Power and Authority

A Barn Door

 Within he context of Whitehead's frightfully sensible moves to unbifurcate nature and science I can imagine we might think of billionaires as the scientists of nature. And this I think is why we, or I at least, prefer Bergson, a mind less interested in bpwing down to microscopes and test tubes.

 In the classification of philosophers and their philosophies the rational mind often looks to a Proud Analytical Philosopher whose mother, on the advice of his father engaged in a a sexual relationship with the Private Tutor. And yes, you're correct, we are talking our man of "precision in language" Bertrand Russell, an advisor of studies and career advisor to both Whitehead and Wittgenstein. Hallowed ground, you might call it, if you were still able to smoke cigarettes, drink rum and wonder whether boys should ring around a Maypole or is that a girl thing. 

 Russell, an essentially stodgy old man with strong opinions and some beautiful eccenticities, classified Philosophers and Philosophies this way. 1) Philosophies of love, inspired by love and happiness. 2) Theoretical philosophies, inspired by love of knowledge. 3) Practical philosophies, inspired by love of action. He didn't think Rouseau was a philospher, rather Russell saw Rouseau as the father of nineteenth century Romanticism. 

 So what have we got today on the Power and Authority docket. I'll call it the distinction between re-education, the re-wiring of thought. As against the punishment of sitting in a corner, the chance to reach into your own mind and think about it. 

A back-row comrade who had an idea.

Watering Cans

  "There is no certainty in language, there is no gravity and therefore no grammar jeweled gene to make it easy, no dictionary, no precision in the corridors of meaning. Language emerged, to greater or lesser extent in all living things as an anti entropy bolishivism. An opposition to order, a management mechanism born of the probabilities, uncertainties and convictions existent in the universe's own opinion of itself, and unearthed by the poking around of physicists in that place in the universe where photons have energy and momentum, no mass but they exert pressure, or a slope were life asks questions."

 In other words Walking Stewart was incorrect, the philosopher does not bow down to the microscope. Far from it, the miscroscope bows down to the philosopher.

The trap of conviction and the danger of idealism are two excellent criticisms. The charge of Human Centric claptrap is always a valuebale criticism. If we think of math, science etc as a more correct and precise iteration of language, a place to find the security of an authority that offers a high potential for demonstrably correct answers, there does seem to be a definition of trust that makes great sense. 

 But worth raising a memory here comrade. I friend of mine, a corporal, was once given a report by a young officer, it went this way "His men will follow him anywhere, if only to find out what he'll do next."

 Try not to laugh, but can we look at the idea that the universe is the Front Row, it doesn't know what it's doing, but it's doing something. Life in all its forms is a back row.

 I think this does require us to think of how Schopenhauer's idea of Will might bond with Tagore and together present a human centric back row case to the court with particluar reference to Free Market Economics. Will we listen to science will we listen to myth or do we listen to emotions of the moment and not much more.

 As I have understood him Adam Smith in his wealth of nations saw good in a nation becoming wealthy. He also saw how personal greed could overtake an enterprise, lead to poor decisions, reduce what he called it's efficiency. A wealthy nation needed a sound moral foundation. Something people weren't good at. His answer was a free market, that allowed the efficient enterprise to succeed and the inefficient enterprise to fail.

 In my view science, reason, the art of economics, mathematics have all failed to resolve an issue in our species. That issue is "How do we make good decisions?"

 This leaves us with Power, as if pulled by an invisible force, gravitating toward poorer and poorer decisions, while good decisions follow the fate that Foster Wallace hoped would befall that safeguard of civilization some of us refer to as the joy of irony.

As poor decisions gather momentum, head toward a terminal velocity, the back row remains the preserve of past wisdom. Adam Smith wasn't God. He was a voice from the back row that failed miserably.

Bergson, Whithead and Einstein

Tree Frog

 Rock on Tommy! A man called Zeno said this : We can never move beyond a single point, we are where we are, and where we are is made by yesterday. Our Man Bergson didn't accept this idea. He said it's not about points, leave that to people who did Geometry. For us people time was mobile. Where we are now is made by yesterday, but it's not yesterday as a dead weight, it's yesterday flowing into now. A snowball rolling and gathering, a yesterday packed into Zeno's now and into your now.

 Zeno, Berson suggested, was measuring space not time, and in the 1920's, with his paradigm shift of relativity so was Einstein. 

 I seem to increasingly prefer words related to phenomena and less related to experience when thinking about awareness and the feelings that which ever way I look at it seem to dominate awareness. There's too much My and Me in experience. I think the indivualizing of awareness might be a cultural "phenomenon." 

 When I look at me, and my reaction I find myself seeing my thoughts in two mirrors. The first mirror is How it effects me and the other mirror is How others expect me to react. You're right both mirrors contain cushions, both mirrors reflect a past, and both mirrors have an idea of the future which is colored by a past built of experiences, experiences which have been colored by the value a culture has placed on the individual and expects from a person.

 I do see why Kant might disparage Bergson for being a touchy feely cul-de-sac. But I do find myself really hoping Bergson is correct.

 Kant wanted the mind to be a supreme, orderly judge sitting above the world, sorting phenomena into neat, sterile filing cabinets of space and time. He wanted control. He wanted the security of a well-tutored system.

 But Bergson - and Walking Stewart before him - offered the terrifying, beautiful alternative, that we are embedded in the duration. If Bergson is right, you don't need the two mirrors to tell you who you are or how to feel. You can drop below the surface chatter of the "Me" and feel the actual, un-mediated surge of the vital impetus (élan vital) moving through you.

 I should mention Whitehead, who took Bergson's back-row idea placed it in the front row by tutoring it with points. Another time perhaps.

The Wisest of Men meets Camus.

Tutored Lane

 Where are we in our world tour of bygone, present and future times as we look for cushions to battle the authenticity of greed, buffoonary, un-tutored power and the absurdity of it all. 

 The tutored cushion can easily become an anesthetic. It softens the blows of the system just enough so that the back row doesn't pitchfork the rich, while ensuring the extraction of the iron ore continues without interruption. It turns the tragedy of the human condition into an administrative problem.

 Yes, in many ways, by standing up for a Philosophy of Answerlessness, we are absolutely pulling Socrates out of the marble tomb the front row built for him and we are putting him back on the dirt road where he belongs.

 When the Oracle of Delphi declared that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, Socrates didn't puff his chest out like an emperor or a modern billionaire. He went into a crisis. He spent the rest of his life interviewing the "tutored" elites - the politicians, the poets, the master artisans - trying to prove the Oracle wrong.

 And thusly Socrates achieved his ultimate, back-row conclusion : "I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." Yes indeed, he drank the poison with absolute, serene composure. Before the cold reached his heart, his last words to his friend were: "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please pay it, and don't forget."

 Asclepius is the god of healing. By asking his friends to offer a sacrifice of a cockeral to Asclepius the healer, Socrates was dropping the back-row one last bead of cosmic irony

 "Life," the Wisest of men might have said "Under the tyranny of ready-made answers is the sickness. Death is the cure. I am finally being healed."

 Let's call it the exact, defiant revolt that Camus was talking about. Socrates didn't run away, and he didn't weep; he looked the absolute absurdity of his execution square in the face, accepted the parameters of his physical reality, and kept his curiosity intact right up until his eyes closed and the photons of life left him. He didn't let the executioner break his footing on that rope across the abyss.