Essay 7: A Prolegomena to a Defence of Todd McGowan’s Book Emancipation After Hegel
Every action is contradictory, the only way we reconcile this fact is to limit its duration.
Every life philosophy is contradictory: this is why we call extremism bad. The extremist follows the logic of their own system. How dare they do that.
The philosophical precedent is consoling, but should it be? What difference does it make, someone having said it?
I write a note and fear losing it, or finding it later but not finding the meaning in it.
Why does a purely happy piece of art seem false, even sinister? William Gass talks about this in an essay in Finding a Form, but I appear to have misplaced the book.
Following the logic of any idea far enough, you find contradiction at the heart of it. Is that true?
It has always bothered me that there are two incompatible methods for subtraction--one for numbers that are ordinal and another for those that are cardinal.
When I make plans, I feel that a beam is attached long-ways to my face, projecting a false future, which requires reconciliation before I have even gotten to it.
Every enthusiastic guru or dictator ends up defending their system with sarcasm or simplistic rationalizations.
What are we to make of it? Why do tragedies feel accurate? The cause of the hero's downfall was in his character from the outset. It wasn't an enemy who did it to him.
Believing and not believing in a god, when extended to a population, becomes unworkable. It appears the solution is to both to believe and not to believe, or not to believe too much, whatever that means.
Doesn't the necessity of balance point to the presence of a contradiction?
The atheist (of which I am one, in a way) points to the contradictions of a given god to justify their positive disbelief in it, but he resorts to silence when asked to explain the basis for his own metaphysical system--a holy aporia, a virtuous skepticism.
Why did the New Atheism movement fail so silently? It had nothing to say. Sam Harris was perhaps its last stalwart, and the last I heard of him, he was advocating for state-sponsored censorship.
What is meditation if not a practice of aporia? Why are we instructed to drop the story instead of finding one that works?
Why have so many Buddhists written books that essentially instruct us in how not to perform the behavior that they engaged in to write the book?
The key to living a good life is to form good habits, but any habit is only good in a limited set of circumstances, and circumstances are always changing.
Contradiction points to the context-dependency--to the contingent nature--of any solution.
Use your right hand, use your left.
The world is so contradictory that we had to evolve a split-brain just to survive it.
Contradiction, difference, interrelatedness--call it what you want--everything with two feet is a walking contradiction.
We are divided up over time, the way a jigsaw puzzle is, or a roll of film.
The depressed person isn't wrong unless you listen to them long enough, which is true of anyone.
The question of whether Hegel's ontology reconciles with physics is absurd; physics doesn't even reconcile with itself. Do you think it ever will? And were it to, then what? What does that have to do with us?
I am told that a black hole is not a thing, and yet it has mass.
The mantra of the followers of Niels Bohr was to "shut up and calculate" because all attempts to make sense of it beyond the math working out was a failure. One has to measure the quanta for it to become real? Surely not.
Why has Popper's scientific method proven so fruitful? Because it is an extension of pragmatism, which says that the only questions that are valid apply to narrowly defined objectives. We make sense of the world by circumscribing our inquiry to aims, and those are often in service of domination and the transference of suffering from one population to another.
Money addresses the problem of the coincidence of wants, and yet no one can seem to define the correct attitude to hold in regard to it, except sociopaths.
Money is the ultimate thing that is not itself, an object that is only a reference.
We need a currency with a high stock-to-flow-ratio: scarcity is the means to abundance. If money becomes too available, it loses its value. Europeans have ruined several economic systems by increasing the flow of the local currency.
It seems the only solution to real problems is engineering, and we are apparently about to engineer ourselves out of existence, but we are only doing it a little earlier than it would have happened anyway.
The New Sincerity and Effective Accelerationism are fundamentally acts of irrational faith, or, the fundamental rationale of each of them is to avoid crippling depression--which, fair enough.
We love to say that each generation says that the prior one was better, but notice that this does not mean that they are wrong. They say it was better because it was farther away from the outcome that necessarily follows.
Is colonizing the less puissant people Lindy? It seems so. The colonizer always becomes colonized from within, and the Derridas of the world come along to mock meaning in general.
The more opportunity is offered, the less the agent wants what it was asking for.
Jordan Peterson's university lectures inspired a subset of a generation to clean their room, and then he lost his fucking mind. So we say you can't judge a message by the outcome of its author, but judging a tree by its fruit is as Lindy as it gets.
Some research points to the mind of the depressed person being more logical than the healthy one, whatever that means, and is that reproducible?
Don't healthy people follow fictions that remedy their own contradictions with other contradictions?
A minimally ambiguous worldview is not going to make it, and yet our innovations in engineering come from exquisite precision and specificity.
We say the hero who lives long enough to die of natural causes has by then become the villain. That is the lifecycle of the hero. We divide the contradiction up into minutes and hours, but as Anton Chigurh said, If the rule you followed led you to this, of what use is the rule?
Kant fled from vernunft to embrace verstand--categorization--but I can't even organize my bookshelf without falling into contradiction, and how do his a priori categories justify their existence?
Christianity justifies itself by claiming eschatological imminence--so don't have kids--but the Christians keep having them, and doesn't the bible say to be fruitful? A new book built on willful misreadings of its predecessor, as any Rabbi can tell you.
If everything were to happen all at once, as in the mind of god, it would be pure contradiction, a creation that negates itself.
The more fruit the oak tree produces, the closer it is to death.
Every redemptive idea is cope, including calling out other ideas as cope. All universal ideas fail under analysis.
So we adopt local ideas, setting ourselves at odds with our neighbors.
We learn from economists like Thomas Sowell that all economics involves trade-offs. What is a trade-off if not a response to a contradiction?
The highly organized person accomplishes the attainment of their ideal by making arbitrary distinctions, or by prioritizing pragmatism over everything else. Reality makes no sense unless we are asserting our will over it.
I listen to my favorite song over and over until I can't stand it anymore.
So we read Pema Chödrön or, worse, Byron Katie, who find redemption by embracing radical skepticism and pessimism--imagine the outcome were a society to follow through on that. What would Kant think of it.
Most process improvement efforts involve externalizing the inefficiency to another department or organization. And the ones that don't do that require radical adoption of policies that make cogs of the individual, all under the mantra "Respect for people".
We marry someone just like us and then amplify each of our differences, like twins or neighboring cities. Or we marry our opposite and spend our lives trying to find common referents in our incompatible procedures.
We follow sports to materialize our hatred of the other in an acceptable and profoundly wasteful spectacle.
The sophisticated person says the upshot of the dialectic is not the necessity of compromise or finding the middle path, but can they point to a society that doesn't do that? Have we abolished any barbarism, or just found a fashionable replacement for it? Have we really abolished human sacrifice, or have we concocted clever a rebranding?
Why is watching a tragedy cathartic if it is not telling the truth? Does hearing a lie relieve the pressure on your chest?
We provide for the ones we love by alienating them, or by finding a compromise.
The only people who deny the fundamental necessity of compromise point, first, to an evil class that created this system on the backs of others and, second, to a vague utopian solution, a modern Platonic Republic.
I write with my non-dominant hand in order to escape the horrible comfort of the familiar, but doing so became familiar some time ago. Should I move next to my feet?
A question is a request for information, but the more relevant the question is, the less my GI tract works, so I can't eat and my stomach hurts when I try to prepare for the future.
The elder dinosaur in The Land Before Time tells Little Foot that an upset stomach only goes away with time, but he doesn't mention that it keeps coming back.
The bipolar person follows the favorable implications of a frame of thought until they inevitably encounter the other that is internal to the system. They put on temporal blinders. Head down. The depressed person sees the pattern and shuts that route down. But the bipolar person has seen the pattern, too. Knowing there's a trap ahead, you have only so many choices, and the traps are everywhere.
And yet my mood is generally positive because I have an ideological commitment to the Task itself being Holy. I am committed to reducing suffering without externalizing it from myself onto another, and I am not convinced of the efficacy of my own system, but I will adhere to it while the jury is still out, but even then, I wish I knew who my co-defendants were and how I could ensure their immunity.
I use my feelings to guide my choice of words, but when I use that same method outside of writing, I fall into the trap that Nabokov warned us of: carrying out aesthetic convictions into our interactions with others.
There's a reason we rarely follow our own advice.
Happy songs always sound ironic in cinema when they are played over modern settings.
In summary, the human mind (and the minds of other creatures, for example, birds) evolved to address competing demands: the demand for situational awareness, so we don't get eaten, and the demand that we focus on one thing, so that we can eat. And these two hemispheres are always in opposition to one another.
We want to relax so that we can be vigilant against predators, and we want to concentrate on our prey.
In a world with unforeseen horrors, the logic of the hoarder strikes me as more convincing than the one held by the people performing the intervention.
In traffic, I watched the dog of a panhandler, staring intently into some nearby woods, as the panhandler tried to catch my attention.
How's this for a Hegelian turn: Kazuo Ishiguro describes a literary technique he calls a double cross metaphor which is a metaphor that appears, at first, to point to away from the story itself, but actually points back to it. He gives an example. The movie Soldier Blue is about a massacre of an American Indian village by American settlers. Because of the time that the movie was released, 1970, critics assumed that it was actually about the My Lai massacre, but Ishiguro contends that it is actually about the slaughter of an American Indian village. We needed a new massacre to occur before we could directly address a prior one, so that it appeared that the depiction of one was actually the depiction of the other.
If the human condition is not fundamentally contradictory, why is it that the surest way to contentment appears to be to not pursue it?
The discrete is an analog, which is a discrete.
Having written this, I don't know what I have just said.
The writer who has no time to write because he is too busy refuting himself.