The Uniqueness of No-group or becoming a Potted Plant

Oxalis Bloom

The word Positive is fraught. In the 1300's its meaning was firmly on the side of a legal understandings, formally laid out, decreed by authority, if it was positive, it was there to be obeyed. The point is, "decreed by authority" doesn't or shouldn't mean good and it doesn't or shouldn't mean bad. So, when you ask the question "what does Positive Distinctiveness" mean, one answer might include the suggestion that positive, in this context, is better understood as the opposite to negative rather than as a value judgement on the condition of meaning in the word distinctiveness. In almost every way, social psychologist's who use the expression drive for positive distinctiveness would be better off placing this urgent need or tension that motivates a social being firmly within the meaning of the words Optimal Distinctiveness. And, joy of joys, in 1991 Marilynn Brewer, a great name, put the pin into Social Identity Theory, with its Positive Distinctiveness, by flaunting her Optimal Distinctiveness Theory. A theory which said there's much more to the 1979 Positive Distinctiveness theory of social Identity than was first admitted to. Dr. Marilynn Brewer, whose argument through most of her work in social psychology, a body of work that includes titles such as "Choice Behavior in Social Dilemmas" which is a big one for me, offers a window into the idea that our identities are shaped by our group membership. She suggests that an individual's identity within a society isn't just a drive for Positive Distinctiveness. No, the motivating tension, the urgent need, the drive is about being Optimally Unique. Of course Marilynn, and this is just typical, didn't mean wonderfully unique and special, she defined Optimal as a unique balancing point which in Distinctiveness Theory meant possessing just the right amount of being someone in the group without being nobody in the group. This balance allows the person to fit comfortably enough into the group to maintain a lonely belonging that was never actually going to be the complete person. And here it might be well worthwhile taking a moment to remember that in the social psychology of groups the wider meaning of Optimal Distinctiveness includes the meanings of leadership and followership.  It's all very accurate I'm sure, but, even when you recover from the daintiness of the word followership, the exploration isn't a pretty commentary on the independent mindedness of us people. Makes some of us yearn to become a hedgehog, a spitting cobra, or even one of Arthur Schopenhauer's poodles instead of a sheep. Social Psychologists, as well as owning an approach to understanding optimal value in the balance between Us and Me, interesting ideas on the extent to which membership of a group is predicted to reduce social uncertainty and apparently provide a psychologically comforting blueprint for behavior, not to mention a road map for both self evaluation and for the evaluation of other possibly less wholesome group members. These, perfectly acceptable and arguably vital demands from the imperatives for social cohesion are pretty much everything Arthur Schopenhauer disliked about the world of people he lived in. Is it fair to ask, I wonder, whether Arthur's "choice behaviors" or how he managed attitudes and behaviors in social situations that presented him with a dilemma, were positively or negatively influenced by contact with society. After all we do have the great comfort of Arthur's assertion that Will is the manifestation of a primal force that is "blind, irrational, aimless and incessantly striving," which, without tossing a seamstress downstairs, is somehow more encouraging than the Calvinist potted plant notion that the "Will is in bondage to a sinful disposition."

Knowledge and Truth

Wash Day

Epistemology is the word used to embrace theories associated with the nature, origins and limits of knowledge. What is knowledge? By one definition knowledge is a Justified True Belief, a JTB. The question, what is belief? One answer is this: Belief is Propositional Attitude. A proposition is a statement that can be either true or false, the attitude is whether you believe the statement is true or whether you believe the statement is false and when the definition of Knowledge holds firm and is reflected in reality you can justify the truth or falseness of the proposition. It's a lot of words for something that would be obvious if it weren't for the truth or otherwise of the proposition: there are a bunch of other things an understanding of belief needs to take into account before reaching a conclusion. Here the next category of contemplation comes under the title of psychology and cognition. Belief is a mental acceptance that gives shape to the world we live in. This shape allows us to navigate our world according to our belief systems and gives us a basis upon which to interpret new information. It makes our mental life possible. Worth noting that much of what we believe is lodged in more distant parts of the mind, we don't have to concentrate too hard on a majority of our mind-to-world connections for them to work. Things like waking up in our own bed and having confidence the staircase is where we last saw it. A third area in the contemplation of belief is the extent to which belief is active, as opposed to passive. An example of this, those of us with dispositions to leave nothing to chance, might become a little obsessive about wearing clean underwear every day in the event of a hospitalization or a romantic interlude, others shrug away these sort of pointless gestures and hold fast to the inevitability of disappointment. Then you have nuances within the word belief. Justified or not you have a belief in, a trust and faith in something being true because wouldn't it be nice of there was a fruitcake in the mail. And you can have a belief that a proposition is true, of course they fill doughnuts with strawberry jam and Vegemite, everyone knows that. So there you have it, I'd call it a serviceable End of The Enlightenment that Heralds the Dawn of Post Irony Critique of Pure Reason. And again I'll ask why has our frail, toothless, non-tree-climbing species evolved in this rich and magnificent, incredibly dangerous and cruel-hearted manner. My own answer is less to do with "it'll be over soon" and more to do with Arendt's expression Spontaneous Beginnings. Go ahead call it a big bang god with absolutely no plan, no design, a randomness containing an open mouthed, wide-eyed expression that screams. Or you can be good to yourself by putting it in the context of the respected yet anti-social Schopenhauer's irrational restlessness. You can make it up as you navigate your way to the Rapture and when you believe it, true or not, it becomes knowledge. Truth isn't an invincible oneness, it's not a Genghis Khan, nor is it putting man on Mars or nailing him to a cross. Truth is no closed doors, it's hallowed ground, it's a little bit of everything and a sense of calm. 

The Original Act of Creation

Arches in Town

Let's talk about some of Hannah Arendt's disagreements with Carl Schmitt. And here, no kidding, Carl died in 1985 at the decrepit age 96 while the beautiful, upright and golden Arendt died in 1975 at the age of 69. In 1933 Carl, who was a scholar and jurist, a professor of constitutional and international law, became a member of the German Nazi Party. "And your point!" Well I'd like first to say that Arendt couldn't help but have an admiration for Carl's scholarship and his "ingenious theories" but saw in him a splendid example of what she called the kind of "absolute cooperation" and replacement of first-rate talents with "crackpots and fools" that occurs under totalitarian regimes. In other words Carl had no balls and very little imagination. Of the many disagreements Carl and Hannah had, it may be possible to summarize them all by mentioning Arendt's understanding of "Spontaneous Beginnings." The term refers to her own thinking about the moment a new political order comes into being, or if you prefer, is born into the world. The discussion usually begins with Schmitt's thoughts on what he called constituent power and sovereignty. Constituent Power, according to Carl, was unlimited power and it belonged to the people. This power was completely arbitrary, absolutely no point in looking for an underlying rationality, and to show how logical and well read he was Carl assured his readers that "constituent power cannot be deduced from any a priori cause..... It is omnipotent and exceptional.... Does not depend on any norm or value..." Carl gets very carried away and he goes on to suggest that creating a New Constitution, new norms and values, required a "decision on the concrete form of its political life." The authority for this decision rightfully derives from Carl's absolute constituent power that has no a priori cause - nothing came before it, it's just obvious from experience. Naturally Arendt looked for dung to throw on Schmitt's walls and hunted down a shovel to sift through the soils and societies through history in her a priori insistence that new beginnings if they were to last, didn't have to derive from a Sovereign Power, an entity Carl defined as "he who decides on the state of exception." By state of exception Carl meant, whether this constituent power was creating new or suspending old, the original act of creation is an extra-legal action. Schmitt was a legal man. In other words, whether it was a psychological anomaly, a blank stare at the library, a passion for Cato the Elder, whatever the reason, it was the Power and Authority, ugliness and misery of force that tickled Carl Schmitt's tummy, gave him a sense of hope for a new world dominated by, if not a king, then a unity. Hannah Arendt's ideas about the spontaneous nature of beginnings was attached to the idea of being born, a new arrival into the world, the risk and excitement of the unforeseen, balloons in the park. For Hannah a political beginning was a shared world created by a collective promise, it was unpredictable and fragile, no two people are the same, it was an agreement, it was the founding act of a plurality. For Schmitt, a political beginning was a unity founded by an extra-legal power that determines and maintains a friend/enemy distinction. Hannah Arendt, a German citizen who was a Jew, had to leave Germany because of Schmitt's notion of unity.

Aristotle on Cognition

Aristotle son of Nicomachus, from Stagira

If you're over 55, instead of comb-overs, golf and colorful body creams it's worth preparing yourself for the inevitable retardation of aging by going back in time to reacquaint yourself with Aristotle's understanding of an element of the Psyche which these days is referred to as "Cognition." But first you must rid yourself of the Stoic conclusion that Logic is one of the three essential parts of philosophy, and embrace Aristotle's Organum by dismissing Logic as merely a preliminary tool used for all Disciplined and all Reasoned Enquiry. For Aristotle, Logic, despite the rather obnoxious Greek First attitude he offered his ex-pupil Alexander the Great, didn't hold with the Stoic position that presented logic as an elitist shell around the delicate yolk of physics and ethics, and as a result produced a monopolistic empiricism that didn't believe in throwing dung at the wall or shovels and as a result stifled inquiry, dulled passion and voided most of the fun in life. Aristotle's central theme in his exploration of reasoned understanding was to know the cause of a thing, and following that up by knowing that the thing cannot be otherwise. A nifty way of describing the scientific method. You start with sense perceptions, what your eyes, your mouth, ears, fingers and so on tell you. Your sense perceptions dutifully give appearance to your imagination which plays with them, looks them up in your memory, thus armed, the mind moves on from details of the appearances your senses have noticed and produces a universal about which, somewhere in your filing system, there may still be a record of prior contacts with said appearances and this is then given to a process of deduction that produces an explanation of the witnessed phenomenon which may have some semblance to true things. Then, as a non-stoic you of course have to add the elements of dung throwing, what you'd prefer to believe, and shovels, digging through your imagination for alternative "facts." Somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age the average male's share of physical and cognitive capacities enter a sort of stasis rich with potential for the charlatans of the culture, medical and advertising industries and at the age of seventy, retardation gathers pace as the cogs of cognition begin to fail, we start dribbling from the nose and the side of the mouth, find ourselves offering vicious and unnecessary opinions conjured out of midair and by the time we're comparing the decline of the Weimar Republic to the Temperance Movement in the USA that produced the 8th Amendment in 1920, which was repealed by 21st Amendment of 1933 while struggling to remember the name of the road we've live on for over twenty years, we're well past time for the grave.