Thoughts 29 January 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Thus the need to sustain two incompatible ‘takes’ on the world simultaneously explains, I believe (and there is no significant competing theory), the extraordinary fact that the brain is so deeply divided, an otherwise inexplicable waste of potential in an organ that exists only to make connexions, and whose power lies, precisely, in the number of connexions it can make.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Attention is not just another ‘cognitive function’: it is, as I say, the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

In English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs–so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.

Consider in light of McGilchrist's take, which I find very similar.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The GOP’s base of electoral support was heavily recruited from the white working class. If we take education as a proxy for class, the single best predictor other than race for voting for Trump was the lack of a college degree. The result was a party unified around themes of cultural identity and affect and riven with contradictions when it came to policy.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Collingwood distinguishes sharply between human life considered as natural process and human life considered as action. Thus, an individual life is in one aspect a structure of biological events containing ‘all the accidents of animal existence’ (IH 304), and in another, action, self-consciousness or thought. Within each single life, as Collingwood puts it, ‘the tides of thought, his own and others’, flow crosswise, regardless of its structure, like sea-water through a stranded wreck’ (IH 304). Individuals can be both biographical and historical subjects, but the limits set by biography are not those set by history.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The political men of letters in Burke’s picture had griped and exaggerated, without presenting a viable alternative. They had delegitimized one institution after another by sapping public faith in social artifice and ignoring the need for a “veil” of unreflecting custom to cloak destructive natural passions. The financiers in their turn had abetted a perilous financial scheme that brought France a ruinous inflation and wrecked public confidence in the state’s fiscal responsibility.

Metaphors We Live By

George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically. (AJ: 133, emphasis added) To assert the “obvious psychic and non-physical fact” of God’s existence is a bold step for the metaphysically reticent Jung. The assertion is particularly significant because it happens in a passage wherein Jung also distances himself from psychologism: given the context, it is impossible to argue that Jung is merely psychologizing the notion of God.

Thoughts 15 Jan. 2022

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[T]here are philosophers of the humanities who think that there is no such thing as reality, since it’s all Made Up Miraculously By Ourselves (MUMBO): naïve idealism. Such people, by the way, never behave as though there was no reality. Nor of course, by its own logic, can they claim any truth for their position. 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

But just because we participate in reality doesn’t mean we invent it out of nowhere, or solipsistically project it on some inner mental screen; much less does it mean that the very idea of reality is thereby invalidated.

Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

The understanding that experiential states are excitations of the will is very useful for grasping how Schopenhauer integrates Plato’s ‘eternal Ideas’—the archetypes or primary templates of which, according to Plato, everything we perceive in the world is merely a distorted copy—in his metaphysics. Indeed, one of Schopenhauer’s most nuanced metaphysical points is the relationship he draws between the eternal Ideas and the world-in-itself. Both always are but never become and never pass away. No plurality belongs to them; for each by its nature is only one, since it is the archetype itself, of which all the particular, transitory things of the same kind and name are copies or shadows. (W1: 171, original emphasis)

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In explaining the level of Mind, or the Ideas, Plotinus employs something like a transformation doctrine with hints of difference/nondifference. Each of the Ideas in Mind is one with the One, yet they are also described as outflows from the One. Plotinus expresses the transformation in much the same ways Vedantin thinkers expressed it. The Brahma- S-tra, for example, compares the One to a source of light and the Many to its rays or illumination (I.1.24, I.3.40, III.2.15 and 25), and Bhaskara, in about 1000 A.D., used the image of the sun and its rays for the One and the Many.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

If the essence of power is the effectiveness of command, then there is no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun, and it would be difficult to say in “which way the order given by a policeman is different from that given by a gunman.”

Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?

Richard J. Bernstein

“The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them”

Last Best Hope

George Packer

Smart America never adopted the normal anti-Americanism of the post-sixties left. It doesn’t hate America, which has been so good to the meritocrats. Smart Americans believe in institutions, and they support American leadership of military alliances and international organizations. In some cases they’ve endorsed smart wars fought with smart bombs, especially with a humanitarian purpose.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

Pareto’s theories, properly understood, do not depend upon any special psychological doctrine. Even if psychology says that men do not have any permanent instincts, it may still be true that there are certain permanent, or at least relatively constant, types of social activity.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Ingenuity includes not only truly new ideas—often called “innovation”—but also ideas that though not fundamentally novel are nonetheless useful.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

The modern economic modeling that attempts to forecast unemployment, interest rates, and so on without any commitment to grand economic theories is a continuation of Descartes’ project.More relevant to Descartes’ own time is the problem of the truth of the atomic hypothesis: it could, more or less, explain appearances, but is that a good reason for believing it true, in the absence of any more direct evidence?

Thoughts 7 Jan. 2022

 

A bestseller! (Well, at least it's sold out its first printing)

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image: an infinitely thin, immobile, fragment of a vast, seamless, living, ever-flowing whole. From a standpoint within the representation, everything is reversed. Instead of seeing what is truly present as primary, and the representation as a necessarily diminished derivative of it, we see reality as merely a special case of our representation – one in which something is added in to ‘animate’ it. In this it is like a ciné film that consists of countless static slices requiring a projector to bring it back into what at least looks to us like a living flow. On the contrary, however, reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life – the re-presentation is simply what one might call the ‘limit case’ of what is real. Stepping out of this world-picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life, will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Self-distrust led to more boosting of the Volk, and the fantasy that the people rooted in blood and soil would eventually triumph over rootless cosmopolitans, confirming Germany’s moral and cultural superiority over its neighbours. Thus, [late nineteenth century] Germany generated a phenomenon now visible all over Europe and America: a conservative variant of populism that posits a state of primal wholeness, or unity of the people, against transnational elites, while being itself deeply embedded in a globalized modern world.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers, in whom they can be discounted. In the work of great authors they lead into the very center of their work and are the most important clue to a true understanding of their problems and new insights. In Marx, as in the case of other great authors of the last century, a seemingly playful, challenging, and paradoxical mood conceals the perplexity of having to deal with new phenomena in terms of an old tradition of thought outside of whose conceptual framework no thinking seemed possible at all. It is as though Marx, not unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, tried desperately to think against the tradition while using its own conceptual tools.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The shaken liberal mood was caught with near-despair in an article by the economist John Maynard Keynes in 1923: “We are today the most creedless of men. Every one of our religious and political constructions is moth-eaten.” Keynes did not mean “liberal” in a party-political sense. He was talking of a liberal world that conservative governments had done much to create. In fixing the blame for the 1914–18 war and the harsh peace that followed, mainstream conservatism took a large share, not least from intellectuals on the right.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

The birth of the noosphere, according to Teilhard [de Chardin], coincided with the birth of Homo sapiens sapiens, the birth of self-reflective thought in higher primates, the birth of the animal who knows that he knows and has an interior life unlike any the world had ever seen.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

As the growth of a crystal is ordered by an abstract lattice structure, the unfolding of both psyche and physical world are ordered according to archetypal patterns. Jung then further conjectures that numbers also have an archetypal foundation or character: they are archetypes of order (cf. S: 57-59). This conjecture—further elaborated upon by Jung’s pupil, psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz, in 1974—allows us to solve a problem that only became widely acknowledged in the last year of Jung’s life: the question of why and how mathematics models and predicts the order of the physical world so accurately and precisely.

Thoughts: 8 October 2021

 

2021 publication,.It will remain relevant for a long time

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The Scottish philosopher David Hume, writing in the 1740s, completed the skeptical demolition of absolute certainty begun by Montaigne. In a tour de force of reasoning which stands unrefuted to this day, he showed that no prediction or causal attribution can ever be certain, even in principle; and that no invocation of miraculous or supernatural causes could ever be justified rationally, even in principle. If no naturalistic explanation can be true beyond any possibility of doubt, and if no supernatural explanation is within bounds, what basis for knowledge could there possibly be?

sng: Great question. Pursue the answer.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The new Bigs [tech giants] were more efficient at converting information into dollars than, say, a reputable statewide paper such as the Arizona Republic was in its heyday, and they could move content in quantities and at speeds which mocked traditional media. But with a crucial difference: they trafficked in information, not in knowledge, and in content rather than truth. They monetized eyeballs and clicks without pausing for reality checks, so that virality and profitability were a closed loop. The economic advantage of real news vaporized.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

Anti-intellectualism, Richard Hofstadter wrote in his study of the subject, has been a defining American trait from the Puritan beginnings: “It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality.”

sng: Anti-intellectualism & resentment of the educated elite have always been a part of the American experience, but in some periods, such as now, it's much worse. And, as Packer argues in his book, not without some justification.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

The shining city on a hill was supposed to replace remote big government with a community of energetic and compassionate citizens, all engaged in a project of national renewal. But nothing held the city together. It was hollow at the center, a collection of individuals all wanting more. Free America measured civic health by gross domestic product. It saw Americans as entrepreneurs, employees, investors, taxpayers, and consumers—everything but citizens.

sng: See the MacIntosh quote following & compare.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Moral systems are the product of collective agreements enforced through social norms, peer pressure, and the expectations of the larger community. And the effectiveness of these cultural agreements depends on a communitarian ethos—a binding sense of solidarity that emphasizes the sacrifice of the self for the sake of the larger group.

sng: Cf. Packer above and, for instance, Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue) and William Ophuls.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Disagreements among sovereign states,” Kissinger starkly put it, “can be settled only by negotiation or by power,” and as for those whose instinctive preference in the Cold War was for the second he also said, “The nuclear age has changed both the significance and the role of power.”

sng: True in some measure, but a limited concept of "power." Cf. Hannah Arendt on power & James Hillman's Kinds of Power.

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

The earth’s resources are also being plundered because of short-sighted approaches to the economy, commerce and production. The loss of forests and woodlands entails the loss of species which may constitute extremely important resources in the future, not only for food but also for curing disease and other uses.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Puzzling as it sounds, conservatism’s ultimate reward for compromising with liberal democracy was domination of liberal democracy.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

And the “chorus”—not so much public opinion as expert opinion—can fall victim to a different set of biases: the craving for certainty (randomized controlled trials, peer-reviewed papers), the habit of debunking any novel theory, or the sunk cost of being invested in “settled science,” not to mention the temptation to make countless false prophecies on opinion pages and talk shows.

sng: To wit, science is a human enterprise subject to all of our foibles & fallibilities.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

Jung defines ‘consciousness’ in a much more specific and restrictive manner. For him, consciousness is a relatively small subset of phenomenality, defined on the basis of three key properties. The first we have already encountered when discussing the psyche proper: only mental states under the control of deliberate personal volition are conscious. But then Jung adds: because of its empirical freedom of choice, the will needs a supraordinate authority, something like a consciousness of itself … Volition presupposes a choosing subject who envisages different possibilities. (ONP: 110, emphasis added) This is an allusion to what modern psychology calls ‘meta-consciousness’ (Schooler 2002) or ‘self-reflection.

Thoughts: 7 October 2021

 

2021 examination of the American political divides

Last Best Hope

George Packer

Equality is the hidden American code, the unspoken feeling that everyone shares, even if it’s not articulated or fulfilled: the desire to be everyone’s equal—which is not the same thing as the desire for everyone to be equal. Equality is the first truth of our founding document, the one that leads to all the others. The word of the eighteenth-century Declaration became flesh in the dynamic commercial society of the nineteenth. Tocqueville described equality as the “ardent, insatiable, eternal, and invincible” desire of democratic peoples.

sng: Equality & liberty are the two great American political (and social) values often seemingly at war with one another. And what about community, social solidarity, as a value? Excluded by our excessive individualism? Our experience with the COVID-19 pandemic suggests so.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

His [Louis Hartz's] Liberal Tradition in America meets the two main objections [to Daniel Boorstein's description of American liberalism] head on: he not only admits but insists that the liberal tradition has a theoretical content—that it is, in fact, Locke’s theory. We began with Locke, according to Hartz, and after every historical scuffle we find, as the dust settles, that we have ended with Locke. The second objection is confronted just as calmly: he not only admits but insists that universal subscription to this theory has made it an orthodoxy, the source of America’s conformism. According to Hartz, we have a liberal theory supported by conservative instincts—Locke’s arguments maintained for Burke’s motives of loyalty. Thus, what is wrong with the liberal tradition is not its liberal content but the fact that it is a tradition, that it forms “a colossal liberal absolutism.” A liberalism thus established is not challenged to reexamine and renew itself. Indeed, philosophical self-examination can no longer be achieved in purely American terms—there is no vantage point outside Locke from which to view our Lockean orthodoxy. The theory is everywhere, made invisible by its omnipresence. The solution is to go outside America—in historical analysis, by placing American liberalism against the broader spectrum of European political philosophies; in practical terms, by pursuing a course of international involvement. Only intimate dealings with other nations can make us recognize the nature of our own theory. In effect, by learning how bad they are, we learn how good we should be.

sng: Wills's dissection of American liberalism, written as a result of his beat as a political reporter in the 1968 presidential campaign, is still spot on, although the political terrain has now added a reactionary element.

Lila

Robert M. Pirsig

The Metaphysics of Quality says there are not just two codes of morals, there are actually five: inorganic-chaotic, biological-inorganic, social-biological, intellectual-social, and Dynamic-static. This last, the Dynamic-static code, says what’s good in life isn’t defined by society or intellect or biology. What’s good is freedom from domination by any static pattern, but that freedom doesn’t have to be obtained by the destruction of the patterns themselves.

sng: Sounds like shades of Whitehead and Hartshorne to me. But I don't recall Pirsig every referring to either thinker. Am I missing something, or misguided? 

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

Three key ideas underlie his [Jung's] implicit metaphysical system: first, that of the collective unconscious as a transpersonal experiential field, which generates all autonomous imagery we experience as both the perceived physical world and the worlds of dreams and visions; second, that of consciousness as an internally connected web of psychic contents that turns in upon itself so as to enable self-reflection; and third, that of daemons, autonomous psychic complexes that, although internally connected and conscious, are dissociated from their psychic surroundings.

sng: Sounds far-out? Both Jung & Kastrup are. But perhaps correct.

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Gaston Bachelard, the foremost investigator of imagination in our century, says that the deformation of the given is the essential method of imagination, which, Bachelard writes, “is always considered to be the faculty of forming images. But it is rather the faculty of deforming the images … of freeing ourselves from the immediate images; it is especially the faculty of changing images … if an occasional image does not give rise to a swarm of aberrant images, to an explosion of images, there is no imagination.”  Centuries earlier, Bachelard’s “deforming” was called by Quintilian “distortion”: “The essence of all wit lies in the distortion of the true and natural meaning of words.”  Distortion tortures language to say what’s concealed from ordinary ears. So do puns. Silly and senseless they may be, but they do make us groan. Samuel Johnson names these low conceits or puns “quibbles” and finds that Shakespeare had a fatal attraction to them.

Postcapitalism

Paul Mason

The great technological advance of the early twenty-first century consists not of new objects but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical elements used to produce them.

sng: The computer chips in your car are now the defining component?

Writing Down the Bones

Natalie Goldberg 

PUSH YOURSELF BEYOND when you think you are done with what you have to say. Go a little further. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that’s why we decide we’re done. It’s getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.