The Appearance of Abstraction

Abstraction has a quality of not being much at all--and this quality has a lure to groups of people. The lure of abstraction is ticklish and follows this equation:

One is in love. One wants to share it with others.

When abstraction is shared in language the speaker is confronted with a dilemma with it's expression because of abstraction's lack of properties and at first it seems important to be clever. This cleverness is the decorations we add like polka dots to a square. The decorations come like a fever and are excessive and contingent. They are conceived to be amusing and dazzling but only serve to mask the actual content.

Then there is a tendency to renounce decoration but to become cynical and minimal. Abstraction becomes an eulogy of the assumption that it couldn't be fully shared in language. The cynicism becomes a mocking of abstraction from the view point of some miserable afterlife. The expression of abstract concepts is to show that abstraction is not there in speech and this expression becomes polemic in any direction.

There must be a sense of ease with abstract language to recover from being a pointless romp or icon for miserable-ism. Abstraction is whole when released from expectation that abstraction is fact-statement or that it must amuse an audience. Abstraction is not a mere fountain of latent fussy thoughts but is indexed by rationality in that its reality exists weather we perceive it or not.

Is Life Worth Living?

Commentary on essay Is Life Worth Living by William James

The essay asks the titled question in a certain context. Even in his time around 1896 much philosophical ground has been ceded by the knowledge gained by science. We can no longer think like we attribute to the medieval ages. His example is how we cannot view the circularity of a heart valve as a sign from God because we know it now to be just flesh.

Because we've ceded an old world view that saw God as the highest good, and nature God's perfection in material to a frightening multiplicity of causes that don't have one observable source, we can feel a sense of nakedness and lack of necessity.

Science imposes material and empirical perspectives on life, yet it also gives a sense it's knowledge is almost complete.

I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already been found by science and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in.

This canned perfection is also a cause for despair as it removes our position to perfection. There is a method but it is alienating and seems to work autonomously. What makes it not fully autonomous is it requires our contribution of observation and this also creates boundaries for us to know what isn't observable.

James answer to the bleakness illustrated is a way out. Like David Hume, James doesn't view perspectives necessarily given by law but something you can backtrack and find some orientation. He views science as a 'private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind'. His way out is to see science as a creaturely endeavor and to see through grandiose claims especially when the outcome truly damages us morally and even invading our personal space typically claimed for relaxation and centers of our private world.

I refuse to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and light no fire just as if it still were warm.

This despondency has a location and it is our house that should protect us from nature. The message is no mistake as science's method is to observe nature and define causes based on what is provided for our senses. James asks us to keep alive a perspective that appreciates what cannot be observed directly and what philosophy and religion focus on. When we orient our lives this way we do not feel uneasy in our homes.

James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy Human Immortality. New York, Dover Publications, 1956.

General History for Our Thought

Many old Philosophical writings prepare princes for propper rule as king. And in these times it wasn't uncommon for someone to found a city and for people to grant authority. Another set of ancient philosophy has the perspective of the people swung by fate with no authority over nature.

Philosophy in the information age takes a different perspective. We rule by aggregation with less emphasis on who has authority. There is less emphasis on right thinking and moderation. There is oly a sense that we need to attend to our desires. Particularly the unconscious quality of desire and using pop culture as a collective memory for desire.

A single ruler does not need to dote on slips of tongue or neuroses. Since the expression is singular the history of preferences is arbitrary. The idea that a ruler should abstain from passion as a model for governance helps communicate law and allow others to adhere.

When we rule as a group like how we image an open-market works, we care less about transmitting law and avoid laws as they antagonize individual choices in a system that provides a variety of selections. We also can image this system crashing if we suddenly stop desiring going shopping and make do with basic essentials.

For a brief period, this shift was seen as an optimistic necessity until people could figure out what makes them nuts and progress as an individual without a mandate from a parental form of government. Now there the optimism is gone but there is a recognition that if we seize the gears of desire everything collapses and our culture projects our desires that haunt us. The most salient projection is the post-apocalyptic genre. We cringe but do not stop and the solutions to mounting problems appear boring while the disaster after neglect appears sultry.

Anit-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia

While unannounced the focus of this book is on ethics. The book makes gigantic claims of opening the potential of human desire without repression but ultimately just defines ethics in a very narrow way.

I'll give a classic example. Aristotle conceived ethics as a way for humans to excel in their field of interest and congregate into a functioning society defined as a polis. The flourishing of careful statesmanship can allow contemplation and the realization of the philosophic temperament.

Aristotle defined a lasting representation of our character that is generated by inward desire but has a container and illustrated in a body/soul dialectic. Deleuze and Guattari harness what they call the 'body without organs'. Their output of thought avoids a container or any abstract thought that can define aggregates of desire ultimately inhibiting us from passing judgment.

This approach is similar to the ancient skeptics who disliked the claims of virtue by the stoics and similar to the unhappy conscious of Hegel. Yet the comparison is extreme and anachronistic. The book does posit a few matters. The first matter is we currently live by the strings and pulleys of capitalism. The second matter is we universally struggle with an ethical dilemma of teetering between paranoia and schizophrenia and must find some middle ground to achieve pure individualism without neurosis. The third more hidden matter is that the solution to the dilemma must be governed by unformed drives in a person and to categorize this is to repress it.

The goal to be a thriving individual is far from the goal of Aristotle's thriving metropolis. While not mentioning Aristotle the authors refer to the city of Ur and use it as a monument to repression. Success for Deleuze and Guattari appears more like an outcast of society that cannot be assembled rather than an outlook that virtue is recognized and promoted to high ranks.

Because the book gives descriptions of the post-modern ethics that portray how society thinks and acts currently it has importance; however, a book that should be read with less enthusiasm than its authors.

Deleuze DIsorder

Deleuze fights psychoanalysis like a bad dream. The quality of psychoanalysis that bothers him is finding crystalline structures that shape what a human is. In some ways, psychoanalysis was a revolution that replaced old traditions with new laws on how humans are determined.

There seems to be a missed opportunity in psychoanalysis in Deleuze's mind. Why reject something arcane and replace it with something oppressive? The human is formless to Deleuze and we realize our potential in a maze rather than an actor in a play.

Speckled in with a preoccupation with absolute freedom of development is a fear of fascism. His writings suggest that fascism is order generated in a formless way. Fascism is to be avoided but could be a result of Deleuze's methods and he is careful to distance his thought from it--as if his fascination with Neitzche has shown that prioritizing a 'becoming' can be dubious in some minds.

For Deleuze, things are most real when they emerge from a nebulous origin and take shape with small acts of desire. Psychoanalysis, for instance, is artificial. It conceived after development and people then start to adhere to it afterward by contorting to its formula. But Fascism would not be like psychoanalysis and would have the origin that Deleuze deduces as most real.

Because of this connection, we have to judge what Deleuze is saying. Past philosophy likened the real with the good. For instance, Epictetus and the Stoics who aligned nature with ethics. Yet this primordial goop of Deleuze is not purely good and it is curious that his thought could have existed in the past but rejected because the nihilistic outcome. Are we left with the possibility that Deleuze is raising something problematic as the highest good?

Thoughts on Modernity

The focus on our subconscious shifts our focus from the perfection of stars to the muddiness of our dreams--Modernity. Its surfacing came from a period defined by war and a democratic spirit. Our desires are now put on a pedestal and an overarching explanation for why things are the way they are.

Then add a preoccupation with observation. To crystalize observation and preserve it. The highest of classes are those who are articulate and not just powerful by force. However, holiness is by science and art. Science is that of scant observations and art is that of illusions. The most articulate are those who can sound legible while distracting from their field's dubious origins are the most sage. To be noted down in a way that is without a typo is more valuable than gold.

The dream emerges as the origin. Everything seems to form before us and chaos before order. Order is human and the arrangement of dreams in a way that resembles observation and data.

Dissappearing in alphabetical order

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

David Hume cuts off logic from causality stating that all conceptions of reality are based on observations. These observations do not have any correspondence to the cause we associate these observations. Ultimately, we are left with a choice concerning causality.

When a cause is not part of some underlying nature we almost pick and choose it as if from a menu. This sounds like how we explain culture rather than some matter of fact.

The Amazing Shrinking Woman (1981) 

The movie is a joke about consumerism. Oddly it relates to Hume's comments on observation but in an inverted way. The woman who shrinks becomes a victim of some admixture of all the chemicals she owns. Her shrinking body has no known cause other than her purchases. Hume notes that when we try to get to the root of a cause we finally rest at some object or memory. Hume also notes that observations have a weakened impression on us if it from some memory and not currently being an experience.

The well-marketed items do not fade. In fact, the colors of the packaging are the bright advertising colors throughout the film. What fades is the observer and there is even a plot by some mad scientists to infect this inverted observer disorder to the rest of humanity as the final warped incarnation of capitalism.