Monday, August 26, 2013

108. The self as work in progress

Heidegger is said to have abolished the spectator theory of the subject, the self as autonomous, disconnected and looking at the world from outside. Instead, the self is involved in the world, and is constituted by actions in that world. Thought and action interact. I discussed this before in this blog, in item 40, on being in the world.

The rejection of spectator theory arises also in pragmatist philosophy, as in the work of George Herbert Mead, with the idea of the self as constituted by interaction with others in the world.

This is part of a wider shift of thought from a static view of the self, with a given mind and body, a given identity or authentic self, to a dynamic view of the self as work in progress. This is found also in the thought of Nietzsche and of Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard described the self as ‘a relation that is itself related to itself’. I understand this in terms of the idea of embodied cognition that I discussed in the items on cognition (23-29). The brain constructs representations of the body, which yield a feeling of coherence of the self, and representations of the world, and higher level representations of representations, on different levels of cognition.  On some level, representations of representations may constitute self-consciousness.

The idea of the self as work in progress, in being in the world, in existence, forms the crux of existentialism, of which Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger are seen as the fathers.

As I discussed in a preceding item on Wittgenstein (item 105), meanings of words get established in their use in practice, yielding language games with their rules of legitimate usage.

The idea was carried further by Michel Foucault, who analysed how legitimate meanings and conversations get established in practices that reflect the interests and positions of persons or institutions in control. See his studies of prisons, health care and education.

This leads to a view of the human being as caught in the power of institutionalized discourse that eliminates freedom, in a suppression to which those subjected themselves contribute, in their tacit acceptance or inevitable entanglement in the language games to which they are brought up to submit. This suppressive power is all the more sinister for its being hidden in what is taken for granted, in the tacit rules of the language game, to the point that what is in fact submission is seen not only as well intended but as beneficial.

As I discussed in item 50, towards the end of his life Foucault tried to find a way for the individual to break out by ‘turning its life into a work of art’. That is what rebelling intellectuals and artists do, and entrepreneurs (as I indicated in item 41). They try to create a new game but thereby break the rules of established games and suffer for it.

In item 107 I proposed that hope turns into despair, and loss of trust, when one gets trapped in conditions one can neither choose nor influence, in established systems and corresponding language games. Kierkegaard proposed that we can only escape from despair by surrendering to God. Rebellious intellectuals, artists and entrepreneurs find other ways to create new hope.

Monday, August 19, 2013

107. Hope and trust
In an interview on YouTube, the Dutch philosopher Paul van Tongeren explained the notion of hope. It is partly active and partly passive. It entails an expectation that ‘things will be all right’, depending in part on one’s own actions, but also, to a greater or lesser extent, on outside forces that one cannot control.
This brings the notion of hope close to the notion of trust, which I discussed extensively in earlier items in this blog (nrs. 68-76). And this appeals to intuition: trust has to do with hope. Trust also is an expectation that no great harm will be done, while one is dependent on outside forces, of people, organizations or (social) systems that one cannot control. Up to a point, outcomes can be influenced by one’s own actions, and one needs to take responsibility for taking such actions.
Trust is to a large extent emotional but it can be based, in part, on a rational assessment of reasons why others may be trustworthy or not, such as self-interest (including reputation), morality, and friendship.
But the scope and force of one’s own actions and rational inference of trustworthiness are limited, and beyond those limits trust entails a leap of faith, a surrender to hope.
A key question is whether people one is dealing with will be prepared to incur losses to honour promises or commitments. Pressures of survival will reduce the trustworthiness of people, the extent to which they are prepared and able to take one’s interests at heart. Under such pressures also hope will dwindle. 
In the trust literature there is a distinction between trust and confidence. In trust one can exert influence, and one has a choice: afterwards, if something goes wrong one can blame oneself for having trusted. In confidence one has no influence or choice: one is inevitably subjected to the powers or forces that be, which one can neither avoid nor influence. Think of God, legal laws, laws of nature, the economy, a dictatorship, or social systems. Do we find this difference also concerning hope? I think so: In case one has no influence and no choice we would speak of resignation, or despair, rather than hope.
However, resignation, and certainly despair, without hope, choice or influence, are scary, difficult to bear.  And so one may convince oneself that the powers that be are benevolent, against all evidence. The classic case is that of ‘father Stalin’, who must be right in his suspicions and purges. It would be unbearable to face reality. Something similar may have applied with Hitler. Here, one fools oneself to turn resignation or despair into hope and to nurse trust.
Markets were seen as a source of hope, in opportunities of labour or entrepreneurship, with a measure of trust in behaviour and institutions, which one could influence in persuasion, in so far as they were personal, and in democratic control. Now markets seem to have become an impersonal, autonomous force beyond control of governments and democratic institutions, destroying both hope and trust. This also is scary, so that some people convince themselves that markets are fundamentally and unquestionably benevolent, in spite of the evidence.

Monday, August 12, 2013

106. Relativism

The philosopher Jacques Derrida initiated the notion of deconstruction. Here, constructions of language, in science or narrative, are analyzed, taken apart, for their possible, possibly hidden, and possibly multiple meanings. A text has no unique, best or final interpretation. There is no single, unambiguous meaning, given in ‘what the author really intended’. Authors may themselves admit that what they intended is ambiguous, multiple, paradoxical, or hidden. That arises most of all in poetry. Interpretations depend on the context and on who interprets.

Readers develop their own interpretations, though those are not unrelated to what the author may have intended. This is in line with the theory of language that I proposed in this blog (in items 32-37). There I argued that reference, i.e. that what a story is about, is identified on the basis of sense, the way in which one identifies things on the basis of a repertoire, formed in personal experience, of what one knows and associates with what is talked about. Identification is achieved in combination with the context, which triggers selection from the repertoire of sense. In dialogue, different ways of making sense by different people are put up for discussion. This may lead to convergence or divergence of views. And the discussion will contribute to the development of one’s repertoires of sense making. Discussion alters the way one looks at the world.

Some people seem to interpret deconstruction as implying that theory of meaning should drop the notion of reference.

This idea has been inspired, in part, by Ferdinand de Saussure, who claimed that meaning is structural: derived from the position of a word or expression in a totality of language or discourse. ‘A word means what other words don’t mean’. Thereby language becomes self-referential. I think this is valid and useful, but the idea has run amok in the position, adopted by some postmodern philosophers, that ‘therefore’ language no longer has external reference. I don’t see that has to follow. Meanings may shift depending on other meanings, while there remains an intention to refer to something.

I think the abolition of reference is madness because it would abolish the aboutness of language. Surely, a central aim of language is to talk about things, and that is what reference means. True, as I showed earlier, language is not always reference, or only reference, and often constitutes a speech act of illocution, as in making requests or giving orders, accusations, endearments, etc. But animals have that, in growling, calling, warning, posturing, luring, purring, or barking, while with them reference is in doubt. Dropping reference is to take away what people have more than animals have. It is de-humanizing.

Is all this relativism? Yes, in the sense that interpretations depend on the context and on the cognitive make-up of the interpreter, resulting from his/her path of life. But not in the sense that any interpretation is as good as any other. There is argument, a comparison or confrontation between differences in sensemaking.

This is closely related to the notion of warranted assertability replacing truth in any absolute and universal sense, discussed in item 104. There may be different judgements of purported truths in the same way that there may be different interpretations. Knowledge of the world is an interpretation of it. But some truths and interpretations are more warranted, have better arguments, than others.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

105 Wittgenstein

I largely disagree with Wittgensteins early work (of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus), while I largely agree with his later work (of the Philosophical investigations) that on some points constitutes a 180 degree turn from his early philosophy, and which for me has formed a great source of inspiration.

I agree with the early Wittgenstein that we fool ourselves with language. This is the case not only in philosophy, but more widely, in talk of abstract entities such as knowledge, happiness, meaning, etc. In particular, as I argued in item 29 of this blog, we suffer from an object bias, treating abstract notions as if they were objects in time and space. The properties of such objects are used for metaphors to deal with abstractions, and thereby they mislead us. Here I make use of the work of Lakoff and Johnson. This cognitive bias, embodied in language, is inherited from our evolution, so I argue.

I disagree with the early Wittgenstein’s famous dictum that ‘Of which we cannot speak one must remain silent’. As I argued in item 103, it is the job of philosophy to speak of things that go beyond scientific and everyday understanding, notions and meanings, which by definition are difficult to talk about but nevertheless insistently knock on the door of our thought.

In line with my pragmatist philosophy, set out in this blog, I agree with the later Wittgenstein’s notion of words as ‘tools’, where meaning is pragmatic, depending on the use to which they are put, in meaning as use. Words may develop new meanings in the way that a screwdriver might be used as a hammer. I discussed this in the items on meaning (nrs. 32-37).

I try to connect Wittgenstein’s views on meaning with established theory of meaning, derived from Frege, with the distinction between what words refer to (extension, reference) and how this reference is established (intension, sense). We determine reference and truth on the basis of associations in thought, connected to words, that constitute sense, which we develop as we put words to practice, along the line of our life. This private sense may yield a shift of public reference, and hence ‘truth’, along a hermeneutic circle. Universals are to be seen as imperfect and temporary, in imperfection on the move. This has important ethical implications, in lifting the suppressive, regimenting weight of universals and giving more room for individuality.

Related to this I like Wittgenstein’s notion of language games with rules for using words, established in conversations and embedded in culture, in tacit habit.

I also like Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance, where entities can resemble each other without having some shared essence. I think this also has ethical implications. People can have affinity or similarity without some shared cultural, ethnic or national essence. Identities can be plural. This may yield an antidote to nationalistic intolerance.

While in his earlier thought Wittgenstein used logic to show up the delusions of language, in his later thought he appreciated words as forms of life that are richer than logic. Language constitutes a category on its own.