metonymy4u

one could ask: why post anything online? why disclose one’s thoughts? why write a book? or a poem? an essay? a novel? or a research paper? i do these things to support my own problem solving skills. and with the hope that others might benefit from my efforts.

Our culture tends to value knowledge over skill. This is a habit learned from 2500 years of Neo-Platonism. The notion that the “truth will set you free” is as unshakeable from our social lexicon as the idea of some “special genius” as the motivating force behind fame, wealth and success. Yet contemporary psychologists have discovered that the success of experts in their field is not so much due to the possession of a superior intellectual problem solving heuristic as it is to the fact that they have practiced certain skills over and over again. Skillful performance is actually more valuable than truth. It adds a new slant to the old joke, “when in doubt, do right!”

What this election says to me is that we are moving closer to something. That something is a world in which people are no longer evaluated by the color of their skin, the partner of their evenings, the impediments of biological accident. It is instead a world in which people are valued for what gives them joy each morning when they wake. It is a world in which we are not so inundated with the struggle to survive that we cannot reach out a hand to another who is also struggling. We used to live in such a world. A world where identification of difference meant the difference between life and death. A world in which political alliances based on marriage also were matters of life and death. But that world is fading away. Its customs are anachronisms. We need not live that way any longer. What we do need to understand is the responsibility we have to those who are still forced to do so. Those who do not yet have the luxuries that we enjoy. Those who still live in that older world. That more violent world. We can move beyond it. And we can bring others with us. Someday we will look back at the mountains we have moved and be pleased. Today, I have hope.

Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return strikes me as a member of the same class of behaviors as Kant’s categorical imperative: a set of heuristics used by some people in certain cultures to attempt to induce liberal habits in others. The idea, if I understand it, is to see each action as weighty in the hopes that under the pressure of the weight all the cruelty will be squeezed out, leaving only pure good will. My concern for this approach is that I think we’ve forgotten that humans are animals. Just as we approach most animals in the wild with a healthy respect tempering our curiosity, why would we suddenly throw this caution to the wind in the case of our own conspecifics? I doubt very much if there is any heuristic that would guarantee any sort of purity of will in a creature subject to the learning history of a life filled with danger and deprivation. It’s just not practical to expect that we can ever realize such an idyllic existence. Why then do we persist in such an approach?

I believe there is a real disadvantage in our culture’s tendency to privilege perceived successes over perceived failures. From the attention deficit, commercial driven, instant pleasure culture of daily life, to publication bias in our scientific community, we can see the drawbacks of our positivity addiction. What use, then, negativity? Well for one thing it gives us the opportunity to learn how to make lemonade out of lemons. And this is an important skill for a species with such large, emotion driven brains. Clever enough to figure out how to build nuclear weapons. Angry enough to create god in our image. The problem, I think, is that we don’t accept the challenge. We don’t understand that to turn bitter into sweet is a task that requires effort, care and skill. That compassion is the sugar in our lemonade.

What I do find compelling about Freud’s project is the attempt to give an account of our ethical capacity. What sort of biological origin can there be for an impulse to consider the needs of another person? This has been, and continues to be, one of the most compelling questions ever asked. The problem with his model, as I see it, is that he seems to have followed, unquestioningly, what I call original sin theory. This is the notion, also present in the writings of Hobbes and Nietzsche, that our aggressive tendencies go all the way down. That humans are essentially aggressive, impulsive, power and pleasure driven creatures with no natural source of restraint. That we are essentially constituted by will to power. This left Freud with the problem of how to account for the restraint of that will. I wonder what factors influenced his decision to not consider alternative models of human nature, because they certainly had been proposed many times in the course of human intellectual history?

For a pragmatist in the world, there is no truth of the matter. Inscriptions are events. Nothing more attaches to them. The series of inscriptions 2+2=4 for example does not re-present a state of affairs “out there,” any more than an artist’s rendition of someone’s face or a landscape in spring. 2+2=4 simply is an event that some people have learned to respond to and others have not. The fact of responsiveness does not guarantee something called “truth.” It simply provides a hint as to what may come later. That someone else may respond in a manner that I find useful, or pleasing. The truth of these statements is founded on nothing more than a correspondence of behaviors. This is not, however, a recipe for nihilism. Our ancestors who responded to inscriptions survived and gave birth to us. In order to continue this tradition, we must work harder and improve.

If we define, for a moment, an ironist as a person seeking to create a new vocabulary never before heard, what then is a theorist? A theorist could be defined as a person who follows an ironist and seeks to interpret the meaning of the ironist’s work for all humanity. These two are in tension. The ironist seeks to invent new metaphors while the theorist seeks to find a final, big set of metaphors that shall apply to all people. I am not saying this is always the nature of ironists and theorists, rather that we use these words this way for a moment in time. Because then we can understand the modern writer as one who seeks to be both ironist and theorist (poet and philosopher). Why would someone try this? Well, perhaps because looking back at the history of ironists like Socrates, the Buddha, Jesus or Mohammed, we notice that they are followed by centuries of theorists who attempt (ironically enough) to codify and universalize by any means necessary, the teachings of the original. And then they fall into metaphysics. Which could be described as the effort to anchor the words of the ironist to a reality out there in the world. Once the anchor is built, others can be saved and the theorists become priests. Priests who convey the Truth to the unwashed masses. Unfortunately this way often lies war and burnings at the stake. So I beg you not to forget: the ironist was a person like you and me. You too are as great as all these. Your mind is the Buddha’s mind. Your divine grace is as eternal as Jesus. Your wisdom as great as Socrates. Your submission as sublime as Mohammed. These people were great only to the extent that they were remembered. And the remembering was an accident of time. So is yours and mine.

I would be very pleased to know that my statements have turned out to be more helpful than true.