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. 

Hazlitt, Love, lust , Proles and The Party

Sedam or Stonecrop

An Irishman called William Hazlitt, who at the age of 52, died in Soho, which is in London, England, once got himself into a bit of a fix for following the ancient tradition of offering a woman money in exchange for sex. Unfortunately William had propositioned a rather well situated young lady, who took offence to his assumption that she was a harlot and made a point of telling the multitude that she was not for sale.  A good friend of Hazlitt, a poet called Coleridge, offered the opinion that Hazlitt was always in love with someone, and he went on to add that his friend was "addicted to women as objects of sexual indulgence." These days it could be called a Compulsory Sexual Behavior Disorder, but Hazlitt himself preferred to explore his obsession in terms of the fascinating relationship between love and lust. He wrote a book called Liber Amoris, The Book of Love, which was a touch on the graphic side and sold very well, earned William a reputation for being an obscene little man, his face marked by smallpox, who deserved nothing but ridicule and disgrace. As the years turned, especially after his death in 1830, William Hazlitt became renowned for his essays, his literary criticism, a long list of achievements that for some of his modern day admirers puts him up there with Samuel Johnson and even George Orwell. Here worth recalling that Samuel Johnson, a perfect gentleman who died in 1784, thought love a poor foundation for a lasting marriage and he saw lust as selfish and disruptive. Orwell on the other hand saw Love and Lust as intricate to his understanding of political power, individual liberty and human nature. Orwell went further, he saw personal relationships driven by love and lust as a central form of rebellion against totalitarianism. Why did Orwell think this? Because in his writing he notes that love and lust as a sexual relationship produced a private world which was outside The Party's control. Hazlitt, who was alive in the early days of Kant's domination of the Enlightenment was one who didn't think human motivation, human nature, was entirely selfish. He stood with the Romantic Poets, Coleridge, Byron and Wordsworth against the utilitarians, the Adam Smith/Bentham invisible hand liberals on question of human nature being more robust and less  amenable to the simplistic and axiomatic understandings the utilitarians wanted to believe. William rather sweetly suggested "the love of liberty is the love of others, the love of power is the love of self." Then in Orwell's 1984 the lovers are captured and tortured, forced to betray each other and, no longer living as reinforcements for each other's love and lust, they were forced to return to The Party, become one with the loves and lusts of The Party. In Orwell's story, the lowest social class of Proles, their lives humdrum and ordinary, they were unimportant but necessary for the Party's survival, they granted a sense of unity and purpose to purer Party Members who were define by what they weren't, they weren't Proles. But as Orwell suggested the Proles retained more of their humanity, they enjoyed their own private loyalties, their secrets and their own humors, than the poor saps who were Party Members.

George Ionescu on Happiness and Defining Freedom by What It's Not

Walnut

Let's talk about a Romanian named George Ghiță Ionescu who wrote a lot of books, who became a British Citizen, who from 1958 to 1963 was Director of the Romanian Radio Free Europe and following the formal demise of the Soviet Union he founded the Bucharest School of Sociology. When you're born in 1913, gain awareness in the First World War, survive the 1920's and 1930's, live through the Second World war, survive exile, return to your home land in 1989 and in 1996 die at the age of 83, you might have a right to wax lyrical on the subject of politics and happiness. George's overall view was that the promise of happiness through politics is illusory. "How did he get there?" Like all students of the Enlightenment he starts out defining what he means by happiness by comparing Bentham and Aristotle on the subject of happiness. Bentham's utilitarian morality produced a hedonistic happiness of the greatest number. Aristotle's eudaimonic happiness - or 2500 year old woke of a good life lived virtuously, an idea so dripping with irony David Wallace might have blushed, has been centered on a sense of meaning, purpose, personal growth, and self-actualization which as everyone attached to the Culture Industry knows was achieved through a solid Protestant, or Calvinist ethic of hard endless and often pointless work that produces obedience and surplus enough for the dreamscape of picket fences and neighbors who make apple pies then send their horrible children round on Halloween to beg for chocolate. George Ionescu's pragmatic point was that attempting to legislate for an individual's internal and subjective state of happiness was ludicrous. Government, political systems, respond to measurable, or at least generalizable, outcomes. Whether you called it Tyranny or Paternalism, George distrusted any suggestion that the government or the state should be the arbiter of the Good Life or of the happiness of the greatest number. No, no no! "Happiness" wasn't the goal of politics it was a by-product of other legitimate goals of politics. George Ghiță Ionescu went on to suggest a few legitimate goals of politics that contributed to the by-product of happiness: Life, Liberty and a Just Framework were exampled. Mind you, and here's the reason George is a wise man, he was confident in his assertion that a Free Society wasn't necessarily a Happy Society.  So what did George mean by freedom : He saw it as an ideal and as a political goal. He saw it as a critique of communism, fascism and tyranny. He saw ideology as a threat to Freedom. He saw populism as a mental constraint chock full of unidentifiable conspiracy theories untouched by reality, it was a mentality maintained by a sense of persecution and it too was a threat to Freedom.  

Critical Theorists

Theodor W Adorno 1964

It was a man called Theodor Adorno, of the Frankfurt School, who proposed that: "Myth and the Enlightenment both emerge from the inclination to dominate nature" and he goes on to suggest that "Myth is already enlightenment" before suggesting that "Enlightenment reverts to mythology." Here Myth for Adorno was the archaic equivalent to the Enlightenment. In another way, Myth and the Enlightenment share a dialectic, a backwards and forwards, and in the course of his life (1903 to 1969) Adorno had concluded that as a result of this dialectic the project of enlightenment which was a move toward human liberation and mastery of nature through reason, had tripped, fallen on its face and bang here we are back in the vice of a new form of myth and enlightenment that's as easily called a tyranny now dominating much of western thinking. Which for Adorno, a man who owned a white shirt, a suit and tie, was a kind way of saying "what the hell is the matter with everyone?" For Adorno, most important in this new mythology, was what he called the "fatal" separation of feeling and understanding, a separation that had long been demanded by the history of philosophy which had put a premium on the error of standing outside and looking in. How do we understand Adorno's position? He was inclined to see this peering through the window as a "privileged aesthetic" that prided itself on being master of the "content over form, form over content debate" and the "contemplation over immersion debate" and in many ways endured a sense of guilt because art as well as science was no longer art for art's sake or science for science's sake. In the dubious world of art, aesthetics is a set of principles, devised by people, that concern themselves with the nature of and the appreciation of Beauty. Adorno went whole hog, he addressed these principles through the lens of his critique of a Culture Industry dominated by it's capacity to make money. In his view, the idea of content under mass production, whether it was cinema, paintings, a contained space, a used handkerchief or whatever, was increasingly dominated by generic, simple to digest and easily reproduce genres that sold tickets.  Art's truth, it's realness, it's value was in the tension found within the form, and it was this tension that produced an intense engagement with the observer that was neither a purely detached contemplation nor an escape into a  thoughtless surrender to spectacle. It was a moving flash of insight into the world's Untruth. It was a man landing on the moon. For Adorno the world's Untruth was a standardized, systematic illusion, almost a form of neurosis that characterized the current iteration of society. "Rock on Theodor!" I hear the call. And yes it does rather redefine cult as a ubiquitous presence. Adorno's quarrel with Idealists were numerous, the abstract was all very well and seemed to be everywhere, but as a materialist what Adorno wanted was concreteness or Concretion which was the word the Idealist Hegel used as the opposite of Abstraction.