Reply to Terra - On The Reductionists Trap

A couple points I wanted to make in response to your earlier entry:

"If we are determined beings, then issues such as love and faith have no bearing
. . . and thus power wins and we are forced to recognize that life truly is
"nasty, brutish and short" (Hobbes)."

This claim [that an ontology of power wins] would not follow from the premise [of any hypothetical truth of determinism] . Nor would it follow that under a deterministic reading of reality issues like faith and love need necessarily lose bearing. If Determinism is true if would follow that all actions and propensities are predetermined and fated from some unimaginably complex mathetmatical formula. Under this world-view, discourses of power also become totally flacid. It would follow that mechanisms of power (eg. Fox News, The Bush Administration, the term 'terrorist', market economies) are themselves also predetermined and subject to the grand math of chaos. This does not reveal that life is nasty and brutish or even meaningless however, even if the course of our lives was predetermined - we still experience lives in which we are swayed by different causal forces. The only thing that the truth of determinism would force us to admit is that [a] no one is a distinct and independant self from the rest of the world in which they exist, and that [b] our reality is the product of an intertwined and inter-related soup of cyclical influences and relationships. This would throw out the notion of free-will in an independant sense, and render the assignment of moral culpability, responsibility and credit out the window (which I think is the case anyway), but it wouldnt change the fact that we experience a world in which our actions are indeterminate to us. Therefore, we would still be able to defend a policy wherien people choose certain forms, values, behaviors etc. that they deem worthwhile - and try to promote and live those forms. The idea is that we may be predetermined, but this doesnt suggest that there is no meaning or worth in pursung social justice or global equality for example.

Within the same framework there is ample room for the subjective experiences of faith and love. The point is that while reality may be noumenologically [according to a God's-eye objective view] predetermined , from a phenomenological or subjective perspective, we don't experience reality this way. We may recognize (and rightly so) the logical necessity of things being predetermined from an objective stance, but in life- we have no direct access to any such objective gaze.

However, those arguing for power fail to understand the nature of their
opponent, for, as Amy noted, emotions exist outside of determinism. Surely Deep,
Bobby and Jason would not defend Hobbes’ cold concept of love when he says:

To show any sign of love, or fear of another, is to honor; for both to
love, and to fear, is to value. To contemn[belittle], or less to love or fear,
than he expects, is to dishonor; for it is undervaluing. (Hobbes 60).

The claim that emotions exist outside of determinism is an unfounded assertion, so long as we want to maintain the value of logic/reason, determinism imho is a much more intelligble/sensical notion than agent causation [that we birth some things, like emotions, from within us without them being brought about through some external influence. I think free-will, like the existence of God, cannot be defended sucessfully in rational discourse...it seems they have to be established upon faith, and when they are, are arguably more powerful than reasoned arguments.

We could conduct a rather improbable thought experiment: take a consciousness, like a new-born, and bring it into being in a reality wherein there is nothing external to its self-as-consciousnes to influence it. This would be a pure and isolated self. Now, could we find any reason to imagine that this mind, floating in a universe which consists only of that immmaterial mind, could have any attitudes, desires or emotions, any propensities whatsoever? I highly doubt it... all this demonstrates is that the individual in and of itself, without any external influence would not seem to have any content. What would then follow from this is that the sum total of all of the content of any individual identity derives purely from external input. The self then is like a computational machine that is fed input in the form of influences, and generates output from their combinations in the form of behavior.

I don't want to sound like my world-view is coldly scientific and devoid of any wonderment, cause its not - however, I think in terms of reasoning, and philosophical discourse goes ... Hobbes is bang on. However, I can still say this while errecting the pillars of values which depart from, ignore, or even contradict these notions on top of them. Basically I think everything Hobbes says is more or less essentially valid, but a comparativel poor precursor to Hegel's somewhat more sensitive and more foundational articulation of the same sort of relationships in "Phenomenology of Spirit". I think a valid Ontology [the experience, understanding, meaning and nature of reality] can be best established by starting with the basic fundamental experiences and notions that minds encounter. I think without a doubt, the first thing that any sentient being understands is somekind of distinction between that which is "self" and that which "other". However, the meaning and content of each of these catergories can only be filled through their interplay and contrast.... meaning that self only has meaning in virtue of the articulation or understanding of the other - which is not it... and that also, the self obtains its content through the selective appropriations of various forms of otherness (ie: we buy into our identities, associate ourselves with different notions, consume social roles and relationships, and also consume the meanings and contents of different truths.

Also, I agree that "Love is a living, strong and potent force", but this does not change or negate or even relate to the fact that emotions including love - absolutely boil down to processes of value (this doesnt even build in that they're determined... but liking or loving someone is a process of assigning value to them). To value something simply means that the given thing has a meaning to you, Love would then neccesarily need to be understood in terms of a value relationship, so would any other emotive condition. However, I do think it's a bit more complex than this ... In any case, though I may not be of sound mind - I would certainly argue that a marriage, friendship etc. is experienced in terms of a value relationship. A friendship, foundationally, when we apply Ockham's Razor, is a relationship in which a self defines a certain sense or meaning or value in another, and moreover - in which, as I suggested earlier, that self - invests the meaning[or value] into his friend that the friend is in some sense akin to the experiencing self: a sort of metaphorical bridge of unity between the usual/self other.

Love is a living strong and potent force, because despite any determinism - Love, and life itself encapsulates the presence or 'thisness' of any subjective reality. Love and life comprise the dialectical motions of the churning of causes in their present and creative states as they are actively experienced by us, the beings that populate it/them. So while on objective rational grounds I think one would have to concede that determinism definately has a lot more evidence and logical cogency going for it, from within a present and lived state there need be no real sense in which anything is determined as such. If I'm making sense? I don't know. I believe reality is predetermined, but I live every day believing I am actively and freely making choices, and though those choices may well be actually determined in the grand theory of it all. It doesn't really bother me. Cause I only experience this subjective reality, in which I am free and create. Even the notion of being a mechanism in some incredible, but determined, cosmis gyre, causally connected to all the rest of being isn't soo terrible a thought either. Though if I were to internalizise it in my life i probably wouldn't do too well

On the life well-lived...

Along the lines of our discussion and the debate that ensued surrounding the good-life, and whether a life lived striving for comfort/balance/mediocrity/complacency was a decent principle of living, and whether a peaceful, balanced life comprises a good life.

A bit self-indulgent I know, and a bit tropy and cliched, but I seem to find myself debating this issue quite often. And our discussion reminded me of this thing i wrote a few months ago. I've no pretentions about being a good poet, but it sort of encapsulates my position. So I thought it might be vaguely appropriate.

reflection on the life well-lived

Life is not for comfort's sake,
nor is a still room enough to keep
its flame - Life is not peace.

Life is not peace, but a wonderful violence
and a tender fist of bruised of earth
and the welt that spreads a blush.

Life is the struggle, to live to fear
to find disparity in dispositions,
and disparate - life binds the desperate.

Life occurs in pains, and colours
and names itself with clamour,
or writes itself in scars.

Life is not peace, Peace speaks:
absolute - with such-silence.
Life is our oldest verb - its
'in the doing', and the changing.

Life haunts by groves of sycamour
though they keep holds of death in sight.
Life is the Immanence: the in this 'thisness'.

Life is our lettings go,
and our fallings together.

-BN

Response to Prof. Ogden's latest post; Part 1

[Edit Pending...]

In the spirit of the dialectical and polemical discourse that we’re propounding in discussion, here’s my impression of/response to Prof. Ogden’s latest post on his blog regarding Milton’s Satan and the “atheist fallacy”.

Prof. Ogden introduces David Renaker’s problematization of Paradise Lost in terms of how: 1) “Satan in books I & II, is magnificent” and 2) “God, judging man in Book III, is detestable. “

My prima facia response to these two claims is that, while the first claim as to Satan’s magnificence, cannot in good reason be rejected, the second, as to God’s detestability as a character in Bk III is problematic and requires much more exploration because of conceptual incoherencies that arise when we treat God as a regular character in Paradise Lost. Given god’s omniscience, omnipotence, and immanence throughout the action of the epic, making any cogent claim as to his laudability is not only problematic, but is in effect an inherently bankrupt enterprise because, as the architect of the story, its metaphysics, and the semiotics of its composite wills, God as character personified in Bk III is himself the only source of normativity. In this light, to call him either commendable or detestable would be incoherent, or at very least totally meaningless, because he himself provides the normative ground on which either term is defined or articulated. However, having tentatively thrown out, or at least suspended, the second claim, the first (Satan’s magnificence) still poses a serious problem for any historically referential reading of Paradise Lost that attempts to connect its representations to held beliefs about the author’s intent.

As I’ve said, and as I maintain – I wouldn’t of my own accord ever really go there. Our understanding of the author’s intent, and our historical sense of the milieu in which it was composed is itself something that is tainted by historicity. As such, it is not simply difficult, but rather – impossible, to remove ourselves and our interpretative bias along with our historical gaze and vantage point from supposedly objective claims about an author’s intent or historical setting. Making reference again to Roland Barthes’ maxim, with the death of the author (as a source of any objective insight into a text’s signification), we are left with the text alone; a text which may give any number of synchronous or divergent readings, and it is with the text alone that we must work

Renaker then continues and classifies two possible articulations of a solution or explanation of this phenomenon in terms of the critic as either “poet-sacrificer” or “poem-sacrificer”. The former explains the appeal of Satan Vs. the repugnance of God, in terms of a poetic failure in Milton as author, whereas the latter insists that the observations 1 & 2 amount to a failure of judgment in the critical reader. Renaker goes on to describe the latter group as “…[giving] up the poem, twisting and wrenching it unmercifully to throw a veneer of justice on God and of viciousness on Satan, Adam, and Eve…”.

Ogden posits that this description amounts to “mere partisanship” because “the only poem that is given up is Renaker’s anti-theistic reading”. Ogden then answers Dr. Renaker’s anti-theistic reading by offering his own postulate, Ogden’s Balm, that “the greater the quality of artistic genius, the greater the likelihood that accusations are failures of critical perception.” However, for reasons I will demonstrate, this postulate comes dangerously close to begging the question, Although, if the possibility of the second catergory is to be defended, Renaker's own binary catergorization is itself unpersuasive.


My impression here is that, in the first case of the poet-sacrificer who concedes Milton’s failure as a poet, the explanation falls flat. Even if we were to do away with Milton altogether and look at the text alone, we would still encounter a text whose thematic content is consistent with what one would expect to be a defense of Christian theology, with a justification of “the ways of god to man”, and that this on its own sufficiently problematizes the incontrovertible depiction of Satan as the poem’s epic hero . To account for Satan’s problematic glorification in terms of Milton’s inattention would comprise an insufficient answer because in forming its explanation, it departs from the text itself and makes reference to insubstantible claims outside the domain of textual continuity or a truly objective basis of verification.

In the later case, which Prof. Ogden problematizes, the case of the “poem-sacrificer”, I find myself much more inclined to agree, at least in part, with Dr. Renaker’s articulation of the position. While Prof. Ogden is quite right to point out that, as Renaker describes it, the poem-sacrificer is only sacrificing one possible reading of the poem, it is my feeling that the particular reading which is being sacrificed (which I maintain need not necessarily be reduced to an anti-theistic reading), is far and above the most supportable reading of the poem in its genre.

Satan’s depiction in PL is unequivocally and uniformly consistent with the trope of the epic hero. In referencing again to our dialectical basis of discussion, drawing from Aristotle’s Poetics, which did much to articulate the qualities of the epic genre as well as those of tragic and comic drama (its central subject), Satan satisfies the qualia of both the epic and tragic hero on the following grounds:

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1. He is, as a former second-rank under God, of noble background and birth, of a lofty origin, which serves to inspire sympathy and ennobling sentiment in his loss and fall.

2. He displays an incredible strength of will in the face of incredible, even impossible adversity.

3. He clearly portrays the requisite hamartia or tragic flaw, which despite his general admirability serves as the basis of his doom. In attic tragedy, and in the Homeric epic – the hamartia in most instances is typically that of excessive pride. Ditto with Satan.

4. In reference to his hamartia, he also displays hubris or an excessive over pouring of hauty self-righteous sentiment, injured merit, wrathful pride etc.

5. Satan also qualifies under the primary and most oft-quoted qualification of Aristotle’s definition of the megalopsuchia, or “Great-Souled Man” as described in sec. II. (??) of the Nicomachean Ethics as one who “claims much (in his attempted usurpation of heaven) , and deserves much (in his noble origin, unmatched by all save God – who as mentioned above we may not be able unproblematically afford the status of a cogent character in PL, and perhaps the Son – if he can be fairly conceived of as meaningful separate from God)”.

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My point is, that when one looks at the text by itself, one is without doubt faced with a heroic and highly ennobled depiction of Satan. To entertain a reading of the poem which denies Satan his position as the tragi-epic hero, though I happily admit and emphasize that such readings are quite possible, amounts to sacrificing the poem insofar as such readings refuse dogmatically to recognize a fundamental component of the poem and its genre: namely, the epic hero – who is beautifully, even archetypally embodied in Satan. We might say then, that in refusing to recognize the poem’s obvious epic hero, once sacrifices the poem insofar as one is conceding a massive, and beautifully presented, component of the poem’s poetic genre as it occurs in the poem. Such readings are quite possible, but they dislocate a very substantial, perhaps primary, piece of the poem’s poetics.

Alternately, and more briefly, for reasons already mentioned viz. indeterminacy of intent and impossibility of objective historical gaze in speculation… readings that attempt to explain the disparity in terms of Milton’s alleged attempt to trick the reader or test him/her through a favorable depiction of Satan, are also unappealingly simple and amount to critical deus ex machina. However, I would have to concede that a reading which affords Satan the role of epic hero, and which recognizes and affirms the obvious ethical devices of the poem, but which answers the problematic conflict between a heroic Satan and the "justification of the ways of God to man" through some other means would have to be taken seriously. Also, if Milton is using the devices of the Epic Genre and his epic portrayal of Satan as a test or temptation for the reader, then one would have to trace what can be infered that such a temptation is saying about the values that underlie the Epic tradition. In this sense, such a reading would indentify a discord between Judeo-Christian and Classical Helenic values and moral traditions latent in the text.

In response to Ogden’s Balm, as postulated by Prof. Ogden, that “the greater the quality of the artistic genius, the greater the likelihood that accusations are failures of critical perception”, the proposed Balm seems problematic to me. Moreover, the shortcoming of the Balm emphasizes precisely the point I was making in terms of difficulties associated with historicity in historio-critical evaluations of the biographical author as a presence in a text. Namely, Ogden’s Balm is problematic because, while its claim may in fact be inductively true, it is precisely in virtue of the contents of critical perception that the quality of artistic genius is evaluated.

That is, the identification of artistic genius, and the assessment of its quality is intrinsically a process of critical perception. With this in mind, we can rephrase Ogden’s Balm as “the greater the critical acclaim of a text, the more likely that its detraction is explainable in the failure of the detracting criticism” . This postulate however, while it is prima facia a truism, falls short of comprising a sound argument, because the presupposition or assumption on which the argument is built (ie: the greatness of the text), depends on the correctness or truth-state of argument it is trying to make (ie: detracting criticism is fallacious). That is, in order for the text to be great, there is already an implication that the detracting criticism must be fallacious. In this sense, Ogden’s Balm amounts to a logical fallacy in begging the question.

To clarify, another way of phrasing it would be to think of the Balm as stipulating that “the better X is, the more probable it is that those who detract from it are wrong”. It follows from this that in order for X to be so damn good – it is already foreconcluded and implied that those who detract from it are wrong. Although in the case of Ogden’s Balm as it is posited, the logical postulate is of a quantificational nature in admitting of degrees (of critical acclaim vs. fallacious detraction) the problem identified in the Boolean or binary conception of its propositional logic is still pervasive.

To illustrate with another example of why/how begging the question is logically problematic, another very clear example of question begging would be in the following sentence: “Biblical decree is valid, because it says so in the bible”. As with Ogden’s Balm, the exemplary sentence is problematic because its argument presupposes the validity of its claim. If the claim or postulate is to come into question, or if we are not to presuppose its final claim, then the argument that justifies that claim falls apart.

[To Be Continued… ]


Addendum: It's come to my attention that a couple of my points need some clearing up, I will try to do this later today.

Hey,

Ok - if we're going to take sides here's where I fall.

I am not in good conscience going to be able to align myself with the metaphysicals as such... but I don't quite feel that the Power vs. Love distinction is fairly/accurately encapsulated in contrasting Hobbes vs. Milton/Metaphysicals. The reason I say this is because if you read Hobbes as philosophy he's not really prescribing an open mandate for a will2power type of thing, he uses his arguments as a basis on which to propound a prescription of mutuallly assured and calculated restraint - that is, of social contract.
The way I see it, the lines feel like they should be drawn something more along the lines of:

Milton's Satan vs. Hobbes vs. Metaphysicals/Milton(maybe?.. i'm not wholly sold that he didnt mean to portray Satan as a hero)

...wherein Milton's Satan we can align with notions like power, selfhood, free-will, choice etc. and wherein hobbes represents something more like social contract & reason and wherein the metaphysicals represent love etc.

anyway... along those lines I'm definately going to take the power side, but in doing so I hesitate to associate myself with Hobbes. Rather, I'll say I take the power side and identify my stance with Milton's Satan...

so for what it's worth... I stand with Satan.... :0P


Terra, thanks - I'll check that link/reference out as soon as I get a chance. When I was suggesting that we shouldn't be too concernced with authorial intent I was thinking something along the lines of the postmodern postulate re: indeterminacy & alogocentricity of language/meaning etc... specifically I was thinking of Roland Barthes' Essay "The Death of the Author"... it's fascinating & excellent and included in both the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, and in the Critical Theory Since Plato Anthology ... both of which are sometimes used for English 360 & 366... anyway here's a wikipedia link on it if it interests: The Death of The Author.
The critical gaze that the essay comes from is pretty well smack-opposite that of the formalist tradition, so your reference should be pretty interesting if it's saying a similar deal.

See you in class tomorrow...

All Good Things,
B.

muss es sein?

Right , so... right!
..for what it's worth - a quick and perhapssomewhat trite analysis/reflection of what I gathered from Wilmot's Upon Nothing.

Wilmot's grappling with the notion/question/issue of a foundational ontological bianarism, the sense and meaning of nothingness as either the absence of being, or as property towards which one can sort of bend an intentionality.... Nothingness as absence of a 'thisness' or of nothingness as a particular 'thisness' which we can think of as an ontological state or an object property.

Wilmot describes his sense of nothing as elder brother even to shade, ( or as we might conceive it - the absence of light, or an empty space), and stipulates that it had being before the world was made, and that - having no fear of temporality - possess a kind of immanence. This kind of makes me think of the invocation to the muse (read: holy spirit) in P.L Bk I... and of the vast abyss that was made pregnant.

Also of interest, this sense of nothingness being impervious to time and place (ln. 4) , and primary to the great united "What" from which all proceeded, seems to suggest or connote a sense that it occurs outside discourse, or if you like - outside of dialect, before self and other, beyond good and evil or in a realm of some kind of totalistic conceptual singularity... we could correlate such a conceptual singularity occuring outside of discourse with a notion of, capital L, Love; power, mediation, discourse, etc. being things which proceed causally from that initial, will endowing, dasein engendering, Satanic utterance of "What".

--- This kind of ties into my position with the major theme/question of the course, that though Love (synonymous with singularity, unity etc.) may occur in some vital sense as primary to, and above & beyond discourses of power, because we are sensory beings and because as Blake put it - the 5 senses are the chief inlets of the soul in this age - power becomes the rule of our worldly experience.. and wordly instances of love as such, can be understood in terms of discourses of power.
Our phenomenological experience begins which each sentience identifying the foundational structural distinction between self and other: it sees that it is a self, and that it occurs in a world where its intentionality is bent towards objects that are other - and it is only in virtue of the otherness of the other that our sense of self can have any meaning, form or content... what follows then is the Hegelian Dialectical Idealist conception of dialectic... an perpetual discourse between a self that identifies otherness, subjugates or appropriates that otherness.. and/or defines its concept of self as contrary to that otherness...

as Nietzsche said, and as Milton's Satan quite rightly implies:
"This world is a Will To Power, and nothing besides."

We can all glean and appreciate from Christian theology that Christ died for our sins, in order to redeem us etc. but it seems few people appreciate the sense that, by the same token - Satan fell for you.

I know what you're about to say, Satan fell out of his own ambition and his own will to power. But given the Christian notion of immanence: that all times occur simulteanously to god & his plan/design permeates all being, - given that notion of immanence ... we have a portrait in which God designs & knows of the fall, knows of the temptation of man... and purposes it in some sense so that we may have knowledge of good and evil (from the apple) and so that we may have a free will to make our virtue meaingful etc. ...
So god purposes it, Satan however - is more akin to man... perhaps he knows god's omnipotence, but he has a will and purpose that is seperate - that answers "thou shalt" which a tragic and beautiful "I will".
In this sense I would position that we are all as human beings, as sovergn "wills towards" something, more akin to satan, and moreso of his lot than of god's... we simply have more in common.

Also, while Blake said that milton was of the devil's lot without knowing it, in class we didnt touch upon the basis on which Blake makes that claim, the first clause of that sentence - that Milton being a true poet, was of the devil's lot. Here we have a sentiment of the association and connection between the capacity to create and the prerequisite utterance of defiance... tying it back together with Wilmot's theme, and the Nietzschean notion that all creation must be preceeded by a destruction, by a wonderful and pregnant violence..

anyway - i realize this entry has been all over the map, overly verbose and needlessly cluttered... but it's late, and I don't sleep much these days... so for what it's worth - there's my two cents, or 83 cents as it were...

a la prochaine,