the year of reading tea leaves I: milieu

Die grosse Frage die niemals beantwortet ist und die Ich trotz dreissig Jahre langer Erforschung der Menschenseele auch night beantwortet konnte, lautet: Was wuenscht sich die Tea-Partierei?

When I hear the argument for “less government” from the Liptoners, I wonder what these people are willing to give up. The military is a big government bureaucracy, shouldn't we start chopping it down or just let it go? Wouldn't a private army, with corporate logos on uniforms, be less costly to tax payers? What about the FDA or USDA? Who needs meat and produce inspected or new drug applications tested? If I can save $4 of my income tax that (hypothetically) goes to staffing the USDA, should I be willing take my chances with tainted meat? Perhaps so, but is this what Tea Partysans believe? Would less government include removing all government restrictions on abortion? Hey why not! The FCC? Why can't kids watch porn at 8pm on my local Fox channel if they want to and if Murdoch wants to broadcast it?

*

In the end, the Tea Partysans are weak in political philosophy and strong on a type of nativist populism that can be described as conservative in a relational sense (not in a principled ideological sense). If it were just a matter of opposing the Wall Street bailout, I could see that as “non-partisan” (even though I think there is no such thing as a truly non-partisan position in politics: non-partisan implies opposition to a partisan position, which is partisan). Everyone hates finance bankers! (except the family members of bankers). However, when the complaints about big government are represented through terms like “socialist”, then I think it is a movement that is cathected to a conservative (i.e., traditionalist) milieu. If it turns into an organized political force, I am pretty sure it will do so within the Republican Party. It is no accident that the Republican Party is welcoming the energy of the Tea Parties: it could replace the flagging energy of aging social conservatives.

the year of reading tea leaves: prologue

Leave It to Teavers

June Teaver: Wally, where are you going?

Wally Teaver: I'm going over to the rally to slur Hussein Obama.

June Teaver: That's no way to talk, this is Sunday.

Wally Teaver: You're right, I'll wait 'til tomorrow and slur him in the cafeteria.

*

Wally Teaver: Gee Dad, how come you know so much about Socialists?

Ward Teaver: Well, Wally, as unbelievable as it may seem they did have Socialists in my younger days.

Wally Teaver: Nixon?

*

Ward Teaver: It's that friend of Beaver's. You know, the one who always talks like he was just frightened by something.

June Teaver: Glenn Beck?

Ward Teaver: That's it.

*

Theodore “Beaver” Teaver: How come Obama's such a creepy guy?

Wally Teaver: He’s a Communist.

*

Wally Teaver: Did Obama hit ya?

Glenn Beck: No.

Wally Teaver: Did he arrest ya?

Glenn Beck: No.

Wally Teaver: Then why ya cryin'?

Glenn Beck: Sometimes things get so messed up, crying is the only thing you can do.

*

Wally Teaver: Boy, Beaver, wait'll the guys find out you voted for a Democrat. They'll really give you the business.

Theodore “Beaver” Teaver: But gee, Wally, you voted for Democrats and the guys don't give you the business.

Wally Teaver: Well, that's because I'm in high school. You can do a lot of stuff in high school without getting the business.

*

Wally Teaver: Obama is a pure socialist and on the verge of communism.

Theodore “Beaver” Teaver: Gee Wally, that's swell.

*

Theodore “Beaver” Teaver: Hey Wally, I carried a sign that reads “You're a president, not a dictator. Go back to Kenya” to the Tea Party rally.

Wally Teaver: What a dumb thing to do. I bet you wouldn't have done anything like this if Mom and Dad were here.

autonomy in heteronomy

I’m skeptical of the idea that any or all forms of externality with respect to the individual can be overcome, surmounted, done away with, or resolved. Also, I’m skeptical of the general claim that when the State grows, the individual loses, that an increase in the scope of the State means a decrease in the range of individual autonomy. What is ignored in the anarcho-libertarian philosophy of the subject is the fact that individuals choose to limit their own claims to absolute autonomy by binding themselves to a legal order or a set of familial relationships. The completely autonomous individual is a fiction, as fictional as the “state of nature” in which such individuals are said to possess unlimited “rights”. But one need not rest the case against the anarcho-libertarian vision of the individual with the Is. Even from the perspective of Ought, the ethical ideal of absolute autonomy for the individual leaves much to be desired. It is an ethico-political theory of the individual that is simultaneously apolitical and unethical; apolitical, because it elides the conditions under which such autonomous individuals might actually thrive (i.e., in concert and in cooperation with other individuals); and unethical, because it recognizes no legitimate external moral constraint on the pursuit of individual wishes and desires.

*

Concerning the zero-sum relationship assumed to exist between the State or any other externality and the individual (i.e., more State functions, less individual freedom) something should be noted: institutions, from informal networks to legally codified bureaucracies, do something that enhances the range of individual autonomy. They unburden the individual of the necessity of single-handedly reproducing her entire way of life by herself. Family relationships share the burden of care of children; schools relieve parents of the burden of educating children; the legal system takes on the burden of securing social order, etc. These institutions relieve individuals of the social, psychological, and political burdens they would otherwise have to carry out themselves, individually and in isolation. Perhaps the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos of the 1970s post-counterculture communes and cooperatives may be an alternative form of social and political organization that would satisfy the autonomy requirements of the anarcho-libertarian philosophy of the subject. However, even here, it is worth noting that such communal forms of living generated a strong sense of interpersonal norms and expectations and, nevertheless, were not sustainable over the long term.

**

Short of viewing individuals as political dupes or sheeple (which is part of the anarcho-libertarian explanatory lexicon), one needs to account for the reason why individuals are not currently in a mad rush to assert the absolute autonomy claims prescribed by anarcho-libertarianism, If one is to avoid the unseemly “false consciousness” account, the process by which individuals currently seek to expand the range of autonomy, the pursuit of an expansion of “rights”, which contributes to the further articulation of the State, needs to be explained. Additionally, a case needs to be made for the priority of individualism in relation to various institutional constraints that limit individualism. In other words, what is the fostering of individualism supposed to achieve and why is it incompatible with externalities, which always already inhibit the absolute free play of individual choice?

Wittgenstein on music

Some people think music a primitive art because it has only a few notes and rhythms. But it is only simple on the surface; its substance on the other hand, which makes it possible to interpret this manifest content, has all the infinite complexity that’s suggested in the external forms of other arts and that music conceals. This is the sense in which it is the most sophisticated art of all. (8-9e)

Structure and feeling in music. Feelings accompany our apprehension of a piece of music in the way they accompany the events of our life. (10e)

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Culture and Value. University of Chicago Press, 1980

Anti-theses on Feuerbach

I

Oprah is the last Young Hegelian.

II

Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity is philosophical Zoloft for the religiously depressed.

III

Sarah Palin refutes the idea that Man’s consciousness is infinite.

IV

Cats take our species as the object of their consciousness.

V

Negative dialectics: Americans project all of their worst predicates onto their politicians. The politicians project them back onto Americans with great accuracy.

VI

The collection plate turns Men into Brutes.

VII

Obligatory monotheism.

VIII

Continental philosophers have only interpreted the world. Analytic philosophers chop up the interpretations into sentences.

Freud on creativity

In my reading of “The creative writer and daydreaming” (in The Uncanny, Penguin, 2003), I don’t sense that Freud seeks to draw a distinction between “normal” creative writers and the “pathological” productions of a Schreber. Unlike his usual tendency to use a perceived alliance between neuroses and infantile sexuality as a means to show that something ‘normal’ (like memory) is bound up with the unconscious, he compares childhood play/fantasy with adult fantasy, and attempts to show both a break and continuity between child’s play and adult fantasizing; then he attempts to draw an analogy between what he’s learned from this comparison and creative writers of a certain sort: writers who “create their own” material and not those who “like the epic and tragic poets of classical times, take over ready-made material” (“Creative writer”, 30) (I’ll return to a problem in this distinction below*). His “evidence” for this sort of writer/writing centers on “more modest authors of novels, romances and short stories, who nevertheless have the most numerous and enthusiastic readership” (“Creative writer”, 30) (Freud, unfortunately, neither explains nor justifies this choice). What interests Freud (and all he is really concerned about) are those works in which a “hero” or psychological individual is the “centre of interest.”

*

As he typically does, he returns to childhood, but not for the purpose of restating the tale of infantile fantasy and desire: his interest rests upon the giving up of child-like play (in the course which reality replaces wishes [and this foreshadows Freud’s discussion of “the omnipotence of thought” in Totem and Taboo]) and the repulsion an adult feels towards his/her own fantasies (which, according to Freud involve either ambition or sex). Whereas a child “does not hide his games [from an audience of adults],” the “adult, on the contrary, is ashamed of his fantasies, hiding them from others and guarding them as his most personal intimacies; as a rule he would rather admit to his wrongdoings than disclose his fantasies” (“Creative writer”, 27). One would expect Freud to move from this insight to explain how creative writers overcome such an inhibition in themselves which remains in effect for ordinary adults. However, in my view, Freud doesn’t have much to say about such creative writers as such that is of psychoanalytic import. What he asserts about these writers -- as opposed to their writings -- is the following: “It has struck me that in many so-called psychological novels there is still only one person, again, the hero, who is described from within; the author sits, as it were, inside the hero’s mind and looks at the other characters from the outside. On the whole the psychological novel no doubt owes its special character chiefly to the tendency of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into partial egos and consequently to personify the conflicting currents in his mental life in several heroes.”

This is very interesting: implicit here is the concept of projection (which goes with fantasy and Freud’s analysis of dreams, taboos, and animistic thought). But Freud’s claim that an author’s writing can be accounted for by this process, in the absence of an observation of the author under analysis, seems to violate the methodological prerequisites of the psychoanalytic technique (not that this stops Freud in many cases, such as his essay on Leonardo Da Vinci). But the other problem* is this: he assumes that the literary texts that are of interest to him (romance-hero novels, psychological novels) are an unconscious manifestation of the author’s own psychological life. This sort of view could be challenged from two standpoints: (1) it ignores “genre”: it may be the case that the novels Freud feels are created ex nihilo in fact are produced from ready-made materials (i.e., conventional narrative forms, plot structures, types of characters and character development) that have no connection to the writer’s internal psychical life; (2) it is open to the convincing challenge (made much later, of course) that “The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self” (Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 16).

**

Freud admits that he hasn’t really said enough about the “creative writer.” In the last paragraph, he gets to what I feel is more important in this essay: an account of the psychological effects produced by aesthetic forms (as he does in his essay “The uncanny”). What the creative writer does, according to Freud, is to overcome the reader’s repulsion towards fantasy.

“However, when the creative writer plays his games for us or tells us what we are inclined to explain as his personal daydreams, we feel a great deal of pleasure, deriving no doubt form many confluent sources. How the writer achieves this is his most intimate secret: the true ars poetica lies in the technique by which he overcomes our repulsion, which certainly has to do with the barriers that arise between each single ego and the others. We can make a guess at two of the means used by this technique: the writer tones down the character of the egoistic daydream by modifying and disguising it, and bribes us with the purely formal – that is aesthetic – bonus of pleasure, which is offered to us so that greater pleasure may be released from more profound psychical sources, is called an incentive bonus or fore-pleasure. In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure that a creative writer gives us is in the nature of a fore-pleasure, and the real enjoyment of the literary work derives from the relaxation of tensions in our minds. Maybe this effect is due in no small measure to the fact that the writer enables us, from now on, to enjoy our fantasies without shame or self-reproach” (“Creative writer”, 33).

Behind this argument are claims Freud makes about how unconscious wishes are expressed in distorted form in parapraxes, dreams, and memory. Of particular importance is the idea that wishes can’t be expressed directly and that (in dreams) the “dream-work” works over the wish, presenting the wish to us in a “safe” form, much as a dissident writer, who -- in a repressive political regime that employs an official censor -- writes a fairytale of chickens defeating foxes, permits her readers to experience a type of (fantasized) fore-pleasure that substitutes for the real, but forbidden pleasure of overthrowing the regime in reality.

***

In sum, I think he has more interesting things to say (in this essay) about psychological effects that are produced by literature than the psychological sources of the creative process itself (and what the author brings into this process from her unconscious). What I find interesting in his version of psychoanalysis is the fact that – in theory, if not in practice – the line between normal and abnormal is not rigidly drawn: after all, he includes modern science – e.g., psychoanalysis – under the category of “omnipotent thought” (as he does animism and religion).

wonder and doubt

Near the beginning of Negative Dialectics, Adorno claims that philosophy had been surpassed (because its moment of realization was missed). Yet, I witnessed a packed auditorium at 9am on a Saturday morning held in rapt attention by Habermas's lecture "From Kant to Hegel and Back Again: The Move toward Detranscendentalization" (in Truth and Justification). There's no schande in the fact that there is professional philosophy (and the claim against academic philosophy that it is academic doesn't constitute a non-trivial finding) and that philosophy exists outside the academy. As an outsider, I'm amused by the apparent war between analytic and continental philosophy (which echoes the apparent war between quantitative and qualitative methods in the social sciences). Professional philosophy is an embattled field, at once the most exulted of the cultural sciences and, often, the smallest department within the humanities. The social sciences have encroached, in their clumsy way, on the philosophical field, appropriating, borrowing, and stealing, frequently without understanding.

*

Socrates: "I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris (the messenger of heaven) is the child of Thaumas (wonder)." Plato, Theaetetus (Penguin Books: p. 25).

Hegel: “Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (Preface).

Wittgenstein: “In every serious philosophical question uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem. We must always be prepared to learn something totally new.” Remarks on Colour (University of California Press: 1-15, 4e).

**

Wonder and doubt should not be placed in opposition. Here I would say that “wonder” stands in a polemical relation to the view of philosophy articulated by Hegel in the Preface to The Philosophy of Right; the notion that philosophy comes on the scene only after events are cut and dried (which allows an identity between the real and ideal, the real and the rational) and the List der Vernunft (in The Philosophy of History) leave no room for contingency, of anything of which one might be “in wonder.” There are no historical surprises for Hegel, no possibility that things could be otherwise; they simply are.

But if I might bring in Wittgenstein here: uncertainty -- a form of doubt -- also opens a way to wonder (the preparation, or capacity, to learn something totally new); or perhaps we can understand wonder and doubt as different orientations that bring about openness towards what exists, what is thought to exist, and categories of knowledge.

***

Whether doubt and wonder should be considered oppositional ways of knowing (of philosophy) or as complementary orientations, one can also acknowledge that a hierarchical relationship exists between wonder and doubt. A homology exists in the relationship between the following terms, with primacy accruing to the first term in the paired sets:

Doubt and wonder

Science and art

The hierarchical relations of doubt/wonder, science/art have other associations (or relations) of superior and inferior mapped on to them:

Doubt:Wonder

Masculine:feminine

Adult:Child

Developed:Un(der)developed

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We can also consider the relation of wonder and doubt in another way, with another provisional “opposition” between philosophy (whatever that might be) as a way of knowing versus an understanding of philosophy as a mode of being. Ricoeur’s summary of the trend in philosophical hermeneutics (represented by Heidegger and Gadamer): “I see the recent history of hermeneutics as dominated by two preoccupations. The first tends progressively to enlarge the aim of hermeneutics, in such a way that all regional hermeneutics [here he means hermeneutics developed for the purpose of the study of the bible and ancient texts (philology)] are incorporated into one general hermeneutics. But this movement of deregionalization cannot be pressed to the end unless at the same time the properly epistemological concerns of hermeneutics – its efforts to achieve a scientific status – are subordinated to ontological preoccupations, whereby understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way of being and a way of relating to beings and to being” (“The task of hermeneutics.” p. 54, in From Text To Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II). The opposition of epistemology (which is associated with doubt, science, and method in Truth and Method) to ontology (with the shift in favor of the latter) has this implication for philosophy in the work of Gadamer. First, we must ask what types of beings we are: we are historical beings; second, interpretation/hermeneutics involves us in acquiring the historical tradition which always already shapes our way of being; prejudices, the bête noire of Enlightenment thought (and the philosophy of doubt running from Descartes to Durkheim), are not to be rejected, but rather are the starting point for an interpretive process in which a fusion of horizons (our own with those of the past) takes place.

Hence, we wind up (following Heidegger and Gadamer) with a rejection of skepticism, epistemology, and, most significantly, explanation, and an exclusive embrace of interpretation and understanding. Ricoeur attempted to overcome this opposition by turning to linguistics as a “scientific method” that is appropriate to language and our being in language (as per Heidegger’s claim that language is “the house of Being.” (“The way to language.” p. 135, in On the Way to Language).

“We can, as readers, remain in the suspense of the text, treating it as a worldless and authorless object; in this case, we explain the text in terms of its internal relations, its structure. On the other hand, we can lift the suspense and fulfill the text in speech, restoring it to living communication; in this case, we interpret the text. These two possibilities both belong to reading, and reading is the dialectic of these two attitudes” (“What is a text? explanation and understanding.” Pp. 113, in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II)

I reference Ricoeur for the purpose of showing an effort work through apparent oppositions that pertain to defining what “philosophy” is. It is possible to both raise epistemological questions (in this case, the conditions of meaningfulness) and ontological questions (the meaning of a text in relation to the world of texts and to ourselves). Ricoeur explains this as follows, with the notion of a hermeneutic arc.

“I shall therefore say: to explain is to being out the structure, that is, the internal relations of dependence that constitute the statics of the text; to interpret is to follow the path of thought opened up by the text, to place oneself en route toward the orient of the text. We are invited by this remark to correct our initial concept of interpretation and to search – beyond a subjective process of interpretation as an act on the text – for an objective process of interpretation that would be the act of the text.”

“The idea of interpretation as appropriation is not, for all that eliminated; it is simply postponed until the termination of the process. It lies at the extremity of what we called about the hermeneutical arc: it is the final brace of the bridge, the anchorage of the arch in the ground of lived experience. but the entire theory of hermeneutics consists in mediating this interpretation-appropriation by the series of interpretants that belong to the work of the text upon itself. Appropriation loses its arbitrariness insofar as it is the recovery of that which is at work, in labor, within the text. What the interpreter says is a resaying that reactivates what is said in the text” (“What is a text? explanation and understanding.” Pp. 121-122, 124, in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II)

In this case, an openness to the text (towards discovery and appropriation of its meaning), is compatible with the philosophical tradition of doubt (epistemology), which raises questions of the conditions for knowing a text. The tradition of doubt does not have to be excised.