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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Month: January 2003 (page 4 of 5)

Nagarjuna, Wittgenstein, and Expediency

wood s lot’s mention of Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna remind me of what an attractive postmodern figure he is. The madhyamika tradition, of which he’s the chief exponent, is basically nihilistic, taking pairs of theses and antitheses and invalidating both to show the inadequacy of rational argument, and of any discourse whatsoever. Its functional similarity to Derrida’s attack on dialectic arguments is much analyzed. (Thanks to Ray at Bellona Times for the link.) Wittgenstein, with all his talk of that which we cannot express, is another popular reference.

I’ve never been fully convinced by the Wittgenstein comparison as far as grasping reality goes, since Wittgenstein, for at least large portions of his life, seemed to be pretty big on free-floating externals. His main concern was an realm of inexpressible “things” that was off-limits from the world of logical and linguistic discourse. It’s a dichotomy that he never broke down.

But the Buddhist concept of “expedient doctrine” has Wittgenstein written all over it. Nagarjuna firmly came down on the side of expedient work (e.g., his own writing) that, while properly nonsensical if you applied its own principles to itself, still assisted one in coming to true understanding. And, well, if you skip to the end of the Tractatus:

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them–as steps–to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

This is an old point (though the site seems to have more in common with Ramon Lull than with Wittgenstein or Buddhism), and even though Wittgenstein is emphatically not trashing rational discourse, the expedient doctrine concept is there. But it’s undercut by the finality and austerity of the Tractatus.

It’s in Wittgenstein’s later work that the expedient doctrine concept feels most present, as he grapples his way through version after version of slowly shifting ideas about the private experiences that seemingly can’t be used as referents in public language. In the rougher notebooks, sentences trail off, thought experiments are proposed with no implied results, and non-sequiturs pop up just when he appears to be getting somewhere. Far more than Nagarjuna’s declarative style, it reads like expedient doctrine, for him as much as me.

(For the dialectical version, please see Chris and Joe’s Philosophical Steakhouse. If you prefer your philosophers to fly rather than struggling to crawl, see Levinas’s World of Wonders.)

Hume, Sympathy, and So On

UFO Breakfast’s discussion of Hume on sympathy made me pull out my old Oxford Press edition of the Treatise (its cover is a very striking and very antiquarian shade of brown). Deleuze describes how partiality in people’s sympathies makes a unified polity difficult. The two Deleuze quotes in this entry are on the mark on how sympathy is steered by culture, but there’s a point buried in there about how sympathy is generated that marks it as far more fundamental.

Hume’s theory of mind was one of raw sense data being apprehended and copied into the mind with no intermediation. When Hume mixes his perception theories with his conception of sympathy, he indicates that sympathy is a survival instinct, not so much egoistic as a necessary mechanism for coping in the world:

I own the mind to be insufficient, of itself, to its own entertainment, and that it naturally seeks after foreign objects, which may produce a lively sensation, and agitate the spirits. On the appearance of such an object it awakes, as it were, from a dream: The blood flows with a new tide: The heart is elevated : And the whole man acquires a vigour, which he cannot command in his solitary and calm moments. (353)

Hume discusses how sympathies are extended over time for consistency’s sake, and how these trends underly family, custom. The regulation of sympathy is determined by the environment and pre-existing conditions, but the tendency is innate, or as close as Hume will come to that term. The application of sympathy is based on “resemblance and contiguity,” which give rise to family, friendship, etc.

When Hume talks about his most skeptical moments, when “I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and facility,” his solutions are all social: “I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends.” This is less of a moral or political issue than an existential one.

Though Hume sets sympathy in opposition to selfishness and egoism, it seems to exist more at the level of his theories of mind rather than those of culture: being necessitates external sympathy. Sympathy seems to exist below the level of self-interest.

Pierre Boulez and His Petard

The Pierre Boulez Project seeks Boulez albums to destroy. The Morton Feldman quotes are pretty great.

Boulez has inoculated himself by recording many prestige albums that people want hanging around on their listening shelves. (I bet no one who bought the 6-disc Boulez Conducts Webern box is willing to see it all go up in flames, or even break up the set.) My one request: the project won’t be complete without that meeting of iconoclasts, Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger.

(Thanks to ParisTransatlantic for the link.)

Social Darwinism Humor

Speaking of eugenics, here’s a bonus question from an old anthropology exam about William Graham Sumner, Yale’s finest advocate of social Darwinism:

William Graham Sumner’s nickname at Yale was:

a. Eli
b. Bulldog
c. Billy
d. Old Screw-the-Poor

Reduction Science Digging Itself a Hole

The latest fight in the sociobiology territories is over proto-sociobiologist Bill Hamilton, who personally held a fairly repellent set of views on eugenics, advocating aggressive pruning of the gene tree.

The Bill Hamilton affair is great fuel for the Gould/Lewontin vs. Dawkins/Wilson debate over most everything, but it throws a lot of noise into the argument, since there’s no necessary connection between Hamilton’s eugenicism and his presmuably more influential sociobiology work.

But I tend against the Dawkins/Wilson stance anyway, so here’s what struck me the most:

[Hamilton] decided in his 20s that genocide was partly a response to the spectacle of a competing tribe’s population growing. He believed that differential birth rates between groups would lead inevitably to massacres like those in Rwanda or Kosovo.

It’s not patently offensive like much of what surrounds it, but it’s more insidious. Sociobiology is often accused of fatalism, which people like Wilson deny, but if Hamilton believed that, it gives his adherents much license to treat savagery and genocide as unavoidable, and thus, something that it is futile to fight against. Napoleon Chagnon got at the same thing when he painted the yanomami (i.e., primitive society) as intrinsically violent.

This point has been made by many, many anti-sociobiologists over the years, but many of them go on to accuse the sociobiologists of racism, sexism, and complicity in all sorts of bestial acts. I don’t know that it’s quite true. It’s one thing to advocate indifference to genocide, and another to advocate a point of view that lends support to indifference to genocide. I’ve known too many people who wore the “hopeless cause” badge as a matter of pride.

But the claim of inevitability makes it very tempting to shred Hamilton, Chagnon, and whoever else for lending support to views that they may not have had. This constitutes the noise in the argument. Most of them wouldn’t say if they did.

Fortunately, claims of inevitability of well near anything have never stood up very well. For a less loaded example, take a look at Dawkins’s imitation of E.M. Cioran:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

River Out of Eden, p. 133

It’s not morally damnable, but it’s hardly scientific. Whether or not Hamilton gave away the secret reprehensible agenda, sociobiology will survive his eugencist beliefs, which will be labeled incidental. The point of weakness remains their fatalism.

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