Author: Philosophics

Philosopher of language and author of speculative fiction

Ambiguous Aesthetics

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That language is arbitrary is tautological, an analytic claim. It’s true by definition. Structuralists, i.e. Saussure, had known this even before the postmoderns, e.g. Derrida, came into the picture.

Trigger Warning
If sexist perspectives offend your sensibilities, continue at your own risk. This is not meant to offend, rather just to illustrate, but you’ve been forewarned.

Where it might be most apparent is in aesthetics. So, when describing the appearance of a woman in a positive light—I’m a guy, so indulge me, please—, one might describe her by one or more of these descriptors:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
  • Adorable
  • Beautiful
  • Cute (or Kawaii, if you’re into the Anime culture)
  • Gorgeous
  • Handsome
  • Hot
  • Lovely
  • Pretty
  • Sexy
  • A 10 (or something along an otherwise arbitrary if not capricious scale)

Each of these is a term to indicate some aesthetic quality. Each capturing a connotative notion, and of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Givenchy – Ugly Beauty

Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

David Hume

I am not going to attempt to illustrate the nuances between these terms. As with any preference-oriented terms, the relationship between and within a given term. What I think is beautiful may not be to you.

What I think is beautiful today, I may not feel is beautiful tomorrow. Speaking in terms of music, there are plenty of songs I thought were ‘good’ when I was growing up, but I don’t like them anymore. Take a look at fashion in the past and how silly it might look now. If you are older, take a look at some pictures of how you dressed in your teens or twenties. You may have felt like quite the chick magnet in the day, and now you cringe and no longer wonder why you spent as many nights alone as you might have.

As a test, gather 100 images of different, say, women—I’m staying with the trend—and rank them from 1 to 100; rate them cute, sexy, whatever. Record your choices. Do this each day for a month and see how steady your choices are. It will be extremely unlikely that there will be no variation no matter how carefully you try to define your classification to remain consistent—and this is just communicating with yourself. Now imagine if you have to consistently convey this to other people.

Cover image courtesy of this article.

Paradox

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3–4 minutes

How can one simultaneously be an SJW (Social Justice Warrior) and be a non-cognitivist? How can one who doesn’t believe in the notion of identity nonetheless defend it? How can someone who doesn’t believe in the notion of justice seek it? And how can a conscientious objector apply a ‘warrior’ title to his own identity?

(Viscerally, I am an SJW—at least I consider myself so (because I just said so, right?). As a non-cognitivist, in particular, an emotivist (Ayer), an expressivist (Moore), and a prescriptivist (Hare), why should I care? And isn’t this somewhat paradoxical or perhaps hypocritical?

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

I used to consider myself an Existentialist Nihilist, and I still have a fondness for this particular worldview. In many ways, at a more mundane, pragmatic level, I operate as an Existentialist, but that’s only because, in the realm of workaday political philosophy, one cannot be so ethereal, as it were.

Even though I don’t believe in any higher purpose for humans or life, I still have an urge for survival, and I recognise that no man is an island, that there is safety in numbers. At least this is my adopted metanarrative. I don’t feel that I am some rugged individual. I rely on others, and I’d prefer amicable relationships over adversarial.

I’ve always valued a sense of personal identity and autonomy, but only as an emotional response. I’ve also never felt the urge to control the identity co-opted by others. This means that if you are gay, straight, trans, pan, or whatever, it doesn’t matter to me.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Jesus, Sermon on the Mount

If you are a CIS-male and want to wear a dress or enhance your breasts, it’s none of my concern.

FULL DISCLOSURE
Although I respect a person’s choice to, say, be trans in whatever shape or form, I don’t consider myself to be pansexual, so I wouldn’t presume that I am going to date that person. Whether this is a prejudice or preference, I am not going to argue the semantics.

Anyhoo….

Despite understanding that identity doesn’t ‘really’ exist and in the end, it doesn’t even matter, I will (and do) vocally defend the ‘right’ of a person to express this identity.

So, perhaps also paradoxically or hypocritically, I’ll comment on someone’s fashion sense —and trust me; I am no fashion maven. So just because I won’t deprive you of your ‘right’ to express yourself the way you chose does not mean I have no opinion (positive or negative) about how you present yourself, and it doesn’t mean that I won’t make a joke or make light of how you express. I am not a fan of politically correct (PC) speech, a trend American Liberals are on the wrong side of.

Intersex Person

In the end, there is the space of objective reality and the space of workaday life. For some accident of history and evolution, I have been thrust into a world where I need to interact with people who believe there is more then there actually is and they subscribe to some metanarrative. Unfortunately, unlike Neo in the Matrix, I am not able to cut through the bullshit, and so my dominant strategy is just to play around. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

As an emotivist, I am an SJW because it is visceral to me.

As an expressivist, your sense of morality expressed through mores and customs hold no water, and I won’t abide by the restrictions they impose.

As a prescriptivist, I think that you should share my emotion in the spirit of do unto others…

Interestingly enough (or not), I am a fairly typical (albeit eccentric) white male. My self-expression differs more in my beliefs and speech than in my physical person or attire. Talk to me for more than a few moments, and this will become immediately apparent.

Freedom is just another word…

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1–2 minutes

Many of us grew up hearing Janis Joplin belt out the words from Me and Bobby McGee, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing else to lose’, but freedom is just another word.

Didn’t I just write a post on freedom the other day? Why, yes; in fact, I did, but I was responding to a post on a different social media outlet, so I wanted to extend that position here.

Many Americans confuse the notions of freedom and liberty. Freedom might as well just be another word for nothing else to lose, but it’s just some nonsensical archetypal promise. Freedom is part of the American Dream
— another pipe dream. I remember George Carlin’s comment that it has to be the American Dream because you’d have to be asleep to believe it. Yet, so many do. I suppose the question might be how humans can be so gullible, but then I see that marketing and propaganda are effective tactics, so I rescind my line of inquiry.

Give me liberty or give me death.

Patrick Henry, Dead American Dude

Another favourite word of Americans is liberty, as in ‘Give me liberty or give me death. Whilst liberty is some nebulous concept. Liberty is simply what a government (or power structure) allows its constituents to do. It has nothing to do with freedom. It’s about leftovers.

Patrick Henry, Dead American Dude

In political philosophy, there is an ongoing conversation about positive and negative liberties. This confounds the situation because it is typically couched as freedom to and freedom from. Freedom to is based somewhat on the concept of free will and autonomy whilst freedom from is about restrictions on behaviours. These two freedoms are not only mutually exclusive in some domains, but some positive freedoms are also actually paradoxical to themselves.

Is Pogonotrophy a Scourge on Society?

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I learnt a new word today: pogonotrophy. So, I decided to take it upon this new threat to society as we know it: pogon worship, a modern-day scourge.

Ian McKellen – Gandalf

It all started when I happened upon the Quartzy port, A Philosopher Wrote an Academic Paper on the Ethics of Growing a Beard.

My ‘research’ took me on a tour of pogonotomy and pogonophora, a world that until now I had not been previously exposed, yet not quite enough to inspire me to follow the path to pogonology.

Full disclosure: I only perused the article and did not pursue the submitted paper, so any commentary is not on the source—merely a reference thereto.

Ernest Hemmingway

So, this is a nonsensical post. Je m’accuse. I am no fan of beards or the hipsters  more categorically who sport them. Sure, some men look decent in beards—old, distinguished lot. I’m not talking the iconic yet ridiculous Abe Lincoln beard. Perhaps the weathered sea captain. 

I’m done. Nothing to see here. Move along… 

Cry Freedom

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Freedom is just another weasel word undergirding many post-Enlightenment constitutions. In this metanarrative, Man needs freedom. It’s another inalienable right.


Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
Jacques Cousteau

Religion is the opitate of the masses

Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Karl Marx wrote something along the lines that ‘religion is the opiate of the masses’, Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes. He was correct, but the masses have more than one drug of choice. Freedom, independence, identity, sovereignty, and a plethora of others.

What is a plethora? Three Amigos (video clip)

Freedom is mind candy for the feeble-minded, a silly remnant of anachronistic Age of Enlightenment. To believe in freedom is to believe in Santa Claus, gods, and unicorns. I’ve got a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

Don’t fall for it. It’s a trap!

It’s a Trap! Star Wars

Find Yourself

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Find your self. What is this self you are searching for, and who is you in the first place?

You and self are taxonomical references—conveniences—, yet they don’t actually exist.


πάντα ῥεῖ : The only constant is change

Heraclitus of Ephesus

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy rules. Things decay. We can see this in the great structures of our ancient past. Try as we may, without energy, everything falls apart.

There is no you. The you that was born is not the same you that attended kindergarten, that graduated high school, dated, worked, or died. Even in a short span of time, you switch personae. Can you be multiple yous simultaneously? Are you only expressing some instance or another? I’m not buying it.

No one ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same person

Plato, attributed to Heraclitus

When Heraclitus said that no man ever steps into the same river twice, it’s not only the river that has changed; the person has changed, too. It’s not the same person.

Woman in River

For the sake of convenience, we create this sense of identity, whether for ourselves or for others we want to categorise in some form or fashion. But they aren’t the same either.

It’s like the physical object that appears to be solid and yet is more space than material. It’s a matter of convenience, but it’s a trompe l’oeil. Yet again, your senses have deceived you.

Does this impact survival or some evolutionary progression? Apparently not. Not if you are here to read this. But that doesn’t make it real. Perception is reality.

But what about identity politics? Can’t a person choose their own identity? Sure. Choose away. It doesn’t it real.

When you search for yourself, you may actually find something, but what you find is not likely you.

I’ve written about the difference between sex and gender. Both are taxonomical creations. Whether a society accepts the distinction between sexes, genders, or even of the distinction of sex and gender is up to that society.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Simone de Beauvoir, Second Sex

As with sex and gender, identity is a social construct. As such, its acceptance into a society is yet again a rhetorical effort.

Defending Democracy

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2–3 minutes

Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. 

Sir Winston Chirchill

I am not a defender of or apologist for Democracy. Any system is only as strong as its weakest link, but save for the rhetorical promises Democracy is nothing but weak links. Turtles all the way down. It’s another failed Enlightenment experiment. Sure, you can argue that the Ancient Greeks invented democracy—or at least implemented it at any scale—, but specious Enlightenment ideals pushed it forward into the mainstream.

The Achilles’ heel of Democracy is the principle-agent problem, the same one that separates management (CEOs) from owners (shareholders). Incentives are different.

Achilles’ Heel

Plato published his solution is Republic, but this proposal was naive at best. The notion that meritocracy is something real or that we can appropriately understand dimensions and measures in order to create the right incentives is another weak link.

Plato’s Republic

We see the same problem controlling elected officials. Time and again, we elect them, and time and again, they disappoint. We, the People, are the principles, and the elected are our agents. People in the US (and in so-called ‘democratic’ societies) have the vote, and yet—per the oft-cited definition of insanity—, they perform the same action and continue to expect different results; in fact; they are always surprised). At its core, it’s an incentive and accountability problem.

Kenneth Arrow wrote about the Impossibility Theorem, where he proved mathematically that no voting system would yield optimal results. Democracy is cursed with mediocrity. We like to soft-pedal the notion of mediocrity with the euphemism of compromise, another Ancient Greek legacy of moderation. If this makes you feel better, who am I to break the delusion? Cognitive dissonance is a powerful palliative.

μηδέν άγαν

Do Nothing in Excess, Delphic Oracle Inscription

Interestingly enough, many people clamour for term limits (a subversion of democracy) because they can’t help themselves from voting for the same shit politicians over and again. They rationalise it and say it is to defend against the other guy’s vote because they’d have never voted for shit representation.

This is often couched as ‘save me from myself’, but it is just as aptly cast as ‘save me from democracy’. I suppose a heroin addict might have the same thoughts.

Homo Hubris

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2–3 minutes

I’ve been engaging in a bit of friendly dialogue countering a claim citing the demise of atheism with a mate (Neal Mack) at a blog named The scientific case against evolution, but I’ve decided to pose some points here so I can leverage some of my expended energy on my own content.

Although I don’t believe in the supernatural or metaphysical, I’ve got no dog in the race as to how others believe. Where I draw the line, though, is where religious doctrine seeps into the realm of political philosophy, jurisprudence, and governance because then it’s not about a ‘personal relationship’ with God. It’s about imposing that God upon me.

Parent scolding child

As the sayings go, if you feel abortion is wrong, then don’t have one; if you don’t approve of gay marriage, then don’t marry a same-sex partner; if you don’t believe that two (or more) adults should be able to engage in safe, sane, and consentual sexual acts, then don’t participate; if you don’t believe that a woman should be able to earn money from sex, then don’t pay her any; and on and on and on and on…


if you don’t approve of gay marriage, then don’t marry a same-sex partner

But don’t impose your sense of morality on me. Keep it to yourself. If it were up to me, I would prefer that there be no religion and no superstition outside of the domain of fiction. But a key reason that these things even work in fiction is the sense that they could be or might be true. It fits into the evolutionary psychology the got humans to where we are instead of withering and dying on the evolutionary vine. But give us time. Homo sapiens sapiens is a relatively young species, and they appear on course to extinguish themselves relatively soon anyway, making all of this moot. Perhaps a more fitting name would have been Homo hubris.

I’ll keep this post short, as I’ve got nothing new to add, and it’s getting late. If you’ve read my other posts, you’ll know that I am a non-cognitivist, and I don’t believe in any objective truth. I also understand—and as Nietzsche pointed out—the difficulty in forming a cohesive society without this orientation and supporting meta-narrative. Yet, this is not my problem.

Love is a Word

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Love is a concept by which we measure our pain.

John Lennon — God

Love is an archetype. It’s a word we’ve created to express the notion of caring off the charts, on steroids. We throw it around and over-use it for many purposes. Generally, love is amorphic and expansive. In the typical scenario, a mother with a loved-child who bears another loves them both equally, but it’s not part of some arithmetic function where each child gets half an equal dose each. Love defies any notion of conservation of energy. Both children receive equal shares of the same quantity of love that the first received.

The Beatles – All You Need Is Love

The ancient Greeks had several words to express love.

Storge (στοργή)

Storge is the love we have for community, for family, for our children and spouses. Storge is not romantic love. It is more a love of affection and tenderness. It may be the basis for the urge toward tribalism and nationalism, and it may have a sort of analogue to gravity, wherein the proximity of the source, the greater the attraction. This is where ‘blood is thicker than water’ and why I like my sports team better than yours.

Storge – love of family

Agape (ἀγάπη)

Agape is a sort of universal love, the selfless love of biblical reference of God and all of his children. Neither is agape a romantic notion. It is akin to charity, and the connection of transcending storge to include all of the world and ignoring the silos of tribalism. There appears to be a tension between agape and storge because one cannot have an equal love for all whilst retaining a greater love for one’s own tribe. Perhaps the notion is more aspirational than practicable.

Agape – Universal love

Philia (φιλία)

Philia is fraternal (to be more inclusive, perhaps also sororal) love, the brotherly love hoped to be inspired by the city of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. This is an affectionate love, typically between equals. Again, philia has no romantic basis.

Philia – Sororal love

Eros (ἔρως)

Eros is notably erotic love; sexual love; intimate, passionate love; lust. Eros is ephemeral. Returning to physics, eros requires a lot of energy to maintain. In a typical setting, eros moderates to storge or pragma.

Plato believed that this love was transcendent of the body—and so could exist independently of body—, but I’ll not give heed to this metaphysical notion. Perhaps, this is where the notion of soulmates derives. This is a romantic love.

Ludus

Ludus is a lightweight version or precursor to erotic love. It is the playful, flirtatious nature expressed by young proto-lovers. Viewed teleologically, ludus may be seen as a stepping stone to eros, but not everyone makes it successfully to the final level.

Full disclosure: Ludus is Latin and not of Greek original.

Pragma (πράγμα)

Obviously, pragma is a pragmatic love. This is the love that remains to bond a pair who have remained together for years, say, an old married couple. This form either requires a lot of energy and compromise or a lot of apathy or indifference.

Older couple demonstrate pragma

Philautia

Philautia is a love of one’s self. It’s a portmanteau of philia + auto. As the saying goes, if you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone. As with most adages, they is as often true as not and require additional context to assess. Philautia should not be confused with narcissism, which may more properly be classified as a mania. It should also not be confused by onanism.

Philautia – Love of one’s self

Love will tear us apart… again.

Joy Division

Mania (μανία)

Some people include mania in their love collection. Mania is simply an unbalanced sort of love; obsessive love; eros gone wild.

Love has many meanings, but they are all about connecting. Perhaps, I am being hasty to dismiss the term, but it is overused and perhaps more phatic than genuine. In the parlance of Foucault, it’s a power phrase—especially in the erotic arena—, a means to manipulate.

This blog post was about mania, but I’ll link it nonetheless.

Image source: Colour Wheel of Love: By Kaitlindzurenko – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45330870

A New Decalogue

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1–2 minutes

Bertrand Russell published a New York Times piece in 1951 outlining his own 10 commandments.

1: Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2: Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3: Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

4: When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5: Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6: Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7: Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8: Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9: Be scrupulously truthful, even when truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Although I don’t agree with all of these, I won’t challenge them here. On balance, they are words to live by.