Apostrophe Comments
These are the missing comments from "Theory of Apostrophe" on Moulton Lava.
25 Comments:
Higs; said...
I’m going to surprise you by not immediately jumping onto the issue of Academic Rule Violation by confusing Hebrew roots with Greek roots. Roots are roots; trunks, boles, and branches are trunks, bole, and branches—some grow up, some grow down. Call them fractals. Ouspensky said, back in the late thirties that all one has to do to imagine the fourth dimension (and he didn’t mean time) is look at a tree. Preferably one with birds and squirrels nested in it.
Anyway, here’s another example of the difference between the sublime and the hermeneutic: the exact, literal, chronological, etymological tracing of a word (logos=embodied idea) backward through the trajectory of its evolving meaning is the hermeneutic way. The sublime path relies more on the intuitive or insightful act of letting a word, now and forever, speak for itself. Aside, of course, from the truth that neither the Hebrew language nor the Ancient Greek language developed in a vacuum and so, surely, can allow for a bit of such fast and loose play—it really doesn’t matter, as long as one doesn’t fool oneself that sublime intuition has behind it the weight of what Aristotle calls “inartistic logic” (facts).
Inasmuch as I’m actually an introverted intuitive type, whose thinking and sense functions are more repressed than I would ever admit, I’m quite fond of the Sublime and find the Hermeneutic to be really tedious, uninspiring, and time-consuming. As a compensation, I’ve naturally developed an overly pompous, more or less infantile imitation of “thinking” to fool the world into letting me be an academic.
So, in fully tracking your post, let me add that there’s at least another fractal wrinkle in apostrophe. You may or may not recall that I often on World Crossing threads got into my Apo-cata hobby horse. Apo is the Greek prefix for up, and cata is the Greek prefix for down. At the time Aristotle was theorizing about what good dramatists did, then, he was still laboring under the old paradigm which placed “inner” subjective events “above” as in a celestial, godlike realm; he also placed the real world of experience “down” as in the bottom where one may fall no farther. So apostrophe not only points toward something that’s elided or unspoken, it means the opposite of catastrophe. What’s kept to the self in apostrophe is sent “up” into the (now conceived as “inner”) subjective world of the personal consciousness, perhaps even the personal subconscious. Repression, in Freud and Jung’s clinical sense, after all, is merely absolute apostrophe.
And catastrophe is the result of hamartia (sin—which in drama as well as theology amounts really to using apostrophe incorrectly, at the wrong time or in the wrong place) followed by peripetia (falling into the objective world) and recognition (releasing repressed content into awareness).
The whole point of the drama is the downfall and the catastrophe. One really doesn’t want to put it off—the whole thrust is to get the flawed hero to get reality straight. The antagonist is always the truth battering away at the hero’s blindness to it. When he turns aside to the chorus (his “inner” cabinet) it’s not to keep the flow going, it’s a stalling technique, a survival strategy for his refusal to see the truth he’s managed to deny, repress, or ignore.
This, incidentally, gets into an interesting double-role that the chorus plays in Greek drama—that of representative of the community as a whole and that of representative of the tragic hero’s consciousness. The Leader of the chorus usually personifies the hero’s conscious ego, while the rest of the chorus tend to be go-betweens with respect to the hero and his community, the king and his kingdom. They’re the ones “caught in the middle,” who have to sort out who the real antagonist is. As Oedipus finally sputters out while pounding his gore-spattered chest: “I mean it is I, me, myself!”
Moulton said...
One of the reasons this blog is subtitled "Moultonic Musings" is because I make no pretense to doing rigorous academic scholarship here.
I rather enjoy kicking ideas around to see if they lead anywhere.
I hadn't considered "apostrophe/catastrophe" as linguistic analogs of "ascent/descent." That's a useful observation.
Your introduction of "transcendent" a day or two ago did get me to compare ascendant/descendant with transcendent.
I was thinking of "transcendent" as "going beyond the limits" to bridge a chasm between protagonist and antagonist, so as to find some newly crafted "common ground" above an otherwise non-negotiable chasm.
The reason I am writing these musings here on Moulton Lava is because, in real life, I have a recurring pattern of failed relationships and failed conversational dialogues where my dialog partner is on the other side an unbridgeable chasm from me.
If I don't throttle back and elide substantial portions of my thinking, I can reliably predict a breakdown in the dialogue (e.g. the train wreck or juggernaut metaphor) where things go to hell in a hand-basket (i.e. descend catastrophically).
Bridges, if they can be built at all, seem to take a long time, and one is evidently obliged to take it slow and easy, lest the whole enterprise collapse ignominiously down the fabled chasmatic pit.
See this thread in the Brain Cafe on Facebook for more background on where I'm coming from.
Higs; said...
It might be useful to think of a distinction between transcendence and transgression. The latter is the one that deals with crossing (in the final analysis false) boundaries; whereas, the former involves actual change—whether it be the reintegration of repressed libidinal content into consciousness or the transformation from a fragmentary, unbalanced psyche to wholeness. The transformation from disease to health.
Transgression does create new space in which to seek common (or otherwise) ground. That whole realm of postmodern theory involves the cultural structure (in the sense I was trying do define the other day) which demands boundaries between the normal and the abnormal, the sane and the insane, the healthy and the sick, good and evil, acceptable behavior and perversion. It’s a sort of backward dialectic, where—instead of antitheses being synthesized to come to a new thesis—action, an act, instantly (as in a lightning flash) creates of itself a duality that is both possible and impossible, sane and insane, good and evil. That’s of interest, in its own right, but I don’t know if it’s relevant, here.
Transcendence, though, especially in the sense in which Jung uses it, seeks to bring the cloudy, the hazy, the morally ambiguous into stark dualistic, antithetical focus. Since the nature of repression is the enfolding the unutterable and unbearable in a cloak of delight seen as a cherished treasure, it becomes necessary to winnow the grain, so to speak, and separate the wheat from the chaff. In this psychic case the chaff it the delightful cherished treasure—or the subconscious delusion of it. The kernel of wheat is the evil, nasty, unutterable thought, wish, desire, event, etc. that has been lost to consciousness while still stubbornly creating havoc in the balance between personal unconscious and personal consciousness. The point is always the reemergence of the anathema into consciousness, which is militated against by the subconscious insistence that the negative is really positive. Bringing them into their sharpest antithetical focus allows them both to be disposed of—the “cherished treasure” to be tossed into the trash fire of the psyche (“Rosebud,” if you recall Citizen Cane). And the anathema reincorporated into consciousness where it can’t do any harm, or at least is capable of less harm since it’s no longer in the hands of an unconscious that desperately doesn’t want it and can only “communicate” with consciousness through ironic, paradoxical, antithetical thrashing.
The Brain Café thread was interesting. One thing about conversations like that that always strikes me is this: almost never does someone say something—in answer to the question, “Why would you want to have any interaction with such a nasty person?”—like, “Because I might learn something about myself.”
No matter how truly wretched a character in the drama of life can be, I’m still quite capable of projecting everything I’ve got in my psychic arsenal—that I’m sure I don’t really have—at them. I can’t pretend to wish to “help” them or change them; what I can do is look at what about that person eats me so, because I’m bound to be forced to accept a little more of my own well-kept psychic secrets.
For me, that’s a requisite step that has to precede any other, in the quest for worthwhile dialogue (I recall we’ve talked about Bohm Dialogue and related concepts, before). Of course, as always, generally the rich get richer and poor get poorer. I learned a lot from the accountant who went to Harvard, for example, though I never learned his name. Unfortunately, I don’t think there was any reciprocal benefit for him.
Patience, above all else, does seem to be the key. And certainly that apostrophe for the sake of not pissing the other off unduly or too early is of value in this context.
Higs; said...
“The difference between Rabbi (רבי) and Rival (יריב) is in the details. The little י (Hebrew "Yod" which looks very much like our Apostrophe) is the tiny iota of difference that makes a difference.”
I like this insight into the potential synergy of positive and negative, good and evil, right and wrong, friend and foe, teacher and antagonist—especially in the psychological sense in which their appearance as antitheses of one another is superficial and subordinate to their actual dynamic interplay in the healing or balancing process.
Remaining for a moment in the garden of Hebrew theology, it’s worth mentioning that the essentially adversarial relation between Man and God is among the chief—if not the chief—thematic motifs in the Torah and the Tanakh. Israel, after all, means “Man fighting with God” in Hebrew, and is the new name given to Jacob upon his survival of his all-night wrestling match with God which is inconclusive: Jacob doesn’t win but he doesn’t lose, either—though he evidently suffers a hip injury that gimps him up some, thereafter.
I’m also put in mind of Yahweh’s admonition to Moses that it were better to remain content with being able to view His backside, because a glimpse of His face would destroy a man. Come to think of it, in the Hebrew story, God is the one who practices apostrophe the most prominently, as he must continually “turn aside” from his human apprentices, lest he destroy them. He’s always giving us only half the truth (the “good” half) for our own sake.
Moulton said...
There's a lot to chew on in your last pair of comments.
I liked the lightning bolt analogy.
Not long ago, I learned that the lightning bolt begins by sending down feelers that open candidate channels from the cloud to the ground.
The first feeler that manages to make contact with the ground then provides an upward path for the main surge, in which the electrons from earth travel en masse back up to the cloud.
This down-then-up model reminded me of the Chiasmus and Chiastory Model that I wrote about six years ago.
'Apostrophe' evidently has the advantage of avoiding a catastrophic "breach of expectations" (which predictably launches a shreklisch "liminal social drama").
If the social drama succeeds, it produces a Chiastic Story of the sort one might find in the Torah.
If the social drama fails, it adds to the collection of emotionally troubling unsolved problems that will have to wait for yet another day to in the sun (or gloom, as the case may be).
Rev. Benjamin Kite said...
One simple point that unfortunately lets some air out of the elegance of this all — the word תורה and the word תורת are the same word (torah) — the ה changes into a ת when the word enters the 'smichut' case or what we call in English, the construct case.
That is, when any feminine word in Hebrew ending in "ה" is paired with another noun, the "ה" turns into a "ת".
This is seen when "תורה" (torah) is placed with אמת (emet): it becomes "תורת אמת". Likewise "ארוחה" (meal) becomes "ארוהת" when paired with the word "ערב" (evening) to make "ארוחת ערב" (dinner).
The word itself does not change in meaning in this case.
Higs; said...
Shucks! Just when I thought we'd turned a chasm into a chiasm.
Moulton said...
Can you explain why "Torah" is translated as "Customary System of Guidance" while "Torat" is translated as "Theory"?
How did the ancients distinguish between theory and story, in the sense suggested by Umberto Eco ("Whereof we cannot express a theory, we must narrate a story instead.")
In other words, if you have a theory, you can exhibit many observable cases (stories or anecdotal observations) that are instances or examples conforming to the underlying theory, pattern, or system model.
For some people, having lots of examples suffices to implicitly define the underlying model. But for those of us who are fond of Systems Thinking, we prefer to explicitly extract the underlying system model or pattern.
Higs; said...
How did the ancients distinguish between theory and story . . . .
Theory is about how.
Story is about what.
Moulton said...
Theory is about how.
Story is about what.
What is the name of "about why"?
Higs; said...
Right.
Philosophy is about why.
Or that's a name for "about why” that works for me.
Theology is not quite right. Ethics gets directly to the nexus of theology and philosophy, but that’s not quite right, either.
Intentionality and values (which are what "why" is about) get muddled when applying them to theory because people have intentions and values that are subjective—both conscious and unconscious; whereas, objective reality’s intentionality and values are beyond our grasp—though I realize System Thinking presumes otherwise. Still, though I’m confident that the “how” of being—and human interaction, in particular—can be mapped out, both descriptively as well as prescriptively—which I also presume is your hope. But the “why” can only be associated with the subjective human aspect, with our need to prevent self-destruction, essentially.
Maybe the name of “about why” is the bridge across the chasm between story and theory. We start with a narrative of what happens, hoping to have insight into how it happens. “How” is the nature of structures already in place about which we may theorize—but in cases where Umberto’s Law applies and we can’t concoct a theory, bringing subjective values and intentions of the characters in the story of what happens at least gets us across the chasm, gulf, rupture—or what have you—where theory and story are essentially one.
I think Eco is more interested in stories than in theories, anyway. What he’s not interested in is the silence (cf. Wittgenstein) reverently observed concerning lacunae in our understanding as a result of our mysterious relation to the unknown and the unknowable. Eco, like Keats, wants the negative capability to face the uncertainty, to embrace the uncertainty, to tell stories of the unutterable. This would place him in the ranks of those Keats calls “Men of Action” who actually transform reality (rather than “Men of Power” who merely ride the recursive wave of events).
Moulton said...
Being a scientist first, and a philosopher second, I'd actually model what/how/why this way:
Theory is about why (scientific model or explanation, not ethical values).
Practice is about how.
Story is about what.
Philosophy, then, would provide motivation driven by ethical values. That is, philosophy explains the why of volition, not the why that explains how things work in the natural world.
I suppose it gets a little tricky, however, if one is reckoning unconscious drives and motives, rather than premeditated courses of action.
As a cognitive scientist, I'm on the lookout for scientific theories that explain unconscious drives and motives, where a person acts rather mindlessly, without the benefit of higher-order thinking.
As to Wittgenstein's famous quote, my version goes this way:
What cannot be spoken of in words must be dealt with by making funny faces.
Higs; said...
Yeah. To me “Why it happens” and “How it happens” are the same thing, if you’re talking about “scientific model or explanation.”
It’s a very old squabble between Aristotle and Plato, both attempting to explain what they thought they learned from Socrates. If one is attempting to examine the cause and effect of something, that’s “how.” It’s also “why” too if all you’re looking at are why the end is produced. Aristotle says everything is already imbued with its telos (Greek τέλος for "end", "purpose", or "goal"), its final product in the cause and effect scheme of things. Plato thought of it a bit differently and saw everything as a reflection of its ideal form. One can, and often philosophers do, argue that telos, or final form is the same as ideal form—but ideal implies a functional relation between thing and essence; telos, or end, implies purpose in things—not a relation between a things and anything else, just things with purpose or intentionality.
I prefer to keep “why” in the context of ethics or at least purpose or intentionality. But none of that matters, in the context of our conversation. Anyway, I see why and how you’re using “why” and “how” and it makes good sense to me.
As a cognitive scientist, I'm on the lookout for scientific theories that explain unconscious drives and motives, where a person acts rather mindlessly, without the benefit of higher-order thinking.
This makes me think of Nash, again, whom you mention in your newest post. One thing I don’t like about Behaviorism is the way it entirely skips the issue of consciousness/unconsciousness and focuses entirely on behavior, itself. I don’t doubt for a minute that someone like Nash—or any other talented behavioral scientist, or computer scientist, for that matter—could come up with an algorithm that more or less predicts all animal or human behavior. But as a “man of letters” interested primarily in the Humanities and the Liberal Arts, I very much do not want to make an end run around the “mystery” that Keats asks me to brave for the sake of Humanity. I don’t know if it would seem so to you, but I actually think this issue—Keats’ distinction between “men of power” and “men of action” relates to the issue of Law Vs. STEM, or the even larger issue of Law vs. Humanity. I think the behaviorist’s logarithm that excludes the mysterious complexity of consciousness and its absence equates to Keats’ men of power who merely ride along on the wave of recursive cause and effect. The whole HOLE problem, it seems to me, is right here—the rule of law (like an algorithm) merely throws experience back on itself in an endless repetition or at least reenactment of the same cultural pattern. It’s no more sophisticated that Traditional Ritual Culture, really; it only appears to be so, and is, in fact, less stable. Instead of striving to perpetuate itself, as Ritual Culture does, “Civilized” Culture strives to perpetuate its self-destruction.
Men of Power actually have no power at all, because they just play their part at the right time and in the right place. Men of Action (I’m still using Johnny Keats’ terms) refuse to accept the predictable and look for more meaningful solutions to decision-making events—even if only partial meaning or truth is available to them. The Action Research you note in your post about Kiera Wilmot is related to all this. I don’t think it’s an accident that Action Research echoes in name Keats’ distinction between those who rely on the fallibility of Law to remain in power and those with Negative Capability who wish to intervene in Western Culture’s catastrophe.
Moulton said...
Aristotle lived and died a century before Archimedes, whom we traditionally credit as the first Engineer.
I suspect that's why there is no P in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).
If you have a scientific theory, properly captured in a computable model, you can mathematically solve the model for best practices to achieve novel (and worthwhile) outcomes that are fully consistent with the discoverable laws of nature. We classify those worthwhile outcomes as "Technology."
Once you admit Engineering into the story, it makes sense to redefine "how" to focus on engineering. Then I narrow the focus of "why" to be the technical scientific explanation (the underlying scientific, technical, or analytic model) and reserve Philosophy to address the issue of human values ("yes we can achieve this or that novel result with engineering ingenuity and technical acumen, but is it wise to do so, or would it prove to be lamentable folly?").
That's the "But why would you want to ...?" question you singled out from the Facebook thread on remaining engaged with someone manifesting a pathological personality disorder.
This is the same issue of Jesus ministering to the sinful rather than safely preaching to the choir.
It's why I tinker on broken systems like old appliances and computers. Bringing defunct systems back to life is more than a pastime for me. If I can understand "resurrection" in the world of technological junk, I can better appreciate the process of healing the brokenness in living systems and dysfunctional human cultures.
Daniel Dennett dismantled and demolished B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism 25 years ago in "Skinner Skinned." I call Behaviorism by another name that sharpens up the issue. I call it "Amygdalic Programming" which is a clinical term for obnoxiously manipulative bullying ranging to atrocious coercive terrorism.
My antidote for Atrocious Amygdalic Programming is to write atrocious song parodies, lampooning the lamentable practice of pain-based methods of controlling other people's behavior. I reckon the song parodies are themselves painful, in the same way that tickling is technically painful, but amusingly so.
How does satire, parody, and other subtle forms of art affect the unconscious, so as to artfully and gracefully awaken awareness of unbecoming practices (like beating people over the head to wake them up)?
I reckon Keats would affirm the view that the pen is mightier than the sword — a sentiment to which I would suggest that the electronic pen is a useful engineering advance in the service of Action Research.
Higs; said...
Yes. My discourse was getting hung up on “why” with respect to the nature of reality (aside from human motivation) rather than the issue of “why do we do look into the nature of reality in one way or another?” The “why” of Jesus’ narrative attention serves to clear that up in a Nazareth Minute.
How does satire, parody, and other subtle forms of art affect the unconscious, so as to artfully and gracefully awaken awareness of unbecoming practices (like beating people over the head to wake them up)?
This is a wonderful question, in that it rhetorically supplies the “why” already, and focuses the sense in which it is an actual question on the “how.” My first musing response to that question is to answer, “Satire, parody, and other subtle forms of art affect the unconscious by enlisting their services in league with its own primary function, which it to right psychic balance between conscious and subconscious content by means of providing antithetical compensation.
They give a conscious nudge to the efforts already at work in the unconscious. Had Swift simply written a political speech or an ecclesiastical sermon in which he pointed out that England was literally eating Ireland’s children, he could only have hoped to provoke among the ruling classes a mild, dyspeptic projection of a very deeply repressed awareness of their culture’s moral depravity. Proposing, alternately, that—as his American friend assures him—children of the poor are good eating, indeed, he manages to get much more compensational bang for his buck. The additional fact that most of his audience, originally, had no idea it was satire, only helps the process. In fact, sadly, satire really only works when it’s mistaken for sincerity—something very hard for our own age to pull off. But all “subtle forms” of art surely aid the unconscious in its natural function to make the ego truly aware of what it’s doing. The unconscious has no moral inclination—only the single purpose to insist the conscious ego is not fooling itself about anything. Art serves, then, as objective, conscious reinforcement coming from outside the individual psyche to engage the enemy (which in this case is a failure to recognize what one is actually doing and feeling). Art shakes up the mix, hoping to cause waves that facilitate the natural working-out of the correct balance between what one is and what one thinks he is, going beyond merely becoming aware of becoming aware—but becoming aware of actuality rather than self-delusion.
If James Joyce didn’t say, “The pun is mightier than the pen,” he should have.
But every good “how” answer raises another “how” question. How, precisely, do these subtle arts enlist their services with the efforts of the unconscious? Beyond saying that they trouble the waters, and instigate a process of projection of extremes that then might crablike creep backward into insights about genuinely projected psychic balances, I don’t know if I have much to offer, at the moment.
How does satire, parody, and other subtle forms of art affect the unconscious, so as to artfully and gracefully awaken awareness of unbecoming practices (like beating people over the head to wake them up)?
Actually, satire and parody attempt to beat people over the head, psychologically, to wake them up. I suppose there is irony there.
Moulton said...
Higs, I would be grateful for your insights and comments here, if you please:
1. Problem Solving Discussion Thread, Scene 1 with Karl Schulmeisters
2. Problem Solving Discussion Thread, Scene 2 with Karl Schulmeisters
3. Problem Solving Discussion Thread, Scene 3 with Karl Schulmeisters
Higs; said...
Karl sounds like an interesting guy. He clearly defines System Thinking a little differently than you do, Barry; I’m hesitant to say he seems to define it in a simpler, or rather broader, way than you, because I don’t know that much about it, myself, being essentially a neophyte, here on this terrain. You’ve been my source of information about this, so I can’t avoid a prejudice for your side in the agon. My own limited view, though, suggests to me that he’s also reductive about the role personality types (I’ll cling to Jungian terminology rather than the simpler, broader temperament) play in the social application of System Thinking.
Such conversations are good examples of the fractal nature of experience, I guess. The inwardly-diminishing meta-levels are receding nearly to infinity. The subject is at the same time: the nature of System Thinking, the nature of Personality Type and its impact on System Thinking, Barry’s own personal ability to apply system thinking, along with an effort to offer Barry fire-in-the-belly emotional training.
As soon as Karl says, “Ahh—Art. Well then that includes Law,” I could see the Paddington Rail Disaster in the making. I think I would have attempted to explain the sense in which the word was being considered in a different way, rather than artfully slamming the door in his face, at that point. But I doubt that the outcome would have been any different.
I’ve been enjoying the Tsang lectures, by the way.
Moulton said...
I'm glad to learn you're enjoying the Tsang lectures.
I regret to say I am not enjoying my conversations with Karl over on the Problem Solving discussion group.
He seems to be working at cross purposes to the goals of the group, but the whole thing has me frustrated and baffleplexed. I frankly have no idea how to deal with him in a constructive or functional manner to jointly solve a problem of mutual interest.
I'd like to invite you to participate there, if you are amenable, or otherwise request that you grant me permission to import your comments over to the group, with or without attribution, since attribution will almost surely drawn Karl here or to your own blog.
I've posted a new problem to the group, asking their help in solving the problem that Karl has brought to my attention.
I don't have a reliable character model of Karl, so I have no basis for working up a script for best practices for dealing with him. And without a reliable character model, I'm pretty much at a loss for employing the tools for thought from Systems Theory to construct best practices.
Higs; said...
You certainly have my permission to refer to my comments here elsewhere. I would leave to you the issue of linking your musings elsewhere, though. It’s your blog and I have no concern about keeping anyone away from, or drawing anyone toward, the table.
I’ll see if I can make myself dive into that sort of thread again.
Moulton said...
Not unexpectedly, the thread was a massive train wreck.
Higs; said...
Todd managed to stay fairly objective, it seemed to me. To an outside observer like myself, toward the end, there, it was Harpo at the mirror. He was talking about himself almost transparently—perhaps—and not in the least recognizing it. You were talking about your frustration and he was demonstrating your frustration.
As far as the substance of the conversation before the eruption of farce—while I think it’s facile to equate ethics with dogma, even given that equation for the sake of argument, it was irrelevant to your disagreement. Bottom line, I would say, is: An absolute refusal to entertain the possibility that dogma, ethics, authoritarianism, or certainty might have some role to play in System Thinking is an example of dogma, ethics, authoritarianism, and certainty.
Moulton said...
I had the impression he was projecting his own faults onto me, but it was such a bizarre distortion that I had no idea how to respond to it.
He's started up again, but this time, I'm just ignoring him. It occurs to me that the Null Response is probably my best strategy for now, since I don't have a clear picture of where he is coming from or what he is seeking in that discussion forum.
I expect the cancer will continue to metastasize for a while longer, possibly crippling the group in the process. I don't have a cure for cancer.
I'm bewildered by his conflation of ethics with dogma, and I have no clue what that authoritarian meme is doing in there, either. None of that fits any model that I'm familiar with.
Higs; said...
Evidently I can’t post there unless invited, and I don’t know how to go about doing that, at my end. I doubt I’d be of much use in such discussions, but I would enjoy being able to dip in now and then.
Karl seems to have removed himself for the time being. But the thing about saying ethics and dogma are the same is a fascinating puzzle to try and see into. For me they’re not even apposite as terms; they’re both nouns, and that’s about as far as the similarity goes. Ethos is about shared values, pure and simple; it manifests itself in two primary ways, at the simplest lever: it represents the credibility of a speaker, and it represents the shared values of a speaker and his audience, the demonstration of which is how said speaker gains his credibility. Beyond that, at every level, ethics is about values that are shared and their function in social cohesion, as you pointed out somewhere in that thread. It’s about comparative values; about currently living, functioning, shared values—not about absolute values.
Dogma is fossilized spiritual insight—quite another thing altogether. It’s the detritus left over from the process of institutionalizing spiritual insight into theocratic power structures; it’s rigidity denies its own original essence.
And, of course, that’s just my definition of the two thrown into the mix. In any case, I can sympathize with an impulse to eschew authoritarianism and dogma, in general. But authoritarianism needs some definitional context, as well. But for the life of me I can’t think of anything more authoritarian and dogmatic than “a rule of law.” So the attempt to defend Law by anathematizing authoritarianism and dogma is self-contradictory at the outset, the way I see it.
My very limited grasp of Chaos Theory allows me to understand that chaotic systems require a certain threshold ratio of negative recursions to positive outcomes before a catastrophic cusp appears in its graphic representation. But I have no idea what that threshold ratio is, nor do I think that particular point of order that Karl rose to argues successfully against the potentially catastrophic nature of negatively recursive systems. Tsang offers a useful reminder that recursion, in itself, is not a bad thing, but rather—well, the only thing. And I like his way of mapping the brain’s use of inhibition surrounding points of stimulation onto the negative vs. positive experiential dynamic of life and narrative.
Moulton said...
To post there, you need to be logged into FB. If you have a Facebook login, I can add you to the group.
Karl is in Paris, so he is on Central European Time.
Karl seems to be adopting the same vocabulary terms as me, but idiosyncratically defining them to be the antonyms of how I define them. That makes functional conversation nigh impossible. What I can't tell is if he doing it nefariously, as a lark, or if he genuinely believes what he says.
He's behaving like a classic Pharisee, ossified with frozen code, rather than conscientiously computing best practices from a living model.
I frankly have no use for dogmatic authoritarianism, and Karl would surely know that from our time spent together in Cafe Utne. So I am baffled why he is projecting onto me practices which I abhor. It makes no sense, unless he is playing a role, the way Satan is recruited to play an obnoxious role in the Job Story.
In Chaos Theory, Mitchell Feigenbaum was the pioneer who addressed the question of finding the threshold where a recursion flips from converging to a fixed point to entering a cyclic loop, marching off to infinity, or going chaotic. If you Google up Feigenbaum's study of the Logistic Recursion, that's the beginning of that line of investigation. James Gleick briefly mentions it in this short video.
Chaos turns up, for example, when laminar air flow abruptly transitions into turbulent flow. There are some nice web sites where one can explore Feigenbaum's discoveries about bifurcations from fixed points to cycles to chaos.
Moulton said...
The original comment thread may be found here