The 'Postmoderns'
StreetlightX informs me in another thread that there is no broadly defining commonalty of thought among the philosophers that are usually referred to as "postmodernists', in virtue of which they could even be rightly referred to as such. StreetlightX also claims that only the "ignorant and the unstudied" would think that there exist any defining commonalities shared by these philosophers.
I disagree. I am thinking primarily of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault here, and I think there are broadly characteristic attitudes shared by these three thinkers to questions about truth, meaning, universality, transcendence and metaphysics. Now I am not saying they all present exactly the same thoughts about these matters, but that the thoughts presented in their various works are generally confined within certain characteristic shared boundaries.
The thoughts of the Postmoderns share another characteristic; they are not easy to pin down due to the fact that they generally eschew argument, so they are able to avail themselves of a certain slipperiness.
Thoughts?
I disagree. I am thinking primarily of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault here, and I think there are broadly characteristic attitudes shared by these three thinkers to questions about truth, meaning, universality, transcendence and metaphysics. Now I am not saying they all present exactly the same thoughts about these matters, but that the thoughts presented in their various works are generally confined within certain characteristic shared boundaries.
The thoughts of the Postmoderns share another characteristic; they are not easy to pin down due to the fact that they generally eschew argument, so they are able to avail themselves of a certain slipperiness.
Thoughts?
Comments (219)
With those little truths of of the way, I should point out just how much bad faith your OP bathes in. It wants to assert that, on the one hand, there are "defining commonalities of thought" between 'postmodern thinkers' (all three of them apparently! Because lets discount the humongous amount of other literature that comes out of the same tradition), and that on the other hand, it's not all that easy to pin down what their saying anyway. As for any actual examples of thesis statements regarding 'truth, meaning, universality, transcendence and metaphysics', of course there's nothing. OP is a joke whose only purpose is to invite further mystification and bad blood.
To understand what is not universal: each state of the world, in its distinction, regardless of it similarity.
Consider various "nature" arguments which make a generalisation about human ability of behaviour. Is it true someone with an AMAB (assigned male at birth) body is stronger than someone with a AFAB (assigned female at birth) body? The old universal assumptions say: "Yes." We are to know, from merely the presence of a categorised body (rather than, you know, someone's actual strength), that someone will be stronger than another. It's a rule which applies regardless of time, environment or the individual.
The post-modern approach disbands this inaccurate (and contrary to the empirical) form of argument. It turns the argument into a question of individual expression, rather than determining constraint. We understand the generalisation about strength to be false. There is no such universality. AMAB bodies are frequently stronger, but they are so on the basis of that individual's strength, not because of a body with a particular sex categorisation.
Instead of relying on ad hoc assertions of necessity, nature, reason and desires, we have to actually to the work to describe people honestly.
We even get around the "distinction is universal" objection, for it is not "universal." We are all part of a shared world. We share an environment. A child shares their mothers body. An artist shares ideas with an audience. And so and so on. We might always be distinct, but we are also always together too. Distinction is not universal.
I agree there are shared characteristics, insofar as they all disregard "universal" narratives, but that doesn't tell us much. All it says is they reject a "grounding myth." Sure, it's upsetting to many others interested in investigating the world (they love their myths which account for all there is), but it's only an assertion is that people can't reduce the world to their particular myth.
There are many differences between them. I mean Derrida and Foucault were famously at each others throats.
This is certainly the statement of someone who has not seriously read them. Postmodern philosophers make arguments all the time. Sometimes they are needlessly obscure and convoluted, but they definitely hold positions. No doubt they are "slippery" in that they don't assert a simple myth (i.e. "the universal ground" ) which is supposed to account for everything, but that says more about what certain readers think they need out of them, rather than the worth or accuracy of what they are saying.
What's the difference between a "general consensus" and "defining commonalities" in your book?
I don't see any inconsistency in asserting that it is difficult (which is not to say impossible) to know what Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault are actually saying, and that there are defining commonalities of thought. Because the latter consists as much in what they are not saying, as what they are saying. And when it comes to the key ideas of the three; they are well enough established.
Maybe you can start with, to pick a random example out of thin air, Deleuze's affirmation that he was a pure metaphysician, in contrast to say, Derrida's attempt to 'deconstruct' all metaphysics. Perhaps you can also say something about Deleuze's commitment to pure immanence, as opposed to Derrida's rather more tangled relationship with transcendence. Or perhaps you can comment on Derrida's and Foucault's lifelong polemic reagarding their respective philosophical methodologies. I mean, I know that one of my interests, personally, is in finding points of convergence and divergence in Deleuze and Derrida. I've been struggling with that one for years, as have a multitude of other scholars in the field. Given the relative paucity of literature on the subject (trust me, I've looked high and low), you might have something interesting to say. Perhaps you can comment on the work on Len Lawlor, who is the kind of standard references when trying to coordinate these thinkers. Go on, show your work.
Is it true that male humans are, on average, physically stronger than females?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I seem to remember that they disagreed about Foucault's treatment of Cartesian doubt in his History of Madness. But can you think of any significant differences when it comes to the 'big' questions.?
Would you say it is true that Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida among other postmodernist thinkers all reject structuralist principles of meaning?
LOL, no. I am interested to know if anyone can come up with a really significant difference or two between any postmodernist thinkers when it comes to truth, meaning, metaphysics and so on.
So some of them remain structuralists? Which ones?
OK, but isn't their rejection of "grounding myths" a significant defining characteristic of PM?
AMAB bodies (mature) are stronger on average than AFAB bodies (mature).
But that's not the question that was asked. An average only speaks about a trend across a large group of people. I asked you whether it was true that a person with a AMAB was stronger than someone with a AFMB body. Giving an average doesn't answer that question.
What exactly is a "big question?"
Yes... but that doesn't tell us anything about what they think and the worth of their arguments. Well, unless you are only interested in cheerleading for "grounding myths," which seems to be the case here.
I freely admit that I have not really extensively read them. My experience had been that they generally are convoluted and that they don't rigorously argue for their theses in the way that AP's and the traditional philosophers, usually do. My impression has always been that if i expended the time and effort to penetrate their works to really understand what they are getting at, that I would be disappointed and feel that I had expended more effort than the pay-off was worth.
I've said this before on these forums; I think their work has more value as poetry than as philosophy. If you are a connoisseur of new and novel ways to think about things in a kind of free-floating vacuum free of traditional philosophical presuppositions then you may well enjoy them very much.
Look, I am no expert on these philosophers, but I have formed an opinion, rightly or wrongly, about them, that there are not significant differences between them on the 'big' questions. I admit I could be wrong, and that could easily be shown by someone coming up with such a significant difference.
Questions of metaphysics, ontology, meaning, transcendence, truth, the nature of dialectic, religion, spirituality, ethics, aesthetics, universals, essence and existence and so on. All the questions that are important to human life, in other words.
Well, it will be more likely that any randomly selected male will be stronger than a randomly selected female; but of course that can tell you definitely what will be the case regarding any particular pair of male and female persons. But that seems to be so obvious as to be hardly worth noting.
It is not so easy to come up with non-examples of significant differences. It should be far easier to come up with examples, specially for those more familiar with the works of the thinkers in question than I. I am not the expert; I am just someone who has read a bit of Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, and formed an opinion that may well be shown to be erroneous.
That would a group probability.
You say that's it obvious, but it's exactly that sort of action which "universals" ignore. We've just spend decades unstitching the "universals" like a man you encountered will be stronger than a woman, to partial success, which grounded gender roles and assumptions of behaviour.
Sure, it seems obvious, but it's not reflected in how people think and react. I mean even you in this very thread jumped straight to "The Truth" of men being stronger than women, as if our understanding of the individual was meant to be channelled through group measures and probabilities.
You didn't answer my question on the terms of what it was interested in. Instead of saying: " You asked about individuals. We need to examine how strong they are," you went for the "universal" which supposedly allows us to say someone's significance without actually knowing or thinking about them.
Well, no I was speaking only generally and in terms of probability. I mean if I asked you whether a gorilla, a tiger, a rhinoceros or an elephant is stronger than a man what would you say?
I'd say you have to look at the tiger, rhinoceros, elephant or man. Probability doesn't cut it. The individual may differ from the supposed "universal." No myths. No generalisations. Individuals understood for who they are rather than assumed to be part of a universal someone thinks the world needs.
Indeed, you were speaking general and in terms of probability. That's the issue. "Only generally" really means "how this individual we are talking about is." You are using it to describe an individual, not talk about a trend or probability.
Well, if I asserted that transcendence is real, or that there are truths which are such independent of humanity or even just independent of discourse, that we have an immortal soul, or that we should trust our individual intuitions, I think I can safely say that none of the three in question will agree with me.
But I'm not. I can't believe that you don't agree that any healthy and mature tiger, silverback gorilla, rhinoceros or elephant would be stronger by far than any man or woman on the planet.
Anyway is this not straying somewhat from the subject of the thread?
Which man or woman? The weaker individuals we are aware of? I have no problem saying a stronger tiger, silverback gorilla, rhinoceros or elephant is stronger by far.
What I don't say is that, without reference to any individuals, a mature tiger, silverback gorilla, rhinoceros or elephant is stronger. It's simply not true. There is no such necessity. The world may do something different.
I'm not surprised you can't believe I would take this position either. That's the way "universals" work. They suppose any other meaning in the given context is impossible. A human that's stronger than a tiger is just something that can't happen by logic. The world simply must have humans weaker than tigers, else it doesn't make sense. Nature would be transgressed.
But the world doesn't care about what you think it needs. It will do what it does. If that includes a tiger that's weaker than a human, then that's what will be.
Maybe, but I'm using the example to demonstrate how your concern is for protecting universals. Your objection to postmodernism about the rejection these "grounding myths." You aren't even willing to engage with them because, as a sort of microcosm of the issue of contention, the won't accept they grounding myth that tigers are necessarily stronger than humans.
Yes, there is a general trend to think in 'modern' and 'postmodern' ways about those issues; and a rejection of much that is traditional in philosophy. The general consensus seems to be very much that these traditional issues have been put to rest, because they were based on false assumptions, or at least assumptions which are no longer thought to be appropriate. In short I think there is a lot of fashion at work in the academy.
I also think it has a lot to do with the rise of the scientific paradigm and its permeation of academic thought in general, which is beginning to 'trickle down'. But, it is a hard assertion to argue for, because where would one begin?
I know that Deleuze considered himself a transcendental empiricist and actually a metaphysician who wanted to provide a metaphysics to support mathematics and science. But this is very far from traditional metaphysics, because it has already accepted that there is a 'master' metaphysics implicit in math and science'; that is it has already accepted materialism. So it is really a rejection of traditional metaphysics; it is only a matter of working out all the details.
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Any man or woman.
I am not saying it is impossible there could be a man stronger than an elephant; I am saying that I have every reason to believe there is no such man, because if there were, everyone would have heard of him.
I'm sorry but that's exactly what you're saying.
If there might be a elephant weaker than a man or woman, then it's not true any man or own must be weaker. You can't just assume any man or woman is weaker. Now, if you restrict your claim to the men and women we know about, the ones weaker than an elephant, then the issue is resolved. But then it's not a "universal truth."
Your second sentence is a common reaction to when the universal gets challenged. The appeal to make it seem like you position must be truth though what we observed of the world. A man stronger than an elephant simply must be known or he wouldn't exist.
Anyone with a basic understanding evidence knows this is false. Things may go unobserved. People may keep secrets. You don't have every reason to discount the existence of such a man. Just every reason to discount him in the observed world (falsified) and good reason not think one is hidden somewhere on Earth (probabilities given what we observed about humans and elephants).
No, you see you are misrepresenting my position. I don't say that tigers are necessarily stronger than humans, but that they generally are. Every mature tiger on the planet is probably stronger than every mature human being; that is what I am saying.
But I certainly would not say that every mature man is stronger than every mature woman; I can say with virtual certainty that that would be untrue.
But, I'm not saying that there is no such man; I'm saying I have good reason to believe that there is no such man. Can you not see the difference between the claims?
Again, that's a probability, not a description of the individual.
If we are actually dealing with describing a person or tiger, such assertions have no force. They are misused group measures, used as a "grounding myth," to assert the meaning of mature tigers and mature women without considering the individuals involved.
No "general rule" is useful for describing an individual.
They are different. The problem is you equivocate them when it comes to relate to the individual. Your "good reasons" become the "ground" from which you derive meaning and expectations of the individual. When you ought to be describing the individual (this person is weaker than this tiger), you use your "good reasons" and assert the "general" expresses what they mean.
Interestingly, the one-volume anthology of postmodernism I mentioned in the other thread, The Truth about the Truth, has an impassioned essay by Huston Smith saying pretty well exactly that. And, he was included in the volume! So I think it's unwise to say that 'postmodernism says...' So, agree with SLX on that. Besides, he really does know Lacan and Badiou and Deleuze and all those writers in depth and detail (in fact the first time I heard of most of them was reading his posts about them). So even though I don't generally find a lot of common ground with SLX, in this matter I think he's probably right!
I wonder if you have ever discovered what is loosely called 'the perennialists'. That was a group of scholars including Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Cooomaraswamy, and Rene Guenon. (There are some pretty out-lying characters also, like Julius Evola.) Now, myself, I only know snippets of these people (hey I know snippets of a lot of things) but I think you would find them more congenial than most of the well-known philosophers associated with post-modernism. (Have a look at Sophia Perennis.)
But then, another approach would be to find some current writer who is a kind of 'post-modern-neo-traditionalist', who draws all those strands together and then critiques the other post modernists on account of their lack of spirituality. There's bound to be one. That would be 'using the strength of the adversary against him'.
It does seem puzzling that you don't enjoy arguing with Deleuze, since he seems to have some of the same primary concerns as you but emerges with a different view.
[quote="Deleuze, 'The logic of sense' p 121] What is common to metaphysics and transcendental philosophy is, above all, this alternative which they both impose on us: either, an undifferentiated ground, a groundlessness, formless nonbeing, or an abyss without differences and without properties, or a supremely indivduated Being and an intensely personalized For. Without this Being or this Form, you will have only chaos...[/quote]
This whole section, in the 'Fifteenth series of singularities', seems like a debate with what you're interested in.
In academic architecture, for instance, Deleuze & Guattari's work attracted interest. But I don't understand what for beside the fact that their approach is reminiscent of artistic work, and seemingly open for arbitrary interpretations. It's easier to make into what you want it to be than, say, the work of APs or the great philosophers of old.
I can't see any reason to think that the fact that an anthology of Postmodernism that includes an essay agreeing with my characterization of Postmodernism, should lead me to think that my characterization is not correct. That would only follow if you equate the anthology of Postmodernism (anthologies of a movement may certainly contain critiques of that movement) with Postmodernism itself. So, in other words, in critiquing Postmodernism Huston Smith is not himself being a Postmodernist.
I can't see any reason to think that the fact that an anthology of Postmodernism that includes an essay agreeing with my characterization of Postmodernism, should lead me to think that my characterization is not correct. That would only follow if you equate the anthology of Postmodernism (anthologies of a movement may certainly contain critiques of that movement) with Postmodernism itself. So, in other words, in critiquing Postmodernism Huston Smith is not himself being a Postmodernist.
I have read only snippets of Schuon and Guenon myself, and I do find them more congenial than the PM thinkers.
Quoting Wayfarer
Badiou would be a good example of just what you say; but unfortunately, I do not find him very congenial. Zizek would be another. I read Tarrying with the Negative a few years ago and found it much more congenial. I remember that in that book, for example, he calls for a new critique of the sophistry of the Postmoderns. So, he generalizes there in relation to PM as much as I am.
I think what I see as the most pernicious postmodern thought is the assertion that the subject is nothing more than what has been constructed by social, cultural and discursive forces. PM is thus a kind of mirror image of the materialistic scientific form of determinism. These twin detreminisms deny the freedom and genuine creativity of the person and reduce her to the status of being a mere individual, who is always thought of as being nothing more than a more or less significant part of a more encompassing whole.
(But then, from what desultory reading I have done of the likes of Lacan, Delueze, and the others, I can't see anything that inspires me to study them so probably I should shut up.)
I added more while you were replying. But in any case I would agree with you that PM is not a school in the strict sense that Marxism is; but I would say it is a movement in the same way that German Idealism is; albeit probably less diverse though.
I think some are interested the transcendent, but it differs to most instances of transcendent tradtions.
A lot of postmodern interest in the transcendent is about the self and its inability to be captured by language or reduced to part of the world. Postmodernism is characterised by awareness of the self. Myths and values are realised our own. In this respect, I think even its interest in the transcendent is sort of opposed to what held in most transcendent traditions. It sort of views the transcendent as an expression of the world, as something done be existing people, rather than "another realm" which sits above the world.
I do see what you are saying. I think a common characteristic of PM ( and of most other strains of modern philosophy) consists in the denial of transcendence; which is to say a denial of spirit and genuine freedom. And I think this presumption of immanence has come to pass as a result of the domination of the scientific paradigm. Philosophers are just not taken seriously, for the most part, if they start speaking about anything beyond what is understood as the immanent condition of culturally mediated humanity.
Now I have more sympathy with apo because he is upfront about his interest being confined only to determinate knowledge. He critiques the PoMos for weaving endless skeins of what he sees as 'poetic bullshit'. I actually like some of that poetic bullshit and I think the perspective from immanence is not without its insights. But it is dreadfully limited, as can be seen in the seemingly endless industry of PM thinkers trying to say something significant about humanity without committing any sins of universalism. PoMo is also the fountainhead of political correctness; which I see as being very much a mixed blessing.
Agree. So they might criticize 'scientism' and the 'instrumentalisation of reason', and so forth, but their shared intellectual background is still very much a product of 20th century materialism, even if they're purportedly critical of it.
This OP is something you might find interesting - on Jurgen Habermas and the idea of the 'post-secular'.
I'm coming to think that philosophy should be more to do with the spirit, with life as freely lived, and less to do with endless endeavours to discursively pin down a determinate originary condition. I don't see Deleuze's efforts, in what I have read of Identity and Difference to be anything but the latter. Deleuze treats metaphysics very much as an enquiry into the notion of materiality. Again the truth of immanence, of immanent materiality, is the overarching presupposition behind all his work, at least as I read it. And that would be OK if it weren't the case that that presupposition seems to underlie just about all the work of academic philosophers these days, whatever 'tradition' they identify themselves with.
I wouldn't say they are critical of materialism (in the sense of the metaphysical position). They're more critical of the use of the material as a transcendent realm (i.e. scientism, Modernism, the image of the every improving world due to technological advance, etc.,etc.). In the respect, I'd say their more than a product of 20th materialism. I terms of the metaphysical position, they are the most ardent advocates of materialism. They expunge notions of the transcendent realm which had carried over into classical and modern materialism.
Only in appearance, to those who are embedded within traditions of transcendence. Postmodernism argues spirit and freedom are immanent. We cannot not escape our own meaning. Anything we value, any freedom we have, must be within ourselves. The sprit, freedom and meaning was in us all along, even under traditions of transcendence-- it's the believer who lives with hope, who leaves behind despair, who is replete with freedom and sprit. The traditions of transcendence never understood humanity. They assert meaning can only come from the outside, even though it comes from within. A spirited and free human is impossible without themselves as a spirited and free human.
Philosophy which says humanity is irrelevant to their meaning is rejected for good reason. It's contradictory. What it claims to be true cannot be. It's an ignorance of our free, spirited selves.
I've never seen any indication from your posts that you have any understanding of what they mean. For instance:
All of the 'traditions of transcendence' say that truth comes from within. I could provide pages of citations in support. The thing which you never seem to grasp is the meaning of the myth (and it is a myth) of 'the fall'. That is, humans are not born with a natural pre-disposition towards inner freedom. The 'natural state' you seem to think is normal, is in fact exceedingly rare. Anyway, this is out of scope for this thread.
That's a good encapsulation of the ignorance of self I'm talking about. The expectation is our spirited selves to come from the outside.
[quote=Stanley Fish]The point can be sharpened: in the context of full-bodied secularism, there would seem to be nothing to pass on to, and therefore no reason for anything like a funeral.[/quote]
Only to those who aren't paying attention to their needs to celebrate, respect and pass on knowledge of the lives of others. Sure both say (the self-ignorant secularist and their religious critics) they have no reason to have a funeral, but this is clearly not true. They have a need to pay respects to the person who was gone.
In this case, both the secularist and the religious critic are expecting the need to come from the outside. They tell a falsehood. A funeral will only matter, they insist, if the outside tells them it's important (e.g. God, Church, etc., etc.). They are turned against themselves and their own needs.
In itself I agree with some of what I think you are saying here, but I don't agree that is what the PMs argue, or at least if they do argue that, it is not freedom and spirit and as I understand it that they can be talking about, because everything wholly immanent is determined by wholly immanent forces.
Until recently, but really only for the last little while, I have also denied transcendence (under the influence of Hegel, mostly) but what has always troubled me is that immanentist philosophies have no way to understand creativity, freedom and spirit; they say that we must be able to give a discursive account of them otherwise we should not believe they are real. ("The rational is the real", and the rational is what we can measure).
Now I have come to think this is nonsense because the most real thing about us is our experience of creativity, freedom and spirit, and we should give up any notion that it is possible to give a discursively determinant account of them. We can speak of and from them, we can speak creative truths and truths of and from freedom and the spirit; and we can know intuitively very well what they mean, and what their value is; but we cannot subject such accounts to critique or analysis, or in any way objectify them because that will lead either to their destruction or to some form of fundamentalism.
They say it comes from within, but they don't believe it. All 'traditions of transcendence' deny people are meaningful-in-themselves. Someone must follow the tradition or else they are heathen nihilists. In each case, meaning is coming for the outside, from God, from scripture, from law and obligation.
The self is the enemy. Everyone one says: "The world means because of God." They do not say: "I mean believing in God." To say the latter would is an offence. It would mean meaning was immanent within them, rather than being granted by a transcendent force.
You are sadly misinformed about that. I do understand why you think it, but it's not correct. What I think you're commenting on, is the idea in all the spiritual traditions about 'transcending the self' or going beyond ego. My interpretation of that is: going beyond the innate self-seeking behaviours and unhealthy inclinations that we're all born with. That's a very general way of putting it, but you will find the same idea in many different traditions.
Consider the central Christian dogma - that Jesus' sacrifice was on behalf of, and out of love for, mankind. That is not dismissive or condemnatory. Likewise in Mahayana Buddhism, the over-riding ethos is the 'enlightenment of all beings' - the Bodhisattva vow says that 'though sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save all of them'.
It is true that religious and philosophical traditions often betray their original intention - nobody could deny that. But if you're engaged in a philosophical analysis of what they mean, then that is not how they should be judged.
So the self that is the enemy is, if you like, the self that seeks itself, that pleases itself, that is interested in its own pleasures, its own powers, getting its own way. Sure the religions say that is 'the enemy'.
Exactly which immanent philosophies say we ought to give such a determination? The idea is incoherent.
Immanence means there is an expression given-- the "divine" is expressed in the material. It's not caused by a force. "Determined by immanent forces" is an oxymoron. Reducing creativity, freedom and spirit to discourse is not required at all. Indeed, it's a contraction to do so. I live my freedom, creative and spirt. It's never just discourse. The "rational" is not the real. Irrational ideas are expressed and have meaning. Logical truth extend beyond what it true of the world. Every expression and state defies reduction to any particular discourse.
Here you analysis working under the idea meaning comes from the outside. Discover the "rational meaning" and you will know what anyone must believe. That's simply not truth. There might be an ethical argument to believe it, but there is no obligation to do do so. People are free to believe an "irrational" (whatever that's supposed to mean. Usually, it just means "what I think you ought to believe" ) position. No discourse can define what people think. They have to live it.
This could be a mission statement of post-modernism. Every experience is meaningful, an expression of creativity, freedom an sprit, a value and meaning of an individual. There is no "grounding myth." All experiences are meaningful and any critique or analysis amounts an instance of discursive violence, an attempt to destroy some idea in favour of another. For someone who professes to reject the philosophical worth of post-modernist, you sure talk like one (expecting perhaps the strength of humans and elephants).
Ah, but there are indeed grounding myths; truths of the spirit that have been handed down to us in the traditions.
Meaning doesn't come from outside at all, but from within. PM generally says meaning comes from culture, that the individual is entirely embedded within culture, and that everything is given by culture. This amounts to saying that the individual absorbs or introjects meaning from culture; but I think this is wrong. The individual absorbs or introjects the means, in the form of education, that enable her to recognize and understand meaning; or to fail to recognize and understand it.
The transcendent meanings of the great works of the spirit within our culture have been leveled down to the rest of the cultural product. According to PoMo, there is no 'high' culture because to say there is would be to posit a hierarchy, a power structure, and hierarchies and power structures are merely arbitrary, after all.
But this is a false conclusion that comes about by objectifying the human spirit. The granting of transcendent (higher spiritual) meaning to the works of culture has come to be seen as merely a function of power and/or discourse. Anybody who says otherwise today will be laughed out of the academé.
I'm saying that very argument is what amounts to nihilism and ignorance of the self.
My point is this: people who do not go beyond self-seeking behaviours or unhealthy inclinations are still meaningful. Their lives aren't worthless becasue they have sinned. They've just been unethical. What they need is not "to be saved (the transcendent)" but to alter themselves so life is better for them and people around them. People don't alter their self-seeking behaviour through the transcendent. They do it themselves (which sometimes involves believing in a transcendent force). What is within (a meaningful life and change in behaviour) is misunderstood to be an outside force.
The central Christian dogma is perhaps a prime example of the ignorance I'm talking about. No sacrifice is needed. Sinners have meaningful lives. Jesus doesn't die for love. He dies because God (and some people) don't understand that people who have done wrong still have meaningful lives. He's sent to save us when we don't need saving and to pay for something (all our wrongs) which have no recompense.
And that's the ignorance. Ethical behaviour is sought by the self, is a power of the self, is an improvement the self, an interested of the self, the self getting its own way and pleases the self. The transcendent tells fibs about overcoming our selfish interests and unhealthy behaviours. In every case, we did that, not some force of another realm.
The problem within immanence in the strict sense, is that immanent, meaning inherent within, does not conceptualize the 'beyond', or transcendent which is accessible within. The concept of "inherent" ensures that the immanent must always be within that which it is inherent within, never transcending it. So if the immanent is within the material body, it is impossible that it transcends the material body, because the concept of inherent implies that it must always be within that.
Quoting Wayfarer
I believe true transcendence is found within. The only way toward transcendence of the material body, and the entire physical, external world, is through the internal. In this way a philosophy of immanence is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't succeed until it finds the route to transcendence through the internal, in this way negating the immanence which leads one there. So the philosophy of immanence is therefore naïve, negating external transcendence, not realizing that the immanent itself will be transcended internally.
Man, you could have just opened with this, at least this is something vaguely concrete rather than just meta nonsense. Two points to make here. First, there's hardly a blanket 'denial of transcendence' within those thinkers you call postmodern. Without getting into it too much, Giorgio Agamben wrote an essay on Deleuze which, among other things, tracks the various positions of related authors, and he produced the following diagram, which I think is pretty accurate:
(Agamben, "Absolute Immanence", Potentialities)
So it's not exactly like all these thinkers hew to immanence. Secondly, immanence <> fatalism. Personally, one of my original motivations for looking into the tradition of immanence was that I always thought that if transcendence was the guarantor of freedom, then this would be no kind of freedom at all. Any kind of freedom, it seemed to me - and still does - ought to include one within it's circuit; only on an immanent basis could freedom mean anything at all. The two books I'd recommended on this subject are Alicia Juarrero's Dynamics in Action, and Heidi Ravven's The Self Beyond Itself. While I would hardly call both books postmodern (Juarrero comes out of systems theory, Ravven fuses Spinoza with neuroscience), they show quite convincingly what it would mean to configure freedom on an immanent basis. A more properly 'PM' book on this would be Judith Butler's Giving An Account of Oneself, where she shows quite convincingly that any kind of genuine ethical freedom would require that one be subject to forces beyond one's control.
In any case, to think that 'spirit and genuine freedom' are precluded by thinking in terms of immanence is misguided. All this apart from the fact that 'PM' is anything but defined by a commitment to immanence (consider Derrida's puzzlement over Deleuze's notion of immanence, in a piece written after the latter's death: " My first question, I think, would have concerned Artaud, his interpretation of the "body without organ," and the word "immanence" on which he always insisted, in order to make him or let him say something that no doubt still remains secret to us" - "I'll Have to Wander All Alone").
For PM meaning is a culture. Culture is lived, not merely a telling discourse. The question of "comes from culture" is restricted to descriptions of handing down ideas and enforcing one discourse over another .
More than that, meaning is a lived experience. It cannot be reduced to merely a function of power or discourse. Things are "arbitrary" because no experience has any more meaning than another. By nature, there is no culture which is better than another. Only in the realm of ethics, hierarchies and power structures can one tradition be preferred to another.
Christian belief and football game are equal in importance precisely because anything else amounts to destruction or fundamentalism. If you want to say your belief is more important, more meaningful or more critical than another, you don't have any choice in discursive violence. You have to say your position is better and more important, that the issue can be reduced to discourse that someone else better believe or follow.
The levelling of culture is a consequence of recognising "grounding myths" are myths. Everything is "high" (or "low") because anything else amounts to reducing another experience to our discourse. It's the truth of spirt lost in recognising we can't reduce meaning to any particular discourse. We know anyone will only be themselves.
(of course, this is what inspires the rabid reactions against PM. Regardless of the ethical worth, any transcendent tradition is revealed to be a falsehood. It hits the traditions where, for believers, it hurts the most: in the idea it's true they've been saved from worthlessness. I mean what's the point of God if it's only a tradition I follow, a set of rules I follow and doesn't make me necessarily more wise than anyone else?).
You are aptly named, that is all I can say.
To the selfish promoters of transcendent beliefs, no doubt.
For people interested in the worth of their practices, as opposed to proclaiming themselves to be better than everyone else, not so much. I don't, for example, have any issue with Christian belief being important to someone. It's not unethical. The world doesn't need Christians to be wiped out. Christianity is still important and valuable.
It just doesn't make someone superior to the football fan. Both cultures are valuable. It's enough for oneself to matter, rather than having to be more meaningful and superior to anyone else. Not that I expect many promoters of transcendent beliefs to grasp that point. It would require too much self-awareness and humility.
So 'absolute immanence' seems analogous to saying that there is an absolute 'up' or absolute 'left', whereas in reality 'up' only exists in relation to 'down', and 'left' in relation to 'right'.
Googling 'absolute immanence', I get this reference:
The rest of that wikipedia article, titled Plane of Immanence, seems nonsensical to me, in exactly the way that John means; but then, to its proponents, the kinds of transcendental philosophies that interest he and I seem nonsensical ti them. I think the only real difference is that the postmodernists aren't afraid of their nonsense, but wear it like a badge of honour.; they fashion buildings from it, because, in their eyes, the universe is basically nonsensical anyway.
OK, there are only three Post Moderns in the diagram there and two of them, Deleuze and Foucault, are classed as thinkers of immanence. The other, Derrida is classed as a thinker of transcendence along with Kant and Husserl. First, I wonder whether that should instead be 'transcendentality' (in the sense of thinking the conditions for experience as not themselves being experienced) and in line with the distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent that Kant himself made.
I agree that we must be subject to forces beyond our control; that is certainly obvious insofar as we have bodies. But being subject to forces beyond our control does not equal being utterly controlled by such forces, and I have never yet heard or read a convincing account of how, if we are immanent material beings and nothing but immanent material beings, the kind of (libertarian) freedom in the sense that I understand to be necessary for moral responsibility could be thought to be possible.
So, you've said Quoting StreetlightX and this makes me wonder just how you understand spirit and doubt whether your understanding of it is anything like mine.Just so you know, I understand spirit to be utterly unconditioned and our radical freedom as depending on that. If you understand spirit as some kind of emergent phenomenon, then it will be ineluctably dependent on matter/energy and could never be free in the sense I am thinking of.
It's true that the universe can be made sense of; insofar as rational, discursive accounts and explanations can be given of it. But there remain aspects of human life, many of which are the most important to us, which cannot be explained in this way. The notion that some things must remain mysterious does not offend me or make we want to reject them in accordance with a demand that all must be explainable. On the contrary I feel happy on account of that.
I haven't anyway said anything to the contrary,
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I couldn't possibly disagree with you more. As I said before there is high culture and low culture and that fact has nothing to do with worldly conditions, power relations, hierarchies or anything like that. What is high and what is low is not determined by any authority, but by the human spirit. We all have our share in the human spirit and we can come to know its truths directly via intuition. Of course that intuition may be clouded by certain ideas; but that is another story. Football is spiritually a low expression; it is an expression of tribalism and aggression; it is a force which divides, not an expression of love. But, don't get me wrong; I am not saying it should be banned or anything.
Eh, that kind of 'radical libertarian freedom' is a myth on par with a loving God for me, and a concept far more mystical and occult than anything a so-called postmodernist has ever subscribed to. If anything, such notions perpetuate suffering by mystifying the real sources of freedom which are only ever to be found in the here and now. Again, check out Ravven's book, where she utterly demolishes any notion of 'free will', showing it to be a theological remnant that has set back our thinking on freedom and responsibility by an order of centuries.
Quoting John
I'd prefer to emphasize not that the universe can be made sense of, so much as it can be made sense of; that is, sense-making is a process, one that occurs in - or even as the universe itself. Immanence is not a thesis of absolute transparency, it is an affirmation of a praxis in or of being that includes history, material composition, political climate, cultural affordances, and so on. I will never know the sense of the world as the bee knows it, but this is not for 'transcendent' reasons, but immanent ones. Of the many definitions of immanence that Deleuze offered, the Spinozist one is the most apt: immanence means that one will never know what a body can do - not, at least, until that body is put into 'practice.'
In mysticism the contemplation of the transcendent is not a gaping at the unreachable. This is a perversion of religion, actually it is a contemplation practice used to focus the mind on a constant, an ideal. The intellection involved in mysticism regarding the transcendent (including the unnamable, the unknowable and the inconceivable etc) is likewise a practice of contemplation on an ideal, which one shapes oneself conceptually, for the purposes of the process of the transfiguration of the self.
I can't speak for the transcendent in philosophy much, as I am not a philosopher, but it appears to be a caricature of the transcendent handed down to us by religion.
You say that the universe can be made sense of, but its ground remains veiled from us(by the nature of our evolutionary inheritance, our bodies). How would we peek beyond that veil, from here?
If you're at all familiar with philosophical discourse in an analytic context, you should be familiar with the "big question" phrase. And after all, there have been scads of books, and even a series, with "big questions" as part of the title/subtitle. See for example these search results:
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Philosophy+big+questions
To address it as it was originally conceived and the way it is is lived you would be required to study its use in mysticism. As it was only the initiated in the religions who actually contemplated it and saw past the caricature.
That the authentic understanding and use of the transcendent is in a personal enquiry within oneself, as was pointed out by Metaphysician undercover a few posts back. So it is a fallacy to regard the transcendent as anything other than immanent, as something external, or not of this world.
I'm askig you this because you know far more about the philosophers in question than I do:
Do any continental and/or postmodernist etc. philosophers employ transcendence/immanence in a non-religious or non-spiritual way, or are they all referring to religious or spiritual ideas?
If anyone is using it in a non-religious/non-spiritual way, what are they referring to?
It's difficult for me to be very interested in it if they're talking about religious/spiritual ideas, but if they're not, I haven't the faintest idea what they'd be talking about.
Nah, it's not an explicitly spiritual idea at all. In phenomenology, for example, transcendence generally refers to a certain structure of subjectivity which is meant to distinguish subject from object. Deleuze and Guattari give a short and extremely condensed history of immanence in What Is Philosophy?, where they track it's evolution from Plato, on down to the Christian philosophers (they mention Nicholas of Cusa, Eckhart, and Bruno), before turning to modern philosophy. The distinction saturates the entirety of the history of philosophy. Anyway, here are some of the later passages:
"Beginning with Descartes, and then with Kant and Husserl, the cogito makes it possible to treat the plane of immanence as a field of consciousness. Immanence is supposed to be immanent to a pure consciousness, to a thinking subject. Kant will call this subject transcendental rather than transcendent, precisely because it is the subject of the field of immanence of all possible experience from which nothing, the external as well as the internal, escapes. Kant objects to any transcendent use of the synthesis, but he ascribes immanence to the subject of the synthesis as new, subjective unity. He may even allow himself the luxury of denouncing transcendent Ideas, so as to make them the "horizon" of the field immanent to the subject. But, in so doing, Kant discovers the modern way of saving transcendence: this is no longer the transcendence of a Something, or of a One higher than everything (contemplation), but that of a Subject to which the field of immanence is only attributed by belonging to a self that necessarily represents such a subject to itself (reflection).
Yet one more step: when immanence becomes immanent "to" a transcendental subjectivity, it is at the heart of its own field that the hallmark or figure of a transcendence must appear as action now referring to another self, to an-other consciousness (communication). This is what happens in Husserl and many of his successors who discover in the Other or in the Flesh, the mole of the transcendent within immanence itself. Husserl conceives of immanence as that of the flux lived by subjectivity. But since all this pure and even untamed lived does not belong completely to the self that represents it to itself, something transcendent is reestablished on the horizon, in the regions of non belonging ... In this modern moment we are no longer satisfied with thinking immanence as immanent to a transcendent; we want to think transcendence within the immanent, and it is from immanence that a breach is expected."
They go on a little to speak about Sartre, before circling back to Spinoza: "Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere. In the last book of the Ethics he produced the movement of the infinite and gave infinite speeds to thought in the third kind of knowledge. ... He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition. ... Spinoza is the vertigo of immanence from which so many philosophers try in vain to escape."
Thanks for the answer, although reading through all of that, I still have no idea what immanence and trascendence are supposed to be outside of a religious or spiritual idea.
"a certain structure of subjectivity which is meant to distinguish subject from object"--I have no idea what that would amount to, for example, but a lot of notions of a subjective/objective distinction outside of my own make little sense to me.
"to treat the plane of immanence as a field of consciousness. Immanence is supposed to be immanent to a pure consciousness"
I'm lost re just what "immanence" is referring to there, though. I also have no idea what a "pure consciousness" would be. What is pure consciousness versus impure consciousness? Maybe some of that is referring to specific passages in Kant or whatever that I should remember, but I haven't read through the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, since probably the late 80s, when I was in my mid/late 20s, so I've forgotten a lot of it.
Do Deleuze and Guattari give anything that would amount to a definition of how they're using the terms?
Hmm . . . well, I don't really buy the principle of sufficient reason. But I suppose that's not important for the distinction you're making.
However, I'm not sure the distinction of "vertical" versus "horizontal" there makes a lot of sense. You can just turn the vertical chain on its side and it's the same thing, but now oriented horizontally instead.
Of course, the distinction could be a web rather than a single chain, but I don't know if anyone thinks that it's really just a single chain anyway (and if that metaphor really makes any sense anyway--it might only come to fruition in the metaphor).
StreetlightX
You see this is a mistaken quest, the transcendent is the immanent in the eye of the mystic. Wherever one approaches or suspects the transcendent, or the transcendental one is mistaken and yet that same approach and suspicion is to and is of oneself, (oneself needn't have gone out to look in the first place, for the gaol, the aim was already here and know).The mystic squares the circle by realising that his/her mind only sees/knows that which leads/looks away from the immanent, the transcendent is mistakenly thought to be out there and one might see it and know it, or never attain it or understand it. But it and the immanent are one in one, in the self and not in the purview of the mind, but the whole self.
I can understand how this might be problematic in philosophy.
Anyway going back to your question, a notion of self is a mental construct, the self which concerns the mystic is the being in which we have our being, in which we have our mind and it's contents. It is understood that the mind cannot access this being, as the mind only looks out from it. Instead the mind is stilled, bypassed, schooled in receiving inspiration through contemplation and living practice. Methodology for this practice is well documented in various religious and mystical traditions. The goal is to develop a synthesis between body spirit and mind, resulting in the transmutation, or in ocassion transfiguration of the self.
I don't know if this can be parsed philosophically(logically), I would have to ask a philosopher?
I dunno man, this just literally sounds like nonsense to me. Not trying to put you down, but there's no-sense I can make of it. It's just standard woo talk.
In a knutshell I was saying that thinking about it doesn't give us an answer, the thoughts just chase their own tails and that mysticism has been grappling with this issue and developing answers independently of western thought for millennia. Perhaps a crossover would yeald a more rounded solution.
I can't communicate in the language of the post moderns, if I can find time perhaps I will read a bit, it looks interesting.
I agree, but it seems to me that the basis or ground of our existence(the universe) here and now is beyond us at this time, due to our limitations(confined within this particular evolution we find ourselves in), or because it is somehow hidden, disguised, or veiled. It might be easy to understand, even to manipulate, but we are none the wiser, it's like we are the blind leading the blind.
An alien, or higher being could come along and tell us the answer and we might say well I never, it's so simple, but we just didnt see it, why were we so blind?
Sometimes, yes, but surely not always? What think you of the legendary football (soccer) game reputedly played between the British and German troops in No Mans Land on Christmas Day in the Great War?
Well, that would certainly be a different matter, I would say. It is not the sheer physical nature of the activity itself that determines spiritual value, but the culture surrounding it and the spirit in which the activity is entered into. So, to say that football (and I was actually, being an Australian, thinking of Rugby) is not a higher manifestation of culture is very much a generalization from which exceptions could certainly be found.
Thanks Wayfarer, I'll check that out.
No point at all. I think it's better not to think of following God as following a tradition or a dogma at all, but as following the spirit. A dogma or a tradition is useless unless it speaks to you. It is always a personal matter.
I agree with this, the only variance I have with it is that I would add to this: Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness does not think they immanent "within the person".
I think PM sees spirit and freedom as factors emerging within culture, immanent within culture, and embedded within it, just as the person is, and as such, being, just as the person is, culturally determined. I think this is mistaken; a culture may support or undermine spirit and freedom (or at least appear to for a time) however, spirit and freedom never find their origin in culture, but in persons.
And that's it in a nutshell, right there, for me . No self-respecting post-modernist would ever subscribe to anything so unfashionable as that.
To me it is just bizzarely funny that anyone would think that the reality of freedom could ever be refuted (or established) by an argument. There is no "our thinking" on freedom and responsibility (other than in a legalistic sense). "Our thinking" is itself a denial of freedom and responsibility.
I don't know, Punshhh; I think the universe is an incredibly complex objectivication that will never be completely understood. But what I was referring to as mysteries were things like beauty, truth, spirit, freedom and love. We can understand (discursively) only what we can objectify. And those things can never be objectified; and any attempt to do so makes them seem to disappear from our lives.
Let's see if I can assist.
For example, one of the standard texts that is often quoted as an expression of 'seeing the transcendent in the immanent' is a passage from Blake's Auguries of Innocence
Another romantic poet, Wordsworth, expresses something similar in I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud
So the theme here is that 'the finite' in some sense encapsulates the infinite; that seen properly, the ephemeral beauty of a flower conveys the imperishable. Blake, again, said 'If the doors of perception were cleansed, then everything would appear as it is: infinite'. Which Huxley took as the title for his essay on his experience with mescaline, of which he wrote:
From Zen master Dogen, paraphrasing the Diamond Sutra:
But so too is the 'moon is reflected in every dew-drop'. So, at once, each dew-drop is perishing, but also reflecting the eternal.
I think those quotes capture something of the elusive nature of that strain of mysticism.
Excerpt from Frithjof Capra, The Turning Point.
From my PoV, all you need to add to that picture, is the idea that when life evolves to a certain point, it is able to see into the order that gave rise to it: that provides for a kind of 'naturalistic spirituality' in which 'enlightenment' is understood as a culminatory phase of evolution, not because it was 'planned that way' by deity, but because it just panned out that way.
I think an interesting argument can be made, and a good discussion had, about the potential of team sports to help us towards higher attainments in communality, spirituality and love - even if that potential is so often betrayed by the corporate interests that commercialise sport, and (more in the UK than in Australia) the thuggish elements that use it as a platform for tribal warfare and hatred. Certainly the Ancient Greeks saw a strong symbiotic connection between the physical, the intellectual and the spiritual.
But that is probably a subject for another thread.
@Wayfarer, as another compatriot, what say you about the potential for various footy codes to enhance, or hamper, the search for cultural and spiritual growth and eudaimonia more generally?
“Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment."
Like the appearance of a precise reflection of the moon in a dewdrop, indeed many millions of them on a dewy hillside and the evocation of walking through that light, in that still quiet night, with a clear mind.
Such things happen every moment in nature, while we lumbering apes(by contrast) labour over how we as a group condition each other's thoughts and nature, I ask you!
Anyway I would point out to philosophers that they can't presume many things about nature which they do every day, unthinkingly. For even if they can come up with systems which describe accurately how things in the world operate, it is only in the world of appearances. Appearances which are likely only a tiny fraction or slither of what is going in the here and now. Developing an insight into what we do not know and cannot presume to be the case is a powerful tool in allowing subtle insights in wisdom to reflect on that dew drop and flicker through that still still mind.
@Punshhh - 'citta chatter' - (Y)
This is the dead end of immanence, that the "field of immanence" must be attributed to a self. It is quite obvious that such a "field" goes far beyond the existence of the self, and therefore it is misnamed as the field of immanence, it should be the field of transcendence.
Quoting StreetlightX
"Communication" cannot skirt the problem of the dead end. It is evident that the so-called "field" is prior to language and communication, as a necessary condition for these things. When we speak, it is necessary that there is something which we speak about, and this something is transcendent to us. The transcendent something is necessarily prior to the will to speak. This leads to the conclusion that the transcendent thing, whether it be conceived of as an object or an ideal, is necessarily prior to the field of immanence. The philosophers of immanence demonstrate that the transcendent thing is an ideal. The problem is that the fundamentals of immanence don't allow that the ideal is prior, nor do they allow that the field is prior.
Immanence sets the logical meaning (what you call the "ideal") outside the question of time. It understood to be infinite. That which is always true, no matter the time. Unlike the transcendent ideal, which functions as a causal means of the world, it breaks the entire question of the "prior field." The world is not derived from an ideal. There is no prior field of constraint which enables the world to be and mean as it does.
Instead, there is no enabling constraint ("the compass just points"), with the world expressing the infinite of meanings on its own. The world is always free and creating, an emergent expression, rather than something following the order of a predetermining ideal. The rejection of the prior field is the insight of immanence.
It does not act upon or within the world.
Transcendence is regarded in terms of a change. At some point, force acts to make, define or insert infinite meaning into being. Reality goes from a meaningless waste of space to something wonderful and wise. A story of rescue from a hell devoid of meaning.
When I say philosophies of the transcendent are nihilistic, this is what I mean. They view meaning to be added into a meaningless world by transcendence.
I don't mean, as you have assumed, various authoritarianisms of organised religions. My point is about the very notion of transcendence itself, of finding the new realm, the saviour of meaning, the "hidden meaning" which turns the world from worthless into something special.
In the world outside that tradition, the (supposedly) infinite is missing. Lost in its politics, in its greed, in its wars, in its pleasures, in its knowledge, in its logical sense, it is without the wonder and meaning of the infinite. Within the stories of transcendence the infinite is reserved for the few change appropriately, rather than understood as that which obtains regardless of space and time. For the infinite to be expressed, there has to be change, an entry into mystic tradition, to find the meaning which is otherwise absent. Accounts of transcendence do not understand meaning to be infinite. It thought to be "obtained" rather than "to be."
Immanence understands meaning to be infinite. From the first rock to past the death of the universe, there is meaning. Whether one has found love or is trapped in war, there is meaning. Whether one goes to the football or partakes in worship of the transcendent, there is meaning. At the birth of one's child and the death of a family member, there is meaning. No event takes it away or alters it. It is not denied anywhere and cannot be given, for it always is. The transcendent has no-one to save and is incoherent.
Exactly, that's why I said it's a dead end, and earlier, that it's somewhat naïve. The rejection you refer to is just that, a rejection, it is not an insight. We can reject all the formerly accepted metaphysical principles, in the mode of skepticism, then attempt to re-establish our own, but the necessary principles will shine through, in continuity. That's reality, and reality necessitates. This is what allows us to avoid the dead ends.
This can be explained by your refering to what is understood as an exoteric understanding of transcendence. While I am not considering that, but rather considering an esoteric transcendence which appears to equate with your immanence. Which is as I explained the authentic transcendent in the mystical traditions, which only the initiated were to work with.
So the immanence of PM is the equivalence of the esoteric transcendence In the mystical traditions.
I think that is what John was criticising, and I'm inclined to agree. (I was trying to be diplomatic before.)
@punshhh - it is pointless discussing 'the transcendent' with TheWillowOfDarkness. And I think you're being far too charitable to postmodernist philosophers as well. Delueze, et al, are committed atheists and implacably opposed to anything spiritual. 'The immanent' means: the world of common experience, shorn of any spooky 'woo-stuff' that the likes of us like to blather on about. (Here's the obituary of a philosopher that you and I are far more likely to find congenial, namely, Timothy Sprigge.)
Yes, on one hand I'm very suspicious of the taken-for-granted dichotomy that seems so transparently exclusive to our discursive minds: 'just panned out that way' or 'planned that way'.
On a different tack, do you think that in this passage Capra is wanting to suggest that although there is no planning of precise details the overall schema of evolution is determined by an overarching necessity? The thought these days is very much that any overt large-scale miraculous divine intervention would disrupt the order of nature. And this is simply not considered possible, because then our whole tidy picture of evolution would be threatened. On the other hand since we have been present as a species for so short a time, and in such a tiny place, cosmologically speaking, how could we possibly know if there had been such miraculous interventions or not?
So, if the form of evolution is necessitous such that spiritual intelligence must evolve, does that mean something like that God 'tweaks' the random mutations to nudge evolution in a certain direction? Does He with a "still small voice" speak to the fundamental particles and forces, inviting them to do his bidding, as He apparently does to people?
In another thread, I posted a link to the Wikipedia article on 'religious naturalism'. This is the view that in some sense religious experience or sensibility is a natural process. I am cautiously receptive to that, with the caveat that one ought not to conclude that it is something that can be therefore understood in terms of what we currently understand as 'naturalism'. But it is certainly naturalistic in the sense of denying the notion of God as a 'divine architect' or director or artificer, which has been a constant tendency in the Western theological tradition.
In his lectures at the World Parliament of Religions, Swami Vivikenanda spoke of 'evolution and involution' (probably a neologism). But the drift is that, an acorn can only become an oak because it falls from an oak, the oak has 'involved' into the acorn which then 'evolves' into another oak. (Of course we nowadays know, which he didn't, that the acorn carries DNA.) But in his allegory, the process of evolution occurs because humans in a sense embody or express the Universe itself, which has 'involved' into the form that can then give rise to evolution; the process of evolution is that 'what is latent becoming patent', as my lecturer in Hindu philosophy used to say.
The meaning is that the process of evolution is like the manifestation of latent form. So that maps against the Vedantic insight that ?tman is an instantiation of Brahman, the universal source of being. But again, my current (and always tentative) feeling is that when life evolves to a certain point, it becomes capable of realising its own true nature or real identity (a recurring theme in Alan Watts' books). But again that kind of understanding is much more like Advaita Vedanta or Tantric Buddhism, than anything in mainstream Western thought; I think this attitude was actively suppressed in the Western tradition, which is why gnosticism, hermeticism, and the like, were forced underground (although that is a big subject in its own right. And the beauty of this understanding is, it doesn't actually exclude 'the Gospel', although it's asymmetric; from this viewpoint, the Gospels are an embodiment of perennial wisdom, but from their viewpoint, their Gospel is the only truth. )
Stick up for yourself! I stand by my criticisms, but you had something to say about other ways of looking at similar themes. I don't think there's anything wrong with criticism provided one is upfront about the degree to which one is familiar with what one's criticizing. That's the real bone of contention here, not that you don't like some of the guys that I like. How do you understand pomo and how do you understand it as antithetical to what you hold dear?
It is determinedly 'secularist', if I could put it like that. The main proponents of it are highly educated in the Western philosophical tradition but I think their approach is very much conditioned by the requirement to avoid anything that can be construed as spiritual. So it seems to me that what they're referring to as 'radical immanence' is the exclusion of what could be allegorised as the 'vertical dimension'.
Actually SLX and I had a debate about the idea of hierarchical ontologies - the 'great chain of being' - a few months back, and he was very critical of any such idea. But I don't particularly want to try and persuade him of it. I am not trying to court conflict. Even so, I think there really is a culture war going on, between materialism (broadly understood) and spirituality (ditto). So, for example, the spiritual aspects or elements of the Western tradition (for example in Platonism) are re-interpreted in broadly Marxist or biological terms or political terms or 'power relationships' by the post-modern secular intelligentsia.
So the Euro-PoMos, as far as I can see, are generally secularist, in that sense - lacking a sense of the spiritual or indeed the sacred. I think there are exceptions to that, although I'm not very well-read - but I think, perhaps, Levinas. But you're right in saying, my knowledge of them is scanty - life is short, there is an immense amount of knowledge in circulation, one has to pick one's interests.
But then, there's the kind of fashionable post-modernism which does see itself as a school of thought, or a multi-disciplinary approach, which is the subject of criticism by the likes of Sokal and the quote at the top by Gioria Orrigi. That is what this thread had in mind, and I think it's a fair comment.
It's more than that. When I say "infinite" or "meaning," I am only pointing to something which my language never is. All language does this. My thoughts and speech about my eye are not my eye. Talk about my computer is not my computer. Speech about the infinite is not the infinite.
The infinite cannot be known in the personal. It cannot be an interpretation. Either requires that the infinite be subject to change, for it be a object depending on the actions, understanding or existence of the finite human.
Transcendent accounts consider the infinite something to be obtained, through study, through living, through following a tradition: belief in the spiritual (to use Wayfarer's term), then the infinite will be present, the world will be saved from the absence of the infinite. Ironically, the argument for the transcendent is that we become the infinite, that we cease living in the finite realm and enter the eternal.
We might describe immanence as the understanding that the infinite is inaccessible to us. No matter what we do, we will not live the infinite. Whatever our lives, we will still be finite creatures of change, no matter how much we understand the world or the infinite which it expresses. While there is infinite expressed everywhere and anywhere, the most we will ever do is point to it, no matter how much we understand (or do not understand) it.
It is in the respect that immanence and transcendence are similar, both refer to eternity expressed in reality. The difference is that transcendence understands eternity to be an object obtained or accessed though specific action, while immanence understands it to be necessary and unavoidable. Even you, more a pluralist in these matters, would say that it's particular action, a particular life, a particular mystic tradition which brings the eternal, which accesses it.
I say that no-one needs to do anything to express the eternal. Everyone necessarily does so, no matter who they are. The whole world does. God (the eternal) is necessary and not something that is obtained or acts. Even the despairing or suffering express it. There is no means to obtain it (God, tradition, etc.,etc.) because it not the sort thing that is obtained. It's outside the world of change, greed and desire. No-one ever accesses it, no matter how much they understand or feel it.
Eugene Thacker has written some very interesting things in the tradition of negative theology, but his is a kind of 'negative atheology' in the line of Georges Bataille. Still his book After Life is easily one of my favorite ever books, as I can't recommended it enough. Daniel Barber Colucciello released an intriguing book not too long ago about reading Deleuzian immanence in a theological key (Deleuze and the Naming of God), but, again I've not read it. Otherwise John Caputo is supposed to be quite easy to read and is a pretty popular theologian in the Derridian vein.
I've been reading Henry lately and I just want to note that Henry's notion of immanence, which is referred to the subject, is so radical that it precludes any kind of relationality.The self, for Henry is utterly untouched by worldly relations, including power relations and discourse (Foucault), the text and semiosis (Derrida) and the transcendental empirical (Deleuze). This is immanence as a kind of absolute innerness, which from the point of view of the world is actuality a radical transcendence, as I read him.
In any case, I wouldn't class Henry or Levinas as Postmodernist thinkers but as phenomenologists. What defines the Postmodern then? It's (notoriously) not easy to say, but I would say the overarching idea is that subjects are constructed by cultural, textual, discursive and/or power relations. The upshot of this idea would seem to be that there can be nothing universal in human nature (other than the fact that it is always constructed by cultural forces). This is arguably not the case for either Henry or Levinas.
I'm not familiar with late Foucault. Why do you say he would not be classed as a postmodernist? Also re your comment about Marx, note that if the conditions I gave are necessary to class someone as a postmodernist (which itself is questionable), it doesn't not follow that they must also be sufficient. Another criterion might be their location in history.
(Y)
Incidentally, rather than 'post-modernism', per se, it's possible the actual issue is the technique or tendency of 'deconstruction'.
Yes, but I would say the issue is also with the notions of 'genealogy' and 'archeology' in relation to subjects.
As for defining postmodernism in terms of it's take on the 'subject', that seems to me to be a particularly reductive take on this. Although it chimes nicely with Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze hardly talk about the category of the subject at all, and with Deleuze in particular, the subject is simply one among every other product of individuation which applies no less too river, rocks, climates and societies. The idea that 'post-modernism' is overbearingly concerned with questions of subjectivity is one of those pervasive myths that deserves a rather quick and unceremonious death.
Perhaps, but there is something for the self to be transcendent of and that is really the point of Henry's polemic against any scientific understanding of the "individual". The point for Henry (and interestingly in a similar way for Berdyaev whom I've also been enjoying reading of late) is precisely that the individual is not the self.
Perhaps the reason that Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida do not talk about the self in this sense is that for them it simply does not exist. So, I'm not (and haven't been) saying that postmodernism is "overbearingly concerned with questions of subjectivity" at all. So, I probably used the wrong term and should have referred instead to individuals being culturally constructed; which of course they are.
This is manifestly untrue. There's not much else to say about that.
Quoting John
Eh, the disjunction between the subject and the self (or the 'ego') has a long and rich history, and is pretty pervasive with respect to all the philosophers we're discussing here. I suspect Henry would reel against speaking about any of his philosophy in terms of transcendence, but I'm not very invested in that debate either way.
I don't know who this is aimed at, but I have read quite a lot of "pomo" literature and even more proto-pomo (Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger). I have been trying to get at something that aint easy to get at (due at least to some not insignificant degree to the nature of much of 'pomo' literature). I actually enjoy reading some Deleuze or Derrida when I'm in the mood to be a connoisseur of ideas for ideas' sake (kind of like you you might drink wine for wine's sake and not to get drunk). Not so with Fouco, tho. ;)
Yes, I know this and I understand your perspective. I agreed with you in my first reply to you.
Here I was picking up on the idea that there can be meaning in the infinite, I find this problematic, I would always defer to the use of eternal rather than infinite.
Yes I agree, but I don't see it as this simple, see below.
Here we need to tease out the esoteric from the exoteric understanding and use of transcendence as it has been handed down to us from the traditions. The notion of attaining the infinite(being delivered into eternity) and following a study and practice and then reach Nirvana and leave behind the finite. This is the exoteric understanding that is disseminated widely through our culture and the religious traditions.
By contrast, the esoteric understanding of transcendence (as it has been handed down to us by the traditions) is a discipline undertaken under strict direction from a master in which the initiated disciple relinquishes the exoteric in every form, stills the mind and metaphorically breaks into the eternal soul within themselves(which is veiled at this point in our evolution). This can be viewed as the opposite of breaking out of something, one breaks into that inner sanctum which is veiled to us in this world, rather like the pulling away the scales which protect a developing bud to allow the flower to bloom.
This process and the language used by the initiated would always have been concealed from the uninitiated.
Yes, this is strictly true of infinity, but do you realise that infinity is a human invention? We should be using the word eternity, or some other word which refers to an endlessness, but also allows for the unknown, which allows for realities and events which seem illogical, or impossible to us from our limited perspective.
This comes to the heart of the matter. For me eternity is also unavoidable, but currently (due to our evolutionary incarnate predicament) unavailable, or veiled to us in our day to day existence. It is due to the veil that eternity is transcendent, but the mystic realises that the veil is the hard casing of a bud, to speak metaphorically and that our body has within it, in a latent form, the apparatus to release our true nature in some way into our incarnate selves.
Yes, I agree, the eternal is everywhere, is all, we are eternity devices, but we just don't see it.
The implication though is that we can't expect to understand it through our invention of logical thought alone. Our understanding would naturally develop through a natural process of unfolding/opening/revealing/unveiling. Because logic can't, at least at this time encompass the eternal.
So as far as I can see we are in agreement.
OK, I'm equating the subject with the self and distinguishing it from the individual. This is not exactly Henry's terminology perhaps. Perhaps he would equate the subject with the individual, and I would have no argument with that; as long as the distinction between the empirically or culturally constructed and determined individual and the radically immanent self is maintained.
I think the "disjunction" you are referring to is something else altogether.
--
*Giorgio Agamben gives voice to what I mean when he writes, in the famous opening lines of his Homo Sacer: "In his final years Foucault seemed to orient this analysis according to two distinct directives for research: on the one hand, the study of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very center; on he other hand, the examination of the technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at he same time, to an external power. Clearly these two lines (which carry on two tendencies present in Foucault's work from the very beginning) intersect in many points and refer back to a common center.
...Yet the point at which these two faces of power converge remains strangely unclear in Foucault's work, so much so that it has even been claimed that Foucault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power. If Foucault contests the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is exclusively based on juridical models ("What legitimates power?") or on institutional models ("What is the State?"), and if he calls for a liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty" in order to construct an analytic of power that would not take law as its model and code, then where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures converge? And, more generally, is there a unitary center in which the political "double bind" finds its raison d'etre?
...Although the existence of such a line of thinking seems to be logically implicit in Foucault's work, it remains a blind spot to the eye of the researcher, or rather something like a vanishing point that the different perspectival lines of Foucault's inquiry... converge toward without reaching."
Incidentally, this line of reasoning is more or less exactly what drew me towards these kinds of thinkers; the notion of human freedom as guaranteed by some liberal conception of universality always struck me as cartoonish and ridiculous, and it always seemed to me that it'd only be by working through the processes of subjectivization that one could ever, in any coherent manner, speak about freedom.
I would still say that Foucault thinks that pre-reflective subjects are constructed by various technologies of power and discourse. Those technologies are ever-changing, so there is nothing universal about the form of the construction of subjects, but surely the point must remain that subjects in all times and places have, for Foucault been constructed by the technologies of power operating within their societies.
I agree with you that Foucault does not think this is how it ought to be, or how it must be; that he thinks the subject, once she comes to critically understand the power relations that have shaped her, can and should then begin the process of manipulation to fashion herself as a living work of art.
But, where I disagree is that I do not see this kind of self-creation as the kind of radical freedom that must be presumed to ground genuine moral responsibility. I would say that freedom only comes to us in the terms in which we think ourselves. If we think ourselves as immanently and exhaustively constituted as individual parts of cultural, social, historical and discursive processes, whether unreflectively and disempoweredly other-constituted or reflectively and empoweredly self-constructed, there can be no radical freedom for us, because we cannot think of ourselves as such. If we think ourselves as radically free and live our lives in the light of that though, who is to say we are not 'really' radically free?
I think it is revealing that Foucault thinks "that the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity-and not of authenticity".
Sartre's, which derives from Heidegger's (really Kierkegaard's) notion of authenticity is predicated on the turn away from the inauthentic generalized deliverances of 'das Mann', towards the personailzed, particularized, lived experience of Dasein, towards the intuitive, phronetic capacity (although Heidegger would not have put it this way) to respond directly to experience in a way utterly free from any of the dictates of 'what one does'.
There is an irony in this because to concern oneself with self-creation, which can only ever be a process of manipulating generalized cultural materials, seems to be seen by Foucault as the "only practical consequence" on account of his very incapacity to free himself from the generalized presuppositions inherent in his genealogies and archeologies of the the subject. So, his position can never be truly revolutionary, but must remain a mediocre reactionary strategy. And it is interesting that many critics have noted this reactionary spirit which lies at the heart of postmodernism as it does at the heart of any philosophy that insists on a discursive account of the self and of freedom.
It is not a matter of freedom being guaranteed by anything. Freedom cannot be guaranteed. That is the erroneous conceptual trap you seem to keep falling into; the demand that freedom must be guaranteed by some discursive analysis or other. As I see it, this demand is monstrously self-limiting. Freedom must be felt, it must be lived, it must be intuited, and it must first be presumed as an act of faith. This is the essence of Kierkegaard's "leap". This is the true essence of authenticity, to turn away from all intersubjective demands for justification of one's acts.
The one universal thing about selves is the fact that they are all truly free. This does not mean that the individual, as a cultural subject is free, it means that the self, insofar as it is spirit, is not restricted to its cultural subjectivity. But if the individual does not believe this ( i'e' has no faith) , then of course the individual cannot be free; irrespective of how brilliantly and ingeniously it manipulates what it understands to be its cultural constitution and 'constructs itself as a work of art'.
Quoting John
I mean, if you really believe this, then all you bluster about freedom needing to be lived, intuited, etc is meaningless. If we're so 'radically free', then what need any practise of freedom? This whole trope about spirit and freedom is on par with animism for me, it treats freedom as this abstract truth which zero bearing on life as actually lived. When I speak about guarantees, I'm speaking out against any such notion, especially any mythical notion of freedom as spirituality ingrained or whatever mystical thesis that makes of freedom some reified Idea in the sky or soul or whatever.
Foucault in fact has a wonderful quote about this, especially on the notion of 'guarantees': "Freedom is practice; . . . the freedom of men is never assured by the laws and the institutions that are intended to guarantee them. That is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around. Not because they are ambiguous, but simply because ‘freedom’ is what must be exercised . . . I think it can never be inherent in the structure of things to (itself) guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom”.
But the problem with what you say is that even if the true spiritual nature of persons is freedom, this cannot entail that there is any rational guarantee of that. And a person's realization of freedom can be obscured by any beliefs that deny it.
So freedom cannot ever be an "abstract truth" but rather something that must first be believed (on the basis of our intuitions and lived experience) before it can be fully lived.
I agree with Foucault that the structure of things cannot guarantee freedom; freedom has nothing to do with structures or processes. As I have said already I don't believe there can be any guarantee in any abstract sense, that is any deductive certainty, that we are free. But we can become certain that we are free when we cease the futile activity of asking for such guarantees.
You are still demanding such guarantees though-- believe, else your freedom will be obscured, else you will not be free. The one thing you won't accept is people are free without a guarantee.
People don't have to believe in freedom to be free. The person who denies they make a choice still chooses. They are still free no matter what they might think.
Here there is an irony to your position: it's you who doesn't think freedom is universal. You think belief is the gatekeeper. Fail to believe and someone will not be free.
People may be lacking in a realisation of freedom, but that doesn't mean they aren't free. It just means they think and say they aren't free, which may or may to cause them anxiety.
I can't speak for others, but I am not talking about any 'freedom' that can be granted by the state, or any freedom from emotions (in the sense that they might be eliminated or whatever).
The kind of freedom i mean is the ability to have determined to have done otherwise than one has done. When you say "I wish I hadn't done that" you imagine that you could have done something else. Of course purely logically speaking we could always have done otherwise, but freedom would be an illusion if we could not actually have done otherwise.
The scientific image of the world makes it seem impossible that there really are alternative courses of action which are available to be entirely determined by the person. Science cannot provide any coherent understanding of how we could be any freer than any other exhaustively physical process.
I think it is undeniable that people may be either freed or enslaved by their beliefs.
People are inherently free but may certainly enslave themselves.
Not with respect to the sort of freedom you're talking about. It's not a question of culture, discourse of power.
Now if you meant people may be harmed or anxious by a particular understanding of the world, by the ideas they deny themselves in their image of the world and truth, that is certainly true. In that case though, the issue is not a lack of freedom, but the particular understanding or belief which is hurting them. The problem isn't any lack of "universal freedom" or the absence "grounding myth (in the sense of one being true)." It's all about who they are, their particular beliefs and how they impact on them.
Someone might well need to think they are free to understand that they are, and feel that their life is worthwhile, but in that there is no challenge to their freedom. It's just a description of the lived culture they will find fulfilling (and the belief system they do not find fulfilling).
It's a much simpler thing I'm talking about; which is that if people do not believe they are free they will not experience freedom nor will they act freely, but instead their acts will be determined by their slavery to the ideas that deny their freedom.
That's a contradiction. If that were true, freedom would be dependent on believing in it, meaning it would not be "universal" and only a particular way, a discourse, a thought, an action, of people behaving.
In any case, no one's actions are predetermined by their outlook on freedom. Every action takes the action itself. All acts are lived. Even the person who denies they have freedom might find themselves acting otherwise to what they thought would happen. Everyone is free. All make choices, even those who think they don't have any choice. Freedom is so without the guarantee of belief in freedom.
But what in the world has belief got to do with freedom? A belief in unicorns speaks nothing as to their reality, and I don't see what a 'belief' in freedom has to do with the practice and exercise of freedom either. In any case, without specifying how belief functions to guarantee freedom - and yes, as Willow points out, you're leveraging belief as a guarantee for freedom, no matter your protestations to the contrary - all you're doing is displacing the problem. To be free, one must believe: OK but what is belief other than some kind of immaterial, 'mental' conviction, no different to one's 'belief' in UFOs and The Secret? In fact, how does your position differ from the self-help woo that is The Secret at all?
I can't speak for John, but as I see it what he is referring to is something along the lines of this. To have a conscious conception of the freedom one is engaged in. I have experienced this, rather like in a lucid dream in which you realise you are fully conscious in the dream and then experience a literal freedom in your actions. Even more so, if you can somehow control the dream, something I was never able to do. A freedom that is fully actualised in living action. This smacks of revelation to me, but one which embeds a realisation of freedom within oneself.
This presumes that this universal human nature is a rigid framework of some sort. It need not be, only the phenomenological stage or ground upon which that human dwells need be universal("all the world's a stage").
As I have pointed out it is incorrect to consider the transcendent somehow external to the subject. It is only ever accessed, received through the intangible being of the self. One ought to realise that temporal and spatial extension are a projection, from the transcendent realm, so each being is symultaniously in (dwelling) the transcendent realm and in the spatio temporal world. It is the world of extension that is external.
Do you mean(in other words) that one allows the possibility of ones self acting freely. By making this space it frees the self that it can feel and act freely, unconstrained?
No, you're misunderstanding. Freedom is not dependent on anything, but your personal sense and understanding of freedom is. The latter is dependent on what you think and beleive. How could it not be? Freedom cannot be dependent on anything, otherwise it is not freedom; and that is precisely what I've been saying.
I haven't said that one's actions are predetermined by their outlook on freedom; that's your misreading at work. All acts are not lived. If an act is entirely unconscious then it is not lived. Of course it is still 'gone through' by the body, but it may be utterly mechanical, or merely organic. Freedom and life are neither mechanical nor organic. Of course "all make choices" but choices my be completely mechanical; even machines can make choices in this sense.
It's not possible to give a positive conceptual account of freedom, so any account must be apophatic.
The kind of belief I am speaking about is not one that is analogous with belief in unicorns or UFOs. There are beliefs you would (or should) be willing to change in a flash if evidence to the contrary becomes undeniable. There are beliefs in things for which there is no plausible evidence, which you will not drop easily because there is no evidence to disconfirm them any more than there is to confirm them. And then there are beliefs for which every moment of your life can give you all the evidence you need. And the belief in freedom is of this last kind.
Everyone naturally believes in their own inherently radical freedom. Of course this may be subjugated, but subjugation of freedom is a separate issue; it is really nothing more than the human imposition of constraints which are like natural constraints; it is is a kind of amplification of natural constraints on freedom. This becomes, then, a matter of justice, freedom hasn't been removed (it can never be entirely removed) but 'pushed down' or held back. I never denied that there are natural constraints on freedom. But it is only when other philosophical ideas like the foreknowledge of God, or the determinism or even randomness of physical processes are brought into consideration, that anyone questions whether they are 'really' free within the limits of natural constraint, as they feel themselves to be.
But to look at freedom in relation to determinism is to objectify freedom, as you seem to be doing. Is there any in-principle determinate state of affairs independent of our thoughts and beliefs as to whether we are free or not, as you would no doubt say there is when it comes to the existence of unicorns or UFOs? I would say that there is no determinate 'in itself' at all. Freedom cannot be empirically (in the intersubjective sense at least), or deductively, confirmed or disconfirmed; so how can it not be a matter concerned entirely with our thoughts, beliefs, intuitions and experience, in other words with life as lived ?
Yes, I would say that one can certainly increase one's sense of freedom by changing one's thoughts about it.
At least, I think that is what you are referring to.
Because to think 'live is lived' is exhausted by our 'thoughts, beliefs, intuitions and experience' is to conceive of life in a horrifyingly narrow and morbidly 'intellectualist' manner. Rather than live life in ones head, life generally is concerned with the things I do, the things I say, the actions I take. And perhaps even more importantly, the things done to me, said of me, that impel me and make claims upon me; life as composed of habits, regularities, flourishes of creative engagement amongst rhythms of time and movement, punctuated with time wasting, routine, imposition, sleep, intensity, and so on. You seem to have a very weird disembodied, intellectualist notion of freedom that 'lives' entirely in one's head. It's frankly unrecognisable as anything anything to do with freedom, as classically understood. Your notion of freedom seems to turn upon some ineffable experience of warm, fuzzy feelings, the 'inner convictions' of romantic 'radical freedom'.
But freedom for the most part is not this; freedom has a decided aspect of sheer debilitation, incapacity to act in the face of a loss of 'normal' function, a sense of powerlessness that says that 'I can do nothing else but this one thing'; When a Rosa Park sits at the front of a bus, this expression of freedom is abyssal, terrifying, completely dehumanizing in every sense of the word. But it has nothing to do with how she 'feels or thinks' and everything to do with what she does. At it's limit, freedom rubs our subjectivity raw, eviscerates us, erases our particularities precisely by putting us in touch with a universal that is brutally indifferent to the quirks of our psychology and the idiosyncracises of our feelings.
Your mystical sense of 'freedom' seems on the other hand oddly suited to a modern world where, it just becomes another in a long line of inconsequential 'I really, authentically feel it, deep down in my heart of hearts and warm fuzziness!'. A kind of freedom suited for suburban moms who attend yoga class for their dose of 'authentic spirituality' ("belief will set you free, girls!"). But this seems a caricature of the ground-swallowing, incapacitation that freedom, when it presents itself in our acts, can in fact present itself as.
If you're willing to carry on the discussion in a spirit of charitability and good faith instead of narrow caricature, tendentious distortion and egregious mischaracterization then I'm happy enough to continue, otherwise I won't waste my time.
:-}
Huh? As it relates to a discussion of Rosa Parks, freedom is a property of the spirit. We're somewhere downstream from metaphysical issues. I'm not seeing why John's view wouldn't accommodate it.
Yes, for me freedom is a mystery, it points beyond both the mechanical and the organic and is like a finger pointing at an unknown moon. Not everything can be decided or accounted for by the discursive intellect. It's a remarkable irony when Streetlight refers to what I have been saying about freedom as "horrifyingly narrow and morbidly intellectualist"!
Yes, I don't see that either. Rosa Parks is a heroic spirit.
But, I don't see much, if any, relevance to what I've been saying in the rest of the post either. It all comes across to me as a bit shrill, defensive and peevish, to be honest.
It is interesting, though, how a discussion that started off about the existence of common themes in PM has zeroed in on the issue of freedom.
I’m not. You’re confusing the social, cultural and lived practice of the idea of freedom (or rather consciousness)is equated with having freedom under your argument. Do remember in one of our earlier discussions when you claimed that removing the “grounding myth” would amount to a loss of freedom?
You position considers freedom dependent on believing one is free. Reject the idea of this “grounding myth,” of the transcendent, a person with be without freedom. I remember you outright stating it— that if there was no such “grounding myth,” that there easn't even a possibly of anyone being free. We must have this “grounding myth,” this belief in freedom, else we will be without freedom and irrevocable damage will be caused to our lives.
Believe or you will burn in Hell as a slave, metaphorically speaking.
All acts are lived. Our worlds and lives are bigger than what we are immediately aware of in one moment. At this very moment, I am doing many more things than just concentrating on this post, some of which are are the result my earlier choices, many of which I did not do by thinking: “And now I will use my freedom to do this.” To say the unconscious is not lived is manifestly untrue. People are affected by what they aren’t aware of all the time.
Any action we take involves some part of the world we aren’t presently aware of. When I think about what letter I need to type next, I’m far more than that thought and my body is doing countless things I’m not aware of in that thought. Living freedom doesn't depend on the thought of it. Such an argument is for one who locates life only in the present idea of their consciousness (e.g. "I'm free" ) rather than wider world that extends beyond their thoughts.
This... rather ironic. You are the one trying to narrow down life to the discursive intellect here. What do you say to say when we point out that life is more than thought? You claim it's not life, as if lives were restricted to the immediately present consciousness experience:
This is to outright suggest there is no life beyond what you term the "morbidly intellectualist," as if life were only what we were present aware of.
Quoting John
It's not that surprising. After all, you - and not just you, to be fair - have literally had nothing of interest or of substance to say about this thing you call post-modernism to begin with.
Certainly, nothing of much interest to you, it would seem. And yet you have 'participated' in the vacuity nonetheless.
[IMG]http://i65.tinypic.com/116pf08.jpg[/IMG]
More like you fail to describe yourselves. You take you own lacking and apply to the rest of the world. Rather than understand you are lacking, that you need to find new knowledge, a new discourse or a new understanding, you proclaim this lack is a failure of existence itself.
Supposedly, there is no meaning unless people find something more, a failure not of the self (which can be remedied by becoming a more ethical person, gaining understanding, etc.,etc.) but of existence. No matter what exists, it will not be enough. Everything is meaningless in-itself.
You don't need that word to understand what the vision of the free society is. It's helpful, though.
Nobody thinks she wanted that particular seat. Her action was highly symbolic.
Lol. You're protesting that we should the think of the Civil Rights Movement in terms of physics. So yea.. .let's do that. A rationalist approach is going to land us where it always has landed us... determinism. How about some empiricism?
No, can you provide a direct quote or citation?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I have tried to disabuse you of this erroneous reading several times but it's not sinking in. Once again, my position is that one can be said to be free in principle regardless of whether one believes it; but one will not live that freedom if one denies it. This is really not different in spirit to Heidegger's notion of authenticity.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I don't remember saying that. It's possible I did. But again, provide the quote. Whether I would agree with such a statement would depend on what it is taken to mean. Tell me exactly what you take it to mean and I'll tell you if I agree with it.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
How could an act rightly be said to be lived if there is absolutely no awareness of it at all? Of course people are affected by what they are unaware of all the time, and they may or may not be more or less aware of those affects; in other words they may or may not live them. If people are, and remain, totally unaware of them, then the affects cannot rightly be said to be 'lived'; to say that they are lived would seem to be a complete contradiction.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I haven't denied that, have I? Do you claim that you live the countless processes of your body at every moment? If you do, then you are working with a different definition of 'lived' than I am; in which case this discussion is going nowhere. I haven't said that you have to be thinking "I am free" at any moment in order to be free in that moment. That would be a simple-minded reading indeed.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Nonsense; where have I said that thought, belief, intuition and experience are confined to the discursive intellect, or even confined to processes that can be explicated by the discursive intellect; that is precisely the opposite of what I am contending. I don't know, Willow; what's the point of discussing with you if you can't even get what I am saying straight.
Lol. You think this.
Quoting Mongrel
Sure - symbolic with respect to what? Her historical circumstances? The way the black community was being treated, both in terms of 'lived actions', and codified at the level of law? Nah, must be all that spirit stuff, the stuff that really matters. Authenticity and all that. Heidegger the Nazi knew all about that. Maybe Parks should have just meditated her way to freedom, had a real feeling, intuition, experience of it. She could have just 'thought' her way there.
WTF?
Quoting StreetlightX
The perception of her humanity. We're done here.
I think you're talking about mok?a, spiritual liberation. That has never been much part of the Western intellectual tradition in my view. It is present elliptically - if you understand something about it, then you can see the traces of it in Western thought (see for instance Greg Goode's analysis of non-dualism in Western philosophy.) I think it has been suppressed in the Western tradition (going back to the formation of the Roman church, in all likelihood). And it's why Alan Watts was correct in calling it a 'taboo' in his book of that name -and why what you're interested in is counter-cultural.
Whereas, post-modernism is, by and large, the philosophical attitude of Western secular academia, so the two views are chalk and cheese.
I don't think that a reduction of the terms of human agency to what comprises it can encapsulate what she did, but we read about it, and we can appreciate how much guts it must have taken for her to refuse. She wasn't the first, others had also refused to give up their seats, it but her case got picked up to run through the courts since they thought it had the best chance of prevailing.
Early start of the postmodern movement...a turn in thought.
Really, I was just referring to the transcendent, whatever we might think that is. It could be 'God', 'moksha', nirvana, or otherwise.
Apropos of your many times avowed interest in Gnosticism Berdyaev offers an interesting discussion of the difference between religion for the masses and for the "spiritually aristocratic". Here is a part:
[i]From this point of view the Gnostics are of particular interest. A great number of them truly belong to the "aristocracy" of the spirit. but they seem to have been unable to reconcile themselves to the "democracy" of the Christian Church. The question is not whether or not they are in the right. The Church had profound reasons for opposing and condemning them, for had the Gnostics won the day Christianity would never have been victorious. It would have been transformed into an aristocratic sect. But the question which Gnosticism raises is a profoundly disturbing one which is always with us, and has its importance even today. Revelation and absolute truth are both distorted and assimilated, according to the make-up and spiritual development of the persons receiving them. Are we bound to consider as absolute and unchangeable that form of the Christian revelation which was intended for the average man? Must the more spiritual, complex, and subtle type of man, who has in some measure received the great gift of Gnosis, be brought down to a lower level and perforce rest content with a reduced spirituality for the sake of the masses, and in order that he may share in the fellowship of the Christian people?....Can the path which leads to the acquiring of the Holy Spirit and to spiritual perfection and holiness be regarded as the sole criterion of spiritual life and the only source of spiritual Gnosis?
The question of the religious significance of human gifts and giftedness is a profoundly difficult one. It was a question which the Gnostics had to face and it also confronted Clement of Alexandria and Origen, who were themselves also Gnostic Christians. It was a question too for Solovyov, and in our own time it is still there for the Christian consciousness to grapple with. It is part of the problematics of Christianity. Must the question of Christian consciousness and knowledge be solved in a "democratic" spirit with a view to the requirements of average humanity, or will a more "interior" solution, beyond the comprehension of the masses, be possible and be allowed by authority? " I have given you milk" says St Paul, "not solid food, for ye could not bear it; and ye cannot bear it even now, for ye are yet carnal."
"Democratic Christianity feeds on "milk", because it attends to "the flesh" and, moreover, the Church is right in acting thus. But this fact does not solve the problem of the possibility of other fare for those whose spiritual hunger is still unsatisfied.[/i]- Freedom and the Spirit 1935
This might be veering a bit off-topic, but on the other hand maybe it has to do with the problem of the relationship between doctrine and the freedoms of both worship and vision, in just the kind of way that Postmodernism would not understand it.
I wonder what Post Modern freedom, being so based on abstruse conceptual technologies as it is, sees itself as having to offer the common intellectually unsophisticated man or woman (for whom it certainly could be nothing other than sheer "gobbledygook") in place of "democratic" religion?
I can almost taste the venom or see it dripping from the screen.
Yeah, I guess I did go off the rails a wee bit there, which is my wont. Oh well...
O:)
But, I think the point is that there are no materialistic models of freedom that are not what a libertarian would understand as an account of a much diluted notion of freedom. Perhaps there are some non-secular existentialist accounts....
Anyway, when these discussions devolve to talking past one another as they nearly always do, it's probably better to let it go, I guess, but I'm a slow learner.
;)
(That is a very interesting quote from Berdyaev, I might take the time to read the rest of that essay.)
As I said to ????????????? any kind of universal transcendent ground, or basis of our existence need not relegate freedom as absurd or ridiculous. Yes you are correct to identify some human freedoms in subjectivisation, but that's not surprising, because they are culturally derived and subjectification is the means by which they are generated, or rather subjugated, and controlled in the cultural narrative. Unless you are blinkered to any freedoms which might be found outside this subjectification, there are other freedoms to be both found and lived.
There are freedoms to be observed and participated in with other beings(organisms) in the biosphere. There is freedom to be found and enjoyed in the imagination and in creative expression. There may be other freedoms available which are orthogonal to our evolutionary directed experience as organisms.
Why would one choose to ignore other freedoms?
If one confines freedom to physical actions and the way in which within the society freedoms are bestowed or deprived, it is in itself to relegate freedom to a byproduct of a mechanistic robotic process, presumably deterministic to boot. I wonder if there are any ranks of thought police involved in this narrative.
[quote=John]But being subject to forces beyond our control does not equal being utterly controlled by such forces, and I have never yet heard or read a convincing account of how, if we are immanent material beings and nothing but immanent material beings, the kind of (libertarian) freedom in the sense that I understand to be necessary for moral responsibility could be thought to be possible.[/quote]
[quote=John]But, where I disagree is that I do not see this kind of self-creation as the kind of radical freedom that must be presumed to ground genuine moral responsibility. I would say that freedom only comes to us in the terms in which we think ourselves. If we think ourselves as immanently and exhaustively constituted as individual parts of cultural, social, historical and discursive processes, whether unreflectively and disempoweredly other-constituted or reflectively and empoweredly self-constructed, there can be no radical freedom for us, because we cannot think of ourselves as such.[/quote]
[quote=John]So freedom cannot ever be an "abstract truth" but rather something that must first be believed (on the basis of our intuitions and lived experience) before it can be fully lived.[/quote]
Emphasis mine.
You've been saying it all through this thread. Not merely that people lack a sense of freedom, but that without belief in it, they lack freedom itself. And every time someone pulls you up on it, you ignore it. You attempt to deflect, suggest you haven't really said it, even though it's basically the key point of your position.
What it means is, according to you (unless these quoted statements are falsehoods), that if someone doesn't think of say: "I am free." or even "I have faith I'm free," then they cannot have radical freedom. The individual with "no faith" cannot be free. That's why you're are so insistent about belief in freedom. You think to be without the belief in freedom amounts to living in enslavement.
I mean you've even said in this latest post where you are steadfastly denying it:
[quote=""John]I have tried to disabuse you of this erroneous reading several times but it's not sinking in. Once again, my position is that one can be said to be free in principle regardless of whether one believes it; but one will not live that freedom if one denies it. [/quote]
How exactly will I be free if I'm not living it? Is my freedom some abstract, merely conceptual thing?
If I have freedom, I live it. So it is for anyone, including those who deny they have it. The individual with "no faith" lives freedom just as much as anyone with faith.
No-one suggested that. The call to subjectivity is about recognising it's a subject which expresses freedom. Pretty much the anti-thesis of a mechanistic robotic process. What's the protest action about? Is it a predetermined outcome of mechanistic forces?
No. It's the action of a subject. A choice which needs be made in response to injustice. An expression for freedom of a subject which cannot be exhausted by what other think and say (i.e. "You can't do that." "You can't oppose. It's [the injustice] only natural," etc.,etc. ).
Life concerns the thing I do and think, not what some initial state predetermined. I acted, not forces, not a space dust or the bully holding a stick over me. I live my freedom in being an existing subject.
I would say so too, but John seems to deny that. His point throughout has been this is about more than a lived culture or state of a person. If his concern was only a question of someone feeling better by their belief, it would be the sort of individual and discursive description he is attacking postmodernism for.
Belief is an ambiguous and vague term, personally I have rid my language and thinking of belief, beliefs, I see no value in, requirement for, it.
This made it difficult to understand John's point initially, but now I see it as a use in which belief refers to something known, lived and experienced without question. As much a part of us as our daily bread. I read an ambiguity mixed in with this due to a transcendent spirit or soul being alluded to, in the notion of a "radical freedom". Something which is I think a nonsense to a physicalist or materialism based philosophy, hence Streetlight's cartoon.
Let's look at an example of a subject who has so much freedom he is one of the most free subjects in existence(on our planet), Donald Trump, he is free to do most anything he wants, or is inclined to do. What does he do, I don't know, but I expect that he simply indulges his animal desires, while feeling socially isolated, psychologically inadequate, childish, naive, etc etc. Is this freedom? he is confined within the constraints of his conditioned subject, perhaps his fight for the presidency is the only thing he has left as a possibility of braking free of his distorted circus of a life and experiencing for a brief moment some freedom.
Let's look at another example of a subject, Ghandi, someone who was content with his food bowl and the ability to weave his own loin cloth. He lived far more freedom than Trump does, by the freedoms expressed from his mind and enjoying a few genuine friendships and a humble constructive role within his society.
Ghandi exercised his intellect and sculpted, crafted his own mind and psychological life with freedom of imagination and creative intellectual vision. Such freedom emerges in the mind of a subject who is somehow transcendent of their social conditioning.
Well said Punshhh, and hear hear. There was a column recently on a similar theme, Donald Trump's Sad, Lonely Life, David Brooks.
Hey Mongrel, I'm with you in spirit :) I confess, I'm not with either protagonist in this thread. But I'm off tomorrow to practice with my choir. We still sing the South African song 'Freedom is coming'. 'Amandla Awethu' as it is in Zulu (Power to us!)...although not so many like to sing 'Viva COSATU!' which is the pro-union verse. Freedom is coming!
Yes, Ghandi is another exemplar of the subject of freedom par excellence; Ghandi, who unlike any other two bit hermit who could starve himself for ideals, actually walked down to the sea to break the salt laws in an act of civil disobedience; Ghandi, who refused to move from the first-class carriage in South Africa when asked to do so in defiance of law; Ghandi, who actively engaged in hard fought political negotiations with South African, Indian and British governments, with tangible, society-changing results; Ghandi, who used his considerable charismatic and organizational skills to leads massive protests by his countrymen; Ghandi, who all too readily gave up his liberty, time and time again, for the sake of non-violence; Ghandi, who lead, with incredible political acumen, the Indian National Congress party (and Ghandi, who slept naked with little girls to test his commitment to chastity...; and Ghandi, who considered blacks in Africa savages, and for whom the 'white race' ought to predominate in South Africa; and Ghandi, whose attitude toward the caste system remains an inextinguishable black mark against his legacy).
But by all means, romanticise his 'food bowl' and his 'loin cloth', along with his 'psychological life' and 'freedom expressed in the mind'. By all means, recall everything about him that resides on the low, rusty rungs of his actual practices of freedom. Perhaps this rosy, spiritualist, beautiful-soul swill is why Zizek polemically issued the reminder that Ghandi was far more violent than Hitler, with respect to his cutting against the grain of his time (that is, unlike Hitler, who capitalized upon - and horrifyingly radicalized - the murderous currents already at work in the Europe of his time). There's probably something to be said too about Walter Benjamin's (a 'post-modernist' avant la lettre) thesis that the aestheticization of politics - no doubt commensurate with a vapid and bathetic concern with foodbowls and loincloths - is the logical outcome of fascist ideologizing, but that's probably neither here nor there.
I accept that a transcendence is not required to understand and explain the narrative, I know this, but it doesn't mean that there isn't such a thing, or something unknown/undetected involved in our lives.
I don't have time today for a more extensive reply. By "pre-reflective" i mean something like Heidegger's 'being-in-the-world'; the condition we find ourselves in where we feel we can simply do whatever we want within the general constraints of nature.
This character of this 'native' condition is challenged only when we reflect on whether we really could have done something different yesterday, when we begin to consider that we are nothing but a physical process like the rest of nature. In this connection, think of Spinoza's analogy with the stone that is rolling down hill:
“Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.”
Our native condition is like that of the stone; we naturally just find ourselves to be radically free. In general, PM, like Spinoza is one of the philosophies that posits this is an illusion. Of course, I don't agree with Spinoza or PM about the source of our feeling of freedom being in innocence or ignorance, and really that has been the point of this thread.
So we don't have to reflectively (explicitly) think of ourselves as radically free in order to be radically free; but our experience of that radical freedom will be curtailed if we come to think of ourselves as being, by whatever external forces, through and through determined. I believe that even the arch-determinist Dennett warned Sam Harris that he should not tell people they have no free will because research suggests that if people think that they have no free will they will begin to behave as though they have no free will.
It could be, yes. Is that the relevant question though? Many things could be. Hitler could be a humanitarian leader and champion of the oppressed. I could be president of the US. A cure for cancer could be.
What does this tell us about our world though? Nothing. To say any of these things could be says nothing about what is. So yes, all the events of the world could be played out by philosophical zombies, but are they? Is it true? Or are we concious subjects?
So worried about "guaranteeing" the presence of concious subjects, about finding the idea or force which means we can say that we're not just robots, whole sections of philosophy completely forget we are concious subjects.
In response to people talking about concious subjects, these philosophy only miss the point, to respond to awareness of ourselves as concious subjects with: "Ah ha, you could be a robot, so we couldn't possibly say you are a concious subject." It's to entirely miss the point and ignore living people.
We see this in your analysis of Trump. In the sense we are talking here, Trump is no more or less free than anyone else. Just like anyone else, he is a free subject who makes choices.The presidency is not the only possible way he could break free from an unfulfillinging life (if he's even unfulfilled at all).
He could act to choose differently right now. He could give away wealth and go help the poor. He could dedicate himself to becoming an artist and leave behind his exploitative and abusive business and social practices. He could dedicate himself to caring for others, becoming liked and respected by a wide circle if friends.
Freedom, as talked about here, is not about overcoming a particular social force. It about being a subject who chooses, who emerges in the world, rather than being pre-determined by an initial force. Becoming president is not the only possible way Trump could overcome his demons.
To say otherwise is just greed and irresponsiblity talking-- "but I can't possibly be ethical or valuable unless you make me president." The statement of a spoiled narcissist.
Nor does any one transcend the social forces around them. In existing, one is given, by definition, with there environment. Any influence present, by definition, affects them. Breaking away from damaging influence is not a question of transcending the world. It's about living differently, about being s person who is no longer driven by negative forces. The solution is the subject in the world, not escaping the world. Negative influences end, not become undone.
Gahndi no less crafted his mind or was impacted by social forces than Trump. He just chose and had different influencescthan Trump. Any influence which might have given him personal relationships like Trump, he either broke away from through his action or never encountered. He didn't break outside social influence. The forces which influenced him were different to Trump.
Heidegger and Foucault were indeed historicists, but I think your confusion here comes from the assumption that because I appropriate one of Heidegger's notions ( authenticity) for the purpose of my own argument, that I therefore must agree with his whole standpoint. I don't. I see much that is good in Heidegger's philosophy; but I don't agree with him about the radical finitude (which is really to say again in a different way, immanence, to return to an initial point of departure in this thread) of human being.
To be determined (caused) as beings who desire is not to say we do not have free will or freedom. It only says forces outside ourselves makes us, cause our existence as beings who desire (and choose). We are caused to be those who desire (and choose).
Spinoza isn't taking out free will there. He's taking out idealism. The problem is the idea our existence is made out of our present concious, such that we are free to be anything we think, defined only by what we believe.
The closest I ever get to that stuff:
Spinoza definitely denies free will, saying that belief in it is based on ignorance. Carefully read the last sentence of the quoted passage again.
But we certainly don't need to specifically conceptualize ourselves as being free in order to feel free; so I remain unconvinced that your criticism is valid.
Of course in order to self-consciously exercise that felt freedom requires that we consciously reflect on and continue to believe in our condition of freedom; but that is a different matter.
I am also not convinced by anything my interlocutors have offered up that it is not the case that if I self-consciously think of myself as, and genuinely believe that I am, a being that is exhaustively determined by necessary or even random physical processes, that I will be unable to experience my freedom.
As I observed before, we're all citizens of free societies and in that sense free in economic, social and political terms. What other kind of freedom is there to discuss? As Punshh pointed out before, take Trump as an example - he presents himself as the epitome of success and power. But he seems crippled by emotional inadequacies which manifest as mendacity, narcissism and other unpleasant traits. So that is in a real sense being bound, being conditioned and determined by various compulsions and emotional lacks. So in one way, such a personality is as free as the next person, but in another sense, until there is insight into the causes of those issues then he will continue to suffer (and many others along with him in this case). Such a personality is not free insofar as they act out emotional compulsions. So that is another sense in which the discussion of what might constitute freedom is meaningful - and one near to the idea of freedom in the tradition of philosophy. (That said, there is nothing preventing a discussion of that subject from the perspective of post-modern philosophy.)
Nonsense, you're simply ignoring the distinction I have made between unselfconsciously felt freedom and selfconsciously conceived freedom and erroneously claiming that what I have said applies to one must apply to the other. You'll need to do better than offering a little conflationary sleight of hand if you want to convince me to revise my thoughts on this.
I agree with Kant that moral responsibility presupposes freedom, and that thinking of people as, for example, physical processes makes such freedom and responsibility seem impossible.
I believe the PM philosophers generally reject Kant's notion of freedom and responsibility. I'm not sure what you are talking about here, but that's basically all I've been talking about all along.
Not a lot of what most people have said in this thread has seemed to me to be very relevant to that. That's fine too as long as there is no misunderstanding to the effect that we are speaking of the same issues when we are not.
The feeling of being free unaccompanied by the concept of being free. I didn't claim it relates directly to moral responsibility. There is no unselfconscious moral responsibility; that's why children are only held to be morally responsible for the acts to the extent that they can consciously understand themselves to be morally responsible.
The conscious understanding of one's moral responsibility presupposes the conscious understanding that one is free. If one thinks that all ones acts are determined by unknown forces or forces outside the ambit of one's control (neural activity for example) then it cannot follow logically that one is responsible for one's acts, any more than the tiger, which simply acts according to the dictates of its nature, could be thought to be morally responsible for savaging a child.
My point here is not about if we are robots, but about the philosophical idea of Post modernism(I admit that I am not well read in PM, so this is just speculation), that it could apply equally to a notional world of unconscious robots, with no "freedom". Or there could be world identical to this world inhabited by philosophical zombies, without consciousness. In this world the Post modern philosophy would apply equally. This is because in this philosophy there is only material, energetic forces and computation. Sentient self consciousness as we experience it is an irrelevance in this view.
Yes I know what you mean about ignoring living people. Also I agree with most of what
PM appears to be saying about freedom, there is some freedom in the autonomous choices we as living people make every day. While most of the structure in our lived lives is conditioned through the social narrative, along with the physical bodies and environment we find ourselves to exist in. However I still think there is a valid point in what I was trying to say about Trump and Ghandi. I can illustrate this with an example in my own life. Something which is real and the results of it are real.
Throughout my youth and younger adulthood, I became negative about money, my father was very frugal and stopped my pocket money and would never buy me anything, even though he had lots of money. I also picked up on a stressful worry about money in him which made him the way he was. When I became an adult I became a parent without adequate planning at a young age and struggled with money, this also lead to some resentment and envy to people who had money. This became an acute fear and stress for me and in a sense I think I also became instrumental in making the situation worse. It became a pervasive stress and worry in my life leading to a kind of negative depression.
But then a change occurred. For (primarily) other reasons, my relationship broke down and I split from my partner and young children, it was an even greater financial struggle at the time, but due to my interest in philosophy, spirituality, self help etc. I took a radical course, which most people in my position would not have taken. I lived hand to mouth on the minimum money required to survive, I saved every penny and then a few months later I took a flight to India and travelled to the Himalayas. I was on a spiritual quest, but equally I was seeking a way out of my problems. I had an insight about money, that provided I could put a bit of food in my mouth every day and put a roof over my head somehow it really didn't matter. This realisation was far more involved than this, but essentially the same. Also due to a postal strike in India at the same time, some of my money which was being posted to me by my mother didn't arrive and I had to survive for a month on 50 Rupees. I was meditating 3 or 4 hours a day and eating a bowl of rice and dalh each day and it became obvious to me to distance myself from my conditioned life back home, including my entire psychology around money. I experienced a great feeling of freedom, all that conditioning had been lifted from me. I had numerous epiphany's and in a very real sense rebuilt my life following simple spiritual values.
I was cured and on my return back home all my problems had evaporated, I still had to earn money to pay the bills and child support, but it was all an easy task of sensible money management, even taking on some debt and working to pay it off. Money was an insignificant tool in living now and I exercised my freedom from it, to this day.
So my point is that through a seeking for some deeper meaning, farsighted principles and ideals. I found a freedom from my conditioned life and have gone on to repeat the process in numerous parts of my life and the lives of my friends, family and associates. I dismantled and creatively rebuilt myself by what amounted to transcendent inspiration, intuition.
There are other freedoms than simply having immediate choices in ones day to day life.
Again I think you are missing the point by suggesting that a spiritual person is seeking to escape the living in the world. For me spirituality is more a focus on my being and living in the world, thoughts about transcendent concepts, heaven, nirvana etc, are simply ideals considered in contemplation regarding universals and how they may intersect with this world etc. I am as I said before content here and now and don't need to go anywhere from here.
Thanks ?????????????, I thought you were a good interlocutor; better and more polite than I sometimes am. I am working on it.
:-#
So following the analogy of the stone, we are as the stone rolling, but perhaps with the choice to change our course, a little, by changing our shape(by analogy) at will. Presumably our ability to change shape has been programmed in to us by the nature of our constituents and processes of our formation. So we are not doing anything radical in any shape change we are capable of.
I can see how a determinist would point always to a prior process of formation of our constituents and that all notion of freedom is illusory. That there is some freedom in a subject due to the presence of an awareness of an individual self and a process of thinking allowing a choice through an awareness of alternative strategies and directions of travel. However that freedom is entirely within the conditioned constraints of a social narrative. Hence no radical freedom, only a little opportunity for constrained autonomy. But the narrative generates the impression within the subject of freedoms.
If we concede these constraints and allow our perceived freedoms to fall under this explanation. What other freedoms are you suggesting, or what is missed in this or these kind of explanation?
(Edit in bold)
Yes and from my perspective there are numerous freedoms available to the being and that the evolution of the soul is a revealing in stages of these freedoms.
So we have;
1, the freedom of movement, a body.
2, the freedom of individuation, a self.
3, the freedom of the self aware, a creative agency.
4, the freedom of imagination, access to a transcendent facet in agency.
5, the freedom from incarnation, self actualisation of the soul.
6, the freedom of the transcendent, nirvana, or the equivalent, such as heaven.
7, the freedom from the manifest, para nirvana, or free of all finite constraints.
8, the freedom from existence, something not even worth trying to understand.
These are just a few freedoms that come to mind.
My trajectory was rather different to what I think you are suggesting here. The Spinoza 'stone' analogy is not something I agree with at all. I do not believe that our sense of freedom originates from our ignorance of the causes determining our every action. This would mean that the sense of freedom is a sense of something illusory.
So, I don't believe that any discursive account or conceptual analysis of freedom can achieve anything other than making it appear to be impossible; which will lead to the dissolution of the sense and of the idea of freedom.
What I have been trying to convey (without much success, apparently) is that I think freedom is of the spirit and the spirit cannot be analyzed in either objective or subjective terms. So when you ask: Quoting Punshhh, my answer would be "Apparently nothing, and yet everything" or "Nothing that we can plainly talk about and everything that we cannot plainly talk about".
What I am saying is quite close to Kant's idea that it is the noumenal or the 'in itself' (an unfortunate term if there ever was one) that sets the limits of knowledge and makes room for faith in God, Freedom and Immortality.
In summary my current position is along the lines of what Kant said about the noumenon, as unknowable and therefore likewise it's role in our existence and the extent or not of our freedoms. But I would not agree that it is unknowable in principle, only that we can conclude that it is unknowable from the human condition or position at this time. Also I am of the opinion that it can be known through "transcendent insight", or it can be revealed through revelation and thus known by a simpleton, or uneducated person equally as to an educated person.
I am also of the opinion that the transcendent is the immanent and that to make the distinction is a category error, due to the human propensity to externalise and hence externalise the transcendent.
I certainly agree with you that the noumenon should not be thought of as "unknowable". I think Kant convincingly showed that we cannot think our way there using rationality and analysis, and that we should not assume that what we know regarding things as they are revealed to us by the senses, and our mathematical and general theoretical modeling of that revelation, can tell us anything about the ultimate nature of those things or whether 'ultimate nature' (which intuitively seems to makes sense to us even though we cannot precisely define it) is really even a coherent concept or not.
What about others ways of knowing the 'ultimate'? Mystical ways for example. Those ways do not deliver determinate kinds of knowledge (or at least they do not deliver inter-subjectively determinate kinds of knowledge). But I am often led back to the thought that we cannot have any certainty at all other than the sense of absolute certainty; and this does seem to be very strongly correlated with mystical 'knowledge' (as well as our knowledge of things in our everyday experience). When it comes to certain aspects of our experience, all doubt seems hopelessly contrived; merely a carping habit, a trivial artifact of our restless intellects.
I think on a certain definition of "immanent" I would agree with you; then transcendent and immanent described two sides of the one coin. For me this is related to the notion that the material world is a symbolic expression of the spiritual world. That idea seems very right to me lately.
Butting in here, but I'm in total agreement with this point - what I've experienced in my few 'mystical' moments had a certainty that is, literally, ineffable. Maybe clarity is the better word? All i know is they put my 'non-mystical' life into relief as a kind of excrescence, valid in-and-of-itself, but somehow derivative and blurred, like a game you started playing, and then forget you were playing, until the limits of the game began to seem like ultimate limits, beyond which nothing.
There's a line in Gravity's Rainbow, toward the end, which captures it so well:
"When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. your skin aches. At last: something real.....moving now toward the kind of light where at last the apple is apple-colored. the knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple. Everything is where it is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more present. So much has be left behind now, so quickly."
I can very much relate to what you say; I liked your analogy of playing a game that you forget you are playing. Also a great passage from Pyncheon. I haven't read Gravity's Rainbow (although it's on my shelves) but I read V a very long time ago and enjoyed it. The one thing that seems to have stuck in my mind is the alligators in the sewers for some reason.
Yes we cannot think our way there (to the noumenon) in isolation. However it has occurred to me that there are at least two other routes, which if when crossed referenced and contemplated* through thought, enable one to go further.
Firstly the development of the realisation that one is acquainted with the noumenon by inhabiting the structures it forms, or generates. This can be viewed exoterically and esoterically. Exoterically one is constituted of bits and pieces of noumenon and through a form of communion equivalent perhaps to prayer or meditation, one knows it. Esoterically, one's being, mind, consciousness, experience and intellect are all expressions of the noumenon and can be known through the contemplation of the authorship of the noumenon, i.e. The equivalence of the fact that the style of an artist can be discerned in the character and technique of the brush strokes, which is like a signature of the artist. A signature which can be deciphered in any work they do, because it is their natural style.
Secondly through mysticism, which is a process in, or journey through, life in contemplation and practice of the principles of mysticism, which are found in the works of other Mystics, or discerned by one's self through contemplation.
Regarding intersubjective determinate knowledge of mysticism. It is communicated Esoterically in some literature, although it may be debatable whether this could be described as determinate. Also and I have practiced this myself, through direct verbal and body language communication with a fellow seaker, the verbal tradition. Also as I have said already I anticipate a determinate science of mysticism, but that it has not been written yet.
Regarding the transcendent and the immanent, in stating that they are the same, or perhaps facets of one coin, as you say. I include the idea that what is being addressed in this is something beyond our rational capacity and so making rational distinctions is in danger of identifying a dichotomy which isn't there. For me the transcendent/immanent is a multidimensional eternal presence within the self, which is accessible either through our common natural evolved faculties, although in a small measure. Or by a process of more direct access through the practice of some mystical or Yogic practice. Something which I would also say is limited by the evolutionary point of development of one's soul.
* I have developed a system of thought in the cross reference of different approaches which approximates by analogy the use of calculus in mathematics.
I would like to introduce the idea of the veil, if I may. A veil in mysticism and spirituality is some natural barrier or threashold demarking domains. For example for my cat, my world of intellectual thought is veiled from her experience. This veil consists in our differing levels of mental capacity, communication etc. For us the nature of the immanent may be veiled from our intellect.
I think I see what you are getting at here, but I would probably tend to say 'being the structures it forms, or generates' rather than "inhabiting...", because the idea of inhabiting seems to introduce a concept of separation; and, for me, the notion of acquaintance through separation seems to make sense only in the context of being acquainted with phenomena.
Quoting Punshhh
Could you what explain a bit more what you mean here Punshhh? The difficulty I am having is with the notion of 'bits and pieces of noumenon'. I don't think the noumenon can be differentiated, anything differentiated is phenomenon.
This thread seems to have moved far from the issue of common presuppositions to be found among the Post-moderns (although I am sure that with a bit of good old-fashioned ingenuity what we are contemplating here could be tied back to it. ;)
By inhabiting I am referring to our conscious entity, our thinking rationalising self. It is, due to abstraction and lack of understanding of its position in the world, separate or veiled from its actual presence in the world. So in mystical contemplation it is necessary to acknowledge that the rational mind is apart from its subject of contemplation. Indeed that it is blinkered, veiled and in a sense is the obstruction to a clear sight of the world. And the rationalising self, which is doing the contemplation, is by its abstract nature seperate from the phenomena of its existence and is only able to contemplate phenomena(hence an obstruction in the contemplation of the noumenon). Mystical practice as I see it is a repeating of this kind of contemplation of difference, abstraction and inhabitation, in order to realise a lack of the same, in the rational mind. So one develops a, by analogy, climbing frame of matrix for the rational mind to see beyond the conditioned mind we are given by our peers.
By bits and pieces, I was referring to the predicament that while we are the noumenon, we don't apprehend it as it is, only in part(bits) and incomplete subjectively(pieces). For example the noumenon does presumably contain in its nature dimension, or extension and we see and understand this through seeing and knowing it in the world. But this is only a part of its nature and we only ever see a part, a part determined by our evolutionary inheritance as beings. So in a sense our world of experience is a mirroring of our nature.
I would say though that I don't think we can conclude that the noumenon is differentiated, or that it is as we might like to imagine it. A contemplation of its nature is another issue as I see it.
Yes I know this is straying from the OP, I am thinking of starting a new thread to discuss these ideas.
:)