Stoicism, the Libertarian Elect and Market Forces.

Turkey Tail Fungi

 Kant was sweet with his categorical imperative and his structures in general. You got to do something, can't just do nothing - was his version of Parmenides' own wisdom which offered "whatever it is, it must be, it cannot not be."

 Kant was a trinity thinker, he'd followed the classic vandalism standards of the later Bronze Ages, he'd straightened his curve with a three in one to keep us people from ever experiencing bliss, which in my view was unenlightened of him but you know, better than releasing the Kraken by not telling other people to think like Calvin and allowing Stoics to morph into limp wristed Libertarians as the Western Beatnik alternative to being a born again Christian.

To make sense of this rabble of words, you have to start with the Renaissance, which went on a bit through the 1300's into the 1600's and the early 1700's. The Renaissance was a peculiar reawakening, in my view led by Thomas Aquinas' attempts to broaden the horizons of the Catholic Belief System by reintroducing the church to an idea that science, while often the practice of heretical covens is also God's precious gift.

 If we go back to the ancient Stoics, and here I reference the Greek Epictetus, who was born a slave, and the Roman Seneca, who advised Nero the fiddle player, but not Marcus Aurelius, a Roman born in Austria who became a Roman Emperor, who might have done better with a personal witch doctor, a god or a psychiatrist rather than attempting to commodify a set of beautiful understandings with his imperial seal.

 These originals of Stoicism, arose during times of massive imperial decay and autocratic rule. A central maxim was to divide the world into what is in our control - such as our opinions, desires, and character - and into what is outside our control - such as the market, the Emperor, sickness, supply and demand, death and for Sartre and Schopenhauer other people.

 But, and I think this an important grasp for the dignity of cocktail hour Stoics, the ancient Stoics while they had an ethic of internal sovereignty, they were not "atomized individualists." They believed in a universal human brotherhood which they expressed through civic duty and an understanding of a cosmopolis, a world city that included all men, both free and enslaved, but probably not girls. The Ancient Stoics, the true blue pre-Roman Emperor from Austria Stoics, were not remotely Libertarian in their thinking!

 Libertarians, or atomized individualists or crude modern day sociopaths, are a mutation of the early Stoics - mutations of the Aurelius castle building cul-de-sac, rather than Epictetus or the practical ethics of the Stoic Seneca the Younger, a poet, playwright and a philosopher.

 Libertarianism took the Stoic emphasis on "internal control" and converted it into property rights and hyper-individualism. "I control my inner soul, I own my body and my capital, and no collective has the right to touch either." And it goes on into an economic coldness, the shameful frigidity of, "If you are poor or struggling, that is your individual responsibility to overcome through discipline; do not ask society for a safety net. Die silently please."

 Yes indeed, by straightening human life into a pure line of Contract and Market Exchange, Libertarianism creates a new aristocracy, much like Calvinism did. The "elect" aren't those predestined by God, but the "self-made" individual who successfully navigates the market without "complaining."

We are constantly told by Libertarians, market dogmatists assure us that "supply and demand" is a law of nature, like gravity or photosynthesis.

 It is not.

 "Supply and demand" under modern capitalism is a human-constructed set of rules that measures purchasing power, not human need and has no clue what a free market is. Those Axioms that emerge from the thinking patterns of Adam Smith and Ricardo are now jaded, old, unenlightened and illiberal.

 If a community has 1,000 hungry children and zero money, the market registers "zero demand" for food in that town. If a billionaire wants a third yacht, the market registers "high demand" for luxury shipyards. (Remember the Bush Doctrine)

 The great moral scandal of our gluttonous era is that we live in a world of manufactured scarcity inside a reality of potential abundance. When we let "market forces" dictate resource distribution, we aren't submitting to a natural law of the universe; we are surrendering human agency, morality, and reason to an unthinking accounting mechanism which defines the future as ever expanding.

The value of honesty.

A Senna Plant in Bloom

 We talked yesterday about interconnections of such magnitude they are sometimes referred to as "Global." The word "Global" was supposed to hint at a meaning so vastly interconnected and complicated, that it ultimately defies attempts to accurately define it with structures. 

 On this topic of interconnections, another way of defying Wittgenstein's "whereof one cannot speak" is to go full "Global Web," blind everyone with Tech Bros Speak and raise the banner "Epistemic Holism" as though it was an untouched round of cheese.

 "It all sounds a little like foreplay?"

 Of interest, in this wide world of meanings, "Epistemic Holism" has a twin opposite called "Epistemic Atomism." Epistemic atomism is the understanding that knowledge, justification, law, pretty much anything that looks whole, is actually made up of what can be referred to as: individual, foundational units.

"What about true scientific value prior to empirical testing?"

Therein lies the rub, my friend. Sometimes when you test the individual, foundational units to find out why the whole isn't working there's nothing wrong with the parts........

"I know the feeling.  It's when the whole is too ennui-laden to get out of bed."

 The Duhem-Quine thesis does rather shrink the value of reductionism as it supports a more coherentist grasp of our universe of things. Pierre Duhem's own Underdetermination Theory of empirical evidence and of course Willard Quine put Akron Ohio on the map with his acid distinction between "no unmarried man is married" and "no bachelor is married" argument which suggested that the analytic stance is fundamentally circular in nature and therefore prone to repeatable  errors.

 "Atomists are such Dweebs."

 Logical Positivists aren't so much Dweebs, Comrade, as reluctant to risk the perils of intuition and that chasm of subjective hopefulness that results in the extreme vacuum of belief states that result in a solidarity around such absurdities as Raelism and Vicarious Redemption.

"They don't actually believe that! It just makes them feel special and different."

 For God's sake! We were not made in laboratory by an extra terrestrial species who has lost contact with us, anyone who thinks that's where we came from struggles with retardation.

 "When you're trying to boff a UFO princess who has a BMW, Raelism makes a lot of sense."

 I'll give you that, but there is no way an infinite, invisible deity came into the world disguised as a man, was executed, and this specific execution is a cosmic legal substitute for the moral failings of all humanity.

 "Stop being a whataboutist!"

 Don't make me go Epistemic Fallibilist combined with Pragmatism all over your kitchen floor comrade! We don't build our ships in the dry dock, we build them from drift wood and bits of floating plastic along with loose bits of kelp while we're at sea. 

The Trouble with Air Breathing Swim bladders

Raintree

  One view suggests language is a representation of reality that varies from language to language and as a result produces different understandings of reality.

 Chomsky's  view suggests  that language is essentially the same from one language to another language.

 You and I talk about flexible meanings in the symbols of language. I think my view is that while the symbols might stay the same meaning changes, gets added to words and it gets taken away from words. Language is a process that moves.

 What do Cognitive science people say about language and  how we understand things.

 What they come up with is an interconnection, sometimes called Global to mean really interconnected, that ultimately defies attempts to define it with structures. That old Austrian Wittgenstein's conviction "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" is a tidy axiom. But we forget that synthesizing thought predates the noises of spoken language, we have to work out how to say things and sometimes we have to invent new words, or take one from another language, like "schadenfreude" to satisfy those "thereof one must be silent" moments.

 God knows where grammar comes from.

 We humans did not make our vocal cords from scratch, they go back to a simpler time 400 million years ago, when we were air breathing fish. A lung fish which had developed folds to prevent water entering our air breathing swim bladders. 

  

The Husserl/Sartre Heresy

Mallow

  Easy to get side tracked with Saint Teresa, she was an astonishing person, and I wonder about the causes and sources of her fits, which might have been epilepsy, might have been moldy bread, could have been mushroom or womanly wiles.

 Which brings us back to Husserl's influence on Sartre's essay - Emotions: Toward a Theory. His suggestion that Emotions were a Bad Faith, magical source of illegitimate excuses for inauthentic action must have been received with degrees of astonishment from professionals in the psychiatry business who, I believe, had been suggesting since Descartes that the Ego was a guide or some sort of decider with the power to squash rebellion and exile the rebellious 

  Sartre's Ego-less existence, when confronted be a Bolshy back row does, in his theory of emotions, seem to have a rebellion squashing technique. I think Freud and maybe Jung saw the role of psychology in our society as "bandage the damaged and send them back to the front." Sartre was, if you'll forgive me, more wishy-washy liberal in his search for a cure rather than a bandage.

  Patience sweet one! For Husserl consciousness was always "intentional." What does that mean? It means consciousness is always directed at something. Might come as a surprise to some, but you aren't just always slack- jawed conscious, what you are is always conscious of something, of a tree, of ruby red lips, of a spot on someone's nose, and so on. Consciousness for Husserl darts around from one corner of the eye to the other, and yes it can be absolutely exhausting.

 Sartre would have seen Saint Teresa's visions, whether from epilepsy, moldy bread, or mushrooms, as her mind choosing a magical transformation of the world. His main squeeze, de Beauvoir, along with a vast swath of psychiatrists, psychologists and the like would want to remind Sartre that the brain was part of a situation. Then they'd go on to moan about how Consciousness does not start from a vacuum. It has to interpret and it has to inhabit the physical state it finds itself in. Consciousness doesn't just lush out and dream of sex and chocolate, it's intentional, it darts around form object to object.

 With Husserl and subsequent thinkers the meaning in "Object" contained the idea that Consciousness was always conscious of something, this something included both traditional objects such as cups and loaves of bread and other objects of the mind including ideas, fear, emotions anything that consciousness could be conscious of. 

 Here the argument goes, "As soon as you reflect on something, that something becomes an Object." 

 This understanding was a golden moment for Sartre. Consciously and intentionally reflecting on something resulted in that object becoming an object that could be examined. The object, in this case an emotion, whether it be ennui or rage, is no longer you. It's an object.

 For Sartre, "If I can step back and observe my own fear, my own ideas, and even my own Ego, then none of those things are ME. They are all objects floating in front of consciousness." And as such, from occasion to situation, these objects could be thought of as a rebellious back row, which meant the magical transformation this particular rebellious back row was attempting to make could be eidetically examined, the layers peeled away and the truth, bad faith or otherwise, revealed.

  Husserl’s phenomenology had dragged everything out into the light. Sartre loved it, it was liberating. But for traditional Cartesian Philosophy, your "mind" or "Ego" was a sacred inner room where emotions, thoughts, and identity lived together as a cozy, neurotic heap of "I'm thinking therefore I am-ing." It was a pile or a stack rich with potential for well paid work, so long as Union Breakers like Husserl and down-right Bolsheviks like Sartre didn't have their way.