March's Blog-- Is philosophy a waste of time and space?

Is philosophy a waste of time and space in an existential crisis? Suppose that you wake up one morning only to find yourself stuck right smack in the middle of some kind of a complicated game with a mindboggling number of players, a game that stretches off way beyond all the horizons of time and space and imagination; and suppose, equally, that you have memory neither of how you got into the game, nor of the precise number or identity of the other players, nor of the rules of the game or of its goals. Let us finally suppose that you decide at some point in this waking nightmare that you are not particularly comfortable being enmeshed against your will in this bizarre game, but then you also somehow realize that you do not have the power to just up and quit and to exit the playing field or the Game (—death is no exit; simply another of the infinite doors in the labyrinth-game!).

            So you have no idea what is at stake in this little game of impenetrable rules, and yet you have no choice but to continue playing.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone of Life-Itself – you are on a journey neither sought for nor desired, only to discover that the road map for the remainder of the trip got left behind in some long-past highway rest-stop.

            Where to go…? What to do…? How…? Why…?

Myriad are the tales of rovers in these “foreign” parts we call Life-Itself.

Homer, for example, in the Odyssey, tells us the stories of the travels and woes of one of the most well-known wanderers in human memory: Odysseus.

[1] Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he saved not his comrades, though he desired it sore, for through their own blind folly they perished—fools, who devoured the kine of Helios Hyperion; but he took from them the day of their returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where thou wilt, tell thou even unto us.

[11] Now all the rest, as many as had escaped sheer destruction, were at home, safe from both war and sea, but Odysseus alone, filled with longing for his return and for his wife, did the queenly nymph Calypso, that bright goddess, keep back in her hollow caves, yearning that he should be her husband. But when, as the seasons revolved, the year came in which the gods had ordained that he should return home to Ithaca, not even there was he free from toils, even among his own folk. And all the gods pitied him save Poseidon; but he continued to rage unceasingly against godlike Odysseus until at length he reached his own land.

Tennyson, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, beautifully rendered the obstacle-laden Homecoming (Grk. Nostos) of this ancient Odysseus into a Ulysses well fitted for the 19th century, a wanderer who, in the absence of the gods, was driven onwards by the swells of his own Wanderlust.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades2

Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honoured of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy3.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life.

Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Another wayfarer, the omniscient narrator in Dante’s Inferno (Canto I), finds himself lost in the Middle of Life, and tells us of his journey through the spiritual realms, until he finally “finds himself” found again.

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;

We are presently living through a period of human existential crisis, with the result that any significance we might attach to our personal passage through the world of Man-existing derives primarily from self-defining, closed interpretive systems—from philosophizing. Such journeys as those described above, and these celebrated travelers, can therefore become roadmaps, and these travelers pathfinders, for each one of us; and if we allow them, if we find the way to make sense of the echo of their voices in the hallways of our own labyrinth, they will become road markers for us modern wayfarers, indicating obstacles for us to avoid, desirable attitudes to cultivate, or not, and helping us to choose out for ourselves from among the almost infinite variety of possible goals that we may freely adopt at one time or another during our own Life-journey.

If this analysis is in fact accurate, then all the resources of Philosophy and Poetry, which are attendant handmaidens in the service of Reason and Inspiration, and which help us to think about and make sense of our Life-journey, can never become exhausted. So as a means of making sense of our world and our journey through it, Philosophy, both as discipline and art, must never be abandoned—that is unless one means to give up entirely on the various interpretive possibilities of human reason and enlightenment. Let it also be clearly said, however, that Philosophy is incapable of yielding just One Single Response/Interpretation of the world upon which all men will agree to hang their hats—rather, it is an ongoing conversation with many layers.

Philosophy in this existential period is fairly persuasively and therefore fairly firmly grounded in the idea of the Subjectum, the cogito, the “I” of Descartes; all other metaphysical ground (read: religious grounding) has been pretty well stripped away—for better and for worse. So it would seem that the “I” who is the Wanderer in this wasteland would be a pretty reasonable philosophical starting place to begin thinking about the World-Life.

            An initial philosophical intuition on the part of some of the earliest thinkers in this modern existentialist period, e.g., German Romantics such Winkelmann, Höldelin, later Heine, etc., and more philosophical types such as Schilling, Hegel, Nietzsche, et al, was to look back into the period of the ancient Greeks in an attempt to discover an original experience of an original world of men as yet unpolluted by centuries of religion.  The strong conception common to these thinkers is that the world of men is tragic (although a variety of different explanations is given in an attempt to explain why this is the case…), and that therefore the experience of men in this world will be defined by Leidenschaft or suffering. From this tragic conception of world and life would also bloom the fine flower of an idea—that the life of the individual is a Work of Art, and that we are all artists. The canvas we paint of our lives is therefore our own.

            Other streams of Philosophy will evolve along other lines of tradition, such as the empirical tradition first articulated by Aristotle, and which will eventually give rise to the 18^th & 19^th century Empiricists like Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill, and then the 20^th century Popper; then there will also be the various traditions of (Anglo-American) Analytical Philosophy, developed by Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege, et al, which will include philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and logical positivism. This is Philosophy in her incarnation as a pseudo-empirical science.

            Another persuasive application for Philosophy during the journey of our lives is in trying to discern and to decide how the self can, may, and perhaps should act in the world. This application, popularized of late by the French philosopher Pierre Hadot, also harkens back to the philosophy of the ancient Greek period in order to re-articulate in and for the modern period the Stoic or Socratic life.

            Finally, Philosophy also contains all the elements and tools of enlightenment criticism … so we can, and should, bring all the might of our human understanding to bear critically upon all the bigger questions that interest the individual “I” in the labyrinthine world of men, in this Twilight Zone of Life-Itself. Questions, for instance, concerning what Men should hold sacred, and which touch upon culturally taboo subjects such as:

1.     The received traditions such as religion

2.     The culturally determined ideas – such as State, patriotism, etc.

3.     Of methodologies – science

So, what to do during a journey that you neither asked for nor desired, a journey through a savage (intellectual) wasteland where each step must inevitably be your own? Take a big breath, and Think Big Thoughts… because you cannot be any more lost than you already are.

On Protest Movements & Conspiracy Theories, in 2-part Harmony. Common Time.

Part I – 21 November 2012

Part II – 28 November 2012

There's something happening here…

What it is ain't exactly clear.

            (Prelude - Verismo)

Paranoia. I am a philosopher with eyes in my head; and this head of mine is canted very deliberately in the direction of the world that surrounds me. Now for what it is worth, although I am not much given to conspiracy theories I still have to admit to being plagued by a rather significant degree of social distrust. Stephen Stills penned words for my Vietnam-era generation’s deep-rooted social malaise in the song For What it’s Worth -- “paranoia strikes deep”; and in my platitudinous book, it is hackneyed but nonetheless still true that “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck….” And, then, how can one contest the ultimate logic of the paranoid, to paraphrase Mel Gibson’s delicately-wound character from Conspiracy Theory—just because I am paranoid does not mean I am not being followed…?

This morning’s Reflection is not about the various theories of conspiracy surrounding the re-newed American President; these are presently holding court in the Internet Universe and each will run its course in due time according to its merit. Rather, I am interested in imagining, in a conspiratorial kind of way, what the world of men around me would begin to look like were I, like an author of some futuristic novel, to develop and implement a plan, or plot, or conspiracy to take over the world. This Reflection is inspired both by Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. Mass Death and the American Future, which my students read in the ethics classes, as well as by my own social paranoia.

The 20^th century, born out of a 19th Century’s industrialized and economic vision of the world of men, has been described quite reasonably as a modern man's Book of the Dead. In this rather unique 1972 book Elliot calculates that the first 70 or so years of the 20^th century oversaw 100+ million state-made dead, which means that both practically and metaphorically, the 20^th century may go down in human history as the era that will compose the Death Symphony of the Individual. Our interest in this Reflection is the metaphorical death of the Individual as an idea, and all germane conspiracies tending toward that end.

            Now, philosophically speaking, the modern idea of the Individual was born along with René Descartes’ (1596-1650) Big Idea of the cogito-Individual—the Thinking Self. Of course the idea was not his alone; but it was his primarily.

Everybody look what's going down…
There's battle lines being drawn

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
            (Intermezzo – adagio)

The History of the Individual as an Idea. From the bird’s eye, the view of the history of this idea looks a little like this: the Greece of antiquity oversaw a shift away from traditional mythological representations of the world, a world full of gods and other invisible critters, to an era dominated by simple men reasoning around and about the physical world that was in front of them, and confining their reasoning to the material edges of that world. The general thinking in this period in the history of philosophy was that it is possible to think about the physical world, and men in the world, without having to explain things in terms of Invisibles… so gods became, by and large, sidelined as explanatory devices. Blandly concluded, Plato the dualist and Aristotle the monist would become central figures in the history of this philosophical shift, each representing a distinct point of view. Plato thought that there were two dimensions of reality, physical and non-physical (but not really gods of any meaningful sort), and Aristotle that there was only one essentially knowable dimension of reality, the physical.

            Now even though Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) will define the human animal as a featherless biped that reasons, i.e., biology that is of the thinking sort, philosophically speaking the Individual as an idea is still not in fact fully birthed in the era of the ancient Greek thinkers (although I seem to recall that F. W. Nietzsche interpreted Socrates as the first individual… it would seem, after all, that FWN did not always get it right!).

            With the advent of the Christian period, which would naturally be more receptive to a Platonism that admits of Invisibles than to an Aristotelianism that finds more persuasive the idea that the world is entirely composed in terms of materiality, the focus of thinking will once again shift away from the substantial world of the earliest philosophers and back to an earlier, mythological way of defining the world in terms of Invisibles. In the Christian period, which will continue all the way to the modern period (where we meet, among others, Descartes), men will not be conceived individually or as individuals in any meaningful fashion, but will be clumped together into a “people”; “all God’s Creatures” will be fused into an indistinct collectivized mass called the Invisible Church, with all the attendant Christian values, vices, and virtues.

            Now all this listing of events hither and yon is neither here nor there, but is just a brief, bird’s eye view refresher in the history of philosophical ideas, which brings us right back around to why Descartes’ idea of the cogito-Individual is a Big Idea. With this idea Descartes in fact challenges the Christian collectivist or fusionist definition of man—the idea of the Church, both material and spiritual, which constitutes the bedrock of Christian belief. For the thinkers of his day Descartes confirmed philosophically Aristotle’s original idea of Man as “biology that reasons,” by persuasively affirming that in its essence the individual is a “thinking thing,” which is what cogito means; and, voilà, an idea is born, and Descartes is obliged to flee très-catholique France for the more “livable” atmosphere of Amsterdam.

            Now, this idea of the cogito-Individual will split off into many historico-philosophical streams.

1) One stream will become the foundation of Kantian philosophy, with obvious repercussions on German thinking as a whole all the way up to Nietzsche, and will go on to be the paradigm structure of the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud in particular.

2) Another stream will go on to inspire the philosophes of the English and French Enlightenments to challenge formally, i.e., philosophically, the collectivizing dogma of the Christian Church, and would ultimately result in the idea that all things pertaining to the church should be separated from anything pertaining to the State, which in turn gave rise to a very modern State value that we call secularism, under whose aegis both the Americans and the French will wrap their young democracies.

3) A third stream of the idea of the cogito-Individual will be that which wetted the thirst of John Locke, who will provide the philosophical fuel for the fire that will ultimately cause the historical meltdown of the idea of the divine rights of kings; from this will spring up in turn a new idea, which is the validation of the idea of the social contract. This idea-stream will then dampen the boots of Thomas Jefferson, who decides that it will fit very nicely as the philosophical cornerstone for the Nation that the new-world philosophes were trying to articulate philosophically and to create practically and institutionally. When “The People” as a body of valuable Individuals is created as an idea, and then set in opposition to the idea of a “king,” this also automatically allows the logical possibility for the creation of individual rights for men.

4) And finally, this idea of the cogito-Individual will also be the foundation that will support the rise of the masses in the 19^th century, where each individual has rights, and each one counts in the real function of State, both as working contributor in the industrial production of the State’s economy, and as social and political participant though universal suffrage “in the way the State should go”.

In the history of western philosophy the period surrounding and following Descartes is aptly called the Age of Reason. Along with generating some amazingly Big Philosophical Thoughts, like the cogito-Individual, there was at this point another idea-pattern that strode upon the center-stage of western history with far-reaching consequences – for with the dissolution of the monarchy-idea and the emergence of the idea of The People, it was almost an organic necessity that men would work out an alternative pattern for social structure—the idea of Nation. Will and Ariel Durant remind us that a simple exchange took place in western social thought in this period of our history—as the cogito-Individual took form philosophically, it also had to rethink itself politically: “In this period the basic developments were the rise of murderous nationalisms and the decline of murderous theologies.”  

You step out of line,

the men come and take you away…  

            (Accelerando)

As I was saying before the historian of ideas in me cried out for context: born of a 19th Century’s revolution in industry and economy, the 20^th century will orchestrate the slow and very deliberate decline of this very particular republican and liberal idea of the Individual. This is the philosophical mooring of Rubenstein’s vision, and of my futuristic fantasy. The exercise for us, then, is to think about the Nazi period in Germany, and then to take the deceptively simple mental step of transposing some of the more disastrous elements of the German State of the Nazi era onto today’s American State (Rubenstein specifically transposes onto the America of the Nixon Administration, but my interest is more general in scope).

            In the broadest strokes, Rubenstein’s argument is that the business (corporate) and industrial philosophy of the Nazi state was framed around the idea that man was an exploitable cog within the machinery of the State, hence subservient to the idea and purpose of State, in all respects. With this idea as philosophical and socio-political premise, a predictable starting point for assuring the economic stability of the Nazi State, was for the State and Industry to seek out or to create a renewable and disposable source of minimally paid, or indeed unpaid labor to ensure continued industrial production.

            To create such a population, in 1935 Germany passed the Nuremburg Laws, which stripped Jews of German citizenship and redefined them as wards or “subjects” of the German State; and by redefining and thereby creating a specific, legally marginalized, and dependent population within the State, Germany was easily able to transition from caretaker State to slaveholder State, which (according to the Internet-God) worked to the advantage of companies such as Thyssen, Krupp, IG Farben, Fordwerke (the German subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company) and Adam Opel AG (a subsidiary of General Motors). Of course, an early 19^th century corporation that might look an awful lot like IBM would be needed to do all the bookkeeping and accounting for the captains of these Industries.

            The process begins by legally redefining and marginalizing the desired population, then interning them, first in ghettos then in internment or labor camps (such as Auschwitz); this provided German Industry & Friends with an almost infinitely renewable source of free labor to be redefined progressively as the particular labor pool became exhausted (i.e., the Jews, the Gypsies, the Communists, the Poles, the homosexuals, the blacks, etc.). So the utility of the state-cog/slave laborer to the German State of the Nazi era was defined in terms of Industry and Production, and this cog/laborer was either immediately disposed of (annihilated), or disposed of in the short term when its work capacity began to diminish below a certain horizon.

            As a business philosophy or strategy, the advantages to German Industry of this process of labor pool creation during the war, were obvious.  Exhausting this type of labor pool does not drain the economic resources of the State, because the overhead is minimal and the labor is free, thus guaranteeing a bottom-line net profit to whoever owns the slave.

End of Part I - Part II on 28 November 2012