Well, I was. You see, I reject your hypothesis, entirely: the implied notion of 'scholasticism'. You have mentioned Descartes. Suffice it to say, Modernity, as you may know, took shape with the Cartesian break with scholasticism. Descartes held one could doubt everything and start from scratch to re-build Philosophy. (There was, partly, the political context of wars destroying universities, so he really had to re-build it. 'Meditations' inaugurated the scientific method which led to sciences distancing themselves from other liberal arts.) Also, I have come to 'rightly' detest metaphysical speculation (I can safely vouch for all Philosophers of Science, today, to share my sentiments), for a plenty of reasons, but the chiefest among of them being—if I may risk put it glibly—that most metaphysical speculations have very little relevance at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them. Philosophy is not 'for bourgeoisie', 'by bourgeoisie' (emphasis mine; and Spinoza, in this regard, would readily agree). The idea that Philosophy is bourgeois was supposed to be a critique of metaphysics and scholasticism, which is what Right Hegelianism was; Left Hegelianism led to Critical Theory—a field of applied philosophy, ushering in death of scholasticism. This is not to imply that there is no 'philosophy' after Crticial Theory, for this is a naïve notion altogether, although much domimant one. I accept Critical Theory as a subject of rigour and fascination with pertinence to everyday life, while 'not totally' rejecting Philosophy per se, because the former isn't totally an autonomous discourse and contains presuppositions and the study of those is 'philosophy'. I prefer to be invited to consider Philosophy that way only. I reject categorical thought, provided I am studying social human behaviour, for its narrow view. 17th and 18th-century Europe encountered a lot of categorical thought. Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, and Kant, primarily. You have mentioned some of these names. I am not interested, unlike them, to focus on transcendental identification of the ideal institution. Relative comparisons of justice and injustice is more feasible and productive than any attempt to identify the nature of perfect justice. Every critical theorist focuses on the former, for it has more relevance to our practical lives. Well, speaking of 'tradition', many theorists have already practised this for a long time, like Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, Jeremy Bentham, and, in our times, Amartya Sen and so on. They focus on realisation-focused comparisons that focus primarily on the removal of manifest injustice from the world that they saw. Presumption of compliance by all with ideal behaviour is a bloody waste of time. For I prefer to concentrate on actual behaviour of people. Most critical theorists will subscribe to some sort of dialectics; but after Deleuze and Derrida, one only hears of post-dialectical thought. Žižek claims it's still dialectics all the same but his is a minority view, a view that I hold dear. I think he might be right but the arguments are too difficult to be popular. I might make your hackles rise when I mention Critical Theory, for you seemingly admire Scruton. I do not. Scruton's critiques of Leftist philosophers are all strawmen and ad hominems. (I must hasten to add that I respect his work on Kant and aesthetics, as clearly do you, but I abhor his polemics. The issue isn't even that he's a conservative, he just doesn't substantively engage with the philosophers he attacks. Most of his views on Lacan [and Badiou and Žižek] are crude and blatant reductionism, without understanding at all what the Lacanian theories are. I really don't understand this, if people aren't bothered to really go through a text and be precise in their critical remarks, what's the point of making vague remarks by resorting to ad-hominem, or making sweeping generalizations with no substantive argumentation that end with saying the whole of a thinker's work has literally nothing of value. I'd rather read Burke. Also, Kant. Very admirable man! But Scruton's hackneyed ideas don't appeal to me. This is partly why Žižek, I don't think, has ever bothered with Scruton. He deals with other conservatives like Sloterdjik, but he's careful and precise. And admires them when they're rigorous. One the other facet, however I liked Scruton's points of conservatism in 'Modern Culture', but I find the whole shebang problematic (for a variety of reasons) to espouse these points as a Bengalee and from other positions where I stand with majority of my fellow citizens. But all these can be reserved for an elaborate discussion in a formal setting, not on substack, I'd say. You invited the average person to engage in every thinker without preconception or haste as well as, I trust, to engage in the present era to pay our era its due. Herein, I loved your poetic storyline, for it is only the work of a poet to take sides, start arguments with evocation. I didn't mean to say anything for it leads every view to get commodified, resulting in nothing but hullabaloo of the fandom on social media. PS: I admire you. ❤
Gorgeous appraisal. I obviously see the differences in our thought, but those are not difference of mere whims but beliefs, I think. Until the walls of my belief fall on being attacked by the bullets of my own self doubt, there is enough virtue to nurture them, for they in turn nurture me too. Also I must admit my clear unfamiliarity with the philosophical literature. I am a poor reader unlike you, I just try to put across what I think as clearly as my linguistic skills allow me to. What I say then, I try out on laymen first. But laymen can be easily convinced by contrary ideas in one single afternoon I am sure. They will agree with the importance of beauty and the importance of "form follows function" at the same time. Hence there is not much to expect from the field of polemics, in terms of rigour. It is meant to sow the seeds in the minds of public at large.
But, the appraisal you have gifted me with, it's great. I hope I am able to read at least half as you have done, perhaps then I will be better equipped to answer you. :DD
(2nd response) Another caveat when you consider today's individuals, regardless of their several demographics, lay persons, thereby subject to malleability and manipulation. This is an assumption that is most derogatory, if one accounts for wider tendencies in a historically chronological manner. You see, at least four major events (I will mention only first two, for the other two are extraneous in this regard) or social forces encouraged the growth of mass media research. The first was World War I, which prompted a need to understand the nature of propaganda. Researchers working from a stimulus–response point of view attempted to uncover the effects of the media on people (Lasswell, 1927). The media at that time were thought to exert a powerful influence over their audiences, and several assumptions were made about what the media could and could not do. One theory of mass media, later named the hypodermic needle model of communication, suggested that mass communicators need only 'shoot' messages at an audience and those messages would produce preplanned and almost universal effects. The belief then was that all people behave in similar ways when they encounter media messages. By contrast, we know now that individual differences among people rule out this overly simplistic view. As DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach (1989) note: "These assumptions may not have been explicitly formulated at the time, but they were drawn from fairly elaborate theories of human nature, as well as the nature of the social order…. It was these theories that guided the thinking of those who saw the media as powerful." Power, thereby, resides with the public, much to a Tory's chagrin. One 'ought to' accept this 'default' status quo nonetheless, although there is much cronyism, lobbying and oligarchies that keep the free market of information at bay. Consequently, the second contributor to the development of mass media research, thanks to the realisation by advertisers in the 1950s and 1960s, was that research data were deemed useful in developing ways to persuade potential customers to buy products and services. Advertisers encouraged studies of message effectiveness, audience demographics and size, placement of advertising to achieve the highest level of exposure (efficiency), frequency of advertising necessary to persuade potential customers, and selection of the medium that offered the best chances of 'hijacking' one's subconscious, if you will, thus making dissents commodified where the dominant ideology remains unquestioned. As far as this point is concerned, I am willing to accept the aforementioned assumption to a certain extent. (Read the book, "No Logo" by Noami Klein.) The struggle, hereby, is to make public philosophy as rigorous as possible without any instance of a disengaged toleration, "You are right in your community, and I am in mine." All public intellectuals, of both Left and Right, and social media platforms push directives rather than making public discourses symmetric. One's ideology is a distorted rationality stemming from essential empirical undetermination, in that one mistakes cant for consideration, and replaces Philosophy with propaganda.
Žižek is a veritable exception, hence an outsider. The urge to belong is an earnest urge; however, unless one is a 'rootless cosmopolitan' (you may consider Rabindranath Tagore, Nirad Chaudhuri, and Satyajit Ray, here, although the origin of the term had a different root), it's difficult to argue as an Indian, today, I hold (for a variety of challenges, both historical and economic, that I shall not mention, here, now). If this is the effect of some 'demoralisation' (the first step of ideological subversion, as you may know) or, as it were, cultural amnesia, on my part, you take it, you would be wrong, for, much like you, I like to grapple with paradoxes without sycophancy or urgent deliberation. And it's been much soul-crushing, I rue confessing.
Glad. Expecting more detailed comments from you : )
You glorify
The doctors
The lecturers
The writers
The philosophers
You prefer to imagine them
Cloaked in truth & virtue
Than sitting on the toilet
Your strategy is to namedrop
And philosophy-hop
Through the puzzle of life
This ignorant fool
Has a question for you
Have you figured it out yet
That there is nothing to figure out?
Hello to you too my dear friend! Long time : ))
You are a poet!
Oh c'mon be critical!
Well, I was. You see, I reject your hypothesis, entirely: the implied notion of 'scholasticism'. You have mentioned Descartes. Suffice it to say, Modernity, as you may know, took shape with the Cartesian break with scholasticism. Descartes held one could doubt everything and start from scratch to re-build Philosophy. (There was, partly, the political context of wars destroying universities, so he really had to re-build it. 'Meditations' inaugurated the scientific method which led to sciences distancing themselves from other liberal arts.) Also, I have come to 'rightly' detest metaphysical speculation (I can safely vouch for all Philosophers of Science, today, to share my sentiments), for a plenty of reasons, but the chiefest among of them being—if I may risk put it glibly—that most metaphysical speculations have very little relevance at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them. Philosophy is not 'for bourgeoisie', 'by bourgeoisie' (emphasis mine; and Spinoza, in this regard, would readily agree). The idea that Philosophy is bourgeois was supposed to be a critique of metaphysics and scholasticism, which is what Right Hegelianism was; Left Hegelianism led to Critical Theory—a field of applied philosophy, ushering in death of scholasticism. This is not to imply that there is no 'philosophy' after Crticial Theory, for this is a naïve notion altogether, although much domimant one. I accept Critical Theory as a subject of rigour and fascination with pertinence to everyday life, while 'not totally' rejecting Philosophy per se, because the former isn't totally an autonomous discourse and contains presuppositions and the study of those is 'philosophy'. I prefer to be invited to consider Philosophy that way only. I reject categorical thought, provided I am studying social human behaviour, for its narrow view. 17th and 18th-century Europe encountered a lot of categorical thought. Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, and Kant, primarily. You have mentioned some of these names. I am not interested, unlike them, to focus on transcendental identification of the ideal institution. Relative comparisons of justice and injustice is more feasible and productive than any attempt to identify the nature of perfect justice. Every critical theorist focuses on the former, for it has more relevance to our practical lives. Well, speaking of 'tradition', many theorists have already practised this for a long time, like Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, Jeremy Bentham, and, in our times, Amartya Sen and so on. They focus on realisation-focused comparisons that focus primarily on the removal of manifest injustice from the world that they saw. Presumption of compliance by all with ideal behaviour is a bloody waste of time. For I prefer to concentrate on actual behaviour of people. Most critical theorists will subscribe to some sort of dialectics; but after Deleuze and Derrida, one only hears of post-dialectical thought. Žižek claims it's still dialectics all the same but his is a minority view, a view that I hold dear. I think he might be right but the arguments are too difficult to be popular. I might make your hackles rise when I mention Critical Theory, for you seemingly admire Scruton. I do not. Scruton's critiques of Leftist philosophers are all strawmen and ad hominems. (I must hasten to add that I respect his work on Kant and aesthetics, as clearly do you, but I abhor his polemics. The issue isn't even that he's a conservative, he just doesn't substantively engage with the philosophers he attacks. Most of his views on Lacan [and Badiou and Žižek] are crude and blatant reductionism, without understanding at all what the Lacanian theories are. I really don't understand this, if people aren't bothered to really go through a text and be precise in their critical remarks, what's the point of making vague remarks by resorting to ad-hominem, or making sweeping generalizations with no substantive argumentation that end with saying the whole of a thinker's work has literally nothing of value. I'd rather read Burke. Also, Kant. Very admirable man! But Scruton's hackneyed ideas don't appeal to me. This is partly why Žižek, I don't think, has ever bothered with Scruton. He deals with other conservatives like Sloterdjik, but he's careful and precise. And admires them when they're rigorous. One the other facet, however I liked Scruton's points of conservatism in 'Modern Culture', but I find the whole shebang problematic (for a variety of reasons) to espouse these points as a Bengalee and from other positions where I stand with majority of my fellow citizens. But all these can be reserved for an elaborate discussion in a formal setting, not on substack, I'd say. You invited the average person to engage in every thinker without preconception or haste as well as, I trust, to engage in the present era to pay our era its due. Herein, I loved your poetic storyline, for it is only the work of a poet to take sides, start arguments with evocation. I didn't mean to say anything for it leads every view to get commodified, resulting in nothing but hullabaloo of the fandom on social media. PS: I admire you. ❤
Gorgeous appraisal. I obviously see the differences in our thought, but those are not difference of mere whims but beliefs, I think. Until the walls of my belief fall on being attacked by the bullets of my own self doubt, there is enough virtue to nurture them, for they in turn nurture me too. Also I must admit my clear unfamiliarity with the philosophical literature. I am a poor reader unlike you, I just try to put across what I think as clearly as my linguistic skills allow me to. What I say then, I try out on laymen first. But laymen can be easily convinced by contrary ideas in one single afternoon I am sure. They will agree with the importance of beauty and the importance of "form follows function" at the same time. Hence there is not much to expect from the field of polemics, in terms of rigour. It is meant to sow the seeds in the minds of public at large.
But, the appraisal you have gifted me with, it's great. I hope I am able to read at least half as you have done, perhaps then I will be better equipped to answer you. :DD
(2nd response) Another caveat when you consider today's individuals, regardless of their several demographics, lay persons, thereby subject to malleability and manipulation. This is an assumption that is most derogatory, if one accounts for wider tendencies in a historically chronological manner. You see, at least four major events (I will mention only first two, for the other two are extraneous in this regard) or social forces encouraged the growth of mass media research. The first was World War I, which prompted a need to understand the nature of propaganda. Researchers working from a stimulus–response point of view attempted to uncover the effects of the media on people (Lasswell, 1927). The media at that time were thought to exert a powerful influence over their audiences, and several assumptions were made about what the media could and could not do. One theory of mass media, later named the hypodermic needle model of communication, suggested that mass communicators need only 'shoot' messages at an audience and those messages would produce preplanned and almost universal effects. The belief then was that all people behave in similar ways when they encounter media messages. By contrast, we know now that individual differences among people rule out this overly simplistic view. As DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach (1989) note: "These assumptions may not have been explicitly formulated at the time, but they were drawn from fairly elaborate theories of human nature, as well as the nature of the social order…. It was these theories that guided the thinking of those who saw the media as powerful." Power, thereby, resides with the public, much to a Tory's chagrin. One 'ought to' accept this 'default' status quo nonetheless, although there is much cronyism, lobbying and oligarchies that keep the free market of information at bay. Consequently, the second contributor to the development of mass media research, thanks to the realisation by advertisers in the 1950s and 1960s, was that research data were deemed useful in developing ways to persuade potential customers to buy products and services. Advertisers encouraged studies of message effectiveness, audience demographics and size, placement of advertising to achieve the highest level of exposure (efficiency), frequency of advertising necessary to persuade potential customers, and selection of the medium that offered the best chances of 'hijacking' one's subconscious, if you will, thus making dissents commodified where the dominant ideology remains unquestioned. As far as this point is concerned, I am willing to accept the aforementioned assumption to a certain extent. (Read the book, "No Logo" by Noami Klein.) The struggle, hereby, is to make public philosophy as rigorous as possible without any instance of a disengaged toleration, "You are right in your community, and I am in mine." All public intellectuals, of both Left and Right, and social media platforms push directives rather than making public discourses symmetric. One's ideology is a distorted rationality stemming from essential empirical undetermination, in that one mistakes cant for consideration, and replaces Philosophy with propaganda.
Žižek is a veritable exception, hence an outsider. The urge to belong is an earnest urge; however, unless one is a 'rootless cosmopolitan' (you may consider Rabindranath Tagore, Nirad Chaudhuri, and Satyajit Ray, here, although the origin of the term had a different root), it's difficult to argue as an Indian, today, I hold (for a variety of challenges, both historical and economic, that I shall not mention, here, now). If this is the effect of some 'demoralisation' (the first step of ideological subversion, as you may know) or, as it were, cultural amnesia, on my part, you take it, you would be wrong, for, much like you, I like to grapple with paradoxes without sycophancy or urgent deliberation. And it's been much soul-crushing, I rue confessing.
You've read
And read
And read some more
Til your eyes are red
You like the idea
Of ideas changing the world
You like clever words
They make your mind clever
You stuff the hole in you
with holy words of
wise old men
This idiotic imbecile
Has a question for you
When will you know that
To know enough is enough
Is enough to know?
Ah, not rhymeless enough, you oafish git! Practise that verse. You might make it. (And maybe put it on your tee to serve a wider purpose?)
Now, a terse answer to your bovine question: I shall probably never, because everyone I talk to, does not have the high-school mentality.
(1st response)
Q. Is a given machine's design based on its purpose or its purpose is based on its design?
A. The former on the planning stage, the latter when you use it for something not intended.
Truly evocative manner of concluding the argument.