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Be Free Now

Going back to the Nietzche don't believe in free will thing; I think it's because the only way that a person could be free is in the moment. In the Walter Kauffman translated Nineteenth Century Philosophy anthology; there's an entry where Nietzche says Free Will does not exist, and in fact it was made up by the religions in order to make the religions powerful. He said it also exists in order to ascribe punishment.

Nietzche might be mad that I'm extrapolating so much from his stuff; but I want to point out that the only time a free choice could be taken is in the present moment. I want you to think about that for a second or at least have it in the noggin while we go over:

Two Kantian Theories of Freedom

The first theory is Autonomy or Moral Autonomy. This exists in his moral writings. The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals is often considered the greatest Kantian work on Ethics. I like the Critique of Practical Reason because it kind of rubs my brain the right way.

Anyway, the way Autonomy works is by contrast with externality. What we mean by externality is anything that is not the case.

By isolating the case as the only thing that could be the case, Kant does an elegant hopscotch. He basically asks us to flag our premises, at the top of our baby logic derivation.

The problem of Determinism says that if someone is predestined by natural forces (chemicals in the brain, psychology of the parents raising you, I don't know; maybe the pleasure that you get from doing something) then you do not have the ability to control what happens. If you do not control what happens, then there is no way you can be responsible for what happens.

The Metaphysical theory of Autonomy (freedom) reads like this: in the Antinomies of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant points out that freedom could be possible if there were a first cause in the noumenal realm, which would then in a non-temporal (not in time), maybe it could jump in the phenomenal realm at any given second and change the series (I'm thinking here thought stream, but it's probably like mental capacities in the whatever-Kant-was-thinking sense).

If the first theory of freedom is satisfying (and I think it is) and the second is unsatisfying, don't think Kant didn't catch it. There are Kantian writings saying that he wishes he put a better stab at it. The first theory of autonomy is pretty good, I think. You might turn to the Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah for a better definition.

I agree with Nietzche though, and even though it is mutually exclusive with Kant's theories, I sympathize with Kant. Kant says we need to pose freedom in order to pursue morality. Nietzche says we need to be responsible in the moment. Ascribing blame and punishment is not being responsible in the way that Nietzche knows we should be.

Wikipedia tells you what truth is: will you listen?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth

Existentialism's Demon

The Existentialist Demon is Postmodernist Commentary-ism.

1) One of the goals of existentialist thought is to get you to live your life as you are living it.

Our Law of Identity reads like this:

x = x


Such that if you want to live your life, you have to live your life. If you want to be happy, you have to be happy.

This is part of the reason Sartre said, "Existence precedes Essence." This simply means you exist before you figure out how you function.

There is no God or moral hierarchy to tell you how to live your life. Before, when everyone believed in God, they basically thought you had a designed function, much in the way that scissors are designed to cut or cars are designed to drive.

I think one of the ideas here is if you want to know how to live your life, you actually have to live. You have to experience life in the moment and create life in the moment because there is no other time that it could be created. You create your originality right now. You live your life right now.

Let's play hopscotch a bit with Philosophy Through the ages. Nietzche says that we do not have free will because free will ascribes reasons for punishing people. But Nietzche still thinks we have to be responsible. Feuerbach believes in the divinity of the moment as people simply live their lives. Divinity is living to Feuerbach. Meanwhile, about a hundred years back, Spinoza cryptically posited this as he Naturalized God or Deified Nature (the words Deus sive Natura appear in some of his letters: God or Nature). People like Roger Scruton in his easy-reader Spinoza think that Spinoza was trying to say something like Feuerbach with the attributes, which are two interpretations of living (Scruton specifically notes music: you can see it as sound waves, or you can see it as melody, both are correct). Finally, Schopenhauer says that you can escape The Will by listening to music and living a very Ascetic life (where you give up your possessions and want of possessions).


2) The Demon

We know better because of Postmodernism. Look at the structures. These philosophers are saying something to the extent that you can simply live life.

Can life simply be lead?

The problem is that the commentaries themselves are part of life. Every time you make a commentary, you cannot separate such commentary from life.

In the case of music, for example, you could not separate listening to the melody and considering its physics structure. The two are inseparable.

Or consider the critic who gets joy from critiquing movies: such is the raw power of life. Consider a chemist who has fun playing with chemicals. At what point can we divide the commentaries of life with the joys of living it?

This, right now, my writing and your reading, is this the joy of life, just reading it? There's this uncontrollable aspect to it all. There is no division between the originality of the moment and the commentary on the originality of this moment because that moment will be gone, too. Which was original? They both were. Which was divine? All of it. How can you escape the Will and realize the divinity of life as compared to the un-divine? You can't.

Some Useful Tautologies

a(a b) b

(a b)(b) a

b((a) (b)) (a)

(a b)(b c) (a c)

(a b) ((b) (a))

a (b a)

(a) (a b)

(a b)((a) b) b

(a b)(a (b)) (a)

ab a

abc bc

I got them from here


http://www.informatik.htw-dresden.de/~nestleri/logic/08/kurb_e3.htm

Discussing the Last Post's Article

Why Obama is right: In this blog, the question of healthy rhetoric is posed. The cool thing about positivity and positive rhetoric is the extent of the performative truth and placebo effect.

Not to mention positive rhetoric empowers people. When people feel powerful, they work better.

In other words, truth is created, and also flows into other stuff. This is Existentialism at its finest.

Another Existentialist riff (riff is a rock guitar pattern) going on here is if you prime yourself to see something some way, to some extent you will see it that way. Consider our Pragmatic Maxim a couple of posts back which says that our conception of something is included in that thing.

This is exactly where our "Can you think of a thought you haven't had?" stuff comes in. If you prepare yourself to see issues in black and white, yes or no, you are going to see more issues in terms of black and white, and yes and no.

Obama is exactly right to consider this world as a complicated place because it is complicated.

On the other hand, issues do not always come down to two options. This proposition seems silly even writing it. The Analytic School of philosophy even allows for different systems of truth (Dialethism is I think what it's called).

There are not two choices for every problem. The reason that we think there are two choices is complicated. Off the top of my head, I think the fact that we have 2 parties in power in the United States, is one reason. Another reason is the polarizing effect that Lobbies and constituents have on government and politicians.

There's something about the availability heuristic: we only notice the fundamentalist positions. Giving out condoms seems way less controversial than killing babies (Pro-Lifers) versus sending doctors to jail (Pro-Choicers). Take gun rules: getting rid of assault weapons is sort of inconsequential compared to altering the Constitution (pro-Gun activists) or giving guns to children (anti-Gun activists).

This speaks to, I think, human nature as well. Some of us can just have one cookie; and perhaps see the complete tree branch diagram of every yes or no choice every time they have that one cookie.

first cookie y/n (if yes go on to second choice)
second cookie y/n (if yes go on to third choice)
third cookie y/n (if yes go on to fourth cookie)

After Gretchen Rubin, I recognize that some of us are Moderators and some of us are Abstainers. Some of us need to give up cookies all together, and some of us need to moderate our intake. (Still others of us have no problems at all, but they are beside the point for moral restraint).

In other words, Freedom and Autonomy are complex things.


Why Obama is wrong:
Sometimes these aren't false choices.

In the article it says that Obama is obscuring discussion using a Straw Man argument.

A straw man could have easily come from the 3 pigs and the Wolf Story, where the Wolf can easily blow the straw house down, but has a hard time blowing that brick house down.

In other words, just like the straw house, the straw man argument is a weaker version of the counterargument.

So for example, if Obama wants to defend himself against Anti-troop surge in Afghanistan, he might say something like, "It's a false choice to have America choose between security and freedom." Well beg pardon, Professor, but you just completely distracted us from the real issue, of whether the troop surge is right or wrong.

Barack "False Choices" Obama

http://www.slate.com/id/2238074/

Sweet Article!

Pragmatism entails Traditionalism?

Okay, so we've pointed out in the last 3 or 4 posts that the astrological sign Capricorn is known both for pragmatism and traditionalism, both sort of entailed with a motto, "I use."

We pointed out that Simone de Beauvoir (French pronunciation: [simɔn də boˈvwaʀ]) (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986) is not a Pragmatist but rather an existentialist; and Charles Margrave Taylor, CC, GOQ, FRSC (born November 5, 1931) a certifiable traditionalist is really a Scorpio. (Hold the phone: doesn't the Traditionalism always smack of Foundationalism, whereupon Foundationalism is a Scorpio trait?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Beauvoir
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taylor_%28philosopher%29

On the other hand, we have shown the two greatest American Pragmatist Philosophers, Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705^[1]] – April 17, 1790) and William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910), are also Capricorns.

I said to Rick, "Shouldn't Descartes be the poster child for Dualism (Gemini) or Foundationalism (Scorpio)?"

Rick said, "Would Descartes think of himself as a Dualist?"


But again the spirit of all of this is to tell the story of the philosophers and to explore where they fit and do not fit into these stories. In this way it's just as important to see how these do not fit into the story.

I think Pragmatism entails a sort of Traditionalism because the motto of "Whatever works" is necessarily past-dependent. Contrast this with a speculative philosophy, based on what has not happened or the boundaries of experience. Pragmatism necessarily functions based on the past.


Pragmatism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism


But John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) is a libra-scorpio; and Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced /ˈpɜrs/ purse^[1]) (September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) is a virgo.



Here's what Wikipedia says about Pragmatism:

Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that includes those who claim that an ideology or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily, that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected. Pragmatism began in the late nineteenth century with Charles Sanders Peirce and his pragmatic maxim. Through the early twentieth-century it was developed further in the works of William James, John Dewey and—in a more unorthodox manner—by George Santayana. Other important aspects of pragmatism include anti-Cartesianism, radical empiricism, instrumentalism, anti-realism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, a denial of the fact-value distinction, a high regard for science, and fallibilism.

Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention from the 1960s on when a new analytic school of philosophy (W. V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars) put forth a revised pragmatism criticizing the logical positivism dominant in the United States and Britain since the 1930s. Richard Rorty further developed and widely publicized the concept of naturalized epistemology; his later work grew closer to continental philosophy and is considered relativistic by its critics.

Contemporary pragmatism is divided into a strict analytic tradition, a more relativistic strand (in the wake of Rorty), and "neo-classical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey.

Here's the old Pragmatic Maxim by Peirce (also from Wikipedia):

The pragmatic maxim, also known as the maxim of pragmatism or the maxim of pragmaticism, is a maxim of logic formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce. Serving as a normative recommendation or a regulative principle in the normative science of logic, its function is to guide the conduct of thought toward the achievement of its purpose, advising on an optimal way of "attaining clearness of apprehension". Here is its original 1878 statement in English^[1] when it was not yet named:

It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

(Peirce on p. 293 of "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", Popular Science Monthly, v. 12, pp. 286–302. Reprinted widely, including Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (CP) v. 5, paragraphs 388–410.)

"Whatever works."
"If it's true, it's useful; if it's useful it's true."

More on the Philosophy of the Zodiac (Round 2)

Flashback from last time:


There are dozens of ways to break down or combine the signs; for one, Virgo is represented by Athena as a war-goddess emphasizing strategies; versus Aries is represented by Aries the war god emphasizing total war. There are lots of combinations, conglomerations and common places for the signs. Some of the broader ones are Quality; Phase; and another is polarity (masculine and feminine signs).

There's a bit of hopscotch about each of these matches around the wheel of the year; fore instance Aries is a Fire sign, and x amount of months later it's Leo, add that same number x to Leo's months and you get Sagittarius, and then x amount of months and back to Aries.

Starsky and Cox identify quadrants as another one of these identifiers. Quote, "The zodiacal quadrants correspond to the metaphysical planes of existence--physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual." The first group of 3 is Aries, Taurus, and Gemini (Physical), next is Cancer, Leo, Virgo (Emotional), Scorpio, Libra, and Sagittarius (Mental), and Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces (Spiritual).

Every time you hit the third one, it's supposed to be a combination or arbitration between the two previous stories.

So Gemini is both Push (Aries) and Pull (Taurus) in its Duality modus operandi.
Virgo is both Intuition-Sensitivity (Cancer) and Discipline-Logical Analysis (Leo) in Applying Fairness in its modus operandi.
Sagittarius is both Foundationalism and Exposing Mysteries (Scorpio) and Higher Civilization and Aesthetics (Libra) in its synthesis modus operandi.
Pisces is both Tradition-Pragmatism (Capricorn) and Invention-Newness (Aquarius) in applying the Dao to its modus operandi.

Hope and Change: The Placebo, the American Humbug and Lacks thereof

I know Heroes, the heroic ideal, Nietzche and fun thinkning about all of these things. I was thinking yesterday about my heroes. Who are they? Have I selected the best when I select my heroes?

I've been going around this semester saying, "When I speak to you, I speak to the highest nature of you. I speak to what is best in you. This isn't necessarily spiritual. You know when you are doing your best."

I got this from Dale Carnegie's How to Make Friends and Influence People.

I'm interested in Dale Carnegie because he was born on my birthday and he was wildly successful.

I'm also interested in Carnegie's work in this Age of Obama because the man basically man something from nothing, creatio ex nihilo, with his concepts of granting courage to people.

This is charlatanism, that criminal act of selling something that is more hype than useable product. But who can tell the difference and how?

I read the book, I found it at the Natural Resources Library in the Interlibrary Loan shelf and the person who had ordered it never picked it up.

I like the Obama rhetoric. For those of you who haven't read How to Make Friends and Influence people, he gives about 10 pieces of advice, poses them as chapters. The chapters are comprised of cracker jack 1920's (I think it was published in the 30's) anecdotes, about 3 or 4 sentences long, of how people changed their lives using these techniques.

According to the wikipedia page, Carnegie was one of the first to launch the self-help craze. This reminds me of course of the DIY do it yourself craze, or the New York Times Magazine article Chronicling Spirituality-Self Help Guru Louisa Hay; of Hay House publishing. Hay was able to unite the spirituality craze with self-help, which has made her millions. Among her writers include Suze Orman and Wayne Dwyer, both of whom my mother has read.

My mother and I have also read books by Eckart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey. A couple of weeks ago I attended a lecture by August Turak; and two years ago my mother and I went to a spirituality lecture with less-well known Gregg Unterberger.

The best and most substantive is certainly Tolle, and I very much like Winfrey. In fact, I like Carnegie, too. The reason, and I don't think I've said this before, is that Carnegie was born on my birthday. The other reason is that I think there is some substance to what he was saying.

One of his tips? Speak to people's higher natures.

But that leads us back to the question: when are people not acting from their higher natures? Why should I have to tell people to act from their higher natures? What's the difference between our higher natures and our lower natures? Is it possible to ask to speak to those parts of a person? What would be the point of talking to a higher personality part, as opposed to any other part.

Philosophies of the Zodiac

I am totally nullifying myself from legitimacy here for this blog, but this will be fun. It's not like Facadesaside has that much philosophical clout anyway.

There are 12 signs in the zodiac, signs of astrology, and each of them has a story. I'd like to think of them as philosophies, but the difference between astrology and philosophy is important. These are sort of life-tackling's. How does each sign (conceptually) tackle life? How is this philosophical? How isn't this philosophical?

This isn't my idea; it comes from the fact that Capricorn is known for Pragmatism; the motto of the sign is "I use," and it just so happens that all the signs sort of look like this if you put them that way.

Starsky and Cox in Sextrology say that the Zodiac is a mirror of the Bible, from Genesis (Aries) to the flood (Cancer) to whatever the last part is (Pisces).



Aries - (Creation) Speed and Originality; the creation of life, Oneness
Taurus - (Eden) the Joy of being alive (Epicureanism) & perhaps eastern philosophy, Materialism (I always think of famous Taurus philosopher Karl Marx and his doctrines of Materialism)
Gemini - (Adam and Eve) - Dialectic; Communication, compromise, deals, Dualism
Cancer - (The Flood) - Emotion, Passion, Intuition, thinking here of Leibniz (1 July 1646 [OS: 21 June] – 14 November 1716) who's philosophy's reassured people with God's existence; Cancer is also associated with women in general, thus Feminism and women's studies go here
Leo - Analytic logic, (Thinking here especially of Hilary Putnam born July 31, 1926, famous Leo Analytic Philosopher)
Virgo - Dialectic Materialism (I know this is a Marxist Doctrine, but think like famous Virgo philosopher George Wilhelm Fredric Hegel (?) and his Dialectic), alchemical change, "earning" philosophy and paying dues (although I'm not sure what system of thought this exactly corresponds to); don't ask me why, but Virgos are also known for Ethics
Libra - Higher thought, civilization; Starsky and Cox link this to Nietzche's (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) concept of the Apollonian coming from Apollo the Greek God of the sun; Aesthetics, philosophy of the Forms is especially pertinent, so Plato and the Rationalists like Kant, Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza are over here.
Scorpio - Foundationalism, Discovery, mystery, the unknown, sixth senses, Exploration, power struggles (20th century political philosopher Robert Nozick November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002 is known for his work on the individual as a building block for governmental systems).
Sagittarius - group thought and therefore political philosophy, Optimism, Synthesis, American Transcendentalism, Romanticism; Starsky and Cox liken the Sagittarius to Nietzche's Dionysian, Existentialism, and also Integration, probably most visible (the only visible) Sagittarius philosopher being Noam Chomsky (December 7, 1928 ); but Voltaire sort of counts because of the intelligent humor he wrote with (November 21, 1694 – May 30, 1778), even though he's right on the line with Scorpio.
Capricorn - the sign that got me on this kick, Pragmatism (Benjamin Franklin's (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705^[1]] – April 17, 1790) philosophy of whatever works and of course William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910)), contentedness and therefore self control, Golden Age rhetoric, Stoicism
Aquarius - invention, mutation, originality, Stoicism (I know I put this twice) John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) practically invented Modern Political Philosophy with his viewpoints on Egalitarianism.
Pisces - Philosophy of Religion, German Idealism, Phenomenalism and Classic Idealism a pretty good representative might be George Berkeley (12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753).

There are dozens of ways to break down or combine the signs; for one, Virgo is represented by Athena as a war-goddess emphasizing strategies; versus Aries is represented by Aries the war god emphasizing total war. There are lots of combinations, conglomerations and common places for the signs. Some of the broader ones are Quality; Phase; and another is polarity (masculine and feminine signs).

There's a bit of hopscotch about each of these matches around the wheel of the year; fore instance Aries is a Fire sign, and x amount of months later it's Leo, add that same number x to Leo's months and you get Sagittarius, and then x amount of months and back to Aries.

Starsky and Cox identify quadrants as another one of these identifiers. Quote, "The zodiacal quadrants correspond to the metaphysical planes of existence--physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual." The first group of 3 is Aries, Taurus, and Gemini (Physical), next is Cancer, Leo, Virgo (Emotional), Scorpio, Libra, and Sagittarius (Mental), and Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces (Spiritual).

Some philosophers and how they do and do not apply:

Shouldn't Descartes (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650), by such a list, be the poster child for (mind-body) Dualism or Foundationalism, and therefore be a Gemini or a Scorpio, respectfully, (and not an Aries)?

Shouldn't Charles Taylor, known for his Golden Age rhetoric, be a Capricorn and not a Scorpio, as he is?

Thomas Hobbes 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679 is an Aries, but he's always talking about Materialism, which is supposed to be a Taurus quality.

Nietzche's a Libra, and his philosophy talks about the Apollonian; so why does his philosophy more closely resemble the Romanticism, Existentialism, and Transcendentalism of the Sagittarius?

Spinoza is known for Monism, the philosophy of Oneness. But really he's a Sagittarius. Shouldn't that make him an Aries?

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (May 19, 1762 – January 27, 1814), Bertrand Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) and John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873)are Taurus-Geminis, but their philosophies are not anything alike; since Mill only wrote about Political Philosophy and Russell only wrote about Political philosophy later in life, he was mostly a philosopher of mathematics. Fichte did rally for the concept of the German state, however.

Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) is known for his cool analysis, but he's a Cancer, or at least a Gemini-Cancer. Shouldn't he be a Leo?

Born four days prior Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) seems like a poster child for Sagittarius existentialism. He's not. He's a Cancer-Gemini, too.

But his philosopher peer Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986) was a Capricorn-existentialist, not a pragmatic philosopher like we would think.

Don't even get me started on Taurus David Hume (7 May 1711 [26 April O.S.] – 25 August 1776) versus Aries-Taurus Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804). Did these guys match any of the zodiac's philosophy?

Jean Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, 28 June 1712 – Ermenonville, 2 July 1778) was a political philosopher, but of course he's a Cancer by zodiac.

Beginnings and the Cosmological Argument

Of the stuff that's purely conceptual, beginnings and endings might be more on the conceptual side, and perpetually up for debate.

Events sort of morph into other Events, and Eckart Tolle says there is only circumstantial evidence for time.

There are sparks and there are the straws that break the camels back, but the events that led up to those happenings are indeed hard to place.


The position that the world must have a starter of causes, the chain of cause and effect, is called the Cosmological Argument. Aristotle originally thought of this idea as The Unmoved Mover from this basic thought experiment that

the Unmoved Mover Argument

Premise 1)If stuff causes other stuff
Premise 2) the Chain had to start somewhere
Conclusion 3) Therefore, there must have been an original cause that was not itself caused (the Unmoved Mover)


One of the medievals, Saint Augustine and Saint Aquinas, and it was probably Aquinas, used Aristotle for, you guessed it, a proof of God's existence. Note that above the Unmoved M0ver does not have to necessarily be God per se, we Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions just so happen to be looking for such a thing.

3 Takes on the Cosmo-Argument:

1) John Locke Uses this in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding
2) Spinoza kind of alludes to this using the principles of Sufficient Reason, but his proofs for God are ontological (Existence necessitates Essence, argument from definition); and of course because Leibniz subscribes to the principle of Sufficient Reason, so does he
3) Rabbi Herman two years brought this up. I was furious.

Kant, as per usual, beats them all by saying the Cosmological Argument is an Antinomy.

Here's the gist of the antninomy: we can't know of a first cause because there might be a cause before that. Consider the big bang argument: people say that the universe came from sands slapping against each other. But where did the sand come from in order to slap together.

If there is a Creator God, it might have been created by something else; and there's no fine print here against saying that something might have many causes. The cosmological argument is staked on the fact that we might see causality as only a linear chain, whereas you might see it as a funnel or a 3 dimensional design in your head.

Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation

(Conceptual) Success (Digression: But isn't all success conceptual?):

I can't remember if I've written in my world my theory that this world is a meritocracy.

By this I mean that the world rewards (merits) and grants advantages to those who would work hard.

This is what the American ideal of success is: that those who work hard will be rewarded (merited) for their efforts.

I make the distinction between a more man-made merit system, which has to do with recognition, and another more individual-based, or non-recognition based success.

Perhaps an example would help. Consider a bureaucratic conglomerate of people and a person who is promoted. She could only be promoted in this way by the recognition of a "higher up". Her success is predicated on the fact that she did something, that it was recognizable, and somebody(s) actually recognized it. The promotion is thus a merit (reward) for working hard.

The hitch is comes when people are not recognized, and they are not promoted-rewarded-merited for their hard work and actions.

Ready for the switch?

I believe that to some extent, people who work hard will be rewarded for working hard with or without the corporate recognition.

This looks like the person who does a good job, enough to triumph over competitors. I consider a more naturalistic environment: inventing the invention (re: using the wheel, fire, or another primitive invention) was the reward itself. In this way, the world rewarded the success. The promotion was using fire, using the wheel, and other primitive inventions.

Of course, to be in a bureaucratic position in as a situation means that we're a little bit removed from such a system. Which leads us to...

The caveat:
People are not always rewarded in the way they need to be rewarded by nature for their actions. Even if the actions the person takes are the correct ones, and the right ones, that doesn't mean that the person will be merited in the way that they want to be merited, need to be recognized.
Say for example you come up with electric cars when there is no gas crisis, in the way that people have been doing since the invention of the car.

A lot of times a long term investment means sort of committing to the fact that you won't get paid back immediately. In fact I think this is somewhere to the heart of the matter.


Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation, the philosophy of Attributes, and Isaiah Berlin's Two Liberties:

Intrinsic motivation is that motivation which comes from the self. That is, the individual self. The common illustrative examples are the motivation to play games and have fun.

What's the big motivation to play frisbee? Playing frisbee. What's the big motivation for going on dates with beautiful people? Going on dates with beautiful people. What's the big motivation for solving a math problem? A lot of times (gasp) it's just solving the problem.

Intrinsic motivation (intrinsic meaning internal) is contrasted and immediately defined opposite Extrinsic motivation, which is simply motivation that does not come from the individual.

Extrinsic motivation might therefore be getting an A + for that math problem, being paid to do a job, getting a punch-in-the-face "pain reward" if you're into masochism, and basically rewards that are not necessarily for being in the act of doing it, but rather from doing it. They are one step removed.

This is remarkably parallel to seminal political Philosophy work Two Theories of Liberty by Isaiah Berlin, which says that negative liberty is freedom from coercion, while positive liberty is freedom to do something. Berlin argues that we should emphasize legislating negative freedom, because positive freedom is really hard to legislate (being so ambiguous and all).

What's the biggest problem with Berlin's theory and how does it apply to intrinsic-extrinsic motivation?

The biggest problem with Berlin's theory is that it is really hard to legislate the difference between positive and negative liberty.

I ask, with this spirit of Berlin criticism in mind, is it so easy to draw the line between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation?

The conflict:

In an experiment on Chimpanzees, which is (semi) famous and I got out of James Kalat's introduction to Psychology book, chimpanzees were given a toy wood block-puzzle to open and close. They opened and closed the puzzle with glee. This is a representation of intrinsic motivation.

In subsequent trials, the scientists put a raisin in the puzzle, which the chimpanzees opened and therefore found a reward for what they had done. Following this, the chimpanzees were less enthusiastic about solving the toy wood block-puzzle.

The point: Intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation decreases intrinsic motivation.

My Isaiah Berlin-Criticism's Criticism: How could you tell the difference? At which point was it intrinsic motivation, and at which point was it extrinsic motivation and how do we know that one caused the other to fail, or succeed.

Isn't it intrinsic motivation to work towards a goal that is still one step removed?


Support for the Caveat to the Chimp problem:

Warren Buffett is said to have rewarded his children by paying for them to clean their rooms.

I also have a business consultant friend who rewards his children by paying them for completing chores. (Intrinsic motivation psychologists: where's the joy in doing chores anyway? Mary Poppins calling, certainly).


Hedonism is self-fulfilling, anyway, to some extent. This is part of our rouge theory of attributes; that thought is the feeling of hearing music playing, whereas extension might be the vibrations of the strings, the compression of the sound waves, the written notation of music, and the friction between the rosin, the bow, and the string.

Comic Book Philosophy (Part 3)

Those interested in this blog entry will be interested in the other two superhero facadesaside posts (Parts 1 and 2). One was on the nature of parallel and opposite enemies versus superheroes, and the other was about the Hobgoblin.

By the way (three posts ago) my friend Rick loves the Joker as shown in Batman: The Dark Knight. He's a Hegelian. He's the reason I took my 19th century philosophy course this semester, and he likes the Joker because there has to be action taken.

An Aside About 2Face:

That's where, so to speak, facades must be put aside if they are there. In the movie the commissioner and the Batman try to eschew their roles (the role of Batman? I want you to think about these questions) and rally behind a new district attorney, Harvey Dent who later becomes Two Face.

This plot (I agree with Denby that the movie itself doesn't really help out here, the plot only really implies some emotional depth) gives two face more credit than he deserves. In the comic book, which I haven't read enough of, and the early 1990's cult classic cartoon show, Two Face was a 2-Dimensional character, and always did the same thing. He chains up Batman on a giant quarter (with two faces, get it?) and roles him down a hill or something.

Now, Two Face needs a coin to make decisions. He is grossly superstitious and, ahem, does not believe in his own free will. In the cartoon show, they point to Harvey Dent actually being superstitious before the accident where he loses half of his face.

So there's this thing about Free Will and superstition. By foiling Batman with a character who is indecisive and immoral (when the coin lands down, he'll murder someone, rob a bank, and so on) because of outside and external happenings; it reveals that Batman himself has such a choice and uses such a choice. So it's this really cool thing about freedom and morality going on.

Generally speaking, this is the big character flaw for Dent-2Face; in addition to this moral conundrum. It's a pragmatic problem, too. For example, when he has Batman rolling down the hill on the quarter, he'll flip a coin and the coin will make him untie batman. This, too, has a neat take home message.

Of course, this is an eternal message that you could do pretty good with. Just as easily, the message could get in a quagmire, or the message could fall prey to overemphasizing the characters, or overemphasizing the plot.

For example, this was completely glossed over in the movie.


Why Rick Loves the Joker:

Considering the foil-aspect, the Joker is Batman's foil in the way that Batman represents restraint, positive proactive established justice, and on and on; all with the "serious" demeanor of doing so. There's established order versus anarchy. The many levels and facets of the relationship are part of what make it enduring. The Joker represents the opposite of Batman so many ways. I think we could break this down into free will, too. Pay attention: we don't want the "free" will of Joker anyway, in the way that such a will would be overly spontaneous; or overly corrupt. Because it's a shoddy free will, it is undesirable.

My friend Rick loves the Joker because Joker is applicable to Hegelian dialectic. Rick says at the point where the Joker comes in and raises chaos, he either has to be answered or he will do whatever he wants. He is pure chaos.

This is a take it or leave it, trial by fire situation, then. This is because when these two forces of Batman and the Joker collide, there has to be one winner or the other will be revealed to be a facade.

When discussing this with my friend Rick, I found myself alarmed. I said to Robert that it is okay for a comic book to have such a moral lesson, but it is alarming to position this to real life. I said that while maybe this is the scenario, we should not have to posit evil in order to assert standards. We do not "need" evil in the way that the Joker "needs" Batman. It makes the story interesting, certainly, but it is a crude misunderstanding to believe that we need this in non-comic book life.

This is only part of what my friend was saying, however. While I realize that my moral impression is pertinent, I think that Rick's criticism needs exploration.

Thought terminating cliche:

I'm out of gas! End

It's impossible

To say, "I'm here write now" and be lying.

Pretty cool, no?

German Idealists: Georg Hegel

So the one philosopher who I've read the least-of-but-still-talk-about-the-most is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who you can meet personally at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegel

and of course at

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/


Why is this guy the guy? Well for one thing, he liked my guys Kant and Spinoza, both of whom I have done a modest amount of work about. Remember, the namesake of this blog is Immanuel Kant, who believed all we can know are appearances.

In fact, Hegel thought that he was completing the Kantian system with his more thorough, rigorous system.

What's the big deal about the Hegelian system?

I don't know, and it would be pretense, facade, and hypocrisy to say that I do know.

I can take one limited educated guess, though. One of the reasons Hegel is popular is because of Hegelian Dialectic.

We've gone over Dialectic quite a bit in reference to the Socratic Dialogues, which were Plato's way of communicating ethics (one of the testimonies to their power is their survival: they're over 2000 years old). Dialectic in the traditional-ancient sense is basically the revealing of some truth from discussion, dialogue. Dialogue would become substantial for the Moderns' communication of their moral discussions, too; this includes David Hume, George Berkeley (I remember the 3 Dialogues characters Hylas and Philonous), and Gottfried Leibniz; among others.

Judaism also has its own dialogue called Talmudic Dialectic (again I'm citing wikipedia; Jewish Facadesaside readers, Religious studies majors, or those interested might just as easily look at the Talmud, Mishnah, and so on). Talmudic Dialectic is conflicting dialogues by intelligent authorities in the Jewish Religion committed to the pages of the important works, such as the Talmud. So for instance, if you open a page of the Talmud, you might see one author comment on the primary source, then another author commenting on that author, and then another author commenting on that author.

(Big Digression: One time, looking at the Talmud with my Rabbi, he said that it was like hypertexting in the internet; even bringing out a book that compared the Talmud to the internet; which furthered my hypothesis that Hebrew itself was like the internet. I haven't written any papers on this yet, but it makes sense: for the longest time, only those polyglots who could speak mutiple languages would be able to cut the mustard of thousands of years of texts; all of which were important. This is the big reason why Latin was forced down the throats of the students back then. This was also the big reason why Latin was the language used by Academia for people like Spinoza, Leibniz (a little bit, he also used German and French, which was the slightest bit audacious at the time) and Descartes all wrote in Latin. The fact that Hebrew and Latin were like the internet is most likely the reason Spinoza was in the middle of writing a practical guide for Hebrew at the time he died; considering that he was a Pantheist and was brutally kicked out of the Jewish community, without any remorse on his part.)

Back to Hegel: what's the big deal? Hegel was a three dimensional philosopher in any of the best ways you can stretch that metaphor. There was something substantial about his metaphysics if you will pardon the philosophy joke.

But he also realized that Kant's Categories, the most important of which include substance and causality; should be dynamic; that is, ever-changing.

What did this mean? Again, I'm not offering too much pretense here, but I think it's Hegelian Dialectic.

Okay, we defined Dialectic upstairs of this blog entry as discussion which reveals a greater moral or a series of greater morals (hopefully all having to do with each other).

Hegelian Dialectic is when two things conflict and converge, but this time instead of revealing a moral truth, they synthesize into something greater. The defeated side actually absorbs into the victor. The victor therein has elements of the defeated in the synthesis. It looks like half of the March Madness bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament. (That too, like just about everything, is interpret-able by Hegelian Dialectic).

Hegel applies this everywhere, in a whole bunch of scenarios. You can, too. It's that fun and easy. Friedrich Nietzche hijacks this philosophy for his will to power theory; and Karl Marx of course hijacks it for Marxist dialectic.

Hegel had a master and slave dialectic whereupon the master uses the slave, but her reliance on the slave makes her weak. Once the slave realizes this, she rebels against the master and becomes the master herself. Cool! Of course, it's a little more complicated than that.

Hegel also applied this to substance-metaphysics: the concept of nothing versus the concept of something produces becoming (hence the dynamic categories).

There's other applications of Hegelian dialectics; and this concept is one of the greater unities of his entire work.

One of the most important implications of this theory is recognition. This would be influential on political philosophers such as Charles Taylor and philosophers of the self.


Hegelian Dialectic and Nostalgia:

Take for instance nostalgia, which is actually what brought on this entire diatribe. Hegel would have you missing something, sure. But when you're missing it, it's not simply you in the past or you in the present. It's you considering the past and recognizing the past. You couldn't do it without the recognition of the past. You couldn't miss something outside of the present, but you couldn't miss something unless you had experienced it then (and it was in the present then), and you probably wouldn't be missing it if you have it in the present.

Here's my triangle, but you can sketch your own on paper if you disagree:

past
present
recognition

You, right now: thinking of something or experiencing something, but not having it or doing it
You, back then: having something or doing something
You a couple of seconds after right now: missing something


Remember, the dynamic nature of this stuff doesn't exactly look this way.

It looks more like


the past \ __combine into_________> recognition of the past in the present
present./ ---------------------------->


Nevertheless, you could not experience missing something unless you had that something in the past or did that something in the past. Furthermore, you could not miss something actively in the past, and the only time you could miss something actively is in the present. Sure, we have missed stuff in the past, but we cannot actively miss something without being in the present. We cannot do anything outside of the present.

But there's something sinister about missing stuff, call it the treachery of memory after Magritte's treachery of images series, which we have talked to death about. But nostalgia and sentimentality lay a treacherous trap: they are necessarily in the past and can only be "regarded" as such.

David Denby's Past Shock

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/07/21/080721crci_cinema_denby?currentPage=2



Time Capsule: This, a year after it came out, is David Denby's criticism of the enormously popular Batman: The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight itself will vanish with enough time because everything does. But the backdrop of morality behind it is something more important, if not more lasting.

Reading Appiah's The Ethics of Identity, the author reminds me we are constantly building our identities; and of the various places we take our identities from, movies are one of them. We tell the narrative stories of our lives and we look for them for ideas for building our identities.

Moreover, watching movies is fun! For me, I like reading the reviews, too, often times without even seeing the movies themselves. I like the joy of knowing without actually doing the immersion of seeing the movie (and to some extent giving myself to a movie). So sometimes I'll read the review and later go to that movie; and other times I'll read the review after I see the movie.

I read this one before I saw it the first time. I can't remember if I had seen Wall-E at the time, but that review matches the movie and really isn't that controversial. (By the way, Denby defends the movie against other critics who think Wall-E attacks the American way of life; but come on, who could hate Wall-E? Except I didn't like how it used the 1980's movie short circuit as inspiration for creating the robot Wall-E himself...Denby also champions Wall-E about morals while knocking The Dark Knight for missing out on its own morals.....hmmmm).

I ended up seeing the Dark Knight twice. It's a long movie, and like Denby says, it's violent. One guy does have a bomb sewn into his stomach, but I didn't think it was that violent physically. I thought it was violent emotionally. Denby also recognizes Ledger's performance as brilliant, and I agreed both times. I remember being enthralled by the way that the Joker has two different stories for why he has the "smile" scars (which I much later found out are common among some gangs). In the movie, he says that his wife killed herself at the party, and that he had an abusive dad; and my point is that they are obviously contradicting and so it's a good show that he's a psychopath.


What was Denby's big problem with this movie? Denby seems to put up all of which he knocks down: the killer performance by Ledger sort of ties with Denby's bitching about Christian Bale; the soundtrack is too intense; the intensity of the movie is one huge climax; only half of the actors can act the movie appropriately; and that the plot moves abruptly. But these, especially in a thriller, would usually be triumphs (on the Wikipedia page, it says Ebert gave this a rave review). You could check out Denby's positive review of the much less acclaimed Will Smith movie "Hancock" which was another summer superhero movie which he wrote a couple of weeks before, which has stark contrast at least to the ambition of the Dark Knight script.

I think Denby's ultimate conclusion about the movie that

"The Dark Knight” has been made in a time of terror, but it’s not fighting terror; it’s embracing and unleashing it—while making sure, with proper calculation, to set up the next installment of the corporate franchise."

is the really important point for Denby. This movie has morals, but these morals are corrupt. Denby says that this movie is a hyperviolent spectacle, and he's worried about the ramifications for our culture. He poses the Wall-E movie as a morally on-level movie.

I also use another magazine, n+1, (which is a sister magazine to the New Yorker; some of the writers from the New Yorker also write for n+1); which had a big argument that wrote something similar, if not on the exact same train of thought as Denby. The n+1 article, and I'm sorry but I don't remember the author's name, said that the Dark Knight actually encourages the war on terror, and takes the neoconservative standpoint; and I don't know if that's exactly right.

Thought terminating cliche (people new to this blog: look it up on the search bar): There's a fortune cookie that said "It's a good thing that life isn't as serious as it seems to the waiter." I can't help but be thankful that not all of our identities come from the movie; but also that maybe it's just cool to watch the movie and not have to think too hard about all this stuff (at least as I'm watching it).

Thing about Baby Logic

Thing about baby logic is I'm always thinking: this is so boring, not fun, and so on.

And then; everyone around me is having fun. Everyone loves symbolic logic and on and on.

The Law of Identity and the Law of Substitution

I'm absolutely fascinated by motivation. What motivates me to be fascinated by motivation? I like the idea of power surrounding it.

Je te presente The Philosophical Law of Identity.

The Law of Identity states we can identify something; and substitute it in later. This is cooler than it sounds.

The Law of Identity gets expressed basically as x = x, or other inane obvious ways. But this stuff is more subtle and interesting than that.

Check out this philosophical classic by Bertrand Russell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Denoting


If I told you that gravity is bodies being attracted to a larger body; and that bodies being attracted to a larger body is gravity; You would say, "Bum rap! That's a terrible answer!"

But in order to give any truthful answer ever, you would have to have an answer that is a true proposition. I know this could be explained better but I'm going to let you chew on that.

And sometimes it can be good to identify something as is. There is some strength in saying an apple = an apple; or x = x


The Law of Identity is closely related to, and this is going to sound heartbreakingly obvious, The Law of Substitution.

For example, in a basic informal proof, we could say that x = (y+z). Then every time we have an x, we can get y+z. This is akin to the point in the Harry Potter movies where he learns to raise his wand and turn an apple into a goat. But even cooler!


The big guy for all of this, again, is Gottfried Leibniz.



Aristotle's big three Logic laws were:

Law of Contradiction (Never P and not P)
Law of Identity (P = P)
Law of Excluded Middle (P or not P)

You look good to me by Oscar Peterson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7xodWzLbCo

Operational Definition of Philosophy, and some problems with Simplification

In this blog we do both academic philosophy and popular "pop" philosophy. In my last post I gave a link to Rosenbaum's pop philosophy article, so I want to talk about pop philosophy a bit.

Operational Definition of Pop (popular) Philosophy: An operational definition of pop philosophy is philosophy which is written with a very large audience in mind, especially to the extent that such philosophical ideas will be simplified.

I'll remind you that Simplification is great, but if we miss out on some relevant material we're in big trouble.

Thusly, popular music includes the Beatles, who write great love songs, but does not necessarily include less instrumentalist and composer Jon Brion. The strength is we get the Beatles on the radio, but the weakness is we do not get Jon Brion on the radio.

Nietzche wants to "do philosophy with a sledgehammer" getting rid of Idols of past heroic philosophers. This hammering is my biggest problem with him as a philosopher. I often joke with Rick, saying that I do not understand all of this stuff but I understand that it is important. He retorts: I understand all of this stuff but I do not understand why it is important. Nietzche himself would not have most of the ideas that he did without reading the classics. He was a professor of Classical Philology; the study of original source texts.

One of the theses played with on this blog, and in my life is, "Everyone is a philosopher, they just may or may not know it." I cite the fact that we use maxims and idioms in order to get through the days. I cite the fact that everyone has to employ some morality in order to assess their goals. Everyone has to make some meaning in order to keep living.

Why can't everyone be a philosopher? Is this an existentialist question? Well basic set theory says we have to denote a group somehow. Intuitively we know that philosophers have a certain number of traits that other people do not.

How is this relevant to our original paragraph; relevant to popular philosophy? I think it's pretty clear that if we are all philosophers then philosophy is pretty popular. Ha! But the reason we scorn pop music, pop psychology, and pop-whatever is because they gloss over some good stuff.

I can't name any really bad music right now, but I certainly can say the Eugenics movement, as it was popular science, was a bad call.


Thought terminating cliche: All of these things are things to think about.

Slate: Rosenbaum on how we haven't solved 3 big mysteries yet

http://www.slate.com/id/2236563/


I really liked this article.

This is "pop" or popular philosophy; which I'll give an operational definition of in the next post.

Some more Philosphical Musings

Wild Philosophy Ideas:


1) Happy people are not more selfish, lazier, or less unimaginative. We could put this in terms of depression in the chemical sense (bipolar, manic depressive and all of the rest); but also in terms of just ordinary happiness and ordinary sadness. I'm using specifically Gretchen Rubin's insights from her Happiness Blog, but also I think I might be using the Dalai Lama's Art of Happiness introduction in that book.

2) Nietzche saw it all as a whirlwind of colors whipping at our faces. He saw objectivity as a facade! He thought so much of human life was hypocrisy and facade. What does this mean? It means ditching philosophers who said this life is not a whirlwind who used that lack of whirlwind as a sense of objectivity. (Would Nietzche have made a shitty scientist? Would it have mattered?)

3) For that matter, Mahatma Gandhi is against hospitals. He said Hospitals weaken the people and that they are not really a sign of civilization. The people get to thinking that they need hospitals in order to be healthy, or that it is natural to extend life in the way that humans do. Both Nietzche and Gandhi (and Nietzche and Deleuze speculate, my main man Spinoza) believe we get into a sort of death worship when we care about death so much through fear. To quote Spinnerzzzza, "Hope and fear are part of the same thing." That is, we get outside ourselves, and into living a sort of third person life, where we're only commenting on the life we're living instead of living it.

4) Marx thought that working can lead to alienation (his concept). Alienation means that the life force that went into making the goods just leaves us.

5) Schopenhauer thought that all of this is THE WILL. I am he as you are he as you are me is all the Will to Schopenhauer. It's just a force. What's this you're reading? The Will. What's the point of all this? The Will.

5b) He thought that you can satisfy the Will, and thus staunch it, by listening to music. Schopenhauer thought that Music is the Best. He was correct in this. Whether this is actual escape from the Will, I cannot say. I don't even know if I believe in the Will.

6) If you want a comprehensive philosophy of empowerment, you don't get much better than Nietzche, which is probably among the reasons why Nietzche is popular with Americans, and young men. Nietzche's philospohy to me feels like, "Shut up and be empowered." or "So what? God is dead. Make up your own." or "There is no free will. Do whatever you want and feel good about it."

7) John Rawls rules. He's the most famous political philosopher outside of John Locke, and he argued for egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is a belief that the most advantaged should help the least advantaged. John Rawls is a hero of many of us young philosophers. He's also awfully recent, and the problems of political philosophy are among the most practically and obviously and readily applicable to life.

8) I agree with my friends. Popular music, the stuff that's on the radio, is philosophically vacant. I like Lady Gaga, but that's the apex of it all, and that's it. There's no greater philosophy in there. (3 years ago's) T-Pain's "I'm in love with a stripper" is a little bit postmodern in that he is being outrageous by saying that, but that's the pressing issue. It's nothing more than that. If you're looking for more behind the lyrics, it's just not there. On the radio now, "Empire State of mind" by Alicia Keyes and Jay Z is the top 100 for the "Billboard" sales chart is the same message as "New York State of mind" by Billy Joel. I like the new one better, but that's arbitrary, at least in terms of philosophy: it's the same idea as some thirty years ago.

Nietzche calling: why should popular music have any greater good or philosophy attached to it?
Marx calling: all artwork is ideological
Schopenhauer: music is our sanctuary, our way out!

9) David Foster Wallace (not a philosopher?) said in his essay about Dostoyevsky (not a philosopher?) in Consider the Lobster said that without Dostoyevsky there would be no Nietzche. Something that DFW says Dostoyevsky realized that Nietzche liked is our love affair with our problems. We aren't ditching them. We aren't working on them. We are just complaining. We are to some extent in love with our suffering.
Modern psychology collates this (I'm quoting from my Industrial Organizational Psychology class); saying that many times people who hate their jobs don't do anything about the jobs or being in the jobs.

10) When I'm having a good moment, sometimes my whole life looks great. When I feel like hell, it feelsl like my whole life has been hell. Perspective means so much. Nietzche formulated Perspectivism, that everything is from a perspective, that perspective cannot be lost and all there is is interpretation.

Gloom doom boom! Wazooo!
Glad Happy Explosion! Hartabokahshoo!!!


I said to my history professor Dr. Ambaras, that this is history for me. This was the last time I was going to see him for this semester. His last test (not a final? He says it's not a final) and his last essay are both entered on line. He cancelled class for Thursday. I said that this is one of the times that we know history is happening.

The Objective-Subjective Nexus Infects Us

I wrote in a Technician article about Performative truths. A performative truth is when performing an action is what makes the truth of the proposition. So when I say, "I now pronounce you man and wife," it means that "the couple is man and wife" is false still after I say it.

But when a Priest says, "I now pronounce you man and wife," it means that the proposition "the couple is man and wife" is true after he said it, and because he said it.

Another example: We give an umpire the authority to say a ball going over is a strike. It's something about his authority that makes it true.

It's a matter of authority, and the authority that we give to people in our society. Philosopher Jamie Whyte has more to say about this, in fact saying that having one's right to her opinion is false and even dangerously wrong. Let's point him out later and maybe retype his argument from the Popular Philosophy Book Crimes Against Logic.

All of this has been said on this blog before. I even said that I got all of this from my philosophy of language class, which wasn't so worthless after all.

My friend Rick says that Performatives existed before the Analytic-Continental divide in philosophy; maybe even Kant did them (we know that we have him and Leibniz to thank for all of this proposition garbage).


My big rant here; my insight is this: Performative truths are a Nexus between objectivity and subjectivity. I was saying this in my article and blog posts before this, but I never really caught it in this way.

I've been posting a lot about Spinoza's Attributes (Thought and Extension) and Feuerbach's divinity of Nature (almost identical to Spinoza, but talking and explicating in his own Feuerbachian way).

This is perhaps where the two planes interact. Spinoza thought that thought is parallel to reality, and that the two were too unalike to interact. Some scholars think of this in terms of listening to music and the production of music. Or, you might consider the stream of consciousness as you are feeling it versus the stream of consciousness, as it exists as a billion's billion chemicals popping and whizzing in your brain, right now. These four things are their pair's two things, and that's what Feuerbach and Spinoza have in mind. FOOTNOTE: George Eliot (Female British Novelist and Philosopher) translated both Spinoza and Feuerbach. Coincidence?


Bring it on home: so the point is this: thought, while seeminlgy subjective (and we can talk about this for a while and try to erase all subjectivity, but until we have the neuroscience to say otherwise will have a difficult time fully unlocking; I personally doubt we will ever eliminate subjectivity (but that is only my belief? (meta-humor people stay with me))) has this foothold in the objective world.

On the other hand; if we reduce all of this business to objectivity, in other words see it in terms of x amounts of chemicals firing in the brain and on and on, everything is completely objective. It works just the same way: objectivity has a foothold in the subjective world.

See? I told you Sarah Palin was like Lady Gaga!

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/12/07/091207crbo_books_tanenhaus

A moral question: happiness or maximized utility?

Here is a threaded email discussion I had with my friend Robert, who sometimes appears on this blog under various names.

so: (in fact, I /will/ put it anywhere)

> Why is it
> such a bad thing that the man is beholden to a group, so long as the group
> is justified?
- who justifies the group?

>But put him in front of the they self, have him be both a grass clipper
>and have him feel good and you've won the best thought experiment.
- cf. Eminem

>So long as he did not have any sadness-regret at not curing AIDs. So
>you've got your man who can justify himself to a bunch of AIDs victims;
>but what kind of happiness is that; and what kind of woman is that?
- the Ubermensch kind

> The truth is, and lamentably so, that humans go for immediate hedonism
> regardless; often times even perceived happiness.  The majority of human
> actions continue not because they are the right thing but because there
> was a degree of happiness in them.
- the other lamentable truth is that, once this problem of hedonism is
recognized, actions continue by some other equally arbitrary
justification in place of pleasure/happiness (e.g. that action being
"the logical/reasonable/altruistic/self-determined/factical/etc thing).
I don't mean arbitrary as being arbitrarily chosen, though...more like I
don't see what larger standard could determine which of these smaller
standards is correct (and what determines that larger standard's
standard for correctness? - so can we even talk about a larger
standard??)

I just lost the game.  But I lost the game after I typed 'Best, Robert'
below; so when I inserted this here this wasn't really the point where I
lost the game; I could have put this anywhere.  So that makes for a good
discussion: did you lose the game at the beginning of this email, since I
told you so then?

Best,
Robert




>
>
> Good, it seems blurry between what society commands him and what he
> justifies to society.
>
> That is, however, the essence of the moral imperative, not a distraction
> from it.  There has to be a society to help in order to cure the society
> of AIDs.
>
> Posing a person who asks me what he *should* do, cure AIDs for a career or
> become a grass clipper; the question is a moral imperative.
>
> What should the man do, cure AIDs or cut grass?  The should says it is a
> moral imperative, he should cure AIDs and work toward that.  Why is it
> such a bad thing that the man is beholden to a group, so long as the group
> is justified?  Put him in front of tyrants, and the case seems weighted
> for your point;  Put him in front of AIDs victims, and the case seems
> weighted for mine.
>
> I think the they self is an excellent test of a happy life in this way.
>
> Stick that man in front of a crowd, have him tell the crowd that cutting
> grass was justifiable so great the happiness gained was.  (Is it always an
> either/or?  And you and I would agree certainly grass clipping as a career
> and AIDs solving is not mutually exclusive, a person can be many careers
> over her long life).
>
> But put him in front of the they self, have him be both a grass clipper
> and have him feel good and you've won the best thought experiment.  We
> could even have the option be for him to either cut grass or cure AIDs,
> and I think people would back that;
>
> So long as he did not have any sadness-regret at not curing AIDs. So
> you've got your man who can justify himself to a bunch of AIDs victims;
> but what kind of happiness is that; and what kind of woman is that?
>
> The truth is, and lamentably so, that humans go for immediate hedonism
> regardless; often times even perceived happiness.  The majority of human
> actions continue not because they are the right thing but because there
> was a degree of happiness in them.
>
>
>
>
>
>> glad you had a good time!
>>
>> and quality stuff here.  I especially liked:
>>> So you say, "Well at least he's doing what he wants to do."  But isn't
>>> it
>>> a crude assumption to say that the person who could be happy being a
>>> grass
>>> clipper is our standard of human happiness here?  Living on a lawn,
>>> clipping glass?  Self-fulfillment?
>>
>> and
>>
>>> That is, I think the greater assumption is for the happy grass clipper
>>> than the unhappy AIDs-curer.
>>
>> But what kind of assumption are we talking about here?  My
>> understanding,
>> since you said "disanalagous" a few times, is that the grass-clipper has
>> to make more of an assumption that the potential-AIDS-curer since his
>> place in our culture has to be justified by something when happiness is
>> not a sufficient justification (and that doesn't even have to be because
>> he doesn't know for sure that he's happy, but perhaps just because we're
>> just not satisfied with his justification that he's happy).  If I
>> understand that correctly: to whom is he making this justification, and
>> why to them?  Perhaps, because his culture/nation/age/etc, maybe even
>> the
>> "fact of the world," is dissatisfied with such a decision (or, at least,
>> he feels that way).
>>
>> Mind that distinction I mentioned in class: when we say "one is free to
>> do
>> what he chooses," do we really mean, as "outsiders" looking at that
>> person, "you are free to do what you choose"?  And if so, welcome to
>> Heidegger's they-self, in this case, where freedom is determined by the
>> third person.  It was a nice move, when folks realized that one ought
>> not
>> to lord over another; but that third-person is still quite powerful,
>> here
>> even to the point where it is that third person that establishes what
>> one
>> can and cannot freely do when /it/ proclaims that "one/you can do what
>> one/you want[s]".
>>
>> Best,
>>   Robert
>>
>>
>>> Robert,
>>>
>>>
>>> That was my favorite birthday ever.  Thank you for a great time.
>>>
>>> I kind of feel like if I have to say that it was a great time, I'm
>>> taking
>>> away from the experience.
>>>
>>> Happy Thanksgiving!
>>>
>>>
>>> What I'm more interested in is this one moral issue we got down to in
>>> that
>>> last 15 minutes.
>>>
>>>
>>> Here's the sketch:
>>>
>>> You said that if there is a moral imperative for someone to do
>>> something
>>> as a Calling, a career,  they should not do that if it does not make
>>> them
>>> happy.
>>>
>>> This is almost entirely conceptual, so I think the thought experiment
>>> of
>>> the person who has the cure for AIDs (or the realizable-potential over
>>> the
>>> course of a career) should do that instead of the doing something like
>>> the
>>> grass clipper like in Hinton's class.
>>>
>>> The objection:
>>>
>>> So in this case you said the person should become the grass clipper if
>>> it
>>> makes them happy.  I'll remind you here that happiness is nebulous and
>>> a
>>> conflicted issue.  Happiness in comparison to other potential
>>> happinesses
>>> is not the least of the problems here: this is because it is very
>>> difficult for a person to say "Okay, if I had become a grass clipper
>>> when
>>> I was 20 years old, then all of my life's worries about becoming a
>>> scientist would be over."
>>>
>>> But my greater argument is against the assumption of the philosophy of
>>> happiness; which derives somewhere from the faulty assumptions of the
>>> previous inklings.
>>>
>>> That is, I think the greater assumption is for the happy grass clipper
>>> than the unhappy AIDs-curer.  There's something dis-analogous about the
>>> unhappy AIDs-Curer;  almost especially in light of the comparison with
>>> being a grass clipper.
>>>
>>> So you say, "Well at least he's doing what he wants to do."  But isn't
>>> it
>>> a crude assumption to say that the person who could be happy being a
>>> grass
>>> clipper is our standard of human happiness here?  Living on a lawn,
>>> clipping glass?  Self-fulfillment?  At the very least it's disanalogous
>>> to
>>> the majority of the human race.
>>>
>>> It's a Mill-ian greater hedonism and lesser hedonism problem.
>>>
>>> Which is why, if he asked me what he morally *should* do, I would tell
>>> him
>>> to cure AIDs, maybe for 10 years of his life, see how he feels, and
>>> then
>>> hit my lawn.
>>>
>>>
>>> -jrg
>>>
>>
>>
>
>

Habits, Consciousness, Poetry, and streaming consciousness between it all

I took a (minor) poetry class with my pal Delray, who is cited sometimes on this bloggo. The class was rustic, strange and awkward and it didn't cost us anything. It was taught by Professor Scanlon from Lemoyne University (in Syracuse).

It has been said that modern philosophy is either poetry or grammar. This refers to the analytic/continental divide because analytic goes by grammar and the assessment of language as a portal to real Truth; and continental explores reality in an essay-style. But there's more interchange than that.

Poetry is supercharged language, and people are trying to be honest when they can. Something strange happens, often: when "being honest" people play to the camera. Cue in your favorite memory of bad poetry. Usually we associate bad poetry with the teenager who complains about how terrible her life is. Give me a break! we all say. In psychology, the name of this is the Hawthorne effect, that considering surveillance changes behavior. In other words, you will act differently in front of the camera.

I read a Men's health where they presented this as a good thing. They called this the Awareness effect. It might be said that Eckart Tolle's Spiritual philosophy is merely the Awareness effect applied to life constantly. I just lost The Game. Once you are aware of an effect, you change your behavior about that effect.

What I learned in David Kessler's The End of Overeating, and from subsequent conversations with my friend Mike Bennett, is that we have habits and that many times that's a great thing.

There are things that some instrumental musicians cannot do which jazz musicians can do while improvising. This applies because the jazz musicians are working as a sort of habitual newness. Meanwhile, when the instrumental musician plays, she doesn't think, "this is a note, this is a note, this is a note"; or even "F#, G#, C#," there's a point where consciousness or subconsciousness and habitual consciousness blur.

Same goes for us, when we do something like tie our shoes, we never say in our streams of consciusness, "Bunny goes through the loop," or "Right string over left string," and on and on and on.

Truth Musings

1) Truth can be broken down in mathematical philosophy. We call a proposition true when it is not false.

2) I knew a kid named Truth McDavid (I think his last name was McDavid, and I think his first name was Andre, but I can't remember exactly).

3) Mr. Nietzche says that there is no objective validity to this world; there is only a world in flux. This is why people have to create their own meanings.

4) All the propositions-studying might have originated with Gottfried Leibniz, who systemized logic by studying language; his two big contributions were the Law of Identity (that something is what it is), and the Law of Indiscernibles (if two things are exactly alike in every possible way, they are the same).

5) My dad says that humor is sudden realization of the truth. I don't know if he originally said this.

6) Spinoza was leery of all humor. He thought humor quickly turned into mockery, which he didn't like. Spinoza also thought that someone who makes fun of other people would be cherished by groups for singling out someone's errors, which Spinoza thought was wrong.

7) They say that people lie but numbers don't. People do lie a lot.

8) I really liked Frankfurt's second venture into Pop-Philosophy On Truth (right down to the fact that in chapter 3 he mentions Spinoza hehe). He said that Truth helps us recognize our limitations. He also said that our whole world is empirically dependent on Truth, like constructing a building.

9) John Stuart Mill, of course, points out that Truth can be suppressed. Oh yes. He cites countless examples, but the one relevant to all Christians might be that Christ's Truth was immediately suppressed. (Hey Atheist philosophers, cheer up, he mentions Socrates, too (who was put to death)).

10) Snoop Dogg said, "What's the use of the Truth if you can't tell a lie, sometimes?" (On Tha Last Supper Album)

Lady Gaga, Sarah Palin, and the Lovable Exorcism of Postmodernism

1) I consider the problem of postmodernism like the last cookie problem, which I have previously written on this blog, but I post again here (flag some assumptions at the top of this derivation, philosophers, I need you to digress with me for a bit):

Imagine a party, where there is a platter of cookies. Everyone is at the party having a great time, you're there, and I'm there. As the party goes on, everyone eats more and more cookies from the platter until there is only one left.

Now, at this point, the music of the party stops and everyone looks around. Manners dictate that no one should take that last cookie, because generally speaking manners are meant to put everyone at ease. In this case, with the cookies, the ease is supposedly that taking the last cookie means that no one else has the potential to eat that cookie, that you're claiming something better, that you take away from the group, and other tensions.

So while everyone is thinking about how polite it is to not take the cookie, and leave that cookie that everyone wants on the platter; someone is honest enough to grab the cookie.

But a funny thing happens: when this honest person grabs the cookie, everyone bursts out laughing for the cutting of humbug. Everyone feels relief at the grace of taking the last cookie and being happy. The true manners in this situation were to eat the cookie and not feel guilty.

But I feel as though taking the cookie is still wrong in this situation. Everyone is laughing and having a great time as the person reaches in, and in my mind's eye I have them laughing, too; then all of the sudden this person eats that last cookie and that's the end of the story.

My philosopher friends ask me, "Why does it matter?"

Hold tight folks I'm about to make a move.

2) This is my solution postmodernism: I think the end of the meta-analysis is the intuitive way that things feel.

Consider the Emperor's new clothes story: it took the little boy to say that the emperor was wearing no clothes in order to realize that everyone was doing something ridiculous.

The analysis of meta-analysis, the problems of problems, and so on, they all end with how it all feels.

So the woman was right in the story to take the cookie because everyone felt better; end of story. Is it the end of the story? For them it is. I might add we have to bring more cookies for the next one. There's other stuff to analyze here, like group dynamics, individualism, and leadership, but I feel like the problem was solved when that last person took the last cookie.

3) Meta Analysis of Gaga and Palin, and the cookie problem

A) Why is Lady Gaga a post-modern figure? I've already commented on why this woman counts as more than your average pop starlet, including the article from Slate where I got the idea.

I say to my friends Lady Gaga is performing an exorcism of the mass media demons.

The mass media demons are the "paparazzi" and the people who would have us second guess ourselves; perhaps when we say that we want to ride a "disco stick" or that we are guilty about what we like, as in "bad romance" (all these quotes are songs by Lady Gaga).

But the songs keep creeping up on me. "Paparazzi" talks about loving a person like the paparazzi. The reason this is wrong is because love and paparazzi parallel each other in lust. The same sexual satisfaction we get from following celebrities is the same as a bad crush, a lust that we might have on someone around us whom we don't really know, but we want to know.

I know better, and hopefully you know better, than thinking stalking is akin to love, or leads to love.

The song, however, isn't aimed at us, it's aimed at "paparazzi". The truth is, right down to "Okay" and "Us" (literally Us) is that we are the paparazzi. We are the people who judge the song "disco stick". We are the second guessers, the judges, of this madness. Lady Gaga is the person in the room taking that last cookie, everyone is laughing, even she is, but this is uneasy laughter, folks.

Who are they to judge? is us, it's us, it's us.

And we root for Lady Gaga to exorcise these evil demons without realizing that it is we who are the demons.


B) Sarah Palin is a parallel to Lady Gaga and the cookie eater. Lady Gaga comments on how terrible the music environment is for its double standards, the cookie eater skates the line of both doing what everyone feels like they should be doing and not doing, a morally dubious course of action that is okay (?).

Sarah Palin continuously talks about how awful the liberal media is; from the lectern of the media.

We're all laughing, and Palin is certainly a rich woman from her new book, as this woman takes this last cookie.

And the people who are rooting for her are the ones who empathize with her the most.

The Biblical saying is, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." the truth is that we are constantly judging negatively and we are constantly fearful of being judged.

People who empathize with Palin, and this is no secret, are the judgers. They are evangelical Christians, the midwesterners, the far right of Republican party.

But who perpetuates all of this?
Who is it that reads the People magazine with Sarah Palin in it?
Who revels in these double standards (right down to the blog you're reading, with yours truly writing)?

She is taking the last cookie, Gaga and Palin are exorcising these demons, and we are all laughing.



****


I think there's something else about calling out a Liberal bias when that's humbug.

Mainstream media, it brings up, and I think it should bring up, news events from an objective standpoint.

That is, when someone comes to you with a whole lot of problems, you might be inclined to call them biased and deluded because they are bringing up problems. You might even be subconsciously inclined to do this.

But that doesn't mean that they are deluded, or that they are biased.

It just means that you were mistaken.