nonsensical responses

First I'll try to say a bunch of things in response to your posts. Then, time permitting, I'll try to write a separate post about Wittgenstein. I mean god, I've been contributing to this blog for nearly half a year and I haven't talked about Wittgenstein yet. What's wrong with me?

First of all, I have to wonder to myself how you read books so fast. You're constantly complaining about how lazy you are and how little work you've done, and yet every week you're commenting on a new book you've read. It's a good month for me when I read a single book, and I don't really think I'm lazy, much as I castigate myself from time to time. In my case, I think there are two main reasons: first, I'm a slow reader, and especially with academic books, I read at a pace of something like five to ten pages an hour, so reading a full book in a week would be a full week's work, and I rarely manage a full week's work. And that's for the second reason, that I have a talent for taking on all sorts of extraneous commitments. I wouldn't really have it any other way, but it does add to the stress levels. Writes the guy on the bus back from London having spent the day sitting in on rehearsals for Tom's a-cold, which opens in a week and a half.

Now, to work roughly from oldest to youngest. Reading your last three posts I was reminded on a number of occasions of something I think you've remarked upon more than once, that we seem to be interested in many similar things even though we look at them through the lenses of rather different intellectual backgrounds. The language and nonsense stuff is a prime example, since it features significantly in my thesis too. Actually, it's maybe more of an anomalous case, since it's not just our interests that overlap here, but even our reading somewhat. I'm supposed to manage to get my head around Derrida at some point. Not sure I will, but I'm sure talking to you about this stuff can't be a bad start. So maybe I could begin by posing some clarificatory questions.

You talk about the rules of language being clearly not logical. I'm not entirely sure what this means, influenced as I am by Wittgenstein's claim that ordinary language is in perfect logical order. Do you simply mean that grammatical rules seem often to have exceptions, or do you mean something stronger than that? If you mean the weaker claim, I suspect that's a bit of a red herring (I'll get on to what I think is not the red herring shortly) because a language without grammatical exceptions isn't free of the sorts of ambiguities you seem to take as paradigmatic of illogicality. Esperanto, for instance, is a language without grammatical exceptions (I believe--I don't actually have more than a passing familiarity with constructed languages), and it seems like there are people who can communicate with it quite fluently, but it also seems (again, speaking out of ignorance) that speaking Esperanto doesn't radically alter the features of language that tempt us to call it an imperfect vehicle.

If you indeed mean a stronger claim that language of any kind--grammatical exceptions or not--is somehow an imperfect vehicle (you talk about language as a "flawed vehicle for thought"), I'm curious how you might spell that out. Flawed in comparison to what, for example? If the struggles we have with language aren't accidents of our language, but structural features of all possible languages, then can this count as an imperfection? Can we articulate what it is we're unable to do that our imperfect language somehow hinders us from doing?

I don't mean to deny that language often trips us up in various ways. I'm just questioning whether we can coherently talk about these snares as "illogicality."

I said I thought that grammatical exceptions were a red herring. What I don't think is a red herring--and something I believe is familiar to readers of Derrida as much as to readers of Wittgenstein or Cavell--is the fact that words can always be projected and used in new contexts, and no rules can lay out in advance how that projection can work, and if we operate with a sense that the boundaries of the concepts defined by our words are rigidly fixed in advance, we are likely to stumble on all sorts of confusions that make for a playground of nonsense. Lewis Carroll is one of the great masters of this genre. I'm thinking of the bit about "jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today" as taking the word "today" to refer to the present day, whatever that day might be, fixed by the present moment rather than the moment of utterance. That's maybe not the best example, since there's more at work than just the notion that concepts need rigid boundaries, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

A few other things on other topics:

Regarding trans-humanism, you seem to share my sense that on one hand, this is obviously perverse, but on the other hand, there's something quite compelling about its logic. Again, more so for someone like me, a vegetarian and aspiring Buddhist, than you, with your punk sensibilities, but I'm glad you seem to share my sense of it. Again, I think of Nietzsche, this time in terms of his emphasis on instincts and his sense that unhealthy creatures come to distrust their instincts. Abolitionism seems to represent this notion perfectly: people who so distrust their own instincts that they can talk themselves into rejecting everything they are naturally. Though I was struck by your remark that you find enhanced intelligence less tempting than enhanced happiness. What thinking person hasn't wished for a little more sharpness of mind? Sure, godlike intelligence and happiness might render us other than human, but that's where the "trans" in "trans-humanism" comes from: from their point of view, if human nature as given to us doesn't sit well with our trans-human future, so much the worse for human nature.

I enjoyed the stuff on Flaubert and received ideas. When I was reading Bovary last summer there was frequent reference in the footnotes to the book, though I never quite knew what it was (having skipped the introduction to get right into the novel). It sounds like a delightful idea. It also reminded me of some stuff I've been reading about Heidegger and das Man. There's some debate about the extent to which das Man in Heidegger is meant to represent the bland conformity of adopting shared norms like driving on the same side of the road, etc., and to what extent it's meant to represent the pernicious conformism of thinking what everyone else thinks, etc. One suggestion is that the two easily bleed into one another, and I find a bit of that in your discussion of Flaubert. I've been working on a paper on Wittgenstein and Heidegger and precisely the question you raise with Flaubert about how we can break out of the habits of thought we've inherited without breaking out of the constitutive grounds for expressing thoughts coherently at all. You won't be surprised to hear that I think Wittgenstein is more successful in this respect than Heidegger. My next post might touch on this.

And lastly, I identify powerfully with what you say about complaints that there's nothing new to say being the complaints of people who can't think of anything new to say. I'd never have put it the way you put it, or even really thought it without your help, and I think it's inspired. Though it also reinforces my sense that I'm not really destined for the life of the scholar. I'm really not sure what there is to say that's new. Not because I don't believe it's possible, but because I feel like I'm able to think with people who inspire me but lousy at striking out on my own. I think my slavish devotion to Wittgenstein comes from the sense that I have nothing to say that could take me beyond what he's already said so well.

our trans-humanist future

The real thing I wanted to write about was a talk I saw last Monday by a guy called David Pearce, who's one of the leading thinkers in the trans-humanist movement. Trans-humanists seem to combine a factual, predictive claim with a normative one. The factual/predictive claim is that humans are increasingly developing technologies--from gene therapy to cybernetics--that allow us to tamper with "human nature" and design the humans (or trans-humans) of the future rather than leaving it up to biology and fate. The normative claim is that this is a great thing and that we ought to get on it pronto.

You can read a nice, brief manifesto from Pearce, which pretty much covers the talk he gave, here: http://abolitionist.com/. The upshot is this: suffering is bad and when we have an opportunity to alleviate suffering--either our own or that of others--we should do it; we will soon have the means to abolish suffering of all sentient life on earth; we should do what we can to speed the arrival of this abolition of suffering. In terms of abolition, he offers things like wiring up our brains so that our pleasure centres are always activated (an option he thinks isn't that feasible since it would remove our incentive to do anything else, so any community that chooses to do this would soon become extinct and other, less happy communities would persist), designer drugs that make us happier without dimming cognitive capacity (he's not just interested in alleviating suffering but also heightening our cognitive abilities), and genetic engineering. He looks forward to a future where beings will experience bliss and cognitive abilities on a level that dwarf the upper ceiling for contemporary humans. He also wants to extend this to animals. He's a vegan and thinks that animal suffering is terrible. Not only does he think we should stop using animals for food, but also we should stop carnivores from eating other animals. We could do this either by growing vat food that we can feed to them or re-wiring their brains so that they no longer have a bloodlust or whatever.

My first reaction to all this was an aesthetic one. I could imagine Nietzsche sitting next to meet pulling his hair out. One of the things I admire about Nietzsche is that he's pretty much the only philosopher who manages to make responsible use of ad hominem arguments. In essence, Nietzsche's arguments usually aren't along the lines of "A says x, but x is wrong for these reasons," but rather "A says x; now what would make someone say x? Is that the sort of person we should want to be?" I think an ad hominem argument is quite appropriate in the case of the abolitionist movement: what kind of a person are you that you think suffering is so absolutely awful that we should go to obscene lengths to eliminate it? I mean, I'm not fan of suffering myself, but come on, man up a little!

This is particular interesting to me as someone who's quite interested in Buddhism. Pearce claimed his arguments were very much in keeping with Buddhist thought, but I disagree. Buddhism famously preaches that all life is suffering and preaches the way to bring about the end of suffering, so in that sense you might see a connection (ignoring for the moment the subtle but important differences between the Pali word dukkha and the English "suffering"). But the Buddha also preaches equanimity in the face of not just suffering but pleasure. The idea is that both suffering and pleasure are impermanent and so we need to learn to greet them with equanimity rather than react to them with intense aversion or craving. It seems to me that the abolitionist movement reacts with intense aversion to suffering. Buddhism might be criticized for its complacency in that it aims to accept the world as it is rather than to change it, but in this sense it's definitely not in keeping with abolitionism.

The talk also seemed to blush over some of the sticky points. For instance, Pearce claims that eradicating suffering isn't a matter of becoming contented vegetables, but on the contrary allowing us to pursue our projects at a much higher level. But I question whether my aims and ambitions would be the same if I lived without suffering. Suffering isn't just a contingent matter of things going badly and suffering bad moods. It's a necessary feature of wanting things. If I want something, there's always the possibility that I won't get it. If I don't get it, I'll be upset. Often, I'm willing to risk that distress because striving for things when there's no guarantee of success is part of the challenge in life, and a great deal of the pleasure in life comes from overcoming obstacles. If the obstacles are taken away, so is the pleasure of overcoming them. I'm not saying Pearce wouldn't have an answer to this, but I think answering it isn't as easy as he seemed to suggest.

Part of the challenge for me, though, is to explain why I might be against abolishing suffering. Surely, whenever I see someone suffering, I would like to ease their suffering if I could, and I wouldn't want to increase their suffering (I speak from my own case here). That's true, though that's also a response to a world where suffering is inevitable and pervasive. I don't know if saying that I want to alleviate any suffering I encounter entails that I want all suffering to cease. And it's also true that I don't want to alleviate all suffering, not even in myself. There are certain kinds of unhappiness and pain I really could happily do entirely without. But, for instance, I think I'd lose my interest in philosophy and writing if I didn't find myself questioning the world and my place in it in ways that aren't always cheerful.

My last, cheeky though was inspired by Douglas Adams. Pearce proposes that we re-wire carnivores so that they don't kill herbivores. If the aim is to eradicate suffering, isn't it morally just as acceptable to re-wire the herbivores so that they enjoy being eaten?