Explanation

Deleteduserrc

Stray thoughts, spinning off the metaphilosophy thread.

(1)

'Explanation' is something that exists prior to philosophy.

First, there's all that you experience. Most of the time, once you reach adulthood, you find that you have a spontaneously generated, continuous narrative that links everything together. You can see how one thing leads to another.

But, occasionally, there are discontinuities.

By 'discontinuity', I mean something that happens that you can't account for narratively. It happens 'out of the blue.' For example, take an early human experiencing lightning. A bolt of lightning isn't, necessarily, a total surprise. Maybe you've seen lightning before. You probably also are familiar with 'omens' that suggest lightning is going to happen. A change in the air, clouds, rain, thunder. But this whole concatenation of things doesn't provide a continuous narrative. It just says: when these things arise, lightning is likely to follow. What explanation does is offer a 'because'. Lightning strikes because The gods threw a bolt. The 'because' establishes a connection between an object level situation and a meta-level from which the object level issued. It's a peek into a broader 'causal' realm (all senses of cause, beyond simplay 'efficient'). Of course, this 'higher level' can also have its discontinuities. Why did the God throw the bolt? You can push this back indefinitely.

(2)

The biggest draw to explanation is a need for security. If you can understand the gears behind the scene, you can anticipate and react accordingly (I realize this is an explanation of explanation but will come back to that later down the road.) One visceral example. If your 'lightning' is 'dad blowing up' maybe your 'gods throwing lightning' is 'dad hitting the bottle'. Now, things pushed back, you have a few more options. You can hide the bottle, or sleep at a friend's house when you see him hitting it. But why does Dad hit the bottle? 'Why is the sky blue?' a kid asks, and you explain best you can. But then they say, 'but why' to that too, and so on, anxiously delighting in the process.

(3)

Philosophy seems to understand what the kid's doing.' x because of y, y because of z' is the normal explanation chain. But the kid instinctively realizes this bottoms out. What if you can extract the explanatory process itself from what grounds it, and get to the why of the why? This leads a constant oscillation between infinite regress and final explanations. Aristotle finds a prime mover; Kant lays out an ultimate indecidability in his antinomies, while deciding in different ways.

(4)

Philosophy generally plays on these two things - infinite regress vs self-grounding ipseity. Or at least, it does this at the limit. What it seems to do most of the time is valorize explanation as the cost of what's explained. The world is mucky, chaotic, mean. Many - if not most - people seem drawn to philosophy to get away from the world. The level of explanation seems sturdier, safer, clearer than what you've experienced in life.

(5)

At this point, the use of the 'because' seems to get clouded over in favor of a fetishization of the 'because'. The act of because-ing, at this point, is a way of diminishing the value of what's explained in favor of the explanation. A common human practice - because-ing- becomes an overvalorized good-in-itself. Your day-to-day experience becomes examples of some more general thing. The world seems less important than whatever you choose to explain it.

(6)

The Ultimate Because takes hold. This can look like grounding in some ipseity or substance (which I think is what people who talk about 'ontotheology' are talking about) or it can look like championing the infinite regress (which is what 'differance' etc is talking about), but either way it's a gathering of people to various ways of fixing the 'why', even if fixing it as the thing that can't be fixed. If you return to the same place to celebrate placelesness, you're still effectively ritualizing a place.

(7)

No matter what philosopher you cleave to, you'll find they're offering a way of organizing your thoughts, in some way, around some central way of conceiving the abyss/fountain of explanation. I'm doing that here too, more clumsily. It seems like a way of building a fire.

(8)

That kind of return to a center seems inevitable. Delaying the center is its own center. But a kind of return seems, to me, good, if inevitable. It's the function of a 'hearth'. But I think returning to it, in your thoughts alone, is an addiction - like any addiction. What happens at a real return, to a real fire, is something that brings all the threads into play. And you're vulnerably sharing them with other people, and it doesn't necessarily link up to one final explanation. That doesn't mean philosophy can't be a thread - but if it tries to be the only, or dominant, thread, I think that will leave you wanting, even if you get a temporary rush. Speculating, I think that's where the schopenhauer slump sets in. The real fire means you don't know where the center is, and you're talking to one another without any one having a landline to it.

(apologies for typos and confusions - typing from a cracked screen phone, between irl conversations. Let me know if the line of thought crumbles in places, and I'll try to fill in the gaps.)

jjAmEs

The real fire means you don't where the center is, and you're talking to one another without any one having a landline to it. — csalisbury

I like this line. Perhaps you'll agree that it itself is a landline. The state of truth is an abyss, but the abyss recognized as such functions as a foundation. 'I know that no one really knows (and that's enough for my performance of the hero).'

The world is mucky, chaotic, mean. Many - if not most - people seem drawn to philosophy to get away from the world. The level of explanation seems sturdier, safer, clearer than what you've experienced in life. — csalisbury

I like this too. I think we can extend this to the human situation in general. The philosopher is maybe an amplified version of this, a self-proclaimed expert who holds himself to higher epistemological standards, an elitist on a restricted diet. But we should also add the anxiety of influence to the stew, because philosophy is also a genre of creative writing. The philosopher is often a mix of the prophet and scientist, tho working on the level of pre-science or super-science.

Deleteduserrc

Perhaps you'll agree that it itself is a landline. The state of truth is an abyss, but the abyss recognized as such functions as a foundation. 'I know that no one really knows (and that's enough for my performance of the hero).' — jjAmEs

Yeah, I'd agree. I don't know to what extent I can step outside the 'landline' -at least right now, on the forums - because the forums are the place I gather my thoughts out of the outside muck.

Talking about the fire is one thing; going to the fire is another. Here, I'm talking about the fire. But I know what I'm talking about, even if it's going to take me a while to zig zag to that space, irl, as a real person.

Which, I'd like to add, as a Forum Talker -- that 'space' is not 'the thing itself', the ecstatic opening-up, the culmination - but the space of the fire. If you can dive back - it's the place where the grown-ups were talking, the central area (Robert Frost, severely paraphrased: 'I was trying to capture the sense of conversation heard in the room over, without hearing the words') You know, immediately, what the space is as a kid - it gets blurred and conceptual as you develop your own defenses. But it's not either a void or an ecstatic fulfillment - its a finely differentiated and dangerous place, but also a finely differentiated and loving place.

I'm tailoring my talk now - on account of I suspect we may have talked to one another in a past life, - but I think 'the culmination' is a self-protecting way of turning away. The moment the idea of the Everything & Ecstasy comes into play, that's a sure sign a protective force (a psychological Daemon) has taken over and is showing a movie (or playing a song) of Things Are Now At The Level of The Rarest Stuff. That's always a hoodwink.

If you are drawn to the Rare, I think, you probably also have a painful memory of something that happened around 'the fire' that led you to retreat and set up base in the shadows. That happened to me, and I think that happens to the majority of people. Philosophy is one way of confusingly groping toward a solution. But that trauma limits access to the communal fire. All sorts of compensations flood in, like lobbyists, to make things easier, if only you give up this, or that. Eventually, you forget that happened.

jjAmEs

Talking about the fire is one thing; going to the fire is another. Here, I'm talking about the fire. — csalisbury

I know what you mean. I can only talk about the black dragon when he's not around. When he's around, the futility and obscenity of talk is palpable and paralyzing. That's the black fire.

But you maybe you mean the good fire.

Ecstasy comes into play, that's a sure sign a protective force (a psychological Daemon) has taken over and is showing a movie of Things Are Now At The Level of The Rarest Stuff. That's always a hoodwink. — csalisbury

I'm not sure I understand you. I do think that we humans are deeply invested in various performances. In this space we have no choice but to be self-conscious and perform. More than most perhaps, you and I work this self-consciousness into our performance. I do think that the rarest stuff is mostly found in unbearably tender places that can only be talked about (if at all) in whispers. Or in very rare friendships and perhaps under the influence. Maybe some of us have a 'secret doctrine.' And all public-facing doctrines are all the more suspect and shallow in the light of this. But 'doctrine' implies something too articulated and stable.

But I'm down with protective forces and characters in general as trauma-generated 'illusions' or hoodwinks. 'Truth' and madness are dangerously familiar here. The 'sane' monkey rides the network of norms, and all that Nietzschean stuff about lies that keep us alive comes to mind.

Deleteduserrc

I know what you mean. I can only talk about the black dragon when he's not around. When he's around, the futility and obscenity of talk is palpable and paralyzing. That's the black fire.

But you maybe you mean the good fire. — jjAmEs

I mean both, I think? That's the hard thing, if I understand what I'm talking about. The Black Dragon & The Good Fire are childhood ways of navigating a tough space. They do good work, for us as kids, but they eventually have to go. And they do go, no matter what we do, I think? But it's like a fantasy world map - if there's a Violent Cataract, it's ok to shelter in Pastoral Cottages for a while, but eventually all of this has to be brought together. It's a psychological way of working out what's happening in real life. A big split can happen when the fire is too violent.

I'm not sure I understand you. I do think that we humans are deeply invested in various performances. In this space we have no choice but to be self-conscious and perform. More than most perhaps, you and I work this self-consciousness into our performance. I do think that the rarest stuff is mostly found in unbearably tender places that can only be talked about (if at all) in whispers. Or in very rare friendships and perhaps under the influence. Maybe some of us have a 'secret doctrine.' And all public-facing doctrines are all the more suspect and shallow in the light of this. But 'doctrine' implies something too articulated and stable.

But I'm down with protective forces and characters in general as trauma-generated 'illusions' or hoodwinks. 'Truth' and madness are dangerously familiar here. The 'sane' monkey rides the network of norms, and all that Nietzschean stuff about lies that keep us alive come to mind. — jjAmEs

I think this way of thinking sprouts, ultimately, out from a scared kid who needs a good shield to protect him from the scary thing. I say this as someone who thinks I do this, or at least is particularly susceptible to it. This sort of thing can start simply and ramify out, with infinite potential for endless subtlety. For instance, your last paragraph is a wary thing saying ' I recognize what you're saying & agree ' as a way of really saying something else. Which I respect & am not trying to press. But the performing self knows how to set up opposing values, and explore them cognitively - often, very well, convincingly - to shade the fact its the performing self speaking. What happens then? It eventually fails to constrain what it's trying to constrain, breaks out, feels remorse, erases the past, and tries to restart. Everyone does this, all the time, on a spectrum, I think?But I think the severity of this is tied to the degree to which the mind divides two realms - that can take any number of forms but resolves ultimately to a self-image of lovable vs hatable. At the limit, If any self gets a splotch of hateful on it, it has to be jettisoned, so a new self can begin from scratch.

jjAmEs

↪csalisbury

I'm enjoying this conversation and think I mostly understand you. But this stuff is complex, so please forgive any misunderstanding.

Correct me if I am wrong:

I think we agree that character/mask is a sort of trauma-generated or trauma-responsive 'fiction' (which must be put in quotes since it's not clear what 'non-fiction' is here.

I am definitely a 'scared kid' but also a 'scared little monster' who sees itself in a world crowded with other scared little monsters. I don't mind confessing this radical vulnerability, and I loved how Bukowski wrote about how terrifying he found life. I think this was a recurring but not constant experience for him, as it is for me. I connect it to a furious attachment to life and its pleasures and perhaps to a child's untamed and ridiculous infinite desires. Have you read Suetonius ? I feel plugged in to the monstrousness in those lives, while actually living a decent life. I like good manners, hate noise. I'm a troll who will play by the rules if the other trolls will leave me alone. I'm relatively taciturn for my circle, and the more sweet and social wife is an important part of keeping me connected to this circle. But, perhaps like many of the taciturn, I am capable of intense/manic relationships and simply saving myself for genuine opportunity -- which I might be aging out of or becoming too eccentric for.

Maybe the 'secret doctrine' line was misleading. It's (for instance) between the lines in Hobbes. To me the full truth of human consciousness can almost obviously not be fit into public conversation. A certain type of philosopher is a bit of sociopath (or the reverse). There's a violence in taking a certain distance for the norms of a community. What is the wicked pleasure taken in seeing today's sacred norms as contingent?

jjAmEs

The Black Dragon & The Good Fire are childhood ways of navigating a tough space. They do good work, for us as kids, but they eventually have to go. — csalisbury

This is interesting. I agree that people have various obsolete traumatic-childhood-induced strategies that they'd be better off letting go of. They could be 'fitter, happier, more productive.' And I confess to being one more human that never grew up.

But (and this 'could' be my immaturity) I have my doubts about the notion of the truly grown-up or enlightened human being. Clearly some people are relatively well adjusted for certain relatively desirable environments. And it makes sense that certain techniques or strains of advice should help transform a less mature and adjusted individual into a more mature and adjusted individual --according to certain standards that maybe we've all inherited in their vagueness. I think of some nice member of the meritocratic upper-middle class. Or perhaps a hard-working nurse who is also a good mother. The main thing is perhaps that they are satisfied and community oriented? I imagine that we imagine them voting for Democrats.

And then perhaps its only a sociopathic excessive something that sees all that from the outside and conjures up their blind dependence on the system in which they are embedded. Is Beckett's art for the sickly and the decadent? Granted that I'm an immature sociopath on some level (which is sincere if also playful), are not the classics themselves crammed with this same creepiness? Think of all the banned books. Slowly this creepy consciousness is mainstreamed as entertainment for the sophisticated. We are mature enough now for Huck Finn, Ulysses, Naked Lunch,...

Do you see what I'm getting at? Is the norm of the mature adult a kind of shadow cast by an ecstatic and anguished consciousness? Is this transgressive consciousness a necessary supplement? Is our high-tech simulation of sex and violence essential to the way we live now? One more drug that keeps the machine greased? I am a temporarily embarrassed Caesar. Maybe the difference between me and the average dude down the street is the perverse pleasure I take in spiritual graffiti. But then just about everyone is on Facebook (which I'm too cool for) blasting away their political-religious meme-treats. Is the only difference a sort of extra serious or investment in self-justifying self-accusing poetry?I guess I'm confessing and yet minimizing my sociopathy. I'm playing at being the madman who knows he mad, a exiled king among those who don't. But we know this is bullshit, too, and congratulate ourselves for knowing it? How similar or dissimilar are our masks? I'm still trying to figure it out.

[All of this reveals as it conceals and the reverse. It's public facing and yet as sincere as 'they' will let it be, the bastards.]

Streetlight

My immediate reaction to the OP is that the *kind* of explanation at issue (broadly: Why X? or What explains Y?) is too broad and underdetermined. What I mean: explanation is usually on the order of: "explain X about Y" or "why is it that X now and not later", or "why does the phenomenon of X take place at all?". In all three cases there's something like a 'third term' involved: you're never just 'explaining X', you're explaining something about X. (in the back of my mind - Deleuze: not 'what?' but: who?, how much?, how?, where?, when?).

I think the metaphysical illusion - the Ultimate Because - comes about when we think we can dispense of this third term. What the third term introduces is a kind of naturalized perspectivism: it introduces a motive, something that animates inquiry, it puts the inquirer back into the inquiry, and dispenses with the idea that there are 'neutral' questions. Explanation is always relative to a frame of inquiry (which doesn't mean it's 'subjective' - a frame of inquiry is largely determined by the phenomenon itself: asking the right questions is as much a matter of 'getting the answer right' as... getting the answer right).

So w/r/t explanation existing prior to philosophy - yes, but also no. I wanna say: there's always an implicit philosophy in any explanation, and the 'spontaneous' frame of reference is egocentric bodily life: why does dad hit the bottle? Because he suffered abuse of his own, because life is shitty, etc (implicit: can I use this info to avoid his outbursts of rage in my day to day?). Philosophy, when undertaken explicitly, 'de-indexes' inquiry from egocentric concerns and 'attaches' them to other 'third terms': what is the phenomenon of dads hitting the bottle indicative of? Should it be treated sociologically? psychologically? Does it tell us something about 'the human'? etc etc.

Philosophy multiplies frames, makes them proliferate, introduces new 'third terms' motivated by [anything whatsoever] (in the back of my mind - Brassier: "Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living": again - not a matter of 'subjective inquiry', perhaps the opposite - but not 'objective' either). My line of thought is that once explanation becomes de-coupled from a 'view from nowhere', once explanation is always 'from somewhere' then the kind of aporias and anxieties you outline if not dissipate, are at least transposed elsewhere.

Deleteduserrc

My immediate reaction to the OP is that the *kind* of explanation at issue (broadly: Why X? or What explains Y?) is too broad and underdetermined. What I mean: explanation is usually on the order of: "explain X about Y" or "why is it that X now and not later", or "why does the phenomenon of X take place at all?". In all three cases there's something like a 'third term' involved: you're never just 'explaining X', you're explaining something about X. (in the back of my mind - Deleuze: not 'what?' but: who?, how much?, how?, where?, when?). — StreetlightX

Oh, for sure. I'd respond by saying that those are all determinations of the 'broad and underdetermined' practice I'm talking about - not as a way to downplay what you're highlighting, but to say that I think we're in the same general neighborhood, drawing attention to different landmarks.

So, in each case of explanation you highlight, there's something that doesn't fit continuously into a current 'space of reasons' or network of conceptual implications. Pre-explanation, that thing or aspect, while still contextualized, is discontinuous at the cognitive/conceptual level - which gives it a shimmering salience that draws thought's feelers toward it. What happens then is a process of explanation which aims to bring it into that space, or network. The 'third term' is a way of determining how, and in what 'region,' x will be brought into the space of reasons. It's like determining what part of your lego world, you're going to set this lego man down in (which isn't to say, it's arbitrary- just as kid's play is never arbitrary.) In the example of Gods and lightning, what's implicitly being asked is 'explain why the world takes on a lightining aspect when it does, with reference to where it comes from ' & the answer of 'the gods do it' brings bundled with it, in turn, a further suite of implicit 'when, where, how, why' questions.

This integration can be imagined in a narcissistic (gustatory, hedonic) way (mind turned belly) or also imagined as a socially shared construction, like bees returning to the hive and dancing. I think it probably usually is operating at both levels at once (both of these two species of 'thinking-for' are operating.) There are probably a lot of other ways of imagining it, as well, but those are the first two that come to mind.

I think the metaphysical illusion - the Ultimate Because - comes about when we think we can dispense of this third term. What the third term introduces is a kind of naturalized perspectivism: it introduces a motive, something that animates inquiry, it puts the inquirer back into the inquiry, and dispenses with the idea that there are 'neutral' questions. Explanation is always relative to a frame of inquiry (which doesn't mean it's 'subjective' - a frame of inquiry is largely determined by the phenomenon itself: asking the right questions is as much a matter of 'getting the answer right' as... getting the answer right).

So w/r/t explanation existing prior to philosophy - yes, but also no. I wanna say: there's always an implicit philosophy in any explanation, and the 'spontaneous' frame of reference is egocentric bodily life: why does dad hit the bottle? Because he suffered abuse of his own, because life is shitty, etc (implicit: can I use this info to avoid his outbursts of rage in my day to day?). Philosophy, when undertaken explicitly, 'de-indexes' inquiry from egocentric concerns and 'attaches' them to other 'third terms': what is the phenomenon of dads hitting the bottle indicative of? Should it be treated sociologically? psychologically? Does it tell us something about 'the human'? etc etc.

Philosophy multiplies frames, makes them proliferate, introduces new 'third terms' motivated by [anything whatsoever] (in the back of my mind - Brassier: "Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living": again - not a matter of 'subjective inquiry', perhaps the opposite - but not 'objective' either). My line of thought is that once explanation becomes de-coupled from a 'view from nowhere', once explanation is always 'from somewhere' then the kind of aporias and anxieties you outline if not dissipate, are at least transposed elsewhere

There's a lot of elements you introduce here that also seem key to me, but I think we're putting them together in different ways. Because I see the 'third term' as part of 'explanation', and the Ultimate Because as Explanation gone wild, I don't think the Ultimate Because arises when it's decoupled from the third term (For instance take contemporary continental philosophy & 'thinking otherwise.' How this slowly becomes thinking 'thinking otherwise', using various third terms to bring this or that thing back to the 'thinking otherwise' cluster of concepts (or performatively thinking otherwise in order to furnish examples of 'thinking otherwise')

That said, I do agree that 'decoupling' is key.

I see the Ultimate Because as the process of explanation exerting too powerful a fascination, decoupling itself from other concerns of life, sometimes relating to all aspects of life as mere fuel for explanation. This is Explanation Unbound (then rebound, then unbound again) which, like all addictions, for sure has interests that do not coincide with those of the living

Think of how strange it is to celebrate the distinction of working for the furtherance of something that has no concern for your well-being, or the well-being of those you love - and think about where we see similar kinds of celebrations outside of philosophy. (next time you watch a Brassier lecture focus on his body language and tone rather than his words ; to me, he looks & sounds like a man badly hurt, if not poisoned, by his work. Think of where else you see body language and tonal inflections like this.)

I want to conclude by doing a little self-phenomenology of my experience writing this post. I can't rule out that I'm speaking largely from my own pathology, but I've found that after getting into really abstract stuff, pushing myself to figure out how to articulate what I want to say, and what conceptual moves to make -I feel jittery, irritable and the physical world seems to have receded a bit in the background. I feel slightly dazed. I have a rumble of aggressive inertia. There's some satisfaction in having put together a short mini-essay that I think succeeds at conveying what I wanted, but it almost doesn't seem worth the icky mood I've stirred up in the process of producing it. I have a weird compulsion to re-read what I've written, and to imagine others reading it, approvingly. It feels similar to the cocaine-induced feeling of wanting more cocaine. Again, this may be my own pathology, or maybe I'm higher on this spectrum, but when I look around the forum at others posts, and how they respond to challenges, I don't think I'm alone in this. There's a tense, aggressive atmosphere in at least 7 out of 10 threads.

Deleteduserrc

@StreetlightX Building off of that, and reflecting personally. I think what happened is the 'explanation' aspect of myself got hypertrophied. When I look back at my life - from a little kid, up to now - I see a lot of unpleasant things happening and I see myself finding safety in explaining what's going on in a way that fits everything together. This was my way of coping. Explaining is always explaining to-someone-else, even if you do it by yourself (there's an imagined interlocutor, sort of like an 'imaginary friend.') I find myself with friends, just compulsively explaining things. A few years back, I got hip to what was going on, but couldn't quite stop it. I realized how lonely it made me, but I couldn't seem to 'snap out of it'.

I think this is because relying too heavily on this coping device meant I didn't develop other ways of interacting with the world or other people very well. When I sense that someone is trying to 'reach me', reach the me behind the explanatory monologue, I reflexively withdraw. This, in turn, leads me to rely even more heavily on explaining. What I've found is that it's very difficult for me to develop other ways of living. This makes me feel helpless and frustrated and makes it more tempting to return to 'explaining' (or drinking, or making ironic jokes). Again, this looks a lot like how addictions function. Or abusive relationships, for that matter. Take these posts. My plan today was to go for a walk, meditate, journal and write poetry. I know that these things would make me feel better than what I'm doing right now. Still, I felt anxious and disconnected today, and it seemed overwhelming to do these things, and I find myself here, explaining.

Deleteduserrc

@jjAmEs

Last time we talked on this thread, I was a substantial number of drinks down. I think I was rumbling on with my own train of thoughts and projecting onto your responses what I needed them to be, in order to keep it going.

Scared kid & monster for me too. The last time I was hospitalized, mixed manic state, things came to a peak when I couldn't decide whether I was a monster (I thought in terms of 'demons', then) masking itself as a helpless kid, or a helpless kid being preyed upon by a monster. I wasn't able, then, to even consider that it's possible to be both.

I don't want to presume too much, but it seems to me that we're both susceptible to what the psychologists describe as 'splitting' where most important things in our lives are either hyper-valorized or largely devalued. In the past, when we've talked, I've sometimes done this: I've 'split' things into 'splitting' and 'not-splitting' (splitting's last desperate gasp) & tried to position myself as performatively 'not-splitting' vis-as-vis your posts, as splitting.

I want to take a different tack here and instead explain why this topic is important to me. I still 'split' but I would like to emerge from it, not because I would like grow into a Mature Adult (which would be Mature Adult (valorized) vs immature (devalued) in order to be protected by inhabiting a valorized 'mature adult' mask ) but because splitting hurts and I don't want to take much more hurt. The psychological pain of being self-devalued leads to a constant struggle for self-valorization which never satisfies for long. It's like treading water outside a sinking ship, grasping desperately at this or that piece of flotsam, until that piece is sucked into the whirlpool, and you have to grab another. Whatever I was trying to get at with The Fire is that, if there's a way to break the splitting cycle, it seems like a different kind of space altogether. When I shy away from rare/common ecstatic/mundane infinite/finite, it's not to bundle those things up into something else that I can put into [those-things]/[what isn't those things] though I have done that in the past (and of course it's still partially like that and there's no way to talk or think about it wothout using binary language.) I see them as something that causes me pain that and any fleeting dionysian delight is purchased at too dear a cost.

I also understand that you may very well be perfectly aware of all the above and simply feel that the highs and lows are worth pursuing for their own sake. That I can understand as well. I think many a-time, I've been trying to articulate an embryonic set of values, or feelings or guiding lights by setting up an asymmetrical moralizing dialogue (externalizing my own self-conversation) which progressively seems unhelpful and self-defeating.

In terms of masks, I think the non-masked is simply the reverse of a focus on the mask, as you say. The only way out is to let thoughts about masks arise and pass away, without giving them to much credence, one way or another.

jjAmEs

Scared kid & monster for me too. — csalisbury

I understand myself to understand myself as suffering/enjoying a wider band of consciousness than the average person. This is the listening to the internal kid / monster. Where id was ego shall be. I read Freud's last book as I was becoming a complete atheist, and even passionate caring about such things at 19 was connected to a strange childhood (dysfunctional working class family but also a certain recognized-by-others potential connected to reading comprehension.) How does imagination fit into all of this? I only started noticing that I was poor as signs of aging set in. The world was an interruption of my dreams, poetic and erotic.

I don't want to presume too much, but it seems to me that we're both susceptible to what the psychologists describe as 'splitting' where most important things in our lives are either hyper-valorized or largely devalued. — csalisbury

I see them as something that causes me pain that and any fleeting dionysian delight is purchased at too dear a cost...

I also understand that you may very well be perfectly aware of all the above and simply feel that the highs and lows are worth pursuing for their own sake. — csalisbury

I've been living a controlled, responsible life for almost a decade now. I get nostalgic at times for dionysion delights. But I transformed myself from a musician/artist/writer who worked menial jobs into a ideal student and then a teacher. And I maintained a solid marriage. It's all pretty good, but now that I'm in a more worldly-conforming phase, I resent my younger self for not taking care of business, owning some stuff, etc. I learned some stuff, grew up in some ways, but I'm getting old. The time would have passed in any case, of course. I'm thinking of buying some tiny piece of land and starting with a tiny house. But mostly because I'm more grizzly as I age. It's more of a flight from annoying stimuli than an exciting adventure. A new artistic friendship would be great for me, but I pickier and more irritable these days, and I sometimes think that's all behind me.

A related theme: I connect 'spiritual aging' to becoming aware of how small one is and how big the world is. True greatness is rare indeed. A person perhaps judges their ability more accurately with time. They may peace with being fairly talented, perhaps, but no genius. But they then pride themselves on processing that truth and congratulate themselves for realism. It's fun to feel like a genius though, and I sometimes envy that naive spirit that writes manifestos. We see it on this forum from time to time. The old cynic is a bit of vampire. I sometimes think that maybe I could write some good fiction, but I also think that the world is stuffed with great fiction. The religion of art doesn't burn as brightly. And people are just so thirsty for recognition. I'm sure that such a thirst is still in me, but it's up against a distaste for the neediness of that pose. I like the idea of leaving marks behind anonymously. There's some weird purification or sublimation in that, which I oppose to the 'incestuous' support-your-local-artist vibe of local artists (friends kind-heartedly flattering one another ---playing mom for one another.) And speaking with one's proper name in public seems entangled with a necessary in-authenticity. The self has to be sold to a vague public-at-large, which connects to tribal polarization, preaching and posing for the choir, when the impish thrill for me is challenging all complacency and identification. This wicked sublimated ideological violence is definitely entangled with being a 'true' philosopher for me. (Hence the sociopath metaphor.)

I hope you find some of this interesting. Somehow it's all entangled for me. Sublimated intellectual 'violence' is like a relatively safe version of or substitute for more visceral dionysion enjoyments. I'd like to have my cake and eat it too. Be safe in a nice marriage with health insurance and log in to the orgy-porgy holodeck where all the nasty consequences of unleashing the id are avoided. But I was born too soon. The Federation may not arrive, of course.

jjAmEs

The only way out is to let thoughts about masks arise and pass away, without giving them to much credence, one way or another. — csalisbury

I agree. I could be lying to myself, but I feel something like an internal equilibrium. I'm more or less at peace with myself despite certain eccentricities and excesses and concerned instead about the world, making a living, affording a certain privacy and security, and (maybe the biggest ) the biological reality of aging. I'm healthy now, but I know what's coming. My old man is in a wheelchair from a stroke. I think I'd prefer a clean and certain death at a certain fixed time sufficiently far away to the smoky maze in which the Minotaur lurks somewhere or another. Married aging couple and all that that implies.

Streetlight

The 'third term' is a way of determining how, and in what 'region,' x will be brought into the space of reasons. — csalisbury

But this does not have to be a one way street (gustatory). The integration here can and should modify the space of reasons into which it is brought as well. There's a great paper by Reza Negarestani which I constantly come back to, and which I think is pertinent here, where he notes that there is a way of understanding in which:

"Looking at the space of the universal, through particular instances or local contexts is in this sense no longer a purely analytical procedure. It is like looking into an expansive space through a lens that does not produce zooming-in and zooming-out effects by simply scaling up and down the same image but instead it produces synthetic and wholly different images across different scales of magnification. It then becomes almost impossible to intuitively guess what kind of conceptual and topological transformations the local context—a window into the universal— undergoes as it expands its scope and becomes more true to the universal.

...The transition from the local to the global requires something more than the juxtaposition or addition of local contexts. It requires a form of interknitting multiplication between localities that while it acknowledges their particular specifications (parameters and orientations), takes localities beyond their immediate and restricted ambits. It is in this sense that the passage from the local to the global is not simply a form of transit through which the local element preserves its constancy. It is instead a mode of production of new orientations, structures, dimensions and new intuitions of locality and globality. In this respect, universality becomes the operation of productive locality which is globally oriented". (cite).

I grant that the above is not easy to do, nor does it comes naturally. It takes a huge amount of effort to keep the whole structure supple, mobile, responsive. It can, on the contrary, rigidify, such that one is always looking to 'bring things back' into the prefab fold (apokrisis was this kind of 'explainer', par excellence, almost to the point of parody). This is explanation as lego-set. But explanation can also be kaleidoscopic in nature: you add a piece, give it a shake, and the whole thing changes (a Deleuzian vocabulary might talk about intensive and extensive approaches to explanation).

I see the Ultimate Because as the rigidifying of this structure, an attempt to 'fix' it and find its Final Form. This danger is real, but it can be mitigated.

Streetlight

Separate post on phenomenology, or rather, psychoanalysis:

I find myself with friends, just compulsively explaining things. A few years back, I got hip to what was going on, but couldn't quite stop it. I realized how lonely it made me, but I couldn't seem to 'snap out of it'.

I think this is because relying too heavily on this coping device meant I didn't develop other ways of interacting with the world or other people very well. When I sense that someone is trying to 'reach me', reach the me behind the explanatory monologue, I reflexively withdraw. This, in turn, leads me to rely even more heavily on explaining. What I've found is that it's very difficult for me to develop other ways of living. This makes me feel helpless and frustrated and makes it more tempting to return to 'explaining' (or drinking, or making ironic jokes). Again, this looks a lot like how addictions function. — csalisbury

I mean, I'm no Analyst obviously, but this is drive at work no? This element of being 'caught' on something non-vital, which for all it's pain, nonetheless provides these little bursts of impersonal jouissance and feeds into a certain consistency of self.

(Z: " We become "humans" when we get caught up in a closed, self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and finding satisfaction in it. This rotary movement, in which the linear progress of time is suspended in a repetitive loop, is the drive at its most elementary. This, again, is "humanization' at its zero-level: this self-propelling loop which suspends or disrupts the linear temporal enchainment. This shift from desire to drive is crucial if one is to grasp the true nature of the "minimal difference": at its most fundamental, the minimal difference is not the unfathomable X which elevates an ordinary object into an object of desire, but, rather, the inner torsion which curves libidinal space and thus transforms instinct into drive").

(Also Deleuze: "How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow - or rather, to make it impossible. Perhaps writing has a relation to silence altogether more threatening than that which it is supposed to entertain with death").

And as for the element of exhaustion ("I feel slightly dazed. I have a rumble of aggressive inertia... icky mood") - I mean I totally relate to this. It's the effort, it seems to me, of trying to keep things kaleidoscopic, of making the entire machinery shake even as it's just this tiny corner of discourse which is being discussed. It's exhausting. There's also depths of jouissance (I don't know any more appropriate word for it) that can be plumbed for ages, and which provides your subjectivity with a certain graspable coordinates. I also don't know how to 'break' it. I don't know that it needs to be broken, maybe just channelled differently, put to use in a different manner somehow. The Deleuzian in me says: put it in connection with things, other things, other people, other practices (hard to do right now, I understand). Don't reply to this if it's better to not.

Sam26

Explanation' is something that exists prior to philosophy. — csalisbury

I think your correct, but my idea may be a bit different from what you have in mind. I distinguish causes from reasons, i.e., causes for belief vs reasons for belief. Doing philosophy necessarily involves language, and those beliefs derived from language. For instance, because of reason (or propositions) A, B, and C, I choose to conclude X (inductively), so reason generally involves choices. Whereas a cause for a belief is an explanation without choice, I find myself believing as a result of cause A. For example, I may believe snakes are dangerous because I was bitten by one (X causes Y). On the other hand, I may believe snakes are dangerous based on reasons or evidence (a choice based on reasons/evidence).

Prior to philosophical inferences most (if not all) of our beliefs are causal, i.e., we inherit a certain background that forms a narrative. This narrative when seen from a causally formed perspective (causally formed beliefs) provides the foundation from which all linguistic beliefs (philosophy) are derived. Moreover, it prevents the kind of infinite regress you seem to be talking about.

So, there is a kind of bedrock to reality that we find ourselves in, viz, the world around us, it is the background or reality that allows us to have a philosophy.

TheMadFool

↪csalisbury

This is probably a very parochial interpretation of what you're getting at but it seems to me that though the explanatory chain is an infinite regress, each explanation in the regress is self-sufficient in the sense it serves its purpose, IF this purpose is some sense of understanding of phenomena and through it some form of control over them.

Take for instance the explanation for why the sky is blue: the scientific consensus is that blue light is scattered by air molecules and other particulate matter. This explanation is something our minds can grasp as the underlying process of the sky's blueness and this explanation is sufficient to make any planet's sky blue given everything else required is in place. It's obvious that one can ask why the air molecules scatter blue light and an explanation for that would be mighty useful if one's inclined to make skys blue. Suppose then that such an explanation exists in the form of, say, the molecules are of just the right size, to cause blue light to scatter. While this explanation too maybe questioned with another "why?" but notice that that explanation is unnecessary if our purpose is to make skys blue: we already know we need to make the molecules of the atmosphere a specific size and it matters not whether we have an explanation for why a certain specific size of a molecule scatters blue light. In other words, some, maybe all, explanations are self-sufficient in re the level of reality phenomena are active in. If one chases the infinite regress then it's not because of a flaw in explanations but because of other reasons like an insatiable curiosity or perhaps a desire to know god's mind.

What bears mentioning is that explanations follow from general principles: the explanation for why a vase fell is gravity and gravity is simply the general principle that all objects having mass must adhere to. We may ask "why does one mass exert gravitational force on another?" and while this is a perfectly acceptable question to ask, we may decide just not to go down that road and emphatically declare it just is!. While this isn't an explanation, it does mean that whatever explanation is being demanded for is either (thought of as) unnecessary or unknown.

It seems then that there is no final because, no final explanation, unless of course one entertains the notion of that this ultimate because was nothing more than a dance with chance and there was no rhyme or reason for it - a paradox indeed that the ultimate because maybe not a because at all. Nevertheless, each because is adequate in its own way. If so then, we maybe able to organize all these explanations into one coherent single unit - a snapshot of reality, awesome in the harmony between explanations albeit only at one particular rung of the infinite ladder of explanations. Could we, would we, be satisfied by this thought?

Deleteduserrc

But this does not have to be a one way street (gustatory). The integration here can and should modify the space of reasons into which it is brought as well. There's a great paper by Reza Negarestani which I constantly come back to, and which I think is pertinent here, where he notes that there is a way of understanding in which:

"Looking at the space of the universal, through particular instances or local contexts is in this sense no longer a purely analytical procedure. It is like looking into an expansive space through a lens that does not produce zooming-in and zooming-out effects by simply scaling up and down the same image but instead it produces synthetic and wholly different images across different scales of magnification. It then becomes almost impossible to intuitively guess what kind of conceptual and topological transformations the local context—a window into the universal— undergoes as it expands its scope and becomes more true to the universal.

...The transition from the local to the global requires something more than the juxtaposition or addition of local contexts. It requires a form of interknitting multiplication between localities that while it acknowledges their particular specifications (parameters and orientations), takes localities beyond their immediate and restricted ambits. It is in this sense that the passage from the local to the global is not simply a form of transit through which the local element preserves its constancy. It is instead a mode of production of new orientations, structures, dimensions and new intuitions of locality and globality. In this respect, universality becomes the operation of productive locality which is globally oriented". (cite).

I grant that the above is not easy to do, nor does it comes naturally. It takes a huge amount of effort to keep the whole structure supple, mobile, responsive. It can, on the contrary, rigidify, such that one is always looking to 'bring things back' into the prefab fold (apokrisis was this kind of 'explainer', par excellence, almost to the point of parody). This is explanation as lego-set. But explanation can also be kaleidoscopic in nature: you add a piece, give it a shake, and the whole thing changes (a Deleuzian vocabulary might talk about intensive and extensive approaches to explanation).

I see the Ultimate Because as the rigidifying of this structure, an attempt to 'fix' it and find its Final Form. This danger is real, but it can be mitigated. — StreetlightX

This,I agree with as well. It's closer to the 'social' half of the entwined gustatory/social image I was thinking of - a shared space of reasons, modified by what it integrates. Drawing from my (half-baked) lit background, the text that comes to mind is T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent. If you haven't read it, here's a (very) short synopsis from poetry.com.

. Eliot’s idea of tradition is complex and unusual, involving something he describes as “the historical sense” which is a perception of “the pastness of the past” but also of its “presence.” For Eliot, past works of art form an order or “tradition”; however, that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the “tradition” to make room for itself.

individual poem <-> tradition maps roughly onto local<->global. In composing a poem* or in reading a poem or in doing litcrit on a poem, there is a similar shuttling back and forth which doesn't simply make the poem/local an example of tradition/global, but produces something new at both levels (as well as in-between) in a complex movement from one to the other. (I'd actually argue it's the same for the legoworld, though it's been a long time since I inhabited one.)

So, this is good. I think by seeing the places where we agree, the place where I'm trying to locate the thing I'm talking about has slightly shifted. Or I'm beginning to realize that what I'm getting at isn't exactly where I was trying to locate it. In the right zone, but slightly off.

Rigidification as a kind of cancerous subspecies of explanatory integration goes a long way. So does drive. If rigidification is a Scylla, then there's also a Charbydis of feverishly dismantling and remantling The later is a drive to keep the whole thing constantly shaking and shuddering, maintaining a trembling pitch (Brassier's physical presence, again.)

Rigidification makes me think of a wolf spider in a hole (If I recall, Apo's avatar was a spider?). For the other thing, I'm having more difficulty finding an image. It seems related to cruel experimentation. Maybe the AI in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Anything can - and ought to be - transformed (fascination with topology, ruptures - how much can I stretch this until it breaks?) with utter indifference to the emotional ramifications. Well. Maybe. Because, I also suspect there is a certain vengeful delight to these destructive effects, and power-by-association with the thing indifferent to humanity. And that any protestations against this power are futile. I think it's very hard to ingenuously read Brassier and not pick up immediately that this is a big motivation for what's going on (the biggest give away, close-reading-wise, is the tic/obsession with the word 'irrecusable'.) At the end of the day, maybe it just comes down to : I'm not really into what's going on there.

I don't know that it needs to be broken, maybe just chanelled differently, put to use in a different manner somehow. The Deleuzian in me says: put it in connection with things, other things, other people, other practices (hard to do right now, I understand). — StreetlightX

That sounds right. I think both of those two extremes come from being so wrapped up in your own thought that you eventually have nothing to think about but thought. I think where I'm landing is a Kantian or Wittgensteinian or etc idea of philosophy as learning your way around and through certain thought-glitches (I think I still want to say glitches around explanation) so you can get on with the rest. Something you're more or less compelled to do if your mind's going to harass you in that way.
(plus philosophy as an aesthetic or leisurely occupation.) I guess it would be more accurate to say that's where I'm landing in terms of how I'm relating to the drive I've been talking about as philosophy (which is definitely very bound up with philosophy, but not exactly the same thing.)
----
* or novel, or short story or essay etc. I just prefer using 'poem' rather than 'literary text' since the latter sounds so clinical.

Deleteduserrc

@StreetlightX You mentioned on another thread that I'm often trying to solve personal problems through transpersonal thought (paraphrasing.) I think that's right. The last gasp of that is probably trying to explain why explanation is a problem, loudly and aggressively. I think basically what I want - need - is something closer to prayer, a different kind of vibration of thought altogether but only accessible once the drive thing bites its own tail and falls away.

Deleteduserrc

I agree. I could be lying to myself, but I feel something like an internal equilibrium. I'm more or less at peace with myself despite certain eccentricities and excesses and concerned instead about the world, making a living, affording a certain privacy and security, and (maybe the biggest ) the biological reality of aging. I'm healthy now, but I know what's coming. My old man is in a wheelchair from a stroke. I think I'd prefer a clean and certain death at a certain fixed time sufficiently far away to the smoky maze in which the Minotaur lurks somewhere or another. Married aging couple and all that that implies. — jjAmEs

I suspect your new avatar means you're no longer with us, forum-wise, but I relate to your thoughts about death (though I think I'm a bit younger.) I'd like clean and certain too. My biggest fear is dying confused and unprepared, with too much unresolved. If clean and certain isn't available, I'd settle for at least the animal instinct of at least a short period of 'knowing' its happening and finding a place for it to happen.

Pussycat

Violent delights have violent endings, or so they say.

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