The Big Dark Relativistic Pit

[proteus-ix]

I can't put a neutron star in a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow's protons and electrons would be fused before the neutron star can get anywhere near the wheelbarrow. Also the wheelbarrow is too small.

Hilarious.   

[Paul Dither]

Well I'll jump in here with 2 methodological tools I have found useful in my past philosophizing:

1.) E-prime (or V-prime):  E-prime consists of forming statemtents and arguments in English (or any Vernacular) that avoid the use of the existential predicate, which consists of the verb "to be" and it's conjugations (am, are, were, was, will be etc).  Using E-prime tends to cause us to express our ideas in ways that avoid dogmatic generalizations which we cannot prove beyond doubt; often we tend to include in our statements more externally or other-verifiable descriptions of our experience.  These tendencies then seem to yield more productive conversations, since we avoid the various infinite regresses that open up when people start off with saying how things "are".

2.) Nominalizations: Verbs frozen into nouns, which we then talk about as if they're physical objects.  We can counter this with the phrase, "There's no such thing...", which you can test by imagining whether you can put that noun in a wheelbarrow.  If someone says "Music is...", you would counter "There's no such *thing* as music", meaning that music doesn't exist as a thing out in the world, it exists as a *process* that people do, composed of various subprocesses like playing, recording, listening, feeling, interpreting.  So you can keep in mind more spefically what someone means when they use a particular nominalizatin (frozen verb, ie Truth, Beauty, Justice, Music, Love), instead of your previous private interpratation.

Both of these tools tend to demystify our language by making it less relativistic; they require or lean towards some potentially shared sensory experience that anyone can verify and validate if they so choose.  As a result, we can often cut right to the heart of where our ideas and understandings with someone else diverge, and can mutually investigate them from common ground.

As one of my favorite poets once wrote with regard to Korzybski's general semantics, the E-Prime concept is partially based upon: "the word is not the thing it represents, just as the map is not the landscape it displays." That pins down one of the problems of this concept. Namely: to confuse an appearance (or truth if you'd like to use a more rigid term) of something with its representation/translation, which is always already the result of a displacement. The concept also seems to assume that the meaning of language can basically be cut down to sole information value only, which would be semantics' equivalent to a naive empiricism and positivism, which I find to be far more dogmatic than any use of "to be." If all comes down to a sort of application mode, you basically end up with a simplistic cybernetic setup that doesn't require any thinking anymore.

I assume that you would basically agree, because with regard to nominalizations you wrote that we could talk about nouns "as if they're physical objects." The problem is of course that they're not, which is also why we can't put them into wheelbarrows. That only works with the help of metonymies and metaphors, which actually push us further away from any sort of immediacy in meaning (etymologically, a metapher denotes the transportation as well as that, which is being transported). So here you're already far away from any unambiguity. And how and why would I counter with "There's no such thing as ...", before we have reached an agreement on what a "thing" actually is? - And by "thing" I don't mean something that's being imagined as something that's lying around in the "outside world," but something that can only be accessed through language as the means of how we are speaking and thinking.

[Paul Dither]

And silence is only a whole rest.

Is not silence still music? ... though not sculpted by anyone, it still has a shape.

Yes, silence is exactly "still music".   

Silence is sexy.

[Paul Dither]

I would consider it *essential* for Eno to lack rigor on that point... as an artist (world-makers, see my previous post).  As a philosopher or scientist (world-describers/analyzers), I would absolutely require more rigor of him.  Fortunately I've never confused him with philosophers or scientists, so I'm happy to appreciate his lack of rigor, and to engage the worlds he offers to us.

That reads like a well-meaning spin on the disenfranchisement of the arts by philosophical means.

[chysn]

This has been a blast, but does anyone care to somehow graft the subject of music onto these concepts?

[proteus-ix]

Well I'll jump in here with 2 methodological tools I have found useful in my past philosophizing:

1.) E-prime (or V-prime):  E-prime consists of forming statemtents and arguments in English (or any Vernacular) that avoid the use of the existential predicate, which consists of the verb "to be" and it's conjugations (am, are, were, was, will be etc).  Using E-prime tends to cause us to express our ideas in ways that avoid dogmatic generalizations which we cannot prove beyond doubt; often we tend to include in our statements more externally or other-verifiable descriptions of our experience.  These tendencies then seem to yield more productive conversations, since we avoid the various infinite regresses that open up when people start off with saying how things "are".

2.) Nominalizations: Verbs frozen into nouns, which we then talk about as if they're physical objects.  We can counter this with the phrase, "There's no such thing...", which you can test by imagining whether you can put that noun in a wheelbarrow.  If someone says "Music is...", you would counter "There's no such *thing* as music", meaning that music doesn't exist as a thing out in the world, it exists as a *process* that people do, composed of various subprocesses like playing, recording, listening, feeling, interpreting.  So you can keep in mind more spefically what someone means when they use a particular nominalizatin (frozen verb, ie Truth, Beauty, Justice, Music, Love), instead of your previous private interpratation.

Both of these tools tend to demystify our language by making it less relativistic; they require or lean towards some potentially shared sensory experience that anyone can verify and validate if they so choose.  As a result, we can often cut right to the heart of where our ideas and understandings with someone else diverge, and can mutually investigate them from common ground.

As one of my favorite poets once wrote with regard to Korzybski's general semantics, the E-Prime concept is partially based upon: "the word is not the thing it represents, just as the map is not the landscape it displays." That pins down one of the problems of this concept. Namely: to confuse an appearance (or truth if you'd like to use a more rigid term) of something with its representation/translation, which is always already the result of a displacement. The concept also seems to assume that the meaning of language can basically be cut down to sole information value only, which would be semantics' equivalent to a naive empiricism and positivism, which I find to be far more dogmatic than any use of "to be." If all comes down to a sort of application mode, you basically end up with a simplistic cybernetic setup that doesn't require any thinking anymore.

I assume that you would basically agree, because with regard to nominalizations you wrote that we could talk about nouns "as if they're physical objects." The problem is of course that they're not, which is also why we can't put them into wheelbarrows. That only works with the help of metonymies and metaphors, which actually push us further away from any sort of immediacy in meaning (etymologically, a metapher denotes the transportation as well as that, which is being transported). So here you're already far away from any unambiguity. And how and why would I counter with "There's no such thing as ...", before we have reached an agreement on what a "thing" actually is? - And by "thing" I don't mean something that's being imagined as something that's lying around in the "outside world," but something that can only be accessed through language as the means of how we are speaking and thinking.

I look at E-prime this way.  The existential predicate - is, are, to be, was, were etc. - functions to create worlds.  This can yield disease, if we create worlds that undermine our happiness, health, etc., however, if used intentionally and with wisdom, can yield greated wealth, health, happiness etc.  It is the essential process of magic: combining two things to transform them both.  Same with nominalizations; they can empower or disempower.   So for me, the trick *is* not to not use them, but to use them with intention and precision.  To know full well the associations and frozen nouns I'm creating or employing, and to keep these conceptual understandings ready as tools to analyze statements that contain them when I notice dis-ease - disagreements, arguing, strife etc.

[proteus-ix]

I would consider it *essential* for Eno to lack rigor on that point... as an artist (world-makers, see my previous post).  As a philosopher or scientist (world-describers/analyzers), I would absolutely require more rigor of him.  Fortunately I've never confused him with philosophers or scientists, so I'm happy to appreciate his lack of rigor, and to engage the worlds he offers to us.

That reads like a well-meaning spin on the disenfranchisement of the arts by philosophical means.

How so?

[proteus-ix]

This has been a blast, but does anyone care to somehow graft the subject of music onto these concepts?

By all means, don't let us stop you. 

[Paul Dither]

I look at E-prime this way.  The existential predicate - is, are, to be, was, were etc. - functions to create worlds.  This can yield disease, if we create worlds that undermine our happiness, health, etc., however, if used intentionally and with wisdom, can yield greated wealth, health, happiness etc.  It is the essential process of magic: combining two things to transform them both.

I guess I don't understand how one would only want half a world, or what you - if this was meant metaphorically - understand a disease to be in this context. The world always comes with both sides, otherwise our experiences would be levelled to the degree of a coma (if everything is happiness, then what is happiness?). It would be like in the song "Heaven" by the Talking Heads.
And again: if one tried to keep out all forms of "to be" nothing could ever become or evolve within language; there would not even be a history. Mutations of all sorts would be impossible. Language itself just doesn't work this way, especially not spoken language.

Same with nominalizations; they can empower or disempower.   So for me, the trick *is* not to not use them, but to use them with intention and precision.  To know full well the associations and frozen nouns I'm creating or employing, and to keep these conceptual understandings ready as tools to analyze statements that contain them when I notice dis-ease - disagreements, arguing, strife etc.

Again: What's wrong with disagreements, arguing, strife? - To me that seems like an attempt to sterilize language and interaction.

[Paul Dither]

I would consider it *essential* for Eno to lack rigor on that point... as an artist (world-makers, see my previous post).  As a philosopher or scientist (world-describers/analyzers), I would absolutely require more rigor of him.  Fortunately I've never confused him with philosophers or scientists, so I'm happy to appreciate his lack of rigor, and to engage the worlds he offers to us.

That reads like a well-meaning spin on the disenfranchisement of the arts by philosophical means.

How so?

Philosophers of aesthetics have always been the natural enemy to the artist, as they basically theorize about how things are to be done properly - sometimes they act like artists that way too. That's why they can never be friends, they're competitors.

There's also a major difference between philosophers and scientists, as the latter don't have to think at all, which I don't mean in a polemic way. It's just that it's not a scientist's job to be concerned about thinking and language for that matter, but rather the processing, evaluation, and application of information and data. That's an operative practice. And by that I'm not saying that scientists can be mindless, it's just that their main subject is not about thinking.

[proteus-ix]

I look at E-prime this way.  The existential predicate - is, are, to be, was, were etc. - functions to create worlds.  This can yield disease, if we create worlds that undermine our happiness, health, etc., however, if used intentionally and with wisdom, can yield greated wealth, health, happiness etc.  It is the essential process of magic: combining two things to transform them both.

I guess I don't understand how one would only want half a world, or what you - if this was meant metaphorically - understand a disease to be in this context. The world always comes with both sides, otherwise our experiences would be levelled to the degree of a coma (if everything is happiness, then what is happiness?). It would be like in the song "Heaven" by the Talking Heads.
And again: if one tried to keep out all forms of "to be" nothing could ever become or evolve within language; there would not even be a history. Mutations of all sorts would be impossible. Language itself just doesn't work this way, especially not spoken language.

Who said I only wanted half a world?  I want a world in which when I choose to resolve a conflict or solve a problem, I have effective tools for doing so.

Regarding the rest after "And again":  How do you know these things?  What can I do to validate the truth of these statements in my own experience?

Same with nominalizations; they can empower or disempower.   So for me, the trick *is* not to not use them, but to use them with intention and precision.  To know full well the associations and frozen nouns I'm creating or employing, and to keep these conceptual understandings ready as tools to analyze statements that contain them when I notice dis-ease - disagreements, arguing, strife etc.

Again: What's wrong with disagreements, arguing, strife? - To me that seems like an attempt to sterilize language and interaction.

Ask the people of Nagasaki about that.    I understand that life involves strife, and that stress can cause growth.  Stress can also crush your skull into your brain when it comes from an 18-wheeler that has intruded into your personal space.  So I distinguish stress that helps me grow from stress that helps me die, and resist romanticizing all stress as if it inherently had some deeper purpose or value.  Sometimes it might, sometimes it might not.  I guess I should have explained that I don't seek to avoid arguments, I seek to avoid arguments that arise from confusions of language.  Once we all use the same language in a discussion and can agree that we do, we can still have disagreements of values.  It is what it is.  ~

[proteus-ix]

I would consider it *essential* for Eno to lack rigor on that point... as an artist (world-makers, see my previous post).  As a philosopher or scientist (world-describers/analyzers), I would absolutely require more rigor of him.  Fortunately I've never confused him with philosophers or scientists, so I'm happy to appreciate his lack of rigor, and to engage the worlds he offers to us.

That reads like a well-meaning spin on the disenfranchisement of the arts by philosophical means.

How so?

Philosophers of aesthetics have always been the natural enemy to the artist, as they basically theorize about how things are to be done properly - sometimes they act like artists that way too. That's why they can never be friends, they're competitors.

There's also a major difference between philosophers and scientists, as the latter don't have to think at all, which I don't mean in a polemic way. It's just that it's not a scientist's job to be concerned about thinking and language for that matter, but rather the processing, evaluation, and application of information and data. That's an operative practice. And by that I'm not saying that scientists can be mindless, it's just that their main subject is not about thinking.

So you are an enemy of artists?  Anyone who makes statements about philosophers IS a philosopher.  (Like that world I created for you? )  Or do you think one can meta-philosophize without philosophizing?  And more, what could have more relevance to philosophizing about aesthetics than doing art?  That makes all artists philosophers of aesthetics.  Do you consider all artists their own enemies?  Well... probably.  At least the best ones ARE. 

[Paul Dither]

Who said I only wanted half a world?  I want a world in which when I choose to resolve a conflict or solve a problem, I have effective tools for doing so.

Well, your choice of words, or rather your binary code (disease vs wealth, health, happiness) evoked a different image.

Regarding the rest after "And again":  How do you know these things?  What can I do to validate the truth of these statements in my own experience?

Simple counter-question: How do you express existential temporality, or rather the temporality that is so essential for our being in and towards the world, without using any form of "to be"?

As for the rest: Each historical attempt to standardize language and meaning in whatever way has always been the outcome of a top-down decision. It creates for example an administrative language, a jurisdictional language, a langage that is somehow tied to institutions, not so much to its everyday use and development. Languages "grow" beyond normative rules, which one can observe with regard to dialects, the vernacular. It also doesn't remain static. Monolingualism is not a reality, not even within one language (like English, German, French, Chinese, etc.), only to the most ignorant ones.

Ask the people of Nagasaki about that.    I understand that life involves strife, and that stress can cause growth.  Stress can also crush your skull into your brain when it comes from an 18-wheeler that has intruded into your personal space.  So I distinguish stress that helps me grow from stress that helps me die, and resist romanticizing all stress as if it inherently had some deeper purpose or value.  Sometimes it might, sometimes it might not.  I guess I should have explained that I don't seek to avoid arguments, I seek to avoid arguments that arise from confusions of language.  Once we all use the same language in a discussion and can agree that we do, we can still have disagreements of values.  It is what it is.  ~

The Nagasaki reference was a cynical remark and I don't see how that is related to disagreements, arguing, and strife when we talk about the use of language. And who said that I was romanticizing stress? I just can't see what's so bad about arguing, or where the negative connotation comes from. It's what you do in discussions and debates when you hopefully don't start a sentence with "I feel like…".

I also don't see how you want to separate language from values. Values don't exist anywhere outside language. They're not independent entities floating about. They have to be defined and thought in and through language. There's a whole philosophical field for that. It's called the "history of ideas".

And I also don't know what you mean by us "all us[ing] the same language in a discussion". Do you want to turn that into a precondition for people who would like to enter a discussion? And who's going to decide what's the right and the wrong language? How should every single person of that group be equipped with the comprehensive linguistic, etymological, historical, and philosophical knowledge of more than 2000 years to be even slightly eligible for making such decisions, if at all?

[Paul Dither]

So you are an enemy of artists?  Anyone who makes statements about philosophers IS a philosopher.  (Like that world I created for you? )  Or do you think one can meta-philosophize without philosophizing?

No, I'm no enemy of artists. It's a joke between artists and philosophers - kind of like between the drummer and the rest of the band. But the disenfranchisement of the arts by philosophy is also a well-researched topic. Its ongoing history pretty much started with Plato (at least with regard to what has been recorded).

And not everybody who's making statements about philosophers is a philosopher, as making statements as such is not related to philosophical methodology, of which there's more than one of course.

As an atheist I don't believe in anything meta, but I can recognize its significance and function.

And more, what could have more relevance to philosophizing about aesthetics than doing art?  That makes all artists philosophers of aesthetics.  Do you consider all artists their own enemies?  Well... probably.  At least the best ones ARE. 

I can't answer these questions, as I don't think that it's necessary to play off art against philosophy. Both can disclose matters in different ways, contradict each other, or inspire each other. There are also a few examples of transgressions, where philosophy turns into poetry and vice versa - which can only happen if you accept no truth or sphere outside of language btw. And of course artists - if you don't mean the ubiquitous term 'artist' that is used for anyone who's slightly creative these days - are concerned about aesthetic questions as long as they reflect upon what they're doing. However, that doesn't automatically turn them into philosophers, even if they may end up asking questions that are of interest in philosophy.

And yes, to some degree I would consider artists to be their own enemies. That doesn't have to be a bad negativity. Each struggle between form and content can be a struggle between an actual realization and an aesthetic concept. Each arist's wish to make a 180 degree turn is another example for that: one turns against one's old artistic self and aesthetic guidelines. It's even obvious in less radical cases; for example if an artist doesn't want to repeat her or himself, or if one tries to develop one's 'own language'.