and I’m a systematic philosopher [1]
I.
Hello Pete, my name is Stephen Alexander, and I mistrust all systematisers and would normally seek to avoid them [2]. In your case, however, I'll make an exception ...
For like you, I'm an independent scholar - which you amusingly suggest is merely a fancy way of saying unemployed with a Ph.D - who is less than impressed with the "ossified social cliques" [3] that control academia and although I live in Essex, my roots, like yours, are in the North East of England; my father was from Gateshead and my mother from Whitley Bay.
We also both came out of the philosophy department at Warwick: I note that you completed your doctoral thesis on Heidegger in 2012; I finished mine, on Nietzsche, in 2000.
So we have some things in common.
II.
However, I also note that you consider yourself "a heretical Platonist, an unorthodox Kantian, and a minimalist Hegelian" [4], and whilst I'm pleased to see you qualify your Platonism, Kantianism, and Hegelianism in this manner, I'm still troubled that these are the three thinkers you name as your primary sources of inspiration.
And whilst we both have a wide range of interests, I'd say my curiosity is motivated more by hate than by love and, actually, I think you're mistaken to say it's all good at the end of the day.
As for your "trinity of dialectical virtues" [5] - sincerity, explicitness, and consistency - well, I had to smile as these are possibly the three things I most try to avoid on Torpedo the Ark, where I never mean what I say or say what I mean and couldn't care less about whether my text is haunted by the spectre of logical contradiction [6]: I am Monsieur Teste in reverse!
III.
Two confessions:
Firstly, I haven't read your 2014 book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, even though I probably should have. For whilst I was never in with the OOO crowd, I did read a good deal of Graham Harman's work and found a lot of it resonated with my own (rather more material and less metaphysical) interest in objects.
It was only when Harman started promoting his version of OOP as a new theory of everything and boasting of how he had become a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" - and had even "captured the notice of celebrities" - that I grew tired of him and his flat ontology [7].
Secondly, I'm not sure your new book is going to feature on my list of Christmas reading either.
That's mainly because as someone who is still very much committed to Nietzsche's reverse anthropocentrism - i.e., his attempt to translate man back into nature and demonstrate how virtue itself is animal in origin - I suspect I'm just the sort of thinker whom you are seeking revenge against in the name of Reason unbound from all such petty naturalism.
What I am going to do, however, is follow your advice and start by reading your newer blog writings (those classified as Phase 3) and then read one (or more) of your interviews, in the hope that I can better understand what you mean by rationalist inhumanism and Promethean socialism; neither of which I very much like the sound of [8].
Notes
[1] This line of greeting from Wolfendale - and the photo - are taken from his blog, Deontologistics: click here.
For those readers who might not know, a systematic philosopher - such as Wolfendale - is one who seeks to develop a logically coherent and comprehensive body of knowledge based upon fundamental principles in order to explain the world we live in. To create such a perfect system - or metanarrative - has been the (insanely ambitious and inherently oppressive) dream of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel.
As for the term deontologistics, this is a neologism coined by Wolfendale to describe his own research project into the nature and limits of reason and his aim to establish a system of philosophy of the kind described above.
In moral philosophy, deontology is the idea that an action should be based solely on whether it is right or wrong according to a set of fixed principles, with no consideration given to the consequences of that action. In other words, it's a form of fundamentalism; insisting that one's duty or obligation is always to uphold the letter of the law and stick to the rules no matter what.
[2] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche writing in Twilight of the Idols ('Maxims and Arrows', 36), who then goes on to add: "The will to a system is a lack of integrity." See the Hollingdale translation (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 35.
[3] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here.
[4] See the short biographical note on Wolfendale on the Urbanomic website: click here. He is one of their authors and his debut book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, was published by Urbanmomic in 2014. His new book, The Revenge of Reason, is forthcoming at the end of this year; a work in which he ponders the fate of Reason in the 21st century and lays out his vision for neo-rationalism as a distinctive philosophical path towards an inhuman destiny.
Ray Brassier obviously thinks highly of him, as he wrote a postscript to the former and supplied a preface to the latter. Details of both works are available on the Urbanomic website.
[5] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here.
[6] When it comes to sincerity, explicitness, and consistency, I side with Nietzsche, Wilde, and Roland Barthes (even at the risk of falling into what Wolfendale terms unrestrained irony). Barthes famously rejects the ideology of clarity (or explicitness) in Critique et vérité (1966), just as he mocks the idea of logical consistency in Le plaisir du texte (1973), from where I borrow the idea of M. Teste in reverse.
For my thoughts on (in)sincerity, see the post dated (9 July 2018): click here.
[7] I'm quoting Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Penguin Books, 2018), p. 8. For my thoughts on this book, see the post published on 24 March 2018: click here.
[8] From what I understand at this point - without having done much reading in the area - rational inhumanism seems to intersect with (or emerge from) Ray Brassier's idea of transcendental nihilism and is an attempt to liberate reason from human biology, psychology, and cultural history.
As for Promethean socialism, I believe this refers to the deliberate re-engineering of ourselves and our world on a more rational and egalitarian basis. In other words, it's a kind of left-leaning accelerationism that affirms techno-scientific progress and the overcoming of natural limits.
One can't help feeling we've heard all this before and that, ultimately, if you strip Wolfendale's work of its complex and sophisticated philosophical theorising, one's left with just another fevered dream of a future utopia.
As The Pretenders sang, there's a thin line between love and hate, regarding which Nietzsche's idealisation/denigration of Wagner is a paradigmatic philosophical illustration - who, in a classic piece of ironic/Christ-cracked equivocation, also advised us to learn to hate our friends. Perhaps frenmity beckons you again with Mr Wolfendale (who bears an amusing/disturbing resemblance to Viz's Lawrence Logic, albeit happily without the acne and with his own alarmingly large eyes). As you say you haven't actually read his work yet, however, your footnote that 'if you strip Wolfendale's work of its complex and sophisticated philosophical theorising, one's left with just another fevered dream of a future utopia' reads as feverishly over-extended itself, wouldn't you agree? Shouldn't you at least pay him and it the respect of doing so before arriving at this type of over-arching dismissal? To chuck in my twopenneth, in our technocratic era of dog-eat-dog neoliberalism, I'm not sure I recognise his suspiciously envious presentation of contemporary academia as rattling with 'ossified social cliques' - though I'm also not sure what he's got against (human) bones in this domain!
ReplyDeleteFinally (for now), Whitman-eque self-contradictoriness (which I think is a close concomitant of complexity to a certain point) is all very well - there's no reason (Lawrence) Logic (rather than the poetic imagination, as I might advocate) should rule our minds. However, for an author of more than passing value, and to make a classic Jungian move, I'd suggest interesting thinking only emerges from holding the tensions of one's oppositions, contradictions, and internal friction . . . and drawing out the implications in time.
Merely arrogating to oneself licence to say one thing one day and another the next without any kind of self-accountability or even self-reflection (while also awarding oneself the right to critique others for what they say) runs the rather obvious risk of imposing a narcissistically arbitrary 'sovereignty' on one's readers, as well as lapsing into the 'unrestrained irony' apparently unfeared by the likes of Barthes. Though I read Nietzsche's work as shot through with equivocation, Ecce Homo is rightly regarded as the catastrophic car-crash of his philosophical career precisely because Nietzsche's project emphasised the centrality of a 'transvaluation of all values' above and beyond a corrosive (rather than creative) perspectivism. The buck of poetry has to stop somewhere, which is why complexity and contradiction should never come at the cost of passion and commitment. (As Malcolm X (rather than your beloved Malcolm McLaren), put it, 'if you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything'.)
I think you'll find that it was Alexander Hamilton who originally said that, not Malcolm X.
DeleteEither way, it's the sort of line I hate: people who are willing to stand for something are often the same kind of people willing to march and to die and kill for their ideological principles, moral values, core beliefs, etc.
I'd rather be one of the fallen, like Lucifer, than a soldier of the Cross who stands up for Jesus; or a militant like Malcolm X who stands for racial nationalism and advocates 'any means necessary' in order to achieve his goals.
I also wanted to add, if I may, a couple of further spins (in two parts owing to the limitations of the Comments platform) on your three C-words (consistency, clarity, and contradiction), plus your smear on the sincere and suspicion of systematicity, with reference to Nietzsche and Barthes. The danger here, on a blog like this one, however eloquent and provocative, is another C-word, 'compression' (with a corresponding dilution of yet another: complexity). In other words, every style casts its shadow, which its proponent may or may not recognise.
ReplyDelete1. Re system-building, in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche's term to connote his stated distrust of said builders' 'integrity' is 'Rechtschaffenheit', highlighting the rootedness of his objections in his antagonism to the practice of (bourgeois) law, rightness and justice. However, any writing is a system (or universe) of some kind, even if it is a whirlpool of chaos. It all depends, as everything depends, on one's definitions and how one extends them. If a writer, for example, gets up every day and dedicates themselves to an act of writing, or, to give another example, conscientiously dedicates themselves to looking after a parent for many years, these are impressive forms of integrity/self-consistency insofar as a person themselves can readily be viewed as a kind of animate text. Either way, I would suggest, one can't very well advocate for/practise integrity/consistency in one place (life) while denying it in another (writing) unless one is somehow content to divide them both against each other.
2. Against this critique of 'Rechtschaffenheit', and in a way that also engages his thinking around sincerity/honesty, Nietzsche counterposes the crucial concept of 'Redlichkeit' (honesty, sincerity, truthfulness). The term has an interesting German flavour of clean-handedness and sturdy/unadorned resilience, which Nietzsche repurposes as a kind of explosive/ dangerous will-to-truth, as when he speaks of a 'gefährliche Redlichkeit' (dangerous honesty) in 'The Gay Science' and 'Beyond Good and Evil', which he also calls 'our last virtue'. In a nutshell, Nietzsche is not some kind of proto-postmodernist or destructive ironist opposed to all 'truth' or sincerity (or even virtue). Rather, he endorses marrying truth-telling to risk, instability, and free-spiritedness as distinct from 'christliche Wahrhaftigkeit' (Christian truth-mongering). The mercurial and metamorphic power of Redlichkeit, in other words, undoes the probity and respectability of Rechtschaffenheit. We could call this kind of volatile honesty, if anything, a type of uber-sincerity that is dangerous not merely to others but also to oneself. (Though Nietzsche has spawned many imitators, the number of writers who are truly dangerous to themselves, who can frighten themselves with their own thoughts, is vanishingly small.) At the end of the day, art is not an exercise in evasiveness or butterfly life. Irony lets one dance around the truth, we might say, but Redlichkeit (rightly) pins one to the wall.
I do agree that a short form such as a blog post has in-built limitations and can lead to an unfortunate compression of ideas. But, as you go on to note, every genre or style of writing comes with its own 'shadow' or set of issues.
DeleteRe individuals who pride themselves on being systematic and great coordinators ...
Just because someone possesses a system, that does not mean they have style. I think a systematiser is a kind of fraud; Nietzsche describes them as mere play-actors, hiding behind a mask and pretending to have a whole and uniformly strong character, whilst all the time lacking the discipline required to have style.
As for 'Redlichkeit' ...
Does it really encompass sincerity? I would tend to read it more as candour (i.e., openness and honesty).
For me, Nietzsche values those who have the courage to speak difficult truths, but with irony and good-humour rather than moral sincerity. That's what he means by 'dangerous honesty' (gefährliche Redlichkeit). But you make a strong case for your reading and I will think about it further - so many thanks for posting these fascinating remarks.
Part II
ReplyDelete3. As I understand it, Barthes' attempt in Criticism and Truth (1966) , in responding to Raymond Picard, is to uncouple clarity and truth, which, since clarity is no more (though also no less) than a myth or extended metaphor, makes self-evident sense. I would suggest this is to enlarge rather than attack the value of clarity in service of its reamplification as anything that sheds analogical light on something, darkly or otherwise, i.e. extends it in imaginal terms. In literary criticism, that is, a critique does not 'reveal' the monolithic truth of a work but, like a kaleidoscope, turns it to the sun to show it differently to different readers/viewers (ideally, there should be as many readings of a work as there are people).
By extension, in film, for Barthes, 'cinema verite' is not some kind of more honest/naturalistic genre but merely another way of looking/movie-making, since the camera, and the person holding is, is clearly never that shy (i.e naive). Good criticism thus provides intelligible models or codes of understanding, holding up splintered mirrors that enhance a work's uniqueness and extend our reading of it, not authoritarian discourses that close it off from further interpretation. (Bad criticism, by contrast, disappears up its own ahole and leaves no trace.)
4. Finally, as to virtue, Nietzsche/Zarathustra also calls his will-to-truth 'our last virtue' ('letzte Tugend'), which signals he is clearly not 'anti-virtue', only anti-Christian/conventionally moral virtue. The 'reverse anthropocentrist' idea of returning human virtue to its animal roots is, on the face of it, hardly news, since human beings self-evidently are animals - though with a strange hyperneural add-on (which for me, as a neo-Gnostic Baudrillardian/McKennaite, may or may not derive from alien/divine intelligence as children of the cosmos). In a Jungian vein, I am interested in returning both the 'animal' and 'virtue', again on etymological grounds, to their relations to animus/anima/animation (breath, spirit, life) and 'vir' = man (capable, strong, able; see also the German 'Tugend'/dūgan → Old High German 'tougen' → Modern German 'taugen': to be good for, fit, capable, of use.). This is to act on James Hillman's (post-Nietzschean) thesis concerning the Christianisation of the culture and concomitant need to reclaim Christianised terms such as 'virtue' from their religious appropriation - and that's before we get stated on Christmas.) What motivates/drives a being is where their values are.
Pretty much agree with what you say in point 3 re criticism.
DeleteInterested to learn in point 4 that you identify as a 'neo-Gnostic Baudrillardian/McKennaite' - though you might guess what I think of Terence McKenna ...
I can/can't guess, but then you also say you don't have positions and/or don't mean what you say etc. etc., so why would I even try?
ReplyDeleteWhat's the difference betwen sincerity and candour/honesty/openness? If you're drawing a distinction here, you'd really need to amplify your definitions/distinctions with some kind of linguistic/philological evidence.
ReplyDelete'Redlichkeit' in German is etymologically connected to 'Rede' (speech, counsel, account) and 'Redlich' (upright, honest), so that the abstract noun implies the quality of being 'true to one's word' - which isn't a bad gloss on 'sincere' in practice, I'd suggest. The etymology of sincerity in English is interestingly uncertain, however, though the folk idea of its rootedness in 'sine cera' (= without wax) is dismissed by the OED.
Yes, it's a stirring conversation, regardless of its in/sincerity. Thx.
ReplyDelete