Friday, 17 April 2015

"Why Grow Up?" by Susan Neiman: First Thoughts on Reading



Why Grow Up? touches on a broad range of philosophical issues surrounding adult-hood and argues that we should rethink our, often anxious, relationship with the aging process.

Neiman points to the way in which "growing up" has of late acquired a somewhat morose theme: being assosiated with a state of resignation and a lacking of vitality.

By contrast Neimen portrays maturity as a process of constant tribulation through which we learn not only how to co-exist with a morally flawed world but with how to hold on to the will to change it for the better and master our own failings.

Understanding maturity in this way is meant to push away from the cult of youth. A cult, which as Neimman observes, destroys the lived experience of youthfulness by placing too many expectations on young people and neglects the pleasures that arrive in later life as a result of hard earned self-mastery cultivated through ones accumulative life experiences.

Textually the book picks a refreshing choice of topic and its execution and exploration of it is pretty spectacular in places, although there are a number of rhetorical turns that leave me a little un-certain.

Her particular philosophical heritage, Neo-Kantianism with a dash of Rousseau and Leibniz, leads her to support the older Socratic belief  that rational and just actions are one and the same. This equivocality between the good and the reasonable helps Neiman argue her view of childhood and adolescance but leaves her particularly reliant on a certain form of metaphysics. Then again I suppose certain axiomatic truths must be left temporarily un-challenged in order to enjoy the book. Another argument for another day.

Neiman also has an unfortunate tendency to write in a similar manner to Theodor Zeldin (not a particular favourite of mine). Accordingly the book has a fairly scattergun approach to contextualising its themes, flipping between psychological, philosophical and historical discussions at a fairly disorientating rate. As a consequence the references are, though wielded competently, rather thematically disparate; the result is a book that in places has more literary than thematic flow making the work pleasurable in form and wide-ranging in scope but also bewildering.


Overall it's an interesting little piece drawing attention to various authors and ideas surrounding adult-hood which are often over-looked or easily taken for granted: much more philosophically nuanced and well researched than I was expecting.

Wednesday, 15 April 2015

Huxley's Brave New World: A Hedonist's Response



"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
 

- John the Savage repudiating Mustapha Mond in Brave New World.


There is common comparison made between Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. One that remarks that while Orwell described the authoritarianism of his time, Huxley predicted the "soft-power" at work today. Read in this way the core theme of Brave New World is similar to that of emanicpatory writers like Rousseau: humans are frequently complicit in their own enslavement. This comparison suffers however from a certain level of western-centrism and misses some of the finer details of the dystopia which Huxley created.


Firstly, and a similar point is levelled by Nadya Tolokonnikova against Slavoj Zizek, the notion that modern capitalism controls its subjects through pleasure ignores the sweat-house labour and dictatorial right wing governments that have arguably played a big role in shaping modern global capitalism. Secondly, in Brave New World there is no evidence that humanity willingly gave up its Bibles or poetry; such things are banned and an inescapable system of social conditioning is required to force these artefacts of ancient pleasure into obsolescence. The depravity of the new world's citizens is artificial it is not an organic product of Huxley's subjects and their desires. As a hedonist of sorts,  while I could cry that Huxley's society is the product of authoritarianism and not pleasure seeking humans, that would do Brave New World a dis-service: the book did give me cause to reflect on hedonism and the relationship between pleasure and authenticity.


 The first thing that struck me as of particular philosophical interest was "Soma". Soma is the fictional drug taken by the new world's inhabitants and it functions as a very trenchant iteration of Nozick's experience machine. Unlike Nozick's original machine, soma requires very little in terms of metaphysical "jump": one could liken it to heroin without the side effects. Furthermore soma highlights the escapist tendencies of Brave New World's inhabitants. By taking soma the characters leave the reality which they ostensibly cannot deal with and submit themselves to a realm of pleasure inaccessible to more sober minds. This idea of "pleasure as escapism" may present some problems for a hedonistic outlook and raises questions about the dialectic between "fake pleasure" and "real pleasure".  Are there pleasures that fail to be valuable because they have no relation to objects outside of the subjects experience? Are mind altering substances providing fake happiness or real happiness?  Is a drunk happy to see you or do they merely think that they are in a welcoming mood?



Currently, I see little reason to make a hard distinction between the pleasures that are accrued through synthetic chemical manipulation, such as alcohol or soma based pleasures, and the organic chemical manipulations achieved through sugar, salt or a caressing touch. Furthermore if the thing that scares us about Soma is that it "merely creates pleasure" then what is that missing ingredient that allows us to be satisfied even if we are not enjoying ourselves? Pain? The outlook of John the Savage is rather reminiscent of Seneca: the roman philosopher who believed that suffering and tribulation should be cherished as a source of meaning in an otherwise empty life.

I can empathise with the Senecan position: life would become very boring if one was absolved of all tragedy. This I do not think is necessarily a problem for hedonists as the hedonic treadmill ensures that we will never run out of tribulations to give purpose to our growth. It may be that the reason we want struggle is that it gives context to our successes. We want struggle and heartbreak not because we don't value pleasure but because struggle and heartbreak make our pleasure worthwhile. 

My response to those who raise up Huxley's Brave New World as a warning against hedonism is that its citizens are not really committed hedonists. They are cattle who have been forcefully deprived of a range of pleasures, primarily intellectual ones, and conditioned to accept passivity as a state of enduring desirability.

When it comes to the relationship between pleasure and eudemonia what Brave New World articulates is a critique of lazy infantilization posing as the good life. As I have argued before, empty gluttonous carnality is not the same thing as an ethical and well-disciplined regime of hedonism.






Thursday, 9 April 2015

The Trouble with the History of Philosophy



As with any sacred cow found to be defunct in the modern age, there are two extremist tendencies one can tend toward. You can either preserve its life forever as per sentimental faux-superstition or in a fit of capricious rebellion you can send it moo-ing and screeching towards the abattoir of obsolescence. Both are equally distasteful, especially when performed for show.


We will return to this point later.

 
The ancients of philosophy; Socrates, Plato, Aristotle et al have a peculiar relationship with their discipline. They are still considered, by some, relevant to the contemporary practise and study of philosophy.  Although, this is perhaps not as idiosyncratic as I have suggested. Plenty of young Artists and Musicians are required to study Titian and Mozart, despite the fact that almost no cultural pioneer in the 21st Century would dream of reproducing their style in order to "push culture forward". The greats are studied in these fields because they exemplify certain important principles or points in our cultural trajectory that are important for contextualising and understanding our practises today.


This stands in contrast with science which encompasses a range of disciplines few of which feel the need to force students to study ancient scientific literature uniformly rejected or superseded by contemporary scientists.

The key difference between science and philosophy then, which makes their treatment of their intellectual cannon so different, is in the scope of questioning. Science, as a method, in order to pay the meticulous attention to detail that it is known for keeps its set of questions narrow and measurable. This ensures precision, quantifiability and clear grounds of truthfulness and falsifiability for each and every statement made.

Philosophy keeps its remit wide. In fact its very draw to new students is that so long as the question is not empirical, philosophy considers that question to be valid and within the grounds of legitimate philosophical enquiry. This means that philosophy cannot guarantee the precision or prediction of concrete phenomena because it eschews such questioning in order to concern itself with the big picture. Philosophers are obsessed with how we fit concrete phenomenon's into systems of perception and rationalisation; we are not concerned with the shape of the game piece but rather with the form of the board it is being placed on and why.


Accordingly this bigger picture requires a wider grasp of history. While philosophers can and do work on problems that are being encountered and hashed out over the period of decades they also struggle with problems which encompass a huge portion of our mental schemas and accordingly are the product of debates raised raged over centuries. These large underlying mental schemas may be the product of a system of thought or categorisation of life that has been around for hundreds of years and so tracing the lineage of that system and understanding its root causes and relationships benefits from historical contextualisation.

This is why philosophy students sit down with Kant, who has been dead for over 200 years. It's why they recount the cantankerous blathering of Socrates and the musings of Descartes. Philosophy students need to understand that much of our intellectual strata is a product of our time. That does not mean it is relative or that it is wrong. It means that our current theoretical framework is merely one of the many ways in which humans have aimed to understand the world, it is not special... nor are the ways in which humans of the past understood the world.

In saying that...


Modern thinkers have some significant advantages over the philosophers of yore and especially over the ancients. First of all we have the advances of science and technology and this along with the invention of the social sciences has meant that today's theorists, which is really all philosophers are once you strip away their grandiose mystique, have more data to work on than ever before.


Ideas about society, gender or the constitutive parts of the world etc can be constructed with reference to actual data. Today, philosophers trying to make sense of how this world works have the benefit of our accumulated scientific knowledge when creating descriptive theories about concrete phenomena.


The second advantage that we have is that we have a huge head-start. Many of these questions have been discussed for a long time now and our philosophy has only gotten deeper, scientifically accurate and refined.


This is a fact that is often ignored and it often irks me when I see that so much of "pop-philosophy" is sold as an explication of ancient secrets. The problem with this marketing tactic is that it reinforces the public's perception of philosophy as something that hasn't progressed since Ancient Greece.
The truth is, depending on your audience, there is a mountain of modern research that is both thoroughly captivating and lucid enough for the layman to grasp. What's more an emphasis on contemporary philosophical research would work wonders in terms of public education. Both by introducing the public to modern philosophy as it is practised today but also by demonstrating philosophy's ever changing and fast paced nature.

To return to the theme of my opening paragraph, this is why I think the likes of Socrates and Kant provide a particularly difficult heritage to manage when it comes to PR.


On the one hand we need to avoid dwelling in the past. The likes of Alain de Botton do nothing but stultify the public's perception of philosophy while appealing only to those pompous and sycophantic fools who seem to think that every question asked in philosophy requires an obligatory homage to dead Greeks.


Alternatively our historical icons are worth acknowledging even if only for the pragmatics of delineating the roots of modern thought and contextualising contemporary debate. To cast the history of philosophy aside in the hope of acquiring some pretence to youthfulness by embracing an edgy irreverence towards anyone who doesn't or didn't own a smart phone would be simple un-cultured idiocy, even if it did work (and it probably wouldn't).

    

Goals for the Second Quarter



You know the drill, I hate these as much as anyone else does but it's my blog hence you will suffer through.

 
Here are three sub-resolutions, corresponding with my previously posted annual resolutions, that are intended to direct my energy into self-betterment threby challenging the status quo of self-destruction.  



#1 All Late Modern Fiction Makes Jack A Dull Boy.


While I do appreciate the ever expanding vistas that have been offered to me by loosening the rather tight leash that I normally keep my reading schedule on, as ever, I want more.  More contemporary work will be added to my diet along with some more European literature, preferably predating the 20th century.



#2 Fighting Machine

My cardio has gotten a lot better since the beginning of the new year and my diet is similarly in a much improved state. What I need now is an activity to  challenge me and provide some motivation so taking my cue from Dizzy Rascal and his immortal line "All I care about is sex and violence" I will join the local judo club.

I have not participated in any form of combat athletics for over two years now, I'm looking forward to making a return. As for the sex part, I'll just have to hope to get lucky more often.


#3 Dropping the Bass, in Favour of Something More Refined.

Basically this part of my resolution has been the one I have capitalised on the least. I figure this is because there is no clear method of progression. The method I now propose is looking over the Albums that I do own, online or physical, tracking down the artists recent work and looking through the sound-tracks of other media that I like for new bands and musicians. You have got to start with that which you already love.