Problems on Prophecy and Nature
The problem of all prophecies is of course that they can only be known after the event. The difference between a false prophet and a real one is less a matter of whether their visions came to pass, so much as whether their lead was worthy of being explored before the full import of their prophecy is itself realized. A false prophet is one who only gives an immediate outcome, a true one is someone whom it is worth following into the wilderness for forty years or more.
It goes without saying that a single writer is always a true prophet and a false one. And it is really up to his or her acolytes to define which they are.
This last problem is all the more complex as all acolytes will want both elements at the same time. The game is then never simply to remove the false prophet (for that is quite impossible) so much as to allow other elements to also be said within that prophecy…
It is of course the sad old story of the prophet that their best adepts are usually the ones who have never heard or even better who oppose, their prophecies. It is these individuals whom the slow white hot urgency of the prophet’s words often transform, rather than their avowed followers.
It is no doubt the case that it is a mistake for the environmental movement to simply look to replacing technology as it is constituted by machines, with some other technocracy. Not only was technology how we got in the mess in the first place, but also it is a poor model for something that clearly needs to replace it.
It is also a mistake for it to attempt to all too simply think globally. The trouble here being that it is by no means clear whose globe such thinking in the end endorses.
Perhaps the answer lies in letting nature too become a communist. Perhaps it is nature (and not man) which needs to be at once the engine of revolutionary change, the raw material for our machines, and some also some dreamy eyed ideal, and yet all the while be none of them!
One of the oddities of modern life is that we are separated from our skills by history, and our slaves by geography. One is only then allowed to be a skilled craftsman if one is appealing to a lost past; Whilst all slavery remains comfortably far away. And we of course exist on a vapid vacuum suspended between the two!
When someone talks too freely of the freedom which westernization will bring, it is best to hide the meat cleaver from them. For you can be certain that such freedom only comes if they first rend the souls of their unfortunate victims apart.
The sole use of the concept of judgement, be it in front of the heavenly Father, Son and Ghost, or dread Robespierre, St. Just and Marat returned from the dead, is that it keeps the living aware of the hidden consequences of their actions. Just imagine having to plead that you destroyed a people and despoiled a planet because you wanted cheap jeans.
The science of truisms is less exact than hope or fancy might make it. We might grip to our past in the hope that there at least, in old debates, lies the certainty of who we are, only to find that these same debates, have themselves become a new form of oppression.
History might repeat as a comedy and yet weaved into that comedy is a slightly different tragedy – and one must be so careful that one’s giggles do not blind one to it!
It goes almost without saying that one needs the confident white hot eye of the prophet to see beyond this farce.
The clue to what a Mon(o)-archy is, surely lies in the name. There is something beautifully simple in taking one element of society, and demanding that all the rest turn upon it. Mono-archies and their fanatics run criss-crossing all our minds, and breeding like rabbits all the while.
The game here though is not to stop this movement or even this breeding. Rather one needs to define, in one throw the conditions that at once allow the mono-archy to function, but also define the sense in which individuals are allowed to be part of it.
But perhaps the problem here is that it is so very hard to define how such definitions might come to be. Here Spinoza’s radical claim is that one must define that which a state might grow into being, and not that which it was. It is bootless to set up a social contracted rooted in the myth of a past; and far better to create an account that attempts to be worthy of something yet to come.
It is of course the tragedy of modern politics that it is suspended between actual problems which are likely to be highly complex, and politically viable solutions which must be simple.
Politicians here really do function as monarchs, charged with finding a single solution to a diverse set of problems.
The problem is of course that other ‘mono-archs’ has set up shop closer to the wellhead of highly complex actuality. From such a position, both the free market thinkers, and the Media will then have the delicious luxury of always looking so much more genuine, and closer to what is, even in their apparent contradictions, than the politicians.
That modern society is a very uncomfortable mixture of now elected eighteenth century monarch, and more modern monarchies, should not really surprise us. Nor I guess should we be that surprised that the dice are weighted so heavily in the interests of the new ways, rather than the modified old ones. But perhaps a little honesty about the situation might be nice….
It is axiomatic, that old theories, like God, are rather difficult to simply kill. For, they have an ‘after-life’ as a revenant, in which they can do far more harm (or good), than ever they did when living breathing theories.
This is why to start again, one so often has to conjure up the Greeks. For in them, one finds the ’living’ form of the assumptions that haunt thought.
However in making this move, one needs to be so very careful that one knows what one is doing. It is bootless to look for the death of Greece. And folly to appeal to a weary story of origins (as if Greece was necessarily purer) – all one is really doing is cooking up new means and strategies for haunting.
The problem with the theory of Holism is not really that it gets the whole ‘wrong’, so much as that it mistakes the parts. Parts are always taken either utterly differently from that whole or else end up subservient to its higher ways. The fact that the whole itself is always in the parts (albeit rather a different part), and that its own ‘wholeness’ lies in remaking itself (and that in another), is lost in a weary metaphysics of Holology.
The problem here is perhaps that the whole can only claim to master the parts in which it resides through either mysticism or biology. Either everything is caught in a cosmic soul, or else it is reduced to a biological rage for survival (that is, tied to the only whole we can think – the body).
Or else (a modern invention) one creates a gene, whose balancing point lies between the whole and the function which, the hope goes, can be made to directly oscillate in one another.
The entire ‘science’ of wholes appears to be surpassed in a single bound, as functions no longer require a simple completion to effect it.
And yet the victory is only partial, as at each point, the union is only possible because there are also ’wholes’ and the functional souls.
One ends up with that strangest of battle cries. ‘Everything is in the gene; and yet the gene by itself is still not anything….’
The challenge for thinking what it means to be a complex cause within a complex system is a real challenge. To say therefore that ‘Man is the cause of global warming’, is empirically correct enough, ad yet what it means, is unutterably complex.
And we can only hope that one of those Greek ghosts, that haunted our thoughts to get us in our current predicament might be capable of spawning a new ghosts, who are up to leading us out…
The strange thing about desires, is where else they might lead one. Lust might always be creative, but it can create so many other things than children.
Choice and oppression are usually synonymous – for both are attempts to rip through reality, and make it simple in order to act.
The Joy about living though, is always that the same action might mean very different things is differing contexts.
Politics is of course on the macro scale less about the science of the possible and more about the creation of unities which enfold many conflicting desires, and times. Such alliances are naturally volatile but always erroneous.
The problem is clearly that they claim to be true in order that they might be stabilized.
The politics of passions are another matter - for truth matters not one iota – and can stabilize nothing.
The past – is the spice by which a flavour is nuanced into a future, rather than a tyrant. But as with all flavours, the game is not to over do it (or take it too seriously).
The present, is by contrast is a palate, on which these flavours need to be balanced, and rebalanced. Moreover, as with all palates, it itself constantly quietly matures.
But the future, is the stuff of tasting itself; the secret of the desire for spice – a desire that runs beyond need, although comprehending it.
To be someone...
To be by nature destined to obesity, is of course, to be naturally pitched against nature. The question is then, are all these natures really the same?
Or to put to otherwise, there is a savage pride in obesity: The self is stage managed within this going against: it gives itself its own flabby space in pitching itself both within and against, its biology. It affirms its worth, or perhaps its taint in the distorting of nature anew, to force it to accept the obese soul’s defiance of it.
The modern gap between nature and culture, or nature and nurture, is surely hollowed out by the oversized dress or trouser size.
Or perhaps to pitch it differently, there is an oddity also in aspiring to pay a tax which one cannot afford in fact to pay, and therefore takes ‘measures’ to ensure that one need not pay. Perhaps that oddity’s name is really politics, while the word ‘voter’ identifies its only true inhabitant.
It is perhaps the self’s supreme going against its own nature, to demand that the dead have more rights over what was their own, than the living. Here is a delicious irony, to go against nature in the name of humanity is to go against a natural justice, whose name can only be humanity.
To proud of one’s follies is normal, but that does not mean one needs to base a politics on that pride.
It is of course self evident that choosing to be the choice maker and making a choice are very different things, even if that difference cannot ever be heard. It is then an axiom that humans always say yea and nay together….
The strangest this about modern souls or identities are surely their inability to separate themselves from the real world of experience. This is of course the point! It allows them to claim the world as their own, in the name of the innate, which is nonetheless only given, in that very claim. The real problem then, with souls, is not so much isolation, as permeability. We are caught in the nightmare that our identity really might drain down the plug hole of our experience. No wonder we talk of it incessantly, how else can we persuade ourselves that it is?
And no wonder we are prepared to allow others to die so very readily. Perhaps they die that we might feel ourselves to be a self…notice in this regard how we turn ‘saving the planet’ into another object of pride: Perhaps we might be less pride if we were merely saving our lifestyle, that is saving our pride, that is our self…
It is obvious enough that children never simply learn on their own: Nor do they learn exactly what adults think they are teaching. Moreover whilst it is perhaps the case that a child learns childhood from its parents, as they teach it; they can only hope to learn of adulthood from fellow children… No wonder adults feel that children are changelings: They are indeed small Daemons, by which one’s very sense of being an adult is challenged.
Or to put it differently, reflections are never simply images, but are criss-crossed by elements that to one side were utterly invisible, and on the other are the only possible reality.
If this seems complex, it is well to remember that two of the great thinkers of the last hundred years or so spent almost their entire lives pondering over the connection between storytelling and images. The problem is not that the two never meet, so much as they appear to meet in the platitude of a single photo, and the ‘story’ it tells, and any other iconography or allegory beyond the banal has a baroque complexity to it. So much so, that one only needs a tincture of Hume’s scepticism to wonder at the value of doing so.
The time one must trust a human being least (including oneself) is when they are being benign. Here the problem is not that humans always have a secret squalid reason for their actions, so much as when they are benign they are also complex, and when they are complex there are always other motivations, and other thoughts involved in their actions. It is these actions that need to be wondered at.
This is possibly the secret of wickedness. We wish to be wicked because it is so very, very much more relaxing.
One suspects that there have been more and bloodier wars fought in the name of cuteness, than any other reason. But also, more creatures have been subjected to persecution, in the name of their cuteness.
The point is, to be an animal is to be caught up in the natural world, but to be ‘cute’ is to be within the human, and the two can never sit comfortably in a single creature.
The greatest coup of modern times was no doubt the enslaving of creativity to the needs of society.
To understand why this annexation was necessary, one only needs to remember that England before this was effected, was famous for its violent revolutions, and its near anarchy, and not for passive order and observance of the rules.
But before one is too hard on other times, it is worth remembering Foucault’s remark that the nineteenth century saw a unique event in Europe. For the very first time in human’s history, they needed to learn what it meant to have mass populations that lived past the age of twenty. It is then perhaps the irony of our times, that we face the double dilemma of having to work out what it means to have a population that demands now to live beyond eighty; while all the while working out what it might mean to think about a planet that might change, so that no human can inhabit it at all, at least not in our current way of living.
The thing about resistance is that one is blind to it. Or to put it a little better, we fail to render it lucid, because resistance is what power, and the knowledge which it breeds, assumes in order to act at all. One’s blindness to one’s power to be Otherwise, is therefore a price that one pays for the too simple demand that one can act and be in control of the consequences of that action.
In this regard it is certainly worth remembering just how difficult it is to be original. Your first set of ideas are always merely what everyone thinks when trying to think otherwise, as is one’s second and third. It is only by care, and very great patience that one becomes able to say something new at all. If one simply demands that everything one says is always one’s own (and therefore original) even this slim hope is likely to be lost.
Remember Foucault’s very great dictat. The Soul is the prison of the body. So be careful that in simply being oneself, one is not imprisoning something so much more worthwhile!
The real problem about the ‘self regulation’ of such things as the media or big business is that it regulates the complaint quite as much as the culprit, and one can only complain if one accepts this fact. Critique and castration become synonymous.
We live in the exchange between our thoughts and actions. Our ways to grasp the world are every bit as much social constructions as they are realities, and we get very upset when the vulgar forget this fact. However this is a mistake, for one ought to be just as upset when we mistake these exchanges for the reality itself, and so confuse medium and message once again.
We defend the idea of identity because of cheesy science fiction, where people are brainwashed into losing their names, their hobbies, and thereby ‘themselves’. Far more terrifying and frequent are the daily brainwashing we all are bombarded with to be someone – whether we like it or not.
Perhaps the greatest danger to society lies not in internal subversion or direct confrontation but complacency. The moment some ruler declares, as Charles the First did, that one is the happiest king in Christendom, that is the moment one should reach for the sandbags…
The Paradox is therefore once again that stability itself destabilizes. Or rather it blinds one to those processes that are already warping the political system from within (the complacency of Victorian England, and the First World War, or the simple declaration that everyone was a Keynesian, followed by a depression).
This becomes no doubt, all the deeper a problem because there is nothing worse than a government worried about such quietly growing anarchies. For such a government invariably feels that it is beholden upon it to act to prevent the anarchy happening. Trouble is, this makes another (and often far worse) anarchy more or less inevitable.
As Foucault showed, it is a mistake to tie violence down to the messy affair of blood and fire. There are far more ways of being violent - that is of forcing another to act in some way, ranging from gentle persuasion to emotional blackmail, or from honest bargaining to subtle sub-conscious advertising.
And yet, it is perhaps here that the Modern Hobbes both has most to say, and yet is most problematic. In the latter case, it is clearly now, given the complexity of violence no simple matter to define a Leviathan, whose preset assumptions allow it to encompass all these anarchic domains. A multitude of smaller sub-states might be needed.
But then it is just at this point that Hobbes once again comes into his own. For he provides one with both a way of understanding the consequences of not having such encompassing leviathans, but also, defines the mechanisms by which each anarchy needs to be overcome. Moreover he also allows for, and attempts to understand both the complex ‘state of war’ which must exist between differing leviathans who nonetheless have no inclination to fight and the conditions by which those states might be bound up into another larger ‘state.
Law needs to be kept impersonal – lest it slip rather easily into anarchy. The trouble here is that the state of nature, motivated by revenge does so naturally want to personalise crime.
Or rather it would not be a problem if one was not inspired by a system which as it makes terms endlessly slip their resonance, is naturally chaotic, and inclined to anarchy (of the worst sort).
A celebrity criminal is therefore almost a tautology.
Well one can dream, both reality and fantasy...
It is a clearly rather a tricky question why we trust the free market to solve the problem of pollution. It was after all the free market that got us in the problem in the first place; so just why should carbon trading or perhaps better bribing the poor to remain undeveloped, ever be the solution? If we were really serious about tackling climate change and poverty, perhaps we would allow the poor countries to sue the rich for the damage and destruction pollution currently causes. The poor would then have money enough, while the rich would have a real incentive just to stop polluting however that was arranged.
Prejudice is so oddly random (why be prejudiced against red hair for God’s sake). It would to probably fairer to every year have a grand draw, a lottery, at New Year to decide what prejudice should IN the next year (and why). Just think of the audience figures.... All the stale old jokes, and teasing could then stay the same, it would merely be that their targets that were changed. One year it might be the blue eyed, or another the brown haired or the five foot tall. With any luck we should all get a turn of being discriminated against. With any luck, the idiocy of prejudice would be laid clear for all to see...
Notes on Philosophy and Literature...
No doubt the really odd thing about thought is that there is never simply one way to do it! This makes it no simple matter where one begins. Now the full complexity here is not that sometimes thought starts from a simple place, while at others a complex one, as on the contrary, all such startings are always complex. The problem is then less of complexity, and more of how that complexity itself is articulated.
Does one commence by taking the complexity as granted, and thereby uncover simple ‘facts’ which one can then reveal; for a while at least (before they too become enmeshed within new complexities of their own): This is perhaps the genetic approach.
Or does one begin by attempting to grasp the formal structure of complexities themselves? That is, by attempting to directly grasp at what they are, or might be or could be. This is surely the approach of all true rationalists.
Or once again does one simply allow experience to be complex even in its apparent simplicity. To perceive another might be simple in itself, and yet that very simplicity haunts the mind in ever more complex ways, and defies all simple resolutions. This is surely the approach of the empiricist, but also probably the novelist; or at least the writer of the ‘great British novel’.
One of the oddest things about any discipline is that it seems so simple when grasped from the outside. The lay person will quickly grasp five or six facts to play with. It is these borrowed facts that are perhaps the only truly simple element in the world.
Herein lies the attraction of much literary criticism or philosophy. By being the great borrowers of another’s ideas, they appear to start from such very secure foundations.
The problem here is less that the foundations are secure (for there is nothing wrong if nothing very good, about that) so much as the ‘critical thinker’ often never gets the courage to venture out of the security of their secure foundations, and into the raging complexities of the world outside (complexities even their foundations would lead them towards eventually).
It goes without saying this simplicity is double edged. There are many disciplines whose soul merit lies in giving simple ideas to other ways of thinking: Such disciplines have the rare luxury of being able to be crude (or even idiotic) in themselves, and yet still need to be taken seriously, by some other way of thinking and at some level (Freudianism might blush here).
There are also entire schools of thought whose essential claims rest in the power and complexity of another way of thinking. Such disciplines might be paradoxical or even crude in themselves,and thereby never move beyond the point of simple foundations, and yet still claim to be rich enough to be of value( the ‘selfish random length chemical’).
Perhaps the most radical things about the novel (and novelist) lies in and why they write at all. It is not like the ‘Great Thinker’, who ponders upon mysteries for his own amusement; nor is it like the affable (or acerbic) researcher who produces his own works, but with another in mind. On the contrary it is always (or at least should be) written about others, and yet also for another. To write well is then to be doubly collective: One is caught up in one’s characters, but also one readers; and the great novelist is the one who remains merely light footed and not light headed in such a perilous position.
A novelist is then suspended between three very different perils; There is the peril of injecting themselves too readily into their own novel; there is the peril of the imbecility of one’s imagined readers (for all novels are merely as good as the imagined audience); Finally there is the peril of the tyranny of the characters themselves, who can so very easily demand that they actually Do have an identity in themselves.
It is small wonder good novels are a little hard to find…
Neitzsche is surely right, that philosophy is most vituperative of disciplines. One where the old fierce quarrels of yesteryear be it two centuries or a thousand years ago are taken up and made to serve the hatreds of today. It is then perhaps unique in that in blending old and new loathing, it allows all its protagonists to becomes heros (or at least foot soldiers) in a eternal Trojan war of the mind, - perhaps to at least pretend they are!
In this of course philosophy is only unique in exactly were it wants to pitch its camp. For all other disciplines appear to be attempting the same move, of saving from the still smoking wreck of history some truth or other. Psycho-analysis and the Novelist seek to save fairy tales (which is why these disciplines must be so oppose to one another); while science thinks up endless new ways to save some species of God. Where Philosophy is perhaps different, is that it wants to keep hold of all the violent quarrels and progroms of the past, albeit now dressed up in the scholarly language of today.
As Neitzsche knew full well, revenge is so much sweeter when it has taken a thousand years or so...
It is a truism to say that the really radical idea looks at once to the past and the future: so that that which is most radical can be easily ridiculed as some how belonging to the past. What is less clear is that even in this ridicule the truly radical idea has a presence. It is already working in various ways distort to what attacks it.
It is not wise to trust too much to those who seek to offer one reassurance; just as long as one never trusts those who only demand the public are ‘re-assured’, just so that they can attack that very reassurance….
It goes without saying here, that democracy can only operate if it at once forgets its immediate pasts (the people never ‘speak), and closes down all other debates as somehow dangerous. Hence it can so very confidently announce that it might be flawed, but it is better than all the rest…
And if it forgets either of these elements, we claim that the election is flawed. A democracy that does not scrabble around finding differences to homogenize – but rather demands another unity, is not a democracy – even if the election itself was ‘democratic’.
In this regard the freedom of speech debate is axiomatic. By allowing scoundrels their freedom, more disruptive elements are drowned out with the raucous babble, and re-assuringly contained as merely ‘one other voice’.
Marx was of course right to claim that modernity is the battle of mole and mole’s mole. On the one hand capitalism digs away at every foundation. It erupts again and again, where it is least expected. On the other hand it too has a mole, that always wants to create other connection tunnels, turning them into something quite different.
It is in the raucously overblown claims of capitalism, that Spinoza’s aristocrat might silently lie. But it is only in the digging action of the mole itself, that his democracy can dig.
The game here for Spinoza is never to form a perpetual and perfect communist state. Indeed he suggests that such states always devolve into aristocracies, and eventually monarchy. The game is always rather to allow other elements, other voices, to constantly bubble up.
Spinoza’s contention was of course that democracy is everywhere, the game is merely trusting it.
However the key word here is allow. A permanent revolution in itself is the best of tyrannies.
Daft Philosophers are the most fun: look at Rousseau!
It is the peculiar reserve of the daft philosophers to stumble across ideas that they do not know what to do with, in the name of follies that they do. It is the delight in reading them to rescue those ideas.
Of course all philosophers are therefore to a degree daft!
The Global is almost certainly a contraction in terms. Nothing is ever global, any more than it is simply willed.
Or better, the Global exists on many levels. There are as many different ‘globals’ as there are processes that are caught up in everything. But there are also that other range of globals which look to the end of processes as their logical universalisation.
And nothing beyond a word need keep these two in accord.
Causality is a strange fish, as it is always lived backwards (as Hume noted). One knows effects, never causes. One merely infers the cause (even though it never feels like that).
It is therefore very naturally deterministic. It breeds in the certainty of utter hindsight.
The problem is that this is where our mind also naturally lives, and it is quite a job winkling it out beyond this shell.
In took a proto-imperialist (Locke) to claim that there must a land, which lies, always out there beyond our perceptions. That is there must a virgin territory, waiting the colonization of perception, a colonialism that is always justified and exact, as long as one worked away at it. Doubt was then merely a matter of inspiring one to work harder, to clear space, and own a land of one’s own (as England was coming to own America…).
It took Kant to move this imperialism into the mind. We all became jolly imperialists of our perceptions. – even if the world in itself was lost to us all.
It took Nietzsche’s urgency to break this trap and think something quite different (but of course it is no wonder he then was labelled a racist).
The thing about a guru is that he claims too much or too little. He wants to be anything and everything, as unless he is the truth and the light, he has no truth at all.
The really strange thing here though is that enlightenment can happen this way – to others at least.
Even if the soul of the guru itself is lost.
Perhaps the problem here is all about trust. It is a mistake to trust too much to perceptions – do not trust them to give you a reality of which they are not capable of ever reporting.
It is better to think of them as the reality themselves.
Esse est Percepti as Percepti est esse
The cry ‘I Think Therefore I Am’ grows like a canker in the mind. Not only (as Nietzsche knew) does thought need no ‘I’, but also, it merely exists as an incidental dimension to itself. It is a thought irrespective of existence (independent of whose imagination it is, be it mine or God’s).
The problem is, as with all cankers, the I that claims to be in thought is either benign, in which case it is merely a noisy nuisance, greedy in its desire to be, and yet not actively harmful; Or alternatively it is a malignant force desperate to sweep up everything, and bending all it can to its strident will. A will that is prepared to change all the rules, and pay every price merely to be.
The thing about the free market is that it dances on the head of a needle, caught as it is at the vanishingly small rational point between rational individual and collective interest.
Perhaps the peril here is not that such a point does not exist (although the least gust of wind makes such a balancing difficult), but rather that it is crowded with other angels of the mind. For religion is also there, balanced between the individual and the collective.
No wonder then there is the current ‘war against whatever’. Each side are aiming to pitch the other into the void.
A Freudian might say that the problem with biology is that it operates as the baby’s dummy of desire.
A structuralist would claim that a Freudian has lost sight of the fact that truth has nothing to do with simple experience. Memory is not enough to make the mind.
A free marketeer would claim that the structural approach forgets the fact that the collective is dynamic (even if that dynamism can not be caught by memory alone).
The biologist’s would claim that the market was merely an expression of biology.
And so
we loop the loop of loopy being
If one claims to be master, one has a rather horrid habit of tumbling into being a slave after all: The sole real use for Hegel.
The problem after all with mastery is its necessary amnesia: it starts to believe the lies it tells others and is lost in that belief.
History does not really respect ‘masterhood’ very well…
Molecules are a strange creation. We create them in order to be the world’s master, but all they really do is change the game of mastery.
All they really do is change the game of chance. The world of omens is replaced by looking for far more elusive signs and symbols, which are known through their little but direct acts of destruction.
The problem I suppose is that we have replaced single Gods (or at least Gods which are focus of many things) with far more complex collective shifting little souls.
The Problem of materialism is that It has a soul.
The Problem with the soul is that it demands the world is itself.
The Problem of demanding the world is ours, is that that claim cannot survive materialism.
Oh well – I suppose this is body-soul loopism.
A Sequence of Bon Mots and Aphorisms loosely following different Rants (and Partially Summarising them)
Notes on Lifestyle
It is an old adage that Philosophy matters because it charts the way a language changes. Arguments are never simply correct or false but rather chart points of transformation.
Or better, they define new points of disjunction and conflict. That is, they define the sense that a demand to reconcilability is opened up between dimensions whose only relationship is in fact conflict. They therefore inaugur whole new ways in which the world is creatively both right and wrong, as these conflicts develop.
And ideas’ role is therefore to create through language an axis within which the very demand for reconcilability can be serve as the trigger (or justification) for an evolving exchange.
In this, history is often initially important, - history allows one to freeze ‘time’, and thereby to develop the rules for conflict, which will subsequently be unwound.
In short, if an argument is at once hopeless flawed, and yet appears still to resonate, start to become suspicious that something rather odd is afoot.
It is of course the case that if there was ever a person to whom one could posthumously attribute making drugs illegal, then they ought to be awarded a medal for services to Capitalism.
The trouble is of course that such an individual never existed. And in their lack of existence the complexity of the problem is revealed.
Drugs by themselves might be okay (and not so very different from wanking really), the trouble is, in a move worthy of philosophy itself, that onanism is too readily mistaken for ontology.
It is therefore very hard to be genuinely revolutionary, so long as one is also fighting for the right to be doped up….
That is, for some, a no handed wank, and love making, can be so hard to tell apart, much to the glee of the ‘repressive-titillation entertainment’ industry.
It is of course an old adage that a lesser evil is a good. The problem with such a truism is that each individual evil is sealed within itself alone, and so very rarely serves as a counter point to another evil.
It is perhaps in this regard one that needs to understand the complexities of the relationship between the ‘war on terror’ and global warming. Each sees a collective ‘enemy’ (be it a number of humans or humanity as a whole), and a partial remedy in science (spooks listening or trapping carbon). And yet each divides partially over the issue of trusting the non-western world. The war on terror looks to ‘westernize’ the world, while it is that westernization which those who are concerned over global warming, fear most.
The battle of evils, is therefore, at its most constructive point of engagement, a contest of whether or not a global world needs to be western.
Plato was an expert mythmaker. That is, he knew that the only way one could communicate experience was through stories, and therefore the choice was always between stories that supported ‘reason’ (as he understood it), and stories which did not.
The problem was, as he also knew well, that the Devil has most of the best tunes. That is, a story which flies in the face of the reasonable, it likely to have more influence than any story or parable which is cooked up to support the rational.
This is of course why the education of his elite was so very very austere. It is only in austerity, and when individuals have been taught to despise diversity, that reason can guarantee its hegemony. Hence the paradox, that once one is in a reasonable state, one can remain in it in perpetuity, but one can never actually reach such a state.
The problem with experience is that it is too damn convincing. One must argue from experience, and ‘learn’ what it teaches.
And yet one must be clear that to learn by experience is utterly different from ‘learning from history’. History’s lessons are all too easy, and so at once invariably wrong, but also always uncompelling. But to learn from experience is, by contrast rather more difficult, and yet remains in the mind the longest.
However this breeds another problem. One must be careful that learning from experience does not simply trap one in past experiences. One must therefore be open to the emergence of new principles, and new ways of thinking.
The experience which one thinks with, must therefore be kept apart from the simple set of events which gave one the experience itself.
There is an irony, in that the attempt to ‘escape history’ is very likely to mean that history will forget you (or marginalize you) as much as possible. The game here is of course to ensure that later, you have to be remembered.
It is an odd fact that when a philosopher really stands out against his times it is not his theories so much as his example which are condemned (think Nietzsche). This is no coincidence, for ‘an example’, the attempt to grasp at other futures, other realities which lie within its orbit, is clearly a mad enterprise.
It is also however a deeply philosophical one…
The trouble with working out what ‘to do’ with pollution is that ideas about pollution need to make active what which is pollution’s most intractable problem; that is, that it at once is caused at a certain point in time (and by some process and therefore individual), and yet is collective in its effect. The problem becomes then about how to relate these two together.
Trouble being that most solutions are likely to be slippery. The Polluter might often gain from the exchange (rather than paying), as they use the very collectivity of polluting, to their own advantage.
The odd thing here though, is that although this is reprehensible in itself, it might allow other odd moves, and the polluted find rather different ways to cope with their predicament.
It is always the ‘trouble with morality’ that none of our ideas appear subtle enough to grasp it fully. We preset morality and ‘wham bang’ everything changes, and we need a fresh code.
Kant’s razor is therefore a brave attempt to escape this problem by finding a rather different basis for the moral.
Our question is always whether we are brave enough to follow him.
If the media love a theory, that alone does not make the account suspect. It merely makes it restricted: for you can be sure the media will not see further that its own nose. They will therefore present great philosophical theories as if they were an account or critique of the media itself.
The problem is of course that the logic of journalism prevents the media from ever reading. Thence they remain perpetual undergraduates, who stretch what they have read (and understood) a very, very, long way.
It goes without saying that it is often the ‘cultural commentators’ who have had least time to actually read; I mean to read anew to read something different into a text. Trouble is, the same can be said for academics.
The thing about power is, that it is seldom clear whose it is.
The same power is usually serving many, many masters, while its own name is also legion.
This is why being an executive and claiming the right to power is so very very tricky. It is no wonder then, a politician’s face gets stuck while pulling the one expression.
It follows of course that to possess is always a sham. One can never be too sure exactly who is possessing whom.
Perhaps this is one of the joys of the peasant lifestyle. It is not that one side possesses and the other is possessed, so much as that the rules of change and switch over, are themselves clear - or at least they feel clear from the outside.
But one must remember that everything is always so very clear from the outside, so even this could be elusive.
It is no scandal or even no great matter that neither society nor the environment actually exist. On the contrary their very power lies within this lack of formal being.
Not to be, is to be unknown in the inverse, in the mistake in the first instance. And yet it is known to be that which is endlessly creating through its mistake. That which makes the mistakes matter.
Creativity becomes eruptive, as these mistakes spawn across the world.
The problem is then that this spawning is so unpolitical. Or better, one cannot ever give it a name and a sense. One can never admit that it was the mistakes that did it!
The best politicians are the ones who can most nearly say this unsayable truth.
The worst political systems are those that for whatever reason can no longer cope with their own errors.
The trouble with a people is that they always contain other people.
The trouble with a land is that it has no special people of its own.
The trouble with us, is that we endlessly confuse these two, and endlessly claim that being a people is only held together by having a land. That way, of course, great madness lies.
There is something so very reassuring in the word molecule. One gets the idea of something there, something present, some truth beyond mere perception. There is something, albeit inert matter out there, something that we can really rely upon.
Each molecule’s power lies in its being the bridgehead to the certain. It is the point where we know where we are at last.
Except of course the problem is that we do not. The lesson of ecology is that molecules are far from being ever predictable - for their unique journeys matter quite as much as their formal reality. A facet of the molecule that opens up once again to the complex world of chance.
Perhaps indeed the death of the molecule as prime or at least simple servant of man is a death every bit as traumatic as the death of God.
In both cases, humans lose their right to suppose the existence of an agent capable of really making the world ‘be’ as it seems to be. That is the world they have promised themselves, is. In both therefore, humanity confronts the fact that the world really does not care for it (and would do rather well without us, or our thoughts – molecules have a life of their own, and perhaps so do Gods)…
This is where nation states and money come in.
The nation state amounts simply to a demand that a piece of the world really does belong to a people, come what may, and irrespective of rhyme or reason. Actually, given the arbitrary nature of this all, I suspect the dafter the claim of the nation state, the more its truth.
In contrast money is informed by a wonderful shotgun marriage of local greed, and global confusion. The one feeds into and attempts to (bizarrely) comment on the other. The problem is, for the world, that this commentary all too easily pulls one way rather than the other - global money market or local greed. The game is surely to makes it balance in the middle, and do so while the balancing point itself is in motion – which is perhaps an impossible trick…
The trouble with cause and effect, is that there are too many causes for the number of effects we have. Each cause is its alone, but can have any number of effects.
Trouble with cause and effect, is that it allows one to apparently irrevocably conjoin order with control. It is surely the deep lesson of society that if one is in control, one often lacks order (dictatorships are on the edge of chaos; while many orders (such as the ant colony) lack any real control. Cause and effect can at best therefore only relate to a small piece of creation (and then usually the least interesting parts).
Trouble with cause and effect is that everything is a cause of everything else. Any gimcrack particle of matter (God, money or gene) can thereby assert control. It is the worst sort of democracy, one which is still a tyranny, with the novelty that everyone is always also a tyrant!
Ambiguity is the stuff of capitalism. It works by doing good and it does bad as it does good.
The point perhaps of environmentalism is that we at last unambiguously get to say that ‘capitalism – it stinks!’
Which is very very nice, except that we are likely to need to subvert capitalism to do anything about the world we live in now. Shit!
Perhaps one merely needs to take a long spoon, so long as one assures that one poisons the devil by dining within him.
Subversion – the clue is in the name. Who needs to be tripping something up, not merely attempting to destroy it violently.
Revolution was never about spectacular acts (which only serve as another’s ‘wake up call’): it rather involves a gas mask, and a steady eye, the one to cope with the stench of carrion capitalism, the other, to watch it for traces of what it could then become
Towards Philosophic History
History is not so much about the past, as the doubling up of the past.
One is always caught up in studying history (and therefore caught up in the arguments which led to the future). But also, one’s present itself is caught up in being historic, in that one’s being is still a part of those argument of yester year: indeed, its direct consequence.
History is therefore truly reflective, as long as one allows for that reflection to shard reality between two mirrors - which creates between them an infinite number of reflected pasts.
Virtue cannot be power and cannot become knowledge, and self reflection cannot simply compose the self, without one needing to show that there was something else to reflect upon, or to know.
The problem then is to hold this other at suitable arm’s length, whether that arm is composed by heaven or practical engagement with the world.
Trouble though, is that in each case, there is a suspicion that this other is merely a dressed up justification of the rights of one group to govern.
It is so hard not to answer to the question ‘Who should govern?’ with ‘Me and my mates’.
Well does anyone else know anyone better to govern than themselves and their friends? Or anyone worse for that matter.
Perhaps Epicurus is right in insisting on the merits of gardening, bread and self cultivation rather than self reflection.
If History is never about the past but the future, this of course raises the problem of whose future is it anyway?
Here the hard facts about the future kick in:
The future is by definition what everyone claims as their own: Your hope is therefore also my hope (or I will know the reason why not).
The future is also that which no one owns. In our hope, both of us are therefore in error, and mistaking the nature of what we are likely to become.
And yet this latter thought is so very scary it is likely to make us insist all the more on the former, and do so in the face of history itself.
History is therefore at once a critique of what has been; that is, the history of past histories – the science of why lessons were never learnt.
But at the same time a new history of history is being written. That is, a new way to compel clouds, towards a future to come, whose runes are engraved across the past – as an advent to come…
The problem with unity is that it is everywhere.
It claims too much therefore, and wants to be what it has not yet become.
The problem here is not that it is not this other, for on the contrary it is, but rather that it cannot make this claim without destroying numerous elements which it also is.
Unity therefore creates anarchy, while anarchy is already serving a unity, merely not one expressed by the current system.
This is perhaps the problem of the anarchist. They are all too easily the apostles of what they hate.
This is certainly the problem of the unionist, for they are always also the disciples of anarchy (or at least its agents).
Trouble with conscience is that it only has a value if it is tender.
Trouble with being tender, is that it is tantamount to hypersensitivity.
Trouble with hypersensitivity is that it loses the ability to tell itself apart from the world, and therefore always risks a double anarchy of world and spirit.
History is Horrid.
Ideas of the past, be they the Crusades or Jihad or just wars, lie dormant together in the mind. Once one occurs, others spring forth, and we are all caught up in the politics of the past: A nightmare of mediaevalism.
Or at least we are, if we are lazy.
The problem is of course, that the past makes such very very good rhetoric, and it is always rhetoric, the appearance of doing things, which wins elections.
All the more so as the past is gloriously lazy. I mean to be old fashioned or to adhere to a morality of the past is beautifully unchallenging, and so encourages one not to think.
It is this conniving with ignorance which is always the best vote winner of them all.
Trouble with reason is that it does not belief that it is a lie.
Trouble with lying is that it assumes that it is not the norm (and is rather outraged to find out that it is).
The trouble with the world is that it does not care about the previous two troubles.
To send one’s mind off on a virtual journey, is always to find something and to go somewhere. The problem is always exactly where.
That is has one simply tumbled into a nether world of realized desires, or has one slipped into the otherside of the mind, the world that could be.
The problem here is that the forces that might allow one to stay in this otherside (to allow the virtual its actualization) might be too extreme and too dark to allow one ever to stay in situ. One tumbles to somewhere, because it easer to enforce…
Abstraction’s danger lies not in being true, but rather in being inescapable.
A good abstraction works by creating its own truth. That is by ensuring that everyone can only think in terms of itself alone; and that they can only act to create it (and it alone).
To be abstract is therefore to ab-stract from reality, to thieve those elements which allow that abstraction to be at all. MAN or ANIMAL (understood in their basic biology) is therefore the biggest thief of them all.
The trouble with law is that it cannot leave its people alone. Law wages then a low level war on the population (or at least always has a tendency to so do (although this low level war is better than the real thing, or possibility better than a higher level of monitoring) .
The trouble with war is that it breeds more war, and more law. War leaks out then into society, and demands new ways to be fought.
The trouble with terror is that it is the direct bastard of these two elements, a breeding that tears the gossamer threads which keep them both apart, and creates a botched
I ache and therefore I am, has more wisdom in it than one might suppose.
It leads to the demand to ache.
And yet perhaps it would lead to the demand not to be, or at least not to be an I which does the aching…
The thing about absence is that it itself has a power.
Almost all the great changes in the world are made in the name of what is not there (Marx understood this point very well, the future always dresses up as the past).
Our world is very much the legacy (or perhaps absence) of past absences. But our problem is that if we do ever realize this, and realise that the emperor really is naked, then there is no telling whether the world will get an awful lot better, or just mind crushingly worse: Remember economic collapses (and ‘the credit crunch’) are the products of just this ‘realization’.
The problem with absence is that it creates abstract presence, that is, laws.
The problem with laws is that they always allow an element that is ‘real’ to defy them, and be other than law. An element that then becomes unthinkable within the very abstractions to which the law based system points.
The problem with anomalies, is that they all too easily abrogate all law, and then all reality to themselves. They become what is real. That advantage of law, that it is impartial, is lost, while its disadvantage, that it renders something powerless is kept. A very modern problem.
A good Mystery is one that no one wants to solve, and yet one that everyone ‘knows’ there is some solution for.
That is why good mysteries are historical ones. The Civil War is an axis of different solutions set within an anarchy of problems.
One is therefore really free to resolve it any way one wants to: that really is its mystery – or power (a fact that Winstanley for one, knew).
Perhaps one needs though to be suspicious of those who want to impose single solutions. They are often merely eulogizing one aspect of a system which they hold up as its explanation.
One certainly needs to be even more suspicious of those who solve a problem by pitching themselves up within it, and quietly transmuting it into another problem (according to the solution they have at hand).
And also never trust an enemy who takes up your policies. When all is said and done they are very likely to still be your opponent - they are merely being cunning!
Trouble with rebellion is that it produces anarchy.
The trouble with anarchy is that it produces violently enforced orthodoxies.
Trouble with orthodoxy is that it instigates rebellion.
Oh well…
Humanity of course loves its abstractions (this is itself an abstraction).
Perhaps it is then better to say that humanity loves feeling itself to be in the right, and the joy of an abstraction is that they make one always in the right (for who can gainsay them?)
This would be rather innocent onanism, if this pleasuring oneself in the abstract did not have a violent underbelly!
A Codex of all too common cowardice, runs:
“I want you to be just like me…
At least I want you to be my immediate inferior, my near equal, my perpetual younger brother
And perhaps I should warn you I am prepared to take any and every action (including thought) to ensure this is the case.”
The problem with anarchy is that it cannot be defined.
The problem here is not that it cannot be defined in itself, but rather that it can be defined in a large number of ways, all of which will claim their own exclusivity to it.
The problem then is that all kinds and manners of poison can hatch out from the most innocent of anarchies.
The problem is as ever, were to Begin. Does one start with the basic unit, and hope that reality can be made to conform? Or does one start with actual complex existence (which might be saying ‘sod it’ to the simple).
If one starts with the former, one needs to hope (fingers crossed) that every thing adds up. If one starts with the latter, one knows it cannot (and must not).
For the former, anarchy is the place in which simple orders compete with one another (and therefore is itself fine). While in the latter, order is what always emerges from an apparent anarchy. There is no guarantee however that these two anarchies are united in anything other than occasion.
The real problem, is then, when these rather different explanations cross fertilize.
At this point one gets avowedly simple citizens of the complex, who are after making a good thing out of other people’s complexity.
The problem is of course that if this doctrine took over, the very rich complexity that breathed life into this simple individual would be removed. Government becomes then either about secretive complicating factors, or the interests of particular individuals.
The problem with masses is that they loathe there own predictability.
The problem with predictability is that it is self defeating.
The problem with this defeat of the self, is that it allows other far more poisonous selves to bubble up into consciousness
Miracles are as much about the suspension of temporality as anything else.
We call it a miracle if it was either too quick to be seen or too slow, or if we found ourselves already assuming it (without ever knowing why)!
The mystery one needs then to grapple with is that this suspension is not something that can be explained, it is rather almost endemic to our nature.
A miracle is really the possibility that we can re-throw our own nature again.
It is a matter of taste or judgement whether one feels this throw to be constant or rather punctuated by voided times.
Or perhaps it is a matter of politics - or where one wants one’s politics to be and what exactly one wants it to say. Should it be about building a new country or merely managing or re-managing the world we are in?
The trouble with a miracle is allowing it the space to be unexpected, and unexplained.
The problem with the unexpected is that we always want to claim that we really did know that it was the case all along.
The problem with the unexplained is allowing it its own uniquely problematic dignity.
The joy of relativism is that it turns my doubt into a universal truth.
My doubt then straps on marching boots and demands to unravel everyone else’s mind.
My doubt creates a world where I am again powerful.
The game is then to pretend that power is not one’s own, (as if I admit it, that power is lost).
The game of the good empiricist is therefore one of diversion. One might distract the audience as one occupies, or at least claims to occupy their mind.
Perhaps then this is why it talks in terms of the camera obscura. It is the role of the projector, the cinematic, to hide the hard corrosions which are seeping in.
The problem with truth, is that it is necessarily beyond me, and so either divine or if it is mine, I must step beyond myself.
The Problem of the divine is that it necessarily ignored the human at all. The jilted human therefore will always look to other Gods.
The Problem of truth being mine, is that I mistake myself for the divine, and so gain the right to jilt others in the world - a right humanity seems to delight in.
It is all about me – but I might allow that you also have a role in it, to many seems the most delightful of creeds.
It is after all the one that allows the world pretty much to be as we see it. That is, which allows for the fact that the world is ours in the seeing and the doing: That allows for the fact that we must (apparently) matter in our own world at least.
The trouble of course that this simple claim to own a peace of mind of one’s own which nonetheless allows for others is far from simple. For that peace of mind is criss-crossed with the thought in which one’s own peace is made. Patterns which might be invisible to a single soul, and yet are all too evident to everyone else.
Herein lies the mystery of collectivity. Others can see things about yourself that you can never see
Human’s problem is then how to understand this externality. Do they ignore it? Do they externalize it in their own mind, as an ethic of greed or human nature? Or do they seek to allow others to speak it to them? But if they do what follows then?
An agonizing if quite unresolved choice.
The trouble with Me is You.
The trouble with You is that I am not sure which bit of you is Me.
Which brings us back to Me again (whom it was about all along!)
It is an old adage that the joy of tradition lies in its certainty.
There is never a better place for a radical to pitch up, than this certainty, for people will allow you to do such odd things with it, and the way that it’s defined.
One can then quietly blow up all of being and all standard thinking and no one will care or even for a generation or more really notice!
IF I possess something but do not own it, I need always keep one eye on the mortgage provider - for they are likely to treat me as an acceptable casualty of whatever war they are fighting.
The game must be then always to read the signs of that war. To attempt to know what it is and what it might be.
Here we are clouded by both our belief in the reality of normality and the general ideas of inner fairness which we have formed about the world. The former is of course always justified and yet unjust. The latter however might be just, and yet it cannot be justified.
The Trouble with perception is that I mistake it for mine.
The trouble with this mine is that I think I own it as mine.
I Forget then that the lesson of perception is surely that the Mine exists within someone else’s property – our problem is of course whose?
Oh - and it is surely the oddest thing about the normal that the entire world might be someone else’s fiction, and yet my normality remains intact. Now that is a certainty to conjure with!
The trouble with looking after Number One, is that Number One is so difficult to keep in the forefront of the mind.
They forever slip into number two (or three or four), and only the torrent of feelings are real. And they are of course only real because it is in their nature to change all the time.
Number one therefore vanishes into a sequence of fetid feelings and a set of whines.
It is an old adage that humans would trade any amount of certainty for the right not to have a doubt.
The trouble is that the forces of certainty know this, and as certainty is political useful, it wages a long war against the desire not to doubt.
What is so interesting about that war is the sheer lack of conscience of the certainty wallahs, who gradually ’peddle doubt’ to have the argument go their way.
Any amount of war or any amount of hatred is Fine for such crusaders (ancient and modern) so long as humans do not relax into merely not doubting.
The problem with causes is that they only give one a limited right to possess what appears in one’s mind. One becomes then the peasant farmer of thought.
Trouble with being a peasant farmer, is that one is prone to the vagaries of climate, and therefore can never quite know what will happen next. One is prone then to doubt.
And it is this point of course certainties muscle in!
One of the odd things about being human is that our feelings and our world complement each other without synthesising into one another.
We feel, we are, and the world feels and the world responds, to each of us in its own ways; and without the two elements nothing could be effected.
Perhaps our real trouble is however, that we resent the position of the world (and its independence from us). We demand then that what it lends us is naturally already our own. Nor does any divinity rule out this assumption, even though disaster usually follows on from it!
The game of owning feelings is complex, as one has to initially admit that they are the ones doing the owning.
The problem with this move is that it is so horrid to human pride. We therefore invent a maze of circumlocutions designed to convince ourselves that the feelings are really ours and ours alone.
The problem is then that in these weasel words, we actually loose sight of how we can be truly proud of what we are, a pride that needs to be contained within what we already are, and not game of dominion.
The Game of morality is problematic because like the game of life it takes a while.
The problem here, is that even more than the game of life, one never has the patience to let anything resolve.
Or perhaps the resolution is actually impossible, as the world will always have changed and re-changed before a code of morality is created. Our Morality will therefore end up needing to comprehend its own history, and yet it does so at a speed which is slower that than that of history itself. The Possibility of having a moral world moves then further and further away.