metonymy4u

I believe I myself have spent much of my life in a state of selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. This is a German phrase which roughly translates as “self–incurred voicelessness.” It is an impossible expression really. How could I have self consciously incurred my own predicament, if I was already –somehow –banished to silence?

Read Full Post »

I’ve always loved this simple statement by Immanuel Kant, age 60 at the time, penned shortly after he had written his most important work, The Critique of Pure Reason:

Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.

Enlightenment is our emergence from our self-incurred voicelessness.

The final phrase is highly significant, and cannot be fully captured in English. The word selbstverschuldeten is a compound of the reflexive with a word which implies indebtedness, as if something has been voluntarily wagered, risked or mortgaged. The last word Unmündigkeit is a noun which literally translates as “mouthlessness” but which in German refers to an absence of developmental or legal maturity. I think there is a subtle irony (melancholy? compassion?) in saying that the immaturity is self incurred, since it would seem call into question the very nature of a self that, though green and untested, yet assumed this mysterious debt. What I think Kant means to suggest is that humanity finds itself apprehended in a Faustian bargain that traps us and keeps us—immature, incapable, voiceless, disenfranchised. In the context of the first critique, I think he is proposing that we have mistakenly acquiesced our reason to an algorithm of certainty, fate, and God, to the detriment of our ability to live, negotiate, and mature.

How well Nietzsche understood the old man!

Read Full Post »

More and more I’m considering the proposition that many (most?) people live life thinking “X should be easy” and then are really pissed off when they discover it isn’t. X could be just about anything, it seems.

Read Full Post »

One of the problems with moral disputes in the US is that they tend to be couched in terms of essentialist ethics. On the one hand the neo-liberal ethic is one of limited government: A Government which makes sure the streets are kept in good repair, (mostly) free of bloodshed, and no more. On the other hand the social justice movement demands that we recognize the essential goodness of all beings, and on that basis treat everyone as “equal” (whatever that means). The problem with both of these perspectives is that they propose to cash the value of an essentialist view of human nature in an algorithmic approach to civic life. Which clearly doesn’t work so well in a world that (apparently) neither heard of their algorithms, nor contracted to follow them. An alternative unconsidered by either camp, probably due to fears of “relativism,” is the notion of civic virtue. The central question of for civic virtue is not “how are we” but “how do we wish to be?” As such it is not nearly as algorithmic as either transcendentalism or utilitarianism – in fact it pretty much gives up entirely the notion of a fixed heuristic approach to human life and instead embraces the apparent contingency of language and community. Rather than asking “what are we?” and then trying to fit everyone into a deductive theory of how we should behave, the question is much more one of “what type of ‘we’ do we wish to be 500 years from now?”

Read Full Post »

Knowledge is often defined in terms of correspondences to reality or facts, and this is indeed useful in certain situations, very ineffective in others. We should not be afraid to jettison such a model when, like an old pair of shoes, it no longer serves our purposes. In such cases knowledge may be defined as a felt sense. That sometimes others feel as well. Or so they say.

Read Full Post »

It seems to me that relativism often gets punished as the obligatory bed-fellow to nihilism. And yet properly understood as the doctrine that all behaviors are learned behaviors, it seems that it is as far from nihilism as any position could be. How did the two get confused?

Read Full Post »

I fear that our country’s founding on classical liberal ideals of equality, self-interest and the rule of law has doomed us all to the mediocrity of ” Sorry, not my job, –I just work here.” Nothing exemplifies this tendency more than the pathetic attempt to adjudicate major moral questions (like same-sex marriage and abortion) on such flimsy notions as equality and privacy, referring them as per usual to some fantasy world of natural rights and liberty. What garbage! Marital opportunities and freedom of reproductive choice are not a matter of rediscovering yet again a nonexistent “right” to equality or privacy, which neither exist nor, apparently, command any sort of respect from governments subjected to even the mildest of exigent circumstances. We would be far better served to consider such questions a matter of civic virtue, a concept which owes nothing whatsoever to the delusion of natural right and consequently cannot by that fallacy be assailed. Civic virtues, in this case the demand for compassion and restraint of political cruelty, by which means alone do we preserve our ability to coexist in community, are the true touchstones of opportunity and due process–our duty to protect and nurture one another. As we have seen time and again, laws alone do not protect people. Ultimately only other people can do that.

Read Full Post »

How can we operationalize “freedom?” I think of it as a relatively greater heterogeneity of operants (behaviors related to their consequences).  And the limit of the series, absolute freedom, noumenal freedom, that has been called god or virtue or morality—is that ever a part of our experience?  Beyond what we say to one another?

Read Full Post »

Plato was certainly what we today would call a behavioral psychologist at heart. Far more interested in describing the behaviors of thinkers and speakers, than in proclaiming the “Truth” himself.

Read Full Post »

I believe the word good refers me to such a broadly heterogeneous set of events that I have a hard time understanding how to respond to it. Moreover, I so often experience it as a feature of emotions like grief, envy, sadness, hatred and jealousy, that I rarely find useful. Given that history, what future could I possibly recommend for it?

Read Full Post »