Generative Aesthetics

I saw this post on Larval Subjects (http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/video-games-gender-and-regimes-of-attraction/) and thought that Peirce already has the basis of a "generative aesthetic."  The triad is generative, and Peirce means it to be a minimal basis of (Kantianish in the early works) categories.

I was thinking, but you also get that in Dewey ... its what I'm working on.  The morphology of aesthetics as the proximate learned basis of an aesthetic is "culture," which as a term signifies linguistically, symbolically, materially, etc. as culture is an activity of nature.  For Peirce--and I would add for Dewey--semiosis is the living of the aesthetic.  It is its generativity.

Musing on Objects and Relations

Once again, I'm thinking out loud again, although this time Leon of After Nature (http://afterxnature.blogspot.com/) is thinking with me as he is an accomplished scholar and I am entering the discourse from a right angle--from Dewey and his appropriations of Peirce.  What motivated the discussion is that the "object" in Object-Oriented philosophy appears to be a stand-in for substance to me, and Leon, being far more knowledgeable, does not discount this view.

I follow the view that "objects" are roughly equivalent to their powers.  Hence, the distinction is about emergence and temporality/history; there is an event in which novel powers emerge due to a concordance of conditions (relations and other objects) that become an "object"; Whitehead calls this "concrescence."  I am assuming an emergentist naturalism in which possibility is an equiprimordial modality of being, per Peirce.


My interest, apart from the process/speculative realism crowd, is to systematically construct a pragmatism phenomenology that incorporates process metaphysics.  This ain't yo Momma's Husserl.

On relations--riffing off Leon--a relation implies that the individuated integrity of an event ("object" if you insist)  is significantly informed by what it is related to.  "Relation" is just an analytical term denoting this.  Also, relations specify possibilities of relations, i.e., emergent teloi.  Btw, by "power" I mean a variant of Aristotelian potentia by which "power" implies a triad of 1) capacity, 2) ongoing activity, and 3) realization (entelechy).  By "possiblity," I mean not logical possibility but "existential" or "real" possibility by which a future event is on the horizon of possibility of the present moment because the present, localized actual existence contains the conditions for its immanent actualization.  However, if chance is equiprimordial to actuality, per Peirce and against many, then we cannot say that the temporal or spatial ordering will occur to actualize any possibility in the immediate horizon.

Process vs. Objects

I have been musing upon the differences between process (process relational?) and object-oriented philosophy, as I have just encountered the contemporary versions of them.  Here, I am thinking out loud and in public while trying to figure out what is meant by the terms, as I have been reading short guide after introductory guide.  I stumbled upon process thought through Dewey and subsequently Peirce, and have discovered that I have been wholesale re-inventing much scholarship that had already been done.  Hence, now I am playing catch-up.

From what I've gathered on some differences between "process-relational" and "object-oriented" philosophy, one is a difference in emphasis on what is ultimate and its status.  I'll speak from my own Deweyan position that is encrusted with Peirce and years of mathematical training.  For instance, what I get about the "object" is that it "withdraws" and maintains a hiddenness from its relations that is not reducible to them.  This sort-of contrasts with a process view wherein relations are internally constitutive such that to be is to be related (else we can say nothing of it, which is to say that it doesn't exist, and we have little to say about modalities of being that do not exist and are not related), although there is an ontological difference between an the emergent actualization and its conditions.  (I believe this is called an actual occasion in Whitehead, yet I lack sufficient mastery to assert that.)  What confuses me about the difference is that I do not see the basis to claim that an object "withdraws" from its relations unless one presumes that the object has some special ontological status not granted by its constitutive conditions.  While I am will to allow emergence (~creativity) and epistemic limitation, I cannot help but think that this view is vestigial substance metaphysics.  That is, there remains a wish for a fundamental unit of determinate identity, the object, whereas a relational/temporal/historical view of (individuated) identity spreads it out.  For example, a relational identity can be designated in terms of an atemporal function (not recommended as isomorphisms will predominate), or in terms of ordered transformation (less problematic) that requires a historical concept of identity.  The latter could be described as a telos, but I don't see how any version of teleology would work unless it were Aristotelian, in which case teloi are directly causal.  (If what I mean isn't obvious, this will take some explaining of in what way teloi are causal vs. emergent.)  Regardless, the alternatives that immediately come to mind for identity all destroy anything like an "essential" conception of identity, which is what I presume is wanted of the "object" in object-oriented.

In conclusion, my hunch about object-oriented philosophy is that there's a want for determinate identity or some determinate basic ontological unit.

Discussion of Gender, Sex, and (Social) Construction at New APPS

http://www.newappsblog.com/

Against Misconstruals of Phenomenology

Many analytic philosophers treat experience as a medium through which to achieve knowledge of the world, where truth lies as the referent of our propositions.  None of this matches a phenomenological view, wherein experience cannot be treated as a medium.  We never go beyond experience to validate our references, because to do so would imply going beyond all sensibility whatsoever.  All the validations and experiments are still experiences, both de facto and de jure.  Classical phenomenologists, particularly Husserl, were concerned that there was no science of the phenomenon, roughly named "experience," despite its being the basis for all knowledge.  However, since experience is what is ultimately immediate to us, no account can include anything that is not present in experience.  The counter-claim to many analytics is that they replace both actual experience and a rigorous descriptive science of experience with a theory of experience, where the latter is accorded truth.  But this makes experience a concept rather than a living experience, and we might as well be living in Berkeley's world of floating ideas.  Dewey called this the "philosopher's fallacy."

For simplicity, I have simplified some terms, e.g., Husserl would more likely describe his work as a science of consciousness rather than "experience."

Against -Isms: Thinking Philosophy

I'm against -Isms.

My entry into the crusade was occasioned by Thomas Alexander, who despises them.  I will tell you my reasons why in a case example, something I'm working on.

I plan to present a counter-argument to a recent author's thesis.  My primary critique can be simplified to this: the author claims that these folks are for this -ism, which is in contradiction with these other -isms, but the author equivocates multiple times for every -ism introduced.  The author is not just wrong, but erroneously conflates so many concepts that I question whether the work is disingenuous.

I see this all the time, especially between cross-tradition work.  (That's another post--my fervent insistence that philosophers recognize traditions and the implications of philosophy being tradition-bound; denial is like refusing to admit one has a mother.)  Frequently in other cases, I will engage in cross-tradition conversations that constantly run afoul of terminology, but none so pernicious as the "umbrella terms," especially -isms.  Using these terms is not per se bad, but using them without being able to define them and distinguish their varied denotations--all too common in my experience--is a pernicious unthinking.

Wisdom from Camus: Evil Comes From Ignorance

I share Albert Camus' view that "evil nearly always comes from ignorance."  Some other time I will explain why I believe this, but more importantly, how.  From The Plague:

"But the narrator is rather tempted to believe that in giving much importance to good actions, one yields finally an indirect hommage and power to evil. Because we are allowed to suppose then that these good actions have not much of a price because they are rare and that the viciousness and indifference are the drives most frequent in the actions of men. That is an idea that the narrator does not share. The evil that is in the world comes nearly always from ignorance, and the good will can do as much damage as viciousness, if it is not illuminated. Men are rather good than bad, and in truth this is not the question. But they ignore more or less, and this is what one names virtue or vice, the vice the most despairing being those of ignorance that believe to know all and who thus make it possible to kill. The spirit of the murderer is blind and there is not a true goodness nor of beautiful love without all possible perceptiveness. (124)


Albert Camus, La Peste. Gallimard, 2007.  My translation.


"le mal vient presque toujours de l’ignoranceMais le narrateur est plutôt tente de croire qu’en donnant trop d’importance aux belles actions, on rend finalement un hommage indirect et puissant au mal. Car on laisse supposer alors que ces belles actions n’ont tant de prix que parce qu’elles sont rares et que la méchanceté et l’indifférence sont des moteurs bien plus fréquents dans les actions des hommes. C’est la une idée que le narrateur ne partage pas. Le mal qui est dans le monde vient presque toujours de l’ignorance, et la bonne volonté peut faire autant de dégâts que la méchanceté, si elle n’est pas éclairée. Les hommes sont plutôt bons que mauvais, et en vérité ce n’est pas la question. Mais ils ignorent plus ou moins, et c’est ce qu’on appelle vertu ou vice, le vice le plus désespérant étant celui de l’ignorance qui croit tout savoir et qui autorise alors a tuer. L’ame du meurtrier est aveugle et il n’y a pas de vraie bonté ni de belle amour sans toute la clairvoyance possible. (124)