| Sometimes people complain that philosophy is irrelevant.
Sometimes they mean that it isn't relevant with the day-to-day necessities and practicalities of life. You can't earn bread or clean your house with philosophy. Sometimes they mean that it is a distraction from a greater, political goal. You can't fight for justice with philosophy.
The first and most philosophical rejoinder to these accusations is that each one, properly speaking, presupposes philosophical attitudes. How can you know which day-to-day necessities and practicalities are important without investigating philosophically? How can you what what justice is without deriving it philosophically?
These are good arguments, but nobody listens to them. The reason why they don't listen to them is because it is based in an appeal to either generalized skepticism or the hierarchical organization of knowledge, both principles of inquiry whose epochs have long passed.
A better argument, I think, goes like this: there is one tool, above all others, that will be at your disposal in practical and political matters, and that is yourself. The obstacles of life are recalcitrant, the emperor is far away and well protected. Much of success in life is due to external chance. But every impact you have on the world will be mediated by your own self, and you have yourself at your disposal at all times to develop into something stronger, wiser, nobler.
At its best, the study of philosophy (or theology, or psychology, or anthropology, or any deep interrogation and challenging of ones assumptions and practices) is the conscious molding of oneself into something greater, so at the moment of greatest opportunity or adversity, you are ready. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| I talked to Melanie tonight. Towards the end of our conversation--which was, in my opinion, a rich one--the topic turned to the fact that we don't really know much about each others' lives now. It's been over two years since we were housemates. Our lifestyles are different, our outlooks are different, the way we relate to other people is different. We've grown.
Can we really say we know each other? Is there still a basis for friendship in the significant sense?
I feel so very strongly. I feel this way about a lot of my distant, low-bandwidth friendships. But it brings into focus a set of thoughts about relationships and knowledge-of-the-other that have been brewing for me lately.
Unfortunately, I don't think I can explain it in any less jargony way than this: When we think about or interact with others, we do so with some sort of mental model of them. The problem is that we have only so much mental storage and computing power, and so our mental models of other people are going to be much simpler than the complete workings of our own mentality. (With a few assumptions,) It follows that our mental models are in most cases going to fall vastly short of the actual complexity of the people we deal with, even if we interact with them every day.
There are a number of ways to deal with this problem.
( Read more... ) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Two things have prompted this post.One Hundred Years</i> was how compelling I found the archetypal male characters. ("Archetypal" because each of the characters manages to be both a character and an archetype.) It struck me, while reading, how comfortably I could relate to them, and especially how I could relate to them as standards of masculinity.
I couldn't put my finger on why until ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) epictetus_rex got me to think about how my own sense of masculinity differs from others (in particular, his). In his framework, my answer would be the priority of "independence"--self-sufficiency, freedom of ones own will, power over oneself--over status or power over others.
This made something click. The men (and all the characters) in One Hundred Years of Solitude are all characterized by their solitude. This solitude is manifest in myriad ways--in the founding of a remote city, in the single-minded pursuit of the Philosopher's Stone, in guerilla military heroism that is motivated by pride but disdainful of honors, in lone craftmanship in throwing sweet parties, in love--but the theme carries. So many of those characters are heroic to me, even (I think this is telling:) when their traits that strike me as heroic are their greatest weaknesses and undoings.
It is strange to me that I am struck by this aspect of myself that I see with clarity has affected me my whole life. Perhaps I've just forgotten it. Perhaps it's because my solitude, like in Marquez' novel, is hereditary and so always seemed to be the norm. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I've now been living in a metropolis for two years, and some sort of city for six. It is the middle of autumn. My thoughts about this month's seasonal change until recently were, "There goes summer. It's just a long slide toward winter now. No more rooftop parties."
I had reduced seasons entirely to the state of the weather.
On Sunday I went back (to my parents') home in the suburbs. "Suburbs" may evoke the wrong image to some of you, because you are from plains or fields or something. Despite their being hotbeds of real estate development, my New England suburbs are still carved imperfectly out of forests. Old trees stand tall. Invasive creatures are the norm. It's not nature on any grand scale, but I can see why my parents moved out of the city to live there, why that was a triumphant step for them.
There are oak trees there, and where the oak trees are thickest the ground is covered in acorns. Chipmunks stuffing their faces brazenly ignore you. Some coniferous trees grow small red berries that look delicious but which I've always been told are poisonous to humans. Tall grasses sprout grain-like stalks of purple seeds.
What I had forgotten (and what was accented by Sunday's temperate weather) is that while autumn is when the weather declines, it is the time when the earth is most fruitful. It is ripe for us.
"No wonder things are so good," I think to myself. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Since laurent_atl asked...
My motivations for the propositional logic in JSON thing are embarrassingly speculative at this point. My official reason for looking into it is "the intellectual exercise."
But basically, I think it would be pretty cool if:
- There were a way to represent propositional logic formulas in JSON
- in a way that made it easy/natural to write the kinds of formulas that represent the way people tend to argue
- and in a way that made it "easy" to do some common operations on those formulas (like, for example, conjoining them)
Preliminary investigation has revealed to me that JSON is (surprise!) not particularly suited to this task. But an example of something I've been toying with has been the following mapping:
| [P,Q] | P or Q |
| P:Q | P -> Q |
| {P:Q, R:S} | (P -> Q) and (R -> S) |
Most of my questions have to do with the best choice of meaning for the pairing operator (:)--implication, reverse implication, biconditional. In the example above, you could write a Horn Clause like (P and Q) -> R as:
[{P : false}, {Q : false}, R]
but I find that to be a pretty contorted way of representing that kind of implication to a human being. If it has to be that bad, might as well use XML instead. On the other hand, if ":" stands for reverse implication, then you get this representation of the above clause:
{R : {P : true, Q : true}}
which I think is quite elegant. Unfortunately, I don't think there's any way to represent negation in this system!
Any thoughts? | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Day off | | Time: | 09:32 pm | | Current Mood: | fat and happy |
|
| I made an awesome decision earlier this week: to take today off.- I spent the morning in bed trying to figure out an appealing way to encode propositional logic formulas in JSON. (This is part of a master plan)
- I ate a big brunch at my favorite diner where I updated my To Do list and realized that my job may be getting me to where I want to go after all.
- Wrote a mediocre piece of microfiction.
- I investigated graduate schools.
- I wrote a blog post about the politics of open source that I've been meaning to write for a week.
- I learned that Alex from the Big Hat is really going to start the blues band (that needs a harmonica guy full time, obviously), and that my old friend Kendell Woodstern may be in on it as the trumpet player.
- Edited a friend's microfiction and investigated places to publish it. Fantasized about making a microfiction publishing cooperative website.
- Did some laundry.
- Made myself a big stack of quesadillas with black beans, cremini mushrooms, tomato, onion, garlic, and pepper jack.
Now I'm in a bit of a food coma from the quesadillas.
What I get, on days like these, is an encounter with the root of my being, where it is both productive and indolent. Operating alone, I am free to motivate myself, to hope and dream unrealistically, and to apply myself to ends I don't expect anyone else to appreciate in the near term. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Almost exactly a year ago I wrote this post, largely about my politics, and I am a little disappointed that I don't see much change in my attitude since then. If anything I'm more apathetic, especially about electoral politics and governance.
This is partly because the main way I engage with governments now is as a sympathetic service provider. Most of our clients are government agencies working in some executive capacity. (Contrast with how I used to interact with the government, which was by campaigning for new legislation). We are two organizations with goals that happen to be aligned and good (get data out in an accessible way, support open source software, develop new technology that helps them do their (often technocratic) work well). Even when I work explicitly with "open government" in mind, it's not about putting popular pressure on legislators. It's about making a technical argument to the right human being about the best practices and tools for them, and trying to make sure the technology that's right for them also serves the greater good.
This suits me. I've never been a believer in any of the big Theories of Justice, or in any particular theory of Legitimacy. I don't believe that democratic governments Represent their constituencies or that legislators are particularly competent to govern. So I guess I hold them to a low standard. If there are serious societal problems, that's because society is seriously broken. Governments are just another kind of institution within society. But they are institutions that despite their flaws can do a lot of good, and most of the people in them--at least the ones we work with--are into using their positions of power to improve the way things work.
It's accomplishing a technological change. Is it accomplishing a political change? I think so. Because the main political challenge I care about these days isn't about representation in a government context, but about liberation/empowerment in a more general context. And knowledge, data, technology, etc. are, when easily and equitably available, liberating--they accelerate the disclosure of being by existence, they are the torch of truth that can be wielded best by the champions of humanity against its enemies. Sort of by definition, if I had a more specific idea of how these tools would be used, it wouldn't count as real empowerment. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Yesterday was the two year anniversary of my starting the Working In New York chapter of my life. Seems like a good time to reevaluate my life, goals, politics, etc. So I looked back to posts from last year to get a sense of how things have changed.
What I got was two parallel timelines of the summers of 2008 and 2009.
( Read more... )
Ok, that wasn't what I meant to write this about at all. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This week was one of those weeks when you don't have time to catch up with yourself.
Sunday night I through a very successful party that evolved into a 3:30 am outing to Brooklyn's J'Ouvert parade wrapping up with watching the sunrise on my roof with some Chinatown pork dumplings and a bottle of Ardbeg. Then I stepped through the seven people sleeping in the living room to take a nap, got up, and reopened the scotch because that day was Brooklyn's Carnival celebration and there was shit to do.
Sunday's party ended roughly 11pm on Monday night, by some measures.
Then the work week, which was multifaceted.
greebsnarf came over Wednesday and we had a great conversation about metaphysics, among other things. Unfortunately, things came to a close right before we got to the most important and hardest part: agency, causality, etc.
Thursday I learned that I am going to be sent to Belize for a few days at the end of September. Nobody yet knows much about what I will be doing there or why exactly I'm going to be there. Later that day, we had an office whiskey tasting. Laphroig, Four Roses Small Batch, and something distilled from rye in New York.
Today, I am staying home alone. I am trying to study for the GRE's. I take them tomorrow. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I've heard Steve Morrell tell me stories about him countless times, and I've listened and practiced along with his music for ten years. But for some reason this is the first time it's occurred to me to look up Paul Butterfield on YouTube and actually get a sense of what it was like to see him perform.
Good lord is he good.
Check out that technique starting at about 2:30 in the video. Again, I've heard it over and over again before, but the visuals there are breathtaking. Look at all that hand work. And his stage presence--all that movement.
Dang. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| So, you're sitting around reading Hegel, and you slog through a lot of prose like this:
In the pure reflection of the beginning as it is made in this logic with being as such, the transition is still concealed; because being is posited only as immediate, therefore nothing emerges in it only immediately. But all the subsequent determinations, like determinate being which immediately follows....* And you do your best to follow along and understand what he's talking about.
"Wow, it's hard to know what he's talking about sometimes," you think to yourself, "but every once in a while I think I know what he's talking about and he seems on to something. He's probably a genius. I'm going to keep working at this and see where it goes."
So you keep on trucking, doing your best to keep track of how determinate being as such differs from determinateness and from a determinate being, and you ever begin to think you might be getting it, when suddenly he busts out a concrete example of what he's talking about like:
But even a stone, as a something, contains the distinction of its determination or in-itself and its determinate being, and to that extent is contains the identity of the stone with its other. If it is a base capable of being acted on by an acid, then it can be oxidized, and neutralized, and so on. In oxidation, neutralization, and so on, it overcomes its limitation of existing only as a base; it transcends it, and similarly the acid overcomes its limitation of being an acid. This ought, the obligation to transcend limitations, is present in both the acid and the caustic base in such a degree that it is only by force that they can be kept fixed as (waterless, that is, purely non-neutral) acid and caustic base.**
At which point you suddenly think, "You know what? Maybe Hegel is just COMPLETELY OUT OF HIS MIND. What the hell is this psychobabbly, alchemical bullshit? Why's he trying to bring pH balance into this?"
Two paragraphs later, he's talking about what it would feel like to be a magnet.
* Science of Logic, Miller translation, p.99 Chosen at random.
** p. 134. Bold emphasis mine. | | comments: 16 comments or Leave a comment |
| - At work we've finally reached consensus that we shouldn't try to build a slick Web 2.0 web app without using a slick modern web framework. So suddenly all hell has broken loose and we've been allowed to futz around with Django in an officially sanctioned way. In a coup, we've taken the opportunity to try out distributed versioning control as well. So our futzing-with-Django project is in a Mercurial repository and is hosted on BitBucket.
The discovery is: all of this stuff is awesome. Django is totally slick and it's a joy to get shit done in it. Mercurial is sweet and is a joy to work with. All the hype is right.
My secret plan for a long time has been to actually apply some of the things I've learned how to do to actually accomplish something I care deeply about (so far my follow-through on this sort of thing has not been great). Django seems like an especially effective way to do that, so I'm glad to be tilting that way.
- Hey, just now I realized that listening to cool music makes you think you are cool. It's a strange thing, because music is on the one hand external to you, and also often social. So the "feeling cool" part may just be smugness about ones own curatorial taste. I associated myself with music X; I think it's a nice choice. Maybe I think that other people will value that taste in me. So when I listen to it I am proud of being the sort of person who listens to X.
Some people take this to an extreme where they describe some of their music preferences as "guilty pleasures."* Why "guilty"? I guess to distance themselves from something they believe to be beneath them (socially? in some objective aesthetic sense?)? Very confusing.
But I think you could argue that it infects your experience in such a way that it ends up being internal as well. So, if I am listening to wimpily absurdist, resiliently detached music on my iPod in the subway, I will experience things around me in a wimpily absurdist, resiliently detached way.** Throw in some handwavy assumptions about neural plasticity, and all of a sudden you're a wimpily absurdist, etc. person! On the other hand, if I am blasting energetic, aggressive, and perhaps crude music from the highway***, then I will experience things in an energetic, aggressive, and perhaps crude way and... you get the idea.
So maybe music has more to do with identity formation than just endlessly reflected social anxieties!
Thoughts welcome.
* N.B. I don't do this.
** N.B. I don't do this either.
*** N.B. Or this. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Iron and Wine "Pagan Angel and Borrowed Cat" | | Time: | 08:12 pm |
|
| My back leaves sweat stains on this cheap futon. It gets darker but nobody has put the lights on. I still smell bacon fat.
I had been having trouble carrying the entire weight of the future. Without knowing it, planning Saturday's party forced me to confront such and enormous task with such immediacy that it flushed out all other considerations.
About midnight, when the band started playing, I knew that that my work was done. Since then, I have been as calm and open as an empty jug. I hung out all Sunday with Abraham and everabridged without the slightest feeling of anxiety.
Today I've felt the slow trickle filling the vessel again. It is not heavy yet; I can still be just in this moment if I choose to. Daydreaming is possible. I think I'm going to go for a walk outside. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Tags: | stress | | Time: | 12:34 am | | Current Mood: | ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/bitospud/courier/black/tired.gif) exhausted |
|
| Lately, I've felt like I've only just barely been able to keep it together.
The thing that puts it over the edge might be all these roaches. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| ( The reading group )
Hegel asks "With what must science begin?" What he really means is, "With what must philosophy begin?"
He makes the following argument:
Either it must start with something immediate or something mediated.
If it begins with something immediate, then in must start with a simple immediacy, which means with pure being, because if there were any determination or content to it then that determination would involve mediation, contradicting the supposition.
If it begins with something mediate, then that mediation implies a separate of something from another, which in turn implies that there is something, some work, that has gone before. That contradicts the very idea of a beginning.
So we must begin philosophy with pure being.
( Objections )
But I am warned/influenced by de Beauvoir here, who includes this statement prominently in her conclusion:
As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the infinite. That is why reading hte Hegelian system is so comforting. I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Biblioteque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the consolation of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men.
More than ever before in my life I live in midst of living men now. More than ever in my life I am now one. I will need to approach Hegel on that plane. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| The options once appeared to be:
- Objective truth is what is revealed to us by a combination of rationality and empirical evidence, but only empirical evidence that we could detach from the particular observer. The Subject of knowledge is a single unified, disembodied subject of Reason of which we partake to the extent that we cogitate in lock step with it.
- Objective truth is that which is present at the terminus of the unfolding of history or inquiry. The Subject of knowledge is that unitary communal subject into which we, as finite moments, are carried up into in a sublated form.
The problem is that we are finite. In particular, we have individual bodies without which the world is meaningless. So both proposed subjects of knowledge are chimerical. We--not as communal "we", but as you and I--are the subjects of knowledge.
Simple as this is, it is profound in that it entails that there are Other subjects. It makes Love possible, for example. It makes a substantive ethics possible.
But what of objective truth? It would be unacceptable to lose this concept in the fray.
There answer is that truth is being as disclosed through the infinitude of human projects linked together through time. We pass Being from One to Another, like a torch. With it, we set more aflame, bring more to light. But it changes hands.
What we must abandon is not the idea of objectivity but the idea of totality, in two senses.
- First, as an existence (as a subject) I can never view the totality of Being. There is always a horizon for me. (To give the being within that horizon meaning I must extend it through the eyes of a genuine Other, who travels further down the road.)
- Because Being is only that which will be disclosed by the free projects of the genuine, it is an open system. Horizons are a function of our point of view, not of the edge of the earth. Space-time is curved.
| | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Rare is the book that increases my admiration for both open source software and my Grandmother. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| |
![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/bitospud/courier/black/amused.gif){kind=small}
excited