20 February 2006
Yesterday, watching "Frida", I stumble for the first time in a long while over talk about revolution and the coming happiness of the people. And the thought that strikes me even as I watch the clichéd exchanges on the topic is that the naivete involved in the expectation that all it takes is for a "revolution" to bring about the terrestrial paradise is similar to the wishful thinking behind new year's resolutions.
31 January 2006
07 June 2006: The following ramblings might make more sense if you first read the Kantian fragment under "04 January 2006" that provoked them.
I've been meaning to add some comments to the quote from Kant, below, and I am only now getting to do it. Here they are.
With this sentence K concludes the brief argument as to why a question such as "what is the truth?" is senseless. Such a question, he says, purports to obtain an ultimate truth, THE truth, a truth that is valid no matter what. But, Kant says, truth is merely the adequacy between our knowledge and a certain reality
02 February 2006: Ok, not really Reality, but rather our perception (or intuition) thereof.
about which that knowledge is. Therefore, the truth can only be about something, (something similar in William James's Pragmatism which I might have quoted earlier) which in turn means that one can't ask what is THE truth but only what is the truth about so and so. Though this passage may seem unkantian in tone, especially towards the end, it is really completely in line with the whole project of what the Critique of Pure Reason is about, namely, correcting our pre-established views about the acquisition of knowledge. The chapter starts with the hint that the question 'what is the truth' is asked with a view to confuse or bewilder the logician, that is, the question is asked so as to make a point, the point that it is impossible to know truth ergo, whatever other knowledge may be acquirable it isn't of a first degree or of very much purity or value. K. devotes the section to debunking that notion. But what made me stop to this fragment is that it suggests a pseudo-teaching/learning game, a mock-epistemological endeavor: to question is to look for knowledge, except when one already thinks one has the answer and merely pretends otherwise as a matter of rhetorical trickery.
02 February 2006: "When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once..." James Joyce, Ulysses
Socrates played a similar game in his time. Or, we could take the opposite path, and use the topos of teaching (rather than learning) when we aim in fact something totally other than expanding the knowledge of our interlocutors. We pretend for instance, to teach our audience about our extraordinary products, when in fact we are merely trying to convince them that a. they have an unsatisfied need and b. our products will fulfill it. We pretend to teach (or inform) the audience what is the right answer to certain political or economic questions, when in fact the notion of a single right or wrong answer is more often than not fatuous. Or simply to teach the audience who we are in order to get the job (political or otherwise) we're aspiring to. In short, the topos of teaching/learning is very dear to whoever has a sale to make, whether the advertised product is material or not. Now, I find it interesting that Kant should choose to compare this mock-teaching/learning experience (which, as stated above, is so basic to many of our public acts) with an act that is, to all third party observers, one of a couple of madmen. It places all the relationships where mock-teaching/learning takes place under the same umbrella of actions that, to a rational person, make no sense, or, at best, that make sense only as game, only as part of a mutually agreed upon encounter, wherein the stakes are generally low, if not altogether paltry. We arrive then on yet another path at the notion that the whole rush of selling and buying that keeps the world running is sheer madness, is merely keeping busy, while we wait for the one essential outcome that will greet us all eventually, and ultimately, we arrive, via an otherwise innocent remark of Kant's to the quietly amused smile of the Buddha proclaiming that all the world is an illusion, that to desire is to be unhappy, even though and while it may seem, through some sort of perversion of the Universe, that our wishes come true, that our sale (or buy) goes through, that our party gains the majority, that he whom we voted for becomes president, that he whom he named becomes member of the Supreme Court, and that our world view comes to life. Then again, it may be all just an illusion or a game worth nothing once we manage to extricate ourselves from it, but for as long as we are victims of this illusion, innocent players of this game, it is the only thing that matters to us.
I wonder: is it better to be winning or losing at the game? I suspect that losing is more conducive to that 'extrication' from the game, for psychological reasons both of the "sour grapes" and of the "know thyself" kind. So that the question becomes: is it better to get out of the game or to stay in? Undoubtedly the worst case scenario is staying in and continuing to lose. Losing without realizing that what you lose isn't worth much is bad. At the other extreme are those who gain and keep on deceiving themselves that their gains are not worthless. They are the ones who keep the world going, they are the mice on the treadmill. The perpetuators of the species and civilization, with all its good and its bad. The fighters whom only natural or man-made catastrophes disrupt every once in a while, and then, generally, only for brief moments. Yet, it strikes me that there are (at least in theory) people who get out of the game even though they're quite good at it. Too good for their own good, one might say, though doing so would amount to admitting that staying in is good. And in truth, in so far as the contentment of getting out is purely intellectual, and in so far as intellectual joy is never guilt-free or innocent, as such, never pure of an undermining element of discontent, I almost feel inclined to believe that though illusory and paltry, the contentment to be found in the game is pragmatically better, more rewarding psychologically.
04 January 2006
"Es ist schon ein großer und nötiger Beweis der Klugheit oder Einsicht, zu wissen, was man vernünftigerweise fragen solle. Denn, wenn die Frage an sich ungereimt ist, und unnötige Antworten verlangt, so hat sie, außer der Beschämung dessen, der sie aufwirft, bisweilen noch den Nachteil, den unbehutsamen Anhörer derselben zu ungereimten Antworten zu verleiten, und den belachenswerten Anblick zu geben, daß einer (wie die Alten sagten) den Bock melkt, der andere ein Sieb unterhält."
"It is, to be sure, a sign of great and important wisdom and insight to know what question it is reasonable to ask. For when the question has no rhyme or reason and calls for an useless answer it also has (aside from the shame of the one who proposes it) the following flaw, namely that it misleads the careless hearer into giving a senseless answer with the laughable result of one (as the ancients said) milking the buck and the other one holding a sieve." (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Second Part, Introduction, SS. 3)
2005
