we need to talk about Hegel (MP3 AUDIO)

Paul Redding speaks out about Hegel's contemporary importance for politics, ethics, and religion HERE.

The interview, conducted by the Australian radio program The Philosopher's Zone, was prompted by the recent controversy surrounding Redding's ARC funded research project. (See HERE for more info about that.)

What Jaron Lanier Thinks of Technology Now : The New Yorker

Lanier on technology & social-media. One great idea was how he (correctly, I believe) stated that social networking sites are more often driven by hate and fear, rather than by love.

And remember Jong's quote: "Gossip is the opiate..."

http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_kahn

The Aesthetic Appreciation of Natural Disasters

Reblogging this from NewApps and Aesthetics for Birds (where it first appeared).  Please visit their sites.  (As a side note, I also found this post by Mohan Matthen - on beauty and evolution - informative, but also conversant with the reblogged post below.

The Aesthetic Appreciation of Natural Disasters

[this post originally appeared in Aesthetics for Birds as a guest post] Hayao Miyazaki's animation movie Ponyo features a tsunami. The tsunami is shown in its full threatening and destructive power, yet is rendered with a great aesthetic sensibility. On several occasions, Miyazaki expressed his aesthetic delight in natural disasters, and defended it as follows:

There are many typhoons and earthquakes in Japan. There is no point in portraying these natural disasters as evil events. They are one of the givens in the world in which we live. I am always moved when I visit Venice to see that in this city which is sinking into the sea, people carry on living regardless. It is one of the givens of their life. In the same way people in Japan have a different perception of natural disasters.

Miyazaki is not the only artist to find inspiration in natural disasters. William Turner depicted with gusto a hapless steamboat, struggling in a snowstorm. That we find aesthetic delight in natural disasters is puzzling. Why do we sometimes delight in natural disasters? And is it morally appropriate to do so? These questions have not often been addressed because both aesthetics and psychology have tended to focus on positive and pleasurable aesthetic properties of nature, such as the delicacy of a flower, the slow twirling of autumn leaves, the majesty of a waterfall. But we are not only be moved by nature (as Noël Carroll describes our intuitive and visceral response to nature) in its delicate, pretty form, but also in its destructive form.

There is a wealth of research indicating that humans prefer natural, green environments (e.g., farmland, forest, oceanside) to built, urbanized surroundings. In his recent book, The Artful Species, Stephen Davies points out that evolutionary approaches to landscape aesthetics tend to equate desirability with beauty: the hidden assumption is that we take aesthetic delight in environments that are attractive to live in. Evolutionary aestheticians have launched the “savanna hypothesis”, which stipulates that a large part of human evolution took place in savannah-like landscapes with plenty of access to water and food sources (such as fruit-bearing trees). This sort of environment, unsurprisingly, pops up as the image of paradise across cultures (the garden of Eden in Christianity and Judaism and Jannah in Islam for example). This is exactly the sort of environment that is popular in landscape and park design, such as the grounds of Blenheim Palace where I regularly walk.

But this evolutionary story is inadequate. The fate of the work of the garden architect of Blenheim, Capability Brown illustrates this well: shortly after his death, his works became depreciated as smooth and bland by a public that had become more excited by wilderness rather than meticulously kept Italian gardens, stark snowy mountains rather than gently sloping hills, a stormy sea rather than a calm lake. Davies suggests that the great adaptability of humans to their environments could be key: people can feel at home in a wide range of environments, often molding them to their own needs, such as the arid wastes of northern Australia or polder landscaping. 

However, that still does not explain why we can be fascinated, and sometimes even aesthetically moved, by things that are definitely not conducive to human flourishing, such as volcanic eruptions, tornadoes or tsunamis. Such ambivalent aesthetic experiences of nature in its forbidding forms are encapsulated in Kant's concept of the sublime. According to Kant, volcanoes and tornadoes provide both aesthetic pleasure and displeasure. We feel pleasure because of our superiority of reason over nature (this is why we only appreciate the sublime when we have some safe distance from the natural disaster at hand), yet also displeasure, an awareness that we are physically powerless in the face of such events. We oscillate between these feelings of attraction and repulsion. How can we make sense of the sublime within contemporary cognitive psychology? The feeling of repulsion could be explained by an evolved aversion to events that are potentially dangerous. But how to account for the feeling of attraction? Awe, an emotion that is still in need of further study, may be a good candidate for this. 

The prototype model of awe by Keltner and Haidt suggests that awe - the emotion most commonly associated with the sublime - is elicited by stimuli that are vast and that prompt a need for psychological accommodation. Keltner and Haidt see awe as an adaptive emotion that arose in our primate ancestry, in particular, in the need for lower-status individuals to recognize the status of higher-status individuals within the group: by feeling awe for an alpha individual, one would desist in fruitlessly trying to challenge his or her authority, which would have been adaptive. Keltner and Haidt propose that the primordial form of awe is the emotions a low status individual feels towards a powerful one. This model does not explain why awe is felt in situations other than the social domain, such as when we are confronted with natural disasters. We do not feel social emotions like shame or guilt in the presence of landscapes, whereas a site like the Grand Canyon elicits awe - indeed natural landscapes are more frequent elicitors of awe than other humans according to self-reports. Keltner and Haidt's explanation for this is that the features of powerful others that elicit awe, such as high rank, dominance or fame can be transposed in landscape terms, such as physical vastness. To me, this is quite a stretch (for instance, they think vastness can not only be social or physical, but also conceptual, as when we are in awe of the scope and power of a mathematical formula, or a scientific idea).

A complicating factor in the psychological study of awe is that its negative valence has disappeared in the shifting semantics of the term. Awe used to be an ambivalent term, for instance, awe and fear are synonymous in the Hebrew Bible, as still clear in terms like a 'God-fearing person'. When Haidt asked his students whether they felt awe at the 9/11 attacks, they were reluctant to do so. “I think our current use of the word awe has been bleached into a positive emotion, so people in my emotion class were reluctant to say they felt awe on 9/11” (Haidt, quoted in Sundararajan). So we have a concept that is disappearing in everyday discourse, even though the emotion associated with it still occurs. We are sometimes aesthetically moved (awed) by natural disaster, and from a psychological perspective, it is currently unclear why this is the case. Moving into the normative domain, Yuriko Saito argues that such feelings should be resisted: it is not morally appropriate to appreciate the sublimity of a tsunami, volcanic eruption or tornado, given the pain and suffering it provokes. Clearly, natural disasters were not produced with artistic intent. Nevertheless, according to Saito, “our human-oriented moral sentiments do dictate that we do not derive pleasure (including aesthetic pleasure) from other humans’ misery, even if it is caused by nature taking its course”.

There are theological parallels. In the Hebrew Bible, Elihu, one of Job’s friends cites his aesthetic appraisal of storms and floods as marks of God's divine majesty; ironically, the very same things that destroyed Job's house and killed his children. One cannot help but feel how insensitive and morally objectionable Elihu is when he says this. When discussing the question, Bruce Janz (UCF) remarked that such aesthetic delight would “certainly be morally risky, in the same sense that humor based on things like race or religion can be morally risky.” What does it say about someone who finds, say, sexist jokes funny, whereas others find them demeaning? “Did those others find them not funny at all, or did their moral sense override their sense of humor?” Similarly, what does aesthetically appreciating natural disasters say about that person? Does it indicate a decreased sensitivity for the suffering associated with these disasters? This may explain the moral risk involved in the aesthetic delight in natural disasters. Perhaps this would still allow for such aesthetic appreciation under some conditions, for example, when one is in a situation where the safe distance is smaller or gone, as when one lives in an environment where one could be affected by it.

quote of the day

"The idea that only substances can produce changes goes back to Aristotle. In Plato and the pre-Socratics however, the causal efficacy of principles is recognized (e.g. the love and strife of Empedocles)."

"There is no discernible reason why an existential fact cannot be grounded in nonexistential ones, why substantial things cannot be explained on the basis of some nonsubstantival circumstance or principle...Modern science teaches living organisms from complexes of inorganic molecules. If such a principle fails as regards matter and life, need it hold for substance?"

- Nicholas Rescher, A System of Pragmatic Idealism (Vol. 3: Metaphilosophical Inquiries)

can Whitehead be a Christian philosopher? on the monarchical social organization of actual occasions

Hartshorne's ethical treatment of Leibnizian monads in Whiteheadian vein - that is, as societies of occasions guided by a dominant monarchical monad, is something that I look favorably upon due to my metaphysical commitment to panpsychism and panentheism.  For more information on that, see the section "Social Process," HERE.

The fact that it may be possible for a dominant occasion (dominant in its ontological integrity and positive aesthetic, moral, and political value) to guide or lure all other becoming occasions, monads, etc. etc. - looked at within the domain of theology - may thus place Whitehead, if his ontology be universalized sufficiently enough, within the domain of Christian or dare even I say "Catholic," i.e. "universal," metaphysics. See HERE. 

How the diversity of these occasions, or ever-becoming qualitative forms of life, is organized under a singular vital function or principle, thus constituting not only an ecological metaphysic but an ecotheological metaphysics, is HERE.

process-relational philosophy and value experience

Steven Shaviro has two posts HERE and HERE covering among other topics processes of individuation (Simondon) and the basic nature of value experience (Whitehead).  These two posts have prompted me to go and dig through my own posts/thoughts on the subject and repost them below, as I apparently have covered alot of similar themes and thought readers might benefit from taking a look.  But first just a thought of introduction.

A basic truth spoken by Whitehead and Hartshorne is that the value character of experience is determined by various intensities which, relating to each other, form the basic aesthetic contrasts of experience.  The crucial question does not concern the relations between or among the intensities of experience (although this is an interesting question), but rather how these intensities communicate singular expressions of perspective and thus may be taken as self-determining becoming-subjects in their own right.  In other words, how do singular "firsts" come to be?  In the generation of "firsts" (dynamic singular agents) the value character of experience becomes ethical and political when "seconds" and "thirds" are added - although as a "first" any agent is always already primitively aesthetic - felt as some positive character of experience.

Or to put it another way, from Firsts (aesthetic quality) we get Seconds (reaction, clashes) and Thirds (generalities, law) together in a categorial scheme.  Peirce saw this quite clearly, as did Whitehead.

1. Hartshorne on internal and external relations 
2. In defense of relations (again)
3. Whitehead's concept of importance and James' "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" 
4. Hartshorne, Leibniz, panpsychism 
5. Whitehead's God and powers: a response to "subjectalism" 
6. Shaviro on aesthetics and forms of life 
7. What is Nature? 
8. The upholding and sharing of value intensity 
9. Do animals grieve?

"The correction of defects in traditional versions of Idealism."
From Charles Hartshorne, The Zero Fallacy.

MV: One perhaps puzzling aspect of your philosophy is your “ideal­ism.” For you, objects do not depend on our particular experiences of them; rather, you believe in the asymmetrical dependence of subjects on their objects. Thus, epistemologically speaking, you are not an idealist but a real­ist. However, you contend that “Epistemological realism is entirely compati­ble with metaphysical idealism.” What, exactly, does your “metaphysical idealism” entail, and is “idealistic” indeed an appropriate label for your type of metaphysics? 

H: I deal with this especially in “The Synthesis of Idealism and Real­ism,” Theoria 15 (1949); also in “What was True in Idealism,” Philos 43 (1946). The key is fourfold: (1) subject-object relations are subject-subject relations so far as objects are active singulars and concrete, otherwise the objects are abstractions from or collections of such subjects; (2) actual objects are temporally prior to and hence independent of subjects to which they are given; (3) subjects (Leibniz) are enormously varied and in the vast majority of kinds more or less radically different from human persons, vary­ing from feelings of electrons, say, at the lower end of the hierarchy, to God at the upper end; (4) fully concrete and particular subjects are not persons and the like, but single experiences (Whitehead’s actual entities). My psychical­ism and Whitehead’s “reformed subjectivism” are virtually the same, so far as I can see. The subject-object relation is prehension. No one else ever clearly had this idea previously. Tibetan Buddhism seems to have come fairly close, Berkeley and Hegel not at all. 

interesting Stengers and Whitehead article + some thoughts on society or social vs. nature and individual

Interesting article on Whitehead and Stengers titled "Realities to be-come: on Cosmopolitics," HERE.  The article brings up the distinction between social and non-social, between a society of occasions and thinking that transcends modal dichotomies in favor of plurimodal actualities.  For example, a thinking beyond nature and culture (Descola, Stengers) but one, also, that embraces the reality of singular actualities that are "individuals" that ever be-come.

I have been reading alot lately about the social nature of actual occasions, the social nature of the individuating process, with hopes of discovering within it a more subjective, personal, and "private" process of self-articulation and process of individuation.  On this road, the metaphysics of individuation, I've traveled along with the likes of Tarde, Simondon, Deleuze, Ruyer, Stengers, Latour, Leibniz, and Whitehead.  I've even immersed myself within Weiss's Privacy and You, I, and the Others (that's an obscure reference, but an avenue that has taught me much).  Ecologically speaking, I am now interested in the value of individuals and societies.

How is it that I've made my way through these philosophers in just a few months?

The secret to reading alot is to read whenever you can.

Unlike Us #3 - Social Media: Design or Decline

Unlike Us #3 - Bernard Stiegler: Social Networking As a Stage of Grammatization and the New Political Question from network cultures on Vimeo.


Unlike Us #3 - Social Media: Design or Decline

Session 1: Theory and Critique of ‘Social’

Bernard Stiegler (FR) Social Networking As a Stage of Grammatization and the New Political Question

Conference Day #1 (22 March 2013)

Social networking and engineering are dimensions of the digital stage of a process of grammatization that began thirty thousand years ago. With the advent of digitization, psychic and collective memory as well as social relations have all become objects of exchange value. What this means is that, given digital technologies are organs of publishing, that is, of the production of public space and time, digitization is a process of privatization of the public thing – of the res publica. Privatization here means: commodification. In short, what is occurring is the destruction of the psychic and collective process of individuation that began with the Greek polis. Furthermore, the domination by those giants that are Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon is possible above all because very little genuine work is being done on the stakes of digitization by either the academic sphere or the political sphere.

Platonic forms and process-relational philosophy

Can Plato contribute anything to process-relational philosophy, or is Platonism process-relational philosophy's opposite?

How might we draw upon notable process philosophers of the twentieth century (Whitehead or Deleuze, for example) in order to ask whether there is room for Platonic Forms in a process-relational ontology, whether in the shape of eternal objects or virtualities? 

These questions and others are entertained in a book which considers Plato's relationship to process philosophy, as well as to the philosophy of religion, HERE.

Biosemiotics (OHP Living Books About Life book download)

HERE (875 KB .pdf file)

When Living Systems Become Minded: Biosemiotics (VIDEO)