the X-MEN

SO.... I finally completed the download of the complete animated series of the X-Men last night. Very excited.

Does anyone else find it as interesting as me when your mystical childhood recollections are burst by revisiting something you once had a deep emotional attachment towards? It reminds me of the effects of a chemical we have when we are younger (can't remember the name of it)-- but it operates within our brain to make sensory experiences deeply intense when we are young. Ill have to do some research on that.

Anyway, the social philosophy of the X-Men is still quite relevant. In the first episode, Jubilee is sought out by a government agency that wishes to marginalize mutants (social deviants)/(insert your own marginalized group). Dr. Xavier is forced to see flaws in his blind optimism that though they are met with hostility by non-mutants, reason alone is not enough to break the hostile barrier into peace and co-existence.

As sort of a criticism to my own ideals, Magneto (in opposition to Xavier) views mutants as the next link in the chain of a superior human race (insert Nietzsche's Ubermench). It is the expression of the superior mutant force that should reign and direct the future evolution of the human species. [Bridge my ideals here with vulnerability.... ]

Xavier goes into the mental barriers of Sabretooth in episode 3. The animation is quite a bit outdated, but the concept of Xavier fighting with Sabretooth, inside his mind, against the monstrous subjects and manifestations of his personal emotional barriers to an enlightened understanding of himself and the world is still socially relevant. It is so amazing to see how the real, layered meaning of this series can go lost on a child but still hold a powerful sway over them, only to lose some of its luster in its rediscovery as an adult EVEN in light of now grasping its total and very relevant meanings.

I guess I just cant get past a lot of the cheese-ball lines and unimpressive animated effects given the technological progress we have made since 1988-1993. We can demonstrate so much more with technology in and of concepts nowadays with just the impartation of images, and their organization. I ripped Iron Man 2 a couple nights ago as it got released in Russia apparently. The development of even our movie special effects seems to bring the realization to us that our science is not that far off. You'll see what I am talking about if you go see the movie and observe what kind of an office Robert Downey Jr.'s character has to operate with. Science fiction has its way of speaking/writing technological advancements into our dreams and therefore into existence.

Aaaaand..... with that this may be my last blog. Time is coming to a close, and I am out of steam. I have been pressing so hard these last days that I just want to relax for a bit and enjoy the peaceful, stress-less reflection of a semester that still has more to teach me as I continue to remember it.

I have loved this blogging thing.... and I will definitely read all the writings of the class that I haven't gotten to yet and post comments as I am inspired. I'll probably even keep posting a thing here and there even though the grading is over.

It has been nice to know all of you, as the class room and library has allowed, and am only sorry my busyness hasn't allowed me to invest into your personal thoughts and lives more as I had hoped and planned at the beginning of the semester.

Maybe in the future...

~Sterling

Ayer's Logical Positivism

I know we are all in the common study of the History of Classical Philosophy, and the classical thought we deal with doesn't really get too deep into Empiricism (beyond its predecessors in the Atomists/Elementalists), but reading Ayer and Russell on the side this semester has been difficult for me. And so, in that struggle, I have tried to clarify (to myself) what I can glean from the meaning of these two and form some conclusions of my own, because much of my direction in philosophical study has its foundation, and relies, on what we can empirically know.

If you have read my other blogs you know that I have metaphysical, normative understandings of the universe that would already imply that I reject much of what the logical positivist has to offer.

In any event... This is my treatment of what I understand of Ayer's logical positivism. I'll be taking a class with Dr. Marcum this summer where I hope he illuminates my understanding here a bit.

Dr. Baird briefly touched on the Logical Positivists this semester (and it is because of his mention of them that I looked into it)-- So, I'll begin with how he characterized their movement:

~One thesis and One fundamental Claim: All cognitively meaningful propositions are either analytic or empirically verifiable

Analytic statements such as those in math/logic/language are empirical: OR, they are Nonsense

Metaphysical statements are pseudo-statements and are not cognitively meaningful

Just so happens, though that the thesis: All cognitively meaningful propositions are either analytic, empirically verifiable, or they are non-sense Is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable.

So... onto Ayer:

1... For Ayer, truth is first defined as being meaningful. Ayer requires that which is meaningful to be relevant to the world as it can be experienced; what could possibly be meaningful if it is impossible to experience? Once one agrees that truth could not be truth unless it is perceived to be so, then it is only logical to exclude all other persuasions from its serious pursuit. This being Ayer’s foundation, inherited from Russell and Hume, he must reject metaphysics and all other propositions which can be neither proven true nor false by “some possible sense-experience.” Ayer doesn’t attack the fruit of the metaphysician’s field, rather he argues that it is impossible for a metaphysician to make any sense at all seeing as the sentences they use, or propositions to be more accurate, cannot meet a significant definition of such, as they have no experiential meaning and thus no means to be proven true or false. For Ayer, such propositions are “literally senseless.” Ayer wants to argue, now that he has corrected the past problems of philosophers, that the philosopher’s job is never to conflict with the hypotheses of science and is to champion the refinement of logic as it can be used to sharpen the propositions of scientists. Philosophers and their philosophies are warned of inevitable frivolity by Ayer if they do not liken to their only useful role as that of scientists of logic.

2... The original verification principal only required that in order to determine whether or not a sentence had “literal meaning,” the proposition it expressed must be either analytically or empirically verifiable. Ayer dances in rebuttal to his critics as he offers one hedge after another. Ayer admits that a given sentence, even one he would say is meaningless, inherently implies an expression. To this possible “meaning” of a sentence, Ayer introduces the equivocation of the terms: sentence and proposition so that he may substitute the word “statement” synonymously for “sentence” while reserving the word “proposition” to continue to refer to the expressions of statements which can be either empirically or analytically verified. However, the full apologetic move arrives when the very word “verifiable” wants definition. Weak and strong verifiability are introduced so that the author does not find himself in a trap where he must categorize all that which the scientific method has yet to verify as meaningless. Offering this hedge of weak verification allows Ayer to escape a logical black hole of contradiction by allowing a degree of meaning to phenomena which could be conceivably verifiable by experience. In the end, it seems as though the stress of the author’s own defense has him parting with logic where he backs his own right to make uncertain assumptions in the face of an always present uncertainty which therefore must be assigned a probability factor according to some derived potentiality of experience.

Brief Break from the Blogging Sweat Shop; On Tradition and Birthdays

So.... Yesterday was my birthday, yes, as some of you friends in class and "Facebookers" have noticed. I wanted to take the time here and thank you all for the wonderful birthday wishes. I have more to complete in this class, or I would be enjoying my family's Crawfish Boil right now with a bloody marry in hand. :))

Admonishment to you 21's and younger: The glory and celebration surrounding your birthday sharply fades at the 22nd birthday. No one tells you that this is going to happen....it just does.

Philosophically, birthdays are funny to me. Like Christmas. A birthday really is nothing more than the annual acknowledgment of the day that you were thrown into this world and that you happen to still be in this world. We have made much more cultural add-ons to the event, seemingly to make it also a celebration of wanting to make that person feel good, to affirm to them the reasons that we like them, or to make them puke and drool on themselves for our own amusement. Like, Christmas.... well, in my family at least :). The convention of Christmas has its pagan roots and arbitrary date, and weird, disconnected conventions that seem to do nothing with-- if you would ask a Christian-- its organic intention.

All in all, it is just peculiar how grown up traditions start to replace our intent...generation after generation, and that we allow this in-authentic practice for ourselves even with half and full awareness of it.

"Every tradition now grows more venerable the farther away its origin lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence; and thus the morality of piety is in any event a much older morality than that which demands unegoistic acts."

Nietzsche, "Human, All Too Human"

Phaedo; Against Plato's Recollection of the Forms; a work in progress

The theory of recollection that Plato puts forth in Phaedo and Meno hinges on the supposition that all non-empirical “knowledge” is recalled from a communion with the Forms prior to birth; his theory stands myopic and venerable to the copious alterative possibilities for coming about such “knowledge.” Once it is seen that Plato’s Forms aren’t the contingent conclusion of the intuitive “reason” to which his character Simmias conveniently stipulates, it becomes clear that Plato’s subsequent epistemologies and proofs for God (and the immortal soul) are rendered unsound, if not invalid.

Wanting to be fair and charitable to Plato’s approach to “pre-epistemology”, it is important to establish his definition of knowledge. Plato makes two distinctions of knowledge. First, it could be said that Plato understands that there is an encounter with experience which is composed of events and facts which one observes once one is born. To know that Barrack Obama is the current president of the United States is an empirical fact which Plato will deemphasize in his epistemology if he can’t totally it reject as knowledge. Though Descartes will come later, and it can’t been argued that Plato has avoided the possibility of doubting even these “facts” as a certainty of life in the context of an Evil Deceiver, he at least permits it as an observation irrelevant to his own definition of knowledge. The types of knowledge which Plato chooses to say are valid are the concepts (such as equality, justice, et cetera) of which there appears to be no other way of knowing without it existing before the individual became aware of it. Here, Plato’s argument is that, referring to equality, it must exist in some perfect Form in order for our understanding of it to be possible since it is clear that it is inherently unavoidable to escape making such distinctions as part of human nature.

Whenever someone, on seeing something, realizes that that which he now sees wants to be like some other reality but falls short and cannot be like that other since it is inferior, do we agree that the one who thinks this must have prior knowledge of that which he says it is like?…this is possible only if our soul existed before it took on this human shape (Phaedo, 74e, 72e respectively).

This argument has also planted the seeds for later work such as St. Anselm’s powerful ontological argument which blooms into the conclusion, in short, that because one cannot dispute that he can conceive of a supreme being; a supreme being must exist. Though Plato does not go this route, his contention agrees that to conceive of a transcendent Form beyond our natural world, is to inherently necessitate its existence, and that by making the observation that as things in this world bear resemblance to such abstract notions as equality, is to prove that all knowledge of these things is a function of recalling them from an a priori communion with their Form.

Plato desires to use his theory of recollection as the proof which solidifies the existence of Forms and consequentially implies an immortal, transcendent nature of the soul even if nothing can be concluded about the nature of the longevity of the soul. In light of the originally mentioned vulnerabilities of such thinking, it seems sophomoric to say that the most important criticisms here are that Plato fails to answer how it is that the soul originally exists in order to relate to such Forms. And it is additionally superficial to find it constructive to say that this philosophy fails where Plato doesn’t propose a complete system for understanding how and why something in this world could and should embody an inferior Form of itself. These points are ancillary chidings which only allude to the incomprehensible nature of our complex existence which ends up giving the philosophy more credit than it deserves.

Beyond Plato’s validly suspicious assumption that the origin of knowledge must come through a recollection of a prior relationship to transcendent Forms, these thoughts are very interesting and should be taken seriously but only in the context that it is one of many possibilities rather than a freestanding proof. It is the other more plausible and even the exceedingly mystical alternatives of modern epistemology which throw Plato’s contention of proof into the quagmire of competing theory. One diametrically opposed view to this epistemology, but with many salient tenants, is that of modern existentialist Michel Foucault. Foucault argues that every human being, without being able to control it, enters into an existence without any fixed point of reference other than the current cultural context. And that, though time, history shows that all that has been done in the name of reaching a more enlightened understanding of the knowledge of human nature has been a regurgitation and reinvention of the same application of ideas and terms which were borrowed from some other point in history. Foucault, though having many problems with this view as well, has just as validly replaced Plato’s need for transcendence with an ignorant adaptation of history’s terms, definitions and values. Just for means of comparison, Foucault wishes to remove the individual from the marginalizing effects of such assumed and inherited ideas of knowledge by emphasizing the importance of the individual to create an original perspective concerning the nature of concepts so that it is the human cause that is progressed rather than the stagnation that has resulted in the preoccupation of generations to cling to enshrined ideas purported by past philosophers who claimed to have the proofs concerning the truth of what we know and how to go about knowing it. And briefly, another, though more fanciful idea about how we come to know things, is the theory of collective consciousness. Collective consciousness is an idea that wildly, but plausibly, adapts Leibniz’s metaphysics (that all of existence is connected by spiritual/biological cells called monads) and that these monads complexly react to each other throughout all that are so composed, linking every brain in some degree or another. Through this philosophy, it is believed that all of our knowledge is really shared (arguably in complex energy packets called photons receivable by the monad) subconsciously, eternally and continuously in relation with the ultimate monad called Lambda. Wild and unconventional as this latter philosophy may seem, it shares many obvious parallels and defining distinctions with Plato’s conjectures, and yet is just as plausible as the theory of recollection (especially if one invites the findings of the theoretical possibility of such waves and their receipt).

You may think that Plato’s was right, or it may be the case that our seemingly inherent sense of concepts are only a complex, naturalistic manifestation and evolution of the human brain. What is clear, however, is that it is human nature to be curious about the relationship of concepts to our existence and to discover the different implications along the way, but to date there is no proof, and humanity does not have to bear Plato’s mark as brilliant an option as it is. I see no need for conclusion here, actually. On a matter as important as this I think it is alright to treat certainty as an illusion.

Foucault

What is Continental Philosophy? Can anyone give me an exhaustive understanding of this branch of philosophy?

As finals, and the semester, come to a close I plan on reading as much Continental Philosophy as I can. Shayan and Ray... I know you both have read a fair amount in this area and would appreciate yours and everyone else's suggestions.

Here and there I have been building notes and an outline concerning Michel Foucault and his works (pirmarily Madness and Civilization, since I haven't exhausted the work and am hesitant to move on until I do). It is sort of a hobby and I would like to share some of this and invite thoughts about my representation of Foucault and his ideas.

Foucault Bio:

Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, on June 15, 1926.

Foucault became academically established in the 1960’s and went on to hold numerous and varied positions in top French Universities (also to include a stint at UC Berkeley in 1983) before he finished out his career as the Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the College de France, this latter position is still considered one of the highest academic positions in French education. Primarily concerned with the histories and related impacts of medicine and social sciences, Foucault’s passions lead him to protest on behalf of homosexuals and other groups he felt were marginalized in society. Foucault died in Paris on June 25^th, 1984 due to complications of the AIDS virus.

Foucault’s Most Notable Works:

“Madness and Civilization” (1961)

“The Order of Things” (1966)

“The Order of Discourse” (1971)

“The History of Sexuality” published in three volumes:

Vol. I: An Introduction [1976]

Vol. II: The Use of Pleasure [1984]

Vol. III: The Care of the Self [1984]

“Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology” (1998)

“Power” (2000)

Timeline of Madness:

~The Medieval Period: leprosy fades in prevalence and madness assumes its station in society. Madness is seen as having a dark connection with (if not inspired by) the divine. Society’s attitude toward madness in this period is marked by a curious admiration.

~The Renaissance: The 17^th Century’s full integration of madness into society; art and literature give it a voice.

FOCUS: Classical Period: 1660-19^th Century

~Foucault sees this period as giving birth to many of the lasting states of our modernity.

~Period of “Confinement” dawns with the building of the Hospital General in 1656 and with a cultural shift in practice and attitude towards madness. Madness shifts from a tolerated part of society to a threat to society’s organization, safety and progress. Society changes its identity as a result of its relation to madness.

Terms relative to Foucault’s interpretation of the Classical Period:

“Confinement:” practice, specific to the 18^th century, whereby society creates a space for social deviants to be locked up, silenced and excluded from society. Included in the list of “deviants” were: criminals, the unproductive poor and the perceived mad. Confinement, like many of Foucault’s categories and definitions, is better understood as a condition of society’s attitude toward deviance and madness rather than a physical condition of bondage or natural phenomenon. The Hospital General became a physical representation of the contrast of society’s shift in attitudes between the 17^th century’s integration of madness and “unreason,” and the 18^th century’s desire to exclude and silence it.

“Madness:” is essentially defined by Foucault as being within the construction and control of the intellectual and cultural forces which operate within society. The treatment of the mad depends fundamentally on how they are perceived. Therefore madness is not a fixed concept which natural phenomena can explain. Madness is always defined against society’s current attitudes and ideas about reason and rationality. In the middle ages, madness was associated with dark secrets and visions of the end of the world; in the classical period it was confined along with other forms of social deviance and lost its “exclusive status.” The modern idea of madness as a treatable mental disease developed from nineteenth century ideas of madness as a kind of moral evil.

“Unreason:” has somewhat of a relationship to madness in that it, too, is a non-static term defined in relation to reason. Foucault calls “unreason” reason “dazzled”. It seems that he means to say that “reason dazzled” is an alternative perspective of experience and reality which can be a symptom of madness or can also be completely distinct from it.

“Delirium:” the general move away from reason (by whatever cause) and made sustainable by a “discourse.”

“Discourse:” central to most of Foucault’s work: a totaled system of knowledge which makes certain statements either true or false. Ex: A madman’s discourse is “especially powerful” citing that it consistently allows the subject’s deviance to be sustained.

“Police:” defined by Foucault as dealing with an ideological set of practices meant to facilitate work and to protect the interests of work and the “order” it provides society. Work as being inherently “good” rose primarily as a Christian theme. Madmen and the practitioners of unreason consistently contrast to this idea of society.

~Role of the Passions:

“The possibility of madness is therefore implicit in the very phenomenon of passion.”

~M. Foucault, “Madness and Civilization”

***(Cartesian link between mind and body (soul and body), thus allowing madness???)

~19^th Century: Characterized by the end of “classical confinement” and an additional shift in attitude toward madness, making it a condition of moral evil and “treatable” in asylums by the employment of religiously influenced power relationships between doctor and patient.

Source Voices of Foucault’s madmen: King Lear, Artaud, Nietzsche and more…

“Since the end of the nineteenth century, unreason no longer manifests itself except in the lightning flash of works such as those of Hoederlin, of Nerval, of Nietzsche, or of Artaud.”

~Foucault, “Madness and Civilization”

Foucault’s Conclusions about Madness and Civilization:

Foucault claims that we don’t listen to the voice of the madman, that psychoanalysis and all other forms of “treatment” used under the guise of a positive “confinement” are a façade and a symptom of how we are bound to the paradigms of a particular era.

Foucault sees the relationship of art to madness as being the only avenue through which “unreason” and “madness” can surface to be understood and appreciated even considering the efforts of the aforementioned medical structures to hide it. Foucault also claims that art attempts to “fight against the world” and to reconcile the balance between madness and society by “asking the world disturbing questions and requiring answers.” This provides a stark contrast to the solution proposed by modern psychiatrists and psychologists who impose a perspective of moral judgment onto their captive subjects. Madness exists in the undercurrent of society in the works of mad authors and should be considered in such light to find relevance rather than to have it marginalized.

Implications for a Critique of Historical Reason: ??

With this perspective involving the historical analysis of the reason of society, Foucault hijacks the project of modern epistemology from the hands of Kant.

:::::::ITEMS TO EXPAND:::::

Form a chart from: Descartes to Foucault Does

Foucault stand Kant on his head??

General Controversy & Critique:

Historical Inaccuracy: The Ship of Fools?

Preferential sampling: artists & their interesting products are Foucault’s focus

~the mundane “madman” seems uninteresting to Foucault

~calls into question the universality of Foucault’s picture of the madman

Gen. Note~Foucault’s sentence structure can be very cloudy and unclear: intended to let the reader experience the “discourse” of the madman? or simply an inability to write clearly due to an affinity for obscurity?

Brings to mind Nietzsche:

"Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water."

~Nietzsche....aphorisms, source???

BIO POWER:

“Bio-Power” becomes Foucault’s ultimate existential conclusion which attempts to synthesize all his works. Through the synthesis all of his work, Foucault wants us to see that what and who you think you are in your heart as person and as people in a society is nothing more than an evolution of contingent historical factors. He sees the incorporation of the individual’s needs for passion, comfort and accomplishment into the state, as an empowering affirmation of life. This is the potential “bio-power” that modern politics posses to emerge from judgments and repression of the individual, into an era which transcends the chain of historical contingency.

In Support of MLK's Love of Enemies

We started off our class with King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, and I though I love King's rhetoric, I think it mostly serves to subtly warp his logic into emotive force for his point. Plato would have a problem here with King if he were to view, as I do, that King's dabbles in Sophistry from time to time and- even being a philosophy major- he tends to handicap his fierce logical mind with a pre-occupation with a particular locality of interest.

However, I recently read a speech that King gave about loving your enemies and I greatly agree with his intuitive insights.

Here, I treat King unto himself. In a later blog I will want to compare Aristotle and King in this area of loving your enemies.

King delves into his process for “loving thy enemy” as prescribed by Christ in the Book of Matthew. His method starts with self evaluation citing that loving an enemy is intrinsically related to self analysis. This is the type of self analysis that is introspectively aware, delicately yoked and honest enough to admit that it may be responsible for the very actions that have incited the contempt of an enemy. Starting from this vantage, it is easy to see where King is moving with this and how his model of “love” has global implications especially in context of the tumultuous political and social conditions of his era. King’s next step is to contend that it is inherent to contain goodness being created in the image of God, and that to overcome the obvious hurdles involved with loving an enemy, the individual must seek and dwell upon whatever shard of goodness lies within the enemy as it is “within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good”. Now, essentially, we are to put this love into practice by proving our heartfelt understanding of “goodwill for all men” by “refusing to defeat any individual” when the opportunity presents itself. This has a parallel in the modern, mainstream religious maxim: “love the sinner, hate the sin.” For King, this is accomplished though his highest form of love: “love of others for God’s sake”, which he borrowed from Plato and “Bernard of Clavicaux.” Though it is agreeable that this is a plausible plan for transforming perspective into humanistic love, the problem of its obvious lack of modern application lies within the tendency to be abstract and paradoxically objectifying of the actual individual. When the individual is loved for the sake of something else, it is causal that the individual is not loved for his reasons alone. Most anything becomes lovable in the abstract where an idea of the person is conjured to take the place of his existential qualities. Though King’s system requires much adherence, the objectifying and abstraction of love for people stands as an obvious impediment to its universal presence today. King does not stop here. The impact that hate has on the “hater” is described by King as to turn inside out the very perspective and values of the individual. And it makes experiential sense that a preoccupation with things that an individual hates is really more telling of that individual than it is of those things. King contends in his speech that even what was ugly to the person turns beautiful and what was hailed as bad becomes the good. Conversely, it appears true that love has the power to build individuals. This provides sounds experiential reason for finding ways to avoid hate and to love your enemy. The anecdote posited by King referring to Abraham Lincoln seems to embody King’s philosophy of love here while cleverly (though it may not have been his intention) turning the popular phrase “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” into a fanciful oxymoron.

Freud and Nietzsche: Where's the Vulnerability?...that other 1/2 of our Nature?

Where Nietzsche sees the perversion of the authentic human instinct to express its will as occurring at the moment where individuals subjugated their autonomous powers in the form of contracts with each other, the psychological insights of Sigmund Freud become relevant. In Future of an Illusion, Freud sites that such a contract between individuals would constitute a society and that all societies are “built up on coercion and renunciation of instinct.” As implied by Nietzsche, and made explicit by Freud, societies, by their very definition, force their constituents to renounce their instinctual drives by subjugating personal autonomy to an external will. Freud’s psychoanalysis contends that the act of subjugation by society is accomplished through a “prohibition,” which is a regulation that disallows the “satisfaction of an instinct.” When an instinct is not allow to be satisfied, it “frustrates” the individual leading to conditions of “privation” which are internalized as “kernels of hostility toward civilization.” Though Nietzsche’s polemic devices are intended to warn humanity that it risks sterilizing its own will to power, thus providing for its own extinction, he can also be seen as agreeing with Freud in that, underneath the centuries of synthetic moral practice, the future health of humanity depends on the ability for a generation of human animals to “conquer God” through the work of the same psychological devices that subjected us to him. Freud and Nietzsche essentially want the same thing. Freud, too, would like to free humanity from its slave-like adherence to religious morality by absolving the human psyche in the realization that religion, and god, are psychological illusions.