatives and positives impact us personally. Nobody, well, nobody I know, intentionally works to do wrong but lots of us have to deal with gray areas. The ease with which we binarize to black or white ought to give us pause. To avoid coming into the grip of harmful or selfish decision making, if indeed we operate on the basis of some self-interest essence, is to teach ourselves to draw the largest possible circle of beings and cultures with which we can identify.

with which, well, I just don't agree. I especially disagree with the last line. I think that everything we need we have before us. More data and more analyses offer us what? Machiavelli’s vaguely diachronic analysis of Italian politics lay before us only a few good examples from which to extrapolate the necessary ruling maneuvers. I would say, though, that Machiavelli doesn't engage in heavy analysis--and most people would agree with him (or disagree on a moral ground).

One more point about analysis that will link back up to the sense, which is common. In their recent book, The Wages of Wins, the authors say that Allen Iverson was not as good a basketball player as 90 other players during the season in which he won the MVP award. No one that follows basketball would seriously consider that statement. It would be a piece of nonsense. If I came up to you and said that I'd analyzed all the data, considered all the facts and I've proved that you're standing on thin air (which most people are--there aren't many atoms per volume under us) or that you're the most morally reprehensible person whom I've ever seen--well, what are you going to say? Isn't such a claim to further analyzed data much like a claim to idealism? That there's a noumenal data world behind the apparent phenomenal world, and the scientists/economists/mathematicians are going to pear behind the edges of the everyday world to bring us a report, to enlighten us?

Not to resist science. Science underlies our actions and certainties, certainly. But in what sense does science refute intelligent design? If you thought it really did, then the only evidence that I would accept for there to be no more people believing in intelligent design. That has not happened. In what sense can you affirm one language-game over another while the two are at war? I think it may be best to be neutral in some cases--or at least not expect too much. (However, we play a language-game [some of us] that involves the Constitution; and this language game clearly stipulates the supremacy of certain other language-games within it; and one of those language games, whose claim to supremacy it seems to deny, is a religious or faith-based language-game; so I'm not saying that intelligent design should be taught to sixth graders or anything.)

Our everyday actions may be analyzed into discrete psychological concepts. But to think that our everyday actions must then fit these psychological concepts would be a great fallacy. And if they don't have to fit them, then what's the point of the psychological concepts?